Venezuelan Government Blames Opposition for Violence

CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) - Senior Venezuelan ministers said on Friday an opposition plot to topple President Hugo Chavez's administration by force was behind violent clashes with government loyalists in Caracas this week.

Interior Minister Luis Miquilena strongly denied that Chavez's ruling Fifth Republic Movement (MVR) had ordered hundreds of militants to attack some 2,000 anti-government demonstrators on Thursday on the streets of the capital.

More than a dozen people were injured in the most bloody political clashes since Chavez took office in 1999. It was the second anti-government demonstration to dissolve into violence in only two weeks.

``We have information this was a previously established plan put into effect yesterday with the objective of turning the march into a riot,'' Miquilena told a news conference.

``They wished to take advantage of that fiction circulating in the imagination of some deluded people that this government could be destabilized by converting any type of demonstration into a public disturbance,'' he added.

During Thursday's clashes, downturn Caracas was briefly turned into a battlefield, with riot police firing rubber bullets and tear gas to prevent some 300 Chavez loyalists armed with rocks and sticks from overrunning a legal demonstration.

Opposition party Democratic Action (AD) had convened the march to protests Chavez's use of special legislative powers to decree far-reaching economic reforms without consultation.

Miquilena, a veteran leftist politician, said aggressive demonstrators wearing MVR T-shirts and sporting Chavez's trademark red beret were probably agents provocateurs in disguise trying to discredit the government.

Should any of these rioters be identified as an MVR member, they would suffer disciplinary sanctions, Miquilena said.

Defense Minister Jose Vicente Rangel, previously an anti-corruption journalist and leftist presidential candidate, said some of the AD demonstrators arrived at the march carrying sticks and prepared to fight.

``There are some sectors which are using the Internet, word of mouth, and the telephone to insinuate that there could be a military coup if these type of disturbances continue,'' Rangel said, adding that an armed uprising was ``impossible''.

Recent opinion polls have shown Chavez's popularity falling to around 50 percent, from more than 80 percent when he took office three years ago.

Many voters have tired of his failure to deliver on campaign promises to tackle widespread poverty and crime in the world's No. 4 oil exporter. Chavez's current presidential term is due to expire in 2007.

``President Chavez's government does not have the desire to be repressive, neither by means of the police or through MVR's militants,'' Rangel said.

---Hugo Chavez---Fidel Castro

Venezuela's Chavez Declares Revolutionary Campaign ("anti-imperialist revolution")--- Among the ``revolutionary laws'' whose preparation Chavez said he was personally supervising, the Venezuelan leader mentioned a land law that would target owners of vast unproductive estates. ``What do these estate owners think, that they're just going to merrily carry on?'' he said.

Chavez also lambasted members of Venezuela's business elite who have been among his most vociferous critics. Blaming them for opposition campaigns against him and conspiracies to destabilize his government, he also accused many of them of failing to pay taxes and falsely declaring business losses.

He singled out owners of banks, newspapers, TV stations and soft drink companies and said a new tax law was being prepared that would toughen penalties against offenders. He threatened confiscation of properties. ``That's justice,'' he said.

[Excerpted from] Hillary Clinton and the Radical Left--Ever since abandoning the utopian illusions of the progressive cause, I have been struck by how little the world outside the left seems to actually understand it. How little those who have not inhabited the progressive mind are able to grasp the ruthless cynicism behind its idealistic mask or the fervent malice that drives its hypocritical passion for "social justice." .....

If others could understand your truth, you would not think of yourself as a "vanguard." You would no longer inhabit the morally charmed world of an elite, whose members alone can see the light and whose mission is to lead the unenlightened towards it. If everybody could see the promised horizon and knew the path to reach it, the future would already have happened and there would be no need for the vanguard of the saints.

That is both the ethical core and psychological heart of what it means to be a part of the left. That is where the gratification comes from. To see yourself as a social redeemer. To feel anointed. In other words: To be progressive is itself the most satisfying narcissism.

That is why it is of little concern to them that their socialist schemes have run aground, burying millions of human beings in their wake. That is why they don't care that their panaceas have caused more human suffering than all the injustices they have ever challenged. That is why they never learn from their "mistakes." That is why the continuance of Them is more important than any truth. …………… (snip)

……But you never had the honesty-then or now-to admit that. You told the lie then to maintain your influence and increase your power to do good (as only the Chosen can). And you keep on telling the lie for the same reason.

Why would you admit that, despite your tactical support for civil rights, you weren't really committed to civil rights as Americans understand rights? What you really wanted was to overthrow the very Constitution that guaranteed those rights, based as it is on private property and the individual-both of which you despise.

It is because America is a democracy and the people endorse it, that the left's anti-American, but "progressive" agendas can only be achieved by deceiving the people. This is the cross the left has to bear: The better world is only achievable by lying to the very people they propose to redeem.[End Excerpt]

Fidel Castro Finds Heir in Chavez-- Chavez has yet to confiscate property of national and international landholders, and he hasn't jailed his political opponents. Unlike other democratically elected leaders who preceded him, Chavez hasn't sent thugs to rough up or arrest Venezuelan journalists. He courts foreign investment in oil and natural gas at the same time as he condemns the evils of ``savage neoliberalism.''

Well he has now!

What is Hugo Chavez up to?

(November 8, 2001) -HUGO CHAVEZ SUPPORTERS ATTACK PARENTS protesting Chavez's education takeover--- A supporter of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez holds a brick and threatens the parents and teachers who marched against the government's proposed education reforms in Caracas, Venezuela, Thursday, Nov. 8. 2001. The demonstration ended in violence when the protesters were met by hundreds of Chavez supporters when they reached Congress.

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