The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy (16 page)

For years millions of Venezuelans had effectively been disenfranchised by the poverty that plagued Venezuela. No one could object to an effort to ensure that these people be incorporated into society by giving them the same voter ID cards that had been provided to other citizens. However, in an effort to inflate the voter rolls, the National Electoral Council dispensed with the requirements that verified the identity of the cardholder. Mobile units were dispatched to the poorest
neighborhoods, handing out voter IDs to anyone who asked for one. In 2003, eleven million people were registered voters. There was
a bump of nearly three million voter registrations by the end of 2004, which meant the authorities were handing out roughly thirty-seven hundred voter IDs each day. By 2009, the total number stood at nearly eighteen million. According to
El Universal
’s Eugenio Martínez, 40 percent of registered voters do not even have an address listed. Election experts naturally feared that such a massive influx of unverifiable voters would open the system to phantom voters, multiple voting, and other types of hard-to-detect fraud. “Before, the system handed out secure voter IDs,” the former National Electoral Council staffer told me. “Now they will give you an ID in the street. They have given voter IDs to people who are not even Venezuelan.”

Some of the tools that Chávez has employed are dirty tricks familiar in any democracy. For example, Chávez’s electoral engineers have been fond of gerrymandering, not unlike what was once practiced in America’s Deep South to prevent African American candidates from being elected to predominantly white legislatures. Ahead of the last legislative elections, the government announced it would redraw the district lines. Everyone expected the redistricting would be an exercise in gerrymandering, and indeed it was: the number of representatives coming from urban areas, where the opposition usually fared best, was diluted in favor of rural areas that favored Chavista candidates. (For example, in Amazonas, a rural state considered a Chávez stronghold,
it took only 42,000 votes to get a member of parliament. Meanwhile, in Zulia, a state where the opposition had performed well, it required 708,000 votes to earn one representative.) However, the National Electoral Council went further than just gerrymandering the districts: once it drew them up, it then withheld the information from opposition candidates. When I first visited Venezuela, although it was only ten months until the election, opposition candidates still did not know the districts from which they could run. It is hard to know in which neighborhoods to campaign if you cannot find your district on a map. However, no one, including the former member of the electoral council, doubted that Chavista candidates knew where the lines had been drawn. After a steady stream of complaints, the government published the new electoral districts, roughly eight months before Election Day.

Perhaps the most sophisticated way that Chávez has been able to maintain his majorities in parliament is by contorting the election rules to ensure favorable results. Venezuela’s system of voting is
a so-called mixed electoral system; each voter is allowed to cast ballots for an individual candidate as well as for a party. Most officeholders are elected as individual candidates from single-member districts, as in the United States. But 40 percent of the seats are allocated based on the principle of proportional representation. The idea behind the mixed electoral system is to prevent any single party from dominating an election. In theory, the second-largest party—which would presumably be an opposition party—should be safeguarded by having a fair percentage of its candidates selected from the party lists.

Chávez’s advisers, however, found a loophole. They have gamed the system by having candidates loyal to Chávez run under the banner of political organizations that are legally distinct from Chávez’s main party. Thus, Chávez is able to capture seats won by individual candidates as well as the seats that are allocated based on the party lists.
Martínez showed me how it was theoretically possible for Chávez’s party to win only 51 percent of the vote but walk away with 80 percent of the seats.

The results are astounding. In the September 2010 legislative election,
Chávez’s party and the opposition captured roughly the same percentage of the popular vote. Still, with nearly the same vote count, the opposition won only 39 percent of the seats in the National Assembly, while Chávez’s party earned 59 percent. In the state of Carabobo, the opposition won 54 percent of the popular vote. Yet, with only 46 percent of the electorate, Chávez’s candidates won seven of ten seats. The same occurred in the Caracas Capital District: Chávez’s party lost the popular vote but won seven of ten seats. One simple revision in the election laws had the net effect of swinging eleven seats from the opposition to Chávez’s allies. “If you count only the fact that there are elections and votes, Venezuela is a democracy,” says the former electoral council staffer. “If you look beyond that, deeper than that, it is not.”

Not that Chávez is content to leave his political dominance to his ability to finesse the vote. When his attempt to end presidential term limits was narrowly defeated in 2007, he simply brought the proposal back in another reshaped referendum in February 2009. Many of the
executive powers he sought in his failed 2007 referendum were later achieved through presidential decrees and legislation produced by his rubber-stamp congress.
Chávez has enacted more decrees than any president in Venezuelan history—169 decrees in his first ten years. Venezuela’s first eight presidents only enacted 172 decrees in nearly forty years.

The net effect of Chávez’s manipulations, end runs, and power grabs has been to make Venezuela a unique paradox: with each election, the country loses more of its democracy.

Robert Serra can’t sit still. He gets up from his desk and sits back down. A few minutes later, he is up again, now pacing. Back at his desk, he can’t figure out what to do with his hands. When he is speaking, he uses them to slice through the air and punctuate his points. He speaks quickly, the words tumbling out, so his hands have a lot of work to do. The blown-up photographs that decorate his campaign headquarters show him in motion. In each, Serra, with his signature spiked hair rising a good inch above his head, is outside, addressing crowds, leading marches, shaking hands. In his office, when he isn’t speaking, he seems less sure. He stops to listen, is even quiet, but you can see the tremor building underneath, as if the twenty-three-year-old politician were a volcano about to erupt. He isn’t angry, and he isn’t nervous; he is simply impatient to do what he does best: fill the air with words. After ten minutes, his nickname seems appropriate; some people call him mini-Chávez.

Serra made a name for himself as one of Chávez’s most aggressive and outspoken student leaders. Now, two months before the legislative elections, he is running as a candidate for Chávez’s ruling party, seeking to represent the gritty neighborhood of January 23rd. (The name January 23rd is a reference to January 23, 1958, the day that the Venezuelan dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez was ousted.) His office is on the sixth floor of a high-rise in north Caracas, across the street from the National Pantheon, which houses the remains of Simón Bolívar under its main altar. The Pantheon is the site of many of Chávez’s presidential addresses. Just a few days before I visited Serra,
Chávez had shocked Venezuelans, even some Chavistas, by exhuming Bolívar’s
body live on television, shortly after midnight. Chávez had the body raised for “forensic tests”; he believes that Bolívar, rather than dying from tuberculosis, was assassinated by Colombian oligarchs. During his speech, Chávez asked Jesus Christ to bring Bolívar back from the dead and later claimed to have spoken with the liberator’s bones. (It is rumored that he often leaves an extra chair in cabinet meetings for Bolívar.) Chávez live tweeted the entire macabre event.

Speaking with a Chavista, especially one as devout and ideological as Serra, can be a somewhat surreal experience. When I asked him about the country’s deteriorating economy—the only South American economy in decline, with mounting inflation—he looked perplexed, replying that every year salaries had risen. Of course, he ignored the fact that those raises had been devoured by that same inflation, or that price controls had led to a shortage of basic goods like sugar and milk. When I pressed him on the country’s economy, he explained that the hike in prices for simple grocery items was the result of hoarding by the wealthy. Even the shortage of water was the result of hoarding. He did not, however, see any connection between the food shortages and the shipping containers, owned and operated by the government, that had recently been discovered to hold more than 100,000 tons of rotting food. Over the course of two hours, Serra confronted facts with a stream of bizarre claims, denials, and deflections.

Near the end of our meeting, I asked him if he thought his legislative campaign may have been made any more difficult by Chávez’s sagging approval numbers. Naturally, Serra denied that Chávez’s popularity had declined at all, despite multiple polls and recent elections that suggested the opposite. Referring to the upcoming legislative election, Serra said, “
I believe we will have very good results. The peace of our country rests on what happens.”

The comment stopped me.

“Peace? Why peace?” I asked.

“Chávez is the principal guarantee of peace in Venezuela,” he replied. “He is the barrier to all of those Venezuelans who are not going to take power through force because they see themselves represented in Chávez. The day Chávez is not there something will happen. Those millions of people will go to the streets and take power by any means necessary.”

Here I thought we were discussing an upcoming election. Serra
was now raising the specter of civil war. Without Chávez, he implied, there would be blood in the streets. Never mind that we were discussing a legislative contest and President Chávez was therefore not on the ballot. It would be an extraordinary thing for a politician to say, if it wasn’t something that Chávez, and other Chavistas, repeated all the time. It was almost reflexive for Serra to imply that Venezuela’s social contract would collapse if the correct result was not reached. It is emblematic of the loaded, high-stakes rhetoric frequently employed to both inflame public opinion and frighten people on either side of the political divide. The threat, even implied, does not ring hollow to Venezuelans after Chávez has spent years creating people’s militias, the so-called Bolivarian Circles, to defend the revolution. (In their oath, members of the Bolivarian Circles pledge to sacrifice their lives to defend the revolution.) Beyond encouraging voters to revolt, Chávez has even suggested he would overturn an election that did not go his way, saying, “
If the oligarchy is allowed to return to power, I might end up letting the … tanks out to defend the revolutionary government and the people.”

For more than a decade, Chávez and his allies have perfected the subtle use of fear and intimidation to achieve their aims. It is a way of shaping voter behavior without the outright violation of people’s rights. Of course, Serra wouldn’t have described his words as intimidating. He was simply stating the facts, suggesting that now that Venezuela was so polarized, it was his and other Chavistas’ job to help contain and calm the people. It was like saying that if a lion is poked and prodded, his handler is more necessary than ever—true, even if he is the one who upset the beast. The political message is not aimed at Chavistas or members of the opposition. Both of those camps know how they will vote come Election Day; no words will easily sway them. The target is the bloc of undecided voters—the so-called
ni-nis
(neither-nors)—who make up more than 40 percent of the electorate. Fear can be a very effective weapon for the sizable bloc who reside between the poles of Venezuelan politics.

One of the most notorious examples of voter intimidation came in the form of something called the Tascón List. The opposition had managed, after repeated attempts, to force a recall referendum on Chávez’s presidency in August 2004. Several months before the referendum,
Chávez requested that the National Electoral Council release the names of the three million people who voted in favor of holding the referendum to his campaign manager, Luis Tascón. Chávez’s stated rationale was that he believed many of the signatures were forgeries, and he planned to expose them as such. Once he had the election data, Tascón posted the names on his Web site. Anyone could refer to the Tascón List to see who had been in favor of holding a referendum on Chávez’s rule.

Of course, the publication of the names had another purpose: political persecution. The health minister, Roger Capella, said that any doctors or nurses who had signed the recall referendum would be fired for what amounted to an “act of terrorism.” Alí Rodríguez, the head of PDVSA, the state oil company, said he expected that workers who had signed the referendum would be dismissed. In one instance, more than eighty state employees from a government banking agency were fired because they supported the referendum. Jesús Caldera, the agency’s president, said it had conducted the purge to make way for civil servants who “adhered to the government project.” Rampant reports surfaced of people being denied jobs, promotions, and basic government services because their names appeared on the list.

A year later, Chávez’s supporters developed an even more comprehensive tool called the Maisanta. A reference to a nineteenth-century rebel commander, the Maisanta was a digital database that pulled together detailed information on all of Venezuela’s registered voters. The Maisanta included a person’s name; address; voter identification number; and whether he or she had voted for the referendum, abstained in earlier elections, or received support from the government’s social programs. All of this information, for more than twelve million Venezuelan voters, was stored on a single compact disc. Worse, it had been copied and distributed across the country.

In fact, you don’t even need to look for the Maisanta; the Maisanta will find you. In the summer of 2010, I was waiting on the front steps of a government building in downtown Caracas where members of the National Assembly keep offices. I had an appointment with a Chavista congressman later that day. While I waited, people came up to me to try to sell me pirated DVDs. At least at first that is what I assumed they were. When I looked more closely, I realized they weren’t the
Hollywood knockoffs you find on street corners in New York, Paris, or Beijing; they were copies of the Maisanta. For about $1.50, I had voter information on millions of Venezuelans.