As the military took the keys;
Most of Latin America’s leaders breathed a sigh of relief earlier this week, after Venezuelan voters rejected President Hugo Chávez’s constitutional amendment referendum. In private they were undoubtedly relieved that Chávez lost, and in public they expressed delight that he accepted defeat and did not steal the election. But by midweek enough information had emerged to conclude that Chávez did, in fact, try to overturn the results. As reported in El Nacional, and confirmed to me by an intelligence source, the Venezuelan military high command virtually threatened him with a coup d’état if he insisted on doing so. Finally, after a late-night phone call from Raúl Isaías Baduel, a budding opposition leader and former Chávez comrade in arms, the president conceded—but with one condition: he demanded his margin of defeat be reduced to a bare minimum in official tallies, so he could save face and appear as a magnanimous democrat in the eyes of the world.
Now, it makes sense.
just like Lorne Calvert adjusted his polls.
Yeah this is an odd one..the military junta turning off Hugo’s tyranny instincts. What gives? Oh well we can expect some military officers to disappear shortly.
Amazing how so many Leftards, especially among the NDP, love this abberation of humanity and would smile at the news of him slaughtering millions of “little brown skinned” Venezuelans to promote “the welfare of the poor.” Those people make me sick.
Great article.
There were hints about this, the adjustment to the loss margin, a day or so later.
As you said Kate….now it all makes sense.
Question is why? So that the next time he runs this referendum he can fiddle with the figures to show a narrow win and claim victory and expect the opposition to “do as I did”
He isnt going away anytime soon, he is in office till 2012 if I remember correctly. And Oil isnt dropping in price anytime soon.
Question is will the Oil region and the military disobey him?
Doug, it’s the “little browned skinned Venezuelans” who support Chavez, as his mostly wealthy, light-skinned opponents are fond of pointing out – amongst themselves.
Secondly, the ndp is fonder of people like Chile’s Bachelet – a social democrat – than socialists like Chavez.
I suggest you do a little reading beyond your right-wing comfort zone.
p.s. Kindergarten insults (e.g., “Leftard”) don’t cause people like me to say, “Oh, I must be wrong” or “There’s a powerful argument”.
Actually exile,
I believe the ‘little brown-skinned’ people supporting Chavez are a result of his thug/murder squad’s successful enforcement practices.
You sound disappointed that his crypto-commie power grab didn’t make it past the people. Oh well, you NDP types still have the murderer and butcher Castro to look up to for your daily dose of socialism in progress.
That was obvious from the fact that it came close in the first place. Even ignorant peasants won’t vote for a dictator.
What will be interesting is what will Chavez do now.
Now it does make sense. My guess is Chavez will make repeated attempts to secure permanent power before someone takes him out. Just my theory though…
exile,
No one can talk you out of an opinion no one talked you into.
The idea that someone will be able to “convert” you from left to right isn’t the way it works. You change or not on your own.
And calling leftards what they are isn’t supposed to be a method of conversion but of voicing contempt for the contempable.
My prediction is that nothing will happen for the first while. Then I figure that there will be a crime wave or “terrorism” by “opposition members”, which will require sweeping new “security reforms”.
Once the correct people (and numbers of people) are dead or behind bars, there will be a pause in action so that people forget about the bad stuff that happened. A new wave of cash handouts, and then another vote.
I do wish my own prediction would come true. It involves a bullet and a dead commie but it’s more wishful thinking than soothsaying.
I did, all through university, I read all your sacred bull shit from cover to cover and actually believed it for a while until I grew up and became an adult realizing that you can’t go through life blaming others for your perceived grievances.
You know, why don’t you focus more on fulfilling your United Nations obligation towards stemming AGW by offering yourself for human sacrifice?
It’s an interesting view of events. It also ties into a long South American tradition, either explicit or tacit of the military as “the guarantors of the constitution” — a concept once explained to me by a former army officer from a South American country — I can’t remember which one — Chilean or Argentinian I think. While the pitfalls of such a constitutional construct are glaringly obvious maybe, for once, it actually worked as intended.
“p.s. Kindergarten insults (e.g., “Leftard”) don’t cause people like me to say, “Oh, I must be wrong” or “There’s a powerful argument”. ”
You are correct, calling names doesn’t do any good; but, that doesn’t change the fact that your “leftist” ideology is “retarded.” The left has no principals, it collectively runs in circles like a chicken with its head cut off demonizing anyone who doesn’t agree completely with their ideology, yet not realizing that policy they support actually has the opposite effect in the long run.
For example the higher demand for BIO fuels has put pressure on grain prices and will result in 90 million Africans not getting the food required to stave off starvation over the next few years. The very Global Warming we are trying to fight off to save millions of lives in Africa, will have the opposite effect. This is not in dispute, this is the very concern raised by African leaders during the Goricles GW awareness concert in Africa.
Real life issues such as this don’t concern the “leftist” because there is nothing in it for them. The “Leftist” is unwilling to admit the they are not the only ones who care about people, or the environment. To admit this would acknowledge there may be different methods to accomplish these universal goals, and that would expose the fact that socialist have done NOTHING to improve the condition of the environment, or the welfare of the worlds citizens. In fact they have been a drain on the whole system, holding their hands out and miss-allocating the precious recourses we do have to combat the aforementioned issues.
Please forgive Doug for his name calling, but it is frustrating to listen to the “self-loathing leftist” cry and pout about everything, and on the other hand DO ABSOLUTLY NOTHING!
Stalin did the same thing at an early Soviet congress. He modified the results so he only just lost by a fraction after loosing badley. He then spent the next months eliminating all the delegates. No oposition left by the next time.
Given how this vote was conducted it’s highly unlikely that this story is true. We’re talking about a vast conspiracy to fudge the vote results in a closely watched and audited election.
Given how this author doesn’t have an iota of evidence it’s much more likely that either he or his unnamed informant have simply made this up.
But by all means take it as the gospel truth. It wouldn’t be the most ridiculous notion you believe to be true by a long shot.
Given how this vote was conducted it’s highly unlikely that this story is true. The vote was extensively audited so a conspiracy to rig the results (but for some stupid reason not change the outcome??) would involve a great number of people many of whom are hostile to Chavez.
Given how this author doesn’t have an iota of evidence it’s much more likely that either he or his unnamed informant are simply full of crap.
But by all means take it as the gospel truth. It wouldn’t be the most ridiculous notion you believe to be true by a long shot.
The bulldozers are quiet for now.
But prepare for the storm of Bullshit to follow.
I see, Jose, LEFTARDS like you don’t believe that a South American DICTATOR could possibly rig an election, but the US presidential election on the other hand….
ALL lefties are simply RETARDED.
Rediculous notions:Bush caused 9-11,big oil caused the Iraq war,vapour trails from air liners are really the govt poisoning the people,fire wont melt steel,etc. Chavez wanting a close election equating with those? Maybe to some.
Okay, Jose.
After all, “Jorge Castañeda is Mexico’s former foreign minister” and what would he know, eh?
Cheers,
lance
Even thugs like Chavez need the support of his generals, and they pay attention to the mood of the people perhaps better than he does. His command-and-control style of leadership might work as a senior officer where he can bark and others fall in line. And his vulgar machismo may rouse some emotional vigor in the lower income classes. Effective leadership however requires more subtle traits than these, and as the Venezuelan economy continues to slide, his generals in particular may be fully appreciating his incompetence.
His apparent bravado and international chest thumping is more for internal consumption, to demonstrate that he’s a great leader (compare with Saddam, N. Korea’s Kim, Castro, etc). In a culture where appearance goes a long way, his draw with Hollywood celebrities was supposed to gain him stature, but it’s plainly not working either, and his wooing of allies like Iran and China simply can’t get him out of the economic mess he’s got himself into.
The loss of a firm mandate in the referendum (even a slim majority would have been seen as a loss, which is why I don’t believe it was rigged) is a signal that he no longer has the emotional support of the nation, and as the people get hungrier he knows it’s only going to get worse. His generals surely know it too, and he knows that they know it.
The threat of a coup, indicated in the passage, is language that he understands well enough. Think of this as a poker game; his generals have hands in it too, and everyone now knows he has no aces. His support is not as unified and coherent as it once appeared to be.
In the midst of a political crisis in nearby Ecuador a few years ago, prominent generals removed the president as an apparent appeasement to the disgruntled masses. I say ‘prominent generals’ because the junta did NOT have unanimous support amongst the senior military leadership. This could have exploded, but didn’t. The coup was somewhat peaceful, fortunately, due to the political maturity and level headedness of the various stakeholders of all who-knows-what political stripes.
This example is no predictor of what might happen in Venezuela, of course. But this is a different era; think back to the bloody conflicts in nearby countries just a couple decades ago at the end of the Soviet era, and see where they are now.
Chavez has been trying to take sides in another east/west-style detente that has so far either failed to materialize or is too weak to matter, and he’s running out of time. Let’s hope his ‘friends’ in the army are wise enough to remove him before Venezuela slides too much further.
Don’t minimize the role that Venezuelan college students have consistently played in countering Chavez and probably the lives that will be extracted from them in the future.
The WSJ covered the Chavez/military angle yesterday with another eyewitness conributor relating that the military flat out told Chavez on election night that they would not fire on civilians, that sent him sulking to his room for a long period.
Idiots like Jose and Useful Idiot lefty Hollwood dupes that aren’t getting a real measure of Chavez are mind boggling.
Jose: Please tell me how it was conducted, and who actually monitored it, how closely?
Notice that the author isn’t just saying that he thinks it happened, but that El Nacional reported it.
I confess (not speaking Spanish) that I have not read its report; have you? Got an English translation? Does it list sources?
(And would anyone in Venezuela actually put their real name on such an accusation?)
Now, of course, all these reports may just be lies. But they’re credible and they fit the pattern of Chavez’ actions and those of dictators in general (of both the left- and right-wing persuasion).
Can you provide a reason to believe them false?
Jose is out to lunch when he says that the story is made up.
Charles Krauthammer amoung others who are very well connected to sources within and around Venezuela (read: Columbia) were saying very early on after the vote that the margin against Chavez was much, much higher, that the #s had been fixed and that the military would prevent Hugo from falsifying the vote the other way.
From here on this will go one of two ways – hugo will ‘get’ the miltary leaders that held him back and restage the vote sometime in the next year or so this time with a new and supplicant military leadership permitting the fraud to happen
OR
as C.K. suggested, HC will be overthrown, probably within the year. I favour the latter and suspect that it will be the most likely outcome – the economy is in collapse.
As for the blind (willfully or ignorantly) assertion of some commenters that the left didn’t actually support HC as much as it did other regimes – how do they explain the public appearance of Sean Penn and several other limosine liberals with hugo?
Chavez will be lucky to make it to 2012. Given Chavez’s continued silence, it’s hard not to notice that there’s now a measured leash around this pitbull’s neck.
The huge number of enemies he’s made will ultimately set an early stage for his swan song.
Chris said:
“My prediction is that nothing will happen for the first while. Then I figure that there will be a crime wave or “terrorism” by “opposition members”, which will require sweeping new “security reforms”.”
I agree…there will be some security crisis involving opposition created to justify consolidating power in Chevez’s office…this has worked pretty everywhere a governing cabal has used it.
Other marxist dictators have staged failed coups themselves to justify eliminating the opposition.
I cannot see HC having this put to a vote again, the constitution prevents him from doing this, but he may rule by decree for the remainder of his term, or until the food just runs out… quickly followed by someone’s revolution.
It’s worth noting, that between last presidential election and this referendum, HC “lost” +3 million votes, abstaining votes seem to be very difficult to “just make up”
not that he didn’t try…
http://caracaschronicles.blogspot.com then scroll down to satuday December 08,2007
(“actas”, are like polling or voting centres here)
Gotta love how democracy works in Latin America. Have a vote, and then have a power clash over who gets to manipulate the vote numbers.
It’s sort of like a poker game, where the cards are analogous to votes. Having good cards (or lots of votes) are part of the game but there is a lot more to it than that (betting, bluffing, strategizing).
It reminds me a bit of the last Mexican election where the drama lasted long past voting day.
Lets not forget the another revolutionary and leader of the people for the people, Mr Robert Mugabe and how successful his reforms have been
Several commenters have it exactly right. Chavez governs as long as his Generals and THEIR military choose to allow him.
This isn’t a Cuban style revolution, with an effective guerrilla force to back up a coup.
The military in South America are very conservative by tradition and frankly I haven’t seen any indication that Venezuela’s are any different.
Chavez will discover that his pobres aren’t very reliable when they can’t feed their families, and 2012 is really being generous; I’m guessing another 18 months at best.
Anyone want to start a dead pool?
(WLMackenzie Redux thinks it’s the officers who’ll disappear; who’s going to do the wet work? Chavez?!)
Where was “(Worst Ex)President For Life” Jaime Carter with his magical ability to confirm a vote count?
Some will claim that whatever the excesses of El Chávez, that he has been a good steward for Venezuela and its poor since he first was elected in 1998: improvements in health, education, etc. Consider these statistics before you accept that claim as gospel truth. If El Chávez is such a good steward of Venezuela from 1999 on , then please explain the following:
There are shortages of basic food products such as milk and sugar mainly due to price controls. Prices have recently been lifted on long-life milk, fortunately. It is difficult to obtain agricultural production information for Venezuela, but sugar production is available. Sugar production in 2006 was less than 60% of 1997 production.
The murder rate in Venezuela nearly doubled from 1998 to 2005, from 22 to 42 per 100,000.
Housing units constructed per 1,000 population. This shows how good El Chávez is at creating infrastructure.
1990-1998 3.2
1999-2006 1.2
Regards the superior progress of the health care system of Venezuela under the stewardship of El Chávez , take a look at Infant Mortality, which is usually considered the benchmark for evaluating a country’s performance in public health.
% reduction in Infant Mortality, 2000-2005
Latin America 13.4%
Venezuela 12.6%
Consider the claims that the Venezuela of El Chávez has eliminated illiteracy.
In 2006, youth literacy (ages 15-24) for Latin American and the Caribbean was 96.0%; for Venezuela, 97.2%. The 1990 figures for adult literacy are 89.7% for Latin America and the Caribbean compared with 93% for Venezuela. From 1990-2006, Latin America and the Caribbean increased its youth literacy rate by 3.3%; Venezuela by 1.2%. ( World Bank World Development Indicators, online.
For all the oil money that El Chávez has had, it doesn’t appear that with regards to health and education, he hasn’t done any more than the rest of Latin America has, and most of Latin America hasn’t had the oil revenue windfall ( from $10 to $90/bbl since 1998) that Venezuela has.
Housing Sources:
a) http://www.cvc.com.ve/ , El déficit y la producción formal de viviendas. (05- 2006)
b) http://buscador.eluniversal.com/2007/01/15/eco_art_142150.shtml
Infant Mortality, Population and Education: World Bank World Development Indicators, online via a State Library System.
DaninVan, I like the pool idea. I think Hugo’s got less than 24 mo’s so put me down for Christmas 2009. It’s not a question of “if” the military will take him down, it’s when.
Of course that could change if Hugo actually takes the advice from Spain’s King.
Looks like their getting tired of that wussietard already CRY ME ARIVER HUGO CHAVEZ