ACCION DEMOCRATICA: A HOPELESS CASE

S E C R E T SECTION 01 OF 03 CARACAS 001026 SIPDIS SIPDIS HQSOUTHCOM ALSO FOR POLAD FOR FRC LAMBERT E.O. 12958: DNG: CO 04/12/2026 TAGS: PGOV KDEM VE SUBJECT: ACCION DEMOCRATICA: A HOPELESS CASE REF: A. 05 CARACAS 03713 ¶B. 05 CARACAS 01011 CARACAS 00001026 001.2 OF 003 Classified By: ACTING POLITICAL COUNSELOR MARK A. WELLS FOR 1.4 (D) -------------- Summary -------------- ¶1. (C) Accion Democratica (AD),Venezuela's largest opposition party, is going nowhere fast. Its leader, secretary general Henry Ramos Allup, is unimaginative, SIPDIS overconfident, and even repellent. Rather than seeking unity among the opposition, Ramos Allup insults other party officials. Rather than formulate a platform, AD officials plead for help from the international community, whose representatives Ramos Alup also disrespects. Because AD is an extremelycentralized party even by Venezuelan standards, fficials with alternate views rarely have a voice. Challengers to Ramos Allup wind up marginalized. As a result, AD's voter base, which consists ofpeople who vote for the party out of tradition, i quickly dwindling. -------------- Fecklss Leadership -------------- ¶2. (S) Acion Democratica's main problem has a name: Henry Ramos Allup. Accion Democratica (AD) secretary gneral Ramos Allup is crude, abrasive, arrogant, ad thin-skinned. His style is not unlike that ofPresident Hugo Chavez. In a meeting with AndeanAffairs office director Phillip French February 5, Ramos Allup pounded on the table and called his opponents names. Reflecting Chavez' idealistic uderstanding of foreign policy, he ranted about hw the Spanish had forgotten the generosity of fomer AD administrations after the Spanish Pablo Ilesias foundation had withdrawn some scholarship offered AD. His pettiness extends to his intra-arty rivals--he told the press "no one supports" oe of his AD challengers--and to U.S. Ambassadors whom he critiqued during a party meeting attendd by poloff. Asked how he responded to charges hat traditional political parties were responsibl for many of Venezuela's problems, Ramos Allup eumerated improvements the so-called Fourth Repubic had made on the dictatorships that preceded it. ¶3. (C) Ramos Allup has become perhaps the mos vocal advocate of electoral abstention since a prceived snub by opposition party Primero Justici forced him to cave to pressure from the AD rankand-file to withdraw from the December 2005 legilative elections (REF A). He has received prais from conservative Chavez opponents who have apprciated his grandstanding--Ramos Allup's greatestskill--against the electoral process. According t March press reports, Ramos Allup said those whoadvocated participation in the December 2006 preidential elections would be voting "with their pats around their ankles." He has disparaged thos who have declared themselves as candidates. While his counterparts in Primero Justicia and Copei have adopted a wait-and-see approach and have urged quick consensus on a unity candidate, Ramos Allup has already announced that he expects the new CNE leadership to consist of Chavez lackeys masquerading as opposition representatives, according to April 4 press reports. ¶4. (S) Ramos Allup is as overconfident as he is unimaginative. He tends to rest on his increasingly obsolete laurels as the head of the largest opposition party, a title he claimed repeatedly during the meeting with the AND director. He boasted to reporters during a March interview, CARACAS 00001026 002.5 OF 003 "either conditions change here or there will be no elections." Ramos Allup alleged in March that AD would certainly win a primary election, but he reasoned that he was not going to help seek a unity candidate because no other party would support AD in a race against Chavez. (Embassy Note: AD does have the most support in terms of numbers of opposition voters; it polls about 8 percent. Yet, the party lacks anyone charismatic enough to confront Chavez.) Ramos Allup opponent Luis Emilio Rondon told us that surveys of possible candidates did not mention a single name from AD. -------------- Solve Our Problems For Us -------------- ¶5. (C) Rather than court Venezuelan voters, Ramos Allup's principal political strategy has been to seek help from the international community, a media interview of the AD leader suggests. Indeed, AD officials have explicitly and repeatedly sought funds and favors from the Embassy. When refused by one Embassy official, they ask another. AD first vice president Victor Bolivar, who solicited funding from poloff (REF B),organized a meeting in December 2005 with polcouns to make the same pitch. When polcouns changed the subject, Bolivar and his fellow AD officials made the same long, detailed request in English in case poloff did not understand. Asked whether they were planning to engage the public on important issues, the officials said they intended to go to the OAS to complain about Chavez' handling of the National Assembly election instead. Former AD National Assembly deputy Pedro Pablo Alcantara calls and visits the Embassy regularly with requests for visas, scholarships for friends, etc. He calls different sections of the Embassy if he does not receive what he requests. One of the few, albeit brief, successes of AD's strategy to depend on foreigners was a news segment it helped a Norwegian television station produce that highlighted Chavez' failures to alleviate poverty. -------------- No Support For Alternative Views -------------- ¶6. (C) In a country where hierarchical parties is the norm, both AD officials and contacts from other political parties single out AD for its centralized decisionmaking practices. Not only is AD extremely vertically organized, it also is dictatorial. The party prohibited AD official Luis Emilio Rondon, who struck poloff as having better ideas than most AD officials during an October 2005 meeting, from running for secretary general in late 2005. Discussing the lack of free SIPDIS internal elections, Rondon rhetorically asked poloff what made AD different from Chavez' movement. The party also replaced its international affairs secretary, Rondon's running mate Alfredo Coronil, with Mauricio Poler, one of AD's solicitors for Embassy funds. ¶7. (C) There are a few AD officials willing to challenge the party's conventional wisdom, but their views rarely surface in daily party rhetoric. For example, National Executive Council (CEN) member Alfonso Marquina opposed withdrawing from the parliamentary elections, Ramos Allup told us. Former AD president Humberto Celli still favors participating in the presidential elections, according to press reports. Movement toward Socialism party officials who support seeking a unity candidate have also told us they have met with sympathetic AD officials. ¶8. (C) Strategic thinkers within AD are even rarer. Alfonso Marquina, AD's haughty former parliamentary bloc CARACAS 00001026 003.2 OF 003 leader, told poloff in late 2004 the opposition needed to shift its rhetoric away from political issues and address the problems of the majority poor, but his own party has not yet taken his advice. In contrast with Ramos Allup's policy of antagonizing many opposition counterparts, the now silenced Luis Emilio Rondon told us in October 2005 that the most important task facing his party was to build an opposition alliance. In April 2006, CEN member Nelson Lara told poloff he had a plan to work within Chavez' poor voter base, although he based it on an unwarranted sense of optimism. Lara claimed that the opposition controlled 85 percent of Caracas's neighborhood associations. He also said the opposition needed an action plan in case Chavez unexpectedly fell from power after a palace coup. -------------- Comment -------------- ¶9. (C) As the principal party of the discredited Fourth Republic, AD boasts card-carrying members who traditionally vote the AD ticket throughout the country. As such, however, it carries even more baggage. These voters are becoming the only ones on which the party can count. Barring a major reinvention, AD is well on its way to becoming a relic of the past. Ramos Allup's current threat to halt elections is delusional on two counts. First, he does not speak for anyone in the opposition outside AD. Second, while a credible opposition candidate would certainly make the presidential election more believable, Chavez does not technically need the opposition to hold an election. Should he lack real opponents, Chavez would most likely invent his own. BROWNFIELD