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| International |
| More than half of Venezuelans want to dump Hugo |
| 2002-04-25 |
| More than half of Venezuelans want President Hugo Chavez to resign, according to a recent poll, two weeks after he was deposed in a failed two-day coup. More than 52 percent of people surveyed by the influential daily El Universal, a leader in the opposition to the populist president, said Chavez should resign, while 55 percent thought he should be removed from office by a constitutional recall vote. Seventeen percent of those polled supported a successful repeat of the April 11 coup, when Chavez was removed from power by a joint business and military effort. Thirty-four percent of survey respondents would rather remove Chavez by legal means. Those favoring a military coup d'etat were 13.5 percent. Just 15 percent saw no need to change the current situation. He's probably calling Fidel every day to ask for advice. I don't think Venezuelans want to go back to having coups every few years, but I don't think they want to be a little Cuba, either. There should be lots of raw money from oil exports, and it should be trickling into the pocketbooks of the citizenry, as in Kuwait or the UAE. If Hugo can't accomplish that, maybe they should borrow a few al-Sabahs to make it happen. Kuwait gets more than half its annual income from investments it's made over the years with its oil money. (Wonder what the proportion is for the Arabians? Anybody ever see any figures on it?) |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |