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Venezuela elections: resurgent chavismo and “unrecognised” democracy

by Ricardo Vaz, from InvestigAction.net

Voting queues in the Caracas Poliedro, where residents from the neighbourhoods in Eastern Caracas that have been plagued by violent opposition protests voted (photo by Gregorio Terán, AVN)


After weeks of imperialist threats and opposition violence, the elections for the Constituent Assembly (ANC) in Venezuela took place on July 30th. The result was a massive turnout of over 8 million voters, around 41% of the electorate, which gave chavismo a much-needed shot in the arm. The western media reacted by trying to dispute the number and sticking even closer to the narrative being pushed by the opposition and the US State Department. With the opposition scrambling and US authorities bringing more sanctions and threats, it is now chavismo that has the political initiative. The Constituent Assembly will not solve everything by itself, but it is a tremendous opportunity to push the Bolivarian Revolution forward.

A tale of two elections

On July 16th the Venezuelan opposition held a “consultation” in which it called on its supporters to symbolically reject the Constituent Assembly, appeal for military coup and support a so-called “national unity” government. Here is how Associated Press reported on the turnout:

The opposition said 7.6 million Venezuelans participated in Sunday’s symbolic referendum, which the government labelled an internal party poll with no relevance for the country.”

There is no mention of the fact that people were free to vote more than once, that no electoral roll was used and that no audit was possible because everything was burned at the end of the day. Apart from this, in a recent article we explored other reasons why this total was very doubtful, based on simple estimations given the number of voting booths available. A phone conversation between opposition leaders in Aragua state also revealed how the numbers were being cooked.

President Maduro was the first to vote, casting what he called “the first vote for peace”.


In contrast, Sunday’s elections had the full weight of the electoral authorities behind them, over 12,000 voting centres and 24,000 voting booths, and the approval of international monitors. The main obstacle was the opposition’s violence, and so additional voting centres, such as the Caracas Poliedro pavilion, were set up for people who were not able to vote in their own neighbourhoods [1]. Pictures showed voting queues forming since early morning and the voting deadline was extended so everyone could vote.
It is also worth reminding how the Venezuelan voting system is as close to foolproof as it gets. Voters access voting machines using their fingerprints, exercise their vote electronically, and then a paper ballot is printed. The voter checks that it matches the vote he/she just made and places this paper ballot in a box. Once the voting is done, a random audit of voting centres is made to ensure that the paper ballot tally matches the electronic tally to a margin of 0.1%. In particular, a big discrepancy between the voting totals, paper and electronic, would stand out immediately. And yet, this is how Associated Press reported Sunday’s turnout:

National Electoral Council President Tibisay Lucena announced just before midnight that turnout was 41.53 percent, or 8,089,320 people. Members of the opposition said they believed between 2 million and 3 million people voted and one well-respected independent analysis put the number at 3.6 million.”

Based on what, exactly? If they have evidence they should present it. Some pictures of empty voting centres in middle-class neighbourhoods, which for all we know could have been taken the day before, do not prove anything. Surely, among the thousands of electoral commission workers, one of them would report that there were 3 times more electronic votes than paper ballots in his centre. When Donald Trump claimed that he lost the popular vote because 3 million illegal immigrants voted for Hillary Clinton the media checked and disproved the wild claim. But apparently these standards, or any standards for that matter, do not apply to the Venezuelan opposition.

What’s in a number?

The ineffable Guardian [2], which went into propaganda overdrive in recent days, simply let the US State Department set the tone to describe Sunday’s events in Venezuela. Perhaps still in denial, the Guardian had yet to report the total number of votes on Monday morning. A second piece that revealed the 8M votes surrounded by all the supposed controversy also shed some light on the disputed predictions and the “well respected independent analysis”:

“An exit poll based on surveys from 110 voting centers [note: out of a total of 12.000] by New York investment bank Torino Capital and a Venezuela public opinion company estimated that 3.6 million people voted…”<a href="#3"[3]

It would be interesting to know the sample size, the margin of error, which voting centres were used and which baseline is being compared against. Exit polls work by comparing against exit polls from a previous election, or a model based on previous elections. Voters are interviewed during a certain period of time, and numbers are compared to similar ones in a previous election during the same time to predict turnout (and also how the vote might swing, which is not relevant in this case). Since exit polling has been forbidden in the past in Venezuela, it really makes us wonder how these predictions are made.
We also need to point out that in this case not all voting centres are created equal. Given that the opposition flat-out refused to participate, turnout will have been much more suppressed in the opposition strongholds, and even more so in the vicinity of violent opposition barricades. An oversampling of these would inevitably skewer the prediction, which is why the data needs to be scrutinised and compared to the official results if it is to be taken seriously. The opposition’s long track record of crying fraud and presenting fabricated evidence (or none at all) also makes these claims very hard to believe.
In any case, we expect the media to uncritically parrot the opposition “prediction” with the same bias that they uncritically parrot the 7.6M total for the opposition’s consultation.[4]

Voters in Barquisimeto (photo from Alba Ciudad)

“The world is ending tomorrow. If not, then next week”

After winning the legislative elections in December 2015, the Venezuelan opposition announced that it would get rid of the government in six months. Following protests in September 2016, again we were told that the end was near.
The same doomsday announcements were found in the recent wave of protests and violence. In response to the call for a Constituent Assembly, opposition leaders boldly announced that it would not take place! And finally, the opposition announced that their July 16th marked the “zero hour” of a new phase, in which they would nominate a “national unity” government. This was later downgraded to an “governability accord” which some factions refused to sign. Their demand that the Constituent Assembly elections be cancelled was also a failure.
Last week’s events capture this phenomenon in a nutshell. After a two-day “civic strike”, which amounted to little more than closed shops in wealthy areas and bosses locking out their workers, they announced the “takeover of Caracas” for Friday. This then became a “takeover of Venezuela”, and finally another “trancazo”, in which opposition groups simply lock down their own areas. Then they wanted to march to voting centres on Saturday and physically impede the elections from taking place, but this too was to become another “trancazo”
There is very little credibility left to this opposition that behaves like a doomsday cult, predicting the end of the world on a given day and later re-scheduling. For their own sake, one hopes that they have a “no refund” policy, otherwise funders like the National Endowment for Democracy or USAID might want their money back.

Lessons in democracy and international recognition

The pressure and propaganda against Venezuela in recent weeks were centred on the idea that the simple fact of these elections taking place would mean the “end of democracy” and the definitive arrival of a “dictatorship”. Often absent from these pieces is the fact that everyone could vote and anyone could stand as a candidate.
But beyond this we encounter the obvious question of why Venezuela should get lessons in democracy or electoral procedures from the likes of the United States. Intellectual Gore Vidal famously said that

There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat.”

The fact that Brazil (!) complained about the legitimacy of this process shows that an unexpected victim of last year’s parliamentary coup, which brought Temer to power, was irony.

Mainstream outlets were determined to paint the narrative of government repression but could not resist using a photo of a bomb detonated by the opposition against security forces. As a result, many simply referred to an “explosion” without identifying the culprits!


When it became clear that the Venezuelan government was not going to back down and the vote was going ahead, the tone changed slightly. The US, the European Union and the usual suspects (Argentina, Mexico, Colombia,…) now announced they would not recognise the election results. Here it is worth recalling a few episodes of international recognition:

  • the US initially refused to recognise the results of the 2013 Venezuelan presidential election, even after it was proven beyond any doubt that Maduro was the winner.
  • the US and Spain rushed to recognise Pedro Carmona’s government after the 2002 coup, even though the coup authorities dissolved all public powers
  • European countries and later the US recognised an unelected body, chosen by delegates appointed by the various sponsors of the Syrian war, and operating in Turkey, as “the legitimate representative of the Syrian people”. This body would later be consigned to irrelevance.
  • To these we could add a multitude of leaders who came to power following bloody or back-door coups, from Pinochet to Temer, and never had any trouble being “recognised”. The Israeli apartheid regime has no issues in terms of recognition despite its permanent history of crimes and ethnic cleansing. So there is hardly any correlation between legitimacy and recognition from the US and its followers.

    What happens next?

    The total of 8M votes is higher than Maduro’s 2013 total and 2.5M more than what chavismo got in the 2015 legislative elections. This is being presented as “evidence” against the official results. This stems from a very narrow-minded perspective that does not understand that chavismo is much bigger than Maduro, just like it was much bigger than Chávez himself. The Venezuelan opposition and the mainstream media also seem incapable of considering that people would actually vote in defiance of the violent actions of the opposition and the imperialist threats from the US. Instead we hear the same recycled allegations that public workers or people living in houses built by the government were forced to vote. [5]
    The poor showing in 2015 was blamed by the grassroots on the top-down nature of the chavista electoral machine, which simply chose the candidates. For these elections the more radical sectors were able to put forward their own candidates, and as a result many people who would not necessarily vote for Maduro or for PSUV legislative candidates went out to vote for the specific proposals put forward by friends, co-workers and comrades.

    A popular assembly of “Chavismo Bravío”, a radical current that presented several candidates to the ANC, a few days before the vote (photo from Reinaldo Iturriza’s twitter)


    In retrospect, Maduro’s gamble can only be seen as a huge success for chavismo and a huge failure for the opposition. With the opposition ramping up (violent) pressure on the streets and claiming they were an overwhelming majority, Maduro essentially “called their bluff” (phrase borrowed from Mike Prysner). By calling for a Constituent Assembly, Maduro hoped, and managed, to galvanise chavismo with a participatory process that could reach the bases, and at the same time expose the opposition by forcing them bring forward their ideas. Polls reveal that Venezuelans are aware that the opposition has no plan whatsoever, and the opposition duly backed itself into a corner by refusing to participate, reducing their political arguments to these lobotomised slogans “we do not want to be Cuba”.
    While the turnout represents a victory for chavismo, the battle is far from over. The Constituent Assembly is not a magical cure for all problems, and whatever comes out of it will depend heavily on the balance of forces among its members. Now more than ever it is urgent to make clear push to the left, with more power to the communes, increased worker control over the economy, expropriations against the instigators of the economic war, etc. With the opposition hell-bent on their violent regime change plans and a permanent imperial onslaught, only radicalisation will ensure the survival of the Bolivarian Revolution.

    NOTES

    [1] It is quite remarkable that, according to the media, the EU, the US, etc, the “pro-democracy” faction is the one that was physically trying to stop others from voting and destroying electoral material.
    [2] In the run-up to the elections the Guardian also published an “explainer” which essentially a propaganda piece. We tried to expose some of the lies and distortions in this article.
    [3] The Venezuelan company involved in the exit poll was Innovarium, which has no track record of having done electoral polls, or exit polls in particular.
    Innovarium appears to be headed by Carlos Guzmán Cárdenas. A quick look at his social media accounts reveals a very strong anti-government bias. As a reference, Maria Corina Machado’s US-funded Súmate ran a phony exit poll for the 2004 recall referendum predicting an 18-point defeat for Chávez. Chávez ended up winning by a landslide, and former US-president Jimmy Carter slammed Súmate for having
    “…deliberately distributed this erroneous exit poll data in order to build up, not only the expectation of victory, but also to influence the people still standing in line”
    We have contacted both Torino Capital and Carlos Guzmán Cárdenas asking for more information about this exit poll, and will update the article if this information is provided.
    [4] The media has also latched on to the revocation of the house arrest deals of opposition leaders Leopoldo López and Antonio Ledezma. What the media failed to mention is the repeated violations of the terms of their house arrest, with constant calls for anti-government actions and for a military coup.
    [5] It is not too hard to understand that people living in houses built by Misión Vivienda would take part in a process that, among other things, aims to solidify social gains and missions. Especially when the opposition has already made it clear that their intentions are to privatise the housing mission.

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    BigB
    BigB
    Aug 3, 2017 2:40 PM

    “…only radicalisation will ensure the survival of the Bolivarian Revolution.”
    That, and economic diversification. I don’t know the solution: but I do know the problem – oil. When 65% of your sole export goes to your cultural enemy – the ultra-Capitalist USA – you are always going to have problems. Especially when the globally manipulated price of oil crashes (to sanction Russia (epic fail!) or to favour US shale production, for instance) – and you find yourself at economic war with the very country that holds the economic purse strings to your economy ($$$)…
    In this case, the only short term diversification available is who you sell the oil to. China has already extended a $50bn lifeline. Will they extend that? I don’t know, but they could. As I understand it, the issue at hand is to change the Constitution to allow Rosneft in to expand its operations in the Orinoco Oil Belt (selling oil independently of the state owned PDVSA [FT-paywall]) Which is also exactly what Tillerson (Exxon) and Mnuchin ($$$) want. Will they allow Russia and China further in??? No way, Senor Maduro…
    America is (as usual) dealing from the bottom of a crooked deck: with an ace up the sleeve. They could spite their face and deny the country dollars overnight; something they stopped short of doing in their latest sanctions. Their tactic seems to be to starve Chavismo for a few more months until next years Presidential Elections. Then bring the really crooked ‘Diebold’ voting machines – to get a ‘fair’ result. You know, the one they paid for… Judging from Ricardo’s article: that tactic may not work…
    There is a lesson for all of us here. Capitalism and Socialism don’t mix. The neoliberal ‘Third Way’ (“capitalism with a human face” – Hugo Chavez) offers the worst of both worlds. Personally, I would love to see the Bolivarian Revolution “radicalised”… I would love to see Maria Corina Machado working on the production line making toilet rolls in a factory she cooperatively owns. Being pragmatic, that seems an unlikely event in a country ringfenced by the military bases of the world leading rogue terrorist monopoly capitalist nation.
    It’s not my call, I don’t have the inside knowledge, but it seems to me that for the Bolivarian Revolution to succeed… the continuation and acceleration of Land Reform, food sovereignty, cooperative control of supply chains, and the swiftest move possible to food self-sufficiency and security are the issues of the day??? Because the Government claims of self-sufficiency and the reality don’t seem to add up??? If the oil revenue has dried up, and Maduro needs Russian and Chinese finance capital in return for oil to complete Chavez’s reforms – so be it. The alternative is GMO corpo-fascism with Monsanto, Cargill, Exxon, etc. Under a right-wing oligarchical neoliberal compradorist junta… With Machado in charge???

    writerroddis
    writerroddis
    Aug 3, 2017 2:59 PM
    Reply to  BigB

    “Capitalism and Socialism don’t mix. The neoliberal ‘Third Way’ (“capitalism with a human face” – Hugo Chavez) offers the worst of both worlds.”
    Couldn’t agree more. Such hopes as I have rest in the main on the challenge to US imperialism from China and Russia. It’s not that I see those two as more humane, just that the world desperately needs a counterbalance to the most dangerous empire the world has ever known.

    BigB
    BigB
    Aug 3, 2017 3:39 PM
    Reply to  writerroddis

    Indeed, the realpolitik of the situation is that Russian and Chinese investment is more humane (I’ve taken my environmentalist hat off for the day!) If US corpo-fascism were to get in: overnight 95+% of the people would become disposable. Including the ones that are currently rioting for US intervention. Land reform would be stopped and the people made dependant on imported USAID. They might get toilet paper back on the shelves, but that is the only benefit I can see!

    BigB
    BigB
    Aug 3, 2017 4:21 PM
    Reply to  writerroddis

    Of course, the other problem (with no sovereign income) is foreign debt. If China-Russia could find a way to restructure/write-down foreign debt; so that loans became available to the people – not just creditors: that would be the really humanitarian thing to do. 🙂

    bevin
    bevin
    Aug 3, 2017 6:21 PM
    Reply to  BigB

    Excellent points. The country is still infested with Latifundia. An immediate, radical and comprehensive land reform would not only undercut the bases of oligarchy but also solve supply problems.
    In the mean time I have no doubt that contra-guerrilla bands, armed to the teeth and earning vast salaries have been sneaked over the Guyanese and Colombian borders to undertake the normal ‘regime change’ operations (see Libya and Syria, Ukraine etc).
    It is essential that Corbyn not allow himself to be panicked by the right wing Blairite scum (to put it very mildly) who in Colombia sided with the death squads and para-militaries, sponsored by the US and the narco-feudalists against FARC.
    Labour would do well to send a mission of enquiry to Caracas to meet with, inter alia, Trade Union and Socialist parties and educate the people on history of the region and the aspirations and achievements of the (flawed though it may be) Bolivarian government.

    BigB
    BigB
    Aug 3, 2017 7:26 PM
    Reply to  bevin

    Flawed, but better than the alternative! If the US don’t get the result they want next year: that is when they will go peak regime change, I suspect.
    Back home, I see Thornberry and Eagle each put a drop of poison in the chalice: and tried to get Corbyn to drink from it and condemn the Maduro government. He would do well to continue to decline.

    mohandeer
    mohandeer
    Aug 4, 2017 7:21 PM
    Reply to  BigB

    If he doesn’t continue to decline I’ll be withdrawing my support from the Labour Party, writing to him and the Unite Union to explain one or two reasons why Thornberry et al should keep their gobs shut.

    mohandeer
    mohandeer
    Aug 3, 2017 1:51 PM

    As long as Maduro can unite the many factions within the chavismo with his 9 point policy aims strategy, he will have the power base he needs. The opposition is, so far, shooting itself in both feet – may they continue to do so for a very long time.

    mohandeer
    mohandeer
    Aug 3, 2017 1:34 PM

    Reblogged this on Worldtruth.

    Seamus Padraig
    Seamus Padraig
    Aug 3, 2017 11:26 AM

    Where was Jimmy Carter? He certified all of Venezuela’s other elections.

    Now more than ever it is urgent to make clear push to the left, with more power to the communes, increased worker control over the economy, expropriations against the instigators of the economic war, etc. With the opposition hell-bent on their violent regime change plans and a permanent imperial onslaught, only radicalisation will ensure the survival of the Bolivarian Revolution.

    Could not agree more! It’s finally time for Maduro to go on the offensive. He’s been letting the enemy put him on the back foot ever since he became president.

    Seamus Padraig
    Seamus Padraig
    Aug 3, 2017 1:44 PM
    Reply to  Seamus Padraig

    Oh: and what does Abby Martin have to say about all this?

    leruscino
    leruscino
    Aug 3, 2017 10:01 AM

    Reblogged this on leruscino.

    writerroddis
    writerroddis
    Aug 3, 2017 7:32 AM

    Very timely and welcome. It’s imperative that the emerging post election mainstream narrative on Venezuela be challenged at every turn and through every channel.
    As one now frantically playing catch up – my eye has been on the middle east to the exclusion of so much else – I note that much is being made by corrupt media and political establishment both sides of the Atlantic of claims, by the company supplying the electoral machinery, of ‘irregularities’. Anyone got information about this? Looks like it’s going to be a key strand of the propaganda war.

    BigB
    BigB
    Aug 3, 2017 10:58 AM
    Reply to  writerroddis

    Phil: my ears pricked up when it was announced that the company, Smartmatic, was British. As far as I can tell, so far the claim is baseless. They claim to have the hard data, but to my knowledge have yet to release it (they need to ‘audit’ it first.) Based on Ricardos article above – if the system has biometric safeguards – the only way to fool it would be with 1m thumbs of dead people. Until CEO Antonio Mugica produces his “tamper evident” data (or a big bag of thumbs) – it’s a substanceless claim. [The article is in yesterdays Graun if you want to read it.]

    Norman Pilon
    Norman Pilon
    Aug 3, 2017 1:21 AM

    Reblogged this on Taking Sides.

    A Petherbridge
    A Petherbridge
    Aug 2, 2017 11:26 PM

    Very illuminating – thank you.