Reports so far indicate that oppositions to Chavez are not united, and their strike this time is less successful than those in the past:
***** New York Times 30 November 2002 White-Collar Oil Workers Key in Venezuela Crisis By FRANCISCO TORO
CARACAS, Venezuela, Nov. 29 - As tensions continue to rise after last week's call by the opposition movement for a general strike next week to protest President Hugo Chávez's left-wing government, much attention is focused on the country's powerful oil industry and the state-owned oil giant, Petróleos de Venezuela.
Dissident white-collar workers at the company, which is known as PDVSA (and pronounced peh-deh-VEH-sa), are increasingly angry over what they see as a drive to rid the company of managers opposed to President Chavez. The managers' union has not formally endorsed the general strike, but its leaders have signaled to members that they favor it. The biggest federation of blue-collar unions in the oil industry, Fedepetrol, is split between pro- and anti-government factions, making it difficult to predict how its members will respond to the strike, which is set for Monday.
Oil is crucial to Venezuela: it accounts for about three-quarters of the country's exports by value and yields half its tax receipts.
Venezuela's minister for energy and mines, Rafael Ramírez, pledged this week that a strike would not affect the industry, saying he had "taken measures to guarantee normal operations," without giving specifics. But on Tuesday, dissident managers of PDVSA disrupted a meeting of the the company's board and 75 pro-government executives, called to discuss contingency plans for a strike.
More than 100 dissident managers, many of them at senior levels of the company, interrupted the meeting led by the company president, Alí Rodríguez, to present a petition for the removal of the company's internal security chief, Gustavo Pérez Issa. They accuse Mr. Pérez Issa of leading a campaign of harassment and intimidation against managers suspected of sympathizing with the opposition. The dissidents says their petition is backed by the signatures of 2,500 of the company's more than 46,000 employees, with more to come.
The dissidents say that Mr. Pérez Issa, a retired army officer who participated in the failed 1992 coup that first brought Mr. Chávez to national prominence, has spied on their e-mail and telephone communications, and led a witch hunt against anti-Chávez managers at the company.
The petition expressed the dissident managers' concern with "the continual abuses against the meritocratic ethic and the rules of the company," stressing that Mr. Pérez Issa's immediate removal would be the determining factor in defusing the situation. Mr. Pérez Issa has not commented publicly on the accusations, and has made no public statement recently.
The dissidents stopped short of fully endorsing the general strike, leaving it up to each manager to make the decision "according to his conscience." Given the current superheated political polarization in Caracas, most of the company's white-collar workers are likely to join the strike.
The government has sought to avert a strike by signing an unusually generous collective bargaining agreement with the company's blue-collar work force. The contract sets the industry's minimum salary at more than three times the legal minimum wage. Still, the industry's labor unions are divided, and it remains unclear whether enough workers will turn up to work on Monday to operate the company's wells, docks and refineries.
After a year of dismal sales, both retailers and wholesalers are reluctant to see a strike in the middle of the holiday shopping season. Their apparent lack of enthusiasm for an open-ended strike makes the PDVSA employees' support all the more crucial to the opposition.
The company's white-collar workers have been an important opposition ally since February. Venezuela's heavy reliance on its oil industry makes any disruption of PDVSA operations highly destabilizing to the government.
In April, dissidents at the company began a strike that brought most of the oil industry to a halt, stopping oil shipments from the country for several days. Their protest quickly escalated, eventually unleashing a military coup that toppled Mr. Chávez briefly, before loyalist army units restored him to power two days later.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/30/business/worldbusiness/30VENE.html> *****
***** Venezuelan strike falls short of earlier protests Merchants reluctant to forgo holiday sales T. Christian Miller, Los Angeles Times Tuesday, December 3, 2002
Caracas, Venezuela -- A nationwide strike closed businesses, health clinics and schools throughout Venezuela on Monday, but participation was not as widespread as in previous protests.
Opposition figures claimed they had shut down 80 percent of the country, from banks to bus lines to bakeries. They said they would continue the strike today in order to force President Hugo Chavez to hold a vote on his rule....
"The strike has been a total success," said Manuel Cova, secretary general of the country's largest union, the Confederation of Venezuelan Workers. "The people have roundly rejected the government of Hugo Chavez and have asked for an electoral solution to this crisis."
Officials loyal to Chavez claimed just the opposite, saying that 80 percent of the deeply divided nation continued to function. They condemned the protest as a thinly veiled attempt to spark a second coup against Chavez.
The government said the all-important petroleum sector -- which accounts for half the nation's revenue and is the third-largest supplier of oil to the United States -- was functioning "basically normally."
But Felix Jimenez, head of Fedepetrol, the country's biggest federation of oil workers' unions, said 82 percent of oil workers had stayed home. Juan Cahuao, a union president, said workers from the Sunday night shift still were on duty on Lake Maracaibo oil rigs because striking boat crews refused to transport their replacements.
"The strike has been a complete failure," said Luis Alfonso Davila, a director in Chavez's political party, the Fifth Republic Movement.
The truth seemed to lie somewhere in between. A tour of Caracas clearly showed that many stores were shuttered, and the streets had far less traffic than normal. But just as clear was the difference from a one-day stoppage in October, during which the opposition claimed 90 percent participation.
Timing accounts for less widespread participation Monday. These protests come in December, when workers with Christmas bonuses do their holiday shopping and merchants enjoy their strongest sales.
During the last strike, Jose Birouti shut down his tiny hardware store on one of Caracas' main boulevards. But he was open Monday, although he said he opposed Chavez.
"I've got to pay the rent," Birouti said. "I'd be closed, if not for the expenses that I have to pay."
Another reason was the nature of the strike. Opposition figures have refused to say how long it would last, leading some people to do emergency shopping in preparation for a prolonged strike.
But perhaps the biggest reason for the lower participation was fatigue. After more than a year of nearly continuous conflict between Chavez and a scattered opposition that includes businesses, unions, the Catholic church and the media, Venezuelans have little to show but a deeply riven nation....
<http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/12/03/MN139902.DTL> ***** -- Yoshie
* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Anti-War Activist Resources: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/activist.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osu.edu/students/CJP/>