VENEZUELA: President Hugo Chavez proposes constitutional reforms to tightened his grip on power

Speaking in front of Congress on Wednesday (August 15), Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez proposed a series of constitutional changes to consolidate power around his self-styled socialist revolution. Unveiling his constitutional reform plans, which need to be approved in a referendum vote, Chavez said presidential terms should be extended by one year to seven years without restrictions on re-election. "The presidential term is six years and the president of the republic can only be re-elected once for a new term. I propose to my people to modify Article 230 by having presidential terms of six years -- which was my original plan but the assembly took back to six. And that president can be reelected for a new term, just that simple," he said. The maximum workday, he added, would be reduced to six hours from eight hours. "With the objective that workers are endowed with sufficient time for the holistic development of their character, the workday will not exceed 6 hours and the work week 36 hours," Chavez said. He said he will also seek to strengthen his government's expropriation powers as part of a campaign to drive his oil-producing nation toward socialism. Chavez said the government should be able to control assets of private companies before winning a court expropriation ruling. The leftist former paratrooper, who is in open confrontation with the United States, also proposed scrapping the central bank's autonomy and handing fiscal control directly to the president. The proposed reforms must now pass through Congress, a branch 100 percent controlled by Chavez supporters, and then be submitted to a referendum. Should the changes be approved, they will ratify the constitution he helped rewrite in 1999 after his landslide election a year earlier. His proposals and leftist politics have sparked the ire of critics and U.S. officials who call him authoritarian and accuse him of using Venezuela's oil wealth to threaten democracy in Latin America. A close ally of Cuba's Fidel Castro, Chavez has used bountiful oil revenues to finance a broad network of social programs that have cultivated strong support among the poor, who overwhelmingly backed his 2006 re-election.

ITN Source | August 16, 2007

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