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CARACAS, February 2 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) – Opposition leaders in Venezuela say they will ease the two-month-old strike against the country’s president, Hugo Chavez, from Monday, February 3, but the crucial oil sector will remain on strike.

An opposition spokesman, Jesus Torrealba, said Saturday, February 1, that the movement “will enter a new phase” late Sunday, with businesses, industries, schools and shopping centers resuming activity over the course of the next week, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).

Torrealba, executive secretary of the opposition coordinating committee, said it would continue the fight in the key oil industry, demanding that 5,000 oil workers sacked by the government be allowed to return to work.

The fight, Torrealba said, is not only over these workers but “also will be focused on derailing the government’s ambitions to use PDVSA to serve its political ends.”

Opposition members have been demanding Chavez step down as soon as possible. He has rejected the idea and said they can seek a recall referendum in August.

Far from easing up on pressure on Chavez, Torrealba insisted that starting Monday, the opposition “will sponsor with greater drive demonstrations with one goal: pushing Chavez out of office.”

He said strike leaders were pleased with mediation proposals from the Organization of American States, and the creation of a Group of Friendsof Venezuela to try to help end the standoff that has crippled Venezuela’s economy.

Victory for Chavez

The decision, which opposition leaders said would be explained in detail in a news conference on Sunday night, was seen as a clear victory for Chavez, who has played down the walkout while calling its organizers fascists and coup plotters, reported British daily the Independent.

The government’s opponents characterized their action as a new phase in their efforts to unseat Chavez. They asserted that the strike led to international participation in Venezuela’s political crisis and pressed the government into negotiations that could lead to an electoral solution.

However, the fact is that for many days the strike has been one in name only, with Venezuelans tired of a walkout that had devastated their economy while bringing none of the results promised in December. The blow to the Venezuelan economy, Latin America’s fourth largest, is estimated at U.S.$4 billion in lost oil revenues alone.

“We share the opposition’s opinion, but we live by working,” said Maritza RondÓn, owner of a wholesale hardware store in Venezuela’s second-largest city, Maracaibo, that reopened weeks ago. “Our business has nothing to do with our politics.”

Alfredo Chirino, owner of an auto parts factory in Caracas that reopened this week, said he could not keep his business closed any longer. “We wanted to have some income, and we had to meet some commitments dating back to November,” he said. “We needed to bring in income to pay our workers.”

The reopening of businesses appears to give Chavez the upper hand in negotiations with the opposition that are being mediated by the Organization of American States. The government’s position could be further solidified as the state-owned oil company continues to reactivate oil production.

“The opposition has basically lost the strike,” said Gregory Wilpert, an American here who is finishing a book about the Chavez era. “They gambled that the strike would get rid of Chavez, and the strike failed. They now don't have many other options.”

The Group of Friends is made up of the United States, Chile, Mexico, Brazil, Spain and Portugal.

With that intervention, “the national strike has reached its objectives and the protest is entering a new phase,” Torrealba claimed.

The opposition to Chavez announced Friday it would “rethink” the general strike next week. It has been on since December 2, and its impact has been greatest due to the blow it has dealt to the key oil industry and the state oil giant PDVSA.

However, experts say the strike had begun to falter as many companies, faced with bankruptcy, re-opened for business, according to the BBC news online.

The National Banking Council and the Venezuelan Banking Association said they decided by a two-thirds vote to restart normal operating hours from Monday.

Management at shopping centers, restaurants and schools were also reportedly planning to return to work Monday.

The strikes have forced Venezuelans to queue for cash, food and gas, and sparked angry protests in which at least seven people have been killed.

Change of Tactics The strikes have forced Venezuelans to queue for cash, food and gas

Having agreed to ease back on the strike, opposition leaders are now focusing their efforts on gathering signatures for a petition aimed at pressuring Chavez out of power.

Opposition leaders intend Sunday to hold what they have described as the “Great Sign-up” in which the people of Venezuela will be called upon to register their support for a number of demands for the government.

Chief amongst these would be a constitutional amendment which would change Chavez’s term of office from six years to just four.

Under the country’s constitution, opposition leaders would be permitted to make the request if they secured the signatures of 15% of Venezuela’s registered voters - approximately 1.8 million people.

“Our idea is to get 5 million signatures,” Carlos Ocariz, from the opposition party Justice First, said.

Chavez has repeatedly brushed aside calls for his resignation and seems determined to not surrender the leadership.

www.vheadline.com Posted: Sunday, February 02, 2003 - 7:11:57 AM By: Patrick J. O'Donoghue

According to Higher Business Studies Institute (IESA), there are around 1 million persons in Venezuela living in a state of social exclusion. Researchers attending a forum titled, “Social Pact towards overcoming poverty and development,” describe such persons as people with no work, no education no social nucleus .. 38% are young people and 75% men.

Andres Bello Catholic University (UCAB) Social Studies Institute director, Luis Pedro Espana makes a distinction between poverty patterns before and after the current government … "in 20 years before Chavez Frias there was a progressive curve of 56% of families moving towards poverty but in the last four years the curve has shot up spectacularly."

The forum has published the following conclusions:

800,000 families live in extreme poverty (approximately 4.5 million nucleons) bringing the housing shortage to 1.8 million houses

600,000 low-income households live in shacks

Of every 10 workers, 5 belong to informal sector, 2 are unemployed, 1 works in the public sector and two are on private sector payrolls

22% of people over 55 yrs. old are illiterate 652,000 children between the ages of 3-6 do not attend pre-school 142,000 (7-12) do not go the primary school 208,00 miss out at secondary schools

Espana says we have become a "society of losers looking for scapegoats and in need of an avenging angel … the current government is repeating mistakes of the past but using the avenger discourse creating a series falsehoods based on confrontation.”

www.sltrib.com BY JUAN FORERO THE NEW YORK TIMES

    CARACAS, Venezuela -- With large numbers of businesses across Venezuela opening to offset huge financial losses from a 62-day-old general strike, opposition leaders said Saturday that they would scale back the walkout this week so that factories, shops, malls and schools could reopen.

    The strike, which has failed in its originally stated mission to force President Hugo Chavez to resign or to call early elections, will continue only in the all-important oil industry.

    But the decision, which opposition leaders said would be explained in detail in a news conference today, was seen as a clear victory for Chavez, who has played down the walkout while calling its organizers fascists and coup plotters.

    The government's opponents characterized their action as a new phase in their efforts to unseat Chavez. They asserted that the strike, which began Dec. 2, had led to international participation in Venezuela's political crisis and pressed the government into negotiations that could lead to an electoral solution.

    "Now that there is a concrete proposal for elections, the Venezuelan conflict is going into a new phase where the key to the protest is no longer the strike but negotiations," said Jesus Torrealba, executive secretary of the opposition group's coordinating committee.

    But the fact is that for many days the strike has been one in name only, with Venezuelans having tired of a walkout that had devastated their economy while bringing none of the results promised in December. The blow to the Venezuelan economy, Latin America's fourth-largest, is estimated at $4 billion in lost oil revenues alone.

    "We share the opposition's opinion, but we live by working," said Maritza Rondon, owner of a wholesale hardware store in Venezuela's second-largest city, Maracaibo, that reopened weeks ago. "Our business has nothing to do with our politics."

    Alfredo Chirino, owner of an auto parts factory in Caracas that reopened last week, said he could not keep his business closed any longer. "We wanted to have some income, and we had to meet some commitments dating back to November," he said. "We needed to bring in income to pay our workers."

    The reopening of businesses appears to give Chavez the upper hand in negotiations with the opposition that are being mediated by the Organization of American States. The government's position could be further solidified as the state-owned oil company continues to reactivate oil production.

    "The opposition has basically lost the strike," said Gregory Wilpert, an American here who is finishing a book about the Chavez era. "They gambled that the strike would get rid of Chavez, and the strike failed. They now don't have many other options."     Opposition leaders, who called their decision Saturday a goodwill gesture toward the government, said they would continue to apply pressure.

    Today, they plan to hold what is being called El Firmazo -- loosely translated as "the big sign-up" -- a petition drive. Organizers are hoping to collect hundreds of thousands of signatures to support a constitutional amendment to shorten the president's term and lead to new elections.

www.thisismoney.com Lisa Buckingham, Mail on Sunday 2 February 2003

HE stock market has ways of making the most sure-footed appear foolish. Even Gordon Brown's reputation for prudence could be sorely tested by the current share price rout.

At the time of the Chancellor's first budget, Brown stealthily removed the tax credit that pension funds had traditionally enjoyed on the dividends* they earned on their shareholdings. It looked clever at the time - to everyone except the pension funds, which sensed the import of what he had done.

The general view was that share prices were rising, and even if the value of pension schemes grew less rapidly, they were still growing.

What the Treasury did not count on was the impact this would have on the behaviour of those funds by encouraging them to put money into gilts* and bonds* rather than shares. This shift was already being advocated by wiser heads in the pensions business. They were reading the demographic runes showing that people were living longer so the cost of providing them with pensions would become greater. With increasingly long-term liabilities, pension funds needed to be sure they could meet payments - rather than using any surpluses in the pension fund to supplement profits in one way or another.

Boots famously became the first big pension fund to make a total shift out of equities* and into bonds in October 2001. But others have quietly been following suit - and share prices have been under pressure as a result of all this selling.

Now the Institute for Fiscal Studies has calculated that the assault on dividend tax credits has deprived pension funds of a stunning £36bn of income over the past seven years. Plunging markets have left pension schemes with a collective black hole of anywhere between £85bn and £150bn, according to your choice of actuary*.

At some stage, companies are going to have to start repairing these deficits if they don't want to condemn their employees to an old age in poverty. This, by some calculations, could cost £10bn a year for the next decade. And that will have to be found from profits.

Because of the slump, Brown's expected tax take from share-dealing - things like stamp duty* and capital gains tax* - is already likely to fall more than £3bn short of what he had hoped for this year.

If companies have to start using profits to pay into their pension schemes, what he can take from business will fall even shorter of his expectations.

Add to this the wallop to consumer confidence and company profits that could accompany this April's tax rises and even Brown's notoriously conservative assumptions could be blown off course.

Clearly, Brown did not cause the collapse in share prices. But the stealth tax on pension funds could prove his most costly mistake.

Fuel's game YOU do not have to believe that President Bush's burning desire to consign Saddam Hussein to the despot dustbin is all about oil. But it helps.

Impending military action against Iraq underlines the West's failure to confront one of the most crucial challenges of the past 30 years - security of energy supplies.

Iraq's massive crude oil reserves - 112bn barrels - mean it is the only country capable of replacing Saudi Arabia as the world's leading petrol station.

An Iraqi regime that looks favourably on the West would go a long way to ensuring that oil keeps flowing cheaply. But even at the best of times the Middle East is a tinderbox; there is no guaranteeing the stability of Saudi Arabia, let alone an Iraqi regime that is seen as the spawn of the Great Satan.

The West has signally failed to respond to the economic threat posed by volatile, and frequently hostile, oil producers housed in the Opec cartel. The civil strife in Venezuela, which is now on the point of imploding, is another ominous example.

The writing was on the wall as far back as 1973 when the infamous Arab embargo quadrupled the oil price in a matter of weeks and pushed the world into recession.

Frenzied policy-making followed in an attempt to break the West's addiction to oil imports. But in the case of the US, the habit has only grown - despite further Middle East-inspired oil shocks.

Bush's pledge in his State of the Union address to provide funding of $1.2bn to help develop hydrogen-powered cars is the latest in a long line of token gestures from the land that brought us gas-guzzling monsters.

In the UK, we may feel smug in our role as a net* oil exporter, though this will not be the case for much longer.

Strategic oil reserves aside and whatever Bush's motives for going to war, the West should now learn its lesson and develop a strategy to lessen its long-term dependence on Opec.

www.boston.com By Mike Ceaser, Globe Correspondent, 2/2/2003

CARACAS - Almost two months into a petroleum strike that has crippled Venezuela's economy but has failed in its goal of removing President Hugo Chavez, the unlikely anti-Chavez coalition of business, union, media, and political parties is beginning to fragment.

Across the country, unions and businesses are being forced into hard choices between their opposition to Chavez - whom many accuse of corruption, authoritarianism, and trying to remake Venezuela into another Cuba - and their own economic survival.

Small independent stores and restaurants were the first to give in and reopen their doors. Some did so as early as mid-December, although some business owners admitted to never having completely shut down, as they were partially obligated by a Labor Ministry decree requiring them to meet normal payrolls.

Then the tanker pilots went back to work. Banks, which had restricted their hours, announced last week that they also would return to normal operations. And organizations of shopping malls, fast-food franchises, and private schools are all considering ''flexibilizing'' the strike by reopening at least partially.

Strike leaders said yesterday that they would ease the work stoppage this week to protect businesses against bankruptcy.

The decision was prompted by pressure from the ''Group of Friends,'' a forum made up of the United States and five other nations who are supporting efforts by the Organization of American States to broker an end to Venezuela's bitter political stalemate.

The state petroleum company managers, whose walkout initially slashed Venezuela's crude production by more than 95 percent, have stayed away from work - but they may no longer have a choice. Chavez, who has restored one-third of normal crude production using lower-level employees and foreign workers, has issued many of them pink slips.

''There's no going back,'' said Jose Toro Hardy, a former director of Petroleum of Venezuela whose striking workers have been one of Chavez's most visible opponents.

Even Carlos Ortega, president of the Confederation of Venezuelan Workers, and the opposition's most aggressive leader, has backpedaled on several points, including a call for a tax strike and his vow to continue the strike until Chavez leaves office.

Another part of the opposition's rhetoric has even shifted into damage control, trying to salvage the jobs of the Petroleum of Venezuela managers who walked off in early December, apparently confident that the collapse of the Chavez regime would follow.

Ortega rejects suggestions that the strikers are softening their stance.

''There can be no `flexibilization' of the strike,'' he said. ''What there can be is a change of strategy, which is something totally different.''

After a ruling on Jan. 22 by the Supreme Tribunal of Justice, however, the opposition is groping for a strategy.

The tribunal, considered by critics to be pro-Chavez, used a technicality to annul a referendum Feb. 2 on Chavez's rule.

That decision frustrated opposition hopes that a resounding defeat for the increasingly unpopular president would mortally weaken his government.

Although Chavez had vowed not to step down even if he lost 90 percent of the vote, the referendum also provided the opposition a clear objective - and a convenient date to declare victory and call off the strike.

The justices' ruling ''was temporarily demoralizing,'' said Anibal Romero, a Caracas political analyst and a Chavez critic. ''But that only lasted 24 hours.''

Yet without the referendum to rally them, opposition forces have begun jousting among themselves over which anti-Chavez strategy to try. As a result, they are trying anything they can think of.

In a Caracas plaza, Jorge Antonio Vergara was collecting signatures on one petition to cut the presidential term and another to convoke a constituent assembly to rewrite the constitution from scratch. Soon, Vergara said, they would add several more petitions, to cut the terms of legislators and to try another consultative referendum on Chavez's rule.

But all the strategies face major obstacles in the Chavez-dominated government.

''More than anything, it's a fight to keep insisting,'' Vergara added, ''since he has all of the governmental powers controlled.''

Chavez says the opposition is welcome to try any constitutional means to cut short his rule and that he will not oppose a revocatory referendum after August, the halfway point of his six-year mandate.

But a variety of opponents have voiced doubt that Chavez would ever relinquish power democratically.

Meanwhile, as the petroleum strike has extended, the economic picture has darkened. Analysts expect the economy to shrink 40 percent in the first quarter, and they predict another million unemployed this year on top of the government jobless rate of 16 percent last year.

The government plans exchange controls to protect the plummeting currency, the bolivar, and it expects to impose price controls on basic necessities.