It is possible that the translation is screwy, but as far as I know the numbers trillion, billion and million should be pretty easy to get right in a translation. Could someone with beter spanish than mine just check the original story and see if she really said that those sums were billions and trillions. Those numbers might be close with the old bolivars which, from memory, went at around 2,100 to the dollar, but the stong bolivar official conversion rate is around 2.147 to the US dollar.

Considering that the annual GDP of Venezuela is under $240 billion USD and the population is about 27 million, spending $11 billion on a single land fill project is 4.5% of the annual GDP, or over $400 for each man woman and child in the country!

A trillion stong bolivars is $465 billion USD roughly double the annual GDP of the whole country, and she claims she is going to spend that on a few environmental projects in one selected region. Somebody is dreaming!

I think that some of those figures Sanz was throwing about in the announcements about compensation for miners and investment spending were in the billions of strong bolivar range as well. They didn't look right either, so maybe it is a translation thing, or perhaps the ministers are not used to the difference between the old bolivar and the new strong bolivar. If it's the latter it is no wonder they can't get their planning right when they don't seem to have any ideas of the value of their own currency.........