While Dubya is hard at work pissing off the Guatemalans, look what’s going on in Nicaragua:
This Sunday, the governments of Venezuela and Nicaragua signed an agreement to build a petroleum refinery, and incorporated Nicaragua into the multinational channel TeleSUR.
The plant will be built in León , to a capacity of 150,000 barrels a day.
“I am happy to announce that we will build a large refinery in León to process Venezuelan crude,” announced President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.
The investment for the construction of the refinery in the western province will come to 2.5 billion dollars.
“This refinery will assure that Nicaraguans will have no more problems supplying oil in the future, and so that in the not so distant future, Nicaragua will become a net exporter of petroleum, which will help it escape from poverty,” Chavez added.
The refinery will process 150,000 barrels a day of petroleum, which will permit Nicaragua to stop seeking aid from the IMF and join the recently created Bank of the South.
Translation mine.
As you can see, Sunday’s not a day of rest for Chavecito. While Bush is on a meaningless PR trip that will ultimately come to nothing, Chavecito comes fully loaded to a neighbor country–with something that will make a real difference where it’s sorely needed.
At this rate, the IMF will end up playing the beggar for a change, according to Bloomberg News. No wonder Dubya’s running scared.
And he’s not the only one. CNN is worried, too:
The news network, CNN en Español, believes that the rejection it is receiving from TV viewers in Latin America is due to a “psychological phenomenton of displaced anti-Bush sentiment” in the region.
So believes the vice-president of the station, Puerto Rican Christoper Cromett, who said in an interview published today by the daily, Página 12, of Buenos Aires, that “when there’s an event that creates a great polarization of opinion”, such as the war in Iraq, “it’s always easier to criticize a media outlet like CNN, which is based in the US.”
“If you’re looking for a channel to criticize and unload your anger on, CNN is perfect, because it is identified with the United States and the location of its head office. When people cannot channel their anger against Bush, the public fights against CNN,” said Cromett, supervisor of the channel’s editorial line.
The director explained that what is happening to CNN “is a psychological phenomenon of the court of public opinion”, “blaming the messenger” who “corresponds best to a displacement of anti-Bush sentiment onto the screen.”
“While outside the United States they criticize CNN for reflecting the Bush government policies, inside the country they raise their voices that this is a channel which is ‘anti-government’, ‘anti-American’, and ‘anti-patriotic’. This double reception assures us that our information is impartial,” he said.
The executive said that “if you compare what CNN en Español puts on the air with other channels, no other broadcaster devotes so much space to Latin America.”
He said that the “success” of the channel, which has been on the air for ten years in Latin America, “has not gone unnoticed by other companies”, such as Qatar’s al-Jazeera, “which, for economic or political reasons, understand that they need to establish a presence here.”
Translation mine.
Notice the quickness to compare Telesur (whose name they seem curiously loath to mention, I wonder why) to the Arab network al-Jazeera–best known (no doubt as a terrorist sympathizer in Bushieland) for airing Osama bin Laden’s missives unedited.
Couldn’t have anything to do with the fact that Telesur has recently signed on not only Nicaragua, but Bolivia–bringing the total number of member countries to six. Could it now?