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CHICAGO — The number of Venzuelan-born people arrested by Chicago police this year is up 2,538% compared to 2022, according to data provided by the police department. It’s up 11,333% compared to 2021. As of November 12, CPD arrested 686 people this year who listed Venezuela as their birthplace, according to data provided by the department in response to our Freedom of Information Act request. That compares to 26 for all of last year and just six in 2021. Since this year’s tally only includes arrests through November 12, while 2022 and 2021 are full-year numbers, the disparities will increase...

Hugo Chávez’s government has granted Cuba key concessions in Venezuela’s food distribution system by making the island its purchasing agent abroad as well as its seaport manager — activities that represent a fabulous business for the Castro brothers while generating more scarcity and huge losses for Venezuela. The governor of the state of Carabobo,Henrique Salas Feo, said that a great part of the problems of scarcity and cost of living increases in Venezuela could be attributed to the corruption of people close to its government and Cuba’s inefficiency managing the facilities at Puerto Cabello. “Puerto Cabello is the entry gate...

In their game of “Who can Create the Fastest Slave State," Venezuelan Dictator (now official) Hugo Chavez is now ahead of US Dictator Barack Hussein Obama. Not long ago, Chavez made the comment “Hey, Obama has just nationalized nothing more and nothing less than General Motors. Comrade Obama! Fidel, careful or we are going to end up to his right.” Slowly at first but recently more quickly, intensely and more violently every day, Hugo Chavez has become one of the current incarnations of Josef Stalin. Over strong objections from the opposition, in December, Chavez’ ruling and majority Socialist Party...

George Will asked to comment on the BP $20 billion dollar contingency fund comes back with a classic answer. If you are not worried you should be. His biggest concern is the White House usurping the courts in terms of claims against BP and of course that it’s not exactly voluntary. The Chicago Way.

It’s been a while since we last visited the Bolivarian Workers Paradise of Venezuela, where “the pluck of a harp on the radio” means Big Brother Dear Leader Hugo Chavez is about to address the nation. However, in order to hear Hugo, one needs to have power for the radio, and that has become a big problem for Chavez. Despite having massive oil resources, Chavez has relied mainly on hydroelectric generation for the nation’s power — and now faces a critical shortage of electricity, thanks to a drought: President Hugo Chavez inaugurated a folksy new radio talk-show on Monday by...

VENEZUELAN President Hugo Chavez expelled the US envoy to Caracas today and threatened to halt crude exports to the US on a day he highlighted the recent arrival of two Russian Tu-160 strategic bombers. Mr Chavez today ordered US ambassador Patrick Duddy to leave the country within 72 hours, in a move he described as an act of solidarity with Venezuela's ally Bolivia, which also expelled its US envoy. "Starting at this moment the Yankee ambassador in Caracas has 72 hours to leave Venezuela," Mr Chavez said at a public event in the port city of Puerto Cabello, 120km west...

Warfare: Quick, which nation shows average civilian deaths at 33 a day in the last third of 2007? Now name the one where civilian deaths average 19 a day? If you guessed Iraq and Venezuela, you'd have it backward.Shocking? Of course. But true. With even Venezuelan officials admitting their country clocked 12,249 murders in 2007, Hugo Chavez's socialist "sea of happiness" resembles a war zone. In December alone, Venezuela had 670 murders while Iraq had 476 — and that number is falling fast. This is Hugo Chavez's Venezuela, the place wildly praised by Hollywood eminentos like Oliver Stone and Sean...

Just how bad is the odious Hugo Chavez? It’s a good question to ask. As an increasingly dictatorial and anti-democratic ruler of Venezuela, he certainly doesn’t want what’s in our best interests and he hasn’t been shy about criticizing our country and its current leadership. What needs to be sorted out is how much of this is posture and how much could be backed up with policy. Chavez styles himself the new Simon Bolivar. He claims he leads the Venezuelan people to freedom from the evil Colossus of The North. If Huey “The Kingfish” Long savvied the Spanish language, Hugo...

BOSTON Feb 16, 2007 (AP)— In a TV commercial, former Rep. Joseph Kennedy stands aboard an oil tanker moving across the Boston skyline and promises that millions of gallons of discounted heating oil are on their way to poor, shivering families, courtesy of "our good friends in Venezuela. What he doesn't mention is that those "good friends" include Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a socialist and staunch U.S. critic who famously called President Bush "the devil" in a speech last year at the United Nations. The reference to Venezuela has led to accusations that Kennedy is a shill for Chavez. Rep....

CARACAS (AFP) - Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez said that when he called US President George W. Bush a "devil" before the UN General Assembly, he was talking straight from the heart."The way I called him a devil was not something I had planned, it came from the heart, because for me, it's the truth," Chavez said at a news conference. When he addressed the General Assembly in New York in September, Chavez said he could still smell the odor of sulfur left by the devil, a reference to Bush who had spoken the previous day. "Somebody had to tell the...

UNITED NATIONS -- Venezuela accused Guatemala on Friday of bowing to U.S. pressure and backing out of talks on a compromise candidate to break a deadlock in their battle for a seat on the U.N. Security Council. Venezuela's Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro said if talks resume his government will again propose Bolivia as a compromise nation "because it is an emerging country with a new leadership representing very well South America." Latin American diplomats had hoped that high-level talks on Thursday between Maduro and Guatemalan Foreign Minister Gert Rosenthal could break the impasse after 41 ballots failed to produce a...

HAVANA, Aug 5: Cuban leader Fidel Castro is recovering satisfactorily from stomach surgery, the country’s vice-president said on Saturday, while government sources said he had started to eat and sit up in bed. Brazilian officials denied a newspaper report they had been told by Cuban authorities the veteran revolutionary had a malignant stomach tumour and may never be able to return fully to power. Vice President Carlos Lager, speaking on a trip to Bolivia, was the third Cuban official in the past two days to reassure the Communist-ruled nation that Castro was on the mend from surgery for internal bleeding....

TEHRAN (Reuters) - To deserve a statue in central Tehran, you normally need to be an 11th-century Persian poet. However, Venezuela's 19th-century independence leader Simon Bolivar surveys passers-by in Goftogou Park. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, wearing the checkered headscarf of the Basij volunteer Islamic militia, stressed the cordiality of Tehran-Caracas relations when he unveiled the statue of his hero on an icy November day in 2004. Right-wing Venezuelan and U.S. media have attacked Chavez's growing ties with Tehran. In their most fanciful conspiracy theory, Iran is planning to ship nuclear warheads to Venezuela in a re-run of the 1962 Cuban...

CARACAS, Venezuela - Venezuela is buying helicopters, boats and military transport planes in defense deals worth about $2.7 billion, modernizing its military as tensions grow between leftist President Hugo Chavez and the United States. Flush with oil profits but blocked from buying U.S. arms, Chavez is increasingly looking to countries like Russia and Spain as suppliers. A cargo ship carrying 30,000 Russian-made Kalashnikov assault rifles is headed to Venezuela with the first shipment of an order totaling 100,000 guns to arrive by year's end. The military is looking to buy more submarines, and Chavez is planning an even bigger deal...

VENEZUELA-Top Washington officials worry that Venezuela and Iran may be building more than economic bridges.They started with an agreement to build tractors, but Iran and Venezuela have quickly moved to oil, cement, homes, auto parts, shipbuilding and perhaps even nuclear energy. The new friendship between the two deeply anti-American governments was further cemented last month as Iranian Parliament speaker Gholam Ali Haddad Adel headed a delegation that visited Venezuela and drew expressions of support from populist President Hugo Chávez. ''It's a natural byproduct of their confrontation with the United States,'' said Armando Durán, a columnist and former Venezuelan foreign minister....

Tension between Venezuela’s government, led by President Hugo Chávez, and the US has increased in recent weeks, judging from the rhetoric coming from both sides. Mr Chávez, now entrenched as president after an unsuccessful referendum failed to oust him last year, continues to accuse the US of meddling in Venezuela politics, and has even suggested that Washington is plotting to kill him. US officials, for their part, have portrayed Mr Chávez as a rogue leader who is undermining democratic governments elsewhere in Latin America. While the war of words has yet to produce a change of policy on either side,...

The Bush administration is weighing policy options on Venezuela that include launching a high-level task force, highlighting corruption there. With President Bush personally firing off questions, his administration is carrying out a top-to-bottom review of U.S. policies toward Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and his leftist ''revolution,'' U.S. officials say. One option already on the table is to create a multiagency task force of a type usually reserved for critical issues. Others include campaigns to highlight allegations of graft in Chávez' government and persuade his Latin American neighbors to help rein him in, the officials added. With Chávez appearing increasingly belligerent...

CARACAS, Venezuela, Jan. 17 (UPI) -- President Hugo Chavez has made clear his well-known strategic shift in Venezuela's international policy by increasing oil sales to China in lieu of the U.S. market, thereby doubling the trade between the two countries. The two countries are quickly forging a strategic alliance based on China's increasingly omnivorous demands for energy. Less than a year ago that Chavez threatened the United States with stopping oil export shipments to that country to divert them towards China. Relations between the United States and Venezuela have been tense for a number of reasons, not the least of...

Venezuelan authorities have identified more than 500 farms, including 56 large estates, as idle as it continues with its controversial land reform policy. Under a 2001 land law, the government can tax or seize unused farm sites. A further 40,000 farms are yet to be inspected, the state's National Land Institute has told Associated Press. Vice president Jose Vicente Rangel has said farmers and ranchers with their titles in order and their lands productive have "nothing to fear." Critics of the land reform policy claim president Hugo Chavez is trying to enforce a communist-style economic programme that ignores property rights...

CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) - A Venezuelan prosecutor probing a 2002 coup against President Hugo Chavez was killed by a car bomb that the government blamed Friday on radical opponents it said were training in the United States. Senior officials said the attack that killed Danilo Anderson late Thursday was carried out by opposition "fascists and terrorists" and they accused the U.S. government of tolerating hard-line Chavez opponents on its territory. "This was clearly a political assassination," Information Minister Andres Izarra said. "We believe the U.S. government must explain how these terrorist groups can be operating in Florida, U.S. territory." The...