Oil Wars

Rifts Plague Anti-Chávez Venezuelans
By JUAN FORERO

QUÍBOR, Venezuela — Julio Borges is an unusual politician among Venezuela's fragmented opposition. He is running for office.

While much of the rest of the opposition is intent on boycotting the presidential election this year, Mr. Borges was busy here on a recent twoday campaign swing, shaking hands, kissing cheeks and trying against long odds to win over supporters of President Hugo Chávez.

"We spent seven years trying to get Chávez out of Miraflores," Mr. Borges said, referring to the presidential palace. "What we have to do is get Chávez out of people's hearts."

He is the first to admit that it is a lonely task. Mr. Chávez remains hugely popular, with a 55 percent approval rating in opinion polls, for having funneled billions of dollars in oil revenue to the poor. Perhaps more important, he has put his stamp on nearly every aspect of life, and every institution of real power.

Mr. Borges argues that boycotting elections only adds to Mr. Chávez's power and has already made Venezuela in effect a one-party state. Proponents of a boycott say Mr. Chávez has undermined the institutions of democracy, so they seek to undercut his legitimacy by spoiling elections.

They charge that the president stacked the Supreme Court and the five-member National Electoral Council, has registered fraudulent voters and keeps tabs on how Venezuelans vote — all accusations that the government denies.

Many supporters of a boycott are in the segment of the opposition that failed to oust Mr. Chávez with a coup attempt and a two-month oil strike in 2002, and a recall referendum in 2004. Last December they organized a five-party boycott of the elections for the National Assembly, losing all representation in the government.

Some opposition leaders called that boycott a success because 75 percent of the voters abstained, showing their unhappiness with the electoral system Mr. Chávez had established.

"It's a diabolical system," said Antonio Ledezma, a leader in National Resistance, a group of opposition leaders that favors a boycott this year. "We win by resisting, to not be under the thumb of a government that wants to dominate us."

While international monitors have called past elections here fair, they have also noted deep public distrust of electoral officials and called for an overhaul of the Electoral Council, which oversees the elections.

A newspaper editor, Teodoro Petkoff, and the governor of the state of Zulia, Manuel Rosales, are considered possible presidential candidates, but Mr. Borges is the only one who has declared his candidacy so far. He says his biggest obstacle is uniting a disillusioned opposition, whose fractures have been among Mr. Chávez's biggest advantages.

"The most difficult challenge is to get past the noise of our own opposition," said Mr. Borges, 36, a lawyer from Caracas. "The opposition does not have the luxury to just give up on politics. Here, some people say: 'Let's not do anything. Let's hope for a miracle.' I don't believe in that."

As in the rest of Venezuela, people in this state, Lara, are solidly behind Mr. Chávez and at best indifferent to Mr. Borges's small First Justice Party, whose members are mostly young professionals from wealthy districts of Caracas. Potential voters were polite but distant.

When one unabashed supporter, Carmen Martínez, embraced Mr. Borges — whispering, "May God and First Justice be our hope" — it was a bright spot in an otherwise difficult campaign swing.

Mr. Borges does not sugarcoat the obvious: his campaign is far behind, underfinanced and spread thin. His one advantage may be that most Venezuelans — 84 percent, according to a recent survey by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, a Washington polling firm — support taking part in the election, even if they question the impartiality of the electoral authorities.

His first big battle was with his own party, which went against him and voted to sit out last year's legislative elections. But he also faces an image problem. Many Venezuelans see his party as close to the Bush administration, elitist and out of touch with Mr. Chávez's base in the country's ramshackle barrios.

"They're seen as the yuppie party, and the challenge is how do you reach the poorest people," said a senior American diplomat in Caracas, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of embassy rules.

"It's not enough being the anti-Chávez," another American diplomat said. "You have to offer a plan and an alternative."

To do that, Mr. Borges and his aides say they are going to go after the president where he is vulnerable. While Mr. Chávez appears to be obsessed with the United States, Mr. Borges said surveys for his campaign showed that Venezuelans were much more concerned about unemployment and rampant crime.

"Before voting for the Chavistas, I'll vote for Borges," Johanna Padilla, 29, said after meeting Mr. Borges as he went from house to house here. "All we have here is crime. There's no work. If you get a job, it's for three months and you're out."

On his campaign swing, wearing jeans and a blue pullover shirt, Mr. Borges handed out fliers titled "The President's Gifts," about Venezuelan aid to other countries.

"We want to show we're more nationalistic, more patriotic, more worried about Venezuela than Chávez," he said. "He's more involved in trying to become the president of Latin America. This is good for us."

For now the message is a hard sell. Mr. Chávez's largess to the poor, after all, has won him a solid following that is not about to switch to an unknown like Mr. Borges.

"I adore the man and thank God he's in power," Elizabeth Jiménez, 37, said of the president. "The opposition — each day they lose more standing. They criticize everything, everything that's for the people. But when they were in power they never did anything."

Venezuela promotes Microsoft alternative

MAR. 29 7:11 P.M. ET President Hugo Chavez, long critical of big transnational companies, is promoting free open-source software as an alternative to market-dominating Microsoft Corp.

Venezuela's science and technology ministry recently held the Latin American Free Software Installation Fair, an event promoting the use of the open-source Linux operating system and other nonproprietary programs over Microsoft's Windows.

Groups of Linux users have been organizing similar events in other Latin American countries, including Argentina and Colombia, and the Venezuelan government has signed on as a promoter.

The technology ministry said the fair is part Venezuela's move toward "technological sovereignty, and taking advantage of knowledge for building national scientific independence."

Chavez, a vehement critic of the capitalist system, issued a decree in 2004 ordering all the country's public institutions to actively move toward open-source alternatives, hoping to save millions of dollars.

Government agencies have gradually been making the change.

Chavez says previous governments spent more on licensing fees for proprietary software than social programs to fight poverty.

The Venezuelan government hasn't focused direct criticism on Microsoft, but Chavez has regularly condemned "the hegemony of the multinationals" -- saying many big companies are to blame for putting profits above the needs of poor people across Latin America.

The villagers of Abu Sifa near the Iraqi town of Balad had become used to the sound of explosions at night as American forces searched the area for suspected insurgents. But one night two weeks ago Issa Harat Khalaf heard a different sound that chilled him to the bone.

Khalaf, a 33-year-old security officer guarding oil pipelines, saw a US helicopter land near his home. American soldiers stormed out of the Chinook and advanced on a house owned by Khalaf’s brother Fayez, firing as they went.

Khalaf ran from his own house and hid in a nearby grove of trees. He saw the soldiers enter his brother’s home and then heard the sound of women and children screaming.

“Then there was a lot of machinegun fire,” he said last week. After that there was the most frightening sound of all — silence, followed by explosions as the soldiers left the house.

Once the troops were gone, Khalaf and his fellow villagers began a frantic search through the ruins of his brother’s home. Abu Sifa was about to join a lengthening list of Iraqi communities claiming to have suffered from American atrocities.

According to Iraqi police, 11 bodies were pulled from the wreckage of the house, among them four women and five children aged between six months and five years. An official police report obtained by a US reporter for Knight Ridder newspapers said: “The American forces gathered the family members in one room and executed 11 people.”

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n Abu Sifa last week, Khalaf’s account was corroborated by a neighbour, Hassan Kurdi Mahassen, who was also woken by the sound of helicopters and saw soldiers entering Fayez’s home after spraying it with such heavy fire that walls crumbled.

Mahassen said that once the soldiers had left — after apparently dropping several grenades that caused part of the house to collapse — villagers searched under the rubble “and found them all buried in one room”.

“Women and even the children were blindfolded and their hands bound. Some of their faces were totally disfigured. A lot of blood was on the floors and the walls.”

Khalaf said he had found the body of his mother Turkiya with her face unrecognisable. “She had been shot with a dumdum bullet,” he claimed.

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It was on November 19 last year that a US marine armoured vehicle struck a roadside bomb that killed a 20-year-old lance-corporal. According to a marine communiqué issued the next day, the blast also killed 15 Iraqi civilians and was followed by an attack on the US convoy in which eight insurgents were killed.

An investigation by Time established that the civilians had not been killed by the roadside bomb, but were shot in their homes after the marines rampaged through Haditha. Among the dead were seven women and three children.

One eyewitness told Time: “I watched them shoot my grandfather, first in the chest and then in the head. Then they killed my granny.”

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Last week Jalal Abdul Rahman told this newspaper about the death in January of his 12- year-old son Abdul. It was a Sunday evening and father and son were driving home after buying a new game for the boy’s PlayStation.

They were a few hundred yards from their home in the Karkh neighbourhood of Baghdad when — according to Rahman — US forces opened fire on the car, killing Abdul.

Soldiers approached the car and told Rahman he had failed to stop when ordered to do so. Rahman said he had never heard an order to stop. The soldiers searched the car and, as they departed, they threw a black body bag on the ground.

“They said, ‘This is for your son,’ and they left me there with my dead son,” he added.

Rahman claimed he had had nothing to do with the insurgency until that moment. “But this is America, the so-called guardian of humanity, and killing people for them is like drinking water. I shall go after them until I avenge the blood of my son.”