The biggest innovation of the Rosales campaign, and the item likely to win him the most votes, is called mi negra, or "my black card," a charge card that Rosales promises, if elected, to give to all low-income Venezuelans as a way to directly distribute up to 20 percent of the country's oil profits, which amounts to billions of dollars per year. Depending on oil revenues, the card would provide a stipend of between $250 and $450 per month, per person--a good bit more than Venezuela's minimum wage. This populist proposal is ironic: The opposition regularly lambastes Chávez for being a "populist" and giving handouts, yet mi negra would require virtually nothing of recipients--except, of course, voting for Rosales. Further, the name for this initiative has racist implications in an election in which race is a constant subtext: Most opposition leaders are white, while Chávez, like most Venezuelans, is a mix of indigenous, African and European ancestry.

Racism is never far from the surface in Venezuela.While I was standing in line to buy a cold beer on a scorching hot Saturday morning in October during a Rosales campaign rally, a tall man wearing Diesel jeans and Armani sunglasses told me, "I can't wait to get that monkey out of office. I am sick of looking at his ugly face on TV for the last eight years."

Nor is the issue of US involvement very far from Venezuelans' minds. Reflecting a dangerous dependency among the opposition that trumps healthy critical engagement with the democratic process or a strengthening of civil society, one opposition supporter told me, "If we don't win in December, we can always hope the Marines invade." Opposition groups supporting the Rosales campaign have received financial support and incentives to work together through largely classified funding mechanisms involving the CIA, the US Agency for International Development and the National Endowment for Democracy. Documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act reveal what seems to be the tip of an iceberg of US funding for opposition groups.

One of the best-known of these groups is called Súmate, or Join Up. María Corina Machado, the founder of Súmate, was in the presidential palace during the coup and while the Carmona decree was issued. Súmate and the US government openly admit that they have funding agreements, and since the coup, Machado has met personally with President Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and many others in Washington's inner circles. The White House web page, in a caption under a photo of Bush shaking hands with Machado in the Oval Office, describes Súmate as "a non-governmental organization to defend the electoral and constitutional rights of all Venezuelan citizens and to monitor and report on the performance of Venezuela's electoral institutions."

Súmate used its US funding to initiate and then mobilize support for the recall referendum against Chávez in 2004--which Chávez won with nearly 60 percent of the vote. The Carter Center and the Organization of American States both certified the referendum as free and fair. But Súmate, along with most major opposition groups and parties, refuses to recognize the results, and Machado currently faces charges of using foreign money to influence Venezuela's domestic electoral process. The Venezuelan National Assembly has opened an investigation into the group's accounting irregularities related to large dollar transfers from US government agencies in and out of their accounts. Machado, who declined repeated interview requests, has said that she is being persecuted for politically motivated reasons.

Rosales consistently polls in the 30 percent range, while Chávez polls in the high 50s. However, no one is sure what to expect on election day. So polarized has the country become, and so suspicious is each side of the other, that conspiracy theories abound, with many Chavistas convinced that the opposition has some shady plan for preventing a clear and clean Chávez victory. Some believe that the opposition plans on delegitimizing an election they know they can't win, by boycotting it at the last minute, as five opposition parties, including Rosales's, did during the 2005 national assembly elections. Rosales vehemently denies that he is considering withdrawing, and given that many of his hard-core supporters believe he will win, it seems highly unlikely.

Other Chavistas present a variety of conspiracy theories involving a secessionist movement in the state of Zulia. Giancarlo Di Martino, a "Chavista light" and the mayor of Maracaibo, the capital of Zulia and Venezuela's second-largest city, has condemned a supposed destabilization plan involving CIA funding for violence and assassinations to interrupt the elections. Groups like Rumbo Propio, accused by pro-Chávez media of receiving covert US funding and tacit support from Rosales, openly advocate "autonomy" for the oil-rich state. Any violence, or even just a Rosales victory in Zulia, where he is already governor, could be used by the opposition to mobilize regionalist sentiments and to inspire Chávez government repression against the "Independent and Eastern Republic of Zulia," as US Ambassador William Brownfield is rumored to have called it in recent months. All this could open the possibility of direct US intervention--at least according to the theories of some hard-core Chavistas.

A more likely scenario is that Chávez will win the election with somewhere around 60 percent of the vote, nowhere near the 10 million he is campaigning for--an impossible goal unless voter turnout is nearly 100 percent and his share of the vote upwards of 66 percent. Some opposition groups, including those with US funding, like Súmate, will undoubtedly make accusations of electoral fraud, no matter what the international election observers say or how many of their demands regarding the terms of the election are met. And the Bush Administration is likely to continue its interventions--at this point political and electoral, although many Venezuelans are certain that the military option is on the table.

But Chavismo is now solidly entrenched in Venezuela, and Chávez has made many friends in Latin America and beyond (including Nicaragua's Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega, who recently won the presidential election there). Still, Chávez now faces the challenge of meeting the raised expectations of his own citizens, many of whom call for more radical reforms toward building what Chavistas call "twenty-first-century socialism." In the months and years ahead, Chávez will need not only the inspiration of Bolívar but also the engagement and participation of even greater numbers of Venezuelan citizens.

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