Reuters Posted January 2 2003, 1:34 PM EST

CARACAS, Venezuela - Venezuelans seeking an extra bang for their New Year's parties or political protests have found a noisy new ally -- the Bin Laden.

The name of Osama bin Laden, leader of the militant Islamist al Qaeda network and suspected mastermind of the Sept 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, has been borrowed by Venezuelans to describe a particularly loud, powerful -- and dangerous -- type of firecracker.

As in many countries in South America and Asia, Venezuelans use fireworks and firecrackers to add zest to feast days, Christmas and New Year celebrations -- and political marches.

At a New Year's party in Caracas held early on Wednesday by tens of thousands of foes of leftist President Hugo Chavez, the thunderous clap of exploding ``Bin Ladens'' punctuated a barrage of firecrackers and fireworks.

In ear-splitting decibel power, the ``Bin Laden'' tops the bewildering arsenal of fireworks sold at this time of year by street vendors in bustling downtown Caracas.

Before the Sept. 11 attacks, the noisy explosives went Spanish names like ``Tumbaranchos'' (Hut-destroyer) or ''Matasuegras'' (Mother-in-Law killer).

But the Bin Laden, a battery-sized cylinder wrapped in colored paper and packed with gunpowder, has passed into the popular Venezuelan vocabulary.

``The Bin Laden is the most dangerous ... that is powerful gunpowder,'' said 22-year-old Juan Diego Ramirez, selling fireworks at a small stand in central Caracas.

``Bin Laden was someone who really made a bang, which resounded around the world,'' said fellow vendor Javier Lopez.

Caracas Fire Chief Rodolfo Briceno says Bin Ladens can maim and kill. He says fireworks killed nine people and injured over 200 in December. Fireworks started at least 400 fires in the last two months, including a big Nov. 18 blaze in Caracas that killed three people and injured more than 50.

by IMC Brazil • Saturday January 04, 2003 at 04:44 PM contato@midiaindependente.org

Two thousand landless families in Guarulhos, Brazil are facing the risk of eviction on Monday morning. Your international solidarity may be decisive.

Their story begins on mid July 2002 when a group of a few hundred families squatted an abandoned urban area in Osasco, near Sao Paulo, Brazil. The 50 hectares area in a fancy neighborhood used as a clandestine garbage field was soon occupied by ten thousand poor people living in simple tents. The city government and the rich neighbors immediately started a campaign accusing them of stealing land and bringing thiefs and drug dealers to the neighborhood. After a 5 months campaign, they were evicted. The owner of the area and the city government brought bulldozers protected by riot police who violently destroyed people's houses. One could see workers, women with children and the elderly crying over their destroyed houses filled with poor furniture and their personal possesions..

The homeless managed to get a deal with the state government and were transferred to a state unused area in Guarulhos - still near Sao Paulo but over 20 miles away from their former houses and jobs. But once the buses transferring them arrived, they had again to face the police. The city government of Guarulhos (controlled by the PT, the "Worker's" Party) had called the city police to prevent them from getting into the area. City government argued that the city has no structure to host the families and that their transferring violated urban legislation. After long negotiations they managed to get in.

But the city government went to the courts and a judge just decided for a new dramatic eviction, due to next Monday, January the 6th. The homeless have no option but to resist. Riot police will arrive early in the morning and people fear a massacre as families can't leave because they simply have nowhere to go. Local activists are mobilizing to join the homeless. International activists are called to put pressure on authorities.

What you can do:

You can send emails to the following authorities:

Governador do Estado de São Paulo São Paulo State Governor Mr. Geraldo Alckmin Email: saopaulo@sp.gov.br

Secretaria de Justiça e Defesa da Cidadania do Estado de São Paulo State Secretary for Justice and Citizenship Mr. Alexandre Morais Email: justica@justica.sp.gov.br

Prefeito de Guarulhos City Mayor of Guarulhos Mr. Elói Pietá Email: prefeito.guarulhos@sp.gov.br

Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) The Worker's Party Email: presnacional@pt.org.br

www.arabnews.com 5 January 2003

The general strike in Venezuela, already disastrous in economic terms, is threatening to turn even uglier, now that the first two lives have been lost in a mysterious shooting into a crowd of demonstrators. The strike has already polarized Venezuelan society into the predominantly poor supporters of President Hugo Chavez and the middle classes and the upper class elite, who are resisting the president’s proposed reforms.

Venezuela needs reforms, but the president chose the wrong strategy. He chose to confront the entrenched interests of the country’s superrich, when a wiser man would have sought to negotiate and compromise. By picking battles that did not need to be fought, Chavez has sabotaged the implementation of his on radical political agenda. The result is the chaos into which this important oil-producing country has sunk.

Part of Chavez’s problem is that he is a military man, used to giving orders and having them carried out. A modern industrial democracy does not work that way. What he has very probably achieved by his headstrong behavior is throw away the chance to engineer long-overdue changes. It seems inconceivable that any sort of settlement of this bitter general strike will lead to the sort of consensus necessary to implement more than the most superficial of reforms.

The concern now is that the strikers are now calling on the armed forces to join them. This is the point where their protests depart from the legitimate. It is not the business of armed forces to involve themselves in politics. Latin America has suffered enough from the maladministration of military men. If the strikers cannot attain their aims by protest, then they should acknowledge they have failed and return to their jobs.

By seeking to involve the military, they are placing their country in the gravest danger. Some units may be persuaded to intervene while others will rightly see it as their duty to stay loyal to the democratically elected president. If the military splits, the result could be civil war. Such a thing ought to be unthinkable to all parties. But the first blood has already been drawn and tempers are running higher. If the strike does not collapse soon, the government’s own stocks of fuel will start to run out and public order could evaporate completely.

Chavez may still be the elected head of state but the time is fast approaching when he must consider his own position. Can he really continue to occupy his office if, by doing so, his country will be plunged into armed conflict? His reform program is in ruins, Venezuelan society has been split into two rival camps and paralyzed by the general strike.

The answer may be that the president calls a snap election, to renew the reform mandate. Such a contest is likely to be as violent as it would be bitter, but it may be the least of the evils facing the country. If Chavez loses, then, the reform agenda will have been halted, but it will not go away. Other wiser heads can take up the torch of reform at a later date. If, however, he wins, then his political opponents will have lost ground, to the extent that their will to resist change will have been broken. Either way, by returning to the ballot box, Venezuela will have been steered away from civil war.

PARIS: www.gulf-daily-news.com

A sustained increase in oil prices, seen as the most likely scenario should war be launched against Iraq, would hit at a bad time for a listless world economy.

The price of oil has been inching upwards for weeks under the double impact of a threatened showdown with Iraq and the strike in Venezuela, both Opec members.

Prices rose again on Friday over $30 a barrel despite an announcement by the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) that it may increase overall production.

This has raised eyebrows in two of the world's key economic zones, Japan and the western European-based euro zone, both now mired in relentless stagnation. The US economy, the bench mark that sets expectations for the rest of the globe, meanwhile is giving contradictory signals.

President George W Bush has raised hope with his pledge to announce an economic stimulus package next Tuesday even though US stocks began the year with an upward surge.

In the interim, experts have tried to quantify the fallout of any US-led intervention in Iraq by looking back at the Gulf War of 1991 - while conceding that there were different starting points for both.

"In 1991, the US was trying to climb out of a classic recession. Now, it is an entirely different situation. The economy has remained disappointing since the stock market bubble burst nearly three years ago. We have overproduced, and it's much more difficult to get out of this kind of situation," said Philippe d'Arvisenet, the chief economist at the French bank BNP Paribas.

A new armed conflict in Iraq could thoroughly shake the already fragile world economy, causing severe political instability in the Middle East and disrupting oil supplies to the rest of the world, particularly Asia which has little oil resources of its own and remains heavily dependent on imports.

The US financial ratings agency Standard and Poor's said on Friday in the event of a US invasion of Iraq, "confidence will fall and the costs of capital will increase. Many Arab countries will experience private capital outflows." The International Monetary Fund (IMF) also warned recently that a sustained price hike of $5 per barrel of crude would slow down growth in world economy by 0.3 points.

www.sundayherald.com

The shadows of South America are under new scrutiny from the media and the government. Could al-Qaeda be operating from a secret base in Brazil? Timothy Pratt investigates

IT is a notion that has gripped the US media: Middle Eastern extremist groups, including al-Qaeda, are reported to be creating a new terror base in the jungles of South America.

And despite a US State Department spokesman telling the Sunday Herald that 'the US has no information that al-Qaeda is present anywhere in Latin America', he admitted that investigating terrorism was 'a major component' of a recent visit by a department official to the so-called triple-frontier region where Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina meet.

Deputy director for counter- terrorism Brigadier General Jonathan Cofer met with officials from the three countries on December 18, and the State Department offered the governments $1 million to strengthen their intelligence-gathering and abilities. 'Future visits are absolutely planned,' added the source.

Terrorism experts agree that the area has all the ingredients of a global hotspot. 'The concept of having international terrorist groups in Latin America is consistent with the region,' says Timothy C Brown, chair of international studies for the Sierra Nevada College in Nevada and a former US diplomat in several Latin American countries during three decades. Brown says he has heard reports in the region of groups including Hizbollah, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation and Hamas, as well as Spain's ETA, 'since at least the 1960s and 1970s'.

Brown, who acted as a liaison between presidents Reagan and Carter and the anti-communist Contras of Nicaragua, has written extensively on guerrilla movements in Latin America. He recalls an incident in Managua, Nicaragua, during the early 1990s in which a bomb exploded at what he described as a safe house for terrorist groups. He says that, in the investigation that followed, documents linked to the PLO, ETA and the IRA were found.

The region currently under American scrutiny has long been a centre for Arabic expatriates: up to 15,000 are understood to live there . Myles Frechette, a 35-year American foreign service veteran who enjoyed a stint as consul in S‹o Paulo, Brazil, recalls being in the state of Parana when Iranian Shi'ite leader Ayatollah Khomeini died in 1989. 'I was in a small town in Brazil, and I remember being surprised to find three mosques full of Muslim Arabs mourning the death of Khomeini,' he says.

The area is also widely known for its leaky borders. 'This is of great concern, because we know there have been people from a variety of Middle Eastern countries coming through for a long time,' says Frechette. 'Most of the Middle Eastern people in the area are peaceful and industrious, but terrorists may be hiding among them.'

Douglas Unger, the author of several books on the region and of a forthcoming article on the guerrilla movements that combated Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner across the three borders from the 1960s to the 1980s, echoes the former consul's description of the area. 'The region is full of pirates and smugglers, and is sort of a catch-all for immigrants, many of whom are shady,' he claims.

Unger, a Pulitzer Prize-nominee whose last novel, Voices From Silence, was based on the thousands who disappeared under Argentina's dictatorships in the 1970s, also says the region would be an easy place to hide terrorist training facilities. Such camps are rumoured to exist north of Brazil's Igua?u Falls .

'It's possible to be a fringe group here and not be noticed,' he says. 'If you go back to the ongoing history of guerrilla activities, it's always been going on -- so why would it be a surprise that a group of Arabs is training when you have 50 years of this kind of thing?'

It has been suggested that left-leaning governments in Venezuela and Brazil will help create a safer haven for anti-US groups such as al-Qaeda -- but neither diplomat agrees.

Brown believes Latin governments have too much to lose by not at least giving the appearance of cracking down on terrorism: 'There may be sympathies among the left for anti-American ideals, but they understand which side their bread is buttered on.'

Frechette adds: 'President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela has been accused of sympathies to the FARC [a Colombian guerrilla army] and he's done some foolish things, but I don't think he has sympathies for Middle Eastern groups. Brazilian President-elect Lula is left of centre, but he is also nationalist and interested in helping Brazilians, and is trying to confront the problem of violence tied to drugs in his country. I have no reason to believe he is in the least bit sympathetic to Arabic terrorists.

'And in today's post-September 11 atmosphere, if there was anything serious going on there, the US would be johnny-on-the-spot.'

But the challenge, of course, will be finding out about something serious before it happens. As State Department official Francis Taylor said in a speech to leaders from Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina only three months after the September 11 attacks of 2001: 'We are worried ... not by the things we see, but by the things we do not see.'

What do you think? Have your say in the forum Support our Christmas appeal to help avert a food crisis that threatens the lives of 14 million people in southern Africa