All is not well in Venezuela. There are calls for an investigation of the vote, since many pre-election polls had the recall of Chavez winning by a margin of 12-18 percentage points. The Providence Journal says there is reason to be skeptical of the election outcome:
On the eve of the balloting, polling stations were reassigned in areas with heavy concentrations of anti-Chavez voters ... sometimes hours away.Fingerprint scanners malfunctioned, causing delays and discouraging voters. Supporters of the petition for the president's recall were not allowed to be present when the ballots were counted, and the state election agency would not authorize audits of paper receipts issued by electronic machines.
Independent exit polls had shown a clear majority of Venezuelans favoring the recall, but the official results were almost mirror images of the exit figures....Not least, and most suspicious, fewer people voted to recall Hugo Chavez than had signed the referendum petition last fall.
CARACAS, Venezuela--On Monday afternoon, dozens of people assembled in the Altamira Plaza, a public square in a residential neighborhood here that has come to symbolize nonviolent dissent in Venezuela. The crowd was there to question the accuracy of the results that announced a triumph for President Hugo Chávez in Sunday's recall referendum.Within one hour of the gathering, just over 100 of Lt. Col. Chávez's supporters, many of them brandishing his trademark army parachutist beret, began moving down the main avenue towards the crowd in the square. Encouraged by their leader's victory, this bully-boy group had been marching through opposition neighborhoods all day. They were led by men on motorcycles with two-way radios. From afar they began to taunt the crowd in the square, chanting, "We own this country now," and ordering the people in the opposition crowd to return to their homes. All of this was transmitted live by the local news station. The Chávez group threw bottles and rocks at the crowd. Moments later a young woman in the square screamed for the crowd to get down as three of the men with walkie-talkies, wearing red T-shirts with the insignia of the government-funded "Bolivarian Circle," revealed their firearms. They began shooting indiscriminately into the multitude.
A 61-year-old grandmother was shot in the back as she ran for cover. The bullet ripped through her aorta, kidney and stomach. She later bled to death in the emergency room. An opposition congressman was shot in the shoulder and remains in critical care. Eight others suffered severe gunshot wounds. Hilda Mendoza Denham, a British subject visiting Caracas for her mother's 80th birthday, was shot at close range with hollow-point bullets from a high-caliber pistol. She now lies sedated in a hospital bed after a long and complicated operation. She is my mother.
I spoke with her minutes before the doctors cut open her wounds. She looked at me, frightened and traumatized, and sobbed: "I was sure they were going to kill me, they just kept shooting at me."
Jimmy Carter, the man who said we could trust North Korea in 1994, has given his assurances that the election result is legitimate.
Posted by dan at August 19, 2004 10:35 AM