Venezuelan students lead Chavez referendum outcry
VENEZUELA, Nestled in Venezuela's snow-capped Andes, Merida is a
picturesque city with tidy public squares, a cable car and a novelty ice
cream store offering flavors from garlic to viagra.
But its university seethes with political protest.
Burnt tires, thrown rocks and graffiti scrawls of 'Yes' or 'No,'
litter the campus and city back streets following violent clashes over
left-wing President Hugo Chavez's plan to rewrite the constitution and
scrap limits on how long he can rule.
The political turmoil in a city known for tourism and academia has
also played out across the OPEC nation as students lead a growing outcry
against Chavez's move, giving him the toughest vote test of his eight
years in office.
Marches in the Andes, the plains, the Caribbean coast and the capital
Caracas have drawn hundreds of thousands of students into the streets
against a raft of constitutional changes that must be approved on Sunday
in a referendum.
"We are looking to make people conscious of the arbitrary nature of
what the government is doing," engineering student Mayra Cruz said as
she distributed "No" leaflets in Merida. "If they don't wake up, then
when it does affect them, they will wonder why they didn't do anything
to stop it."
Chavez supporters dominate Congress, the courts, the country's
electoral body and the state oil company in the fourth-largest exporter
of oil to the United States.
He is highly popular for his oil-financed social spending programs,
his folksy style and his open confrontation with the United States,
which is unpopular in much of Latin America. But his constitutional
overhaul is far less attractive to voters.
Apart from ending limits on his own rule, the proposal would
formalize Venezuela as a socialist state, allow Chavez to censor media
in an "emergency" and let him handpick regional officials with more
power than elected governors and mayors.
He has added sweeteners such as giving workers most of Fridays off,
but polls show he could lose the vote.
Chavez first won power in a 1998 election and again coasted to
victory in 2000 and last year, but he would have to leave office in 2013
unless he can reform the constitution.
Traditional opposition parties have been weakened by bickering and
failed to find much support outside the wealthier classes, so the
student movement has filled a void.
In May, when Chavez ignored most Venezuelans' objections and shut a
TV station, students flooded the streets. Chavez's constitutional reform
plan has brought them out again in an unstructured movement with myriad
leaders where word-of-mouth or text messages can amass thousands at
rallies.
"The students give politics a moral face. They are not defending the
rights of the rich but of all of Venezuela," said political analyst
Fausto Maso. "We were complaining of a lack of leadership and suddenly a
multitude of leaders stepped up."
Opposition parties, the Roman Catholic Church and rights groups have
all condemned Chavez's constitution changes as authoritarian. The
president has also suffered defections from former allies, sowing doubts
over his plan among moderate supporters, pollsters say.
But the students are his most vocal and visible opponents.
Some demonstrations have turned violent and pro-Chavez students have
clashed with the anti-reform band, scarring the referendum campaign with
images of hooded men shooting from motorcycles or smoke and tear gas
choking parts of cities.
At one Merida campus protest, a man shot and wounded four policemen
in the most violent incident of the campaign.
Student movements shook the regime of a dictator in 1928 and 30 years
later helped overthrow another, but in the last few decades campus
politics were largely confined to small leftist groups with
anti-establishment causes.
Chavez has praised members of his own government as former student
stone-throwers while he has sought to discredit the youth of 2007 as
U.S.-backed "little rich kids."
But the students cut across class lines. While many are well-to-do,
others come from the shantytowns where Chavez draws his support and one
leader's revolutionary pedigree comes from his parents - the Soviet
admirers named him Stalin.
Capitalist or communist, the students preach a message of inclusion.
They say Chavez wants to polarize Venezuela with a reform that makes
outcasts of anyone but socialists.
"It's like apartheid in South Africa or ... Hitler's Germany, where
citizens who were not with the government stopped being citizens," said
one student leader, Yon Goicoechea, as he sat cross-legged on the grass
at a campus in Caracas.
Reuters
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