Weekly Report - 24 February 2004

Sometime this week Venezuela's electoral authority, the CNE, will have to decide whether the mass of suspect referendum petitions are just `trivial procedural errors', as the opposition claims, or evidence of a `megafraud' plotted by the opposition, as President Hugo Chávez and his followers maintain. At that point, the observers from the OAS and the Carter Center will have to decide whether the CNE decision has been impartial or biased. At the end of last week, the CNE had 213,190 petition forms `under observation'. Of these the bulk, 171,359, were submitted by the opposition; the remaining 83,127 were submitted by the pro-Chávez camp in support of recall initiatives against the opposition.