Venezuela: Thousands Rally in Support of Chavez

[Say_What]

Chavez and supporters commemorating the fifth anniversary of his first presidential election.

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Thousands of people have rallied in the Venezuelan capital to show support for President Hugo Chavez, who is facing a possible recall referendum.

Supporters of the president waved banners and shouted pro-government slogans as they marched Saturday into Altamira Square in eastern Caracas, traditionally controlled by opponents of Mr. Chavez.

Local mayor Leopoldo Lopez says he was forced to flee the plaza when Chavez supporters began throwing objects at him.

Mr. Chavez was expected to speak to the crowd later in the day.

more...


Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez arrives at a rally of his supporters commemorating the fifth anniversary of the former paratrooper's first presidential election in Caracas, Venezuela, Saturday, Dec. 6, 2003. (AP Photo/Leslie Mazoch) (Bild 1)

[sablefish]

1. Hugo Chavez represents his people.

He is being undermined by the CIA and the NWO that it protects.. Face it Bush and Co. do not like Democracy.. Oh...They pretend to.. But Nooo.. What they really like is to take over the natural resources of other countries and install dictorships to protect multinational foreign investment.. NWO types

And if the civilian population of the country objects.. They are called terrorists and gunned down with the same urgency as if they were Communists..

And yet all these people in foreign nations want is their own natural resources.. To benefit themselves.

[Tinoire]

2. Chavez versus the Free Trade Zombies of Americas

((Thanks Say-What!))
---
The walking corpse of Argentina's economy was there, as well as the long-deceased body of Ecuador and several other South American nations whose economies were long ago murdered and buried by the free trade and free market nostrums of the World Bank and the IMF. Yet on they came. Stiff-legged, covered in rotting bandages, the official zombies marched to Miami to pledge, one and all, to sign on for their next dose of free market poison.

Every nation but one: Venezuela, the single and solitary nation to say "no thanks" at Miami's treaty of the living dead economies. Today, I met up with Venezuela's chief FTAA negotiator. Victor Alvarez was saved from zombification by his sense of humor. He noted that while the Bush Administration was preaching free trade to their dark-skinned compatriots south of the border, the USA itself was facing one of the largest penalties in World Trade Organization history for raising tariffs on steel products. He would have laughed out loud in Miami if it didn't hurt so much: the illegal US trade barriers have closed two steel plants in Venezuela.

<snip>

We finished our conversation as President Hugo Chavez walked in. Chavez is not one for subtleties. "FTAA is the PATH TO HELL," he said.

He meant this in the deepest theological sense. What is at stake for Chavez is Latin America's mortal soul. "I have seen children shot to death," said the president, "not by an invading Army but by our own nation's soldiers."

Chavez was referring to February 27, 1989. While the Northern Hemisphere was celebrating the impending fall of the Berlin Wall, "another wall was going up," he explained, "the wall of globalization." That day, the army massacred Venezuelans, young and old, during a demonstration against diktats of the International Monetary Fund imposed on that nation.

<snip>

Greg Palast is on assignment in Caracas for Rolling Stone Magazine. For photos and more on Venezuela, go to GregPalast.com.

http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=16090

[Tinoire]

3. Cruisin' for a Bruisin' with Hugo

CRUISIN' FOR A BRUISIN' WITH HUGO

Saturday, November 29, 2003

Hugo Chavez has an attitude problem. Only last April the Venezuelan president escaped a kidnapping by the Chairman of the nation's Chamber of Commerce. This weekend, Chavez is facing a recall petition by the angry rich of Venezuela. He also faces the wrath of an angry rich American president who does not appreciate Chavez' bad attitude toward globalization a la Rumsfeld. Annoying the moneyed and the powerful is Chavez' gift. And this week, at the meeting of the Congress of Andean Parliaments, he unwrapped a special surprise, a renewed proposal for PetroSur, functionally, a Latin American OPEC.

Venezuela, not Saudi Arabia, has long been the USA's largest supplier of foreign oil. By combining Venezuela's huge state-owned oil company with Ecuador's, Brazil's and Trinadad's (all nations now headed by elected leftists), Chavez could create a bargaining hammer for hemispheric trade talks which, up to now, have been mostly a one-way lecture from the USA.

<snip>

A proposal for a Latin OPEC is an invitation for a bullet. But that's Chavez' style. His assassins don't have to hunt him down; he looks for THEM. His attitude is, "take your best shot." And, as if to make the point, I'd noted he left the several bullet holes in the windows of the Presidential Palace from the last coup attempt (the one where he was held hostage under orders of a wannabe dictator, Pedro Carmona, chief of the nation's business confederation).

<snip>

If creating a Latin OPEC is possible, Chavez is the man to pull it off. During Venezuela's recent turn at the Presidency of OPEC, Chavez successfully raised the world price of crude to $20 a barrel from $10.

This year Chavez successfully rebuilt Venezuela's oil company after a devastating management strike and campaign of widespread sabotage at PdVSA plants and pumps. It has to infuriate Bush's oil patch buddies that Chavez restored Venezuela's output from near zero to 2-1/2 million barrels a day while, after the same eight month period, Generalissimo Paul Bremer still can't pump enough oil out of Iraq to fill a Humvee.

<snip>

http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=296&row=1

[Tinoire]

4. Be Careful Chavez! OPEC could try to push oil prices still higher

((I'm searching to see just how many thousands were out there supporting him (10's, 100's?) but found this which I think is interesting- note the source)) :)

VIENNA, Dec 5 (AFP) - While OPEC has postponed any cut in its output ceiling for now, the cartel has signalled that it will try to push up oil prices in the near future to compensate for a weak dollar that is eating into producers' profits.

As the market expected, the Organisation for Petroleum Exporting Countries decided at a ministerial meeting in Vienna on Thursday to maintain its five-week-old production ceiling of 24.5 million barrels per day (bpd).

But ministers from the cartel's 11 member states made plain they could reduce it at their next meeting, scheduled for February 10 in Algiers, to shore up the price of crude ahead of a drop in demand that usually comes at the end of winter in the northern hemisphere.
In order to justify a cut that may anger clients, ministers repeatedly referred to the "handsome discounts" some consumer countries enjoy thanks to the weaker US currency.

<snip>

At Thursday's meeting the "weak dollar" was once more among the main arguments advanced by the cartel to justify the high oil price.


<snip>

Something else that aroused the suspicion of the market was the proposal by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in October to raise the price band from 25-32 dollars. The proposal was not officially on the agenda for Thursday's meeting but some analysts believe that OPEC was flying a kite to test the reaction of the market.

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http://www.petroleumworld.com/story3035.htm

[Say_What]

5. Tinoire, start counting...

:-)

[Tinoire]

8. WooHoo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

That is a BEAUTIFUL site! Democracy in action! Hope to see it here one day!

[Judi Lynn]

6. So it looks as if the Chavez supporters have been going for days,

would you say?

(snip) VENEZUELA: Chavistas: `We have won!'

BY CHRISTIANO KERRILA

On the evening of December 2, tens of thousands of working-class supporters of Venezuela's radical left president, Hugo Chavez, poured into the streets of the country's capital, Caracas, to celebrate the defeat of the right-wing opposition's attempt to gather 2.4 million signatures required to force a recall referendum.

“We have won”, they shouted, according to a December 3 report on the Venezuelanalysis.com web site. “Many of those in the streets believed the government’s claims that the opposition had not gathered enough signatures to reach the 2.4 million needed to request the recall referendum”, the reported added. “Others believed that if they were to reach that amount, it was because of rampant fraud and sabotage of the signature process.”

The radical reforms implemented by the popularly elected Chavez government have provoked repeated attempts by Venezuela's ruling capitalist oligarchy to oust him from power. These attempts have included “general strikes” (employer shutdowns), capital flight, media manipulation, mass rightist demonstrations and two attempted military coups.

The first coup was initially successful, only to be reversed 48 hours later by an enormous worker-soldier uprising. The second coup attempt again failed to oust the government but it did temporarily succeed in shutting down the country's vital oil industry. The government's response to the oil bosses' strike was to organise oil production workers to “re-nationalise” the nominally state-owned oil industry by removing its managers, who were drawn from the families of the capitalist oligarchy. (snip/...)

http://www.greenleft.org.au/current/565p19.htm

I hope the citizens of Venezuela get to keep their landslide-elected President. They DID elect him, after all.

[SpiralHawk]

7. Go and see "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised"

It's a documentary film about Chavez and Venezuela.

It will rock your world.

I saw this independent documentary last night at the Santa Fe Film Festival, and walked out stunned like the rest of the overflow audience.

Is it a preview of things to come in the US of A? Many of the people chatting in the lobby after the show seemed to think so.

The film won one of the top prizes for the festival -- so I'm not the only viewer who was deeply impressed with the content (and the style) of this documentary. A must see.