I wish we could begin a new period of normal relations with the government of the United States.

What would happen if we financed somebody in the U.S. to destabilize the government of George W. Bush? They would go to prison, certainly.

The imperialist, genocidal, fascist attitude of the U.S. president has no limits. I think Hitler would be like a suckling baby next to George W. Bush.

I became a soldier, not because I had a military vocation initially, but because it was the only way that that young, poor-class child from the provinces could go to the center of the country: through baseball, which was my dream.

Mr. Bush is an illegitimate President. In Florida, his brother Jeb deleted many black voters from the electoral registers. So this President is the result of a fraud.

Most governments in the United States in a hundred years have not respected the peoples of Latin America. They have sponsored coup d'etats, assassinations.

Venezuela has the biggest oil reserves in the world. And the biggest gas reserves in this hemisphere, the eighth in the world. Venezuela was a U.S. oil colony. All of our oil was going up to the north, and the gas was being used by the U.S. and not by us. Now we are diversifying. Our oil is helping the poor.