On Sunday, August 15th, a national referendum is scheduled to take place in Venezuela to decide whether democratically-elected president Hugo Chávez should remain in office. The outcome of this referendum, while significant, is only a fragment of a much larger and longer tale of class struggle in Venezuela, where 80% of the population lives in poverty and the richest 20% control the majority of country's natural and human-produced resources. Far from being simply an electoral process determining the destiny of a leader, many in Venezuela understand the current struggle as a confrontation between the popular movements of the Bolivarian revolution against the Capitalist Empire. Media activists on the ground in Venezuela describe the situation as a potential brink of class war. The organized poor are prepared to protect, by any means necessary, the revolutionary processes they have been building at the grassroots level even before Chavez took office.
CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) - President Hugo Chavez survived a popular referendum to oust him, according to results Monday, while Venezuela's opposition swiftly claimed fraud.
Backers of the leftist populist president set off fireworks and began celebrating in the streets of the capital in the pre-dawn darkness upon hearing the news from Francisco Carrasquero, president of the National Elections Council.
Carrasquero stopped short of declaring Chavez the outright winner. But vote counts he released showed the firebrand former army paratrooper had a virtually insurmountable 58-42 percent lead, with 94 percent of the vote counted.
Carrasquero said 4,991,483 votes had been cast against Chavez's recall, with 3,576,517 in favor.
Chavez claimed victory in a victory speech from a palace balcony.
"It is absolutely impossible that the victory of the 'no' be reversed," Chavez told thousands of cheering and whistling backers.
Haydee Deutsch, an opposition leader, said fraud had been committed and that the opposition "has no doubt that we won by an overwhelming majority."
At the opposition headquarters in Caracas, opponents watching the Carrasquero's announcement on television shouted "Fraud! Fraud!"
"This is impossible to swallow," said Jesus Torrealba, another opposition leader.
Indicating a possible split in the five-member National Elections Council, Sobella Mejia _ one of the members who is aligned with the opposition _ told a news conference before the tallies were announced that any release of partial figures would be premature and invalid. It was not clear how that would affect the results.
The first-ever recall vote for a president in Venezuela's history was aimed at putting a lid on years of often violent political unrest and a bloody coup and came after a lengthy and complicated petitioning process. Uncertainty about the future of the world's fifth-largest oil exporter has contributed to record high oil prices, which have reached more than $46 a barrel.
Chavez had repeatedly claimed that the opposition leaders were pawns of President Bush.
"Hopefully, from this day on Washington will respect the government and people of Venezuela," Chavez boomed from the balcony.
But he had words of reconciliation for the opposition.
"Those who voted for the 'yes' should not feel defeated. I want us to send them our respect," Chavez said.
Venezuelans could either vote "no," allowing Chavez to serve out the remainder of his six-year term which began in 2000, or "yes" to recall him. For Chavez to lose, more must have voted against him than the nearly 3.8 million who voted for him in the 2000 presidential elections, and there must also have been more "yes" votes than "no" votes.
With more than 8,568,000 votes cast, Sunday's referendum shattered the previous record of voter turnout, when 7.5 million Venezuelans voted in the 1988 presidential elections.
Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who monitored the vote, had said it was the largest turnout he'd ever seen, and lines extended for more than a mile in some places.
The referendum comes after a two-year drive to oust Chavez, which included a short-lived 2002 coup, a devastating two-month strike and political riots last March that claimed a dozen lives.
There was no immediate reaction from Carter or Cesar Gaviria, head of the Organization of American States, on the results.
Activists from both sides had urged voters to the polls, but they needed little pushing. Venezuelans tend to love or hate Chavez, a 50-year-old former paratroop commander, with sentiment drawn along class lines.
Chavez is a champion among the majority poor for freely spending on social programs with Venezuela's oil revenues. But his vilification of the rich and close ties with Cuban leader Fidel Castro made him many enemies among the wealthy.
The sheer number of voters along with problems with electronic thumbprint ID machines led election officials to twice postpone the polls' closing to midnight _ eight hours later than first scheduled. They then said the polling stations would be kept open even longer until everyone in line voted.
Some of the electronic thumbprint registration machines, aimed at preventing people from voting more than once, had difficulty registering thumbprints. Even Chavez had to move to another machine to register his thumbprint after the first one failed.
___
AP reporters Christopher Toothaker and Alexandra Olson in Caracas contributed to this report.
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