About 3,000 opponents of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez marched through the capital on Saturday to protest a package of laws that expand his power and accelerate his push toward socialism.
Shouting chants and waving balloons reading “play fair,” they complained that some of the laws resemble constitutional reforms sought by Chavez that voters rejected at the polls in December.
“We said no,” university student Mariangel Rodriguez said. Chavez “says he’s a democrat. I don’t know what his concept of democracy is, but to me, this is not democracy.”
Chavez approved the package of 26 laws on July 31, the last day of special legislative powers granted him by the National Assembly.
He says the new rules — which increase government control over food production and commerce and create civilian militias, among other things — will strengthen the country’s institutions.
The demonstrators also railed against a Supreme Court ruling on Tuesday that 272 officials suspected of corruption, including some key Chavez opponents, can be banned from running in upcoming elections.
Popular Caracas mayoral contender Leopoldo Lopez, one of the barred candidates, called the blacklist an “abuse of power.”
“The government is scared of the people,” he said.
In an interview published by Venezuela’s state news agency, Jesse Chacon, the government’s candidate for a Caracas mayoral post, denied that the blacklist is an attempt to sideline the president’s rivals.
“President Hugo Chavez did not create the disqualifications against the opposition,” Chacon said.
The protesters — who numbered about 3,000 according to journalists’ estimates — marched to the National Electoral Commission before dispersing peacefully on Saturday.
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
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