Was It Fraud?

Venezuela's official election results: Overwhelmingly red.

Can a government whose popularity is in the mid-20 percentiles, whose incompetence has given its people a shrinking economy, the world's highest inflation rate and a terrifying crime rate, and driven untold thousands of its citizens to flee to Colombia, really win in almost three-quarters of its provinces?

It strains credulity, particularly since the electoral authorities also announced a high turnout of 61% of voters for a regional election.

And fraud wouldn't be unprecedented. After July elections for members of a Constitutional Assembly, which was boycotted by the opposition, the company which supplied the voting machines called the government's turn-out numbers inflated. The assembly was widely denounced as illegitimate. Venezuela is notoriously corrupt.

Caracas Chronicles, a pro-opposition website, speculated that opposition voters lost enthusiasm and did not turn out. But does it make sense that pro-government voters would turn out in big numbers when store shelves are bare of toilet paper, medicines and basic food stufs?

Perhaps information will leak out and reveal what really happened. Until then, Venezuela's crisis is only likely to worsen.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Adiós to Venezuela's Democracy

Maduro and followers celebrate their 'victory' in rigged voting in Sunday's election.

During the 1970s and '80s, when military coups installed right-wing dictatorships across much of South America, Venezuela maintained a democracy, if a very imperfect one. Now, ironically, democracy has brought a leftist dictatorship to Venezuela.

Perhaps the best evidence of Venezuelan Pres. Nicolas Maduro's anti-democratic intentions is the fact that he never permitted regional elections supposed to be held late last year - and which his party was sure to lose. Maduro claimed that the country, which has the world's largest oil reserves, lacked the money to pay for elections, and called democracy a luxury for the elites.

Yet, miraculously, Maduro had no trouble finding the money for Sunday's constitutional assembly - which he made sure he'd win.

The Maduro government has also packed the Supreme Court, done all it could to negate the results of unfavorable elections, shuttered hostile media, imprisoned political opponents - and even briefly dissolved the opposition-dominated National Assembly.

But none of the Venezuelan government's anti-democratic measures have come close to Sunday's election of a constitutional assembly, manipulated to ensure a pro-government majority, despite Maduro's extreme unpopularity. The assembly has apparently unlimited powers to rewrite the country's constitution and remake its government.

The voting for the assembly representatives included manipulations such as giving rural voters - who have remained loyal to Maduro - disproportional representation, while reducing representation for city dwellers, who overwhelmingly reject Maduro. (Come to think of it, that arrangement is a lot like the United States' unfair and illogical Electoral College - which gave us president Trump.) And the voting system also gave pro-Maduro social organizations preponderant weight in the voting.

Government workers were ordered to vote or lose their jobs. Even so, media observers reported that voter turnout was light.

What's more, many experts say that Maduro lacked the authority to call this vote without first holding a popular referendum. But Maduro knew he'd lose any such referendum.

The Venezuelan opposition boycotted the vote in order to not give it legitimacy. As a result, Maduro's victory will be close to 100%, whether votes are counted fairly or not.

The new Constitutional Assembly's powers aren't defined, and may be unlimited. Expect Maduro to order his minions to eliminate the country's hostile National Assembly and to remove the attorney general, Luisa Ortega, a courageous politician who stood on principle in the face of the government's violations of human rights and trampling of its own Constitution.

Ortega charged that Venezuela was turning into a dictatorship.

In fact, immediately after the vote, Maduro called for removing National Assembly legislators' legal immunity and for replacing Ortega. Two prominent opposition leaders were quickly arrested.

The travesty will continue as long as Venezuela's armed forces - the police and military - continue backing Maduro, and so far they show no signs of wavering.

Already, the governments of Colombia, Mexico and Panama have said they will not recognize the voting's results. But if not, how will they deal with a government they consider illegitimate?

The U.S. and other nations have threatened the Maduro government with sanctions for holding the assembly vote. But don't expect the Trump administration to make the single move which could topple Maduro - cutting off oil sales to the United States. That's because doing so would hurt too many big corporations and lose Trump popularity among drivers.

Maduro and Trump, two incompetent, populist leaders, are also co-dependent.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

And The Winner Is...Alvaro Uribe

A campaign poster for a candidate for the Camara, along Calle 26 in Bogotá.

The return of ex-Pres. Alvaro Uribe to political power (he never left politics) in today's congressional elections probably won't sink the peace negotiations with the FARC guerrillas, but it could complicate things. Uribe's newborn Centro Democratico party finished second in the Senate with 14.4% percent of the vote - just one percent behind Uribe's old party La U.

A mural in Bogotá memorializes the Union Patriotica party,
thousands of whose leaders were assassinated during
the 1980s and '90s. The party was recently refouned. 

Uribe has been a furious opponent of the talks, which he claims amount to giving impunity to the guerrillas, who have committed innumerable severe human rights violations. As a senator and leader of one of Congress's largest political forces, Uribe will have a much more powerful voice. Two of the issues yet to be resolved in the Havana peace talks are how to end the guerrillas' participation in narcotrafficking and whether the guerrillas will receive political representation. As president, Uribe waged war on the guerrillas and aggressively eradicated drug crops. As a senator, he will surely oppose negotiated settlements on either of those issues.

Semana magazine doubts that Uribe's forces will be able to block the peace process. But that doesn't take into account the dynamic of popular opinion, which might turn against the negotiations. The new parliament will make the peace process more complex.

'Firm hand, big heart.' A billboard in Bogotá for
Alvaro Uribe's Centro Democratico Party. 

Today's vote also showed that Colombia remains a very conservative nation. In the Senate, the three largest vote winners and four of the five biggest parties are conservative. And the fourth place finisher, el Partido Liberal, isn't very liberal anymore. In the Camara, or House of Representatives, La U party came in first as well, the Liberals finished second and the Partido Conservador finished third. Uribe's Centro Democratico won only 5.5% of votes among Camara candidates, a respectable showing for a new party.

As for the far-left parties, the Polo Democratico received 1-7% of votes in the Camara and even less in the Senado. The reborn Union Patriotica got even less.

And MIRA, the evangelical Christian party which has been mired in scandal and legal problems, received fewer than 5% of the votes, meaning that it loses its representation in the Senate.

As for the presidential election coming up in May, today's vote doesn't change much - if only because Uribe's Centro Democratico Party's candidate has no charisma.

The Green Alliance, with its confused ideology, elected ex-Bogotá mayor Enrique Peñalosa as its presidential candidate, setting him up for yet another doomed campaign.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Dry End to a Wet Week

Demonstrating either how seriously Colombians take voting- or how scared they are of it - the country banned alchohol sales beginning six p.m. Friday, 48 hours before the vote. Hmmm. Are they afraid that people will become too crazily excited over democracy?

Ironically, this last week was one of the wettest in history, in terms of rain.

Here's a billboard in which Santos plays the Chavez card - without naming the leftist Venezuelan leader. Chavez has warned several times about the consequences of Colombia electing Santos, who pissed off Chavez by bombing a FARC guerrilla camp located in Ecuador.

On Monday, the second round, between Santos and Mockus, will officially begin.

Written by Mike Ceaser

More on Mockus

I looked over the 'Green party's' 'green' agenda. There's a single bullet point, out of 15, and a vague one at that. Which is a lot less than George W. Bush and Exxon promise for the planet.

So, give them credit for not making wild promises. But let's be clear that the green in the party is a color only.

The guy at Caracas Chronicles suggests that the recent polls which place Mockus substantially ahead undercount the rural population. That might be true, since these folks are much less likely to have telephones. And it's also true that rural folks are less likely to be impressed by a guy who dropped his pants in front of his class and dressed up as Superman - or even to have heard of Mockus. Rural people are also more likely to be grateful to Santos for driving the guerrillas away from their lands.

All in all, the election is still up for grabs.

Who's better for the country is another issue entirely. Santos has accomplished a lot as defense minister by freeing great sections of the country from the persecution by the guerrillas. But the guerrillas have not gone away, in part because they've got huge incomes from drugs and extortion, combined with the fact that Colombia's poverty rate is still a terribly high 43 percent overall and 61 percent in the countryside. And 23 percent of Colombians are indigent. That makes becoming a guerrilla (or a paramilitary or a plain-old narco) a tremendous temptation for a poor kid. (I've spoken to enough ex-guerrillas and ex-kidnappees to know that they don't sign up because they read Das Kapital and decided to overthrow capitalism.) Presumably, Mockus would invest more in social causes, and this could mean fewer kids joining the guerrillas out of desperation.

Or, maybe Santos would hike investments in education, health and other social causes. After all, Nixon got us out of Vietnam and into China.

Speaking of the guerrillas, the other day the FARC issued a statement denouncing the government for human rights violations. And there are many government scandals, the most notorious being the 'false positives' - cases in which poor young men have been kidnapped, murdered and dressed up as guerrillas, apparently by military units trying to get credit for extra kills. It's a terrible, horrific thing, and a real stain on the nation and on presidential candidate Santos, under whose watch these killings took place. But the guerrillas are way behind the curve on this one - Colombia's legal system has been investigating these rights violations for years, and military officials are in prison for it. More than that, the guerrillas have no moral standing for making such denouncements, since murdering civilians is what they do. And no guerrilla court holds them accountable for their innumerable crimes.

This blog written by Mike Ceaser of Bogotá Bike Tours