VENEZUELA: Signatures Against Chavez, Future Uncertain

By Humberto Márquez Reprint | | Print |

Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Aug 20 2003 (IPS) - The political opposition in Venezuela officially presented three million signatures Wednesday – backed by massive marches – to request a referendum on whether President Hugo Chávez should remain in office.

But questions surrounding the validity of the signatures and the make-up of the National Electoral Council have cast the referendum into doubt.

The possibility of holding a so-called "revocatory" referendum at the halfway point of any elected official’s mandate is established in the 1999 constitution that Chávez himself promoted.

"The countdown has begun," proclaimed opposition leader Enrique Mendoza to a crowd of tens of thousands gathered in central Caracas after turning in the signatures to the National Electoral Council.

A dozen speakers, representing parties across the ideological spectrum, and civil society and labour groups, agreed that Wednesday marked a solid beginning in the process to remove Chávez from office through electoral means.

Tuesday night, anti-Chávez groups in Caracas and other cities celebrated the halfway point of Chávez’s six-year term with fireworks, not because they are happy with the president’s performance but because the date opened the way for his removal.

The opposition coordinated six marches through the Venezuelan capital which converged for a big rally on a central avenue.

The pro-Chávez groups, meanwhile, set up an exposition and food fair Tuesday on another major thoroughfare in Caracas, and on Saturday plan to hold a rally with the participation of the president, who is currently visiting Argentina.

"Today has been a day of peace and of democracy. Public order was protected and the convocation to take part in the marches did not degenerate into violence," said Vice-President José Vicente Rangel.

The bid for a recall referendum is the opposition’s third big effort against Chávez.

The first was a short-lived coup in April 2002 staged by a sector of the opposition movement and dissident military officers that put Chávez out of power for two days. Then came the 63-day business and labour strike that began in December of that year, largely paralysing the country’s crucial oil industry.

In May, after seven months of mediation by Organisation of American States Secretary-General César Gaviria, the Chávez government and the opposition coalition, known as the Democratic Coordinator, agreed to channel their differences towards a "peaceful, democratic, constitutional and electoral" resolution.

The 1999 constitution establishes that the mandate of any elected official can be revoked once half of his or her term has passed, and if a series of requirements are met.

A request to hold a recall referendum must have the support of at least 20 percent of registered voters, and then the votes for removal must be more than the total votes that put the official in office in the first place.

In Chávez’s case, 2.4 million signatures in support of the revocatory referendum are needed, and once the vote is held, at least 3,757,764 people must cast ballots in favour of his removal.

If the referendum is held before August 2004 and Chávez is removed from office, Venezuelans would have to elect a new president to serve out the rest of the term, but if it comes after, the vice- president – who was chosen by the president – would succeed him. In February the opposition collected millions of signatures for three initiatives aimed at removing Chávez from power: the revocatory referendum, a constitutional amendment to shorten his mandate, and the convocation of a new constituent assembly.

Now the Democratic Coordinator wants the government election authorities to authenticate the signatures within 30 days and to convene the recall referendum for two months later, so that the vote is held in November or December.

But the process could be complicated. Government officials and constitutional experts have said that the referendum would not be able to be held before the end of the year.

If the recall referendum is held in 2004, "There will be no way to keep it from mixing with the regional and municipal elections scheduled for next July, and it will be relegated to the background," opposition analyst and newspaper editor Teodoro Petkoff told the press Wednesday.

Jurist Jorge Olavarría, also a member of the opposition, told IPS, "The signatures collected in February are not valid. The heading (of the signature forms) is not a request but rather a usurpation of the faculties of the Electoral Council."

The referendum forms did not ask the electoral authorities to organise the vote, but directly proclaim: "We have decided to convene a referendum."

However, Corina Machado, of the organisation Súmate, and head of the signature-gathering effort, told a press conference, "The signatures are valid, and if there were some defect in the procedure, the Electoral council can set it straight."

Repeating the opposition’s refrain, she added, "If the Council rejects them, we can collect millions of signature again."

Machado said that 3,236,000 signatures were gathered for the recall referendum, and in collating them with civil and electoral registries, more than 2.7 million of them proved valid.

But Chávez and his supporters say they have reports that many of the signatures are illegitimate because they were falsified or transferred en masse from lists of bank and cellular telephone clients, via electronic means and without the authorisation of the individuals they purported to represent.

Chávez said Wednesday in Buenos Aires that he "has proof" that such transfers took place.

"I believe that the opposition really collected a million signatures," Vice-President Rangel told IPS.

The questions surrounding the referendum will be resolved by a new Electoral Council.

The Supreme court is preparing to designate its five members in the next few days, taking the duty out of the hands of the parliament – where the governing party and the opposition hold nearly equal weight – after lawmakers were unable to achieve the two-thirds votes necessary to name five members to the Council.

"There will be no referendum this year because the new Electoral Council must be sworn in and establish reglamentation before going to work on the signatures and deciding what question" would be put to the voters, constitutional expert Carlos Escarrá told IPS.

Marisol Plaza, Venezuela’s prosecutor general, repeated Wednesday that she does not consider the signatures valid because, "only as of today can the process begin. What the opposition is doing is staging a publicity show." Petkoff criticised the Democratic Coordinator for presenting the signatures gathered in February, saying the opposition coalition should have held a new signature drive instead.

"All that the Chávez administration has to do is present reasonable doubts – which have been stated even by members of the opposition, like Olavarría – if it wants to initiate challenges to postpone the process," he said. Jurist Olavarría has said, "If the government is bad, the opposition is worse… It failed in April 2002 (with the attempted coup), nearly committed suicide with the two-month general strike, and if there is no referendum this year the opposition has only itself to blame."