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...regional voting in Venezuela on Sunday was ostensibly about gubernatorial and mayoral contests. But for the past decade, every election held in the Western hemisphere's richest oil nation has boiled down to one thing - a referendum on left-wing President Hugo Chávez. The balloting this time was no different. The bottom line: Did Chávez's party win big enough for him to rebound from a stunning defeat in last year's constitutional plebiscite? That vote reaffirmed the presidential term limits that Chávez had hoped to eliminate - and he needed a huge win this...
...Chávez's United Socialist Party (PSUV) did pick up 17 of 22 state governorships, including Chávez's home state of Barinas, on Venezuela's poor llanos, or plains, where the president's brother Adan held off a strong challenge from a breakaway Chávista candidate. The PSUV also took about two-thirds of the total national vote and kept the opposition from winning the seven or eight states it needed to stun Chávez. If the radical, anti-U.S. firebrand showed anything, it's that his red-beret power and popularity are relatively...
Still, though Chávez crowed that his country was back on "the road to socialism," Venezuela isn't quite "dressed all in red" this week. Until the vote, the opposition had held only two governor seats. Of the five it won Sunday, three control some of the nation's largest population centers, including western Zulia state, the heart of Venezuelan oil production and home to the country's second largest city, Maracaibo. Perhaps worse for Chávez, the socialists lost the mayor's seat in the largest city, Caracas, the nation's capital - even after Ch...
...Former Chávez associate Antonini Wilson was caught trying to smuggle a suitcase stuffed with $800,000 in cash from Venezuela into Argentina last year but was allowed to return to his Miami home by the Argentine authorities, where - the court found - undercover emissaries from Venezuela and Argentina, Duran among them, had tried to threaten and bribe Wilson to hush up a political scandal that threatened the leaders of both countries...
...were divided among 13 candidates. The press at home and abroad hailed her as Argentina's "New Evita" and its "Hillary", and voters believed that Fernández would distinguish herself from the previous administration by repairing the country's relations with the U.S., bruised by close ties with Chávez. She was also expected to improve relations with her domestic opposition...