About a week ago, I gave Chávez credit for respecting the outcome of the referendum in Venezuela. However, if Jorge Castañeda is to be believed, maybe that credit was misplaced. Quoting Castañeda’s editorial in Newsweek:
[B]y midweek enough information had emerged to conclude that Chávez did, in fact, try to overturn the results. As reported in El Nacional, and confirmed to me by an intelligence source, the Venezuelan military high command virtually threatened him with a coup d’état if he insisted on doing so. Finally, after a late-night phone call from Raúl Isaías Baduel, a budding opposition leader and former Chávez comrade in arms, the president conceded—but with one condition: he demanded his margin of defeat be reduced to a bare minimum in official tallies, so he could save face and appear as a magnanimous democrat in the eyes of the world.
I suppose that it’s still something to respect the outcome of the vote…even if that is tarnished by tweaking the results so as to enhance propagandic value.
Perhaps credit really belongs to the Venezuelan military for holding Chávez’s feet to the fire.