WEB-ONLY Venezuelan President Meets Sympathetic Crowd At World Social Forum

santafenewmexican.com By ALAN CLENDENNING | Associated Press 01/27/2003

From left, French activist Jose Bove and Bernard Cassen meet Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez for a private meeting on Sunday, Jan. 26, 2003. - AP | Giuseppe Bizzarri

PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil—Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, facing protests at home, got an enthusiastic welcome after arriving at the World Social Forum to meet with sympathizers among 100,000 activists venting against American-style capitalism.

Chavez met with forum organizers and addressed activists Sunday in this far southern Brazilian port city, harshly criticizing opponents in Venezuela staging a 56-day strike.

He said they would fail to oust him from power, and praised activists for their opposition to neoliberalism - their term for a mix of unfettered free-market economics, liberal trade and the breakdown of national borders

"You here at the forum and we in Venezuela are trying to come up with an alternative to neoliberalism that is destroying the world," Chavez said in a two-hour speech attended by more than 2,000 cheering activists. "If we don't put an end to neoliberalism, neoliberalism will put an end to us."

Before he spoke at Port Alegre's state legislature, hundreds showed up outside and handed out free copies of a book in English and Spanish entitled, "The Fascist Coup Against Venezuela," a compilation of Chavez speeches over the last two months.

Dressed in her white habit and waving a small Venezuelan flag, Franciscan nun Maria Vandege Santa said Chavez is fighting injustice and poverty in Venezuela.

"I am here to protest the efforts to topple a president who only wants to help the poor," said Santa, who lives in Brazil's poverty-stricken northeast.

Chavez said would soon propose a tax on all financial transactions in Venezuela, saying it would be "a kind of Tobin tax." Tobin taxes, named after Yale University economist and Nobel-laureate James Tobin, are designed to tame currency market volatility.

Chavez did not provide more details on the new tax, nor when he would seek to have it put into place. He also said Venezuela's dollar-based reserves dropped a total of US$3 billion in December and January.

Opponents gathering signatures to demand a constitutional amendment that could lead to early elections are welcome to do so, Chavez said, but claimed an earlier effort was tainted by fraud.

Any new effort "has to be a valid collection of signatures," Chavez said.

Although Chavez wasn't formally invited to the World Social Forum, a counter-conference to the World Economic Forum being held in Davos, Switzerland, he was attending some events.

Activists at the six-day social forum are participating in 1,700 sessions and workshops on topics ranging from corporate misdeeds to Third World debt.

Chavez fits right in, many say, because he advocates political, social and economic revolution to solve South America's ills.

He came to the forum because he "wants to further address in Porto Alegre the same issues of poverty, misery and corruption that he is trying to address in Venezuela," said Jo Moraes, vice president of the Communist Party of Brazil.

The strike in Venezuela has paralyzed the country, crimped oil production for the world's fifth-largest oil exporter and caused severe food and fuel shortages. Chavez told reporters, however, that oil production that was once as low as 200,000 barrels per day is rising and is now at 1.32 million barrels a day.

On Sunday, at least 100,000 Venezuelans were parked on a Caracas highway in what they said would be their longest protest yet against Chavez.

But Chilean Senator Gladys Marin, a Communist, said Chavez is helping to fight what could become fascism in South America.

"If this coup wins, you will suffer a long dictatorship and it will be cruel," she told 1,000 activists gathered at a forum workshop.

Also Sunday, an unidentified woman threw a strawberry cake into the face of Jose Genoino, the head of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's Workers Party, yelling "Lula does not represent us in Davos."

Some activists criticized Silva, who is popularly known as Lula, for going to the economic forum in Switzerland after attending the social forum.

The woman left a statement saying she belonged to a group called "Bakers Without Borders." Genoino called the incident an "act of anarchists," according to Brazil's GloboNews television network. The woman fled, and no efforts were made to detain or arrest her.