<a href=www.vheadline.com>Venezuela's Electronic News Posted: Tuesday, June 03, 2003 By: Patrick J. O'Donoghue

Most opposition political parties say they support next week's "Assault on Petare" one hundred percent and promise to go the whole hog with or without municipal permission. 

Coordinadora Democratica (CD) leader, Enrique Mendoza  says he will obtain permission to hold a public rally from Metropolitan Mayor Alfredo Pena, if Sucre Mayor Jose Vicente Rangel Avalos refuses ... "no public official can prohibit a pacific protest and Pena is a higher authority." 

Proyecto Venezuela (PV) leader, Jorge Sucre challenges the government, warning that the government knows it has lost support in Petare and has resorted to the threat of armed groups to keep protestors off the streets. 

Primero Justicia (PJ) leader, Carlos Ocariz joins the opposition chorus that people in Petare no longer support President Chavez Frias. 

Alianza Bravo Pueblo (ABP) president, Antonio Ledezma has announced that he will lead a march on Thursday to protest the government media content law and laughs at the proposed government Public Protest Law ... "the security zones didn't work nor will a new law .. the government hasn't learned its lesson." 

Showing he is far more gung-ho than other opposition leaders, Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) leader, Leopoldo has jumped one step ahead announcing that after Petare, the opposition will lead an assault on La Guaira (Vargas). 

On a more timid note, former MAS leader and current Union party leader Luis Manuel Esculpi says his party is preparing legal actions against the proposed Public protest law.

Tue June 3, 2003 07:14 PM ET CARACAS, Venezuela, June 3 (<a href=reuters.com>Reuters) - Venezuelan Finance Minister Tobias Nobrega is in New York seeking financial help from banks and investors to ease a fiscal crunch facing his oil-rich country following a crippling opposition strike, officials said Tuesday.

National Budget Office director, Gen. Alfredo Pardo, told the official state news agency Venpres that Nobrega was "overseas, pursuing some public credit operations".

Pardo gave no more details but a Finance Ministry source, who asked not to be named, told Reuters that Nobrega had been in New York since Monday meeting bankers and investors.

Venpres said the operations being considered by the minister could involve possible bond issues.

Nobrega has said that the government is seeking to ease a heavy concentration of debt payments this year through possible debt swaps, direct credits from banks and financing for specific projects, especially in the strategic oil sector.

Venezuela, the world's No. 5 oil exporter, is experiencing the worst recession in its recent history in the wake of a grueling strike staged in December and January by foes of leftist President Hugo Chavez.

The country is due to make debts payments totalling $960 million this month, according to official figures.

Venezuela's total external debt stands at $22.3 billion, of which $5 billion in debt payments and service falls due this year.

Nobrega has said the government wants to try to lighten the payments crunch. Internally, the government has carried out a number of domestic debt swap operations.

The opposition strike, which fizzled out in early February, disrupted oil exports, slashed government revenues and triggered heavy capital flight, forcing Chavez to introduce tight currency controls. As a result, Venezuela's economy shrank a record 29 percent in the first quarter of 2003, and unemployment and inflation have also been rising.

BY JEAN-GUY ALLARD —Special for Granma International—

A CIA-sponsored agent and beneficiary of the generosity of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Robert Menard is famous for his iron-fisted management of the organization Reporters Without Frontiers (RWF), a kind of one-man-show where he and no one else gives orders. He has realized that in the last few days, the United Nations organization that he had apparently successfully penetrated was not so docile at the point of drawing conclusions.

Apart from his sponsors in Washington, Langley and sectors of the European Union that he has managed to poison, Robert Menard, sui generis "freedom fighter" doesn’t hesitate to accept checks from several figures who are not exactly characterized for their defense of the poor.

According to the AFP news agency, RWF could soon lose its role as a consultative member within the UN following a decision by the UN Committee for Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) to propose its suspension for one year.

The French agency reported that the committee "took the decision of asking for the one-year suspension of RWF at the behest of Cuba", mentioning that the proposal was also supported by China, the Ivory Coast, Iran, Pakistan, Russia, Sudan, Turkey, and Zimbabwe.

In statements revealed by AFP, Menard mentions opposition by Peru and Chile but omits to mention – purely by chance – the United States.

If the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) accept the petition in July, RWF would lose its status as a consultative member.

The Cuban delegation proposed RWF’s exclusion for having provoked incidents at the opening of the 59th Human Rights Commission in Geneva last March 17, during the contribution by the Libyan representative who presides over the commission.

In its violently anti-Cuban charade, whose characteristics are in line with CIA directives, besides organizing various costly publicity campaigns in newspapers and on television – RWF has recently organized various operations in Paris in relation to the detention in Cuba of several paid collaborators of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, led by CIA agent James Cason; not to mention costly publicity campaigns in newspapers and on television.

These mercenaries, or self-styled "reporters," were recruited as informants for the ultra-right press in Miami and have been openly financed by Menard, who acknowledged the fact in an interview with journalists Hernando Calvo Ospina and Katlijn Declercq, authors of the book Dissidents or Mercenaries?

BESIDE MONTANER AND VARGAS LLOSA

Menard’s crew, associated with the fascist International Freedom Foundation created last October in Spain, led by Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa and of which terrorist Carlos Alberto Montaner – honorable son of one of dictator Fulgencio Batista’s agents – is a member, occupied the Cuban Tourist Office in the French capital for a number of hours in early April, and at the end of the same month attempted to prevent people entering the Cuban embassy.

The whole of RWF’s campaign is systematically linked with the anti-Cuban plans of the United States developed in Washington and Miami, where Menard has wide connections with the mafioso leadership that dominates South Florida using terror, blackmail and corruption. And these "independent journalists" that he defends with such ardor are precisely the ones that feed the Batista press such as the Diario de las Américas and governmental organizations like Radio Martí, a subsidiary of Voice of America.

Apart from his sponsors in Washington and Langley, and sections of the European Union that he has succeeded in poisoning, this sui generis "freedom fighter" doesn’t hesitate to accept checks from French multi-millionaire and editor Francois Pinault.

And likewise from Jean-Luc Lagadère - who recently passed away - another wealthy Frenchman and trader in… missiles. And besides these two, Serge Dassault, international arms dealer.

In such a way when European missiles fell over Belgrade and killed 16 journalists from the national television, Menard forgot to account for them in his "annual report."

In Venezuela, Menard’s defense of the putschist press’ condemnation of Hugo Chavez’ popular revolution was really quite eloquent. And in Iraq, where was Menard when the U.S. troops opened fire on the Hotel Palestine where the international press was staying?

It is also known how Menard even defended the "freedom of the press" by going to the extreme of legitimizing... the neo-fascist press, the most retrograde, as he scandalously demonstrated last January 8, during the program Culture et dependances on French TV channel, France 3.

MENARD’S FREE PRESS IS A COALITION OF DISINFORMATION

Menard’s "free" press is the one that justified the massacres in Afghanistan and Iraq by dint of lies, that denied seeing the corpses inside containers in Kabul, the concentration camp-style cages in Guantánamo and the two million prisoners – the vast majority blacks or Latinos – as well as the record figures of executions in U.S. jails.

It is also the press that belongs to the information multinationals that sustain self-censorship according to their own interests and which tried to convince the world that George W. Bush’s presidential election was a democratic one.

In reality, Menard, the prophet of global misinformation, does not defend freedom of the press but the absurd capitalist concept that everything one could desire is for sale, the freedom of the monopolies of information to acquire anything that moves in the media world, even though it reduces journalists’ freedom to enslavement to those intercontinental monsters of pseudo-information.

Menard plays naive when it comes to the single greatest danger to press freedom: economic censorship.

To offer one revealing detail, Menard’s press campaigns are conceived "free of charge," according to him, by the New York office of the international advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi... the global giant of capitalist propaganda, which employs 7,000 workers in 138 offices in 82 countries, and holds 60 of the most important 100 corporate advertising accounts worldwide. Nothing less.

It would appear after all, that RWF is, unquestionably, the multinational of lies.

WHILST WASHINGTON AIDS HIM IN GENEVA

A strange dichotomy was awaiting Robert Menard during a visit to the Californian capital of Los Angeles, while his State Department buddies ran to his aid in Geneva, Switzerland. As he had no press visa, the lifelong Reporters Without Frontiers president was arrested, registered several times, put on the police records and jailed for 26 hours by the immigration authorities before being deported to France.

Menard was on his way, with six expert journalists, to a video game trade fair, when immigration agents – responsible for applying the Patriot Act in the interests of national security – realized that the seven Frenchmen did not possess the corresponding journalist visas required by the Bureau for Citizenship and Immigration regulations.

"If you are a reporter and are coming to the United States as a journalist, you need a specific visa," explained Francisco Arcaute, spokesperson for the governmental organization.

Menard and his friends arrived in the United States on May 10 and left on the 11.

Frustrated by this lack of respect towards him after having rendered so many services to the empire, Menard sent a letter to Howard Leach, U.S. ambassador in Paris, complaining that he had been treated like a "common criminal."

The most absurd thing about the controversial figure’s situation is that his buddies in Washington are now pledging to block at all costs the proposal to kick their agent out of his seat at the Human Rights Commission.

According to Amanda Blatta, State Department spokesperson, Cuba would have to provide "a detailed report of the incident" at the UN’s request before demanding his expulsion.

Washington’s rush to aid this figure who so actively supported its interfering operations in the Third World confirms – if that is needed -- the true orientation of Menard’s activities that, certainly frustrated by the mistreatment he received in Los Angeles, failed to denounce any violation of... the freedom of the press.

smh.com.au June 4 2003

Seventy-one contestants end more than two weeks of hectic preparations as they go before the judges and an estimated 600 million television viewers today for the 2003 Miss Universe title.

Among the favourites in the field of 71 contestants - 15 finalists have already been chosen, but their names won't be announced until the awards ceremony - are South Africa, the Dominican Republic, Colombia and Venezuela.

The winner will replace Justine Pasek of Panama, the first runner up last year who took the crown after the Russian winner surrendered the title voluntarily.

But many here are already betting on Miss Dominican Republic, a tall aspiring singer named Amelia Vega, 18, whose uncle is well-known Merengue singer Juan Luis Guerra.

Vega is following in the family footsteps in more than one way: her mother represented her country in the 1980 Miss Universe pageant.

Miss Venezuela, Mariangel Ruiz, is the Cinderella of the contest: the 22-year-old almost couldn't come to the competition, because of financial problems in her home country. A donor finally turned up to meet the costs of her trip.

Cindy Nell, 21, is a bit of a departure among the favourites; a refined South African tourism promoter in a field dominated by Latin Americans.

And the favourite among local photographers is another aspiring singer, Miss Colombia Diana Mantilla, who happily poses for photos and even released a record of her songs here.

It's also showtime for Panama, which will have a few minutes of prime time to promote itself as a new tourist destination after decades of living under the shadow of the US military that long protected the Panama Canal.

On December 31, 1999, the United States took its last soldiers home and handed Panama the canal administration.

The women arrived on May 15 and have visited schools and hospitals amid rehearsals for the finals.

"I am excited and anxious. I have been preparing for this for 10 months," said Vega. "It is partly because of confidence and the personal pride of representing your country."

Mantilla said the contest also has a social purpose, noting the winner promotes the fight against AIDS. "It is not just a search for a pretty woman."

Today's finals start at 9 pm (1500 AEST Wednesday), and will be hosted by television personalities Daisy Fuentes and Billy Bush. Puerto Rican Pop singer Chayanne and Bond, a female quartet, will perform.