Category: Latin America

; As dawn broke, the residents of a quiet neighborhood here readied for battle. Some piled rocks to be used as projectiles. Others built barricades. A pair of teenagers made firebombs as the adults looked on. These were not your ordinary urban guerrillas. They included a manicurist, a medical supplies saleswoman, a schoolteacher, a businessman and a hardware store worker. As the National Guard roared around the corner on motorcycles and in an armored riot vehicle, the people in this tightly knit middle-class neighborhood, who on any other Monday morning would have been heading to work or taking their children to school, rushed into the street, hurling rocks and shouting obscenities. The guardsmen responded with tear gas and shotgun fire, leaving a man bleeding in a doorway. […]

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The oil market has lived in interesting times for so long it could do with a weekend off. This one wasn’t it. Ukraine dominated headlines, but in terms of oil output it is an irrelevance. Libya and Venezuela loom much larger. It wasn’t meant to be like this. Coming into 2014, the International Energy Agency was projecting oil supply outside of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries to rise by 1.7 million barrels a day against global demand growth of 1.3 million a day. That excess should have meant rising inventories and spare OPEC capacity, pushing down prices. Instead, after initial weakness, Brent crude is back above $110 a barrel. The impetus for this has come not from riots in Caracas or even rising demand from emerging markets. Rather, demand for oil in the industrialized world increased, bucking the trend of recent years. That was partly due to […]

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Venezuelan opposition leader Henrique Capriles today pulled out of talks with President Nicolas Maduro after the death toll from protests rose to 13 and both sides traded insults over the weekend. Maduro last week called on governors to meet at the presidential palace in Caracas today for talks, warning there would be legal consequences for skipping. Capriles said Feb. 22 he would attend while demanding the government free opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez, who was imprisoned last week on charges of inciting violence at rallies. “How do I go amid the repression, amid the violation of human rights,” Capriles, a two-time presidential hopeful and currently a state governor, told reporters in Caracas today. “The presidential palace is not the place for dialog in the country.” The talks were scheduled after two weeks of unrest that have claimed the lives of 13 people, according to […]

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Anti-government demonstrators put up barricades and set fire to trash in Caracas on Monday despite calls from within the opposition to rein in protests that have led to 13 deaths in Venezuela’s worst unrest for a decade. Traffic in the capital slowed to a crawl and many people stayed home as protesters burned trash and piled debris along main avenues a day after opposition leader Henrique Capriles called on them to keep demonstrations peaceful. "We know we’re bothering people but we have to wake up Venezuela!" student Pablo Herrera, 23, said next to a barricade in the affluent Los Palos Grandes district of Caracas. Authorities in the convulsed border state of Tachira confirmed another death: a man who fell from his second-storey apartment after being hit by a bullet from a nearby protest. The demonstrations are the biggest challenge to President Nicolas Maduro’s 10-month-old government, though […]

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Venezuela’s cities are convulsed with riots . A local beauty queen was shot in the head during protests over . . . well, everything: chronic shortages of basic goods, increasing repression of free speech by a government that clearly feels it cannot tolerate any dissent. She is not the only person to have been killed in recent days. The government is cracking down — hard — on any and all opposition. It seems to me that this was always the inevitable end game to the disastrous policies of the late President Hugo Chavez. Diverting funds from capital investment into the nation’s oil fields was politically popular. But it was also disastrous: Venezuela’s oil is sludgy stuff, hard to get at and hard to refine, and it requires a high level of capital expenditure just to keep production level. Predictably, production is now well below pre-Chavez levels. That wasn’t so […]

Click here to view full article at www.bloomberg.com

Venezuela’s cities are convulsed with riots . A local beauty queen was shot in the head during protests over . . . well, everything: chronic shortages of basic goods, increasing repression of free speech by a government that clearly feels it cannot tolerate any dissent. She is not the only person to have been killed in recent days. The government is cracking down — hard — on any and all opposition. It seems to me that this was always the inevitable end game to the disastrous policies of the late President Hugo Chavez. Diverting funds from capital investment into the nation’s oil fields was politically popular. But it was also disastrous: Venezuela’s oil is sludgy stuff, hard to get at and hard to refine, and it requires a high level of capital expenditure just to keep production level. Predictably, production is now well below pre-Chavez levels. That wasn’t so […]

Click here to view full article at www.bloomberg.com

Riots in the streets. Killings of protesters. Shortages of consumer staples like toilet paper and flour. Power outages. Confiscations of private property. Capital flight. Inflation running at more than 50%. The highest murder rate in the world. The situation in Venezuela has grown so terrible that we could very well be witnessing the waning days of the Chavez-Maduro regime. But don’t hold your breath. Despots propped up by revenues from natural resources have had a surprisingly robust track record over the past 100 years. Saddam Hussein survived through ruthlessness and handouts to Baath party loyalists. Khadafi perfected the same model in Libya. The Saudis and other Gulf sultanates and emirates have survived by paying off tribe members. Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe is still around thanks to his trade in blood diamonds. In each case, the big boss keeps his head by paying off everyone who matters. Hugo Chavez appeared to […]

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Mr Maduro said many international networks had created a false idea that Venezuela is facing civil war The American news network, CNN, says Venezuela has revoked the accreditation of its Caracas-based reporter, Osmary Hernandez. Two journalists who had been sent to Venezuela to cover the current crisis had their working permits cancelled. President Nicolas Maduro had vowed to expel CNN unless it "rectified" its coverage of recent opposition marches. Eight people have been killed in the protests, according to the government. Chief Prosecutor Luisa Ortega Diaz said 137 people had been injured in the current series of protests, which began earlier this month. The opposition leader who called for the marches, Leopoldo Lopez, was detained on Tuesday during a protest in Caracas. The government accused him of inciting violence as part of a right-wing coup plot. CNN […]

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Mr Maduro said many international networks had created a false idea that Venezuela is facing civil war The American news network, CNN, says Venezuela has revoked the accreditation of its Caracas-based reporter, Osmary Hernandez. Two journalists who had been sent to Venezuela to cover the current crisis had their working permits cancelled. President Nicolas Maduro had vowed to expel CNN unless it "rectified" its coverage of recent opposition marches. Eight people have been killed in the protests, according to the government. Chief Prosecutor Luisa Ortega Diaz said 137 people had been injured in the current series of protests, which began earlier this month. The opposition leader who called for the marches, Leopoldo Lopez, was detained on Tuesday during a protest in Caracas. The government accused him of inciting violence as part of a right-wing coup plot. CNN […]

Click here to view full article at www.bbc.co.uk