Venezuela President wins recall referendum by Juan Gonzalez, Medea Benjamin, Patrick Markey.. Reuters / New York Daily News / Reuters.. 4:22pm 13th Aug, 2004   Aug 22, 2004    My "Revolution" will not hurt you, Chavez tells Opponents, By Pascal Fletcher. (Reuters)    CARACAS, Venezuela - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez told his opponents on Sunday they should not fear his left-wing "revolution" after his referendum win and pledged to respect private wealth and fight corruption.    While he offered a dialogue to foes who accepted his victory in the Aug. 15 recall poll, Chavez said he would ignore opposition leaders who refused to recognize his mandate and urged other Latin American leaders to ostracize them as well.    In a television broadcast, the populist leader sought to dispel fears among rich and middle-class Venezuelans that he planned to launch a fresh ideological offensive against their status and property. "What we want is national unity ... this revolution should not frighten anybody," Chavez said during his weekly "Hello President" TV and radio show.    Opposition leaders say Chavez won the recall vote through fraud by rigging voting machines, but international observers found no evidence of cheating.    Venezuela has remained calm through the referendum, but some opposition leaders have called for protests. This has raised concerns of renewed conflict in the world's No. 5 oil exporter, which has been bitterly divided over Chavez's rule. First elected in 1998, Chavez won 59 percent of the referendum vote and will now serve until 2006 elections.    "All this stuff about Chavez and his hordes coming to sweep away the rich, it's a lie," he said. "We have no plan to hurt you. All your rights are guaranteed, you who have large properties or luxury farms or cars." But he pledged to intensify social programs for the poor and proceed with reforms of Venezuela's Supreme Court and judiciary that critics say are squandering the country's oil resources and seek to consolidate his personal grip on power. He also vowed to "fight to the death against corruption."    Aug 16, 2004    "Chavez Survives Recall, Observers Dismiss Fraud", by Patrick Markey.    CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) - Venezuela's left-wing President Hugo Chavez easily survived a referendum on whether he should step down, and international observers on Monday dismissed furious opposition charges of fraud.    World oil prices eased on hopes the clear result would end more than two years of often violent confrontation between the populist president and critics who say he wants to convert the world's fifth-largest oil exporter to Cuban-style communism.    Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who led an observers' mission, said verification tallied with preliminary results from the National Electoral Council, which gave Chavez 58 percent of the vote. Officials said more than 8.5 million of the 14 million registered voters participated.    Before dawn, Chavez, who survived a coup two years ago and a grueling oil strike a year later, appeared on the balcony of Miraflores presidential palace to lead hundreds of supporters in celebrations and sing the national anthem.    "The Venezuelan people have spoken and the people's voice is the voice of God!" roared the former paratrooper, whose self-styled "revolution" has diverted oil wealth to housing, medicine, education and food for the country's poor majority. .    Chavez's victory was a blistering defeat for the opposition, a coalition of political parties, labor unions and civilian groups that fought for more than a year to secure a vote against a leader they accuse of authoritarian rule. They forced the referendum on Chavez by obtaining 2.4 million signatures on a petition, but the results showed the country's poor backed the charismatic president, a friend of Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Buoyed by soaring oil prices, Chavez has increased spending on his programs for the poor.    August 17, 2004    "Why Hugo Chavez Won a Landslide Victory", by Medea Benjamin. (CommonDreams.org)    When the rule of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was reaffirmed in a landslide 58-42 percent victory on Sunday, the opposition who put the recall vote on the ballot was stunned. They obviously don’t spend much time in the nation’s poor neighborhoods.    I knew Chavez would win the referendum when I met Olivia Delfino in a poor Caracas barrio that our international election delegation visited. Olivia came running out of her tiny house and grabbed my arm. “Tell the people of your country that we love Hugo Chavez,” she insisted. She went on to tell me how her life had changed since he came to power. After living in the barrio for 40 years, she now had a formal title to her home and a bank loan to fix the roof so it wouldn’t leak. Thanks to the Cuban dentists and a program called “Rescatando la sonrisa”—recovering the smile—for the first time in her life she was able to get her teeth fixed. And her daughter is in a job training program to become a nurse’s assistant.    Getting more and more animated, Olivia dragged me over to a poster on the wall showing Hugo Chavez with a throng of followers and a list of Venezuela’s new social programs that read: “The social programs are ours, let’s defend them.” Then slowly and laboriously, she began reading the list of social programs: literacy, health care, job training, land reform, subsidized food, small loans. I asked her if she was just learning to read and write as part of the literacy program. That’s when she started crying. “Can you imagine what’s it has meant to me, at 52 years old, to now have a chance to read?” she said. “It’s transformed my life.”    Walk through poor barrios in Venezuela and you’ll hear the same stories over and over. The very poor can now go to a designated home in the neighborhood to pick up a hot meal every day. The elderly have monthly pensions that allow them to live with dignity. Young people can take advantage of greatly expanded free college programs. And with 13,000 Cuban doctors spread throughout the country and reaching over half the population, the poor now have their own family doctors on call 24-hours a day—doctors who even make house calls. This heath care, including medicines, are all free.    The programs are being paid for with the income from Venezuela’s oil, which is at an all-time high. Previously, the nation’s oil wealth benefited only a small, well-connected elite who kept themselves in power for 40 years through an electoral duopoly. The vast majority in this oil-rich nation remained poor, disenfranchised, and disempowered. With the election of Hugo Chavez in 1998 on a platform of sharing the nation’s oil wealth with the poorest, all that has changed. The poor are now not only recipients of these programs, they are actively engaged in running them. They’re turning abandoned buildings into neighborhood centers, running community kitchens, volunteering to teach in the literacy programs and organizing neighborhood health brigades.    Infuriated by their loss of power, the elite have used their control over the media to blast Chavez for destroying the economy, cozying up to Fidel Castro, antagonizing the US government, expropriating private property, and governing through dictatorial rule.    They also accuse Chavez of using the social programs that have so improved the lives of the poor as a way to gain voters. In this, the opposition is right: providing people with free health care, education, small business loans and job training is certainly a good way to win the hearts and minds of the people.    Sunday’s overwhelming victory for Chavez has given him an even stronger mandate for his “revolution for the poor.” It should also give George Bush and John Kerry reason to rethink their attitude towards Hugo Chavez. Rather than demonizing him as a new Fidel Castro and stoking the opposition, US leaders should embrace Venezuela’s social transformation and the way it is empowering people like Olivia Delfino.    (Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the human rights group Global Exchange and the women’s peace group CodePink, is an election observer in Venezuela).    August 12, 2004 (Juan Gonzalez, New York Daily News)    'Chavez has the votes," William Camacaro from Queens predicted yesterday as he boarded a plane at Kennedy Airport for his homeland of Venezuela.    The war in Iraq may get all the press attention these days but for Camacaro and thousands of New York Latinos, this week's big story is Sunday's recall referendum in Venezuela, where voters will decide the fate of President Hugo Chavez. Not since Fidel Castro in the 1960s has Latin America produced a more controversial figure than Chavez.    A charismatic former army paratrooper who won landslide elections in both 1998 and 2000, Chavez has moved ahead with a populist program to improve conditions for the 80% of Venezuelans who live in poverty.    The nation's tiny upper and middle classes, long accustomed to milking the country's huge oil revenues, have mounted a furious resistance to what Chavez calls his Bolivarian revolution. Aided by constant favorable coverage from the country's private media companies, opposition leaders have sought repeatedly to topple Chavez from power. Two years ago, they even launched a military coup that won the initial backing of the Bush administration before collapsing.    Chavez barely survived that coup and several national strikes that followed, and he now faces another test in this referendum. The vote comes at a time, however, when his popularity is on the rebound.    White House officials have never hidden their disdain for Chavez, and several of his opponents have received financial backing from U.S.-connected groups like the National Endowment for Democracy, but the Bush administration has had to tread lightly. Venezuela, after all, is the third-largest supplier of oil - even with Chavez in power. Each day 1.5 million barrels of Venezuelan oil enter the United States. That's more oil than even Saudi Arabia supplies us. And with oil prices at record levels, the Chavez government is swimming in cash - enough to finance a huge expansion of social spending.    "A lot of people have seen the fruits of the programs Chavez started," says Eva Golinger, a Brooklyn lawyer who travels frequently to her Venezuelan homeland and who has seen those programs in action.    There is, for example, Mision Robinson, the literacy program where the government pays the minimum wage to any adult Venezuelan for learning to read and write. Then there is Mision Rivas and Mision Sucre, which provide government payments for studying for a high school or college degree. Another program, Barrio Adentro, has dispatched 10,000 Cuban doctors to Venezuela's worst shantytowns to provide free medical care. Mision Vivienda has distributed thousands of free government-built apartments and houses to slum dwellers.    For those who espouse neo-liberal economic models for the Third World, the Chavez revolution seems a disturbing throwback to a bygone era of government largess. Opponents of Chavez bluntly claim his government is a socialist dictatorship in the making.    But in Latin America a string of U.S.-backed neo-liberal governments were driven from office in recent years because of popular unrest. There, many see the ballot box revolution Chavez has engineered as a nonviolent way to finally close the region's obscene gap between rich and poor.    "A lot of poor people who have never voted before will come out this Sunday for Chavez because of what he's delivered," Golinger says. Chavez opponents know ousting him will not be easy. According to Venezuela's constitution, they must not only garner a majority of the votes in the referendum, the total anti-Chavez vote must surpass the 3.7 million who voted for him in the last election.    Former President Jimmy Carter and hundreds of international observers are scheduled to arrive in Caracas this week to monitor the voting. "It will be historic," Golinger says. "I wouldn't miss it for anything."    (Juan Gonzalez is a columnist for the New York Daily News, Past President National Association of Hispanic Journalists, and co-host of Democracy Now).
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