I just discovered that the link I provided may take you to a subscription page instead of the article..... It didn’t earlier.
Sorry.
And I can’t find another link that works, even going through my original source. Fortunately I posted the entire article, (other than the photo of Uncle Hugo that accompanied it).
Here you go, AP wire via yahoo news has pretty much the same story
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/081227/lt_venezuela_mining.html?.v=2