Scholar Points Out Violence and Corruption in Venezuela's Election

Scholar Points Out Violence and Corruption in Venezuela's Election

Phil Brennan, NewsMax.com
Friday, Aug. 20, 2004

In the face of exit polls that showed 58 percent of voters favored ousting Venezuelan president and Fidel Castro stooge Hugo Chavez while only 41 percent wanted him retained, election officials blandly reported that 58 percent of the voters wanted him retained and only 41 percent wanted him out.

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The most widely heralded outside observer of the election, former president Jimmy Carter, ignoring demands that the recall results be investigated, said that he was shown the computer vote tally by supporters of Chavez's regime and that everything seemed in order. He then skipped town, heading back to the U.S to celebrate his wife's birthday and leaving in the lurch the opposition groups that had naively relied on him to make sure the election was on the up and up.

In a shocking report in the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal.com, Thor Halvorssen, First Amendment scholar at The Commonwealth Foundation in New York and a courageous Venezuelan citizen, gave an account of the massive irregularities that occurred during and after the voting.

His report "The Price of Dissent in Venezuela - Hugo Chavez's thugs celebrate their 'victory' by shooting my mother," described the reaction of bands of Chavez's thugs to citizens peacefully protesting the rigged election results in a Caracas public square. They were brutally assaulted by more than 100 of Chavez's supporters, who, after chanting "We own this country now," threw bottles and rocks at the crowd and then began shooting indiscriminately into the multitude.

Recalls Halvorssen: "A 61-year-old grandmother was shot in the back as she ran for cover. The bullet ripped through her aorta, kidney and stomach. She later bled to death in the emergency room. An opposition congressman was shot in the shoulder and remains in critical care. Eight others suffered severe gunshot wounds. Hilda Mendoza Denham, a British subject visiting Caracas for her mother's 80th birthday, was shot at close range with hollow-point bullets from a high-caliber pistol. She now lies sedated in a hospital bed after a long and complicated operation. She is my mother."

Halvorssen described the ruses used to rig the election in Chavez's favor:

Thousands of voters, including Halvorssen, were mysteriously removed from the voting rolls.

Citizenship was granted to half a million illegal aliens in a crude vote-buying scheme.

Citizens were "migrated" away from their local polling places. One opposition leader was moved to a voting center in a city seven hours away. Another man, Miguel Romero, had for years voted in his neighborhood school in a Caracas suburb, but the Electoral Council computer indicated that he was to vote at the Venezuelan Embassy in Stockholm.

Venezuelan diplomatic posts around the world "inexplicably ran out of passports. Many Venezuelan expatriates were thus prevented from returning to their country to vote."

Electronic voting machines were supplied by two U.S. companies with ties to Chavez. Wrote Halvorssen: "Many in the opposition are baffled by the inverse relationship between the projected numbers and those reported by the Chávez regime. One possible clue to this remarkable phenomenon lies with the companies hired to supply the voting machines and the software."

Those companies, Smartmatic Corp., a Florida company that has never before supplied election machinery, is owned by two Venezuelans. The software came from Bizta Software, owned by the same two people. According to the Miami Herald, Chavez's regime spent $200,000 last year to buy 28 percent of Bizta and put a government official and longtime Chavez ally on the board.

After the Herald's story broke, Bizta bought back the government-held shares and the official resigned from the board. But, said Halvorssen, it was not until after the two companies got a healthy chunk of the $91 million contract for the referendum. Executives at Smartmatic and Bizta have denied any political allegiance to Chavez's regime and have issued public statements saying the contract was awarded on merit.

The results of all of this skulduggery: "In the early hours of Monday, the Electoral Council's president (who had imposed a gag order on all exit polls until a full audit of the vote had been completed) issued a statement declaring that the computer votes had been tallied and that the government had won the referendum with 58% of the vote. The announcement came in a vacuum, without an audit, with no verification whatsoever from the international observers, and over the indignant protest of two of the five council members, who publicly questioned the result's transparency."

Chavez now brags that the referendum results are irreversible and permanent and pledges that Venezuela's communist revolution, which is bankrupting his nation and reducing its citizenry to poverty, will now intensify.

"He is firmly in control of the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government; the armed forces; electoral bodies and two-thirds of the country's economy," Halvorssen wrote.

And he's firmly under the thumb of Fidel Castro.

Editor's note:

New Book Exposes Jimmy Carter – Click Here Now!

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