Venezuela election crisis settles into slow boil

Posted on Friday, 04.26.13

Venezuela election crisis settles into slow boil
By FABIOLA SANCHEZ and MICHAEL WEISSENSTEIN
Associated Press

CARACAS, Venezuela -- A postelection crisis appears to be setting into a
slow boil in Venezuela, with the government and opposition trading
bitter accusations but holding back for the moment from moves that would
escalate into direct conflict.

The government is threatening to jail opposition leader Henrique
Capriles on charges of masterminding postelection violence but has given
no indication it has any immediate intention of acting against him.
Capriles, meanwhile, is boycotting an audit of the vote and plans to
challenge his narrow loss in court. He is almost certain to lose in the
government-controlled court system, but hasn't hinted that he will call
his followers to the streets anytime soon.

"This isn't a struggle just for one day," Capriles said late Thursday.
"This wasn't a fight for the presidency, rather to have a better
country, a different one. A country in which institutions function."

For Capriles, open confrontation could bolster accusations that he only
wants violence. His strategy for now appears to be waiting out the
socialist government, which is struggling to keep its narrow margin of
popularity from being eroded by food shortages and daily electrical
blackouts that independent observers and the opposition link to
mismanagement of the economy and national infrastructure.

For the government, jailing Capriles while he's seeking resolution in
the court system could bring international condemnation and drive more
people into the opposition camp.

"There are ways to express opposition to the government without risking
violence or confrontation. It's a very fine line. Capriles has shown
he's very smart and he can figure out where that line is," said Michael
Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based
think tank. "The government, I think, they have to keep up some of the
rhetorical attacks and threats ... at the same time they have to be
careful not to go too far, that would provoke a strong backlash within
Venezuela but also among Venezuela's neighbors."

The conflict is not just rhetorical, however. The government says
postelection attacks by Capriles supporters killed nine members of the
ruling Chavista movement, left dozens injured and damaged government
offices and medical clinics. The opposition and independent observers
dispute the accusation.

Meanwhile, the opposition says hundreds of government workers have been
fired and threatened with punishment for supporting the opposition. And
a 35-year-old American documentary filmmaker, Timothy Tracy, was
arrested Wednesday and is being held by Venezuela's intelligence
service, accused of being a spy who paid right-wing youth groups to
create post-vote unrest. The government said Thursday that it planned to
charge him promptly, then repeated that statement on Friday, without
providing details.

A member of Venezuela's top electoral authority said Friday that it had
formally decided not to meet opposition demands for a top-to-bottom
audit of the April 14 presidential election, a move that will keep
tensions high over the almost evenly split and contested vote.

Vicente Diaz, the only member of the five-person National Electoral
Council not seen as being firmly pro-government, told reporters that he
had abstained from the council's vote because it did not include a
review of registers containing voters' signatures and fingerprints.

President Nicolas Maduro, 50, was declared the winner of the election by
a 267,000-vote margin out of 14.9 million ballots cast, or less than 2
percent of the total. Capriles says voting rolls included 600,000 dead
people and a review of the registers would reveal votes cast in the
names of the deceased.

Venezuela has a relatively advanced, multi-step voting system in in
which citizens cast their vote on a computer, which generates a paper
ticket that they place in a ballot box, before signing and placing their
fingerprint in a register. At the end of election day, each computer
generates a paper tally of votes.

A series of government officials have indicated in recent days that the
vote audit would consist simply of matching the strips of paper tallying
votes with the individual tickets in the ballot box. Capriles says the
audit would show that those tallies match but won't uncover other types
of fraud, like voting by people using the names of the dead.

"The members of the National Electoral don't want you to see what's in
the voting register!" Capriles wrote on Twitter Friday. "How many dead
people voted?"

While this week has seen a series of statements from high-ranking
officials that they are ready to jail Capriles in connection with
post-vote violence, Maduro appeared to be softening that tone on Friday
as he toured the country reviewing infrastructure projects and promising
more efficient responses to complaints of government mismanagement.

"We are all going to turn ourselves into popular communicators," he
said. "Let's work together and build a stable revolutionary majority,
which can even reach 70 percent ... let's knock on the door of the house
of the people. Let's tell them our truth."

Late Friday, Maduro announced that he would travel to Cuba in the coming
hours to ratify the strategic alliance that grew between the countries
under Chavez.

"Tomorrow Saturday we are going to form a mixed commission with the
government of Cuba to sign agreements for a new stage of cooperation in
health, education and sports, to ratify our strategic alliance with the
socialist government of Cuba," he said.

----- Fabiola Sanchez on Twitter: http://twitter.com/fisanchezn

Michael Weissenstein on Twitter: http://twitter.com/mweissenstein

http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/04/26/v-fullstory/3366783/government-rejects-full-venezuela.html