Chavez Seeking 25 Year Term

[Gold9472]

Chavez seeking 25-year term

http://calsun.canoe.ca/News/World/2006/05/07/1568108-sun.html

By AP
5/8/2006

CARACAS -- President Hugo Chavez said yesterday voters should have the chance to decide whether he should govern the country for the next 25 years.

Speaking at a stadium, Chavez said he would hold a referendum to put the question of his remaining in office to Venezuelans if the opposition pulls out of upcoming presidential elections.

"I am going to ask you, all the people, if you agree with Chavez being president until 2031," he said.

It was not clear if Chavez was talking about holding a legally binding vote to eliminate term limits or proposing a plebiscite.

[Partridge]

Got this via Marxmail today:

Marc Cooper and term limits in Venezuela

I think everybody has gotten used to the idea that Marc Cooper has pretty much landed with both feet firmly planted in Hitchensville. Despite his formal opposition to the war in Iraq, Cooper redbaits the actual movement that has come together to bring the troops home in the pages of the bourgeois press. And when he is not busy redbaiting the antiwar movement or boosting the "sensible" Kennedy-McCain immigration bill (a new version of the 'bracero' program of the 1940s, a form of indentured servitude), he lashes out a Cuba for not allowing the National Endowment for Democracy to have free rein. But perhaps his biggest gripe is with Hugo Chavez, who has the temerity to stand up to American imperialism and use oil profits for the benefit of Venezuela's poor.

In a May 7th entry on his blog titled "Hugo's Ploy," Cooper relies on an AP dispatch that states that Chavez is seeking a 25-year term. It quotes Chavez as saying, "I am going to ask you, all the people, if you agree with Chavez being president until 2031." However, AP is forced to admit that "It was not clear if Chavez was talking about holding a legally binding vote to eliminate term limits or proposing a plebiscite."

Well, if Cooper were a serious journalist rather than a Matt Drudge wannabe, he could have tracked down an item that was forwarded in the comments section of his blog by one Brian Jones beforehand. It has a link to a Yahoo Spanish News article that clearly states that Chavez was only seeking an end to term limits:

>>La actual Constitución "bolivariana" de Venezuela, aprobada en 1999, permite la reelección una sola vez. Un eventual referendo podrÃ^a modificar esta condición.<<

Full: http://espanol.news.yahoo.com/060506/52/1ameq.html

This says, "The actual 'Bolivarian' Constitution of Venezuela, approved in 1999, permits reelection only once. An eventual referendum would modify this condition."

How does being opposed to term limits get translated into a 25 year presidency? The answer is obvious. The same way that Maurice Bishop's Grenada got turned into a Russian military base or that Sandinista Nicaragua became a totalitarian dungeon--despite having democratic elections throughout the 1980s.

There's a word for this: disinformation. Using his by now 33 year old service as a translator for Salvador Allende as left cover, Marc Cooper is performing the same role on his blog and in the pages of the LA Times that people like Shirley Christian carried out in the NY Times in the 1980s. It is not a pretty sight.

...

And the rather witty follow-up e-mail:

Don't forget, however, that when he [Marc Cooper] was in Chile he was in a cell of the Chilean Socialist Party that called itself the "Francois Mitterand Cell". 'nuff said...

[Gold9472]

Associated Press Falsely Portrays Chavez as Seeking 25-Year Term

http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1723

(Gold9472: I love AP... not.)

By: Justin Delacour - Latin America News Review
Monday, May 08, 2006

A little scrutiny of a recent Associated Press report about Venezuela provides a lesson in how the English-language press often gets the story wrong. Take the first sentence: "President Hugo Chavez said Saturday that Venezuelan voters should have the chance to decide whether he should govern the country for the next 25 years."

No, such a referendum would not be about "whether he should govern the country for the next 25 years." A referendum would be about whether Chavez would be permitted to run every six years and --in the event that he were to continue winning elections-- serve multiple presidential terms. The AP report's opening sentence makes it sound as if such a referendum would do away with elections in Venezuela, as if its intent would be to grant Chavez a new 25-year term in office! The website of The Calgary Sun even titles the wire report "Chavez seeking 25-year term"!!

This is obviously an extremely poor piece of reporting. Chavez made it clear that, if the opposition committed to participating in the upcoming presidential election, he would not convoke a referendum to end presidential term limits. He explained that the intent of his threat to convoke such a referendum was not to perpetuate himself in power but rather to defend the Bolivarian Revolution.

Fortunately, Agence France Press (AFP) got the story right. The opening sentence of AFP's Spanish-language report reads, "Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez claimed Saturday that, if the opposition decides not to run candidates in the December presidential election, he could decree a referendum to permit his reelection for multiple terms until 2031."

So the choice for the opposition is simple. If they don't want a referendum that would end presidential term limits, they shouldn't pull out of the upcoming presidential election. As far as I'm concerned, the threat of a referendum is a perfectly reasonable (and democratic) way to dissuade the opposition from trying to delegitimize Venezuela's electoral process.

When Venezuela's opposition knows it's going to lose an election, it has a tendency to try to delegitimize the electoral process. Instead of facing up to the fact that it is unpopular, the business-led opposition tries to shift the blame for its electoral misfortunes to the National Electoral Council (CNE). The opposition claims that the CNE could commit "fraud" and that the vote might not be secret. Opposition conspiracy theories of this nature are legion. Never mind that there have been international observers on hand that have testified to the fairness of Venezuela's elections. Never mind that even the opposition's own polls show that Chavez is much more popular than they are.

In other words, many members of the opposition aren't really interested in trying to win elections because they know that they lack popular support. Many in the opposition prefer, instead, to try to create the impression internationally that Venezuela's electoral process is illegitimate.

One has to understand that, given the combination of the opposition's economic interests and political incompetence, it is very desperate. Since it is unable to attract popular support domestically, the opposition resorts to attempts to draw more U.S. hostility toward Chavez in hopes that such hostility might somehow weaken or destroy his presidency. Electoral boycotts are part and parcel of this strategy. The opposition wants to create the (false) impression internationally that Venezuela is another Ukraine and that Chavez wins elections by "fraud," etc. etc. That's what Chavez is up against.

OAS General Secretary Jose Miguel Insulza effectively summed up the problem that Chavez faces when he said the following about the opposition's boycott of legislative elections last December:

"We had a problem with the Venezuelan opposition, which assured us that they would not withdraw from the [electoral] process if certain conditions were met. These were met and, despite this, they withdrew."

Insulza continued, "if the path of abstention is chosen, then one cannot complain that the entire parliament is in the hands of one's political adversary."