Venezuela: The NO won; now what?
By
Eduardo Dimas
“I
prefer it this way. I couldn’t stand a pyrrhic victory."
—
President Hugo Chávez, acknowledging the victory of the NO
vote.
The
stormy waters of the Referendum for a Constitutional Reform in
Venezuela have subsided. A relative calm reigns. The opposition has
scored a victory over President Chávez and the Bolivarian
Revolution, after losing nine consecutive elections and referenda,
including a recall referendum, since 1999.
The
opposition’s victory is really pyrrhic. The difference in the two
parallel votes cast Sunday, Dec. 2, does not reach 200,000 votes. In
the first bloc of laws, the NO received 50.7 percent of the vote; the
YES got 49.29 percent. In the second bloc, the NO won with 51.05
percent of the votes; the YES received 48.94 percent.
The big
winner was abstention. Forty-four point 11 percent of the Venezuelans
with the right to vote (about 7 million people) chose not to go to
the polls.
By
Eduardo Dimas Read Spanish Version
“I
prefer it this way. I couldn’t stand a pyrrhic victory."
—
President Hugo Chávez, acknowledging the victory of the NO
vote.
The
stormy waters of the Referendum for a Constitutional Reform in
Venezuela have subsided. A relative calm reigns. The opposition has
scored a victory over President Chávez and the Bolivarian
Revolution, after losing nine consecutive elections and referenda,
including a recall referendum, since 1999.
The
opposition’s victory is really pyrrhic. The difference in the two
parallel votes cast Sunday, Dec. 2, does not reach 200,000 votes. In
the first bloc of laws, the NO received 50.7 percent of the vote; the
YES got 49.29 percent. In the second bloc, the NO won with 51.05
percent of the votes; the YES received 48.94 percent.
The big
winner was abstention. Forty-four point 11 percent of the Venezuelans
with the right to vote (about 7 million people) chose not to go to
the polls. It is impossible to know whether they were against or in
favor of the reforms. More than 3 million of the abstainers voted for
Chávez in last year’s presidential election. This week, they
chose not to participate. Why?
I think
this is the first question that the Bolivarian revolutionaries in
charge of mobilizing the people should ask themselves: Why did people
who supported Chávez and voted for him last year preferred to
abstain this time? There are several possible answers. The most
logical one is that those people did not know the contents of the
Constitutional reforms. That’s not their fault; it’s the fault of the
speed with which the referendum was held.
The
National Assembly approved the reforms in September. To the 33
changes proposed by Chávez, the deputies added 36. The
amendments were written in the thick and difficult language of laws,
easy for lawyers to interpret but hard for the ordinary citizens, who
mainly support the reforms because they benefit from them.
It’s
hard to believe that a reduction in the working hours from eight to
six, a guarantee of social security for workers in the informal
sector of the economy, paid maternity leave for women in that
informal sector, the right to own one’s home, and the right to free
health care and education were not to the satisfaction of most of the
population.
The
opposition media, which account for most of the country’s media,
misreported other laws of a socialist nature. For example, referring
to the amendments on property rights — which also appear in the 1999
Constitution — the media intimated that all personal property would
be nationalized and that people would lose their homes, cars and
small businesses. That is false.
Perhaps,
as some analysts of Venezuelan reality point out, Chávez
hastened to talk about socialism, even though it is "21st-Century
socialism." For decades, the propaganda emitted by the United
States and the local oligarchies against socialism and communism have
instilled among Latin Americans a kind of conditioned reflex, an
almost visceral reaction against that word.
It is
reasonable to think that, if instead of announcing a road to
socialism Chávez had proceeded with the reforms — without
calling them by their name — they would have been accepted by a
majority of the population, because all were beneficial.
A friend
told me recently that if in Cuba in 1961 the socialist nature of the
Revolution had been submitted to a referendum, it might not have been
approved. He’s probably right. That conditioned reflex existed in
Cuba, too.
Even
parental control (the famous patria
potestas) came up during
the Venezuelan opposition’s campaign against the reform. Some media
said the government would take the children away from their parents
at the age of 2, to teach them the ideas of communism. At least in
this case they couldn’t say that the children would be taken to
Russia, killed and turned into canned hash, as happened in Cuba in
the early 1960s.
But
other Constitutional reforms may also have affected the propaganda
spread by the Bolivarian Revolution to promote the referendum. It is
well known that the Venezuelan states are very regional-minded.
That’s something that has existed for centuries and is very hard to
overcome.
One of
the reforms granted the president broad powers to appoint vice
presidents by regions (formed of several states), whose function it
would be to direct and control the plans for the development and
operation of the governorships. For obvious reasons, in a country
where governors are the top authority in their regions, that change
was not welcome by neither Chávez’s opponents nor the
Chavistas themselves.
Among
the most debated issues was the indefinite reelection of the
president. According to the present Constitution, a president can
stay in power for only two consecutive terms of six years each. The
reform established that the president can be reelected as many times
as he seeks reelection and the people vote him back into office. A
similar provision appears in the Constitutions of 17 European
countries and it has never been questioned as being antidemocratic.
However,
that change was criticized by the opposition media and the overseas
media to such a degree that it became a Trojan horse against the
reforms.
The
concern of the Venezuelan oligarchy and its allies in the U.S., Latin
America and Europe is that they don’t have any political figure
capable of opposing Chávez. In nine years of government,
despite the tremendous difficulties he has had to cope with, Chávez
has done more for the Venezuelan poor than all the previous
administrations put together.
Perhaps
for that reason — and in addition to their defense of the 1999
Constitution, which they had previously criticized and tried to
eliminate with the coup d’état of April 2002 — the
oppositionists issued the slogan "Chávez, yes; reform,
no" at the end of their campaign against the reforms. That
slogan, they figured, might please some revolutionary sectors in the
Venezuelan society that were not in agreement with the reforms or
feared the intended changes.
That is
why we can reasonably reach the conclusion that — independently from
the calls to a coup d’état, Operation Pincers, organized by
the Central Intelligence Agency, and other plans that might have
plunged the country into a civil war — the opposition’s propaganda
was intelligently designed to touch upon each of the topics that
might provoke discord.
The
outcome is clear to see, and I think that it is up to Chávez
and the Venezuelan revolutionaries to learn from this defeat, the
first one they have suffered in eight years of government. It is
evident that, although the NO’s margin of victory was small, the
opposition will try to utilize this success to create more problems
and weaken the Bolivarian government.
We
cannot rule out that the opposition will demand Chávez’s
departure or try to promote a military uprising, with the aid of the
U.S. government, as they were already doing. Let us not forget that
the Bolivarian Revolution and Chávez are an impediment to
Washington’s plans of domination and control of the region. Let us
not forget that Chávez is seen — not without reason — as the
principal promoter of the changes taking place in Latin America,
thanks to the economic resources he has.
It is
not by whim that the campaigns against Chávez in the United
States and Europe are increasingly more aggressive and unethical. The
world’s power elite cannot allow — because it runs against its
interests — Venezuela, a country rich in oil and other natural
resources, to break all the ties that bind it to the world’s
neoliberal, globalized economy.
Chávez
is, like Fidel Castro once was, the principal enemy in Latin American
of the "new world order" the United States attempts to
impose upon the world. If Washington can keep Chávez from
carrying out his plans for social justice, it will do so. If it can
eliminate him, it will do so, too.
