President Hugo Chávez has been in Spain on an official visit. Relations between him and King Juan Carlos have been restored and Chávez was joking about the ¿Por qué no te callas? (Why don't you shut up?) incident*.
He has offered Spain 200,000 barrels of oil a day at a price of $100 dollars a barrel. Spain's annual consumption is 1.1m barrels so this is a considerable offer. The price difference will be made up in the form of technology transfer programmes for Venezuelan development. Ken Livingstone also negotiated a cheap oil deal for London with Chávez. As far as I know, the price differential there was made up in the rhetoric of socialist solidarity.
Chávez has changed his tune lately and has become far less aggressive. A few weeks ago, a computer belonging to the leader of the FARC, and presumably holding sensitive information and details of FARC supporters, was captured. It is believed that these two facts are not unrelated.
*28 July
Chávez has given King Juan Carlos a T-shirt to commemorate the incident.
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