José Cárdenas

Aug
30
2012
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Heading for the Home Stretch in Venezuela

jose r cardenas Heading for the Home Stretch in Venezuela

José R. Cárdenas

José R. Cárdenas served in several foreign policy positions during the George W. Bush administration (2004-2009), including on the National Security Council staff. He is a consultant with Vision Americas in Washington, DC.

Venezuela’s presidential election is less than six weeks away, but there has been no shortage of twists and turns in recent days that will likely impact the vote on October 7th. First, the polls, including this week’s stunner that has for the first time given challenger Henrique Capriles a couple of percentage points lead over President Hugo Chávez.

Now, polls are notoriously difficult to gauge in Venezuela, with accusations regularly traded that both sides skew their polling to favor their interests. But Consultores 21 is one of the more reliable pollsters in Venezuela; the firm accurately predicted that the opposition would win a slight majority in the popular vote in the National Assembly elections in September 2010.

Many other polls continue to show Chávez with a lead, but there is every reason to believe the gap is narrowing as Capriles’ energetic campaign blankets the country. The difference in energy level between the two candidates is palpable, as Chávez, despite all the theatrics portraying him as recovered from his cancer, is clearly nothing like his old self.

But cancer isn’t Chávez’s only problem. Other recent incidents spell trouble for his campaign.

For instance, this week’s deadly explosion at Venezuela’s largest oil refinery at Amuay was both a tragedy and a monumental case of bad-timing as it brought unwanted attention to the government’s poor track record of maintaining Venezuela’s infrastructure. The accident has also given new fuel to (well-founded) accusations that the Chávez government has placed a premium on political loyalty over technical competence in its management of state enterprises.

Also this month, the governor of Carabobo state, Henrique Salas Feo, charged that Cuba’s inefficient management of the key port of Puerto Cabello was exacerbating food shortages. Chávez gave the Cuban government a lucrative contract to manage the port but, according to Salas Feo, the result has only been more corruption and increased delays in transporting goods.

Also troubling for Chávez are indications that things may no longer be that rosy between him and his working-class base. Last week, the government was forced to hastily cut off a national television feed when workers began disrupting a Chávez campaign appearance in the northeastern state of Bolívar.

It seems that most of the workforce in the area’s state-owned factories wanted to let the President know of their displeasure that his government had repeatedly failed to renegotiate their collective contract (guaranteed in Chávez’s constitution), meaning their wages have been frozen for some two years, even as inflation has approached 30 percent.

Indeed, one suspects that spiking prices and food shortages, as well as rising street crime and deteriorating public services and infrastructure, may be taking their toll on Chávez’s base. If that is so, the home stretch of the campaign will be defined less by Capriles’s ability to present a fresh face of the opposition to Venezuelan voters — by most measures he has appeared to already have accomplished that — than by whether disillusioned Chávez supporters are fed up enough to switch their allegiances.

Of course, all things aren’t equal in Venezuela. Chávez still maintains huge advantages in money and access to the airwaves, and he still has plenty of militant supporters to intimidate voters. And a desperate Chávez is a dangerous Chávez. But it appears he is finding it increasingly difficult to prevent the election from becoming a referendum on his record in office. Whether he can survive such a referendum remains to be seen.

 
Jul
25
2012
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Venezuela’s Free but Not Fair Elections

jose r cardenas Venezuelas Free but Not Fair Elections

José R. Cárdenas

José R. Cárdenas served in several foreign policy positions during the George W. Bush administration (2004-2009), including on the National Security Council staff. He is a consultant with Vision Americas in Washington, DC.

With Venezuela’s presidential election only a few short months away, international attention is starting to focus on the country leading up to the vote. Such scrutiny is welcome, given Hugo Chávez’s historical track record of tilting the playing field in his favor every time Venezuelans go to the polls.

In recent weeks, two reputable international organizations — Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG) — have released comprehensive reports detailing the Chávez administration’s abuse of power, and the extremely difficult conditions being faced by the Venezuelan opposition prior to the October 7th election.

While the reports’ observations will not surprise anyone who has remained informed of Chávez’s systematic hollowing out of the country’s democratic institutions over the years, they are nonetheless important, non-partisan additions to the record by serious watchdog organizations. Try as he might, Chávez can hardly dismiss them as mouthpieces of “the empire.”

Human Rights Watch’s 133-page report, “Tightening the Grip: Concentration and Abuse of Power in Chávez’s Venezuela,” is a follow-up to their critical 2008 report that earned its authors an unceremonious expulsion from Venezuela. It concludes that basically nothing has improved and that, “the accumulation of power in the executive and the erosion of human rights protections have allowed the Chávez government to intimidate, censor, and prosecute critics and perceived opponents in a wide range of cases involving the judiciary, the media, and civil society.”

On the media in particular — which plays an essential role in ensuring freedom of expression in any electoral campaign — the report documents how “the Chávez government has used its regulatory authority to expand the number of pro-government media outlets, while reducing the availability of those that engage in critical programming.”

The International Crisis Group’s report, “Dangerous Uncertainty ahead of Venezuela Elections” paints an equally bleak picture: “Under President Chávez’s watch, power has been concentrated in the executive and checks and balances steadily eroded. Politics are polarised, society divided and levels of criminal violence high, while the proliferation of weapons and of pro-government armed groups offer easy opportunities for stoking violence.”

The report does an impressive deep-dive into all facets of the campaign and finds Chávez up to his old tricks: using his control of the state treasury and the media to try and steamroll any challenge, and to prevent the opposition from getting a fair hearing before the Venezuelan people.

For example, the report’s authors write, “Arguably the gravest symptom of CNE [Venezuela's electoral authority] bias is the failure to check blatant violations in the rules restricting the use of state resources for campaigning mostly – though not exclusively – by the ruling party.” The ICG report calls on Chávez to halt his practice of using the promise of government social programs to induce Venezuelans to vote for him.

On the media, they write, “…together the Chavista dominance of the state media, the cadenas [government-mandated broadcasts], the compliance or self-censorship of much of the non-state media and the harassment of outlets that openly support [opposition candidate Henrique] Capriles give the president a handy advantage.”

Nor does it appear that credible international observers will be present on election day, because the Chávez government has no intention of inviting any. Still, the ICG urges regional governments to press Venezuela for credible observers to monitor the election — a plea certain to fall on deaf ears in Caracas.

The ICG report also devotes some analysis to Henrique Capriles’ chances amidst Chávez’s continuing abuses of power. Most notable is the report’s assessment that Capriles’ campaign has not let itself become distracted by Chávez’s unfair tactics. It is focused, disciplined, moderate in tone, and absolutely committed to convincing voters that the opposition understands the country has changed and that working-class and poorer sectors’ interests will be respected.

Polls for October’s election continue to give the edge to Chávez, but his health remains the wildcard. The uncertainty – along with the substantial proportion of undecided voters – means events could go off in any number of directions should he succumb to his cancer. But the Capriles campaign remains clearly focused on the here and now. The playing field may be tilted in Chávez’s favor, but the opposition are clearly determined to take the campaign to him regardless of the disadvantages. In this they make Chávez, who continues to preposterously assert that his cancer is cured, look weak. It is indeed a measure of how far the Venezuelan opposition has come since the early days of Chávez’s rule.

 
Jul
12
2012
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Hugo Chávez, golpista

jose r cardenas Hugo Chávez, golpista

José R. Cárdenas

José R. Cárdenas served in several foreign policy positions during the George W. Bush administration (2004-2009), including on the National Security Council staff. He is a consultant with Vision Americas in Washington, DC.

Hugo Chávez’s penchant for labeling anyone who disagrees with him a “golpista” (coup-mongerer) is well-established. This, despite his own history of leading an ill-fated military coup in 1992 against former Venezuelan President Carlos Andres Pérez. But it seems the years since haven’t diminished his ardor for military coups when it suits his purposes — a fact affirmed by recent events in Paraguay.

Paraguay recently saw the sudden impeachment of President Fernando Lugo for “poor performance.” Whatever one thinks of that drastic action, it happened to be consistent with the country’s constitution.

Yet events in Paraguay apparently didn’t pass muster with Hugo Chávez, who ordered his foreign minister, Nicolas Maduro to meet with Paraguay’s military leadership to try and convince them to intervene and forcibly restore President Lugo to office. (In this effort, Maduro, who was in the country as part of a Unasur delegation monitoring the impeachment, was accompanied by Ecuador’s ambassador to Paraguay, who represents another government that routinely identifies opposition as golpistas.)

Infuriated by the meeting, the Paraguayan government withdrew its ambassador from Caracas, citing “the grave evidence of intervention by Venezuelan officials in the internal affairs of Paraguay.” It also ordered a shake-up of the military brass, with new President Federico Franco stating, “We will not tolerate military officers who want to become insubordinate or accept the recommendations of foreign countries.”

On a continent with a long, tortuous history of military involvement in politics, Paraguay stands out. It was not until 1989 that the 35-year reign of General Alfredo Stroessner ended. As a result, there is great sensitivity towards the matter in the country and is why a senior foreign official meeting with the military to encourage their intervention in Paraguayan politics constitutes an outrageously reckless act that threatens not only the internal stability of the country, but has wider regional implications as well.

Yet not only has the regional silence been deafening on Maduro’s meeting, but countries like Brazil and Argentina turned around and effectively rewarded Chávez by granting Venezuela full-membership in Mercosur, the political and economic pact among Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. This fulfilled a key foreign policy objective of Chávez for years that had previously been blocked, ironically, by the Paraguayan Congress. But with Paraguay suspended from the customs union because of the Lugo impeachment, Brazil and Argentina moved instantly to grant Chávez membership. It’s not that Mercosur will bring Venezuela any measurable economic benefits, but to Chávez it is one more key symbol of the legitimacy of his political project and one more instance of Venezuela’s integration with Latin American countries in a union that excludes the United States.

As Brazilian diplomat and former Mercosur representative José Botafogo Goncalves told the Brazilian newspaper O Globo, “Venezuela doesn’t meet the basic requirements to enter Mercosur. Venezuela’s problem is Chávez, who doesn’t like free trade and wants to transform the bloc into a political platform.”

But degrading their own multilateral institutions is one thing; Chávez’s encouraging a military coup in Paraguay is quite another. Lamentably, the continued regional indulgence of Hugo Chávez’s provocations appears to know no bounds. Apparently, there is no action he can take, no matter how reckless or interventionist, that will bring rebuke. Instead, he is rewarded. It is indeed a sad commentary on the current state of Latin American regional leadership.