Courcy’s Intelligence Brief

On 7 October, Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez is seeking re-election for a presidential election that will keep him in power until 2019.  He is by no means certain of victory over his main opposition rival, Henrique Capriles Radonski.  The election looks as if it will be very close, with the abstention rate representing a big risk for Chavez.  However, the ability of the ruling Partido Unido Socialista de Venezuela (PSUV) to mobilise turnout on the day should not be underestimated.  As Ramon Avelledo, of the opposition Mesa de la Unidad Democrática (MUD), has pointed out: the Venezuelan election is free, but not entirely fair.  Also, if Capriles does win, the possibility of unrest and military dissent cannot be ruled out.

The government says that, according to its polls, Chavez is set for a clear victory.  However, Chavez has been suggesting that the opposition is preparing not to recognise the result and could even resort to violence upon a defeat on Sunday.  Going further, Chavez’s left-wing colleague, President Rafael Correa of Ecuador, has warned: “There is a campaign of manipulation to create doubts about the result.”  Also, on 1 October at the UN General Assembly in New York, Jorge Valero, Venezuela’s ambassador to the UN, warned of radical opposition plans to disrespect the election result, which he stated would be won by Chavez.

Although the talk from government supporters has been of the opposition not accepting a Chavez victory, the effect has been to raise doubts about how Chavez supporters, particularly in the army, will react to a Capriles victory.  People are recalling that the defence minister and former head of the Venezuelan armed forces (FAN), General Henry Rangel Silva, said in November 2010 that the army would find it “very difficult” to accept an opposition government.  This week, Rangel Silva attacked Capriles’s declaration that he would appoint an active general as his defence minister by saying: “How can he say that he is going to nominate an active general when his plan of government disarticulates the armed forces?  I don’t think there is a general active who would lend himself to disarticulate the Bolivarian armed forces.”

Our own sources point out that there are two distinct currents in the army ahead of the 2012 polls.  Major General Wilmer Barrientos, the head of the army’s operational command and director of its electoral security mission, has been very clear that the army will facilitate a peaceful “democratic celebration (fiesta)” in which citizens can have confidence.

In contrast, General Cliver Alcala Cordones, the commander of the Fourth Armoured Division and the Maracay military garrison (Aragua) and a known hard-line ‘Chavista’ - who like Rangel Silva has been blacklisted by the US treasury for alleged links to drug traffickers and left-wing Colombian guerrillas - stated earlier this week: “We are proud to belong to a moralised national Bolivarian armed force, an armed force always in defence of sovereignty.  An armed force that stopped being an instrument of the oligarchy…to today be part of a people’s revolution.”