[Marxism] Venezuelan vote boycott: Washington paves road to intervention

["Paul H. Dillon" <illonph@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

    WSWS : News & Analysis : South & Central America

     Venezuelan vote boycott: Washington paves road to intervention

     By Bill Van Auken
     7 December 2005

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     With predictable brazenness, the US State Department on Monday
questioned, on grounds of a low turnout, the legitimacy of Sunday's
legislative elections in Venezuela. But, as the US government is well aware,
the low vote total was caused in large part by a boycott and sabotage
campaign mounted by right-wing opposition parties that Washington supports,
both politically and financially.

     State Department spokesman Adam Ereli, noting that "the abstention
rate was very high," declared, "given that rate of abstention, plus
expressions of concern by prominent Venezuelans, we would see that this
reflects a broad lack of confidence in the impartiality and transparency of
the electoral process."

     The election resulted in a clean sweep by parties supporting the
government of President Hugo Chávez. These parties are expected to control
all 167 seats in the National Assembly. Turnout was lower than anticipated,
with approximately three quarters of potential voters staying away from the
polls.

     Facing inevitable defeat, the opposition, led by the two parties that
had ruled on behalf of the Venezuelan oligarchy for four decades, opted not
to participate. Polls had indicated that Chávez's Fifth Republic Movement
(MVR) and allied parties would easily gain a two-thirds majority in the
legislature, relegating the opposition to near irrelevancy.

     The two-thirds margin would provide the government's supporters with
the power to amend the constitution, including the repeal of a statute that
would deny Chávez the ability to run for a third term.

     The boycott was spearheaded by the group Súmate, which is funded by
the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and whose leader, María
Corina Machado, was welcomed by Bush in the Oval Office six months ago.
There can be no doubt that this political maneuver was organized in close
collaboration with US officials with the aim of providing Washington and the
US-backed opposition a pretext for denouncing the Chávez government as a
dictatorship and preparing new provocations against Venezuela.

     Over the past year, Súmate and the opposition parties, with strong
backing from Venezuela's right-wing privately owned mass media, have waged a
non-stop propaganda campaign aimed at discrediting the country's electoral
system. First they claimed that the August 2004 referendum on Chávez's
presidency, in which the opposition was soundly defeated, had somehow been
rigged, a spurious charge rejected by international observers.

     Then, they raised baseless objections to technical arrangements for
the December 4 vote, first opposing the use of voting machines and then
demanding that the country's Electoral Council scrap plans to use
fingerprint scanners to guard against voters casting more than a single
ballot. The opposition falsely claimed that the technology could be used by
the government to determine for whom each voter cast his ballot.

     The machines used in Venezuela were judged by international observers
to be far more reliable than most of those used in the US 2004 elections.

     Despite repeated concessions by the Electoral Council, including the
scrapping of the use of the fingerprint scanners and an agreement to do a
manual count of 45 percent of the paper ballots generated by the machines,
the opposition at the last minute bolted the process. This came after the
opposition's repeated assurances to the Organization of American States
(OAS) that it would participate on the basis of the changes agreed to by the
Electoral Council. Some 400 independent observers from the OAS and the
European Union were allowed to monitor the voting.

     There is no doubt that this propaganda campaign, combined with the
boycott, contributed to the low turnout in Sunday's voting.

     Another factor, however, was the threat of violence. On the eve of the
election, there was a major bombing of a key oil pipeline as well as a
series of smaller explosions in the capital of Caracas. The sabotage attack
destroyed part of the Ulé-Amuay pipeline, which brings oil from the Lake
Maracaibo area to Paraguana, site of the world's largest oil refinery.

     The president of the Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA, Rafael
Ramirez, said that authorities had foiled four other attempted attacks.
Groups "trying to create a climate of violence in our country were involved
in this," he said, adding, "The same people behind the oil sabotage three
years ago...are trying to create fear in our country."

     Military officials reported uncovering a cache of 24 pounds of C4
explosives Friday in the northeastern state of Zulia along with weapons and
grenades. C4 was reportedly used in the pipeline attack.

     Súmate director María Corina Machado set forth the line of the
opposition on the elections, declaring, "From a multiple-party parliament we
pass to a mono-party parliament that does not represent the broad sections
of the population. Today a National Parliament is born that is wounded in
its legitimacy."

     The leader of the COPEI Christian Democratic party, meanwhile, said
that his party would seek to have the election annulled by the Supreme
Court. "I know that no court in this country will agree with us, but we'll
go through all the national judicial channels before going to the
international courts."

     Chavista leaders dismissed these charges, pointing out that only 10
percent of the more than 5,000 candidates running in the elections had
dropped out, and that a number of different parties and social organizations
were represented in the new National Assembly, just not the old discredited
parties of the oligarchy, which one official referred to as "unburied
cadavers."

     Interior Minister Jesse Chacón told a press conference that the new
assembly was just as legitimate as any that preceded it. In 1998, he pointed
out, Acción Democrática won control of the body with the support of just
11.24 percent of registered voters, less than half the percentage (of a
considerably larger electorate) that the MVR-led coalition won in the latest
vote.

     Vice President José Vicente Rangel added, "There are countries like
the US in which only 25 percent participate in the elections to Congress,"
while no one in Washington questions the elections' legitimacy.

     The decision not to run for a legislature that will be in office for
the next five years appears, on the surface, to be an act of political
suicide by the opposition-principally the discredited parties of the corrupt
system in place in the half-century leading up to 1998, Acción Democrática
and COPEI, as well as the newly founded Justice First, which portrayed
itself as a party of free market technocrats.

     In reality, it is only the latest gambit in a series of desperate
political maneuvers aimed at overturning Chávez by extra-constitutional
means. These have included the abortive US-backed coup in April 2002, which
was defeated by a popular uprising, the 2002-2003 oil bosses' strike, and
the 2004 referendum.

     By purposely ceding any representation in the National Assembly, the
opposition is taking a self-declared path of "extra-parliamentary"
opposition, whose methods and program it has yet to spell out. It is clear,
however, that the strategy this layer is pursuing is aimed at provoking a US
intervention to restore them to power.

     Venezuela's foreign minister, Ali Rodriguez-Araque, charged at a news
conference Monday that the opposition had plotted directly with the Bush
administration to sabotage the parliamentary elections. He went on to say,
"We have evidence that there are concrete plans by the imperialist US to
launch an attack against Venezuela."

     Indeed, there is ample evidence that this is the case. The Pentagon's
2005 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) and its military plans for the fiscal
years 2008-2013 include documents singling out five "threat" countries for
"full-spectrum" preparations for military attack, the Washington Post
reported last month. After North Korea and Iran, included on the grounds of
alleged weapons of mass destruction, and China, seen as a potential
strategic competitor, Venezuela is listed together with Syria as a "rogue
nation."

     American troops are already reportedly carrying out military
operations against Syria, and the US has made no secret of its desire to
extend "regime change" in Iraq across the border by toppling the government
of Bashar Assad. Preparations for similar actions against Venezuela are
undoubtedly well advanced.

     Washington's interests in mounting such an intervention are clear.
Regime change in Venezuela would have the same essential purpose as in Iraq:
establishing direct US control over strategic oil reserves.

     Venezuela's state-owned oil company, PDVSA, accounts for 11.8 percent
of US imports-providing the US economy with 1.5 million barrels a day. The
country is the world's fifth largest oil producer.

     The escalating tensions between Venezuela and Washington are firmly
rooted in the Chávez government's decision to strengthen state control of
this strategic sector, rather than embark on a program of privatization and
opening up the country's oil reserves to foreign investment, as prescribed
by the US.

     Moreover, Chávez has pursued a nationalist policy in direct conflict
with US hegemony in the region. He has established close relations with
Cuba, a country that US foreign policy has sought to maintain as an
international pariah, and has pursued economic relations with US rivals in
Europe as well as with China.

     In October, the Venezuelan government confirmed that it had withdrawn
its foreign currency holdings-some $20 billion worth-from US treasury bonds
and invested them in euros with the Swiss-based Bank for International
Settlements. Chávez said that the move was taken out of concern that the US
could freeze Venezuelan assets as part of Washington's escalating
aggression.

     Finally, the Chávez government's program of populism and
reformism-proclaimed by the Venezuelan president as "socialism for the 21st
century"-is anathema to a US government that insists that all obstacles to
the "free market," i.e., the pursuit of US profit interests, be obliterated.

     The election boycott is a familiar part of Washington's repertoire of
dirty tricks and acts of counterrevolutionary subversion, employed
repeatedly in Latin America along with military coups and invasions to
overthrow democratically elected governments seen as a threat to US
interests.

     In 1984, the US Embassy in Nicaragua engineered an election boycott by
its chosen presidential candidate Arturo Cruz, then on the CIA payroll to
the tune of $6,000 a month. It sought to bribe and threaten the other
opposition parties to join the boycott in a bid to discredit the Sandinista
government, which was set to win with overwhelming popular support no matter
what other parties participated.

     Despite the findings of election observers that the voting had been
free and fair, Washington seized upon the boycott that it had organized to
brand the Sandinista government an undemocratic dictatorship and justify the
CIA's "contra" war against Nicaragua.

     Similarly, in Haiti, the US-backed opposition boycotted a 2000
election under conditions in which it was politically discredited and the
Lavalas party of Jean-Bertrand Aristide was headed for a resounding victory
at the polls. Again, despite a clean bill of health from election observers,
the opposition continued to claim that the vote was rigged, right up until
the moment in 2004 that US Marines invaded the country and ousted Aristide,
Haiti's elected president.

     There can be little doubt that the latest maneuver in Venezuela has
been carried out as part of a similar strategy of counterrevolution and
military intervention.

     See Also:
     Christian Coalition leader Pat Robertson calls for assassination of
Venezuelan president
     [24 August 2005]
     Venezuela: Right-wing opposition clamours for another US-backed coup
     [9 March 2004]
     The Economist prescribes "regime change" for Venezuela
     [5 May 2004]
     Venezuela "strike": the anatomy of a US-backed provocation
     [20 January 2003]



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