abcnews.go.com — By Patrick Markey

CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) - A six-nation group led by the United States and Brazil was ready to make a fresh bid to end Venezuela's political conflict on Friday, a day after a grenade blast in Caracas stoked fears of increasing violence in the world's No. 5 oil exporter.

Foreign ministers from the group were to hold talks in Washington with President Hugo Chavez's government and his foes, who are staging a crippling strike to force the leftist leader to resign.

Chavez, on the eve of the Washington talks, said he would not to negotiate with an opposition he dismissed as "fascist terrorists" trying to oust him by destroying the oil sector.

"We do not negotiate with terrorists. We do not negotiate with coup-mongers. We defeat them," the populist president roared at thousands of supporters rallying in central Caracas.

The group mediating in Washington also includes Spain, Portugal, Mexico and Chile. Chavez, whose anti-imperialist rhetoric often strains ties with the United States, has said he believes it should be expanded to bring in other countries, such as Russia, France and Cuba.

Negotiations brokered by the Organization of American States have so far failed to break the deadlock.

Opposition leaders, who include rebel executives at state oil firm PDVSA, have vowed to stay on strike until Chavez quits. But the combative president refuses to step down and rejects calls for early elections.

At least seven people have died in shootings and street clashes since the strike began on Dec. 2. A fragmentation grenade exploded Thursday in central Caracas, killing one man and wounding more than a dozen near the Chavez rally.

International efforts to end the crisis have intensified after the stoppage slashed Venezuela's vital oil production and exports, pushing up global oil prices as the United States prepares for a possible attack on Iraq.

The Bush administration, keen to find a quick solution to the conflict in one of its major oil suppliers, on Thursday endorsed a proposal by former U.S. president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Jimmy Carter on elections.

Carter presented Chavez and his opponents with two ideas at a meeting on Tuesday -- an amendment to Venezuela's constitution that would trigger early elections or a binding national referendum on Chavez's rule on Aug. 19. Both proposals called for an end to the strike.

Chavez, who survived a coup in April, has urged foes to wait until August to hold a midterm referendum on his presidency, as the constitution allows.

But his opponents demand that Chavez accept early elections, saying Chavez has governed like a dictator and dragged the nation toward Cuba-style communism.

www.nytimes.com

he best hope for a peaceful, democratic outcome to Venezuela's political crisis may now rest in the mediation efforts of Jimmy Carter. During his presidency Mr. Carter was a firm champion of democracy throughout Latin America, standing up to the military tyrannies that then predominated in the region. Now he has proposed two principled and plausible solutions to the long-running conflict over President Hugo Chávez, which has divided Venezuela's people, hobbled its economy and raised the specter of a breakdown in constitutional rule.

Mr. Carter, who met separately in recent days with Mr. Chávez and opposition leaders, offers two possible solutions, both compatible with Venezuela's laws and the right of its people to choose their own leaders freely. One provides for passage of a constitutional amendment, either by Venezuela's legislature or a popular vote, that would shorten the current six-year presidential term and provide for new elections later this year. The other would set up a binding referendum this summer on whether Mr. Chávez should resign or stay in office as scheduled until 2006. That isn't exactly what either side wants, but Mr. Chávez and at least some opposition leaders have suggested that they might be able to accept one or both of the Carter proposals.

Until this week Mr. Chávez's opponents had hoped to drive him from office long before summer. They were counting on the combined pressure of a non-binding referendum that had been scheduled for Feb. 2 and a national strike now in its eighth week that has shut down much of Venezuela's vital oil industry, depriving the government of badly needed revenues and sending world oil prices soaring.

But the strike has begun faltering, and this week Venezuela's Supreme Court suspended preparations for the February referendum, which Mr. Chávez had vowed to ignore anyway. That should strengthen elements of the opposition willing to accept a reasonable compromise along the lines Mr. Carter has suggested.

The United States and five other nations trying to resolve the standoff hold their first meeting in Washington today. Venezuelans of all persuasions should rally behind the Carter proposals.

news.ft.com CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) - 24 Jan 2003 05.29

A defiant President Hugo Chavez has raised the stakes in Venezuela's bitter oil industry conflict by announcing 3,000 oil company executives were sacked and saying oil output was rising faster than expected.

Chavez's left-wing government has used troops and replacement crews to break a seven-week-old strike aimed at driving him from office. But he still faces huge problems restarting refineries and persuading foreign shippers to return to what was the world's fifth-largest oil exporter.

Anti-government oil workers conceded crude output was rising despite the long stoppage, saying it reached 25 percent of capacity at 812,000 barrels per day (bpd) on Thursday.

Opposition data lag government estimates, which peg production above 1 million bpd, but both figures show a steady recovery over the past fortnight.

"The oil wells are working and today we have already exceeded one million barrels per day in oil production and the recovery has been much faster that we hoped," Chavez said.

"The perspective we have is that by the end of January, within a week, or at the latest in the first week of February, we should be at roughly two million barrels per day of oil production," he told a huge government rally.

Oil used to provide more than half of Venezuelan state revenue, and the 53-day-old strike has caused an economic crisis in the OPEC member nation. Chavez announced a massive budget cut and suspended foreign exchange trading Wednesday.

"The anti-patriotic, privatising, neoliberal, fascist, coup-plotting, depraved oligarchy thought they would kick us out of power by the end of the year through the oil strike, or rather the oil sabotage, because there is no strike here," Chavez said, adding the strike had failed.

Strikers, who want to force Chavez to resign and hold early elections, claim 90 percent support for the strike among the country's 37,000 oil workers. They poured cold water on Chavez's output objectives.

"The government might get it up to 1.3 or even 1.5 million barrels per day, but alone they will never get back to the three million we had before," an opposition spokesman said.

Chavez blamed a spate of accidents, including oil spills and refinery fires, on sabotage by the strikers. In his speech on Thursday, the president said a total of 3,000 state oil firm managers and technicians had been fired -- 1,000 more dismissals since last week.

"They sabotaged the loading terminals, the distribution ports and the pipelines, but these have all been restored by the revolutionary government, the people and the Venezuelan Armed Forces," Chavez said.

The opposition said the government was neglecting crucial safety procedures in its rush to restore output, blaming the accidents on unqualified strike-breakers.

EXPORT STILL SLOW

Despite two weeks of higher flows at the wellhead, oil exports have been stuck around 500,000 bpd, a fifth of normal levels, according to shipping agents.

About 90 percent of the country's oil refining remains closed, according to opposition estimates, and foreign ship owners say insurance risks due to uncertified port staff and poor safety practices prevent them stopping in Venezuela.

Before the strike, Venezuela pumped 3.1 million bpd of crude oil and refined a third of the oil, supplying 13 percent of U.S. import needs.

The strike has helped drive world oil prices to two-year highs, and caused severe fuel shortages on the local market.

Some blue-collar oil workers have returned to work to avoid losing their jobs. But support for the strike remains strong among skilled workers at oilfields and refineries, and managerial staff in the company head offices.

Bladimiro Blanco, an anti-Chavez member of the Fedepetrol oil union, said 85 percent of his 20,000 membership, including blue collar PDVSA employees and contractors, stayed on strike on Thursday.

PDVSA chief Ali Rodriguez said last week that 75 percent of contract workers have returned to work, while half of the management was still out.

Earlier this week, oil tanker pilots in the western Lake Maracaibo oil hub went back to work after accepting a big pay packet from the government.

The move has eased port operations in the region which pumps half the country's crude oil, but export levels have not recovered partly because foreign ship owners have stayed away.

Pilots in the east of the country have been working normally since the beginning of January, but ship agents say very few tankers are leaving from these ports.

Strike leader Juan Fernandez said oil exports from the western Lake Maracaibo were increasingly dangerous because the government had failed to maintain dredging of the long channel linking export terminals to the Caribbean Sea.

www.nola.com Friday January 24, 2003 By Stephanie Doster Kenner bureau

During a closed-door detention hearing Thursday, a federal judge decided a Belle Chasse man charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering will not be released on bond, lawyers in the case said.

Harry Adair, 51, 116 F St., who said in court records that he works for a company in Harvey called Signal Resources, was among three people indicted Thursday by a grand jury on charges of conspiracy to commit money laundering. From Our Advertiser

Also indicted were Kenneth Vicknair, 52, 3212 Pansy Court, Marrero, and David E. Wallace, 49, 510 Folse St., River Ridge. Vicknair and Wallace were released on bond Tuesday -- $50,000 for Vicknair and $75,000 for Wallace -- after detention hearings that were open to the public. Attorneys would not say why Adair's hearing was closed, and Assistant Special U.S. Attorney Patricia Jones said she does not anticipate that other hearings will be held behind closed doors.

The three men were arrested last week on money laundering charges after meeting an undercover agent and offering to trade $150 million in Venezuelan promissory notes for what the agent told them was drug money, Secret Service officials said.

Also arrested was Chien C. Lam, 52, 7527 Freret St., New Orleans, but he was not named in the indictment. Prosecutors would not comment further about Lam. Lam, who is identified in a federal complaint as a martial arts instructor, was released last week on a $25,000 bond.

The investigation began in early January, when Secret Service agent Darren Vogt learned Adair wanted to sell $150 million in promissory notes issued by the Bank of the Republic of Venezuela, according to a complaint filed in federal court.

After several recorded conversations, the agent met the four suspects in a conference room at the Hilton Garden Inn, 4535 Williams Blvd. After examining a $5 million note and repeating that his money came from drug dealers, the agent told the suspects that he was ready to buy that note on the spot with a cashier's check, authorities said, and that he would buy the rest of the notes the following morning.

The four suspects were subsequently arrested.

Lyman E. Thornton III, first assistant U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Louisiana, said investigators are trying to determine if the notes are real and how they got into the country.

www.globeandmail.com POSTED AT 3:35 AM EST    Friday, January 24 Associated Press

Caracas — A pipe bomb exploded in downtown Caracas, killing one person and injuring at least 14 as hundreds of thousands of protesters gathered for a rally in support of Venezuela's embattled president.

The explosion scattered shrapnel and damaged two buses outside a subway station Thursday as some 300,000 people were converging in the capital's to protest an economically devastating 53-day-old general strike aimed at ousting President Hugo Chavez.

A homeless man who was rummaging in the trash where the bomb was apparently hidden was killed in the blast, said Colonel Rodolfo Briceno, the Caracas fire chief.

The rally went on as planned, with Mr. Chavez blasting his opponents as a “fascist oligarchy” and insisting that his left-wing, populist regime would survive despite the crippling effects of the strike on the world's fifth-largest oil-exporting nation.

Mr. Chavez accused strike leaders and the Venezuelan news media of using the strike to weaken the economy and orchestrate a coup like the one in April that briefly forced him from office.

The work stoppage prompted the government to suspend trading in the national currency, the bolivar, for five days.

The President lashed out at media coverage of the strike, condemning the nation's four private television stations as the “four horsemen of the Apocalypse” and threatening to rescind their broadcast licenses.

“The Venezuelan people don't want violence,” he told the crowd. “But it's convenient to remind the coup-plotting, fascist oligarchy attempting to overthrow the Bolivarian government that the Venezuelan people are willing to defend their government.”

The rally followed a decision earlier this week by Venezuela's supreme court to invalidate a planned Feb. 2 referendum aimed at forcing Mr. Chavez from power - a nonbinding vote that he had declared unconstitutional.

As the chaos continued, delegates from six nations planned to meet Friday in Washington to discuss ways of resolving the crisis. Among the plans under discussion is one offered by former U.S. president Jimmy Carter that would end the general strike in exchange for early elections.

Mr. Chavez said late Wednesday he welcomed international help but warned against outside intervention in Venezuela's internal affairs. He urged the delegates from the six nations - Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Portugal, Spain and the United States - to recognize that his is an elected government and warned them not to give equal weight to an “undemocratic” opposition.

Opposition leaders contend Mr. Chavez's leftist policies have damaged business and scared away foreign investment.

Meanwhile, most blue-collar workers and half the administrators have returned to work at the state oil monopoly and production has surpassed 1 million barrels a day, the company's president, Ali Rodriguez, told the state news agency Venpres.

Union and striking oil executives disputed his claims about the workforce and insisted production is about 812,000 barrels a day. Pre-strike production was about 3.2 million barrels a day.