How Venezuela’s Military Saved Democracy (For Its Own Reasons) [View all]

[FBaggins]

n Oct. 26 Nicolás Maduro signed his name to a document he didn’t much like. It was a formal commitment to peace and democracy, regardless of what might happen after the Dec. 6 parliamentary elections. But doubts, grave doubts, remained about his sincerity. For months, polls had shown Maduro’s party, founded by the late President Hugo Chavez, sinking beneath a wave of popular discontent. In fact, Maduro hoped he could count on the Venezuelan military to keep him in power.

Even as the voting approached, the question remained open: Would the generals back the hand-picked civilian successor to Chavez. Maduro was not really one of theirs, after all. Chavez had emerged from the military ranks and a failed coup attempt in 1992 to become a populist demagogue and president from 1999 until his death in 2013. But Maduro was a former bus driver and labor leader who, since he took office, has presided over a collapsing economy. So where would the high command throw its support? How would it protect its own image and extensive interests? Would it back Maduro? Or would it back democracy and, inevitably the opposition?

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After that, the Chavistas knew two things: that they would lose the elections and that the army, or a large part of the army, would not go to the streets to overturn the results. “There are many gray areas in the accounts of what happened, but it seems clear that the military did not want to validate a fraud and decided to defend the people’s will,” says exiled Cuban journalist Carlos Alberto Montaner, who follows Venezuela closely. “People often forget that 95 percent of the military suffers from the same ills as the rest of the Venezuelans. “

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The military’s decision to respect the popular will was key to Maduro’s recognition of his defeat, even as he attributed it to “economic war” being waged against him and his country. The father of jailed opposition leader Leopoldo López told Spain’s EsRadio radio that if the military had acted otherwise, taking to the streets, “a massacre would have happened.”

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/12/17/how-venezuela-s-military-saved-democracy-for-its-own-reasons.html