www.washingtonpost.com Marcela Sanchez Thursday, January 30, 2003; 2:47 PM

In order to understand the crisis in Venezuela, one must live it. There is no doubt about that.

Last week, representatives of the polarized forces that are ripping that South American nation apart made their pilgrimage to Washington. Their only shared intention, it seems, was to act out their drama on a world stage.

If their words were any indication, a solution to the problem is as distant as ever. Each side has mastered the fine art of pointing the finger at the other. It is they, one said of the other, who have used a position of privilege to call for discord, violence and death. Both seemed determined not to make the least concession to the other, who, after all, was the true enemy of democracy.

Each side, of course, was making an effort to offer its best diagnosis of the crisis. If the symptoms are not recognized, Foreign Minister Roy Chaderton explained, how can one prescribe a cure? True.

Yet one was left with the impression that both were spending far more time, passion and talent revealing the depth of their suffering than seeking a salve to soothe it.

The two sides seemed to agree most on one complaint: The world fails to understand their dilemma. No surprise then that they both endorsed, as the first step of international response to a crisis that could no longer be ignored, the creation of a Group of Friends to take part in negotiations between the Venezuelan government and the opposition.

The group might satisfy that desire for international attention. But more critically, it should make everyone realize that world attention and understanding does not necessarily translate into adopting wholesale the view of one side or the other.

Various Washington analysts concurred this week that the group could be especially helpful in restoring confidence to the discussions and pressing Venezuelans to alter their apocalyptic rhetoric. It also could exert pressure to explore compromise solutions and help to reinforce them--although it is hard to imagine any pressure greater than that imposed in the last two months by the Venezuelan opposition's devastating national strike.

It is too early to tell how successful the Friends will be. Somewhat predictably, the initial meeting of its foreign ministers and their deputies here last week ended with few concrete results.

More importantly, Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim, speaking on behalf of the six member states (Brazil, Chile, Spain, Mexico, Portugal and the United States), sent forth one very essential message: Solutions to the problems in Venezuela must come from Venezuelans. That message may seem simplistic. Yet the point here is that the Group of Friends could prove to be useless especially if its existence becomes yet another excuse for inaction.

During the 1990s, many Colombians looked abroad for solutions. Worn down by an internal conflict that had spun out of control, many looked especially to the United States as the only source of hope for a solution. At the end of the day, however, with Washington unwilling to be the savior and their own internal crisis worsening, the Colombians seemed to recognize the need to do more for themselves.

In situations like the one in Venezuela, self-examination is not easy. It is easier, even comforting, to look abroad and grab convenient, predictable, ever-assuring allies. President Hugo Chavez seems to have just such a find in the Cuban leader Fidel Castro; and, curiously but not surprisingly, the Venezuelan opposition has found its own version of the same in Castro's archenemy--the Cuban exile community, especially of Miami.

Castro and the exiles are neither friends in need nor friends in deed. Their approach to their own country's situation has resulted in a diplomatic impasse four decades long. Given the level of tension present now, Venezuela needs open minds on the sidelines, not cheerleaders. Of what value are friends more interested in pulling apart the two sides than bringing them together?

The intensity of Venezuela's strike appeared to be subsiding this week but this is no time to declare winners or losers. A true victory won't be something claimed but something gained. The Group of Friends might help Venezuelans realize the need for another type of sacrifice--the one that brings them together instead of tearing them apart.

Marcela Sanchez's e-mail address is desdewash@washpost.com.

www.vheadline.com Posted: Wednesday, January 29, 2003 - 1:37:17 PM By: Oliver L Campbell

Date: Wed, 29 Jan 2003 12:35:17 -0800 From: Oliver L Campbell oliver@lbcampbell.com To: Editor@VHeadline.com Subject: Mr Willke's Letter

Dear Editor: I refer to Mr. Willke’s interesting e-mail of 28 (www.vheadline.com) January where he expounds the problems of education and inequitable income distribution in Venezuela ... I would, however, have liked him to suggest some solutions as well.

I passionately believe that a lack of sellable skills is main problem of the poor in Venezuela. In a recent article I wrote “It is essential these people (the poor) are brought into the economy by learning useful skills. This means reforming the education system so more technical institutes are created which provide practical instruction and training to those who are not cut out for an academic education. A technical qualification will be given the recognition it deserves and carry its own prestige. At the same time, a host of young people will acquire the dignity and intense satisfaction that come from being employed and doing a worth while job.”

I do not disagree with Mr. Willke that inequitable income distribution is a problem in Venezuela as, indeed, it is in many countries. The trouble is how do you reduce it?

Venezuela already has a progressive system of income tax and an inheritance tax of 40% ... we all know that value-added taxes hit the poor more than the rich. The only thing I can think of is a wealth tax of some kind, and that certainly would be difficult to introduce.

The centrally-managed economies had some success because they could dictate salaries. The result was, for instance, that a medical doctor with years of training did not earn substantially more than, say, an electrician. However, this type of economy proved to be very inefficient and most countries that had it (including Russia), have now moved to a market economy.

My point is, that in a market economy, it is very difficult to reduce inequitable income distribution. For instance, how do you lessen the large differentials in salaries where the general manager earns, say, twenty times what one of his manual workers does?

The only practical way to eliminate this is through education or ... as I prefer to put it ... through the acquisition of skills required in the market place. Those countries that have tried to introduce an incomes’ policy, like the United Kingdom, have soon abandoned it as unworkable.

You can, of course, throw money at the problem of the poor by giving them hand-outs, allowing them to use public services free of charge, and improving the infrastructure of the sectors where they live e.g. the 'ranchos' of the large cities ... this has all been done, but it is only a temporary palliative (panitos calientes), and the aim surely must be to enable them to earn a reasonable living.

The Chinese have a saying "Give a hungry man a fish and he will be hungry again ... teach him how to fish and he need never be hungry again." If money has to be thrown somewhere, it should be at the construction of technical schools all over the country. This will mean increasing taxation ... but it is the cost of rectifying the indifference of governments over the last 50 years.

I agree with Mr. Willke that whichever government is in power, it will have to address the problem of the poor: it is not a problem that will quietly go away.

Oliver L Campbell oliver@lbcampbell.com

www.vheadline.com Posted: Thursday, January 30, 2003 - 5:02:49 AM By: Gustavo Coronel

VHeadline.com commentarist Gustavo Coronel writes: Loyalty to an Institution is one of the rarest qualities of Venezuelan bureaucrats. Traditionally, loyalty among this personnel has been reserved for a man or a group with political power. The Venezuelan bureaucrat is frequently a client and serves a patron. By doing so, he or she obtains the favor of the powerful.

Although this is not new in Venezuelan politics, it has become overpowering during the current government. This is yet another sign that we are dealing with an authoritarian regime. Personality cult  and loyalty to patrons usually reaches very high levels during authoritarian governments. Citizens are either classified as unconditional followers of the leader or as enemies of the regime.

• I am enemy 985 of the regime in the latest ranking of the revolution as published by La Razon ... followed by Cardinal Velasco, at 986 ... all of this comes to mind when considering the tragedy of PDVSA.

I said in my last commentary that the reason for Chavez' merciless attack against PDVSA was his urgent need to politically control this institution and dispose (without limitations) of the $20 billion or so that the corporation generates every year for the Venezuelan nation.

When he arrived in power, he immediately started working towards that goal ... he fired the President of the institution and replaced him with another technocrat, who he felt would be more flexible.

Six months later, he realized that this new technocrat was loyal to the institution, but not to him. Therefore, he dismissed him in favor of one of his most loyal servants, Hector Ciavaldini. It did not matter that he was incompetent and mentally unbalanced, because all he was asked was to be faithful. He was so faithful that he wanted to outdo the master and decided he would annihilate the oil labor unions.

But the unions gave him a sound trashing. So, he also had to be removed.

Chavez then sent a fully-fledged, uniformed Army General to lead the corporation and to do his bidding ... General Lameda ... a man apparently loyal to Chavez ... did something unexpected. Once within the organization, seeing how the professional management behaved, he was won over to their side, becoming loyal to the corporation and not to the man.

At this point in time, Chavez became really enraged. As General Lameda was being driven to his office one morning, he heard on the radio that he had been removed from the presidency of PDVSA and that yet another President had been named in his place ... Gaston Parra,  a Marxist professor at a Maracaibo University.

Parra had spent most of his life writing articles about the need to purge PDVSA of anti-patriotic managers and to staff the company with real patriots. He did not know how oil was found, or produced, or refined, or transported, or sold in the world markets.  He did not have empathy with the managers he was going to supervise. In fact, he hated their guts.

But, he seemed to be a loyal follower and Chavez hoped he would not be a nitwit like Ciavaldini.

I wonder what Peter Drucker would think of this manner of selecting top officers for the most important company of a nation?

At this moment all hell broke loose. PDVSA managers, who had been outraged by the manner with which Chavez was trying to intervene the company; who had seen the arrival of political commissars and spies in their midst; who had silently suffered the verbal abuse of Chavez when he spoke of the need to audit the performance of PDVSA, intimating dishonest dealings, now refused to roll over and play dead.  They rejected the new president and the new board, stacked with friends of the government.

This rebellion actually ousted Chavez from the Presidency in April 2002, until he was brought back, not by the people but by General Baduel, the man who claims to have lived several lives and is now emerging as the strong man behind the puppet ... a kind of Venezuelan Noriega.

For the fourth time, therefore, Chavez was defeated in his attempt to control PDVSA. So he tried just one more time. From Vienna, he brought in Ali Rodriguez Araque, his former Minister of Energy.  A former guerrilla fighter during the 1960s, Rodriguez  had specialized in kidnapping and sabotage of oil facilities.

As a technical staffer for Shell in those years, I remember that the criminals' wrath was reserved for US companies. We kept putting up signs on our pipelines saying : "The Exxon pipelines are the others.... these are ours!" in the hope that they would spare ours ... and they did. They were selective!

So, Rodriguez came in and ... for a brief period ... things came back to "normal." He projected a suave, civilized image and tried to speak the proper language of business. But not for long. Chavez wanted a servant, not a manager ... and he got one. Rodriguez Araque opened the doors of PDVSA to the Bolivarian Circles ... he refused to dismiss the spies and commissars imbedded in the organization ... he promoted unworthy persons to positions of authority ... he became an instrument for the politicization of PDVSA ... and the managers would not accept it.

The managers of PDVSA went on strike ... not asking for bigger salaries, not asking for privileges, not asking for power. They went on strike, they put their jobs and future on the line to try to preserve the institution, to defend the institution against the desires of Chavez for political and financial control. This is what they were supposed to do as professional managers, as trustees of the institution and this is exactly what they did.

Their loyalty was not for one man, or one ideology, or one political tribe ... their loyalty was to PDVSA.

Today PDVSA is burning. I do not know if it will burn to the ground ... I hope not ... I trust PDVSA will be reborn after this nightmare.

I still hope we are not ... as the hobbit  Merry said in "The Two Towers" ... engaged in " a meaningless journey in a hateful dream."

I trust that the house of Mordor will fall, and that the Venezuelan people will be ... once again ... homeward bound.

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

www.granma.cu Havana. January 30,  2003

WASHINGTON (PL).- The White House might have announced that it was initiating a war on terrorism, but in its own backyard extremist groups Cubans and Venezuelans are plotting and receiving military training to attack their own countries of origin.

In their determination to bring down Presidents Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez, the capos of the F-4 organization, who have admitted their involvement in acts of terrorism against Cuba, plus the so-called Venezuelan Patriotic Front — led by a coup officer from the Venezuelan army — have signed a "civil-military alliance", according to The Wall Street Journal.

The F-4 Commandos are led by 56-year-old Rodolfo Frómeta and the Patriotic Front by coup member Captain Luis Eduardo García, (aged 37). During last April’s failed coup d’état, he was one of the first military dissidents to attack the Caracas Presidential Palace in order to topple the South American country’s democratically elected president.

According to the daily, the two groups are committed to uniting their "combined military experience and exchanging espionage information" in their attempts to attack the legitimate authorities in Havana and Caracas.

García himself revealed that he is offering military training to 50 F-4 Commando members at a firing range located in the Everglades swamps; 30 of the recruits are Cuban-American and the rest are Miami-based radical dissidents.

Miami has become the refuge for a growing number of anti-Chávez extremists, in the midst of an exodus in which some 10,000 Venezuelans have gravitated to the city in the last three years.

"New arrivals" discover a well-established Cuban-American community whose most radical sectors are particularly enthusiastic allies in the fight against Chávez, notes the publication.

sf.indymedia.org by repost • Thursday January 30, 2003 at 07:32 PM

For me this is mostly a chance to hear some general impresssions of the forum, stats, changes, etc. It seems strange in its organization as an essay - leaving the message until the last couple of paragraphs, not really trying to answer its own questions, and staying focused on the negatives. Stories like this need to spend 3/4 on suggestions for improvement or on educating about the success of differerent formats and offer info on how to achieve that. But this is important and good info, regardless.

Published on Thursday, January 30, 2003 by the Globe & Mail/Canada What Happened to the New Left? by Naomi Klein

The key word at this year's World Social Forum, which ended Tuesday in Porto Alegre, Brazil, was "big." Big attendance: more than 100,000 delegates in all! Big speeches: more than 15,000 crammed in to see Noam Chomsky! And most of all, big men. Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the newly elected President of Brazil, came to the forum and addressed 75,000 adoring fans. Hugo Chavez, the controversial President of Venezuela, paid a "surprise" visit to announce that his embattled regime was part of the movement.

"The left in Latin America is being reborn," Mr. Chavez declared, as he pledged to vanquish his opponents at any cost. As evidence of this rebirth, he pointed to Lula's election in Brazil, Lucio Gutierrez's victory in Ecuador and Fidel Castro's tenacity in Cuba.

But wait a minute: How on earth did a gathering that was supposed to be a showcase for new grassroots movements become a celebration of men with a penchant for three-hour speeches about smashing the oligarchy?

www.commondreams.org/views03/0130-03.htm