Venezuelan Elections: Opposition's Chances are Nonexistent
September 18, 2010
The pro-Chavez alliance clearly has the potential to win the race: it is campaigning energetically across the country and – at least as the opposition claims – relies heavily on the available administrative leverage. Teams of Chavez's campaigners known as patrols employ an array of tactics to mobilize support for their candidates from mass rallies to individual interactions with voters, trying to pay a visit literally to every apartment and home. Their approach is that Chavez's every supporter should convince ten other people to vote for pro-Chavez candidates. Chavez stressed in an address to the patrols gathering that the plan is absolutely realistic. He said: “Talk to your friends and relatives, knock on you neighbors' and acquaintances' doors, persistently invite all those who benefit from our social missions but so far lacked the activity to support our government. The right time has come”.
The opposition boycotted the previous parliamentary elections in Venezuela in 2005. Its leaders cited various reasons for the boycott, particularly stressing that the elections would likely be rigged by the Chavez regime. Supporters of the government do believe Washington advised the opposition not to partake, meaning to cast a shadow over the legitimacy of the elections outcome. Eventually the opposition's withdrawal de facto played into the hands of Chavez and helped him pass the legislation necessary to implement his XXI century socialism program.
At the moment the Coalition for Democratic Unity is doing everything to win as many seats in the parliament as it can. In some cases, the opposition leaders are Chavez's former allies turned foes. Chavez's one-time friend and former defense minister Raul Baduel who is serving a sentence of eight years for corruption but sells himself as a prisoner of conscience issued an appeal to the Coalition for Democratic Unity members from jail. Chavez and his team hold that the opposition plans to use the parliament for distinctly conspiratorial purposes. If the Coalition for Democratic Unity gets entrenched in Venezuela's parliament, the replay of the Honduran scenario – the toppling of the country's legitimate president - will only be a matter of time.
Both Chavez's supporters and the opposition regularly conduct public opinion polls. The recent data released by the GIS XXI polling company hired by the government showed that the alliance of PSUV and the communists would garner 53% of the vote. Moreover, some polls give Chavez's supporters as much as two thirds of the seats in the new parliament, which would mean the government would enjoy unlimited freedom of legislative initiative.
Surveys conducted by the polling companies working for the opposition carry projections evidently tailored to the tastes of their clients: according to their forecasts, the Coalition for Democratic Unity will either outpace Chavez's supporters by a small margin or secure a 50:50 result. The soberer of the opposition leaders do expect a much more modest result in the 25-30 seats bracket. Some hyperactive journalists even asked a magician from the Vargas state who generously dispenses political predictions of his own making what to expect from the elections – he promised 138 seats to the supporters of Chavez and 27 – to the opposition.
These days an average Venezuelan enjoys relative social comfort: Venezuela's labor code guarantees the rights of employees and a decent pay, plus the government coverage of medical care and opportunities for continued training. Residential construction in line with modern standards is underway en mass both in the country's industrial centers and in its remote areas, and the solution to the housing problem already looms on the horizon. Residences are also being built for Indians, the formerly but no longer disadvantaged group of population.
Chavez's government diverts up to 30% of the Venezuelan budget to social spending. A lot is done for the younger generation, and the country is free from social discrimination. The Ayacucho Foundation awards thousands of government-funded stipends annually to let Venezuelan students study in prestigious universities abroad.
The opposition has no trump cards to beat Chavez's socially-oriented policies. Instead, it paints the frightening picture of Chavez's transformation into a “perilous communist dictator” and asserts that removing him from power should be “the mission of genuine democrats”. Money is poured into the propaganda by the CIA via various NGOs.
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is a key force behind the workings of the Venezuelan fifth column. USAID coordinates the dissent movement among Venezuelan students and intellectuals. Eva Golinger, a renown expert in CIA covert operations in Latin America, says that over the past several months alone the Venezuelan opposition grabbed a handsome $50m to destabilize the country and to launch opposition media campaigns.
Long before the opening of the current elections campaign, the opposition started to focus on staples like the threat of famine in Venezuela, the drought, the problems experiences by the country's electric supply grid, and the rising level of crime across the country which allegedly topped the corresponding levels in such heavily criminalized countries as Mexico and Columbia.
The opposition and pro-US media deliberately overlook the Venezuelan government's accomplishments in the sphere of food security – from the creation of agro-industrial complexes and peasant cooperatives to the supply of free meals at schools and the establishment of the nationwide Mercal discounter network. They pretend to be oblivious to the facts that the living standards in Venezuela have improved seriously over the period of Chavez's rule and that these days the Venezuelans' menus are typically superior to those of the people in the majority of Latin American countries.
Climate fluctuations and the drying of water reservoirs have affected the functioning of several of Venezuela's hydroelectric plants, the result being temporary power supply downscaling. In a smear campaign, the opposition made the problem look like evidence of the government's total inaptness. However, an agent of the Columbian intelligence service was arrested in Barinas State shortly thereafter while photographing co-generation plants, hydroelectric plants, electric power transmission lines, and high voltage stations for the CIA. The incident helped unmask those who are actually responsible for the electric power supply disruptions in Venezuela.
The claims that the crime situation in Venezuela is severer than in Mexico, the country where the drug war accompanied by tens of thousands of fatalities and attacks on police and army checkpoints is raging, are clearly at odds with reality. Nor is it fair in this regard to compare Venezuela to Columbia where the oligarchy has been waging war against the country's people with the US support since 1948. For a long time, Venezuela has been suffering from the conflict in Columbia, the country from where the AUC paramilitary groups, FARC and ELN guerrillas, drug cartel emissaries, and ordinary criminals are serially penetrating its territory. In a recent example, SEBIN, the Venezuelan intelligence service, arrested in the border-zone Táchira state three members of Black Hawks, a Columbian paramilitary group. The group's hideout was loaded with military and police uniforms as well as various weaponry including the TS-15 assault rifles used in the past by the Florida State police. SEBIN maintains that on the eve of the elections the CIA is sending increasing numbers of terrorist groups to Venezuela in the framework of a reserve plan to organize political murders and allegedly spontaneous public unrest and thus to compromise the PSUV-led alliance.