Updated: Will a Set-back for Hugo Chavéz be a Victory for Rational Discourse?

Over in Foreign Policy, I'm running a commentary by The Guardian's Seumas Milne about the narrow defeat of Hugo Chavéz' reform package* in Sunday's referendum in Venezuela.

It's well worth reading, but Milne makes one point with which I have to disagree:

Perhaps most significantly for a better international understanding of what is actually going on in Venezuela, yesterday's result must surely discredit the canard that the country is somehow slipping into authoritarian or even dictatorial rule. It is clearly doing nothing of the sort. The referendum was a convincing display of democracy in action - though doubtless if the margin of victory had been the other way round, the US-backed opposition would have cried foul and swathes of the western media would have accused Chávez of imposing a dictatorship.

I visited over half a dozen polling stations yesterday in the state of Vargas north-east of Caracas and in the city itself and the process seemed if anything more impressively run than in Britain - with opposition monitors everywhere declaring themselves satisfied with the transparency and integrity of the process.

It "must surely" nothing.Yes, the fact that Chavéz put all of his political capital into the referendum -- which was drafted according to the Venezuelan Constitution and followed the electoral laws to a T -- lost by a narrow margin and will respect the results should make it more difficult for his detractors to accuse him of dictatorial tendencies.

We can even take that a step further. The fact that a coalition made up of the Venezuelan subsidiaries of leading U.S. corporations (including Ford, General Motors, DaimlerChrysler, Bridgestone/ Firestone, Goodyear, Alcoa, Shell, Pfizer, Dupont, Cargill, Coca-Cola, Kraft, Novartis, Unilever, Heinz, Johnson & Johnson, Citibank, Colgate Palmolive, DHL and Owens Illinois) pulled out all the stops to sabotage the referendum with a massive, and at times illegal, propaganda campaign should shift the focus to the consistently anti-democratic maneuvers of the Venezuelan opposition, which was dragged kicking and screaming into the democratic process only after their coup attempt and various strikes failed to destabilize Chavéz' administration.

Also, according to James Petras, a confidential memo from the US embassy to the CIA "which is devastatingly revealing of US clandestine operations" to influence the referendum was leaked to the public just before the vote:

The memo sent by an embassy official, Michael Middleton Steere, was addressed to the Director of Central Intelligence, Michael Hayden. The memo was entitled 'Advancing to the Last Phase of Operation Pincer' [OP] and updates the activity by a CIA unit with the acronym 'HUMINT' (Human Intelligence) which is engaged in clandestine action to destabilize the forth-coming referendum and coordinate the civil military overthrow of the elected Chavez government. The Embassy-CIA's polls concede that 57 per cent of the voters approved of the constitutional amendments proposed by Chavez but also predicted a 60 per cent abstention…

OP involves a two-pronged strategy of impeding the referendum, rejecting the outcome at the same time as calling for a 'no' vote. The run up to the referendum includes running phony polls, attacking electoral officials and running propaganda through the private media accusing the government of fraud and calling for a 'no' vote. Contradictions, the report emphasizes, are of no matter.

UPDATE: It looks like the memo is likely bogus.

So to take it a step further: that an opposition that's consistently represented the interests of about 15 percent of Venezuelan society, and is backed and advised by U.S. institutions, used dirty tricks to win by a hair, and that even opposition pollsters concede that Chavéz still has the support of a significant majority of the population despite the referendum results, should at least start a conversation about the degree to which a leftist Latin American government is forced to consolidate power in order to survive.