[Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was handed his first electoral loss
since winning the presidency seven years ago when he narrowly lost a
controversial referendum on 69 proposed changes to the constitution
earlier this month. Below a debate hosted recently by Democracy Now between Greg Wilpert, author of 'Changing Venezuela by Taking Power', and Francisco Rodriguez, the
former chief economist of the Venezuelan National Assembly.]
[Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) in Washington, D.C. takes a critical look at a recent piece by the Latin America editor of The Economist, Michael Reid, which paints a dismal picture of Venezuela and argues that the British left should support economic policies in Latin America which Reid argues are "building on the economic reforms misleadingly known as the Washington Consensus". For Weisbrot it is a tribute to the sophistication of the British left that they can see through the one-sided media coverage of Venezuela and Latin America.]
[The Gringo In Venezuela blog has provided English subtitles to a documentary on Venezuela's opposition student movement by
Spanish journalist David Segarra Soler entitled 'New Faces, The Same Objective'. In the documentary Soler reveals the connections that
Venezuela's opposition student movement has with various CIA front organisations,
and right-wing political groups from around Europe.]
[The Nation recently asked five U.S. analysts for their views on the defeat of constitutional reforms championed by
President Hugo Chávez. In the article below, one of the contributors, assistant professor of sociology at Queens College, City University of New York, Sujatha Fernandes, argues that the referendum defeat provides an opportunity to reorient the course of the revolution away from
determining how to keep Chávez in power indefinitely and proposing
reforms from above, and toward promoting alternative and local sources
of leadership and facilitating a plural public debate about the future
of socialism.] Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez gestures in this Dec. 3, 2007, file
photo, during the press conference in Caracas where he acknowledged his
defeat in a referendum that would have let him run for re-election
indefinitely and impose a socialist system. (AP Photo/Fernando
Llano/FILE)
[Red Pepper editor Hilary Wainwright recently visited Venezuela as an international observer
of the democracy of the election process and found it in many ways more
democratic than in the UK. Wainwright also ended up observing the internal
democracy of the Chavista movement itself and found at its
grassroots an inspiring commitment to pluralism, critical debate, and
popular autonomy from which we also have much to learn. For a Spanish version of this article click here.]
[Aljazeera's The Listening Post asks what effect Venezuela's recent Constitutional referendum will have on the western media's confrontational relationship with Hugo Chavez.]
[For Venezuelan sociologist Javier Biardeau the scenery of a political defeat with a high abstention rate, even if it had resulted in a pyrrhic election victory, places the strategic leadership of the revolution in the only rational and emotional space necessary to overcome the current situation: to recognise mistakes and correct them, starting with the one sided view of the infallibility of the leader. Click here to read the original Spanish version of this article.]
[Below is an English translation of President's Chavez's concession speech following the defeat of his constitutional reform proposal in a referendum. The constitutional reform referendum, which Chavez described as the most important vote of his presidency, was to help bring about "21st century socialism in Venezuela".]
[For John Pilger some journalists in the mainstream media fail to report the facts when
dealing with Venezuela, preferring instead to parrot Washington's line.]
[In a briefing for the Transnational Institute (TNI) Edgardo Lander and Pablo Navarrete argue that Venezuela has undergone profound political and social changes since
Hugo Chávez assumed the presidency in February 1999, which have been
reflected in a fundamental shift in the country's economic policy. The
briefing offers a historically grounded account of how, in three
distinct stages, the Chávez government has put an end to neo-liberal
policymaking in the country and instituted various structural changes
to the Venezuelan economy.]
