Excellent analysis of the referendum in Venezuela, minus any discussion of the subversive CIA $8 MILLION DOLLAR destabilization campaign...
Venezuela: why Hugo Chávez lost
By Stephanie Blankenburg. Wednesday 5 December 2007
Hugo Chávez’s first major electoral setback is devastating - but not in itself the end of his reform project. Stephanie Blankenburg, in Caracas, assesses the result.

After eleven resounding election victories in less than ten years, President Hugo Chávez Frias of Venezuela finally had to concede defeat in a referendum on constitutional change on 2 December 2007. On a day when only 56% of the 16.1 million eligible voters went to the polls, 50.7% of these rejected the president’s proposal to modify forty-six articles of the 1999 constitution. 51.05% of voters similarly rejected an additional proposal by Venezuela’s national assembly to change a further twenty-two articles...

CIA Venezuela Destabilization Memo Surfaces
November 28th 2007, by James Petras
On November 26, 2007 the Venezuelan government broadcast and circulated a confidential memo from the US embassy to the CIA which is devastatingly revealing of US clandestine operations and which will influence the referendum this Sunday, December 2, 2007.

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' 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....