Chavez: Venezuelan Oil Output at Over One Million Barrels Per Day

www.voanews.com VOA News 26 Jan 2003, 22:59 UTC

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez says his country's oil production output is now over one million barrels per day, despite an eight-week-old anti-government general strike.

Mr. Chavez, who is in Porto Alegre for the World Social Forum, told reporters Sunday that within a month Venezuela should manage to boost production to 2.7 million barrels a day.

The strike is aimed at forcing Mr. Chavez to resign or call early elections. Before the strike, Venezuela produced about three million barrels of oil a day and was the world's fifth largest oil exporter, mainly to the United States.

Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports opponents of President Chavez renewed their protests on a major Caracas highway Sunday.

The protest began the night before as hundreds of thousands of people danced to the sound of salsa music. They also set up tents and inflatable mattresses along the 24-kilometer stretch of highway.

The demonstration was officially called to protest a Supreme Court decision to stop a referendum on the president's term, which the opposition had hoped to hold February second.

Last week, former U.S. president Jimmy Carter proposed a plan to end the political crisis in Venezuela while attending negotiations between the government and opposition. The former president's Atlanta-based Carter Center, along with the United Nations and the Organization of American States, are co-sponsoring the talks.

President Chavez, in an interview published Saturday in a Canadian newspaper, La Presse of Montreal, called the Carter proposals "interesting" but not necessarily new ideas that should be discussed with the democratic opposition.