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Hugo Chávez, Strongman on the Run

By David Agren

AS/COA’s Christopher Sabatini speaks to Canadian newsweekly Maclean's Magazine on the forthcoming Venezuelan electoral race.

TV screens often switch without warning across Venezuela for unscheduled messages brought to them by the Ministry of People’s Power for Communication and Information. Radio stations follow suit—as obligated for these interruptions, known as cadenas, or chains. The cadenas usually carry an address from President Hugo Chávez, who is known to talk at length—nine-plus hours on one occasion—about his political projects and plans for “21st-century socialism.” The appearances seldom highlight pressing problems, such as a recent prison riot that added to the more than 300 deaths that have occurred behind bars this year, or the late August explosion that ripped apart the country’s most important refinery and claimed 48 lives.

Cadenas have been a fact of life in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, but with elections scheduled for Oct. 7, Chávez has had a lot more to opine about of late. The broadcasts underscore what opponents and analysts say is an unfair advantage for Chávez as he seeks his fourth term as president of a country with the world’s largest proven petroleum oil reserves. The often confrontational president and cancer survivor—he credits his recovery to treatments in Cuba—can already count on positive press coverage, having forced non-compliant channels off the air or into submission. He also has the courts and the electoral commission in his corner, the opposition contends. Then there’s his seemingly bottomless barrel of petro bucks to ply poor voters with everything from cheap appliances and free houses to clinics staffed with Cuban doctors….

How much that sort of hardship harms Chávez remains to be seen. “Chávez’s popularity does not depend entirely on the economic success or stability of the country,” says Christopher Sabatini, senior director of policy at the Americas Society/Council on the Americas. The president’s opponents, he says, “fail to understand the deep reserves of resentment for the old ruling class and the reserves of support for Chávez….”

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