Posted on 04/14/2002 4:01:40 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
"If the National Electoral Council says tomorrow or the day after tomorrow that the opposition has got the signatures, I'll be happy to go to a referendum," Chavez said at Miraflores Presidential Palace after meeting Carter. ***
''There must not be any delays,'' said Alberto Quiros, a spokesman for Democratic Coordinator, an opposition umbrella group. ``We are in the final stretch.''***
Marin defends the action, however, by saying fewer than 40 of Citgo's 4,000 employees are Venezuelan, although the six-member board is all Venezuelan.
"When a new CEO gets to a company, what a CEO normally does is they get with the managers that they feel more comfortable working with," he said. "That's normal in any company."
While outside observers say Marin was appointed to his Citgo position by Chavez, he insists that PDVSA leader Á;li Rodríguez and the oil company's board selected him and that the president was simply informed of the appointment.
But Marin does admit dealing with Chavez, who was briefly ousted from his office in April 2002 by a coup. ***
................The electoral council's decision came six chaotic months after the opposition claimed to have collected 3.4 million signatures in a four-day petition drive monitored by the Organization of American States and the Carter Center, former President Jimmy Carter's organization. Election authorities, though, invalidated hundreds of thousands of signatures in March, saying that tens of thousands of petitions had been filled out in suspiciously similar handwriting.
The opposition eventually agreed to a three-day "repair period" ending last Sunday, which permitted voters to reconfirm their signatures. About 1.9 million signatures collected in December had already been validated, meaning the opposition needed to muster 530,000 voters. Electoral authorities projected that once they had counted all the signatures, there would be more than 2.5 million affirmative signatures.
One of the country's top pollsters, Alfredo Keller & Associates, reported in April that if the vote were held now, Mr. Chávez would win the backing of 35 percent of voters, while 31 percent would vote against him and the rest would abstain. With Venezuela now flush with oil money, thanks to world oil prices around $40 a barrel, the government has been spending furiously on social programs, and has a 40 percent approval rating. ***
……….In view of this, the Chavez government and the ECOPETROL management have obliged the workers to start a STRIKE MOVEMENT to defend ECOPETROL, the workers' rights and the existence of the Oil Workers Union.At the same time the leaders of the union in a brave attitude have declared a Hunger Strike supporting the workers' fair demands.
The Workers Central Union is strongly committed in this fight, as well as the rest of the Venezuelan union movement. The unions have declared their support to this movement that seeks to defend our national patrimony.
As a result, we call on the national and international union movement, all social and popular organisations, and all democratic forces and in general to all those citizens that care about the fate of our nation to accompany and support us in our fight.***
Venezuela's opposition had compiled 2.54 million votes to demand the recall, surpassing the 2.43 million needed as set by the constitution, elections council president Francisco Carrasquero said.
It was the first formal announcement by the council that Chavez would face a recall since the officials projected a likely vote based on preliminary signature totals last week. ***
"Their role could be limited, or maybe they won't be there. I don't think they should be there because of the way they behaved," Battaglini told reporters.
His comments were likely to alarm Venezuela's opposition, which considers the foreign monitoring essential to prevent fraud or attempts by Chavez to evade the vote.***
Forced on him by a multimillion-signature drive, the referendum is the latest example of the political tumult that's roiled this nation since Mr. Chávez, a former Army paratrooper who led a failed coup in 1992, was elected six years ago on a promise to redistribute wealth to the poor.
His potential ouster may not end the class warfare caused by his heavy-handed rule. Chávez's crude attempts to arrest opponents, pack the courts, and extend his time in office have led to violence, a short-lived coup against him, and street confrontations. Most of all, this admirer of Fidel Castro has created a huge but divided opposition set on removing him but one which doesn't offer a stable alternative.
At the least, the referendum signals a shift to use constitutional means to settle Venezuela's divisions. Chávez used trickery to block or delay the vote, and now he's trying to bribe and coerce votes from the poor, many of whom are disenchanted with his failed and corrupt administration.
Venezuela's fragile democracy is being challenged by Chávez's rushed and rough attempts to reduce economic disparities. Its poor should take whatever benefits are being offered, and then vote their conscience. [End]
''Clearly it is in the Cuban government's commercial and economic interests to have Chávez remain the president of Venezuela,'' said Kavulich, who compares a possible Chávez loss to the end of Soviet subsidies to Havana in 1992.
The loss of Moscow's subsidies, estimated at $4 billion to $5 billion a year in the 1980s, created an economic crisis that forced Castro to adopt some free-market policies, open his doors to tourism and legalize the use of U.S. dollars in the early 1990s.
''Venezuela has clearly replaced the USSR in terms of the commercial and economic element,'' says Kavulich. ``Without Venezuela, Cuba would not be able to maintain its current commercial, economic, and political systems. There would have to be some changes.''
The deep friendship between the two leaders was underscored by Chávez's recent decision to dispatch his brother Adán to Havana as Venezuela's ambassador.
While Chávez has said that Cuban-style communism would not work in Venezuela, he has nevertheless famously exclaimed that the two nations are ``swimming together towards the same sea of happiness.''
Chávez also has pursued a series of other Cuba-style political initiatives, such as land redistribution and the creation of ''Bolivarian Circles,'' pro-government groups of civilians, some of them neighborhood-based, some of them said to be armed.***
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/opinion/9314252.htm
Posted on Wed, Aug. 04, 2004
Venezuelan justice
OUR OPINION: MAYOR CAPRILES SHOULD BE RELEASED IMMEDIATELY
Henrique Capriles Radonski shouldn't be in prison. Yet for more than two months he has sat in solitary confinement in the offices of Venezuela's political police.
His ''crime''? He tried to pacify a crowd gathered in front of the Cuban Embassy during the tumultuous days of a failed attempt to overthrow President Hugo Chávez in 2002. Mr. Capriles' real crime? He is an outspoken critic of Venezuela's increasingly authoritarian president.
News video shows the popular mayor of Caracas' Baruta municipality -- think Coral Gables -- trying to calm the angry crowd, not inciting a riot. Nor did he trespass; the video shows him being invited into the embassy via ladder by Cuban diplomats in the midst of the disturbance.
The crowd destroyed cars, cut off the embassy's electricity and threatened to invade the building. But Mr. Capriles wasn't leading the charge. He says he was calling for help from local authorities. Nonetheless, Venezuelan prosecutors have charged him on six criminal counts, including property damage, trespassing and violating international principles. Hogwash.
It couldn't be more clear that he is in jail because he is an opponent of President Chávez. The charges and imprisonment have the look and feel of political persecution -- accusations fanned by other questionable cases.
The indictments of leaders of Súmate, a civic group that promotes democracy, comes to mind. Their ''crime'' was to accept $53,000 for election monitoring from the National Endowment for Democracy, a congressionally funded U.S. foundation that helps pro-democracy groups worldwide. Súmate also helped collect signatures for Mr. Chávez's recall. For the Chávez government, that's akin to using foreign funds to ''conspire'' against the state.
Mr. Chávez should immediately release Mayor Capriles. Since he hasn't -- and likely won't -- international organizations such as the Organization of American States and the United Nations should be jumping up and down demanding his immediate release.
Where are they?
But late openings at some polling stations, the malfunction of a system to identify voters through fingerprint scanning and other glitches seriously slowed the voting process nationwide.
Because of the problems and crush of voters, election officials extended voting hours, which had been scheduled to end at 6 p.m., until midnight.
The five-member National Election Commission, composed of three Chavez supporters and two opponents, barred the media from reporting the findings of private exit polls or any other unofficial results while the polls remained open. The first official results were not expected until several hours after the voting ended.
Both Chavez, 50, and his political opponents have promised to respect the vote if it is deemed free and fair.
Chavez will serve out the remainder of his current term, which runs through 2006, if he triumphs in Sunday's referendum. If he loses, Chavez would be immediately replaced by Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel and new elections would be held as early as mid-September.
The Supreme Court has yet to rule on whether Chavez can run in those elections, as he has said he intends to do.
Many voters reported waiting eight hours or more in line under the tropical sun and intermittent rain to cast their ballots. ***
Chavez survives recall vote: official
Last Updated Mon, 16 Aug 2004 5:41:46
CARACAS, VENEZUELA - Venezuela's leftist president, Hugo Chavez, appears to have almost 60 per cent support among those who voted in a referendum on his leadership over the weekend, the president of the National Elections Council said early Monday.
With 94 per cent of the vote counted, Francisco Carrasquero said, almost 5 million Venezuelans cast ballots indicating Chavez should continue in his job, compared to 3.6 million who wanted him removed from office.
Opposition politicians were quick to call the results fraudulent.
"We firmly and categorically reject the result," opposition leader Henry Ramos Allup said at a news conference Monday. "We're going to collect the evidence to prove to Venezuela and the world the gigantic fraud which has been committed against the will of the people."
Nevertheless, Chavez supporters set off fireworks in the capital of Caracas to celebrate the populist president's apparent victory.
"It is absolutely impossible that the victory of the 'no' be reversed," Chavez declared in a victory speech from a balcony of his palace.
The size of the "no" vote will allow the 50-year-old former paratrooper to serve out the rest of his six-year term in office, which began in 2000.
This was Venezuela's first-ever attempt to recall a president, and ended a two-year drive by opposition parties to oust Chavez.
He is adored by most of the country's poorer citizens. However, the wealthy say he is ruining the economy of the world's fifth-largest oil exporter by spending oil revenues lavishly to fund social programs, and accuse him of destroying the country's democratic institutions.
A huge voter turnout, with lineups stretching two kilometres in places, led election officials to keep polling stations open an extra eight hours Sunday night. Everyone in line as of the official closing at midnight was allowed to vote.
Many people lined up for seven hours in order to vote.
"This is the largest turnout I have ever seen," said former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who monitored the vote. "There are thousands of people in line, waiting patiently and without any disturbance."
Problems with electronic voting machines also delayed the process. They were designed to prevent voters from voting more than once by registering people's thumbprints, but even Chavez had to move to another machine to vote because his first attempt failed.
http://www.cbc.ca/stories/2004/08/16/venezuela_results040816
He also claimed repeatedly that opposition leaders were pawns of President Bush (news - web sites)."Hopefully, from this day on Washington will respect the government and people of Venezuela," Chavez boomed from a palace balcony.
With 94 percent of the votes counted, Chavez had 58 percent of the vote and the opposition 42 percent, according to Francisco Carrasquero, president of the National Elections Council. But Carrasquero stopped short of declaring Chavez the outright winner.
Carrasquero said 4,991,483 votes were cast against recalling the former army paratrooper, and 3,576,517 in favor.***
In what part of the process do you believe the results could have been altered?
"In what we call the first phase. This is when the citizen votes directly on the touch screen machine. The accusations of fraud indicate, for example, that they would choose 'Yes', the paper slip issued by the machine was marked 'Yes', but the software recorded 'No'."
How do you come to the conclusion that the figures from the vote don't agree with the real vote?
"Because we did very serious polling, with specially trained people, at the poll exits, at 300 voting centers, and our results, at the great majority of locations, differed from the official results. For example, at a school in Monagas state, our projections showed 65% voting 'Yes', compared to 37% according to the official results. There is a great difference." ***
The tally sheets show that the number of "yes," or anti-Chavez, votes from several electronic machines in the same locations were either the same or within one vote of each other. Pro-Chavez votes from the same machines varied widely.
Arguing that such results were statistically impossible, opposition leaders suggested that a computer program limited the anti-Chavez votes to a predetermined number by either switching some to "no" votes or by nullifying them.
Most of Sunday's voting was conducted on a new electronic system. Once a vote was cast, the machines produced a paper receipt, which could be checked by the voter for accuracy before being deposited in a ballot box.
The audit is comparing those receipts with the electronic tal-ly. Because not all paper ballots may have been deposited in the boxes, observers say, the electronic and physical votes might not match perfectly. ***
I was reminded this week of how Castro so artfully used Mr. Carter when Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez took a page from his Cuban mentor's playbook. On Monday, the Carter Center along with the head of the monumentally meaningless Organization of American States, Cesar Gaviria, endorsed Chávez's claims of victory in the Venezuelan recall referendum, rather too hastily it now seems.
The problem was that the "observers" hadn't actually observed the election results. Messrs. Carter and Gaviria were only allowed to make a "quick count"--that is, look at the tally sheets spat out by a sample of voting machines. They were not allowed to check this against ballots the machines issued to voters as confirmation that their votes were properly registered.
If there was fraud, as many Venezuelans now suspect, it could have been discovered if the ballots didn't match the computer tallies. The tallies alone were meaningless. The problem was clear by Tuesday but it didn't stop the State Department spokesman Adam Ereli from chiming in. "The people of Venezuela have spoken," he proclaimed.***
From the snowy peaks of Bolivia to guerrilla hideouts in the Colombian jungle, Chavez's win fortified a common cause among anti-American radicals: the fight against "imperialist" economic policies that they believe Washington intends to impose on the region.
After results of Sunday's recall referendum were announced, Evo Morales, leader of Bolivia's Indian coca farmers, told The Associated Press that Chavez had become "Latin America's leader of liberation forces."***
"This result opens the possibility that the fraud was committed only in a subset of the 4,580 automated centers, say 3,000, and that the audit was successful because it directed the search to the 1,580 unaltered centers. That is why it was so important not to use the Carter Center number generator. If this was the case, Carter could never have figured it out."
Mr. Hausmann told us that he and Mr. Rigoban also "found very clear trails of fraud in the statistical record" and a probability of less than 1% that the anomalies observed could be pure chance. To put it another way, they think the chance is 99% that there was electoral fraud.
The authors also suggest that the fraud was centralized. Voting machines were supposed to print tallies before communicating by Internet with the CNE center. But the CNE changed that rule, arranging to have totals sent to the center first and only later printing tally sheets. This increases the potential for fraud because the Smartmatic voting machines suddenly had two-way communication capacity that they weren't supposed to have. The economists say this means the CNE center could have sent messages back to polling stations to alter the totals.....
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