Todos Podem
Por Cristovam Buarque
A maneira como o Brasil tem tratado a educação de suas crianças, ao longo de toda nossa história, é irracional e imoral. Irracional porque condena o futuro do País, em cuja base está um povo educado, capaz de desenvolver nossa ciência, nossa tecnologia, nossa cultura. Imoral porque condena a sociedade brasileira à desigualdade crônica se não for feita uma revolução na educação de base do País, desde a pré-escola até a pós-graduação. Os dados comprovam que essa irracionalidade e imoralidade são conhecidas. Não vale a pena ficar repetindo. Basta lembrar que nosso desempenho nessa questão está entre os piores do mundo, de acordo com todas as análises feitas por órgãos internacionais, como Unesco e OCDE.
A revolução educacional, a doce revolução feita com lápis e computadores, por professores e professoras, só será possível quando sucessivos governos nacionais assumirem a liderança, a coordenação e parte substancial do financiamento à educação básica. Mesmo quando isso acontecer, a educação não será responsabilidade apenas do setor público, ainda menos da União, nem somente da escola. A educação é um processo que requer o esforço de todos. Sem isso, não será viável nem será educação. De imediato, exige a participação de escola, família e mídia. Mas não dispensa a colaboração de cada setor da sociedade brasileira. Exige também, para dar um salto, que o governo federal dê o salto maior. E que cada setor faça sua parte desde já.
Nesse cenário, o setor empresarial tem um papel importante. Primeiro, do ponto de vista político. Cabe aos seus líderes usar a força de que dispõem para pressionar o governo, especialmente o governo federal, com o objetivo de forçá-lo a descobrir a importância da educação, a prioridade que ela merece e a importância da continuidade das políticas públicas.
Do ponto de vista da ação direta, cabe aos empresários, entre outras ações:
1. EM FAVOR DO SISTEMA EDUCACIONAL
¿Adote¿ escolas, ¿adote¿ professores, adote crianças em idade escolar. Perto de sua empresa há escolas que precisam de equipamentos e livros; professores que precisam de um incentivo, um prêmio; crianças que precisam de uma bolsa-escola (remuneração por mês sob condição de freqüência) ou poupança-escola (depósito em caderneta de poupança se o aluno for aprovado, sob a condição de que o dinheiro só poderá ser sacado quando ele terminar o segundo grau). O Banco de Boston desenvolve uma ação desta natureza em convênio com a ONG Missão Criança.
2. EM FAVOR DE SEUS EMPREGADOS
Crie no setor de gerência de recursos humanos um núcleo destinado a acompanhar a educação dos próprios empregados e de seus filhos e oferecer incentivos à educação, tais como: produção de cursos de alfabetização, primeiro e segundo grau, ou cursos técnicos, com liberação de horas de trabalho equivalentes às horas que o empregado diminui de seu período de lazer para dedicá-las aos estudos; incentivo os bons alunos, filhos dos empregados, quando eles forem aprovados e concluírem seus cursos médios.
3. EM FAVOR DOS CLIENTES
Com algum esforço de imaginação, praticamente toda empresa pode oferecer prêmios a alunos e professores que sejam seus clientes. Os supermercados, por exemplo, podem criar clubes de mães e de alunos e, além de prêmios, oferecer descontos nas compras. Políticas como essa devem fazer parte da rotina dos pacotes de marketing por meio dos quais as empresas se relacionam com seus clientes para vender institucionalmente seus produtos.
*Cristovam Buarque é Professor da Universidade de Brasília e senador pelo PDT-DF
miércoles, diciembre 06, 2006
Cuba After Castro
Cuba After Castro
By George Friedman
It is now apparent that Fidel Castro is dying. He is 80 years old, so that should not be surprising. The Cubans are managing his death as if it were a state secret -- hiding the self-evident -- but that is the nature of the regime, as it is the nature of many governments. The question on the table is whether the Cuban government can survive Castro's death -- and in either case, what course Cuba will follow.
The Communist regime, as we have known it, cannot possibly survive Castro's death. To be sure, Fidel's brother Raul will take over leadership; the Cuban Communist Party, the military and intelligence system, and the government ministries will continue to rule. But the regime that Castro created will be dead. It will be dead because Castro will be dead, and whatever survives him cannot be called the same regime. It will have been fundamentally transformed.
Fidel Castro's departure from the stage, then, leads to two questions. First, what will the future hold for Cuba? And second, will that matter to anyone other than the Cubans?
The Death of a Dream
Under Fidel, the Cuban regime had an end beyond itself. Fidel believed -- and, much more significantly, enough of his citizens and international supporters believed -- that the purpose of the regime was not only to transform life in Cuba but, more important, to revolutionize Latin America and the rest of the Third World and confront American imperialism with the mobilized masses of the globe. Fidel did not rule for the sake of ruling. He ruled for the sake of revolution.
Raul was a functionary of the Castro regime, as were the others who now will step into the tremendous vacuum that Fidel will leave. For Raul and others of his class, the Cuban regime was an end in itself. Their goal was to keep it functioning. Fidel dreamed of using the regime to reshape the world. His minions, including his brother, may once have had dreams,
but for a very long time their focus has been on preserving the regime and their power, come what may.
Therefore, on the day that Fidel Castro dies, the regime he created will die with him and a new regime of functionaries will come into existence. That regime will not be able to claim the imaginations of the disaffected and the politically ambitious around the world. The difference between the old and the new in Cuba is the difference between Josef Stalin and Leonid Brezhnev. It is not a difference in moral character but of imagination. Stalin was far more than a functionary.
He was, in his own way, a visionary -- and was seen by his followers around the world as a visionary. When the Soviet Union fell into the hands of Brezhnev, it fell into the hands of a functionary. Stalin served a vision; Brezhnev served the regime. Stalin ruled absolutely; Brezhnev ruled by committee and consensus. Stalin was far more than the state and party apparatus; Brezhnev was far less.
Brezhnev's goal was preserving the Soviet state. There were many reasons for the fall of the Soviet Union, but at the core, the fact that mere survival had become its highest aim was what killed it. The Soviets still repeated lifelessly the Leninist and Stalinist slogans, but no one believed them -- and no one thought for one moment that Brezhnev believed them.
It has been many years since Fidel's vision had any real possibility of coming true. Certainly, it has had little meaning since the fall of the Soviet Union. In some ways, the death of Che Guevara in Bolivia was the end. But regardless of when the practical possibilities of Cuba had dissolved, Fidel Castro continued to believe that the original vision was still possible. More important, his followers believed that he believed, and therefore, they believed. No one can believe in Raul Castro's vision. Thus, the era that began in 1959 is ending.
The ascent of Raul raises the question of what hope there is for Cuba.
Fidel promised tremendous economic improvements, along with Cuba's place in the vanguard of the revolution. Thevanguard now has disintegrated, and the economic improvements never came in the ways promised. When Fidel took power, he argued that it was economic relations with the imperialists that impoverished Cuba. By the end of his rule, he had come
to argue that it was the lack of economic relations with the imperialists that impoverished Cuba -- that the American embargo had strangled the country. That was absurd: Cuba could trade with Canada, the rest of Latin America, Europe, Asia and wherever it wanted.
It was not locked out of the world. It wasn't even locked out of the United States, since third parties would facilitate trade. But then, Fidel was always persuasive, even when completely incoherent. That was the foundation of his strength: He believed deeply in what he said, and those who listened believed as well. Fidel was writing poems, not economic analysis, and that kept anyone from looking too closely at the details.
Now, the poetry is ending, and the detail men and bean-counters are in charge. They don't know any poems -- and while they can charge the United States with bearing the blame for all of the revolution's failures, it is not the same as if Fidel were doing it. Regimes do not survive by simple brute strength. There have to be those who believe. Stalin had his believers, as did Hitler and Saddam Hussein. But who believes in Raul and his committees? Certainly, the instruments of power are in their hands, as they were in the hands of other communist rulers whose regimes collapsed. But holding the instruments of power is not, over time, enough. It is difficult to imagine the regime of functionaries surviving very long. Without Fidel, there is little to hope for.
A Question of Control
The future of Cuba once meant a great deal to the international system. Once, there was nearly a global thermonuclear war over Cuba. But that was more than 40 years ago, and the world has changed. The question now is whether the future of Cuba matters to anyone but the Cubans.
Geopolitically, the most important point about Cuba is that it is an island situated 90 miles from the coast of the United States -- now the world's only superpower. Cuba was a Spanish colony until the Spanish-American war, and then was either occupied or dominated by the United States and American interests until the rise of Castro. Its history, therefore, is defined first by its relationship with Spain and then by its relationship to the United States.
From the U.S. standpoint, Cuba is always a geographical threat. If the Mississippi River is the great highway of American
agriculture and New Orleanshacer click aquí its great port to the world, then Cuba sits directly athwart New Orleans' access to the world.
There is no way for ships from New Orleans to exit the Gulf of Mexico into the Atlantic Ocean but to traverse two narrow channels on either side of Cuba -- the Yucatan channel, between Cuba's western coast and the Yucatan; or the Straits of Florida, between the island's northern coast and Florida. If these two channels were closed, U.S. agricultural and mineral exports and imports would crumble. Not only New Orleans, but all of the Gulf Coast ports like Houston, would be shut in.
Cuba does not have the size or strength in and of itself to close those channels. But should another superpower control Cuba, the threat would become real and intolerable. The occupation of Cuba by a foreign power -- whether Spain, Germany, Russia or others -- would pose a direct geopolitical threat to the United States. Add to that the possibility that missiles could be fired from Cuba to the United States, and we can see what Washington sees there. It is not Cuba that is a threat, but
rather a Cuba that is allied with or dominated by a foreign power challenging the United States globally. Therefore, the Americans don't much care who runs Cuba, so long as Cuba is not in a politico-military alliance with another power.
Under Spain, there was a minor threat. But prior to World War II, German influence in Cuba was a real concern. And Castro's Communist revolution and alliance with the Soviet Union were seen by the United States as a mortal threat. It was not Cuban ideology (though that was an irritant) nearly so much as Cuba's geopolitical position and the way it could be exploited by other great powers that obsessed the United States. When the Soviet Union went away, so did the American obsession. Now,
Washington's Cuba policy is merely a vestige from a past era.
Without a foreign sponsor, Cuba is geopolitically impotent. It cannot threaten U.S. sea-lanes. It cannot be a base for nuclear weapons to be used against the United States. Its regime cannot be legitimized by the fact that the international system is focused on it. That means that since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Cubans, under Castro, have been trying to make themselves useful to major powers. Havana approached the Chinese, and they didn't bite. The Russians may be interested in the future, but they have their hands full in their own neighborhood right now. Countries like North Korea and Iran are in no position to exploit the opportunity.
The Cubans have had to content themselves with playing midwife to the leftist movements in Venezuela and Bolivia. The Latin American left in general continues to take its inspiration from Fidel's Cuba. Now, this does not create a new geopolitical reality, but it does create the possibility of one, which is what Fidel has been working on. If Fidel dies, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Evo Morales of Bolivia are not going to turn to Raul for inspiration and legitimacy. Rather, Raul is going to
be looking to Venezuela for cheap oil, while Chavez claims the place of Fidel as the leader of the Latin American left.
So, if Cuba is no longer to be the center of the Latin American revolutionary left, then what is it? It will become an island of
occasional strategic importance -- though not important at the moment -- with a regime of functionaries as inspiring as a Bulgarian Party Congress in 1985. Cuba with Fidel was the hope of the Latin American left. Cuba without Fidel is tedious method, a state with a glorious past and a dubious future.
Past as Prologue
Certainly, Raul and his colleagues have superb instruments with which to stabilize Cuban security, but these are no better than the instruments that Romania and East Germany had. Those instruments will work for a while, but not permanently. For the regime to survive, Cuba must transform its economic life, but to do that, it risks the survival of the regime -- for the regime's control of the economy is one of the instruments of stability. Raul is not a man who is about to redefine the
country, but he must try.
We are, therefore, pessimistic about the regime's ability to survive. Or more precisely, we do not believe that the successor regime -- communism without Fidel -- can hold on for very long. Raul Castro now is reaching out to the United States, but contrary to the Cuban mythology, the United States cannot solve Cuba's problems by ending the trade embargo.
The embargo is a political gesture, not a functioning reality. End it or keep it, the Cuban problem is Cuba -- and without Fidel, the Cubans will have to face that fact.
By George Friedman
It is now apparent that Fidel Castro is dying. He is 80 years old, so that should not be surprising. The Cubans are managing his death as if it were a state secret -- hiding the self-evident -- but that is the nature of the regime, as it is the nature of many governments. The question on the table is whether the Cuban government can survive Castro's death -- and in either case, what course Cuba will follow.
The Communist regime, as we have known it, cannot possibly survive Castro's death. To be sure, Fidel's brother Raul will take over leadership; the Cuban Communist Party, the military and intelligence system, and the government ministries will continue to rule. But the regime that Castro created will be dead. It will be dead because Castro will be dead, and whatever survives him cannot be called the same regime. It will have been fundamentally transformed.
Fidel Castro's departure from the stage, then, leads to two questions. First, what will the future hold for Cuba? And second, will that matter to anyone other than the Cubans?
The Death of a Dream
Under Fidel, the Cuban regime had an end beyond itself. Fidel believed -- and, much more significantly, enough of his citizens and international supporters believed -- that the purpose of the regime was not only to transform life in Cuba but, more important, to revolutionize Latin America and the rest of the Third World and confront American imperialism with the mobilized masses of the globe. Fidel did not rule for the sake of ruling. He ruled for the sake of revolution.
Raul was a functionary of the Castro regime, as were the others who now will step into the tremendous vacuum that Fidel will leave. For Raul and others of his class, the Cuban regime was an end in itself. Their goal was to keep it functioning. Fidel dreamed of using the regime to reshape the world. His minions, including his brother, may once have had dreams,
but for a very long time their focus has been on preserving the regime and their power, come what may.
Therefore, on the day that Fidel Castro dies, the regime he created will die with him and a new regime of functionaries will come into existence. That regime will not be able to claim the imaginations of the disaffected and the politically ambitious around the world. The difference between the old and the new in Cuba is the difference between Josef Stalin and Leonid Brezhnev. It is not a difference in moral character but of imagination. Stalin was far more than a functionary.
He was, in his own way, a visionary -- and was seen by his followers around the world as a visionary. When the Soviet Union fell into the hands of Brezhnev, it fell into the hands of a functionary. Stalin served a vision; Brezhnev served the regime. Stalin ruled absolutely; Brezhnev ruled by committee and consensus. Stalin was far more than the state and party apparatus; Brezhnev was far less.
Brezhnev's goal was preserving the Soviet state. There were many reasons for the fall of the Soviet Union, but at the core, the fact that mere survival had become its highest aim was what killed it. The Soviets still repeated lifelessly the Leninist and Stalinist slogans, but no one believed them -- and no one thought for one moment that Brezhnev believed them.
It has been many years since Fidel's vision had any real possibility of coming true. Certainly, it has had little meaning since the fall of the Soviet Union. In some ways, the death of Che Guevara in Bolivia was the end. But regardless of when the practical possibilities of Cuba had dissolved, Fidel Castro continued to believe that the original vision was still possible. More important, his followers believed that he believed, and therefore, they believed. No one can believe in Raul Castro's vision. Thus, the era that began in 1959 is ending.
The ascent of Raul raises the question of what hope there is for Cuba.
Fidel promised tremendous economic improvements, along with Cuba's place in the vanguard of the revolution. Thevanguard now has disintegrated, and the economic improvements never came in the ways promised. When Fidel took power, he argued that it was economic relations with the imperialists that impoverished Cuba. By the end of his rule, he had come
to argue that it was the lack of economic relations with the imperialists that impoverished Cuba -- that the American embargo had strangled the country. That was absurd: Cuba could trade with Canada, the rest of Latin America, Europe, Asia and wherever it wanted.
It was not locked out of the world. It wasn't even locked out of the United States, since third parties would facilitate trade. But then, Fidel was always persuasive, even when completely incoherent. That was the foundation of his strength: He believed deeply in what he said, and those who listened believed as well. Fidel was writing poems, not economic analysis, and that kept anyone from looking too closely at the details.
Now, the poetry is ending, and the detail men and bean-counters are in charge. They don't know any poems -- and while they can charge the United States with bearing the blame for all of the revolution's failures, it is not the same as if Fidel were doing it. Regimes do not survive by simple brute strength. There have to be those who believe. Stalin had his believers, as did Hitler and Saddam Hussein. But who believes in Raul and his committees? Certainly, the instruments of power are in their hands, as they were in the hands of other communist rulers whose regimes collapsed. But holding the instruments of power is not, over time, enough. It is difficult to imagine the regime of functionaries surviving very long. Without Fidel, there is little to hope for.
A Question of Control
The future of Cuba once meant a great deal to the international system. Once, there was nearly a global thermonuclear war over Cuba. But that was more than 40 years ago, and the world has changed. The question now is whether the future of Cuba matters to anyone but the Cubans.
Geopolitically, the most important point about Cuba is that it is an island situated 90 miles from the coast of the United States -- now the world's only superpower. Cuba was a Spanish colony until the Spanish-American war, and then was either occupied or dominated by the United States and American interests until the rise of Castro. Its history, therefore, is defined first by its relationship with Spain and then by its relationship to the United States.
From the U.S. standpoint, Cuba is always a geographical threat. If the Mississippi River is the great highway of American
agriculture and New Orleans
There is no way for ships from New Orleans to exit the Gulf of Mexico into the Atlantic Ocean but to traverse two narrow channels on either side of Cuba -- the Yucatan channel, between Cuba's western coast and the Yucatan; or the Straits of Florida, between the island's northern coast and Florida. If these two channels were closed, U.S. agricultural and mineral exports and imports would crumble. Not only New Orleans, but all of the Gulf Coast ports like Houston, would be shut in.
Cuba does not have the size or strength in and of itself to close those channels. But should another superpower control Cuba, the threat would become real and intolerable. The occupation of Cuba by a foreign power -- whether Spain, Germany, Russia or others -- would pose a direct geopolitical threat to the United States. Add to that the possibility that missiles could be fired from Cuba to the United States, and we can see what Washington sees there. It is not Cuba that is a threat, but
rather a Cuba that is allied with or dominated by a foreign power challenging the United States globally. Therefore, the Americans don't much care who runs Cuba, so long as Cuba is not in a politico-military alliance with another power.
Under Spain, there was a minor threat. But prior to World War II, German influence in Cuba was a real concern. And Castro's Communist revolution and alliance with the Soviet Union were seen by the United States as a mortal threat. It was not Cuban ideology (though that was an irritant) nearly so much as Cuba's geopolitical position and the way it could be exploited by other great powers that obsessed the United States. When the Soviet Union went away, so did the American obsession. Now,
Washington's Cuba policy is merely a vestige from a past era.
Without a foreign sponsor, Cuba is geopolitically impotent. It cannot threaten U.S. sea-lanes. It cannot be a base for nuclear weapons to be used against the United States. Its regime cannot be legitimized by the fact that the international system is focused on it. That means that since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Cubans, under Castro, have been trying to make themselves useful to major powers. Havana approached the Chinese, and they didn't bite. The Russians may be interested in the future, but they have their hands full in their own neighborhood right now. Countries like North Korea and Iran are in no position to exploit the opportunity.
The Cubans have had to content themselves with playing midwife to the leftist movements in Venezuela and Bolivia. The Latin American left in general continues to take its inspiration from Fidel's Cuba. Now, this does not create a new geopolitical reality, but it does create the possibility of one, which is what Fidel has been working on. If Fidel dies, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Evo Morales of Bolivia are not going to turn to Raul for inspiration and legitimacy. Rather, Raul is going to
be looking to Venezuela for cheap oil, while Chavez claims the place of Fidel as the leader of the Latin American left.
So, if Cuba is no longer to be the center of the Latin American revolutionary left, then what is it? It will become an island of
occasional strategic importance -- though not important at the moment -- with a regime of functionaries as inspiring as a Bulgarian Party Congress in 1985. Cuba with Fidel was the hope of the Latin American left. Cuba without Fidel is tedious method, a state with a glorious past and a dubious future.
Past as Prologue
Certainly, Raul and his colleagues have superb instruments with which to stabilize Cuban security, but these are no better than the instruments that Romania and East Germany had. Those instruments will work for a while, but not permanently. For the regime to survive, Cuba must transform its economic life, but to do that, it risks the survival of the regime -- for the regime's control of the economy is one of the instruments of stability. Raul is not a man who is about to redefine the
country, but he must try.
We are, therefore, pessimistic about the regime's ability to survive. Or more precisely, we do not believe that the successor regime -- communism without Fidel -- can hold on for very long. Raul Castro now is reaching out to the United States, but contrary to the Cuban mythology, the United States cannot solve Cuba's problems by ending the trade embargo.
The embargo is a political gesture, not a functioning reality. End it or keep it, the Cuban problem is Cuba -- and without Fidel, the Cubans will have to face that fact.
lunes, diciembre 04, 2006
Periodistas 21 : los blogs y la política
Algunos políticos descubrieron el poder de los blogs hace tiempo. Los nuevos líderes ya hacen política en el ciberespacio y la blogosfera. Elecciones como las recientes norteamericanas o las autonómicas catalanas no hubieran sido iguales sin la blogosfera, la ciberpolítica y la propaganda viral.La videocracia avanza a clic de vídeo en internet.
¿Cuál es el próximo paso? ¿Comprar el apoyo de los blogueros?
Los partidos ya consideran internet un espacio político y una herramienta imprescindibles.
Para conocer más sobre este fenómeno: haga click arriba donde aparece el título de esta nota.
¿Cuál es el próximo paso? ¿Comprar el apoyo de los blogueros?
Los partidos ya consideran internet un espacio político y una herramienta imprescindibles.
Para conocer más sobre este fenómeno: haga click arriba donde aparece el título de esta nota.
Venezuela, Bolivar and the revolution
Venezuela, Bolivar and the revolution
Historic contradictions: the phrases of the past
Alfredo Ascanio (askain)
We the Venezuelans live in a permanent contradiction. The political speeches for the masses are manipulated.
Today 4 of December Hugo Chavez gained again the presidency of Venezuela for 6 years more.
The results of the elections are the same that the Electoral National Counsel indicated during the process of the revoking of the mandate of the President, that is to say: 60% vs. 40%.
For this " bolivarian revolution " is important to recall some phrases of Simon Bolivar:
“Flees from the country where a single leader exerts all the powers: it is a country of slaves”.
“The continuance of the authority in a same individual often does that they finish the democratic governments”.
“It is very dangerous to leave for long time to a same person in the power...then arises the usurpation and the tyranny”.
“With my name wants to be done good and evil and many invoke me to justify their nonsenses or errors”
The abuse generalized has become a dysfunctional society. The soldiers are not complying with their rights and tasks. Again the historic phrases of Bolivar (1821):
“It is not the military despotism the one that can achieve the happiness of the citizens”
“It is unbearable the military spirit in the civil government”
The corruption generally is related to the lack of meritocracy and uprightness. Then Bolivar said in 1813:
“It is better to employ honest men although be enemies”
Thus are the facts that they are contradicted with the myths.
2006/12/05 오전 3:44
domingo, diciembre 03, 2006
Moment of Truth in Venezuela
Moment of Truth in Venezuela
Poll suggest Rosales could defeat Chavez in Sunday's presidential election
Alfredo Ascanio (askain)
Published 2006-12-03 11:46 (KST)
A recent telephone-based study conducted over a 44-day period predicts that Manuel Rosales will win the presidency of Venezuela on Dec. 3 with 55 percent of the votes, and that Chavez will only receive 43 percent.
It is likely that 67 percent of the 15,919,200 registered voters will come out to the polls because abstention rates have tended to be 33 percent. It is estimated that Manuel Rosales will obtain 5,866,255 votes and that Hugo will get 4,586,321. This is if there's no fraud, of course.
These figures are just estimates of course, and a truer indication of Sunday's results is the number of supporters who have been mobilized in the streets and avenues of Caracas for each candidate.
The experts calculate that Manuel Rosales mobilized more or less 980,000 citizens.
Chavez seems to have mobilized 250,000 citizens, more or less. It has been suggested that he was able to mobilize such a high number because 2,150 buses were used to bring people in from around the country. It is also alleged that many of them were paid with a bonus equivalent to one month's wages.
On Dec. 3 all eyes will be on the electronic voting machines. When voting is finished at 4 p.m., each center or table will emit a count.
The count will be given to the witnesses of the presidential candidates, who will then proceed to negotiate which boxes will be verified or audited. Only 55 percent of the boxes will be used to verify the transparency of the voting.
As the voting system is electronic, the final results will be known some hours after the process is finished.
The citizens wait for voting without conflict and with an elevated affection for democracy.
That same day Venezuela will begin to be very different from a political, social, and economic point of view.
Poll suggest Rosales could defeat Chavez in Sunday's presidential election
Alfredo Ascanio (askain)
Published 2006-12-03 11:46 (KST)
A recent telephone-based study conducted over a 44-day period predicts that Manuel Rosales will win the presidency of Venezuela on Dec. 3 with 55 percent of the votes, and that Chavez will only receive 43 percent.
It is likely that 67 percent of the 15,919,200 registered voters will come out to the polls because abstention rates have tended to be 33 percent. It is estimated that Manuel Rosales will obtain 5,866,255 votes and that Hugo will get 4,586,321. This is if there's no fraud, of course.
These figures are just estimates of course, and a truer indication of Sunday's results is the number of supporters who have been mobilized in the streets and avenues of Caracas for each candidate.
The experts calculate that Manuel Rosales mobilized more or less 980,000 citizens.
Chavez seems to have mobilized 250,000 citizens, more or less. It has been suggested that he was able to mobilize such a high number because 2,150 buses were used to bring people in from around the country. It is also alleged that many of them were paid with a bonus equivalent to one month's wages.
On Dec. 3 all eyes will be on the electronic voting machines. When voting is finished at 4 p.m., each center or table will emit a count.
The count will be given to the witnesses of the presidential candidates, who will then proceed to negotiate which boxes will be verified or audited. Only 55 percent of the boxes will be used to verify the transparency of the voting.
As the voting system is electronic, the final results will be known some hours after the process is finished.
The citizens wait for voting without conflict and with an elevated affection for democracy.
That same day Venezuela will begin to be very different from a political, social, and economic point of view.
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