Tag Archives: Carabobo

Oct
1
2012
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Capriles Rally Draws Thousands Against Chavez Ahead of Vote

Bloomberg News
October 01, 2012
By Nathan Crooks and Jose Orozco

henrique capriles radonski Capriles Rally Draws Thousands Against Chavez Ahead of Vote

Courtesy of: Juan Barreto / AFP / Getty Images

Venezuelan opposition candidate Henrique Capriles Radonski symbolically closed his Caracas campaign against President Hugo Chavez yesterday with a march attended by tens of thousands of supporters.

Capriles, dressed in a shirt styled with the three colors of Venezuela’s flag, promised to confront growing violence in the South American country after he said three supporters were shot and killed over the weekend in Barinas state. He asked voters to judge Chavez’s priorities after 13 years in power and decide if they were happy with their lives today.

“This government gives away resources to every other country,” Capriles said. “There is no gauze in the hospitals here, but they give money away to sponsor samba dancing at the carnival in Rio.”

Capriles, 40, has held large rallies across Venezuela over the past month to close his campaign and build momentum after making house-to-house visits to offer what he described as a message of unity, progress and private investment. He filled the stadium used by Chavez’s favorite baseball team on Sept. 27 in a rally to close his campaign in the central state of Carabobo.

“This has to be one of the largest marches in the history of Caracas,” Capriles said yesterday to a throng filling the length of Bolivar Avenue in downtown Caracas, a symbolic space often used by Chavez for campaign rallies, waving party flags, chanting, dancing to campaign music and blowing vuvuzelas.

Leopoldo Lopez, a member of Capriles’ campaign team, said on the Globovision television network Sept. 28 that he hoped as many as a million people would attend the march. The campaign didn’t provide an estimate on the size of the march afterward.

Three Dead

Shots were fired at a caravan of cars in eastern Barinas state on Sept. 29 when Capriles supporters tried to pass a checkpoint, the Primero Justicia political party said in a statement, adding that the barricade had been set up by “presumed” Chavez supporters.

Police have detained three suspects, the Venezuelan government said yesterday in an e-mailed statement, without providing additional details. Chavez, who spoke at a rally yesterday in western Zulia state, said the incident was “regrettable” and urged his supporters not to fall into “provocations.”

Chavez, who also spoke at a rally on Sept. 29 in central Miranda state, said he himself is one of the biggest critics of his government and that there were reasons for some people to be “discontent.”

Insecurity, Crime

“There have been failures and problems, but what is at stake on Oct. 7 is not about the small or medium problems including water or electricity problems,” said Chavez. “We’ll solve the problems of insecurity and crime.”

Andrea Thadino, who lives in Caracas slum of San Agustin where a cousin was killed by a gunfight three years ago, said she works at a street nail salon because she can’t get a job teaching at a public school after signing a petition against Chavez.

“Despite studying for five years, I have to work as a street vendor to survive,” she said in an interview at yesterday’s march while carrying her 2-year-old son. “I voted for Chavez the first time but not anymore. I think Capriles is a sincere man who is going to make a change.”

Fitness for Office

Capriles, a former governor of Miranda state, has played up his youth and fitness to offer a stark contrast to the condition of his 58-year-old opponent, who is coming off three operations related to an unknown cancer in the past 15 months. He is ahead in several polls while trailing by as much as 15 percentage points in others.

“There are two options here. One we already know and has been in power for 14 years,” Capriles said. “I lead the other option that aims to solve your problems.”

Capriles, who arrived on a truck with “Progress” written on its windshield, said Chavez had dashed the hopes of many Venezuelans.

“There was a lot of hope, wherever you went, there were rivers of people full of hope,” said Capriles, referring to the period after Chavez was first elected. “Almost 14 years later, you be the judge of who is in the process of change and who is sick with power. Because the man in Miraflores defrauded the Venezuelan people.”

After his speech, Capriles hugged his mother and tossed his trademark baseball caps with the Venezuelan colors into the crowd.

Middle Class Votes

Chavez, a self-professed socialist who is traditionally supported by the country’s poor, has spent his final days on campaign trying to attract middle class and rich voters.

“Those with a big house and two or three cars in the garage, a good job, their kids in a good school, the ones who go to the club on Friday night and take their plane to Miami or Margarita Island on Saturday, those people should vote for Chavez,” the former paratrooper said in an interview broadcast yesterday on the Televen television network. “We are the guarantee of tranquility. Think about it well. It’s not for me, it’s for you.”

Armando Briquet, head of the Capriles campaign, said the government is trying to make the vote difficult for the opposition with actions including the closing of Venezuela’s Miami consulate, which will require thousands of voters to travel to the nearest voting center in New Orleans.

“Even with all that, we are going to win by more than 10 percentage points,” Briquet said backstage after the rally, citing the campaign’s polling numbers.

“On Oct. 7, Chavez wins!” Chavez told supporters yesterday in Zulia state. “It will be a grand victory, I don’t have a doubt.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Nathan Crooks in Caracas at [email protected]; Jose Orozco in Caracas at [email protected].

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Joshua Goodman at [email protected].

To read this article on Bloomberg News, please click here.

 
Sep
15
2010
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Ahead of Legislative Elections, Venezuela’s Student Movement Comes of Age

Estudiantes+venezolanos 11 Ahead of Legislative Elections, Venezuelas Student Movement Comes of Age By Francisco Toro

Back in 2007, Venezuela saw the rise of a boisterous student movement, as university students spilled out onto the streets in  protest over the government’s decision to shut down the most popular TV stations in the country. Three years later, the  student movement is no longer out on the streets; they’re far too busy with the phone banks for that stuff.

With less than two weeks to go before the crucial legislative elections, Venezuela’s student movement is coming of age. Far  from turning away from politics, students have quietly remade themselves into the backbone of a  sophisticated election-day ground game. And while the movement can’t hope to match the seemingly limitless  resources of a hyper-empowered petro-state, it’s already clear that, for the first time in the Chávez era, this election cycle the  opposition is not about to wave a white flag in the ground war before a shot is fired.

“Back in 2008, we even called our organization here ‘Estudiantes en la Calle’ – ‘Students out in the Street,’” says Dayana  Mendez, a 21-year-old journalism student active with the movement in Carabobo State. “This time, we’ve decided our role  has to be different: instead of protesting in the streets, we’re giving people reasons to vote, and the tools to defend their vote.”

Two organizations are leading the student charge: DefiendeTuVoto.com (DefendYourVote) and VotoJoven.com (YoungVote). As its name implies, DefiendeTuVoto.com focuses on recruiting and training witnesses both inside and outside polling stations to help prevent the kinds of irregularities that have marred previous elections. VotoJoven.com, meanwhile, is working to demystify Venezuela’s complex voting system and promote voting among young people - a key demographic, considering that Venezuelans under 30 make up 46% of the country’s registered voters.

Though officially non-partisan, the groups liaise closely with Venezuela’s opposition parties and with opposition-minded NGOs such as ESDATA.info. On the basis of careful statistical analysis of recent election results, ESDATA has identified the congressional districts most open to government abuse, pinpointing the specific polling stations where statistical anomalies suggest the vote has being rigged.

For example, if people in one polling station voted 85% for the government, but that polling station is surrounded by four others that voted 56%, 58%, 53% and 55% for the government, it seems likely some kind of electoral hanky-panky was at play. ESDATA’s analysis flags such anomalies, bringing them to the students’ attention. They are then charged with recruiting, training and supporting witnesses to go to the problem stations and watch them like hawks on election day, with a camera-enabled cell-phone in hand, of course.

In the past, allegations of vote rigging have concentrated in poorer, more pro-government areas: precisely the type of areas where many polling stations had no trained witnesses at all. With no one watching over their shoulders, pro-government poll workers could simply line up at the end of the day and vote in place of those who had “forgotten” to turn up. The results, in some cases, bordered on the comical, such as the one polling station in Apure State that had 100% turnout and 100% pro-government votes in the February 2009 referendum on a Constitutional amendment.

The problem, for the last several cycles, has been that witnesses have crowded around reliably opposition-minded areas – where they are least needed – leaving no one to watch the problem areas. “In election after election, we have had a dozen witnesses in every polling station in the [relatively affluent] East of Caracas, where the voting is like in Switzerland,” says one movement activist who asked not to be named, “but no witnesses at all in the barrios, where voting is more like in Iran.”

This year, the student movement is going all out to make sure this kind of situation doesn’t happen again. Along with a concerted drive to sign up, train and support witnesses, the movement is working aggressively to make sure they’re sent to voting centers with a history of irregularities when no one is there to watch. Other students are organizing roving squads to make sure that the areas directly outside polling stations are free of the kind of voter intimidation – or even vote-buying – that have also become standard features of Venezuelan elections.

With less than two weeks to go, the students are bullish. Though the decentralized nature of their movement makes national figures hard to come by, it’s clear that in much of the country, chavistas are going to have to deal with an unprecedented opposition ground game. Some areas where chavismo has traditionally been unencumbered by witnesses – like the pro-government South-side of Valencia – are nearly booked solid with student witnesses this time around, making the opposition competitive in areas long seen as wide open to government intimidation and abuse.

* Francisco Toro is a Venezuelan journalist, political scientist and blogger.  He edits since 2002 Caracas Chronicles, a well-known blog about Venezuela.