Signatures Sufficient for Chávez Recall Vote, Venezuelans Say 

JUAN FORERO / NY Times 3jun04

CARACAS, Venezuela, June 3 — Foes of President Hugo Chávez have collected enough signatures to trigger a recall referendum that could end the tumultuous rule of the leftist firebrand, electoral authorities announced this afternoon.

If it takes place, a successful recall would remove an old-style populist whose five-and-half-year presidency has polarized Venezuelans between those who blame him for wrecking the oil-rich country and masses of poor who believe he is the first leader to ease their hardscrabble lives.

Jorge Rodríguez, a member of the National Electoral Council, said late this afternoon in a subdued, nationally televised announcement that early estimates showed the opposition had collected 2,451,821 signatures, 15,738 more than required. No date was set for a recall, though authorities had recently said a vote could be convened Aug. 8 if a decision on the signatures were reached this week.

The announced touched off celebrations. Drivers honked horns, people ran out into the streets with the Venezuelan flag and government opponents gathered in throngs at the Plaza Altamira in a decidedly anti-Chávez neighborhood in the affluent east side of Caracas.

Opposition leaders were content but cautious, saying that it still remained unclear if the referendum would take place quickly enough for them to remove a left-leaning government that has rankled Washington with its anti-Bush rhetoric and close ties to President Fidel Castro of Cuba.

That is because, according to Venezuelan law, a successful referendum after Aug. 19 would only remove the president. There would be no election, and instead Mr. Chávez's vice president would take over, effectively giving Mr. Chávez the chance to rule from behind the scenes and then run again in 2006.

"We're still far from seeing all of this resolved," said María Corina Machado, who helped organize the signature-gathering for a group called Sumate.. "We still have to see what date is set."

In the gritty urban streets and shantytowns where Mr. Chávez draws most of his support, though, people reacted angrily to the decision and promised to defeat any effort to remove their president. Earlier in the afternoon, before the announcement by electoral authorities, a small group of the presidents backers briefly opened fire on the offices of Mayor Alfredo Peña, an outspoken Chávez foe. No one was reported injured.

"Here what we have is a revolutionary, democratic government," said Jose Gregorio Blanco, an official with Mr. Chávez's Fifth Republic Movement. "Those people out there celebrating, shooting off fireworks and waving flags are the ones who have destroyed this country for 50 years."

He pledged that the president's supporters would win a recall by marshalling supporters and weakening the oppositions efforts to draw voters to polls.

"The people will go out and support the president any way they can," he said.

The electoral council's decision came six chaotic months after the opposition claimed to have collected 3.4 million signatures in a four-day petition drive monitored by the Organization of American States and the Carter Center, former President Jimmy Carter's Atlanta-based center. Election authorities, though, invalidated hundreds of thousands of signatures in March, saying that personal information on tens of thousands of petitions had been filled out in suspiciously similar handwriting.

Opposition groups denounced the decision, saying the government had stolen the election before it had ever taken place. The OAS and the Carter Center also said the signature gathering had been fair and transparent.

The opposition eventually agreed to a three-day repair period ending this past Sunday that permitted voters to reconfirm their signatures. Since 1.9 million signatures collected in December had already been validated, the opposition needed to muster 530,000 voters to 2,600 polling sites to verify their signatures.

Sumate, which has overseen the process, said that their totals show that 754,397 reconfirmed their signatures and 95,777 withdrew them, giving the opposition a total of 2,569,584 signatures favoring a referendum. Electoral authorities projected that once they had counted all the signatures, there would be more than 2.5 million affirmative signatures.

For an opposition movement that has failed to remove Mr. Chávez through a 2002 coup and four national strikes that devastated the economy, Thursdays news was a rare victory.

Still, a successful recall of Mr. Chávez is anything but certain.

One of the country's top pollsters, Alfredo Keller & Associates, reported in April that Mr. Chávez could barely win a recall. With voters disenchanted and the opposition fractured, the pollster said Mr. Chávez would collect the backing of 35 percent of the registered voters questioned, while 31 percent would vote against him and the rest would abstain.

With Venezuela now flush with oil money thanks to world oil prices hovering around $40 a barrel, the government has been spending furiously on education, health care and other social programs. The assistance has helped give the government a 40 percent approval rating, respectable in Latin America.

To remove Mr. Chávez, the opposition needs 3.76 million people to vote against the president, more than voted for him when he was reelected to a six-year term in 2000.

Mr. Chávez, whose landslide election in December 1998 smashed two long-standing, corruption-riddled parties, promised to purge the elites from government and obliterate the old institutions that had benefited a small elite for decades. Holding referendums to win backing for what he has called a peaceful revolution, Mr. Chávez's supporters redrafted the Constitution and took control of the National Assembly.

Promises to ease life for the poor have won him a multitude of support, particularly in poor neighborhoods long ignored by successive governments.

The president's opponents, though, contend that half-baked economic policies and his divisive rhetoric have severely damaged Venezuelas economy and sparked violence.

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