Venezuela: A Dictatorship Masquerading as a Democracy

Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela’s president, recently announced that if the opposition were to gain a majority in the National Assembly in elections this Sunday, “We would not give up the revolution and … we would govern with the people in a civil-military union.” To ensure that no one would accuse him of not being a true democrat, he clarified that “we would do this with the constitution in hand.” The president conveniently ignored the small detail that the constitution does not have any provision for a “civil-military” government, nor does it give the government the option of disregarding the outcome of an election. What Maduro did stress, however, was that if the revolution fails, “there will be a massacre”—a threat he has repeatedly made throughout the campaign. He usually follows such threats with reassurances that this violence will not ensue since it is impossible for opposition candidates to win enough votes for a legislative majority, which Maduro’s party has enjoyed for the past 17 years.

Maduro, in fact, frequently dismisses the very notion of an opposition victory as, in his cryptic words, a “negated and transmuted scenario.” His self-assurance is surprising considering that almost all opinion polls show an overwhelming public rejection of the government in general and the president in particular. So why is Maduro so confident? There are many reasons, most of which have nothing to do with “free and fair elections.” (Disclosure: I served as Venezuela’s minister of trade and industry and director of its Central Bank from 1989 to 1990.)

One of these reasons is that public employees in Venezuela may be inclined to vote for the government’s candidates. Maduro perhaps knows that there are thousands of government managers like Jose Miguel Montañez, who is in charge of customs at the international airport in Maracaibo, the country’s second-largest city. An employee reportedly caught Montañez on tape conducting a town-hall meeting in which he menacingly ordered his personnel to vote for regime candidates and bring in a picture of their ballot the day after the election to prove they voted “correctly.” Maduro also knows he can count on the massive and unaccountable use of public funds and resources to support his candidates. His faith in the impossibility of the “transmuted scenario” is surely bolstered by the aggressive and frequent deployment of dirty tricks to defame opposition leaders, jail them, or prevent them from running for office. The opposition has also had to contend with “armed people’s militias” that violently attack their marches and sometimes even murder their leaders, as recently happened to Luis Manuel Diaz.

And then there’s the government’s grip on the media. Not only has there been a wave of acquisitions of Venezuela’s main television channels, radio stations, and newspapers by “private investors” who, upon gaining control of a given property, convert it into a government propaganda organ, but the few media companies that are still independent are severely limited in terms of what they can broadcast or publish. A recent study by Javier Corrales and Franz Von Bergen of what appears on Venezuelan television (both private and public channels) showed that opposition candidates for the National Assembly were rarely mentioned—unless they were being denounced—while the regime’s candidates were omnipresent and extolled. A revealing indicator of this strict censorship of the media is the fact that there has been no mention on national television of the arrest in Haiti of two of the first lady’s nephews, who are accused of trafficking 800 kilos of cocaine and are currently being processed in a Manhattan court. (High-ranking Venezuelan officials have increasingly been seeking asylum in the United States and making serious allegations about the criminal behavior of their former bosses and colleagues in government.)

http://news.yahoo.com/venezuela-dictatorship-masquerading-democracy-173623747.html