www.canada.com Canadian Press Thursday, January 30, 2003

CARACAS (AP) - Venezuelan opposition leaders accused President Hugo Chavez of threatening the country's bankers to make them abandon a general strike aimed at toppling him.

The National Banking Council said Wednesday that its members will return to normal operating hours on Monday. For two months, thousands of people have waited in long lines while banks opened just three hours a day. Other sectors, including workers in the state oil company, will remain on strike.

"This is a government that, one way or another, acts with pressure and repression. This influenced the decision," said strike leader Carlos Fernandez.

Chavez had threatened to fine banks and withdraw the armed forces' deposits from private institutions if they did not resume normal operations. Bankers said they provide a public service, which influenced the decision.

"We owe the public," Nelson Mezerhane, the council's vice-president, said after a council meeting Wednesday. "They have their earnings and money in our institutions."

Fearing that effects of the work stoppage - shortages of food, medicine, fuel and cash - could hurt their cause, many businesses plan to reopen next week. Many also worry about bankruptcy.

Deepening recession, the strike and lack of oil income will close 25,000 small and medium-size manufacturing and service businesses - at least eight per cent of total small and medium firms, the Fedeindustria business chamber has predicted. Closures in the first half of 2003 will leave 200,000 people jobless, it said earlier this month.

Oil output surpassed one million barrels a day this week, a third of pre-strike levels. Oil provides half of government income and 70 per cent of export revenue.

Dissident executives at state-run oil monopoly Petroleos de Venezuela S.A., or PDVSA, said the strike will continue in the oil industry despite the government's success in raising production.

The strike has cost Venezuela $4 billion US so far. It has forced the government to suspend foreign exchange trading until at least Feb. 5 to protect its currency, the bolivar, which has lost 25 per cent of its value this year. At the end of the freeze, the government plans to limit the amount of foreign currency Venezuelans can buy.

The government may set the bolivar at 1,600 to the U.S. dollar and then devalue it every month, Ricardo Sanguino, a member of the congressional finance commission and Chavez's Fifth Republic Movement party, told Globovision television Thursday. The bolivar closed at 1,853 before the dollar sales freeze began last week.

Arguing that oil executives sabotaged oil installations to ensure the strike's success, Chavez has fired one-eighth of the company's work force to regain control of the industry.

"These traitors should be in prison," Chavez said on Wednesday. "I call on judges to listen to the clamour of the people and jail these traitors."

Oil company strikers have rejected the accusation and challenged the government to present proof of sabotage.

While businesses pinched by the strike began to stray, government adversaries decided the best strategy to oust Chavez is by amending the constitution to shorten the presidential term and open the way for early elections.

The idea, which was floated by former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, "is the priority, it's the proposal we prefer," said Pedro Nikken, a lawyer and adviser to the Democratic Co-ordinator opposition movement.

Venezuela's diverse opposition had been considering a host of proposals, ranging from a referendum in August on the president's rule to amending the constitution to shorten the president's term from six years to four.

Chavez was elected in 1998 and re-elected two years later. His term ends in 2007.

The amendment proposal will be formally presented to "The Group of Friends of Venezuela," a forum of six countries helping broker an end to Venezuela's political conflict.

Diplomats from the United States, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Spain and Portugal were to arrive in Venezuela on Thursday to support negotiations led by the Organization of American States.

www.uexpress.com Georgie Anne Geyer

NEW YORK -- It has been my sage observation over some 30 years of interviewing world leaders that the press usually attack them. The journalists are the questioners and complainers, not the other way around.

But when Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez came to the United Nations last week for a speech and afterward admitted a few of us to a press briefing, the quixotic Chavez did things a little differently -- and perhaps that should have been expected.

Stalking into the room at the Venezuelan Mission on 46th Street, Chavez looked for all the world the vengeful enforcer, the raging godfather, the paranoid-in-winter. His once-handsome and controlled face was dark and brooding, his eyes tight and wary as he constantly scanned the room.

What was left of his nervous restraint broke down completely at the first question from a Latin female journalist: "Why is it that so many say you are capricious and ineffective?"

"It is very difficult for me to talk about myself," he began, before speaking for nearly 25 minutes about himself. "Not only do they call me 'capricious and arbitrary,' but they call me an 'assassin ... Hitler ... Mussolini ...' I believe that I am the victim of a psychological war. I am in the laboratory, and you on the radio and in the newspapers, you repeat it over and over, as if I were Jack the Ripper. If you repeat the 'big lie' 10 times, or a thousand times, people will begin to believe it."

Why, he asked, do so many Americans tell him that he is the "enemy of America"? He told us that he said to people in New York: "I am not an enemy; it is the information you are getting. For instance, I was in Baghdad last year, and I was riding around in a car driven by Saddam. How could I know that no president of any country had gone there since the Gulf War? I was also in Riyadh, in Doha, in Djakarta, with other presidents, but nobody was interested in that.

"I met with the pope three times, and that was never published anywhere."

Then this man who has called the Roman Catholic Church in Venezuela a "tumor on Venezuelan society" suddenly proclaimed to the journalists, many of whom were looking more than slightly stunned: "I am a Catholic!" Pregnant pause. "My mama wanted me to be a priest." At this, he began humming the Mass. "And I am a Christian," he added. He suddenly took a small silver cross out of his pocket, kissed it vigorously and began to sing robustly, "Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned."

"They've made me into a devil," he said a little later. He paused, and an ambivalent small smile played around his lips. "Perhaps," he added, "we need an exorcist."

Other stories were told that late afternoon, many of them about Fidel Castro, whom Chavez constantly referred to emotionally as "my friend!" But after seven weeks of upheaval, violence and oil strikes in his country, the Venezuelan opposition are not his "friends" at all.

"They ought to be in prison, those terrorists of these last few weeks," he stated in an obviously disturbed voice. "Why are they here and not in prison? I have political power, but I am not a dictator -- otherwise, I would have shot them! In other times, they would have shot them in the patio of the military barracks. Shot them! That has not happened in Venezuela."

With disdain and derision virtually dripping from his words, he added, "You can see what quality of opposition we have in Venezuela -- a bunch of fascists!"

At this point, he looked very deliberately at the reporters whom he knew were from Latin America, directing his remarks particularly to Brazil and Ecuador, where fellow leftist leaders of his have just been elected to the presidencies. "It's fascism, brothers!" he went on. "Because tomorrow it could be you. Until now, the rich have given us presidents, and the rich have taken them away. This is the war of the end of the century, the war of the end of the world. I will fight to the death."

And all the while -- the meeting went on for most of an hour and a half in the early winter's evening -- the Venezuelan president carefully and suspiciously checked off each questioner on a media list prepared for him by his information officers in order to know who was who.

As I watched and listened, I could not help but compare this man of dark rages and apocalyptic visions to the Hugo Chavez I had interviewed in Caracas only four years ago, just before he was elected president of the country. Much thinner, infinitely sunnier and charming, Chavez then spoke only about peacefully reforming the country in its own historic Venezuelan way. "There isn't any model," he told me then, "certainly not Cuba or the Soviet Union. We don't copy other models, we invent them."

But in these four years, Hugo Chavez has gone completely to the left. Fidel is his best friend and, despite his fulminations to the contrary, the pope is not. After seven weeks of oil company and other strikes that have paralyzed the country, Chavez is at total war with the opposition, which is a melange of substantial middle-class people, trade unionists and businessmen, but also leftover politicians from the two "democratic" parties that ruined and scavenged the oil-rich country for 40 years.

This same week, a "friends" group made up of the United States, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Spain and Portugal has been formed to try to broker a peace settlement between Chavez and the opposition. But one has to wonder whether it is too late. The sense of the Venezuelan crisis, from the Chavez left, is that they are in an all-out push for revolution, no longer for reform. The opposition seems to plan no further ahead than the next day's demonstration -- and every day, those demonstrations grow more violent, more obdurate and more dangerous.

From Caracas, the message is that it is too late for negotiations. The world oil markets have been shaken by the cutoff of Venezuelan oil. An estimated 50 percent of small businesses are in danger of collapse. "Here, there is a clash of systems," the Venezuelan scholar Alberto Garrido, a specialist on Chavez's philosophy, was quoted as saying this week in The Washington Post, "something that neither (the Organization of American States) nor the United States understands. For this reason, no negotiation is possible."

If Chavez believes what he has said, that the country's public and private institutions must be broken down in order for his revolution to take root in Venezuelan soil, that appears to be what is happening in that important Latin American country. If so, the United States and the world could be up against a war even more bizarre and threatening than Hugo Chavez's words.

www.vheadline.com Posted: Thursday, January 30, 2003 - 1:01:53 PM By: PETROLEUMWORLD

Venezuela's crude oil output stood to 1.44 million barrels a day Wednesday, dissident Venezuela´s oil company PDVSA executives said in their daily report.

The operations in eastern part of the country produced 692,000 b/d is being produced. Another 300,000 b/d on top of the current 692,000 b/d could be produced in the east in the coming weeks, dissident PDVSA executives reported.

Western operations stood at 260,000 b/d while in the southern region, 92,000 b/d were being produced Wednesday, unchanged from Tuesday.

Refining activities remained unchanged from Tuesday. El Palito refinery which has a capacity of 120,000 b/d is producing 75,000 b/d, the report said. The Paraguana refinery complex which has a capacity of 940,000 b/d is at 80,000 b/d.The 200,000 b/d. The 200,000 b/d Puerto La Cruz refinery is produccing 75.000 mbd,The 200 mbd La Isla refinery in Curacao is producing 25,000 b/d, the report said.

Venezuela is in its 59th day of a civil disobedience nation wide general work stoppage that has hampered oil production and exports. The strike is aimed at forcing President Hugo Chavez to resign followed by early elections.

By Elio Ohep, Petoleumworld.com; 58 412 9525301; ecohep@hotmail.com

Petroleumworld News 30-01-03 1230 GMT

www.vheadline.com Posted: Thursday, January 30, 2003 - 8:55:36 AM By: Matthew Riemer

International commentarist Matthew Riemer writes: This past Sunday, January 26, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez greeted a reported 100,000 supporters at the third annual World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil; this year, the forum was appropriately titled "Life after Capitalism."

Such a title is appropriate because of the transformational throes and growing pains that world society and the global economy are now entering. As globalization's reach expands and its pace quickens, so too does the resistance and crisis. The events in Venezuela over the past year are the perfect example. They represent the new economic warfare formula whereby the masses of a country (typically overwhelmingly poor) and their leader resist international forces usually comprised of the World Bank/International Monetary Fund, multinationals, and incredibly wealthy private investors.

These "international forces" are represented locally by the regional elite: bankers, union heads, wealthy businessmen, and the upper-middle class. Their goal is to de-nationalize industry and replace it with privatization, thus making accessible to foreign investment the whole of a country's resources. These resources are then developed with foreign money using cheap domestic labor while the products are almost exclusively exported.

This results in the inherent wealth (resources, human potential) of a country being siphoned off to the international "market" while the native population reaps no reward from their country's own wealth or their own labor.

• Such was the case in Argentina. Such is the case in Venezuela. And Brazil could be next.

Venezuela's biggest prize is the state-run (nationalized) oil company, PDVSA. The reasons why should be obvious: PDVSA is the country's largest company and employer; Venezuela is a member of OPEC, and the only one in the Western hemisphere at that; Venezuela is the world's fifth largest oil exporter and third largest to the United States; the oil industry accounts for a full third of the Venezuelan GDP.

Control of the PDVSA means not only incredible control of the fortunes of Venezuela but also control of the world oil market. A Venezuelan economy in the hands of the United States and their proxy financial institutions is crucial to the life of globalization as Washington, with its newfound doctrine of unprecedented militarism and unilateralism, continues to destabilize both the world economy and social fabric.

Recently, opposition forces staged a sleepover protest on a section of one of Caracas' highways. The claims that the opposition is solely made up of the pampered upper-middle class is certainly born out by the photos from the event: the scene looked like some kind of rock concert festival held in the United States or Europe where a sea of brightly colored tents, sleeping bags, and inflatable mattresses are all the eye can see. This in a country where about 75 percent of the population lives below the poverty line. Yet "the opposition" looked like they'd just visited their local REI or EMS outdoor retailer.

But Chavez is still holding tight. He survived the coup last April, even after temporarily being removed from power. Now, with the current work stoppage about to enter its third month next week, there are signs that the opposition is weakening and that Chavez will hold on for yet another round.

Such resistance should be quite indicative to globalizing forces of the human spirit's newfound resolve. One can only hope that the global elite, like so many times in the past, won't let their frustration get the better of them when subtler methods fail and resort to overt and bloody repression.

[Matthew Riemer has written for years about a myriad of topics, such as: philosophy, religion, psychology, culture, and politics. He studied Russian language and culture for five years and traveled in the former Soviet Union in 1990. In the midst of a larger autobiographical/cultural work, Matthew is the Director of Operations at YellowTimes.org. He lives in the United States.]

YellowTimes.org is an international news and opinion publication.  www.YellowTimes.org  Matthew Riemer encourages your comments: mriemer@YellowTimes.org

www.forbes.com Reuters, 01.30.03, 8:21 AM ET

CARACAS, Venezuela, Jan 30 (Reuters) - Striking Venezuelan oil workers said a recovery in oil output stalled on Thursday around 1 million barrels per day (bpd), or a third of pre-strike levels, while the government said it had risen to 1.4 million. The two sides are locked in a bitter battle for power over the world's fifth largest oil exporter, and have diverging estimates of activity levels at the country's oilfields, refineries and export terminals. Striking employees of state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) said in a daily report that output stood at 1.055 million bpd on Thursday, almost unchanged since Tuesday when it first topped the million mark. Energy and Mines Minister Rafael Ramirez said on Wednesday night that it had risen to 1.427 million bpd, up from the 1.320 million bpd reported by Chavez Sunday. This compared with pre-strike levels of 3.1 million bpd in November. "We are in a process of constantly increasing our oil production," Ramirez said on Wednesday night. Ramirez put the current level of exports at 544,000 bpd. "We have a constant flow of exports which is important for the country's foreign currency income," he added. The government has fired more than 5,000 PDVSA employees and has been using troops and replacement crews to try to break the strike. It has consistently been providing higher output estimates than the opposition. But both sides report a marked recovery in production since it hit a low of 150,000 bpd in December.