Word: chã
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...panic set in around 7 p.m. Sunday evening, when the news arrived from inside Venezuela's National Election Commission (CNE), which is dominated by allies of President Hugo Ch??vez. Referendum returns indicated that Ch??vez's constitutional reforms, including the elimination of presidential term limits, would narrowly lose. Inside the Miraflores presidential palace in Caracas, Ch??vez - who had yet to lose an election since winning the presidency in 1998 - was visibly upset. Still, according to government sources, he soon checked his anger and insisted the tally would turn his way before the CNE announced the results...
...Ch??vez was still losing by less than 2 percentage points. But the CNE, seemingly overwhelmed by the close contest, delayed its announcement while Ch??vez waited for the margin to drop below 1%, at which point he'd seek a recount (as Al Gore did in Florida in 2000, he said later). But the margin barely budged, and the opposition started seething in the streets, fearing fraud. Around midnight, Ch??vez's ex-defense minister, Raul Baduel, who opposed the reforms, warned that Ch??vez was flirting with popular unrest. By 1 a.m., says a government insider, Vice President...
...Ch??vez's calm concession did Venezuela, as well as democracy-challenged Latin America, a valuable service. And, whether he believes it or not, Venezuela did Ch??vez a favor as well by rebuffing the constitutional amendments that sought to expand and extend his already ample political power. The referendum loss should prod him to focus on the Venezuelan problems that need to be fixed before he leaves office in 2013, instead of the globe-trotting socialist and anti-U.S. crusades he hoped to pursue as President "until 2050," as he remarked last month. If so, he stands...
Still, despite polls that show tepid support at best for the reforms - as well as the growing anti-reform protest movement by university students, a cohort that used to be a reliable vanguard of Latin American leftism - Ch??vez is expected to win on Sunday. That's largely because the fiery anti-U.S. leader knows how to get out his base. His administration has politically and economically enfranchized the majority poor for perhaps the first time in Venezuela's history and he has been very skillful at whipping up that mass of his support by portraying contests like this...
...Ch??vez does prevail, pundits then expect to see just what kind of state the former paratroop commander - who controls the hemisphere's largest oil reserves and 12% of U.S. oil imports - really wants to create. Opponents insist that by nixing term limits he is crossing his own Rubicon into a Cuba-style dictatorship. (Ch??vez has already been in power since 1999 and his current term ends in 2013.) But considering that developed countries like France still allow unlimited presidential re-election, as the U.S. once did, that's likely an exaggeration. Bernardo Alvarez, Venezuela's ambassador...