Word: venezuela
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Venezuela A Blow to Ch?...
Manuel Rosales, who captured the Maracaibo mayoral post amid threats by Chávez to have him arrested for allegedly plotting the President's assassination (a charge Chávez often hurls against his critics), said, "The map of Venezuela has started to change." Maybe. But Chávez and the opposition did make Venezuela seem a bit less angrily polarized. Caracas mayor-elect Antonio Ledezma reached out to work with Chavez - a gesture that would make any reported attempts by Chávez to cut off budget resources to opposition victors look petty...
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...
...former army paratrooper officer who led a failed coup attempt in 1992 before winning the presidency in the 1998 election (and a special race in 2000 under a rewritten constitution), has benefited greatly from a dysfunctional opposition led largely by leftovers from the old guard that pilfered Venezuela's oil wealth and left more than half the population in poverty; it thwarted Chávez last year only because a more politically adroit cohort of university students led the anti-amendment movement. Even for Sunday's contests, opposition parties struggled to unite behind single candidates and often failed to offer...
...while Chávez isn't set to loosen his heavy-handed control of Venezuela's legislature and judiciary - as witnessed by the scores of opposition candidates who, like López, were peremptorily disqualified from running - his acceptance of Sunday's results preserved his democratic bona fides. "Aside from his party winning big," says Jones, "he showed that the evil-dictator image is still overblown." After Sunday, it seems, Chávez can best keep things that way by turning ahead to problems that need to be tackled next year, instead of back to matters that voters already decided...