Just a comment. I noticed on TV that Hugo Chávez was speaking from behind a lectern on which was draped a Venezuelan flag. Now, my trusty World Almanac has a picture of the Venezuelan flag, with a broad yellow stripe on top, then a blue stripe, and then a red stripe, with seven stars in a rainbow arc in the middle of the blue middle stripe. The flag Chávez was using, though, had a large black Venezuela below the arc of stars, and the shape of Venezuela on that there flag did not correspond to that on your National Geographic map. It corresponded to that of Venezuela AND Guyana. Seems that Chávez is claiming that Guyana is part of Venezuela. Now, there's been a long-standing border dispute between Venezuela and first, the British, who took over Guyana as a colony and held it until the 1960s, and then the Guyanese, when they became independent. The Americans at one point at the turn of the century were called in to mediate the border dispute between Britain and Venezuela. Now it looks like Chávez is claiming the whole thing. He's the typical nationalist jerk who gets wrought up over lines in the jungle, and that kind of person is very dangerous; look what happened in 1995 between Ecuador and Peru, Official Dumbest Latin American War of the Nineties. (The Official Dumbest Latin American War of All Time would be the time El Salvador took on Honduras over the results of a soccer game--or the time Paraguay went at it with Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay and only like 30,000 Paraguayan men survived, so polygamy had to be introduced to restock the population--or when Peru and Bolivia went after Chile and got creamed--or that time Bolivia and Paraguay had it out over the utterly useless Chaco--or the other two previous Ecuador-Peru wars--or Argentina deciding to take on the Royal Navy--or Santa Anna taking on the US again in 1846, after he'd already been beaten by just the Texans. Only Cool Latin American War Effort Ever: when Brazilian troops fought with the Allies in the Italian campaign between 1943 and 1945.)