reuters.com Tue January 14, 2003 01:09 PM ET

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Tuesday urged Venezuelans reeling from a crippling strike to use only lawful means to resolve their differences and said he wanted to help calm the situation.

"I will be seeing President Hugo Chavez here on Thursday ... and I hope to be able to discuss with him the developments in Venezuela, and how one can intensify the mediation efforts, to calm the situation and return it to normalcy," Annan said.

"I have had the chance of speaking to him several times on the phone, and he knows I believe one should use constitutional and democratic means to resolve this issue, and this is my message not only to him, but to the opposition," Annan told a news conference.

An opposition strike, started on Dec. 2, has deeply shaken the government and Venezuela's oil industry, stoking tensions between Chavez and his political foes, who are demanding he resign and call immediate elections.

Chavez, who survived a brief coup in April, has rejected demands for an early vote.

The shutdown has slashed Venezuela's oil exports, causing widespread domestic fuel and food shortages and jolting world energy markets.

Notorious on Wall Street for his failed economic policies and anti-capitalist rhetoric, Chavez was elected in 1998 vowing to wrest control from the country's corrupt elite and enact reforms to help the poor.

But opposition has grown amid charges the president wants to establish a Cuban-style authoritarian state.

Chavez was officially coming to U.N. headquarters to attend ceremonies turning over Venezuela's leadership of the "Group of 77" developing nations to Morocco for 2003. The group has 134 members.

He was due to hold a news conference after his talks with Annan.

From a correspondent in Caracas January 15, 2003

VENEZUELA'S crippling strike has entered its seventh week amid renewed violence and warnings by President Hugo Chavez he would strengthen military efforts to end the action that has throttled the vital oil industry. In what has become an almost daily routine, police and National Guard troops fired tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse protesters in Caracas and the country's second largest city, Maracaibo.

Yesterday it was Chavez supporters who were targeted by security forces - in Caracas after they hurled rocks at government opponents, injuring at least two people, and in Maracaibo as they tried to stage a protest outside the governor's offices.

On Monday troops dispersed thousands of anti-government protesters who gathered outside a military base in Caracas to back the strike, which is aimed at forcing Mr Chavez from office.

While protesters taunted soldiers blocking access to the army installations, the opposition has been trying to court the armed forces.

www.newsok.com 2003-01-14 By Alexandra Olson Associated Press Writer

CARACAS, Venezuela -- Ruling party legislators said Monday they will urge citizens to boycott a February referendum on President Hugo Chavez's rule if the Supreme Court allows it to take place.

Venezuela's opposition is demanding that Chavez resign and call new elections if he loses the nonbinding referendum tentatively set for Feb. 2. They have buttressed their demands with a strike that entered its seventh week Monday and has dried up oil revenue.

Chavez refuses to step down, arguing that Venezuela's constitution only allows a binding referendum midway through a president's term -- August, in his case.

Members of his Fifth Republic Movement party, which has a slim majority in Congress, have challenged the constitutionality of the vote in the Supreme Court.

"If the referendum does take place, our position would be total abstention," Fifth Republic lawmaker Omar Mezza said. "Our complete abstention would take away its legitimacy."

Chavez's opponents cite articles in the constitution that let citizens petition for a referendum on "matters of national importance" at any time or to disown governments that threaten democracy.

The Supreme Court has not said when it will rule on the referendum.

www.abs-cbnnews.com Tuesday, January 14, 2003 9:10:56 p.m By MARK WEISBROT Special to The Washington Post

Weisbrot is codirector of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, an independent nonpartisan think tank in Washington.

Walking around Caracas late last month during Venezuela’s ongoing protests, I was surprised by what I saw. My expectations had been shaped by persistent US media coverage of the nationwide strike called by the opposition, which seeks President Hugo Chavez’s ouster. Yet in most of the city, where poor and working-class people live, there were few signs of the strike. Streets were crowded with holiday shoppers, metro trains and buses were running normally, and shops were open. Only in the eastern, wealthier neighborhoods of the capital were businesses mostly closed.

This is clearly an oil strike, not a “general strike,” as it is often described. At the state-owned oil company, PDVSA, which controls the industry, management is leading the strike because it is at odds with the Chavez government. And while Venezuela depends on oil for 80 percent of its export earnings and half its national budget, the industry’s workers represent a tiny fraction of the labor force. Outside the oil industry, it is hard to find workers who are on strike. Some have been locked out from their jobs, as business owners -- including big foreign corporations such as McDonald’s and FedEx -- have closed their doors in support of the opposition.

Most Americans seem to believe the Chavez government is a dictatorship, and one of the most repressive governments in Latin America. But these impressions are false.

Not only was Chavez democratically elected, his government is probably one of the least repressive in Latin America. This, too, is easy to see in Caracas. While army troops are deployed to protect Miraflores (the presidential compound), there is little military or police presence in most of the capital, which is particularly striking in such a tense and volatile political situation. No one seems the least bit afraid of the national government, and despite the seriousness of this latest effort to topple it, no one has been arrested for political activities.

In the United States, a strike of this sort -- one that caused massive damage to the economy, or one where public or private workers were making political demands -- would be declared illegal. Its participants could be fired, and its leaders -- if they persisted in the strike -- imprisoned under a court injunction. In Venezuela, the issue has yet to be decided. The Supreme Court last month ordered PDVSA employees back to work until it rules on the strike’s legality.

To anyone who has been in Venezuela lately, opposition charges that Chavez is “turning the country into a Castro-communist dictatorship” -- repeated so often that millions of Americans apparently now believe them -- are absurd on their face.

If any leaders have a penchant for dictatorship in Venezuela, it is the opposition’s. On April 12 they carried out a military coup against the elected government. They installed the head of the business federation as president and dissolved the legislature and the supreme court, until mass protests and military officers reversed the coup two days later.

Military officers stand in Altamira Plaza and openly call for another coup. The government’s efforts to prosecute leaders of the coup were canceled when the court dismissed the charges in August. Despite the anger of his supporters, some of whom lost friends and relatives last year during the two days of the coup government, Chavez respected the decision of the court.

The opposition controls the private media, and to watch TV in Caracas is truly an Orwellian experience. The five private TV stations (there is one state-owned channel) play continuous anti-Chavez propaganda. But it is worse than that: They are also shamelessly dishonest. For example, on December 6 an apparently deranged gunman fired on a crowd of opposition demonstrators, killing three and injuring dozens. Although there was no evidence linking the government to the crime, the television news creators -- armed with footage of bloody bodies and grieving relatives -- went to work immediately to convince the public that Chavez was responsible. Soon after the shooting, they were broadcasting grainy video clips allegedly showing the assailant attending a pro-Chavez rally.

Now consider how people in Caracas’s barrios see the opposition, a view rarely heard in the United States: Led by representatives of the corrupt old order, the opposition is trying to overthrow a government that has won three elections and two referendums since 1998. Its coup failed partly because hundreds of thousands of people risked their lives by taking to the streets to defend democracy. So now it is crippling the economy with an oil strike. The upper classes are simply attempting to gain through economic sabotage what they could not win at the ballot box.

From the other side of the class divide, the conflict is also seen as a struggle over who will control and benefit from the nation’s oil riches. Over the past quarter-century PDVSA has swelled to a $50 billion a year enterprise, while the income of the average Venezuelan has declined and poverty has increased more than anywhere in Latin America. Billions of dollars of the oil company’s revenue could instead be used to finance health care and education for millions of Venezuelans.

Now add Washington to the mix: The United States, alone in the Americas, supported the coup, and before then it increased financial support of the opposition. Washington shares PDVSA executives’ goals of increasing oil production, busting OPED quotas and even selling off the company to private foreign investors. So it is not surprising that the whole conflict is seen in much of Latin America as another case of Washington trying to overthrow an independent, democratically elected government.

Where does the US government stand on the question of democracy in Venezuela? The Bush administration joined the opposition in taking advantage of the December 6 shootings to call for early elections, which would violate the Venezuelan constitution. The administration reversed itself the next week, but despite paying lip service to the negotiations mediated by the OAS, it has done nothing to encourage its allies in the opposition to seek a constitutional or even a peaceful solution.

Sixteen members of Congress sent a letter to Bush last month, asking him to state clearly that the United States would not have normal diplomatic relations with a coup-installed government in Venezuela. But despite its apprehension about disruption of Venezuelan oil supplies on the eve of a probable war against Iraq, the Bush administration is not yet ready to give up any of its options for “regime change” in Caracas. And -- not surprisingly -- neither is the Venezuelan opposition.

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www.voanews.com VOA News 14 Jan 2003, 09:01 UTC

Venezuela's long-running general strike has contributed to a rise in global oil prices as the political strife in the South American nation enters its seventh week.

Crude oil on the New York Mercantile Exchange climbed to $32 per barrel Monday. In London, Brent crude was selling for more than $30 per barrel. Last week, prices reached $33 per barrel before OPEC announced its decision to boost production.

Analysts say the Venezuela unrest and the threat of a U.S. war with Iraq are contributing factors. Both nations are OPEC members.

On Monday, Venezuela's military fired rubber bullets and tear gas to disperse pro-government demonstrators in downtown Caracas. Similar incidents were reported in western Zulia state. Venezuela's opposition called the strike to force President Hugo Chavez to resign and call early elections. He refuses to give in to their demands.

Venezuela's energy minister said Monday the strike has cost the country four billion dollars. Venezuela is the world's fifth largest oil exporter. Meanwhile, President Chavez is expected to meet with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan Thursday in New York to discuss Venezuela's political crisis.

International pressure is building for a solution to the conflict in Venezuela, which usually provides 13 percent of U.S. oil imports. South American leaders are preparing a compromise plan they hope to present to Venezuela to end the crisis. Brazil's new leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and the secretary-general of the Organization of American States, Cesar Gaviria, are expected to discuss the plan Wednesday in Quito, at the inauguration of Ecuador's new president, Lucio Gutierrez.

Some information for this report provided by AP, AFP and Reuters.