Venezuela: Why Chavez lost his bid for supreme power

“Thank God, the people said no,” said Lucas Riestra in Venezuela’s El Periodiquito. Venezuelans this week refused to allow President Hugo Chavez to “eternalize” his power, narrowly voting to reject the 69 proposed constitutional amendments that would have abolished presidential term limits and given the president direct control over the central bank and the national oil reserves. Had the amendments passed, Venezuela would have “lost all semblance of democratic pluralism.” It would have become

a thoroughly socialist state, with a single party and a centralized economy—just like a Soviet republic. Fortunately, the Venezuelan people “drew their strength from God and said no.”

You can’t say Chavez didn’t try his best, said Miriam Leitao in Brazil’s O Globo. The referendum questions were written in “deceptive language” that made it sound as if a “yes” vote would make Venezuela an instant paradise. In the final weeks ahead of the vote, when he saw that support was waning, Cha­vez “had opposition activists and students detained and branded them traitors.” Yet it was all for naught. The failure of this attempted power grab is good news for the entire continent. Had Chavez succeeded in making himself, in effect, president for life, fellow leftist firebrands such as Bolivia’s Evo Morales and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa would have been emboldened to follow suit. Instead, “democracy has won and tyranny has lost.”

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Chavez got complacent, said Bolivia’s La Prensa in an editorial. Since he first came to power, in 1998, Chavez hasn’t lost a single election or referendum. He had so thoroughly vanquished the bourgeois business community that opposed him in those early days that he wasn’t looking for opposition from other sources. A sudden surge of “opposition activism on university campuses took him by surprise.”

The students were just the vanguard of a wave of dissent, said Luis Herrero in Spain’s El Mundo. Just as the universities began hosting demonstrations, “cracks appeared in the Chavist regime.” Gen. Ra