www.vheadline.com Posted: Wednesday, March 12, 2003 By: Patrick J. O'Donoghue

Opposition hardliner, former Patria Para Todo leader, Carlos Nieto, who now heads the Ventana por la Libertad NGO, has challenged the government’s record on prison reform.

Arguing that the government moves only when the media splashes a story, Nieto says reforms fell through ... not because of the lack of international financing but due to negligence ... “several governments have already contributed $90 million between them.“

Nieto points to 10 million euros from the European Union (EU) to finance a penitentiary project led by MIJ official Jose Antonio Moreta and $90 million from the Inter American Development Bank (IADB) to finance prison projects.

“The MIJ has done nothing on either project … the money has been there for several years … IADB has an office at the MIJ Rehabilitation & Custody Department in El Platanal.”

Apart from the above contributions, Nieto adds that the British Embassy in Caracas had financed a project to train prison wardens … “it’s been wasted because nothing was done.”

www.miamitodaynews.com By Susan Stabley    Miami's luxury real estate market may get a boost from foreign investors now that a proposal to further limit the length of stay for international visitors has been withdrawn.    Gov. Jeb Bush applauded last week's decision by the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services, formerly known as INS, to withdraw a rule that could have limited foreigners to 30-day visits instead of up to six months.    According to the Governor's Office, in 2001 more than 8 million international visitors came to Florida. Tourism is the state's top industry, comprising 20% of Florida's budgeted general revenue and generating more than $50 billion in economic impact annually.    Just this month, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, was disbanded and absorbed by the new US Department of Homeland Security. The Department of Justice dropped the rule change before making its official transition, though it is still unclear whether the new department will try to revive the limitations.    Alex Sanchez, CEO for the Florida Bankers Association, said the proposed rule could have cause a major divestiture of Florida holdings by foreigners.    International visitors generated more than $500 million in sales tax revenue, Mr. Sanchez said. Substantial portions of the 8 million international visitors are part-time residents, he said, and own property, buy cars and invest in local businesses.    "That's a big part of the economic diversity in the state of Florida," Mr. Sanchez said. "This is important news for us."    The immigration proposal has also been a serious issue for real estate insiders like Jean-Charles Dibbs, a real estate partner at the law firm of Shutts & Bowen, who represents domestic and foreign clients who buy and sell luxury waterfront single-family homes and condos.    In the wake of 9/11, Mr. Dibbs said, he has had to move a significant amount of foreign-owned real estate - both vacation homes and income-producing properties. But balancing the demand to sell is a surge of buyers predominantly from Argentina, Colombia and Venezuela, many who move here with large investments.    International clients make up 75% of Mr. Dibbs' business.    In the past six months, Mr. Dibbs said, he has handled transactions of properties valued from $2.7 million to more than $5 million. Most are in Key Biscayne, South Beach or the islands along the Venetian Causeway and the demand for waterfront property has cause a "feeding frenzy," he said.    Toni Schrager, a long-time high-end real estate agent and one of the founders of Avatar Real Estate Services, agrees that many luxury buyers are from Argentina, Colombia and Venezuela, as well as Brazil and Mexico. Attitudes are split, though, with as many buyers and sellers taking a conservative stance, as are those who are operating like it's "business as usual," she said.    For real estate agents, the visa issue created "nervousness," Ms. Schrager said.    "We didn't see mass selling, but there was an undercurrent," she said. "Realtors talked about a concern."    Still, among property owners a greater concern revolved around the ramifications of selling.    "Many are afraid that they won't be able to get back in the market if they sell, that prices would become much higher than they are comfortable with."    "There's a lot of uncertainty," she said. "But Miami seems to have its own economy. You can't compare us to other places."    "It's a microcosm here. Miami is already the capital of Latin America," Mr. Dibbs said. "The economy is largely dependant on South American investment. We can be in a recession countrywide and my business will not feel it because of the investment coming from South America."    Mr. Dibbs said he keeps asking himself when the bubble might break.    "So far, it hasn't slowed down. Interest rates are low and Miami is positioning itself as a world-class city and a cultural Mecca... It's causing a lot if people to take notice."

www.latintrade.com March, 2003

María Elena Carrero had been out of work for a year when she found a job in Venezuela’s fastest-growing underground industry—telecommunications. A friend hired the former secretary to sit at a table on a busy pedestrian boulevard and charge passers-by for the use of a pair of cellular telephones.

Pay phones a few feet away are several times cheaper than what Carrero charges, but she says many Venezuelans don’t carry prepaid pay phone cards—sold by dominant telecom Compañía Anónima Nacional Teléfonos de Venezuela (Cantv)—nor can they afford their own cellular phones. Venezuelan pay phones do not take coins.

“What can one do?” Carrero says of her work, at which she clears US$30 a week. “I was in the house all day long.”

A virtual army of the unemployed provide rent-a-phones on sidewalks across the country, cutting pay phone use in half in less than two years. Such is Venezuela’s changing telecom business, where cable TV companies aspire to lop off the top residential consumers, wireless handsets hide inside home-phone units and long distance is under attack from a dozen by-the-minute discounters. Through it all, ex-monopoly Cantv—now controlled by a consortium led by former U.S. baby bell Verizon—fights to stay on top.

Cantv competitor TelCel, owned by another U.S. baby bell, BellSouth, seized the lion’s share of Venezuela’s cellular market when it launched a decade ago. Today, TelCel controls 45% to Cantv-unit Movilnet’s 38%. (Telecom Italia-controlled Digitel has the rest of the market.) Meanwhile, BellSouth’s ‘Telcel fijo’ units, which use wireless technology in a standard desk-style phone, have taken a 15% bite out of the residential market in less than two years. Venezuela has 3.2 million fixed lines for a population of 24 million, plus 6 million wireless lines.

More threatening still are a dozen new companies determined to skim off the 10% of customers that provide more than half of revenues. One is NetUno, a cable-television provider that offers home-telephone service in the upscale Caracas neighborhoods where its cables already run. Chile’s Entel, a subsidiary of Telecom Italia, also says it will invest $80 million in Venezuela by 2007 and expects to win 20% of the Internet and long-distance markets.

“In the areas where we are, we are taking many clients away from Cantv,” says NetUno publicity manager Jorge Parra. “It’s not much now, but there will come a time when it will be tremendous.”

In response, Cantv has cut long-distance rates, though not enough to match the competition, and it is offering new services such as home surveillance and medical diagnosis via Internet, as well as spending US$190 million to upgrade its cellular system to permit wireless Internet service. And it has introduced a popular tarjeta única, a single pre-paid card for home telephone, Internet and long-distance services.

A pack of start-ups, too, now offer monthly and call-by-call long-distance deals at substantially lower rates. The new long-distance carriers have stolen away between 5% and 7% of the market. “The competing companies are going to go after the large customers, so Cantv has to be prepared,” says Gartner Dataquest analyst Marta Kindya.

Cantv is still in the driver’s seat in most segments, including home telephony, long-distance, Internet and data transmission services. Through its Caveguías subsidiary, it also publishes Venezuela’s telephone books, and it has nearly 400 ‘Communication Center’ franchises, where the public can make calls, use the Internet and send and receive faxes. Calls from the centers have taken off even as the economy weakened.

Fighting back. Cantv reported net income down nearly 4% in the first nine months of 2002, even as it added income from services like broadband Internet and business data services. It blamed a weak economy but also pricing pressure in long-distance.

“We’re worried, but we’re not terrified,” says Chief Operating Officer Vicente Llatas, who says the company is fighting back with discounted rates and its own version of TelCel’s fijo wireless home phone.

The winner in phone privatization has been ordinary Venezuelans. Cantv once obliged customers to wait 15 minutes for a dial tone and an average of eight years for installation. During the 1990s, the company reduced its workforce 30% and slashed its debt load, a move which helped it fend off a 2001 hostile takeover bid by AES Corp., a U.S. energy company. Today, dial tones come in seconds and new phones are installed in days.

Cantv may have another advantage. In the minds of many Venezuelans, the company is still synonymous with basic telephone service. Being big has proven best in many markets in Latin America, most clearly in countries like Mexico, where the former state monopoly continues to rule the roost. Converting itself into the next Telmex, however, will take some serious focus.

Author: Mike Ceaser • Caracas

www.prospect.org By Robert Dreyfuss Issue Date: 4.1.03

For months Americans have been told that the United States is going to war against Iraq in order to disarm Saddam Hussein, remove him from power, eliminate Iraq's alleged stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, and prevent Baghdad from blackmailing its neighbors or aiding terrorist groups. But the Bush administration's hawks, especially the neoconservatives who provide the driving force for war, see the conflict with Iraq as much more than that. It is a signal event, designed to create cataclysmic shock waves throughout the region and around the world, ushering in a new era of American imperial power. It is also likely to bring the United States into conflict with several states in the Middle East. Those who think that U.S. armed forces can complete a tidy war in Iraq, without the battle spreading beyond Iraq's borders, are likely to be mistaken.

"I think we're going to be obliged to fight a regional war, whether we want to or not," says Michael Ledeen, a former U.S. national-security official and a key strategist among the ascendant flock of neoconservative hawks, many of whom have taken up perches inside the U.S. government. Asserting that the war against Iraq can't be contained, Ledeen says that the very logic of the global war on terrorism will drive the United States to confront an expanding network of enemies in the region. "As soon as we land in Iraq, we're going to face the whole terrorist network," he says, including the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and a collection of militant splinter groups backed by nations -- Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia -- that he calls "the terror masters."

"It may turn out to be a war to remake the world," says Ledeen.

In the Middle East, impending "regime change" in Iraq is just the first step in a wholesale reordering of the entire region, according to neoconservatives -- who've begun almost gleefully referring to themselves as a "cabal." Like dominoes, the regimes in the region -- first Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia, then Lebanon and the PLO, and finally Sudan, Libya, Yemen and Somalia -- are slated to capitulate, collapse or face U.S. military action. To those states, says cabal ringleader Richard Perle, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and chairman of the Defense Policy Board, an influential Pentagon advisory committee, "We could deliver a short message, a two-word message: 'You're next.'" In the aftermath, several of those states, including Iraq, Syria and Saudi Arabia, may end up as dismantled, unstable shards in the form of mini-states that resemble Yugoslavia's piecemeal wreckage. And despite the Wilsonian rhetoric from the president and his advisers about bringing democracy to the Middle East, at bottom it's clear that their version of democracy might have to be imposed by force of arms.

And not just in the Middle East. Three-thousand U.S. soldiers are slated to arrive in the Philippines, opening yet another new front in the war on terrorism, and North Korea is finally in the administration's sights. On the horizon could be Latin America, where the Bush administration endorsed a failed regime change in Venezuela last year, and where new left-leaning challenges are emerging in Brazil, Ecuador and elsewhere. Like the bombing of Hiroshima, which stunned the Japanese into surrender in 1945 and served notice to the rest of the world that the United States possessed unparalleled power it would not hesitate to use, the war against Iraq has a similar purpose. "It's like the bully in a playground," says Ian Lustick, a University of Pennsylvania professor of political science and author of Unsettled States, Disputed Lands. "You beat up somebody, and everybody else behaves."

Over and over again, in speeches, articles and white papers, the neoconservatives have made it plain that the war against Iraq is intended to demonstrate Washington's resolve to implement President Bush's new national-security strategy, announced last fall -- even if doing so means overthrowing the entire post-World War II structure of treaties and alliances, including NATO and the United Nations. In their book, The War Over Iraq, William Kristol of The Weekly Standard and Lawrence F. Kaplan of The New Republic write, "The mission begins in Baghdad, but it does not end there. … We stand at the cusp of a new historical era. … This is a decisive moment. … It is so clearly about more than Iraq. It is about more even than the future of the Middle East and the war on terror. It is about what sort of role the United States intends to play in the twenty-first century."

Invading Iraq, occupying its capital and its oil fields, and seizing control of its Shia Islamic holy places can only have a devastating and highly destabilizing impact on the entire region, from Egypt to central Asia and Pakistan. "We are all targeted," Syrian President Bashar Assad told an Arab summit meeting, called to discuss Iraq, on March 1. "We are all in danger."

"They want to foment revolution in Iran and use that to isolate and possibly attack Syria in [Lebanon's] Bekaa Valley, and force Syria out," says former Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs Edward S. Walker, now president of the Middle East Institute. "They want to pressure [Muammar] Quaddafi in Libya and they want to destabilize Saudi Arabia, because they believe instability there is better than continuing with the current situation. And out of this, they think, comes Pax Americana."

The more immediate impact of war against Iraq will occur in Iran, say many analysts, including both neoconservative and more impartial experts on the Middle East. As the next station along the "axis of evil," Iran holds power that's felt far and wide in the region. Oil-rich and occupying a large tract of geopolitical real estate, Iran is arguably the most strategically important country in its neighborhood. With its large Kurdish population, Iran has a stake in the future of Iraqi Kurdistan. As a Shia power, Iran has vast influence among the Shia majority in Iraq, Lebanon and Bahrain, with the large Shia population in Saudi Arabia's oil-rich eastern province and among the warlords of western Afghanistan. And Iran's ties to the violent Hezbollah guerrillas, whose anti-American zeal can only be inflamed by the occupation of Iraq, will give the Bush administration all the reason it needs to expand the war on terrorism to Tehran.

The first step, neoconservatives say, will be for the United States to lend its support to opposition groups of Iranian exiles willing to enlist in the war on terrorism, much as the Iraqi National Congress served as the spearhead for American intervention in Iraq. And, just as the doddering ex-king of Afghanistan served as a rallying point for America's conquest of that landlocked, central Asian nation, the remnants of the late former shah of Iran's royal family could be rallied to the cause. "Nostalgia for the last shah's son, Reza Pahlavi … has again risen," says Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA officer who, like Ledeen and Perle, is ensconced at the AEI. "We must be prepared, however, to take the battle more directly to the mullahs," says Gerecht, adding that the United States must consider strikes at both Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps and allies in Lebanon. "In fact, we have only two meaningful options: Confront clerical Iran and its proxies militarily or ring it with an oil embargo."

Iran is not the only country where restoration of monarchy is being considered. Neoconservative strategists have also supported returning to power the Iraqi monarchy, which was toppled in 1958 by a combination of military officers and Iraqi communists. When the Ottoman Empire crumbled after World War I, British intelligence sponsored the rise of a little-known family called the Hashemites, whose origins lay in the Saudi region around Mecca and Medina. Two Hashemite brothers were installed on the thrones of Jordan and Iraq.

For nearly a year, the neocons have suggested that Jordan's Prince Hassan, the brother of the late King Hussein of Jordan and a blood relative of the Iraqi Hashemite family, might re-establish the Hashemites in Baghdad were Saddam Hussein to be removed. Among the neocons are Michael Rubin, a former AEI fellow, and David Wurmser, a Perle acolyte. Rubin in 2002 wrote an article for London's Daily Telegraph headlined, "If Iraqis want a king, Hassan of Jordan could be their man." Wurmser in 1999 wrote Tyranny's Ally, an AEI-published book devoted largely to the idea of restoring the Hashemite dynasty in Iraq. Today Rubin is a key Department of Defense official overseeing U.S. policy toward Iraq, and Wurmser is a high-ranking official working for Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton, himself a leading neoconservative ideologue.

But if the neocons are toying with the idea of restoring monarchies in Iraq and Iran, they are also eyeing the destruction of the region's wealthiest and most important royal family of all: the Saudis. Since September 11, the hawks have launched an all-out verbal assault on the Saudi monarchy, accusing Riyadh of supporting Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda organization and charging that the Saudis are masterminding a worldwide network of mosques, schools and charity organizations that promote terrorism. It's a charge so breathtaking that those most familiar with Saudi Arabia are at a loss for words when asked about it. "The idea that the House of Saud is cooperating with al-Qaeda is absurd," says James Akins, who served as U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia in the mid-1970s and frequently travels to the Saudi capital as a consultant. "It's too dumb to be talked about."

That doesn't stop the neoconservatives from doing so, however. In The War Against the Terror Masters, Ledeen cites Wurmser in charging that, just before 9-11, "Saudi intelligence had become difficult to distinguish from Al Qaeda." Countless other, similar accusations have been flung at the Saudis by neocons. Max Singer, co-founder of the Hudson Institute, has repeatedly suggested that the United States seek to dismantle the Saudi kingdom by encouraging breakaway republics in the oil-rich eastern province (which is heavily Shia) and in the western Hijaz. "After [Hussein] is removed, there will be an earthquake throughout the region," says Singer. "If this means the fall of the [Saudi] regime, so be it." And when Hussein goes, Ledeen says, it could lead to the collapse of the Saudi regime, perhaps to pro-al-Qaeda radicals. "In that event, we would have to extend the war to the Arabian peninsula, at the very least to the oil-producing regions."

"I've stopped saying that Saudi Arabia will be taken over by Osama bin Laden or by a bin Laden clone if we go into Iraq," says Akins. "I'm now convinced that's exactly what [the neoconservatives] want. And then we take it over."

Iraq, too, could shatter into at least three pieces, which would be based on the three erstwhile Ottoman Empire provinces of Mosul, Baghdad and Basra that were cobbled together to compose the state eight decades ago. That could conceivably leave a Hashemite kingdom in control of largely Sunni central Iraq, a Shia state in the south (possibly linked to Iran, informally) and some sort of Kurdish entity in the north -- either independent or, as is more likely, under the control of the Turkish army. Turkey, a reluctant player in George W. Bush's crusade, fears an independent Kurdistan and would love to get its hands on Iraq's northern oil fields around the city of Kirkuk.

The final key component for these map-redrawing, would-be Lawrences of Arabia is the toppling of Assad's regime and the breakup of Syria. Perle himself proposed exactly that in a 1996 document prepared for the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS), an Israeli think tank. The plan, titled, "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," was originally prepared as a working paper to advise then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. It called on Israel to work with Turkey and Jordan to "contain, destabilize and roll-back" various states in the region, overthrow Saddam Hussein in Iraq, press Jordan to restore a scion of its Hashemite dynasty to the Iraqi throne and, above all, launch military assaults against Lebanon and Syria as a "prelude to a redrawing of the map of the Middle East [to] threaten Syria's territorial integrity." Joining Perle in writing the IASPS paper were Douglas Feith and Wurmser, now senior officials in Bush's national-security apparatus.

Gary Schmitt, executive director of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), worries only that the Bush administration, including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney, might not have the guts to see its plan all the way through once Hussein is toppled. "It's going to be no small thing for the United States to follow through on its stated strategic policy in the region," he says. But Schmitt believes that President Bush is fully committed, having been deeply affected by the events of September 11. Schmitt roundly endorses the vision put forward by Kaplan and Kristol in The War Over Iraq, which was sponsored by the PNAC. "It's really our book," says Schmitt.

Six years ago, in its founding statement of principles, PNAC called for a radical change in U.S. foreign and defense policy, with a beefed-up military budget and a more muscular stance abroad, challenging hostile regimes and assuming "American global leadership." Signers of that statement included Cheney; Rumsfeld; Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz; Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs Peter W. Rodman; Elliott Abrams, the Near East and North African affairs director at the National Security Council; Zalmay Khalilzad, the White House liaison to the Iraqi opposition; I. Lewis Libby, Cheney's chief of staff; and Gov. Jeb Bush (R-Fla.), the president's brother. The PNAC statement foreshadowed the outline of the president's 2002 national-security strategy.

Scenarios for sweeping changes in the Middle East, imposed by U.S armed forces, were once thought fanciful -- even ridiculous -- but they are now taken seriously given the incalculable impact of an invasion of Iraq. Chas Freeman, who served as U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War, worries about everything that could go wrong. "It's a war to turn the kaleidoscope, by people who know nothing about the Middle East," he says. "And there's no way to know how the pieces will fall." Perle and Co., says Freeman, are seeking a Middle East dominated by an alliance between the United States and Israel, backed by overwhelming military force. "It's machtpolitik, might makes right," he says. Asked about the comparison between Iraq and Hiroshima, Freeman adds, "There is no question that the Richard Perles of the world see shock and awe as a means to establish a position of supremacy that others fear to challenge."

But Freeman, who is now president of the Middle East Policy Council, thinks it will be a disaster. "This outdoes anything in the march of folly catalog," he says. "It's the lemmings going over the cliff." Robert Dreyfuss

Copyright © 2003 by The American Prospect, Inc. Preferred Citation: Robert Dreyfuss, "Just the Beginning," The American Prospect vol. 14 no. 3, March 1, 2003 . This article may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission from the author. Direct questions about permissions to permissions@prospect.org.

www.vheadline.com Posted: Wednesday, March 12, 2003 By: Gustavo Coronel

VHeadline.com commentarist Gustavo Coronel writes: The rebellion of the PDVSA managers and technicians ... regardless of how it is perceived by different people ... has good reasons. I consider this rebellion as one of the most wonderful examples of institutional loyalty I have ever seen in Venezuela, and the only example of a collective decision.

The reasons behind this decision can be understood by analyzing the nature of true professional managers. Already in 1918, Weber predicted that the big showdown of the 20th century would be between professional managers and professional politicians.

Later, Putnam and others (Harvard) detailed the characteristics of both groups, some of which are:

Professional Managers.

1. Take a long time to be educated, have formal schooling
2. They have long and ascending careers (marathonists)
3. They go up thru a ladder based on performance
4. They work within pre-existing values, norms and procedures 5.Their process of decision-making is collective
5. They show loyalty to the Institution

Professional Politicians.

1. They are graduates of the University of "Life"
2. They tend to have brief and descending careers
3. They can go up on the strength of a 30 seconds speech
4. They abide by no rules, create their own
5. They are loyal to men or tribes

Being so different, it is hardly surprising that an organization, led by managers or by politicians, should also show drastic differences.

In the case of PDVSA, this company was managed professionally for 24 years. During this period it had a President every 3.7 years ... their executives were selected on the basis of merit. The orientation of the company was strongly commercial, designed to make a profit. Its operation was largely respected by the political sector.

But during the last 3.8 years, it has been politicized by Chavez, and it has had a President every 8 months. Its executives have been selected on political and ideological grounds ... one has been mentally unstable, one has a criminal record and one had an obsessive hatred of the managers he was supposed to work with.

The orientation of the company became political and designed to serve as a source of ready cash for the government.

Under professional management PDVSA was a company of the First World.

Under the political control of Chavez it has rapidly become a Third World company.

Why, then, rebels rebel?:

Because they can not see their company under the Presidency of the mentally unstable; of someone with a criminal record or of someone who hates the organization..

Because they can not accept that a company so important for Venezuela should change Presidents every 8 months,

Because they can not accept that company installations should be used for political events,

Because they can not tolerate seeing the headquarters taken by violent, armed groups and social lumpen,

Because they can not accept that the company should be politically controlled by the President of the country,

Because they can not accept the breaking down of the company into uncoordinated, regional entities.

In summary, they rebel because they can not passively accept the destruction of the company they have created and made into one of the most important petroleum companies of the world.

Each one of us has to have an ethical posture in life ... there are many events that fall within the zone of moral indifference, to which we need not react in any particular way. There are events that demand from us a moral obligation, based on the principle of minimum altruism.

This means that we have to commit ourselves to be of help, but without real sacrifice (donating 1-5% of our salary to the poor, perhaps?) ... but there are events that call for maximum altruism, that call for maximum commitment short of total sacrifice. No one is morally obliged to react heroically.

However, this is what the rebels of PDVSA have done.  They have put their careers, their economic well-being, their family life, their personal ambitions, on the line.

They are not talking money.

They are not talking power.

They are demanding respect for the institution which is the economic bloodline of Venezuela, and which is being destroyed by a bunch of demagogues.

They have behaved as heroes.

Knowing many of them in person ... knowing how they were trained ... being familiar with the values of the organization they came to cherish ... I am not surprised that they reacted in this way ... I am not surprised that they remain steadfast, unmovable in their convictions ... loyalty by conviction is indestructible.

Loyalty bought (such as the one a portion of the military had for Perez Jimenez and now for Chavez) usually ends abruptly ... when the money or the privileges are no longer available. He who buys loyalty invariably ends up as hostage of the people he buys.

Modern 'janizaries' will overturn their caldrons at the first indication that their leader is weakening.

In summary, rebels rebel when they can no longer live in a moral environment which violates their principles and innermost convictions.

They have read John Locke, John Stuart Mills, Martin Luther King.

They have read the categorical imperative of Kant.

Rebels rebel when their decision ... no matter if successful or failed ... becomes morally unavoidable.

As Luther said: "Here I stand. I can do no other..."

Gustavo Coronel is the founder and president of Agrupacion Pro Calidad de Vida (The Pro-Quality of Life Alliance), a Caracas-based organization devoted to fighting corruption and the promotion of civic education in Latin America, primarily Venezuela. A member of the first board of directors (1975-1979) of Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), following nationalization of Venezuela's oil industry, Coronel has worked in the oil industry for 28 years in the United States, Holland, Indonesia, Algiers and in Venezuela. He is a Distinguished alumnus of the University of Tulsa (USA) where he was a Trustee from 1987 to 1999. Coronel led the Hydrocarbons Division of the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) in Washington DC for 5 years. The author of three books and many articles on Venezuela ("Curbing Corruption in Venezuela." Journal of Democracy, Vol. 7, No. 3, July, 1996, pp. 157-163), he is a fellow of Harvard University and a member of the Harvard faculty from 1981 to 1983.  In 1998, he was presidential election campaign manager for Henrique Salas Romer and now lives in retirement on the Caribbean island of Margarita where he runs a leading Hotel-Resort.  You may contact Gustavo Coronel at email ppcvicep@telcel.net.ve