Did Hugo Chavez try to steal the election in which his constitutional referendum was voted down, only to be rebuffed by the Venezuelan military? Jorge Castañeda writes at Newsweek:
Most of Latin America's leaders breathed a sigh of relief earlier this week, after Venezuelan voters rejected President Hugo Chávez's constitutional amendment referendum. In private they were undoubtedly relieved that Chávez lost, and in public they expressed delight that he accepted defeat and did not steal the election. But by midweek enough information had emerged to conclude that Chávez did, in fact, try to overturn the results. As reported in El Nacional, and confirmed to me by an intelligence source, the Venezuelan military high command virtually threatened him with a coup d'état if he insisted on doing so. Finally, after a late-night phone call from Raúl Isaías Baduel, a budding opposition leader and former Chávez comrade in arms, the president conceded—but with one condition: he demanded his margin of defeat be reduced to a bare minimum in official tallies, so he could save face and appear as a magnanimous democrat in the eyes of the world.
Q and O and Ed Morrissey write that the next step is fairly predictable: Chavez will purge the Venezuelan military to diminish its ability to check his power.
After a purge, the next vote will presumably go Chavez's way regardless of will of the Venezuelan electorate.
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