As was expected by Hugo Chavez Watch and most observing the election in Venezuela, Hugo Chavez has won re-election. As with the recent election of Felipe Calderon in Mexico, the opposition in Venezuela seems to be contesting the results. Rosales only seems to have gotten 38 percent of the vote, making it far less narrow than the returns we saw in Mexico.
Simon Romero of the New York Times offered this analysis of what voters have given Chavez in re-electing him to a third term:
CARACAS, Venezuela, Dec. 4 — If President Hugo Chávez rules like an autocrat, as his critics in Washington and here charge, then he does so with the full permission of a substantial majority of the Venezuelan people, Sunday’s election here showed.
Sent to power for a third time, Mr. Chávez seems intent on assuming the mantle from the fading Fidel Castro of chief Latin American scourge of the United States. He also has made no secret of his intent to consolidate his power further through legal and personnel changes.
Romero goes on to note Chavez's spoken intent to alter legislation to allow himself to remain in power for the next 14 years. I recently posted on his worrying proposal to clamp down on private television stations that air dissenting voices.
From the man himself, Chavez reiterated his "devil" attack on President Bush:
Repeating an attack on the US President, George Bush, he said: "It's another defeat for the devil, who tries to dominate the world. Down with imperialism."
UPDATE: For a favorable take on Chavez's re-election, I went to a source I knew would be slanted in his way. If you're not familiar with them, Democracy Now! is a far-left news program and website hosted by Amy Goodman. Goodman interviewed sociologist Greg Wilbert, who seemed a bit gushing towards Chavez even through the transcript.
Goodman didn't ask Wilbert anything about Chavez's policy towards private television stations that broadcast dissenting voices, but she did ask him about Chavez's desire to be president for life (not in those words, of course!):
AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Greg Wilpert in Caracas. President Chavez says that he is going to convene a commission, once he had won again, to propose constitutional reforms, among them to remove term limits. This would be the last time he could run again, in 2012, the next election.
GREG WILPERT: Yes. This is actually something that I think a lot of people are rather skeptical about. That is, there’s no real consensus, and Chavez himself in the past actually said he would not do such a thing and only has recently said that he’s thinking about removing these term limits. I’m not sure exactly how that will fare, as people in Venezuela -- I think there's a large segment of people who support him who are aware of Latin America's rather bad history with personalistic rulers, and that would not help in terms of lowering the dependency of Chavez's project on a Chavez the person. So I’m not sure if this will really pass. I’m kind of secretly hoping, actually, that people around him will convince him not to do this. He’s adjusted it several times. I’m not completely sure it will actually go through.
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