Here is the NY Times article on a businessman's strike. They're not going to eat at Tarzilandia. Comments anybody? Am I being ridiculous in seeing a resemblance to the overthrow of Allende?
-- John K. Taber
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/05/business/worldbusiness/05VENE.html
December 5, 2001 Venezuela Businesses Plan a Shutdown to Protest Leftist Policies By JUAN FORERO ARACAS, Venezuela, Dec. 4 — For half a century, discerning diners have known that the place to go for juicy steaks and seafood specialties is Tarzilandia. Tradition is everything at this Caracas institution, where customers sit among tropical plants and squawking macaws while choosing from a menu that has changed little since the 1950's.
But they will not be dining there next Monday, as Tarzilandia and perhaps hundreds of thousands of other businesses across Venezuela will be shuttered for the day as part of an extraordinary protest by the country's businessmen.
Furious with the left-leaning policies of President Hugo Chávez, particularly his approval of 49 economic laws seen as antibusiness, owners nationwide are closing stores, factories and offices in an action that is shaping up as the most significant challenge to the maverick leader.
"He is introducing, through these laws, communist philosophies into our country," charged Sebastiao Araujo, one of Tarzilandia's owners. "So on Monday, we are going to close, and our clients will have to eat and drink at home."
Though it is unclear how many businesses will shut down, the powerful business association Fedecámaras voted last week to stage the protest to prod the government to suspend about 10 of the laws it finds most objectionable.
Today, the Confederation of Venezuelan Workers, the largest trade union group, with one million members, announced that it would join the 12-hour protest.
Mr. Chávez has reacted angrily. A former army paratrooper who has taken control of Congress and rewritten the Constitution in the three years since his election, he has cast the protest as part of a conspiracy "aimed at toppling Chávez."
For many in the middle and upper classes here, there is nothing they would like more than a debilitated presidency. There is little they have enjoyed about Mr. Chávez, or his revolution — not his efforts to inject what he calls his "Bolivarian" ideology into schools, his appointments of military officers to important posts, his dalliances with Cuba's Fidel Castro and Colombia's leftist rebels.
The new laws include such changes, unpopular among business owners, as giving the government more control of the oil industry and allowing expropriation of farmland. The businessmen decided to protest.
"It was a hard decision, yes," said Lope Mendoza, who owns a paint company with 900 employees. "But the government continued avoiding dialogue and so this grew and grew and grew until it was time for the stoppage."
To government supporters, such talk is seen as little more than whimpering from an old political order that once shut out a majority of Venezuelans.
Chávez loyalists like Tarek William Saab, a powerful member of Congress, said a majority of Venezuelans would not join the stoppage. "The businessmen, who know December is an extraordinary month for sales, are not going to be listening to four economic Talibans," he said, referring to organizers of the protest.
Indeed, on the streets, many Venezuelans who earn their living selling from sidewalk stalls said they would be working Monday. Institutions providing essential services, like hospitals and pharmacies, say they will be open.
Still, the politically charged atmosphere has unnerved the government. José Vicente Rangel, Mr. Chavez's defense minister, has tried to talk organizers out of protesting. So far, the effort has been futile.
Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company