The Democratic Dictator

Episode 15  |  How did elections become one of Hugo Chávez's most powerful weapons? 

This episode traces how Chávez manipulated Venezuela’s electoral system from 1999 to 2012—rewriting the rules, blacklisting opponents, coercing public employees, gerrymandering districts, and stripping rivals of power. This is how Venezuela became a dictatorship through the ballot box. 

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Transcript

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Speaker 0:00

What if a dictator never abolished elections because they were the most powerful weapon he had? There's a misconception, a myth that persists around the world today, that Hugo Chavez was a Democrat, that he was simply so popular, so deeply loved by Venezuela's poor and working classes, that Venezuelans continued to re-elect him and his movement over and over again. It was this image that transformed Chavez into an icon for much of the global left.

Speaker 7 0:34

He created space for an enormous diversity of other left-oriented leaders that seemed almost more acceptable to the West up against the figure, the lightning rod figure of Chavez.

Speaker 0:46

And even by 2012, when overwhelming evidence of his authoritarianism had shattered any reasonable basis for that image, the illusion persisted. Whoever wants to see democracy, come to Venezuela. That was the ultimate defense of Chavez's supposedly democratic government, that Venezuela still held elections. But elections alone do not make a democracy. As I'm sure you've already noticed throughout this series, a dictator does not need to abolish elections. He can manipulate them. He can transform them into instruments of intimidation, surveillance, propaganda, and control. And that's precisely what Chavez did. But how did it begin? How did elections become one of Chavez's most powerful tools for consolidating his dictatorship? That's the question we will answer this week on The Guacamaya. Chavez began manipulating elections almost immediately after taking office in 1999. He had been elected with a promise to convene a constituent assembly to rewrite Venezuela's constitution. Normally, this is a temporary body elected for one purpose: drafting a new constitution. But Chavez presented it as an all-powerful authority that stood above every existing institution. First, though, he needed to control it. The election abandoned Venezuela's traditional system of proportional representation. Instead, more than 1,100 candidates would compete individually for just 131 seats. Each candidate was assigned a number that voters would select at the polls. On the surface, this seemed reasonable. A constituent assembly was supposed to represent individuals, not political parties. But Chavez's candidates were individuals in name only. His movement enlisted two mathematicians to design a strategy that would maximize its representation. Chavez nominated only as many candidates as there were available seats, organized them into carefully constructed slates, and distributed lists of their numbers to his supporters. All his voters had to do was arrive at the polls and select the candidates endorsed by Chavez. The opposition, meanwhile, was divided among more than 900 competing candidates. That was the trick. Chavez concentrated his vote behind a disciplined slate, while the opposition vote was scattered across hundreds of names. On July 25, 1999, Chavez's movement won with just under 66% of the vote, but it captured 124 of the Constituent Assembly's 131 seats. Approximately 95% of the entire body. Chavez had transformed a substantial electoral majority into virtually absolute institutional control. The votes were real, but the rules had been designed to predetermine what those votes would produce. The next serious electoral challenge that Chavez faced came in 2004, when the opposition activated a recall referendum to remove him from power. But by then, Chavez controlled virtually every institution of the Venezuelan state. After surviving the 2002 coup, he purged the armed forces. Then, following the 2003 national strike, he fired thousands of employees from the state oil company, PDVSA, and replaced opponents throughout the public administration with loyalists. That included the institution overseeing the referendum itself, the National Electoral Council, the CNE. To force the recall vote, the opposition needed signatures from 20% of registered voters. Millions of Venezuelans signed. But the Electoral Council delayed the process, rejected more than a million signatures, and forced hundreds of thousands of people to return and confirm or repair their signatures in a climate of political persecution. Because the government turned the petition into something far more sinister. Luis Tascon, a pro-Chavez legislature, obtained the names of the signatories from the Electoral Council and published them online. Anyone could enter a national ID number and discover whether that person had signed against President Chavez. The information was later incorporated into a larger database, known as the Maisanta Program, which combined political records with addresses, electoral participation, and enrollment in government programs. The government didn't need to know how Venezuelans voted inside the polling booth. It only needed them to believe that political disloyalty could cost them their jobs, contracts, or access to the state. But the delays also gave Chavez something else: time. When the recall campaign began, Chavez was politically vulnerable. His approval rating had fallen dramatically, and the opposition believed that he would lose. But while the Electoral Council prolonged the process, global oil prices surged. Chavez used that windfall to launch the Bolivarian missions. Mass social programs that brought Cuban doctors into poor neighborhoods, expanded literacy campaigns, and distributed subsidized food. The programs addressed genuine needs, but they were also inseparable from Chavez's campaign to survive the referendum. By the time Venezuelans finally voted in August 2004, Chavez had recovered much of his popularity. And he won. The opposition cried fraud. That reaction was understandable because they had watched the government persecute the people who had signed the petition, manipulate the timetable, and deploy the financial power of the state behind Chavez. But the referendum had also introduced a new electronic voting system that many opponents deeply distrusted. Many concluded that the machines themselves had been programmed to steal the election. And that conclusion proved disastrous. Because now, in the minds of much of the opposition, every future election was already rigged. That was perhaps Chavez's greatest victory. He had manipulated the system so thoroughly that his opponents no longer believed participating in it could matter. In 2005, the major opposition parties boycotted the National Assembly election. They were right that the election had no guarantees, but refusing to participate was a catastrophic mistake. And so, Chavez captured every seat in the National Assembly. For the next five years, there was no opposition inside the Venezuelan state. Chavez could pass laws, approve budgets, and appoint the officials controlling the courts, the electoral authority, and every other branch of the government. The opposition believed it was delegitimizing the election. Instead, it surrendered the last major institution Chavez did not already completely control. By 2006, Chavez was now at the height of his power. Oil prices were booming, public spending had exploded, and Chavez could mobilize the entire Venezuelan state behind his campaigns. The government busts supporters to enormous rallies that became giant street parties. People drinking, dancing, and basking in Chavez's magnetism. International observers reported the excessive use of public resources and the active participation of government officials in the campaign. Chavez won re-election in 2006 with almost 63% of the vote, defeating his opponent by nearly 26 percentage points. He had already spoken about socialism, but it was only after securing another six years in power that he revealed how aggressively he intended to pursue it. Chavez declared that Venezuelans had not voted for him, they had voted for socialism. And in 2007, he moved rapidly to impose it. In May, his government refused to renew the broadcasting license for RCTV, one of the country's largest opposition-aligned television networks. The closure sparked a new student movement. University students poured into the streets to defend freedom of expression, facing tear gas, rubber bullets, and arrests. Then Chavez announced a referendum to reform 69 articles of the Constitution. The reform would eliminate presidential term limits, extend the presidential term, strip the central bank of its autonomy, and create a new system of communal institutions that did not derive their authority from universal elections. This was not a minor constitutional reform. It was the legal architecture of Chavez's socialist state. And once again, the government threw the full weight of the state behind the campaign. But for the first time, it failed. On December 2nd, 2007, Chavez lost by just 1.3 percentage points. The student movement had played an extraordinary role in mobilizing opposition to the reform, but the decisive change occurred among Chavez's own supporters. He had received more than 7.3 million votes in 2006. Fewer than 4.5 million voted for his reform one year later. Millions of Venezuelans who had recently supported Chavez either rejected his proposal or stayed home. And the regime already possessed the machinery to identify them. Because the Maisanta Program didn't only reveal who had signed against Chavez during the recall referendum, it also tracked electoral participation and whether a person was enrolled in government social programs. The government was recording not only who openly opposed Chavez, but who had failed to show up and support him, and whether those people depended on the state. And that information was used. Inside the Ministry of Science and Technology, for example, a room on the top floor was filled with desks, telephones, and call sheets. The lists identified ruling party members and beneficiaries of government programs who had failed to go vote. Ministry employees were required to spend part of their lunch breaks calling them, asking, why didn't you vote? You know we're counting on your support. These were threats. Supervisors inside state-owned companies also warned employees that failing to vote would cost them their jobs. This system was replicated across the entire public administration, transforming state institutions into extensions of Chavez's party. Not opposing the president was no longer enough. You had to demonstrate your loyalty. And this was still only 2007. What a democracy. And the defeat of 2007 did not moderate Chavez. He taught himself that every remaining opening for the opposition had to be closed. In August 2008, Venezuela's Supreme Court upheld a list barring 272 people from running for public office. Many had never been convicted of a crime. Among them was Leopoldo Lopez, one of the country's most prominent opposition leaders at the time who had planned to run for the Metropolitan Mayor of Caracas. But even then, the opposition won several important states and the Metropolitan Mayorship of Caracas in the 2008 regional elections. Again, Chavez did not need to cancel the election. He simply stripped the winners of the power that they had been elected to exercise. But Chavez still faced one obstacle of his own. The constitution prevented him from running for president indefinitely. Venezuelans had already rejected his attempt to abolish re-election limits in 2007, so in 2009, Chavez made them vote again, this time on whether to remove presidential term limits. Once again, the entire machinery of the state campaigned behind him. And Chavez won. He could now run for president again and again. The next major contest came in 2010, with the election of the new National Assembly. This time, the opposition would not repeat the catastrophic mistake of 2005. Its parties united under a single coalition and negotiated a single slate of candidates. They had learned that however unfair the system had become, abandoning elections only strengthened Chavez. But Chavez had also learned. His National Assembly approved a new electoral law that changed the distribution of representatives across districts. Then the Electoral Council redrew crucial districts, dividing opposition strongholds and combining them with pro-government areas. It was gerrymandering, and it worked. When Venezuelans voted in September 2010, Chavez's Alliance received approximately 48% of the national vote. The opposition received 47%, a difference of less than one percentage point. But that near tie did not produce an equally divided parliament. Chavez's Alliance received 98 seats in the National Assembly.

Speaker 2 16:42

The Opposition received only 65.4 million de votes for the Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela contra 5.3 million de la mesa de la unidad.

Speaker 17:06

You've spoken about a victory of 5.4 million votes for the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, compared with 5.3 million for the Democratic Unity Coalition. I don't think you know it, because the answer is there. But Flores refused to be intimidated. Chavez still didn't answer. Instead, he dismissed the question as illogical, gelatinous. Chavez spent more than nine minutes evading a question that required a very simple answer. Virtually the same number of votes had produced radically different representation because the distortion was built into the rules. Still, the opposition had denied Chavez the two-thirds majority he needed to exercise some of the assembly's most important constitutional powers. So Chavez moved before the newly elected legislatures could even take office. In December 2010, the outgoing Chavista National Assembly granted Chavez the power to legislate by decree for 18 months. The opposition had fought its way back into the National Assembly, but before it could even enter the building, Chavez had transferred much of its authority to himself. That was the pattern. When Chavez won, the election represented the people. When his opponents won, he stripped them of all their power. By Chavez's final presidential election in 2012, the Venezuelan state had become an electoral machine built around one man. The opposition had united behind a single candidate, Henrique Capriles Radonski, presenting Chavez with his most serious electoral challenge in years. So Chavez deployed everything he had built. State television promoted his campaign, government ministries mobilized voters, public employees were pressured to support him, and that election year, public spending increased by 46%. The government poured money into housing, pensions, and social programs, all to ensure Chavez's re-election. And again, it worked. Chavez won with approximately 55% of the vote. Which brings us back to the question we heard at the beginning of this episode. Why was it so difficult to convince the world that Venezuela was a democracy? Chavez's answer was that Venezuela held elections. And it did, 17 elections and referendums during his 14 years in power. But elections could not meaningfully limit Chavez's power. When he lost, he stripped elected officials of their powers, governed around them, or made Venezuelans vote again. And here's the important takeaway. Democracy is not measured by how often people vote. It's measured by whether their voices can constrain those who govern. And no one could constrain Hugo Chavez. Chavez didn't preserve elections despite becoming a dictator. He preserved them because they had become one of the most powerful weapons of his dictatorship. Thanks again for listening. See you next week.