By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Aug 18 2004 (IPS)

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez triumphed in the recall referendum because he transformed the electoral struggle into a military-style campaign, with a unified command and a strong single message.

He also won on Sunday because he was able to successfully handle the social fracture that first appeared in this South American country at least 15 years ago.

Nearly six of the 10 million voters (58 percent) who turned out for the referendum were in favour of Chávez completing his term, which ends in January 2007, while around four million (close to 42 percent) voted to remove him, according to the preliminary results.

When Chávez was first elected in December 1998, he took 3.67 million votes (56.2 percent of the total). And in July 2000, when he held another election under the newly rewritten constitution, he won nearly 3.76 million votes (59.8 percent).

His April 1999 call to set up a constituent assembly to rewrite the constitution was approved by 3.6 million voters, and the new constitution was ratified in December 1999 by 3.3 million Venezuelans.

“The codes with which the people have responded to elections in Venezuela since 1998 have been the same for a sector of society that identifies with the call for a radical change,” Germán Campos, a political science professor at the Central University in Caracas, said in an interview.

“At bottom, the same election has been repeated over and over again,” based on “a model of rupture with the past and a search for alternatives, which dates back to the ‘Caracazo’,” added Campos, referring to the week of mass protests and rioting in February 1989 that followed the implementation of stringent structural adjustment measures.

Hundreds were killed and many more wounded in the harsh crackdown by the government forces.

In 1992, two military uprisings were staged, one of which was led by Chávez – a paratrooper officer at the time – and enjoyed popular support for months afterwards, according to opinion polls.

In the 1993 elections, Rafael Caldera won the presidency for the second time, but as an independent, after leaving the social Christian COPEI party that he founded and which he represented as president from 1969 to 1974.

The Institute of Higher Administration Studies reports that since 1978, this oil-rich country has experienced a steady decline in private investment and real wages, to the point that 56 percent of households now fall below the poverty line, according to the Andrés Bello Catholic University’s Economic Research Institute.

Then Chávez reappeared on the national scene, with a discourse based on his close identification with the impoverished majority.

When he speaks in public, which he does nearly every day, or on his Sunday radio and TV programme “Aló presidente”, he talks about his life as a poor boy growing up in the Venezuelan “llanos” or plains region, and his years in the barracks, where he rose to lieutenant-colonel.

“He is a leader who is extraordinarily good at communicating, and exceptionally gifted in connecting with his audience,” Luis León, director of the local Datanálsis polling firm, who has studied the Chávez phenomenon since 1997, told IPS.

With respect to initiatives for the poor, the Chávez administration did not substantially differ from previous governments in its first few years in office, except that it assigned military units to social projects like building schools.

But last year the government launched a broad number of social programmes aimed at the lower-income sectors.

The “Mercal” project set up shops where the poor buy foodstuffs at subsidised prices; “Máxima protección” created a network of community soup kitchens; the “Robinson” literacy drive is on its way to teaching one million adults to read and write; and “Ribas” and “Universidad Bolivariana” provide support to help poor students complete high school and study at the university.

One of the highest-profile initiatives is the “Barrio Adentro” project, through which more than 10,000 Cuban doctors have brought primary health care to Venezuela’s slums. Other programmes offer small loans to microenterprises and the urban and rural poor, dental care, and property title deeds in rural and urban areas.

In the past few months, financing for this wide array of projects increased thanks to the windfall oil profits brought by soaring international prices.

The social initiatives helped boost Chávez’s popularity, according to the polls, which found that at least one in three of his “opponents” looked on the projects with friendly eyes.

The social programmes have improved the lives of millions of people, and many see Chávez as a leader who is living up to his promise of addressing the needs of the poor.

Oscar Schémel, director of another local polling company, Hinterlaces, told IPS that in its surveys, which were combined with focus groups, “we found a very intense need for affection and identification with a leader ‘who is one of us’, who not only represents, but understands.”

In the campaign for the referendum, the Democratic Coordinator opposition alliance remained unable to come up with a single, charismatic leader, and merely continued to attack the government with the same arguments it had used for over two years.

The coalition of around 20 political parties and 40 business, labour and civil society groups lagged in the creation of an alternative programme showing how it would govern if Chávez were removed, and then gave its new proposal scarce dissemination.

A well-known editor of an opposition media outlet commented to IPS that in the referendum, instead of revoking Chávez’s mandate, voters actually “revoked” the opposition alliance, which was incapable of carrying out a convincing campaign and failed to “defend the ‘Yes’ vote”.

The government supporters, on the other hand, developed “an aggressive, intense and rich communication strategy, with the advantage that they had a single message,” said León.

Chávez personally headed the campaign, organising pro-government activists in thousands of “electoral battle units”.

The campaign for the “No” vote, opposed to the removal of Chávez, practically wallpapered the streets of the cities with red campaign posters.

Most of the surveys carried out in the country between late 2001 and May 2004 had indicated that a majority would vote against Chávez if elections were held, although he maintained a strong core support base among the poor.

But when the campaign for the referendum began in June, the proportion of undecideds, known here as “ni-ni’s” or “neither-nors” (those who identified with neither side) began to shrink. According to León, a majority of the ni-ni’s turned out to be Chávez supporters deep down.

In the weeks before the referendum there was a growing sensation that Chávez would win.

The opposition, meanwhile, merely came up with a theory that out of fear, public employees and people in predominantly pro-Chávez neighbourhoods were telling pollsters that they would vote for the president, when in reality they planned to vote to remove him.

Chávez also benefited from the expansion of the voter registration lists, which grew from 12 to more than 14 million names between December – when the opposition gathered signatures to trigger a referendum – and the closing of the registration drive in July.

Some of the newly registered voters were young people who had recently turned 18, but most were people who had not registered because they had no national identity documents in the past, or immigrants who had become naturalised citizens in the last few months. The great majority came from Chávez’s support base: the poor.

Chávez, who was strengthened by the referendum, is now calling on the opposition to engage in dialogue.

Vice-President José Vicente Rangel said Tuesday that he was given the mission of building bridges with the opposition to begin a process of national reconciliation. But his problem, he said, is finding leaders who are willing to talk.

Rangel said the opposition leaders are “frightened of a radicalised social base, which lives in the (middle-class and wealthy) eastern part of Caracas, and is constantly egged on by the private media,” which are fervently anti-Chávez.

The opposition, meanwhile, remains reluctant to accept Chávez’s victory, complaining of “fraud”, although the Organisation of American States and Carter Centre election observer missions clearly stated that they had found no signs of fraud, and endorsed the official returns.

*With additional reporting by Alejandro Kirk.

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