Economy & Business - April 2005

President Hugo Chávez is backtracking on some of his more extreme comments about the US. He said, at the end of March, that the country wanted to go on sending 1.5m bpd of crude oil to the US. Over the past 18 months Chávez has frightened US politicians with his threats to cut oil supplies to the US. Venezuela is the US fourth-biggest source of oil after Canada, Mexico and Saudi Arabia.