[Peace-discuss] Campaign For Venezuela's Elections Heats Up - In Washington

Sun Dec 6 11:34:58 EST 2015

Campaign For Venezuela's Elections Heats Up - In Washington

Description: Latin America Venezuela US imperialism

 <https://www.popularresistance.org/category/educate/> Educate!
<https://www.popularresistance.org/tag/elections/> Elections,
<https://www.popularresistance.org/tag/united-states/> United States,
<https://www.popularresistance.org/tag/venezuela/> Venezuela 
By Mark Weisbrot,
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-weisbrot/venezuela-election-us-_b_869176
6.html> www.huffingtonpost.com
December 5th, 2015

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Above Photo: From PopularResistance.org.

The campaign for Venezuela's Dec. 6 National Assembly election is only three
weeks long, but in the United States it started about six months ago with
<http://www.wsj.com/articles/venezuelan-officials-suspected-of-turning-count
ry-into-global-cocaine-hub-1431977784> leaks by anonymous U.S. officials
making unsubstantiated allegations that Venezuelan officials were running a
"cartel." More recently, relatives of Venezuela's first lady Cilia Flores
were
<http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/11/americas/venezuela-president-family-members-a
rrested/> arrested and taken (not extradited) to the U.S. after being lured
by DEA agents to Haiti. Then last week, when an opposition politician was
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/outrage-after-venezuela-o
pposition-leader-killed/2015/11/27/de0b73a8-9550-11e5-befa-99ceebcbb272_stor
y.html> shot and killed, the secretary general of the Organization of
American States, Luis Almagro, immediately joined Washington in
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/outrage-after-venezuela-o
pposition-leader-killed/2015/11/27/de0b73a8-9550-11e5-befa-99ceebcbb272_stor
y.html> trying to make it look like a political murder. Within a day,
evidence from investigations
<http://www.businessinsider.com/r-venezuela-lashes-us-opposition-amid-blame-
over-activists-slaying-2015-11> appeared to show that the victim was likely
a gang member killed by a rival gang.

To understand the strategy of the U.S. government and its allies - including
Almagro and  <http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-34899227> now the
president-elect of Argentina - we have to look at what happened in the 2013
Venezuelan presidential election. In 2013, President Maduro won by 1.5
percentage points, but there was absolutely no doubt about the
<http://www.cepr.net/publications/reports/a-statistical-note-on-the-april-14
-venezuelan-presidential-election-and-audit-of-results> result. Because of
the
<http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/05/2013510101743343447.html>
extensive safeguards in the voting process - including an immediate audit,
with witnesses, of a random
<http://www.nlg.org/sites/default/files/Venezuela%202013%20NLG%20print.pdf>
sample of 54 percent of voting stations - former U.S. president and election
expert Jimmy Carter called Venezuela's election system "
<http://www.cartercenter.org/news/multimedia/Conversations/30-years-of-the-c
arter-center.html> the best in the world."

But the Venezuelan opposition, not for the first time, rejected the result
and claimed fraud, taking to the streets with violent demonstrations. The
U.S. government, with almost no allies, backed the protestors by refusing to
recognize the election results. The stage was set for increasingly violent
conflict, but South American governments stepped in and publicly
<http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/apr/22/united-states-contempt
-venezuelan-democracy> pressured Washington to join the rest of the world in
accepting the results.

Description: vote venezuela

An opposition demonstrator wearing a shirt that reads in Spanish "Silence
gives consent. Vote." (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)

Now you can see where this is going, and possibly even predict the near
future. The Venezuelan opposition is currently leading the government by a
sizable margin in most national polls - although this
<http://prodavinci.com/2015/11/29/actualidad/quien-ganara-y-otras-preguntas-
sobre-el-6d-a-luis-vicente-leon/> appears to be narrowing in the past week
or so - and this is what the U.S. and international media have been
reporting. But these polls do not necessarily indicate who is going to win
the National Assembly, or by how much. The margin of victory is very
important because, for example, a two-thirds majority will give the
legislature much more power.

The government party (the United Socialist Part of Venezuela, or PSUV) has
millions of members and has for years demonstrated an ability to mobilize
its voters. The opposition has no comparable organization or campaign, and
this is a non-presidential election. Also, sparsely populated (mostly rural)
states have more representation per voter than those with higher
populations. In the U.S., 584,000 people or so in Wyoming get the same
number of senators as almost 39 million Californians. In Venezuela, there is
only one legislative chamber, so the small states' disproportional power is
not as great as in the U.S. system. But it is significant, and unlike in the
U.S., where the rural vote tends to be right wing, in Venezuela it leans
more toward the Chavistas.

The result is that, win or lose, the opposition is very unlikely to do as
well as the national polls indicate. So when the opposition is "surprised"
by the results, we can expect claims of fraud. If the last 14 years of
extralegal efforts (
<http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/18/venezuela-protests-us-
support-regime-change-mistake> supported by Washington) to topple the
government are any guide, the rejection of election results could turn
violent. Last weekend, the head of Venezuela's leading opposition newspaper,
Miguel Henrique Otero of El Nacional,
<http://www.el-nacional.com/politica/MHO-oposicion-pierde-gente-calle_0_7475
25252.html> declared that the opposition will take to the streets if they do
not like the results.

Description: election protest venezuela

Venezuelans demand the release of political prisoners during a demonstration
in Caracas in June, 2015. (Carlos Becerra/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

>From the U.S. Congress, the Obama administration, allied non-governmental
organizations and Almagro, there have been
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-weisbrot/venezuela-election-us_b_8554750
.html> demands that the OAS be allowed to monitor Venezuela's elections. But
it is very clear after what the OAS has
<http://www.cepr.net/press-center/press-releases/oas-overturned-haitian-pres
idential-election-in-a-qpolitical-interventionq-new-cepr-paper-suggests>
done repeatedly in Haiti - including the 2011 reversal of presidential
election results without a recount or even a statistical test - that OAS
monitors cannot be considered neutral.

Washington's current campaign is targeted at the Latin American and
hemispheric media, in order to increase political pressure on governments to
not do what they did in 2013: publicly shame the U.S. into accepting the
results of democratic elections. There will be international campaign
events, including U.S. newspaper editorials, Senate hearings and more, every
day in the next week and following the elections.

It is bad enough that all of these foreign actors are campaigning in another
country's elections. But by attempting to delegitimize - with no evidence of
possible fraud - the actual election results, they are promoting instability
and possible violence.

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