Venezuela has become the epicentre of an information war, writes Serene Assir Only 25 per cent of Venezuela's 14.5 million registered voters participated in last week's legislative elections, thus bringing down the levels of participation by about half in comparison to the last elections. Despite the low turnout, the Venezuelan, Spanish-language and political press has been filled with comment on the issue, presumably reflecting the heavy polarisation that the country's political spectrum has been plunged into ever since controversial President Hugo Chavez re-took power in 2002. Candidates representing the party of controversial Chavez -- hero for some, dictator to others -- managed to secure all 167 parliamentary seats, thereby almost doubling their presence in parliament. While international observers from the European Union and the Organisation of American States were reported to have given the election a relatively clean bill of health -- stopping short of calling it fully democratic given the factor of voter distrust -- the victory of supporters of Chavez was marred by a total boycott by opposition parties of the election. Mass abstentions -- emerging from a mixture of voter apathy, mistrust and the boycott -- were capitalised on by the opposition, the majority of who support sweeping economic change in Venezuela, a return to the privatisation of the oil industry and close relations with the United States. Just as the press has been remarkably emotional in its coverage of the situation of a country whose interests are so crucial to the US, the Internet is filled with posts which have only been on the rise ever since Chavez's return to power. One anti-Chavez blog, hosted at www.venezuelanet.org, includes a series of cartoons mocking Chavez's rapprochement with Cuban leader Fidel Castro, depicting the Venezuelan president as a pet of the long-time head of the Caribbean island. At times portraying him as a dog and at others as a pig, the cartoons show the Venezuelan parroting Castro's orders. Meanwhile, the site, which makes no bones about its support for US President George W Bush, also criticises Chavez's domestic politics, describing him as a "dictator" imposing "Castro-Communism" on Venezuela's national politics, and his "revolution" as being "a train on the verge of derailment". Website www.desdeelexilio.comwww.desdeelexilio.com/i(meaning From Exile) also features heavily anti-Chavez entries, including one by Luis Gomez entitled "Chavez's democracy: A history of fraud". The author defends the opposition's decision to boycott the elections by describing the electoral and political systems in Venezuela as generally autocratic and as conducive to the abuse of power by the leader. It features a citation from another critic of the president, describing Chavez's regime as tending towards "totalitarianism" and as "intolerant of dissidence". Criticism has not only been penned by Venezuelans. Spanish broadsheet La Vanguardia has also featured content attacking the Venezuelan head of state. Joaqim Ibarz, the newspaper's special correspondent in Caracas, described the legislative elections as "a new step in the imposition of an autocracy which, despite limiting liberties, nevertheless manages to disguise as democracy using the most up-to-date techniques in authoritarianism." The correspondent also describes the victory of Chavez's supporters of having been rendered possible only by virtue of being faced with "a weak and divided opposition". Meanwhile, Spanish national daily El Pais published an editorial criticising both the opposition's decision to boycott the election -- denoting it as a key strategic error -- and Chavez, describing him as feudal, "imprudent" and "increasingly authoritarian". The piece also says that the Venezuelan leader's continued hold over power has now only gained further legitimacy following his supporters' victory in the legislative elections, and that "no president with a sense of democracy and respect for social cohesion as crucial elements in the development of a nation would have allowed things to go so far." While criticism of Chavez builds up, so too does support for his regime and his outspoken defiance of the US administration. Published on www.rebelion.orgwww.rebelion.org/i, an article by Javier Ortiz described the opposition as "anti-democratic", and stated that "the real reason why the Venezuelan opposition refused to participate in the legislative elections was because they knew that they would make no gains from them." Ortiz also pointed out that only 10.8 per cent of the original list of candidates was actually from the ranks of the opposition to start with, and so he reasons that their last-minute withdrawal could not really have affected the results. Renowned commentator James Petras also featured in the Rebelion website, with an article entitled "Chavez wins, the US loses (again!)". The writer describes the interesting economic polarisation that has been so clearly a feature of Chavez's tenure of power, noting that while voter participation in middle and upper class areas was under 10 per cent, voters turned out in waves and queued for hours to place their ballots in working class areas. He also criticises the strategy implemented in Venezuela by the Bush administration and Congress -- the "all or nothing" strategy -- of pouring funds into the pockets of a weak opposition, in spite of signs of its growing failure. Writer for the Cuban agency Prensa Latina (Latin Press) Miguel Lozano meanwhile described the victory by supporters of Chavez in the election as signalling an "absolute 'red' control" over parliament, and the opposition's boycott as an act of "self-exclusion" from the country's politics, one which "in effect prevented what would have constituted (for the opposition) a much worse defeat."
