Sao Paulo, Brazil – Venezuelan comedian and presidential candidate Benjamin Rausseo said that President Hugo Chavez is campaigning for reelection abroad because he has nothing to show the public in Venezuela.
“He (Chavez) doesn’t want to campaign inside Venezuela because he doesn’t want to go into the residential neighborhoods where he has nothing to show,” Rausseo said in an interview published Sunday in the Brazilian daily Folha de Sao Paulo.
The 45-year-old humorist, who registered his candidacy with the Piedra Party last week, said that Chavez “has been making jokes in the countries to which he gives money for seven years,” a reference to the petrodollars the Venezuelan leader has distributed abroad during his tenure in power in a concerted effort to open political doors with foreign leaders.
On Dec. 3, some 16 million Venezuelans will be called to the polls to choose a president, who will serve from 2007-2013, and Rausseo says that his own candidacy is viable and shows promise, given that he is currently in third place in the polls with the support of 12 percent of the voters.
Chavez is far ahead in first place with the backing of 40 percent of the prospective voters, followed by opposition candidate Manuel Rosales, the governor of Zulia state, with 20 percent.
Rausseo has announced that he will pull out of the race and urge his supporters to back Rosales if one month before the vote the polls do not show that the comedian is in the best position of the opposition candidates to defeat Chavez.
“What I’m promising is a happy campaign … without offending anyone, and that is what’s going to set me apart from the other candidates,” Rausseo said.
The comedian, who has been making Venezuelans laugh for 21 years with his idiosyncratic and irreverent brand of humor, is not letting the criticism from some Chavez supporters – who say he is just a clown who cannot get elected or govern effectively – bother him.
“If a coup leader can, why not a clown?” Rausseo asked, referring to Chavez’s failed 1992 coup d’etat against then-President Carlos Andres Perez.
“The Constitution doesn’t say a comedian can’t get” to the presidency, he added.
Meanwhile, the head of Chavez’s campaign, Francisco Ameliach, said Sunday that the other 27 registered presidential candidates “are all opposition” candidates.
He made his remark one day after one of the opposition groups favoring abstaining from the Dec. 3 election said it was “suspicious” that so many candidates had registered, “the majority (of them) unknown … (and with) supposedly opposition” stances.
Such a large field of candidates does nothing but serve “a government strategy … (and) has the mission of shoring up the decisions (of the National Election Council) to hurt the opposition,” said National Command of the Resistance chief Oscar Perez on Saturday.
Ameliach, however, said that the candidates are exercising their right to represent various sectors of the opposition and accused Perez of fearing “political inclusion.”
