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November17th.,
2008
Chavez In Campaign
“The opposition has a plan to get me
out of Miraflores. They are doing everything in their
power to win some governor elections, and then overthrow
me next year, but if the oligarchy takes control in
Carabobo, next year would be of war, I would deploy the
tanks to defend the revolution. Homeland or Death is the
motto. Mario Silva, the PSUV candidate here on my side,
whom I ask you to support, is the guarantee of peace,
with the oligarchy only war will come. You may choose
the road.” That is Chavez’s speech, broadcast on the
State channel, and frequently on a mandatory nationwide
radio and TV broadcast, in tireless tours around the
country, identifying as his the PSUV candidates for
Governors and Mayors. In Silva’s case, he stated:
“Mario, crush them, that’s my command. Do whatever
it takes, but we must win all governorships and
mayoralties”. In Sucre State, whose governor is
Ramon Martinez, dissident of Chavez’s administration, he
declared: “The current governor, a gangster and a
traitor, he will not only lose his office, he’s going to
jail, we will sweep you, you filthy traitor. You will
have to surrender your office to our candidate, and no
one will save you from going to jail.” The script of the
speech is the same in all states: if the oligarchy or
the traitors triumph, they have a plan to overthrow me,
but there will be war, because this is an armed
revolution. The PSUV candidate is my candidate, voting
for him is voting for Chavez, voting against war, voting
for peace.
Experts agree on the fact that Chavez
is trying to turn regional elections into a plebiscite
because he is convinced that most PSUV candidates lack
leadership in their states and municipalities, and the
aggressive, threatening and wary speech has the
objective of intimidating, disarming psychologically a
collectivity with which he seems to be tuning out. Those
who follow him for conviction and the beneficiaries of
donations, he tries to compress them: losing endangers
the continuity of the regime. He repeats: “this is a
revolution and we have come to stay, you cannot change
Picasso while he paints Guernica”. Chavez believes he is
the revolution; he has opted for the electoral way due
to the advantages of the plebiscitary support. He
assures that he will win all governorships and
mayoralties. He disqualified those who according to the
surveys would win and mobilizes all the State machinery,
under his full control, to “pulverize” the opponents.
The Constitution and laws forbid him to support a
political side over another and the use of public funds
to support political campaigns. The demands before the
CNE and the Supreme Court have had the same answer: the
President has his right to defend his work. To those who
censor the abusive use of the official media, Chavez
replies: win the Presidency and do all the mandatory
broadcasts you want.”
A
NEW MAJORITY?
The survey wars ended on November 15th,
the last day they may be released. The regime announced
theirs, transmitted through the Agencia Bolivariana
de Noticias (Bolivarian News Agency, ABN). It
reports that the Grupo de Investigación Social
(Social Research Group, GIS), led by Nelson Merentes, ex
minister of Finance, responsible in PSUV for the opinion
research, found that 45.2% of voters will vote for the
party that Chavez rules and 26.9% support the candidates
of the opposition. In the independent polls, Chavez
maintains a good popularity level, but his “aircraft
carrier” capacity has weakened. Voters are more inclined
towards candidates that guarantee good governance.
Experts point out that the scenery has had an important
change, with the birth of dissidence, strong enough to
represent a third actor. A relevant example is Barinas,
where Julio Cesar Reyes, dissident candidate for
Governor is better placed than Adan Chavez, the
President’s brother. His message is that he will remain
loyal to the revolutionary process but he disagrees with
the President’s family ruling the country as if it were
a farm they own. Another case is Guarico, where Chavez
imposed Willian Lara, one of his unconditional allies
and he is confronted by Leslie Manuit, who quit the PSUV
in protest against the presidential imposition, and a
week before the elections he is better placed than Lara.
These are outstanding cases, even when there are
dissident candidates with high percentages of favor in
other 3 or 4 states. The consolidated segmentation of
public opinion gives Chavism 41% and the qualitative
segmentation a sector of Chavists do not support the
pro-government initiatives.
Assuming that the GIS data is
correct, if 45% will vote for the PSUV, where will the
other 55% of votes go to? The question is appropriate
because in the electoral registry (REP) there are near
17 million people. There is no great discussion about
the abstention rate: they all admit it will be around 40
and 45%. If it is so, the electorate reference is of 10
million, with irrelevant variations. According to the
pro-government survey, 45% of the PSUV represents 4.5
million votes. The PSUV would win most of the
governorships, corresponding to the most unpopulated
states, where the rural vote, of villages and small
communities is more sensitive to missions and prone to
be manipulated in electoral centers that are totally
controlled by PSUV militants, with no effective presence
of opposition witnesses. Even so, the opposition vote
will be greater because it is guaranteed in the north
coast region, more populated, mostly urban, with
critical middle classes who demand respect for
decentralization. They mostly voted NO and there
political parties have good mechanisms for electoral
control. Regarding this hypothesis, the regime will try
to create, at a national and international scale, an
opinion matrix of an overwhelming triumph, through exit
polls and quick counts that will be spread through their
wide communication network, before the end of the
scrutiny phase, with the accomplice silence of the CNE.
The democratic challenge is to stress the volume of
votes for governors, where the difference may surpass
the million, shadowing the number of governors.
The challenge after 23 N is to prove that a new majority
has appeared against Chavez, with the potential
to successfully become the main actors of the 2010
agenda: a new Parliament.
THE
PEACEFUL REBELLION
In Venezuela something odd is going
on, according to Carlos Genatios, former Minister of
Science and Technology for Chavez, and nowadays in an
independent position as director of Ojo Electoral,
an NGO accepted by the CNE as Observers. “Technology has
become the tool of some organizations to manipulate the
election system and this degrades the quality of
democracy.” The Esdata organization, an NGO that
groups scientists and specialists, designed the first
electoral risk map, which identifies the voting centers
that show a high risk of manipulation of results. It is
the only advantage succeeded against all the official
efforts to prevent the analysis of sensitive election
information, according to Alfredo Weil, member of
Esdata and former general director of Election
Systems of the CNE. The results of our studies, he adds,
reflect that more than one third of voting centers are
of high risk, due to the unusual intensity of movements
in the Election Registry, demographic instability of
electoral rolls over the number of adult inhabitants of
these municipalities, illegal migrations and the great
amount of PSUV activists that have been selected by the
CNE as polling station members, most as Presidents or
Secretaries of the stations. The risk map allows
opposition parties and candidates to optimize the
electoral control resources, such as the deployment of
volunteers, witnesses, and table members and logistics
equipments. It is a possible goal in the urban center of
big cities, but it is very difficult in slums controlled
by gangsters that use the “red, very red” uniform as a
protecting shield, and in small villages and towns,
where Chavez’s “battalions” turn into the real election
authority, with the complicity of the Plan Republica.
It is the experience of previous elections.
Chavez affirms that the opposition
always shows the ghost of electoral fraud, and that the
voting system is the most secure and modern of the
world. “They talk about fraud, because they know we will
sweep them from the political scenario”. Maria Corina
Machado, leader of Sumate, replies that these are
not seizures of those who oppose or disagree with the
regime. Up to this date, the CNE has not published the
results of 4500 ballots of the 2 D referendum. “We
Venezuelans have learned that whatever happens before,
during and after elections is important. We are
encouraging people to become active, as polling station
members, witnesses or voters. We will scan the ballots
and we will put them on the internet after the CNE’s
first bulletin. We have traced the goal of training
53,000 super witnesses to cover all voting centers. We
need to vote to impose a new barrier to the attempt of
getting more autocratic power. There is a real
revolution, the citizenship’s. Chavez is terrified by
this revolution. He looks exasperated and his campaign
speech is absurd. He feels we will conquer once again on
November 23rd.” Machado is right. There is a peaceful
rebellion that may declare the end of Chavez as leader
of a process disguised as democratic, or the beginning
of another one, in which a 21st Century socialism is no
longer an ambiguous speech but a copied model of the
Cuban experience.
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