President Chávez announced the withdrawal of the ambassador to Colombia, Gustavo Márquez, and said he decided to freeze relations with Colombia in response to accusations that the Venezuelan government had supplied weapons to FARC rebels. "Faced with this new aggression from the irresponsible government of Colombia, I have ordered that our ambassador be withdrawn from Bogotá. We are going to freeze relations with Colombia. On the Colombian side, unfortunately, the government is not serious, we have made efforts, we have extended a hand, but enough is enough, we will withdraw not only the ambassador, but all senior officials, the economic relationships will freeze, we will replace imports from Colombia, none of this is indispensable," he said. "The next aggression against Venezuela, of this type or similar type of signal or accusation, will simply result in breaking relations with Colombia's government and we will prepare ourselves for that in every respect, economic trade, we will expropriate the Colombian-owned businesses here, Uribe, you expropriated Monómero over there, hang on to that, it's yours." He also warned that "we will be looking at every Colombian company that has a presence in Venezuela."
The Government of Sweden confirmed today to Colombian media that several Swedish-made weapons recently seized from FARC guerrillas were sold to Venezuela in the late 1980s. "We were able to confirm through the serial numbers in cooperation with the Government of Colombia," said Swedish Commerce Ministry official Jens Eriksson to the radio station "La W". Eriksson added that the weapons corresponded to a cache "sold 20 years ago." He said that he still had not received an official response from Venezuela to his requests for information on the matter. For its part, Venezuela will respond "in a timely manner'' to Sweden on the anti-tank rocket launchers that Caracas acquired and landed in the hands of the FARC, said Foreign Minister Nicolás Maduro Tuesday, accusing Colombia of promote a campaign to "destabilize the region''.
Congressman Ismael García revealed at a press conference the recording of an alleged conversation between Judge Venicce Blanco, president of the Criminal Judicial Circuit of Caracas, and Judge Alicia Torres, in which Torres was pressured to sign the order to ban Globovisión president Guillermo Zuloaga from the leaving the country. "I want you to make this ruling and it has to be done now," Blanco said. In the conversation made public by the leader of Podemos, Blanco apparently asks Judge Torres to resign if Torres was not willing to issue the ruling. Meanwhile Torres argued that she could not sign an order that was not within her jurisdictional power. Alicia Torres was suspended from her post on the 13th Court of the Caracas metropolitan area, in which the case against Globovisión president Guillermo Zuloaga was brought, known as "ToyoClub". In the last week, Judge Torres has denounced the fact that she received orders to sign such measures in the case.
The draft law governing the automotive industry modifies the concept of private property as established in the constitution, said the president of the National Alliance of Consumers and Users (Anauco), Roberto León Parillo. Upon determining the position of the organization that presides over the scope of the bill to regulate the purchase and sale of new and used vehicles, both domestic and imported, Parillo clarified that Article 115 of the constitution provides that property rights inherently have four fundamental elements which are the use, benefit, enjoyment and provision of the good. He warned that if the user of the good cannot sell it in the two years subsequent to buying it, this would mean one of those elements is not there, which would do harm to the constitutional right to property. He also said that after 10 years of an oil bonanza during which the country has received substantial income, the automotive sector of the country has not improved and this has been a lost decade, as the industry is still depressed.
President Chávez announced on Tuesday that Petrobras and PDVSA, after intense negotiations, reached an agreement to form a joint venture responsible for building and operating a refinery in northern Brazil. Chavez, who received Petrobras president José Sergio Gabrielli on Monday, read a joint press release from the two state-owned oil companies, not yet published, according to which they reached an agreement after years of negotiations. "We continued the talks to make possible the formation of the joint venture Abreu Lima Refinery, agreeing on the negotiation points that allow allow PDVSA to be a shareholder in the Pernambuco refinery," Chávez read from the statement. The agreement to establish this joint venture will be signed in September during President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's visit to Venezuela. Chávez gave no further details on the resolution of the issues that had blocked the negotiations until now.
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