Top Venezuela Union to Chavez No More Games

CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) - Venezuela's top union leader, who called workers onto the streets last week in convulsive protests that sparked a failed coup, told President Hugo Chavez on Saturday the time for games was over and he needed to change his ways to avoid worse bloodshed.

Carlos Ortega, head of the Venezuela Workers' Confederation (CTV) and critic of the paratrooper-turned-president, said both sides were sizing each other up after Chavez offered talks to settle simmering discontent with his autocratic rule.

He said Chavez had no choice but to change: "I think it's the only option open to him. He can't play around any more. ... It's all up to him now."

Months of mounting anger boiled over on April 11 into a huge anti-Chavez protest after three days of strikes that virtually paralyzed the country.

Seventeen people were killed when security forces and armed civilians opened fire on protesters, triggering a short-lived military coup against Chavez hours later.

Chavez bounced back to the helm of the world's No. 4 oil exporter last Sunday as loyalist officers rebelled and civilian supporters took to the streets. Dozens of people were killed in the protests and looting over four days.

"If he really doesn't change his attitude ... I really think we're going to see a similar, or worse, situation to the one we saw," Ortega said.

Ortega said there were reservations on both sides, but he had already held "tough" preliminary talks with Defense Minister Jose Vicente Rangel, who is acting as mediator, and would meet Chavez soon.

But he said everyone had to pitch in: "If we Venezuelans can't reach agreement, unfortunately, unavoidably, irrevocably, painfully, we'll be headed for civil war."

Chavez, a charismatic populist with wide support among Venezuela's poor majority, has apologized for mistakes in his three-year rule, but has yet to offer concrete concessions to opposition groups, which complain of his heavy-handed style and the left-leaning policies they say scare investors.

He looked to have resumed business as usual in a television interview aired on Friday, making clear he had no plans for a referendum on his rule, as some opponents want.

Ortega, who said he had received death threats since the coup, said he wanted real progress on his demands for more flexible contract negotiations to improve pay and conditions which the government had so far sidestepped.

Political analysts say the coup has split the military, which Chavez put at the center of his "revolution."

The military was shaken still further when the head of the air force, appointed only this week in the coup aftermath, was killed in a helicopter crash on Friday caused by bad weather.

He has called for a full investigation into the killings. A prominent human rights group said on Saturday at least three journalists had received death threats after reporting on the killings, which opposition groups blame on armed gangs and other allies of Chavez. The government says most of the dead were Chavez supporters.

Seventeen people were killed when security forces and armed civilians opened fire on protesters, triggering a short-lived military coup against Chavez hours later.

Chavez's security forces have been beefed up with Castro's agents and the armed civilians are Chavez's Bolivarian Circle Chavistas, also called thugs and looters.

Baltazar Porres, a senior Catholic bishop whom Chavez turned to for protection on the night of the coup, said last week's violence was a "machete blow to the soul of the Venezuelan people" and though Chavez' apologies for the errors of his rule were a good start "more has to be done." He has called for a full investigation into the killings. A prominent human rights group said on Saturday at least three journalists had received death threats after reporting on the killings, which opposition groups blame on armed gangs and other allies of Chavez.-- The government says most of the dead were Chavez supporters.

One of the dead was a reporter and I believe two others were wounded. Chavez has blamed unrest on the media (and just about everyone else) and his Chavistas have been terrorizing them for a long time. Interesting that in a protest numbering 500,000, reports had so many casualties.

Hugo Chavez -Venezuela

A very interesting column. Clash of Visions Pushed Venezuela Toward Coup *** Venezuela's military has long been one of the country's most admired institutions. The army comprises the vast majority of the military's 79,000 uniformed members, and is the most socially diverse and politically liberal of the service branches. The navy is one of its smallest forces, and considered the most exclusive. As recently as three decades ago, only the children of married parents were accepted into the naval academy that Molina attended.

When Chavez entered the army's academy in the early 1970s, a project by Venezuela's Communist Party to infiltrate the ranks with sympathizers was 10 years old. The project eventually fractured into ideological splinters, and Chavez became the head of a small group of leftist officers in the early 1980s that opposed the conservative government. In 1992, then-Lt. Col. Chavez led this group in a failed coup to topple President Carlos Andres Perez, an attempt that made him a national figure and paved the way for his election six years later.

Despite their different backgrounds,(Rear Adm. Carlos) Molina was too accomplished for Chavez to overlook: an officer with two master's degrees, fluent in four languages and an expert in signals intelligence, anti-submarine warfare and weapons systems on the frigates and destroyers that account for most of Venezuela's surface fleet. In November 2000, Chavez named Molina his national security adviser. Molina helped create an "intelligence center" at Miraflores, the presidential palace, designed, in the words of Chavez aides, to "monitor the social situation around the nation." Chavez opponents viewed the operation as another step toward a police state. Although part of Chavez's inner circle, Molina said last week, "I was a trusted man, but only relatively so."

Molina said he was alarmed by what he saw in his national security role. Without offering evidence, Molina said he discovered Chavez's "ties with and sympathies for" Colombia's Marxist guerrillas fighting a U.S.-backed government next door. He said Chavez brought in Cuban advisers to control dissent at home. Chavez has denied both charges. But Molina said that, beyond those specific security concerns, he became convinced that Chavez was carrying out a communist project that he began when he was a young army officer. "The evidence couldn't be more clear -- his attacks on civil society, the media, the church -- that he is turning this country into a large class struggle," Molina said.

After eight months, Chavez dismissed Molina. The president offered him the ambassadorship to Greece, which Molina declined. According to non-U.S. diplomats here who know him, Molina began last November to plan for Chavez's ouster with a group of dissident officers led by Air Force Col. Pedro Soto. But the sources said Molina broke with the group to join with a more powerful faction of senior navy and national guard officers who ended up in the provisional government this month. Soto is now one of three officers seeking asylum in the Bolivian embassy here. On the day of the coup, he was in Washington, attending a House committee hearing where Otto J. Reich, assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, was testifying. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), a staunch Castro opponent, introduced Soto as a "great patriot."*** Full article

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