Sophisticated Chavista get-out-the-vote machine delivers
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}It's nearly midday Sunday and pro-government community leader Richard Escobar is marshaling get-out-the vote forces just outside a polling station in his piece of Petare, one of Latin America's biggest slums.,
"Noon at the red rendezvous point," he repeats several times for emphasis to a man who will dispatch volunteers into steep hills jammed with brick homes to rouse laggards that they know will vote for Nicholas Maduro, the anointed political heir of Hugo Chavez, who died of cancer last month.
"We're planning at midday to comb all the stairways in the sector and knock on doors to make sure they vote," says Escobar. "Each person will go up a separate stairway."
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}During Chavez's 14 years in power his supporters consolidated grass-roots power in Petare, where a half million of Venezuela's 29 million people reside, by divvying out cash for soup kitchens, senior centers, nurseries and other services.
They also built up a powerful machine staffed by several hundreds of thousands that compiles lists of government workers and recipients of government largesse and makes sure they get to the polls, even if they have to be driven there.
"If we don't go up into the hills and persuade the poor to vote, we're going lose," says Escobar, who says he recognizes Maduro is just an imitation of Chavez but calls the alternative, opposition candidate Henrique Capriles, a murderer and a fascist.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Get-out-the-vote efforts are also strong in wealthy neighborhoods where Capriles is favored.
In Los Palos Grandes, an eastern Caracas district of shaded streets and pricey boutiques, groups of young people with megaphones paraded down sidewalks chanting, "You've got to vote. You've got to vote."