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Chavez Fights Back After Recent Referendum Loss

VPM | By Julie McCarthy

Published December 7, 2007 at 9:00 PM EST

Updated July 10, 2023

ROBERT SIEGEL, host:

By most accounts, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was graceful when he accepted the defeat of his constitutional reforms last weekend. But by mid-week, that kinder, gentler Chavez was gone.

From Caracas, NPR’s Julie McCarthy reports.

JULIE McCARTHY: The various personas of Hugo Chavez were on display this week. Sunday saw a chastened Chavez seated before long-faced ministers, don’t be sad. The difference in votes was microscopic, he told them. It was just 1.4 percent.

A magnanimous Chavez then turned to the opposition, reassuring them that he would honor the results.

President HUGO CHAVEZ (Venezuela): (Speaking in Spanish)

McCARTHY: I hope that those leaders of the opposition who have been nervous and thinking that I would not recognize this reality or that we would prolong this agony, feel peaceful and content. He told them to go home and celebrate what they have to celebrate, in a healthy way.

Explaining why Venezuelans had voted down his sweeping constitutional reforms that would have allowed him unlimited reelection and speeded Venezuela’s march toward socialism, Chavez said, the ideas were audacious, and admitted, there were doubts and fears.

The statesman-like demeanor was a sharp departure from the pugnacious Chavez on the referendum campaign trail, where he ridiculed the opposition as lackeys of Washington, and warns supporters that if they voted against him, they would be regarded as traitors to the revolution.

Dmitri Oborsner(ph), professor emeritus at the Central University of Venezuela, says the 180-degree turn in tone on the night of his concession speech was vintage Chavez.

Professor DMITRI OBORSNER (Professor Emeritus, Central University of Venezuela): He has an amazing capability to switch from a very aggressive, confrontational tone to a sudden mired style where he sounds like the perfect democrat, and one wonders whether it’s really the same man. But so far, as experience has shown that these times of miredness(ph) are usually very short-lived.

McCARTHY: In fact, barely 72 hours had elapsed and Chavez’s congeniality had evaporated. He attacked claims by some in the opposition that the tally from Sunday’s vote was the result of a deal made under pressure from some elements in the army.

In the joint news conference with the high command, Chavez had some choice words for the opposition, so choice, they had to be bleeped out.

President CHAVEZ: (Speaking in Spanish)

(Soundbite of bleep)

McCARTHY: You should administer your victory properly. But already, you are covering it in (bleep). It’s a (bleep) victory, he said. And ours call it defeat is a defeat of courage, valor and dignity. We haven’t moved a millimeter, and we won’t.

President CHAVEZ: (Speaking in Spanish)

McCARTHY: The headline in today’s leading opposition newspaper Tal Cual blared, the government is (bleep). New vulgarisms have been decreed for this revolution with words such as democracy, liberty and consensus that are considered disgusting, the paper said. Pollster and economist Luis Vicente Leon said President Chavez’s only electoral defeat in nine years has dulled his political sheen.

Mr. LUIS VICENTE LEON (Pollster, Economist): He was like an idol and so strong. He never lost – almost a god, you know. And now, he is just a normal guy who could lose.

McCARTHY: Even staunch Chavez loyalist and national deputy Luis Tascon says that the referendum defeat showed the president to be, quote, “is a historical leader also a human being.”

Tascon wants a reassessment of the Chavismo movement and a more pluralistic path to reform that would remove those, he says, who have lost touch with the people.

Mr. LUIS TASCON (Deputy, National Assembly): (Through translator) Inside Chavismo, they are constructing an elite of power at all levels too – a regional elite, the municipal elite and national elite. But like all elites, it’s beginning to be removed from the reality of the people. For example, for members of the powerful elite, the problem of personal security doesn’t exist because they are surrounded by guards watching their backs.

McCARTHY: Chavez has minimized the defeat and warned that he’ll renew the fight to advance his socialist agenda by other means. As one analyst put it, he lost a battle but not the war.

Julie McCarthy, NPR News, Caracas. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

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Julie McCarthy

Julie McCarthy has spent most of career traveling the world for NPR. She's covered wars, prime ministers, presidents and paupers. But her favorite stories "are about the common man or woman doing uncommon things," she says.

One of NPR's most experienced international correspondents, McCarthy opened the network's Tokyo bureau, "and never looked back." She has come full circle, recently returning to Asia to open the newest in the constellation of NPR's overseas bureaus in Manila.

In an overseas career spanning 25 years, she's covered Asia, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and South America.

Before assuming her current post as NPR's South East Asia correspondent based in Manila, McCarthy served as NPR's international correspondent based in New Delhi, India, where she spent six years. She'd crossed the border from Pakistan, where McCarthy had established NPR's first permanent bureau in Islamabad.

McCarthy won a Peabody Award for her coverage of Pakistan. She was named the Gracie Correspondent of the Year in 2011, and she was honored with the Southeast Asia Journalists Association's Environmental Award for her coverage of Pakistan's 500-year flood in 2010.

Before moving to Islamabad, McCarthy covered South America as NPR's bureau chief in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from 2005 to 2009. She covered the Middle East for NPR from 2002 to 2005, when she was first dispatched to report on the Israeli incursion into the West Bank, and later the war in Iraq and the turmoil in Saudi Arabia.

McCarthy's stint as London Bureau Chief for NPR often took her far afield from Britain. She spent months at NATO covering the war in the Balkans, reported for weeks on the devastating earthquake in Turkey in 1999 and devoted much of summer of 2001 at UN headquarters in Geneva covering the run-up to the Durban Conference on Racism. She covered the re-election of the late Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and traveled to the Indian island nation of Madagascar to report on political and ecological developments there.

Following the terror attacks on the United States, McCarthy was the lead reporter assigned to investigate al-Qaida in Europe. She traveled extensively in Iran following the Sept. 11 attacks to report on the Iranian reaction and the subsequent war in Afghanistan.

McCarthy was the first staff correspondent in Japan, assuming leadership of NPR's Tokyo Bureau in 1994. Her tenure there was a rich tapestry of stories including including the Kobe earthquake of 1995, the 50th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and the turmoil over U.S. troops on Okinawa. Her distinguished coverage of Japan won the East-West Center's Mary Morgan Hewett Award for the Advancement of Journalism.

McCarthy's coverage of the Asian economic crisis earned her the 1998 Overseas Press Club of America Award. That same year, McCarthy chronicled the dramatic fall of Asia's longest-running ruler President Suharto and the chaos that followed his toppling from power.

Prior to moving overseas for NPR, McCarthy was the foreign editor for Europe and Africa. She served as the Senior Washington Editor during the first Persian Gulf War. NPR was honored with a Silver Baton in the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards for its coverage of the conflict.

In her capacity as European and African Editors, McCarthy was awarded a Peabody, two additional Overseas Press Club Awards and the Ohio State Award.

NPR selected McCarthy to spend the 2002-2003 academic year at Stanford University where she won a place in the Knight Journalism Fellowship Program. Her time at the East-West Center in Hawaii in 1994 as a Jefferson Fellow helped launch her long career as an international correspondent for NPR.

McCarthy holds degrees in literature and history, and is a lawyer by training.

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