The Washington Post
The head of Venezuela’s National Guard said Thursday night the military had taken control of the country from President Hugo Chavez after a day of protests against the government that left at least 12 people dead.
In a televised address, Gen. Alberto Camacho Kairuz said the Chavez administration had “abandoned its functions.” A few hours earlier, Vice Adm. Hector Ramirez, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, condemned the attack on protesters who were marching on the presidential palace on the third day of a national strike. About 50 senior officers from all sectors of the armed forces joined in calling the act “undemocratic,” and opposition leaders said 90 percent of the troops had declared themselves against the president.
As there was a flurry of rumors regarding the president’s fate, opposition sources said Chavez remained in the presidential palace Thursday night, holding conversations with the Cuban ambassador to Venezuela. The sources said the president was being protected by members of Bolivarian Circles, pro-government civic groups that have attacked protesters in recent days, and Cuban security agents.
Chavez allies insisted Thursday night that the president remained in charge of the country, and that a “conspiracy” to topple his government had failed. But the reports of the meeting with the Cuban ambassador fueled speculation that Chavez was arranging to leave the country for Cuba, whose leader Fidel Castro has benefited from cut-rate Venezuelan oil under Chavez’s government.
At least 12 people died in the streets of Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, in a surge of violence that followed Chavez’s decision to remove from the air local television channels covering the protests. The decision prompted an immediate reaction from Venezuela’s armed forces, an institution that Chavez, a former colonel, was once a part of, but which has shown increasing resistance to his leftist rule in recent weeks.
Since his 1998 election on a broad populist mandate, Chavez has angered the United States as well as the powerful domestic opposition that had enjoyed power for the previous four decades. His foreign policy, which turned Venezuela, a leading supplier of oil to the United States, toward such countries as Libya, Cuba and Iraq, generated frequent friction with Washington and spawned criticism at home that he was putting in place a communist government.
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