Off the ballot but running against Chavez

Washington Post:

Young and photogenic, Leopoldo López has been running the campaign of his political life, rummaging for votes here amid a warren of crowded slums and as far away as Venezuela's lawless western frontier. Polls show that the politician has won a strong following by promising a sharp change from the populist government of President Hugo Chávez, who after nearly a decade in office pulls virtually all the levers of power in the hemisphere's biggest oil power.

In next month's state and local elections, López had been positioned to claim what is considered the second-most important political post in the country -- mayor of greater Caracas, the bustling, chaotic capital. But López, 37, is no longer campaigning for himself. Instead, he is stumping on behalf of allies nationwide who are running against the amply funded candidates of the governing United Socialist Party in the Nov. 23 vote.

The Harvard-trained technocrat, who is as comfortable gabbing with barrio dwellers as he is with stuffy bankers, has been disqualified along with other opposition candidates who posed a challenge in some of Venezuela's most important states.

To many here, the disqualifications appear politically motivated. Among Chávez critics, they underscore the lengths to which the pugnacious, 54-year-old former army colonel will go to ensure he holds all the reins of power and implements his socialist model.

"It is a deceptive mechanism that violates not just the right to be elected, but the right to elect," said Luis Miquilena, a former interior minister who was once a mentor to Chávez but has since broken with him. "This is not just an infringement of the rights of the person who is running for office, but it is also an infringement of the rights of the voter."

The president's backers already control all but seven seats in the National Assembly, as well as the Supreme Court, the Central Bank, the electoral board and all of the government's internal affairs agencies. Though Chávez lost a referendum last December that would have expanded his powers, the president and his followers say success in the November elections will permit him to find other ways to take his revolution into overdrive. It is vital, the president has said, for his associates to win the governorships of all 23 states and the leadership of several key municipalities to deliver what he calls "a splendiferous triumph."

López, by campaigning for fellow opposition leaders, is hoping to block that effort. "Our challenge is to build up a protest vote so that those Venezuelans who wanted to vote for us vote for the alternative candidate," said López, currently mayor of the affluent Chacao district of Caracas.

Earlier this year, the state controller general, Clodosbaldo Russián, a close Chávez ally empowered to conduct internal investigations, disqualified dozens of political candidates. Then in August, the Supreme Court upheld the decision.

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Still, the Venezuelan constitution and a hemisphere-wide human rights treaty to which Venezuela is a signatory say a politician can lose the right to run for office only after being convicted of a crime. Constitutional experts say the flouting of the constitution, coupled with the fact that the disqualified candidates were prominent, demonstrates that the exclusions were politically motivated.

"The point is not if more of them were with the government or more of them were in the opposition," said Carlos Correa, director of Public Space, a Caracas policy group that monitors free-speech issues. "What is clear is that they took away the candidates from the opposition who had big possibilities."

The Venezuelan Institute for Data Analysis had López besting the government's candidate for greater Caracas, Aristóbulo Istúriz, 56 percent to 34 percent in a July poll.

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Chavez is using Stalinist methods to stay in power while he practices the pretensions of democracy. He is acting very much like the religious bigots in Iran who keep those they oppose off the ballot in order to stay in power. Since he is a close ally of Iran that is not surprising.

What is surprising is that despite the setback Lopez continues to campaign in opposition to Chavez and may help elect other opposition leaders who were not targeted by the corrupt Chavez apparatus.