Weekly Report - 23 August 2007 (ISSN 1741-7422)

COLOMBIA | Exports surge. Total exports in 2007 could eclipse the previous annual record of US$28bn, according to the trade minister, Luis Guillermo Plata. Exports for the first five months of the year stood at US$11.18bn, 17.6% up on the same period in 2006. The exports of non-traditional products were up 20% in this period, although these were driven mainly by huge demand in Venezuela for cars, car parts and livestock. The sale of traditional products (oil, coal, coffee and ferronickel) increased by 15%. Imports for the first six months of the year were US$15.29bn, up 27.1% on the same period in 2006, according to the national statistics agency, Dane.

VENEZUELA | Pdvsa chief punished for maletinazo. Diego Uzcátegui, the president of Venezuela's state-owned oil company Pdvsa in Argentina, resigned on 17 August in what looks like a gesture by President Hugo Chávez to his Argentine counterpart Néstor Kirchner, who had apparently demanded Uzcátegui's removal after the suitcase scandal earlier this month [WR-07-32]. The media has been claiming that it was Uzcátegui's son Daniel who invited Antonini Wilson, the Venezuelan-US citizen carrying a suitcase containing US$790,550 in US$50 notes, onto a flight to Buenos Aires chartered by the Argentine state energy company Enarsa on 3 August. Kirchner had dismissed a senior Argentine official, Claudio Uberti, the right-hand man of federal planning minister Julio de Vido, for chartering the flight. The official Pdvsa statement said that Uzcátegui had stepped down because internal rules were broken. His departure takes some of the heat off the Argentine government ahead of October's presidential elections by making a public show of Venezuela's commitment to fighting corruption. Speaking on his weekly broadcast Aló Presidente, Chávez said he had come under no pressure from the Kirchner administration whatsoever, but that Pdvsa officials had made a mistake and the matter was now in the hands of the judiciary. An Argentine judge issued an international arrest warrant for Antonini Wilson last week.