The Leader of the Opposition

Quico says: You thought Chávez was a handful running the government?

Just wait till you see him running the opposition.

The Urban-Rural Split in Numbers

Quico says: So I wanted to take a more systematic look at the Urban-Rural split in Sunday's elections. Here's what I did:

Using data from the 2000 Census (out of date, but the best we have) - I made a simple ranking of municipios according to the percentage of its inhabitants living in apartments. I think that's a reasonable proxy for the "urbanness" of a place - certainly, it's the best we can do with Census data.

With that list, it was easy to figure out that half of the Venezuelan population lives in 52 municipios where more than 6% of residents live in apartments, and the other half live in the remaining 286 municipios, where less than 6% of the residents call an apartment home. Lets call those first 52 municipios the Urban Half, the remaining 286 the Rural Half.

(Caveat: this is an approximation. As everyone knows, Venezuela is about 85% urban, so the "rural" half still contains places like San Juan de los Morros that a geographer would probably call urban: for our purposes, all that matters is that places like that are "less urban than the place where the average Venezuelan lives.")

Next, I made this spreadsheet looking at the results of races for mayor in the Urban Half.

First things first: the opposition won just 16 of those 52 municipios, while PSUV won 36. Overall, PSUV-backed candidates took 46.5% of the vote in the Urban Half, the main opposition candidates took 44.6%. Chavista dissidents (PPT, PCV and MEP candidates in places where they weren't backing the PSUV guy) got 1.8% and microparties got 1.7% of the vote.

But - and here's the dousy - Opposition Disunity candidates took 5.4% of the vote in the Urban Half. Enough to doom us in more than a few municipios.

Nonetheles, in the Urban Half, anti-Chávez candidates won more votes than chavista candidates.

Lump the PPTistas and commies in with PSUV, and the oppo disunity guys with the mainline oppo, and the election in the Urban Half of the country came out like this:


This next part is more approximative.

It would've been way too time-consuming to calculate another spreadsheet for 286 bumf*#k nowhere rural counties, so I cheated. I subtracted each side's urban votes from its nationwide vote for governor, and called the difference its rural vote. For comparability's sake, I also chucked out the microparties.

That yielded this rough-and-ready estimate of the Urban-Rural split:

Chavismo's entire advantage is down to a better than 3-to-2 split in the Rural Half!

Or, coming at it from a different angle, 60% of opposition votes come from the Urban Half, while just 47% of chavismo's votes nationwide come from the 52 most urban municipios.

Which, I still think, pretty much tells the story of this election.

The Battle for City Hall

Quico says: A while ago, I identified 13 urban municipios the opposition should target in this year's election. I picked out big urban municipios that fulfilled two conditions:

- The mayor elected in 2004 was chavista
- The municipality voted No in the 2007 referendum

These are places where the opposition should've expected big gains. So how did it go?

Not well. We took only four of the 13, lost eight, and one (Maracay) is still in limbo.

The silver lining is that, buoyed by big wins in Maracaibo and Petare, we did get more votes than PSUV in these 13 municipios, edging them out 1.14 million votes to 1.05 million votes. On the other hand, our guys couldn't match the No's performance in last year's referendum anywhere.

Here's the breakdown.

• Mérida City, Mérida:

AD's Lester Rodríguez won with 51.9% of the vote against the PSUV guy's 37%. The communists got 3.5% here. A win, but hardly overwhelming considering we'd gotten 66% for the No side a year ago.

• Maracaibo, Zulia:

Manuel Rosales crushed the PSUV guy 60% to 39.6%. Even so, Rosales underperformed the No vote in Maracaibo by 2.4 points.

• Petare, Miranda:

In the sweetest win of the night, Primero Justicia's Carlos Ocariz came in at 55.6% to Jesse Chacón's 43.9%. The No side had gotten 61.6%, though.

• El Tigre, Anzoátegui:

PSUV's Carlos Hernández squeaked out a win over the Podemos guy, Ernesto Paraqueima, by 48.6% to 47.0%. Disunity cost us this race: PSUV's margin of victory was 1,082 votes, while Bandera Roja ran a no-hoper who got 1,087 votes!

• Coro, Falcón:

PSUV's Oswaldo Leon had no trouble crushing a Copei lady 64% to 35%.

• Puerto La Cruz, Anzoátegui:

PSUV had its own Stalin in Puerto La Cruz, last name Fuentes, who beat out the oppo guy 52.1% to 46.3%. Last year, the No side got 55.2% out there.

• Barquisimeto, Lara:

Amalia Saez rode Henry Falcón's considerable coattails to a PSUV victory here by 55.4% to 41.2% over Causa R's Alfredo Ramos. Marisabel Rodríguz could manage just 2% of the vote in a city that voted 56.5% against letting her ex get re-elected forever.

• Barcelona, Anzoátegui:

Chavismo ran two candidates but won anyway, with PSUV's Inés Sifontes getting 46.7% of the vote, ahead of the AD guy's 43.4%, while a MEP guy took 7.1% - all in a town that voted 53.7% against constitutional reform.

• Maracay, Aragua:

Primero Justicia is asking for a re-count of paper ballots after their guy, Richard Mardo, came in just 100-some-odd votes behind the PSUV guy. Both were on 45.7%. A PPT guy took 4.6% out there. Last year, Maracay was 53.7% No.

• Cumaná, Sucre:

Cumaná was AD's gift to Chávez Sunday night. PSUV's Rafael Acuña took it with 47.8% of the vote, with Podemos's Hernán Nuñez in second on 36.5%. AD's guy got 13.6% of the vote. Buena esa, compañeritos.

• Los Teques, Miranda:

Another squeaker: PSUV's Alirio Mendoza got in on 50% of the vote, with Primero Justicia's Rómulo Herrera second on 48.7%. Los Teques voted 52.9% against constitutional reform.

• Guacara, Carabobo:

PSUV's guy won comfortably: 52.3% to Proyecto Venezuela's guy's 43.5%. The No side won the referendum last year with 51.8% here.

• Ciudad Bolívar, Bolívar:

A rare win for Causa R: Victor Fuenmayor won with 46.3% of the vote to PSUV's guy's 45.2% of the vote. PPT's María Manrique cost PSUV this one: she took 2.3% of the vote and swung Angostura to the opposition, in a place where the No side had 50.3% last year.

The long and the short of it is: we're competitive in most urban areas, but hardly dominant there. Our guys (and, sad to say, our candidates in these towns were all guys) underperformed the No in every one of these municipalities. And disunity's still costing us in places where it never should've been an issue.

The Truth About Petare

Quico says: Petare parish, (in Sucre Municipality of Miranda State) has more registered voters than any other parroquia in Venezuela: 310,430. The barrio it hosts is the biggest in Venezuela. By some accounts, it's the biggest shantytown in all of South America.

Petare is also a state-of-mind, a kind of by-word for all that afflicts urban Venezuela, a place of immense symbolic resonance.

The other day, Chávez blamed PSUV's loss in Sucre municipality on the rich, racist oligarchs that infest the district. While some other parroquias within Sucre municipality do have important middle class - though hardly rich - areas, Petare parish itself is pretty much one giant slum.

The truth is, on Sunday, Henrique Capriles beat Diosdado Cabello Petare by 102,361 votes to 79,436.

Note: (The charts that accompanied this post have gone bye-bye while I get a chance to correct them...)

The Cartogram

Quico says: Lets face it: the standard results map is depressing to look at. Just too much red. Of course, most of those red states have more cows than people. Make the size of each state proportional to its actual (human) population, and you get:

Where Distrito Capital is shown half-and-half since PSUV controls the municipality and the opposition the Alcaldía Mayor.

Isn't that better?

Here's the same thing shown on a chromatic scale linked to PSUV's vote share, ranging from rojo-rojito to a paler shade of oligarch:

[A massive hat-tip to Dónall Ó Murchadha, who put his superior GIS skills to good use making this for us!]

A massive data-trove from Sunday's election

Quico says: Longtime reader Abelardo Mieres has done it again! Over the last few days, Mieres has grabbed CNE's website by the lapels and shaken it virulently until it gave up this massive trove of election data, all in convenient Excel format.

What you get:

1. Results for Governor by Candidate At the State Level
2. Results for Governor by Candidate At the Municipal Level
3. Results for Governor by Candidate At the Parish Level
4. Results for Governor by Party At the State Level
5. Results for Governor by Party At the Municipal Level
6. Results for Governor by Party At the Parish Level
7. Results for Mayor by Candidate at the Municipal Level
8. Results for Mayor by Party at the Municipal Level
9. Results for Metropolitan Mayor of Caracas by Candidate At the Municipal Level
10. Results for Metropolitan Mayor of Caracas by Party At the Municipal Level
11. A National Overview of results in Governors' Races + the Race for Municipio Libertador in Caracas
    
12. All the associated "Fichas Técnicas" (Registered voters, total votes, valid votes, null votes, turnout, etc.)

Download the whole thing here.

One quick, interesting result from Abelardo's work: a staggering 223 parties nominated at least one person for governor somewhere, but just 10 parties got more than 1% of the nationwide popular vote:

Click to enlarge

The first thing that jumps out at you here is how fragmented party allegiances are in Venezuela. The top 10 parties account for 83.6% of the nationwide votes for governor, meaning that a still significant 16.4% of Venezuelans voted for microparties that got less than 1% of the vote nationally. A staggering 413,000 people voted for one of the 165 nanoparties that each got less than 0.1% of the nationwide vote!!

The second thing that jumps out at you is that AD is still the only opposition party with a genuinely national presence: all the other anti-Chávez parties got results in their home regions only.

And the final, belief beggaring thing, is that the Tupamaros - basically a leftwing paramilitary gang founded to carry out extrajudicial killings of neighborhood thugs in western Caracas - are now one of the main parties in Venezuela, larger than such historical parties as Causa R, MAS, MEP, etc! Crazy stuff...

Looked at in aggregate, the party breakdown looks like this:

Julio Cesar: Show me the actas!

Quico says: It wouldn't be a Venezuelan election if nobody was crying fraud. This time it's chavista dissident extraordinaire and scourge of the Chávez clan in Barinas Julio Cesar Reyes, who says that while 99% of actas (official tallies) were electronically transmitted from Barinas back to CNE headquarters in Caracas, only 90% were reported in the first official CNE bulletin. Reyes says that counting the missing 9% of actas would show him in the lead.

Thankfully, for all its many, many faults, CNE's electronic voting system does contain an auditing mechanism that would make any numerical fraud very, very evident. The system generates not one, not two, but three independent tallies: a center-by-center machine tally, a hand-counted audit tally and the central tally calculated by CNE in Caracas. Witnesses from each campaign are entitled to receive copies of the first two on a center-by-center basis; the third is made public online.

If the three sets of tallies match (triple congruence), there's really no credible way to claim fraud.

Just as a refresher, lets review how the auditing mechanism works.

(These slides are just reproduced from a post a few days after the 2D referendum...seems like I end up needing them after every election.)






Basically, it's very simple, Julio Cesar: if you can show, acta en mano, that there is no Triple Congruence between Audit Tallies, CNE Tallies, and Machine Tallies, you have a serious case to make. If you can't, you don't.

Your witnesses were entitled to copies of the Machine and Audit Tallies at each and every voting center in Barinas: if you had your act together, you have them in your possession right now.

So, no te nos vayas por la tangente. Don't tell me about the actas...show them to me. Just get on a scanner and get to it! Which specific voting machines are we talking about? From which specific voting centers? At which specific escuelitas rurales? We need specifics here, not arm waving.

If the 9% of actas not reflected in the First Bulletin really do put you in the lead, you'd better produce the goods.

A fraud allegation, acta en mano, would be absolutely devastating. Without it, it's worse than a waste of time: it's a credibility black hole. Loose talk of election fraud with no evidence to back it up has cost the anti-Chávez movement way too much in the past for us to continue to tolerate it.

Ya basta con la habladera de paja: show me the actas!!

Boy, that took work!

Quico says: It took some doing, but in the end a four-way opposition split handed Valencia's City Hall to chavismo's Edgardo Parra - and even then, by less than 2%!

Good going, guys...Operación Alegría indeed.

Guatepeor update: CNE has PSUV winning in Maracay by 151 votes...oy vey!

Carajo, No Escrutan!

Quico says: Friggin' CNE! I shouldn't be surprised by now, but after making such a big to-do about how the voting system is 100% electronic this time around, is there any reason why we're still waiting for results? And not just details...important posts like mayor of Maracay, Valencia and Parapara are still not up on their results website. Do electrons travel slower in Valencia than in Maracaibo?

Puzzle me this: if you click on Aragua State's Girardot Municipality (a.k.a., Maracay), you can get detailed results for the governor's race, but nothing at all for the mayor's race! What sense does that make? Same voting centers, same voters, same machines, same transmission...THEY OBVIOUSLY HAVE THE DATA! Why won't they give it up?!

Last year, on 2D, the delays were merely annoying - with the added bonus of feeding the conspiratorial fantasies of those so-inclined (I plead guilty, your honor). This year, though, real people all over the country are sitting around wondering if, come next year, they'll be mayor, assembly-member, or unemployed.

How many hundreds of millions of dollars did we spend on this boondoggle again?! For how many election cycles in a row can Tibisay Lucena get away with first telling us we have the best, most reliable, high-tech and fastest electoral system in the world and then sitting on results for hours (or days or weeks or months) on end after they've come in?

A post-mortem of my own

Juan Cristobal says: - Scattered thoughts on yesterday's election:

1. Four words: hard work pays off.
The victories by Ledezma, Rosales, Capriles, and especially Carlos Ocariz underline something the opposition should etch onto their foreheads: you can't win elections without talking to voters and working hard to earn their trust.

Ocariz has been kicking those hills for eight years. Ledezma worked hard for this election, as did Capriles, who last week even had the gall to campaign in Los Valles del Tuy, deep chavista territory. All of them carried a positive message, all of them placed the voters' concerns front and center, none of them made Chavez an issue in their campaign.

2. Liliana needs a day job.
As much as I dislike her, it was painful to see Liliana Hernandez come in fourth in Chacao, after Grateron, Muchacho and, get this, the PSUV candidate. That's just wrong. Finishing behind the chavista in Chacao is like a horse coming in after the ambulance.

Hernandez belongs in the National Assembly fighting with chavistas, not in some mayor's post where she actually has to feign empathy for people's concerns and solve problems. It just doesn't suit her.

3. The parties that matter.
The opposition showed that it's really UNT, PJ and the Copei/PV axis. Ledezma and Morel Rodriguez are one-man political parties, they really belong in UNT, it would make everyone's life simpler.

4. The parties that have stopped mattering.
AD, MAS, PODEMOS, La Causa R, Convergencia, PPT - all vestigial wings. Good riddance.

5. Message to chavismo: moderate or become irrelevant.
Who were the big winners in this election on the government's side? Henry Falcon, Tarek William Saab, Marcos Diaz Orellana, Rafael Isea. All moderates (insofar as a chavista can be moderate) and, except for Saab, relatively new faces.

After ten years in power, chavistas need to renew their ranks and go for moderates who can actually deliver. Because what this election was about was efficiency in providing local services, as all regional elections should be.

6. God-given vacation.
After yesterday's humiliating defeat, one has to wonder what the future holds for Diosdado Cabello. I think he's a lock for an Ambassadorship. At any rate, his slim chances of succeeding Chavez in 2012 crumbled like the hills of Baruta last week.

7-I'll trade you my Velasquez for your Mardo.
People criticized Julio Borges for not backing Andres Velasquez in Bolivar. They may have a point. I think the real reason PJ was backing Rojas in Bolivar (a Podemos guy) was as in exchange for Podemos' support in the Maracay mayor's position, a city where Podemos has solid machinery and where PJ's Richard Mardo is expected to win. Hats off to Borges for pulling this off and broadening his party's appeal beyond Miranda.

8. Re-election now.
It's clear Chavez doesn't have the votes to try and reform the Constitution so he can run again in 2012. And with the price of oil tanking, the longer he waits, the less resources he'll have to keep clients satisfied and fund his electoral machine.

Launching the reform proposal now would be absolutely crazy, but waiting would be even worse for his chances. Expect Chavez to announce it in the coming days.

9. Medvedev is Russian for "quítate-tu-pa-poneme-yo."
With inner-circle chavistas losing yesterday and chavista moderates winning, the race to succeed Hugo Chavez in 2012 just got very interesting.

It's possible Chavez will run a flunky (Willian Lara? Carrizalez? Jorge Rodriguez?) making it clear to everyone he will remain in charge. Will it work? Stay tuned.

10. You give dissidence a bad name.
Lenny Manuitt, Julio Cesar Reyes, Bella Maria Petrizzo, get the hint: there is no dissidence in chavismo. It's either his way, or our way. Not learning this lesson in time has left you as electoral roadkill, ni chicha ni limonada, just unemployed.

Tarek, Henry and The Cat

Quico says: Here's some more Excel fun.

Last night, chavistas scored 710,336 more votes for governor than non-chavistas. Fully two-thirds of that lead came from just three states: Anzoátegui, Lara and Monagas, which Chavismo won by a combined margin of 470,715 votes.

What do the three have in common? Popular chavista governors who did not want Constitutional Reform. In fact, in last year's Constitutional Reform Referendum, the pro-Government Sí side lost those three states by a combined margin of 8,148 votes.

What that means to you is that if those states had voted last night as they did a year ago, chavismo's popular vote margin would've been 2.4%, rather than 7%.

For Chávez, it means something different. There are three simple reasons he can't stand for re-election again in 2012: Tarek, Henry and The Cat.

Geeking out with Excel

Quico says: Here's another way to slice yesterday's results: how did Chavista candidates do in comparison with the "Sí" vote from a year ago ago?

Click to enlarge.

Turns out Chavista candidates outscored the government's 2007 referendum results in 12 states. They underperformed the referendum results in 10 states and Distrito Capital.

The first thing that jumps out at you is that, while we didn't win anywhere rural, we made steady gains throughout the llanos. In fact, we made up ground in Cojedes, Guarico, Barinas, Portuguesa, and Apure compared to where we were a year ago. Yaracuy - a special case, considering the Lapi family saga - is the only Plains state where we lost ground.

But what's really interesting is that three out of the four states where chavistas outperformed the Sí side by the biggest margins are places where very popular chavista candidates got re-elected: Monagas, Anzoátegui and, most of all, Lara, where Henry Falcón got a massive 24 point edge over the "Sí" tally. Why did those three do so much better yesterday than the "Sí" did a year ago? Maybe because, a year ago, all three of them campaigned for the "No" side!

What does that tell you? That if Chávez is thinking of bringing up another constitutional reform to enshrine indefinite re-election, he's going to end up facing the same problem he had last year: popular incumbent PSUV governors mobilizing their voters against him.

The Popular Vote: Chavismo Wins (Corrected)

Quico says: Working off of CNE's first bulletin, it looks like chavismo just took more votes nationwide than we did yesterday:

I've corrected this chart to include Central Caracas only (rather than Metropolitan Caracas) in order to avoid double-counting voters in Chacao, Baruta, Petare and El Hatillo. That change adds 1.1% to PSUV's nationwide total.

State by state, it becomes clear that the huge margins PSUV ran up on us in rural states overwhelmed our advantage in urban states:

Click to enlarge - all non-PSUV votes added for readability.

The state-by-state tally:

Especially noteworthy here is Henry Falcon's Lukashenkoesque margin of victory in Lara. In fact, a quick, back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that PSUV's entire nationwide lead rests on Lara. If you reattribute Falcón's votes to the "dissident" column (where they belong!) PSUV's national share drops to 49.2%!

Obviously, that's a pretty rough way of figuring it. Of course PSUV would've gotten some votes even if Falcón had run as a dissident. But still, a massive portion of the chavistas' lead comes down to the popularity of a single guaro who doesn't really get along with the leadership in Caracas.

Disjointed Morning-After Thoughts

Quico says: I detest more-than-one-topic-per-post posts, but I'm too frazzled and sleep deprived to do better:

1. Los tres cochinitos
Meet the new leaders of the opposition. These three. Ledezma, Ocariz and Capriles: three big wins in Caracas area districts with lots of poor people. Unfair as it is, the other oppo winners from last night have a built in handicap: they just live too darn far away from the big TV studios and news rooms. So these three now become the visible heads of the opposition, the de facto leadership.

They'll have to cooperate. But don't kid yourselves, they'll also be competing. If you've ever seen The Weakest Link, you know the drill: making nice along the way may be necessary, but if you want the big prize, you just gotta knife the other guy in the back at the end. It's nothing personal. Business...just business.

So, which of these three would you rather see end up with the ring? For me, it's an absolute no-brainer...

2. It's the Parapara problem, stupid...
The standard journalistic frame about Venezuela, for the longest time, has been rich vs. poor. What last night suggests is that that's an increasingly outmoded frame. It's not rich vs. poor, it's urban vs. rural. The opposition can compete in poor urban areas. It's in the countryside where we got served again and again and again.

The Parapara Problem is still kicking our butts. In recent years, we've barely ever heard opposition figures pose the problem in City v. Country terms. The oppo leadership hasn't even seemed aware that it had a problem in the countryside. Last night's results are so stark, the urban/rural divide so obvious, you'd hope they'd realize they just can't compete nationally without a rural message and a rural organization.

Then again, our Top Leaders are now all confirmed city slickers, people who wouldn't know how to plant a yuca if their lives depended on it.

Who will lead the big oppo rural revival?! We'd hoped for Julio Cesar Reyes...it just didn't pan out.

3. Next year
2009 will be the first year since 2003 without a National Vote. (Unless Chávez manufactures one somehow...)

4. It's the oil cycle, stupid...
Last night may be remembered as the last election of the Chávez Oil Bonanza. Venezuelan oil prices ended last week just a smidgen above $40/bbl. That shock hasn't really fed through to the real economy yet. Oil markets - like all markets - are inherently unpredictable, but there's a reasonable chance that last night was Chávez's last go at High Oil Electioneering. And there's just no way to make the maths work to avoid a deep adjustment before 2010 if oil prices don't recover soon.

In Venezuela, it's foolish to interpret any election result without placing it in the context of the oil cycle: it's not that the opposition won 5 big urban states + Caracas last night, it's that we won 5 big urban states + Caracas in the boom part of the oil cycle.

5. Unity Über Alles
On this blog, we were fairly dismissive about the opposition's fixation with unity during this cycle, interpreting it as one part sound electoral tactics, two parts panicky squalid hysteria.

In the end splits really did cost us in Bolívar, Barinas and imaginably in some other places like Anzoátegui and Libertador, where we might have poached more votes from the other side if we hadn't been so disunited. The only place where Chavismo paid the price for their splits was Carabobo.

6. Who needs LL?
Juan Cristobal is a blogging GOD for starting to believe in Ledezma's chances before anyone else. (And, I gotta wonder, did Cadena-gate cost Aristóbulo?!)

7. Cosmic Payback
In a small, cosmic way, I feel that forcing Jorge Rodríguez to sit through weekly meetings flanked by Antonio Ledezma, Emilio Grateron, Gerardo Blyde, Carlos Ocariz and Miriam do Nascimento will be some tiny measure of payback for the sheer hell the man put us through back in 2003 and 2004.

8. All that is solid melts into air
What the hell happened in Sucre State?!

9. Who's afraid of the big bad turnout?
Last year, the chavista line was that they lost because turnout was down to 55%. Last night, turnout hit an unprecedentedly high (for a regional election) 65%, truly remarkable...and we still held our own.

10. The final map

Caution: Red objects on this map are smaller than they appear.

First Official Bulletín: Caracas es Caracas y el resto es monte, culebra y chavistas (with noted exceptions)

Quico says: The first official results are in. The opposition lost all the toss-ups except the one that mattered: the Metropolitan Mayor's Office in Caracas.

When all is said and done, we'll have 5 governorships, including the three most populous, as well as Metro Caracas. We still can't win anywhere rural, though.

I'm thrilled about the results in Caracas - especially Petare, where Carlos Ocariz is set to win big. But I'm desperately heartbroken about Barinas. We came so close...so close...

First Results

Quico says: We can now confirm three opposition wins:

• Pablo Perez has been elected Governor of Zulia
• Henrique Salas Feo has been elected Governor of Carabobo
• Morel Rodriguez has been re-elected Governor of Nueva Esparta

Not exactly earth-shattering news, we realize, but this is what we can say for sure at this point. We're trying to confirm other races.

It looks pretty good, but it'll be a long night.

Chigüire Forever!

Chigüire says: Any minute now we could get a bulletin with the final results from the December 2, 2007 referendum.

Plan República: Magical Realism Edition

Quico says: UnionRadio just reported that a bunch of hoods actually held up a voting center in Anzoátegui today, overpowered the Plan República soldiers, and stole two army rifles! Plop!

Super secret confidential inside info:

Quico says: I got nothin'...

Chutzpah Chronicles

Quico says: Muller Rojas denounces that the opposition is offering cash to people waiting in line to vote to go home!

Update: Teodoro says Muller Rojas sounded like he's been drinking. (Election night is so much fun!)

The Nerviest Hour

Quico says: Every election cycle, it's the same thing. The polls close. But results don't come out for another 3 or 4 hours. In the interim, we collectively go insane.

It's hit Borges. Ramos Allup too. They're peddling some weird theory about some strange fraud involving keeping voting centers open beyond the official closing time. How that works is anybody's guess.

It's hard to keep your head during the nerviest hour. The wait feels endless. Por dios.

Ommmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...

Update: Teodoro Petkoff tries to de-dramatize Borges's statement.

What's at stake in Barinas

Quico says: El País of Spain is the only paper to have done some in depth reporting on the race for governor in Barinas. If you can read Spanish, don't miss it: terrific stuff.

"They have nine mansions in Barinas in their names, which they recognize. On top of that they've bought ranches, where they've built even basketball courts. The Chávezes hate me for making this public, but that hatred is reciprocated."

Wilmer Azuaje says the Chávezes are the biggest latifundists and capitalists in Barinas. He says old man Chávez used to own, in a town half an hour by car from the city called Camirí, a little farm called La Chavera, about 30 hectares before he became governor. "Now that little farm is 600 hectares" [about 600 football fields]. A bit frther on, by Isla de la Fantasía river, another member of the Chávez family has La Martinera, a 300 hectare ranch with a basketball court. Nacho also has another one in Santa Lucia, 700 hectares. One of Chávez's nephews has another scandalous farm. But the biggest one of them all belongs to Argenis, La Malagueña, which is registered to Nestor Izarra, a longtime family employee, and comes in at no less than 2000 hectares.

[Hat tip: Kep.]

Yet More Gossip: Street Money Edition

Quico says: PSUV offered its activists payments ranging from BsF. 2,000 to BsF. 4,000 ($900-1800 at the official exchange rate) to work on the campaign. The deal is half-cash, half Cestatickets. Plus Chávez has been promising prize trips to Cuba for the best campaign workers.

Desperation to mobilize folks? Maybe...but still, it's a measure of how brutally outspent we're getting. I mean, if the opposition had the possibility to offer those kinds of incentives to its rank-and-file, you can bet they'd jump on 'em.

(I really feel bad to have to keep my sources secret here, but some things are said in confidence and, well...you understand.)

Resignifying the Porkchop

Quico says: A tiny observation: isn't it funny how the word "chuleta" (meaning cheat-sheet - but literally, porkchop) has been resignified over the last few days?

When I was a kid, a chuleta was, by definition, naughty: the thing you weren't supposed to bring with you to a test. But since CNE declared that it's ok to bring a cheat-sheet with you when you come to vote, I keep hearing all these people-in-authority reminding folks again and again to bring their chuletas...

This is a minor concession to sanity: the voting process today is mind-numbingly complicated. People in Petare, for instance, are expected to vote ten times (mayor, metropolitan mayor, and various numbers of votes for municipal council, state assembly and metropolitan city council) and the number of candidates and parties on the ballot is downright dizzying. Still, there's something weird about hearing, say, Julio Borges telling people again and again how important it is to, in a way, cheat!

(Of course, chigüire just did some resignifying of his own...)

Why Today Matters

Quico says: The funny thing is that today's elections matter almost entirely on a symbolic level. What we're seeing today is the latest installment in the decade-long psychodrama that has been the Chávez era.

With small and shrinking responsibilities and budgets, no tax-raising powers and levels of autonomy that ressemble that of US counties more than US states, Venezuelan governors and mayors can't really alter the political life of the country in any material sense. Least of all now, when the crash in oil prices (and, consequently in situado transfers) will make, to paraphrase an old cliché, "the winners envy the losers."

What's at stake here is something different: the political content of venezolanidad. For a decade, Chávez has been trying to sell us this story where the only Real Venezuelan (sound familiar to anyone?) is a chavista, that voting for the opposition is somehow un-venezuelan, even treasonous. Today, with any luck, the good burghers of Petare, Barinas, Trujillo, etc. will start to put the lie to this brand of emotional-blackmail-cum-political-discourse.

Chávez Cries Fraud!

Quico says: Bonkers but true: Adan Chávez claims when his dad (a.k.a. Governor Chávez) voted in Barinas, the machine printed out a ballot voucher that didn't match the name of the person he had just voted for!

Imagine This?

Rafael (from the comments section) says: With all this talk about how this time Chavez has a lot to lose, not much mention has been made of what happens if we end up with Sucre, Nueva Esparta and nothing else...

That would be a complete reversal of any momentum from last december, and a return to the wilderness from which we may not be able to recover in a long time. That would leave the door open for the approval of the indefinite reelection, and being out of any important regional office for a few more years may make people thing that the only legitimate office pretenders have to be chavistas. The only reason Rosales and his bunch are competitive right now is because they have been there recently, not because of any other particular talent or quality.

I have a bad feeling about this one, we should be much further ahead.

Quico ads: I want to be clear. This is not the most likely scenario. As of one week ago, polling still showed us narrowly ahead in Carabobo, Zulia, Táchira, Trujillo, and Guarico, with Miranda and Barinas basically tied and Cojedes within reach. This here is the worst-case scenario, what would happen if PSUV got a boost in the last week of the campaign and then beat the hell out of us at the turnout game. We're in possible-but-not-likely land here.

The Lee Atwater Awards: Valencia Edition

Quico says: Another bit of polling gossip: support for the incumbent, dissident chavista Governor of Carabobo, Luis Felipe Acosta Carlez (a.k.a., Cap'n Burp), has apparently completely collapsed in the wake of the arrest of his buddy, Valencia mayoral candidate Abdalá Makled.

Along with Chávez's repeated visits, this is turning Carabobo into a two-horse race, with the chavista vote congealing around the execrable Chávez sycophant/attack dog Mario Silva. The three-way dynamic that had been such a boon to oppo candidate Henrique Salas Feo is no more, giving way to a still-unlikely-but-increasingly-imaginable upset by PSUV.

If the government pulls this off, whomever thought up the genius plan to set up Makled's brother for drug trafficking just day's before the election deserves the Lee Atwater Award for Machiavellianism and Dirty Trickery.

(Incidentally, chigüire is on fire this weekend.)

Where are they now? Election edition (+ Bonus rant)

Quico says: Ever wonder what ever happened to Luis Alfonso Dávila, the Miquilenista former chairman of the National Assembly and Interior Minister? Or to Pedro Soto, Air Force captain who set off that string of anti-Chávez pronouncements by active duty officers back in 2002? Or to David de Lima, former governor of Anzoátegui? Or to Rogelio Peña, former Adeco mayor of Barinas and star of my documentary on the Lands' Law?

You guessed it: they're all running no-hope campaigns for governor - of Anzoátegui, Aragua, Anzoátegui and Barinas, respectively.

Bonus rant: Why oh why do so many politicos in Venezuela go to the trouble of running for offices they haven't the slightest sliver of a chance of winning...what's the point?! What good does it do anyone!?

There are eleven candidates for governor in Táchira! In Vargas, things are so out of hand they need two tarjetones to fit in the thirteen candidates for governor! It's insane, most of these people wouldn't get recognized by their neighbors walking down the street.

That's why Venezuelan ballots sprawl so absurdly out of control...seriously, look at that Distrito Metropolitano ballot...you don't need a chuleta to make sense of that, you need an atamel.

And another thing...what's with all these tiny parties? Dozens and dozens of them...springing up like mushrooms after spring rain, they turn the simple act of voting into a baffling ordeal.

Sure, there's the unburied dead...the MEPs and Causa Rs and URDs and MASs of this world...parties well past their sell-by dates that have petered out to insignificance without quite vanishing altogether.

But that's not the worst of it...what I want to know is, on what ontological plane does "Vision Venezuela" exist? Or "Poder Laboral"?! Or "Vanguardia Popular"? How about "Guardianes de la Patria" (some of these have terrifying, Minutemen-sounding names)? Or - I swear I'm not making this up - the "Partido Auténtico Nacional - PANA"? Do these parties hold weekly CEN meetings? Do they have CENs!? If you put their entire membership in a VW Beetle, would you have room left over for your girlfriend and her dog? And, most pressing of all, why don't they get a life?!


In England, they have a simple but effective way to deal with this problem. If you want to appear on the ballot, you have to pay a 500 pound deposit. If you get more than 5% of the vote, that money is returned. If you don't, you lose it.

It's a clever system, when you think about it: giving everyone ballot access while at the same time penalizing la mamadera de gallo. It's even worked its way into the British political vernacular, where "losing your deposit" has become shorthand for an utter electoral drubbing.

The upshot is that British ballots are blissfully free of loonies and no-hopers (well, mostly free). Unlike with our ballots, you can actually make sense of a British ballot just by glancing at it...even if you don't have a double Ph.D in Political Science and Graphic Design!

See? Simple.

A deposit system...would that be so hard? Would it be too high a price to pay for ballots that normal people can make sense of? Would it?

Frontline on Aló Presidente: Simply Brilliant

Quico says: Frontline, PBS's flagship current affairs show, has just released a documentary on el que te conté on its website. They're calling it The Hugo Chávez Show, and it's as close to The Whole Story on Chávez in 90 minutes as you're ever likely to get.

Watch it. No, seriously, watch it. The production values are top-notch, and the analysis is on a level of sophistication well beyond what we're used to seeing in foreign outlets.

This segment in particular, which methodically takes apart the way Chávez brutalizes his own ministers and supporters on Aló, presidente, includes some of the most insightful stuff yet on the way the man actually exercises power. The basic insight/paradox, that opposition supporters enjoy far more freedom of speech in Venezuela than government backers, is brilliantly shown, not told.

Don't miss it.

The Spanish version está aquí.

[Hat tip to like 15 or 20 of you who've been bombarding my inbox with links to this thing...]

Chigüire Strikes Again

Quico says: Barreto reveals revolutionary plans for a sub-aquatic Caracas.

Could Chávez's Cadena Blunder Rescue the Opposition in Caracas?

Panel one: "Not sure whether to go vote or not..."
Panel three: Cadena announcement... "It's decided...I'm going to vote!"

Venezuela: "I could use a little help over here!"
Chávez: "Quit bugging me, I'm on cadena."

Quico says: Looking at editorial cartoons like these, I have to wonder if Chávez's idiot decision to run an hours' long cadena in the middle of a natural disaster might not provide the kind of lifeline opposition hopeful Antonio Ledezma needed to pull off a dramatic, come-from-behind win in the race for Metropolitan Mayor of Caracas.

I mean, that cadena was a disaster. Commandeering the airwaves, all the airwaves, for an unrelated rant, at a time when people needed up-to-the-minute information as a matter of life or death...that just crystallizes everything that's gone wrong with the revolutionary dream.

Chávez se olvidó del pueblo!

The guy's off doing his own thing. Your problems just don't rank all that high in his list of concerns, not even when they're something quite as dire, quite as immediate, as needing to know whether you're about to get washed away by a flash flood in the next few seconds.

That cadena was Fat Man in a Palace Syndrome made visible in its starkest, most dramatic terms. I refuse to believe chavismo won't take an electoral hit for it.

Will it be enough? As recently as a week ago, Ledezma was pretty far behind. Veremos.

Polling gossip: Pessimist's Edition

Quico says: A trusted reader with access to polling data I could only dream of writes in. Our forecast map looks optimistic to him. Says only Sucre and Nueva Esparta are genuine Deep Blues. Zulia, tightening. Táchira, tightening. Carabobo, tightening. Miranda, dead even. Aragua, Anzoátegui, Bolívar, Vargas, Yaracuy and Caracas-at-Large: all well out of reach.

In states where we're behind, we're way behind. In states where we're ahead, we're barely ahead. The one bright spot: Trujillo, where the dissident chavista has a better shot at upsetting PSUV than most realize.

Life Immitates Satire

Quico says: Yesterday's scenes of traffic madness in Caracas reminded me of a classic Otrova Gomas piece called "El Día D." It originally showed up in El Cofre de los Reconcomios - a collection of wonderfully bizarre and extremely funny essays he first published (if you can believe this) all the way back in 1979.

It takes some local knowledge to fully appreciate the genius of this piece, for sure. But even if you've only been to Caracas once or twice you can intuit how the city's location along a long, narrow valley makes this scenario chillingly plausible.

Of course, the original Spanish (which I'll post in the comments,) is way funnier than my translation. Still, here goes nothing:

D-Day
by Otrova Gomas

A couple of days earlier, I had the feeling that the traffic reports on the radio were showing uncommon concern. I seem to remember one of the chopper guys saying he'd never seen so many cars in one place. But really, it all happened on February 24th.

At 9 a.m., the massive traffic jam from Caricuao bumped up into the one from Altamira, while the tailback on Plaza Venezuela practically cut off the flow of cars from the University, whose drivers got desperate and started trying to flee towards the highway via downtown. That might have worked, except the tailback from Universidad Avenue had blocked the highway in both directions.

A number of desperate drivers then struck off for the Norte-Sur, but the congestion on Nueva Granada Avenue, caused by the gridlock in El Paraiso produced by the cars that were fleeing the jam in Caricuao, ended up blocking every route into and out of Central Caracas.

At 10:30, after a truck overturned on the way into the La Guaira highway tunnel, a rubberneckers' crash on the way up into Caracas shut down traffic between the city and the coast forever. We have to acknowledge that people, driven crazy by the hot sun beating down on them, ended up making everything worse by clogging the breakdown lane as they tried to turn around and head back, making it impossible for tow-trucks to reach the scene and try to patch things up somehow.

Meanwhile, back in Caracas, the cars coming from the Cota Mil got boxed in on the eastern end because gridlock on the East-side highway had set off an unprecedented jam on the Francisco de Miranda Avenue, which in turn got blocked on the west by the traffic jams from Chacaito, la Libertador and the end of Casanova Avenue, and to the east by the collapse of the Altamira overpass (que tiempos aquellos!), which buckled under the weight of the cars stranded on it.

I remember that the Prados del Este Highway, crammed full of desperate drivers, ended up gridlocked from Chacao to the Prados del Este roundabout, where furious drivers tried to turn back without realizing that they would end up locked into a circle formed by the cars that were trying to escape through Alto Hatillo from the jams in El Cafetal and Chuao as well as the desperados fleeing Baruta.

At 11:00 a.m., with the entire city clogged and becoming a bedlam of cars trying to turn back, it started to rain. When Catia flooded, traffic on Urdaneta Avenue shut down completely, setting off panic in San Bernardino, San José and La Pastora. Crazed drivers tried to get out by driving on the sidewalks and traffic isles, even if it meant mowing down trees, but the deep puddles that started to form all over the city closed down every escape route.

By 3:30 p.m., the city of Caracas was completely gridlocked without the slightest possibility of movement anywhere. To make matters worse, a bus accident in Tazón shut off passage through the mountains to the South, after the tailback from the Valle-Coche highway ran into the one from the East-side highway.

At first, traffic wardens and motorcyclists tried to help out in emergency cases, but the desperation of people trying to flee through any gap, even if it meant driving over smaller cars, formed an automotive barricade over every nook and cranny that made it impossible even for bikes to get through.

At 4:55, the bikes were abandoned just like hundreds of cars had been. The army overflew the city and the president improvised a cadena from the jam in La Carlota, calling for calm and promising to work things out somehow. But the suppressed sobs in his voice made it impossible to believe him. There was no hope.

Foreign experts declared it impossible to get traffic moving again, explaining that the streets had morphed into one immense traffic jam that circled back on itself again and again like a snake. The only chance to get any movement, according to a Ministry of Transport communiqué, would involve getting 50,000 cars to reverse at the same time, but that would inevitably just mean replicating the jam backwards.

Worst of all was the irresponsible attitude of thousands of drivers who, at 3 in the morning, abandoned their cars. Some even locked the doors to make sure they didn't get stolen.

It was the worst night in memory. The honking horns of idiots, the carbon monoxide, the smoke, the gasoline vapors and the high lead concentrations caused the first fatalities towards 5 in the morning.

Within two days, the exodus started. Still not quite able to believe the official declaration that it was impossible to move that inferno of cars, people started to abandon the city. The absence of supplies turned it into a dead city almost overnight.

Millions of people began the greatest migration in the history of time, taking nothing more than what they could carry in their arms.

Within six days, the city was completely abandoned. It had become the exclusive preserve of hundreds of thousands of vehicles forming a horrific queue of luxury junk. A ghost city populated only by a handful of very patient and extremely inattentive drivers who, never noticing the exodus, waited patiently for traffic to get going.

(Read the original in the comments.)

Thinking through the Major Mayor's race

Juan Cristobal says: A lot of you have asked about the Caracas Mayor-at-Large (or Major Mayor) race between Chavez's candidate Aristobulo Isturiz and opposition candidate Antonio Ledezma. The race is not just one of the most symbolically important ones that will be held on Sunday, it's also a toss-up: one to watch very closely (assuming the rains don't just wash away the whole valley which, at this point, is a toss up too.)

In the last election in 2004, the good people of the Metro area elected Juan Barreto over Claudio Fermin by a margin of 60-40. This went down in the midst of dismally low turnout by our voters, right on the heels of the Great Recall Referendum Debacle of 2004.

Barreto got most of his votes from the Libertador side of the city. Chavista votes in Libertador accounted for 73% of his total. The opposition votes came from all over - 29% of the votes for Claudio Fermin came from Baruta, 17% from Sucre, 10% from Chacao and 6 % from El Hatillo. But still, 37% of his votes came from Libertador.

So in order for Ledezma to win, two things must happen: there has to be a significant increase in opposition turnout in our strongholds of Baruta and Chacao, a surge of opposition votes in Sucre, and a competitive fight in Libertador that blunts Aristóbulo's advantage there. In other words, people in our strongholds need to turn out big, and the predictable chavista victory in its stronghold should be less than overwhelming.

Several facts suggest the wind is blowing in Ledezma's favor. Though he is the one oppo politico Quico loves to hate more than any other, he has run a disciplined campaign, and deserves kudos for getting Leopoldo Lopez's full endorsement.

The competitive race in Chacao may increase turnout if people feel strongly about one candidate or the other. Furthermore, Ocariz may be riding a wave of support in Sucre that could translate nicely into a bigger margin for Ledezma.

Finally, in Libertador, the opposition is running two competitive candidates: student leader Stalin Gonzalez and Claudio Fermin. Neither of them has a chance against Jorge Rodriguez, but this two-sided attack may steal enough votes from Rodriguez from both older, more traditional adeco voters and younger voters identified with the student movement, that it may well push Ledezma over the finish line. If instead of Freddy Bernal's 74% win in 2004 over Carlos Melo, Jorge Rodriguez were to win with, say 50% of the vote, Ledezma could squeak through.

In other words, running several candidates in both Chacao and Libertador could end up benefitting the opposition!

It's the oldest cliché in the book, but true nonetheless: it's all down to turnout. Now with the rains, who knows. In this clip, Ledezma is sounding like the Mayor already.

Panic on the Streets of El Rosal

Quico says: A day of chaos in Caracas yesterday, as uninterrupted, torrential rain caused deadly mudslides and absolute traffic chaos all over the city. Mudslides wiped out at least 30 houses (a euphemism, really they mean shanties) in Baruta (Southeastern Caracas). In Libertador (Central Caracas), 170 houses were destroyed. Five people died in Caracas, including two children. Two more died in floods in Zulia.

As an urban system, Caracas just stops functioning when it rains this hard. Yesterday saw a kind of systemic city-wide traffic collapse. (Erm...more so than usual, is what I mean.) Caracas's open-sewer-cum-river, the Guaire, looked set to burst its banks...literally covering El Rosal with shit. The Prados del Este and Valle-Coche Highways simply stopped moving, with water and mud waist high in places and people reduced to sleeping in their cars. Spotting an opportunity, gangs of muggers made their way through the cola, holding up stranded motorists at will. Mad Max stuff.

Amid all this, at around 4:00 p.m., Chávez called a cadena broadcast, linking up all terrestrial TV and radio. "Good," you think, "the Big Man is taking this weather bull by the horns!"

Not a bit of it...it was just a standard, ranting, ideology-heavy cadena, this time to welcome the Vietnamese president and sing the praises of Ho Chi Minh.

His one mention of the weather? A wistful complaint that all that rain would mess with the satellite link-up to the site of a planned Vietnovenezuelan low-energy light-bulb factory in Falcón State - which was to be the highlight of the cadena. The sheer chaos all around him? Bien gracias...lets just say it wasn't just those light-bulbs operating at suspiciously low wattage yesterday.

For once, Leopoldo Castillo's incensed rant at the end of the cadena made good sense to me:

Fat Man in a Palace Syndrome is never quite so stomach turning as when people really do need their government to help them as a matter of life or death. In the normal run of affairs, Chávez's galactic level of isolation is merely funny, in a sad sort of way. But when the flood waters are rising all around you, it's not funny. Not funny at all.

So there you have it...more and more rain, pouring down and taxing the country's emergency response services just hours before an important vote, and the government utterly focused on the election rather than on sorting out the growing chaos engulfing the city...remind you of anything?

Update: Apparently the Guaire did finally burst its banks in some places. Some reports now talk of 11 deaths from the floods. Traffic in Caracas is still not back to normal. And the forecast calls for more rain today and tomorrow.

Two more 23N maps

Quico says: The pre-election forecasts are coming thick and fast now, and just to keep the people who make them accountable after the election, we're going to keep posting them.

Opposition-linked pollster Oscar Schemel of Hinterlaces has a map that's not miles away from our own forecast:

Schemel has Cojedes and Yaracuy reversed from our map, and he's holding out hope for our side in Vargas, which no one else seems to be doing. He doesn't think Sucre is in the bag yet, though, or that we have a chance in Mérida or Aragua.

The biggest difference, though, has to do with Bolívar, where Schemel thinks we're likely to win, even though the opposition vote will be split between two rival former governors each of which is about as popular as the other! How that's supposed to work, I have no idea...

Then there's Chaverrific pro-government pollster Consultores 30.11. The Venezuelan Embassy in DC has been circulating their forecast - which, right there, tells you about as much as you need to know about these guys' independence. Going through their slides, I got this map:

Ummmm...where to start? 30.11 thinks we have a better chance in Delta Amacuro than we do in Táchira! And they give us an outside chance in Cojedes - rushing into territory where Schemel fears to tread...but then they call Zulia, which the opposition is very likely to win by double-digits, a toss up.

Lets not mince words: this map makes no sense. Their methodology sheet is so garbled, I have to wonder if any actual polling at all went into the making it.

But hey, at least they're giving us Margarita...

23N Map: Caracas Chronicles Forecast

Juan Cristobal and Quico say: So after some debate, we have decided to go out on a limb and publish a Forecast Map for Sunday's gubernatorial elections. We think it'll go like this:


This is basically Juan's post, with Bolívar shifted over to the Solid Chavista column and Mérida downgraded to "Lean" from Solid Chavista. On second thought, we can't see how a divided opposition can possibly take Bolívar, and we have to accept that even if William Dávila is a tool, Mérida has been trending blue in recent votes and the opposition could conceivably pull it off there.

We also decided that in a context where Chávez has spent considerable time and effort attacking the hell out of "dissident chavistas", it doesn't make sense to think of Lenny Manuitt in Guárico or of Julio César Reyes in Barinas as anything other than opposition. So we're making them blue rather than green.

We're real unsure about Portuguesa, where we have neither polling nor inside info to go on. A couple of months ago Datanalisis thought the PPT candidate was competitive there, but we can't really believe chavismo can lose a state like that. Falcón is another place where we wished we had more local knowledge to go on, as was Aragua. But on the basis of what we know now, the former looks like a chavista lock and the latter like an imaginable oppo upset.

Turnout will be a key factor everywhere, but nowhere more so than in the race for Mayor-at-Large of Caracas (how how how to translate Alcalde Mayor?!) We're saying it is lean chavista, but again, if Ocariz wins big in Sucre and the oppo heartland of Chacao, Baruta and El Hatillo turn out in numbers, anything could happen. We'll post on that in detail later.

Overall, the opposition is almost sure to win 4 states, likely to win 9, but could go as high as 13 if the stars line up just right for us. The government is a sure thing in 9 states and likely to win 12 (+ Greater Caracas) in all, but could imaginably win 18 if our people don't turn out.

That's our story and we're sticking by it!

Orbital Identity Crisis Chronicles

Quico says: So I was reading this thing and wondering how long it will take after the satellite breaks down before Chavistas suddenly "discover" that the First Venezuelan Satellite wasn't actually Venezuelan at all and start passing the buck saying, y'know, of course that thing was 100% certified slanty-eyed, rice-burning and amarillo amarillito from day one:

In May 2007, the Nigerian government rejoiced as the Chinese-built Nigeria Communications Satellite - 1 (NIGCOMSAT-1), was sent into orbit by a Chinese rocket at the Xichang launch facility. Nigeria was upbeat and looking forward to 15 years of advanced telecommunications service, thanks to a satellite which China, along with sending into space, had funded to the tune of well over $200 million.

But in early November, after NIGCOMSAT-1 had been in service for only 18 months, all the dreams were dashed. NIGCOMSAT-1 went out of service completely with its onboard electrical power supply damaged significantly due to a malfunctioning solar array. Rumors flew that it was almost completely out of control and perhaps a threat to nearby satellites. These were addressed by Nigerian and later Chinese officials, but only after a day had passed, and after that only a series of denials were issued.

Just a week earlier, the Chinese had launched a new communications satellite for Venezuela known as Venesat-1 which used the same core technology or "bus" as NIGCOMSAT-1. If the sequence of events was reversed, and Venezuela's first communications satellite was still on the ground when the NIGCOMSAT-1 breakdown took place, there is a strong possibility that Chinese satellite engineers would have postponed the launch of Venesat-1 to make sure that the same problem would not surface again.

Now, with the window of opportunity for a thorough pre-launch assessment of Venesat-1 lost, its operators in Caracas are almost completely powerless to control its fate, and no doubt evaluating the need for a new game-plan.

Too-long-to-translate Chronicles

Quico says: Not for the first time, Chuo Torrealba has the most insightful take on the current political situation you're likely to find. (Sorry, Spanish readers only.)

Election guide 2008: The Governors

Juan Cristobal says: - Dozens of governors' races, hundreds of mayor's races. With so much information, what should you watch out for in Sunday's Regional Elections? How will you be able to tell whether we did well or we underperformed?

What follows is my personal summary of the election, including the things to look out for in each state.

First off, Governors.

Safe opposition states

Zulia
Importance: Crucial. The most populous state in the country, one that has rarely supported Chávez in the past, bucking the rest of the country's trend. Oh, and it's the most vergatarious place on Earth ...
Opposition candidate: Pablo Pérez (UNT), Manuel Rosales' right-hand man in the State government for the past eight years. Not a particularly inspired candidate, but he's getting the job done.
Chavista candidate: Giancarlo DiMartino, popularly known as DiMardito. Effective as mayor of Maracaibo, but recent allegations of corruption and links with the FARC have seriously hurt his standing among moderates.
What to look for: Pérez will win, double digits.

Sucre
Importance: Little to none. Beautiful state is also one of the poorest, far removed from Caracas. Traditionally strong adeco presence and nasty fight with the dissident current governor may have come back to haunt chavismo.
Opposition candidate: Eduardo Morales Gil, Sucre's first elected governor and something of an intellectual. Check out this fun little video on his website.
Chavista candidate: Enrique Maestre, mayor of Cumaná. His candidacy has been beset by infighting. One of the states where chavista allies the PCV (Communist Party) is running its own candidate.
What to look for: Comfortable eight-point win for Morales Gil.

Táchira
Importance: A legion of former Venezuelan presidents hailed from Táchira, from Castro to Gómez to Lopez Contreras to Medina to Pérez Jiménez to CAP. Is it something in the water? Border state is home to the main traffic routes to and from Colombia. In recent years, rural areas have become notorious safe havens for the FARC, under the complacent watch of chavista authorities. The state gave the opposition one of its biggest margins of victory last December.
Opposition candidate: César Pérez Vivas, former COPEI congressman and scratching post for demented chavista feline and fellow Táchira congresswoman Iris Varela. Winner of a late primary amongst opposition candidates.
Chavista candidate: Leonardo Salcedo. Won the PSUV primary against all odds, beating strong candidates Vielma Mora and Arias Cárdenas. Considered part of the "technocratic" wing of the PSUV (if there is such a thing). An Oxford-educated lawyer, so it's no surprise Iris Varela considers him a sifrino, which should immediately make him palatable to moderates. Another state where the Communists are running their own candidate.
What to look for: Pérez Vivas with a comfortable nine-point win.

Nueva Esparta
Importance: Little to none. The smallest state in the country is its own little island paradise, far removed from many of the political ills of the mainland. Still, it's nice to know it's there, a sturdy opposition stronghold, one of two states we managed to win in the 2004 debacle.
Opposition candidate: Morel Rodríguez, incumbent governor and a one-time protegé of former President Carlos Andrés Pérez.
Chavista candidate: William Fariñas. Fariñas has had a long and undistinguished career managing different funds set up by Chávez like the FUS and the Foncrei. A former Lt. Cnel. of the Air Force, he participated in the aborted coup of November, 1992. Considered part of chavismo's radical wing.
What to look for: Rodríguez with a comfortable double-digit win.

States that are leaning opposition

Miranda
Importance: Huge. Caracas' backyard is the second most populous state in the nation. A mix of urban and rural voters of all ethnic backgrounds make this an interesting bellweather.
Opposition candidate: Henrique Capriles Radonski (PJ), mayor of Baruta. After much wrangling and the help of Clodosvaldo Russián, who ilegally banned popular former governor Enrique Mendoza, the opposition decanted on Capriles as its candidate.
Chavista candidate: Incumbent governor and Chávez right-hand man, Diosdado Cabello. Hard to believe Godgiven Hair was actually President for, like, three minutes. Makes up lack of charisma with machiavellian sense of timing, a pragmatic streak and an allegedly large stake in many a shady business. Although Chávez has been campaigning hard for him, he has huge negatives that all but rule out a win for him.
What to look for: Capriles ekes out a four-point win, but this could be a cliffhanger, and if Cabello pulls it off, there could be trouble in the streets.

Cojedes
Importance: More symbolic than anything else. Agricultural state in the center of the country is fertile ground for Chavez's message, so an opposition win here would carry large symbolic weight.
Opposition candidate: Alberto Galíndez, former AD governor. Hey, he may be from Cojedes, but he has his own Facebook group.
Chavista candidate: Teodoro Bolívar, mayor of Tinaco. An economist with a graduate degree, Bolívar seems like too much of a yes-man to make much of a dent in a state where the Chávez brand has been severly damaged. Plus, the MEP is running its own candidate in Cojedes.
What to look for: Galíndez with a narrow three-point win.

Guárico
Importance: Moderate. Another one of those llanero states where interesting things are happening. What should be a chavista lock is looking less and less like one.
Opposition candidate: Lenny Manuitt, state Assembly member and the daughter of incumbent governor Eduardo Manuitt. While Manuitt is technically not part of the opposition, she is no chavista either. She hardly qualifies as a chavista "dissident" when Chávez has accused her, her father and her party (the PPT) of high treason and worse. Iris Varela went so far as to accuse Governor Manuitt of violating human rights. Meanwhile, the opposition has been busily shooting itself in the foot by running folk singer Reynaldo Armas and former MAS congressman Nicolás Sosa. Still, look to Manuitt to seal the deal in what has become a fight of Shakesperian proportions.
Chavista candidate: Willian Lara, former Minister, former president of the National Assembly and frontline chavista figurehead. A prissy, urbane university type, Lara has looked hopelessly out of place mingling with rural Guárico voters.
What to look for: Manuitt will eke out a win in this three-way election. Pundits will tack this for the "dissidence," but there is no such thing in Chávez's "with-me-or-against-me" world.

Barinas
Importance: On paper, moderate to little. Symbolically, huge. A loss for Chávez in his own home fiefdom would be hard for the Narcissist-in-chief to digest.
Opposition candidate: Julio Cesar Reyes, mayor of Barinas. While the nominal opposition candidate is former congressman and Chávez marble playmate Rafael Simón Jiménez, he will not be a factor in this election. Like in Guárico, Reyes will ride a wave of anti-corruption outrage and win this election.
Chavista candidate: Adán Chávez Frías. Does the name ring a bell?
What to look for: Save your dulce de lechoza for when Reyes wins with a two-percentage point victory in this three-way election. I eagerly await an ungracious, expletive-laden concession speech by Adán's brother.

Carabobo
Importance: Huge. Industrial powerhouse is the third-most populous state in the nation.
Opposition candidate: Henrique Salas Feo (PV), former governor and the son of former governor and presidential candidate Henrique Salas Römer. Salas Feo lost his job by a few thousand votes in the 2004 debacle, and he looks set to recapture it.
Chavista candidate: Mario Silva, viperous shock-jock. One of the few people in Venezuela the opposition hates more than Chávez. Say what you will, but it takes talent to accomplish such a thing. Running Silva in a moderate, prosperous state like Carabobo is akin to Sarah Palin running for mayor of Provincetown. Don't miss Silva's Frikipedia profile.
What to look for: Salas Feo will win, but by less than people are predicting (I say six points). Incumbent chavista governor and so-called "traitor" Acosta may just steal more votes from Salas than Silva. Still, it's hard to see Silva or Acosta winning this thing.

Final tally for the opposition: 9 states

States that are leaning chavista

Anzoátegui
Importance: High. Populous, prosperous state in eastern Venezuela should be fertile ground for the opposition. In fact, Anzoátegui voted strongly against the government last December.
Opposition candidate: Gustavo Marcano (PJ), mayor of the Puerto La Cruz suburb of Lechería. Marcano was the runner-up in the primaries and assumed the nominal unity candidacy when front-runner Barreto Sira was banned from running. Marcano is young and energetic, but he has been hurt by allegations of nepotism when he named his mother to run for his current post of mayor. Comedian Benjamín Rausseo ("Er Conde del Guácharo") didn't get the unity memo and has run a surprisingly strong campaign.
Chavista candidate: Incumbent governor Tarek William Saab. The "poet of the revolution" has kept a low profile nationally in the last few years, and he has never been regarded as a scenery-chewing chavista.
What to look for: Look for Saab to post a comfortable seven-point win. Marcano and Rausseo's joint vote tallies will trounce Saab, but they won't hatch a unity deal before the election, and first across the finish line wins.

Bolívar
Importance: Large. Industrial powerhouse is the second-largest state of the union, but the governor has traditionally been less powerful than he/she should be given the federal government's outsized importance in the state. Sucre Figarella, anyone?
Opposition candidate: If you want to make the case that the oppopsition cannot get its act together, Bolívar is Exhibit Number One. The opposition is running two strong candidates: former governor, union leader, congressman and Quico's personal friend Andres Velásquez, and former governor Antonio Rojas Suárez. Both are likely to lose, and the fight has at times been ugly. Curious thing about Rojas Suárez: the PJ candidate was the guy at the wheel of the tank that plowed through the gates of the Palacio Blanco on the placid evening of February 4th, 1992.
Chavista candidate: Incumbent governor Francisco Rangel Gómez. This is the rare state where chavistas are running several candidates (the PPT has its own man) and, still, they are poised to win because disunity among the opposing ranks is even worse.
What to look for: Rangel will win a comfortable four-point victory, unless a late-hatching unity pact changes things dramatically.

Yaracuy
Importance: Moderate. State is mostly agricultural, but lately they have become an important exporter of prickly, pointed political punditry.
Opposition candidate: Filippo Lapi. Who? Yes, the brother of the former governor Eduardo Lapi, who is on the run from the feds. Filippo stepped up to the plate like three hours ago, after the Supreme Tribunal decided that Eduardo couldn't run. Late-bloomer will not be able to make a dent.
Chavista candidate: Julio León Heredia, president of the Yaracuy State House. León won the PSUV primary with a mere 26 percent of the votes. Still, this is one state where the Chávez coattails may still carry some weight.
What to look for: León ekes out a close three-point win.

Aragua
Importance: Huge. Industrial powerhouse is looking like an important pickup for chavistas.
Opposition candidate: State legislator Henry Rosales (PODEMOS), who won the Súmate-organized primary in what has been one of the highlights of this election season.
Chavista candidate: Former Finance Minister Rafael Isea. Isea is young, charismatic and sort of likeable from what I can gather.
What to look for: Isea will squeak out a four-point win. It's hard to pinpoint why this isn't closer for the opposition, specially considering that Rosales' ads are really well-made and his website is outstanding. But Aragua is a left-leaning state tailor-made for a moderate chavista candidate like Isea.

Safe chavista states

Mérida
Importance: Moderate. Venezuela's rooftop is beautiful and its population better educated than the average, but its politics tend to be quirky.
Opposition candidate: Former governor William Dávila (AD). A longtime Caracas politician, Dávila is backed by pretty much the entire spectrum of opposition parties. His spots, though, have been particularly uninspired. Check out this one and the ones like it - the candidate is not even shown!
Chavista candidate: Marcos Díaz Orellana, a youngish state government bureaucrat. Díaz benefits from running as a moderate - check out the piano score in the video link on his webpage - straight out of a Hallmark ad.
What to look for: Díaz will win a comfortable five-point victory. This will be particularly disappointing given that Mérida voted 54% against the Constitutional Reform of 2007, but Díaz Orellana has run a disciplined, centrist campaign.

Apure
Importance: Minimal. Apure is like Venezuela's Wyoming, a sparsely populated FARC-infested hinterland. No offense.
Opposition candidate: Miriam de Montilla, former first lady. Don't miss the vacuous, content-free ads complete with an 80s revival band.
Chavista candidate: Incumbent governor Jesús Aguilarte. Apure is one of the few states where the PPT and the MEP are also running candidates. They won't affect the outcome.
What to look for: Aguilarte, double-digits. Apure is the land of caciques, and Aguilarte is the current one. Santos Luzardo never wins in Apure - Doña Bárbara does, and Miriam de Montilla is not Doña Bárbara in this analogy.

Delta Amacuro
Importance: Nil. The Delta is one of those places few Venezuelans have ever been to. With no industry and little agriculture, it basically lives off of Chávez's checkbook.
Opposition candidate: Victor Cedeño (Copei), state assemblyman.
Chavista candidate: Lizeta Hernández, state bureaucrat and the daughter of a former governor. Other chavista candidates include Amado Heredia and Henry Hernández.
What to look for: While El Universal is bullish on Cedeño sneaking in thanks to divisions within chavismo, it's more wishful thinking than anything else. Lizeta Hernández will join Guárico's Lenny Manuitt and the lady in the following state as one of our country's three female governors.

Falcón
Importance: Moderate. Falcón is one of those places that rarely makes the news, but we all sure love to visit its beaches.
Opposition candidate: José Gregorio "Goyo" Graterol (COPEI), former congressman. Graterol was in a bitter fight for the unity nomination against UNT's Luis Stefanelli, and this may have left some scars. His website is surprisingly wonkish in spite of the earsplitting reggaeton soundtrack.
Chavista candidate: Estela de Montilla, incumbent first lady. Chavismo has been remarkably organized in this state, and Falcón residents don't seem to mind the incumbent governor's Kirchnerian move to push his wife into the seat he is term-limited from. I only hope Mrs. Montilla's commitment to her state parallels her dedication to plastic surgery.
What to look for: The bosom, in double digits.

Lara
Importance: High. Populous central state is one of chavismo's bright spots.
Opposition candidate: Who cares? Some schmuck named Pedro Pablo Alcántara (UNT) is gonna take the fall on this one.
Chavista candidate: Henry Falcón. Popular, moderate mayor of Barquisimeto was briefly expelled from the PSUV for not being socialist enough, only to force Chávez to swallow his insults due to the mere power of his appeal. One of the few chavistas a good chunk of the opposition will be voting for.
What to look for: Falcón in Lara, in triple digits.

Monagas
Importance: Moderate to high. Oil powerhouse makes it important, but the real power lies in PDVSA.
Opposition candidate: Domingo Urbina (AD), mayor of Maturín, the state's capital. Long legacy of AD backdeals in the home state of Luis Alfaro Ucero suggests Urbina is running on a damaged brand.
Chavista candidate: Incumbent governor Jose Gregorio "el Gato" Briceño. You gotta admire a politician with the gall to name his political party "my cat", but even more admirable is the fact that he is hugely succesful.
What to look for: Briceño, in double digits.

Portuguesa
Importance: Low. Agricultural state has many problems, but they seem set to stick with chavismo.
Opposition candidate: Jobito Villegas (COPEI), current mayor of Mun. Sucre. Villegas has been mentioned in an ugly scheme involving the state police and human rights violations, and this has kept him off message.
Chavista candidate: Wilmar Castro Sotelo, former Tourism Minister and a close ally of Chávez. A moderate in nature (I once heard him being cordially interviewed by Marianella Salazar of all people), he is benefitting from strong chavista roots in his state.
What to look for: Not even Our Lady of Coromoto can prevent Castro from coasting to a double-digit victory. Chavez's allies the PPT and PCV are running a separate candidate, state congresswoman Bella María Petrizzo, but the PPT will lose this seat they currently hold and Castro will be elected.

Trujillo
Importance: Moderate to none. My old stomping grounds, the place where maracuchos drive to "cool off" and harass the locals with their loud music, it is a lovely state to visit, but is rarely in the news. It is also a chavista stronghold, as solidly red as they come.
Opposition candidate: Enrique Catalán (UNT), the former mayor of Valera.
Chavista candidate: Hugo Cabezas, the former head of the ONIDEX and the guy whose signature in the form of an "x" graces millions of Venezuelan ID cards. When you think of it, voters will be voting using a card signed by Cabezas himself - how's that for effective advertising?
What to look for: Cabezas in double digits. Catalán is a nice enough guy, but he's just no match for the chavista machinery in full throttle backing a candidate with national name recognition. Besides, what do Trujillo voters care about an article in the Miami Herald?

Vargas
Importance: Moderate. Vargas is one of those heavily chavista states that is just begging to be flipped. If only...
Opposition candidate: Roberto Smith (VdP), former Minister, Ambassador and Presidential candidate. A technocrat and a favorite of Quico's, one can only hope his day finally comes. It won't be this time though.
Chavista candidate: Jorge Luis García Carneiro, loyal chavista general, former Minister and a "hero" of chavista mythology concerning the 2002 coup.
What to look for: García Carneiro is a lock here, in double digits. Varguenses' dependence on the federal government will override any hopes Smith has of flipping tiny Vargas.

Final tally for chavismo: 13 states.