VENEZUELA

Washington Post: A Split Screen In Strike-Torn Venezuela
Co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Weisbrot
has
recently returned from eight days in Caracas. His latest article on
Venezuela appeared in Sunday's Washington Post. He said today:
"Venezuela
is in turmoil primarily because the opposition refuses to accept the
results of democratic elections. President Chavez's government has won
five

elections since 1998, including the referendum on the country's 1999
constitution. Although the opposition can organize large
demonstrations,
they have been unable to put together an electoral majority. So they
have
tried to remove the government by extra-legal means. In April they
tried a
military coup; now they are trying to make the country ungovernable, by
crippling the economy with an oil strike. (Although there are numerous
references to a general strike, outside of the 30,000 employees on
strike
in the oil industry there are not many workers actually on strike; some
are

locked out because the business owners have shut down.) The Bush
administration shares the opposition's goals of overthrowing the
elected
government and has supported them, although lately it has had some
reservations about the cutoff of Venezuelan oil and gasoline, and the
effect of that on oil prices and markets, and the economy."

"Walking around Caracas late last month during Venezuela's ongoing protests, I was surprised by what I saw. My expectations had been shaped by persistent U.S. media coverage of the nationwide strike called by the opposition, which seeks President Hugo Chavez's ouster. Yet in most of the city, where poor and working-class people live, there were few signs of the strike. Streets were crowded with holiday shoppers, metro trains and buses were running normally, and shops were open for business. Only in the eastern, wealthier neighborhoods of the capital were businesses mostly closed.

This is clearly an oil strike, not a "general strike," as it is often described"