Interesting:

As reported in El Nacional, and confirmed to me by an intelligence source, the Venezuelan military high command virtually threatened him with a coup d'état if he insisted on doing so. Finally, after a late-night phone call from Raúl Isaías Baduel, a budding opposition leader and former Chávez comrade in arms, the president conceded—but with one condition: he demanded his margin of defeat be reduced to a bare minimum in official tallies, so he could save face and appear as a magnanimous democrat in the eyes of the world. So after this purportedly narrow loss Chávez did not even request a recount, and nearly every Latin American colleague of Chávez's congratulated him for his "democratic" behavior.

I wondered about that. Seemed out of character.

Why did these leaders not speak out? Surely they knew of Chávez's machinations... The reason for the silence: these leaders know Chávez can count on a fifth column in nearly every country in the region. Even while he denounces the policies of his opponents and throws vitriol in every direction, he also uses his nation's resources to befriend their constituencies.

Chavez backs anti-democratic elements throughout South America. Likewise, in our country, it's those who yell "Democracy" loudest who seem to love Chavez most. They have an understanding of "true democracy" meaning not a simple outcome of the vote, but an overturning of the current unjust order of things.

For example, Noam Chomsky:

Interviewer: One of the unquestionable ideas that were force fed from our first days in school is that we do live in a democracy. In your opinion, in what sense is our society democratic?

Chomsky: .... As to whether it's a democracy, I don't think that there is a simple answer to that. Democracy has lots of different dimensions .... in the political arena, first of all there is one huge segment of social and economic life which is simply excluded from public control, in law and in principle, and it's the most important part. It has to do with what's produced and how its distributed, and so on and so forth. That's all in the hands of what amount to huge private tyrannies, of which are about as totalitarian in character as any institutions that humans have so far concocted.

By "public control", Chomsky means "government control." Chomsky is, in effect, angry that people can own and control their own resources. For example, if I hire someone to landscape my yard, and I don't like what they're doing, I can decide to stop paying them my money and ask them to get out of my yard. No, no, says Chomsky. "The people" (which inevitably only means people in power who agree with Noam) need to control my money and how I spend it, and on whom.

In short, Chomsky is saying that as long as the Constitutional protection of private property exists, we don't have a Democracy. And his statement above is simply a restatement of Marx's complaint that the "capitalists" control the means of production, and that this needs to end. The old Communists were honest enough to admit what they were; the new ones pretend they embody Constitutional ideals and their allies in the media enable this deception.

Chavez pretends to care for the poor, and shares the goals of the left. He will interfere with rich private individuals, who the left sees as a bigger threat than the state. So he's their friend, and a good guy. For these individuals, "Democracy" is about justice (as they define it) not primarily about freedom. "The will of the people" is thus rhetorically transmuted from the vote (which is not really democratic since the poor mind-controlled saps don't know any better) into unchecked rule by a small elite who will express only my ideals.