Some events are so momentous, so history shaking, all you need to refer to them is a date. 911 is, I suppose, the grand-daddy of them all, not to mention the main reference point American readers will have for the whole idea of the History Changing Date.

In Venezuela, we...

It's a campaign ad, entitled "Hall of Fame." It opens in a computer-generated museum. As the camera pans from one dictator's portrait to the next, we hear a famous passage written by Venezuela's independence hero, Simon Bolivar, all the way back in 1819:

"Nothing is so dangerous...

Talk about Venezuela these days and people assume the argument splits neatly between two camps: nutty Pat Robertson-style Chavez-hating right-wingers who couldn't care less about the poor at home, let alone in South America; and sane, progressive folks with the sense to balance off concerns about Hugo Chavez's autocratic streak...

You've gotta feel for Hugo Chavez. Things are not going well for him. Just six months ago, the guy was on top of the world: with sky high oil prices bringing in unprecedented amounts of money into his oil-rich fiefdom and, on top of that, the best of all possible...

It's not easy being a progressive Venezuelan opposed to the Chavez Regime. A lot of my leftie friends in the US look south and see a fresh, irreverent if slightly over-the-top leader sticking it to the man and fighting for Latin America's poor...understandably, they can't help but wonder if I...

Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's narcissist-Leninist president, surprised precisely no one last week when he coyly gave his supporters "permission" to petition for a referendum to abolish presidential term limits. It didn't exactly come as a shock: Chavez has never really hidden his determination to exit the presidential palace horizontally.

This indefinite...