- America is showing increasing signs of alarm at the influence
of Hugo Chavez, the firebrand Leftist president of Venezuela who has eclipsed
Fidel Castro as Washington's regional bogeyman.
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- The United States, obsessed with the Middle East for
the past three years, has let Latin America drift to the Left, leaving
Washington with almost no allies in its own back yard.
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- Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, yesterday visited
Colombia, the last steadfast ally of the US in South America after Ecuador's
Lucio Gutierrez was driven from power last week.
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- She promised that US aid would continue at present levels
of some £400 million a year, despite the fact that the war on drugs
has stalled and Marxist guerrillas have a launched a series of attacks
that have wrong-footed the US-backed military.
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- After a polite rebuttal in Brazil, Miss Rice has received
support only from Colombia during her tour of Latin America - designed
to isolate Mr Chavez. "It is well known that we have worries about
the activities of the Venezuelan government in this region, destabilising
activities, and internal activities that raise doubts about her democracy,"
she said.
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- One source of tension is Mr Chavez's recent arms deals
including one with Russia for 100,000 new AK assault rifles.
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- Jorge Alberto Uribe, the Colombian defence minister,
said the arms deals "deepened the military unbalance in the Andean
region".
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- The Colombian military has long asserted that Mr Chavez
backs the powerful Marxist rebels in their 41-year war.
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- He responded by calling Mr Uribe "a pawn of the
empire" who was "spouting what the lady wanted to hear."
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- Mr Chavez has his own riposte to the Rice tour. Yesterday
he visited Havana to sign agreements knitting his oil-rich country with
Cuba's faltering economy.
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- While Presidents Chavez and Castro are rabidly anti-American,
there is a second tier of Latin leaders who reject "meddling"
and want to see US influence diminished.
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- This stems primarily from the failure of free market
policies exported by Washington to alleviate poverty levels and redistribute
wealth.
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- An Inter-American Development Bank study said Latin America
had the most unequal distribution of resources in the world with 20 per
cent of the population controlling more than 60 per cent of the wealth.
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- This is one of the reasons that a wave of Left-leaning
leaders has been elected in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Venezuela and Uruguay,
while US-friendly leaders have been deposed in Ecuador, Argentina and Bolivia.
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- © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2005.
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- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/m
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