After the death of Venezuelan
President Hugo Chavez, the West had high
hopes for better engagement with the country.
But those hopes may be put on hold
after Chavez’s hand-picked successor, Nicolas Maduro, appeared to have won a
narrow victory in Sunday’s presidential election.
Maduro obtained 50.7 percent of the
vote while opposition leader Henrique Capriles got 49.1 percent, according to
the official government tally. This means Maduro won by only about 200,000
votes.
Venezuela’s electoral commission
declared the results “irreversible” even if the margin of victory was smaller
than that with which the late Chavez himself narrowly beat Capriles in October
2012.
Maduro’s victory comes days after whistleblower
site WikiLeaks published a classified cable showing that aid NGOs
funded by the U.S. Agency
for International Development had been working to overthrow the
Chavez regime and defend U.S. interests in Venezuela.
The cable detailed that the NGOs were
instructed to penetrate pro-Chavez groups in order to weaken support for him at
the grassroots level, his main power base among the county’s poor.
Chavez was considered a champion of
the poor both home and abroad and contributed to the development of countries
with like-minded leaders in Central and South American as well as the
Caribbean, for instance
Haiti.
However, he also subjected aid groups
working on human rights in Venezuela to restrictive laws, especially if the
NGOs received foreign funding.
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