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Hugo Chavez drops in on Jamaica, Haiti | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, visited Haiti and Jamaica Monday on the next stage of his parallel tour of the Americas with US President Bush. BBC Caribbean understands that PetroCaribe - the Venezuelan cheap oil deal - was the key issue when he met the Jamaican Prime Minister Portia Simpson-Miller. On a visit to Kingston last year the Venezuelan leader had announced plans to provide Jamaica with billions of dollars in loan funds for highway construction and other development projects. Government happy, opposition unimpressed "We had a very good meeting, we had a long meeting with the president... He's busy, needs to get to Haiti, and the agreement we signed is very important to Jamaica," Prime Minister Portia Simpson-Miller said after meeting with the Venezuelan leader. But the opposition Jamaica Labour Party appears not too keen on relations with President Chavez. And it says it's unclear as to the exact reasons for his visit to Jamaica on Monday. JLP spokesman Karl Samuda has expressed hope that Prime Minister Simpson-Miller will shed some light on the issue in Parliament. Hearts, minds...and cheap oil Jamaica and Haiti are both signatories of PetroCaribe, a strategic oil alliance with Venezuela which allows Caribbean countries to buy Venezuelan oil at preferential rates. President Chavez has been highly critical of a swing through Latin America by US President George Bush. The two leaders appear to be battling it out for the hearts and minds of the peoples of the region. Mr Chavez has ridiculed one initiative from Mr Bush - to send a navy medical ship to the Caribbean and Latin America. President Bush said the United States planned to send the Navy ship to treat 85 thousand patients and conduct up to 15 hundred surgeries in the Americas. Among the countries where the ship will make stops are Belize, Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana and Suriname. But Mr Chavez was not impressed. He ridiculed the announcement of what he called this little boat with doctors and medicines for 15 hunded people as if it were a great thing. Cuba and Venezuela alone, he said, had operated on the eyes of more than half a million people in the Caribbean and Latin America. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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American Airlines plane crashes in Jamaica
