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Venezuela and Brazil not in an arms race: general
Sao Paulo (AFP) Nov 5, 2007 Venezuela and Brazil are not competing in a regional arms race, despite suspicions voiced in Brasilia, an influential Venezuelan general said in an interview published Monday. Although both countries have announced billion-dollar increases in military spending recently, in Venezuela the reason has more to do with US sanctions than any hostility to neighboring countries, General Alberto Mueller Rojas told the Brazilian daily Folha de Sao Paulo. He denied a claim by Brazilian senator Jose Sarney, a former president who is now a key ally to President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, that Venezuela posed a "threat" to Brazil and Latin America. "That's simply ridiculous ... Venezuela is not in any sort of arms race. Ex-president Sarney must be crazy or simply joking around," said the 72-year-old officer, who up until recently was one of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's senior advisors. He added that Venezuela's military was much smaller than Brazil's. Sarney "knows perfectly well ... what is the size of Brazil's (armed) forces and what is the size of Venezuela's forces. It's an abysmal difference." Brazil last month said it was boosting its military spending by more than 50 percent, to 9.1 billion reals (5.2 billion dollars), in what it termed a purely defensive move. Venezuela, flush with oil money, has already embarked on an ambitious military spending spree, shelling out around four billion dollars to buy machines and material, including 24 Sukhoi Su-30 fighter jets and 53 helicopters from Russia. Caracas has also bought three Chinese-made radar installations, 100,000 Russian-made assault rifles and five Russian submarines. Rojas said "the purchases Venezuela is making is in part resulting from the fact that a good proportion of Venezuelan military equipment, like its F-16s, is American, and the US has blocked replacement parts." He added that European-made equipment that used US technology was also barred from being bought. He also said that Venezuela was equipping itself for asymmetrical warfare, "because conventional war is ceasing to exist." The United States has slapped an embargo of US-made military technology to Venezuela amid worsening relations between Washington and Caracas. The United States considers Chavez a dangerous leader set on destabilizing South America and spreading his leftist revolutionary ideology. The Venezuelan president has nurtured ties with Cuba's Fidel Castro and with Iran, and is using his country's oil wealth to try to form a regional coalition able to resist US influence. Brazil sees itself sharing borders with several countries that are either sympathetic to Chavez or allied to the United States. It considers itself unallied, though the Folha de Sao Paulo said that Brazil's military leaders "have an expectation" that Washington will now make overtures to bring the country into the US orbit to counter Venezuela's rising might. Community Email This Article Comment On This Article Related Links The Military Industrial Complex at SpaceWar.com Learn about the Superpowers of the 21st Century at SpaceWar.com
Lockheed Martin to meet deadline for India's war jet deal
New Delhi (AFP) Nov 2, 2007US aerospace giant Lockheed Martin on Friday said it would meet a March 2008 deadline set by India to bid for the world's largest military aircraft deal estimated at 10 billion dollars. |
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