Posted on 05/01/2002 3:14:13 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
CARACAS - Officially, Bolivarian Circles are groups of poor Venezuelans organized by populist President Hugo Chávez to carry out such neighborhood activities as cleaning up garbage and fixing potholes.
But Chávez's opponents allege that they are armed gangs of pro-Chávez radicals and thugs who terrorize them, attack their street marches, shoot up their offices and cruise Caracas streets in menacing motorcycle packs.
Perhaps more than any other action, the creation of the Bolivarian Circles has heightened the impression -- consistently denied by Chávez -- that he is building his own political army. As a result, the groups have become a critical point of confrontation between the president and his opponents.
Opponents now say they've had enough of the Bolivarian Circles and are demanding that the president disarm and disband them as the first step toward the reconciliation that he promised following the April 11 coup attempt. The debate over the fate of these groups might go a long way toward resolving -- or deepening -- the political crisis engulfing Chávez.
`THE TALIBAN'
'These are the Taliban, thugs who commit every kind of abuse under the guise of `citizen activism' and are never punished by this government,'' said Caracas Mayor Alfredo Peña, a strong Chávez critic.
Like many other Chávez opponents, Peña alleged that the government has distributed pistols to hard-line supporters and sent some to Cuba for military training so they can help defend the president in times of unrest.
Cuban President Fidel Castro said two weeks ago that Chávez had holed up April 11 at the Miraflores presidential palace with ''300 Bolivarian cadres'' -- Marxist-speak for elite hard-liners. He did not say whether they were armed.
During the coup, anti-Chávez police raided Bolivarian Circle offices around the country, seizing a number of pistols and shotguns. Most were found to be legal and returned after Chávez resumed power April 13, officials said.
Chávez appeared chastened after the attempt to oust him, carried out by military officers angered by allegations that armed Bolivarian Circle members had fired on 200,000 opposition marchers on April 11, leaving 17 dead.
''If for some reason some member of a Bolivarian Circle is walking around armed, without authorization, well, then I urge them to abandon that attitude,'' he said last week. ``That way, we don't need them.''
Supporters insist that the 70,000 Circles around the country, each with seven to 11 members, are part of an inoffensive campaign to mobilize and organize poor Venezuelans because the government is too weak to help them.
''The problems of the country are so strong that the state cannot deal with them, so we want people to help themselves,'' said Freddy Bernal, mayor of the poor Caracas district of Libertador and a pro-Chávez firebrand accused of some of the Circles' worst excesses.
Though their country has the world's fourth largest oil reserves, 80 percent of Venezuela's 24 million people live in poverty, half lack full-time jobs, and 69 percent dropped out of school by age 14.
Named after independence war hero Simón Bolívar, the Circles will also eventually provide the citizen participation components required by some 90 articles in the 1999 Constitution, said Rodrigo Chaves, a senior organizer.
Elena Raspillo, 54, a widow, said her Circle in the Caracas slum of Chapellín runs a low-cost day-care center for the children of single mothers who work in overnight jobs such as garbage pickup and office cleaning.
Painter David Bello, 50, is part of a Bolivarian Circle that offers after-school art classes to children in the Libertador district. Teodoro Ruiz belongs to another that runs a sports program for school dropouts.
Other Circles run low-powered television and radio stations financed by the government to broadcast neighborhood news, and still others deliver food to the needy and transport the elderly to and from clinics.
Bernal insisted the Circles ''support government projects more than the president personally.'' A government pamphlet says they will ''defend the Bolivarian Revolution,'' Chávez's program in favor of poor Venezuelans.
But while the president's critics acknowledge that some Circles are innocuous, they assert that many others have acted aggressively to silence dissent and as neighborhood bullies extracting political loyalty to Chávez.
Soon after Chávez has fired rhetorical missiles at his critics in nationally broadcast addresses, Circle members have often turned up outside the targets' offices to protest and disrupt their business.
Opposition politicians and journalists from television stations and newspapers accused of being anti-Chávez have been pelted with rocks and bottles, and Peña said he believes some Circle members plan to kill him.
CUBAN INVOLVEMENT?
Some Circle members are clearly armed. But on the allegations of Cuban involvement, ''we have a lot of reports and frankly little hard evidence,'' said a U.S. State Department official who monitors Latin America.
Anti-Chávez street protests are often countered by gangs of motorcycle-riding presidential supporters, mobilized by broadcasts from the community TV and radio stations and brandishing steel bars and wooden sticks.
Some Circles recently proposed holding ''popular trials'' for Chávez opponents, and another sent an opposition lawmaker threatening e-mails listing her home address, her children's schools and friends who frequent her home.
Bernal blamed those actions on ''people who fell into extremist positions, who strayed from the line.'' He added: ``They took the concept of revolution and started becoming radical.''
One such radical is Lina Ron, a young zealot arrested on charges of provoking several violent street clashes earlier this year.
She also burned a U.S. flag on a Caracas plaza one day after U.S. jets began bombing Afghanistan last year, calling it ``terrorism.''
Ron's political faction, the People's Power Network, controls 45 Circles in the Libertador district ''and will always be here to defend our president,'' said her No. 2, Rosa González, 32, a social worker.
González denied that Circle members are armed, saying, ''our only weapon is the Constitution. Asked about pro-Chávez graffiti around Caracas signed by a mysterious ``Bolivarian Militia,'' González said it was the work of ``counter-revolutionaries trying to satanize the Bolivarian Circles.''
GUNMEN IDENTIFIED
One of the half-dozen gunmen filmed by TV crews as he fired at the April 11 opposition marchers has been identified as a Circle member.
Another was identified as a pro-Chávez councilman from Bernal's Libertador district.
An apparently remorseful Bernal said after the April 11 bloodshed that some of the opposition marchers were also armed but admitted that some of the Bolivarian Circles had overstepped their bounds.
''We have to redesign the Circles and make them get out of belligerent politics,'' he told The Herald.
''Not enough,'' opposition lawmaker Gerardo Blyde said. ``They must be disarmed and brought to trial for everything they have done, or the taste of para-legal gangs at the service of an authoritarian president will linger.''
Chavistas: Venezuelan street toughs: Helping "revolution" or crushing dissent?****CARACAS, Venezuela - From her bed in a Caracas military hospital, the wiry, chain-smoking prisoner vowed to continue a hunger strike and risk becoming the first death in Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's "revolution." "Comandante" Lina Ron, who considers herself a modern version of "Tania," a woman who fought alongside Cuban revolutionary Ernesto Che Guevara, says she is a willing martyr for Chavez's cause. She was arrested after leading a violent pro-Chavez counter-protest against demonstrating university students. Thousands follow her lead in Venezuela and they have increasingly quashed dissent, breaking up anti-government protests, intimidating journalists and alarming the president's critics.****
Venezuelans who saw the tape, replayed repeatedly on television, were outraged, blaming the gunmen and the government for shooting at a sea of unarmed antigovernment protesters.
But more than two weeks after 17 people died and another 100 were wounded in the incident, the worst case of political violence in Venezuela in a decade, new evidence has emerged that seems to show that the men on the bridge were exchanging gunfire with other armed men.
The evidence suggests that multiple gunmen - uniformed and civilian, pro- and anti-Chavez - fired weapons in the midst of the largest antigovernment demonstration in Mr. Chavez's turbulent three years in office.
The violence led to Mr. Chávez's temporary downfall when military officers, blaming the government for the deaths, publicly withdrew their support for the president.
It is unclear who actually aimed and fired into the crowds on the afternoon of April 11. But interviews with investigators, police officers and witnesses suggest that a gunfight took place across three blocks of Avenida Baralt, south of the Carmelitas Bridge, which was teeming with unarmed protesters.
At the same time, unidentified gunmen with rifles fired down from at least three tall buildings, hitting most victims in the head and upper body.
Only three people have been arrested in connection with the violence, civilian supporters of President Chávez who were captured on videotape firing from the bridge.
Investigators and some influential politicians and political activists say the evidence suggests that weapons were also fired by National Guard troops who blocked protesters from reaching the presidential palace, and by members of a police agency.
The police agencies include the Metropolitan Police, which answers to Mayor Alfredo Peña, a political opponent of Mr. Chávez, and the departments from two wealthy districts of the capital that stridently oppose the president, Baruta and Chacao.
Investigators say civilians with guns, opponents as well as supporters of the president, also fired weapons. Today, in a radio commentary, the president said he had deployed soldiers and tanks during the march, but only to control the disorder because the police and guardsmen were overwhelmed.
"What happened was what Venezuelans call a melee," said Rafael Simón Jiménez, first vice president of the National Assembly and a supporter of the president. "I think the National Guard fired. I think the Metropolitan Police fired. I think Chávez supporters fired. I think other people fired, including the Baruta and Chacao police and people from the opposition."
These reports come in a politically charged atmosphere in which stalwart supporters of the president in the National Assembly, the country's legislature, are trying to outflank opposition politicians to influence the direction of the inquiry.
Armed with amateur videotapes and photographs taken during the chaos, politicians have held news briefings to spread blame for the violence.
The investigation got off to a slow start when the director of the Technical Judicial Police, Venezuela's version of the F.B.I., was fired and a team of homicide investigators that had begun the probe was replaced.
Although an official explanation has not been given, two officials who worked in the initial stage of the investigation said Chávez administration officials had been angered by what they viewed as strong-arm tactics used by Judicial Police investigators who raided the homes of ministers in the two days Mr. Chávez was out of office.
The delay in replacing the investigative team meant that 12 days passed before crime scene experts arrived to look for evidence at the Carmelitas Bridge, a lapse that ensured that shell casings, fingerprints and other evidence had disappeared.
The lag, and the political sniping over who is responsible, have raised questions about the government's commitment to the investigation, said Liliana Ortega, a leading human rights worker who has criticized the government's investigation.
Indeed, some of the president's ministers have gone to great lengths to depict the gunmen as members of the Metropolitan Police or civilians hired by coup plotters.
Isaías Rodríguez, the national prosecutor, said the shooting might have been part of a well-organized plan to "produce a public commotion to serve as an argument or excuse for the events that took place later," meaning Mr. Chávez's removal. "It looked like a strategy," he said in an interview.
Mr. Rodríguez did not directly blame the police for killing unarmed demonstrators, but he said evidence showed that some police officers had taken part in the anti-Chávez demonstration, marching as civilians but carrying arms that might have been discharged in the chaos.
Metropolitan Police officials have angrily denied such assertions, saying instead that they were protecting protesters from pro-Chávez gunmen. "They are looking for a scapegoat, turning around what was a criminal problem into a political problem," said Iván Simonovis, the police commissioner.
Still, some police officers appear to have fired their service revolvers and standard-issue HK-MP5 submachine guns in self-defense, said two Metropolitan Police officers who spoke on condition that their names not be used. Their comments ran counter to those of senior police officials, who said in interviews that police officers had fired only rubber bullets from shotguns.
"If someone starts to shoot at me, I am going to shoot back," explained one officer, who said he had fired toward the Carmelitas Bridge with his HK-MP5. "They were not firing flowers at me."
Those on the bridge seemed to fire in various directions. A longer videotape of the bridge suggests that the gunmen there were exchanging shots with others a block away at the Eden Hotel.
"They say we were firing at the multitudes and protesters, and that is not true," said Richard Peñalver, a local pro-Chávez official who shot from the bridge and remains at large. In a telephone interview last week, he said gunmen from the hotel and a street below had shot toward the bridge, prompting him and others to shoot back.
His comments are backed up by a videotape of the shooting, as well as bullet marks on the hotel, the storefronts outside the hotel and an awning near the southeast corner of the bridge where most of the gunmen were firing.
Still, there is little else that is clear.
Police radio transmissions capture the disorder across several blocks of downtown streets.
In one, a dispatcher tells officers: "Get the people out! Get the people out!" as gunfire crackles and officers brace for shots from what they believe is a sniper. Interviews with investigators and the police show that aside from the Eden Hotel, gunmen might have been shooting from at least two other tall buildings, aiming directly below at terrified protesters.
"There were people who knew how to shoot long arms," said one investigator. "It is not easy to fire from 50 to 100 meters and hit someone in the head." [End]
Chavez also promised to soften his uncompromising style after one military and popular rebellion ousted him April 12 and another swept him back into power two days later. At least 50 people died and dozens were injured during that weekend of protests and rioting.
"We must acknowledge that there are still disruptive elements," Chavez said Tuesday after inaugurating the panel of economists, businessmen, labor leaders, journalists and church leaders.
"There are actors still seeking an unconstitutional way" of deposing the government, he added.
The so-called "Commission of National Dialogue" was charged with promoting tolerance in a country bitterly split over Chavez's rule. Chavez has alienated business associations, labor unions and civic groups with his fiery populist rhetoric, labeling them "oligarchs" and "enemies" of his efforts to ease poverty.
Since regaining power, Chavez has promised to reshuffle his economic Cabinet. Ruling party legislators are considering changing laws that expanded the government's control over the economy and prompted two national strikes.
Most opposition parties in Congress, however, dismissed Chavez's conciliatory gestures. Some are promoting a constitutional amendment to shorten the presidential term and convoke elections as soon as December.
Chavez holds a slim majority in Congress and can block those efforts.
Most key opposition figures - including the business group Fedecamaras, which played a central role in the attempted ouster, and the main labor confederation - did not attend Tuesday's ceremony.
Opposition lawmaker Liliana Hernandez said the commission appointed Tuesday amounted to "a virtual reconciliation."
"There was a time for dialogue and change of course and the government made a mockery of it," said Hernandez, a Justice First party member.
Chavez supporters and opponents planned separate demonstrations Wednesday amid tight security to prevent clashes.
A congressional commission investigating the role of political and business leaders, and the armed forces, during the violent demonstrations was scheduled to begin its questioning on Thursday. The first witness called is Pedro Carmona, the business leader who was sworn in as interim president for a day, and is now under house arrest. [End]
This is modeled after Castro's infamous Committees for the Defense of the Revolution.
Like many other Chávez opponents, Peña alleged that the government has distributed pistols to hard-line supporters and sent some to Cuba for military training so they can help defend the president in times of unrest.
Cuban President Fidel Castro said two weeks ago that Chávez had holed up April 11 at the Miraflores presidential palace with ''300 Bolivarian cadres'' -- Marxist-speak for elite hard-liners. He did not say whether they were armed. ***
BUMP!
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