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Governo e oposição chegaram a acordo na Venezuela que destaca o compromisso de criar um "clima de concórdia no país" até à realização do "referendo revogatório" presidencial, pedido pela oposição, em Agosto deste ano. O documento do acordo, que inclui 22 pontos, diz que ambas as partes aceitam que o Conselho Nacional Eleitoral convoque a consulta, e prevê que o governo garanta a activação do "Plano República", ou seja que garanta a segurança dos eleitores, dos boletins de voto e do equipamento. Governo e oposição comprometem-se, por outro lado, a impulsionar uma campanha de desarmamento dos civis, sob a supervisão de observadores internacionais. O acordo exorta a Assembleia Nacional a criar a Comissão da Verdade, para investigar os acontecimentos de Abril de 2002, quando simpatizantes e opositores do actual regime se envolveram em confrontos junto ao palácio presidencial de Miraflores, que resultaram na morte de dezenas de pessoas. Lusa

EDITORIAL • March 27, 2003      Venezuela struck a curiously magnanimous tone in recent days, promising to be a reliable wartime supplier of oil. "We are and will continue to be the most secure supplier of oil to the United States," said Venezuela's Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel last week, as the United States appeared on the brink of war with Iraq.      Surely, any pledge of goodwill from Venezuela towards the United States raises eyebrows these days, given the recent testy exchanges between the two countries. But, despite the tensions, Venezuela could hardly be expected to punish itself economically by halting oil exports to the United States.      Venezuela has traditionally provided about 20 percent of America's crude-oil imports, and it is the world's largest oil producer outside of the Middle East. In the wake of a two-month nationwide strike that began Dec. 4, Venezuela's oil production has been impaired. About 40 percent of the workers at Venezuela's state oil company were fired for striking. Before the strike, Venezuela was exporting about 2.5 million barrels a day, of which 1.5 million (60 percent) went to the United States. Estimates vary on what Venezuela is currently exporting.      Some private analysts believe Venezuela is exporting 1.8 million barrels a day and producing 2.4 million barrels a day. The government says it has passed its OPEC production quota of 2.8 million barrels a day, and can even push up production to 4 million barrels by April, if there's a supply emergency.      Regardless of the varying estimates, the company's ability to recover from the strike is impressive. And the United States does indeed need Venezuelan oil, particularly now. The Bush administration has successfully balanced its need for Venezuelan oil with its determination to hold Mr. Chavez accountable for his actions. The administration criticized Venezuela's arrests of strikers, for example, to which Mr. Chavez responded by telling the United States to mind its own business.      Now, with some Iraqi oil wells set on fire and the war possibly disrupting oil production for an unknown period of time, it may be tempting for the United States to go silent on its concerns about Mr. Chavez. But a continuation of the Bush administration's calibrated policy would bolster U.S. credibility and leadership. Also, the engagement of the United States and other countries in the Group of Friends initiative — an effort to broker agreements between the government and the opposition — keeps Mr. Chavez's policies within certain democratic bounds. The Group of Friends may also be moderating the opposition's tactics. A more restrained Mr. Chavez helps avert the kind of crisis that would disrupt Venezuela's oil production over the medium or long term.      The best guarantor of stability and oil production in Venezuela will be the international community's steady engagement. At this point, the whole world has a stake in Venezuela's future.

Marin? Tuesday March 25, 5:19 AM

Venezuelan Ambassador to the U.S. Bernardo Alvarez said Venezuela has been talking to many companies interested in using its crude to help fill the SPR. "What's important is that we have the political will to contribute," Alvarez said.

The ambassador said Venezuela plans to discuss its production levels with the U.S. Energy Information Administration to try to persuade the statistical agency its oil output has recovered to pre-December levels.

Marin said PdVSA is in talks with refinery services company UOP LLC and it's getting technical assistance from Mitsubishi Corp. (J.MIB) to resume full operations at the El Palito refinery. He said that plans for a liquefied natural gas export development by Royal Dutch/Shell Group (RD) and Mitsubishi remain "very serious."

Marin described the loss since November of about 17,000 PdVSA staff, or 43% of the prior workforce, as largely complementing the company's prior plans to downsize, but he said he would have preferred not being forced to restructure the company by December's labor walkouts.

Among structural changes the oil monopoly has made are reducing its Caracas corporate headquarters to no more than 400 staff and shifting responsibilities to its eastern and western producing regions, he said. PdVSA is forming a sales division in the east to handle all crude oil marketing and another in the west to handle all refined products marketing, he said.

Marin said he expects Venezuelan crude oil production to reach about 3.1 million b/d over the next few months. Venezuela has an understanding within the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to produce above its quota of 2.819 million b/d to make up for the exports it lost in December and January.

-By Campion Walsh, Dow Jones Newswires; 202-862-9291; campion.walsh@dowjones.com

www.vheadline.com Posted: Sunday, March 23, 2003 By: Patrick J. O'Donoghue

That is how historian and political activist, Domingo Alberto Rangel brands the leaders of the failed national stoppage.

Venezuelan Confederation of Trade Unions (CTV) president, Carlos Ortega and Federation of Chambers of Industry & Commerce (Fedecamaras), president Carlos Fernandez looked like and talked like two Napoleonic Field Marshals up till January 31.

"Every afternoon at the same time they used to issue a victorious proclamation ... they or the organizations they headed decreed the stoppage on December 2 ... less than 10% of mercantile establishments complied ... the most powerful international monopolies hardly stopped activities ... because they chose to undertake the stoppage at the worst moment and methods."

Rangel goes on: "the two Napoleons did not consult anyone ... December was the worst month economically and above all, they relied on the TV as if it could produce miracles ... the stoppage was a failure from the very start ... there was no stoppage in the street and no coup in the barracks."

Rangel maintains that there has always been a combative tradition in Venezuela banning cowardice in the political arena and points to students, known in Venezuela as the generation of 28, who fought the government in 1928 and were placed in forced labor camps and those who own struggle against Perez Jimenez (1953-1958).

"Now the two Marshals .. one with tears in his eyes is begging them NOT to change his comfortable house arrest to a common prison cell ... the other, Ortega running to the Costa Rican Embassy for asylum ... the two gentlemen are not only cowards but are politically as blind as bats."

The Chavez Frias regime is a farce, Rangel insists, full of thievery as Chavez Frias preaches administrative honesty ..."loaded with pickpockets that pose as heroes, quislings as never seen before,who fancy themselves ant-imperialists."

"It's an ideal regime that could be destroyed by a political trial ... turning a trial into a constant accusation against Chavez Frias for his double-speak, contradictions, slyness, hero-posturing would be ideal for any opponent."

The two marshals have let the opportunity slip away.

So why, then, are they scared in a country which has a proud tradition of warlords of risking their lives and people spending 14 years in prison under Gomez (1908-1931) and others, such as Rangel himself, spending 8 years in prison during Perez Jimenez (1953-1958) and Betancourt (1959-1964)?

Ortega and Fernandez' fear is based on class ... "they represent the moneyed oligarchy in the political arena ... they are front men."

Our oligarchy is coward ... other oligarchies are not."

Rangel compares Venezuela to Colombia where he was columnist in 1949 at El Tiempo broadsheet and virtual editor of the Revista de America owned by former Colombian President, Eduardo Santos. Rangel was 29 at the time.

Santos refused to leave Colombia despite an onslaught against members of the Liberal Party, saying the newspaper and his personal fortune were obtained thanks to Liberal activists and supporters, who were being murdered in the streets and villages.

Rangel ends his weekly column repeating that "Chavez Frias' regime is fragile because it is a farce ... the regime is full of thieves that talk with Catonian rigor and cites the example of an Energy & Mines (MEM) Minister flying to New York and Washington to shamelessly offer (unlike Gomez' ministers) Venezuela's oil resources.

Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) president, Ali Rodriguez, "supposedly a champion of nationalism ... is an traveling salesman of the national wealth share-out ... a regime in which abandoned children and beggars grow with manifest speed where there is no coherent policy or tangible undertakings."

Conclusion: Ideal for a fighting and lucid opposition and not an opposition of deserters. "Chavez Frias can be beaten because he is a hypocrite and irresponsible but one must stay here with a quiver full of arrows."

<a href=www.newsday.com>"Simply grassroots groups that are defending the "peaceful revolution"" By Bart Jones STAFF WRITER March 23, 2003

Their critics call them armed gangs of thugs who are terrorizing residents of well-to-do neighborhoods in Venezuela.

But Rodrigo Chaves says the Bolivarian Circles are simply grassroots groups that are defending the "peaceful revolution" of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and his campaign to clean up some of the worst political corruption in the world.

"What we are proposing is a profound transformation of society," Chaves, national coordinator of the Bolivarian Circles in Venezuela, said in an interview Monday.

Chaves came to New York City last week to defend the organizations, attend a rally in Manhattan, plot strategies with Chávez supporters from across the United States and proclaim that his president is not the monster some contend.

"It's the most democratic government and the one that has given the most freedom of speech" in Venezuela's history, Chaves, a surgeon, said in Spanish.

Since winning the presidency in 1998, Chávez has survived a firestorm of street protests, strikes and - in April - a coup. A two-month walkout at the huge state oil company Petróleos de Venezuela ended in February, but left the economy battered.

Chávez has split Venezuela between those who maintain he is a new Fidel Castro and those who see him as the first president in Venezuela's history to stand up for the impoverished masses and challenge a corrupted class of wealthy elites.

The bedrock of his support is the Bolivarian Circles. They have grown rapidly in the past two years, Chaves said, comprising 220,000 groups and 2.2 million people across the nation.

The groups, named after South American independence hero Simón Bolívar, study Venezuela's new constitution, repair schools, install sewage systems and even host chess tournaments, Chaves said. Critics say they have a more sinister purpose: to physically intimidate Chávez opponents. Miguel Hernández Andara, head of the Queens-based anti-Chávez group Civil Resistance of Venezuelans Overseas, said the circles are modeled after Castro's community groups created to defend the revolution. "They are a bunch of terrorists," Andara said in Spanish.

Chaves scoffed at that, and said it is the opposition that has engaged in violence. He alleged that opposition leaders placed snipers on top of hotels in downtown Caracas in April, ordered them to fire on their own marchers during a protest, and then blamed the deaths on Chávez. Dissident military officials quickly carried out a coup against Chávez, who regained power 48 hours later in a counter-coup.

Opposition leaders say Chávez and his supporters were responsible for the killings. At least 24 people died, including some Chávez backers. Many analysts agree snipers were on top of the hotels, but disagree on who put them there.

Chaves laughs at accusations that the president wants to impose a dictatorship. He said that hundreds of thousands of people regularly protest for and against Chávez, and that opponents often go on TV calling for another coup or the assassination of the president - and nothing happens to them.

"If someone went on TV [here] and said they should kill [President George W.] Bush," Chaves said, "they'd be in jail in a minute."