In their first-ever defeat, pro-government legislators narrowly lost a vote that would have ratified new parliamentary procedures aimed at speeding up passage of legislation backed by President Hugo Chavez.
The vote was over the legality of an outdoor session held Friday in a poor Caracas neighborhood considered a bastion of support for Chavez. Pro-Chavez lawmakers convened there to approve the new parliamentary debate rules two days after ruling party and opposition legislators ended up in a shoving match inside the legislative palace. They argued the session was necessary to prevent the opposition from "sabotaging" the National Assembly.
The 79 opposition legislators boycotted the session, saying they feared being attacked by Chavez sympathizers.
After a five-hour debate, Tuesday's vote ended with 82 in favor of the legality of Friday's session, 79 against and three abstentions. It was one vote short of the 50 percent plus one needed for approval. One member of the 165-member unicameral National Assembly didn't attend the debate.
It was the first defeat for Chavez's multiparty ruling coalition since the 2000 general elections that gave the president an almost two-thirds congressional majority. That majority has eroded to a handful of seats over the past three years after several allies defected to the opposition.
The government's loss Tuesday is another headache for a president facing calls for a referendum on his rule later this year. The opposition is trying to organize the vote under a pact brokered by the Organization of American States designed to bring stability to a country convulsed in the past year by a failed coup and a ruinous general strike.
Chavez 's opponents accuse the former army paratroop commander of trying to install an authoritarian regime modeled after Cuba's. Chavez says that a resentful "oligarchy" is sabotaging his efforts to bring social equality to Venezuela.
The vote Tuesday could mean that Chavez may have trouble passing several key laws, including one to tighten restrictions on the media. That law would require that 60 percent of programming be produced within Venezuela, half of which would have to be created by "independent producers" approved by the government. Broadcasters say the law would give too much influence to censors hand-picked by Chavez to crack down on the mostly opposition news media.
A shouting match erupted Tuesday after ruling party legislators demanded a third recount, which the opposition said would be illegal under both the new and old rules. National Assembly President Francisco Ameliach refused to accept the defeat and suspended the session until Thursday.
"We've been tolerating your majority for four years and you for the first time are incapable of accepting a defeat gracefully," opposition lawmaker Cesar Perez Vivas shouted in Ameliach's face. "Get used to it. It's the first of many."
Opposition legislators have also challenged the legality of Friday's session in the Supreme Court.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
RSS