I was reading one of Daniel's posts about the lurid murder-sex-drug story at the Venezuelan embassy in Kenya. Daniel asked as an afterthought why on Earth we needed an embassy in Kenya in the first place.
I have asked myself the same thing before.
Venezuela is a poor country. I repeat: Venezuela is a poor country. One of our problems is we think the country is rich and we "just" need to distribute our enormous wealth. Even if we were to distribute oil resources fairly (which we are farther away from doing now), each person would get hardly enough.
Chile is another underdeveloped nation. I don't see Chile as a heck of a great model, even though I do think we could learn a few things from it. Corruption there is much lower than in Venezuela, for instance. Crime is much lower and even though Chile's GDP per capita is clearly higher than Venezuela's, it has less embassies around the world.
Venezuela's:
I suspect the Chilean representation in "Greenland" is the same as in Denmark...for obvious reasons. Chile has representatives in Israel and in Iraq as well as Pakistan and Thailand as well as in New Zealand, whereas we don't. We had an embassy in Libya until "Libya's Simón Bolívar" (Chávez dixit) was toppled down. We also had an embassy in Mali until...I still don't know if we have one after the latest coup. We have one in Kenya, in Ethiopia, in Namibia, in Angola, in Togo and in Senegal. What for? And of course, in Belarus...for nothing but to give away resources and to get KGB-support from them.