Venezuela has enrolled some 1.5 million new voters in recent months, mostly in areas where President Hugo Chávez, who is facing an Aug. 15 recall vote, enjoys wide support.

BY RICHARD BRAND

CARACAS - A campaign by President Hugo Chávez's government has boosted voter rolls by an astounding 1.5 million in recent months, mostly in poor areas likely to favor the leftist president in next month's recall vote.

Venezuela's voter rolls swelled from 12.5 million in April to about 14 million, an increase of some 12 percent, National Electoral Council member Sobella Mejias announced Tuesday.

While Chávez last week praised the voter drive as a victory for ''participatory democracy,'' opposition leaders and independent analysts say the surge of registrations raises concerns.

''It's a huge increase in the number of voters in the days and weeks before a critical election,'' said Peter Hakim, president of Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington policy institute. ``If voter registrations increased even 1 percent in the U.S. in the weeks before an election, there would be extreme suspicion.''

The number of new voters is even more striking because in Venezuela, a nation of 25 million people, registering to vote was usually a lengthy and frustrating process laden with bureaucracy.

Government officials said the high number of new voters registered was the result of a massive campaign, ''Mission Identity,'' conducted by teams of immigration agency employees dispatched to many of Venezuela's poor neighborhoods -- where Chávez draws most of his support.

The teams, which issued 2.3 million new national ID cards, were sent into the barrios under the rationale that it is poor Venezuelans who most often lack proper documentation.

Venezuelans are deeply divided by Chávez's leftist populist rule. His critics say he is taking the country down an authoritarian path, while supporters say he is standing up for the country's poor majority. Those tensions have produced a series of nationwide strikes, deadly street clashes, a failed coup in April 2002 and now the Aug. 15 recall vote.

Opposition leaders say the registering of so many new voters is at best an effort to increase the number of voters who may support Chávez in the referendum, at worst a chance to create phantom voters. Government officials have insisted that the process was clean of fraud.

''This is a fraud in the works,'' said Antonio Ledezma, a leader of Brave People, an opposition group.

Added Hakim: ``The government of Hugo Chávez has not shown an incredible amount of respect for democratic niceties. They have a record of pushing the envelope.''

TOUCH-SCREEN HEAT

The National Electoral Council, considered pro-Chávez, has taken heat for its decision in February to buy new touch-screen voting machines from two tiny South Florida companies with no election experience. The government owned 28 percent of one of the companies at the time of the deal but sold its shares back to the company in June after The Herald reported its ownership stake.

Venezuela's Congress, with a slight pro-Chávez majority, recently voted to expand the Supreme Court -- which would likely decide any legal disputes on the recall -- from 20 to 32 members, an expansion criticized by Human Rights Watch as an attempt to pack the court.

Opposition concerns over vote fraud deepened in January when the Chávez government began implementing a new immigration initiative: ''express'' naturalization for the uncounted but clearly huge number of illegal immigrants.

Hugo Cabézas, the head of Venezuela's immigration agency, known by its Spanish acronym DIEX, told state-run media July 7 that ''Mission Identity'' had issued some five million national ID cards -- the equivalent of citizenship.

He gave no details on who received the cards, but a report Wednesday in El Universal newspaper, based on a document from the Electoral Council, said the total was actually 4.6 million -- 1.8 million to Venezuelans who never had cards before; 500,000 to undocumented immigrants naturalized under the ''express'' program; and 2.3 million renewals.

Although receiving an ID card and registering to vote are usually separate processes here, two Peruvians naturalized under ''Mission Identity'' said they were automatically registered to vote.

Cabézas told reporters in January that the initiative was designed to ''safeguard the security of the state'' by documenting foreigners.

Hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants from Colombia, Peru, Ecuador and other countries began flooding into Venezuela during its oil boom in the 1960s and 1970s, seeking higher wages or fleeing bloody wars in their homelands.

HARASSED NO LONGER

One of the new Venezuelans is José Mendoza, 33, a Peruvian who said he applied for the ID card because police regularly harassed him for lacking proper documents as he sold women's shoes on the streets of Caracas.

Mendoza, who has lived in Venezuela for four years, said he was grateful for being naturalized because the police can no longer hassle him -- and intends to vote against the recall.

''When you receive a favor, you return the favor,'' he said.

But not all the new Venezuelans intend to vote for Chávez.

''When they issued my ID card, they told me I must support the government, because if the opposition wins then they would cancel my ID card,'' said Yiovanna, a Peruvian maid who asked that her surname not be used. ``But I don't trust Chávez. I think he is dangerous and I will vote against him.''