"We've made the ideal decision for defending the Venezuelan economy and to defend the international reserves," Chavez said. He added that exchange controls would help Venezuela pay its foreign debt. The fixed rate will be flexible, changing periodically when and how the executive branch and central bank see fit.
Venezuelan businessmen warned Wednesday that plans to restrict access to foreign currency will bury the reeling economy, which is highly dependent on imports. Venezuela imports roughly half of its food and refined products. The strike had choked off Venezuela's income from abroad by hobbling the state oil company, by far the nation's biggest exporter.
Chavez on Tuesday lashed out at business leaders who had led the strike, saying the "coup plotters" were stashing billions of dollars abroad. Analysts say the economic woes caused by the failed two-month strike to oust Chavez will close more than 20,000 businesses and leave 200,000 people jobless.
Strike leader Carlos Fernandez, head of the Fedecamaras business federation, said Chavez was trying to impose control over the struggling private sector, which relies on imports for 60 percent of its supplies and raw materials. Lope Mendoza, president of the Conindustria business chamber, urged citizens to buy Venezuelan products to keep the economy afloat. "The industrial sector isn't going to please the president, who wants to see a cemetery of businesses," Mendoza said. Chavez's government suspended dollar purchases on Jan. 22 after the bolivar lost more than 30 percent of its worth during the strike, which began Dec. 2 and ended in all sectors but oil this week.***
Between now and August, Chavez and his closest collaborators will have completed an elaborate blueprint for vote fraud on an unprecedented scale. In short, Hugo Chavez is planning to steal the next election. But for that, he needs time to put the whole plan in place.
"Hugo Chavez is buying time. Right now, Hugo Chavez needs between three and four more months. That is the time it will take him to finalize his plans for vote fraud", says Army General Nestor Gonzalez Gonzalez, a former Chavez-loyalist who is now part of the Militares Democraticos resistance movement which is calling for free and democratic elections as soon as possible.
The Chavez plan for stealing Venezuela's next election is long and complex. But here it is, in all its detail.
To pull it off, Chavez simply needs enough time to put his preparations in place. If an election is held in Q1 or Q2 of 2003, it will be too soon. Q3 will be OK for him, as will any later date.
Constitutional vote cancelled because more time was needed for fraud preparations
Strictly adhering to the rules of the Venezuelan Constitutition for calling a referendum, the opposition and the electoral authorities - known by its Spanish initials CNE - had scheduled a vote for February 2. Chavez, doing everything in his power, was determined to stop it: From having his supporters shoot at the opposition, then sabotaging the electoral commission, not offering funding or army protection, an even ordering an unconstitutional decision in the Supreme Court -- a ruling which the head of the Supreme Court's electoral court called "a travesty" and "purely political". Supreme Court judge Alberto Martini Urdaneta publicly called for the Chavez-ordered ruling to be overturned, pointing out not just clear political bias, but also that the ruling violated basic rights guaranteed by the Constitution, and that it suspended the rights of the citizens to participate in free and democratic elections.[1]
To gain time, Chavez publicly declared that the current board of directors of the electoral commission, the CNE, "is not even qualified to oversee the vote of the ugliest cat on the corner," and that no election - says he - can go forward until all its members are replaced.[2]
"This is troubling," says an international diplomat, "since the same board, with the same people, was qualified to oversee all the previous elections; those called by Chavez himself when he wanted to. But now their replacements are suddenly needed."
Chavez party deputees, a majority on the selection committee, have an absolute veto in picking the new members of the CNE board. They have announced that it will take them months to reach the decision, and that possibly the new board will not be installed until April 2003.
This will give Chavez some of the time he needs to intimidate the opposition into either not campaigning in the next election, or else at least campaigning a lot less. The death threats have already started, and so have the deaths. In a show of state sponsored violence, Chavez has armed organized groups of supporters who, led by locally elected party officials, attack pro-democracy activists. Amateur video abound of small groups of violent Chavez supporters shooting at much larger groups of opposition marchers, causing dozens of dead and hundreds of wounded in the last year.
If this is not enough to keep the opposition at home, money is. The opposition, a ragtag movement of volunteer grassroots groups, has no powerful source of funding. They are up against the the well-financed MVR party, backed with four years of oil billions and not observing the rules for campaign financing. Chavez, treating state coffers as a private piggy-bank, draws indiscriminately on governments funds for party use and for his own political campaigning.[3]
Following in the footsteps of Milosevic and Fujimori
The steps taken by the Chavez administration to foil the will of the voters follow similar attempts by Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic and Peru's Alberto Fujimori in recent years. Chavez is aiming for just a little over half the vote. To make that happen, he is not afraid of shooting at opposition voters, issuing false ID cards, buying votes for cash, salting the electoral registry, and putting his own party faithful in charge of the whole process -- and that's just the beginning.
The voters' rolls, known in Venezuela as REP (Registro Electoral Permanente), are in the hands of General Ramon Guillermo Santeliz, a fanatical Chavez loyalist who only takes orders from Hugo Chavez himself. At the electoral council (CNE), his right hand collaborator, Romelia Chaviel, is in charge of administration, and the accounts for transport, publicity, and food, all vital items needed in any election. Likewise, other key
Chavez placements are firmly in charge of the remaining departments at the CNE: Leonardo Lazo, Alexis Ramos, Marcos Mendez. Nothing substantial can happen without these individuals authorizing it. If Chavez does not want a vote to be held, these are the people who will stop it ... by sabotage, if necessary.[4]
Ramon Guillermo Santeliz is the key for having Chavez pull off his vote fraud. Because with a die-hard loyalist in charge of the REP, even the dead can vote; a fact not lost on top Chavez party members Diosdado Cabello and Ramon Rodriguez Chacin. Together, they developed a plan for issuing tens of thousands of false ID cards, enabling the holders to vote as many as seven times in each election. As top investigative journalist Nelson Bocaranda discovered, the country's main ID-card issuing office - Onidex in El Silencio, downtown Caracas - has been working night shifts to issue false ID's to Chavez supporters.[5] Cross-checking with the CNE database of registered voters, names of deceased Venezuelans are used for these new cedulas, issued in bulk with up to seven per each Chavez voter.
The false ID's became so widespread that Onidex ran out of dead people to use. They had to use names of ordinary Venezuelans, picking those not yet registered to vote. These "living ghosts" were then registered with the CNE, in the tens of thousands. In some cases, the real owner of the identity later registered to vote -- only to find that someone had registered using his name and ID card number, but in a different city and state. Hundreds of such cases have been documented by Venezuelan newspapers, and thousands more made public in local Internet forums.
But being found out does not deter the co-author of the plan, Ramon Rodriguez Chacin, himself a seasoned user of false identities. He had to resign as Chavez's Interior and Justice Minister in mid-2002 after a scandal where his alter ego, fake ID-card # 4.125.249 in the name of Rafael Montenegro, was discovered as the owner of a large bank account with ties to crime.[6] Conveniently, under Rodriguez Chacin's watch as minister of Justice, the law regulating use of ID-cards, the Ley de Identificación y Extranjería, was changed: It is no longer a crime to use fake ID!
Legal ID's are also issued, but only to Chavez supporters. Why? Again, so they can vote. In December, Diosdado Cabello announced a government plan for issuing more than 3 million ID cards during the first six months of 2003. Onidex goes into schools and poor neighborhoods, looking for new Chavez voters who have no cedula yet. During socalled 'mega mercados' organized for the poor by Chavez loyalists in the military, one-stop Onidex booths issue on the spot ID cards to the Chavistas. In contrast, in middle class neigborhoods, opposition voters must typically wait between 6 and 8 months before their 'cedulas' are ready.
If election authorities were seriously interested in a clean election, at a minimum, a clean REP is needed. For that to work, a new ID card system must be put in place before the election authorities can trust who is who, and who has the right to vote. Former interior minister Luis Miquelena tried to do just that, but was forced out by powerful MVR party interests. Venezuelans still remember his plan for new unforgeable 'cedulas'. The contract was first signed with Korean company Hyundai, but amidst allegations of fraud, Miquelena brought in the United Nations to manage it (PNUD sectional office, Caracas). However, not even the United Nations could do anything against powerful party bosses eager to keep the broken ID-card system in place.[7]
To further weaken the opposition, Venezuelans abroad are virtually barred from voting. In the face of economic hardship at home, an estimated 900,000 Venezuelans have already left their country. This Venezuelan diaspora is solidly anti-Chavez, and to prevent them from voting, Chavez-dominated embassies and consulates have not allowed voter registration to go forward smoothly.[8] Unable to register, the abstention rate will be 95% among Venezuelans resident abroad, depriving the pro-democracy opposition of more than eight hundred thousand votes in its favor.
In the interior of Venezuela, Chavez just buys his support outright. During the last 18 months, party organizer Elias Jaua spent the equivalent of $23 million on payments to government rally participants, and according to MVR Tactical Command, a similar budget will be made available for the "mobilizing of voters" during the next election.[9] On January 23, when all of Venezuela was out of gasoline, six thousand government-owned busses were used to transport paid Chavez supporters to Caracas for a pro-Chavez show of support. Including Caracas-based participants, the event gathered 103,000 people (at a cost of up to Bolivares 180,000, approximately $100, for those arriving from the states of Nueva Esparta and Tachira.) As poverty has increased markedly under Chavez's economic mismanagement, formerly apolitical segments of the population are motivated to trade their votes and political support for the cash provided by Tactical Command.
Heavy control of public opinion, clampdown on opposition
To further solidify control, Chavez made sure that in the next election campaign, only his own message dominates. His media strategy is to ignore both reality and opinion polls, and instead to constantly claim that he and his party has the backing of the vast majority of Venezuela. This strategy, especially pronounced since mid-2002, is being stepped up further. It will allow him to claim victory with a straight face when the results of his Q3 or post-Q3 rigged election announces that he won with just over half of the votes.
Chavez's main tool for control of the airwaves is to simply hijack them and then broadcast his own message on all TV and radio stations. Incredibly, this is legal in Venezuela, where the custom is known as 'cadenas'. This is Spanish for chaining up all media outlets to one single message: The booming voice of el comandante. Previous governments used this right very sparsely, usually limiting themselves to State-of-the-Union type broadcasts. But Chavez, taking a cue from Cuba's Fidel Castro, has made heavy use of the airwaves and the private broadcasters' primetime. Throughout all of 2002, such presidential programming happened weekly and bi-weekly.
Human Rights Watch criticized this as government abuse, condemning the way that the Chavez government "openly interfered with private television programming by forcing private media stations to transmit government-supplied broadcasts."[10] In response, Chavez merely stepped up this abuse: For all of 2003, Venezuelans have been treated to these rambling multicasts daily, sometimes even twice daily.[11]
Realizing that he can not be on TV and radio 24 hours a day, Chavez has taken steps to firmly control what is being broadcast the rest of the time. The new Content Law strictly regulates what the press can and can not say, and criticism of government officials will be punished with swift and permanent closure of TV stations and newspapers.[12] The accompanying National Security Law furthermore makes it a crime to participate in a protest march or even write about one, punishable with between five and ten years in jail.[13]
While the Content Law is being put in place to shut down the independent voices of privately-owned media outlets, millions are being invested in a revamp of state-owned TV channel 8, VTV Venezolana de Television.[14] This taxpayer-funded channel, which is run by Chavez party members and which a recent independent study[15] found to be violently pro-Chavez, is even getting a new logo at the same time that the competing private channels are being silenced.[16]
Chavez has a history of disregard for democracy
While this is the first time that a vote is being so blatantly rigged in Venezuela, it is not the first time the Chavez has resorted to playing loose and fast with democracy. Disregarding fair play, the Chavez administration has long been known for writing new "revolutionary" rules whenever it wanted to favor itself: In the 1999 election for a Constitutional Assembly, Chavez supporters got just 56% of the votes cast, yet somehow ended up with all but 3 of the 150 winning candidates. The opposition, a full 44% of the electorate at the time, had to see itself represented by just 2% of the elected seats.[17]
Bending the rules to fit his own version of history is Chavez's way to disguise that fact that he never won by a "landslide". Of the 24 million Venezuelans, less than 4 million ever voted for him. In the five elections where Chavez participated, he never got more than thirty-five percent of the eligible votes.[18] Today, having lost even that precaurious support base, the Chavez party machine is having to go to even further lengths to maintain its hold on power. So now only fraud is left.
Abroad, Chavez - with help from the Cuban-financed Prensa Latina propaganda agency - has stepped up the intensity of an international press campaign with two purposes: To portray himself as a democrat, and to discredit everyone else. One aspect that particularly troubles Chavez is the way that all opinion polls demonstrate, for the world to see, how low his suppport really is among the voters. If the opinion polls keep reporting the truth, few will believe a doctored vote result giving him more than 50 percent. So in preparation for this, Chavez is already starting to call the opinion polls "terrorist lies". On TV, he cites an exit poll from Ecuador which didn't predit the Guiterrez win. In print, his spin-doctors lash out at what they call "simulated polls", using personal attacks on the owners of the largest, oldest and most respected Venezuelan polling companies.[19] Another favorite argument is that since the poor do not have phones, and since many polls are conducted by phone, the polls don't count the support for Chavez among the poor. This argument doesn't explain the heavy cell phone ownership in the slums, nor does it explain why door-to-door polls and polls in the street consistently reach the same results as phone polls: That if given the choice to vote today, less than 1 in 5 Venezuelans would vote for Chavez.
Chavez's continued loss of popular support is the reason for both the latest round of heavy-handed laws and the meticulously orchestrated vote fraud planned for the third quarter of 2003. But this planned fraud and the dictatorial nature of Hugo Chavez has lost him many of his closest supporters. And some of them are now speaking out against him in public, despite being labelled "fascists" and "terrorists" in Chavez's daily broadcast railings against these former allies who now joined the democratic opposition.
"Chavez is drunk on power," says Luis Miquelena, previously an Interior and Justice Minister in the Chavez government and the man who Chavez himself considers his political mentor.[20] To Miquelena, it is now all too clear that "Chavez is not fit to govern in a democracy."
This statement is echoed by Militares Democraticos leader Enrique Medina Gomez, who as Chavez's military attache to Washington D.C. got to know the Chavez regime from the inside and is familiar with its undemocratic nature.
" There is nothing democratic about Hugo Chavez. He is a dictator, and he is deadly serious when he says that he will rule until 2021. To make sure that this happens, he is preparing a massive vote fraud. If given a few more months, he will succeed. August is clearly too late. By then, democracy will be lost in Venezuela." [End]
REFERENCES:
1."Presidente de la Sala Electoral critica decisión sobre el referéndum", Globovision, Caracas, 28 Jan 2003
2.Official transcript, Hugo Chavez 'Aló Presidente' N°128, Petare, 24 Nov 2002
3."Organización civil denunció al Presidente por supuesto peculado de uso", Globovision, Caracas, 30 Jan 2003
4."Factores de Poder", El Nuevo Pais, p.3, Caracas, 8 Jan 2003
5.Nelson Bocaranda: "Trampas en la Onidex: 7 cédulas por chavista", in Denuncias, MilitaresDemocraticos.com, 25 Dec 2002
6."Más indicios sobre doble indentidad de Rodríguez Chacín", by Juan Francisco Alonso, El Universal, Caracas, 15 Jun 2002
7.Press Club Caracas: Lucy Gómez interview w/ Luis Miquilena, Hotel Tamanaco, Caracas, Dec 2002
8."Denuncian anomalías en base de datos electoral", El Universal, Section 1, Page 7, 29 Jan 2003
9.Source: Comando Tactico de la Revolucion, MVR, 10 Jan 2003
10."Human Rights Developments in Venezuela", HRW World Report 2003. Human Rights Watch, New York
11."Venezuela: Media Freedom Threatened", Human Rights Watch, Press Release, 25 Jan 2003
12.Proyecto de Ley Sobre La Responsibiliad Social en Radio y Television, Asamblea Nacional, 23 Jan 2003
13.Ley Orgánica de Seguridad de la Nación, Gaceta Oficial, República Bolivariana de Venezuela, 18 Dec 2002
14.Channel 8, VTV commercial, 8:52 PM Jan 29 2003
15.Blanca Santos: "Canal 8 signado por la ausencia de pluralismo y libertad", eud.com, 23 Jan 2003
16."VTV perdió producción nacional" by Mariveni Rodriguez, El Universal, Caracas. 23 Jan 2003
17.Source: CNE, Consejo Nacional Electoral, 1999 results
18."Myth Unmasked: Chavez Never Won By 'Landslide'" by Johan Freitas, Militares Democraticos research unit, 17 Jan 2003
19."Can You Believe Venezuela's Pollsters?" by Justin Delacour, Narco News, 22 Jan 2003
20."Chávez se emborrachó con el poder" by Jose Valles, Revista Cambio, Bogota, Colombia, 16 Dec 2002