Thanks to Julian in Donkey Town for sending this. It is a pretty good review of the setback at the weekend.

Here is HOV’s referendum blog.

Australia-Venezuela Solidarity Network statement on Venezuela’s
constitutional reforms referendum

December 4, 2007

The December 2 referendum on 69 proposed changes to Venezuela’s
constitution resulted in a narrow majority “No” vote. The result was
immediately accepted by President Hugo Chavez, who said: “We have
fulfilled our promise of respecting our institutions. The umpire has
spoken… We declare that we recognise the decision that the people have
made. For now we could not do it. …I congratulate my adversaries for
their victory. We are prepared for a long battle.”

9,002,439 Venezuelans voted, of which 8,883,746 votes were valid. In the
block A vote (the reforms proposed by Chavez), 50.7% voted against and
49.3% voted for. In the block B vote (the reforms proposed by the
National Assembly), 51.1% voted against and 48.9% voted for.

This is the first time in 12 national polls since Chavez was elected in
1989 that the opposition has won. Had the proposed constitutional
reforms been adopted, they would have significantly extended democracy
and social justice in Venezuela. They included the constitutional
recognition of new institutions of popular power based on direct
democracy, such as the communal councils, and new measures to allow
people to directly manage resources and decision-making in their
communities. While respecting the right to private property, the reforms
recognised new forms of “social property” run by and for the people
themselves, and were to give further recognition to the growing number
of cooperatives.

The rights of gay men and lesbians would have been recognised in the
Constitution, and the voting age reduced to 16 years. The rights and
culture of Afro-Venezuelans and indigenous people would also have been
Constitutionally protected, and governments would have been obliged to
ensure free university education to the entire population. As well,
workers’ rights would be significantly extended, including a reduction
in the working week from 44 to 36 hours, and social security and
pensions were guaranteed to approximately 5 million workers in the
“informal” economy.

In the words of Robert Hernandez, vice-president of the Venezuelan
legislature, the reforms aimed to “transfer greater powers to the people
and that’s precisely the first step towards socialism. It’s not anything
other than giving society functions that until now have been privileges
of the State.”

But the referendum result is far from a fatal blow to the Bolivarian
revolution. The fact that 4.3 million people voted for this program of
action is in many ways remarkable, a measure of the deepening
revolutionary process. As Chavez said after the result was announced:
“In the proposals there where some very audacious ideas without
precedent.”

High abstention

Exposing as lies the persistent efforts of the international media to
portray Chavez as a “dictator”, the December 2 referendum was thoroughly
transparent and democratic. “We will accept the results no matter what
they are”, Chavez said as he voted on December 2. “This process has been
a gain for democracy in Venezuela. Everyone has the right to express
themselves, even if it is done crudely sometimes … For most of
Venezuela’s history the people have been isolated from the political
process. Here popular power will have its say.”

While the opposition can claim an electoral victory, it is not a
decisive one. A defining feature of the December 2 poll was that
participation (55.9% of the voting-age population) was considerably down
from the December 2006 presidential election, in which 74% voted. The
abstention rate of 44.4% in the constitution reform poll points to the
real story of this referendum.

Compared to last year’s presidential elections, the opposition won very
few people over, increasing their vote by less than 100,000. The
pro-revolution vote dropped by around 2.8 million, but those votes did
not go to the opposition, but to abstention. Commenting on this, Chavez
said: “We need to work out what were the reasons for this … but I am
convinced that the majority of these people are still with us. They did
not vote for the opposition, they abstained due to doubts, fears, lack
of time and due to lack of our ability to explain.

Confusion and fear were undoubtedly factors in the outcome. The fact
that the proposed reforms aimed to provide a legal framework for
significant advances in empowering Venezuela’s poor majority was a
direct threaten the political and economic power of Venezuelan and US
corporate elites, who pulled out all stops in their campaign against the
reforms.

US-backed opposition

Aided and abetted financially, politically and propagandistically by the
US government and corporate media, Venezuela’s privileged elite ran a
campaign of disinformation, intimidation and attempted destabilisation
in the lead-up to the referendum.

A CIA memo uncovered the week before the referendum revealed that the
opposition campaign was funded by the US embassy in Venezuela to the
tune of US$8 million for propaganda alone. Contrary to international
media portrayals of the Chavez government as restricting free speech,
the opposition still controls the majority of media outlets in Venezuela
and they used them to spread lies and rumours aimed at instilling fears
about the proposed constitutional reforms. It was said, for example,
that if the reforms were passed the state would be able to take your
children and your home, and that small shops would be nationalised.

But the opposition campaign was not limited to propaganda. A month
before the referendum, opposition leaders met with US officials who
urged them to “organise acts of economic sabotage against
infrastructure, destroy the food transport and delivery chain … and
organise a military coup with all means possible, including bloodshed by
means of paramilitary force” to stop the constitutional reforms. (These
same defenders of the old constitution carried out a short-lived coup in
April 2002 that did away with the constitution altogether and dismissed
all the freely elected state powers and institutions, including the
congress, attorney-general, governors and mayors.)

In Caracas, two weeks before the referendum, anti-Chavez students
violently attacked pro-reform students at the Universidad Central de
Venezuela. Then, on November 26, anti-Chavez protesters blocking streets
in the central Venezuelan state of Carabobo shot three times and killed
a worker on a truck full of pro-Chavez workers from local factories who
tried to pass the roadblock.

On November 30, the government publicly released a video (see
http://www.aporrea. org/medios/ n105515.html) revealing the opposition’s
strategy of destabilization for the referendum, in which opposition
leaders are seen calling on supporters assembled in a church in Caracas
to not recognize the results of the referendum and take part in
nation-wide protests to overturn the constitutional reforms by
“generating a political crisis and crisis of instability”.

These events were consistently ignored or misreported by the
international media, which continues to portray the opposition as
peaceful “anti-dictatorship” protesters.

International media lies

Following the referendum result, the corporate media will of course be
triumphant. Within minutes of the result being announced, Reuters was
again pedalling its lies in an article that appeared almost
simultaneously in online newspapers around the world, declaring: “Mr
Chavez, 53, has said he wants to rule until he dies”. The reforms, said
Reuters, would have allowed “Mr Chavez – who has been in office since
1999 – to run for re-election indefinitely, control foreign currency
reserves, appoint loyalists over regional elected officials and censor
the media if he declares an emergency … [and] boosted his powers to
expropriate private property”. The fact that almost every western
democracy empowers its government to declare states of emergency (US
presidents can declare states of emergency that suspend citizens’ normal
rights and liberties for up to two years) and that, unlike in Australia
and the US, the Venezuelan constitution grants people the ability to
recall any elected official, including the president, before their term
finishes, was not mentioned.

The Reuters coverage claimed that Chavez still “wields enormous power in
a country he has pledged to turn into a socialist state. His supporters
dominate Congress, the courts and election authorities … [and] Mr Chavez
had tried to make the referendum vote a black-and-white plebiscite on
his rule.” This media spin is almost surreal: a “dictator” defeated in
an undisputedly democratic election called by his government who
immediately accepts the vote just doesn’t add up. In Chavez’s own words,
the December 2 referendum “demonstrated the credibility of our
constitution [adopted in 1999, after Chavez was first elected] and the
institutions that it has created, in our political system and Bolivarian
democracy. Venezuelan democracy has matured and every process that
unfolds allows it to continue to mature.”

The revolution continues

The revolution has won every major battle with the opposition forces
since 2002, until this referendum. But alongside the opposition’s recent
electoral victory is genuinely mass support for – and increasingly mass
“ownership” of – the social missions, the new democratic structures, the
economy and all the concrete content of the developing revolution. The
opposition have won this election, but it is quite another thing to
confront and defeat the increasingly organised and armed working people
in an all-out struggle for power.

That around 2.8 million people who voted for Chavez last year were not
convinced of the reforms does not amount to a rejection of what is
contained in the proposed reforms, but indicates that the revolutionary
forces were unable to successfully counter the media offensive and
convince millions of Chavez supporters why they should back the reforms.
It is in this context that Chavez’s statement, “This Bolivarian republic
will keep getting stronger. This is not a loss; for me this is another
`For now’”, should be understood. The battle of ideas continues.

“We have been a people under fire, a people that has faced an …
artillery of lies and rumours”, Chavez said. “However, it has been a
massive step forward politically that 49% have voted for a socialist
project … We will continue in the battle to construct socialism within
the framework of the constitution. The reform proposals will continue to
be put forward. It continues to be alive. It will not die.”

The Australia-Venezuela Solidarity Network is organising public events
in a number of cities in December to discuss the constitutional reforms
and the outcomes of the referendum. Visit
http://www.venezuel asolidarity. org for details, and for links to further
information about the Venezuelan revolution.