This article was originally posted by The Miami Herald
The situation in Venezuela is becoming dangerously tense. Ramón Guillermo Aveledo says that the Sept. 26 parliamentary elections may be the last ones in the country — ever.
Aveledo, a prestigious lawyer, writer and former president of Congress, is the executive secretary of the Mesa de la Unidad Democrática, the umbrella organization for the united opposition.
What’s happening in the country? Possibly, Hugo Chávez could lose, so he’s looking for a way to tamper with the results. One month away from the elections, the most reliable survey — by Consultores 21, as disclosed by expert Joaquín Pérez Rodríguez — gives the victory to the opposition, 52 to 42 percent.
That fact is reinforced by another question that is even more revealing. When voters are asked whether they like or reject Chávez, 37 percent say they like him, 56 percent don’t.
Obviously, Chávez’s popularity has plummeted for at least five powerful reasons:
• The unbearable violence that has turned Caracas into one of the world’s most dangerous cities and all of Venezuela into a slaughterhouse with more victims than Iraq, as The New York Times has reported. Almost 120,000 persons have been murdered since Chávez came to power. Violence has risen fourfold.
• The whole of society detests the existence of paramilitary armed gangs in the service of the government. CNN called them “Chávez’s Guardians” in an excellent documentary that rattled the country. Their task is to intimidate and mistreat the population.
• The infinite clumsiness of a government that, despite receiving a torrent of petrodollars, is incapable of supplying markets, conserving food (millions of kilos rot in warehouses or vanish), maintaining the infrastructures or equipping hospitals halfway decently. With good reason, Venezuelans perceive that no other country in South America is as poorly governed.
• Venezuela’s uncomfortable occupation by Cubans and the donation of much of Venezuela’s wealth to Havana, Managua, Bolivia and the rest of the famished family of 21st-century socialism. With those subsidies, Chávez buys his international importance and fosters the highest level of corruption Venezuela has ever known — which is saying a lot.