Lagniappe

 

Oliver Read : The opposition to Chavez

Three days before the Dec. 3, 2006, presidential elections in Venezuela, fireworks enlivened the sky above Caracas, Venezuela's capital city. Earlier that day, Manuel Rosales, the man who emerged only several months earlier to challenge Hugo Chavez for president, called on his supporters to light up the city.

And that they did: they fired off miniature rockets, blasted guns into the air, whacked pots and pans, blew whistles and honked car horns.

But when Venezuelans went to the polls, they ultimately decided the country did not need new blood in office. At around 11 p.m. Election Day, Rosales conceded defeat.

In the affluent neighborhood of Las Mercedes, situated in the hills overlooking the city where many of Rosales' supporters reside, the noisy celebrations ceased. By 11:30, nearly all the lights had been turned off. People just went to bed.

In another part of the city, Hugo Chavez -- perched on the balcony of the Miraflores presidential palace, his signature red shirt soaked by rain -- addressed a crowd of thousands, promising an "expansion" of the Bolivarian Revolution. The roaring crowd waved huge Venezuelan flags and pumped their fists. "Long live the revolution!" he bellowed.

According to Venezuela's electoral council, Chávez won 63 percent of the vote to Rosales' 37 percent. Still, Rosales and the opposition chalked up their loss under the win category for garnering a sizeable chunk of the voting population by legitimate means. The opposition has indicated that it intends to keep Rosales, a politician from the western state of Zulia, as its front man, but presidential losers in Venezuela have a tendency to disappear.

Coup de blah

In the recent past, challenging Chávez democratically has not been the preferred tactic. In 2002, the opposition -- at the time, the leaders of the two political parties that dominated Venezuelans politics for 40 years before Chávez emerged -- staged a military coup that failed. Then came the national oil strike in 2002-3, which caused enormous damage to Venezuela's economy.

In 2004, the opposition to Chávez managed to get some 3 million Venezuelans to sign a petition, which in turn led to a referendum to determine whether Chávez should be recalled from office. Chávez maintained his presidency after 58 percent of Venezuelans voted against sacking him.

To this day, some opposition members insist the referendum was stolen. However Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C., argued that international observers, including the Carter Center and Organization of American States, deemed the process clean. "You can see [that the opposition is] in a bubble world," Weisbrot said. "I've talked to these people a lot ... and I haven't met one who can even carry on a conversation like a normal person."

During the Venezuelan congressional elections in December 2005, opposition parties decided to boycott the elections because they said they couldn't "trust" the electoral process. This proved to be a major blunder. Even they admit that. The abstention in the end gave Chávez full control of the 167-member National Assembly.

Since then, there has been "an evolution" within the opposition, said Alvaro Vargas Llosa, director of the Center on Global Prosperity at the Independent Institute. Two years ago, "some of the old guard -- the dinosaurs -- were still trying to control things." Now, the opposition has expanded to include a middle class and lower middle class that don't directly benefit from Chávez's social programs, and the people who have democratic instincts but feel threatened by the gradual erosion of these institutions, said Llosa.

And so all these groups have coalesced behind Rosales to traverse the democratic avenue in hopes of one day dislodging Hugo Chávez.

The hard-fought battle

On the Friday before Sunday's elections, some Venezuelan government employees received an image in their e-mail inbox. The image showed two smiling men (one was Rosales) clutching each other by the elbows. To the right of the men was a checklist of accusations, including: "They dared to kidnap President Chávez with the intention to assassinate him." Below the checklist was a phrase meant to reference Rosales' campaign slogan, "Dare to change!" However, the phrase in the image read, "If you dare you will regret."

It was a threat with real possible consequences. After the recall referendum in 2004, the names of those who participated -- as well as their ID number and their vote to keep or remove Chávez -- was made public. The information, known as the Maisanta List, can easily be purchased on the streets of Caracas. After the list was divulged, numerous state employees who voted against Chávez lost their jobs, according to State Department officials in Caracas.

"Some people have a well-founded fear of speaking out," said Llosa of the Independent Institute.

Also causing fear among potential Chavez dissenters were the fingerprint machines set up at the polling stations aimed at preventing people from voting multiple times. Although some observers praised the equipment as effective measures against cheating, critics -- including several U.S. State Department officials in Caracas -- said that many Venezuelans worried that the machines would be used to create another Maisanta List.

On the whole, said Milos Alcalay, former Venezuelan ambassador to the United Nations and now adviser to Rosales, Election Day went smoothly. The problem, he said, was that while international observers were impressed by the level of participation and professionalism at the polling stations, they failed to observe the chicanery occurring behind the scenes, or that the National Electoral Council "supports the government."

Alcalay said that many in the opposition viewed this last election as a "now or never" situation, that if they didn't grab the presidential reins this time around, Chávez would be able to continue his consolidation of power. Alcalay insisted that the loss was still a win, and that winning the presidential election at this time was most likely impossible. "Reality obliges you to go on the sense of possibilities."

Indeed, was is it possible for Chávez to not lose? His face -- spray painted on walls, printed on posters, talking on television -- is ubiquitous and inescapable in Caracas. As one recent story from The Economist magazine put it: "With abundant oil revenue at his disposal and no budgetary restraints or institutional checks on his power, Mr. Chávez is a tough opponent."

Chávez has characterized the opposition as the corrupt guard of yesteryear. And the opposition has played into that perception, said Michael Shifter, vice president for policy at the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington, D.C. "With [the opposition's] political inexperience and their lack of strategy, they helped Chávez reinforce his message," Shifter said.

For instance, the opposition complained that the Cuban doctors, whom Chávez sent into the Caracas slums as part of his social program, were poorly trained. But for an impoverished Venezuelan, a poorly trained doctor is better than none.

"It was just terribly foolish, just no sensitivity at all for people who have absolutely no access to medical service," said Shifter. "This was just an example that struck me as having no political sense."

According to the Evans/McDonough opinion research firm, 4 percent of Venezuelans say that the opposition is their "most important problem," next to corruption and housing. When Chávez addressed his people on election night, the crowd passed above their heads a coffin with the phrase "Mi Negra" pasted on the side. Mi Negra (My Black One) was Rosales' proposed economic plan, which called for distributing 20 percent of the country's oil earnings to the poor via a debit card, which is black in color.

But on top of painting the opposition with a negative brush, Chávez has impassioned his constituency -- the poor Venezuelans -- with his social welfare programs called "missions," which have helped abate poverty, improve education and provide health care to those who are otherwise deprived.

According to Bernardo Alvarez Herrera, the Venezuelan ambassador to the United States, in an article in Foreign Affairs, "Venezuela's social programs will allow the country to meet the U.N. Millennium Development Goals in 2012, three years ahead of schedule, and the country's ranking on the U.N.'s Human Development Index (a broad measure of economic and social welfare) continues to rise. Although some critics have called these programs clientelistic, they are simply responding to long-ignored needs and building much-needed human capital in Venezuela."

The opposition, on the other hand, has its laundry list of complaints: Crime is rampant (between 2001 and 2006, the number of homicides in Venezuela has been three times the number of victims in Afghanistan, according to Llosa); many of the missions, Chávez's magnum opus, are closed; the government is corrupt; the country's infrastructure is crumbling (the big bridge that links Caracas to Venezuela's main airport recently collapsed); housing is scarce; and Chavez is wasting the country's windfall oil revenues in other countries, including the U.S.

However wresting the presidency from Chavez will take more than pointing out Venezuela's problems, said Alcalay, the former U.N. official, but also devising feasible answers that people will accept, not paste to the side of a coffin.

"It's extremely difficult for [the opposition] to develop new policies and develop new credibility," said Richard Gott, author of the book, "Hugo Chavez: The Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela."

"The most probable outcome of the Chávez era (and I think it's got a long time still to go) is that it will eventually fall prey to its own internal contradictions, and groups of it will split off," said Gott. "But that, I would say, is several years in the future. And in the meantime, this existing opposition has to sort of go through the motions. But it must in its heart of hearts know that it's pretty hopeless."

- Caracas

Oliver Read is a journalist with PBS, Online NewsHour. Petroleumworld not necessarily share these views.

Editor's Note: This commentary was originally published by PBS,Online NewsHour, on 12/21/2006. Petroleumworld reprint this article in the interest of our readers.

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Petroleumworld News 12/26/06

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