Posted on 04/14/2002 4:01:40 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
LINKS to Hugo Chavez's "government" June 2001 - March 2002
I'm keeping track of Hugoland formally known as Venezuela. Please LINK any stories or add what you wish to this thread. The above LINK takes you to past articles posted before the new FR format. Below I'll add what I've catalogued since that LINK no longer could take posts.
(March 1, 2002)-- Venezuela's strongman faces widespread calls to step down
By Phil Gunson | Special to The Christian Science Monitor
[Full Text] CARACAS, VENEZUELA - The man who won Venezuelan hearts three years ago as a strongman who could deliver a better life to the masses is now facing them in the streets.
More than 20,000 people turned out this week calling for the resignation of President Hugo Chávez, while some 2,000 supporters marched in a rival demonstration of support. The demonstrations come after months of building discontent with a president who has managed to alienate the labor class, the media, business groups, the church, political parties, and the military.
Four military leaders have publicly called for his resignation.
In November, Chávez introduced 49 "revolutionary" decrees. The package of laws - affecting everything from land rights and fisheries to the oil industry - unified virtually the whole of organized society in a nationwide business and labor stoppage that paralyzed the country on Dec. 10.
The protests this week have a note of irony, because they started out as a commemoration called by President Chávez. In his eyes, Feb. 27 is a milestone of his so-called revolution - "the date on which the people awoke" in 1989. That is when thousands of rioters and looters took to the streets in protest of an IMF-backed austerity plan, in which the government hiked gas prices.
In what became known as the caracazo, or noisy protest, thousands of rioters and looters were met by Venezuelan military forces, and hundreds were killed. Three years later, Chávez and his military co-conspirators failed in an attempt to overthrow the government responsible for the massacre, that of President Carlos Andres Perez. Chávez was jailed for two years.
"But the elements that brought about the caracazo are still present in Venezuela," says lawyer Liliana Ortega, who for 13 years has led the fight for justice on behalf of the victims' relatives. "Poverty, corruption, impunity ... some of them are perhaps even more deeply ingrained than before."
Chávez's supporters consist of an inchoate mass of street traders, the unemployed, and those whom the old system had marginalized. This, to Chávez, is el pueblo - the people.
"But we are 'the people' too," protests teacher Luis Leonet. "We're not oligarchs like he says. The oligarchs are people like Chávez, people with power."
On Wednesday, Leonet joined a march led by the main labor confederation, the CTV, to protest what unions say is a series of antilabor measures, including one of the 49 decrees dealing with public-sector workers.
Chávez won't talk to the CTV, whose leaders, he says, are corrupt and illegitimate. So he refuses to negotiate the annual renewal of collective contracts with the confederation, holding up deals on pay and conditions for hundreds of thousands of union members like Leonet.
Across town on Wednesday, a progovernment march sought to demonstrate that the president's popularity was as high as ever.
"For the popular classes, Chávez is an idol," says marcher Pedro Gutierrez.
Pollster Luis Vicente Leon, of the Datanalisis organization, warns that marches are no measure of relative popularity. "There is a lot of discontent among ... the really poor," Leon says, adding that so far the protests are mainly among the middle class.
But the middle class can be a dangerous enemy. It includes the bulk of the armed forces, and the management of the state oil company, PDVSA.
This month, four uniformed officers, ranging from a National Guard captain to a rear-admiral and an Air Force general, called on the president to resign, while repudiating the idea of a military coup of Chávez, himself a former Army lieutenant-colonel.
But senior "institutionalist" officers "are under severe pressure from lower ranks frustrated at the lack of impact" that these acts have had, a source close to military dissidents says. In other words, a coup cannot be ruled out, although the United States publicly denounces the idea.
Meanwhile, the president's imposition of a new board of directors on PDVSA this week sparked a virtual uprising by the company's senior management. In an unprecedented public statement, managers said the government was pushing the company "to the verge of operational and financial collapse" by imposing political, rather than commercial, criteria.
The political opposition remains relatively weak and divided. But in the view of many analysts, a president who offends both the military and the oil industry is asking for trouble. In the bars and restaurants of Caracas, the debate is no longer over whether Chávez will finish his term, which has nearly five years to run. It is when and how he will go - and what comes next. [End]
Much of the business - legal and illegal - is controlled by a population of 30,000, mainly Shia Muslim Arabs who fled the Lebanese civil war. They run their enterprises from the shabby shopping malls and chaotic streets of Ciudad del Este but usually live in the more affluent Foz. Among them is a small but dedicated hardcore of militant Muslims. For years, often under the guise of charitable donations, millions of dollars have flowed from the Triple Frontier to Hizbollah, the Iranian-backed militant Lebanese Shi'ite faction. Money was also raised for Hamas, the Palestinian extremist group.
Despite a limited crackdown and handful of arrests by the Paraguayan authorities, David Aufhauser, the outgoing United States Treasury Department official on terrorist funding, last month described the Triple Frontier zone as home to a "rich marriage of drugs and terror". A senior US State Department official said: "In terms of terrorist financing, the area is a black hole."
The money trail is complex and difficult to trace but The Telegraph has learnt that American intelligence officials have electronically monitored cash transfers via banks in Sao Paulo and North America to a web of accounts in the Middle East linked to Hizbollah and Hamas. They also disclosed that the US has been using satellites to monitor telephone conversations in the area after learning that Middle East terror suspects were dialling so-called switching stations in Foz or Ciudad del Este and giving a password to have their calls re-routed to their destination.
The procedure made calls impossible to trace and avoided triggering interception mechanisms. More than a dozen switching stations have been found and closed down in recent months. To the frustration of the US, cracking down on the terror financing operations has been much more difficult, especially as Paraguay and Brazil want to resuscitate tourism at the falls and to avoid losing the Arabs' business acumen.
Corruption is rampant and financial controls have been lax for so long that they verge on the non-existent. Money-laundering is conducted through myriad front companies, under-invoicing is endemic and the plethora of foreign exchange offices, money-wiring companies and commercial banks offer ample scope for moving large sums unnoticed.
A recent Brazilian customs investigation indicated the scale of illicit financial movements through the Triple Frontier. It concluded that between 1996 and 2000, an estimated $35 billion (£22 billion) had been moved illegally from Brazilian accounts held in Foz via a Paraguayan bank in neighbouring Ciudad del Este to New York. "It is easy to understand Ciudad del Este," said a lawyer there. "All you need to know is that everyone here is a bandit."***
Like millions of poorly educated, impoverished Brazilians, dos Santos has always dreamed of a better life, a dream that invariably centers on owning a house and land.
Now he's closer to his dream than ever before.
An organizer for a Brazilian group called MST, the Portuguese acronym for "Landless Workers Movement," dos Santos joined about 300 other families last year in occupying a vacant, dusty tract about 20 miles north of Sao Paulo, Brazil's teeming industrial hub.
They are part of a growing wave of confrontational, sometimes violent land invasions by the poor across Brazil, a movement that has created a growing crisis for the new government of President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva -- himself a laborer who rose from poverty.
With his roots in the labor movement, da Silva raised great hopes among the landless, who gave him their solid support and ended their invasions for several months after his January inauguration in the belief he would quickly answer their demands.
But da Silva has moved cautiously on the landless issue, prompting a new round of land invasions that have sometimes turned bloody.
Outraged landowners have banded together and hired armed guards to protect their property, while dozens of landless protesters have been killed in clashes with police and guards.
With each side dug in, the crisis seems on the verge of exploding.
"The law allows us to defend our land," said Marcos Menezes Prochet, head of a landowners group called the Union of Democratic Ruralists in the southern state of Parana. "We are the ones being attacked, not the opposite. What creates violence is not our armed guards, but the invasion of our lands."
Prochet's farm was invaded six years ago by peasants armed with guns, knives and agricultural tools, he said. The men held him hostage for several hours, then occupied his ranch for several months before he could win a court order to have them removed.
"This movement, MST, is not a social movement," he said. "They are a political, ideological movement and their goal is socialism, the expropriation of land with no payments to the owners, just like in Communist Russia." ***
MARIA ISOLIETT IGLESIAS EL UNIVERSAL - [full text] The Altamira Plaza activist who was illegally arrested on Friday October 31 octubre, was found as if by magic by CICPC agents, Thursday 11:00 pm in Valencia.
According to the police report by Silvio Daniel Mérida Ortiz, he was taken by his captors to a hut near Valencia, where he was forced to sit at gunpoint until the arrival of the CICPC Immediate Rescue Unit who rescued him but did not make any arrests.
Between torture and hoods
Silvio Daniel Mérida Ortiz was captured, illegally, on Friday October 31 by civilians who arrived at Block 7 in the El Silencio [district] executing a police raid. Since that day, until Thursday November 6, he was held somewhere [outside Caracas].
During this week he was victim of constant torture. He was hung for 12 continuous hours by his wrists, they put a cigarette out on his skin, they whipped his back, applied electric shock to his feet, and shoved his head into a toilet, in order to make him reveal, according to his attorneys Guillermo Heredia and Rigoberto Quintero, if he had any knowledge of ties between the Altamira military dissidents and bombs detonated at diplomatic facilities, and possible insurrection by the opposition.
Place and date
The reason for the liberation of Mérida Ortiz is questionable and still has no coherent answer.
The actions by police following the rescue have arroused questions. They interrogated him two hours after finding him, without his lawyers present, he slept cuffed to the legs of his cell bunk, and the forensic report made [in Valencia] made no mention of physical damage, but according to his mother... where, at the hearing to present charges, they could not even put the handcuffs on him "because his wrists were lacerated". [end]
The decision was a blow to a program that President Hugo Chávez has hailed as a cornerstone of his professed ''revolution'' for Venezuela's poor majority. The program is one of several initiatives into which the government has poured millions of dollars ahead of a possible recall referendum on Chávez's rule next year.
The ruling was a victory for Venezuela's medical establishment, which argues the so-called ''Inside the Slum'' program violates laws requiring foreign doctors to pass equivalency exams before practicing here. Chávez's political foes claim the program seeks to indoctrinate the poor with socialist ideals, charges the government denies.
Former Health Minister María Urbaneja and Freddy Bernal, the mayor of the Caracas district where most of the Cuban doctors work, had challenged the lower court's Aug. 21 decision to suspend the program until about 1,000 Cuban doctors working in Caracas take equivalency exams.
The Supreme Court declined to hear their appeal, arguing neither official was qualified to file cases in representation of collective interests, according to a statement released by the Supreme Court. [end]
More than a year later, experts on Latin America tell this magazine that Washington's soft line on Chavez in Venezuela adversely is affecting U.S. security and the stability of the entire region. This hands-off policy toward Chavez seems to originate from the highest levels of the Bush administration, these foreign-policy specialists say, and has evolved to the point of negligence of a crisis that already constitutes the greatest threat to regional stability since Castro took power in Cuba in 1959. Indeed, even as Congress has been intent upon removing travel restrictions to Castro's island prison, say these regional specialists, the Cuban leader is working with Chavez to destabilize governments in the region.
A senior U.S. official who worked in Venezuela during the rise of Chavez speaks with grudging admiration of the Venezuelan leader's classic Marxist-Leninist approach to expanding power: two steps forward, one step back. "Chavez is constantly underestimated by people who do not understand his patient, methodical approach to recruiting and strategy," says this retired Army officer. "Chavez never provokes the U.S. or other nations, but instead works obliquely to erode the position of his enemies."
As an example of Chavez's successful approach, the official cites U.S. Ambassador to the Organization of American States (OAS) John Maisto, a former ambassador to Venezuela and Nicaragua. He reports that Maisto was the chief exponent of what the source calls the absurd argument that Chavez is a democrat at heart and that the United States should not "push" Chavez into the arms of Castro. "Maisto did the same thing in Nicaragua," says the official, "until Washington lit a fire under him." In fact, this observer says, Chavez has been a radical all his life, influenced by Marxist and authoritarian political theorists, and has been expanding his influence in the region using his links to Cuba and terrorist groups in the Middle East [see "Fidel May Be Part of Terror Campaign," Dec. 3, 2001, and "Fidel's Successor in Latin America," April 30, 2001]. ***
The announcement comes less than a month after Chavez restored control of the capital's police department to the mayor of Caracas, one of his opponents.
"Faced with the problem of crime and public insecurity, the federal government cannot cross its arms," the president said in a speech at Venezuela's Military Academy in Caracas.
Chavez did not say when the military police would be deployed in the capital and its suburbs, beefing up the 9,000-member city force.
Metropolitan Police Chief Lazaro Forero has said violent crime has increased because his officers are often outgunned by criminals. There have been about 1,800 murders in Caracas so far this year, compared to 1,435 homicides in 2002, he said.
In November 2002, the army took control of all police stations in Caracas and confiscated the department's automatic weapons and shotguns, leaving officers to patrol with revolvers.
On Oct. 10, the federal government relinquished control of the stations and dispatched national guardsmen to patrol the capital, but did not return the weapons. Chavez ordered the takeover after accusing the Metropolitan Police force of aiding a botched 2002 coup. [end]
The decision came after weeks of pleading by opposition leaders to allow Venezuelans abroad to participate in the Nov. 28-Dec. 1 signature drive.
Council vice president Ezequiel Zamora said three council members approved the ruling while the two others abstained, arguing the decision was unconstitutional. The council is made up of two pro-Chávez members, two opposition sympathizers and a ''neutral'' president.***
World is shrinking
By creating the Free Trade Area of the Americas, the United States and our hemispheric neighbors have a historic opportunity to shape open markets for our collective benefit. The 34 trade ministers meeting this week in Miami can play a pivotal role in moving the process forward. They must focus on the prosperity that an integrated hemispheric market could ultimately bring to each nation and work constructively through the disagreements that naturally exist.
The reality is that the world already is globalizing. No one can turn back that tide. Nor should they want to. Our best hope is to prepare for the inevitable future -- and do so before our economies are pounded by other trading blocs and low-cost China. We welcome discussion on how best to do so by all sides. Free speech is alive and well in Miami, and we should see it in many peaceful debates and demonstrations this week. It will include, for example, the participation for the first time of civil-society groups as a part of the official FTAA conference. The meeting also will be an opportunity for Miami to shine and remind visiting dignitaries of how good it would be for an FTAA headquarters to be located here, if there were to be an FTAA agreement -- even though site selection isn't a central focus of this week's agenda.
Ideally the FTAA could spur economic growth throughout the hemisphere. Industries and firms with strong competitive advantages would have ample opportunities to profit from access to the world's largest open marketplace: More than 800 million people in 34 countries, from Canada's Northwest Territories to Argentina's Patagonia. ***
State prosecutor Danilo Anderson said the judge gave the order after authorities produced evidence implicating Gen. Felipe Rodriguez and Lts. German Varela and Jose Colina in the Feb. 25 blasts that badly damaged a technical office of the Spanish mission and Colombia's consulate. Five people, including a 4-year-old girl, were injured in the blasts.
"We are trying to locate these individuals," Anderson told reporters. The three were believed to be in hiding.
Opponents of leftist President Hugo Chavez say the accusations against the three officers are part of a government campaign to discredit the opposition before a Nov. 28-Dec. 1 drive to collect signatures for a referendum to try to vote Chavez out of office. ***
The attack killed one person and injured 72, including at least one American. It was the first time rebels had tried to target U.S. citizens in a terrorist-style attack in Bogotá.
Three U.S. government contractors are being held as prisoners of war by Colombia's largest rebel group after their plane crashed in rebel territory last February. A fourth American and a Colombian soldier who were aboard the plane were executed by members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as the FARC.
The rebels have been angry at the United States because over the past three years, it has provided $2.5 billion to Colombia to help the government battle rebels and drug traffickers.
A man, identified by police as a member of a commando unit of the FARC, threw hand grenades into two bars Saturday night. Both bars — the Bogotá Beer Company and Palos de Moguer — were popular with U.S. soldiers, contractors, journalists and other expatriates. *** [A bit off topic, Telemundo was just reporting that a Venz congressman charges that 11,000 Cubans have been brought in as a "parallel" army. Just thought I'd throw that out there. I've been hearing similar things for years now, but this is the first time I had heard such a figure. I have no idea if it is realistic. 2 posted on 11/20/2003 10:05 PM EST by marron ]
Under the gaze of rifle-toting soldiers, thousands of Venezuelans signed petitions demanding recall votes for 38 lawmakers. Results were expected within a month.
The four-day sign-up, a bid to strengthen Chavez's hold on Congress, came as his opponents gear up for their own petition drive — also a recall campaign — set to start next Friday.
The Organization of American States views a presidential recall referendum as a peaceful way to resolve a conflict threatening the stability of one of the world's largest oil producers. Any vote on Chavez's term, which runs to 2007, would likely occur next year.
Chavez has vowed to defeat the effort, just as he survived a coup in 2002 and a punishing general strike earlier this year. In recent months he has spent millions of dollars on programs designed to feed, house and educate Venezuela's majority poor.
"We have to kick out those obstructing the revolution," said Diana Trejo, an unemployed woman who signed Chavez's petition Friday. "All of this (government spending) benefits the poor who always have been excluded in this country."
A former army paratrooper, Chavez led a failed coup in 1992, was imprisoned for two years and was elected president in 1998 on an anti-corruption platform. He ushered in a new constitution, won a new six-year term and seized control of Congress in subsequent elections.
Since then, more than a dozen lawmakers have abandoned the Chavez camp to protest his inability to fight crime or create jobs. Many cite fears he wants to impose a Cuban-style dictatorship in this South American nation. Chavez's Fifth Republic Movement now has a single-digit majority in Congress. ***
The economist affirmed that this system, which has been applied with success in many western nations, can not take hold in Latin America despite the fact that the majority of countries in the region fulfill all of the measures required by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
De Soto said that to establish a market economy in Peru, it is not necessary to have natural resources, innovation, nor education, although the latter is important. “What we need is an efficient reform of the State that would include the informal business sector, who unlike the big investors do not have the support they need. You have to remember that 80% of Peruvians do not have access to the instruments of a market economy and because of that do not support it, nor are they even interested in preserving it, he said.
Nevertheless, the economist pointed out that the main problem for Peru is not economic, but legal, and that for this reason the creation of a legal structure that will permit the development of a market economy is absolutely necessary. A president who lacks leadership can not carry out a reform of the State. He must lead, be committed, and be convinced of the reforms, to create entrepreneurial structures adequate to the reality of the country, to establish law so that all Peruvians can operate on a larger scale, and establish property titles in order to create capital.
With respect to the statements by the prime minister Beatriz Merino, who said a massive layoff of workers was not necessary in order to reform the State, De Soto said that Merino ought to explain how to achieve it and that it would be interesting to know how they planned to implement the reforms and to what purpose.
The economist was against taxing banking transactions, as that would increase costs and increase the informal economy [end]
Under the gaze of rifle-toting soldiers, Chavez's Backers Stage Petition Drive
Near the square where the president signed, his supporters fired exploding firework rockets directly into surrounding apartments where anti-Chavez protesters had beaten pots and pans on balconies, witnesses said.
Brushing aside opinion polls that show two out of three Venezuelans would vote him out in a referendum, Chavez insists he will win and serve out his term until the end of 2006.
Chavez's foes accuse him of ruling like a dictator and of trying to install Cuba-style communism. He says his self-styled "revolution," including cheap credits and land grants for the poor, seeks to distribute Venezuela's oil wealth more equally. ***
The government's four-day signature drive came a week before Venezuela's opposition holds its own four-day petition drive to demand a recall vote against Chavez.
The government's recall effort against 37 of the 165 lawmakers is seen as a bid to strengthen Chavez's hold on Congress. To hold a recall referendum against the legislators, the government needs to obtain enough signatures to equal 20 percent of the vote that got each legislator elected.
Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel said the turnout was massive for the drive, which ended Monday. Officials results, however, will not be released for weeks, and opposition lawmakers rejected Rangel's claim.
Venezuela's Constitution allows for recalls halfway through an elected official's term - that was August for Chavez.
Opponents accuse Chavez of attempting to establish a dictatorial regime inspired by Cuba's Fidel Castro, mismanaging the economy and dividing this mostly poor country of 24 million along class lines.
Chavez accuses adversaries of trying to grab power to regain lost privileges rather than to improve living conditions for the poor majority. [end]
Several of those who handed in weapons Tuesday before dignitaries and journalists acknowledged that their neatly pressed camouflage garb was given to them for the ceremony, and that they normally dressed in civilian clothes. After the ceremony, authorities took the disarmed fighters to a social club equipped with a swimming pool and a soccer pitch in La Ceja, outside Medellin. The fighters are to spend the next three weeks there healing their scars and learning new jobs.
But an editorial in Medellin's main daily, El Colombiano, said three weeks was not enough time to ensure the fighters have fully renounced violence. "It is not prudent to sing victory already," the editorial said.***
Opposition leaders are hoping for a resounding victory. If they collect well over the threshold number of names, "the President will be a lame duck," says Henrique Salas Romer, an opposition presidential contender. But Chavez may not go easily even if a recall referendum were to win. The danger remains that his supporters and opponents alike could take to the streets -- and that Chavez could declare a state of emergency. Venezuela's political struggle is far from over.***
"If an act of violence occurs, a coup attempt, or subversion ... and a television station is involved in it, be assured that it will be taken off the air," said Chavez during a speech at the presidential palace.
Chavez has recently accused dissident soldiers and radical opposition groups of plotting to spur violence during a Nov.28-Dec. 1 signature drive for a presidential recall.
News media owners responded by saying they had not been asked to broadcast ads. Still, they offered to air voting information approved by elections authorities before an opposition petition drive this weekend to demand a presidential recall vote.
Chavez claimed that Venezuela's private television stations were refusing to broadcast paid government advertising.
Marcel Granier, general director of RCTV television, and Victor Ferreres, director of Venevision, told reporters that none of Venezuela's private TV stations had been asked to air pro-government ads.
Also Wednesday, the Inter-American Press Association urged Chavez's government to respect press freedoms during the recall drive.
Opposition groups are trying to drum up support for the drive, claiming Chavez is trying to impose a socialist state. More than 2.4 million signatures must be collected to force the recall, which would be held next year. Chavez's term runs to 2007.
Chavez allies said Tuesday they had collected enough signatures during their own petition drive last weekend to force recall votes against 37 opposition lawmakers and so increase their majority in congress. [end]
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