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Democracy in Venezuela: An Election Observer's Re****t
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
Red Pepper via Venezuelanalysis - Dec 12, 2007
http://www.redpepper.org.uk/article753.html
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/2994
Observing Venezuelan Democracy
by Hillary Wainright
Referendum day in Caracas began unofficially at 3am with voters letting
off firecrackers and sounding horns to celebrate the dawn of the day of
decision on the fate of President Chavezs proposals for constitutional
reforms. These reforms contained an ambitious mix of social rights for
housing, social security, education and a shorter working week along
with proposals for entrenching community councils, formalising
Venezuela as a socialist state, giving the president a wide range of
emergency powers and allowing Chavez to stand again as president after
his second term expires in 2012. Observing the vote
For me, referendum day began at the more leisurely hour of 7am with
donning the grey jacket and baseball style cap of the ~observacin
internacional. We were an international group of around 80 people from
academic, media or civil society organisations observing the voting
procedures of the referendum. We were allocated to ten mini-vans and
dispatched across Caracas and its hinterland. I found myself in Grupo
10 visiting six polling stations in the neighbourhood of Catia La Mar,
a lower middle class/working class area near the air****t, and returning
at the close of polling to observe a manual audit of the electronic
votes in a large secondary school in central Caracas.
As we arrived at our first assignment, people were queuing to check
their names on lists pinned up on the wall of the polling station to
find out to which of up to eight ~tables in the station they had been
assigned. They went to the appropriate room with their ID, signed and
also marked their fingerprint by their printed name. A treble check on
their identity " quite a contrast from the casual polling card system
at home in the UK.
They then cast their vote in secret behind a make****ft cardboard
screen, or rather they pressed their chosen button on an electronic
machine. The same machine then printed out the vote for the voter to
check and put in a ballot box as a basis for auditing the electronic
voting. A random 54 per cent of machines were audited in this way and
later in the polling station in central Caracas we saw 360 or so paper
votes from one of these the ballot box being carefully counted and
checked against the electronic votes. Much to everyones relief they
tallied.
Finally every voter had purple indelible ink painted on one of their
finger tips as they left the polling station. At one polling station a
voter challenged its indelibility and he and the observers were taken
through a thorough experiment with bleach and ammonia to put the purple
ink, successfully, to the test.
The whole process was conscientiously run by the young staff of the
National Electoral Council (CNE) an institution set up as part of the
Bolivarian constitution of 1999 with dedicated responsibility for
developing and implementing the procedures for running elections. It is
autonomous from the government, with a board appointed by the National
Assembly of academics, civil society organisations, and the ombudsman.
The stations were guarded by equally youthful members of the armed
forces " many women as well as men " with machine guns slung over their
shoulders. The police evidently are not to be trusted.
Each ~table had a president and a secretary appointed on a random
basis from the local neighbourhood and trained to take an active part
in the process. Then there were two witnesses, one for the ~Si and one
for the ~No, who in all the stations that I visited agreed on the
fairness of the rules and the integrity and openness of the process. In
most cases, these local partisans showed a degree of mutual respect
totally at odds with the polarised picture conveyed in the national
press and enacted on the streets of downtown Caracas. At one station a
~No witness started ranting against the proposals and at another we
heard that the cocky manner in which ~Si voters behaved as they voted
had driven the ~No witness away. But otherwise they were all smiles.
State of shock
By the end of the day, the smiles of ~Si sup****ters were gone and
there was simply the glaze of shock. It was widely known that the
results would be close but exit polls had indicated a lead of 6-8 per
cent for the proposals. We were told the results would all be known by
mid evening. (The electronic process was devised partly to ensure
speedy results and avoid the tensions of a delay).
We assembled in an extension of the CNE building in downtown Caracas
and waited and waited. It was going to be closer than everyone
expected. That much was clear.
By midnight still no result. Rumour had it and then television screens
confirmed it that opposition militants were storming the CNE building,
interpreting the delay as a sign that something dodgy was going on. The
truth was that the polling stations had closed late (the rule was to
keep the station open beyond the closure time of 4pm so long as there
was anyone queuing to vote) and the auditing process had taken longer
than anticipated.
Behind the scenes the atmosphere was tense. Only the day before polling
there had been considerable violence, including someone killed in
political fight. The careful, ever-prepared CNE organisers had planned
to take the international observers back to the hotel but it was
decided that this would be too dangerous. When on several occasions
there was a rush towards the platform, it was easy to think that some
kind of attack was underway. But it was just people ru****ng in from
foyers to the main hall thinking an announcement was about to be made.
Soon after 1am the president of the CNE, Tibisay Lucena walked calmly
on to the platform and, facing a battery of cameras and microphones,
quietly announced the results.
Two women hugged each other in front of the stage but generally there
was a stunned silence. The international observers were shepherded
protectively out to the bus. We walked to the car park flanked on
either side by an armed guard. In fact, everything seemed calm (the
next morning several people remarked that had the results gone against
the opposition, there would have been multiple outbursts of violence
across Caracas). Left critics of Chavez
In the bus we listened to Chavez, humble and confident at the same
time. The ~people have spoken he said, noting the way the result
strengthened the legitimacy of Venezuelas democratic institutions. The
constitutional proposals were defeated, he accepted. ~**** ahora he
added, echoing a resonant phrase, ~for now, that hed used at an
earlier moment of defeat that was also a precursor of victory: in a
broadcast following the failed military coup he had led in 1992 against
the reactionary oligarchs of the corrupt Venezuelan state.
The legacy of these institutions still lives on. Bureaucracy and
corruption are still pervasive at every level, blocking Chavezs
ability to get the oil money down to those who need it. For Chavez, the
constitutional reforms were aimed at transforming this oligarchic
state, destroying its legacy forever. But while sup****t for his
presidency continues to be high " the polls indicate over 60 per cent
sup****t " his proposals for reform are deeply controversial among many
who strongly sup****t the Bolivarian process of democratisation, popular
power and the creation of a new kind of socialism.
Indeed, a less comfortable sign of the strength of Venezuelan democracy
for Chavez has been the flouri****ng of debate and criticism among his
own sup****ters. For example, one of Chavezs most cogent critics from
the left is Edgardo Lander, a widely respected socialist academic who
was one of the Venezuelan negotiators on ALCA (the Free Trade Agreement
of the Americas). Lander stresses his sup****t for the Bolivarian
process while criticising the degree to which reforms centralise power
in the hands of the president and treat popular power as part of the
state rather than as a source of autonomous power over the state. While
having no truck with the right wing opposition he also insists that the
reforms involved such a thoroughgoing overhaul of the constitution that
they should have been subject to a real constituent process of popular
participation. (See www.tni.org for a translation of his arguments.)
The view from the barrios
How significant are the arguments of such socialist critics? What is
going on among Chavez sup****ters to explain the rejection of his
proposals at a time when sup****t for his presidency rides high?
The best place from which to answer these questions seemed to me to be
in the barrios, the poor neighbourhoods of Caracas. It was here in
Chavezs popular base that the decisive ****ft had taken place. Around
7.3 million voted for Chavez in the presidential elections of December
2006. Only 4, 380,000 voted for his reform proposals. But the 4,504,000
votes for the ~No was only marginally more than the 2006 vote for the
opposition candidate in 2006. So it was the abstention of around three
million Chavez voters that made the difference. What lies behind this
mass abstention?
As Pablo Naverrete (Red Peppers Latin American and Venezuela blog
editor) and I arrived at the bottom of the barrio known as 23 de Enero,
after the mass occupation of the apartment blocks that form its core,
on 23 January 1958, a symbol of one factor behind the abstentions hits
you in the eye and the nose. Rivers of rubbish.
~Frustration with the bureaucracy, the lack of a response to our
problems from the state, must be one reason why so many Chavistas
didnt vote, argues Maryluz Guillen, a critical ~Si voter who is
working almost full time to build the capacity of the local communal
council to solve these problems or to pressure the municipal state to
solve them. Government programmes known as ~Misiones, with Cuban help
in health and s****ts training, have been one extremely successful
solution to the states lack of constructive social capacity as far as
education, health and food distribution is concerned. The result,
though, is an uneasy dual system and they have limited scope on issues
such as housing, sanitation, waste and urban planning, which are in
theory the responsibility of state institutions. Defenders of reform
Defenders of the reform proposals would say that this widespread
popular frustration with the state was exactly the reason behind the
proposals to transform the state by increasing Chavezs power to force
change from the top and by strengthening the power of popular democracy
from below. ~Hes a good listener, says Gustavo Borges, a hip hop
promoter and designer who lives in the heights of 23 de Enero. Among
many other activities, Borges runs an impressive website www.el23.net
and helps his militant Chavista father to produce a smartly designed
community newspaper Sucre En Communidad.
~The reforms were the result of Chavez listening to the people, Borges
insists, arguing against those who say that, unlike the process of
drawing up the original Bolivarian constitution, there was little
popular participation (the proposals were published only one month
before the referendum). For him the high abstentions must be put down
mainly to the failure of the leader****p of Chavezs party " the United
Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) " to explain the proposals and
counter the oppositions ~terror campaign in the media. (The media
campaign included adverts stating that the reforms meant the state
expropriation of small businesses and taking children away from their
families into the care of the state.)
Even so, he cautions against ~blaming the leader****p. The community
must take responsibility too. Communal councils must be more than just
about management of projects " they must be political too. They should
have taken more responsibility for the reform proposals. Chavez
~kidnapped
Edgar Perez takes the idea of community responsibility further. Hes a
gentle community leader in Las Casitas at the top of a neighbourhood
called La Vega. We met him in the ~Casa de Alimentacion, a centre for
distributing food to the poor, beneath Frida Kalhos famous picture of
the woman with lilies.
Las Casitas is a community that announces its self-government on the
walls that mark its boundary. Predictably, perhaps, given this
militantly self-governing background, Edgar argues that the flaw in the
reforms and the reason they failed to convince, lay less in how they
were explained and more in how they were made: ~We should have had a
constituent process, the possibility of inputs from every community.
Certainly, if Perezs community is anything to go by, there would be
plenty of positive take-up to such an idea. He described their
struggles, mostly successful, in bending public resources to the needs
of the people. As he talked, he distinguished Chavez from the state and
its functionaries, pointing to another source of frustration: ~The
president is much less accessible than he used to be. They [the
functionaries] have kidnapped him.
Perezs comments connect with something written in the web magazine
A****rea the morning after the result by Javier Biardeau, a well
respected commentator and academic close to the process (everyone
refers to the Bolivarian process, the Chavista revolution, the
Venezuelan changes as ~the process).
~The largest share of the responsibility for the defeat lies in those
who convinced Chavez that the revolution depends exclusively on his
personal figure, Biardeau writes. ~This is an error. Probably without
Chavez there would be no revolution, but neither will there be one only
with Chavez. There is a need to correct the tendency to minimise the
leading role of the people in im****tant deliberations and decisions.
The "Chavismo apparat" [the leader****p of the PSUV, the United
Socialist Party of Venezuela] was defeated. The revolution is built
from the bottom up, or it wears down from above. Doing away with
vanguardism
I first heard of Biardeaus article when it came up in discussion with
a group of young activist intellectuals, self-defined ~grassroots
Chavistas and occasional Chavez speechwriters as they chewed over the
results at their favourite Chinese restaurant. The minister of
communication and information had asked one of them to gather
grassroots feedback on the referendum defeat. As they talked they kept
returning to Biardeaus statement, believing it summed up what they
wanted to feedback to el presidente:
~Not only has the maximum degree of social equality to be achieved but
of political equality too. The Jacobin vision of revolutions directed
from above by vanguards and singular personalities has to be done away
with. It is time for profound reflection, time to finish with both the
pragmatism of the domestic right and the Stalinism of the domestic
ultra-left, time to end corruption and bureaucratism, time to stop the
drift towards caesarist-populism and time to renew critical socialist
thought. It is also time to ask forgiveness for the many abuses
committed and to show some humility. Its powerful stuff. (See the
English translation on Red Peppers Venezeuela blog.)
Biardeaus analysis crystallised a common theme amongst the grassroots
Chavistas that we met in 23 de Enero and La Vega, whether they voted
~Si, abstained or even in a few cases voted ~No: the need to ****ft
~the process back towards popular democracy. Judging by the level of
activity and increasingly interlinked organisations in the barrios, the
workplaces and the rural areas " the urban land committees, health
committees, organisations of the landless, networks of co-operatives,
and worker managed factories " the organisational basis, as well as the
political desire, is there to be developed and sup****ted.
It has autonomy from Chavez at the same time as being the source of his
sup****t. There is in the barrios a love for Chavez. But it is not
slavish adoration. Its not comparable to the passive politics of
celebrity and spectacle in the west. Its based on the material
improvements in their lives and on the wider op****tunities and space
hes opened up for them to make their own future, to develop their own
power. They are occupying these spaces to an extent that those around
Chavez do not seem to appreciate. Democratic tensions
The Venezuelan process illustrates the tension between two
understandings of democracy and democratic leader****p. On the one hand
there is the idea that once a democratic mandate has been won, the
peoples will is represented by the victor " the president or the
mayor, for example " and leader****p is about firmly imposing this will
against all hostile forces. On the other hand is the idea that the
power of popular mandate needs to be actively deepened and developed
through encouraging popular self-organisation in all its plurality and
leader****p " and that it is about using positions of legitimacy and
authority to encourage this self-organisation and deliberation as a
deeper, more lasting and creative source of democratic power.
Chavezs most recent remarks show signs of recognising the value of
this latter understanding and strengthening the participatory nature of
the Bolivarian process. In an interview following the defeat of his
proposals he insisted that the principle objective must remain the
transformation of the state but he recognises that ~this is a moment to
begin a true reflection and self-criticism. The Venezuelan people have
the power and the right to present a request for constitutional reform
before this presidential term finishes, of which there are still five
years.
He is referring to the provision in the constitution that a petition
backed by 15 per cent of registered voters would give them the right to
present a proposal for constitutional reform. Edgar Perez from Las
Casitas and his networks are already on to this one, and have begun to
organise. An alliance of grassroots organisations, which came together
over criticisms over Chavezs reforms, could well be the focal point of
a new grassroots initiative.
We~ve seen how in response to defeat, Chavez claimed that the vote
demonstrated the strength of Venezuelan democracy. He was referring to
the electoral processes and the institution of the CNE that I observed
on the day of the referendum and of the way the government respected
the process.
But as Josh Lerner puts it on the excellent website
www.venezuelanalysis.com: ~He may be more right than he realises. Not
only did the referendum show that the government respects the
democratic process, it also shook people up in a new way. Whereas in
the past, Chavez shook people out of complacency and passivity, this
time he may have shaken them out of unconditional sup****t and fixed
assumptions. More so than ever before, millions of Chavez sup****ters
openly questioned and dissented from their leaders wishes.
So while I began my visit as an international observer of the democracy
of the election process, finding it in many ways more democratic than
our own, I ended up also observing the internal democracy of the
Chavista movement itself and finding at its grassroots, an inspiring
commitment to pluralism, critical debate and popular autonomy from
which we also have much to learn.
*
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