AFP - Incoming opposition legislators decried as a "coup d'etat" new laws that clamp down on press freedoms and grant President Hugo Chavez sweeping new powers.
The mood was echoed in Washington, where an influential US lawmaker urged the regional Organization of American States (OAS) bloc to stand up against the Chavez "tyranny."
The calls come after laws were pushed through Venezuela's National Assembly by the ruling Socialist Party just weeks before a new assembly, in which pro-Chavez legislators lose their supermajority, takes office on January 5.
The measures include granting the president temporary power to decree laws, restricting Internet content and broadcast media freedoms, and punishing legislators who switch parties.
"We energetically condemn the coup d'etat that is taking place by the regime," read a statement from the 67 opposition legislators set to take office in January.
They believe that supporters of Chavez, a key ally of Communist Cuba, "intend to implant a communist system in Venezuela through a totalitarian and militarized state."
The statement called on the Venezuelan people "to unite, to reject and peacefully activate themselves" against the "absolute concentration of power in the hands of the president of the republic."
The government "has become a tyranny that the Venezuelans should defeat, and will defeat," added the statement.
Opposition legislators won 67 of the 165 seats in the single chamber National Assembly in September elections, shattering a five-year streak in which pro-Chavez legislators had an overwhelming majority.
Chavez supporters say the authority to govern by decree was necessary to handle a weather emergency, and that the media laws are designed to prevent abuses as well as regulate, not censor, the Internet.
Chavez said Wednesday that his opponents are "calling for someone to kill me."
Speaking at a military base and surrounded by military officers, Chavez said that opposition leaders "have been driven mad, and are calling on the armed forces to refuse to recognize" the government.
In Washington, congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, soon to become chairwoman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the House of Representatives, blasted the OAS for doing little about events in Venezuela.
"Choosing to take no side in the battle between tyranny and democracy in Venezuela only helps the tyrannical side," Ros-Lehtinen, who left Cuba as a child, said in a statement.
"It is shameful that Chavez?s actions to usurp power and impose Castro-style control over the media have been met with barely a whimper from most member-states of the Organization of American States, an organization that is supposed to promote and protect democracy in the Western Hemisphere."
Ros-Lehtinen, 58, is a fierce critic of the Castro regime in Cuba, as well as the leftist regimes of Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua.
The Republican, who represents a south Florida district that includes thousands of Cuban exiles, has in the past proposed channeling Washington's OAS dues instead to US programs.
The Washington-based OAS comprises the 35 independent states of the Americas, though Cuba and Honduras are currently excluded. Its goals include strengthening democracy and defending human rights.
Her call comes days after Washington warned that US-Venezuelan ties will suffer now that Chavez has formally rejected US President Barack Obama's nominee for ambassador.
Meanwhile Chavez and his supporters "are once again ratcheting up the government?s power to punish critics," said Jose Miguel Vivanco, the Americas director at Human Rights Watch.
HRW described the new measures as "an assault on on free speech (and) civil society."
The new media law now gives Chavez "legal cover to expand its longstanding practice of bullying local human rights defenders and trying to keep international advocates away from the Venezuelan public," Vivanco said.
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