VENEZUELA: Two-Month Anti-Chávez Strike Begins to Unravel
Humberto Márquez The nearly two-month general strike against Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez began to wane Wednesday with banks returning to their usual schedules and other sectors beginning to normalise activity as well, while the opposition tries to avoid the appearance of defeat.
The association representing the country's 30 private banks, which handle 90 percent of all financial activity, ''decided by a two-thirds majority to renew normal hours of operation as of Monday, Feb. 3,'' announced the group's president, Ignacio Salvatierra.
CARACAS, Jan 29 (IPS) - The nearly two-month general strike against Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez began to wane Wednesday with banks returning to their usual schedules and other sectors beginning to normalise activity as well, while the opposition tries to avoid the appearance of defeat.
The association representing the country's 30 private banks, which handle 90 percent of all financial activity, ''decided by a two-thirds majority to renew normal hours of operation as of Monday, Feb. 3,'' announced the group's president, Ignacio Salvatierra.
Since the strike began Dec. 2, the banks have only been open to the public for half their normal hours -- in the mornings --, leading to long queues of clients and prompting difficulties in other sectors of the economy.
The political opposition declared the nationwide work stoppage to demand a non-binding referendum in which voters would indicate whether or not the populist Chávez should immediately resign.
But on Jan. 22, the Supreme Court indefinitely postponed its debate on the constitutionality of the referendum.
Another aim of the strike, according to the business, labour and oil industry leaders who are heading it, is to show the world the magnitude of the Venezuelan people's opposition to Chávez.
The strike was further designed to pressure the government and opposition negotiators, engaged in talks brokered by Organisation of American States (OAS) Secretary-General César Gaviria, to quickly come up with an ''electoral solution'' to the crisis.
Education Minister Aristóbulo Istúriz said 90 percent of the country's public schools are functioning again, while private schools have been holding assemblies to discuss opening their doors next week.
''We have a timetable for dismantling the strike without it being interpreted as a defeat,'' a Christian Democratic leader who has been one of the main organisers of the opposition protests told IPS on condition of anonymity.
''The logical thing is to start with the most sensitive areas, like the food industry and education,'' he said.
Since December, activity has been paralysed in shopping malls, department stores and the main manufacturing industries, although for some sectors the beginning of the strike coincided with the traditional December-January vacation period.
A large part of the country's small and medium industries continued to operate normally, including neighbourhood shops and bakeries. Mass transit was not involved in the strike, and many factories and other businesses had already begun to return to normal operating schedules.
Over the past week, central areas of Caracas and other large cities have experienced the habitual noise and traffic congestion seen after every annual vacation period, even though long lines of vehicles continued outside the service stations, as the Venezuelan oil industry is only beginning to restore production after it fell to a relative trickle.
On Sunday, the shopping centres will open their doors to opposition activists collecting signatures in support of various initiatives aimed at pushing Chávez out of power.
Petition drives will also be carried out in front of the hundreds of schools that generally serve as voting stations.
There are numerous initiatives for which signatures are being collected, including a constitutional amendment to cut short Chávez's 2000-2006 term, a referendum that would revoke his mandate, and a call for the creation of a constituent assembly to rewrite the constitution.
A few days later, according to the opposition source, the malls and the franchises in Venezuela of international corporations will open their doors on restricted schedules, ''to maintain the climate of civic protest, the point towards which the current strike will ultimately evolve.''
The reduced hours will allow shopkeepers to readjust the prices of their products once foreign exchange controls go into effect on Feb. 5. The government announced the new controls after suspending foreign exchange trading by the Central Bank on Jan. 22.
Car-makers are negotiating agreements with their workers to put them on leave with partial payment of their wages while they sell off accumulated inventories.
General Motors, the leading automobile manufacturer in Venezuela -- the company sold 25,945 of the 74,560 vehicles assembled in the country in 2002 -- asked its 1,800 employees to remain on leave and to take a 25-percent pay cut until some 6,000 vehicles are sold on the local market or exported to Chile, Colombia and Ecuador, said the company's director of legal affairs, Luis Kolster.
Similar accords are being negotiated by Ford and Chrysler, while they await the reopening of their showrooms and sales lots. Much depends on the government's decision on foreign exchange, because around half of the components that go into each car are imported.
The strike's flagship industries -- those in which the two- month stoppage had most support -- include bottlers (of beer and soft drinks), flour, and food processing plants, which are to gradually reinstate operations throughout February.
The privately-held communications media, which halted broadcasts of advertising and changed their normal programming to focus on covering and promoting the anti-Chávez conflict, "will be the last to return to normal operations, though perhaps by Feb. 10," said the opposition source.
The oil industry, normally Venezuela's economic engine, has been the core of the power struggle here. The managers and several thousands of employees of the giant state-run Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) stopped working, halting operations at oil wells and refineries and on tankers.
Petroleum represents a quarter of the gross domestic product (GDP), half of fiscal revenues and 80 percent of cash inflows.
The country's normal output of 2.8 million barrels of crude per day fell to just 150,000 with the onset of the strike in December. Venezuela, an oil exporter for the last 90 years, had to import gasoline for the first time in three generations.
The government responded with an emergency plan backed by the armed forces, and has achieved a partial recuperation of production. Chávez says daily output now stands at 1.32 million barrels of oil. The opposition PDVSA managers' union, Gente del Petróleo, however, puts the figure at 1.05 million.
This was achieved "by overexploiting the fields of light crude, where are easier, while the heavy crude will be hurt because they are more difficult to reactivate, meaning the output levels from prior to the strike will not be achieved in the short term," a protest leader told IPS.
On another front at PDVSA, the government began rapid reforms "to streamline its structure and eliminate extra personnel," company president Alí Rodríguez said as he reported the layoff of 5,111 employees.
The anti-Chávez coalition is demanding amnesty for all oil employees who participated in the strike, "but the problem is that the government refuses to address the point in the negotiations," said Américo Martín, one of the six negotiators representing the opposition.
Officials say that some of the oil industry's installations were sabotaged. Administrative proceedings have begun against the leaders of the strike in the petroleum sector.
"For the saboteurs, there will be neither pardon nor amnesty," said Vice-President José Vicente Rangel, leader of the government's negotiating team. (END)