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Venezuelan council is set to decide on Chavez vote

An opponent of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's government throws a Molotov cocktail during a demonstration on Sunday in Caracas. Venezuela's election commission was set to give its preliminary judgement yesterday on whether the opposition had collected enough signatures to demand a referendum on Chavez's tenure. PHOTO: AFP

Venezuela's electoral council was set yesterday to rule on a drive to recall President Hugo Chavez amid violent protests by the president's supporters and a threat to use oil as a weapon if Washington tried to intervene.

"In the interests of preserving and maintaining peace in the country, we have decided to give the results of the decisions for the presidential recall referendum tomorrow," electoral council executive Jorge Rodriguez said Sunday.

Rodriguez said the council had postponed announcing preliminary results because it was checking petition signatures collected by Chavez opponents calling for a referendum.

Pro-Chavez demonstrators meanwhile set up roadblocks in poor neighborhoods, where the left-populist president has much of his support. Two people were shot to death at the barricades, state-run VTV television reported.

A motorcyclist was also shot in the head in a neighborhood opposed to Chavez's rule near the Caracas freeway where National Guard troops were positioned to stop opposition demonstrators from blocking the road, television reports said. Later in the day, two journalists were shot at during an anti-Chavez demonstration.

A photographer received a superficial injury to the chest, saved by a bulletproof vest, after a youth targeted him with a 9 mm weapon.

A Univision cameraman was shot in the exclusive Chacao district as opposition demonstrators attempting to set up a roadblock clashed with highway police. Another opposition protester was shot, as was a highway police officer, the Caracas fire chief said.

Opposition leaders say they collected 3.4 million signatures seeking the recall referendum. The constitution requires a minimum of 2.4 million valid signatures.

The government says that fraud was widespread in collecting the petitions.

But former US president Jimmy Carter, an electoral observer, said the electoral council guaranteed monitors access to the signature verification.

Carter and the Organization of American States brokered a deal last year between Chavez and the opposition to end attempts to oust Chavez through mass demonstrations and instead to use the constitutional provision allowing the president to be recalled at any time after the halfway point of the term.

Venezuela's constitution calls for a vote on a new president within 30 days if Chavez is ousted in a referendum. Chavez, whose term ends in 2006, has agreed to abide by the results of the vote.

At a rally, the president told some 60,000 cheering supporters that he would block US access to Venezuela's vast oil resources if Washington decides to move against his government.

In a three-hour anti-American diatribe that singled out US President George W. Bush as an illegitimate leader, Chavez said "if Mr. Bush is possessed with the madness of trying to blockade Venezuela, or worse for them, to invade Venezuela in response to the desperate song of his lackeys ... sadly not a drop of petroleum will come to them from Venezuela."

Chavez has long accused Washington of backing the opposition, which has tried to oust Chavez twice -- once in a nationwide strike that ended last year and in an aborted 2002 coup.

The US is keenly interested in stability in Venezuela, its fourth-largest oil supplier and and the only Latin American member of the Organization of Oil Producing Countries.

US interest in Caribbean stability peaked this week as an armed rebellion led to the resignation Sunday of Haitian president Jean Bertrand Aristide.
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