Massimo's photoblog

Cojedes, Venezuela (Jan 2, 2004)

This photo was taken in venezuela in January on the highway to caracas, in the state of Cojedes, in the llanos (the wet plains at the center of Venezuela). The governor of the state Cojedes, Colonel Liutenent of the National Guard Jhonny Yanez, has been elected with a ticket of Chavez political party. the graffity says “the revolution advances with Yanez and Chavez”.

Today there are yet other elections in Venezuela (to elect governors and city mayors). The government party is poised to win in may places previously controlled by the opposition, thanks also to the attitude of the opposition defeated in the presidential recall referendum a few months ago. The recall referendum ended with the confirmation of the president Hugo Chavez by an ample margin, The referendum result was heavily contested by the opposition, who denounced an electoral fraud (“megafraude”), despite the declarations of the international observers (Organization of American States, and Centro Carter) who confirmed the validity of the result. The controversy continued for several weeks, with a barrage of statistical analysis made in Venezuela and abroad, each trying to demonstrate “statistically” that there was (or not) any fraud. The net result of this mess was that a large fraction of the opposition supporters (and voters) has now lost faith in the electoral process (thanks to the declarations in such respect of some opposition leaders), and will not go to vote in these local elections, allowing the victory of the government party even in places where the opposition is majority (this is what I call a nice example of political “auto-suicide”, to use a term coined by a former venezuelan president).

All this chaos just two days before another election (which will have a much wider significance for the whole planet), also poised to end up in chaos. The polls shows that the two candidates are perfectly tied in many critical states, so it is impossible to say how it will end. What is worse, if the results will be as close as four years ago, a recount will be necessary, but impossible, as some states (among which Florida) decided to use electronic voting machines that do not produce any paper record of the votes. What will happen in this case? Given the situation, maybe for the first time in history, US has called for international observers to monitor the fairness of their electoral process (from the Organization for Cooperation and Security in Europe - OCSE, which had this very role during the first elections in Eastern Europe - and many other states). Among the states called to send international observers, ironically, there is also Venezuela...