Venezuela offers to cure Nicaragua's oil ills
President Hugo Chavez met Friday with President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua to discuss an array of Venezuelan assistance programs, capping an unusually frenetic week for this country's efforts to enhance its political and economic influence in parts of Latin America.

At the heart of many of the agreements reached this week — with Nicaragua, Ecuador and Argentina — is Venezuela's use of its windfall from rising oil prices, and sometimes its own reserves and exports of oil, to lift its regional profile.

Chavez is using Venezuela's oil revenues, valued at more than us$50 billion a year, to counter the influence of the United States and multilateral lending organizations like the International Monetary Fund.

Venezuelan aid for Nicaragua has been a godsend for Ortega, the former Sandinista guerrilla leader who was elected president last year.

Venezuela has already agreed to forgive more than us$30 million in Nicaraguan debt, provide more than two dozen generating plants to alleviate an electricity shortage and open an office of Venezuela's development bank in Managua to offer low-interest loans to small businesses.

Venezuela is also considering building an oil refinery in Nicaragua and a pipeline across that country from the Caribbean to the Pacific to transport Venezuelan crude oil to refineries in China and Japan, part of an effort to move away from exporting oil to the United States.

"Nicaragua can forget about fuel problems," Chavez said during recently in Managua.

The talks with Nicaragua were preceded in recent days by an offer from Venezuela of us$500 million in financial assistance to Ecuador, where the administration of President Rafael Correa has been considering efforts to restructure part of its foreign debt.