Resignation Comes to Protest Squelching of Chavez Recall

By Jon Jeter and Colum Lynch
Washington Post Foreign Service

CARACAS, Venezuela, March 4 -- Venezuela's ambassador to the United Nations resigned Thursday in a high-profile protest of President Hugo Chavez's efforts to stall a referendum on his continued leadership of the country.

Ambassador Milos Alcalay said he believed that citizens should be allowed to vote on whether they want Chavez to stay in office. He also charged that the National Electoral Council had engaged in "very tricky actions" that threatened to hurt Venezuelan democracy. The commission this week challenged the authenticity of more than 800,000 signatures calling for a recall referendum against Chavez.

"Chavez is the elected president of Venezuela. There is no doubt. But the constitution established the referendum," Alcalay told reporters at the United Nations. "I think the spirit of the law, the spirit of the constitution, is allowing the people to express" themselves, he said. "If you have an impasse, if you have a conflict, call the people to vote."

At least one person was killed in scattered protests and violence around the country on Thursday, the Reuters news agency reported. The unrest that began last week when the electoral commission signaled that it would not certify the 2.4 million signatures -- 20 percent of registered voters -- required to schedule a recall referendum.

A 50-year-old woman was fatally shot in the town of Machiques near Venezuela's western border when soldiers fired canisters of tear gas into a crowd of pro-referendum demonstrators, Reuters reported. Opposition leaders blamed the soldiers for the woman's death, but government officials said the woman was killed by a civilian gunman who fired into the crowd and fled on foot, the news agency said.

The killing was the at least the seventh reported since last Friday, when anti-Chavez demonstrators took to the streets in support of the referendum. Dozens more have been wounded.

Protests in Caracas, the capital, were mostly peaceful on Thursday. Traffic and commerce resumed following a week in which police used burning barricades and roadblocks to diffuse demonstrations mainly in the wealthier eastern portions of the city, a stronghold of anti-Chavez sentiment. Protesters accused Chavez of illegally arresting more than 300 people since the marches began last Friday.

Referendum supporters have called for a mass demonstration Saturday. Officials with the Organization of American States are working with elections officials and supporters of the ballot initiative on a compromise that would allow referendum organizers more time to validate the signatures.

Alcalay, a veteran diplomat with 34 years in Venezuela's foreign service, had served as Chavez's envoy to the United Nations since 2001. He was scheduled to become the country's envoy to Britain.

But the Venezuelan diplomat said that he could no longer serve a country that has resorted to violence to bar protests, and which constantly changed the rules of democratic political participation. "My decision is a very sad decision for me; it's maybe the end of my career," he told reporters. "But I think that sometimes you have to say no."

A frequent critic of U.S. foreign policy, Alcalay criticized Chavez's confrontational style of international diplomacy, suggesting that Venezuela had recklessly antagonized the U.S. government and other Latin American countries.

"You cannot be good with Iraq and bad with the United States. You cannot be good with Iran and bad with Chile," he said. Alcalay also faulted Chavez for criticizing the U.S. embargo against Cuba while imposing sanctions on the Dominican Republic for harboring Venezuela's former president, Carlos Andres Perez.

Lynch reported from the United Nations.

© 2004