Venezuela Decides Term Limits Today — Chávez Bid to Run Again Leads Slightly

"The people participate in everything. Here they do not impose on us," said Enrique Salazar, who plans to vote for the amendment. "It is fatherland or death, with my president. With him, health care and education is guaranteed."

In pleading for support, Chávez has taken to the airwaves to explain that he would like nothing more than to settle down in Venezuela's vast savannah. But the people are clamoring for him to remain in office, he says, and he reluctantly abides by their wishes.

"I am, quite simply, subordinate to what the people want," Chávez told a crowd recently. "And that is not cheap rhetoric. That is the way it is. I learned that a long time ago."

In marshaling state resources for his cause and curtailing the opposition's campaigns, Chávez is making sure he has the upper hand going into election day. Vehicles from the state oil company are used in the campaign, and many of the central government's more than 2 million workers have been pressured to attend pro-Chávez rallies. Electoral officials took so much time to approve opposition advertisements that they never aired; university students were denied permits for protests.

The government has also bristled at any hint of criticism, particularly from abroad. When Lech Walesa, the union leader who helped topple Soviet communism in Poland, was invited to Caracas by a civil society group this week, Chávez quickly raised concerns. "We are obligated to make sure Venezuela's dignity is respected," Chávez said Tuesday in comments broadcast on state television. "He can say what he wants outside the country, but not here."

After journalists reported that Walesa would be barred from entering, officials scrambled to deny it and accused reporters of lying. But Chávez, speaking Wednesday on Telesur, called Walesa "almost irrelevant, this figure." Walesa then canceled his trip, with the Lech Walesa Institute citing a lack of security for the Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Another observer, Luis Herrero, a European Union deputy, was detained by more than a dozen intelligence agents outside his hotel Friday and expelled from the country after he referred to Chávez as a dictator at a news conference. Copei, a leading opposition party, had invited Herrero to Venezuela.

Teodoro Petkoff, a former guerrilla who runs a newspaper critical of Chávez, said the government's defensive posture, coupled with Chávez's all-out campaigning, demonstrates the president's concern about losing the referendum.

Chávez reacted bitterly in December 2007 after his first loss at the ballot box, when voters turned back 69 constitutional reforms that would have expanded his powers and permitted him to run for office an indefinite number of times. Then, in November, opposition politicians won office across Caracas, its slums long a bastion of government support, and in the country's richest, most economically important states.

"As the years pass, the two forces have become more balanced," Petkoff said of the government and its foes. "Today we can say, for all practical purposes, that the country is divided in two halves, and the outcome of elections is each time tighter."