THE PAST AND PRESENT OF JEWS IN VENEZUELA: And fear for the future:

Jewish settlers arrived in Coro, a small town in western Venezuela that was the county's first capital, from Curacao in 1827. In 1855, nearly the entire community left after a mob ransacked Jewish homes and shops.

Venezuelan Jews say that was the last time anti-Semitism flared up in the country. But in the past few years a community that had considered itself among the most well-established in South America has lost up to one-fifth of its members, prompted by an increasingly hostile environment under the government of President Hugo Chavez, a radical leftist who has been in power since 1999.

That would be the same Hugo Chavez who was such a popular speaker at the UN and single-handedly boosted the sales of Chomsky's book Hegemony or Survival.

Technorati Tag: UN and Hugo Chavez and Venezuela and Anti-Semitism.