It's over, but not over, for the Venezuela recall effort. Chavez will remain and will undoubtedly use his position to punish his opponents.
Venezuela's opposition has rejected as a fraud results showing President Hugo Chavez has won a referendum on his rule, and say they will contest the outcome."We firmly and categorically reject the result ... we're going to collect the evidence to prove to Venezuela and the world the gigantic fraud which has been committed against the will of the people," opposition leader Henry Ramos Allup told a news conference on Monday.
He spoke shortly after Venezuela's top electoral officer, National Electoral Council President Francisco Carrasquero, announced to the nation preliminary official results showing that Chavez had survived the recall vote.
Carrasquero said in a national broadcast the "No" option opposing Chavez's recall had obtained just over 58 percent of the vote, while the "Yes" vote obtained nearly 42 percent.
"Our numbers ... are very different," Ramos said, adding the opposition would ask international organisations who observed the referendum to check the voting machines and ballots.
Why do we care about what happens in Venezuela? Robert Jensen, leftist professor at The University of Texas at Austin, says it's just the usual attempt by Western oligarchies to prop up anti-democratic elements and control the natural resources of a exploited third-world country.
Whatever objections U.S. officials might have to the Venezuelan president's policies, it is clear the attempts to push Chavez from power have nothing to do with the charge that he is an authoritarian president (or "quasi-authoritarian,"as one U.S. newspaper described him in an editorial, or perhaps a "quasi-editorial"). Since his 1998 election, Chavez's real "crimes" have been not just consistently speaking out against the unjust distribution of resources in his country but taking tangible steps to help the poor, such as literacy programs and community-based health clinics.
Much more pertinent is the fact that Hugo Chavez is harboring terrorist camps and infiltrators from known state sponsors of terror in the Middle East and elsewhere.
Another South American hub of Arab terrorism has emerged recently in northern Venezuela near the border with Colombia. Thousands of terrorists now occupy an unknown number of camps in that region, and move about with the support and collaboration of the Venezuelan government. President Hugo Chavez plays host to a growing horde of Middle Eastern terrorists from some of the USA’s most notorious enemies, including Libya, Saddam’s Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Pakistan. Thousands of Venezuelan identity cards have been legally issued to these foreigners. Such cards can be used to obtain legal travel documents and passports for unimpeded entry into other South American countries and into the USA.These terror groups are known to work in conjunction with the Colombian anti-government insurgency group, FARC. They offer FARC terrorists safe haven in mountainous and unpatrolled regions of Northeastern Venezuela. They may provide Hugo Chavez with a covert force that can be used to support FARC against the Colombian government. Venezuelan cooperation with these terrorists may buy President Chavez a guarantee that terror assaults will not be perpetrated in his country.
South America is yet another front in the War on [Islamic] Terror, and Venezuela is in the forefront of risky countries.
Related:
Terrorist and Organized Crime Groups in the Tri-Border Area (TBA) of South America (PDF)
Posted by Alan at August 16, 2004 05:43 AM