FEATURE-Venezuelan students lead Chavez referendum outcry

MERIDA, Venezuela (Reuters) - Nestled in Venezuela's snow-capped Andes, Merida is a picturesque city with tidy public squares, a cable car and a novelty ice cream store offering flavors from garlic to viagra.

But its university seethes with political protest.

Burnt tires, thrown rocks and graffiti scrawls of 'Yes' or 'No,' litter the campus and city back streets following violent clashes over left-wing President Hugo Chavez's plan to rewrite the constitution and scrap limits on how long he can rule.

The political turmoil in a city known for tourism and academia has also played out across the OPEC nation as students lead a growing outcry against Chavez's move, giving him the toughest vote test of his eight years in office.

Marches in the Andes, the plains, the Caribbean coast and the capital Caracas have drawn hundreds of thousands of students into the streets against a raft of constitutional changes that must be approved Sunday in a referendum.

"We are looking to make people conscious of the arbitrary nature of what the government is doing," engineering student Mayra Cruz said as she distributed "No" leaflets in Merida. "If they don't wake up, then when it does affect them, they will wonder why they didn't do anything to stop it."

Chavez supporters dominate Congress, the courts, the country's electoral body and the state oil company in the fourth-largest exporter of oil to the United States.

He is highly popular for his oil-financed social spending programs, his folksy style and his open confrontation with the United States, which is unpopular in much of Latin America.

But his constitutional overhaul is far less attractive to voters.

Apart from ending limits on his own rule, the proposal would formalize Venezuela as a socialist state, allow Chavez to censor media in an "emergency" and let him handpick regional officials with more power than elected governors and mayors.

He has added sweeteners such as giving workers most of Fridays off, but polls show he could lose the vote.

Chavez first won power in a 1998 election and again coasted to victory in 2000 and last year, but he would have to leave office in 2013 unless he can reform the constitution.

STUDENT STAND

Traditional opposition parties have been weakened by bickering and failed to find much support outside the wealthier classes, so the student movement has filled a void.

In May, when Chavez ignored most Venezuelans' objections and shut a TV station, students flooded the streets.

Chavez's constitutional reform plan has brought them out again in an unstructured movement with myriad leaders where word-of-mouth or text messages can amass thousands at rallies.

"The students give politics a moral face. They are not defending the rights of the rich but of all of Venezuela," said political analyst Fausto Maso. "We were complaining of a lack of leadership and suddenly a multitude of leaders stepped up."

Opposition parties, the Roman Catholic Church and rights groups have all condemned Chavez's constitution changes as authoritarian. The president has also suffered defections from former allies, sowing doubts over his plan among moderate supporters, pollsters say.

But the students are his most vocal and visible opponents.

Some demonstrations have turned violent and pro-Chavez students have clashed with the anti-reform band, scarring the referendum campaign with images of hooded men shooting from motorcycles or smoke and tear gas choking parts of cities.

At one Merida campus protest, a man shot and wounded four policemen in the most violent incident of the campaign.

Student movements shook the regime of a dictator in 1928 and 30 years later helped overthrow another, but in the last few decades campus politics were largely confined to small leftist groups with anti-establishment causes.

Chavez has praised members of his own government as former student stone-throwers while he has sought to discredit the youth of 2007 as U.S.-backed "little rich kids."

But the students cut across class lines. While many are well-to-do, others come from the shantytowns where Chavez draws his support and one leader's revolutionary pedigree comes from his parents -- the Soviet admirers named him Stalin.

Capitalist or communist, the students preach a message of inclusion. They say Chavez wants to polarize Venezuela with a reform that makes outcasts of anyone but socialists.

"It's like apartheid in South Africa or ... Hitler's Germany, where citizens who were not with the government stopped being citizens," said one student leader, Yon Goicoechea, as he sat cross-legged on the grass at a campus in Caracas.