The new military powerhouse of South America.

last updated 8 January 2015

Venezuela

William Waack

Venezuela is alarming its neighbors, said William Waack in Brazil’s O Globo. President Hugo Chavez has taken his oil wealth on a “spending spree,” and he’s not building hospitals. He has bought 100,000 AK-47 assault rifles, along with a factory to manufacture the bullets. He has bought anti-aircraft systems and submarines. Most ominously, he has bought a bunch of Russian Sukhoi-35s, sophisticated fighter jets that outpower any aircraft on this continent and “can go up against American F-15s and F-18s.” What is all this military muscle intended for? It’s not like there’s some great external military threat to his country. Nor is Chavez using all that hardware to secure his own territory; the Orinoco Belt, a key oil region, is still “the area preferred by criminal gangs for shipping huge amounts of drugs to Europe.” That leaves one explanation: The arms buildup is just a way of provoking the United States. Let’s hope Chavez doesn’t “bring a new conflict to our hemisphere.”