Never one to mince his words, President Hugo Chavez is warning of instability or even outright civil war in oil-rich Venezuela if he is not re-elected next month.
The dire warning from the populist treated for cancer over the past year is largely seen as a gambit to woo undecided voters ahead of the Oct. 7 vote. Chavez has been in power for nearly 14 years and is seeking another six.
He has warned repeatedly that if the opposition candidate Henrique Capriles wins, the new government would wipe away subsidized food, health care and housing programs that are the pillars of what Chavez calls his socialist revolution.
Photo: Reuters
Capriles has a hidden neo-liberal agenda that “aims to take us back to a Venezuela that would not withstand this and would again enter a terrible scenario, a deep destabilization ... that would perhaps even take us close to civil war,” Chavez said on Monday in a radio interview.
Luis Vicente Leon, head of the polling firm Datanalisis, said Chavez’s remarks were more a political maneuver than a true reflection of the prospect for civil war.
“If Chavez is not in power, there will be chaos. If Chavez is not in power, there will be a civil war. If Chavez is not in power, there will be a coup,” Leon said. “The president is putting a price on voting for Capriles: a turbulent country that is at war.”
Most polls give Chavez a comlead of 10 to 20 percentage points over Capriles, although this cushion is thinner than it used to be.
However, these surveys also indicate that many Venezuelans are either undecided, plan to abstain or have decided who to vote for but say they might ultimately change their mind. Collectively these people are known as the ni-nis, meaning “neither this nor that.”
“Chavez’s intention is to keep people from voting for Capriles,” a former governor of the populous northern state of Miranda who is supported by a coalition of opposition parties, said political analyst Mariana Bacalao, a professor at Central University.
Leon said ni-nis could amount to as much as 30 percent of the 19-million-strong electorate and that Chavez is trying to spook people who prefer peace over change.
Capriles is countering Chavez’s doomsday warning by giving assurances that he would maintain Venezuela’s social welfare safety net.
Analyst Carmen Beatriz Fernandez of consulting firm DataStrategia said Chavez is playing the fear card to hold on to his own supporters, a tactic he used in 2010 legislative elections.
“Now, he is doing it with greater vehemence because he knows his lead [in the polls] is not as big as it used to be,” Fernandez said.
Swedish campaigner Greta Thunberg was deported from Israel yesterday, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs said, the day after the Israeli navy prevented her and a group of fellow pro-Palestinian activists from sailing to Gaza. Thunberg, 22, was put on a flight to France, the ministry said, adding that she would travel on to Sweden from there. Three other people who had been aboard the charity vessel also agreed to immediate repatriation. Eight other crew members are contesting their deportation order, Israeli rights group Adalah, which advised them, said in a statement. They are being held at a detention center ahead of a
A Chinese scientist was arrested while arriving in the US at Detroit airport, the second case in days involving the alleged smuggling of biological material, authorities said on Monday. The scientist is accused of shipping biological material months ago to staff at a laboratory at the University of Michigan. The FBI, in a court filing, described it as material related to certain worms and requires a government permit. “The guidelines for importing biological materials into the US for research purposes are stringent, but clear, and actions like this undermine the legitimate work of other visiting scholars,” said John Nowak, who leads field
NUCLEAR WARNING: Elites are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers, perhaps because they have access to shelters, Tulsi Gabbard said After a trip to Hiroshima, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday warned that “warmongers” were pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Gabbard did not specify her concerns. Gabbard posted on social media a video of grisly footage from the world’s first nuclear attack and of her staring reflectively at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. On Aug. 6, 1945, the US obliterated Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people in the explosion and by the end of the year from the uranium bomb’s effects. Three days later, a US plane dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, leaving abut 74,000 people dead by the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is to visit Canada next week, his first since relations plummeted after the assassination of a Canadian Sikh separatist in Vancouver, triggering diplomatic expulsions and hitting trade. Analysts hope it is a step toward repairing ties that soured in 2023, after then-Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau pointed the finger at New Delhi’s involvement in murdering Hardeep Singh Nijjar, claims India furiously denied. An invitation extended by new Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to Modi to attend the G7 leaders summit in Canada offers a chance to “reset” relations, former Indian diplomat Harsh Vardhan Shringla said. “This is a
RSS