Mr. Chavez’s Claim

Editorial

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55981-2004May25.html

IN A COLUMN on the opposite page Venezuelan President
Hugo Chavez makes the remarkable assertion that he
hopes his opponents will succeed in triggering a recall
referendum that could cut short his term in office.
Remarkable, because polls consistently show that Mr.
Chavez would lose the referendum — less than 40
percent of the population supports his eccentric,
quasi-authoritarian populism. Contrary to his claims,
he has impoverished as well as polarized his country:
Venezuela’s per capita income has declined by a quarter
in the six years he has been in office, and the poor
are worse off than ever.

More to the point, the president’s words conflict with
his actions. He has spent the past year doing
everything in his power to prevent a democratic vote on
his tenure — and has repeatedly vowed that no
referendum will take place.

So why would Mr. Chavez claim otherwise? Because the
latest propaganda strategy of this would-be "Bolivarian
revolutionary" is to portray a complicated petition
verification process scheduled for this weekend as an
impartial procedure whose outcome should be accepted as
a fair resolution of the country’s political conflict.
In fact, the procedure should not be taking place at
all: It is the result of an attempt by Mr. Chavez’s
appointees to invalidate on bogus technicalities 1.6
million out of 3.4 million signatures the opposition
collected to trigger the recall election. By all
rights, the election should have occurred months ago,
because the opposition gathered 1 million more
signatures than required by the constitution and has
now collected more than enough signatures for a recall
vote on two occasions. Instead, after protracted
wrangling, authorities have set aside two days in which
hundreds of thousands of would-be voters must return to
confirm their signatures. Unless at least 600,000
manage to do so despite numerous procedural obstacles
and intimidation by government goon squads, Mr. Chavez
and his cronies will declare the recall a failure.

Sadly, the odds are that Mr. Chavez will carry out this
coup-by-technicality and thwart a democratic resolution
to Venezuela’s long-running political crisis. The
president points out that some of his opponents
previously supported a coup against him (Mr. Chavez
doesn’t mention that he also once led a military
rebellion against a democratic government); but now
that the opposition has committed itself to an
electoral solution, Mr. Chavez refuses to allow it.
About the only hope for a fair outcome is the presence
of observers from the Organization of American States
(OAS) and the Carter Center who could call attention to
acts of overt fraud and intimidation; Mr. Chavez tried
to exclude them from the verification process but was
obliged to give in late last week.

Mr. Chavez swallowed the observers for the same reason
he penned his op-ed: He hopes not only to block the
referendum but also to head off any subsequent decision
by the OAS to invoke its democracy charter, which calls
for sanctions against governments that interrupt the
rule of law. Even if it decided to act, the OAS
probably wouldn’t be able to stop Mr. Chavez from
destroying what remains of democracy in Venezuela.
Already, the president’s only real friend in the
outside world is Cuba’s Fidel Castro. But if he
proceeds to deny his country a democratic vote, Mr.
Chavez should, at least, be denied the pretense that
his actions are legal, or acceptable to the region’s
democracies.