Venezuela Reelects Hugo Chavez. What’s Next?
Hugo Chávez’s triumph in the October 7 Venezuelan presidential elections, after 14 years in office, is a feat virtually without precedent anywhere. Elected presidents invariably suffer an erosion of support, which is why few are reelected more than once in countries without term limits. In contrast, October’s victory was Chávez’s fifth, including the opposition’s botched recall election effort in 2004. Chávez’s 55 percent of the vote far surpassed the 48 percent that his movement’s candidates received in the congressional elections just two years before and was nearly the same as what he obtained in his first presidential bid in 1998. Speaking from the “people’s balcony” of the presidential palace just hours after the results were announced, Chávez called the election “the perfect battle.”
To judge by his previous victories, Chávez’ win will be quickly followed by a new wave of reforms. In his first years in office, his emphasis was on political reforms, but after receiving massive support at the polls, he turned to anti-neoliberal economic policies including an agrarian reform. After winning the recall election in 2004, he redefined private property as a right coupled with obligations. Then after being reelected in 2006 he began expropriations. His most recent popular measure was a new labor law passed this year that outlaws outsourcing, reduces the work week and provides generous severance payments. Each step has been greeted with approval from his movement’s rank and file and serves to ensure them that the so-called “process of change” has not stagnated.
Much of the Western media coverage of the campaign has taken its cue from Chávez's opposition. Thus the age factor and the contrast between the old and the new received considerable play. On the one hand, a 58-year old Chávez, who may not survive the next presidential period due to his bout with cancer, attempted to extend his time power. On the other hand, his 40-year-old energetic rival, Henrique Capriles, sought to become the youngest president in Venezuelan history.
Concrete issues, however, were very much at stake in the October elections. Two very different visions emerged. Chávez addressed the phenomenon of the foreign takeover of vast sectors of the Venezuelan economy in the 1990s, from telecommunications, steel, cement, electricity to the airlines. His antidote has been nationalization of multinational-owned companies and (in the case of the airlines) the founding of a new state company. During the campaign, Chávez raised the banner of “national independence,” which became the first objective in his “Program of the Fatherland for 2013-2019.”
In contrast to Chávez’s economic nationalism, Capriles defended an open door policy toward foreign investments without reference to possible government controls on the private sector. At a rally in the provincial capital of Barcelona on the second to the last day of the campaign, Capriles mocked Chávez’s slogan of independence, saying “we achieved independence two centuries ago.” He added “for me independence means paved roads, improved garbage collection and preventing blackouts.”
The two candidates were also far apart on foreign policy. The Guardian noted that Capriles “vowed a dramatic change in foreign policy” including “shifting his country away from China and Russia.” According to the article, Capriles would also “end the Chávez policy of promoting worldwide revolution and focus on Venezuela’s needs.”
Reports that Venezuela’s foreign policy is ideologically driven, however, are misleading. Chávez has been a key player in promoting Latin American unity through various organizations (UNASUR, MERCOSUR, CELAC and Petrocaribe) and in the process has built bridges with non-leftist governments (see my “The New ‘Community’ in America’s Backyard” in In These Times, May 2011). In contrast to his stormy relations with former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe, Chávez has maintained exceptionally friendly relations with that nation’s current president, centrist Juan Manuel Santos.
In fact, Chávez has maintained cordial relations with most countries throughout the world, with the exception of the United States, which he sometimes brands “the empire.” Nevertheless, a week before the Venezuelan elections, Chávez declared “if I were from the United States, I'd vote for Obama,” thus leaving open the possibility of an easing of tensions between the two nations in 2013.
Much of the media has put its own spin on Chávez’s impressive electoral record. Chávez is often portrayed as a demagogue whose fiery but empty rhetoric is designed to rally the masses. He is also frequently called a “populist” who knows how to win elections but not how to run the economy.
On October 5, a New York Times article titled “Fears Persist Among Venezuelan Voters Ahead of Elections” pointed to Chávez’s “many advantages over the opposition candidate… from the airwaves he controls to the government largess he doles out.” The article, however, failed to point out that the Venezuelan corporate media was heavily slanted in favor of the opposition. Nor, in suggesting that the election might be less than democratic, did it mention that leaders of the opposition, including its presidential candidate, repeatedly assured their followers that voting fraud was impossible. In fact, Jimmy Carter affirmed that of the 92 elections monitored by his Carter Center “the election process in Venezuela is the best in the world.”
The article also claimed the electoral results might be skewed by a fear among Venezuelans that a new electronic voting system could allow the government to identify their vote. One quote in theTimes’ article stands out for its flimsy evidence of this “fear factor.” The article quotes a second-year law student by the name of Fabiana Osteicoechea who was “an enthusiastic supporter” of Capriles but indicated she was going to vote for Chávez out of fear “that the government career she hoped to have as a prosecutor could be blocked if she voted the wrong way.” The Times failed to explain why someone with such an unusual name would reveal her secret voting preference to the international media. Osteicoechea’s Twitter account includes a photo of the law student kissing a Capriles poster.
Chávez's win may prompt a reexamination of relations between the government and the opposition, which, up until now, have been so polarized that neither side has recognized the other’s legitimacy. During the campaign, Capriles even refused to pledge himself to accept the official results announced by the National Electoral Council.
Signs immediately following the elections indicate that the mutual distrust may be easing. Keeping a promise he made on election day, Chávez phoned Capriles and for the first time refrained from using derogatory language against his former rival. More important, Chávez committed himself to “extending a hand” to his opponents and made a call for “national reconciliation,” which would even include business interests of all sizes. This attitude toward the organized opposition breaks with Chávez’s hardened position since 2002 when a coup overthrew him for 48 hours. In the aftermath of that event Chávez attempted to bring the opposition to the negotiating table but his opponents refused to meet the president half way and continued to plot his overthrow. Chávez subsequently indicated that his naïve efforts during those months served as a learning experience.
There is no guarantee, however, that Chávez’s national reconciliation proposal will get off the ground. Pro-government leaders have made clear that first the opposition itself needs to change. Diosdado Cabello, vice-president of the governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela, stated the day after the elections that the government was waiting to see “if a really true opposition emerges.” Chávez also makes a distinction between the “far Right”–conspiratorial, disruptive and neoliberal–and the less-radical “Right” (meaning, perhaps, the center).
In the weeks prior to the elections, several prominent opposition leaders broke off from Capriles on grounds that his program was based on radical neoliberalism. One of the dissidents, former governor David De Lima, declared that Capriles’ right-wing “Justice First” party was set on “dismantling the state,” including the elimination of social programs, and that its success could bring the country to “the door of a civil war.” De Lima claimed that not all of the pro-Capriles coalition partners favor this approach and that some resent the efforts of the Justice First party to gain the upper hand within the opposition bloc.
Of course, government flexibility toward its adversaries may be designed to foster divisions in the opposition. In any case, the new approach of pro-Chávez leaders represents a break with their previous policy of viewing the opposition as monolithic and at the service of foreign interests.
Nor is it clear how far Chávez will actually go to seek reconciliation. Negotiations with the opposition imply a willingness to make concessions, which is contrary to Chávez’s strategy of seizing opportunities to deepen the process of change without allowing critics to weigh in.
All major opposition leaders firmly resist the use of massive government expenditures to finance ambitious goals. Up until now, the programs that Chávez claims create the conditions for “socialism” have been financed by windfall oil revenue. Thus, for instance, expropriations to bolster the nation’s mixed economy are designed to allow state companies to compete with private ones in hopes of controlling inflation, which at over 20 percent is the highest in the continent. Another costly and ambitious area of investment has been community councils, which receive financing to carry out their own public works projects and to form what the government calls “communes.” The main opposition parties may be divided with regard to the role of the state, but none of them go along with the type of transformation to which Chávez is committed.
Thus, entering his fourth term, Hugo Chávez is at a strategy crossroads. The continuation of far-reaching programs that invigorate the rank and file will meet resistance from opposition leaders who claim they are not sustainable over the long run. On the other hand, major concessions to the opposition would run the risk of dampening the enthusiasm of his followers. While the strategies of change and national reconciliation may not be mutually exclusive, it will take considerable political skill to combine the two in ways that overcome the intense political schisms that have divided Venezuela in recent years.
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Venezuela eyes change
By Tatsuo, Miyachi at Oct 15, 2012 09:11 AM
Venezuela eyes change
By Editorial Board, Published: October 7
IF HUGO CHAVEZ is an autocrat, how could he be in danger of losing the Venezuelan presidency in an election on Sunday? The question, posed by one of Mr. Chavez’s dwindling band of American supporters, is a fair one: Polls show a race to the wire between the caudillo and challenger Henrique Capriles Radonski. An opposition victory would mean an epochal change of political direction in one of the world’s largest oil producers, with far-reaching consequences for Cuba and other leftist Latin American regimes.
The answer begins with the fact that Mr. Chavez, like his allies Vladimir Putin and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, feels obliged to stage elections; the totalitarianism of Cuba or North Korea would risk rebellion by his population and international isolation. So elections are held — but in an environment that heavily favors the regime. Mr. Chavez controls Venezuela’s courts, election commission and most television channels, which bombard the population with propaganda. That includes hours-long appearances by the president on all channels simultaneously. Mr. Capriles is allowed three minutes of air-time per day.
According to a report by the Committee to Protect Journalists, even media not directly controlled by the government have been reluctant to report critically on Mr. Chavez. Many voters, too, are intimidated by high-tech polling machines that read their fingerprints; polls show that they suspect their votes will not be secret. Those not motivated by fright might be lured by greed: The government has amassed a list of 3 million people it has promised new homes. There are about 12 million likely voters.
That Mr. Chavez is in danger of losing in spite of all this is testimony to the havoc he has wreaked in what was once Latin America’s richest country. At more than 20 percent, inflation is the highest in the region and is accompanied by chronic shortages of food, basic consumer goods and power. The country’s infrastructure is crumbling: Within the last two months an explosion at a state oil refinery killed 50 people, and a major highway bridge collapsed. Perhaps worst of all for average citizens, violent crime has become epidemic under Mr. Chavez. The murder rate, which has more than tripled, is one of the five highest in the world. Drug traffickers have made Venezuela a hub for shipments to the United States and Europe with the help of senior government officials, including the current defense minister.
Fortunately, Venezuela’s opposition has evolved from a collection of feuding has-beens to a united and dynamic movement spearheaded by youth who long to push the country onto the modernizing paths of Brazil, Chile and Mexico. Mr. Capriles has survived imprisonment and systematic harassment by Mr. Chavez while remaining a committed liberal democrat who cites Brazil’s social democrats as his model. A tireless campaigner, Mr. Capriles has visited more than 300 municipalities, while Mr. Chavez — visibly weakened by what several reports have said is a terminal case of cancer — has mostly stuck to television.
Mr. Chavez’s illness probably means that his days as Venezuela’s leader are numbered anyway. The question now is whether he will give way if he loses on Sunday. Venezuela’s neighbors, and the Obama administration, should be ready to react if he attempts to remain in power by force.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/venezuela-eyes-change/2012/10/06/8e3e7c54-0e6b-11e2-bb5e-492c0d30bff6_print.html
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Venezuelan secret service erased our data
By Tatsuo, Miyachi at Oct 15, 2012 09:10 AM
Venezuelan secret service erased our data, claims journalist
Critic of Argentinian and Venezuelan regimes 'detained at airport for two hours after covering Chavez election'
Argentina's top TV journalist Jorge Lanata has alleged that he was held in the basement of Caracas airport for nearly two hours while Venezuela's secret service erased his team's camera, computer and cellphone memories. Only then, he says, were they allowed to leave the country.
Lanata, a harsh critic of the Venezuelan government of Hugo Chavez and of the Argentinian president Cristina Kirchner, was returning to Buenos Aires on a regular airline flight after covering the Venezuelan election. One of the most popular segments of Lanata's show is a comedy segment with Chavez and Kirchner impersonators that has made his show, Periodismo Para Todos (Journalism for Everyone), one of the most popular on Argentine television.
The journalist said that he and his team were interrogated by Venezuelan secret police and accused of spying because, during his report last night for the Argentinian TV channel 13, he showed two written orders from Venezuela's secret service ordering his surveillance while in Caracas.
"We are very shaken and they erased all the material we were bringing back," said Lanata on his release. The passengers of Lanata's airline flight had to wait for nearly two hours while the journalist and his team were interrogated.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/oct/09/argentina-journalist-venezuela-detain/print
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Chavez petrodollars fuel voter worship
By Tatsuo, Miyachi at Oct 15, 2012 09:09 AM
Chavez petrodollars fuel voter worship
By John Paul Rathbone, Saturday, October 13, 3:37 AM
CHUAO, Venezuela — It has been a week since Hugo Chavez’s landslide electoral victory — but that is not why the president’s supporters are still laughing in Chuao, a fishing village on Venezuela’s surf-pounded Atlantic coast.
Last Sunday, in the general hilarity and excitement of the results, a carouser popped a wheelie by Chuao’s colonial-era 17th-century church and fell off his motorbike. When the gas tank ignited in the crash, the bystanders’ laughter soared into the night sky alongside the roaring flames.
“At least the motorbike didn’t explode!” grinned Elvis Morillo, a burly Afro-Caribbean fisherman.
Chuao is a “chavista” stronghold and also one of those semi-mythic Latin American towns that seem to leap from the pages of a novel. It is accessible only by boat, so that even the town’s new school bus had to be brought in by surfing it on the waves.
Two hundred years ago, Simon Bolivar, the South American liberator and Chavez’s hero, passed a night of despair here — and, some say, contemplated suicide until the aroma of the cacao drying on the church patio lifted his spirits.
Four years ago, Chavez used Chuao’s cobbled streets and palm-fringed bay as a backdrop for his “Al Presidente” television show. “Hello, Chuao!” he exclaimed at the start of the eight hour talk-a-thon, before declaring a series of new socialist projects.
Such histories, old and new, make Chuao a folkloric microcosm of modern Venezuela. It is also why the town and its 3,000 inhabitants help illuminate why Chavez has been reelected president for another six years after what many consider 14 ruinous years in power.
“Of course I voted for ‘mi presidente,’ ” said fisherman Orlando Santana, while tying up at Chuao’s new stone wharf, built thanks to a $698,000 “revolutionary” reconstruction project, as a broken billboard nearby declares. “Why would I vote for anyone else?”
However, Chavez’s political success owes less to revolutionary ideology than to a petrodollar-financed love affair with voters.
Black gold flows through Venezuela, the Saudi Arabia of South America but with more oil reserves, and over the past decade Chavez has showered it on Venezuela’s poor. The flow has been immense: $1tn of revenues over the past decade. Yet as Chuao shows, Venezuelan history is replete with natural bounty abundantly displayed: It is Latin America’s traditional, some say pre-modern, way of doing things.
Chuao’s ancient hacienda still grows a cacao so fine that chocolatiers, such as France’s Valhrona, consider it the “best in the world.” In colonial times, this “premiere cru” cacao turned Chuao into such a font of wealth — the oil gusher of its day — that it financed the first university in Caracas, a white neo-Gothic structure near the Plaza Bolivar.
The education that Chuao provided then and that Chavez provides now — he has expanded university enrolment four times — can be a source of both personal self-advancement and revolutionary renewal, as Chavez so often says.
Indeed, when the hacienda’s last owner, the pious Dona Catalina Mexia del Castillo died in 1669, she bequeathed Chuao to the slaves who worked there on the condition that they stayed and grew cacao.
Which they did, so forging a distinctively rebellious local popular culture.
At religious festivals, masked men dressed as laughing devils castigate onlookers while cackling with laughter. It’s a culture in keeping with a gauche brassiness that is peculiarly Venezuelan, and with which Chavez empathizes.
“I’m also a devil. We’re all devils — good devils, because there are bad devils, too,” he had joked to his Chuao audience during his TV show.
As elsewhere in Venezuela, not everyone is won over by Chavez’s demagoguery or folksy turns.
“I voted for the opposition because I’m the only intelligent person here,” said Juan Velocidad, an overweight beach restaurateur.
The waste and corruption of Chavez’s extravagant state-sponsored populism is huge. As they say in Caracas: “Any senior chavista who hasn’t made millions is a ‘huevon,’ ” or fool. Yet with 300 billion barrels of oil reserves, worth more than $30 trillion at current prices, people’s lives have improved, and the government still enjoys a huge margin of error.
That is just as well, because the 58-year-old Chavez, although he says he is cured of cancer, may have just begun a tricky transition by appointing Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro, a street-sharp former union bus driver, as his vice president and eventual successor.
Not that anyone in Chuao seems worried about such distant political concerns. Here, the smooth continuation of Chavez’s presidency has returned life to the way it was four months ago, before the election hysteria, which is why the burning motorcycle, for now, is the only news worth talking about.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/chavez-petrodollars-fuel-voter-worship/2012/10/12/39d1c90e-1498-11e2-bf18-a8a596df4bee_print.html
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Hugo Chávez accused of spying
By Tatsuo, Miyachi at Oct 15, 2012 09:08 AM
Hugo Chávez accused of spying on rival in runup to presidential election
Hugo Chávez's government has been accused of spying on his defeated presidential rival in the runup to the Venezuelan elections, with leaked documents allegedly showing that secret service agents tracked the movements of Henrique Capriles and his family.
Argentinian journalist Jorge Lanata, who said he was interrogated by secret service agents at Caracas airport last week as he left Venezuela, was due to release the files on television on Sunday night. The documents have not been authenticated but are said to come from secret service files.
One report, dated 3 October, is titled Arrival of relatives of MUD presidential candidate Henrique Capriles Radonski, and tracks the arrival of the candidate's aunt, Andrea Radonski, and nine others at La Chinita airport.
Another, marked Secret, states that "with regard to the monitoring under way of the main personalities from the national political arena passing through the International Airport Simón Bolívar de Maiquetía, it is observed that presidential candidate Henrique Capriles Radonski, has not made any trips since 6 August 2012, when he arrived from Maracaibo on board airship 215T".
Others documents report on the infiltration of student groups and he movement of foreign journalists covering last Sunday's polls.
Lanata said secret service agents questioned him for two hours in the basement of Caracas airport, and deleted data from his team's computers, cellphones and cameras before allowing them to leave the country. "They wanted to know where we had got the documents from," said Lanata, who was to reveal their contents on his news programme Periodismo Para Todos (Journalism for All).
Last week, Lanata released documents apparently showing how he and his team were being tracked by the secret service during their stay in Venezuela.
"They kept on asking me for my email password because they wanted to see what other documents I had," said Nicolás Wiñazki, a journalist on Lanata's team. "They thought they had found it when they found my scribbled password for the WiFi at my hotel."
Wiñazki refused to give the agents his password and after nearly two hours in the basement of Maiquetía international airport, he and the rest of Lanata's team were returned their passports, as well as their now emptied cellphones, cameras and computers, and allowed to board their plane to Buenos Aires.
Lanata says he is convinced the documents are genuine because of the interrogation. "The SEBIN (secret service) agents kept asking how we got hold of the documents that we had already aired, so those were definitely authentic. These ones about Capriles came from the same source."
Lanata, a critic of the Chávez government and his ally, Argentina's president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, expects a strong reaction to his broadcast. "They could charge me with violating Venezuelan secrecy laws. I suppose they could bar me from ever returning to Venezuela or ask for my extradition from Argentina, that would be a great story too."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/oct/14/hugo-chavez-accused-spying-henrique-capriles/print
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