Chavez's Venezuela to get its own time zone

CARACAS (Reuters) - So he did mean it.

Venezuela will roll clocks back by half an hour on Dec. 9 as part of President Hugo Chavez's effort to give early-rising schoolchildren more daylight.

The shift to a unique time zone has been repeatedly announced and canceled in recent weeks, but this time it's official -- published on Wednesday as a new law in Venezuela's national gazette.

The change will take place a week after Venezuelans vote on Sunday in a referendum on a constitutional reform proposal that would allow Chavez, a Cuba ally leading a self-styled socialist revolution, to run for reelection indefinitely.

Venezuela's clocks will be set to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) minus 4-1/2 hours, a time zone shared by no other nation.

Chavez first announced the plan in August and said it would take effect in less than a month, then postponed it amid confusion over how it would work.

Chavez and his brother Adan, the education minister, at one point incorrectly said in a television broadcast that the plan was to move clocks forward.

Businesses will now have to reprogram computers and perhaps change work schedules to better match those of trade partners.

Critics dismissed moving the clock by half an hour as the eccentric whim of a president who has changed the official name of the country, the coat of arms and the nation's flag.

The anti-U.S. Chavez has defended the move by arguing the world's hourly divisions were imposed by the United States.

(Reporting by Brian Ellsworth; Editing by Stuart Grudgings)