The pro-opposition part of Panama’s Venezuelan community has turned out en masse, dressed in Venezuelan flag costumes, to show El Panama America the strength of their movement to oust President Hugo Chávez. There were exactly eight people in the photo.
Why would such a photo be presented to Panama as the will of the Venezuelan people? There are two reasons: first, in Venezuela the opposition-controlled private media are not at all subtle, and thus Chávez’s opponents have never learned how to stage a media event that would be credible without an unusually credulous press; and second, it’s a matter of class solidarity among Latin American oligarchies, wherein folks like the descendents of Harmodio Arias view the Venezuelan opposition press magnates as soul brothers.
But come Election Day in August, all such corny opposition displays, and Chávez’s long and bombastic speeches too, will be beside the point. The votes will be counted, a result will be announced, and whatever the result might be the hostilities that have rent Venezuelan society will not go away. But they may be toned down, especially if the result is unambiguous.
Like Panama, Venezuela has a national economy within the national economy. There it’s the state-owned oil sector, here it’s the canal. In both countries, the work forces of the privileged industry enjoy a standard of living comparable to that of their counterparts in the industrialized countries, while the rest of society is sharply divided between the very rich and a low-paid working class, with not much of a middle class in between.
In Venezuela, like Panama, a thuggish political class dominated by two main parties alternated in a downward spiral of corruption and incompetence. There it all broke down, and the people turned to an unlikely, often comical, former military officer and failed coup plotter to sweep the oligarchy out of power. Here the voters have given one of the major parties, Martín Torrijos’s PRD, a chance --- maybe the one last chance --- to get its act together and to get Panama on a road toward positive development.
But of course, that’s not how it plays in the mainstream press or on TV.
The June 6 “Hoy por Hoy” front-page editorial in La Prensa, for example, equated Hugo Chávez with Manuel Antonio Noriega. Never mind that the Chávez administration holds no political prisoners and hasn’t shut down a single newspaper or radio or television station. (If the truth is to be told, it’s Chávez’s opponents who have attacked freedom of the press. The first thing they did in their April 2002 coup attempt was shut down pro-Chávez public TV, and after that coup failed and the Venezuelan national government passed regulations allowing for low-power community television stations, the opposition local government of sent in their cops to close the first one that began to broadcast.)
The April 2002 coup attempt, which took place with the US Navy assisting offshore by jamming telecommunications and American diplomatic and political advisors on the ground in Caracas working with the insurgents, failed because Chávez had the support of the Venezuelan Army’s rank-and-file, and because while the blondes in the rich neighborhoods celebrated, the far more numerous brunettes in the slums poured onto the streets and braved the coup forces’ gunfire in a popular uprising. But at the time that wasn’t reported in the corporate mainstream press, either in Venezuela or elsewhere. The New York Times stringer in Caracas was also an opposition activist, and his slant on the situation was every bit as scandalous as the Jayson Blair affair. DirecTV is part owned by Venezuelan oppositionist Gustavo Cisneros --- one of George H.W. Bush’s golfing buddies --- and thus CNN has an important business relationship with him. So does Panama’s dominant commercial broadcast empire, MEDCOM, which encompasses the RPC and Telemetro networks and Panama City’s Cable Onda cable system.
Time after time, the Venezuelan and international anti-Chávez media reported polls suggesting that the Venezuelan president was nearly universally despised, but it turned out that these were polls taken by the Caracas opposition media, which most often never ventured into the low-rent pro-Chávez areas.
But respectable polling outfits eventually made their way into Venezuela, and even if their results weren’t commissioned for or published by the opposition news outlets, they were at odds with the “polls” that got the most publicity. They showed a slight majority opposed to Chávez and dwindling support for the opposition. Their's was a tale a Venezuelan electorate that had grown tired of the conflict, for sure, but without any alternative to Chávez having captured the public imagination.
Moreover, another thing that has steadfastly been ignored by the likes of MEDCOM, La Prensa, El Panama America, CNN and The New York Times is the Venezuelan constitution. Promulgated by one Hugo Chávez Frias himself, it is a rare national charter in that it allows a recall vote of any sort. The August election will be, in fact, the first presidential recall vote in Latin American history. But 50 percent plus one doesn’t mean that the president has to step down, according to the Venezuelan constitution. To remove a public official there must be more votes cast for recall than were cast to elect that person in the first place, and Chávez holds his current job because he won nearly 60 percent of the vote in a high-turnout election. Thus the most recent credible polls suggest that although a majority would vote to remove the president, it wouldn’t be enough of a majority to actually recall him.
However, now that enough signatures have been validated to schedule a recall election, new dynamics will certainly come into play. Surely the opposition will present the choice as one between recall and renewed chaos. Surely Chávez will continue to point out foreign support for the opposition. Either of these campaign strategies could work against those who employ them, however.
And then the old strategies and tactics will remain in play as well. The opposition will continue to get money from Uncle Sam, by way of the National Endowment for Democracy and otherwise. The enormous profits coming into the Chávez administration’s coffers from a time of booming oil production and high world prices will be spread around key sectors of Venezuelan society in a bid for anti-recall votes. Chávez will rail against his adversaries in his uniquely clumsy style. And we will see more silliness like the recent opposition claim that this year’s Miss Venezuela didn’t make it into the Miss Universe finals because of Chávez --- even though that blonde beauty queen was selected by a company owned by Gustavo Cisneros and the pageant was run by Donald Trump.
A lot can happen in two months, but at this point it looks like a close election, a contest of hatreds between those who can’t stand the oligarchy and those who can’t stand Chávez.
If Chávez survives, the Bush administration will surely not accept the result. As US State Department spokesman Adam Ereli put it, “Venezuela's neighbors, the OAS and the United States, are working to help the people of Venezuela realize their aspirations in a democratic and peaceful way.” With those “aspirations,” of course, being Chávez’s removal. At a debate at the Center for Strategic International Studies in Washington, US Adjunct Subsecretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Peter DeShazo warned that the Bush administration would only accept the recall election result if the process is "free and transparent," and walked out of the room when asked who would be the judge of what’s free and transparent.
However, most Latin American governments --- Panama’s being one of the glaring exceptions --- quickly denounced the April 2002 coup. Venezuela’s largest neighbor, Brazil, has been very friendly to the Chávez administration. Too crude of a US performance would surely have widespread diplomatic consequences.
This first-ever Latin American presidential recall election will almost surely become a polarizing event throughout the hemisphere. Whatever happens, oligarchs around the region see their own fate bound up with that of their Venezuelan counterparts. Meanwhile those Latin Americans looking for an alternative to ruinous US-imposed neo-liberal economic policies see Chávez’s vulnerability as the fragility of their own hopes. Certainly if Chávez survives the recall vote and the Americans don’t accept it the US drive for a Free Trade Area of the Americas will be one of the political casualties. And if Chávez loses the vote fair and square and refuses to step down, that will surely lead to some sort of a war, whether in the form of a civil war or of a foreign military intervention.
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Panama News Briefs
Search for al-Qaeda leads to Panama
Venezuela to hold a presidential recall vote
