Car Bomb Hits Venezuelan Oil City of Maracaibo

A car bomb exploded early on Sunday in the western Venezuelan oil city of Maracaibo, destroying three cars and damaging homes and a local office of the U.S. oil company Chevron Texaco, police said. Hours after the blast, President Hugo Chavez said his country’s security forces were on an anti-terrorist alert. It was the third bomb attack in less than a week in Venezuela, where a long-running political feud between left-wing populist Chavez and his opponents has raised fears of violent upheaval in the world’s No. 5 oil exporter. Chavez, who is resisting opposition calls for early elections, Sunday blamed political foes for bomb blasts in the Venezuelan capital Caracas Tuesday which badly damaged Spanish and Colombian diplomatic buildings, injuring five people. “We’re on the alert in the whole country,” the former army paratrooper said on his weekly “Hello President” television and radio show. He did not mention Sunday’s blast, which blew bits of masonry from the fronts of several private houses in the Richmond residential estate of Maracaibo’s San Francisco district. Debris was scattered over a wide area. The explosion also shattered windows of a nearby administrative office of the U.S. oil giant Chevron, one of several major foreign oil companies operating in oil-rich Venezuela. Police said Chevron did not appear to be the target. Full Story