www.vheadline.com Posted: Sunday, February 23, 2003 By: Paul Volgyesi

Date: Fri, 21 Feb 2003 23:38:55 +0100 From: Paul Volgyesi sanbasan@interware.hu To: editor@vheadline.com Subject: I very badly miss the country we had

Dear Editor: "I very badly miss the country we had before Chavez ... a country in which we could all smile to each other."  (One of the many on the same tune)

Any zoo expert will confirm that all animals living behind steel bars are highly neurotic. My personal idea of mental sanity, freedom and democracy doesn't include living either behind steel bars or in guarded compounds as all middle-class and up has to in all of Latin America (non-exhaustive).

So against all my cells crying for Latin sun, and despite my hate of the cold, I moved to Canada thirty some years ago and bought a house with no fence toward the curb, like zillions in Canada.

My neighbors, owning the same front-fenceless houses, were workers or engineers, cops and white collars, doctors, whatever. The poor were in worse houses, but in houses, had a bad life, but didn't go hungry ... and a huge part of crime was relevant to criminology and not sociology.

Now, calling "the country we had before Chavez ... a country in which we could all smile to each other" is either a case of selective blindness, or it really vindicates those claims that Upper Venezuela considers Lower Venezuela as populated by non-humans ... a mentality which is by no means specific to Venezuela or even Latin America.

And I'm not theorizing this.

This is like a soccer team where only the coaches and referees get three meals a day. Of course, the players all smile at the owners so they can keep at least their ONE meal a day. Oh! So sorry! I forgot the TV guys who get 2 for telling us how great a game these starving guys are showing us!

Saying that freedom and democracy require the shrinking of the income span and not the current opposite trend isn't some kind of whacko ideology ... it only requires looking at how people live here and there in the world.

• Now since we've all been taught at school that we must participate in democracy, comes a guy who says: "participate" and they all start shooting at him?

If the so(or self?)-called 'meritocrats' had decided to participate, Venezuela would be on its way to look like Switzerland ... the rich would still be rich, albeit maybe less shamefully, and everybody would be smiling at each other.

Paul Volgyesi sanbasan@interware.hu

caracaschronicles.blogspot.com By Francisco Toro Thursday, February 20  

What do you call a political leader jailed for his political views? A political prisoner, right?

Just wanted to settle that up front – President Chávez’s endlessly repeated claim that there are no political prisoners in this country is now dead. Last night, the government “arrested” Carlos Fernández, one of the most visible opposition leaders, in a secret police operation that looked more like a kidnapping – a dozen heavily armed men suddenly jumped on him and commandeered his car, as he was leaving a restaurant. There was no district attorney present (as required by Venezuelan law), these guys showed no arrest warrant, they are keeping him incommunicado and they won’t even confirm his whereabouts. So where, exactly, is the borderline between an arrest and a state-sponsored kidnapping?

Carlos Fernández is far from my favorite opposition leader – he’s crass, often radical without a purpose, he’s a terrible public speaker and he played a major role in leading the opposition up the garden path known as the General Strike – a fantastically dumb adventure that did nothing but consolidate Chávez in power. Yet seeing him arrested in this way seems to back up everything he always said about the government: that they haven’t the slightest clue what democracy is all about, that they’ll stop at nothing to consolidate themselves in power, and that they treat the constitution the way your cat treats his litter box.

Watch for the foreign lefties to start justifying his arrest on the grounds that, christ, he’s the leader of the business association, he must be some sort of evil blood-sucking plutocrat, and it’s ok if they go to jail, right? Don’t laugh, it’s the precise corollary to Naomi Klein’s argument on the press in The Guardian the other day.

But beyond that, Fernández is a genuine self-made man, a postwar immigrant from Spain who was penniless on arrival, built up a trucking firm from a single truck into a fairly large company, and rose through the ranks to preside the major business federation here, Fedecamaras. It’s the Venezuelan dream, the dream of tolerance and social mobility Chávez can’t stand because it lays bare the bankruptcy of his vision of Venezuela as an ossified, near-colonial society.

For decades, Venezuela had been well past the political cultural of responding to dissent with jail. Under Chávez, we seem to be regressing.

Sunday, February 23  

For a second, I worried it had been a one-off. But reading this AP story I’m more and more convinced that the foreign media’s coverage of the crisis is now shifting very significantly.

Up until a few weeks ago, incidents like last night’s shootout outside PDVSA (two blocks from where I live, incidentally!) were covered in a scrupulously agnostic way – especially by the agencies. You kept running into phrases like “a shootout ensued,” or “each side blamed the other for starting the violence,” or “after an armed confrontation, X people lay wounded” – formulations specifically designed not to place the blame on one side or the other. And last night’s shootout was, at least as I saw it, murky enough that it could, imaginably, have been the work of agents provocateurs. It’s not likely, of course: as per usual, all the circumstantial evidence suggests that it was yet another unprovoked chavista attack, but it’s not entirely impossible that some shady right-wing group could have done it to raise trouble – absent footage of known chavistas shooting, how can you be sure?

In the past, that level of doubt would have been enough to elicit the wishy-washy, non-committal language described above. It drove opposition minded Venezuelans crazy reading stuff like that, because many times the weight of evidence against the government seemed so crushing that refusing to assign blame sometimes bordered on complicity with government-sponsored violence. There were some very unfortunate episodes where chavistas were demonstrably, evidently to blame for serious attacks - more than a couple of incidents were even photographed and videotaped and really left no room for doubt - and yet the foreign papers were just not willing to come out and say it clearly.

That’s one problem we don’t have in the post-Fernández-arrest era. The AP write-up is astonishingly unambiguous in assigning blame over last night’s shootout:

"Gunmen loyal to Chavez ambushed a group of policemen overnight, killing one officer and wounding five others, said Miguel Pinto, chief of the police motorcycle brigade. The officers were attacked Saturday night as they returned from the funeral for a slain colleague and passed near the headquarters of the state oil monopoly, which has been staked out by Chavez supporters since December. After a series of attacks on Caracas police by pro-Chavez gunmen, Police Chief Henry Vivas ordered officers to avoid oil company headquarters. But the funeral home is located nearby.

'We never thought it would come to this,' Pinto said.

Chavez's government has seized thousands of weapons from city police on the pretext that Vivas has lost control of the 9,000-member department. Critics allege Chavez is disarming police while secretly arming pro-government radicals."

Now, the journalists reading this know how the sausage is made. This is not the way you write a story if you mean to leave any doubt in your readers' minds about who's responsible for the killing. It’s a gutsy way to write, really - and refreshing to see in the typically bland AP. It just goes to bolster my theory that Chávez screwed up big time with Carlos Fernández – the speed with which the benefit of the doubt has vanished is amazing. He can expect to get raked over the coals abroad for every little slip up now. Once the media start treating you this way, it’s a matter of time until you end up with full-on pariah status. This shift has been a long time in the making. Now, it’s happening.

asia.reuters.com Sun February 23, 2003 05:47 PM ET By Phil Stewart

CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez warned the world to stop meddling in the affairs of his troubled South American nation on Sunday, as police locked up a prominent strike leader on "civil rebellion" charges.

The populist president accused the United States and Spain of siding with his enemies, warned Colombia he might break off diplomatic relations, and reprimanded the chief mediator in tortuous peace talks for stepping "out of line."

"I ask all of the countries of this continent and of the world ... are you going (to) stop this meddling?" Chavez asked angrily, during his state-sponsored television show 'Alo Presidente.' "This is a sovereign nation."

The tongue-lashing followed a recent flurry of diplomatic communiques expressing concern over Carlos Fernandez, a strike leader and prominent businessman who was yanked out of a Caracas steakhouse on Thursday at gunpoint by police.

A judge placed the silver-haired executive under house arrest on Sunday to await trial for charges of civil rebellion and criminal instigation, which could land him up to 26 years in prison. He spearheaded a two-month nationwide shutdown by oil workers and industry in a failed bid to force elections.

"I've committed no crime, of any kind," Fernandez said defiantly from his country home just outside Caracas.

Chavez carped that the same international worry by diplomats over Fernandez wasn't shown when he was briefly ousted in a 48-hour coup last year. He said some countries, including Spain and the United States, applauded the putsch.

"It's worth remembering that the Spanish ambassador was here, in this room, applauding the coup. So the Spanish government is going (to) keep commenting?" Chavez asked.

"We say the same thing to the government in Washington. Stop making mistakes ... A spokesman comes out there saying he's worried. No! This is a Venezuelan matter."

PEACE HOPES WANE

Venezuela's crisis has drawn the international spotlight with leaders afraid the world's No. 5 supplier of oil could slide into civil war as Chavez allies and enemies face off.

Hailed by supporters as a champion of the poor, the paratrooper-turned-president has pledged to crack down on enemies of his self-styled "revolution." Foes call him an ignorant dictator looking to impose Cuban-style communism.

Chavez crushed an oil walkout by firing 13,000 dissident workers, and laughed off the two-month-old strike which hurt the private sector and was meekly abandoned in early February.

He won an arrest warrant for another strike leader, union boss Carlos Ortega, and threatens to lock up a group of media moguls he dubs the "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse."

The United States, Spain and four other countries have dispatched diplomats to the negotiating table in a bid to defuse tensions fueling the crisis. But the talks have so far proven fruitless, and Chavez on Sunday seemed to push away members of the six-nation group.

Chavez reserved his most severe criticism for Cesar Gaviria, who is the chief mediator in talks to end the political deadlock. Gaviria, a former Colombian president, is the head of the Organization of American States.

"Mr. Gaviria, this is a sovereign nation, sir. You were president of a country. Don't step out of line," Chavez said.

The maverick leader, whose fiery rhetoric inflames adversaries, also took time on Sunday to include Colombia in his tirade. The neighboring nation's foreign minister accused Chavez last week of meeting frequently with rebel leaders.

Chavez has always denied those allegations, and on Sunday criticized the country for providing asylum for Venezuela's brief president during the April coup -- Pedro Carmona.

"What do they want? For us to break off (diplomatic) relations? That we break off ties?" Chavez exclaimed.

"Over there in Colombia they had a party on the day of the coup ... They applauded Carmona and they have Carmona over there in Bogota. He lives over there, that fugitive."

Venezuela's internal standoff has left at least seven dead and scores injured in street violence since December. Police are also investigating last week's killings of three dissident soldiers and an anti-Chavez protester, which relatives of the victims blame on political persecution.

portmacquarie.yourguide.com.au Monday, 24 February 2003

PORT Macquarie motorists, already reeling at prices of $1.04c for unleaded petrol, are fearing significant rises in the near future.

Sydney prices last week reached 107.9c, with predictions it could rise to $1.20 in coming weeks.

Fears about future oil supplies are pushing up the price of advance crude oil order on international financial markets.

The likelihood of an impending war with Iraq pushed the international oil price to a 21/2 year high of around $US37 a barrel last week.

It is possible international crude oil prices might jump to around $US45 a barrel or more, say some analysts.

This would push Australian prices up another 10 to 15 cents a litre. Oil supplies from Venezuela and Nigeria are also low.

The Australian Service Station Association has warned motorists to brace for further rises.

Economists are worried motorists will respond by cutting discret- ionary spending, reducing economic activity and retarding growth.

Petrol normally accounts for about five per cent of household budgets, so fuel price rises have a big impact on consumer confidence.

There have been a few occasions over the past couple of years when petrol in Port Macquarie has exceeded the $1 mark.

The recent increase has motorists worried that this may not be a short-term move.

Motorists have been paying more than 90c litre for the past three years with only a couple of occasions where the $1 litre mark was reached.

However, this time last year the price was in the low to mid 80c a litre bracket.

Currently Port Macquarie service stations have unleaded ranging from 102.9c to 104.9c litre.

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