www.forbes.com Reuters, 01.27.03, 5:37 PM ET

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Cocoa prices jumped to the highest level in three months Monday as angry street protests in top exporter Ivory Coast fed more worries that world supplies will be disrupted this year. In other commodity trade, oil prices slid as the outlook for more weapons inspections in Iraq would likely delay a U.S.-led military assault there. Gold prices edged higher as Wall Street stocks fell and wheat plummeted on profit-taking.

At the New York Board of Trade, cocoa for March delivery closed $63 higher at $2,250 per metric ton, the highest closing price since Oct. 15.

Ivory Coast was plunged into crisis by a coup attempt on Sept. 19. The putsch failed, but ensuing civil war has left hundreds dead, displaced more than 1 million and split the country of 16 million along ethnic lines -- a rebel-held, largely Muslim north and a heavily Christian south.

On Monday, street protests in Ivory Coast for a third day over a peace deal with rebels were posing a serious threat to cocoa shipments and export loadings, industry sources said.

Gangs of youths, some armed with machetes, blocked streets in Abidjan in protest against the peace deal they saw as imposed by former colonial power France. Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo urged the youths to remain calm after he agreed to a power-sharing accord that will bring the rebels into a coalition government.

Residents said the protests spread to key cocoa towns Monday, with demonstrators taking to the streets of San Pedro -- the country's main port for cocoa -- Gagnoa and Soubre.

"If trouble goes on, the ports will be inaccessible for cocoa trucks and the work force won't be at work," a leading exporter in Abidjan said. "We are all waiting to see what will happen during the day, but in any case nobody is at work.

Exporters also feared more troubles in the bush. Most cocoa workers in the west are from Burkina Faso or other Muslim neighbors, who are widely seen as sympathetic to the rebels.

"We have to expect more problems in the cocoa sector as local farmers accuse cocoa workers of financing the rebels with their cocoa beans," a leading San Pedro-based buyer said.

Ivory Coast usually accounts for 40 percent of world cocoa supplies each year to chocolate manufacturers.

At the New York Mercantile Exchange, crude oil prices fell 3 percent after United Nations arms inspectors offered little evidence that Iraq was hiding banned weapons.

U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan then called for more time for inspectors to finish their job in Iraq.

March crude oil closed 99 cents lower at $32.29 a barrel, down about $3 from the 26-month of $35.20 high struck last week on fears of war in Iraq.

In London, March Brent crude oil fell 63 cents at $29.86. News that anti-government protesters in Venezuela were debating on a limited rollback of their disruptive 57-day-old general strike also weighed on crude oil and product prices.

NYMEX March gasoline fell 1.93 cents to 90.67 cents a gallon. March heating oil fell 1.85 cents a gallon to 88.87.

Hans Blix, chief U.N. arms inspector, reported to the U.N. Security Council on Monday after two months of inspections, detailing gaps in information that Iraq should have delivered by now. But he said those gaps could not lead him to conclude Baghdad possessed prohibited arms.

The White House said Blix's report showed Baghdad failed to comply with U.N. disarmament demands and warned the inspections process was "running out of time." On Sunday, Secretary of State Colin Powell said the United States was prepared to go to war against Iraq with or without its European allies.

Those sentiments also jostled the gold market, which closed below six-year highs set earlier in the day ahead of the Blix remarks. COMEX February gold closed $1.00 higher at $369.40 an ounce after reaching its highest level since November 1996.

Gold bullion in London was fixed at a six-year high in the morning at $370.80 but eased to $368.50 at the afternoon fix.

At the Chicago Board of Trade, dismal wheat export business sparked speculative profit-taking in wheat despite worries that bitter cold weather in the Plains and Midwest may have hurt some of the dormant winter wheat crop in recent days.

March wheat closed 8 cents lower at $3.10-1/2 a bushel.

"I haven't seen or heard anything other than technical fund selling that would do this," said analyst Lisa Wheeler at Cargill Investor Services. "Exports aren't good, but we've known that for quite a while. I think this was purely technical."

The U.S. Department of Agriculture on Monday said U.S. wheat inspected for export last week totaled less than 7 million bushels. Traders had expected 13 million to 17 million bushels.

March corn closed 1/2 cent lower at $2.35 a bushel and March soybeans closed 1-3/4 cents lower at $5.67-1/4.

calgary.cbc.ca

Calgary - The international oil markets are approaching what industry analysts are calling the perfect storm.

OPEC countries have been cutting their production, the flow from Venezuela has been interrupted by strikes, cold weather across North America has increased demand and a war with Iraq is nearing, the Canadian Energy Resources Institute heard Monday. Paul Horsnell, head of energy research at JP Morgan in London, expects prices to average $26 a barrel this year, unless there is a war in Iraq and its ability to produce oil is damaged for the long-term.

"You'd have to have a scorched earth policy by Iraq," Horsnell said of the situation it would take to push prices up long-term. "The loss of production capacity, potentially for longer periods, an escalation of the conflict, the Kurdish issue getting out of hand in the north, the Turks involved, the Iranians involved."

Prices were just over $33 a barrel Monday morning, but had dropped 99 cents to $32.29 by market close.

Judith Dwarkin, chief economist at Ross Smith Energy Group in Calgary, is predicting prices will exceed $40 a barrel if war starts.

"The big fear right now is that one little thing more will go wrong, in what's really a tinderbox in terms of pricing situation," Dwarkin said.

She said a big jump in oil prices isn't good for the economy because it results in other products costing more and could help lead to a recession.

Send your comments to webmaster_calgary@cbc.ca  

www.timesdaily.com By ANDREW SELSKY Associated Press Writer January 27. 2003 6:07PM

A Colombian police officer stands guard over a bridge on the Arauca River that leads from Colombia to Venezuela, Saturday, Jan. 18, 2003. President Alvaro Uribe has made Arauca state a priority, but months into his crackdown, it remains a lawless frontier. The governor, a retired army colonel, recently resigned because of death threats. And while government forces are concentrated in the towns and U.S. special forces have arrived to train Colombian troops, rebels and paramilitaries still carry out attacks in the grassy savannas at will. (AP Photo/Zoe Selsky)

Colombia's interior minister insisted Monday that the government was still in control of Arauca state, a region where one rebel group killed six soldiers and a civilian with a car bomb over the weekend and another kidnapped two foreign journalists.

Colombian Defense Minister Martha Lucia Ramirez and the commander of the armed forces, Gen. Jorge Enrique Mora, visited Arauca on Monday to investigate the volatile situation.

The car bomb, which exploded near a military patrol in the village of Pueblo Nuevo on Sunday, was believed set off by the rebel Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the army said.

The civilian who died was the driver, the army said. The blast, about 200 miles northeast of the capital, also wounded eight soldiers and another civilian, the army said.

Authorities have accused rebels of twice using hostages as unwitting suicide bombers, luring them into cars without telling them the vehicles were packed with explosives, and then detonating the bombs by remote control when the car neared a military target.

Arauca - a state about twice the size of New Jersey in northeastern Colombia, along the Venezuelan border - is rich in oil resources, and FARC and other rebel groups have repeatedly attacked a pipeline running through the state. An illegal right-wing militia is battling the rebels for control of the oil plains in the state, which has about 350,000 residents.

Some 70 U.S. Army special forces trainers are to begin training a Colombian army brigade in counterinsurgency tactics in Arauca this week so they can protect the oil pipeline, owned jointly by Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum and the Colombian oil monopoly Ecopetrol.

Interior Minister Fernando Londono said Monday the government was still in control of Arauca, despite the violence.

"This doesn't mean that the government, the armed forces and the police have lost control of Arauca, which is a very difficult zone to manage," Londono told RCN radio Monday.

The army announced it killed three rebels Sunday near the Arauca town of Saravena. No further details were immediately available. There was also no word on the fate of kidnapped American photographer Scott Dalton, 34, and British reporter Ruth Morris, 35.

Their rebel captors - the National Liberation Army - have said nothing about the freelance journalists since announcing Thursday over a clandestine rebel radio station that they had "detained" the two, who were on assignment for the Los Angeles Times, on Jan. 21.

There was concern the recent bombings and clashes between government security forces and rebels put the hostages' lives at risk, but there have been no calls for the army to mount a rescue attempt.

Arauca's oil pipeline resumed pumping Sunday night after being shut down for four days due to a rebel bombing, an Ecopetrol spokesman told Dow Jones Newswires on Monday.

The dynamite attack last Wednesday was the first of the year on the pipeline, which was bombed 40 times in 2002 and 170 times in 2001.

Some 3,500 people die each year across Colombia in the decades-long war. The army announced Monday that rebels had killed eight people over the weekend in various parts of the country, including two who had been kidnapped.

www.quicken.com

Monday, January 27, 2003 04:37 PM ET  Printer-friendly version   NEW YORK (Dow Jones)--The national average retail price of regular gasoline rose by 1.4 cents a gallon to $1.473 in the latest week, the Energy Information Administration said Monday.

The price is up for the seventh straight week and at the highest level since last Sept. 24. Retail gasoline has gained 8.3%, or 11.3 cents, over the past seven weeks amid worries over an impending war with Iraq and the continuing strike disrupting Venezuela's oil exports.

Prices are 37.2 cents above a year earlier.

Prices are based on a survey of 900 retail outlets.

Prices gained in all regions.

On the East Coast, prices were up 0.4 cents at $1.466 and were 37.6 cents above a year earlier.

Midwest prices were 2.1 cents higher at $1.459 and were 38.3 cents above a year earlier.

Gulf Coast prices were 0.7 cent higher at $1.414 and were 36.8 cents above a year earlier.

Rocky Mountains prices were 2.4 cents higher at $1.438 and were 32.1 cents above a year earlier.

West Coast prices were up 2.1 cents at $1.569 and were 35.9 cents above a year earlier.

• By David Bird, Dow Jones Newswires; 1-201-938-4423; david.bird@dowjones.com

www.scoop.co.nz Tuesday, 28 January 2003, 10:03 am Press Release: Council on Hemispheric Affairs

Venezuela: Tainted Journalism or Paranoia? Memorandum to the Press 03.03 For Immediate Release Monday, January 27, 2003

Venezuela: Tainted Journalism or Paranoia on the Part of The Middle-class Opposition

Dear Colleague,

As part of the ongoing debate concerning the current political instability in Venezuela, we are reprinting an article, authored by Thor Halvorssen, published in the commentary section of the The Washington Times on Jan. 22, 2003, attacking the position of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, and the response to it by COHA director, Larry Birns, which appeared in the Washington Times on Jan. 26, 2003.

Venezuela through a tilted lens? Washington Times, January 22, 2003 Thor Halvorssen

With every passing day, life for Venezuelans becomes more dangerous. Since his election four years ago, President Hugo Chavez has presided over the most dramatic decline in the nation's fortunes: Analysts predict that in the first quarter of 2003 the economy will contract by 40 percent; more than 1 million jobs have been lost; approximately 900,000 people have gone into voluntary exile (most of them middle-class professionals); unemployment is at a staggering 17 percent; Almost 70 percent of the country's industries have gone bankrupt; 70 percent of Venezuelans live in a state of poverty (up from 60 percent when Mr. Chavez began his rule); and the income of more than 15 percent of Venezuelans has dropped below the poverty line.

Mr. Chavez's policies have left the nation in shambles. Stratospheric levels of corruption, collectivist central planning, mismanagement, and incompetence during the greatest oil boom have squandered a historic opportunity to cultivate a stable middle class. But stability is hardly the goal of Lt. Col. Chavez, who uses the nation's wealth to fund and supply weapons to the FARC and ELN drug-trafficking guerrilla terrorists in Colombia and the ETA Basque terrorist organization in Spain.

Mr. Chavez has cozy relationships with the dictators of Cuba, Libya, Iran, and Iraq (Mr. Chavez praised Saddam Hussein as his "brother" and "partner"), and earlier this month Mr. Chavez was accused by his personal pilot of funneling $900,000 to Osama bin Laden. Mr. Chavez has publicly described the U.S. military response to bin Laden as "terrorism" claiming he saw no difference between the invasion of Afghanistan and the September 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S.

Readers of the New York Times, The Washington Post and of the Associated Press, and viewers of CNN, are fed a dramatically different story. There is an enormous divide between what the world is hearing about Venezuela and what is really happening there. Reporters have so controlled the flow of information and disfigured the truth that their coverage of Venezuela is a caricature of what conservative critics call the "liberal media bias." What we are seeing in media coverage of Venezuela is not liberal bias, but totalitarian bias.

A recent example is Christopher Toothaker of the Associated Press. Mr. Toothaker has spent considerable time in Venezuela, he speaks Spanish, and he has access to government and opposition sources. In a Jan. 4 report, he minimized the importance of the upcoming constitutional referendum, stating that the opposition presented "over 150,000 signatures" to election authorities calling for a vote on whether Mr. Chavez should resign. This is a dramatic and deliberate understatement. The Venezuelan Constitution, approved by Mr. Chavez himself, provides for a referendum if 10 percent of the electorate petitions in writing. The opposition presented 2,057,000 signatures - some 15 percent of the voting rolls - a startling error that any fact-checker should catch. The smaller figure appears in dozens of other Associated Press reports, CBS, CNN and even in a story bylined by Ginger Thompson of the New York Times that was carried in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

Miss Thompson is no fan of objectivity. On Jan. 3, the opposition organized a march to protest Chavez. Hundreds of thousands of nonviolent demonstrators carried flags, posters and signs calling for a peaceful resolution. The protesters were ambushed by members of Mr. Chavez's armed militia who dispersed the march with a hail of bullets and rocks. The Chavez police blithely watched the armed thugs shoot at the defenseless crowd. I was there. To our incredulity, the Chavez police then supplied the criminals with tear gas grenades. In her Times story, Miss Thompson characterized the violence as a "clash" and a "street fight" - moral equivalency at its worst. American readers would never know it was an ambush.

The sympathies of Miss Thompson's colleague, Juan Forero, are revealed by Larry Birns, director of the Council for Hemispheric Affairs. In late December, Mr. Birns, a refreshingly sincere D.C. activist who acts as a Chavez cheerleader and apologist, told a Venezuelan government official the names of the four reporters he believed were most amicable to the Chavez government. This Times scribe made the top of his list: "He is committed to the revolution," Mr. Birns said of Mr. Forero. Reuters and the Associated Press were also praised for their "strong support" of Mr. Chavez.

The Washington Post's reporting is just as cant-laden as the New York Times', and its editorial page is utterly one-sided. Last Sunday, Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research penned a column calling the Chavez government, responsible for dozens of political deaths, "one of the least repressive in Latin America." He should travel more.

Mr. Weisbrot states that "no one has been arrested for political activities." This is nonsense. Some of these arrests are so public Mr. Weisbrot cannot credibly claim ignorance. For example, Carlos Alfonso Martinez, an outspoken political opponent of Mr. Chavez and one of the most respected officers in the armed forces, was arbitrarily arrested on Dec. 30 by the secret police. The act caused public furor both because it was a further indication of government repression and also because Mr. Martinez was arrested without a warrant and remains under arrest even though a judge ordered his immediate release. How did this fact slip by the editors at The Post?

Mr. Weisbrot ends his column in The Post by saying that Chavez is Venezuela's best hope for democracy and social and economic "betterment." And yet Mr. Weisbrot does not support the referendum that would let the voters declare whether Mr. Chavez rules with the consent of the governed. Mr. Chavez told voters in a television broadcast: "Don't waste time. Not even if we suppose that they hold that referendum and get 90 percent of the votes, I will not leave. Forget it. I will not go."

Putting aside Mr. Chavez's track record on economics, does this really sound like the best hope for democracy?

Meanwhile, members of the U.S. government, business, and diplomatic communities make their decisions based on the "knowledge" they acquire from the media. Venezuelans are suffering unnecessarily because of the arrogance and favoritism of a handful of journalists. It is wicked. Yet what is worse is that, no matter what happens, the media will never be held accountable.

Thor Halvorssen is a human-rights activist who was a political adviser andconsultant in two Venezuelan presidential elections. He lives in Philadelphia.

Letter To The Editor, Washington Times, Published Sunday January 26, 2003

Tony Blankley Editorial Page Editor The Washington Times

January 26, 2003

To the Editor:

I admit I hadn't heard of your contributor, Thor Halvorssen ("Venezuela Through a Tilted Lens," 1/22/03), but I now know that he's a shameless inventor. Moreover, the Times may have been gulled by an author with a complex past, which can be checked on the internet. Also, why didn't he reveal that he wasn't just your average Philadelphian, as listed, but served as Venezuela's drug czar in the early 1990s, under one of the most corrupt governments in its history, when he was involved in questionable incidents of public interest?

Halvorssen savages your professional colleagues for their alleged bias reporting from Venezuela. Among these, were two highly respected New York Times reporters, Juan Forero and Ginger Thompson, to whom I have spoken by telephone. Halvorssen's mean-spirited attack and his patently off-the-wall conspiracy theories regarding their alleged favoritism towards leftist Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez, are an extremist's fulminations against the international media. These, almost without exception, see today's uproar there not as a Castro complot, but due to misadventures on both sides.

Halvorssen's targets - the New York Times, the Washington Post, Reuters, and AP - are also vilified by the left for their anti-Chávez bias, using almost the same verbiage as his. The sin of these very solid professionals apparently is that they have tried to fairly treat an extremely involved story, thus inviting Halvorssen-like sclerotic attacks.

While I'm grateful for his characterizing me as "refreshingly sincere," I'm afraid I can't return the compliment, for I think he's up to knavery. He says that I told a Venezuelan government official that Timesman Forero was "committed to the revolution." Nonsense! I said no such thing. Last Christmas Eve, I received a phone call at my in-laws house in New Jersey, from a man who spoke rapid Spanish and poor English. Since I couldn't quite understand him, I soon turned the phone over to a Spanish-speaking relative.

This alleged high Chávez official frantically blurted out that an anti-Chávez coup was to occur on Dec. 29th, and that I must come down to Caracas immediately and bring four U.S. journalists of my choice with me as observers. I expressed skepticism whether this was possible, but at the very least I would need to consider it, and besides I felt that the New York Times, Reuters, AP, among others, were doing a first-class, balanced job, so why were more reporters required? I quickly sensed that the Caracas call might be a scam, particularly when the official didn't again call, as scheduled. Given his somewhat gamey biography, I now assume that Halvorssen was somehow involved in this script, or even made the call, because the only other conversant person would be the professed Chávez official, who presumably would not be the former's soulmate.

Rather than a Chávez "apologist," as Halvorssen claims, COHA has been a critic since 1998, when it attacked him for his too-close military ties. Since then it has found him "arrogant," "confrontational," "authoritarian," "acerbic," and "inflexible." As for both Halvorssen and the opposition, on the rare occasions when they tell the truth, they wail that the economy is dying and that the petroleum industry is heading for ruin, but fail to acknowledge their own direct complicity.

What is needed is moderation and concession. Venezuelans of Halvorssen's ilk must see that they constitute a disloyal opposition threatening the destruction of the political system through foul play, and not Athenian democrats. As for Chávez, he risks suffocating his revolution by holding it too tightly, as time runs out for him and also the opposition.

Larry Birns Director Council on Hemispheric Affairs Washington, D.C.

1730 M St. NW, Suite 1010 Washington, DC 20036 (202) 216-9261 coha@coha.org