A tense Friday in Venezuela, marches in preparation and a double Chavez cadena

Friday 5, March 2004

Tough day today, at least on our patience as still no word on the what will happen to the stolen signatures.

Meanwhile the opposition prepares a big march for tomorrow and many people are coming from deep inside Venezuela. I decided to stay although there is a march in Yaracuy that I will miss on Sunday. Really, for once that Yaracuy has some real action with a Governor declaring himself in civil disobedience. But I am here in Caracas and we are marching to the Avenida Libertador, the scene of February 27 disaster. Thus tomorrow I will not be able to cover events as I will take part of them. As I guess that Miguel will also march, our readers will have to wait and hope for a quiet day. I think it will, the government will not have the stomach to attack us tomorrow.

Still, this does not stop the government from trying to scare us away from marching, with what can only be qualified as childish attitudes. Two were downright stupid, one from the security vice minister confusing declarations on possible security breaches tomorrow. The other one a last minute decree suspending all bearing arms permits for 10 days. The real reason behind that one is probably elsewhere, since putting a gun in somebody's car during arrest will be enough to have a legal way to jail them. Civil rights and justice are not paramount these days.

But the crown goes to president Hugo Chavez. Deeply stung by the recent European Union criticism, and other countries too, he summoned all ambassadors for a long, long speech that we got in cadena, not only at noon time, but also tonight as a repeat performance. The thing that lasted about two hours was a series of unfounded accusations, manipulations, complaints, etc, etc... Nothing really unusual from Chavez who already blew a fuse last Sunday. But it seemed so petty as all the ambassadors stoically sat through the ordeal. Only a very few of them applauded politely at the end, and perhaps half a dozen sincerely, including of course the Cuban cheer leader.

But the discourse to the ambassadors was not directed at them, not even to their government. It was directed at Chavez followers, to show that he could browbeat ambassadors and foreign powers at will. This is actually insulting for the Chavez followers that do not know better, that do not know that Ambassadors are trained to deal with the most unsavory regimes on earth. Cheap, very cheap retaliation which can only alienate even further other countries. And also a confession on how weak the international position of Chavez has become.

There was an interesting detail though, the show of clips from the movie (and I carefully do not use the word documentary) "the revolution will not be televised". The ambassadors know very well what that movie is all about. Again, the targeted audience is not the diplomatic corps, it is the chavista emotional core, to justify for them the violence of these days as a pay off from the April 2002 violence. It is one way to get all networks to transmit the movie again, twice in a day. For purely propaganda purposes. And some people still wonder as to why the private media is so opposed to Chavez....

Quite a way to build a country Hugo!

To finish for tonight. At least we got a very good, very clear editorial from the Washington Post that I reproduce below completely. Compare that one to the New York Times. Somebody should tell the NYT that it is getting a beating on Venezuela reporting, and not only from the Post.

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Coup by Technicality

Friday, March 5


LATE LAST YEAR 3,448,747 of Venezuela's 24 million citizens turned out in just four days to sign petitions calling for a recall referendum on President Hugo Chavez. This extraordinary civic exercise, monitored by observers from the Organization of American States and the Carter Center, offered a democratic solution to years of political conflict in that important oil-producing nation -- trouble that threatened to push Venezuela into dictatorship or civil war. Now Mr. Chavez, whose crackpot populism and authoritarian methods provoked the crisis, blatantly seeks to stop the vote, in violation of his commitment to both the OAS and his own constitution. His actions have already prompted a new wave of unrest across the country, including demonstrations in which at least seven people have been killed. Unless he can be restrained, Mr. Chavez may complete his destruction of one of Latin America's most enduring democracies.

Though the constitution, drawn up under Mr. Chavez's own administration, requires 20 percent of all voters to back a referendum, opposition groups collected 1 million signatures more than should have been needed for the recall vote. These signatures were rigorously audited by a nonpartisan civic group before being forwarded to the electoral commission. Yet, after delaying its response for weeks, the commission, dominated by Mr. Chavez's supporters, rejected 1.6 million of them, or nearly half the total. To do so, it invented requirements that didn't previously exist. Most notably, it threw out 876,000 signatures, each accompanied by a thumbprint, because someone other than the voter had entered registration details on the petition.

Mr. Chavez's functionaries subsequently announced that they would give about a million of those stricken from the list a chance to restore their names -- but only if they appear in a limited number of registration centers during one two-day period. In practice, that poses a next-to-impossible logistical challenge to the opposition, even if there were no harassment from Mr. Chavez's police and civilian goon squads. But attempts by the foreign mediators to reverse this Kafkaesque coup have so far been unsuccessful.

Mr. Chavez, who has built a strong alliance with Cuba's Fidel Castro and imported thousands of Cuban personnel, appears eager for a domestic and international confrontation. Last weekend he called President Bush an "illegitimate" president, referred to him with a vulgar epithet and threatened to cut off oil supplies to the United States. Opposition leaders say that more than 300 people have been arrested in recent days, and that some have been tortured. Given the Bush administration's weak position in the region, hope for a peaceful or democratic solution rests mostly with Venezuela's Latin American neighbors, starting with Brazil. If Mr. Chavez continues to deny his people a democratic vote, leaders from those nations must be prepared to invoke the Democracy Charter of the OAS and threaten him with the isolation reserved for autocrats.