Hugo! (63 page)

Chávez had reason to be wary of the Court. Some magistrates
appointed with the help of his former political mentor Luis Miquilena
turned against him and openly assumed an antigovernment stance after
the two men fell out in early 2002. After the April 2002 coup, the court
let all the suspects go free and declared there was no coup.

While no one could argue that Chávez was not the legitimately
elected president of Venezuela, some critics asserted he was a "
fake democrat,"
as suggested by the title of an op-ed piece in
The New York Times
by
Bernard Aronson. A former assistant secretary of state for inter-American
affairs, Aronson was by now involved in Venezuelan investments. A day
before the referendum, he wrote that Chávez "represents a new breed
of Latin autocrat — a leader who is legitimately elected but then uses
his office to undermine democratic checks and balances and intimidate
political opponents." He pointed to the Supreme Court packing, the case
against Sumate's Maria Corina Machado, and the detention in May of
Mayor Henrique Capriles Radonski, who after Operation Guarimba was
put in jail as part of the investigation into the riot at the Cuban embassy
during the 2002 coup. Aronson said he was detained "on a clearly fraudulent
charge of fomenting a riot." The Cuban ambassador disagreed. He'd
remained trapped in the embassy that day and night with his staff and
some of their children, with food, water, and electricity cut off. Outside
was an angry mob that the mayor and his police failed to disperse.

Aronson's piece was similar to another
Times
op-ed article written
a year earlier by Naím, Carlos Andrés Pérez's former minister of trade
and industry: "Hugo Chávez and the Limits of Democracy: How Free
Elections Led to Tyranny in Venezuela." Citing one of Venezuela's infamous
polls, Naím claimed that two of every three Venezuelans living
below the poverty line opposed Chávez. Coupled with the overwhelming
sentiment against Chávez in the middle and upper classes, it meant the
vast majority of Venezuelans opposed the president, Naím asserted. All
they needed was an election to boot the tyrant out.

Aronson argued in the
Times
that "a new agenda is needed that offers
upward mobility and political empowerment to the hemisphere's poor.
This would require not only a deepening of structural economic reforms
and fiscal discipline, but a new focus on giving the poor title to their land,
credits for micro enterprise, easing the transition for small enterprises
from the informal to the formal economy, cracking down on tax evasion
and official corruption, and ending the subsidization of higher education
at the expense of primary and secondary education."

Yet with the major exception of Chávez's failure to significantly
crack down on endemic corruption, many of the steps Aronson
outlined were exactly what Chávez was pursuing. His educational programs
and land reform were prime examples. Crackdowns on alleged
tax evasion including by multinational companies such as Coca-Cola,
McDonald's, and Chevron were soon to increase.

While most of the media downplayed or ridiculed it, Chávez was
redirecting vast sums of Venezuela's oil wealth to the most impoverished
sectors. Education Minister Aristóbulo Istúriz estimated that the
government was spending $4.5 billion, or 20 percent of its budget, on
education. That amounted to 6.1 percent of Venezuela's gross domestic
product, about twice the percentage of the previous year. For its part,
PDVSA was pumping $1.7 billion of its $5 billion capitalization budget
into the government's social programs such as Mision Robinson. It
included $600 million on education and health care programs, $600
million on agriculture, and $500 million to build homes, highways,
and other infrastructure projects. While most of the media and elites
like Naím and Aronson focused on the complaints of the opposition,
a
grassroots revolution — however flawed — was breaking out in the
barrios and countryside. The opposition's bubble prevented them from
seeing it.

Chávez transferred the widespread popularity of his social missions to
his
campaign to
defeat the referendum. Turning to his penchant for
historical references, he dubbed his
anti-recall campaign "The Battle
of Santa Inés." That was the site of a famous nineteenth-century battle
won by Ezequiel Zamora in Barinas, where he lured the unsuspecting
Spaniards into an ambush. Chávez personally directed the anti-recall
campaign, appointing a new team to run the electoral effort. He called
them the
Comando Maisanta after his great-grandfather. The team,
which included few political cadres, was dominated by artists, academics,
and social communicators with little previous participation in
politics. Untainted by the past, they lent prestige and freshness to the
campaign.

With his presidency on the line, Chávez and his supporters came up
with a novel idea. They organized thousands of small
ubes or Electoral
Battle Units in the barrios. Each ube was made up of ten people who
were responsible for convincing ten other people to vote against the referendum
and making sure they got to the polls. Each unit, then, was
to secure one hundred votes. Rather than working with assigned electoral
lists, many ubes organized themselves street by street or building by
building. Others focused not on where they lived but where they worked.
They proved to be an effective electoral tool: An estimated 1.2 million
people, or 4 percent of the population, joined a ube. Many were activists
in long-standing social movements or land and health reform committees
that were springing up in barrios amid the Bolivarian Revolution.
But for the majority it was their first experience in political activism.
Chávez called on them to get to the polls early.

They listened. On Sunday, August 15, hundreds of thousands of
shantytown dwellers woke up to the sounds of fireworks and "reveille"
bugle calls blasted from loudspeakers. The ubes were summoning their
followers to action. It was three A.M. The polls did not open until six. In
wealthy eastern Caracas and other pockets of affluence, residents were
equally charged up. They were finally getting their chance to vote. They
were ecstatic and convinced the national nightmare was about to end.

The
turnout was stunning. Thousands of people were lined up
an hour before the polls opened. As the election got under way, lines
stretched for blocks around polling places — up to 1.2 miles. People
waited patiently in the scorching sun. A typical wait lasted seven hours.
The voting was mostly peaceful and orderly.

International observers who had monitored elections around the
globe were taken aback. They had never seen anything like it. Jimmy
Carter said it was the biggest turnout of any of the dozens of elections
he had monitored, from Nigeria to Indonesia to Mozambique. The
recall referendum was turning into an impressive, beautiful celebration
of democracy. The people were having their say. When Chávez went to
cast his ballot in the impoverished 23 de Enero barrio of high-rise apartment
buildings, he commented, "All those who were saying the dictator
Chávez wouldn't agree to a vote . . . Well, here's the proof." Carter and
his team were greeted with loud cheers everywhere they showed up.

By late afternoon it was clear there would not be enough time for
all the voters still in line to cast their ballots. The National Electoral
Council extended the 6 P.M. voting deadline to 8 P.M. That still wasn't
enough, and they extended it again, to midnight. Even then, people
were still voting. Balloting in some neighborhoods went on until three
A.M., mainly in poor sectors. The election marathon lasted twenty-one
hours. In the end, nearly ten million of fourteen million registered
voters went to the polls. It was a record in Venezuela.

By 4 A.M. authorities were ready to release the first official
results.
As Francisco Carrasquero, president of the National Electoral Council,
appeared on television to make the announcement, much of the nation
was still awake and watching intently. Both sides were convinced they
were going to win. Chávez supporters were gathered outside Miraflores.
Opposition leaders came together in affluent eastern Caracas. They
were totally unprepared for what Carrasquero was about to declare.
Television was part of the reason why.

The nation's major networks, controlled by media moguls who
opposed Chávez, had spent the day showing long lines of people waiting
to vote in anti-Chávez neighborhoods such as Altamira. They did not
bother going into the far more numerous low-income barrios where
the lines were at least as long and the sentiment in favor of Chávez
ran strong. The networks, which had played a leading role in the 2002
coup and the economic strikes, created a false impression that the anti-
Chávez forces were winning an overwhelming victory in the recall referendum.
Their distortion was so great that at one point, leading Chávez
critic and newspaper editor Teodoro Petkoff called the owner of one station
to urge him to send cameras into the slums in the interest of a more
accurate and balanced account of what was happening. According to
Petkoff, the owner refused.

The slanted television coverage, the media-reported polls showing
a close race, and the opposition's preconceived conviction that it spoke
for the majority of the country made Carrasquero's 4 A.M. announcement
all the more shocking and unbelievable to the president's opponents.
Chávez, he declared, had won in a landslide. His margin of
victory was overwhelming — 58 to 42 percent, Carrasquero said. As
more results came in later, Chávez's margin of victory grew, increasing
to 59-41. The results even surpassed Chávez's margin of victory in 1998,
when he had won by a 56 to 44 percent margin. He surpassed the 5 million
votes he predicted in June he would obtain, attracting a record 5.6
million. The opposition garnered 3.9 million, losing but still making a
notable impact: Four of every ten Venezuelans opposed Chávez.

Carrasquero's announcement set off a fusillade of fireworks in
Chavista neighborhoods that shook the city. An hour later as dawn
approached, the beaming president walked out onto the second-floor
balcony at Miraflores Palace to greet a cheering throng of supporters.
He had triumphed — again. Including congressional and gubernatorial
elections, it was his eighth straight victory since 1998, when he'd
won the presidency. It was also the third major defeat for the opposition
in two years, following the failed April 2002 coup and the failed oil
shutdown. Chávez told the ecstatic crowd that the anti-recall success
was the equivalent of hitting a mammoth home run that rocketed out
of Caracas, sailed over Cuba, and landed on the grounds of the White
House occupied by
George W. Bush. "Venezuela has changed forever,"
he said. "There is no turning back. The country will never return to the
false democracy of the past where the elites ruled." He added that "this
is a victory for the opposition. They defeated violence, coup-mongering
and fascism. I hope they accept this as a victory and not as a defeat."

But the opposition was not about to accept the results so easily. Within an
hour of Carrasquero's announcement, they were appearing on television
and claiming fraud. They based their allegations largely on an exit poll
conducted by the New York-based polling firm Penn, Schoen & Berland
Associates. The poll showed Chávez losing by the same margin the electoral
council declared he had won by. Breaking a law against releasing
exit poll results before the balloting ended, Penn, Schoen & Berland
Associates sent out a fax and e-mail at 8 P.M. to the media and opposition
offices. Its headline read, "Exit Poll Results Show Major Defeat for
Chávez." News of the poll spread earlier during the afternoon by cell
phone, contributing to the widespread impression among the opposition
that they were on their way to a smashing and inevitable victory.

Besides breaking the law against releasing polls while people were
still voting, there was another problem with the survey: It was conducted
not by neutral observers who were trained poll takers but by volunteers
from Sumate, the anti-Chávez group that led the recall drive
and was funded by the NED. Exit polls are notoriously unreliable —
as the 2000 US presidential race proved — but Sumate's participation
cast even more doubt over the poll's legitimacy. As Communications
Minister
Jesse Chacon put it, "If you use an activist as a pollster, he will
eventually begin to act like an activist."

Jimmy Carter believed the opposition used the discredited poll to
try to tilt the vote their way and create the impression of a victory that
was imminent and unstoppable. "There's no doubt some of their leaders
deliberately distributed this erroneous exit poll data
in order to build up,
not only the expectation of victory, but also to influence the people still
standing in line," Carter later told reporters.

But none of that mattered to the opposition. They did not question
the poll. Instead, they took it as evidence that the government was committing
massive fraud. They insisted they had won. Headlines in the
opposition-controlled press blared "Catastrofe," "El Fraude Permanente,"
and "Serias Dudas."

It was a minority opinion. Carter endorsed the
results of the vote
as free, fair, and accurate. So did César Gaviria of the Organization of
American States. Even the US government declared Chávez had won,
although it declined to congratulate him. "The people of Venezuela
have spoken," State Department spokesman J. Adam Ereli said. Even
a "quick count" sampling of votes conducted by
Sumate that was separate
from the Penn exit poll showed that the government had won. The
opposition chose to ignore it and keep it quiet.

Carter and Gaviria met with
media owners and opposition leaders
early that Monday in Carter's hotel suite before Carrasquero's announcement
to try to calm them and convince them to accept the results. The
two men had been present in the electoral council headquarters at
about 12:30 A.M. to witness the disclosure of the first electronic tabulations,
which showed Chávez well ahead with 6.6 million votes counted.
Now, in the hotel suite, Carter and Gaviria said they believed the vote
count was just and that their own polling samples confirmed the results
of the electoral council. Some of the leaders became "extremely irate,"
according to Carter's account. "Their faces were white, and they were
very condemnatory of our lack of objectivity and fairness." Other opposition
leaders such as Miranda state governor Enrique Mendoza were
"clearly astonished and remained quiet," one news report said.