I will be in the United States for the next two weeks speaking in Illinois, Wisconsin, Missouri, Kansas, and Minnesota, about Venezuela and Latin America.  Following are some of the public presentations:

I spent the Christmas holidays in my hometown of Cheyenne, Wyoming. It is always interesting to return to the U.S. and to get back in touch with a bit of the reality there.

One evening I was attending an open house party when I saw a former public high-school principal that I have known for a long time. I don’t remember if he greeted me, or simply began to speak about Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez. The remark was something like this: “That crazy Chávez thinks the U.S. is sending spy planes over Venezuelan territory. What do we need spy planes for when we have satellites providing all the information we need?”

Is the Associated Press in Venezuela a Religion?
 
Recently Colombia accused Venezuela of providing three anti-tank rocket launchers to the FARC (the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia).  President Chávez has repeatedly denied the charge.
 
On August 5, Chávez held a special news conference with the international press that lasted several hours.  He presented evidence that the rockets were among five that were stolen from the Venezuelan armed forces on February 25, 1995, when a military base was attacked by Colombian guerillas.  This was four years before he became president.

A few days ago I bought a copy of the Venezuelan daily, El Nacional, and asked God for forgiveness. Many years ago it was my favorite newspaper here. Now I feel I am sinning whenever I put two more bolivars into their coffers.

I wanted to see their coverage of the situation in Honduras. But what I quickly discovered on page three was their un-coverage of a woman. In a half-page ad, black and white, there was a naked woman! Don’t get excited. She wasn’t a French, Italian, or Venezuelan model. She could have been any ordinary barrio mother. Her arms covered her breasts. Her face looked sad. She almost appeared to have been beaten.

The white words that penetrated the blackness were: “The Social Property Law will take everything from you. NO to the Cuban law.” The ad was sponsored by “CEDICE.”

The June 29 coup in Honduras did not surprise me.

The day before I read in the morning newspaper that General Romeo Vasquez said a coup d’état was “not certain.” He said “we (the military) are seeking the use of reason and not force in order to resolve the conflicts by dialogue.”

As soon as I saw the words, “not certain,” I said to myself immediately that it was one of the options the general was considering. I also felt he was not talking about dialogue but about a monologue that the opposition would present to President Manuel Zelaya.

             The Venezuelan newspaper I bought this morning in Caracas carried two pictures of demonstrators in Iran yesterday.

U.S. President Obama, Venezuelan President Chávez, and Bolivian President Morales will be together for the first time this weekend in Trinidad for the Summit of the Americas. I hope they will become friends for a number of reasons.

At this moment I am pondering one in particular: the personal well-being of Obama as president. I think that in the years ahead he will need the friendship of these two Latin American leaders as much or more than they will need his. I think President Obama is going to have to confront the same kind of opposition that these two men have had to contend with. It won’t be easy and it would be good for Obama to have a support group with whom he could share feelings and frustrations.

For some odd reason, Delta Airlines recently put me in the first class section on a flight from Atlanta to Caracas.

As I sat there uncomfortably comfortably among people who had a lot more money than I ever dreamed of having, the flight attendant managed to make me even more uncomfortable by asking if I would like some wine with my meal. I decided to join the crowd, but said that I would like white wine—everyone else I could see had something red in their glasses. “Of course,” she said, and went to the front of the plane.

      Living in a foreign country often puts a different slant on what is happening in the United States. 
 

I have just finished reading INTERPOL’s report on the computers that the government of Colombia says it found in an encampment of the FARC-EP on March 1. Reading the report I am once again fascinated with what experts can do with computers. But I am shocked that the world’s best known detective agency cannot add three plus three.