Names on a List

Episode 10  |  What was the Tascón List? 

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In 2004, Hugo Chávez faced a recall referendum that threatened to remove him from power. 

But as millions of Venezuelans signed to demand a vote, their names were turned into a political weapon. The infamous Tascón List exposed citizens—and helped transform democracy into a system of loyalty and fear. 

This is the story of the 2004 recall referendum, the Bolivarian Missions, and the blacklist that divided Venezuela. 

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:00

Before we begin this week, I want to say thank you to everyone who's been listening, sharing, and supporting this project. It really means a lot to me that so many people are interested in learning about what happened in Venezuela through my podcast. If you want to help make the project sustainable, I've just opened a Patreon. There's no paywall and there's no extra content. It's just a way for you to support the work if you want to. You can find the link in the description. Let's begin. Starting in 2003, the political playing field had been irreversibly changed in Venezuela. Between the coup and the national strike, Venezuela had come close to political collapse. Chavez's opponents had tried to force him from power through extraordinary means. But Chavez had survived the coup, and he had survived the national strike. And now he had taken control of the most important institutions in the country, the ministries, the electoral council, the military, and most importantly, PDVSA, the state oil company. But for Chavez, control was never enough. Because remember, Chavez was not just a president, he was a revolutionary. And revolutionaries divide the world between friends and enemies, between those who serve the revolution and those who stand in its way. Polarization tore through society, splitting families and friendships, locking the country in an escalating struggle between enemies. By early 2003, the opposition was devastated. The two months-long strike had failed. Businesses had collapsed, people had lost their jobs, savings, livelihoods, all for nothing. In the end, Chavez had still won. He took control of PDVSA and fired more than 18,000 employees, wiping out roughly 40% of the workforce. That purge created space for Chavez to fill the state oil company with loyalists. And PDVSA was not just another institution. It was the source of essentially all of the country's wealth. By taking control of PDVSA, Chavez had taken control of the country's most important source of power. At the same time, the coup and the strike had damaged almost everyone who had challenged Chávez. The opposition was fragmented, the military had lost credibility, the private media had exposed itself as a political actor. By 2003, the forces that had once seemed capable of stopping Chávez were weaker than ever. But here's the important thing to remember. Chávez was also weakened. Despite his victory over the opposition, the country remained very unstable. The economy had been battered, and Chavez's popularity was suffering. By August 2003, polls showed that barely a third of Venezuelans wanted him to remain in office. So the opposition changed strategy. If the coup had failed and the strike had failed, there was only one option left. The Constitution. And that meant a recall referendum. Now, if you're not Venezuelan, that might sound unusual, but the recall referendum was one of the innovations of the 1999 Constitution, the Constitution written under Chavez himself. Chavez had always described Venezuela's new political system as a participatory democracy. The idea was that ordinary citizens would not just vote every few years. They could actively shape political life. And one of the mechanisms created to do that was the recall referendum. Under Article 72 of the Constitution, voters could remove any elected official, including the president, once that official had reached the midpoint of their term. Presidential terms lasted six years. And in 2003, Chavez reached the halfway point of his presidency. That meant that the opposition had a constitutional path to remove him from power. But first, they had to collect signatures. To trigger the referendum, the opposition needed signatures from 20% of registered voters. That meant more than 2.4 million signatures had to be collected and submitted to the National Electoral Council. And this is where the real story begins. Because the recall referendum revealed just how much power Chavez already had over the institutions that were supposed to referee the game. The signature drive began in mid-2003. It was led by an organization called Sumate, a new grassroots organization founded just a year earlier, together with a Coordinadora Democrática, the coalition of civil society opposition forces to Chavez. One of Sumate's founders was María Corina Machado. The same woman who today, two decades later, has become the central figure of Venezuela's democratic resistance. On August 20th, 2003, the exact midpoint of Chavez's term, the opposition submitted nearly 3.2 million signatures. But the government-controlled Electoral Council stalled. It rejected the petitions, arguing that the signatures had been collected too early, before the midpoint of the presidential term, and without proper oversight. Then the Electoral Authority imposed a new rule. Signatures had to be collected again, this time during a narrow four-day window from November 28th to December 1st, 2003, at designated signing centers. Despite those restrictions, the opposition and Sumate mobilized again. Volunteers organized, guiding people through the process, and helping collect signatures across the country. In just four days, they gathered more than 3 million signatures and resubmitted them. But again, the Electoral Council delayed. It waited until January 13, 2004, more than a month later, to even begin the verification process. Then, in March 2004, the Electoral Council enforced another rule. It said that forms could be disqualified if the information appeared to have been filled out by the same handwriting. More than 800,000 signatures were thrown out. And suddenly the opposition was short. The Constitution required 2,807,580 valid signatures to activate the referendum. Under the Electoral Authority's retroactive rule, the opposition now fell roughly 600,000 signatures below the threshold. So the Electoral Council created one more obstacle: a five-day reparation period in May of 2004. Anyone whose signature had been invalidated had to return in person to confirm that yes, they really had signed in favor of recalling the president. And this is where the story becomes darker. Because the signature drive didn't just become an electoral battle, it became a list. And that list would become one of the most important tools of political persecution in Venezuelan history. What Chavez was saying was, sign against me and I will know who you are. People were afraid that if they signed, there would be consequences. And they were right to be afraid. Because that's exactly what happened. The names were delivered to a man named Luis Tascón, a pro-Chavist deputy in the National Assembly. And shortly after receiving the list of names, Tascón published it online, complete with national ID numbers for anyone in the country to see. In theory, signing the petition was a constitutional right. It didn't remove Chavez from office. It didn't even necessarily mean that you would vote against him. All it did was trigger a referendum. That was the point of the Constitution. That was the promise of participatory democracy. Citizens were supposed to be able to hold elected officials accountable. And Chavez himself, when he first ran for office, had claimed that he would only govern for as long as the people supported him. But Chavez was a revolutionary, and to Chavez the only real people were his people. Everyone else was not just an opponent. They were counter-revolutionaries, enemies. So the recall referendum, a mechanism Chavez himself had included in the Constitution, became something else. It became a test of loyalty, applied to the entire country. Signing the petition was not treated as a constitutional right. It became a marker of political betrayal. Chavez said it openly. That was the purpose of the Dascon list. It wasn't just a list of names. It was a weapon that used fear and political persecution to undermine the democratic process. The very same process outlined in Chavez's own constitution. Chavez and his allies used every tool available to prevent the recall from happening. The midpoint of Chavez's term was August 20, 2003. But the government delayed the process, challenged the signatures, imposed new rules, and created a climate of fear around the act of signing. The message could not have been clearer. You have the right to sign, but we have the power to punish you for it. And yet, astonishingly, the opposition still succeeded. Despite the threats, despite the fear, the firings. Enough Venezuelans returned during the reparation period to validate their signatures. Chavez had tried to stop the recall from being activated, but now he had no choice but to accept it. Still, it's important to understand the full extent of polarization in Venezuela at the time, because the Dascona list was not only used by the government. In some private sector workplaces, the pressure moved in the opposite direction. Supervisors and co-workers used the list to identify people who had not signed. You were stigmatized as a Chavista. You would be pressured, isolated, or ostracized. This was not the same as state persecution, of course, but it does show how poisoned Venezuelan society had become. Politics had entered everything your workplace, your friendships, your name, your signature. By 2004, Venezuelans were not debating politics. They were being divided by it. And finally, after a year of delays, threats, discarded signatures, and political persecution, the recall referendum was scheduled for August 15, 2004. But by then another miracle had appeared on Chavez's doorstep.

Speaker 14:05

The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder.

Speaker 1 14:17

The U.S. invasion of Iraq could not have come at a better time for him. Global oil prices surged, reaching $50 a barrel, and Venezuela was suddenly flooded with petrodollars. And this wasn't just any oil boom. With PDVSA now under his control, Chavez could now channel that money without restraint. The same state oil company that had once resisted him now became the financial engine of his revolution. And in 2003, Chavez used that money to launch the most ambitious social programs of his presidency, the Bolivarian Missions. For the poorest Venezuelans, the impact was real. Misión Robinson sent literacy brigades into homes, schools, and community spaces, teaching adults how to read and write. Misión Barrio Adentro placed Cuban doctors inside Venezuela's barrios, offering free consultation and basic medicines to families who had often lived their entire lives without reliable access to a physician. Misión Mercal opened subsidized food markets where people could buy rice, beans, cooking oil, and other staples at prices far below the market rate. And for millions of Venezuelans, this had a significant impact on their daily lives. These programs reached people who felt ignored for decades. People who had heard politicians promise inclusion, dignity, and justice before, but had rarely seen the state appear in their neighborhoods in any meaningful way. By June 2004, one poll found that 43% of Venezuelans said that they or someone close to them had benefited from one of these missions. But the missions were not just social welfare or propaganda, they were also a political strategy. At the very moment Chavez was facing the greatest electoral threat of his presidency, the missions helped him recover support, especially among the poor. And that's what makes them so important. While the Electoral Council delayed the recall referendum, Chavez was using that time to change the political landscape. The opposition had gathered signatures, but the vote itself kept being pushed further and further into the future. And every delay gave Chavez more time. More time for oil prices to rise, for the missions to expand, more time for the government to campaign, more time to turn the recall from a referendum on Chavez's failures into a referendum on everything Venezuelans now feared that they could lose. The playing field was dramatically uneven. The government had access to unlimited state resources. Ministers, governors, mayors, public officials, state television, public money, the entire machinery of government were deployed in defense of Chavez. That's why the 2004 referendum was never truly free and fair. The opposition was trying to remove a president, but it wasn't just facing a president. It was facing the entire Venezuelan state. Because Chavez had become the state. The government had first tried to stop the opposition from triggering the recall altogether. When that failed, it played for time. And during that time, it used every available tool to reshape the contest in Chavez's favor. The law became part of the strategy, not only through open threats of political persecution, but through delays, technicalities, and legal manipulation. This is something known as autocratic legalism, the use of law and constitutional procedures to entrench authoritarian power. In Venezuela, the law was used to delay, to intimidate, to protect the president. And even the wording on the ballot reflects this manipulation. The question on the ballot was not, "do you want to recall President Hugo Chavez?" This is what it read: "Do you agree with rendering ineffective the people's mandate given through legitimate democratic elections to the citizen Hugo Rafael Chávez Frias as president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela for the current presidential period?" The word "recall" never appeared. Instead, the question was written in a way that emphasized Chavez's democratic legitimacy before voters even reached the choice itself. By the time you finish reading it, it's almost unclear what you're being asked. Were you voting to remove Chavez, or were you being asked to undo the will of the people? That was the genius of the manipulation. The referendum still existed. The vote still existed. But the entire process had been corrupted. The Electoral Council bought Chávez time, the signatures became a blacklist of his enemies, and the oil funded missions reshaped the political landscape in his favor. By the time Venezuelans finally went to vote, every institution, every dollar, had been mobilized for a single purpose Hugo Chavez's survival. On August 15th, 2004, Venezuelans finally went to vote. Turnout was massive. People waited in long lines for hours, many deep into the night, in one of the most consequential elections in the country's history. And Chavez won. The official result gave him 58% of the vote. A result that seemed almost impossible only months earlier. For Chavez, it was a political resurrection, but for the opposition, the result was impossible to accept. The Coordinadora Democratica immediately cried fraud, pointing to the Electoral Council's lack of credibility, the government's control over the process, and the use of new voting machines. Belief in fraud spread quickly among opposition supporters. Part of that belief came from an exit poll conducted by Sumate Volunteers with a U.S. polling firm, which suggested that Chavez had lost by a wide margin. The official results showed the opposite. But international observers rejected the fraud claims. The Carter Center and the Organization of American States certified the referendum, and even the Bush administration recognized Chavez's victory. Jimmy Carter dismissed the exit poll as unreliable, arguing that it had been conducted by anti-Chavez activists. He also accused opposition leaders of circulating false results before the voting had ended, inflating expectations of victory among people still waiting in line. There was no evidence of fraud, Carter concluded. The allegations, he said, were completely unwarranted. Still, many in the opposition remained convinced that there was fraud, and that suspicion didn't come out of nowhere. After everything that had happened, the delays, the signatures, the Tascón list, the intimidation, millions of Venezuelans found it very easy to believe that Chavez was capable of stealing the vote. Several statistical studies later examined the official results and claimed to find irregularities. One study, published in the International Statistical Review in 2006, argued that there were problems in roughly a quarter of the tally sheets, affecting 18% of the voting centers, and concluded that the opposition had statistical grounds to reject the official result. But the deeper issue was not only whether the numbers had been altered. It was that the institutions meant to guarantee trust in elections had already lost it. By the time the referendum was over, one side believed Chavez had been ratified by the people, the other believed that he had rigged the election. And that mistrust would shape everything that came next. The opposition shattered. Many of its supporters now believed that the electoral system was rigged beyond repair. The Cordinadora Democrática, already weakened by years of failed strategies, soon dissolved under the weight of internal divisions. Chavez, meanwhile, emerged stronger than ever. His popularity surged, oil revenues kept climbing, the Bolivarian missions deepened his connection with the poor, and after surviving the recall, Chavez could now claim democratic legitimacy with renewed force. Later that year, in the 2004 regional elections, Chavismo swept the country. It captured 20 of Venezuela's 22 governorships and won more than 80% of the mayoral races, an extraordinary reversal from the political vulnerability Chavez had faced just months earlier. Then, in 2005, the five main opposition parties pulled out of the National Assembly elections just days before the vote, arguing that the process would not be free and fair. It was another catastrophic mistake. Polls at the time suggested that the opposition was unlikely to win a majority. But by boycotting the election, they guaranteed their own exclusion. Between 2006 and 2010, every single seat in the Venezuelan National Assembly was controlled by Chavez and his allies. Chavez now dominated every branch of the Venezuelan state. But there's something that Chavez took from us that we often don't talk about. Not just an election, not just PDVSA, or the courts, or the Electoral Council, something deeper. He took the possibility that Venezuelans could disagree without becoming enemies. That was the first great betrayal. Because Hugo Chávez could have done extraordinary things. When he was elected in 1998, millions of Venezuelans truly believed that the future had arrived, that the country was finally going to enter the 21st century ready to transform itself, to include the excluded, to confront the corruption of the past, to build something fairer, something more dignified, something worthy of the people who had placed their faith in him. And he took that faith. This one man took the power the Venezuelan people had given him, the power of their hope, their anger, their desire for change. And he used it to divide them. And when it became clear that he couldn't keep winning elections forever, he crossed a line from which the country never fully returned. Whatever revolution he claimed to lead, however historic he believed his mission to be, Chavez began to weaponize the state against its own people. Citizens became categories: loyal or disloyal, patriot or traitor, revolutionary or enemy. And individual Venezuelans, with lives, families, jobs, fears, and dreams, were reduced to nothing. Just numbers, for or against. Names on a list. That's the tragedy at the heart of Chavez's Venezuela. A country of unbelievable beauty, a country of warmth, humor, music, generosity, and connection became a battlefield for one man's ambition. And to me, that's the ultimate crime. To hold in your hands the hope of millions of people, to be given the chance to heal a wounded nation, and instead to teach that nation to fear itself, to create a system of political apartheid, to turn citizen against citizen, neighbor against neighbor, name against name. All so one man could remain in power, whatever the cost. Thanks again for listening. And if you want to support the project, the Patreon link is in the description. See you next week.