CARACAS, Venezuela — President Hugo Chávez,
long a fiery foe of Washington, won re-election on Sunday, facing down
cancer and the strongest electoral challenge of his nearly 14 years in
office and gaining a new mandate to deepen his socialist revolution.
Though his margin of victory was much narrower than in past elections,
he still won handily. With 90 percent of the votes tallied, Mr. Chávez
received 54 percent, to 45 percent for his opponent, Henrique Capriles
Radonski, the national election council said. Fireworks erupted in
Caracas after the news, and Chávez supporters celebrated in the streets.
“This is a country full of love,” Caravayo Mercedes, 50, said
exultingly, waving a Venezuelan flag. “Let Chávez reign forever.”
Motorbikes and trucks full of Chávez supporters whizzed by, some firing
gunshots in the air.
Shortly before 11:30 p.m. local time, Mr. Chávez stepped out onto the
balcony of the presidential palace in Caracas and waved to a sea of
jubilant supporters. “My words of recognition go out from here to all
who voted against us, a recognition for their democratic temperment,” he
said. A former soldier, he called the election a “perfect battle.”
Still, after a spirited campaign, the polarizing president finds himself
governing a changed country. He is an ailing and politically weakened
winner facing an emboldened opposition that grew stronger and more
confident as the voting neared, and that held out hope that an upset
victory was within reach.
Mr. Chávez gave no indication Sunday night that the strong showing by
the opposition would cause him to govern in a different way than before.
He invited his opponents to give up a way of thinking “that has led
them to deny everything that is good in Venezuela,” adding, “Venezuela
is not a catastrophe — Venezuela today is the best Venezuela we’ve had
in 200 years.”
When he finished speaking, he wiped sweat from his face with a bright
red handkerchief and waved the yellow, blue and red national flag.
Mr. Chávez said during the campaign that he would move forward even more
aggressively in a new six-year term to create his version of socialism
in Venezuela, although his pledges were short on specifics.
His health, though, remains a question mark. He has undergone several
rounds of treatment for cancer in the last 15 months, but has refused to
make public essential details of his illness. If he overcomes the
disease and serves out his new term to its end in 2019, he will have
been in power for two full decades.
Toward the end of the campaign, facing pressure from Mr. Capriles, he
pledged to make his government more efficient and to pay more attention
to the quality of government programs like education. He even made
appeals for the middle class and the opposition to join in his
revolution.
But Mr. Chávez spent much of the year insulting and trying to provoke
Mr. Capriles and his followers. And on Sunday night, he had to face the
fact that the people he taunted as squalid good-for-nothings, little
Yankees and fascists, turned out to be nearly half the electorate.
As the opposition’s momentum grew, Mr. Chávez’s insults seemed to lose
their sting. By the end of the campaign, young people in Caracas were
wearing colorful T-shirts that said “majunche” or good-for-nothing, Mr.
Chávez’s favorite taunt.
Mr. Capriles was subdued on Sunday night, congratulating Mr. Chávez and
saying he hoped the president would see the result as “the expression
today of a country with two visions, and to be president means working
to solve the problems of all Venezuelans.”
He appeared poised to carry on his fight in the elections for state
governors in December. “You should all feel proud, do not feel
defeated,” he told supporters.
Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a research
institute in Washington, called the presidential election “a fundamental
turning point.” He said Mr. Chávez was “going to have to deal with a
very different society than he dealt with in his last term, a society
that’s awakened and more organized and more confident.”
Even so, the opposition is a fragile coalition with a history of
destructive infighting, especially after an election defeat. Mr.
Capriles will have to keep this fractious amalgam of parties from the
left, right and center together in order to take advantage of the new
ground they have gained.
“The opposition has more power, it feels more support,” said Elsi
Fernandes, a schoolteacher, who voted for Mr. Capriles on Sunday morning
in Catia, a poor neighborhood in Caracas. “The difference is that we’re
not going to stay with our arms crossed.”
The turnout was more than 80 percent, the highest in decades, the
election council said. People stood in line for hours, although the
voting appeared in most cases to run smoothly.
Venezuela uses a touch-screen electronic voting system, and voters are
identified with a digital thumbprint reader; technical problems at some
polling places caused long delays and, in some, a resort to backup paper
ballots. Polling places were told to keep working until everyone in
line at closing time had a chance to vote.
Venezuela is mired in problems, including out-of-control violent crime,
crumbling roads and bridges, and power blackouts that regularly plague
much of the country outside the capital. Oil production, the country’s
mainstay, has plateaued in recent years, and other exports have not
picked up the slack. The overall economy grew this year, largely because
of a huge pre-election boost in government spending, but clouds loom. A
devaluation of the Venezuelan currency, the bolívar, is widely seen as
inevitable, and inflation remains stubbornly high.
Mr. Chávez has trumpeted his programs to help the poor, and has pointed
to a sharp reduction in the number of people living in poverty. But he
has governed during a phenomenal rise in oil prices, which have soared
from $10 in 1998, the year before he took office, to more than $100 in
recent years and the high $80s now, pouring huge amounts of revenue into
Venezuela. Mr. Capriles, who has served as a legislator, mayor and
governor, campaigned almost nonstop, seeking to contrast his energetic
style and youth with the reduced schedule of Mr. Chávez, who received a
diagnosis of cancer in 2011 and is obviously less robust than in the
past.
Mr. Chávez has kept most details of his condition secret, refusing to
say exactly what kind of cancer he has or where in his body it is. He
received chemotherapy last summer after an operation to remove a tumor,
but the cancer returned and he had another operation in February,
followed by radiation therapy. The operations and treatments were
performed in Cuba, taking Mr. Chávez out of Venezuela for extended
periods.
His health, and whether he was well enough to serve a new six-year term,
always loomed over the campaign, but it receded as an issue as Mr.
Chávez gradually increased his public appearances. Still, he never threw
himself into campaigning at the frenzied pace of Mr. Capriles, and he
often appeared to be saving his energy.
Opposition to Mr. Chávez has long been divided and easily manipulated by
Mr. Chávez, a master politician who kept his rivals off balance. Mr.
Capriles changed that. He crisscrossed the country, campaigning in
places long considered bastions of support for Mr. Chávez, including
urban slums and poor rural areas. He told voters that he was the future
and Mr. Chávez the past.
Mr. Chávez dismissed Mr. Capriles as an unworthy opponent, accusing him
of lying about wanting to continue Mr. Chávez’s social programs. He
called Mr. Capriles a right-wing oligarch in disguise who sought to
bring back the bad old days of rule by the rich. In Catia, María Elena
Severine, 59, who works as a cleaner in a bank, said that Mr. Chávez was
still as fresh a candidate as when he first ran in 1998. She lives in a
rental apartment but hopes someday to be given a new home
government-built home.
“I like my president,” she said. “He is the revolution. He is change.”
No comments:
Post a Comment