CARACAS, Monday September 06, 2004 | Update
A group of Venezuelan engineers and experts in mathematics
rebutted the statement of U.S. statistician Jonathan Taylor,
on whose researches The Carter Center based to claim that
no fraud was committed in the August 15 revoking referendum
on President Hugo Chávez, and Taylor publicly backed
down in his web page (www.stat.standford.edu/jtaylo/)
and admitted he was wrong.
Jorge Rodríguez, a spokesman for the group, previously
said they sent Taylor a mathematic model the engineer Elio
Valladared developed to show Taylor that is was highly unlikely
that similar results were obtained in 336 different voting
stations, as Taylor ensured.
Rodríguez added that Taylor sent him an e-mail admitting:
"I have realized my model was wrong."
"Therefore, the figures The Economist quoted (in an article
by The Carter Center official Jennifer McCoy claiming that
the August 15 recall vote was transparent) are seriously defective."
Taylor corrected his model and admitted that the new results
"all almost identical to yours. I regret not having realized
my mistake before the article was published in The Economist."
10:07 AM. DIPLOMACY. Admired by the Colombian guerrilla after his coup attempt in 1992, the then lieutenant colonel Hugo Chávez Frías received financial support by the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) for his projects after his capture that year. This mostly explains the relationship and "debt" between the parties, as revealed by a paper of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) of the United Kingdom.