Ironically, Chávez began the speech promising to be brief. He said that long speeches made sense at the start of the revolution but that a six-hour speech was now “an abuse”. He did not clear up what he made of nine-hour speeches during his peroration. Chávez defended the government’s work in the health and oil sectors, housing and food production, and in combating drug-trafficking. He admitted failings in combating public insecurity, one of the major battlefronts on which the upcoming elections will be fought, and promised to launch a new ‘mission’ to tackle it, before straying on to Colombia’s armed conflict.
Chávez insisted that if he were needed he would be available to support peace accords in Colombia. “In truth I have never supported the Colombian guerrillas,” he said. Colombia’s president, Juan Manuel Santos, might have improved bilateral relations dramatically since succeeding Alvaro Uribe (2002-2010), but he is unlikely to be tempted to take the political risk of engaging Chávez’s services, whose ill-fated mediation efforts under Uribe in 2007 poisoned relations in the first place.
The day after Chávez’s offer to help in a negotiated peace the Colombian current affairs magazine Semana emblazoned the face of Venezuela’s newly appointed defence minister, Henry Rangel Silva, over the caption “El Amigo de Timochenko”, the leader of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Farc). In a long opinion piece Semana cited Farc emails found on laptops seized by the army to argue that Rangel was a good friend of Timochenko and Chávez’s liaison with the Farc. It concluded that by appointing Rangel as defence minister Chávez was “throwing down the gauntlet” to Santos, who recently expressed his confidence that Chávez would arrest Timochenko if he was found on Venezuelan soil.
Perhaps the most remarkable part of the whole speech, however, was the impromptu response Chávez gave to Deputy María Corina Machado, who is competing in the presidential primary elections of the opposition Mesa de la Unidad Democrática (MUD) on 12 February. Machado, in an interjection of just 15 seconds deep into the eighth hour of his speech, accused Chávez of being “a liar and a thief”, referring to insecurity, food shortages and expropriations. Caught off guard, Chávez briefly lost his composure and said “You called me a thief in front of the country”. Fifteen months ago Chávez said that Machado, “that good-looking bourgeois lady”, would be his preferred rival in the presidential elections. Now, resorting to his favourite idiom “eagles do not hunt flies”, he said she was not worthy to engage him in debate until she won the MUD primary.
The official news networks went after Machado in the days after the speech, indirectly boosting her profile ahead of the primaries and possibly lifting her support for her temerity in confronting Chávez. Polls suggest that the favourite is Henrique Capriles Radonski, the governor of Miranda. Capriles has stressed that if he were to win election, he would make combating poverty a priority, along with better education and healthcare and more job creation, as well as improving management of state resources. “I don’t make promises, I get things done. I don’t spend five hours talking on the television,” he said.
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