Word: chavez
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Sunday's vote has already sparked speculation about who might be Chavez's successor in that race, as well as whether a rejuvenated but usually fractious and incompetent opposition might finally field a viable candidate. Aside from perhaps Rodriguez, pundits can think of few if any chavista potentials. Opponents, meanwhile, could include erstwhile Chávez allies like Garcia, who because they defected over the reforms may have a crossover appeal sorely lacking in Venezuelan politics right...
...experts at Harvard said the results of Sunday’s referendum in Venezuela were encouraging for the opposition, but they remained skeptical about the country’s long-term democratic prospects. Sunday night marked the defeat of proposed constitutional amendments that would have granted socialist President Hugo Chavez greater control, including the constitutional power to remain president for life. This is the opposition’s first major electoral victory since Chavez came to power. Federico Andrés Ortega Sosa, a second-year student at the Kennedy School of Government from Caracas, Venezuela, said the election results...
...Indeed, some of Venezuela's poor hit the streets this week for student-led protests rather than pro-Chavez rallies. Luis Escobar grew up in Plan de Manzano, a poor clutter of homes that hang precariously from a hill along an old highway connecting Caracas with the Caribbean coast. He studies telecommunications at UNEFA, a university run by the Armed Forces that often drapes an enormous poster of Chavez over its main building. "People say UNEFA is 100% chavista, but that's not the reality," Escobar said. He attended the opposition's final march on Thursday sporting a university shirt...
...Arlenis Espinal is a university professor at Simon Rodriguez University and a community leader in the lower-class Caracas neighborhood of 23 de Enero, traditionally a bastion of Chavez support where the President himself votes during elections. Espinal, who has been fighting for social change since the 1970s, at times amid police repression, says more people in her area abstained or voted against the President than in last year's election...
...Both Chavez supporters and opponents said in interviews before the vote that they didn't believe the no vote had a chance. Despite that atmosphere, and a persistent opposition conviction that the results could be fraudulent, the nascent student movement helped galvanize many detractors to vote. When students took to the streets to protest the forced shutdown of the opposition-aligned television station Radio Caracas Television earlier this year, the country had all but forgotten that the universities were one of the very few sectors of society left that was not yet controlled by the government. On that occasion, young...