[News] Chavez offers US$100m aid package to Haiti

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20070317/business/business1.html#

Chavez offers US$100m aid package to Haiti
published: Saturday | March 17, 2007

[]

Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez (centre) stretches hands with 
<http://www.jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20070317/business/business1.html#>Haiti's 
President Rene Preval (right) and a representative from Cuba during a 
news conference at the National palace in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on 
Monday.- Reuters

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has promised impoverished Haiti aid 
amounting to just under US$100 million to boost social and 
<http://www.jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20070317/business/business1.html#>economic 
programmes, saying it was partially a thank-you gift linked to their 
shared history.

Haiti, then ruled by president Alexandre Petion, helped his country 
secure independence from Spain in 1817, said Chavez, offering 
?weapons, men and resources?.

"It is here in Haiti that a group of revolutionaries, among them 
Francisco de Miranda, waved the Venezuelan flag for the first time," 
he said during a joint news conference with Haitian president Rene 
Preval, at the 
<http://www.jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20070317/business/business1.html#>presidential 
palace.

Giving back

"By helping Haiti today, we are only giving back a small part of what 
we owe to this country," said Chavez. "It's just a start," he stated.

Chavez, as part of his stated goal to diminish the influence of the 
United States in the region, has been offering aid and preferential 
trade terms to countries of the Caribbean and the wider hemisphere.

The George W. 
<http://www.jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20070317/business/business1.html#>Bush 
administration, he said, "represents the cruelest, the most terrible, 
cynical and the most deadly empire the world has ever seen, while we 
represent the Bolivarian project for independence and freedom."

millions in savings

His PetroCaribe oil facility which offers petroleum to Caricom 
countries on concessionary terms, will save Haiti more than $150 
million a year, Haitian officials say.

Chavez' anti-U.S. rhetoric found resonance among some Haitians, who 
are still smarting from the ouster of former president Jean 
Bertrand-Aristide, who remains in asylum in South Africa.

The Bush administration has been accused of engineering Aristide's 
removal from office in February 2004 in collusion with Jacques 
Chirac's French Government ? an accusation Washington and Paris have 
repeatedly denied.
? CMC


TAKEN FROM THE FINANCIAL GLEANER, FRIDAY, MARCH 16, 2007


The Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 863-9977
www.freedomarchives.org 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20070319/8a7c315c/attachment.htm>