Chavez to work on problems facing Venezuela

Chavez to work on problems facing Venezuela
By Larry Moonze in Havana, Cuba
Wed 11 Nov. 2009, 04:02 CAT

VENEZUELAN President Hugo Chavez has said his administration will go into offensive in the next three years to solve numerous problems still affecting Venezuela. Meanwhile, President Chavez has warned that if the United States militarily attacked Venezuela through Colombia, it would have provoked a war of hundred years.

“We are the sons of Simon Bolivar (Venezuelan national hero) and we are spread from Mexico to Argentina,” President Chavez said. “Venezuela is not alone, we have a large group of friends… Nobody can think that a war against our country would be only against Venezuela.”

In his Lines by Chavez, before he distributed 80,000 new houses at US $84,000 each in Portuguesa State on Sunday, he said the essential objective of his socialist revolution was to give everyone greatest possible amount of happiness.

President Chavez said the government was subsidising part of the cost at an interest rate of 4.5 per cent payable in a 30-year term.

“Only consciousness frees the human been from the tyranny of the time,” he said. “It can also be said that there is a force as powerful as consciousness that is called love. In the words of Christ, when we love one another, the human being is able to get over the miseries of egoism and the chains shortsightedness.”

President Chavez said in December three years would have passed since his overwhelming victory in the presidential elections of 2006.

“Years 2010, 2011 and 2012 will be a powerful offensive that will permit us to continue solving the numerous problems that still affect Venezuela,” he said.

“They will be three years of battle in the elevation of life levels of the whole people, fulfilling its most profound needs. That will only be possible, I repeat, through socialism.”

Turning the tide to friction with Colombia following the agreement to grant US seven military bases around Colombia, President Chavez asked Venezuelans to be alert and get ready to defend the country if it were necessary. He said agreement gave the United States’ naval, air and land forces strategic presence in Latin America.

"The best way to avoid war is being prepared," he said. President Chavez, who condemned the US-Colombia agreement on his Alo Presidente television and radio programme on Sunday, said all Venezuelans should be ready to defend their homeland. The United States under the accord would have 800 troops and 600 American civilian contractors with diplomatic immunity and would not be subjected to Colombia laws.

President Chavez said an attack by the US from Colombia would provoke a regional war. He said the Colombian administration of President Alvaro Uribe was a “government of lackeys of the empire”.

“Colombia has been transferred to the United States. It was handed over but not the people but the government of that country and the oligarchy who previously wore a mask and now they have taken off their mask,” President Chavez said.
He also announced that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would visit Venezuela to strengthen relations.

“Imperialism and its lackeys have Iran and Venezuela on sight but we will defeat them,” said President Chavez. “As Iran has Israel, we have Colombia's government at the service of the Yankee empire.”

The Venezuelan government suspended bilateral relations with Colombia on July 28 in retaliation to the seven American military bases in Colombia which it says threatens the security of Venezuela and the region.