«We need volunteers!» «Will you be my witness?» «Will you help organise the primaries in London?»
These kinds of messages have been filling up my inbox for some time now. Having organized numerous Venezuela-related political events in London before, everyone seems to think I will be involved again this time.
However, I am not. While my fellow Venezuelan bloggers have jumped into discussing who they will vote for and why, I must say that I won’t be voting—neither this Sunday nor come October. Let me explain why the upcoming primary will not be the groundbreaking event that everyone is «predicting».
No amount of hopeful thinking and secret politics will defeat Venezuela’s strongest, richest, and most dominating politician. In my opinion, it’s pointless to beat around the bush. Regardless of whether the opposition candidate receives 1.5, 2.5, 3.5, or even 5 million votes on Sunday, Chavez will win again in October.
It seems utterly absurd to me to even believe that the opposition has a chance in the presidential race—unless the caudillo passes away in the meantime—while the electoral power remains firmly in Hugo Chavez’s Election Ministry.
The opposition, both old and new, is doomed. It’s hard for me to get excited about Henrique Capriles Radonski when his close relatives are deeply involved in massive corruption schemes and effectively run Chavez’s most efficient propaganda channels.
Moreover, wasting time debating whether they are center-left or center-right or likening them to Lula or Uribe is pointless. Instead, they should focus on ensuring that every polling station in the country is manned, especially in rural Venezuela, where countless phantom voters continuously grant Chavez a staggering 100% of the vote. They must guarantee that what the CNE announces is a true representation of the people’s vote, not an unaudited, manipulated result from CNE-controlled Smartmatics that only someone like Jimmy Carter would endorse. Until that’s achieved, none of them stands a chance, and to think otherwise is naive. They shouldn’t be looking to Lula as their role model, but rather to Alejandro Toledo, the humble cholo who defeated what can be argued as South America’s first post-modern dictator: Alberto Fujimori.