Venezuelan Primary Elections: what's really going on?

Hello everyone,

I hope you are doing great. As some of you might know from the media, last Sunday Venezuela's opposition parties held the first national primary elections to choose the candidate that will challenge Hugo Chavez in the next presidential elections on October 7th, among other public charges for Mayors and Governors.

The results were given the same night, thanks to the automated electoral system runned by the national authority (CNE in spanish). Henrique Capriles (39 years old) won the election with more than 62% of the votes, more than doubling his nearest adversary, Pablo Perez (42 years old). More than 3million people voted, from a universe of 15million people registered. This big convocation represents the major achievement for the opposition parties in Venezuela, who had not been able to cohere in a single movement for the last 13 years. 

Even though the elections were held with the joint action of the national government authorities (mostly pro Chavez) and opposition partisans, the controvery arises from the fact that the opposition agreed to destroy the electoral rolls 48 hours after the results were given, in order to ensure the confidentiality of the vote. However, the Government calls for fraud (even when they control the electoral authority). 

This situation has provoke several popular manifestations from the opposition side. On the other hand, the authorities took actions that result in violent situations and the unfortunate balance of one student killed defending the electoral votes in his community. 

After all, disregarding of whether either part have the right to call for their arguments, the political polarization in Venezuela has lead to this radical balances over the last decade. My call is to rescue the values that someday identify us as nice people and work in favor of people's need instead of people's ego.

Above, all the opposition candidates sending a united message after Henrique Capriles was elected as the unitary opposition candidate to challenge Chavez next October.

If you want to know more about the elected candidate, visit: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-17006224 or contact me at any time!

I also wanted to recommend a blog from good friends of me that relates better than anyone the Venezuelan situation: http://caracaschronicles.com/. To be fair, they try to show what's happening in Venezuela from an objective point of view, but all of the writters's ideas are more common to the opposition, so their posts are rather critical. However, they make a pretty good diagnostic of the situation and evaluate objectively both parties.

Here are some pics from the Sunday afternoon at Chicago's electoral center. Thanks to the people of Ciao Amore Restaurant who facilitated their amenities. Roughly 950 venezuelan citizens are registered at Chicago, but only 150 came to vote.