Language

News from journalists in Caracas

Submitted March 6, 2004 - 9:49 pm by Jules Siegel
I've been trying to understand exactly what's going on in Venezuela without much success. I've yet to see any concrete discussion of the issues in the mainstream press. Earlier today, I wrote to Roy S. Carson, editor in chief of vheadline.com, an independent news portal in Caracas and asked him to explain why the opposition refuses to cooperate in validating the signatures that are being challenged. Specifically, what are the procedures to which they object?

In addition to some comments of his own he sent me some documents that I think journalists should read, including an excellent article from Caracas by Alan Cisco, published this weekend in Counterpunch, along with a transcript of the Venezuelan government statement to the Carter Center/OAS. Since the complete texts are too long for an email, I've published excerpts from Cisco's article, the full text of Carson's comments and the government statement at newsroom-l.net.

Summing up: After grueling negotiations, everyone involved agreed on a process for gathering the signatures for a referendum to recall Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez. When the signature gathering drive was completed, the National Election Comission, whose five members had been approved by all concerned, invalidated more than one million of the three million signatures.

About 143,000 were either dead, under age, foreign born or otherwise ineligible. The rest were invalid because the identification data had not been filled in by the signers, but by others, which was forbidden in the process all had agreed to follow. The election commission established a five-day period for signers to go to 2700 centers to re-affirm the validity of their signatures. The opposition insists that these signatures must be honored and has gone to the streets to enforce its demands.

U.S. congressman Barney Frank told Carson, "I've spoken with the Carter Center and I believe that the signatures that were gathered without them filling out the forms, that there was a miscommunication, a misunderstanding and there does not appear to be any doubt about these signatures/thumbprints and that is pretty well verifiable."

Despite Frank's opinion, it's clear that everyone was aware of how the signatures were to be validated. As the Venezuelan government pointed out in its statement, the suspect signatures would have been thrown out in California. Misunderstanding or not, why should anyone be given the benefit of the doubt when it comes to kicking out a democratically elected president?

Reply

Our Policy on Comment Submissions: Co-publishers of Narco News (which includes The Narcosphere and The Field) may post comments without moderation. All co-publishers comment under their real name, have contributed resources or volunteer labor to this project, have filled out this application and agreed to some simple guidelines about commenting.

Narco News has recently opened its comments section for submissions to moderated comments (that’s this box, here) by everybody else. More than 95 percent of all submitted comments are typically approved, because they are on-topic, coherent, don’t spread false claims or rumors, don’t gratuitously insult other commenters, and don’t engage in commerce, spam or otherwise hijack the thread. Narco News reserves the right to reject any comment for any reason, so, especially if you choose to comment anonymously, the burden is on you to make your comment interesting and relevant. That said, as you can see, hundreds of comments are approved each week here. Good luck in your comment submission!

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.

More information about formatting options

User login