VENEZUELAN Youth Opposition Leader - "Praised in US, Vilified at Home"

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Praised in U.S., vilified at home
American group awards $500,000 to student who led protests last year in Venezuela
The Associated Press
May 11, 2008
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/headline/world/5771464.html

CARACAS, Venezuela - For his outspoken opposition to President Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's best-known college student has been called a U.S. collaborator and has had his nose broken in a scuffle.

On a wall opposite the converted garage where Yon Goicoechea lives, graffiti denounces him as a defender of the rich and powerful. Now, state television airs a cartoon of him holding a fistful of dollars and stamped "Made in USA."

Lately the attacks have intensified because of the $500,000 award he received last month from the Cato Institute, a U.S. think tank that advocates individual liberties and free markets, for his "pivotal role in organizing and voicing opposition to the erosion of human and civil rights in his country."

The 23-year-old law student and protest leader arrives in the U.S. today and will collect the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty, named for the late Nobel laureate economist, in New York on Thursday.

"In Venezuela you can't speak of democracy because all branches of government are controlled by one single branch," he said in an interview. "It's growing dangerously close to a totalitarian regime."

Still, his activities and occasional triumphs suggest Venezuela's opposition has room to maneuver, despite Chavez's efforts to tighten his socialist grip on the country.

Goicoechea first drew attention last year, when he led protests against a government decision that forced an opposition TV channel off the air.

It runs in the family

His big moment came when he helped organize protest marches and made passionate speeches against constitutional changes that would have included removing presidential term limits and giving Chavez emergency powers to suspend civil liberties.

The reform was rejected in a December referendum, dealing Chavez his worst political defeat.

Goicoechea says an early influence was his Cuban-born grandmother, who left the island in the 1940s and became an ardent foe of Fidel Castro.

Goicoechea was just 14 when Chavez was elected in 1998, and says she warned him: "That guy's a communist."

An honor student at the private Andres Bello Catholic University, he emerged as a charismatic speaker while rallying students to vote "no" to Chavez's "dictatorial reform" and calling for "struggle against totalitarianism."

Chavez dismissed last year's protests as rich kids serving his critics in Washington. The $500,000 from the Cato Institute has led to posters going up on Caracas streets calling Goicoechea "Half-a-Million Yon." Mario Silva, a pro-Chavez talk show host, says the student is "a launderer of money that's going to be used to continue conspiring against Venezuela."

At a university event where Goicoechea was to speak last year, he was pummeled by several young men in the crowd, emerging with a fractured nose.

Goicoechea is unapologetic about accepting the prize. He says he is still studying the legal requirements for bringing the prize money into Venezuela but wants to use it to develop a foundation and train others in Latin America who share his values.

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