Venezuela Sans Chavez?

Surely there are those who ponder whether Venezuela is a socialist, or a police state.  Both, without doubt.  Hugo Chavez, who once as a 37-year-old lieutenant colonel led a failed coup, has long since surrounded himself with his fellow soldiers.  Come to think of it, something like former KGB member Vladimir Putin, appointing former KGB members to positions of high authority in Russia, enabling them to enrich themselves through control of state enterprises.

In Hugo Chavez's great revolutionary socialist experiment, taking his cue from his closest mentor, Cuba's Fidel Castro, the passion to have Venezuela become as rigidly authoritarian in adhering to socialist principles and ideology and he the national hero whose name will be blessed in posterity, takes central stage.  President Chavez has elevated retired and active military members to ranking posts within the country outside the military.

Five of 30 Cabinet ministers, including those responsible for health, food and public banks are members of the military; current and retired.  And the elite members of the country's military, some 300 out of an estimated 500 officers, are committed to Venezuela continuing to 'fairly and democratically' elect their symbol of power, Hugo Chavez.  Very fair and very democratic; people fear that their votes are monitored and identified, and with good reason.

In the past they have been, and those who voted for anyone but Chavez saw their futures, their jobs and their opportunities evaporate.  Now, electoral officials and political leaders on either side of the polarized spectrum assure the public that reliable safeguards have been put in place to ensure the vote remains secret; the suspicion lingers, however, that thumbprint readers used to verify identities at polling stations might still track voters' choices.

Venezuela's entire military high command is appointed by Hugo Chavez.  His military loyalists are legion, but not among mid- and lower-ranking officers necessarily.  And then there are the militantly supportive militias in one of the most violent-prone countries of the world, with a reputation for rampant crime that remains as yet unrivalled other than in South Africa.  Of the militias numbering over 100,000, most are held to be thugs reporting directly to a military officer under Hugo Chavez.

Though the country's constitution clearly forbids employing he military in a political role, the opposition accuses Chavez of doing just that.  President Chavez's challenger for the presidency, Henrique Capriles, placed a photo on social media of soldiers abandoning their tell-tale green fatigue uniforms for the red T-shirts donned by "Chavistas" thronging the president's rallies.  Not quite the picture of neutrality.

|According to Diego Moya-Ocampos, an analyst with IHS Global Insight, "The armed forces will be the key arbiter of the election process", all the more so if challenger Capriles strides forward with a narrow victory.  Expectations are that the Chavez side will strenuously resist with any means at their disposal, a changeover in the presidency. 

Retired military officers claim deep divisions in the armed forces, though they feel rank-and-file officers would accept the democratic choice of the country's voters.  While the chairman of Venezuela's joint chiefs claimed on national television the military is set to "heed the constitution and respect the will of the people" that will result from Sunday's vote, the minister of defence has been stumping for Hugo Chavez.

General Henry Rangel Silva went so far several years back as to claim that both the military and the public would never accept an election victory over an opposition to Chavez.  Closer to the election currently being challenged by former centre-left governor Henrique Capriles, Rangel warns of Capriles's plans to dismantle the country's armed forces.  What Mr. Capriles did suggest, however, is that he has chosen an active general to act as his defence minister.

And there are other tactics being used in this election.  Venezuelans are accustomed to the love affair between their president and Fidel Castro.  They are familiar with Hugo Chavez's trips to Havana for medical treatment to treat his cancers.  They might wonder why it is that with the vast oil resources and resulting revenues of their country, their own medical care is not good enough to treat their president.  And why it is that there is so much endemic poverty in Venezuela, let alone violence.

The president's close supportive alliance with the Islamic Republic of Iran might also cause a few Venezuelans second thought.  Those privy to international news and balancing it against what their own government-controlled news media provide for the edification of the people might wonder too that a socialist state has made common cause with a rigidly fascist state like Iran.  A radicalized theological ideology in bed with a sternly socialist ideology.

Perhaps the common factor that aligns them in their interests is their abhorrence of the 'Zionists'.  A very handy propaganda tool for the Chavistas dining out on the ethnic heritage of the president's opponent, Henrique Capriles, grandson of Polish Jews, Holocaust survivors, though now a committed Catholic.  On the other hand, if the Holocaust never existed, perhaps those Polish Jewish grandparents never did, either.

Sunday evening will tell.