Venezuelan not-quite-President-for-life-but-getting-there Hugo Chavez announced that he’s asking for a few changes: an extension of the length of the Presidential term of office, and an end to limits on reelection.
To those critics who suggest this is another step in his road to fidelity to a Fidel-like dictatorship, Chavez has an answer. Not a very good one; but an answer nonetheless: it’s only a possibility, a possibility that depends on many variables.
But of course. Only a possibility, depending on many variables, such as how firmly he can entrench himself in power in the meantime, and how many of the former constitutional safeguards against tyranny he can manage to jettison. If the “possibility” doesn’t become an actuality, it’s certainly not for lack of trying on the part of Chavez.
Not surprisingly, Chavez is also proposing changes in some of those “variables,” such as a program to end “the autonomy of Venezuela’s Central Bank, which would give him access to billions of dollars of foreign reserves. He also called for increasing the government’s power to expropriate private property before getting a court’s approval.”
And so Chavez marches on. To those who suggest he’s undermined the democratic process in Venezuela, he cites the wide margins by which he’s won elections.
Wide margins, of course, do not a democracy make. In fact—with the rare exception of the occasional bona fide landslide, of course—they tend to be the hallmark of dictatorships featuring fixed, manipulated, and/or coerced elections. The quoted AP article fails to detail the very strong evidence that Chavez did exactly that, but it’s here if you wish to peruse it (follow the links in there, as well).
