By Manuel Jimenez
SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic (Reuters): Blamed by Washington for a surge in narcotics shipments through its territory, Venezuela said on Friday it was arming itself with Chinese satellite technology and Russian Sukhoi-30 jets to help crack down on the illegal drug trade.
The acquisitions will allow Venezuela "to reinforce surveillance, not just of our air space but of our maritime passages and land," said Victor Reverol Torres, one of Venezuela's top anti-narcotics officials.
He spoke at an anti-drug summit in the Dominican Republic, which shares the Caribbean island of Hispaniola with deeply impoverished Haiti.
The summit, hosted by Dominican President Leonel Fernandez, was attended by his Haitian counterpart, Rene Preval, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe and the prime ministers of Jamaica, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Trinidad and Tobago.
The day-long forum, in which participants called for stepped up regional cooperation in drug war, came against the backdrop of a recent report from the US State Department saying the number of drug smuggling flights from Venezuela to Hispaniola increased by 167 percent from 2005 to 2006.
The Dominican Republic and Haiti are both traditional transit countries on smuggling routes for Colombian cocaine and heroin en route to the United States and other markets. But US counternarcotics officials say they have grown in importance thanks to Venezuela.
In his remarks, Reverol Torres did not elaborate on the satellite system, or so-called "spy in the sky" technology, he said the government of President Hugo Chavez, the populist nemesis of the United States, was buying from China.
But he said "state of the art" radar and sensor technology was also being acquired from China to help Venezuela better detect clandestine drug shipments and cocaine-laden planes from Colonbia, its Andean neighbor.
Chavez, a vocal critic of what he calls US imperialism, has said he was buying Russia's Sukhoi jets to replace his air force's US F-16 fighter jets. He has also said he is preparing his nation's armed forces to repel US aggression. | 
