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Today, lawyer Tulio Alvarez presented his final report on the fraud in the recall referendum, the evidence is truly remarkable once the analysis of the telecommunications is included. You can find Alvarez’ full report here, it is quite long and dense, but it has a lot of stuff in it. I am translating a shorter version to post on it and link to it. But let’s start at the beginning. Alvarez had hired a room at a local hotel (Eurobuilding) to hold his press conference. When the management of the hotel found out what the press conference was going to...

Parliamentary row disolves into fistfight A fistfight broke out between government and opposition MPs during a parliamentary debate in Venezuela. Rival members traded punches as tempers frayed in a row over a controversial media bill, reports the BBC. The incident forced a 10-minute suspension of proceedings in the National Assembly. Venezuelan television showed images of the brawl which began after the bill was slipped into the agenda against the opposition's wishes. It started when Nicolas Maduro, of President Hugo Chavez's Movement of the Fifth Republic, and Nicolas Sosa, of the opposition Movement for Socialism (MAS), started pushing and shoving each...

Former US President Jimmy Carter has endorsed official results showing Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez won Sunday's vote to remain in office. Mr Carter said his team of observers had also concluded there was a "clear difference in favour" of Mr Chavez. He was speaking after the opposition claimed there had been massive fraud in the referendum and called a protest. Later, at least three people were said to have been injured after gunmen fired at an anti-Chavez protest in Caracas. The head of the Organisation of American States, Cesar Gaviria, also said his monitors had not found "any element of...

CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) - Three Venezuelan government ministers, who did not want to be identified, said on Monday that President Hugo Chavez had easily survived a referendum on whether to recall him.

August 13, 2004 -- SUNDAY is a red-letter day for democracy and for the price of oil: Vene zuelans vote on a referendum on whether to recall President Hugo Chavez. Long a friend of the United States and since 1958 one of Latin America's most stable democracies, Venezuela stands at a crossroads, headed for either democracy or Cuban-style socialism. Elected fair and square in 1998, Chavez took office with sky-high popularity on a reform platform. But he has since donned the cloak of political strongman, run the economy into the ground and helped roil world oil markets. Plus, he's a...

By JORGE RUEDA Associated Press Writer CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) - Outraging Venezuela's opposition, President Hugo Chavez has conscripted the military and the broadcast media in his bid to defeat an August recall referendum. On Tuesday, Chavez presided over the graduation of hundreds of officers from military academies. He forced all of Venezuela's broadcast media to show the event, using a law that allows him to take over the airwaves for matters of national importance. But opposition leaders charge that Chavez violated an agreement in which the government and private media pledged to give equal time to both sides in the...

Venezuelan Recall Vote Set for Aug. 15 35 minutes ago CARACAS, Venezuela - President Hugo Chavez will face a recall referendum, the elections council said Tuesday, setting the date of Aug. 15 for the vote. Venezuela's opposition had compiled 2.54 million votes to demand the recall, surpassing the 2.43 million needed as set by the constitution, elections council president Francisco Carrasquero said It was the first formal announcement by the council that Chavez would face a recall since the officials projected a likely vote based on preliminary signature totals last week. Chavez has since accepted that he would face a...

John Kerry, the Bay State boy toy, launched a scathing attack on the neo-communist leader of Venzuela, Hugo Chavez today, accusing him of being a "dubious democrat", and upsetting the possiblity of getting an endorsement from the Venezuelan. This skirmish between the two leftist leaders has upset some in the Kerry camp, who supported Chavez in his Revolution that brought him back to power two years ago. One anguished Kerry supporter took to the internet, and in a missive laden with profanity, opined: F* Kerry, what a piece of sh*t. This kind of crap really pisses me off. As much...

CARACAS, Feb 5 (IPS) - Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez would be defeated by a wide margin in any election or any referendum on his mandate, according to two private polling firms that released their survey results here Wednesday. Polls conducted in 64 cities and in rural areas show ''consistently since late 2001 that, at a ratio of around 70-30, the electorate would vote against Chávez,'' Luis León, director of the Datanálisis firm, told the foreign press. In a potential referendum to revoke Chávez's mandate -- a vote that the opposition is seeking and which the Constitution allows as of August...

One of the most difficult points to put across to foreign readers, especially those who may be inclined to sympathize with a leftwing regime in a poor country, is the consistently, systematically, unabashedly deceptive nature of the Chavez regime. It's not that regime leaders lie now and then about this or that, it's that lying is their default mode, standard operating procedure, on most issues most of the time. This list contains just 100 particularly public and blatant lies - but comes very far from exhausting the possibilities. In a proper democracy, any one of these lies would have set...

If you think Venezuela's leftist President Hugo Chávez was out of his mind when he broke the last vestige of diplomatic etiquette and called President Bush ''a jerk'' in his three-hour speech to the nation Sunday, you may be wrong. The majority view among senior U.S. officials and Latin American diplomats is that Chávez, the former army coup plotter who was elected in 1998 and has since driven his country on an increasingly authoritarian path, has made a decision to provoke the United States into an all-out confrontation and to radicalize his ''Bolivarian'' revolution. It sounds crazy for Chávez to...

CARACAS, Venezuela - Clashes between police and thousands of protesters pressing for the recall of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez overshadowed a summit of developing nations, with at least two people killed and dozens injured. AP Photo   The confrontation came Friday as Chavez opened a two-day summit with the leaders of 18 other developing nations in Caracas, urging them to reject free-market policies imposed by industrialized nations. "Globalization has not brought expected independence. It has increased dependence. ... It has extended poverty," Chavez said. "Free market ideology was created by the North to serve its own interests." Near the summit...

<p>Clashes between police and thousands of protesters pressing for the recall of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez overshadowed a summit of developing nations, with at least two people killed and dozens injured. The confrontation came Friday as Chavez opened a two-day summit with the leaders of 18 other developing nations in Caracas, urging them to reject free-market policies imposed by industrialized nations. "Globalization has not brought expected independence. It has increased dependence. ... It has extended poverty," Chavez said. "Free market ideology was created by the North to serve its own interests."</p>

International observers are likely to leave Venezuela in the next few weeks, diplomats said on Thursday, as Hugo Chávez, president, creates further obstacles meant to block an opposition drive for a recall vote on his rule Mr Chávez's opponents in December filed a petition with nearly 3.6m signatures demanding a presidential recall vote - 30 per cent more signatures than are required to trigger a referendum. If a recall vote is held before August and Mr Chávez loses, as some opinion polls predict he would, fresh presidential elections would be required. But the national electoral council (CNE) is already weeks...

CARACAS, Venezuela -- The U.S. State Department revoked the visas of 17 pilots who fly the Caracas-Miami route for the privately owned Aeropostal Alas de Venezuela airline, the company's president said. The local El Universal quoted Nelson Ramiz on Friday as saying the visas for pilots subcontracted by the airline were suspended last week without any explanation from the U.S. government. Ramiz said the airline has requested an explanation from the U.S. consul in Venezuela, but has yet to receive an answer. Aeropostal, said Ramiz, was temporarily contracting U.S. pilots to cover the route, Venezuela's most popular international route, so...

The fundamental reason given by the group now in power to go ahead with a “revolution” was the poverty suffered by the bulk of the population, while the few rich enjoyed wonderful homes, luxury cars, jewels and exotic foods. This was not fair, said the “revolutionaries” ... this is why, in 1992, they tried twice to overthrow the democratically-elected government. They failed, but some 200 Venezuelans died, mostly poor and middle class. They did not die fighting on the side of the revolution but mostly as innocent bystanders or fighting against it. The leader of the rebels went to prison...

In February 2003, when Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez fired over 18,000 Petroleos de Venezuela employees (of which three-quarters were managers, engineers and technicians), after they had joined the December 2002 national strike against his government, his hatred for the brave men and women of the Venezuelan oil industry turned to brutality. Chavez’s cruelty reached a peak on September 25, when his goons savagely attacked, house-by-house, oil families sleeping in their beds, in the oil camp of Los Semerucos on the Paraguana Peninsula (where the Amuay and Cardon refineries are located). The attack against the families of former PDVSA employees commenced...

CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who faces a referendum challenge from political opponents, has canceled a planned visit to the United States next week that included an address to the U.N. General Assembly, government sources said on Tuesday. Besides the United Nations (news - web sites) in New York, the left-wing Venezuelan leader had been planning to visit the Organization of American States in Washington and the oil industry city of Houston in a Sept 25-29 trip. "He's not going to either Washington or the U.N ... he prefers to concentrate on affairs at home," one government...

Potentially damaging to the opposition is that the ruling appears to exclude from participation in future referendum petitions the nongovernmental organization Súmate, which coordinated the February operation. Súmate has a network of tens of thousands of volunteers throughout the country, ready to assist with a fresh petition. But the electoral council's view is that Súmate ''does not represent civil society'' and cannot therefore play any role. There was no immediate reaction from the organization itself.……………………….………………………Flores told reporters that Article 72 of the constitution, which establishes the recall referendum, ''makes it clear that there can only be one request'' for such...

<p>Venezuela's Economy Shrank 9.4% in the Second Quarter (Update3) Sept. 1 (Bloomberg) -- Venezuela's economy shrank 9.4 percent during the three months ended in June, led by a decline in construction, as the country's worst recession on record entered a sixth quarter.</p>