www.washingtonpost.com By Scott Wilson Washington Post Foreign Service Thursday, February 20, 2003; 12:11 PM

BOGOTA, Colombia, Feb. 20--Venezuela's secret police have arrested one opposition leader and are searching for another as President Hugo Chavez follows through with his pledge to punish those behind the financially crippling general strike that failed to oust him from office.

Carlos Fernandez, head of Venezuela's largest business federation, was arrested late Wednesday night by eight secret service agents as he dined at an upscale restaurant in eastern Caracas. Fernandez was taken to the headquarters of the Disip, as the secret-police agency is known, where opposition leaders say he is being held on charges of treason, "civil rebellion" and illegal assembly.

At the same time, government authorities are searching for Carlos Ortega, head of Venezuela's largest labor federation who along with Fernandez was the most public figure behind the two-month strike that faded earlier this month. Ortega told Venezuelan media this morning that Fernandez's arrest was a "terrorist act" and that he would not turn himself him.

The arrests followed the discovery earlier this week of three dissident Venezuelan army soldiers and an opposition activist, whose bodies bore the signs of torture. International human rights groups said the killings appeared to be politically motivated and demanded an immediate investigation.

Fernandez's arrest came a day after government and opposition negotiators agreed to an eight-point declaration renouncing violence and inflammatory rhetoric as they seek a solution to the political crisis that has shaken the oil-rich nation for more than a year. The document was the first accord to emerge after three months of talks being mediated by Cesar Gaviria, the secretary of the Organization of American States.

But the government's apparent retaliation against opposition leaders has cast the agreement and the talks themselves into question. A person close to the negotiations said this morning, "The government thinks they have everything under control. Now they can go on the offensive. It's going to be very hard to keep people out of the streets, and the opposition may just step away from the table. Things could get very bad."

Indeed, thousands of anti-Chavez protesters took to the streets in response to Fernandez's arrest, many of them in front of the headquarters of Petroleos de Venezuela, the state oil company where many employees continue their walk-out against Chavez. Opposition leaders said the arrests were designed to undermine a successful petition drive that could set a referendum on Chavez's rule perhaps as early as this year.

"This arrest is an open provocation against the Venezuelan public," said Felipe Mujica, an opposition congressman with the Movement Toward Socialism party. "The government is trying to distract the public's attention from the process that is already underway to remove Chavez through an electoral solution. We want a peaceful solution. Nonetheless, we are going to mobilize the public against this act."

Chavez, a populist firebrand first elected in 1998 on a pledge to help Venezuela's poor, has survived two attempts to force him from office during the past year. An opposition movement comprising labor and business groups, leftist political parties and middle-class civilians has accused Chavez of trying to impose a Cuban-style dictatorship on Venezuela, packing the courts, the armed forces and the oil industry with allies on behalf of his "social revolution."

Chavez was briefly ousted last April when a white-collar walkout at Petroleos de Venezuela prompted a general strike, street violence and a short-lived military-led coup. The United States endorsed the interim government that replaced Chavez until its collapse.

The second attempt began Dec. 2 when the opposition began a general strike designed to force Chavez to resign or move up the 2006 presidential elections to this year. A former lieutenant colonel who led his own failed coup in 1992, Chavez survived the strike by creating a makeshift supply system that kept the country in food and gasoline at great expense to the public treasury. Six people died in violence associated with the protest.

The private sector, reeling after missing the vital Christmas season, lifted the strike Feb. 3. But workers at the state oil company, which supplies the government with almost half its budget and the United States with 15 percent of its oil imprints, remains on strike even though the government has production back up to more than half its pre-strike level of 3 million barrels a day.

Since then, Chavez has promised "an offensive" against his political opponents that has apparently begun with the arrest of Fernandez. In the weeks ahead, Chavez will also likely begin depriving opposition businesses of dollars and other foreign currency, as he has promised, under a new exchange mechanism that he adopted earlier this month to protect the fading Bolivar, as the national currency is known.

"We are extremely concerned by these retaliatory operations by the government against the leaders of the opposition," said Jose Miguel Vivanco, head of the Americas division of Human Rights Watch. "The risk here is that the government has decided to criminalize political expression and the actions of the opposition. That is obviously a violation of a fundamental freedom."

Opposition leaders met this morning to decide how to respond to the recent round of arrests. At least one of the charges against Fernandez -- "civil rebellion" -- does not appear in the criminal code, said opposition members who also complained that some of them were stoned by pro-Chavez mobs this morning as they gathered for a meeting.

The OAS talks are not scheduled to resume until Wednesday, giving both sides time to plan their next steps. Gaviria is out of the country at the moment, but his aides say he is talking with both sides in an effort to keep the talks alive.

Rafael Alfonzo, an opposition negotiator who represents Fedecamaras, the business federation that Fernandez heads, said this morning that "this [non-violence pact] was the first agreement we had at the table and this [Fernandez's arrest] is the first violation we have had."

"Obviously, we must do something about this," Alfonzo said. "Some [opposition] people complained when we signed the agreement, but we believed in it. Now we have this demonstration on the government's part that shows clearly that we do not have a democracy and freedom in this country."

www.alternet.org By Terrence McNally, AlterNet February 20, 2003

On Sept. 17, 2001, six days after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, Bill Maher made this now-infamous remark: "We have been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building? Say what you want about it, it's not cowardly."

Those words ran afoul of Press Secretary Ari Fleischer. They also aggravated ABC and Disney, which insisted that Maher's comment and some sponsors' cancellations had nothing to do with his show's eventual cancellation.

"Politically Incorrect," which Maher created in 1993, won four Cable Ace Awards at Comedy Central; after it moved to ABC in '97, it was nominated for several Emmy Awards. His newest book is "When You Ride Alone, You Ride With Bin Laden." His new show, "Real Time With Bill Maher," will debut on HBO at 11:30pm on Friday, Feb. 21.

Maher recently had the following conversation with Terrence McNally, host of the radio show, Free Forum.

Terrence McNally: How did "Politically Incorrect" happen?

Bill Maher: I did an election night special in '92 for Comedy Central. It went well, and they were a new network open to ideas. I didn't even do a pilot. I just said: I've always wanted to do a show with an Algonquin type roundtable of mismatched characters who'd otherwise never be caught dead together in the same room.

You've said you were shocked that it lasted nine years.

I'm shocked that we lasted six on ABC. ....Though, I'll tell you, as time goes by, whenever I hear my comment from last September 17 it seems less and less radical. I'm more and more befuddled how anyone could've twisted it into a critique of the military, which it wasn't.

I don't think anyone if they heard it today would be that upset. Which just shows you where our heads were right after that attack.

But you know, there was a good side to that time too. For about a month or two, this country was ready to change. And I will always hold it against this president for not taking advantage of that and asking people to really do anything to change.

...Except to resume shopping.

Right. "Go see Cats! Take the wife out to dinner. Keep that economy pumping."

And you point out that sacrifice has always been – at least through Roosevelt and Kennedy – an American trait.

Right. That's a lot of what the new book is about. There was a World War II propaganda poster: "When You Ride Alone, You Ride With Hitler" – trying to get people to join a car-sharing club. And that message is just as relevant today because we're also in a war that involves oil.

... much more so.

Yeah, a lot of people say the Japanese attacked us because we cut off their oil supply and they saw no other way out. I don't know about that. But I do know that Bin Laden and his ilk get their money, albeit indirectly, from oil. They don't get it from drugs like the Administration would like you to believe. It's not the Medellin Cartel that's sending them money. People get their money from their relatives. And excuse me, but these are Arabs attacking us and Arabs make oil. Period.

Oil money goes to finance Madrases, which are of course prep schools for hate. ...and oil money pays for telethons for suicide bombers. How did Bin Laden get rich? Well, it's because the people in Saudi Arabia got rich from oil and they paid his family to construct things there.

Every time there's an oil interruption, a problem in Venezuela or Ecuador or somewhere, Saudi Arabia makes a big announcement: "We're going to pump another 500,000 barrels this month to ease prices." Then they're the big heroes.

Therefore, we can't really be dispassionate about the other side of the equation, which is, this is where the hate is coming from. I don't care what they try to sell you. The center of that religion is Mecca. It's literally a Mecca for the very radical form of the religion that is practiced over there. Very radical, very hateful. You look at the textbooks in the schools over there, and the basic idea is: Non-Muslims are infidels and Americans are pretty evil. But we can't really hold their feet to the fire on stuff like that as long as we're so beholden to them on the oil issue.

When did you make the connection that the linkage of war and sacrifice has been lost to this generation?

I've had this poster book from World War II for a long time. Many of them are familiar. Uncle Sam Wants You. Obviously people know that one. Rosy the Riveter. Loose Lips Sink Ships. Some of these images are pretty familiar, I think, even to the guy on the street, but many of them are not.

By the way, when I say "propaganda poster," that's not a knock. Propaganda is not always a bad word, and this country was very unabashed about using propaganda to get the citizens of America to help in the war effort.

During World War II, the things that people could do were many and varied, including saving oil, but it was also saving tin, planting a victory garden, working harder. You know, they were very unafraid to just put their finger in the chest of Joe Citizen and say: "Hey, bub, get out there and work hard. The harder you work, the sooner the boys will come home."

This is a different war, and it may not be saving tin or planting a victory garden, but there are things we can do. And that's what the 33 posters in this book are about.

That's even the subtitle. "What the government should be telling us to help fight the war on terrorism." I'm sure a lot of people would be shocked to find Bill Maher saying, as you do in the preface, that you love this country.

I don't think people who watched my show [Politically Incorrect] would be shocked to find out I love this country. I always say, a real patriot is like a real friend – the one who tells you the truth. The one who really gives it to you straight. After you think about it for a day or two, you come back to that guy and say: "You know what? Thanks a lot for telling me that because somebody needed to and I appreciate it." That's the kind of friend I think people should be to their country, and that's the kind of friend I am to America.

What do you think happened to the role of the citizen as part of something bigger than a consumer group?

Well, somewhere along the way we confused freedom with not being asked to sacrifice.

The freedom to do what we damn well please...?

Right, and that's not what being an American means. It's wonderful that we have all this freedom and it's wonderful that we have all this prosperity. But for too many the idea of being an American and being free is: "Don't ever ask me to do anything, I'll drive whatever the hell I wanna drive! What do you think this is, Europe, bub?" That's not what is going to get the job done in the war on terror.

In 1963 when Kennedy said: "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country," that wasn't just elevator music, not just words from the latest empty suit to occupy the Oval Office. That was real stuff delivered to a country that had been through a war 15 years earlier, a war in which he'd made the sacrifice himself. And so there was no cynicism when people heard that. They nodded and went: "Yeah, that's about right."

We've come a long way in 40 years. A long way from that and we should get back to it.

On September 12, 2001 there should have been a dual mission. One, we're going to get al-Qaeda; and two, we're going to get oil independence. Do you think this Administration was particularly incapable of making that message?

Because of their ties to oil, of course. It's a shame. Bush could've been the exact guy to do it because it would've been a Nixon-to-China kind of a thing. He would've been the one guy who if he went up against oil, would've had a lot of credibility. But he spit the bit, in my opinion, on that one. He always claims, "I don't need a poll or a focus group to tell me what I think." Really, Mr. President, then why don't you fire Karl Rove?

Not that he's a dumb guy or a puppet, but he is as much as anybody I have ever seen, a politician. And politicians do not want to lose high approval ratings. And I think he's so trained, as all the politicians are nowadays, not to ask people to sacrifice. The government is only there to give you goodies. Never to ask of you, only to give. When Carter asked people to put on a sweater, they practically ran him out of town.

This president and this Administration are very eager for war, but they leave out the part that says: This war involves you guys...

I don't mind us going up against Saddam Hussein. I used to argue on my show that fighting off evil dictators is actually the liberal thing to do because it comes from the word "to liberate." Those poor people in Iraq have lived under a horrible police state for long enough, and we have the power to liberate the heel of the boot off their necks.

We've had Saddam in a nice little box for the last 12 years. I mean, he was basically the Mayor of Baghdad. He did not control most of his own country. Our planes flew over the north end of it, the south end of it, and we routinely fired upon his anti-aircraft batteries and any of his planes that got off the ground.

Not in the news very often, but a weekly event.

We sort of had him tied up. And for that reason, I don't think he thought about going offensive. Now if we attack, we're giving him a reason to use chemical weapons. And that could get real nasty. Even if it doesn't kill a lot of guys at the time, I bet you in 5, 10 years...

Gulf War Syndrome; even the government and the Justice Department finally admit there's something to it. And that was hardly a ground war.

By the time the effects show up, everyone who was so eager for this war will be long gone.

We're also talking about somebody who, no matter how much they try to sell it, is not part of the al-Qaeda operation.

Bin Laden hates the royal family of Saudi Arabia. He doesn't hate the country, but he hates the monarchy who, in his view, are way too secular and way too corrupt. And for the same reason, he hates Saddam Hussein because he's not a true believer. He's not all about Allah. He's about power and gold and oil and Viagra.

It's amazing the way the Administration was able to pull off this switch: "We're going to go after Bin Laden ... we gotta get Bin Laden ... we gotta get Bin Laden ... Hussein." Suddenly it morphed like a hologram. And I worry that by doing this, we actually drive these two guys together who otherwise hate each other.

As funny as it is, your book, "When You Ride Alone, You Ride With Bin Laden," is more serious than people might've expected.

I'm a comedian so I sometimes get to the end of a sentence, and it's a joke. But it's a serious book. I think what hooks even little kids into it is that there are 33 posters that are really provocative. You know the old saying: "Do I have to draw you a picture?" Well, for some people, you do.

This goes very well with your friend Arianna Huffington's anti-SUV campaign. By the way, I was the first person to give her a ride in a Prius.

Well, you should be honored because now she won't get out of it. People still ask me about mine: "How much do you have to plug it in?" You don't have to plug it in; you just drive it like any other car. It's a hybrid. You don't have any of the pain and the problem of an electric car – a totally electric car. But you're going to get 55, 60 miles to the gallon.

And if there's a war, gas prices are only going to go up even more.

Not that we really care about that over here because gas is so cheap.

A number of posters in the book deal with why they hate us. Because I think one thing that's been very lacking in this war on terrorism is the long-range approach. Yes, in the short range, we gotta go get Bin Laden and al-Qaeda, and certainly shore up the homeland defense, which is not shored up at all if I read the Hart Report.

You point out that the way they're approaching airport security is show, not reality.

It's a complete Potemkin village; it's nonsense. I'm having a wand passed over my arms while I sign an autograph. I just want to make a rule: Either I'm a guy who signs autographs, or I'm a possible terrorist. I don't think you can be both.

What's the new show going to be like? Similar? Different?

Both similar and different. We're going to have a full hour on HBO – without commercials. I think the biggest complaint about "Politically Incorrect" was it was a half-hour show – minus commercials. Five people basically trying to say something in about 20 minutes of actual airtime.

In this show, we're also going to have more of an all-star panel – a rotating pool of about seven or eight people. And there'll be some different elements. There'll be a satellite interview and a stand-up comedy piece at the end. But I think the heart of it will still be a 20, 25-minute panel of three of my favorites each week.

I want to get back to Iraq for one second. One of the things I haven't heard enough people saying is: Wouldn't it be cheaper to just keep a permanent inspection regime and not have to ramp up to war?

Yeah... absolutely, though I don't know if the UN would go for that. But it seems like we're working backwards like when we did chemistry labs. You know, you'd get the answer first, and then you'd work backwards to make the data fit. Or the way some people do their taxes. They write down what they want to pay on them and then they work backwards from there. We seem to be doing that here. It's like they seem to have a date that they want to go to war because I know that you don't want to go to war in the summer over there, it's too hot.

They had a date when they said it was good to sell the product by.

Right. Exactly. You know, this is a very punctual Administration. This ain't like the Clintons with the pizza boxes and the dorm room mentality and people getting sex all over the place. This is a very on-time Administration. And they want to go to war by, I would say, March the latest. So that means everything else has to be backed up from there.

So it just seems like there's an inevitability that there shouldn't be. I don't think it'll be the worst thing in the world if we topple Saddam Hussein. And Lord knows that part of the world needs a shaking up badly. But if we're not going to put it back together, then we are going to wind up being hated more than ever by the entire Muslim world. And that's what I fear the most. To me, the big big bugaboo in this is the pool of hatred from the Muslim world. That is where the recruits come to al-Qaeda.

And as long as that pool remains stagnant, we're going to be living with this problem for the rest of our lives. Now, if we went into Iraq and stayed there, and did some nation-building, which I know Bush didn't speak too well of during the campaign, but maybe he's got religion on it. If our foreign policy would start liberating the Arab world, I think we might have a chance to turn this thing around, and maybe we wouldn't be so hated and they wouldn't be able to say: "Oh, well, you know, you put these dictators on the throne in the first place and it's your foreign policy that keeps us down."

Try a little Marshall Plan.

Yeah, exactly.

Do you have any heroes?

Arianna's one of my heroes because she changed her whole outlook over the years. When people say – it always makes me laugh – "Why don't you run for office?" Well, there are many reasons I couldn't nor would I want to. But one reason I'm glad I'm not a politician is politicians are not allowed to change their mind.

That's a flip-flop.

Right. If 30 years later you don't agree with what you said back in 1972 that is somehow taken as a lack of constancy on your part. "Can he be trusted?" And my point of view is, if you haven't changed in 30 years, you really can't be trusted. Boy, what a moron you are. I guess nothing in the world changed, you didn't read anything new, no information entered your head that might affect your thoughts on things. So I admire people who can make a change. And Arianna did.

I also think that we have a field of Democrats who are not terribly respected and they don't seem to be catching fire. But I think Al Sharpton is going to really change things. I'm glad he's in it, I don't think he's going to win. But Democrats are going to have to get a lot more real with him in the race as far as he goes. The Democrats' problem is that they refuse to defend what they really believe in. They constantly keep trying to be more like the Republicans. And he's not going to let that happen.

Interviewer Terrence McNally has worked as a writer, producer, and director of documentaries. He is the host of Free Forum on KPFK 90.7fm, Los Angeles (streaming at kpfk.org), where he interviews people in search of "a world that just might work."

news.ft.com By Carola Hoyos, Energy Correspondent Published: February 20 2003 20:59 | Last Updated: February 20 2003 20:59

As President George W. Bush presses ahead with his plans to topple Saddam Hussein, the oil world is preparing for what many foresee as the dramatic effects of any return by Iraq to the international market. "The re-emergence of Iraq will be of historic significance, because of the scale of the resources and because of the realignment it may portend among the major oil exporters," says Daniel Yergin, chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates (Cera), an industry consulting group.

Fadhil Chalabi, a former Iraqi oil minister and a second cousin of the Iraqi opposition leader Ahmed Chalabi, goes further. He predicts that Iraq could within five years rival the dominant position of Saudi Arabia, which controls 260bn barrels of crude oil reserves, more than 20 per cent of the world's total and the majority of its spare capacity.

Iraqi oil officials suspect the country's 112.5bn barrels of proven crude oil reserves - the world's second largest after Saudi Arabia - would top 300bn barrels once Iraq's entire acreage was mapped.

And unlike the Caspian region - the "great new frontier" of the 1990s - Iraq's crude oil is easier to access and to export. Iraq has the added advantage of having the ability to transport much of its output through the Mediterranean via pipeline to Turkey in case of turmoil in the Gulf - a flexibility many other Middle East producers lack.

The need for more reliable sources of oil has become acutely apparent, to Washington in particular, in the past two months as political turmoil in Venezuela halted 15 per cent of the US's usual import stream.

Neo-conservatives have lobbied for the US to reduce its dependence on Saudi Arabia, since it emerged that 15 of the 19 hijackers involved in the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001 hailed from the kingdom.

The US relies on the kingdom for one sixth of its oil imports and depends on it as the only producer that, with a usual spare capacity of up to 3m b/d, could boost its exports significantly in the event of a world crude oil shortage.

That dependence could change drastically if Iraq were finally able - after decades of wars and sanctions have left many oilfields undiscovered and much of its infrastructure destroyed - to fulfil its true potential.

"Iraq needs to be seen as a part of the larger emerging contest between Russia and the Caspian on one side and the Middle East on the other side as to who will add more capacity to meet the growing world's demand," says Mr Yergin, author of The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, international oil companies flocked to the Caspian region, tempted by possible total reserves of more than 200bn barrels and potential exports of more than 3m b/d by 2010.

Meanwhile, Russia began to resurrect the production it lost throughout the 1980s and 1990s, pushing it to more than 7m b/d within eight years and steadily eating away at Saudi Arabia's share of the world market. More recently, presidents Putin and Bush announced a strategic partnership between the two countries and BP this month signed a $6.8bn (€6.3bn, £4.3bn) deal to create Russia's third-largest energy company.

Nevertheless, bottlenecks from Russia's pipelines to its ports and an inhospitable business environment make the country a long-term bet rather than a short-term possibility in terms of investment and strategic oil supply, in the eyes of many oil executives.

Whether the same must be said for Iraq depends on many "unknowable factors", as one oil company director put it. Would the country's transition be a smooth one, or would Iraq disintegrate into political turmoil? Would Saddam Hussein, who last month appointed Sameer Aziz al-Naji, a ruthless Ba'athist commander, as his new oil minister, destroy Iraq's oilfields as he retreated?

Vera De Ladoucette, of Cera, warns it could take Iraq two to three years to restart production after a damaging war.

But Mr Chalabi takes an optimistic view, dividing Iraq's investment needs into two phases: recovery and development. The first phase, which would probably last one to two years, would see Halliburton, Schlumberger and other service companies helping Iraq restore its production from the current 2.5m b/d average to 3.5m b/d, a volume it last saw in July 1990, just before it invaded Kuwait.

The second, the development phase, would include the world's biggest oil companies, among them BP, Total, ChevronTexaco, Exxon/Mobil, Shell, Lukoil and Eni, vying for lucrative production sharing contracts with the new government.

Mr Chalabi estimates Iraq's production capacity could increase by another 4.5m barrels per day by 2008, eventually reaching 10m bpd and possibly surpassing Saudi Arabia and Russia to 12m. Others are far more pessimistic.

"This isn't going to happen overnight. It can't. We are going to have to be patient," says James Simpson, managing director for the Middle East and North Africa for ChevronTexaco.

Adam Sieminksi, analyst at Deutsche Bank, says a large increase would be theoretically possible, but he believes Iraq, unwilling to risk severely depressing world oil prices, would choose to move much more slowly. In a recent report he concluded: "In theory, new investment could add a mind-bending 4.7m b/d to Iraq's capacity. In reality, this looks more like a 20-year investment trend and extremely unlikely to come on stream over a short period of time."

Still, Iraq's desperate need for money to reconstruct an economy ravaged by sanctions would probably encourage deals, analysts say. Adding to the burden is the country's $140bn debt and the possibility that the US could demand that a new regime help pay for the cost of the war.

What type of oil policy Iraq would then follow is as unclear as who would run the country. Even if Iraq did not maintain a similar policy of voluntarily shutting in some of its production to act as a swing producer, an aggressive production growth policy could have huge ramifications for the future of Opec.

Since 1999 the cartel has managed to maintain high oil prices by reining in production - a delicate balancing act that could be destroyed if the group's members felt their market share was in jeopardy. That would undercut prices and ultimately also reduce Iraq's returns, but it would benefit consumers, as did the discoveries in the North Sea and Alaska that helped bring down prices from the lofty heights they reached after the Iranian revolution in 1979, when Americans queued for gasoline for the first time.

Rilwanu Lukman, who recently stepped down as Opec's president and is Nigeria's presidential energy adviser, says Opec must face the reality of Iraq's return: "Sooner or later they will come back." He adds: "You have to be reasonable. If we allow Iraq in, someone is going to have to give up."

That sacrifice will probably have to be made by Saudi Arabia, which has gained the most in extra market share from Iraq's absence. How much the kingdom will be willing to rein in production will ultimately decide the future of the oil market and perhaps of Opec itself.

santafenewmexican.com By JAMES ANDERSON | Associated Press 02/20/2003

CARACAS, Venezuela - Hundreds of people demonstrated Thursday against the arrest of a leader of Venezuela's general strike, who was snatched out of a restaurant by secret police and faces charges of treason and instigating violence. Protesters took to the streets of Caracas and other cities while motorists honked car horns following the arrest of Carlos Fernandez, president of Venezuela's largest federation, Fedecamaras, who faces charges for his role in the mass, anti-government protests that crippled the nation's economy. Opposition leaders on Thursday threatened to call another strike in response to arrest. Strike co-leader Carlos Ortega, of the Venezuelan Workers Confederation, was ordered to surrender, also on treason and instigating violence charges, said magistrate Maikel Jose Moreno. Ortega and Fernandez led the two-month strike that started Dec. 2, seeking to oust leftist President Hugo Chavez. The strike ended this month except in Venezuela's oil sector. Chavez on Thursday gloated over Fernandez's arrest, telling a trade forum that "I went to bed with a smile" Wednesday night when he learned of the magistrate's arrest order. "One of the coup plotters was arrested last night. It was about time, and see how the others are running to hide," Chavez said. Chavez accuses the two strike leaders of trying to topple his government. Ruling party lawmaker Tarek William Saab said Fernandez was accused of participating in a brief April coup against Chavez and of promoting a tax rebellion, a bank strike and the continuing oil strike. Ortega told Globovision television he wouldn't turn himself in. "We have nothing to fear," he said by telephone. "The only one who has a date with justice is the president." Eight armed men seized Fernandez at about midnight Wednesday as he was leaving a restaurant in Caracas' trendy Las Mercedes district, his bodyguard, Juan Carlos Fernandez, said. He said the men, who identified themselves as police agents, fired into the air when patrons tried to stop them from taking Fernandez away. Fernandez's wife, Sonia, spoke briefly with Fernandez by telephone and said that he was in good condition at secret police headquarters despite being hit during his arrest. Fernandez was meeting with his attorneys, she said. Ortega condemned the arrest as "a terrorist act" against Venezuela's opposition, already shaken by the slayings and possible torture of three dissident Venezuelan soldiers and an opposition activist. International human rights groups have demanded an investigation into the slayings of the four, whose bodies were found in the suburbs of Caracas with hands tied and faces wrapped with tape. Darwin Arguello, Angel Salas and Felix Pinto and opposition activist Zaida Peraza, 25, had multiple bullet wounds and showed signs of torture, Raul Yepez, deputy director of Venezuela's forensics police, said Wednesday. He said the four were abducted Saturday night. According to the New York-based Human Rights Watch, a witness saw the victims being forced into two vehicles by men wearing ski masks, not far from a plaza that has become the opposition's central rallying point. "The circumstances strongly suggest that these were political killings," said Jose Miguel Vivanco, executive director of the Americas Division of Human Rights Watch. Yepez said police had "practically ruled out" political motives. There have been no arrests. Dissident soldiers supported the nationwide strike, which demanded Chavez's resignation and early elections. The strike was lifted Feb. 4 in all areas except the oil industry to protect businesses from bankruptcy. The vice president of Fedecamaras, Albis Munoz, warned of another nationwide strike. The workers confederation said a 12- or 24-hour stoppage was possible. "Definitely there will be actions, and very strong actions," Munoz said, adding that Fernandez was "practically kidnapped." Opposition leaders called for street protests and appealed to the Organization of American States, the United Nations and the Carter Center, run by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, which have brokered talks here. One opposition delegate to those talks, Rafael Alfonzo, said Fernandez's abduction made a mockery of a "peace pact" renouncing violence that government and opposition negotiators signed on Wednesday. "This government doesn't want to negotiate. It only wants conflict. We won't back down," Alfonzo said. OAS Secretary General Cesar Gaviria issued a statement urging Venezuela's judiciary to treat Fernandez's case in "strict compliance with the laws and rights guaranteed by the (Venezuelan) constitution." Chavez was elected in 1998 and re-elected in 2000, vowing to wipe out the corruption of previous governments and redistribute Venezuela's vast oil wealth to the poor majority. His critics charge he has mismanaged the economy, tried to grab authoritarian powers and split the country along class lines. Having abandoned their strike, opponents are now petitioning for a constitutional amendment to cut Chavez's term in power from six to four years. They said Wednesday that more than 4.4 million Venezuelans had signed, well over the 15 percent of registered voters, or about 1.8 million, needed to force a referendum on early elections.

www.vheadline.com Posted: Thursday, February 20, 2003 By: Patrick J. O'Donoghue

Reactions to the government-opposition negotiating teams’ non-aggression agreement have been skeptical and mute. Universidad Central de Venezuela (UCV) Political Psychology Unit coordinator, Mireya Lozada says the problem is putting the agreement into concrete actions on different levels of society.

Reflecting growing intuition among analysts that agreements reached at the top are not enough to stem the tide of violence, Lozada says the agreement must be assimilated and carried out on all levels of society.

"Each association, political party and NGO must drop insulting and aggressive language … that means both sides must drop the spin that the other side is responsible for the violence … discourse must favor dialogue and respect and democratic values.”

Lozada insists that print & broadcast media have a special role to play to make the agreement work … “they have to make sure that programs don’t contaminate each other and must avoid sending conflicting signals to viewers and listeners.”