SFChron -- Venezuelan judge orders house arrest for anti-Chavez strike leader; Police officers ambushed by civilian gunmen

Another very slanted AP story from Ixer. A somewhat less slanted BBC article restates the main facts that the leaders of the countries business lockdown have been charged by a judge with rebellion and inciting criminal acts.

VHeadlines has an editorial on how media within Venezuela manipulates the news, AP and Reuter, the only sources for much US news media, slants the news for outside the country. For more details from VHeadlines:

Although Fernandez insists that he is innocent and that he has done nothing wrong, he was the very visible leader of a two-month opposition stoppage which has caused considerable damage to Venezuela's already fragile economy and his co-conspirator, Confederation of Venezuelan Trade Unions (CTV) boss has gone into hiding to avoid capture after he called on Venezuelans to assassinate the Venezuelan Head of State.

[President] Chavez Frias has also highlighted the fact that there was an absence of international diplomatic concern when his own democratically-elected government had been overthrown last April and that before he was returned to power 48 hours later, the governments of the United States and Spain had already applauded the coup d'etat and welcomed Dictator Carmona Estanga as a friend and ally. "It's worth remembering that the Spanish ambassador was here applauding the coup ... so the Spanish government is going to keep commenting?"

While Chavez Frias still enjoys enormous support from Venezuela's millions of poor, he and his government are routinely insulted on Venezuela's privately-owned television stations and in the opposition-controlled print media which claims that he is attempting to impose a Communist-style dictatorship in his efforts to establish political and economic recognition for the 89% of Venezuela's 23.4 million population that has been driven into abject poverty through more than 40 years of unbridled corruption by political parties now in opposition.

The opposition is pledged to ruin Chavez while Chavez Frias says he will force them to pay taxes and accept the rule of law they have ignored through decades of privilege.

The timing of the strike was an attempt by the rich to avoid paying taxes, which forty years of property owners rulership had not prepared them for.

The stoppage was abandoned at the end of last month as union boss Carlos Ortega went into a frenzy of abuse that would have seen him quickly behind bars in the United States or any other western democracy. Chavez Frias has faced strong criticism for not acting immediately to imprison the anti-constitutional conspirators, but reasoned that it was more equitable to let them run out of their own steam first.