www.alertnet.org 25 Feb 2003 00:33

BOGOTA, Colombia, Feb 24 (Reuters) - Colombia on Monday said Marxist guerrillas hide in Venezuela, intensifying a diplomatic war of words between the two South American neighbors.

"The case of the frontier with Venezuela is worrying because of its length, its level of traffic, and the presence of members of violent groups who use the neighboring country to hide," the Colombian government said in a news release.

Relations between the two countries nose-dived last week when Colombia's Interior Minister Fernando Londono accused Venezuela's leftist President Hugo Chavez of frequently meeting Colombian Marxist guerrillas.

An angry Chavez hit back in his "Hello President" television program on Sunday, threatening to break off diplomatic relations with Colombia and accusing it of celebrating when it seemed he had been overthrown in a coup last year.

"We will insist to the Venezuelan government on the need for the forces stationed on either side of the frontier to cooperate, as we have repeatedly asked President Hugo Chavez," said the Colombian government, warning that Venezuela could "end up as a branch of the Colombian tragedy".

Colombia's armed forces have in the past accused Chavez, a former paratrooper turned populist politician, of allowing guerrillas to cross the 1,400-mile (2,200-km) border, much of which is thinly populated jungle and savanna.

But until now relations at the government level were more civilized, despite the differences of ideology and personality separating the flamboyant Chavez from the right-leaning Colombian President Alvaro Uribe.

Colombian soldiers suspect Chavez, a friend of Cuban leader Fidel Castro, of ideological sympathies with rebels fighting a four-decade-old war which claims thousands of lives a year.

www.caller.com

By Dave Lozano, KRIS-TV February 24, 2003

Political problems in Venezuela caused some Del Mar College Students to nearly drop out of school.

Enyely Pachas enjoys college, but thousands of miles away, political troubles cripple her homeland.

A two month strike against President Hugo Chavez caused many businesses in Venezuela to shut down including the banks. That was bad news for Enyely.

Enyely says, "My family said, 'How can I help my daughter? She's by herself. She doesn't have anything."

Because the banks closed, her parents were not able to send her money for school.

Enyely says, "I was scared to lose my school, my apartment, everything."

Two other Venezuelan Students, Natasha De Campos and Ingrid Merrick were in the same situation.

The Local Chapter of the Pan American Round Table of Texas, the Del Mar College Office of Development and Del Mar College Foundation stepped in.

On Monday Afternoon, the students were presented with scholarship money so they could stay in school.

Enyely says, "I called my mom and I said, 'We don't have to worry about my school.' And she was so happy. She can breathe now."

The money the women received will pay for spring's tuition.

Because all three of them came to this country with student visas, they're only allowed to work on campus for only 19 hours a week.

*This story is written and published by KRIS Communications. Please send your comments to newsroom@kristv.com

story.news.yahoo.com Wed Feb 19,10:08 PM ET Add Op/Ed - Ted Rall to My Yahoo! By Ted Rall

TAIPEI--One of the most striking aspects of life in Third World countries is information starvation. Because they've learned not to trust their state-controlled media, people in authoritarian backwaters carefully debrief newcomers. What's going on abroad? What's going on here? Did you get any foreign newspapers or magazines through customs?

News is a component of infrastructure every bit as important as roads and telephones. Businesspeople need to know if a border with a neighboring country is open so they can decide whether or not to send out a truck. Citizens need to know their government's international standing--are those falling bombs their leader's fault? Hunger for news hurts a country almost as much as hunger for food.

The First Amendment enshrines freedom of the press in the U.S. Constitution, but a variety of forces conspire to prevent totally free access to information. Residents of most cities rely on one large daily newspaper, usually part of a media conglomerate that itself owns the biggest local radio and television stations. Directors of that corporation and the editors who work for them are frequently loathe to offend influential government officials and business tycoons, for if they get cut off--excluded from access to press releases, interviews, leaks, etc.--their ability to collect news is impeded. One might argue that such "news" is little more than worthless propaganda, but fear of causing offense often inhibits the media's natural role as a watchdog of democracy.

Our government very rarely censors the media. It doesn't have to.

A new, subtle form of self-censorship has recently become commonplace. A news story is covered in full, minus a crucial fact that changes the entire tenor of the piece. That missing bit of information is invariably something that would make someone important look bad.

The American media has, for example, devoted extensive coverage to political unrest in Venezuela, where mobs loyal to President Hugo Chávez have clashed with striking employees of the state oil company. The crisis sparked an attempted coup d'état in April 2002. To busy Americans, this looks like a simple story of a right-wing Latin American dictator crushing poor workers. That's because three key facts are regularly omitted from the story. First, the oil company strike was called by its wealthy managers, not its workers. Second, Chávez was democratically-elected. Third, the coup plotters were backed by the Bush Administration. "We were sending informal, subtle signals that we don't like this guy," said a U.S. Defense Department official quoted in The Guardian, an English paper that has become an important post-9/11 resource for Americans in search of objective reporting. The bully, it turns out, is us--not Chávez, who is standing up for his nation's poor.

Similarly, the North Korean crisis looks like a simple case of crafty commies welching on their agreement not to develop nukes in exchange for economic aid. Repeatedly left out of the thousands of words spilled daily on this topic are the contents of the 1994 North Korea (news - web sites)-U.S. Agreed Framework, in which President Clinton (news - web sites) promised to develop full diplomatic relations with Kim Jung Il's regime, and North Korean warnings dating to 1999 that they would resume nuclear research unless the U.S. kept up its end of the bargain.

North Korea is violating the agreement. But the U.S. broke it years earlier.

The closest thing to a "smoking gun" found by U.N. arms inspectors in Iraq is 12 warheads found at an ammo dump south of Baghdad. Americans know that the White House considers this discovery a "material breach" that justifies war. Few are aware that, as reported Jan. 17 in the U.K. Telegraph, the canisters were empty, and are probably American-made shells sold to Iraq by the Reagan administration. Not much of a "smoking gun."

Scratch the surface and you find this sort of thing all over the "news." Democratic complaints that the Bush tax cuts only benefit the "richest one percent" of Americans are duly reported, but leave out a definition of the term. Did you know that you have to earn more than $330,000 a year to be in the top one percent? Nineteen percent of Americans don't. They told Time that they think they're in that top one percent.

Perhaps you've read that American soldiers are fighting off guerrillas loyal to warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in eastern Afghanistan (news - web sites). Hekmatyar, the Associated Press says, is "believed by Afghan and U.S. authorities to be allied with Taliban and Al Qaeda remnants." That may be true. But Hekmatyar was always a sworn enemy of the Taliban--until the CIA (news - web sites) tried to kill him last May, with a Hellfire missile fired by a Predator drone plane.

One missing detail. Changes the story a little, doesn't it?

(Ted Rall is the author of "Gas War: The Truth Behind the American Occupation of Afghanistan," an analysis of the Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline and the motivations behind the war on terrorism. Ordering information is available at amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com.)

www.voanews.com VOA News 24 Feb 2003, 22:51 UTC

The United States is urging Venezuela's government and opposition to uphold a recent agreement that calls for an end to political violence and confrontational remarks.

State Department spokesman Philip Reeker said Monday in Washington that "heightened political rhetoric" has contributed to acts of violence in Venezuela in recent days.

Mr. Reeker also urged the government in Caracas and its opponents to continue the political dialogue being facilitated by the head of the Organization of American States, Cesar Gaviria.

Meanwhile, President Chavez has warned the world to stop interfering in his country's affairs. He has criticized the United States, Spain and Colombia for siding with his opponents.

The United States last week criticized Venezuelan authorities for arresting business leader Carlos Fernandez He helped organize a two-month nationwide general strike that failed to oust Mr. Chavez.

Mr. Fernandez is now under house arrest. He faces charges of civil rebellion and and criminal indictment for helping lead the walkout. Another strike leader, Carlos Ortega, went into hiding after a warrant was issued for his arrest.

On Sunday, a police officer was shot dead and at least five others wounded in an ambush in Caracas. Some police officials say they suspect supporters of President Hugo Chavez were responsible because of tensions between the police force and central government.

www.theaustralian.news.com.au

February 25, 2003

WORLD oil prices have raced higher as the United States and its allies submitted a draft UN resolution pushing for military action to disarm Iraq.

Icy temperatures in the United States and low world fuel supplies also pushed prices higher.

"There is a confluence of a lot of events that don't point to lower prices," Mike Fitzpatrick, market analyst at the Fimat brokerage house, said.

"There is the urgency of the war, the cold persists and the world inventories are still low."

New York's benchmark light sweet crude for April delivery shot up US90c to $US36.48 a barrel.

In London, the price of benchmark Brent North Sea crude oil for April delivery surged US91c to $US33.18.

Oil prices rose as US moves to disarm Iraq by force entered the final phase.

The United States, Britain and Spain submitted a draft resolution stating Iraq had failed to rid itself of weapons of mass destruction and calling on the United Nations Security Council to take action.

The US-British draft said Iraq had not co-operated fully with disarmament inspections as required under UN resolution 1441, passed on November 8.

The resolution, which will face stiff French-led opposition in the council, says the council "decides that Iraq has failed to take the final opportunity afforded to it in resolution 1441".

President George W Bush pressed for action.

"Is it going to be a body that means what it says? We certainly hope it does," Bush said.

"But one way or the other, Saddam Hussein, for the sake of peace, and for the security of the American people, will be disarmed," he said.

France put a counter-proposal to the Security Council today calling for strengthened inspections of Iraq's arsenal. Russia and Germany were co-signers of the memorandum, which does not need a vote, while China backed the proposal.

Cold weather in the United States further supported oil prices.

"Apart from the continued Iraqi uncertainty, a lot of bad weather is expected again in the States, meaning more demand, which has pushed product and crude oil prices up," said Ed and F Man trader Graham Flint in London.

Traders said a strike in Venezuela's oil industry was still propping up prices, although export shipments recovered partially.

The head of Venezuela's state-run oil company PDVSA, Ali Rodriguez, said Venezuela was now producing 2.06 million barrels of oil a day, which it hoped to boost to 2.5 million this week.

GNI-Man Financial analyst Lawrence Eagles said the Venezuelan opposition had on Friday estimated Venezuelan output at 1.515 million barrels per day.

"Whatever the actual level of output, it is clear that output and shipments are increasing, and this should ease the pressure on the world market if there is a war with Iraq," he said in London.

The slew of political and market concerns outweighed a statement from Iran that the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) should avoid cutting production at its next meeting on March 11.

Asked about the possibility of an output cut from the present level of 24.5 million barrels a day, Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zangeneh said: "I don't think so. The current situation in the region is abnormal both from a political and military point of view."