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Hugo of Sabaneta keeps taking away powers from any form of elected government that is not under his control. As Venezuelans rejected his proposals in the 2007 referendum to create parallel regional governments and to introduce the figure of special "vicepresidents" (i.e. viceroyals) to regions, Hugo decided to push through said proposals anyway by using special powers given to him by his Assembly.
Now Hugo created a Federal Council to have a better control over the states. Although most municipalities have mayors that are pro-regime, around 45% of Venezuelans live in municipalities with opposition governments (never mind those goverments have less and less to do by the day).
Elías Jua, vicepresident and one of the key figures of the regime, has just announced what mayors are going to represent each state in this new Federal Council.
You can see the municipalities of those mayors in the map I created here: the winner takes it all and all those representatives are absolutely loyal to the former coup monger. The reddish areas have chavista mayors, the blueish have oppo mayors and the yellowish "discidence mayors". The green spots represent the mayors now in that council. They are all in the reddish regions. They will manage a lot of the moneys Hugo decides to give back to the states. The oppo mayors will have to beg to them.
In the following months you will see how chavismo will use any legal and illegal measure to prevent the opposition from gaining many deputies in the National Assembly, how it will bring electoral fraud to new levels of sophistication and how it will, eventually, emasculate the National Assembly to prevent the opposition from gaining any power there.
The Carter Centre, mostly IT illiterate, thought fraud was when you had soldiers pointing at you with an AK47s, telling you how to vote. They did not see that in Venezuela, so they thought things were kosher and they keep being as they were in 2004. Things are a wee bit more sophisticated than that, as the Smart Machines and the weird paper trails have shown.
I wonder if the EU is again going to send EU observers who will only follow the election from their hotel rooms or if the Venezuelan regime will simply invite those "EU observers" that love to have pictures of theirs taken with the comandante. Vamos a ver.