Word: chavez
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...astonishment of his opponents, Chavez did. At around 2 a.m. this morning, Caracas time, Chavez conceded his first electoral defeat since winning Venezuela's presidency in 1998. After facing an unusually strong protest movement on the streets of Venezuela's major cities - led not by traditional opposition figures but by university students who'd grown fearful that Chavez was moving the country toward a Cuba-style dictatorship - his reforms were narrowly beaten back by a 51% to 49% margin. The result, and Chavez's graceful acceptance of it, may well have set not only Venezuela, a key U.S. oil supplier...
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's left-wing, oil-fueled revolution usually carries itself like a swaggering, cocksure juggernaut. So it was a sign that things perhaps weren't looking good for the fiery, anti-U.S. leader Sunday night when he didn't appear on the balcony of Miraflores, the Caracas presidential palace, pumping his fists and crowing confidently about victory. Venezuela's polls had closed in a national referendum on a raft of constitutional reforms that would have profoundly tightened his hold on political power in Venezuela - including an amendment to eliminate presidential term limits (which currently last...
...Only about half of Venezuela's 16 million registered voters showed up at the polls on Sunday. Low turnout was supposed to have hurt the opposition's "no" vote; but in the end it was Chavez, thought to have a reliable populist political machine at his disposal to get out the "yes" vote, who couldn't rouse his base among Venezuela's majority poor. Even that cohort, despite having benefited from Chavez's vast socialist project, backed away from his bid to solidify "21st-century socialism," which also would have put the autonomous Central Bank under his control and exerted...
...President Hugo Chávez, El Troudi formulates socialist strategies that actually get put into practice. Some of them, like an epic campaign to create "socially oriented" industrial cooperative factories, will be put to a national referendum this Sunday, when Venezuelans vote on a raft of constitutional reforms that Chavez says will create a model of "21st-century socialism." From his offices inside a tower in the capital's Parque Central complex, once one of the country's capitalist nerve centers, El Troudi boasts, "Our revolutionary process is at a point of no return...
...referring to the region's historical penchant for protracted personal rule. A chief reason, White notes, is that traditional democracy and capitalism have largely failed to improve Latin America's gaping inequality and frightening insecurity - so voters have largely decided to "cling as long as possible" to leaders like Chavez and Uribe who they feel can. "The failure of democratic institutions like judiciaries has led us back to personalismo, this time lightly fettered by constitutional structures," says White. The U.S. has been complicit, he adds, by regularly and rather lazily sending signals to Latin America that free elections alone...