State Governor - Is The Latin American Left Stumbling World - Hugo Chávezs Re - Election Bid

As in the international edition of TIME, and as Girish Gupta last week on TIME.com, Venezuela s burgeoning violent crime may well prove a deciding factor in the Oct. 7 presidential election. The baffling inability of socialist President Hugo Ch vez, who controls the world s largest oil reserves, to rein in his country s murder rate which by some estimates is four times what it was when he took office 13 years ago has gotten under the skin of Venezuelan voters. Ch vez wasn t helped last Sunday when two supporters of his centrist challenger, Miranda state Governor Henrique Capriles Radonski, were shot and killed in Ch vez s home state of Barinas, allegedly by Ch vez backers who were blocking a Capriles campaign caravan.

A third victim, also a Capriles supporter, is in critical condition. Ch vez urged Venezuelans to confront each other with votes, not violence, but he just as quickly took the polarizing low road and blamed his bourgeois opponents for the deadly confrontation. The Capriles camp was angered again on Wednesday when a judge in Barinas, where Ch vez s elder brother Ad n is Governor, inexplicably released two of the shooting suspects.

Ch vez, who is battling cancer, is still favored to win re-election this Sunday. But the Barinas episode is a reminder of why he s no longer considered a shoo-in and why a Capriles victory is no longer unthinkable. More and more, Ch vez s left-wing revolution is marked by the kind of dogmatic denial and bullying bluster that has left Venezuelans like Luz Marina Mor n, whom I recently interviewed in the poor Caracas barrio of Catia a cradle of el presidente s political support feeling harta, as she told me, or fed up. Doctors at the hospital in Catia say 80% of trauma cases are gunshot wounds. Mor n s son was gunned down a few years ago in Catia by a street tough who wanted his tennis shoes; and to her, the homicide plague spotlights the paradox of Ch vez s long rule. That is, how his welcome anti-poverty mission has been undermined by his mismanaged socialist mission how crises like crime, inflation and corruption have become as much a part of the revolution s landscape as new health clinics and defiance of the U.S.

(MORE: Challenging Hugo Ch vez: Can His Old Foe Capriles Unseat Him? )