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Now
The Venezuelan election was off to an
ominous start. At 2pm on Friday, I received a call from Táchira,
near the Colombian border: someone, presumably right-wing paramilitaries
had torched several large government buildings in San Cristóbal.
Frantic calls flew around for a few hours, many thinking this
the beginning of a broader campaign of pre-election sabotage,
but no other stories emerged, and the remainder of Friday passed
uneventfully.
The early hours of Saturday
were characterized by uncharacteristic calm for a city the size
of Caracas. Both sides maintained hope, and began to line up
at polling stations. I spend much of the day travelling between
radical barrios: first to 23 de Enero, where Chávez
voted in the presence of a compact crowd of several hundred,
prominently including the revolutionary collective Alexis Vive,
named for a martyr lost in the 2002 coup. After voting, Chávez
climbed into a small, red Volkswagon bug and drove off to spend
time with family. Despite "dry laws" being in effect,
beer is not entirely difficult to come by, even at 11am.
We move on to Caricuao, a barrio
situated to the southwest of Caracas, to visit a local radio
station. Caricuao, unlike 23 de Enero, has a sizeable opposition:
around 20-30 percent, compared to something less than 5 percent
in 23 de Enero. Organizers in Caricuao tell me that despite some
concern Friday evening, when the opposition attempted to mount
a guarimba, stacking tires outside voting centers to burn,
they managed to defuse the situation. As we speak, they maintain
a perimeter with walkie-talkies while following news reports
and transmitting updates: it is this sort of grassroots management
of information that reversed the 2002 coup.
As evening fell it began to
rain, first lightly and then progressively heavier. So too did
denunciations of the electoral process fall from the sky. On
the one hand, we saw opposition supporters gathering outside
voting centers, shouting to be let in to "audit" the
process. Somehow, the opposition had instilled in their followers
the asinine idea that the constitutionally-protected right to
observe the electoral process meant that anyone at all could
demand to be let in to watch the members of voting tables count
the votes and transmit the data. On the other hand, a spokesperson
for the Rosales campaign issued a denunciation of the forcible
re-opening of voting centers, allegedly at the point of the National
Guard's guns, and for the purpose of allowing busloads of Chavistas
to vote (buses figure prominently in hysterical opposition lore).
Minister of Communication and Chávez campaign team member
William Lara denied categorically that this had occurred at all.
A more serious claim emerged
from the opposition team: after all sides had apparently observed
the ban on exit polling and early results, it was alleged that
Telesur had released numbers favorable to Chávez. Teodoro
Petkoff and Roberto Smith, both members of the Rosales team,
used this as an excuse to threaten the release of their own numbers,
numbers which were alleged to point toward a Rosales victory.
The tenor of this rhetoric reached a dangerous point when Pablo
Medina got on the microphone from Rosales headquarters around
9pm. Medina, founder of the Chavista Patria Para Todos (Homeland
for All) party, but himself a proud member of the opposition,
began to pre-emptively attack the results of the election, calling
on members of the opposition to take to the streets Monday to
protest the fraud that was taking place. It seemed, for a moment,
that the opposition was going to follow the plan proposed by
the likes of Rafael Poleo.
For its part, the National
Electoral Commission (CNE) acted with the utmost of caution:
after having received data from 78 percent of election tables,
the CNE opted for an extended meeting with international election
observers prior to announcing results (in the past, such recognition
has been difficult to achieve, as was the case with OAS recognition
of the results of the 2004 referendum). At around 10pm, the CNE
appeared on a national cadena, a direct simultaneous broadcast
on all channels, with serious faces on. In retrospect, this made
sense: it would have been an error to show the excitement that
many members must have been feeling with the result. CNE president
Tibisay Lucena announced initial results: Chávez with
61 percent, Rosales with 38 percent.
The first thing I did was go
to the window and lean out. Living in an upper-middle class neighborhood,
we had been forced to listen to the emotional outbursts of the
opposition for several hours. Fireworks and the banging of pots
of the cacerolazo had accompanied all announcements, as
wealthy caraqueños struggled to maintain hope (these
people, we should remember, specialize in maintaining hope against
all odds, and against all logic). But now, Lucena's initial results
were met with a different, and clearly partisan response: a few
shouts of "Viva Chávez!" echoed around the neighborhood,
before being met with an ominous and deafening cacerolazo.
The sound, for anyone who has experienced it, can only be described
as eerie. More fireworks now, these clearly from Chavistas,
and so we proceed to the roof, where a neighbor tells me that
she had tried to convince herself that the government wouldn't
be able to steal a second consecutive election (the first, presumably,
being the 2004 referendum). I don't mention the difficulty involved
in stealing more than 3 million votes.
She tells us that Chavistas
are setting off fireworks in Plaza Altamira, so we go down to
see. It's still raining, and the Plaza is empty, but it's not
difficult to see where the Chavistas have gone: the Avenida Francisco
de Miranda is a stream of vehicles, freighted with screeching
Chavistas, headed from the eastern slums toward Miraflores palace
in the west, where Chávez has just finished giving a victory
speech. We catch the last westward-bound Metro, and like Lenin
from Switzerland we speed toward the old city center, the train
only slowing in the stations and only stopping when throngs of
red-clad Chavistas are waiting on the platform.
The train is one big party,
and we move from wagon to wagon to get closer to the chanting
crowds. Upon reaching Capitolio, the train empties and all those
inside begin to sprint up the stairs toward the only exit which
remains open, to merge with the crowds on the streets, streaming
North toward Miraflores and only pausing to launch fireworks
from the street. The streets around the palace are choked with
Chavistas: it's 11pm, and the party is well underway, and it
won't end for days.
We find ourselves on Puente
Llaguno, the now-infamous bridge where protesters were shot by
snipers to prepare the ground for the 2002 coup. Now, it is adorned
with a sculpture commemmorating the martyrs, and the crowds swarming
all over it seem to be the best proof that, in an oft-quoted
phrase, "No Volverán!" ("They shall not
return!"). This and other chants echo from under the bridge,
where we find ourselves sheltering from the increasingly-heavy
rain. One particularly striking chant seems to have been developed
precisely for the occasion:
Where are they now? Where
are they now?
Those sons-of-bitches who
said they were going to win?
The space under the bridge
has become a celebratory bullfight of sorts: cars and trucks,
packed with Chavistas, pass under the bridge to be met with cheers
and songs from those gathered underneath, who wave flags and
posters and pound on the passing vehicles.
With all of the celebrations,
it's impossible to find a cab. We walk back toward Parque Central
at 2am, down streets which would be definitively off-limits at
this time of night under normal circumstances. Tonight, however,
every passing vehicle reaches out the window to show their ten
fingers, to represent the ten million votes Chávez has
been aspiring to garner. For the moment at least, everyone is
a Chavista. When we finally score a taxi, we aren't disappointed:
"This rain," we are told, "is the tears of the
escualidos, the tears of the opposition." Rosales
has accepted defeat, and it seems for the moment that the opposition
isn't willing to go to the street to defend such a massive failure.
"Chávez 'til 2021!" the taxista exclaims
as we say a hearty goodbye: "Chávez 'til 2100!"
George Ciccariello-Maher is a Ph.D candidate in political theory
at the University of California, Berkeley. He lives in Caracas.
He can be reached at: gjcm@berkeley.edu
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