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Weekly Report - 06 August 2015 (WR-15-31)

VENEZUELA: Fatal looting marks start of electoral registration

Registration for legislative elections on 6 December got underway this week. While the government frontloaded its list of candidates with the First Lady Celia Flores, some cabinet heavyweights, singers and sportsmen, the national electoral council (CNE) rejected the application of María Corina Machado to run for the opposition coalition Mesa de la Unidad Democrática (MUD). Machado won more votes than any other candidate in the 2010 legislative elections and her exclusion is a major blow for the MUD. In a sign of the tension that is likely to build as the electoral campaign unfolds, a youth was shot dead in the midst of the looting of a supermarket in the city of Ciudad Guayana in the south-eastern state of Bolívar on 31 July.

President Nicolás Maduro announced the list of legislative candidates to drive forward the Bolivarian Revolution during a rally to mark the start of the five-day registration period on 3 August. Flores, a former president of the unicameral national assembly, leads the way as “the first combatant”, representing her native central state of Cojedes. Other big hitters on the list include Communes Minister Elías Jaua; Oil Minister Asdrúbal Chávez; Infrastructure Minister Haiman El Troudi; Education Minister Héctor Rodríguez; Indigenous Affairs Minister Aloha Nuñez and Housing Minister Ricardo Molina; singers Cristóbal Jiménez and Roque Valero; Olympic fencing champion Rubén Limardo; and TV presenter Érika Ortega.

Maduro maintained that the forthcoming electoral campaign would be “the toughest battle in the 16 years of the Bolivarian Revolution”. He said that this was due to the “economic war” being waged against his government, which would intensify as the elections approached with a planned wave of violence “sponsored by the Pentagon” to sow discord and chaos in Venezuela. Maduro described the killing of a youth in the looting of a supermarket in Ciudad Guayana, which led to 60 arrests, as a “planned” incident staged by the Right following orders from the US to undermine the Bolivarian Revolution. The governor of Bolívar, Francisco Rangel, maintained that the looters were “armed and induced”.

The MUD said the incident was evidence of the extremes to which many Venezuelans are pushed to acquire basic necessities amid scarcity of food and other essentials, and the rapid erosion of the value of the local currency amid hyperinflation. The MUD’s executive secretary, Jesús Torrealba, called for a day of national protest on 8 August “against hunger and crime and for freedom”, to take place in Caracas and all of the state capitals, to demand the immediate adoption of MUD proposals “to confront corruption and official ineptitude with common sense rather than bullets”.

The MUD released a statement saying that, “We condemn the intolerable and unprecedented situation of collapse which the Venezuelan people endure today due to the government’s destruction of the economy”. It blamed the “destruction of the productive apparatus” and “the massive theft of dollars from oil” as the principal causes of this collapse, aggravated by recent measures, such as restricting foreign exchange for importers, which it said was simply “throwing fuel on the fire of scarcity”. The MUD concluded that this “absurd conduct seems designed to generate a social revolt with the aim of creating the pretext of suspending or postponing the legislative elections which it knows are lost”.

The MUD has tried to capitalise on public discontent with food shortages and rampant inflation in the past without the desired success. The loss of Machado will only make its task tougher. Machado received an administrative sanction from the comptroller general’s office on 14 July barring her from standing for election for one year so the CNE’s decision to deny her registration was not unexpected. Machado said that neither of the two bodies had the legal standing to deny her registration, and that “the regime” had not forgiven her for speaking out against the presence of Cuban soldiers in the Venezuelan armed forces as well as denouncing official corruption. She had a ready-made replacement by her side to stand in her place for the MUD: Isabel Pereira, a director of the liberal thinktank Centro de Divulgación del Conocimiento Económico para la Libertad (Cedice).

On 4 August the US State Department released a statement expressing “concern” at the decisions to block the candidacy of Machado and other opposition politicians which “clearly have the intention of complicating the ability of the opposition to run candidates for the legislative elections, and limiting the range of candidates that can be presented to the Venezuelan people.” It went on to argue that “democracy must be inclusive”, and urged “all relevant Venezuelan authorities to reconsider the ban imposed on candidates”. The Venezuelan government responded with a statement of its own accusing the US of “interfering in internal constitutional matters”.

Meanwhile, Maduro ruled out monitoring of the electoral process by the Organization of American States (OAS), insisting that “Venezuela will not be monitored by anyone”. He claimed that the political opposition would denounce irregularities and fraud with or without monitoring.

  • Polar warehouse expropriated

The looting of the supermarket in Bolívar came a day after the government sent in troops to seize (not for the first time) the Caracas warehouse of Venezuela’s largest food distributor, Polar, which President Maduro has accused of seeking “to sabotage the economy”. “This is our principal dispatch centre,” Polar director, Manuel Larrazábal, said, from which the company sends out 12,000 tonnes of food and 6m litres of drink per month. Larrazábal said that expropriating the warehouse at a time of food supply problems was “irrational”, and urged the government to reconsider its action.

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