“Faced with these threats of war by the government of Venezuela, the government of Colombia is weighing heading to the Organization of American States and UN Security Council,” said a statement from President Alvaro Uribe, read out by his spokesman Cesar Velasquez.

“Colombia has not made nor will it make any bellicose move toward the international community, (and) even less so toward fellow Latin American nations,” the statement said.

Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez. AFP PHOTO

“The only thing we are interested in is defeating terrorism related to drug trafficking, which has been so unfair to Colombians for so many years.”

Colombia, the statement added, “remains ready for frank dialogue, achieving greater understanding and to the rules of international law.”

Hours earlier, Chavez urged his military leaders to prepare “for war” and to ready citizens to “defend the homeland,” as tensions continue to mount over fractious ties with neighboring Colombia.

“Let’s not waste a day on our main aim: to prepare for war and to help the people prepare for war, because it is everyone’s responsibility,” Chavez said during his weekly radio and television show “Alo, Presidente.”

The comments come at a tense time for the region as Colombia signs a controversial military agreement with the United States to let US forces use seven military bases in Colombia for anti-drug operations.

Chavez has repeatedly voiced deep fears of US encroachment in the region.

Plummer said that many people have responded to the economic crisis by withholding their money, and with the life blood of the financial sector cut off, governments have been forced to throw money in to save the financial sectors, small businesses and spending on infrastructure development, in a bid to restore the economy.

“We have not had the ability to do so because, as you know, we have limited resources. Basically, what you find is that we have not been able to provide the sort of stimulus that other countries have been able to do,” he remarked.

However, he said that the Jamaican Government has reacted to the crisis by engaging in talks with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), maintaining stability in the foreign exchange market and reducing interest rates, as well as the size of the public sector.

“If we have limited resources, we have to spend less and two of the things that we have been trying to spend less on is interest rates, or interest costs, and wages,” Plummer said.

“So, right now, we have the Prime Minister coming out boldly and telling us that one of the things that we will have to do is to reduce the size of the Government sector. Those are what we can do. We cannot spend money like everybody else. Things that are under our control we will try to control,” he explained.

Plummer, speaking recently at an Economic Outlook seminar, said however that there is hope as many countries are now reporting growth, which is an indication of recovery from the economic crisis.

“Basically, six months ago the climate was gloomy and many countries were reporting that their economies were declining. What are we hearing today, we are hearing that these countries are growing,” he pointed out.

He said that countries like Brazil and Costa Rica in Latin America, Germany and France in Europe and the United States, were now reporting some amount of growth.

These reports are good for Jamaica, which depends on these countries to import its goods and services, he noted.

“We sell them services like tourism. Our relatives over there send us money, so we want them to grow, as they have been growing recently.” he said.

He added that other signs of recovery included a rise in business and consumer confidence, increases in the purchase of durable goods, higher commodity prices, especially for oil, and an increase in car sales.

“There is some amount of rising business and consumer confidence, so people are now more willing to do business and we are seeing an increase in consumer purchases. Certain types of machines that you do not ordinarily buy if you do not have to, we are seeing people buying these things, which is a good sign,” he noted.

Prime Minister, Bruce Golding (left) speaking with Patricia Espinosa Cantellano (right) Minister of Foreign Affairs of Mexico, during the official opening ceremony of the Ministerial Meeting of Foreign Ministers of Latin America and the Caribbean (CALC) on Integration and Development  in Montego Bay on Friday. At centre is Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade,  Kenneth Baugh. (JIS photo)

Golding said significant achievements toward integration and collaboration have already been made among various sub-groups of Latin America and the Caribbean. However, there is need for broader, sturdier co-operation to engage and benefit the countries, in terms of how they relate to each other and the rest of the world.

He told Friday’s opening ceremony of the Special Meeting of Ministers of Foreign Affairs of Latin America and the Caribbean (CALC) on Integration and Development in Montego Bay that, while institutions of co-operation are being built, it is equally important to facilitate and promote interaction among the people.

“It is the irony of our relationship that, although we are neighbours, we remain to a large extent neighbouring strangers. Our people encounter each other far more in faraway places than they do in our own neighbourhood. Successful integration must be undergirded by easy and frequent contact among our people,” Golding said.

The Prime Minister said special attention must be paid to facilitating easier travel within the region. He commended the signing, on Thursday, of an air service agreement between Mexico and Jamaica. He also suggested that special attention be paid to encouraging more exchanges between the people of the region, especially in the areas of tourism, culture and sports.

Golding said that the power and potential of the region should not be underestimated.

“With more than 570-million people with the most diverse mix of race, colour and ethnicity, abundance of natural resources, we have more than enough to sustain ourselves and make our people prosperous,” he stated.

He said there are synergies that can be derived from working more closely than in the past, but the countries have looked, separately and individually, beyond the region for opportunities to strengthen their economies and provide a better life for their people.

The Prime Minister said Jamaica welcomed the initiative taken by the President of Brazil in convening the meeting of Latin America and the Caribbean leaders, last December in Salvador, Bahia.

“These deliberations culminated in the Salvador Declaration, which called for an action plan to explore the modalities and mechanisms that would enable us to advance the process of integration and development within the region,” he recalled.

He said that a draft action plan identifying specific targets and strategies has been developed, through intense consultations among subscribing countries.

Other speakers at the ceremony were: Jamaica’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade, Kenneth Baugh; Mayor of Montego Bay, Councillor Charles Sinclair; Mexico’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Patricia Espinosa Cantellano; and Brazil’s Minister of External Relations, Celso Amorim.

The meeting, chaired by Baugh, focused on issues pertaining to the integration and development of the Latin America and Caribbean region. Attention was also given to current global challenges, such as the ongoing economic crisis and energy, food and climate change issues.

With considerable potential and low penetration rates it is a market that would benefit from competition and closer links to other countries. Already mobile growth looks set to take off after restrictions were lifted on mobile ownership and the number of net additions each quarter continues to increase, indicating a voracious appetite for mobile services in the market. Further growth can be expected across the market.

Even with upgrades to the forecasts, the Cuban market has the ability to grow even faster but it is believed that affordability remains a key issue for many Cubans, holding the market back.

The Caribbean’s only other monopoly market, Bahamas, looks set to finally see privatisation take place by the end of 2009 if government plans are to go ahead. Earlier failed attempts to sell 51 percent of the Bahamas Telecommunications Company (BTC) may have put off some potential investors and the already high penetration rate will make the market a challenge for any new entrants but the relatively wealthy population makes this an attractive prospect.

Competition for the mobile market is not set to enter until two years after privatisation takes place and the prospects for growth for any new entrant are low but it is still believed there are opportunities to grow and the market will welcome new competitors.

The report has revised the forecasts for Trinidad and Tobago considerably following the release of 2008 subscriber numbers putting the penetration rate at 138 percent. This is the highest in the region and it is expected further growth to be minimal with a decline beginning in 2012. While there have been cases of mobile markets continuing to grow, way past 138 percent, bmobile is already losing subscribers and the report does not believe that the market can sustain much more growth.

With such a range of markets in the Caribbean it is hard to draw any generalisations but the overall trends for the region see decline for the majority of fixed-line markets owing to the already high penetration rates for mobile services. The mobile market is often the most competitive market and this has driven fast growth in the past. Future increases will come from offering advanced services such as mobile broadband, maintaining interest in mobile services.

The strongest growth patterns will be seen in broadband services with expectations of strong growth to be seen across the region. Haiti and Cuba will continue to report the lowest levels of broadband subscriptions as pricing and availability remain key issues.

BRIDGETOWN, Barbados (BGIS) — The Barbados government has agreed to hire a consultant to seek new areas of employment for Barbadians overseas.

This disclosure was made by Prime Minister David Thompson earlier this week, as he spoke with the media, after the Second Meeting between the Council for Investment, Exports, Foreign Exchange and the Diaspora (CIEX) Cabinet Subcommittee and Barbados’ overseas missions.

Thompson told journalists that Barbadians were not “as enamoured of the farm labour scheme as they used to be”, but preferred jobs at resorts such as the four diamond Amelia Island Hotel, where he had seen them working a few months ago, while overseas.

“To leave Barbados to go and work in the agricultural sector is not as attractive, but we have focussed a lot on that. We now need to focus perhaps a bit more on tourism services in other areas, medical professions etc,” he suggested.

The Prime Minister explained that while the Labour Office managed existing programmes, there was no one looking for new areas, hence the decision to hire a consultant.

“This person will go out to the cruise ships, to hospitals in Canada, and wherever there are indications from our diplomatic staff. The objective would be for that person to find employment consistent with what young people would like to do if they leave Barbados,” he stated.

Thompson stressed that if persons were not pursuing agriculture here, they would not want to go and pursue it elsewhere.

“Certainly, not unless you have modern greenhouses and other agricultural practises that would be consistent with that; but we do have skills here that I think other people want, and we need to match what is available elsewhere to the skills that we possess as Barbadians,” he told the media.

Hurricane Ida, which grew to a category two storm Sunday, was moving into the southern Gulf of Mexico but local officials said it had caused no casualties or damage to infrastructure in the popular tourist resort city of Cancun.

A man looks at cars damaged in a landslide during heavy rains, in Ilopango, east of San Salvador. At least 91 people have been killed in El Salvador by the severe flooding and landslides from Hurricane Ida. AFP PHOTO

Forecasters at the Miami-based US National Hurricane Center said Ida had strengthened packing top wind speeds of 100 miles per hour as it moved over Mexico’s Caribbean coast.

The tail-end of Ida coupled with a low pressure system in the Pacific caused heavy flooding in El Salvador that left 91 people dead and left some 60 others missing, civil defense officials said.

“We have to mourn the deaths of 91 people because of the rains,” Interior Minister Humberto Centeno told reporters here.

Civil Defense chief Jorge Melendez added that “there could be more fatalities” in the eastern regions of Verapaz and Tepetitan, where rescue services have already recorded 20 deaths.

In Tepetitan, landslides and overflowing rivers carried away some 30 houses, authorities said. Some residents had agreed to evacuate the area, but a number “refused to leave their homes,” according to mayor Ana Jovel.

In Verapaz, 71 miles (114 km) southeast of the capital San Salvador, officials reported a raging torrent of mud, rocks and tree trunks ripping through a whole section of the town, burying houses and cars.

A dozen bodies of victims were hauled from the devastation to a local chapel and covered with white sheets, caked with mud, as they awaited identification by relatives.

El Salvador has been on a state of alert since Thursday as heavy rains associated with Ida began to affect the region, destroying an estimated 930 homes and leaving some 13,000 people homeless in Nicaragua.

Saturday, Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega said his government hoped to make available up to 4.4 million dollars in aid for those affected by the storm.

At 2100 GMT on Sunday, the National Hurricane Center said Ida was about 95 miles (155 km) west-northwest of the western tip of Cuba, moving near 10 miles (17 kilometers) per hour.

The center said the storm, currently a category two on the Saffir-Simpson scale, was expected to strengthen further, before gradually weakening on Monday.

“Ida is expected to begin losing tropical characteristics in Tuesday as it nears the Gulf Coast but it could reach the coast as a tropical cyclone,” the NHC said.

A hurricane watch has been issued for parts of the Yucatan Peninsula, as well as for the area east of the Mississippi-Alabama border through the northwest area of Florida.

The NHC stressed the hurricane watch does not cover the city of New Orleans, which was devastated in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina.

Forecasters warned Ida could dump between three to five inches of rain in the Yucatan and western Cuba, with up to eight inches in some places, as well as storm surges and “large and destructive waves.”

This year, the Pacific’s El Nino ocean-warming phenomenon has resulted in an especially calm Atlantic hurricane season — a welcome respite for Caribbean and southeastern US residents still smarting from a 2008 pounding.

There have only been two other hurricanes in the 2009 Atlantic season, which runs from June 1 to late November 30.

Three agents in street clothes snatched her and friend Orlando Luis Pardo off the street in the Havana district of Vedado.

Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez. AFP PHOTO

“They beat me and then they shoved me into a car head first. They did not give me any explanation at any time, but it is clear their goal was to stop us from taking part in the march,” Sanchez, who writes the blog “Generation Y,” told AFP.

Two other friends of hers were ordered into police cars and released later, she added.

In an item on her blog, which is often critical of the Americas’ only one-party communist system in which only state media are legal, Sanchez wrote an expose under the headline “A Gangland-style Kidnapping.”

“It was a very violent episode,” she wrote.

“They squeezed my wrists very hard, beat me in the back in the kidney area, and when people stepped in to do something, they said we were counter-revolutionaries.”

The advocacy group Human Rights Watch condemned the attack in a statement that said “Cuban authorities should cease all attacks on human rights defenders, journalists, bloggers and civic activists.

“The international community should condemn attacks on those who peacefully exercise their basic rights to freedom of expression, opinion, and assembly in the strongest terms,” it said.

“Cuban authorities are using brute force to try to silence Yoani Sanchez’s only weapon: her ideas,” said Jose Miguel Vivanco, Americas director of Human Rights Watch. “The international community must send a firm message to Raul Castro that such attacks on independent voices are completely unacceptable.”

Sanchez, winner of the Maria Moors Cabot 2009 award and Ortega y Gasset Prize awarded by Madrid’s El Pais, said she was not seriously injured and was released half an hour after the arrest.

“Clearly, the beating hurts even more a day later; I am still really affected by all of this, but it is not going to stop me from writing my blog,” Sanchez said.

Cuban authorities say Sanchez and all other political dissidents are “mercenaries” in the pay of the United States and other western countries.