Sat May 24, 2003 03:54 PM ET By Pascal Fletcher

CARACAS, Venezuela (<a href=asia.reuters.com>Reuters) - One person was killed and 22 wounded by gunfire that broke out during a rally held by foes of leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in a pro-Chavez district of Caracas on Saturday, officials said.

Three of the wounded were National Guard soldiers whose patrol came under fire in west Caracas as they took up positions in a security operation to try to prevent violence at the opposition protest.

"There are 22 people wounded by bullets and one killed," Caracas Fire Services Chief Rodolfo Briceno told Reuters.

Government and opposition representatives blamed each other for the shootings.

Gunfire erupted as several hundred supporters of the opposition Democratic Action Party held a rally in a narrow street in Catia, a poor, crime-ridden neighborhood that is a bastion of support for populist Chavez.

"In the middle of the event, there were several volleys of bullets, but the rally went on," Democratic Action leader Henry Ramos told reporters.

"We're not afraid. ... This country doesn't just belong to Chavez supporters, but to all Venezuelans," demonstrator Ana Maria Colmenares told Reuters.

Chavez's opponents accuse him of ruling like a dictator and of trying to install Cuban-style communism in the world's No. 5 oil exporter.

Witnesses said some of the shots appeared to come from side streets where groups of Chavez supporters had gathered to shout insults at the opposition protesters.

The violence broke out a day after government and opposition negotiators announced they had agreed to a political pact to hold a referendum on Chavez's rule after Aug. 19.

The agreement aims to end months of often violent conflict in Venezuela over Chavez's presidency. He was elected in late 1998 and survived a brief coup last year.

STORM OF ACCUSATIONS

Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel accused leaders of the opposition rally of deliberately provoking the violence. "This was a provocation, seeking deaths and injuries," he said.

Ramos denied this. "The death and the injuries are the responsibility of the government," he said.

In scenes of confusion and tension in Catia, the demonstrators, including some women and children, ran in panic as volleys of shots rang out. A Reuters correspondent at the scene saw one man, a motorcyclist, lying bleeding from a bullet wound in his neck.

Authorities had deployed 2,000 police and troops around the small rally in west Caracas, an area of sprawling hilltop slum neighborhoods which is dominated by Chavez supporters.

In the maze of narrow streets and jumbled houses, often crowded with people, it was difficult for police to determine where shots were coming from.

National Guard Caracas region commander Gen. Marcos Rojas told reporters that gunmen blocked a street with buses and ambushed three of his men, a sergeant and two soldiers, shooting all three. He said the attackers were members of the radical opposition party Red Flag.

It was not clear whether the violence might affect the formal signing of the referendum pact between the government and opposition, which is scheduled to take place next week in Caracas in the presence of Organization of American States Secretary General Cesar Gaviria.

At least 50 people have been killed, almost all by gunfire, in clashes between followers and foes of Chavez over the last 18 months. Several hundred more have been wounded.

Chavez, who has said he is willing to submit to the recall referendum allowed under the constitution, was attending a summit of Latin American presidents in Peru.

Sat May 24, 2003 12:07 PM ET CARACAS, Venezuela (<a href=asia.reuters.com>Reuters) - One person was shot to death and at least eight others, including three National Guard troops, were injured by gunfire as opponents of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez rallied on Saturday in a pro-Chavez district of Caracas, police and firefighters said.

Shooting erupted as several hundred supporters of the opposition Accion Democratica Party held an anti-government rally in a narrow street in Catia, a poor, crime-ridden neighborhood that is a bastion of support for Chavez.

Witnesses said some of the shots appeared to come from side streets where groups of Chavez supporters had gathered to shout insults at the opposition protesters.

Demonstrators scattered on several occasions as gunfire rang out.

A Reuters correspondent at the scene saw one man, a motorcyclist, lying bleeding from a bullet wound in his neck.

Earlier, three National Guard troops were shot nearby when a patrol came under fire from gunmen.

The violence erupted a day after government and opposition negotiators announced they had agreed to a political pact to hold a referendum on Chavez's rule after Aug. 19.

The agreement aims to end months of often violent political conflict in Venezuela over the presidency of the populist Chavez, who was elected in late 1998 and survived a brief coup last year.

Juan Forero, <a href=www.sfgate.com>San Francisco Chronicle-New York Times Saturday, May 24, 2003
Bogota, Colombia -- After six months of bitter negotiations, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and his adversaries have agreed to sign an accord that would lead to a referendum on his rule, officials on both sides said Friday.

The agreement, brokered late Thursday by the Organization of American States in Caracas, the capital, calls on both sides to end violence. It is likely to lead to a referendum this year after a new electoral board is chosen to oversee the vote.

The pact, to be signed Wednesday, does not provide a complete framework for how a referendum would be held. But it offers the prospect of calming months of tumult in Venezuela, a major oil exporter.

Uncharacteristically, the two sides agreed with each other on Friday and hailed the agreement, which is meant to help heal a nation badly divided over its president. Chavez, a former paratrooper whose support comes mostly from the country's poor masses, has made enemies with his leftist policies since his election four years ago.

"It is a reasonably good document," Alejandro Armas, an opposition negotiator, told reporters. He added, "From our point of view, there is reasonable satisfaction for the objectives reached."

In Peru, where he was attending a summit meeting of Latin American leaders, Chavez said the pact showed "that the opposition at last understands there is a constitution that must be respected."

Chavez was briefly toppled by a coup in April 2002. His adversaries, a coalition of businessmen, labor groups and private media companies, have staged four national strikes since December 2001.

The latest strike, a two-month walkout that began in December and ended in failure for the opposition, devastated the economy and temporarily shut down Venezuela's oil industry.

Opinion polls show that Chavez would most likely lose a referendum. Since the last strike, the economy has contracted by 29 percent, and a majority of Venezuelans tell pollsters they want a change. Still, Chavez enjoys an important level of support among the poor.

May 24, 2003 By CHRIS WATSON SANTA CRUZ SENTINEL STAFF WRITER

Too many people in Isabel Allende’s family have called her a liar for her to dismiss the charges completely. x They say she spins family stories until they’re unrecognizable.

That she imagines and fabricates characters that never existed.

But the author of these tales — and of novels like "The House of the Spirits," "Eva Luna," "Paula," "Daughter of Fortune" and "Portrait in Sepia" — shrugs off the accusations.

"To be called a liar is awful," she said recently, "but I don’t care.

"And as Mario Vargas Llosa said in his essay ‘The Truth About Lies,’ a fiction writer must use lies to get at the truth sometimes."

It comes with the territory of fiction.

One story no one has a quarrel with, however, is Allende’s story of where she was on Tuesday, 9/11.

But if you ask her about it, be sure to specify which 9/11, which Tuesday — 2001 or 1973 — you want to know about.

On Tuesday, at the Capitola Book Cafe, Allende will talk about her new book, "My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile," which orbits those two significant years in the two countries she calls home — Chile and the USA

"On Sept. 11, 2001, I was at home in California, having a shower, when the phone rang," she said recently from her home in Northern California. "It was my mother from Chile, and she was crying.

"I thought she must be crying about what happened in Chile on Sept. 11, 1973; but she said, ‘no, no, turn on the TV.’ ’’

On the very day the World Trade Center was destroyed in New York, Chileans were remembering the bombs that had leveled the presidential palace in Santiago, Chile, on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 1973 — the bombs that signaled the military overthrow of president Salvador Allende, Isabel’s uncle.

"In 1973 in Santiago," Allende remembered, "I got up early to go to work. The streets were empty, no buses, no traffic, only military convoys going by.

"I drove downtown and stopped at a friend’s house who had a telephone and tried to call my in-laws. Then I heard on the radio that there was a military coup.

"My friend’s husband, a teacher, was trapped downtown, so I went to pick him up. The school was empty, and he was listening to the radio and crying. The radio announced that they were asking the president to surrender, and he wouldn’t and that they would give him half an hour and then they would bomb the palace.

"My friend and I went up to the roof of the school and watched the bombing of the palace, watched the panic, the fires."

For Allende, the terrorist act in New York and the CIA-orchestrated terror in Chile still resonate harmonically.

She writes in "My Invented Country":

"That distant Tuesday in 1973 my life was split in two; nothing was ever the same, I lost a country. That fateful Tuesday in 2001 was also a decisive moment; nothing will ever again be the same, and I gained a country."

With "one foot in California and one foot in Chile," Allende writes that were it not for the events of 1973, she would never have become a writer, never have married an American, lived in California or "lived with nostalgia for so long, or be writing these particular pages."

"My Invented Country" is Allende’s salute to the places, people and events that turned her into the writer she is today. It is a book filled with the geography, politics and history of Chile and with stories about the author’s "weird" family and the places that served, for a time, as her homes-away-from-home — Bolivia, Venezuela, Brussels, Beirut.

A memoir that contains more delight than angst, "My Invented Country" serves also, at times, as a travelogue of Chile, the most civilized of Latin American countries, in some opinions.

Allende’s memoir also works as a vindication of her trademark blend of magical realism — a heady mixture of what is mythic, what is real and what is remembered by the heart.

She writes:

"(My grandmother) introduced me to magical realism long before the so-called boom in Latin American literature made it fashionable."

"Besides," she said, "with my family, you don’t have to invent much."

In the memoir, Allende rationalizes her blurring of fiction and facts. At other times, she carefully profiles the real people who were the models for characters in "The House of the Spirits," "Eva Luna" and other stories.

Still, anyone who’s read her novels will be hard-pressed to distinguish absolutely between what is real and is imagined.

And in truth, that blurring of exterior and interior worlds has affected Allende’s personal life.

In "The House of the Spirits," for example, she discovered that a character she thought was a total invention — the French count — turned out to bear frightening similarities to the father who abandoned her when she was little.

It was only when literary critics began to point it out that she began to recognize the impact of his abandonment on her life.

"I thought I never missed him," she said, "but there are no loving fathers in my fiction, and all the women in my books are strong."

One of the spookiest blendings of fact and fiction occurred around the writing of Allende’s second novel, "Of Love and Shadows," based on a true political crime that occurred during the dictatorship of Pinochet.

"The novel was based on a real case, about people who disappeared during a dictatorship and whose bodies were found five years later in an abandoned mine."

What facts she didn’t know — who found the bodies and how— she invented.

Only later, when a Jesuit priest visited her and asked how she knew he’d heard about the murder in confession, how she knew what he was wearing and that he drove a motorcycle to the mine, did Allende feel a shiver go up her spine.

"When I found out that, to the smallest detail, it was true, I felt panic. I felt that all stories do exist, that I just tap into them.

"And I felt," she added, "that the written word has tremendous power and that a writer has a terrible responsibility."

Allende’s talent, though, is wider than the grave politics that so deeply etch her work.

Her sense of humor, for example, has survived, and is well-displayed in this memoir.

She writes:

• "In my family . . . the national sport is to talk about the person who just left the room.
• "We Chileans are enchanted by states of emergency.
• "We Chileans enjoy funerals, because the dead person is no longer a rival, and now he can’t backstab us.
• "In my family nearly all the men studied law, although I don’t remember a single one who passed the bar. Chileans love laws, the more complicated the better. Nothing fascinates us as much as red tape and multiple forms." Allende hopes, if nothing else, that her memoir incites travelers to visit one of the most enchanting places on earth.

"You should go during our winter, when it’s summer there," she said.

"Take a tour to the south, cross the seven lakes to Argentina. There’s wonderful food everywhere, and the transportation is safe and modern. Chile is not like other Latin American countries where things don’t work. The coffee is good, the beds are good and the bathrooms are clean."

Could she be telling the truth?

Should we believe her?

While we decide, let’s relax and drink a toast to weird families everywhere.

What follows is Allende’s mother’s recipe for Pisco Sours, a preferred drink at summer gatherings in Chile.

Pisco Sours

Mix in a blender:

1 portion lemon juice 4 portions of Peruvian Pisco (a clear liquor similar to tequila) a little whiskey sugar to taste crushed ice Add one egg white (not whipped) and blend again.

Contact Chris Watson at cwatson@santa-cruz.com. If You Go WHO: Isabel Allende, ‘My Invented Country.’ WHERE: Capitola Book Cafe, 1475 41st. Ave., Capitola. TIME: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday. DETAILS: 462-6035.

Sat May 24, 2003 12:13 AM ET By Pascal Fletcher

CARACAS, Venezuela (<a href=reuters.com>Reuters) - Venezuela's government and opposition, seeking to end months of feuding, have agreed a political pact to hold a referendum on Hugo Chavez's presidency after Aug. 19, officials said on Friday.

The accord follows more than six months of negotiations between the two sides, which have been locked in fierce conflict over Chavez's rule.

Organization of American States Secretary-General Cesar Gaviria, who has brokered the talks, achieved a consensus late on Thursday on the framework agreement, an OAS official said.

"There is an agreement," the official told Reuters on condition of anonymity. He added the accord should be signed by Wednesday.

Despite the accord, an opposition party, Accion Democratica, planned to go ahead with an anti-government rally Saturday in a strongly pro-Chavez district of west Caracas.

Defense Minister Gen. Jose Luis Prieto and Interior Minister Gen. Lucas Rincon appeared on national television later on Friday to appeal to both sides to avoid violence during the rally.

Rincon said 2,000 police officers, supported by National Guard, would be on duty to prevent trouble at the protest.

International mediators and foreign governments have been pressing Chavez and his opponents to commit to a referendum to end the cycle of protests, strikes and violence that has gripped the world's No. 5 oil exporter since 2001.

Chavez, who survived a coup last year and a general strike in December and January, has said he is willing to submit to the constitutional referendum on his mandate. But his foes accuse him of trying to avoid a vote.

Chavez opponents say the populist president is ruling like a dictator and trying to install Cuba-style communism.

In the 19-point accord, both sides agree to shun violence, respect democracy and hold referendums for the president and other elected officials as laid down in the constitution.

The accord also endorses plans to disarm the civilian population. At least 50 people have been shot to death and several hundred injured in political violence over the last 18 months.

Both government and opposition negotiators hailed the political pact as a mechanism to reduce tensions.

"This clears the path to a referendum as an electoral solution to the political crisis," opposition representative Alejandro Armas told reporters.

Venezuela's constitution allows for a recall vote on the president's rule once he has completed half of his six-year mandate. In Chavez's case, this is Aug. 19.

To trigger the referendum, the opposition must collect signatures from 20 percent of the electorate.

The government also insists that the National Assembly must first select a new National Electoral Commission.

But the assembly, where pro-Chavez deputies hold a slim majority, is still haggling over candidates for the electoral authority which would verify the signatures for a referendum and set a date for the vote.