After a decade of hearing the president and high-ranking officials from his regime repeatedly claim that all the problems in Venezuela are the fault of the CIA, one can confidently say that the identity of the bogeyman has been firmly established in Venezuelan vernacular. At least in homes where Chávez is regarded as the patron saint, omnipresent and all-knowing. Is there no milk in the market? Blame the CIA. Did the rains cause the collapse of some shanties? That’s the CIA’s doing. Were students gunned down in Kennedy? The CIA is infiltrating our neighborhoods. Are teachers protesting, PDVSA workers announcing strikes, and Vargas victims resorting to extreme measures? The CIA is destabilizing the Bolivarian revolution! The CIA planned, organized, and attempted to topple Chávez in 2002.
The CIA captured Rodrigo Granda and nearly brought Venezuela and Colombia to war when its operatives killed Raúl Reyes in Ecuador. Manuel Rosales is supposedly on the CIA payroll, and the can collectors are actually CIA spies, keeping the empire informed of everything happening, everywhere, in Venezuela. The referendum? Of course, that was another CIA plot. Now, five years after the recall referendum, the CIA has decided to declare, through a cybersecurity expert named Steve Stigall, that Chávez actually stole the election and that the results announced by Francisco Carrasquero and Jorge Rodríguez, once purportedly independent electoral authorities, do not reflect the popular will but rather the result of collusion by the CNE with Smartmatic’s machines. Excuse me, readers, but this new bogeyman is pure nonsense. Stigall has stated that, as far as he knows, the program used to randomly select the centers to be audited in the second audit was proposed by the CNE.
Based on this information, Stigall concludes that no tampering occurred at the chosen centers, meaning the electronic voting was conducted properly; hence, an audit would not uncover anything damaging. However, if there was tampering, as Stigall suggests, electronically altering election results is easy. But we Venezuelans have known this since 2004. Jennifer McCoy from the Carter Center admitted in an email to me that the program used on the CNE computers to select the centers for auditing was indeed from the CNE. The use of this program caused the opposition to withdraw from the audit, declaring it fraudulent, as the agreement among the CNE, government, opposition, and international observers did not stipulate that the CNE would decide which program to use. McCoy stated, “In retrospect, I wish I had insisted on the use of our program, not because I doubt the one used by the CNE, but rather because of the perception problem and the trust this action would have generated.”
I also regret not insisting on direct negotiations between the CNE and the Democratic Coordinator regarding the conditions of the second audit. We believed back then that it was crucial to conduct a second audit as soon as possible to address the Coordinator’s concerns about potential violations of the contents of the ballot boxes. McCoy wrote those words on October 3, 2004. I published my exchange with McCoy on the same day. However, it has taken nearly five years for the CIA to publicly state what we already knew. What the CIA has not explicitly mentioned is that in that second audit, intended to occur in 192 boxes supposedly chosen at random, only 76 boxes were audited. Out of those 76 audited boxes, the opposition only observed 27, and in those 27 audited boxes, the results were contrary to what the CNE had announced. My questions to McCoy back then are still valid for the CIA today: Why weren’t all 192 boxes audited? Why was the opposition only allowed to observe 27 of the 76 audited? Why did the OAS and the Carter Center, violating the signed agreement, allow the CNE to use its random selection program instead of the one proposed by the OAS and the Carter Center, as demanded by the Coordinator? With a CIA like this, Hugo Chávez can sleep easy and continue winning as many elections as he pleases.