Trouble in Venezuelan electoral paradise

Rodriguez, the head of the Venezuelan electoral board CNE keeps trying desperately to apply thick make up on the abstention numbers. With little success, though he did manage to decrease by a point the total abstention "according" to the manual vote counts now in. Isn't it interesting that whenever the manual votes counts come in, chavismo always seem to improve its numbers? Coincidence? Naaaahhhh..... I am just some silly oppo that is always willing to find fault. Shame on me!

The interesting piece of data is that everyone of these already artificially inflated voters cost the nation 20.13 USD! This is kind of steep for virtual voters, if you ask me! You may add Rodriguez, the shrink from hell, to the long list of inefficient Chavez servants. He got the job done, maybe, but at great cost and with all the seams out for all to see.

Meanwhile the Tupamaros are rioting in the streets, and not only those of Caracas. The Tupamaros, who borrowed their name, I think, from one of the most fearsome urban guerilla in Latin America, the one from Uruguay, are a left of Chavez group based originally in the 23 de Enero area, a popular and populous area where the ills of Caracas are particularly strong and which was until this Sunday considered the bedrock of chavismo. This might change soon.

Apparently during the rather fake primary process of selecting candidates for town halls in Chavez party, MVR, (a mistake that will not be repeated for the designation of national assembly candidates of the MVR), the Tupamaros "won" but lost anyway. This at the time was duly reported as scenes of intra chavista fighting were ubiquitous in papers and TV. The Tupamaros were duly pissed off and decided to run on their own, of course to defend the true revolution of President Chavez and to protect him against the thieves inside the MVR who hide the truth to Chavez. Apparently they have not realized yet that Chavez as the president of MVR (illegal and unethical by the way) knows perfectly well that the embarrassing Tupamaros have been set aside. See, Tupamaros have the nerve to demand results from the government actions! Imagine that! Given them money in Mision X is apparently not enough to please them! The nerve!

So now we see them on Globovision and RCTV, two oppo media, defending Chavez but accusing "elements" within the CNE and the MVR of cheating them from their votes. They know of course that all the money comes from Chavez and they are trying the path that so many other ex-chavista tried and failed, to pretend that a camarilla "isolates" Chavez from the reality. Good luck there, Tupas! By the way, in spite of the clear popular roots of the Tupamaros that cannot be accused of being "white" opposition, as you can see from the above picture, they are already being trashed by servile chavistas such as the mayor of Petare who owes his position to his daddy being the vice president. Seeing Vicentico accuse Tupamaros of pro oppo tactics was truly a highlight on how low can people sold out to chavismo fall, how willing they are to become modern days Quislings.

What happened there is that the Tupamaros fell because of the illegal and unethical "morochas" tactics, that is the double voting that favors obscenely the winner of the total vote. That is why chavismo with not much more, if that much, 60% of the vote it racking at least 80% of the seats while Tupamaros or oppo parties, who before Chavez would have got some minority and democratic representation, are shut out from even having a voice to complain. But the regular readers of this blog already know quite well the different ways that chavismo cheats.

It is thus no wonder to see a declaration of Carlos Melo, another one from the left who is left without representation, declare that Chavez objective is the one party state, a la Afro-Muslim fashion where local tyrants pretend that the people are happy with a single party state. And one might add that within that one party structure only the line of El Supremo counts as we see the MVR less and less inclined to try the primary system, going back to the good old days of AD from where it comes from, after all.

And speaking of AD, it also had an internal public fight yesterday. Isn't that something that AD and the MVR look everyday more and more the same! Of course there is a segment of AD that is getting upset at the continuous lack of good results for AD (and Sunday was quite a lackluster day for AD, preferring to go down in flames rather than to concede that it might not be the main opposition voice, another way in which AD and the MVR are so identical!). At least in the press conference that was interrupted by hecklers, AD let out the idea that time for opposition unity had come.

Aside from the funny anecdotal story of this Tupamaros and ADecos, those rioting street scenes should point to us where the future lay, where Chavez wants to go: a single monolithic party that is held together simply because all the electoral mechanism are set and rigged to make it very difficult for a democratic option to develop. The model here is Mexico who managed for 70 years to have the PRI in office. Chavez just want to reach 2021. No! Wait, it is now 2023 and some say 2030. Seems that he is liking power more and more. I suppose he has decided that he wanted at least 20 years of Latin American leadership and each year that Castro lives, well, Chavez must push back his retirement...