EFE News Services

A march of Venezuelan students and union members, in opposition to President Hugo Chavez, crowded streets on the east side of Caracas to protest the government's policy of appropriations and to demand better wages.

Without estimating the number of people in the march, some of its organizers said that it had been weakened because buses of demonstrators from the interior had been stopped on the highways by the authorities before they could reach Caracas.

"This is a fascist government and that is evident by the way it stopped the buses from coming here," Pablo Zambrano, president of a sanitation workers union, said.

Zambrano added that Chavez "does not discuss collective contracts" for workers of state companies or of firms that have been expropriated so they can no longer produce," and that, "even worse, he has plagued the country with soaring inflation, which is why we're demanding a wage increase."

"We're going to battle this government," he said, adding that "this is the first of many marches, because the labor union movement is being reestablished" and is putting an end to its "atomization by a government that persecutes workers."

For his part, university director Bryan Pichert said that the government "attacks everyone: businessmen, because he says they are exploiters, and students, saying that we're Yankee lovers, and those who produce food, because they're big landowners," he said.

"And now, what are they going to say to these workers? This is a government with just one thing to say, it says its leftist, it says it's socialist, but it doesn't have either young people or workers," he said.

About the buses stopped on the road, Pichert said that this is a sign of "a government that is frightened because it has lost support, because it has lost the people and now is resorting to totally authoritarian mechanisms like this."

The protest march also slammed the inefficacy of expropriations and the absorbing of private companies by the state, as in the case of the CANTV telephone company, purchased by the Chavez government from a U.S. multinational.

"Just one small example of what the state takeover of CANTV has meant: it used to take a maximum of three days to respond to reports of service failures, but now there are cases of lines that have been out of order for a year, and what's more, we workers don't have the materials, equipment or vehicles that we need to do our work," Igor Lira, union leader of that company, said.

Now the state as the employer at CANTV, he said, "wants to impose compulsory retirement, but we're going to fight that, and we're going to fight for a substantial wage increase," and to "begin to discuss collective bargaining contracts."

In that regard, lawmaker Alfredo Ramos, former leader of Venezuela's CTV labor federation, announced that "next week we're going to introduce a bill for a general increase in wages and salaries," a regulation that "will oblige the government to negotiate collective contracts."

"The rank and file of labor unions are in the streets today - not so much the leadership of the union federations, some of which have quit fighting for workers to serve the government - and they have said they've had enough of negatives, enough of postponing the discussion of collective bargaining," Ramos said.

Another legislator, Maria Corina Machado, said that the government does not listen to civilians' demands and recalled that Chavez celebrated this Friday the attempted coup he led 19 years ago as a lieutenant coronel in the army.

"It's not right that yesterday he celebrated an attempted military takeover and today turns a blind eye to civilian struggles...we don't accept the imposition of a Cuban-style communist regime that takes away our freedom" and even our food, because with wages at their current level, "we Venezuelans are eating less," she said. EFE

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