Featured Articles - Military

The asinine assertions of Chavez’s ‘authoritarianism’ can be easily refuted, but the purchase of submarines and aircraft are harder to explain. Military hardware is military hardware whichever way you look at it, and at first sight it is not easy to see why a country like Venezuela needs jet fighters, submarines or helicopters.

Much confusion surrounds the Venezuelan military reserves, partly because of the controversy they cause. For the government, they are a critical part of the Venezuelan process because of the role they play in deterring, or in the worst case fighting, a war of invasion by the US.

Many on the left are skeptical of Chavez' credentials as a democratic progressive because of his military origins. Marta Harnecker addresses some of the concerns in this article.