Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean

ELECTIONS-VENEZUELA: No Shades of Grey

Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Dec 1 2006 (IPS) - The contrasting styles of Hugo Chávez, the retired army officer seeking reelection to the presidency in Venezuela, and opposition candidate Manuel Rosales, a teacher, reflect the great divide between the people of this country, who will elect their government for the next six years on Sunday.

Perhaps their humble and provincial origins are the only thing the candidates have in common.

Rosales, nearly 54 and undeniably gifted with political astuteness, hails from Santa Bárbara de Zulia, south of Lake Maracaibo in the northwest, and was a schoolteacher, as was Chávez’s father. The sitting president was born in Sabaneta, a small town in the southwestern plains.

Chávez is an extrovert, loquacious, laughs easily, greets everybody, and talks in a thunderously loud voice. He is a tireless orator and his speeches galvanise his audiences, as he moves rapidly from fiery rhetoric condemning U.S. imperialism to trivial comments about baseball, or folksy anecdotes from his childhood or life in the barracks.

Rosales, on the other hand is sober, rather reserved, sometimes highbrow and distant, and seldom smiles. He is attentive to the formalities of every occasion, and is not overly familiar in his conversations with others. He makes grammatical mistakes in his speeches, and he repeats the same things in much the same words at all his rallies and press conferences.

President Chávez first entered public life in 1992, when as a lieutenant colonel in the army he led a failed attempted coup. He is separated from his second wife, and has four children and two grandchildren.

Rosales rose from city counsellor to mayor of Maracaibo, and finally to governor of the oil-rich state of Zulia. He is married to his second wife, and has 10 children, several of whom are adopted.

Chávez identifies himself as a Bolivarian (after independence hero Simon Bolivar) and a socialist, and his bid for reelection has received outspoken support from presidents Fidel Castro of Cuba, Evo Morales of Bolivia, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, and Néstor Kirchner of Argentina. Rosales, on the other hand, defines himself as “a social democrat, a man of the centre-left.”

Graciela Ordaz, who attended Rosales’ rallies in Caracas, told IPS that “Manuel is our last hope for saving democracy: it’s now or never,” whereas Rosa Piña, who travelled from the southeast border with Colombia to attend a Chavista rally, said that “the ‘comandante’ is like a continuation of Jesus Christ, doing good to the poor.”

These apocalyptic views with religious overtones verging on the messianic are characteristic of the political polarisation that has divided Venezuela over the past decade. And they have been fuelled by the candidates’ radical speeches, depicting the country’s future as a two-horned dilemma, with very few calls for unity and working together to build a country for all Venezuelans.

“We have to choose between two models: on the one hand, those of us who believe in democracy, freedom and social justice, and on the other, those who want to establish a Castro-Cuban-communist system and take away the people’s freedom,” Rosales said at his last political rally on Wednesday in his homeland, Maracaibo, the country’s oil capital.

The same day, President Chávez told his supporters in San Felipe, 200 kilometres northwest of Caracas: “‘Mister Diablo’ (Mr Devil, his appellation for U.S. President George W. Bush) be warned, we are going to pulverise the candidates of imperialism, we are going to give them the greatest political knockout that has ever been remembered in the history of the nations.”

There are in fact a dozen presidential candidates in the race, but the degree of polarisation is such that the people’s opinions have narrowed the choice to Chávez or Rosales. The other candidates do not even reach one percent support in the opinion polls, most of which predict an easy victory for Chávez on Sunday.

“I am not I, I am you. You’re going to vote for yourselves, for the 21st century socialist Venezuela, for freedom, equality, happiness and love, because the other way leads to hatred and capitalism,” Chávez said. And in the lyrics of the “bolero” of the same title, he added amid cheers and applause: “What I feel for you is more than love, it’s frenzy.”

Rosales, who is critical of the alliance between Caracas and Havana, has said: “I have no master, nobody owns me; I only obey God, the Virgin Mary and the people,” and in Maracaibo he asked thousands of his supporters to pray “an ‘Our Father’ for reconciliation in Venezuela.”

Writer Alberto Barrera, who was recently awarded Spain’s Herralde Prize for his novel “La enfermedad” (“The Sickness”), and is also co-author of the most widely-read biography of the president, “Hugo Chávez sin uniforme” (“Hugo Chávez Out of Uniform”), told IPS that “throughout the campaign, since August, neither candidate has mentioned the other’s name.”

Rosales aways refers to Chávez as “el tipo” (“the fellow”), and Chávez calls his rival “aspirante a Frijolito” (“the Frijolito wannabe”). Chávez called his rivals in the presidential eletions of 1998 and 2000 “Frijolito One” and “Frijolito Two”. “Frijolito” (“Little Bean”) was the horse that Henrique Salas rode at campaign rallies when he ran against Chávez in the 1998 presidential elections.

“It’s a metaphor for this country. The other person is nameless, ignored, non-existent. That’s been the political situation in Venezuela all these years: we don’t see ourselves as one people, we just ignore the other half of the country that isn’t on our side,” Barrera said.

During his campaign, Chávez maximised his media presence by inaugurating public works, combined with short trips between rallies of his supporters, where – for alleged security reasons – he always made his appearances from the top of a truck.

Rosales took the country by surprise with long, rather gruelling marches, some of them through low-income neighbourhoods in Caracas and other cities, and enormous mass rallies that he called “avalanches”, in an attempt to give the lie to the opinion poll results.

Chávez, in contrast, “concentrated on media promotion, reinforcing his position as the option of the poor, more than on street demonstrations,” Oscar Schémel, head of the Hinterlaces polling firm, told IPS.

According to Schémel, Rosales “focused on his ‘Mi negra’ debit card (a proposal to distribute oil profits directly to two million unemployed people), but he didn’t pay enough attention to other issues, such as the lack of security that is a pressing issue for most people.” (“Mi negra” can be interpreted variously as “My black card”, “My black oil”, or “My black woman”, a common term of endearment.)

Barrera, for his part, said that Rosales “has in fact benefited from Chavista attacks and from opponents who criticise his oratorical mistakes and his lack of skills or knowledge, because ordinary people are like that, their speech is grammatically incorrect and they make mistakes when they talk.”

“Chávez was stigmatised, too, referred to as ‘sambo’ (a person of mixed indigenous and black origins), ignoramus, clumsy oaf, which helped him become the formidable communicator he is today,” he said.