/ News&Analyses / Americas Human rights & Democracy
Chávez Decisively Wins Bid to End Term Limits
President Hugo Chávez handily won a referendum on Sunday that will end presidential term limits, allowing him to run for re-election indefinitely and injecting fresh vibrancy into his socialist-inspired revolution.
(...)The vote opens the way not only for Mr. Chávez to run for a new six-year term when his current one expires in 2013, but could also bolster his ambitious agenda as an icon of the left and a counterweight to American policies in Latin America.
It also creates a new foreign policy challenge for the Obama administration, strengthening a leader who has made a career of taunting and deriding the United States, even though Mr. Chávez just this weekend seemed to open the door for a different relationship.
At the risk of polarizing Venezuela’s deeply divided society further, the victory could also strengthen Mr. Chávez’s current mandate as he reacts to a sharp fall in the price of oil, the export commodity that has financed his broadly popular poverty-reduction projects.(...)
About 54.4 percent of voters supported the proposal, with 45.6 percent voting against it, electoral officials said late Sunday, based on preliminary results with nearly complete returns.
While Mr. Chávez’s support ebbed from the 63 percent he secured in a presidential election in 2006, he remains by far Venezuela’s dominant political personality.(...)
The referendum was closely followed across Latin America. Populist leaders in several countries in the region, including Álvaro Uribe, Colombia’s conservative president, and Nicaragua’s leftist leader, Daniel Ortega, have recently been trying to remove legal barriers to running for re-election.
The United States, a frequent target of Mr. Chávez’s ire, was also watching. The Obama administration so far has toned down its approach to dealing with Venezuela, one of the largest sources of imported crude oil to the United States.(...)
The vote, which was hastily arranged in the last two months, followed weeks of fierce campaigning on both sides. The campaigning was marked by antigovernment protests and attacks by supporters of Mr. Chávez on institutions viewed as critical of the president, including media organizations like the Globovisión television network.(...)
(...)Mr. Chávez, 54, who was first elected president in 1998 amid broad disenchantment with Venezuela’s political class, surprised opponents by recasting the referendum to include removing constitutional term limits for other elected officials. He has long argued that he needs time beyond his current six-year term to complete his transformation of the country.
Mr. Chávez threw the weight of institutions controlled by his supporters, including the National Assembly and the entire federal bureaucracy, behind the proposal. (...)
(...) Antigovernment student groups joined the fray, facing tear-gas reprisals from security forces in protests in Caracas and provincial cities in recent weeks.(...)
Fears of a sharp economic slowdown this year seemed to weigh on some voters, despite Mr. Chávez’s pledge to continue financing antipoverty programs.(...)
Voting across the country unfolded calmly, without reports of widespread irregularities, electoral officials said.
At polling stations here[Venezuela], the sway of Mr. Chávez’s ideology, which combines elements of Christian liberation theology and oil-financed social welfare projects with a fierce rejection of Washington’s policies in Latin America, influenced some voters.(...)
Sandra La Fuente P. and María Eugenia Díaz contributed reporting.
