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Hugo Chavez spurns Obama

Posted on: Sun January 24, 2010

CARACAS/PORT-AU-PRINCE: Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said on Sunday that American relief efforts in Haiti had fallen short and told US President Barack Obama to send vaccinations, kid, instead of armed soldiers. The left-wing foe of Washington has accused the United States of using the earthquake in Haiti as a pretext for an imperial occupation of the devastated Caribbean nation. Obama, send vaccinations, kid, send vaccinations, Chavez said during his weekly broadcast. Each soldier that you send there should carry a medical kit instead of hand grenades and machine guns. A contingent of 13,000 US troops is helping relief efforts after the Jan 12 magnitude-7 quake killed up to 200,000 people and left up to 3 million people hurt or homeless and clamouring for medical assistance, food and water. Chavez called into doubt the effectiveness of a US hospital boat sent as part of the relief effort, saying American doctors had been unable to find patients and had to request referrals from Cuban and Venezuelan doctors. Why? Because they don t push their way through the debris, they don t go into the slums, where the bodies are, he said. It s because they re afraid. Our (doctors) aren t afraid. Venezuelan government television networks have focused their Haiti coverage nearly exclusively on the US military presence there. One broadcast on Saturday showed footage of soldiers, saying they were American troops surrounding the Venezuelan Embassy in Port-au-Prince. Meanwhile, thousands of Haitian voices rose in songs and prayer from church ruins on Sunday, as aid efforts stepped up and a French ship carrying supplies arrived 12 days after a devastating quake. Haitians had a small miracle to celebrate after a man who survived on cola was pulled alive from the rubble a day earlier, but hundreds of thousands of people remained in desperate need of food, water and shelter. International donors meanwhile prepared to meet Monday in Montreal to discuss rebuilding Haiti after the quake, which killed at least 112,000 people in the worst recorded disaster ever to hit the Americas. In the skeletal shadow of Port-au-Prince s shattered Roman Catholic cathedral where the city s archbishop was buried on Saturday, Father Glanda Toussaint held mass at an altar improvised on a wooden table. Before the January 12 quake around 2,500 people would fill the pews at the cathedral. When Toussaint asked today s congregation of around 300 if they understood why the disaster happened, the crowd murmured their incomprehension. All is not the will of God but all is providential, he said. What we are going through is not finished, we must reconstruct the country and reconstruct our faith. As a Haitian, it hurts. Aid workers have been moving into the recovery phase after the government officially called off search and rescue efforts, but an international team on Saturday dug out 25-year-old Wismond Exantus from the ruins of a shop. I feel good, Exantus said in hospital. I survived by drinking Coca-Cola. I drank Coca-Cola every day, and I ate some little tiny things. Rescue teams have saved more than 130 people from the wreckage of Port-au-Prince since the 7.0-magnitude quake on January 12. But there was a tragic false alarm after a college head received a text message from a friend who was trapped and rescuers checked the area with dogs and radar four times but found no signs of life. There was nothing. It could be explained by the fact that the SMS arrived late, like on New Year s Day, because there were so many calls, French firefighter Christian Morel said.

Courtesy : The News