Venezuela: divisions harden after Chavez victory

National Catholic Reporter, Sept 3, 2004 by Bart Jones

Oscar Rodriguez had left his new part-time home of West Palm Beach, Fla., and was on an airplane headed for his homeland, Venezuela, with an urgent mission: to vote President Hugo Chavez out of office in a recall referendum.

The owner of a chain of furniture stores in Venezuela, Rodriguez believed the leftist firebrand Chavez was destroying the country. In the last two years, Rodriguez shut down 20 of his 50 stores, and then moved his wife and two daughters to Florida because he feared for their safety. Now he commutes between the two countries every week.

"I can't sleep at night because it's a do-or-die situation," said Rodriguez, 39, a self-described member of the Venezuelan oligarchy Chavez loves to lambaste. "What he wants for Venezuela is another Cuba."

The next day, a line of men and women were standing on Avenida Urdaneta in Caracas a block away from the Miraflores presidential palace. They were waiting to buy chickens sold by Chavez's government at cut-rate prices. Workers were passing the bags of poultry down from the back of a truck to a crowd that adores Chavez as much as Rodriguez despises him.

"In the entire history of Venezuela the best thing that has happened is this government," said Gregoria Vina, 43, a lawyer who lives in the working-class neighborhood of La Pastora. "Before I used to buy one chicken. Now I buy three."

Venezuela is the most polarized nation in Latin America today, split between those who view Chavez as a dangerous demagogue who wants to impose a Fidel Castro-style communist regime and those who see him as a hero to the poor masses who is carrying out the most radical social transformation in Latin America since at least the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua in the early 1980s.

The Aug. 15 recall referendum, billed by some as the first in the world against a democratically elected president, was supposed to provide a democratic solution to a standoff that has included a failed coup attempt, an illegal two-month shutdown of the country's massive oil industry and a series of huge street protests.

Chavez won the vote in a landslide and amid a record turnout, with some lines stretching a mile long and people waiting up to 11 hours to cast their ballots. But the referendum has not resolved the country's tensions and in ways. left it worse off and more polarized, according to observers.

Even though Jimmy Carter and his Carter Center along with the Organization of American States certified the vote as free and fair, the opposition leadership is alleging fraud and claiming Chavez stole his victory--despite winning by a 59 percent to 41 percent margin, or by 1.7 million votes out of 9.5 million cast. Even the Bush administration, which is hostile to Chavez, acknowledged he won fairly.

Belief in fraud widespread

Yet the conviction that Chavez stole the election is widespread among Venezuela's small middle and upper classes. "What he did is a fraud," said Luisa Victoria Arana, 65, a housewife in Caracas' middle-class Las Colinas de Bello Monte neighborhood. Carter "is a bandit. We don't want anything to do with Carter."

Some analysts contend a type of "collective neurosis" or "hysteria" has overtaken large segments of the opposition who refuse to recognize they lost--and lost big. "They can't see the reality," said Margarita Lopez Maya, a sociologist at the Central University of Venezuela. "There is a mental block.... It's almost a pathology."

To the outside world, the refusal of the opposition leadership to acknowledge the results is creating the perception that "they are a bunch of crazy people," said Jesuit priest Arturo Peraza, a human rights lawyer and a Chavez critic. He compared them to an 8-year-old child who throws a tantrum when he doesn't get his Way. "All the credibility they had they've thrown away. It's an act of suicide."

The Venezuelan opposition's conviction that Chavez stole the election was fueled in part by exit polls conducted by a U.S. firm in conjunction with Sumate (Join Up), a Venezuelan group that helped lead the drive for the recall referendum. Sumate is the recipient of a $53,400 grant from the National Endowment for Democracy, a U.S. Congress-funded entity that has come under fire from Chavez for pumping $1 million a year into opposition groups.

The exit poll, conducted by Sumate volunteers, showed Chavez losing by 18 percent, when in reality the exact opposite was true. Word of the poll spread quickly by cell phone during the afternoon. Then, four hours before polls finally closed around midnight, New York-based Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates sent out a news release by fax and e-mail declaring, "Exit poll results show major defeat for Chavez." Venezuelan authorities had prohibited the release of any exit poll results before official results were announced.

Sumate "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," Carter said later. Sumate and Penn Associates insist their poll was accurate, and that the Chavez government committed massive fraud.