135 Venezuelans being treated for cholera infections from the Dominican Republic

Venezuelans who were in the Dominican Republic for a wedding have brought cholera back home.Venezuelan health officials say they were infected with the Haitian strain of the disease. The Haitian cholera spilled over into the Dominican as the two nations share an island together. 135 Venezuelans are being treated for the disease.

From this AFP article that we found at Google News, we find out more about the spread of cholera from the Haiti.

"At the moment we have not had a single case of someone being contaminated in Venezuela," Health Minister Eugenia Sader told Globovision.

Authorities have said those being treated were part of a group of 452 Venezuelans who traveled to the Dominican Republic for a wedding earlier this month, and Sader said the government has been calling them "one by one."

Besides the cholera patients in Caracas, another 12 Venezuelans infected with the bacteria were still in the Dominican Republic and four others traveled on to Spain, Mexico and the United States.

The government has called on all the guests to report for testing even if they are showing no signs of the diarrheal disease, and has been warning the general public through media advertisements and a hygiene campaign.

Venezuela has had no cholera in a decade, and health officials have emphasized that it is crucial to gain control of the outbreak in the first 24 to 48 hours to prevent the imported bacteria from becoming established here.

Revolutionary Road? Debating Venezuela's progress.

from the Council on Foreign Relations

How Chavez Has Helped The Poor

When President Hugo Chavez was first elected, in 1998, his critics, many of whom have published in these pages, argued that he would slowly move Venezuela away from democracy. After 12 elections, including the December 2007 referendum, which he narrowly lost, that claim has finally crumbled under the evidence. Now the argument against Venezuela has shifted, and instead of being called undemocratic, Chavez's social programs are labeled as inefficient and his economic management categorized as catastrophic. Much like the first accusations against Chavez, the new criticisms, put forth by Francisco Rodriguez in "An Empty Revolution" (March/April 2008), simply do not stand up to the facts.

This much is undeniable: poverty has decreased in Venezuela under Chavez's administration. According to the 2007 Social Panorama of Latin America, a report released by the United Nations' Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, between 2002 and 2006 Venezuela decreased poverty by 18.4 percent and extreme poverty by 12.3 percent, an achievement second in the region only to that of Argentina. The report attributed these dramatic decreases to "rapid GDP growth and the ongoing implementation of broad social programs" and recognized that the "swift pace of progress considerably brightens the prospects for further reductions in poverty and significantly increases the feasibility of meeting the first target associated with the first Millennium Development Goal."

Rodriguez seeks to dismiss these advances not by claiming that they have not occurred but by arguing that they are just not good enough. He posits that the government's social-spending patterns have not changed from prior governments, that the social programs have not met their goals, and that Chavez's management of the country has not led to any significant redistribution of wealth. On all counts, he is wrong.

According to the Central Bank of Venezuela, social spending as a percentage of all government spending grew from 38.6 percent in 1997 to 44 percent in 2007. Looking more broadly, figures from the National Budget Office show that social spending accounts for a higher percentage of all spending than it did in 1992--Rodriguez claims otherwise--or during the oil-boom years of the 1970s. But more important is that since 2003 the state-owned oil company, PDVSA, has contributed significant sums to social programs--a point that Rodriguez ignores. In 2004, PDVSA announced that it would spend $1.7 billion a year on social programs, a sharp increase from the $400 million it had been spending in years past. In 2006 alone, it contributed $13.3 billion, or 7.3 percent Of GDP, to social programs. According to a report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, when PDVSA's contributions are factored in, social spending during the Chavez administration has grown by an incredible 314 percent per person in real terms.

Venezuela's social programs, many of which have been funded by PDVSA, have been both effective and popular. Rodriguez seeks to dismiss them by quoting isolated and questionable statistics, but he fails to fully consider the gains they have achieved. According to the Central Bank's System of Social Indicators, school attendance at every level increased between 1998 and 2006, and today nine times as many children have access to free meals at school. Through the health mission Barrio Adentro, doctors located in Venezuela's poorest communities have provided more than 200 million checkups, saved over 47,000 lives, and overseen 3,100 births in the 715 different offices and specialized clinics built throughout the count. The treatment provided to HIV/AIDS patients is indicative of the larger commitment to health under the Chavez administration: whereas in 1999 only 335 patients received antiretroviral medications, in 2006 the number was over 18,000. The many social missions have been so well received that during the 2006 presidential campaign, the opposition candidate Manuel Rosales pledged to keep them in place if he won the presidency.

Policies enacted since Chavez was elected have also helped redistribute the gains of Venezuela's record economic growth. Unemployment is down, employment in the formal sector is up, and the minimum wage has increased notably. More important, income has grown fastest for Venezuela's poorest. According to the polling firm Datanalisis, from 1998 to 2006 Venezuela's poorest sectors saw an increase in income of 445 percent, and the wealthiest saw a gain of 194 percent. These gains have come despite a concerted effort by certain sectors of the opposition to throw the country into crisis in 2002 and 2003. In a shocking omission, Rodriguez does not mention that the sabotage of the oil industry in late 2002 and early 2003 bled Venezuela of 24 percent of its GDP. By comparison, during four years of the Great Depression, the United States lost 29 percent of its GDP.

The policies of the Chavez administration have served to help lower poverty, increase access to necessary social services, and better distribute Venezuela's resources. But more than trust the numbers, one can turn to public opinion to verify this. According to a 2007 Latinobarometro report, Venezuelans rank their country among the most democratic in the region, second only to Uruguay. On a number of measures--equality between the sexes, the protection of private property, equality of opportunity, solidarity with the poor, social security, employment opportunities, and even income distribution--respondents ranked Venezuela highest in the region. When asked how their families' economic situations would be in 12 months, 61 percent of the Venezuelan people said "much better" or "a bit better," higher than the figure for Brazil (60 percent) and the regional average (46 percent). On education and health services, 64 percent and 74 percent, respectively, expressed their satisfaction.

None of this is to say that the Venezuelan government is perfect, much less that it does not face ongoing challenges. It does, as Chavez recognized after his December 2007 referendum loss. One of the main challenges, inflation, has already decreased this year, and food shortages have similarly abated. More important, Venezuela will continue growing its economy, with eight percent expansion expected for 2008.

Trying to argue that Venezuela's economic growth and social gains are all a myth sustained by effective international lobbying and public relations both underestimates the intelligence of the Venezuelan people and does a grave disservice to the facts. Contributors to Foreign Affairs may not like Chavez personally, but they should not keep looking for unsubstantiated reasons to attack Venezuelas efforts to create a vibrant and equitable democracy.

BERNARDO ALVAREZ HERRERA is Venezuela's Ambassador to the United States.

Rodriguez Replies

Ambassador Bernardo Alvarez Herrera argues that I have ignored evidence showing the Chavez administration's commitment to the poor and the effectiveness of its social policies, and he cites several indicators that would appear to counter the central arguments of my article. Let us look closely at each of his claims. The ambassador argues that the share of social spending has increased during the Chavez administration from 38.6 percent in 1997 to 44 percent in 2007. However, it is important to be careful about what is meant by "social spending." The growth cited by the ambassador was driven by a substantial increase in the payment of pensions, whose share of total government spending doubled, from 6 percent to 12 percent. There is an extensive literature documenting the regressivity of pensions in countries such as Venezuela, where the poor do not participate in the formal economy and thus are not beneficiaries of the social security system. This is why I restricted myself to the categories of spending that can truly be argued to be mainly directed at the poor: education, health, and housing. The share of spending devoted to these categories has been essentially unchanged during the Chavez administration.

Ambassador Alvarez also argues that I have ignored the large amount of social spending carried out by the state-owned oil company, PDVSA, which totaled $13.3 billion in 2006. Again, it is necessary to be careful about definitions. PDVSA categorizes all of its spending on the direct support of government initiatives as "social development expenditures," regardless of the type of projects it supports. The bulk of these expenditures do not go to programs that under any reasonable definition would be described as pro-poor. The two largest single items of expenditure reported under this category in PDVSA's financial statements are $3.2 billion given to the Ministry of Finance for debt restructuring and $1.1 billion given to the Ministry of Defense. Only 26.8 percent Of PDVSA'S "social development expenditures" went to support education, health, and housing programs. This is roughly the same percentage spent by the central government on such programs, confirming my claim that the data do not show that pro-poor spending is being prioritized by the Chavez administration any more so than it was by past administrations.

The ambassador also shows that school attendance rates have increased since Chavez reached office and that a large number of people have benefited from the government's Barrio Adentro health initiative. Both of these assertions are correct, but neither provides evidence that this administration has done more to help the poor than its predecessors did. The increase in school attendance observed since 1998 simply continues a long-term trend of improvement. Between 1975 and 1998, attendance rates for students between the ages of 6 and 14 increased from 77 percent to 94.4 percent; since 1998, that increase has continued, with the rate reaching 96.2 percent in 2006. (To its credit, the Chavez government maintained the previous administration's program Escuelas Integrales, rechristened Escuelas Bolivarianas, which appears to have been vital in further improving attendance rates.)

Regarding the government's flagship health program, Barrio Adentro, the picture is more mixed. To be sure, a considerable number of Venezuelans have benefited directly from the services of this program. On the other hand, the program's growth has been accompanied by a decline in resources allocated to the conventional functions of the public health system, generating a crisis in many traditional health services, such as hospitalization and the prevention of endemic diseases. According to the Ministry of Health, only 28 percent of hospital beds in the public health system are currently in operating condition, and the number of cases of malaria and dengue fever have skyrocketed, growing by 94 percent and 203 percent, respectively, since 1999. The positive effects of Barrio Adentro must be weighed against the collapse in the broader public health system. It is precisely because of this mixed picture that most Venezuelan health indicators do not show significant improvements--and some show worrying deteriorations.

When it comes to the distribution of income, there are two series based on major surveys carried out by Venezuelan statistical offices. One of them, the Central Bank's Household Expenditure Survey, shows a substantial deterioration in the share of income accruing to the lowest quintile between 1997 and 2005, and the second one, produced by the National Institute of Statistics, shows a moderate increase. The improvement in the National Institute's results appears to be due to some questionable methodological decisions taken by the agency in its calculation. The World Bank, using the same base data as the National Institute, found that the share of income received by the poorest quintile declined from 4.1 percent to 3-7 percent between 1998 and 2005--a period for which the National Institute reported that it increased from 4.1 percent to 4.6 percent. (At the time of this writing, neither the World Bank nor Venezuela's Central Bank had produced estimates for years after 2005.)

The ambassador has pointed to survey results indicating that Venezuelans are satisfied with the state of their democracy and the direction of the country. There are at least two reasons to take these results with a grain of salt. First, responses to such questions tend to be significantly correlated with economic growth, which has been quite high since the current oil boom began. Second, there is growing evidence that Venezuelans do not feel free to express their political opinions. A 2006 Associated Press survey, for example, found that only 42 percent of Venezuelans were "very confident" that their votes in that year's elections would be kept secret. These misgivings have their roots in the publication five years ago by government supporters of the names of 3.5 million Venezuelans who signed a recall-referendum petition against Chavez. The list was widely used to threaten public-sector workers so that they would withdraw their signatures and to ensure that opposition sympathizers would not have access to public-sector jobs. In our recent research, my co-authors and I have shown that signers of the recall-referendum petition received significantly lower incomes than nonsigners after the dissemination of the list.

EU, Latin American Leaders Voice Concern over Food Prices

from Deutsche Welle

The EU-Latin America-Caribbean summit stressed in its final declaration Friday, May 16, in Lima that participants were "deeply concerned by the impact of increased food prices," citing troubled Haiti as an example.

"We agree that immediate measures are needed to assist the most vulnerable countries and populations affected by high food prices," the Lima Declaration said.

European Union Foreign Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner said in the Peruvian capital that soaring global food prices constitute "a regional challenge." The EU has approved a package worth 117.25 million euros ($183 million dollars) for food aid around the world, she said.

Signed by 60 countries at the end of the meeting, the declaration focused on the fight against poverty and climate change and expressed support for Haiti.

Focus on need in Haiti

Haiti is the poorest country in the Americas, with 70 percent of its nearly 9 million people living in poverty. Six people were killed and a further 268 injured last month in Haiti during riots over high food prices, and the prime minister was forced to resign over his handling of the crisis.

Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) President Luis Alberto Moreno, who also attended the summit, noted that his institution has granted loans for $27 million to Haiti to keep down food prices and has created a special fund to improve agricultural productivity, strengthen social networks and develop new technologies.

The Lima Declaration stressed "the efforts by the Haitian government and people to revitalize the state institutions and combat poverty, inequality and social injustices," while acknowledging the need for "urgent and effective continued action by the international community on behalf of rehabilitation and development in Haiti."

Call for distribution of wealth

Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero called on Latin America to implement "fairer" income distribution policies.

"Overcoming poverty, inequality and exclusion is crucial for the attainment of social cohesion, for sustainable development and for the effectiveness of our bi-regional partnership," the declaration stressed.

"There has to be an income distribution policy that is fairer than the current one in Latin America, and a social policy of cooperation for development that tackles basic structural problems," Zapatero said. "Social spending is also productive spending. Social investment generates wealth."

Economy linked to climate change

Peruvian President Alan Garcia addressed the other intended focus of the meeting, climate change, and mentioned an initiative to tax oil and natural gas to raise money to pay for reforestation.

The final declaration stressed that "environmental degradation and climate change seriously affect" economic growth, "hitting the poor hardest and seriously threatening the prospects" for the world's future.

Of the delegations present at the summit at the National Museum in Lima, 37 were lead by prime ministers or heads of state. Some key European leaders were conspicuously absent, including French President Nicolas Sarkozy and prime ministers Gordon Brown of Britain and Silvio Berlusconi of Italy.

Chavez urges $1bn poverty fund

from Al Jazeera

Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president, has called on European and Latin American nations to set up a $1bn fund to help provide food and medicine for the poor.

Chavez said on Thursday that he was willing to commit $365m of the country's oil income to the fund, as global food and energy prices continue to rise.

"[The fund] will allow us to produce, buy and distribute food and medicines to the homes of the poorest families," he said at a news conference in Caracas.

Explosive summit

Chavez made the announcement ahead of his expected appearance at a summit of European and Latin American leaders in Peru that begins on Friday, where he says he will present his aid plan.

But the summit promises to be explosive for other reasons after Chavez on Thursday angrily denounced as "ridiculous" claims that Venezuela and Ecuador had aided the Colombia Farc rebel group.

The global police agency Interpol said in a report on Thursday that documents on laptop computers alleging those links and found following a Colombian attack on a Farc rebel base in Ecuador in March, were not tampered with.

Chavez said his country was revising its diplomatic, economic and political relations with Colombia following the report's release.
Existing fund

Leaders from four Latin American countries have already set up a $100m food security fund for staples such as rice, beans and corn in a bid to offset rising food prices that have sparked global protests.

The presidents of Bolivia, Nicaragua and Venezuela as well as Cuba's vice-president also promised joint agricultural programmes.

Rising food prices have led to violent, often deadly protests in more than 30 countries, including Haiti, Egypt and Bangladesh.

More money, more poverty?

from Latin America Press

Andrés CañizálezElsa Piña.

Consumption soars, but unequal distribution persists.

There is more money in the hands of the poorest Venezuelans, causing consumption to soar, but fundamental issues — such as a lack of shelter and other basic needs — are still far from being resolved.

Once President Hugo Chávez’s government took full control of the state oil company Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) following a December 2002-January 2003 oil strike, the company’s priorities were rearranged.

According to their website, US$13 billion was pledged in 2006 to the nation’s social development. In fact, it is common to find announcements advertising that PDVSA will finance events ranging from children orchestras to food programs.

Luis Pedro España, head of the Poverty Project at the Andrés Bello Catholic University, says that thanks to the oil bonanza, the country is living an illusion, just as it did in the 1970s.

“There are people who consume more, but only because PDVSA has more income. When the oil market suffers a cold, we ourselves will die of pneumonia,” assured España in a recent interview.

Network against poverty
According to the government’s National Institute of Statistics, Venezuela has seen a spectacular reduction in poverty. Households living in poverty reduced from 54 percent in 2003 to 27 percent in 2007, while families in extreme poverty went from 25 percent to less than 8 percent.

David Velásquez, who was minister of Social Participation and Social Development until the beginning of this January, believes that government policies are responsible for the achievements.

“A network against poverty is developing. It is possible to reach the goal of Zero Misery [extreme poverty] in 2001 and Zero Poverty in 2021,” he remarked.

Furthermore, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean gave Venezuela second place (after Argentina) as the country with the most successful policies for reducing poverty in 2007.

However, it is obvious for Mercedes Pulido, former minister of Social Development, that while Venezuelans have higher incomes, “basic problems continue without being resolved.”

“If income alone is measured, there is undoubtedly a positive change, but this does not resolve the structural problem of poverty. What we have, so to speak, are poor people with more money,” commented Luis Vicente León, director of Datanálisis, a market and politics research firm.

According to the Human Development Report 2007-2008 issued by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), there is a serious situation of unequal distribution in Venezuela: the poorest 10 percent must share 0.7 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, while the richest 10 percent control 35.2 percent of the GDP.

For UNDP, a useful indicator for measuring income distribution is the Gini coefficient, which grew from 44.1 in 2006 to 48.2 in 2007 on a scale of zero (perfectly equal) to 100 (perfectly unequal).

The president of INE, Elías Eljuri, disregarded the UNDP report, which he branded as ridiculous.

Venezuela is eliminating poverty, achieving democracy, ambassador says

from The Mac Weekly

Matthew Stone

Poverty will only disappear if the poor become empowered, the Venezuelan ambassador to the United States said last Friday. Charity is not enough in the fight against poverty because poverty signifies a lack of power, the ambassador, Bernardo Alvarez, said.

"This is thinking outside the box. Even some of the leftist thinkers are shocked," Alvarez said before an audience of students and community members in Macalester's Weyerhaeuser Boardroom.

Alvarez visited the Twin Cities at the end of a tour through the northern Midwest and parts of Canada. He and his delegation had plans to attend last Friday's match up between the Twins and the Detroit Tigers at the Metrodome following the address.

Alvarez noted that even as relations between the United States and Venezuela have frosted over in recent years, the two countries share baseball as a tradition. Major League Baseball teams count 57 Venezuelan players on their rosters, he said.

The Venezuelan ambassador was the third diplomat to visit campus last week, which began with convocation appearances by Richard Holbrooke, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and Walter Mondale '50, a former ambassador to Japan. Mondale returned to campus earlier this week, on Monday, to speak at a Mideast Peace Summit with an Israeli Knesset member and a Palestinian legislator.

In a speech that lasted more than an hour, Alvarez called the Venezuelan government's efforts at eliminating poverty through "Socialism of the Twenty First Century"-as Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez and supporters label their political philosophy-a "power struggle." The result of that struggle will be a more participatory democracy, Alvarez said.

"We think representative democracy is good. But, first, it does not help correct inequalities," the ambassador said. "So, we are trying to go for a different model."

Alvarez called the Venezuelan government's issuing of identification cards and documents to the country's poor a key step in including that sector of society in a democracy. It is also a symbol that the poor have been left out in the past, he said.

The Venezuelan approach to combating poverty and governing the country represents a change to a model accepted by the world's power players that assumes that neoliberal economics is a natural counterpart to democracy. The Chavez government's refusal to follow this model has caused ongoing tension-though not necessarily intended-between Venezuela and the United States, Alvarez said.

"I wish we could do it differently," the ambassador said. "This is a very painful process."

Unlike Chavez, Alvarez refrained from using fiery rhetoric to criticize the United States for its engagement in Latin America.

Alvarez spoke largely in broad terms about a "new reality" in Latin America, as Chavez allies have been elected in Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Argentina and Uruguay.
"Now it's possible again to think about radical political change in democracy," the ambassador said.

The success of this "challenge to the prevailing model" will require the participation of other Latin American countries and a refusal to accept U.S. "hegemony" over the region.

Alvarez also addressed criticism that constitutional reforms taking place now in Venezuela will not be conducive to democracy. Chavez, who is seeking to eliminate presidential term limits, will not become president for life because he will periodically have to face reelection and, inevitably, citizens will tire of him and vote him out of office.

"Is he going to be president for life?" Alvarez asked. "Impossible, because unfortunately we are humans."

Malaysia to help Venezuela fight poverty and create more jobs

from The Malasian Star

BY PAUL GABRIEL

CARACAS: President Hugo Chavez has received a boost early into his third term with Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi pledging to be a partner in his efforts to overcome poverty by creating more job opportunities.

Abdullah, who held talks with the newly re-elected president at Miraflores Palace here, said he was confident that Chavez would succeed in his mission to help his people and develop Venezuela.

He said Chavez’s convincing re-election victory on Dec 3, in which he garnered 63% of the votes for a new six-year term, had made him more determined to raise the country’s economic profile.

“He wants to ensure social justice and equal opportunities among his people and is interested in the Malaysian model of development,” he told a news conference with Malaysian journalists covering his first official visit to Venezuela as Prime Minister.

Venezuela has some of the world’s largest proven oil deposits and vast natural resources, yet most of its people live in poverty and in shanty towns. Unemployment is also high.

Chavez, who first swept to power in 1998, earned more than just praises and an “endorsement” of his policies from Abdullah, who brought along “remedies” in the form of a business delegation.

Several MoUs and Letters of Intent are to be signed today to provide assistance to this South American nation of 26 million people.

Golden Hope Plantations Bhd, will undertake a feasibility study on large-scale oil palm cultivation here.

“As a tropical country, Venezuela is suitable for oil palm cultivation. There is a plan to station some of our experts here,” Abdullah said.

Petronas will be involved in oil and gas exploration, particularly in developing the heavy tar-like reserves of the Orinoco Belt in eastern Venezuela which require special technology to extract.

The Construction Industry Development Board will undertake a study, at no cost, to improve the road infrastructure here, while Iris Technology plans to offer its expertise on its latest e-passport and mobile incinerators.