Venezuelan opposition seeks to prove insanity of Chavez

Jan 7, 2008, 20:03 GMT

Caracas - One Venezuelan opposition group is seeking legal action in an effort to prove that President Hugo Chavez is insane and unfit to govern.

Henry Ramos Allup, the secretary general of the Democratic Action (AD) party, said Monday the group will seek the support of other opposition organizations and will also campaign across the country to request Chavez's resignation.

'If I started to enumerate the reasons to request the resignation of the president, this press conference would last days. There is no need to prove facts that are publicly known. That this a bad government is as certain as it is that fire burns or that water gets things wet,' he said.

The party attempted in January 2002 to establish that Chavez was insane, although the country's Supreme Court rejected the move, Ramos Allup said.

'Now we are going to redraft it, and we will add facts that show that the president is not with it, that he is severely unbalanced,' he said.

'If he were a common Venezuelan nothing would happen, but he is the president, and his unbalances, whatever the reasons behind them, are causing grave damage to the country,' Ramos Allup said.

The controversial Chavez became Venezuelan president in 1999, and has since won several elections with at least 60 per cent of the vote, including his most recent re-election in late 2006.

However, Chavez suffered his first electoral defeat as president last month, in a referendum on a constitutional reform that sought among other things to allow the unlimited re-election of the Venezuelan president.