Posted on 01/24/2003 4:51:59 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
CARACAS, Venezuela - President Hugo Chavez told hundreds of thousands of wildly cheering supporters at a rally the country would defend his self-styled revolution against "fascist oligarchs" come what may.
It was one of the largest pro-Chavez rallies of his presidency and was held Thursday in part to protest a 53-day-old strike intended to unseat him.
An explosion near a subway station, located one block from the march, killed one person and injured 14, Fire Chief Rodolfo Briceno said. The cause of the blast wasn't immediately known.
At the rally, which jammed several blocks of a major avenue, Chavez accused strike leaders and Venezuela's news media of trying to succeed where a brief April coup failed. Dissident generals briefly ousted Chavez on April 11 only to have loyalists return him to power two days later.
Chavez referred to four private television stations that have supported the strike as "the four horsemen of the Apocalypse," and he threatened to pull the broadcast licenses of the stations.
"The Venezuelan people don't want violence," said Chavez. "But it's convenient to remind the coup-plotting, fascist oligarchy attempting to overthrow the Bolivarian government that the Venezuelan people are willing to defend their government."
Chavez claims the ideology of his so-called "Bolivarian Revolution," is based on the thoughts and writings of Venezuela's 19th century independence hero Simon Bolivar.
"It's easy to call the opposition fascist, coup-plotting and terrorist when it is obvious you are the only one who doesn't respect the constitution," strike leader Juan Fernandez countered.
The march marked the 45th anniversary of the fall of the country's last dictator, Marcos Perez Jimenez, and came a day before Friday's first meeting in Washington of the "Group of Friends," six nations that have offered to help Venezuela find a way out of its crisis.
The meeting will consider two plans presented this week by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter to end the strike and hold early elections.
Venezuela's Supreme Court this week rejected on a technicality a move to hold a nonbinding referendum on Feb. 2 on whether Chavez should quit.
Chavez said late Wednesday he welcomed international help but warned against outside intervention in Venezuela's internal affairs. He urged the group - Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Portugal, Spain and the United States - to recognize that his is an elected government and to not give equal weight to what he calls an "undemocratic" opposition.
Opposition leaders contend Chavez's leftist policies have damaged business and scared away foreign investment. They called the strike on Dec. 2 to force him from office. The work stoppage has damaged the oil industry in Venezuela, the world's fifth-largest exporter and a top supplier to the United States.
The strike has affected world oil prices, and cost the government $4 billion in lost revenue.
The state news agency Venpres quoted Ali Rodriguez, president of the state owned oil monopoly Petroleos de Venezuela S.A., as saying most blue-collar workers and half of administrators had returned to work. Rodriguez also said crude production has surpassed 1 million barrels per day.
Fedepetrol, Venezuela's largest oil workers union, insisted 17,000 of its 20,000 workers remained on strike. Striking executives, meanwhile, said Venezuela had raised oil production to 812,000 barrels per day. Pre-strike production was about 3.2 million barrels per day.
Facing an economic crisis, the government Wednesday suspended for five business days all foreign currency trading. Venezuelans worried about the future of their currency, the bolivar, have been rushing to buy U.S. dollars to protect themselves.
Chavez said Thursday that some sort of currency controls would go into effect next Wednesday.
Asked who paid just how much for Thursday's demonstration, a presidential spokesman said, ''That's impertinent. That's not informing,'' and hung up. José Vegas, a city administrator from Barranca, insisted that nobody received ''one cent'' from the government. The buses from his city, he said, were paid with ``personal money of the mayor and his friends.''***
From its seedy Soviet-built headquarters in Budapest, the World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY), created half a century ago as an international Soviet-front organization under the control of the Soviet Communist Party Central Committee and the KGB, and somehow still alive, goaded the protesters on with inflammatory statements of support. When the Genoa violence subsided, WFDY issued a release saluting the protesters and condemning vehemently "the brutal and cruel attack and treatment of the demonstrators by the Italian security forces" and the "cold-blooded killing" of a masked protester who was trying to slam a fire extinguisher through a police-car window.
"In the 1980s we observed that Marxist-Leninist antidemocratic groups were consistently supported and helped by misguided members of the left wing of the Social Democratic parties in Europe and a number of other regions," says Constantine C. Menges, a former national intelligence officer at the CIA who is now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington. "Regrettably, they seem to have learned little from the revelations that followed the unraveling of communism in Eastern Europe, and it appears that many of these misguided groups and individuals are back supporting antidemocratic, radical causes. As examples, they are supporting the [Hugo] Chavez regime in Venezuela and the communist guerrillas in Colombia."
Inspired by Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi and Cuba's Fidel Castro, military strongman Chavez is turning oil-rich Venezuela into a populist, anti-U.S. dictatorship, say U.S. intelligence sources. They tell Insight that Chavez is providing a safe haven for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) narcoguerrillas, an 18,000-man insurgency that began decades ago as an offshoot of the local Communist Party and still clings to Marxist-Leninist ideology.
U.S. policy during the Clinton administration provided Colombia, a country twice as large as France, with the means to combat drug producers and traffickers but deliberately restricted the use of U.S.-supplied military equipment to prevent Bogotá from effectively fighting the FARC. A U.S.-brokered "peace" process helped give the FARC a protected sanctuary the size of Switzerland in the heart of the country. Now, Colombia faces the prospect of disintegration as the cocaine- and heroin-financed FARC gains military ground.
Economic hard times and the difficult transitions from populist welfare-state regimes to market-based systems are creating hardship and malaise across much of Latin America, including Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) member Ecuador and industrial powerhouses Argentina and Brazil. Far-left politicians now run the Western Hemisphere's most populous cities: Mexico City and São Paulo, Brazil. Masked Zapatista gunmen spouting Marxist rhetoric gained political legitimacy last year in Mexico, entering into negotiations with the government and even dictating terms in the name of an oppressed Indian minority in the southern part of the country. Across Mexico, Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos, a swaggering figure in a black ski mask who smokes a pipe, enjoys a cult following of sorts. Tourists even can buy chic Marcos postcards at airport gift shops.……Snip…….
"Many of the international communist-front organizations are continuing to operate, but they now are hiding behind one level of cover - groups that are in the antiglobalism coalition," a veteran U.S. intelligence officer explains. "A lot of funding has come from the Communist Party of India. The North Korean Communist Party has taken over some coordination in recent years." Some analysts hypothesize that the People's Republic of China might be trying to jump-start the machinery of the old Soviet front groups, using North Korea as a "funding cutout." But the fronts have changed their terminology: Marxist-Leninist rhetoric is gone, replaced by antiglobalism themes. "It doesn't arouse the concern of Western governments or get stereotyped as being antidemocratic," says a longtime observer. "Though there is a considerable organizational structure behind the antiglobalist movement, it isn't totally coordinated. Much is spontaneous." Spaulding notes, "These rallies have been organized by a combination of Marxists, anarchists, ecologists, feminists and gay-rights activists. And nobody has been able to get control." [End Excerpt]
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