Feb. 11 (Bloomberg) -- Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is making unprecedented use of government resources as he campaigns for a constitutional amendment that would let him run for re- election indefinitely.

Public employees pack his rallies, and ministry Web sites are laced with pro-amendment ads ahead of a Feb. 15 referendum. Caracas’s subway system has blasted jingles urging riders to vote “Yes.” State television and radio transmit pro-Chavez messages around the clock, ignoring the opposition in violation of the law, an elections regulator said.

“We’re seeing an unbalanced campaign without precedent,” said Vicente Diaz, one of five directors on the National Electoral Council. “Government ministries are openly involved.”

The campaign itself crystallizes the opposition’s main argument for maintaining term limits: Chavez, who controls the congress, courts, military and state oil company, has turned the government into a tool of his personal political agenda. Without the constitutional check that forces him from power in 2013, it’s increasingly likely he’ll never leave, opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez said.

“We aren’t competing against a political party,” said Lopez, a former mayor barred by the government from seeking office again until 2011. “We’re competing against an entire state and all of the power it can wield.”

State Power

While Chavez, 54, has used government resources before in campaigns, he has grown more aggressive, said Andres Canizalez, a communications professor who studies Venezuela’s media at the Universidad Catolica Andres Bello in Caracas.

Before a referendum in December 2007, when voters rejected a proposal to end term limits by about 2 percentage points, opposition figures appeared in state media, Canizalez said.

“Today, they’ve completely disappeared,” he said. “They exist only in photographs used to discredit them.”

Polls point to another close vote in this referendum after Chavez’s party lost regional elections in three of the biggest states and Caracas in November, said pollster Luis Vicente Leon, a director at Datanalisis, Venezuela’s biggest independent polling company. Greater use of public funds this year could make a difference, he said.

In a Datanalisis poll conducted in January, 51.5 percent supported the amendment, while 48.1 percent were opposed. The survey of 1,300 people had a margin of error of plus or minus 2.72 percentage points.

Wake-Up Call

Chavez’s campaigners took the 2007 loss, the first since his election in 1998, as a wake-up call, said Blanca Eekhout, president of government-owned VIVE television network and a media adviser for this year’s referendum.

“We overestimated our electoral strength,” she told reporters yesterday in Caracas. “Now we have a party that’s consolidated.”

Political bias runs throughout Venezuela’s media, with state-owned outlets the worst offenders, according to a study by the Grupo de Monitoreo de Medios, a venture formed by the Universidad Catolica Andres Bello in Venezuela and the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.

The group found that from Jan. 22 to Feb. 4, 93 percent of coverage at the state news channel Venezolana de Television favored the constitutional amendment; 7 percent was neutral.

Media Bias

Globovision, a private channel, dedicated 59 percent of its coverage to the opposition and 7 percent to the government’s position. Radio Caracas Television, the network whose broadcast license Chavez refused to renew in 2007, dedicated 91 percent of its news programming to the opposition. Now carried only on cable, it reaches about a quarter of the population, while VTV is available nationwide, Canizalez said.

The problem with VTV, besides lack of balance, is that “it’s all paid for with Venezuelan taxes and with Venezuela’s oil,” said Diaz, the elections regulator. Electoral laws, enforced by appointees of the National Assembly, are ineffectual, he said.

This year, politicization of state institutions has gone almost unchecked, Diaz said, citing pop-up ads on the Web sites for the National Assembly and housing and mining ministries. The state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela SA’s Web page has a link to Chavez’s new newspaper column, “The Lines of Chavez.”

Chavez’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela encouraged state employees to donate a day’s salary to the campaign.

People Power

Roberto Yanez, a technician at Cantv, the phone company nationalized in 2007, said that state employees aren’t required to support the president. Still, management is seeking to politically realign the company, he said.

“They’re trying to make adjustments so that Cantv is inclined toward socialism,” he said Feb. 7, dressed in the colors of Chavez’s party and waiting to see the president in a campaign parade in Caracas.

Even the referendum question itself is slanted, Diaz said. It simply lists amendment numbers that would be changed, and asks if voters favor “increasing the people’s political power.”

Vanessa Davies, a board member at the socialist party, told reporters Feb. 9 that private media long ago created a climate of biased reporting in Venezuela, and said compelling public employees to support political campaigns would be “illegal and immoral.”

Opposition parties have held back complaints about the campaign out of fear they’ll make voters cynical and trigger abstentions, pollster Vicente Leon said.

“The problem is they haven’t gained any real power,” said Patrick Esteruelas, Latin American risk analyst with the Eurasia Group in New York. “Venezuela has a highly centralized power structure where the president is essentially king.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Matthew Walter in Caracas at mwalter4@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: February 11, 2009 00:01 EST