News stories by Humberto Márquez, page 8

The deafening silence of Latin American governments has fallen like another shovelful of earth on the grave of Cuban dissident Orlando Zapata, a bricklayer who died Feb. 23 after nearly three months on hunger strike in prison on the Caribbean island.

Chile has been wrapped in a blanket of international solidarity, while offers of cooperation for the relief of victims and the reconstruction of the country shower down upon it, after the devastating Feb. 27 earthquake and tsunami.

Tens of thousands of shoppers in Venezuela practically stormed businesses selling home appliances and other consumer products after the government cut the exchange rate of the bolivar against the dollar by half.

President Hugo Chávez complained that an unmanned reconnaissance aircraft from Colombia recently violated Venezuelan airspace in the northwest of the country and was sighted by soldiers in Fort Mara, near the border.

'We’re second-class citizens, victims of a war that hasn’t broken out,' said José Duque from behind the wheel of a car carrying passengers from San Cristóbal, in southwestern Venezuela, to the border with the northeastern region of Colombia, near the city of Cúcuta.

Peasants fleeing Colombia's armed conflict are still trickling into Venezuela, joining the multitude who in the last seven years have requested refugee status and an identity document to help them rebuild their lives in their new country.

The red lionfish (Pterois volitans), a venomous coral reef fish from the Indian and western Pacific Oceans, has invaded the waters of the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, threatening to wreak havoc on ecosystems, native fish populations and popular underwater diving areas.

The activities of Colombian armed groups across the border in western Venezuela are aggravating the diplomatic conflict between the two governments, which are ideological opposites, and some analysts have begun to wonder just how far the tension will escalate.

One Friday at around midnight, on Villaflor Street, a favourite spot for gays and lesbians in the Venezuelan capital, Yonatan Matheus and Omar Marques noticed two Caracas police patrol vans carrying about 20 detainees, most of them very young.

The guanábana (soursop) trees in Victoria Martínez's small orchard have yielded none of their delicious fruit this year, which she blames on the scarcity of water, a problem as annoying as the power blackouts at her house close to Tocuyito, a sun-baked town 120 kilometres southwest of the Venezuelan capital.