Well, after 14 years the opposition was not able to win the presidential elections. [Venezuela held presidential elections on October 7, 2012. Incumbent Hugo Chavez took 55 percent of the vote, defeating challenger Henrique Capriles Radonski and winning a fourth term as president.] What happened was that the government received 8 million votes, the opposition 6 and a half million votes. We grew by 2 and a half million in comparison to previous presidential elections. But the good thing was that it grew by about 600,000 votes.
However, the government still won. Why did the government win again? All of the democratic nations need to reflect on why this happened. They won again because they have all of the power. They are the number one employer, they have about 5 million Venezuelans who work directly with the government and more than 3 million people directly receive benefits from the government. Also, voting is an individual act and it is not a collective act.
The people do not vote to help others out but they vote so that they themselves can benefit. And if the president is the one who employs you, the one who gives you money to feed your family. You are not going to vote for – it is difficult that the people support the other candidate who is not able to offer them more or even simply a better future. But at the moment [the opposition] cannot offer them anything.
The opposition obviously has limited resources and the government has an unlimited amount of resources because they own all of the resources of the Venezuelan state to convince the Venezuelan people to vote for them. And what hurts us democrats the most is that there are violations of human rights, that a reign of fear would affect Venezuelans to vote. Truthfully, in Venezuela there is wealth from petroleum and the majority of petroleum countries end up being autocracies.
That´s because these presidents do not need their citizens, they do not need to subsidize their systems through a tax system. They have money from the state to support their causes. That is, a government independent from its citizens does not listen to its citizens and what ends up happening is that the citizens obey its president. And that is what happened in the last election.
What we learned again is that this is similar to David and Goliath and what will be difficult in the upcoming years is that the government can begin to censor the opposition and can put a halt to internal funding for the opposition. What I actually see is that the opposition made a decision to continue nonviolent and peaceful activities to escape the current situation of the government.
And if the price of petroleum continues to be high, the government will continue to subsidize its revolution and maintain just a small percentage of people happy without considering the other percentage of the population which would cause human rights violations. The government will be able to maintain control with its followers for whatever time left they have.
Rodrigo Diamanti of Venezuela is president of “Un Mundo Sin Mordaza” (A World Without Censorship), a network that promotes freedom of speech in the Americas and around the world.
In 2007, Diamanti obtained a bachelor’s degree in economics from the Andres Bello Catholic University of Caracas. Two years later he received a master’s degree in political studies from Complutense University in Madrid. He is a founding member of the Venezuela Student Movement of 2007, which works for free and fair elections, transparent governance, freedom of expression and association, and reconciliation in Venezuela.
Diamanti is a senior fellow of the Alliance of Youth Movements (Movements.org) and has lectured in Turkey, Spain, Mexico and the United States.
Venezuela is a South American country of 28.5 million people with a history of multiparty constitutional democracy. President Nicolas Maduro took office after Hugo Chavez succumbed to cancer in 2013.
During the 1998-2013 presidency of Colonel Hugo Chavez, a series of constitutional and legal changes were implemented that make it far more difficult for citizens to change their government. The Chavez government systematically used public resources to secure its power, closed down independent news media, and used legal and extralegal means to harass and intimidate its critics.
Soon after his first election, Chavez called for a new constitution that would give expanded powers to the president and replace Venezuela’s bicameral Congress with a unicameral national assembly. The new constitution was approved by referendum in 1999. Chavez acquired substantial control of the military, the judiciary, the electoral commission, and the news media. The government closed Radio Caracas Television Internacional (RCTV Internacional), the country’s largest television network, and forced into exile the president of Globovision, the other major opposition-aligned network.
The Chavez government’s increasingly repressive methods generated strong public opposition, including a series of public protests by students, workers, and others who were not previously aligned with the political opposition. In the 2010 National Assembly elections, opposition parties received the majority of the votes, but under the new electoral rules the government took a substantial majority of the seats in the Assembly.
Venezuela’s vast oil resources allowed Chavez to implement policies that steered the country towards a socialist economy. The country’s oil wealth funded a major expansion of government social programs, much to the approval of government supporters in the lower class. Oil became the foundation of Venezuela’s relationship with Cuba, which has strengthened substantially over the last few decades due to shared ideology and financial and security interdependence. Venezuela has replaced the Soviet Union as Cuba’s major benefactor, financially supporting the Castro regime. Cuba in turn has supported the transformation and strengthening of the Venezuelan military. In 2004, the two nations founded the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA), a group of socialist and social democratic nations working toward economic integration. ALBA and its member nations often champion anti-American policies and sentiments. This alliance has led to close ties between Venezuela and nations such as Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Bolivia.
Immediately after Chavez’s passing, Vice President Maduro assumed the role of interim President. He then went on to narrowly defeat an opposition candidate by a 1.5 percent margin in the April 2013 presidential elections. Maduro has pledged to complete Chavez’s socialist transformation of Venezuela.
Recently, Venezuela has struggled with a rising crime and homicide rate, blamed by some on a recent economic downturn, the availability of arms, and the weak judicial system. However, Chavez and Maduro both have linked this increase in crime to the media’s portrayal of both fictional and real violence and have continued to influence what programming and content is available. Both leaders have expanded the security forces within the country, calling on police, militias, and the military to fight crime.
In Freedom House’s Freedom in the World report, Venezuela earned “partly free” status, with an overall rating of 5. A rating of 1 represents the most free and 7 represents the least free.
See all Venezuela videos