reuters.com Tue January 14, 2003 01:09 PM ET

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Tuesday urged Venezuelans reeling from a crippling strike to use only lawful means to resolve their differences and said he wanted to help calm the situation.

"I will be seeing President Hugo Chavez here on Thursday ... and I hope to be able to discuss with him the developments in Venezuela, and how one can intensify the mediation efforts, to calm the situation and return it to normalcy," Annan said.

"I have had the chance of speaking to him several times on the phone, and he knows I believe one should use constitutional and democratic means to resolve this issue, and this is my message not only to him, but to the opposition," Annan told a news conference.

An opposition strike, started on Dec. 2, has deeply shaken the government and Venezuela's oil industry, stoking tensions between Chavez and his political foes, who are demanding he resign and call immediate elections.

Chavez, who survived a brief coup in April, has rejected demands for an early vote.

The shutdown has slashed Venezuela's oil exports, causing widespread domestic fuel and food shortages and jolting world energy markets.

Notorious on Wall Street for his failed economic policies and anti-capitalist rhetoric, Chavez was elected in 1998 vowing to wrest control from the country's corrupt elite and enact reforms to help the poor.

But opposition has grown amid charges the president wants to establish a Cuban-style authoritarian state.

Chavez was officially coming to U.N. headquarters to attend ceremonies turning over Venezuela's leadership of the "Group of 77" developing nations to Morocco for 2003. The group has 134 members.

He was due to hold a news conference after his talks with Annan.

www.austin360.com By STEPHEN IXER Associated Press Writer

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP)--Soldiers loyal to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez seized heavy weapons and anti-riot equipment Tuesday from Caracas' police force, which the government accused of siding with Chavez's opponents.

Critics called the move another attempt by Chavez to weaken Greater Caracas Mayor Alfredo Pena, one of Chavez's most vocal critics. Chavez insists the 9,000-strong Caracas police force, which reports to Pena, routinely suppresses pro-government demonstrations.

Troops searched several police stations at dawn Tuesday, confiscating submachine guns as well as .12-caliber rifles used to fire rubber bullets and tear gas, said Cmdr. Freddy Torres, the department's legal consultant. Officers were allowed to keep their standard issue .38-caliber pistols.

Police said they were still determining the total number of weapons seized. A Defense Ministry spokesman declined to comment on the confiscations.

The seizure could raise tensions in a 44-day-old general strike aimed at ousting Chavez, which has been marked by almost daily street protests, including clashes between Chavez supporters and opponents.

We don't understand this action,'' police chief Henry Vivas told Union Radio. This leaves us at a tremendous disadvantage against criminals. Instead of disarming criminals, they disarm the police. It's outrageous.'' Also seized was anti-riot equipment like tear gas canisters and rubber bullets.

The weapons raids came hours after Chavez's government restored Pena's authority over the police on Monday, Torres said.

Chavez ordered the military to take control of the police department in November, arguing police brutally repressed his supporters during protests. Pena says Chavez sympathizers attack police and that crime has risen since the military took control.

Vivas said the confiscation violated a Supreme Court ruling ordering the government to return the force to the mayor's control.

The police cannot act like protectors of a political side,'' Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel told foreign reporters Tuesday. It's not right that each time (police) go out on the streets, it's to create victims.''

Rangel would not provide details on the raids.

Carlos Guerra, commander of a police station in a poor western Caracas precinct, said about 40 armed National Guard soldiers seized 62 submachine guns and 132 ammunition magazines from his station.

We're left defenseless against the criminals,'' Guerra said. Officers can't offer the same protection when we've only got revolvers and criminals have automatic weapons. If there is a bank robbery there's not much we can do.''

In 2002, there were more than 9,000 homicides in Venezuela, up from almost 8,000 in 2001, according to federal police figures. Figures for Caracas were not immediately available.

The raid comes as Chavez has vowed to defeat the strike aimed at forcing him from power, which has almost paralyzed Venezuela's crucial oil industry. He threatened last week to order troops to seize control of food plants participating in the stoppage.

On Monday, Energy and Mines Minister Rafael Ramirez called the walkout an act of ``terrorism'' that has cost the country $4 billion.

``All these acts of terrorism have brought tremendous consequences for the nation,'' Ramirez said in a televised address.

Once the world's fifth-largest oil exporter, Venezuela has had to pay $105 million to import more than 2 million barrels of gasoline since the general strike began Dec. 2, Ramirez said.

Oil provides half of government revenue and 80 percent of export earnings. The walkout is strongest in state oil monopoly Petroleos de Venezuela S.A., where 30,000 of 40,000 workers are off the job.

Chavez has fought back by firing at least 1,000 white-collar workers at PDVSA.

Ramirez said daily oil production now surpasses 800,000 barrels. Striking oil executives fired by Chavez say output is just over 400,000 barrels a day. Before the strike, production was up to 3 million barrels a day.

Some strike leaders were considering asking small businesses _ who say they cannot sustain losses much longer--to resume work, together with medical workers and teachers, hoping to avoid a popular backlash.

Most private schools and some public schools have been closed since the strike started. Hospital workers supporting the strike are only attending emergencies. Many supermarkets have run out of milk and are running low on staples such as flour and drinking water. Many medicines no longer are available at pharmacies.

William Davila, another Democratic Coordinator leader, said the food industry also should be given the freedom to ensure basic supplies.

But Davila said any easing of the strike should depend on a forthcoming Supreme Court ruling on the legality of a nonbinding referendum on Chavez's rule sought by the strikers.

Chavez says the nonbinding vote would be unconstitutional. His presidency runs until January 2007, and Venezuela's constitution says a binding referendum may be held halfway into his six-year term, or August.

From a correspondent in Caracas January 15, 2003

VENEZUELA'S crippling strike has entered its seventh week amid renewed violence and warnings by President Hugo Chavez he would strengthen military efforts to end the action that has throttled the vital oil industry. In what has become an almost daily routine, police and National Guard troops fired tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse protesters in Caracas and the country's second largest city, Maracaibo.

Yesterday it was Chavez supporters who were targeted by security forces - in Caracas after they hurled rocks at government opponents, injuring at least two people, and in Maracaibo as they tried to stage a protest outside the governor's offices.

On Monday troops dispersed thousands of anti-government protesters who gathered outside a military base in Caracas to back the strike, which is aimed at forcing Mr Chavez from office.

While protesters taunted soldiers blocking access to the army installations, the opposition has been trying to court the armed forces.

www.newsok.com 2003-01-14 By Alexandra Olson Associated Press Writer

CARACAS, Venezuela -- Ruling party legislators said Monday they will urge citizens to boycott a February referendum on President Hugo Chavez's rule if the Supreme Court allows it to take place.

Venezuela's opposition is demanding that Chavez resign and call new elections if he loses the nonbinding referendum tentatively set for Feb. 2. They have buttressed their demands with a strike that entered its seventh week Monday and has dried up oil revenue.

Chavez refuses to step down, arguing that Venezuela's constitution only allows a binding referendum midway through a president's term -- August, in his case.

Members of his Fifth Republic Movement party, which has a slim majority in Congress, have challenged the constitutionality of the vote in the Supreme Court.

"If the referendum does take place, our position would be total abstention," Fifth Republic lawmaker Omar Mezza said. "Our complete abstention would take away its legitimacy."

Chavez's opponents cite articles in the constitution that let citizens petition for a referendum on "matters of national importance" at any time or to disown governments that threaten democracy.

The Supreme Court has not said when it will rule on the referendum.

www.abs-cbnnews.com Tuesday, January 14, 2003 9:10:56 p.m By MARK WEISBROT Special to The Washington Post

Weisbrot is codirector of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, an independent nonpartisan think tank in Washington.

Walking around Caracas late last month during Venezuela’s ongoing protests, I was surprised by what I saw. My expectations had been shaped by persistent US media coverage of the nationwide strike called by the opposition, which seeks President Hugo Chavez’s ouster. Yet in most of the city, where poor and working-class people live, there were few signs of the strike. Streets were crowded with holiday shoppers, metro trains and buses were running normally, and shops were open. Only in the eastern, wealthier neighborhoods of the capital were businesses mostly closed.

This is clearly an oil strike, not a “general strike,” as it is often described. At the state-owned oil company, PDVSA, which controls the industry, management is leading the strike because it is at odds with the Chavez government. And while Venezuela depends on oil for 80 percent of its export earnings and half its national budget, the industry’s workers represent a tiny fraction of the labor force. Outside the oil industry, it is hard to find workers who are on strike. Some have been locked out from their jobs, as business owners -- including big foreign corporations such as McDonald’s and FedEx -- have closed their doors in support of the opposition.

Most Americans seem to believe the Chavez government is a dictatorship, and one of the most repressive governments in Latin America. But these impressions are false.

Not only was Chavez democratically elected, his government is probably one of the least repressive in Latin America. This, too, is easy to see in Caracas. While army troops are deployed to protect Miraflores (the presidential compound), there is little military or police presence in most of the capital, which is particularly striking in such a tense and volatile political situation. No one seems the least bit afraid of the national government, and despite the seriousness of this latest effort to topple it, no one has been arrested for political activities.

In the United States, a strike of this sort -- one that caused massive damage to the economy, or one where public or private workers were making political demands -- would be declared illegal. Its participants could be fired, and its leaders -- if they persisted in the strike -- imprisoned under a court injunction. In Venezuela, the issue has yet to be decided. The Supreme Court last month ordered PDVSA employees back to work until it rules on the strike’s legality.

To anyone who has been in Venezuela lately, opposition charges that Chavez is “turning the country into a Castro-communist dictatorship” -- repeated so often that millions of Americans apparently now believe them -- are absurd on their face.

If any leaders have a penchant for dictatorship in Venezuela, it is the opposition’s. On April 12 they carried out a military coup against the elected government. They installed the head of the business federation as president and dissolved the legislature and the supreme court, until mass protests and military officers reversed the coup two days later.

Military officers stand in Altamira Plaza and openly call for another coup. The government’s efforts to prosecute leaders of the coup were canceled when the court dismissed the charges in August. Despite the anger of his supporters, some of whom lost friends and relatives last year during the two days of the coup government, Chavez respected the decision of the court.

The opposition controls the private media, and to watch TV in Caracas is truly an Orwellian experience. The five private TV stations (there is one state-owned channel) play continuous anti-Chavez propaganda. But it is worse than that: They are also shamelessly dishonest. For example, on December 6 an apparently deranged gunman fired on a crowd of opposition demonstrators, killing three and injuring dozens. Although there was no evidence linking the government to the crime, the television news creators -- armed with footage of bloody bodies and grieving relatives -- went to work immediately to convince the public that Chavez was responsible. Soon after the shooting, they were broadcasting grainy video clips allegedly showing the assailant attending a pro-Chavez rally.

Now consider how people in Caracas’s barrios see the opposition, a view rarely heard in the United States: Led by representatives of the corrupt old order, the opposition is trying to overthrow a government that has won three elections and two referendums since 1998. Its coup failed partly because hundreds of thousands of people risked their lives by taking to the streets to defend democracy. So now it is crippling the economy with an oil strike. The upper classes are simply attempting to gain through economic sabotage what they could not win at the ballot box.

From the other side of the class divide, the conflict is also seen as a struggle over who will control and benefit from the nation’s oil riches. Over the past quarter-century PDVSA has swelled to a $50 billion a year enterprise, while the income of the average Venezuelan has declined and poverty has increased more than anywhere in Latin America. Billions of dollars of the oil company’s revenue could instead be used to finance health care and education for millions of Venezuelans.

Now add Washington to the mix: The United States, alone in the Americas, supported the coup, and before then it increased financial support of the opposition. Washington shares PDVSA executives’ goals of increasing oil production, busting OPED quotas and even selling off the company to private foreign investors. So it is not surprising that the whole conflict is seen in much of Latin America as another case of Washington trying to overthrow an independent, democratically elected government.

Where does the US government stand on the question of democracy in Venezuela? The Bush administration joined the opposition in taking advantage of the December 6 shootings to call for early elections, which would violate the Venezuelan constitution. The administration reversed itself the next week, but despite paying lip service to the negotiations mediated by the OAS, it has done nothing to encourage its allies in the opposition to seek a constitutional or even a peaceful solution.

Sixteen members of Congress sent a letter to Bush last month, asking him to state clearly that the United States would not have normal diplomatic relations with a coup-installed government in Venezuela. But despite its apprehension about disruption of Venezuelan oil supplies on the eve of a probable war against Iraq, the Bush administration is not yet ready to give up any of its options for “regime change” in Caracas. And -- not surprisingly -- neither is the Venezuelan opposition.

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