by Gustavo Soto-Rosa
I want to warn you, first off, that I'm a die hard comeflor, but at the same time I am very distrustful.
What if the Coordinadora, seeing itself on the losing end, invented the story of the fraud to hang on to the 41%, plus those "they stole from us"?
If the exit polls were showing the Si winning four hours before the end of voting and they knew the government was preparing to say No had won, why didn't they publish a statement calling on people to be alert and not to let the ballot boxes out of sight even for a minute in the centers chosen for an on-the-spot audit? Why didn't they give the news media a list of these polling centers? There were opposition representatives in just 27 of the 192 centers selected for the audit. Why didn't they demand the presence of international observers right then, not in Caracas but on the spot at each audit center? Was there a directive issued to stand back from the audit process, from the counting and the tallying and from the after-the-fact audit in order to create doubt? Remember that the first to cry fraud was (Accion Democratica Secretary General) Ramos Allup, and I hope he'll forgive me, but he's one of the CD leaders that inspires least confidence. In fact, I believe he didn't use the word fraud.
Which, of course, take us to the exit polls. They're the very definition of inauditable and can easily be manipulated in tallying. This would show up Plaza and Machado as liars, which is hard to believe, unless they temselves were fooled. [Quico's note - they could also be hopelessly incompetent.] It would also make fools of Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates, the company that designed the exit poll. They have publicly backed the results of their poll. They're a recognized firm with lots to lose if its methodology is questioned, or worse yet, its ethics.
I of course don't doubt for a minute that the government would be willing and able to carry out a fraud. In fact, the fraud is out in the open in the form of the scandalous use of public resources for the No campaign; an unscrupulous use of the goods and power of the state to plow over dissenters and hoard yet more power.
I also think it's very possible that there could have been a switch at the moment when each voting machine connected at to the central database so it would register not the real vote, but pre-programmed, tampered with votes. Call it "matrix" voting, because at the same time it would have to print up the ballots for the fraud to be switched with the pre-existing boxes at the right moment.
Of course, here the plot thickens because we've already seen how long it took Sumate to organize 3.5 million signatures. In this case you'd have to dilute two million voting papers among many others (9.5 million) to make the switch go by unseen. That means they'd have to have had a battery of printers working day and night with people to organize all the boxes, close them with fake signatures to then transport them and switch them with the original.
This is where the fraud theory falls under its own weight.. To be able to pull off a stunt of this caliber, the government would've needed a small army of people to set it all up. A few hackers could have manipulated the system and you could keep that secret, but you can't do that with a mass of people working to switch millions of ballots. How many people did Sumate need to organize the signatures? Multiply it by three. How much time did Sumate, an efficient organization, take? These people were supposedly ready for an audit in two days and according to Smartmatic, they're ready for a total audit. Something is not right with this theory. The government has given many signs of extreme clumsiness when efficiency counts most. Remember how hard a time they had getting signatures against the diputados.
Obviously, somebody is lying here. The truly tragic thing wouldn't be if our adversary lied to us, from Chavez we expect that and much more, but if the betrayal came from our own leaders.
And may God forgive me for going around mistrusting people, like my old lady says.
Join a moderated debate on this post.
August 30, 2004
The political dynamics of crying fraud
Whether or not there was fraud is one question. The political dynamics of the Fraud-claim are something else altogether.
Who gains from the fraud claim?
1-The Current CD Leadership: Claiming fraud shields the CD leadership from an uncomfortable debate about what they did wrong, how they managed to lose the election, and what they should do differently in the future. So long as they cling on to their "reasonable doubt", CD leaders don't have to walk the plank, and they know it. Probably, an all-out finger-pointing Battle Royale would break out if the CD accepted results as legitimate. Fractures would turn up immediately, the CD could collapse altogether. (This, in my opinion, would be a good thing, not a bad thing.)
2-Chavez: At the same time, the fraud claim serves Chavez well, by painting the CD as the same old tired extremist fringe of April 12th 2002 and Dec-Jan 2002-2003. An opposition wedded to fraud claims will tend to exclude itself from the political process, marginalize itself internationally and alienate the uncommited swing-voters Venezuelans call Ni-Nis. Such a movement cannot and will not carry out the painful process of introspection it would take to correct the mistakes it's made in the last two years. Politically, then, the fraud claims are a God-send to the government.
[In my more conspiratorial moments, I tend to think the CNE understands that fraud-claims benefit Chavez, and has refused to take the steps it would take to convince the opposition that the election was clean (the hot-audit, a wide-ranging cold-audit of ballot papers, a machine audit) as a way of keeping the opposition's "reasonable doubt" alive.]
Meanwhile, who loses?
1-Rank-and-file opposition members: Not only did we lose the election, now we're also losing the opportunity to use that loss as a platform to renew our political movement. The referendum leaves us stuck not just with Chavez, but also with the opposition leadership that managed to lose the referendum against him.
2-Rank-and-file chavistas: Who, like anyone who lives in democracy, stand to benefit from having a serious, vigorous, forward looking opposition to the government rather than the dawning Chavista one-party system.
In other words, quite aside from whether there was or wasn't fraud, official results will not change. Given that they will not change, we have to ask ourselves: what is the sense of continuing these claims? Who do they benefit? When will the opposition's rank-and-file work up some anger at the CD and demand more serious leadership?
Join a moderated debate on this post.
Who gains from the fraud claim?
1-The Current CD Leadership: Claiming fraud shields the CD leadership from an uncomfortable debate about what they did wrong, how they managed to lose the election, and what they should do differently in the future. So long as they cling on to their "reasonable doubt", CD leaders don't have to walk the plank, and they know it. Probably, an all-out finger-pointing Battle Royale would break out if the CD accepted results as legitimate. Fractures would turn up immediately, the CD could collapse altogether. (This, in my opinion, would be a good thing, not a bad thing.)
2-Chavez: At the same time, the fraud claim serves Chavez well, by painting the CD as the same old tired extremist fringe of April 12th 2002 and Dec-Jan 2002-2003. An opposition wedded to fraud claims will tend to exclude itself from the political process, marginalize itself internationally and alienate the uncommited swing-voters Venezuelans call Ni-Nis. Such a movement cannot and will not carry out the painful process of introspection it would take to correct the mistakes it's made in the last two years. Politically, then, the fraud claims are a God-send to the government.
[In my more conspiratorial moments, I tend to think the CNE understands that fraud-claims benefit Chavez, and has refused to take the steps it would take to convince the opposition that the election was clean (the hot-audit, a wide-ranging cold-audit of ballot papers, a machine audit) as a way of keeping the opposition's "reasonable doubt" alive.]
Meanwhile, who loses?
1-Rank-and-file opposition members: Not only did we lose the election, now we're also losing the opportunity to use that loss as a platform to renew our political movement. The referendum leaves us stuck not just with Chavez, but also with the opposition leadership that managed to lose the referendum against him.
2-Rank-and-file chavistas: Who, like anyone who lives in democracy, stand to benefit from having a serious, vigorous, forward looking opposition to the government rather than the dawning Chavista one-party system.
In other words, quite aside from whether there was or wasn't fraud, official results will not change. Given that they will not change, we have to ask ourselves: what is the sense of continuing these claims? Who do they benefit? When will the opposition's rank-and-file work up some anger at the CD and demand more serious leadership?
Join a moderated debate on this post.
Return to Interactivity
One week ago, I pulled the plug on the simple "comments" feature due to the turn the discussions had taken...straight into the gutter. This week, thanks to the initiative of several readers, Caracas Chronicles returns to interactivity on a far fancier, moderated forum platform: Nueva-Venezuela.org.
The new software is far more powerful and flexible than the old haloscan comments forum. Nueva-Venezuela has sections for debates in both English and Spanish. It requires you to register before posting, and it will make it much easier to nip abusive posting in the bud.
In the interest of the separation of powers, I will not moderate the discussion myself: longtime posters Pepe Mora and Gustavo Soto-Rosa will keep the peace. Pepe and Gustavo will work hard to keep the debate constructive and civilized: with any luck, the result will be vigorous discussion free from sterile ideological diatribes, personal attacks or party-line rants. Put another way, Pepe and Gustavo will have plenipotentiary authority to boot your ass out of the forum if you succomb to posting sterile ideological diatribes, personal attacks or party-line rants.
Scared yet? If you're not, click here to join the new moderated forum at Nueva-Venezuela.org.
The new software is far more powerful and flexible than the old haloscan comments forum. Nueva-Venezuela has sections for debates in both English and Spanish. It requires you to register before posting, and it will make it much easier to nip abusive posting in the bud.
In the interest of the separation of powers, I will not moderate the discussion myself: longtime posters Pepe Mora and Gustavo Soto-Rosa will keep the peace. Pepe and Gustavo will work hard to keep the debate constructive and civilized: with any luck, the result will be vigorous discussion free from sterile ideological diatribes, personal attacks or party-line rants. Put another way, Pepe and Gustavo will have plenipotentiary authority to boot your ass out of the forum if you succomb to posting sterile ideological diatribes, personal attacks or party-line rants.
Scared yet? If you're not, click here to join the new moderated forum at Nueva-Venezuela.org.
August 29, 2004
Something very strange happened in Venezuela
Readers of this blog know I've had a very hard time trying to piece together what happened during and after the August 15th referendum. Like everyone in the opposition, I've gone through a lot of confusing, contradictory information on whether or not claims of fraud make any sense.
It's a disorienting exercise. Both sides have seemingly incontrovertible arguments, and each has to resort to fantastic allegations to refute the other. CNE has the backing of international observers not only for its official results, but also for a very-tricky to get-around consequent audit. CANTV has ratified that its machine operators and data transmission system worked as advertised. No concrete evidence of fraud has been brought forward. The opposition can only disown the results by explaining away a this evidence on the basis of a massive, perfect conspiracy, a conspiracy with no visible leaks.
But the opposition also has evidence in hand that cannot be contradicted without supposing an set of equal but opposite conspiracies. Everyone knows there's no way that a professionally run exit poll using established methodology and repeated by several different organization comes out with a result 40 points off from the official result. This happened in Venezuela systematically. There are state level pollsters in Venezuela that have been carrying out exit polls using the same methodology in election after election and never gotten an exit poll result more than 1% off from the announced result. This time, using the same methodology and polling intensively - as always - in poor areas, they come up with results miles away from those announced.
No "nice" hypothesis can explain the gap: it's not a matter of bias in the areas polled, because exit poll results from given voting centers vary widely from the results reported from that center. Nor can the gap be assigned to the choice of political activists as polling staff: polls run by Sumate volunteers came up with similar results as polls carried out by firms that hire college students as interviewers.
The only possible explanation for the disparity is that there's a wide-ranging conspiracy, a kind of fraud-crying cartel of any number of different organizations to diffuse false exit poll results. This sort of story is easy for chavistas to believe, after hearing years of oversimplifications and lies about the opposition. But if it is a conspiracy, it's a perfect conspiracy - one where no one leaks, no one squeals, no one made a single mistake.
Whether or not you believe there was fraud, you're required to believe a series of wildly improbable evils against your political opponents for the events of the last two weeks to make sense. Rather than providing a solution to deepening polarization, the dispute over the referendum became yet another phase in this process of increasing polarization of the country into competing camps that believe the very worst about one another.
Because, in the end, Venezuelans will believe the conspiracy theory that favors their side of the political divide and that's the end of it. And this is what's so worrying about this odd-ball situation the country's living. Each half of the country is forced to believe a conspiracy theory that paints the other half in the worst possible light. Each takes refuge in its own truth, and building an understanding, let alone trust, across the divide becomes impossible.
Which is too bad, because Venezuela was badly in need of a peaceful, democratic, electoral and constitutional solution to the governability crisis, and it didn't get it.
Join a moderated debate on this post.
It's a disorienting exercise. Both sides have seemingly incontrovertible arguments, and each has to resort to fantastic allegations to refute the other. CNE has the backing of international observers not only for its official results, but also for a very-tricky to get-around consequent audit. CANTV has ratified that its machine operators and data transmission system worked as advertised. No concrete evidence of fraud has been brought forward. The opposition can only disown the results by explaining away a this evidence on the basis of a massive, perfect conspiracy, a conspiracy with no visible leaks.
But the opposition also has evidence in hand that cannot be contradicted without supposing an set of equal but opposite conspiracies. Everyone knows there's no way that a professionally run exit poll using established methodology and repeated by several different organization comes out with a result 40 points off from the official result. This happened in Venezuela systematically. There are state level pollsters in Venezuela that have been carrying out exit polls using the same methodology in election after election and never gotten an exit poll result more than 1% off from the announced result. This time, using the same methodology and polling intensively - as always - in poor areas, they come up with results miles away from those announced.
No "nice" hypothesis can explain the gap: it's not a matter of bias in the areas polled, because exit poll results from given voting centers vary widely from the results reported from that center. Nor can the gap be assigned to the choice of political activists as polling staff: polls run by Sumate volunteers came up with similar results as polls carried out by firms that hire college students as interviewers.
The only possible explanation for the disparity is that there's a wide-ranging conspiracy, a kind of fraud-crying cartel of any number of different organizations to diffuse false exit poll results. This sort of story is easy for chavistas to believe, after hearing years of oversimplifications and lies about the opposition. But if it is a conspiracy, it's a perfect conspiracy - one where no one leaks, no one squeals, no one made a single mistake.
Whether or not you believe there was fraud, you're required to believe a series of wildly improbable evils against your political opponents for the events of the last two weeks to make sense. Rather than providing a solution to deepening polarization, the dispute over the referendum became yet another phase in this process of increasing polarization of the country into competing camps that believe the very worst about one another.
Because, in the end, Venezuelans will believe the conspiracy theory that favors their side of the political divide and that's the end of it. And this is what's so worrying about this odd-ball situation the country's living. Each half of the country is forced to believe a conspiracy theory that paints the other half in the worst possible light. Each takes refuge in its own truth, and building an understanding, let alone trust, across the divide becomes impossible.
Which is too bad, because Venezuela was badly in need of a peaceful, democratic, electoral and constitutional solution to the governability crisis, and it didn't get it.
Join a moderated debate on this post.
August 27, 2004
Who in the opposition has the moral authority to accept a Chavez victory?
Teodoro Petkoff does.
This is the Aug. 25th editorial in TalCual
Sumate's statement, published yesterday, gives rise to an urgent reflection. In effect, if "it is not possible to speak of fraud without strong evidence," a question of utmost importance arises:
What if there was no fraud? What if the results of the referendum reflect the will of the voters? Today, CANTV reaffirms, on the basis of technical arguments, what the Coordinadora Democratica had said before the referendum about the adequacy of the automated voting system. We recommend reading CANTV's statement because it leads to another question: isn't it possible that the vote remains a trustworthy democratic instrument and that refusing to use it could leave that huge mass of at least 40% of the voters without any kind of alternative vis-a-vis those in power?
Clearing up this matter quickly is crucial for the immediate future, but also for the long term. We have to get past our shock, depression and anger to examine more clearly and lucidly what happened. Because, if Sumate is now cautiously saying that "the numerical patterns found in the actas do not constitute conclusive proof of fraud" (El Nacional, Aug. 23rd, page A3); if CANTV vouches for the total effectiveness with which it carried out its responsibilities on the referendum (which, incidentally, were not limited to data transmission but also included coordinating the work of over 11,000 voting machine operators); if the results of the manual voting tables, which constitute a gigantic sample of one million of the country's poorest voters confirms the general tendency registered in the poorest areas; if OAS and the Carter Center, whose guarantees were previously said to be sufficient to accept the results, did not "rush to judgment" but instead correctly judged reality; if the exit polls, which are now thrown around as though they were Moses's Tablets, were not trustworthy enough, as expressed by one of the main pollsters in Venezuela (whose own exit polls, incidentally, had detected the trend in favor of the No from early on); if, all things considered, it does not appear to be a coincidence that all the pre-vote polls (except UCV's) had the No ahead, isn't it about time, then, to leave behind the listlessness produced by the results and to start to admit that the evidence indicates that Chavez won the referendum, but that the referendum also showed the existence of a powerful force of opposition voters, which won in Caracas and the biggest cities in the countries, that even in the chavista strongholds of the shantytowns has between 30% and 40% of the electorate, and that it would therefore be extremely irrational and irresponsible for people to give in to hopelessness and to fail to participate in the state and local elections next month?
Refusing to capitulate goes beyond mere rhetoric.
It means giving up the consoling conspiracy theories about Bush and "that old wanker" Carter, supposedly in favor of the oil interests of the empire, with the complicity of - wait for it - the Colombian oligarchy as represented by "that fucking Colombian" Gaviria; it means discarding the "pregnant bird" stories about the "Russian superprogrammer" who supposedly tampered with the machines and other such nonsense, and recognizing rather that something must have happened in these last few years in this country to allow the victory of a rhetoric of social redemption in the mouth of a strong leader who knows how to communicate it, and who despite heading one of the worse governments in recent memory, manages to hang on to the affection and the backing of millions of our fellow citizens who do not "sell" their votes but rather identify themselves still - though less and less so - with that hawker of illusions and hopes called Hugo Chavez.
For those who refuse to capitulate, digesting all of this and metabolizing it is indispensable: we need to lick our wounds, jump back into the ring, and fight.
This is the Aug. 25th editorial in TalCual
Sumate's statement, published yesterday, gives rise to an urgent reflection. In effect, if "it is not possible to speak of fraud without strong evidence," a question of utmost importance arises:
What if there was no fraud? What if the results of the referendum reflect the will of the voters? Today, CANTV reaffirms, on the basis of technical arguments, what the Coordinadora Democratica had said before the referendum about the adequacy of the automated voting system. We recommend reading CANTV's statement because it leads to another question: isn't it possible that the vote remains a trustworthy democratic instrument and that refusing to use it could leave that huge mass of at least 40% of the voters without any kind of alternative vis-a-vis those in power?
Clearing up this matter quickly is crucial for the immediate future, but also for the long term. We have to get past our shock, depression and anger to examine more clearly and lucidly what happened. Because, if Sumate is now cautiously saying that "the numerical patterns found in the actas do not constitute conclusive proof of fraud" (El Nacional, Aug. 23rd, page A3); if CANTV vouches for the total effectiveness with which it carried out its responsibilities on the referendum (which, incidentally, were not limited to data transmission but also included coordinating the work of over 11,000 voting machine operators); if the results of the manual voting tables, which constitute a gigantic sample of one million of the country's poorest voters confirms the general tendency registered in the poorest areas; if OAS and the Carter Center, whose guarantees were previously said to be sufficient to accept the results, did not "rush to judgment" but instead correctly judged reality; if the exit polls, which are now thrown around as though they were Moses's Tablets, were not trustworthy enough, as expressed by one of the main pollsters in Venezuela (whose own exit polls, incidentally, had detected the trend in favor of the No from early on); if, all things considered, it does not appear to be a coincidence that all the pre-vote polls (except UCV's) had the No ahead, isn't it about time, then, to leave behind the listlessness produced by the results and to start to admit that the evidence indicates that Chavez won the referendum, but that the referendum also showed the existence of a powerful force of opposition voters, which won in Caracas and the biggest cities in the countries, that even in the chavista strongholds of the shantytowns has between 30% and 40% of the electorate, and that it would therefore be extremely irrational and irresponsible for people to give in to hopelessness and to fail to participate in the state and local elections next month?
Refusing to capitulate goes beyond mere rhetoric.
It means giving up the consoling conspiracy theories about Bush and "that old wanker" Carter, supposedly in favor of the oil interests of the empire, with the complicity of - wait for it - the Colombian oligarchy as represented by "that fucking Colombian" Gaviria; it means discarding the "pregnant bird" stories about the "Russian superprogrammer" who supposedly tampered with the machines and other such nonsense, and recognizing rather that something must have happened in these last few years in this country to allow the victory of a rhetoric of social redemption in the mouth of a strong leader who knows how to communicate it, and who despite heading one of the worse governments in recent memory, manages to hang on to the affection and the backing of millions of our fellow citizens who do not "sell" their votes but rather identify themselves still - though less and less so - with that hawker of illusions and hopes called Hugo Chavez.
For those who refuse to capitulate, digesting all of this and metabolizing it is indispensable: we need to lick our wounds, jump back into the ring, and fight.
August 26, 2004
Turning Japanese
"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."
I show this sentence to Kanako, my Japanese friend. She looks at it for a second, thinks about it, and in her broken Italian says, "No, it's not right."
"Hmm?"
"Maybe it's right in Europe, but somebody Japanese would never believe it. It's a very European idea."
"How do you mean?"
"I think because Europeans are monotheist, you know, there is only one God, and therefore there is only one truth. But in Japan, we don't think this way. We have so many Gods, so many spirits. And a spirit is a source of truth. So for us, it is normal to think that there are many truths, that one spirit doesn't get to impose its truth on another. So yes, Sherlock Holmes is right...in Europe. We, we would never accept it."
"But you see, Kanako, that won't do, because either most Venezuelans voted yes or most Venezuelans voted no. It can't be both."
"Of course," she says, "but you don't understand. Yes, there is one truth on that level. But it doesn't matter. Because the truth is something we make, collectively, by believing in it. Today, maybe so many people in Venezuela believe that Yes won, and for them, that is the truth. Others believe that No won, and for them, that is the truth. They make it the truth by believing in it."
"But a country can't work this way, with half the country sure the other country is wrong."
She smiles and shrugs, "maybe a christian country can't work that way. I don't know what to say. It's a very western idea. For me, having a lot of different truths, well, it's normal, it's the most normal thing there is."
I try to make sense of Kanako's words, and I struggle. But I see that, in some sense, she's just right. There was fraud. And there was no fraud. And half the country will never believe that there was no fraud. And half the country will never believe there was fraud. We're not Japanese. We can't think of that as normal. But maybe, who knows, maybe the Japanese are right. Maybe it is normal. Maybe it's the most normal thing in the world.
I show this sentence to Kanako, my Japanese friend. She looks at it for a second, thinks about it, and in her broken Italian says, "No, it's not right."
"Hmm?"
"Maybe it's right in Europe, but somebody Japanese would never believe it. It's a very European idea."
"How do you mean?"
"I think because Europeans are monotheist, you know, there is only one God, and therefore there is only one truth. But in Japan, we don't think this way. We have so many Gods, so many spirits. And a spirit is a source of truth. So for us, it is normal to think that there are many truths, that one spirit doesn't get to impose its truth on another. So yes, Sherlock Holmes is right...in Europe. We, we would never accept it."
"But you see, Kanako, that won't do, because either most Venezuelans voted yes or most Venezuelans voted no. It can't be both."
"Of course," she says, "but you don't understand. Yes, there is one truth on that level. But it doesn't matter. Because the truth is something we make, collectively, by believing in it. Today, maybe so many people in Venezuela believe that Yes won, and for them, that is the truth. Others believe that No won, and for them, that is the truth. They make it the truth by believing in it."
"But a country can't work this way, with half the country sure the other country is wrong."
She smiles and shrugs, "maybe a christian country can't work that way. I don't know what to say. It's a very western idea. For me, having a lot of different truths, well, it's normal, it's the most normal thing there is."
I try to make sense of Kanako's words, and I struggle. But I see that, in some sense, she's just right. There was fraud. And there was no fraud. And half the country will never believe that there was no fraud. And half the country will never believe there was fraud. We're not Japanese. We can't think of that as normal. But maybe, who knows, maybe the Japanese are right. Maybe it is normal. Maybe it's the most normal thing in the world.
August 25, 2004
Why is this blog so quiet...
Because, to cite Sumate's Aug. 23rd statement...
Sumate has received hundreds of reports of fraud from citizens, civil associations and other organizations [...] Some of these reports have already been investigated and discarted, while others have given rise to more in-depth investigations that will allow, in due time, to demonstrate or rule out the reports of irregularities and to finally uncover the truth.
One of the reports is referred to a series of "patterns" identified in the tallying reports (actas). Sumate is consulting experts and academics in Venezuela and abroad who are carrying out a detailed and exhaustive analysis of these cases. So far, they do not constitute a convincing proof of fraud.
However, we must warn the people of Venezuela that these investigations will take some time.
[...]
A legitimate reconciliation between Venezuelans can only come once all doubts about what happened during the referendum have been cleared up.
We deserve to know the truth. If the result is that the winning option was NO, then NO voters must not feel shame to proclaim it and must not remain under the shadow of suspicion of fraud. If the winning result is the SI, it shall be necessary to proceed to the necessary correction to recognize the will of the Venezuelan people.
Deep down, I'm now 99% convinced that there was no fraud and the government won cleanly. However, I can't make a final judgement until I read and consider Sumate's final report. Until then, I'm afraid posting will be light.
Sumate has received hundreds of reports of fraud from citizens, civil associations and other organizations [...] Some of these reports have already been investigated and discarted, while others have given rise to more in-depth investigations that will allow, in due time, to demonstrate or rule out the reports of irregularities and to finally uncover the truth.
One of the reports is referred to a series of "patterns" identified in the tallying reports (actas). Sumate is consulting experts and academics in Venezuela and abroad who are carrying out a detailed and exhaustive analysis of these cases. So far, they do not constitute a convincing proof of fraud.
However, we must warn the people of Venezuela that these investigations will take some time.
[...]
A legitimate reconciliation between Venezuelans can only come once all doubts about what happened during the referendum have been cleared up.
We deserve to know the truth. If the result is that the winning option was NO, then NO voters must not feel shame to proclaim it and must not remain under the shadow of suspicion of fraud. If the winning result is the SI, it shall be necessary to proceed to the necessary correction to recognize the will of the Venezuelan people.
Deep down, I'm now 99% convinced that there was no fraud and the government won cleanly. However, I can't make a final judgement until I read and consider Sumate's final report. Until then, I'm afraid posting will be light.
August 22, 2004
60-40?
From my inbox...
You know, when I first saw the CNE results, I assumed fraud. The weird hour, the huge spread, and the strange look on Carter's face when he and Gaviria came out of the CNE offices at 1 am....
But now I think I believe these results are accurate... or nearly accurate. I won't go into the debate over evidence (or lack of evidence) of fraud. But on a more general note, when you say in your "Realities" entry that the country is back to a "60-40" split, I don't know if I agree. Let's assume Chavez won, fair and square. I don't think that means 60% support him. I think it's a mis-reading of that vote. I think maybe 40 points of the 60 are loyal chavistas... but the other 20 is a bunch of people who would like to see someone else in charge, but don't see who it could be. These middle 20 (and I don't call them ni-ni, because that misses the point) simply did the math: If Chavez were kicked out, they would have to endure a month of Pres. Rangel and a big, chaotic presidential campaign, and when all was said and done, Chavez would be back in Miraflores by the end of September. I think that middle 20 percent regarded that possibility, sighed a heavy sigh, and said What the hell, let's leave bad enough alone.
When the opposition looks at the CNE results, it interprets them as 60% pro-Chavez, and, seen that way, of course the results look fraudulent. There's no way 60% of Venezuelans are chavistas. But that's not what the 60% really denotes... I think.
You know, when I first saw the CNE results, I assumed fraud. The weird hour, the huge spread, and the strange look on Carter's face when he and Gaviria came out of the CNE offices at 1 am....
But now I think I believe these results are accurate... or nearly accurate. I won't go into the debate over evidence (or lack of evidence) of fraud. But on a more general note, when you say in your "Realities" entry that the country is back to a "60-40" split, I don't know if I agree. Let's assume Chavez won, fair and square. I don't think that means 60% support him. I think it's a mis-reading of that vote. I think maybe 40 points of the 60 are loyal chavistas... but the other 20 is a bunch of people who would like to see someone else in charge, but don't see who it could be. These middle 20 (and I don't call them ni-ni, because that misses the point) simply did the math: If Chavez were kicked out, they would have to endure a month of Pres. Rangel and a big, chaotic presidential campaign, and when all was said and done, Chavez would be back in Miraflores by the end of September. I think that middle 20 percent regarded that possibility, sighed a heavy sigh, and said What the hell, let's leave bad enough alone.
When the opposition looks at the CNE results, it interprets them as 60% pro-Chavez, and, seen that way, of course the results look fraudulent. There's no way 60% of Venezuelans are chavistas. But that's not what the 60% really denotes... I think.
The Carter Center Report on the last phase of the Venezuelan Recall Referendum
The Carter Center has maintained an office and a director in Venezuela since September 2002, at the invitation of the Government of Venezuela and the opposition Coordinadora Democratica. The Center was invited by the National Electoral Council (CNE) to observe the recall referendum process beginning November 2003. The Center has organized five international observer delegations between November 2003 and August 2004, and maintained a longer-term team to observe the four month verification process from January-April 2004.
The Center has performed its role as invited international observers in a neutral, objective manner, respecting the sovereignty of the country and the authority of the CNE. Our role has been to inform the Venezuelan public and international community about the process, to provide evaluation and suggestions to the CNE, and to help ensure transparency and peacefulness of the entire process.
Throughout these eight months we have worked with the CNE to have the access we need and to increase the transparency of the process for the Venezuelan people. We have insisted throughout the process that the definition of fraud consists of an identifiable pattern of bias in favor of or against one party. Irregularities due to administrative difficulties or random statistical effects should affect both sides and should not have an impact on the outcome.
During the signature verification period, the government Comando Ayacucho raised questions about fraud and we suggested instruments to test these concerns, indicating that a significant pattern must be found before classifying irregularities as fraud. Our own evaluation concluded that sufficient signatures were gathered to trigger the recall referendum. We expressed clearly and in public our discrepancies with some of the CNE decisions, especially regarding the so called ?planillas planas? (similar handwriting) and the possibility for signers to ?repent? and remove their signatures during the repair period.
After the recall referendum, the opposition Coordinadora Democratica has raised questions about fraud and we have again suggested various instruments to test these concerns. We will describe below the tools we have used to come to our conclusion that the vote results announced by the CNE do reflect the will of the Venezuelan people.
Observation of the Recall Referendum of August 15, 2004
The referendum on August 15, 2004 rejected the petition to revoke the mandate of President Hugo Chavez. The observation of The Carter Center mission confirms the results announced by the National Election Council announced Wednesday, in which the ?No? vote to recall President Chavez received 59% and the ?Yes? vote received 41% of the votes cast.
The Carter Center, in coordination with the mission of the Organization of American States, fielded a team of international observers from 14 countries. Beginning July 1, 2004, the Center deployed in Caracas an advance team to observe preparations for the recall, monitor the media coverage and access, and observe the pre-election simulations and audits. Two days before the vote, teams of two observers were sent to the states and the capital district.
The Carter Center mission observed the qualitative aspects of the election as well as the new state-of-the-art automated voting system. Overwhelmingly Carter Center observers found a calm environment on balloting day, with thousands of voters waiting long hours for the opportunity to cast their ballot. Given the amount of time it took some voters to cast their ballot, it is clear that the voting process, including relevant polling administrative procedures, fingerprint machines, and the automated voting machines, should be reviewed and swifter voting procedures should be put into place for future elections.
Testing the Automated Voting System
Noting the questions that have been raised about the automated voting system, the Center is providing more detail about our review of that system. The assessment of the automated system consists of three components: I) Voter to the machine; II) Machine to the CNE server; III) Totalization of the votes within the CNE server.
I) Voter to the machine: does the touchscreen voting machine by Smartmatic accurately reflect the vote cast by the elector?
To assess this question, the CNE organized an audit the night of the election to count the paper receipts (comprobantes) in order to compare them with the electronic results (actas). We supported this process, but were only able to observe a small number of the audits because we were conducting our own quick count at the closing of the polls. In addition, the CNE reported that of the 192 machines chosen in a sample whose drawing we observed, only 82 were audited the night of the election due to the very late hour that many voting stations closed and due to misunderstanding of some of the auditors of the instructions. The results of that audit reported by the CNE were a discrepancy of only 0.02% between the paper receipts and the electronic results recorded in the actas.
Due to the incomplete nature of the CNE audit on August 15, our own limited ability to observe that audit, and continued opposition doubts about the machines after the vote, the OAS and The Carter Center proposed on August 17 to the National Electoral Junta (JNE) of the CNE a second audit to compare the paper receipts with the electronic results. This audit is being conducted August 19 -21. The preliminary results of this audit confirm that the machines correctly registered the voters? intent.
Chronology of the audit proposal.
· In designing the audit, we consulted Sumate, members of the Coordinadora Democratica, and with Rectors Zamora and Rodriguez.
· President Carter then described our proposal in a press conference on Tuesday, August 17.
· The morning of August 18, the OAS and Carter Center explained to the Coordinadora how our audit proposal would detect the irregular patterns in the results that they suspected. We then went to the CNE to finalize the proposal with the JNE. The Carter Center obtained a copy of the computer program that would be used to draw the sample, and was prepared to share that program with the political parties.
· The Coordinadora decided not to participate in the audit.
The audit was carried out as follows:
· A random sample of 150 voting stations (mesas) was drawn on the evening of August 18 in the presence of the OAS and Carter Center and with our prior examination of the Pascal program used to draw the sample. An observer from the OAS or Carter Center was in place in most of the military garrisons (guarniciones) around the country which guarded the voting materials, before the sample was drawn. The observers then watched the CUFAN identify most of the designated boxes, and in every case accompanied those boxes via helicopter and truck to the location of the audit in Caracas.
· On the morning of August 19, 21 teams of CNE auditors and 25 observers from the OAS and Carter Center, along with witnesses of the Comando Maisanta and other international observers, and security from the CUFAN, began to count the paper ballots and compare them with the actas and the cuadernos. The CNE auditors and the observers worked long hours in a careful and detailed way to count the paper ballots, and stopped work at any moment that an international observer had to step away from the table.
· Today, August 21st, the CNE as well as the OAS and Carter Center head of mission Mr. Cesar Gaviria and Dr. Jennifer Mc Coy, presented the results of the audit to the public showing there were no fraud.
II) Machine to the CNE server (transmission): to measure the accuracy of the transmission, The Carter Center and the OAS performed a quick count (a projection of the results based on a statistical sample of the vote results at the mesas). Our observers watched the closing of the voting station and recorded the number of votes, calling these in to our headquarters where we could statistically project a result. Our results coincided with the CNE?s results with less than one percent difference. Sumate?s quick count is another test of the transmission.
III) Totalization within the CNE: The Carter Center took a sample of the results from the CNE?s server and made a projection of the final results, confirming the accurate totalization within the CNE server. Sumate?s parallel count of a large number of the mesas also confirms these results, as reflected in the press conference given by Sumate on August 17.
With regard to the concerns of the opposition about the coinciding results within mesas (the alleged caps or topes), after a careful scrutiny of the electronic data, we found 402 mesas with two or three machines that had the same result for the SI, and 311 mesas with two or three machines with the same results for the NO. We found
this similarities very strange and we made consultations with 2 foreign experts. Both confirmed our own and the OAS experts? opinions expressing not only is this mathematically possible, but since both NO and SI votes are affected, this indicates a random occurrence and not a pattern of fraud.
Conclusions
The Carter Center concludes that the automated machines worked well and the voting results do reflect the will of the people. Our quick count also included manual voting stations, and very few concerns were raised about these. We hope these conclusions will give the Venezuelan people confidence that the automated system functions well, particularly as the regional elections are approaching. The Center will make a Final Report to the CNE with the assessment of the overall process and specific recommendations to improve it.
The unusually high turn-out of 73% reflects the intense interest in this recall referendum. The Venezuelan people are to be commended for standing in line for hours without incidents, in this demonstration of civic participation and pride.
We urge all Venezuelans to accept these results and look to the future. The 41% of the population who voted for a change in the presidency have legitimate concerns that should be addressed. We urge the government to recognize the rights and the concerns of this large minority and to engage in discussions with them to create a common vision for the future of Venezuela. We also urge those in the minority to look for ways to work constructively with the government to achieve the dreams of all Venezuelans.
Recommendations:
In order for Venezuela to move forward to the next electoral process scheduled for late September to choose governors and mayors, we respectfully suggest some steps that will help raise confidence in the process and ensure greater efficiency:
Automated systems are the wave of the future, but citizens need to have confidence in new systems. Although we believe the voting machines worked very well, we believe further assessment and information about such automated systems from other computerized companies would help to inform the Venezuelan people about all types of automated systems.
The CNE suffered from lack of internal coordination and communication, impeding the ability of the directorate to make timely decisions and the organization to work efficiently. We urge increased communication, coordination, and sharing of information among the directors and the divisions of the CNE.
Transparency is the fundamental basis of trust. At times during this past eight months, the lack of information from the CNE to the Venezuelan public, the political parties involved, and the international observers, raised unnecessary concerns and suspicions. We urge greater transparency at all of these levels to ensure confidence in future electoral processes.
Requiem for the comments section
With a heavy heart and an annoyed head, I decided to shut down the comments section. It's sad but true that in a time of such wideranging confusion, of so much contradictory information, such rampaging cognitive dissonance and of such unleashed passions, the forum had started to generate much more heat than light.
Right now, we need to pull ourselves together and think anew. We need to reflect, to consider. We need to ask ourselves impossible questions, or questions with impossible answers. We need to open up our minds to think the country afresh.
This is very difficult to do when you're surrounded by ideologically hostile people who amuse themselves by hurling insults at you and mocking you for asking questions they find uncomfortable. You know who you are - and, in a sense, you won this one too, by shutting down a space for dialogue and common-understanding, having drowned it in an ocean of bile and rancour.
Technology permitting, the forum will come back one day, when I find software that allows me to exercise stricter control on abusive posting, and when the political atmosphere is more amenable to genuine, meant-to-enlighten debate.
I don't see any point in continuing to read posts where folks argue for argument's sake, argue as though it was an olympic sport, where the purpose is to hold on to one's ground while scoring petty points against opponents. There's no point. Today's a time to stop, reflect, and digest. To ask what comes next, given that reality is what it is rather than what we would like it to be.
One thing's for sure: you can't reflect deeply in the middle of a shouting match...
Right now, we need to pull ourselves together and think anew. We need to reflect, to consider. We need to ask ourselves impossible questions, or questions with impossible answers. We need to open up our minds to think the country afresh.
This is very difficult to do when you're surrounded by ideologically hostile people who amuse themselves by hurling insults at you and mocking you for asking questions they find uncomfortable. You know who you are - and, in a sense, you won this one too, by shutting down a space for dialogue and common-understanding, having drowned it in an ocean of bile and rancour.
Technology permitting, the forum will come back one day, when I find software that allows me to exercise stricter control on abusive posting, and when the political atmosphere is more amenable to genuine, meant-to-enlighten debate.
I don't see any point in continuing to read posts where folks argue for argument's sake, argue as though it was an olympic sport, where the purpose is to hold on to one's ground while scoring petty points against opponents. There's no point. Today's a time to stop, reflect, and digest. To ask what comes next, given that reality is what it is rather than what we would like it to be.
One thing's for sure: you can't reflect deeply in the middle of a shouting match...
Eyes wide shut... for Justin Delacour
In Venezula, during the mid eighties, in the middle of the damned "IV Republic", robbing restaurants became sort of a fashion. Once, three or four thieves robbed a luxury restaurant in Caracas called "La Madrina". After taking every cent from the cashier, and every piece of jewelry and de luxe watches from the clients present, one on the assailants took his weapon and, putting it on the brow of a fat man, cried: "I want the keys of the red Mercedes Benz parked in front of this place or I'll kill this man!" Absolute silence. The thief repeated his threat, and, after a longer silence, some clients, mostly middle class people, took their car keys and threw it to the thief saying: "It's not the red Mercedes, but take my car... please, don't kill the man". The thieves accepted, and left in four different cars, laughing. The life of the fat threatened man, a journalist and editor called Oscar Silva (alive and kicking, and able to tell the story), was saved by unknown, human, normal people, who willingly sacrificed their cars because, well, a human life was more valuable...
About five minutes later, a silent man stood up, went out, and drove away in his red Mercedes Benz. For several years afterwards, he told the event as a joke in every literary party. The punch line was: "Only a moron would have exchanged MY Mercedes for that stupid fat guy". The owner of the Mercedes was (and is) a well known "leftist", a "human rights activist", a writer, one of the most respected intellectuals of chavista nomenklatura: Luis Britto García, author, among other books, of Venezuela: Investigación de unos medios por encima de toda sospecha. Such an eye opener!
About five minutes later, a silent man stood up, went out, and drove away in his red Mercedes Benz. For several years afterwards, he told the event as a joke in every literary party. The punch line was: "Only a moron would have exchanged MY Mercedes for that stupid fat guy". The owner of the Mercedes was (and is) a well known "leftist", a "human rights activist", a writer, one of the most respected intellectuals of chavista nomenklatura: Luis Britto García, author, among other books, of Venezuela: Investigación de unos medios por encima de toda sospecha. Such an eye opener!
August 21, 2004
You can't fool all the people all the time.
There's people who cannot be fooled by the tricks of oil-rich authocrats like Hugo Chávez. The authors of these two cartoons hail from two very different places. The first was penned by a canadian, the second one by a chilean. They perceived what a substantial percentage of the Venezuelan population has perceived: There is government foul play in this referendum, driven by an addiction to power unhealthy in any tried and true democrat.
Certain forces inside the Chávez camp might have pulled a fast one on the OAS, the Carter Center, the international observers (not all of them though) and the international community, but what's really damaging to him and his entourage is he with the help of his cronies Carrasquero, Battaglini and Rodríguez set up the Venezuelan people to be duped by a less than stellar electoral process which has a lot of loose ends right now.
So here's a word to the wise: this government has done the unthinkable, it has broken the faith of people in the institution of suffrage. People will have a hard time embracing peaceful democratic solutions because they have been deceived and disappointed by the actions of a cabal of fundamentalists and opportunists who see the State as means to an end: power and money.
Hugo Chávez might heve gotten away with it this time, but some venezuelans have learnt the hard way you can't always entrust men like Chávez with power.
P.S.:
To Quico: stop questioning yourself. You're right and you know it.
To the InChBrig: One day we will remember this and laugh about it. You on the other hand will keep telling yourself that Hugo was a patron saint of democracy and the poor when you know it's bullshit.
To JdS: Nice way of being ni-ni: Palo por ese culo? Felicitaciones, te botaste.
"When you have eliminated the impossible...
...whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."
-Sherlock Holmes
1-Impossible: The Carter Center and the OAS conspiring with CNE and the Chavez government to wilfully disregard fraud.
2-Impossible: The Carter Center and the OAS are so clueless they are willing to participate in a cold-audit carried out on a biased sample of ballot boxes, or on ballot boxes that have been tampered with.
3-Impossible: A cold-audit of 150 voting boxes, picked at random and checked in front of CC/OAS, fails to turn up evidence of the theft of millions of votes.
4-Improbable: Wilfully or not, Sumate/PennSchoen&Berland screwed up their exit polls.
5-Improbable: CNE refused the hot-audit because they actually believed that holding up a results announcement for an additional 5 or 6 hours risked destabilizing the country.
Believe me, folks, it brings me no joy to post this...
-Sherlock Holmes
1-Impossible: The Carter Center and the OAS conspiring with CNE and the Chavez government to wilfully disregard fraud.
2-Impossible: The Carter Center and the OAS are so clueless they are willing to participate in a cold-audit carried out on a biased sample of ballot boxes, or on ballot boxes that have been tampered with.
3-Impossible: A cold-audit of 150 voting boxes, picked at random and checked in front of CC/OAS, fails to turn up evidence of the theft of millions of votes.
4-Improbable: Wilfully or not, Sumate/PennSchoen&Berland screwed up their exit polls.
5-Improbable: CNE refused the hot-audit because they actually believed that holding up a results announcement for an additional 5 or 6 hours risked destabilizing the country.
Believe me, folks, it brings me no joy to post this...
August 20, 2004
Y entonces?
From today's Financial Times piece on the cold-audit.
As the audit was under way on Thursday night observers appear to have found only 713 examples from more than 12,000 polling centres that showed results with identical numbers of votes including 311 that showed an equal number of No votes.
"The most important thing is that it affects both sides. It would appear to indicate a random effect," said Jennifer McCoy, a Carter Center official. "This audit will determine if there is a significant incidence of this cap effect."
It's an odd-numbered day, guys: today I'm leaning against the fraud hypothesis.
As the audit was under way on Thursday night observers appear to have found only 713 examples from more than 12,000 polling centres that showed results with identical numbers of votes including 311 that showed an equal number of No votes.
"The most important thing is that it affects both sides. It would appear to indicate a random effect," said Jennifer McCoy, a Carter Center official. "This audit will determine if there is a significant incidence of this cap effect."
It's an odd-numbered day, guys: today I'm leaning against the fraud hypothesis.
Email to stop me in my tracks
Just got this in my email, more grist for the mill...
A word of caution: I come from the former Yugoslavia, specifically Serbia. Over there, we overthrew our elected dictator in 2000. The overthrow was trigerred by the opposition claims of electoral fraud, that in turn brought hundreds of thousands (some say millions) protesters to the street, prompted the police and army to switch sides and Milosevic fell. The specific fraud claim was that the opposition candidate won more than 50% of votes in the first round of presidential elections and that the authorities somehow falsified that result. However, two years later, several opposition leaders confessed in interviews included into a documentary film (not sure about the name) that they had lied. The opposition candidate had less than 50% of votes in the first round but the opposition was afraid that Milosevic would get together his act by the second round and did not want to risk yet another failure. So they consciously lied, the people believed them, and the rest is history.
Which makes me wonder whetehr something similar is happening in Venezuela. If I were with CD and I was aware of an impending loss, I would do exactly what they are doing now. Given the divisions in the Venezuelan society, they do not need to provide any verifiable or convincing evidence of fraud. "Indications" of fraud are enough for most of CD supporters, right? Thus, the opposition supporters will continue believing that they are a majority and be even more fired up because of the "fraud". To admit that Chavez' victory was fair essentially means admitting that "they" have the majority, and in a society as divided as in Venezuela, would anything be more discouraging than that?
LET´S HAVE FUN...
Guys:
I studied literature, not statistics, so the scientific rant is BORING (at least for me!). My main trouble, for all you guys is:
LAST SUNDAY, ALL VENEZUELANS GOT TO VOTE. THE LINES WERE AMAZING (Justin Delacour, as a witness, admitted that, and, as he didn´t know each and every vote, he surely, for the sake of fairness, would stand by his words!), NO MATTER WHERE YOU WENT, NO MATTER WHO YOU WERE, NO MATTER IF YOU CHOSE 'YES' OR 'NO', THERE WAS A MASS STANDING NO FIRST WORLD COUNTRY HAS SEEN IN AT LEAST 50 YEARS!
NOW, GUYS: MY PERSONAL, INDIVIDUAL, PROBLEM, IS:
Can exit polls be so wrong? Fujimori was considered by dear little Carter and the OAS as a"cheater" after those exit polls. Hummm!!! Daniel Ortega accepted his defeat under exit poll evidences, HUMM! Noriega ALMOST admitted his defeat on those "exit polls"! HUMM.
But then, with an unproofed e-system, guys like Dan Burnett told me (us): "You lost! Admit it and move over!" Some Americans doubt the "legitimacy" of Bush´s presidency for just one reason. HUMMM! The e-voting!
So, All of you (and Dan, this is for you) , and also on the name of "foreign" correspondants that took this as a trip to tropical beaches, why should I accept your perceptions as final opinions after less than a week? How long did you take to accept "fair results" in Bush´s case? If I remember well, it was at least a month...
This election was supposed to bring some "stability" to the region (that was CARTER´S ROLE!).
But, even among "light" Chavistas, that wasn´t the evident result. Yesterday, I took a cab. The driver (I told him I had voted yes), never told me how he had voted. He was dubious... as the rest of Venezuelans.
I repeat, again, what I´ve said all along: Maybe the YES lost. If the numbers had been undoubtedly counted in some number of polling stations, I would have accepted the results. After two bottles of good rum, I would have stood up, and followed Mr. Burnett advise and move on. But not even Chavecos are doing it... The cab driver was depressed and worried...
So, as a question to reasonable independents: should I accept your "we are the First World, we are the children" song and dance along? No, guys. I´m a human being, not a number in your fair statisticts that say: in Venezuela, 80 % is poor, so Chávez should at least have 80 % support!
Even if official numbers are right, he just got 60 %. SO SOMETHING IS WRONG. MAYBE WE ARE ALL WRONG!
Look here: over every neck, there is a head. If not, we´ll all look like chickens on the fridge! Something was wrong in the e-vote in Venezuela. If those "soi disant" liberals don´t address my reasonable doubts, the same they had over Bush´ election, I´ll assert that the only valid democracy was the classical one... the one with slaves Pericles developed! And, of course, I´ll be among the Third World slaves... As always.
Best regards, take care, keep safe, stay cool! And, oh, yeah: use e-voting machines. That´s the safest way, guys. Venezuela just prooved it!
I studied literature, not statistics, so the scientific rant is BORING (at least for me!). My main trouble, for all you guys is:
LAST SUNDAY, ALL VENEZUELANS GOT TO VOTE. THE LINES WERE AMAZING (Justin Delacour, as a witness, admitted that, and, as he didn´t know each and every vote, he surely, for the sake of fairness, would stand by his words!), NO MATTER WHERE YOU WENT, NO MATTER WHO YOU WERE, NO MATTER IF YOU CHOSE 'YES' OR 'NO', THERE WAS A MASS STANDING NO FIRST WORLD COUNTRY HAS SEEN IN AT LEAST 50 YEARS!
NOW, GUYS: MY PERSONAL, INDIVIDUAL, PROBLEM, IS:
Can exit polls be so wrong? Fujimori was considered by dear little Carter and the OAS as a"cheater" after those exit polls. Hummm!!! Daniel Ortega accepted his defeat under exit poll evidences, HUMM! Noriega ALMOST admitted his defeat on those "exit polls"! HUMM.
But then, with an unproofed e-system, guys like Dan Burnett told me (us): "You lost! Admit it and move over!" Some Americans doubt the "legitimacy" of Bush´s presidency for just one reason. HUMMM! The e-voting!
So, All of you (and Dan, this is for you) , and also on the name of "foreign" correspondants that took this as a trip to tropical beaches, why should I accept your perceptions as final opinions after less than a week? How long did you take to accept "fair results" in Bush´s case? If I remember well, it was at least a month...
This election was supposed to bring some "stability" to the region (that was CARTER´S ROLE!).
But, even among "light" Chavistas, that wasn´t the evident result. Yesterday, I took a cab. The driver (I told him I had voted yes), never told me how he had voted. He was dubious... as the rest of Venezuelans.
I repeat, again, what I´ve said all along: Maybe the YES lost. If the numbers had been undoubtedly counted in some number of polling stations, I would have accepted the results. After two bottles of good rum, I would have stood up, and followed Mr. Burnett advise and move on. But not even Chavecos are doing it... The cab driver was depressed and worried...
So, as a question to reasonable independents: should I accept your "we are the First World, we are the children" song and dance along? No, guys. I´m a human being, not a number in your fair statisticts that say: in Venezuela, 80 % is poor, so Chávez should at least have 80 % support!
Even if official numbers are right, he just got 60 %. SO SOMETHING IS WRONG. MAYBE WE ARE ALL WRONG!
Look here: over every neck, there is a head. If not, we´ll all look like chickens on the fridge! Something was wrong in the e-vote in Venezuela. If those "soi disant" liberals don´t address my reasonable doubts, the same they had over Bush´ election, I´ll assert that the only valid democracy was the classical one... the one with slaves Pericles developed! And, of course, I´ll be among the Third World slaves... As always.
Best regards, take care, keep safe, stay cool! And, oh, yeah: use e-voting machines. That´s the safest way, guys. Venezuela just prooved it!
August 19, 2004
For all oppo sympathizers of the blog
Rhyme and reason have left the building and, as Quico is not here to control the disorder, I beg you not to post nor debase yourselves with people that can act in such and ungentlemanly fashion when they are sure they won clearly and cleanly. Pa decírselos en español, se les ve la catadura de esbirros, cómo se comportarían en el improbable caso de ganar en sus propios lugares de origen. So, guys, control your anger and let them ramble by themselves. Without interlocutors, they will soon calm down. I beg you: ignore them, or we will lose a place to meet we all appreciate and cherish, while they don´t.
Realities
1-It would take a miracle of public relations management for the opposition to win the international public opinion battle around the referendum. As far as 99% of foreigners are concerned, what Carter says, goes. The opposition has never demonstrated any particular gift for public relations abroad - quite the opposite - so one thing is clear: Five years of efforts by the opposition to explain to the world just how brutally nasty, deceitful and dangerous Hugo Chavez is were comprehensively undone on Monday. This is a battle we will not win.
2-Working on the assumption that there was a Si-cap fraud (i.e. the machines were programmed to cap the number of Si votes they would register) - the fraud will only be understandable by people with a solid background in university level statistics. Chavez is a genius at this sort of thing - most of the outrages he commits are so complicated, they're impossible to explain succinctly and clearly. Just as there's no 30-second soundbyte explanation possible for the Montesinos Affair, the looting of FIEM, the April 11th massacre, the purge of PDVSA, the burning of the Fuerte Mara soldiers, or any of 5 dozen other outrages, there'll never be an understandable 30-second retelling of the Si-cap fraud. However, statistically speaking, it may well be possible to demonstrate a fraud even without looking at a single ballot paper. A statistician can easily work out the probability that the statistical "fluke" that's turning up in the data is merely a coincidence. If, as seems likely, that probability is vanishingly small, I'll have to think there was fraud, whatever the audits say.
3-CNE claimed that the reason for refusing an Auditoria en Caliente is that it would have taken too long - the automated tallying system would have had to be stopped while paper ballots were counted, generating mistrust and confusion. If the purpose of refusing the Auditoria en Caliente was to bolster the credibility of the eventual results, the least one can say is that it was not a very effective strategy. Throughout, CNE acted as though holding an auditoria en caliente would be a punishingly slow task, or one of herculean complexity. This is not so, as the good burghers of Valle de la Pascua demonstrate. According to this International Herald Tribune piece, "In the town of Valle de la Pascua, where papers were counted at the initiative of those manning the voting center, the Yes vote had been cut by more than 75 percent, and the entire voting material was seized by the national guard shortly after the difference was established."
4-Holding an Auditoria en Frio on a sample of Voting Centers selected unilaterally by CNE 12 hours earlier is about as useful as an ashtray on a motorcycle. It stands to reason that if 40% (or is it 60%?) of the country is convinced you're crooked enough to cheat them out of their votes, they're not going to trust you to choose the sample and procedures meant to demonstrate that you didn't.
5-As Daniel explains in his blog, a random selection of voting tables may not be a particularly sensible response to the specific fraud allegations being made. The Coordinadora Democratica is alleging quite specific irregularities in a specified set of voting centers. CNE - which was so adamant in checking every single signature con lupa - refuses to open up the ballot boxes in the specific places where the CD alleges fraud. Why? El que no la debe no la teme. Once again, CNE acts in a way that is at least consistent with a cover-up - and certain to be interpreted as such by doubters.
6-If Chavez won cleanly, CNE's refusal to conduct a hot-audit has robbed him of the possibility of convincing the entire country that he won cleanly. The country is back to square one in terms of collective schizophrenia. 60% of us live one reality, 40% live another reality. Perversely, each side is convinced that it is the 60% and the other side is the 40%. Each side is convinced the other is engaged in a mind-blowingly complex, dark, evil conspiracy to usurp power. The governability crisis continues. The epistemic gulf drags on. The only thing that's changed is that Chavez will now enjoy much greater international credibility. Fronteras adentro, nothing has changed.
August 18, 2004
Credibility, Responsibility and Conspiracy
Folks,
If the after-the-fact audit shows that the CNE results were genuine, this would demonstrate that there was a massive conspiracy to mislead the nation - possibly pushing it towards a civil war - on the part of those who conducted the exit polls. It is plainly impossible for a well-run exit poll of 20,000+ respondents to get results wrong by 20%. If there really was a conspiracy on that scale, all those who conducted exit polls or believed in them will see our credibility hit an unimaginable abyss. If this is the case, Venezuela's rank-and-file opposition members must demand a thorough overhaul of the opposition's leadership. And this blog will have to run a long, thorough apology and go offline.
Fight Gallinerization Today!
The last post has been erased to clean up the comments section, which had descended into an unacceptable string of ad hominem attacks. Since there are many new people posting over the last few days, I'll restate some basic rules:
1-Don't insult your opponents. Ever. It's just not allowed. I'll ban you if you do it again - you know who you are.
2-Make comments meant to take the debate forward, not to bait your opponents into a screaming match.
3-Remember that you don't own the truth, and people who disagree with you are entitled to disagree with you. This is true even when you feel really, really deeply about what you're writing
Finally, a tip rather than a rule: try not to be boring.
No on-the-spot audit, no closure
From the comments...
I only have time for one post tonight. So I have this to say.
If the second audit reveals that the vote tally was fraudelent the CNE, Chavez, JVR and a whole host of others should be in jail and a new RR held right away.
But I would like to hear from folks on this. If the audit matches the announced results is this the end? Will people accept the results? What I am hearing here makes me think that no matter what happens many here are going to allege fraud. So I think that people here should put their cards on the table and say where this ends for them and what results they will accept.
The CNE didn't have to agree to this audit but they did. I'm glad. Someone here is lying big time and will have zero credibility after this is over. We'll know who that someone is shortly. So please, lets all say where we stand on this.
Dan Burnett | 08.17.04 - 10:56 pm | #
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Dan,
You raise the key question, and I'm afraid you are right: even if the auditoria en frio (after-the-fact audit) says CNE had it right, many in the opposition will not accept it. Why? Because the "cuerpo del delito" - the ballot papers - have been in the hands of stooges of the main suspect - the Chavez-controlled military - since Sunday night.
The fact is that the *only* procedure that could've settled this question definitively and beyond any shadow of a doubt was an on-the-spot audit - the so-called auditoria en caliente. If CNE had agreed to open the ballot boxes on Sunday night, five minutes after the last vote was cast, publicly, in a statistically valid random sample of voting centers, in front of poll workers, witnesses from both sides and international observers, counted the physicial ballots and matched them to the electronic tally, then, then - there would be no room for doubt at all. This, after all, is what the Smartmatic machines were designed for, the whole reason they produce a paper vote.
Think how different Venezuela would be right now if we'd had an on-the spot audit. The country would be moving on by now...the winners would be celebrating, the losers soul-searching, the country entering into a new phase. The country would've found a peaceful, democratic, electoral and constitutional solution to the crisis - which was the whole point of the exercise in the first place.
Now, why was there no on-the-spot audit? The history here is very clear, very straightforward, amply documented. Felipe Mujica and Alberto Quiros Corradi, the opposition's negotiators at CNE, pushed hard for this kind of check in pre-vote negotiations with CNE. Jorge Rodriguez, acting as CNE's main negotiator, simply refused, categorically, to even consider any variation on this kind of check.
To my mind, it was JR's refusal to allow an auditoria en caliente that robbed the country of the possibility of a definitive, authoritative solution to the crisis. Even if there was no fraud, JR killed the only check that could've convinced both sides of our terribly polarized, low-trust country that this was so.
In other words, no on-the-spot audit, no closure.
I've spent the last two days obsessively considering this question, and I just cannot think of any plausible explanation for JR's refusal to allow on-the-spot audits that doesn't involve some kind of hanky panky. I wish I could, but I can't. Maybe you can help me here.
On-the-spot auditing, according to the burned-by-Diebold US left, is the key requirement to make eVoting trustworthy. On-the-spot auditing is what the Smartmatic machines were built to allow. Why the hell did they buy the machines and then refuse to perform the key checks the machines were designed to allow? It doesn't add up.
Quico | 08.18.04 - 7:03 am | #
Addendum: I am not a Johnny-come-lately on the on-the-spot audit front. I wrote about it three times in June, just before and just after the CD/CNE negotiations were concluded:
On June 7, 2004 I wrote: "Thre must be a paper trail, and on the spot verification of the automated totals. The experience with Diebold in the US makes this painfully clear."
On June 9th, right after CNE finally set a referendum date and ruled out an on the spot audit, I evaluated the announcement: "The bad: The date is August 15th, not August 8th. There will be no on-the-spot verification of automated results."
On June 11th, in the comments section: "The auditoria en caliente is the key to everything. The system was *designed* with on-the-spot auditing in mind. There is no possible justification for not having it..."
The importance of on-the-spot auditing was clear all the way back then - but I thought, like Quiros and Mujica, that getting to a vote before Aug. 19th was so much more important than any other consideration, that even a key check like this one could be tossed into the pyre for the sake of expediency.
I only have time for one post tonight. So I have this to say.
If the second audit reveals that the vote tally was fraudelent the CNE, Chavez, JVR and a whole host of others should be in jail and a new RR held right away.
But I would like to hear from folks on this. If the audit matches the announced results is this the end? Will people accept the results? What I am hearing here makes me think that no matter what happens many here are going to allege fraud. So I think that people here should put their cards on the table and say where this ends for them and what results they will accept.
The CNE didn't have to agree to this audit but they did. I'm glad. Someone here is lying big time and will have zero credibility after this is over. We'll know who that someone is shortly. So please, lets all say where we stand on this.
Dan Burnett | 08.17.04 - 10:56 pm | #
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
Dan,
You raise the key question, and I'm afraid you are right: even if the auditoria en frio (after-the-fact audit) says CNE had it right, many in the opposition will not accept it. Why? Because the "cuerpo del delito" - the ballot papers - have been in the hands of stooges of the main suspect - the Chavez-controlled military - since Sunday night.
The fact is that the *only* procedure that could've settled this question definitively and beyond any shadow of a doubt was an on-the-spot audit - the so-called auditoria en caliente. If CNE had agreed to open the ballot boxes on Sunday night, five minutes after the last vote was cast, publicly, in a statistically valid random sample of voting centers, in front of poll workers, witnesses from both sides and international observers, counted the physicial ballots and matched them to the electronic tally, then, then - there would be no room for doubt at all. This, after all, is what the Smartmatic machines were designed for, the whole reason they produce a paper vote.
Think how different Venezuela would be right now if we'd had an on-the spot audit. The country would be moving on by now...the winners would be celebrating, the losers soul-searching, the country entering into a new phase. The country would've found a peaceful, democratic, electoral and constitutional solution to the crisis - which was the whole point of the exercise in the first place.
Now, why was there no on-the-spot audit? The history here is very clear, very straightforward, amply documented. Felipe Mujica and Alberto Quiros Corradi, the opposition's negotiators at CNE, pushed hard for this kind of check in pre-vote negotiations with CNE. Jorge Rodriguez, acting as CNE's main negotiator, simply refused, categorically, to even consider any variation on this kind of check.
To my mind, it was JR's refusal to allow an auditoria en caliente that robbed the country of the possibility of a definitive, authoritative solution to the crisis. Even if there was no fraud, JR killed the only check that could've convinced both sides of our terribly polarized, low-trust country that this was so.
In other words, no on-the-spot audit, no closure.
I've spent the last two days obsessively considering this question, and I just cannot think of any plausible explanation for JR's refusal to allow on-the-spot audits that doesn't involve some kind of hanky panky. I wish I could, but I can't. Maybe you can help me here.
On-the-spot auditing, according to the burned-by-Diebold US left, is the key requirement to make eVoting trustworthy. On-the-spot auditing is what the Smartmatic machines were built to allow. Why the hell did they buy the machines and then refuse to perform the key checks the machines were designed to allow? It doesn't add up.
Quico | 08.18.04 - 7:03 am | #
Addendum: I am not a Johnny-come-lately on the on-the-spot audit front. I wrote about it three times in June, just before and just after the CD/CNE negotiations were concluded:
On June 7, 2004 I wrote: "Thre must be a paper trail, and on the spot verification of the automated totals. The experience with Diebold in the US makes this painfully clear."
On June 9th, right after CNE finally set a referendum date and ruled out an on the spot audit, I evaluated the announcement: "The bad: The date is August 15th, not August 8th. There will be no on-the-spot verification of automated results."
On June 11th, in the comments section: "The auditoria en caliente is the key to everything. The system was *designed* with on-the-spot auditing in mind. There is no possible justification for not having it..."
The importance of on-the-spot auditing was clear all the way back then - but I thought, like Quiros and Mujica, that getting to a vote before Aug. 19th was so much more important than any other consideration, that even a key check like this one could be tossed into the pyre for the sake of expediency.
August 17, 2004
GUYS, calm down...
As is obvious to all the "parroquianos", I'm against Chávez. That means that, ballot counting, we can still lose. But not by the margin Carrasqueso says (THAT WASN'T A MISSPELLING!). All we want is a fair counting, that's all. Not the typical "acta mata voto" (translation: "red tape gets over people", or something near that), but a real recounting of ballots, a statistically valid sampling. I can lose, guys... Here, in this particularly weird blog, all Chávez's opposers knew we could lose. But what I won´t take (what WE won't take) , never, is to be treated like scum. I want demonstrations, not beautiful words. My perceptions (the mood in Caracas is just the one we had after the Vargas' tragedy) are of no avail, neither is the fact that there are no celebrations, just agressions. WE WANT THE TRUTH! WE WANT THE FACTS. And if oil prices go up... well, those of you who live in the first world should instruct your mothers in the old, lost, mysterious art of walking!
The fat lady hasn´t sung yet...
"CABALLERO NO SE ACUESTE USTÉ A DORMÍ
SIN COMESE UN CUCURUCHO DE MANÍ"
(Just to start a new thread, so no one gets fired. Be calm, reasonable, as our doubts!)
SIN COMESE UN CUCURUCHO DE MANÍ"
(Just to start a new thread, so no one gets fired. Be calm, reasonable, as our doubts!)
"Exit Poll Results Show Major Defeat for Chavez"
This is the Penn, Schoen and Berland exit poll press release.
New York, August 15, 2004, 7:30pm EST - With Venezuela's voting set to end at 8:00pm EST according to election officials, final exit poll results from Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates, an independent New York-based polling firm, show a major victory for the "Yes" movement, defeating Chavez in the Venezuelan presidential recall referendum.
With more than 8 million Venezuelans having cast their ballots so far, the results of a national exit poll show that Chavez has been ousted by referendum.
The Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates exit poll shows 59% in favor of recalling Chavez (the "Si" or "Yes", anti-Chavez vote) and 41% against recalling Chavez (the "No", pro-Chavez vote).
The poll results referred to in this release are based on an exit poll just concluded in Venezuela.
This is a national exit poll conducted in 267 voting centers throughout the country. The centers were selected to be broadly representative of the national electorate in regional and demographic terms.
In these centers, 20,382 voters were interviewed. Voters were selected at random but according to a strict demographic breakdown by age and gender to ensure a representative mix reflective of the national electorate. Those voters who were randomly selected to participate in this exit poll were asked to indicate only their vote ("Si" - for "Yes" - or "No") on a small ballot which they could then personally drop into a large envelope in order to maintain secrecy and anonymity. Data was sent by exit poll workers to a central facility in Caracas, Venezuela for processing and verification.
The margin of error for these final exit poll results referred to in this release is under +/-1%.
New York, August 15, 2004, 7:30pm EST - With Venezuela's voting set to end at 8:00pm EST according to election officials, final exit poll results from Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates, an independent New York-based polling firm, show a major victory for the "Yes" movement, defeating Chavez in the Venezuelan presidential recall referendum.
With more than 8 million Venezuelans having cast their ballots so far, the results of a national exit poll show that Chavez has been ousted by referendum.
The Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates exit poll shows 59% in favor of recalling Chavez (the "Si" or "Yes", anti-Chavez vote) and 41% against recalling Chavez (the "No", pro-Chavez vote).
The poll results referred to in this release are based on an exit poll just concluded in Venezuela.
This is a national exit poll conducted in 267 voting centers throughout the country. The centers were selected to be broadly representative of the national electorate in regional and demographic terms.
In these centers, 20,382 voters were interviewed. Voters were selected at random but according to a strict demographic breakdown by age and gender to ensure a representative mix reflective of the national electorate. Those voters who were randomly selected to participate in this exit poll were asked to indicate only their vote ("Si" - for "Yes" - or "No") on a small ballot which they could then personally drop into a large envelope in order to maintain secrecy and anonymity. Data was sent by exit poll workers to a central facility in Caracas, Venezuela for processing and verification.
The margin of error for these final exit poll results referred to in this release is under +/-1%.
One detail, and my last contribution...
Carter said the Carter Center had been present at the tallying. Gaviria said they hadn´t...
The Perfect Fraud
Or, an avalanche of whys
The last three days have been a terrible emotional rollercoaster, and the time may not be right for cool-headed analysis. One of two things happened on Sunday - either the government won massively or it cheated massively. Last night, I was almost sure the government won massively - today, I'm leaning the other way. Why?
Ever since CNE decided on the Smartmatic machines, there's been a number of troubling question hanging over the election: why, if you're paying millions of dollars for thousands of machines whose main benefit is that they produce a paper trail for each vote, did CNE refuse, from the start, to allow an auditoria-en-caliente (on the spot audit) to compare the paper votes at each of the voting centers with the actas (tallies) transmitted back to CNE headquarters? In the days after the reparos process, opposition negotiators Felipe Mujica and Alberto Quiroz Corradi pushed hard for this guarantee to be built into the process, but met a brick wall in Jorge Rodriguez. He wouldn't even agree to an auditoria en caliente of a small sample of voting centers - why?
One obvious hypothesis is that JR understood that an auditoria en caliente was the one control that would lay bare the kind of fraud they were planning - where the machines register votes that are different from those cast.
More deep dark whys: Why did CNE work so hard to limit the scope of activity of the International Observers? Why did they allow Carter and Gaviria to do a quick count of the transmitted (i.e. already tampered with) results only? Why did they insist on inviting Hebe de Bonafini and other open government supporters, but "forget" to send out invitations to the European Union mission?
Why were they so scared of exit polls?
Why did they threaten to shut down TV stations if they aired exit poll results?
Why were some Aporrea posters sure they'd lost on Sunday night? Why did Romero Anselmi go on VTV on Sunday night, looking like a funeral director, to say that, "whatever happens, the democratic game goes on" and that "it's ok, because we have a lifesaver called the Constitution, and that will go on"? Why did Comando Maisanta disappear all Sunday and turn up on TV looking dishevelled and straining to put on a smile? Why was Chavez praising JVR's loyalty on Sunday morning? Why?
Why did a half-dozen independently conducted exit polls all come up with the same results, which were a mirror image of the results eventually announced? Was this a massive opposition conspiracy? Who gave the CD leaders such stunningly effective acting lessons? Why were they so exultant all night on Sunday? If they were acting, why aren't they given an emergency Oscar?
Why was the CNE's Comite de Totalizacion (tallying committee) never assembled, as it should've been according to CNE's own regulations? Who carried out the totalizacion? Why was Ezequiel Zamora barred from the tallying room? Why were opposition witnesses barred from the tallying room?
Where are the paper votes right now? What guarantee do we have that they're not being tampered with ahead of an auditoria en frio?
There are too many loose ends here. I'm getting leaks from an OAS staffer who says he believes there was fraud, but the restrictive observation rules imposed by CNE made it impossible for the observers to detect it.
Remember, so far, not one paper ballot has been matched to a single electronic tally - CNE did not allow OAS/Carter Center to perform such checks. In the end, these idiots agreed to carry out an observation mission under rules that barred them from poking into the site of the fraud.
Extremely serious stuff. If the fraud allegations are true, Venezuela today is a dictatorship, a country run by the minority. You have to admire the gumption, the audacity of CNE's directors in pulling off a stunt of this magnitude. Worst of all, with no auditoria-en-caliente, it may well be that the paper ballot have already been disposed of or tampered with. We may never know what really happened...because, again, CNE insisted on a series of observation rules that leave room for this avalanche of whys.
Of course, this could be all wrong - perhaps there was no fraud, perhaps the Perfect Fraud came on the other side, in the form of a carefully orchestrated opposition conspiracy to cast doubt on perfectly valid results. The one instrument that could have cleared this up definitively - an auditoria en caliente directly after the close of voting performed on a random sample of voting centers - was denied categorically by CNE.
Why?
The last three days have been a terrible emotional rollercoaster, and the time may not be right for cool-headed analysis. One of two things happened on Sunday - either the government won massively or it cheated massively. Last night, I was almost sure the government won massively - today, I'm leaning the other way. Why?
Ever since CNE decided on the Smartmatic machines, there's been a number of troubling question hanging over the election: why, if you're paying millions of dollars for thousands of machines whose main benefit is that they produce a paper trail for each vote, did CNE refuse, from the start, to allow an auditoria-en-caliente (on the spot audit) to compare the paper votes at each of the voting centers with the actas (tallies) transmitted back to CNE headquarters? In the days after the reparos process, opposition negotiators Felipe Mujica and Alberto Quiroz Corradi pushed hard for this guarantee to be built into the process, but met a brick wall in Jorge Rodriguez. He wouldn't even agree to an auditoria en caliente of a small sample of voting centers - why?
One obvious hypothesis is that JR understood that an auditoria en caliente was the one control that would lay bare the kind of fraud they were planning - where the machines register votes that are different from those cast.
More deep dark whys: Why did CNE work so hard to limit the scope of activity of the International Observers? Why did they allow Carter and Gaviria to do a quick count of the transmitted (i.e. already tampered with) results only? Why did they insist on inviting Hebe de Bonafini and other open government supporters, but "forget" to send out invitations to the European Union mission?
Why were they so scared of exit polls?
Why did they threaten to shut down TV stations if they aired exit poll results?
Why were some Aporrea posters sure they'd lost on Sunday night? Why did Romero Anselmi go on VTV on Sunday night, looking like a funeral director, to say that, "whatever happens, the democratic game goes on" and that "it's ok, because we have a lifesaver called the Constitution, and that will go on"? Why did Comando Maisanta disappear all Sunday and turn up on TV looking dishevelled and straining to put on a smile? Why was Chavez praising JVR's loyalty on Sunday morning? Why?
Why did a half-dozen independently conducted exit polls all come up with the same results, which were a mirror image of the results eventually announced? Was this a massive opposition conspiracy? Who gave the CD leaders such stunningly effective acting lessons? Why were they so exultant all night on Sunday? If they were acting, why aren't they given an emergency Oscar?
Why was the CNE's Comite de Totalizacion (tallying committee) never assembled, as it should've been according to CNE's own regulations? Who carried out the totalizacion? Why was Ezequiel Zamora barred from the tallying room? Why were opposition witnesses barred from the tallying room?
Where are the paper votes right now? What guarantee do we have that they're not being tampered with ahead of an auditoria en frio?
There are too many loose ends here. I'm getting leaks from an OAS staffer who says he believes there was fraud, but the restrictive observation rules imposed by CNE made it impossible for the observers to detect it.
Remember, so far, not one paper ballot has been matched to a single electronic tally - CNE did not allow OAS/Carter Center to perform such checks. In the end, these idiots agreed to carry out an observation mission under rules that barred them from poking into the site of the fraud.
Extremely serious stuff. If the fraud allegations are true, Venezuela today is a dictatorship, a country run by the minority. You have to admire the gumption, the audacity of CNE's directors in pulling off a stunt of this magnitude. Worst of all, with no auditoria-en-caliente, it may well be that the paper ballot have already been disposed of or tampered with. We may never know what really happened...because, again, CNE insisted on a series of observation rules that leave room for this avalanche of whys.
Of course, this could be all wrong - perhaps there was no fraud, perhaps the Perfect Fraud came on the other side, in the form of a carefully orchestrated opposition conspiracy to cast doubt on perfectly valid results. The one instrument that could have cleared this up definitively - an auditoria en caliente directly after the close of voting performed on a random sample of voting centers - was denied categorically by CNE.
Why?
August 16, 2004
None of it makes any sense...
But it looks very much to me like the government won fair and square. If it didn't, it'll come out in the paper-trail audit, which CNE's Jorge Rodriguez has already agreed to.
If the government did win fair and square, the Coordinadora Democratica has a LOT of explaining to do. In fact, if the government did win fair and square the Coordinadora Democratica leadership has a lot of resigning to do.
Worst Case Scenario
It's the very worst thing that could've happened. CNE head Francisco Carrasquero, by himself, announces a set of partial results that give the government a huge advantage. The opposition CNE members immediately say the announcement was made without following proper procedures. The opposition cries foul, and announces mirror-image results. The Carter Center/OAS mission is missing in action, at least at first.
A national disaster, in short. The referendum was meant to bring closure to the governance crisis in Venezuela. With results that fly in the face of exit-poll results announced on the basis of a fishy procedure, the referendum takes Venezuela further away from closure, not closer.
These are dangerous days for Venezuela, dangerous hours. The potential for violence is high. The opposition cannot, will not accept these results. And chavismo, surely enough, will not accept their reversal.
In other words, God only knows how the referendum will go down in history, but it will not go down as the peaceful, constitutional, electoral and democratic solution to the crisis that was the one chance the country had of avoiding both dictatorship and civil war.
There could, I suppose, still be a 13th hour surprise. But Jimmy Carter and Cesar Gaviria are diplomats, not miracle workers.
Pray for Venezuela, folks...it's going to get ugly.
A national disaster, in short. The referendum was meant to bring closure to the governance crisis in Venezuela. With results that fly in the face of exit-poll results announced on the basis of a fishy procedure, the referendum takes Venezuela further away from closure, not closer.
These are dangerous days for Venezuela, dangerous hours. The potential for violence is high. The opposition cannot, will not accept these results. And chavismo, surely enough, will not accept their reversal.
In other words, God only knows how the referendum will go down in history, but it will not go down as the peaceful, constitutional, electoral and democratic solution to the crisis that was the one chance the country had of avoiding both dictatorship and civil war.
There could, I suppose, still be a 13th hour surprise. But Jimmy Carter and Cesar Gaviria are diplomats, not miracle workers.
Pray for Venezuela, folks...it's going to get ugly.
12:45 a.m.: The Carter Shuttle Swings Into Action
Past midnight, and the mood in the opposition is exhultant. The real question now is how the government will deal with the staggering defeat they're being dealt. Will they grin and bear it, or are there more tricks to come?
UnionRadio reports that President Carter has just left Opposition headquarters at the Tamanaco Hotel headed towards the National Electoral Council. This is crunch time, la hora de la chucurrucuticas. The next few hours are critical.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, when all is said and done, we'll have to choose a major Caracas street to rename Avenida Presidente Carter...
UnionRadio reports that President Carter has just left Opposition headquarters at the Tamanaco Hotel headed towards the National Electoral Council. This is crunch time, la hora de la chucurrucuticas. The next few hours are critical.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, when all is said and done, we'll have to choose a major Caracas street to rename Avenida Presidente Carter...
August 15, 2004
Carter: Everyone Will Get To Vote
President Carter announces that CNE says it is willing to keep voting centers open for as long as it takes so everyone gets to vote. Lines remain very long throughout Venezuela, turnout appears to be extraordinarily high.
Presidents Carter and Gaviria once again urged everyone not to announce results before CNE makes an official statement...but, lets get real: this is Venezuela, information leaks, exit polls leak, sewer systems leak, everything leaks...and, dear readers, Hugo Chavez is in big big trouble...
Presidents Carter and Gaviria once again urged everyone not to announce results before CNE makes an official statement...but, lets get real: this is Venezuela, information leaks, exit polls leak, sewer systems leak, everything leaks...and, dear readers, Hugo Chavez is in big big trouble...
Eyewitness Report #1
I woke up before 5:00 am and got to my voting center by 5:10. Everything went smoothly and even that way, I got to vote by 8:30 am. Guess what was causing the delays?
You got it...the fingerprint machines. The funny thing is that the voting centers that have fingerprint machines (very few,) already gave up on transmiting the data to make comparisons. They only get your fingerprint and that's it. This is the situation nation-wide.
Before getting home I took a little ride around the city and huge lines are the common scene.
Many voting centers haven't been opened yet but people seem to be waiting patiently.
That's it for now.
Cristina in Caracas
Have a short, sharp snippet of observation to add to this blog? Send it to caracaschronicles@fastmail.fm
You got it...the fingerprint machines. The funny thing is that the voting centers that have fingerprint machines (very few,) already gave up on transmiting the data to make comparisons. They only get your fingerprint and that's it. This is the situation nation-wide.
Before getting home I took a little ride around the city and huge lines are the common scene.
Many voting centers haven't been opened yet but people seem to be waiting patiently.
That's it for now.
Cristina in Caracas
Have a short, sharp snippet of observation to add to this blog? Send it to caracaschronicles@fastmail.fm
August 14, 2004
One for luck, please read it carefully
(The following is the Homeric Hymn to Ares, Greek god of war. The ancients had a form of ritual, called "apothropaic", in which you called by good names gods and godesses that were to fear. Ares is one case. It comes from circa 485 A. D., and the translation is Charles Boer´s, considered by many as the best in English. Please read it carefully, specially the final lines. Let the gods and godesses and every possible force bless us!)
Ares, superior force,
Ares, chariot rider,
Ares, wears gold helmet,
Ares has mighty heart,
Ares, shield-bearer,
Ares, guardian of city,
Ares has armor of bronze,
Ares has powerful arms,
Ares never gets tired,
Ares, hard with spear,
Ares, rampart of Olympus,
Ares, father of Victory
who herself delights in war,
Ares, helper of Justice,
Ares overcomes other side,
Ares leader of most just men,
Ares carries staff of manhood,
Ares turns his fiery bright cycle
among the seven-signed tracks
of the aether, where flaming chargers
bear him forever
over the third orbit!
Hear me,
helper of mankind,
dispenser of youth's sweet courage,
beam down from up there
your gentle light
on our lives,
and your martial power,
so that I can shake off
cruel cowardice
from my head,
and diminish that deceptive rush
of my spirit, and restrain
that shrill voice in my heart
that provokes me
to enter the chilling din of battle.
You, happy god,
give me courage,
let me linger
in the safe laws of peace,
and thus escape
from battles with enemies
and the fate of a violent death.
Ares, superior force,
Ares, chariot rider,
Ares, wears gold helmet,
Ares has mighty heart,
Ares, shield-bearer,
Ares, guardian of city,
Ares has armor of bronze,
Ares has powerful arms,
Ares never gets tired,
Ares, hard with spear,
Ares, rampart of Olympus,
Ares, father of Victory
who herself delights in war,
Ares, helper of Justice,
Ares overcomes other side,
Ares leader of most just men,
Ares carries staff of manhood,
Ares turns his fiery bright cycle
among the seven-signed tracks
of the aether, where flaming chargers
bear him forever
over the third orbit!
Hear me,
helper of mankind,
dispenser of youth's sweet courage,
beam down from up there
your gentle light
on our lives,
and your martial power,
so that I can shake off
cruel cowardice
from my head,
and diminish that deceptive rush
of my spirit, and restrain
that shrill voice in my heart
that provokes me
to enter the chilling din of battle.
You, happy god,
give me courage,
let me linger
in the safe laws of peace,
and thus escape
from battles with enemies
and the fate of a violent death.
Nothing left to write...
Today, there's nothing left to write. If political speculation was an export commodity, Venezuela would be Kuwait. Every possible spin has been put on every possible snippet of information. Writing is useless today. Waiting is all we can do.
How can you shake off the explosive cocktail of anxiety and trepidation you're feeling today?
1-Get cooking. Lines tomorrow will be long. Very long. People may hold out for a few hours, then poop out as they start to get hungry. Bring some food for yourself. Bring some food for your line-mates. Arroz con pollo is a good option, as is a big pasta salad. Or just make a thermos full of coffee and bring some plastic cups. Make a personal connection with the other "si" voters in line so they feel bad about going home even if the line lasts 10 hours.
2-Get calling. Phone a Ni-Ni Today. Give it one last try. Call anyone you know who is minded to vote "si" but is apathetic and may stay home. Offer them a ride.
3-Get calm. Get ready mentally to be civil to the "no" voters you meet in line tomorrow. Even friendly.
4-Get grateful. Read the international page of the newspaper. Realize how much worse off people in Nayaf are compared even to our worst case scenario. Feel fortunate.
5-Get stoned. Camomille tea. Flores de Bach. Valeriana. Paciflorum. Nerv-o-calm. Lexotanil. Whatever it takes...
How can you shake off the explosive cocktail of anxiety and trepidation you're feeling today?
1-Get cooking. Lines tomorrow will be long. Very long. People may hold out for a few hours, then poop out as they start to get hungry. Bring some food for yourself. Bring some food for your line-mates. Arroz con pollo is a good option, as is a big pasta salad. Or just make a thermos full of coffee and bring some plastic cups. Make a personal connection with the other "si" voters in line so they feel bad about going home even if the line lasts 10 hours.
2-Get calling. Phone a Ni-Ni Today. Give it one last try. Call anyone you know who is minded to vote "si" but is apathetic and may stay home. Offer them a ride.
3-Get calm. Get ready mentally to be civil to the "no" voters you meet in line tomorrow. Even friendly.
4-Get grateful. Read the international page of the newspaper. Realize how much worse off people in Nayaf are compared even to our worst case scenario. Feel fortunate.
5-Get stoned. Camomille tea. Flores de Bach. Valeriana. Paciflorum. Nerv-o-calm. Lexotanil. Whatever it takes...
August 13, 2004
Supositorio de Triquitraqui
Yesterday's closing "Si" march seems to have breathed some badly needed hope and dynamism into the opposition's campaign. At the last possible moment, the opposition remembered how to march. There is no better tonic for opposition morale than holding a big, big march, and yesterday's rally seems to have done wonders to dispel the gloom that had been visibly falling over the "Si" camp. Supositorio de triquitraqui, que lo llaman...
CD spokesman Chuo Torrealba - far and away the brightest star in the CD's upper realms - has a little riff that goes something like: "Look, the dirty little secret here is that we are not the leaders of the opposition movement, we are merely the conductors. The leadership of the opposition movement is out on the streets, in the energy of the millions of people who simply will not accept the imposition an authoritarian system of government in Venezuela. We, as conductors, can try to channel that energy. But we did not put that energy there, nor do we control it. At most, we try to steer it."
This reality came into focus clearly on the Autopista yesterday.
When chavistas talk about "the opposition", they're referring to the 50 or 60 people who lead the Coordinadora Democratica. And many of them are, no doubt, lamentable figures - batequebraos de toda la vida. It's not surprising that the army full of caciques and shorn of indios called the CD put on an awful, unfocused, discombobulated campaign. There was never much hope of getting pears from that particular elm tree.
But if the "Si" camp is going to win, it was never going to be thanks to the efforts of the Batequebrao Squad. The one hope the "Si" has is that the movement's leaders would once again come to the rescue of its conductors. However misconceived the opposition campaign has been, there are millions of Venezuelans passionately committed to ending the Chavez experiment. They deserve much more competent conducting that they've been getting, but they won't stop playing simply because the conductor is not up to the task.
[Incidentally, the millions of earnest, idealistic Chavez supporters out there certainly also deserve far more competent leadership than they've been getting, but that's a subject for another post...]
Today, I have serious doubts that the Batequebrao Squad is really up to running the country. But looking at the image's of yesterday's march, I can see that the country has changed, decisively, over the last 6 years. If the "Si" wins and the regime changes, the conductors will not be able to break free of the leaders, because the leaders will be only too aware that it is them (i.e. US!) who put them in power. The era of closed-doors elite decisionmaking is over - the leaders have realized that the conductors work for them, not the other way around.
For all of the government's fixation with the opposition's alledged "secret heads" - from George W. Bush to Carlos Andres Perez - it's always been the grassroots who've called the shots. It's the grassroots that signed, marched, and will vote. On Sunday, we'll find out if this grassroots movement actually outnumbers the one on the government's side.
If it doesn't, que nos agarre confesados...
CD spokesman Chuo Torrealba - far and away the brightest star in the CD's upper realms - has a little riff that goes something like: "Look, the dirty little secret here is that we are not the leaders of the opposition movement, we are merely the conductors. The leadership of the opposition movement is out on the streets, in the energy of the millions of people who simply will not accept the imposition an authoritarian system of government in Venezuela. We, as conductors, can try to channel that energy. But we did not put that energy there, nor do we control it. At most, we try to steer it."
This reality came into focus clearly on the Autopista yesterday.
When chavistas talk about "the opposition", they're referring to the 50 or 60 people who lead the Coordinadora Democratica. And many of them are, no doubt, lamentable figures - batequebraos de toda la vida. It's not surprising that the army full of caciques and shorn of indios called the CD put on an awful, unfocused, discombobulated campaign. There was never much hope of getting pears from that particular elm tree.
But if the "Si" camp is going to win, it was never going to be thanks to the efforts of the Batequebrao Squad. The one hope the "Si" has is that the movement's leaders would once again come to the rescue of its conductors. However misconceived the opposition campaign has been, there are millions of Venezuelans passionately committed to ending the Chavez experiment. They deserve much more competent conducting that they've been getting, but they won't stop playing simply because the conductor is not up to the task.
[Incidentally, the millions of earnest, idealistic Chavez supporters out there certainly also deserve far more competent leadership than they've been getting, but that's a subject for another post...]
Today, I have serious doubts that the Batequebrao Squad is really up to running the country. But looking at the image's of yesterday's march, I can see that the country has changed, decisively, over the last 6 years. If the "Si" wins and the regime changes, the conductors will not be able to break free of the leaders, because the leaders will be only too aware that it is them (i.e. US!) who put them in power. The era of closed-doors elite decisionmaking is over - the leaders have realized that the conductors work for them, not the other way around.
For all of the government's fixation with the opposition's alledged "secret heads" - from George W. Bush to Carlos Andres Perez - it's always been the grassroots who've called the shots. It's the grassroots that signed, marched, and will vote. On Sunday, we'll find out if this grassroots movement actually outnumbers the one on the government's side.
If it doesn't, que nos agarre confesados...
August 11, 2004
Three questions to start a juicy comments thread...
1-Who do you think will win next Sunday and by how much?
2-Why do you think so?
3-What will happen on August 16th? 17th?
Please try to answer briefly - no Cont.'s. Do NOT flame.
This thread will be interesting to look back on after the fact.
Thanks to Dan Burnett for the idea
2-Why do you think so?
3-What will happen on August 16th? 17th?
Please try to answer briefly - no Cont.'s. Do NOT flame.
This thread will be interesting to look back on after the fact.
Thanks to Dan Burnett for the idea
August 10, 2004
Why should the minority accept the veredict of the majority?
What gives the many the right to impose decisions on the few? How can the few be constrained by the many, and yet remain free? These are deep philosophical questions that have to be answered if democracy is to mean freedom for all rather than freedom for the majority only. As far as I know nobody's answered it better than Rousseau. When we vote, it is the will of the nation, as a single organic unit, that we try to ascertain. That's what Rousseau calls the general will. From this point of view, if the "no" side wins on Sunday, the opposition will have to accept that we were wrong, that what we believed to be the general will is not, in fact, the general will. And we will have to accept the majority's decision as something that is not imposed on us, but rather as something that was, in the end, our will. Needless to say, this applies in the other direction as well.
From Rousseau's Social Contract, Book IV, Chapter 2:
The vote of the majority always binds all the rest. This follows from the social contract itself. But it is asked how a man can be both free and forced to conform to wills that are not his own. How are the opponents at once free and subject to decisions they have not agreed to?
I retort that the question is wrongly put. The citizen gives his consent to all the decisions of the body politic, including those laws which are made in spite of his opposition, and even those which punish him when he dares to break them. The constant will of all the members of the State is the general will; by virtue of it they are citizens and free. When in the popular assembly a law is proposed, what the people is asked is not exactly whether it approves or rejects the proposal, but whether it is in conformity with the general will, which is their will. Each man, in giving his vote, states his opinion on that point; and the general will is found by counting votes.
When, therefore, the opinion that is contrary to my own prevails, this proves neither more nor less than that I was mistaken, and that what I thought to be the general will was not so. If my particular opinion had carried the day I should have achieved the opposite of what was my will; and it is in that case that I should not have been free.
This presupposes, indeed, that all the qualities of the general will still reside in the majority: when they cease to do so, whatever side a man may take, liberty is no longer possible.
From Rousseau's Social Contract, Book IV, Chapter 2:
The vote of the majority always binds all the rest. This follows from the social contract itself. But it is asked how a man can be both free and forced to conform to wills that are not his own. How are the opponents at once free and subject to decisions they have not agreed to?
I retort that the question is wrongly put. The citizen gives his consent to all the decisions of the body politic, including those laws which are made in spite of his opposition, and even those which punish him when he dares to break them. The constant will of all the members of the State is the general will; by virtue of it they are citizens and free. When in the popular assembly a law is proposed, what the people is asked is not exactly whether it approves or rejects the proposal, but whether it is in conformity with the general will, which is their will. Each man, in giving his vote, states his opinion on that point; and the general will is found by counting votes.
When, therefore, the opinion that is contrary to my own prevails, this proves neither more nor less than that I was mistaken, and that what I thought to be the general will was not so. If my particular opinion had carried the day I should have achieved the opposite of what was my will; and it is in that case that I should not have been free.
This presupposes, indeed, that all the qualities of the general will still reside in the majority: when they cease to do so, whatever side a man may take, liberty is no longer possible.
The die is cast.
Alea jacta est.
Caius Julius Caesar
La suerte está echada. The die is cast.
However you may wish to interpret it, the fact is there's very little time left to change the course of fate. Only an event of miraculous or catastrophic nature could modify the idea that millions of Venezuelans (of any political sign) have made themselves about this government during almost 6 years. Yes, indeed it's been almost 6 years. On August 15th, 2004, President Chávez will have spent exactly 5.53 years in power. 5.53, you ask.
Yes, 5.53 years. That is the product of dividing the amount of days Hugo has been in power between the amount of days in a year: 2021 days/365 days pr. year = 5.53 years. It is curious that on that day, a president who keeps telling us he will be in power until 2021, arrives at exactly 2021 DAYS in power. Coincidence? Fate?
It will be 5.53 years, which began auspiciously because the lot of us bought into Chávez's intentions and promises of taking the country ahead in peace.
That there's violence in both sides, that both parts have degraded political discourse, that the opposition does not condemn it's own violent radicals, that we don't assume the reponsability of the actions of both Carmona and Ortega, that we are an embodiment of the past; are all ideas frequently presented as arguments by "ni-ni's" and philochavistas to present the idea that the Venezuelan President should be left alone.
Well, I want to express the following:
- Violence from any source is despicable and must be abhorred
- Both parts have commited grave mistakes in their handling of the last three years.
- Again, Violence is depicable. If the opposition is responsible for it, it is even more so, because the way to go should be democratic.
- I admit that I felt a strong sympathy for the paro and its promoters at its beginning, although I understand they did not force anybody to do anything. IT must be noted though that the Venezuelan approached the Paro as if it did not exist: it was "virtual", "inexistent", "mediático". Now the Paro is to blame for even the simplest things.
- I was exactly 18 years old at the 4F 1992. I voted for the first time in 1993. And I did so perfectly conscious of the responsability of the act of voting. I took the time, even as party-minded 18 year old to find out about the candidates and their agendas. In 1998 Chaves proposed change, in peace. And lied. I never belonged to any political party, and adecos and copeyanos I feel no sympathy for. But antipathy for adecos, will not drive me to support Hugo and his hate agenda
Having said all that, I decided to post this, because if it serves to convince a single "ni-ni" who believes Chavez should be left to finish his period, or a chavista who has enough doubts about the intentions of their leader, that this government is nothing but a vile lie, smoke and mirrors with everybody's money, I've accomplished my task.
Again: Alea jacta est. But my undecided friend, there's always time to reconsider: Venezuela, not its government, requires your loyalty. The future is also in your hands.
Los "civilistas" protegen a los escuálidos de si mismos
August 7, 2004
Just a specimen of Venezuelan humour...
(Sure that I ´m going to be censored and earn a "color de hormiga" card, I can´t resist the temptation to post this joke here).
Conjugacion del verbo REVOCAR:
YO revoco
TU revocas
ÉL SE VA
NOSOTROS celebramos
VOSOTROS celebráis
ELLOS huyen
In English:
I revoke
You revoke
HE GOES AWAY
We celebrate
You celebrate
THEY FLEE
Conjugacion del verbo REVOCAR:
YO revoco
TU revocas
ÉL SE VA
NOSOTROS celebramos
VOSOTROS celebráis
ELLOS huyen
In English:
I revoke
You revoke
HE GOES AWAY
We celebrate
You celebrate
THEY FLEE
August 6, 2004
An attempt to enlight the situation.
The last couple of days have been quite agitated both in Venezuela and CC.
Andres has always tried to make things lighter by posting some Poetry from Venezuelan Laurates.
Some have mentioned the need to let go and release the tension.
So, I'll leave you with a piece of music(at least its lyrics), in order to ease our moods in this last stretch of the road till the 15th.
Sobre mis párpados vela
el gallo de la madrugada,
sobre el péndulo que la vigilia mueve.
Tus rotundas palabras,
tu cortante gesto son el gélido viento que silba
por las rendijas de mi pensamiento.
Y es tan grande la tristeza que hoy siento...
Aléjate espejismo del amor eterno,
sólo eres literaria veleidad.
Ni al peregrino das posada
ni al sediento agua
ni al que ansía saber muestras la verdad.
Detesto el tiempo, la ansiedad lamento.
Descansar sólo quiero, junto al calor del fuego,
Me amarro al momento, y lo único que poseo,
con los hombres azules
irme al azul desierto.
Es lo que hoy deseo,
y a ti te deseo que de cascabeles,
pífanos y timbales se alegre tu camino.
Que nunca te sea adverso el destino.
Que encuentres en tu vida
amigos diáfanos y entretenidos.
Sobre mis párpados velas,
frágil ave de la madrugada.
Eres péndulo que en la vigilia hiere.
Tus cortantes palabras,
tu rotundo gesto
son el gélido viento que silba
por las rendijas de mi pensamiento.
Y es tan honda la nostalgia que hoy siento...
Aléjate espejismo del amor eterno,
sólo eres literaria veleidad.
Ni al peregrino das posada
ni al sediento agua
ni al que ansía saber muestras la verdad.
Somete el tiempo apagará el lamento
bajo un límpido cielo al calor del fuego.
Me acojo el momento y lo único que deseo
es con los hombres azules
irme al azul desierto.
Es lo que hoy deseo.
Y a ti te deseo
que encuentres tu camino.
Es lo que hoy te deseo y lo que hoy te escribo.
Manolo Garcia(Musico Español, Los Hombres Azules,2001)
Andres has always tried to make things lighter by posting some Poetry from Venezuelan Laurates.
Some have mentioned the need to let go and release the tension.
So, I'll leave you with a piece of music(at least its lyrics), in order to ease our moods in this last stretch of the road till the 15th.
Sobre mis párpados vela
el gallo de la madrugada,
sobre el péndulo que la vigilia mueve.
Tus rotundas palabras,
tu cortante gesto son el gélido viento que silba
por las rendijas de mi pensamiento.
Y es tan grande la tristeza que hoy siento...
Aléjate espejismo del amor eterno,
sólo eres literaria veleidad.
Ni al peregrino das posada
ni al sediento agua
ni al que ansía saber muestras la verdad.
Detesto el tiempo, la ansiedad lamento.
Descansar sólo quiero, junto al calor del fuego,
Me amarro al momento, y lo único que poseo,
con los hombres azules
irme al azul desierto.
Es lo que hoy deseo,
y a ti te deseo que de cascabeles,
pífanos y timbales se alegre tu camino.
Que nunca te sea adverso el destino.
Que encuentres en tu vida
amigos diáfanos y entretenidos.
Sobre mis párpados velas,
frágil ave de la madrugada.
Eres péndulo que en la vigilia hiere.
Tus cortantes palabras,
tu rotundo gesto
son el gélido viento que silba
por las rendijas de mi pensamiento.
Y es tan honda la nostalgia que hoy siento...
Aléjate espejismo del amor eterno,
sólo eres literaria veleidad.
Ni al peregrino das posada
ni al sediento agua
ni al que ansía saber muestras la verdad.
Somete el tiempo apagará el lamento
bajo un límpido cielo al calor del fuego.
Me acojo el momento y lo único que deseo
es con los hombres azules
irme al azul desierto.
Es lo que hoy deseo.
Y a ti te deseo
que encuentres tu camino.
Es lo que hoy te deseo y lo que hoy te escribo.
Manolo Garcia(Musico Español, Los Hombres Azules,2001)
For all those who expect the best from (AND FOR) Venezuela
SOLO LA TIERRA
Por todos los astros lleva el sueño
pero sólo en la tierra despertamos.
Dormidos flotamos en el éter,
nos arrastran las naves invisibles
hacia mundos remotos,
pero sólo en la tierra abren los párpados.
La tierra amada día tras día,
maravillosa, errante,
que trae el sol al hombro de tan lejos
y lo prodiga en nuestras casas.
Siempre seré fiel a la noche
y al fuego de todas sus estrellas
pero miradas desde aquí,
no podría irme, no sé habitar otro paisaje.
Ni con la muerte dejaría
que mis cenizas salgan de sus campos.
La tierra es el único planeta
que prefiere los hombres a los ángeles.
Más que el silencio de la tumba
temo la hora de resurrección:
demasiado terrible
es despertar mañana en otra parte.
EUGENIO MONTEJO
Terredad
Por todos los astros lleva el sueño
pero sólo en la tierra despertamos.
Dormidos flotamos en el éter,
nos arrastran las naves invisibles
hacia mundos remotos,
pero sólo en la tierra abren los párpados.
La tierra amada día tras día,
maravillosa, errante,
que trae el sol al hombro de tan lejos
y lo prodiga en nuestras casas.
Siempre seré fiel a la noche
y al fuego de todas sus estrellas
pero miradas desde aquí,
no podría irme, no sé habitar otro paisaje.
Ni con la muerte dejaría
que mis cenizas salgan de sus campos.
La tierra es el único planeta
que prefiere los hombres a los ángeles.
Más que el silencio de la tumba
temo la hora de resurrección:
demasiado terrible
es despertar mañana en otra parte.
EUGENIO MONTEJO
Terredad
August 5, 2004
on the subject on the "correct behaviour"
Tips for Effective Online Communication
Online etiquette is often referred to as "netiquette".
Remember: You are communicating with real people, not machines.
- Use the same courtesy as you would extend someone you are having a phone conversation with.
- Don not entice a flame and don?t participate in flamefests. Flaming occurs when you send a message that provokes an angry, and often nasty, response. When others join in, a full-fledged flamefest ensues.
- Use the same rules regarding good grammar, punctuation and word choice as you would for any written communication.
- Don not type your message in all capital letters. the are hard to read. This is known as SHOUTING and may provoke flaming.
-
- Use the subject line to give recipients an idea of the message?s contents.
- Don not use vulgar language or make sexist comments.
August 4, 2004
An anecdote to start a new thread
Yesterday, I was in the mood for hot-dogs, so I went to a street vendor very near my house. There was a girl there, waiting for a "pepito" (that´s a meat sandwich, delicious, for the unfortunate non-Venezuelans that have never tasted it), and, by their dialogue, I figured out two things: 1) she used to work around there, while she lives somewhere else; 2) she and the vendor knew each other and were on friendly terms.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, he started to talk about how he was going to vote for the NO, and about this hot girl that lived near by... "but she is an escuálida, so I´m losing points there" (the speech was a little bit longer, but that was the drift). Neither the girl nor me said a word, but then I turned out to look at her, and she was looking at me. We both smiled, and, without a word, we both knew the other was going to vote YES. No publicity, no outward signs, nothing but a look and a shy, sly, smile. Isn´t it wonderful to live in a country where you can communicate without words with total strangers as if you had known them all your life?
Suddenly, out of nowhere, he started to talk about how he was going to vote for the NO, and about this hot girl that lived near by... "but she is an escuálida, so I´m losing points there" (the speech was a little bit longer, but that was the drift). Neither the girl nor me said a word, but then I turned out to look at her, and she was looking at me. We both smiled, and, without a word, we both knew the other was going to vote YES. No publicity, no outward signs, nothing but a look and a shy, sly, smile. Isn´t it wonderful to live in a country where you can communicate without words with total strangers as if you had known them all your life?
August 3, 2004
July 31, 2004
If Chavez Wins
The comments section has had some not-very-enlightening debate on how the opposition may react in case Chavez wins. With my last post, I wanted to make clear that it's not only an opposition problem, since chavismo contains its own radical fringe that may not accept a defeat. However, the problem is altogether dicier for the opposition, which seems less psychologically prepared for a loss, and less clear on what comes next if we do lose.
So what would we do if Chavez wins, as he may well? What should we do? To answer these questions, it's worth thinking back to September 2002, when the slogan Elecciones Ya! was born. It's taken 23 months of agitation, four signature gathering drives, the paro, the reparos, Plaza Altamira, zopotocientos foros in the Ateneo de Caracas and an astonishing organizational drive by the Coordinadora Democratica and Sumate to turn that slogan into a reality. For years, literally, we've been working towards August 15th. After all that, a defeat would be a bitter, bitter pill indeed.
But why was it, at the end of 2002, that the opposition started to congeal around the idea of the "electoral solution" to the crisis? Because it was clear to us that when people voted for Chavez in 1998, 99 and 2000 they were not told they were voting for a personalist, autocratic system, that they thought they were voting for a democratic government and would not have voted for Chavez had they known that, after 2000, he would veer as sharply to the autocratic left as he did. We were sure that, given a chance, the voters would remedy that mistake.
We also knew, after April 11th, that any attempt to expel Chavez from power that was not peaceful and democratic would further worsen the nation's division. That it would bring a government that a huge chunk of the country would consider illegitimate and would, therefore, only lead to further instability. We understood that the goal was not merely to get rid of Chavez, but to get rid of Chavez well. Or, as I was writing way back in October 2002,
It's critical that Chávez is replaced through an election. Aside from all the valid idealistic reasons for demanding democratic decision-making, the fact is that he does retain the support of a third of the population. Much more relevantly, he maintains the fervent support of about 20% of the electorate, the so-called chavistas duros (hard-core chavistas) who see him more as a mystical figure than a politician. If Chávez is pushed out of office unconstitutionally, by force, these people will never accept the outcome. At best, they'd be a constant thorn on the side of the next government, at worst they could start a civil war. It worries me that the most radicalized opposition figures out there don't seem to realize how much of a problem this is, and continue to push for extra-constitutional means of getting rid of the guy. Making sure that 20% feels included - or at least doesn't feel openly violated - by the transition to the post-chavista era will probably be the most important task of the next government. Let's hope they don't screw it up.
Only an election offers the possibility of a peaceful, democratic, and constitutional outcome to the crisis that is recognized as legitimate by all, because only in an election can the entire body politic participate. In a situation as badly polarized as Venezuela's, only the opinion of the whole can convince the minority of the legitimacy of accepting the majority's decision.
Today, Venezuelans can no longer say Chavez is an unknown quantity. The regime's extremism, sectarianism and authoritarianism are plain for all to see. Two years ago, the opposition gambled that, given this choice, people would rush to throw out the bum. Today, polls put that in doubt. It seems imaginable, now, that a majority of Venezuelans actually wants this kind of fuzzy-autocracy, or is satisfied enough with Chavez not to see it as a problem. If they win, well, I'll be forced to say I don't understand their ideology or values at all. But I have to respect them.
And, of course, if the vote goes smoothly and the observers sign off on a Chavez win, the opposition will not really have any choice but to respect the results either. All its bargaining power, credibility, and ascendancy over the armed forces, the international community, etc. will be up in smoke. A real Waterloo. If the opposition loses and loses decisively, its reaction will, in a sense, be quite beside the point - the Coordinadora will have no choice but to accept the results...if not in words, in deeds.
This is the beauty of the democratic system, folks. Los politicos proponen y la gente dispone. This is how it's supposed to be - and barring a catastrophic technical failure, this is how it will be.
So what would we do if Chavez wins, as he may well? What should we do? To answer these questions, it's worth thinking back to September 2002, when the slogan Elecciones Ya! was born. It's taken 23 months of agitation, four signature gathering drives, the paro, the reparos, Plaza Altamira, zopotocientos foros in the Ateneo de Caracas and an astonishing organizational drive by the Coordinadora Democratica and Sumate to turn that slogan into a reality. For years, literally, we've been working towards August 15th. After all that, a defeat would be a bitter, bitter pill indeed.
But why was it, at the end of 2002, that the opposition started to congeal around the idea of the "electoral solution" to the crisis? Because it was clear to us that when people voted for Chavez in 1998, 99 and 2000 they were not told they were voting for a personalist, autocratic system, that they thought they were voting for a democratic government and would not have voted for Chavez had they known that, after 2000, he would veer as sharply to the autocratic left as he did. We were sure that, given a chance, the voters would remedy that mistake.
We also knew, after April 11th, that any attempt to expel Chavez from power that was not peaceful and democratic would further worsen the nation's division. That it would bring a government that a huge chunk of the country would consider illegitimate and would, therefore, only lead to further instability. We understood that the goal was not merely to get rid of Chavez, but to get rid of Chavez well. Or, as I was writing way back in October 2002,
It's critical that Chávez is replaced through an election. Aside from all the valid idealistic reasons for demanding democratic decision-making, the fact is that he does retain the support of a third of the population. Much more relevantly, he maintains the fervent support of about 20% of the electorate, the so-called chavistas duros (hard-core chavistas) who see him more as a mystical figure than a politician. If Chávez is pushed out of office unconstitutionally, by force, these people will never accept the outcome. At best, they'd be a constant thorn on the side of the next government, at worst they could start a civil war. It worries me that the most radicalized opposition figures out there don't seem to realize how much of a problem this is, and continue to push for extra-constitutional means of getting rid of the guy. Making sure that 20% feels included - or at least doesn't feel openly violated - by the transition to the post-chavista era will probably be the most important task of the next government. Let's hope they don't screw it up.
Only an election offers the possibility of a peaceful, democratic, and constitutional outcome to the crisis that is recognized as legitimate by all, because only in an election can the entire body politic participate. In a situation as badly polarized as Venezuela's, only the opinion of the whole can convince the minority of the legitimacy of accepting the majority's decision.
Today, Venezuelans can no longer say Chavez is an unknown quantity. The regime's extremism, sectarianism and authoritarianism are plain for all to see. Two years ago, the opposition gambled that, given this choice, people would rush to throw out the bum. Today, polls put that in doubt. It seems imaginable, now, that a majority of Venezuelans actually wants this kind of fuzzy-autocracy, or is satisfied enough with Chavez not to see it as a problem. If they win, well, I'll be forced to say I don't understand their ideology or values at all. But I have to respect them.
And, of course, if the vote goes smoothly and the observers sign off on a Chavez win, the opposition will not really have any choice but to respect the results either. All its bargaining power, credibility, and ascendancy over the armed forces, the international community, etc. will be up in smoke. A real Waterloo. If the opposition loses and loses decisively, its reaction will, in a sense, be quite beside the point - the Coordinadora will have no choice but to accept the results...if not in words, in deeds.
This is the beauty of the democratic system, folks. Los politicos proponen y la gente dispone. This is how it's supposed to be - and barring a catastrophic technical failure, this is how it will be.
July 30, 2004
Ramon Machuca threatens to cut off oil supplies to the US if the "yes" side wins
From Union Radio
Leaders from the pro-chavez oil workers' union, Sentraset, threatened to cut off oil supplies to the US and start a national stoppage if "on next aug. 15th a new fraud is committed" and the "yes" side wins the referendum.
More...
Leaders from the pro-chavez oil workers' union, Sentraset, threatened to cut off oil supplies to the US and start a national stoppage if "on next aug. 15th a new fraud is committed" and the "yes" side wins the referendum.
More...
El 28, el 28, el 28...
The real threat to the integrity of the referendum is not the possibility of fraud. It's not ballot stuffing or triple voting or voting from beyond the grave. The real threat is that, like in May 2000, CNE just won't be ready to hold the vote in time.
2.5 weeks to go, and the voter registry has just now been finalized, including huge numbers of questionable address-changes and millions of somewhat mysterious new voters. The SBC people have still not been given the REP information they need to program the voting machines. The thumbprint readers may or may not be able to cope with the pressure put on them. Francisco Carrasquero rejects the possibility of manual voting if the automated systems fail.
Paranoia, as we all know, is free. But this type of strategy of systematic delay has become a bit of a trademark for this CNE. Ever since August 2003, every obstacle imaginable has been trotted out to delay the effective activation of people's rights under the constitution's Article 72. This is the CNE that turned a simple signature drive into a 8-month long telenovela, the same CNE that sat on the electoral registry for a year before suddenly "discovering" thousands of dead people on the rolls and stood by passively as dozens of reparos tables instituted an operacion morrocoy, that has never really tried to hide its disdain for the possibility of a presidential recall.
It escapes no one's attention that, if the election system fails catastrophically on Aug. 15th, Chavez will have to hold out less than a week before his grip on power is extended until 2006. It would be the mother of all political crises. But then, as you see Jorge Rodriguez's determination to deploy a fingerprint-logging system that CNE's own tests show will not work, it's impossible not to wonder about hidden agendas.
2.5 weeks to go, and the voter registry has just now been finalized, including huge numbers of questionable address-changes and millions of somewhat mysterious new voters. The SBC people have still not been given the REP information they need to program the voting machines. The thumbprint readers may or may not be able to cope with the pressure put on them. Francisco Carrasquero rejects the possibility of manual voting if the automated systems fail.
Paranoia, as we all know, is free. But this type of strategy of systematic delay has become a bit of a trademark for this CNE. Ever since August 2003, every obstacle imaginable has been trotted out to delay the effective activation of people's rights under the constitution's Article 72. This is the CNE that turned a simple signature drive into a 8-month long telenovela, the same CNE that sat on the electoral registry for a year before suddenly "discovering" thousands of dead people on the rolls and stood by passively as dozens of reparos tables instituted an operacion morrocoy, that has never really tried to hide its disdain for the possibility of a presidential recall.
It escapes no one's attention that, if the election system fails catastrophically on Aug. 15th, Chavez will have to hold out less than a week before his grip on power is extended until 2006. It would be the mother of all political crises. But then, as you see Jorge Rodriguez's determination to deploy a fingerprint-logging system that CNE's own tests show will not work, it's impossible not to wonder about hidden agendas.
July 27, 2004
About English, Spanish, Rhetorics and Rhythm
(For Quico and Coral, in the middle of my insomnia).
Coral wrote:
"I agree with Quico. In the USA, the finest, most enduring, historical manifestos and speeches have been written in notably simple English. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was written in language a baby could understand".
An example: "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal". Would a baby uderstand an expression as "Four score and seven years ago"? Wouldn´t "87 years ago" be more to the point? It´s as if we started, in a good Spanish speech about the 23 de enero de 1958, by saying: "ocho lustros y seis años atrás"... Not very clear, but it sounds so much better than "hace 46 años"...
Another example: "When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation". That is a little bit complicated, to say the least.
To translate both statements you would need to go back in time, looking for Rhetorical expressions inside the language you are trying to translate them into. No easy task.
The problem, a basic problem, I think, is of rhythm. As Fiona Shaw pointed out in a brilliant show about Shakespeare for the BBC, Shakespeare took the common language, identified its rhythm, and turned it into poetry. That is what explains why, even if the Gettysburg Address is not exactly simple, it can reach out to everyone who read it in the Lincoln Memorial, without even reading it aloud... and please believe me, I had to go up to the Lincoln Memorial alone, to read it and weep by myself before facing my prosaic family (and that version of the Imperial Roman Campo di Marte which the Mall is, with all its monuments to dead soldiers...).
Now read this. "But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground". Feel the rhythm! It´s there! It jumps at you as you read it, grabs you by the throat, and doesn´t let you go until you are choking!
On the other hand, Spanish has always been a "prosaic" language. It´s not easy, to put it bluntly, to achieve what Shakespeare did in "blank verse" without going into rhyme! To reach a shimmer of the rhythm of English, Spanish has to turn to long resounding phrases. The effect is not always fortunate, I´ll give you that. But you work with the language you ara forced to. No way Venezuelans could write an agreement in perfect, rhytmical English, and be understood by common readers. Given that most Venezuelans seldom read good literature is Spanish (for some cultural reasons we favour foreign literatures, and in translation, mind you, over good Spanish prose), it is unfair to ask from them a perfect, moving speech, inspiring, rhythmically conceived and, at the same time, simple and pristine.
But again, that is our language. We inherited from Spain, as Americans from Shakespeare, a specific rhetorical (Quixotical?) rhythm. As a baby can "comprehend", without understanding clearly, Lincoln´s "eight score and seven year ago", a not so bright Venezuelan reader can understand, in a glass darkly, what the CD agreement meant. Spanish is less clear than English, maybe, it requires more words to say the same thing, but it has its own traditions, heights and chasms. To all those shortcomings every Spanish speaker is used. It´s his language, and those shortcomings fit him like a big, mildly uncomfortable coat (just as Shakesperian English fits most American readers).
So, please, dear gals and guys, start by understanding that a language is a way to conceive the world (Borges wrote some line I would find for you as soon as possible, it´s over 5:00 a.m. and I´m simply spent), not just a vehicle to transmit ideas or an arbitrary repertoire of symbols. As a speaker of that language, you are forced into its limits, unless you have the power of a poet like Shakespeare to break or extend them. Granted no one on the CD is a Shakespeare, a Cervantes or even a Cadenas, try to value what they have done. Do as you do with Lincoln and Jefferson: go to meet them half-way. Do your part.
Coral wrote:
"I agree with Quico. In the USA, the finest, most enduring, historical manifestos and speeches have been written in notably simple English. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was written in language a baby could understand".
An example: "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal". Would a baby uderstand an expression as "Four score and seven years ago"? Wouldn´t "87 years ago" be more to the point? It´s as if we started, in a good Spanish speech about the 23 de enero de 1958, by saying: "ocho lustros y seis años atrás"... Not very clear, but it sounds so much better than "hace 46 años"...
Another example: "When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation". That is a little bit complicated, to say the least.
To translate both statements you would need to go back in time, looking for Rhetorical expressions inside the language you are trying to translate them into. No easy task.
The problem, a basic problem, I think, is of rhythm. As Fiona Shaw pointed out in a brilliant show about Shakespeare for the BBC, Shakespeare took the common language, identified its rhythm, and turned it into poetry. That is what explains why, even if the Gettysburg Address is not exactly simple, it can reach out to everyone who read it in the Lincoln Memorial, without even reading it aloud... and please believe me, I had to go up to the Lincoln Memorial alone, to read it and weep by myself before facing my prosaic family (and that version of the Imperial Roman Campo di Marte which the Mall is, with all its monuments to dead soldiers...).
Now read this. "But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground". Feel the rhythm! It´s there! It jumps at you as you read it, grabs you by the throat, and doesn´t let you go until you are choking!
On the other hand, Spanish has always been a "prosaic" language. It´s not easy, to put it bluntly, to achieve what Shakespeare did in "blank verse" without going into rhyme! To reach a shimmer of the rhythm of English, Spanish has to turn to long resounding phrases. The effect is not always fortunate, I´ll give you that. But you work with the language you ara forced to. No way Venezuelans could write an agreement in perfect, rhytmical English, and be understood by common readers. Given that most Venezuelans seldom read good literature is Spanish (for some cultural reasons we favour foreign literatures, and in translation, mind you, over good Spanish prose), it is unfair to ask from them a perfect, moving speech, inspiring, rhythmically conceived and, at the same time, simple and pristine.
But again, that is our language. We inherited from Spain, as Americans from Shakespeare, a specific rhetorical (Quixotical?) rhythm. As a baby can "comprehend", without understanding clearly, Lincoln´s "eight score and seven year ago", a not so bright Venezuelan reader can understand, in a glass darkly, what the CD agreement meant. Spanish is less clear than English, maybe, it requires more words to say the same thing, but it has its own traditions, heights and chasms. To all those shortcomings every Spanish speaker is used. It´s his language, and those shortcomings fit him like a big, mildly uncomfortable coat (just as Shakesperian English fits most American readers).
So, please, dear gals and guys, start by understanding that a language is a way to conceive the world (Borges wrote some line I would find for you as soon as possible, it´s over 5:00 a.m. and I´m simply spent), not just a vehicle to transmit ideas or an arbitrary repertoire of symbols. As a speaker of that language, you are forced into its limits, unless you have the power of a poet like Shakespeare to break or extend them. Granted no one on the CD is a Shakespeare, a Cervantes or even a Cadenas, try to value what they have done. Do as you do with Lincoln and Jefferson: go to meet them half-way. Do your part.
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