I’m Miguel Centellas, a political science professor at Mount St. Mary’s University. Because of academic interests, I post frequently on Bolivian politics. I also occasionally discuss interesting books, pop culture, and daily life in Baltimore.
By now most people have commented on the defeat of Chávez’s constitutional reform proposal in yesterday’s referendum vote. The fact that Chávez came out quickly to accept the defeat is a positive signal. It means that Venezuela is not as “authoritarian” as some of its harshest critics would suggest. Hopefully, this will push Chávez to reconsider some of his ambitions (i.e. his desire for indefinite reelections)—especially since he made the constitutional referendum a personal issue (a vote for or against himself).
Meanwhile, this might send a signal to Correa (Ecuador) and Evo Morales (Bolivia). Both critics & fans of Chávez can agree that the “Bolivarian Revolution” is an inspiration (and a source of funding & military hardware) for other regimes. Perhaps this may lead similarly-minded presidents to reconsider their options. Reforms are certainly needed throughout much of Latin America (particularly in the Andes). But I hope these can be built on broad consensus. After all, that would be the best way to ensure that such regimes were actually long lasting.
Time will tell of course. But the relatively peaceful voting process in Venezuela suggests that Chávez doesn’t (yet) control all the levers of power. There are at least some institutional checks on his authority. The opposition chose poorly to boycott previous elections; perhaps they learned their lesson. Hopefully, Evo & Correa can learn from Chávez not to insist on imposing constitutional reforms in the face of popular opposition. Ironically, Chávez gave a valuable lesson on the need to respect for the voting process.
University students were a key source of opposition to Chavez's attempt to amend Venezuela's constitution.
Are there enough university students in Bolivia and Ecuador to have as strong an impact on the attempts by Morales and Correa to amend the constitutions in their countries?
Also are university students as unified against the reforms as they were in Venezuela?
Posted by
Ginger
December 3, 2007 4:10 PM
...As with any country in LA, there are university students here in Ecuador, and in the main, they can be qualified as leftist in outlook, although not radically so. That said, those students have not been a factor, to date, in any Correa-related developments (his election, etc.), nor has any student group really come out with any defined postions on the Constituent Assembly. In short, they haven't been an actor in the CA process up to this point.
The number of university students isn't large in Bolivia (as in much of Latin America). But it has played a role. University students have protested in Santa Cruz, Sucre, and even in La Paz in defense of university autonomy & sometimes aligning w/ the anti-MAS opposition. So there are parallels.
This was interesting discussion of distribution of IDH (gas) revenue. Note that universities receive a small 6.6% slice of a pie that has grown. I wonder how that affects students. It's also a nice stream of money and teaching jobs into the cities that have universities. But the recent MAS redistribution left their share untouched. (Article also gives a little recent history of the distribution.)
Sorry dude, but yesterday, just 2 days after recognizing his defeat; Chavez publicly said that opposition victory was “the mierda”, in other words, bullshit; so he plans to have another referendum about the same issue next year. According to him, he only needs 15% of the electoral vote to request this election again, piece of cake.
There goes to the trash your, he isn’t so “Authoritarian” after all; I always wander how much prove you need to get a clear picture of things, especially since you call yourself and intellectual and a scholar. Maybe your knowledge of human history and the terrible things we did in the past intrinsically affect your judgment about issues like a rulers authoritarianism because you don’t want them to happen again.
