Eduardo Dimas: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. 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.



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