Election madness!

Elections for Venezuela's "house of representatives" were on Sunday. The results came out yesterday, and many of the locals I know here were very pleased with the results. The state I live in, called Zulia, is the "opposition" state in Venezuela (aka the vast majority of government positions are held by people not in Chavez's party). In the elections, 92% of Zulians voted against the Chavez party. Incredible! But, most of the rest of Venezuela remains "Chavista" and a lot of Chavistas were re-elected or put in office. Still, the Chavistas lost some positions so now in the parliament there are 1/3 opposition representatives and 2/3 Chavistas. This means that the Chavistas don't have enough control to be able to pass new legislation completely on their own--they need to cooperate with the opposition. Everyone that I spoke with at school was very happy that the opposition made progress and hopes that this trend will continue for the next election. I suspect there must be some Chavistas that work at my school but I'm sure they keep their mouths shut since there's a lot of Chavez-bashing that occurs.

Last night there was a big procession of cars and people walking to celebrate the elections. There was music blaring and horns honking (which isn't too out of the ordinary... but this time it was organized, haha).

Since the election process is not very secure or modernized, the city is basically shut down to vote. For instance, my school was canceled from Thursday-Monday. The superintendent decided to cancel school the week before because he suspected that the government would cancel schools around the state on short notice and he wanted to be prepared (apparently the government has done that before and it's been chaotic). So the students didn't have school but we had professional development days. On Sunday, many stores were closed and it was difficult to get around because some streets were blocked off to accommodate the crowds at the voting centers. There were huge lines of people, and vendors selling food and drinks while people waited 1-3 hours to vote. There is an interesting method to ensure that people only vote once. After you vote, you have to dip your pinky finger in to a jar of permanent purple ink. I mean, it's super permanent! Four days after the election everyone is still walking around with bright purple fingers haha! It's an interesting procedure and I suppose it's effective.

There seems to be a pretty good turnout for voting here. In the US voter registration is ridiculously low... and I can't imagine what would happen if people had to wait 1-3 hours in line to vote! People here really seem to value democracy, and especially now that the democracy they have come to know has changed so much in the past ten years they want to have their say. I hope their passion helps them achieve what they want to... but I can't help but wonder if I would feel differently if I lived in a Chavista state. I'm still on the fence about him and probably will stay that way for a while.