Venezuela: Can Chavez be beat?

Both Boz ^[1] and Miguel Octavio ^[2] believe that there is a slight chance Chavez might lose in this year's presidential election. Daniel Duquenal is equally ambiguous. He says that the opposition has been wasting time ^[3], but “still, this is such an atypical electoral period that who is to say if the opposition is in fact playing its cards as bad as it seems to be playing them.” Francisco describes ^[4] an agreement by the three opposition candidates that only one of them will run against Chavez as “a rare instance of grown-up behavior in the opposition leadership.”