Strike steps up pressure on Chavez to hold election

The opposition in Venezuela will launch its fourth general strike in 12 months today.

Officially, the aim is to persuade the leftist President, Hugo Chavez, to agree to a referendum on his rule, or to early elections. The government says the open-ended strike is a re-run of events in April, when an unsuccessful army coup attempt briefly removed Mr Chavez from power.

The opposition insists there was no coup: Mr Chavez resigned, they say, creating a "power vacuum". In August, after a pre-trial hearing in the supreme court, charges of rebellion against four senior officers were dismissed, provoking presidential supporters to riot.

A former lieutenant-colonel, Mr Chavez knows all about coups: he spent most of his two decades in the army plotting an old-fashioned one, with tanks on the streets. It failed, in 1992, and he was jailed for two years, but four years after his release he was elected President on a promise to end corruption and give the poor a fair deal.

Among the poor, many still support the President. But most of those within the church, the media, business and unions now want Mr Chavez out. And because the President has made a point of cultivating the likes of Fidel Castro and Saddam Hussein – not to mention the Colombian guerrillas – Washington is none too happy either.

Since the end of the Cold War, coups are out of fashion. Yet the new, Chavista constitution lifts the old ban on military officers making political statements; and its last article, No 350, enshrines the right "to disobey any regime" that violates democratic principles.

Before the events of April, individual officers ranging from an air force colonel to a rear-admiral had begun publicly to denounce the President. The government called it a "drip-drip coup". Then industrial action in the vital oil industry triggered a general strike and a mass march on the presidential palace. Nineteen people were shot dead.

Rear-Admiral Daniel Comisso, who was involved in the April coup, and 10 other admirals and generals made a videotaped statement calling for President Chavez to resign.

But the real coup was by members of the high command, who went on television that night to announce, in the words of General-in-chief Lucas Rincon, that they had "asked the President to resign, and he has accepted".

After two days in military custody, Mr Chavez was restored to power and – in a move no one has since been able to explain – he promoted Gen Rincon to Defence Minister. The opposition never put tanks on the streets, and did not even change the palace guard.

Acquitted by the supreme court, but removed from the command structure, the rebels are now trying another tack. Fourteen, led by a former military attache to Washington, Gen Enrique Medina Gomez, have set up camp around an obelisk in the Plaza Francia. Declaring themselves in "legitimate disobedience" under article 350, they have been joined by more than 100 other officers.

Civilian supporters come and go, but a hard-core group keeps up a round-the-clock vigil. A large, digital clock registers the 900 hours since the protest began.

The protest is a headache for the political opposition, which does not want to be seen as fomenting a coup yet cannot afford to alienate the generals.

Mr Chavez has called it a slow-motion coup and accused the officers of hiding weapons in the underground car park below the obelisk, and in a five-star hotel on the corner of the plaza. But the worst crime that can with certainty be laid at their door so far is that they have destroyed much of the grass in the square – and prevented the Christmas decorations from going up.