Venezuela’s Constitutional Reform:
An Article-by-Article Summary
November 23rd 2007,
by Gregory Wilpert – Venezuelanalysis.com
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/2889
The following is an article-by-article summary of the changes being proposed to Venezuela's 1999 constitution. The summary is in no way official and should only be used as an aid in making sense of the proposed constitutional reform. The official reform text is quite long (31 pages), as it includes the full text of each to be changed article, even if only one sentence or word was changed in the article. Making out what, exactly, the changes are relative to the original 1999 constitution can thus be a sometimes time-consuming and difficult task.
Venezuelans will vote on the reform on December 2nd and will do so in two blocks. Block "A" includes President Chavez's original proposal, as amended by the National Assembly, which would change 33 articles out of the 350 articles in the constitution. Also included in block A are another 13 articles introduced by the National Assembly. Block "B" includes another 26 reform articles proposed by the National Assembly. Voters may vote "Yes" or "No" on each block.
Reform Question: "Are you in agreement with the approval of the constitutional reform project, passed by the National Assembly, with the participation of the people, and based in the initiative of President Hugo Chavez, with its respective titles, chapters, and transitional, derogative, and final dispositions, distributed in the following blocks?"
[Articles in italics are those proposed by the National Assembly, non-italic articles were proposed by the President.]
Block A
Section II. Politico-Territorial Division of the Country: President may declare special military and development zones, citizens have a new "right to the city."
Art. 11 - Allows the President to decree special military regions for the defense of the nation. Also, it would allow him to name military authorities for these regions in a case of emergency.
Art. 16 - Allows the president to decree, with permission from the National Assembly, communal cities, maritime regions, federal territories, federal municipalities, island districts, federal provinces, federal cities, and functional districts. Also the president may name and remove national government authorities for these territorial divisions (these do not, however, supplant the existing elected authorities in these regions).
Art. 18 - Provides a new right, the right to the city, which says that all citizens have the right to equal access to the city's services or benefits. Also names Caracas, the capital as the "Cradle of Simon Bolivar, the Liberator, and Queen of the Warairarepano" [an indigenous name for the mountain range surrounding Caracas].
Section III. Citizen Rights and Duties: Voting age lowered to 16 years, gender parity in candidacies, creation of councils of popular power, social security fund for self-employed, reduction of workweek to 36 hours, recognition of Venezuelans of African descent, free university education, introduction of communal and social property.
Art. 64 - Lowers the minimum voting age from 18 to 16 years.
Art. 67 - Requires candidates for elected office to be set up in accordance with gender parity, reverses the prohibition against state financing of campaigns and parties, and prohibits foreign funding of political activity.
Art. 70 - Establishes that councils of popular power (of communities, workers, students, farmers, fishers, youth, women, etc.) are one of the main means for citizen participation in the government.
Art. 87 - Creates a social security fund for the self-employed, in order to guarantee them a pension, vacation pay, sick pay, etc.
Art. 90 - Reduction of the workweek from 44 hours to 36.
Art. 98 - Guarantees freedom for cultural creations, but without guaranteeing intellectual property.
Art. 100 - Recognition of Venezuelans of African descent, as part of Venezuelan culture to protect and promote (in addition to indigenous and European culture).
Art. 103 - Right to a free education expanded from high school to university.
Art. 112 - The state will promote a diversified and independent economic model, in which the interests of the community prevail over individual interests and that guarantee the social and material needs of the people. The state is no longer obliged to promote private enterprise.
Art. 113 - Monopolies are prohibited instead of merely being "not allowed." The state has the right to "reserve" the exploitation of natural resources or provision of services that are considered by the constitution or by a separate law to be strategic to the nation. Concessions granted to private parties must provide adequate benefits to the public.
Art. 115 - Introduces new forms of property, in addition to private property. The new forms are (1) public property, belonging to state bodies, (2) direct and indirect social property, belonging to the society in general, where indirect social property is administered by the state and direct is administered by particular communities, (3) collective property, which belongs to particular groups, (4) mixed property, which can be a combination of ownership of any of the previous five forms.
Section IV. Functions of the State: Creation of popular power based in direct democracy, recognition of missions for alleviating urgent needs, foreign policy to pursue a pluri-polar world, devolution of central, state, and municipal functions to the popular power, guaranteed revenues for the popular power.
Art. 136 - Creates the popular power, in addition to the municipal, state, and national powers. "The people are the depositories of sovereignty and exercise it directly via the popular power. This is not born of suffrage nor any election, but out of the condition of the human groups that are organized as the base of the population." The popular power is organized via communal councils, workers' councils, student councils, farmer councils, crafts councils, fisher councils, sports councils, youth councils, elderly councils, women's councils, disables persons' councils, and others indicated by law.
Art. 141 - The public administration is organized into traditional bureaucracies and missions, which have an ad-hoc character and are designed to address urgent needs of the population.
Art. 152 - Venezuela's foreign policy is directed towards creating a pluri-polar world, free of hegemonies of any imperialist, colonial, or neo-colonial power.
Art. 153 - Strengthening of the mandate to unify Latin America, so as to achieve what Simon Bolivar called, "A Nation of Republics."
Art. 156 - Specifies the powers of the national government, adding powers that are spelled out in earlier and in later articles in greater detail. New powers of the national government include the ordering of the territorial regime of states and municipalities, the creation and suspension of federal territories, the administration of branches of the national economy and their eventual transfer to social, collective, or mixed forms of property, and the promotion, organization, and registering of councils of the popular power.
Art. 157 - The national assembly may attribute to the bodies of the popular power, in addition to those of the federal district, the states, and the municipalities, issues that are of national government competency, so as to promote a participatory and active democracy (instead of promoting decentralization, as was originally stated here).
Art. 158 - The state will promote the active participation of the people, restoring power to the population (instead of decentralizing the state).
Art. 167 - States' incomes are increased from 20% to 25% of the national budget, where 5% is to be dedicated to the financing of each state's communal councils.
Art. 168 - Municipalities are obligated to include in their activities the participation of councils of popular power.
Art. 184 - Decentralization of power, by its transfer from state and municipal level to the communal level, will include the participation of communities in the management of public enterprises. Also, communal councils are defined as the executive arm of direct democratic citizen assemblies, which elect and at any time may revoke the mandates of the communal council members.
Art. 185 - The national government council is no longer presided over by the Vice-President, but by the President. Its members are the President, Vice-President(s), Ministers, and Governors. Participation of mayors and of civil society groups is optional now. Previously the federal governmental council (as it was called) was responsible for coordinating policies on all governmental levels. Now it is an advisory body for the formulation of the national development plan.
Section V. Organization of the State: President may name secondary vice-presidents as needed, presidential term extended and limit on reelection removed, may re-organize internal politico-territorial boundaries, and promotes all military officers.
Art. 225 - The president may designate the number of secondary vice-presidents he or she deems necessary. Previously there was only one Vice-President.
Art. 230 - Presidential term is extended from six to seven years. The two consecutive term limit on presidential reelection is removed.
Art. 236 - New presidential powers as specified in other sections of the reform are listed here, which include the ordering and management of the country's internal political boundaries, the creation and suspension of federal territories, setting the number and naming of secondary vice-presidents (in addition to the first vice-president), promote all officers of the armed forces, and administrate international reserves in coordination with the Central Bank.
Art. 251 - Adds detail to the functioning of the State Council, which advises the president on all matters.
Art. 252 - Composition of the State Council changed to include the heads of each branch of government: executive, judiciary, legislature, citizen power, and electoral power. The president may include representatives of the popular power and others as needed. Previously the council included five representatives designated by the president, one by the National Assembly, one by the judiciary, and one by the state governors.
Art. 272 - Removal of the requirement for the state to create an autonomous penitentiary system and places the entire system under the administration of a ministry instead of states and municipalities. Also, removes the option of privatizing the country's penitentiary system.
Section VI. Socio-Economic System: Weakening of the role of private enterprise in the economic system, possible better treatment of national businesses over foreign ones, no privatization any part of the national oil industry, taxation of idle agricultural land, removal of central bank autonomy.
Art. 299 - The socio-economic regimen of the country is based on socialist (among other) principles. Instead of stipulating that the state promotes development with the help of private initiative, it is to do so with community, social, and personal initiative.
Art. 300 - Rewording of how publicly owned enterprises should be created, to be regionalized and in favor of a "socialist economy", instead of "decentralized."
Art. 301 - Removal of the requirement that foreign businesses receive the same treatment as national businesses, stating that national businesses may receive better treatment.
Art. 302 - Strengthening of the state's right to exploit the country's mineral resources, especially all those related to oil and gas.
Art. 303 - Removal of the permission to privatize subsidiaries of the country's state oil industry that operate within the country.
Art. 305 - If necessary, the state may take over agricultural production in order to guarantee alimentary security and sovereignty.
Art. 307 - Strengthening of the prohibition against latifundios (large and idle landed estates) and creation of a tax on productive agricultural land that is idle. Landowners who engage in the ecological destruction of their land may be expropriated.
Art. 318 - Removal of the Central Bank's autonomy and foreign reserves to be administrated by the Central Bank together with the President.
Art. 320 - The state must defend the economic and monetary stability of the country. Removal of statements on the bank's autonomy.
Art. 321 - Removal of the requirement to set up a macro-economic stabilization fund. Instead, every year the President and the Central Bank establish the level of reserves necessary for the national economy and all "excess reserves" are assigned to a special development and investment fund.
Section VII. National Security: Armed forces to be anti-imperialist, reserves to become a militia.
Art. 328 - Armed forces of Venezuela renamed to "Bolivarian Armed Force." Specification that the military is "patriotic, popular, and anti-imperialist" at the service of the Venezuelan people and never at the service of an oligarchy or of a foreign imperial power, whose professionals are not activists in any political party (modified from the prohibition against all political activity by members of the military).
Art. 329 - Addition of the term "Bolivarian" to each of the branches of the military and renaming of the reserves to "National Bolivarian Militia."
Section VIII. Constitutional changes: Signature requirements increased for citizen-initiated referenda to modify the constitution.
Art. 341 - Increase in the signature requirement for citizen-initiated constitutional amendments from 15% to 20% of registered voters.
Art. 342 - Increase in the signature requirement for citizen-initiated constitutional reforms from 15% to 25% of registered voters.
Art. 348 - Increase in the signature requirement for citizen-initiated constitutional assembly from 15% to 30% of registered voters.
Block "B"
Section III. Citizen Rights and Duties: Non-discrimination based on sexual orientation and health, increase in signature requirements for citizen-initiated referenda, primary home protected from expropriation.
Art. 21 - Inclusion of prohibition against discrimination based on sexual orientation and on health.
Art. 71 - Increase in the signature requirement for citizen-initiated consultative referenda from 10% to 20% of registered voters.
Art. 72 - Increase in the signature requirement for citizen-initiated recall referenda from 20% to 30% of registered voters. Also, voter participation set at minimum 40% (previously no minimum was set, other than that at least as many had to vote for the recall as originally voted for the elected official).
Art. 73 - Increase in the signature requirement for citizen-initiated approbatory referenda from 15% to 30% of registered voters.
Art. 74 - Increase in the signature requirement for citizen-initiated rescinding referenda from 10% to 30% of registered voters. In the case of law decrees, increased from 5% to 30% of registered voters.
Art. 82 - Protection of primary home from confiscation due to bankruptcy or other legal proceedings.
Art. 109 - Equal voting rights for professors, students, and employees in the election of university authorities.
Section IV. Functions of the State: State and local comptrollers appointed by national Comptroller General, political divisions determined on a national instead of state level.
Art. 163 - State comptrollers are to be appointed by the national Comptroller General, not the states, following a process in which organizations of popular power nominate candidates.
Art. 164 - State powers are specified in accordance with other articles of the reform. States can no longer organize the politico-territorial division of municipalities, but only coordinate these.
Art. 173 - Political divisions within municipalities are to be determined by a national law, instead of being in the power of the municipalities. The creation of such divisions is to attend to community initiative, with the objective being the de-concentration of municipal administration.
Art. 176 - The municipal comptroller is to be appointed by the national Comptroller General, not the municipalities, following the nomination of candidates by the organizations of popular power.
Section V. State organization: Councils of popular power participate in the nomination of members of the judiciary, citizen, and electoral powers, procedures for removing members of these branches specified more explicitly.
Art. 191 - National Assembly deputies who the president has called to serve in the executive may return to the National Assembly to finish their term in office once they stop working in the executive. Previously they lost their seat in the assembly.
Art. 264 - Specifies that Supreme Court judges are to be named by a majority of the National Assembly, instead of being left to a law. Also, in addition to civil society groups related to the law profession, representatives of the popular power are to participate in the nomination process.
Art. 265 - Supreme Court judges may be removed from office by a simple majority vote of the National Assembly, instead of a two-thirds majority and an accusation by the citizen power.
Art. 266 - Adds the ability of the Supreme Court to rule on the merits of court proceedings against members of the National Electoral Council, in addition to its ability to do so in the case of all other high-level government officials.
Art. 279 - Includes representatives of popular power councils for the nomination of Attorney General, Comptroller General, and Human Rights Defender. Also, specifies that each of these may be removed by a majority of the National Assembly, instead of leaving the issue to a separate law and a ruling from the Supreme Court.
Art. 289 - Adds to the Comptroller General's powers the ability to name state and municipal comptrollers.
Art. 293 - Removes the National Electoral Council's responsibility to preside over union elections.
Art. 295 - Inclusion of representatives from the Popular Power in the nomination process of members to the National Electoral Council. Specifies that members may be chosen by a majority of National Assembly members, instead of a two-thirds majority. Election of electoral council members is supposed to be staggered now, where three are elected and then halfway through their 7-year term, the other two are to be elected.
Art. 296 - Members of the National Electoral Council may be removed by a majority of National Assembly members, without the need of a prior ruling from the Supreme Court.
Section VIII. Constitutional exceptions: Right to information no longer guaranteed during state of emergency, emergencies to last as long as the conditions that caused it.
Art. 337 - Change in states of emergency, so that the right to information is no longer protected in such instances. Also, the right to due process is removed in favor of the right to defense, to no forced disappearance, to personal integrity, to be judged by one's natural judges, and not to be condemned to over 30 years imprisonment.
Art. 338 - States of alert, emergency, and of interior or exterior commotion are no longer limited to a maximum of 180 days, but are to last as long as conditions persist that motivated the state of exception.
Art. 339 - The Supreme Court's approval for states of exception is no longer necessary, only the approval of the National Assembly.
Full Spanish text of the constitutional reform proposal
English translation of Venezuela's 1999 constitution
viernes, 25 de abril de 2008
Hispanic in Congress, NY Hon. Jose Serrano speech on Latin America
Congressman José Serrano's
Speech on
U.S. policy Towards Latin America
November 12th 2007, by José Serrano
U.S. Representative from New York, José Serrano Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak about an issue that troubles me quite a bit and I think should trouble a lot of the American people. Certainly it should concern Members of Congress.
A resolution was passed this afternoon by voice vote dealing with the alleged involvement and behavior of the President of Iran, therefore, the Government of Iran, in Latin America and supporting, according to this resolution, terrorist activities in Latin America.
Let me briefly read the opening statement of this resolution, the title, if you will: expressing concern relating to the threatening behavior of the Iranian regime and the activities of terrorist organizations sponsored by that regime in Latin America.
Well, just to deal with language itself, we know that when our government calls another government a regime, it is not saying anything positive about it. It is, in fact, confronting it in some way. But I think that as unnoticed as this went by, as I said it was passed on a voice vote, as unnoticed that this went by, this puts us in a situation, the Congress, the American people, our Nation, on a road, on a path to a very dangerous situation in the future, perhaps in the near future.
We all know how concerned the administration is and how concerned some Members of Congress are about the possibility that Iran could be involved in activities that would be hurtful to us. I want to correct that. I think all Members of Congress are concerned about that possibility.But I think we are also concerned about the fact, many of us, that there seems to be a drumbeat towards war with , a drumbeat that says, basically, some of the same things that were said when we were taken off to war against Iraq. Just about everything that was told to us at that time happened not to be true. History will tell whether, in fact, we were lied to, or whether the information was so bad that the administration had no choice but to pass that on to us thinking that it was correct.
But there are many who feel that we were lied to. Again, history will have to deal with that.My concern is that this resolution today moves away from just a concern about the behavior of the Government in Iran and begins to suggest that there are neighbors of ours, and, yes, I say neighbors, because that’s what the Latin American people are, neighbors of ours, that could be involved in this behavior, behavior which would be dangerous to the United States, behavior which we all should be concerned about, behavior that, perhaps, would lead us to get involved in Latin America in a way that we haven’t been involved for a long, long time.
But I think in order to understand where we are with this issue, we also have to have, I think, an understanding of how history repeats itself, how some things that we are hearing now we have heard before. For close to 50 years now, we have had a very strong lobbying effort in this country against a Cuban Government. The so-called anti-Castro lobby has been very strong, and that lobby has been very influential in getting many Members of Congress and Presidents, present and past, to feel that the only path towards changes in Cuba is to continuously attack and confront the Cuban Government. To the dismay of many people, I am sure, and with all due respect to many people, it is no secret that for the most part that lobby, this effort, has come out of anti-Castro groups who, for the most part, live in the State of Florida.
Well, something very interesting has happened in the last few years. As Latin America has elected leftist-leaning leaders, people who propose to put forth a modern-day socialism, as they call it, 21st-century socialism, but people who have been elected and reelected as they have emerged, they have decided that it would not be improper for them as leaders of those countries to have a relationship with the Cuban Government.
Well, that upsets the same people who have been upset with the Cuban Government. The fact that some new governments in Latin America would now be friendly to the Government in Cuba would upset these folks.
Our policy towards Cuba has been heavily influenced by this anti-Castro movement. I can’t tell you how many times in the 17 years that I have been in Congress and have tried to change that policy. I have been told by Members of Congress on both sides, Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, I have been told by them, I agree with you, you are right with this policy having to change.
But I think we have to continue it, and most of them will tell you, because the lobbying effort, out of a couple of communities in this country is so strong, that I really don’t want to face that. Right on the House floor they have told me, I don’t want to face that, I will just go along with this policy, as outdated as this may be, as inefficient as that may be, because it hasn’t changed anything in Cuba, not that we should necessarily be changing things in another country. But now we find that those same folks have now picked new targets.
Chief among those targets, top of the list, is the President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, who has over and over again shown his friendship to President Castro of Cuba, and that irritates the folks who support ending Mr. Castro’s stay in Cuba. Those folks then have started to say the same things that they have said for years about Mr. Castro.
Now, the fact of life is that the Cuban Government, the system in Cuba, and the system in Venezuela, for instance, are totally different, totally different. But not to those folks who simply would want to get rid of one. They now feel that they have a target which is the President of Venezuela.
That target then, I think, leads us to situations like today, where a resolution presented here speaks of putting together all these groups who have one thing in common. They speak out against our government, they say things we don’t like, and who happen to have been visited or received telephone calls or offers of help from Iran.
Now, Communist China, and I use that title, that phrase, that word, so we understand what we are talking about, are involved in the economy of every country in Latin America; but you don’t see a resolution on the House floor condemning Communist China for being involved in Latin America.
Why? Because they’re a big trading partner of ours. And secondly, let’s be honest, because there is no Chinese American lobby in this country influencing how we behave in Congress. And so we could deal with China every day and they could do whatever they want in their country, and we will never say more than maybe say every so often, behave yourself.
And there are countries in the Middle East who treat their folks in ways that you could spend every day in Congress condemning them, but we won’t do that because we have a relationship with them.
But nothing, and I say this with great admiration, nothing is as strong as the anti-Castro lobby, which has made it clear that the leadership in Latin America that is friendly to Mr. Castro must pay a price, and one of the prices you pay is to lump them together as this hate group that is now going to be involved in terrorist activities in Latin America.
We have democratically elected leaders in Latin America that have these friendly relations with the Cuban Government. That doesn’t matter to us that these folks were elected and re-elected. As long as they are friendly to Cuba, Miami hates them. And as long as Miami hates them, then Congress must hate them too.
So when you hear comments about Chavez, when you hear comments about Evo Morales, the President of Bolivia, when you hear comments about President Correa in Ecuador, understand, when you hear these comments, or about any one of the other left-leaning presidents in Latin America, that you’re basically hearing from the same playbook, the comments that you heard about Cuba for all these years.
But please understand something, that you are not hearing direct attacks on those governments; you’re still hearing an attack on the Cuban Government. It is just being played out in this new scenario called the other countries in Latin America.
Now, it is true that we have, or they have elected leaders in Latin America that are not happy with the U.S. Government and that words have been strong at times towards us. But some of this rhetoric has a history behind it.
While our country paid a great deal of attention to Asia, Europe and the Middle East, we neglected Latin America. That is a fact. That is not Congressman Serrano from the Bronx, New York, just making those comments to sound nice at this time of night. That’s a fact. We neglected Latin America, and they suffered, and still do, through some very difficult periods.And during the Cold War, it was really interesting. We would go to Latin America and we would say, General So-and-So, Senor, do you support communism in the Soviet Union or do you support our style of government? And those generals would say, oh, no; we support your style. We would say, great, you’re our friend. We’ll see you in a couple of years. And meanwhile, they mistreated their folks; they ransacked the country. But it didn’t matter to us because they were not for communism. They were not to the left of the political spectrum. They were not for socialism.
During that time, however, we would say something very positive. Every so often we would kind of knock them on the shoulder and say democracy is the most important thing. Nothing is as important as democracy.
Well, you know something? They’ve tried it all in Latin America. They tried military dictatorships. The people didn’t try it. They were the victims of it, and it didn’t work. Then they tried regular dictatorships, if there’s such a thing different from a military dictatorship. But it didn’t work either. The people suffered, but the ones who tried it didn’t work. Then they tried something new for Latin America in many cases, new to some countries, new to many countries. They tried democracy. They elected folks. But they elected folks who were very much tied to international corporate interests, who got elected, many in questionable elections, and then neglected the people, neglected the people. And the people found out that they had elected people, they had done everything they were asked to do, and they were getting poorer and poorer every day. So what have they done in the last couple of years? They’ve elected left-of-center candidates in Chile, in Argentina, in Ecuador, in Bolivia, in Venezuela. And these folks have been, and are, revolutionaries. They, themselves, claim to be revolutionaries, and that, again, we hear that word, that upsets us. We forget that this great system we have here was created through a revolution against the British. But we were the last ones to use that word in a way that we liked it. Now anybody who calls himself a revolutionary we get upset about. But these people are revolutionaries. They’re trying something new in Latin America. Embarrassing as it may seem, it is new to many countries in Latin America, this whole notion that the person at the bottom, the person who’s been suffering for years, the indigenous people, the darker skinned people, that they would now have an opportunity to have something better.
Now, and this is important what I just mentioned about the fact that in Latin America, the darker skinned folks are beginning to feel that they have a stake in their system.
When Secretary of State Colin Powell, one of the greatest Americans, left the administration at the last, the end of the last term, he came before our Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, State, and I was the ranking member at that time. And he said to us something very important when he was talking about Latin America. He said, the big change in Latin America, and what we Americans need to understand, now he didn’t say it was good. He didn’t say it was bad. He didn’t say it was a problem for us. He just said it was something that was happening in Latin America, that we as Americans have to pay attention to. He said, those folks are beginning to elect people who look like themselves. Now, that’s a heck of a statement by a very intelligent man who has a good understanding of the world. I don’t know if that upsets some of us, but I think it does upset some folks in this country and throughout the hemisphere, that countries that are composed primarily mostly of indigenous people and people of color have now decided to elect people who look like themself, people who come from them. And when they decide to make changes that are very dramatic and, yes, very revolutionary, we get upset because it doesn’t serve the corporate interests of a lot of American corporations.
So Hugo Chavez in Venezuela decides that he’s going to revolutionize the way Venezuela behaves. He came to the Bronx. He visited the Bronx. He spoke to us and he said something very interesting. He told us who he was. And you never hear about this in this country. He told us he was a kid, very poor, who didn’t have shoes until he was a teenager, walked barefoot, who wanted only one dream in life, to become a major league baseball pitcher. And he was pretty good. But from where he lived, to be seen by major league scouts, he had to go to Caracas. And he was told that the only way to get to Caracas was to join the Army. So he joined the Army. He jokes that it was the worst mistake his country ever made, letting him join the Army, because when he began to travel with the Army he noticed something very interesting of Venezuela. He noticed that people who looked like him were very poor, and other folks who didn’t look like him were living in a country with a lot of oil and a lot of money. He also noticed that not all neighborhoods were like his. He thought all of Venezuela was like his neighborhood, and it wasn’t. It had serious pockets of serious money. So he began to grow a conscience about that; became a military leader, eventually led him into politics. He got elected. And when he got elected he immediately set out to change the way Venezuela behaves. And the opposition to him knows that. That’s why they all admit that he’s so popular within his country, by the folks who are at the bottom.
But, you know, I get to watch Spanish television from Latin America on my cable system in the Bronx, and you know, as tough as we are in American politics, some of the stuff you hear about President Chavez from the owners of these stations who open up their morning programming by reminding people that their President has curly hair and is dark skinned, as if that was a sin, but it’s such a revolutionary thing that has happened in Latin America that some people still can’t get over it. So he’s an idiot. He’s crazy. He’s corrupt.
But even the opposition, at times, in attempting to say something against him, really says dumb things. I wish I had the name of the person, although I wouldn’t use it on the House floor, but during the last elections in Venezuela when the polls indicated that President Chavez was at 62 percent of the vote, one of the New York Times reporters, I think it was, asked this leader of the opposition, Why do you think he’s so popular? And the gentleman said, and this has to be the dumbest statement ever made by a politician in the history of the world, the gentleman said, You would be popular too if you were always building schools and hospitals for the poor. Well, to that I say, what American teenagers taught us to say, duh. I mean, isn’t that the reason why you elect people to take care of those in the society who need help amongst others? Because you don’t play class warfare. So they’re saying that because he’s building hospitals and because he’s building schools, he’s very popular. Well, yeah, Mr. Opposition. Why didn’t you try that when you were in power for the last couple of hundred years to do some of that?
Now, these leaders in Latin America that we attack, it’s important to know how they got to that point of being the leaders of these countries. For instance, in this resolution, it says, whereas in January of 2007, the President of Iran made his second visit to Central and South America in 5 months to meet with Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela, to visit Daniel Ortega, President of Nicaragua, and to attend the inauguration of Rafael Correa, President of Ecuador.Well, if we’re going to be technical about this, the fact is he went there for the President’s inauguration, something we all did. I mean, every country in the world sent a representative. I imagine our Ambassador was there. If he wasn’t, he should have been there because this was an elected President of Ecuador.
When you make those visits, as our President does, and I commend him for it, you go and you take the time that you’re in that country and you visit neighboring countries if you don’t get a chance to meet with everybody. That’s something you do.
But we attack these people in this resolution that we passed today, this, in my opinion, dangerous resolution, and that’s why we’re here today. We’re here today because Congress passed a resolution today condemning Iran’s involvement in Latin America and suggesting that these progressive leftist semi, if you want to call them, socialists in Latin America have a bond going with the President of Iran to create havoc for us and to fund terrorist organizations.
But there’s something we forget. Let’s look at Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua. He was elected in a free and fair election, recognized by world organizations. As part of the Central American peace plan, Ortega’s Sandinista government agreed to internationally monitored democratic elections in 1990.
Now, this guy we don’t like submitted himself to elections in 1990 and he lost, and peacefully, after having won a revolution, peacefully turned his government over to Violetta Chamorro, who was the victor, with our support, heavily with our support, because all the arguments in those days about how much money we sent into her campaign.
Now, can you imagine if somebody from another country sent money to one of our Presidential campaigns, another government, what we would do with that candidate in this country? But we do that.
Ortega ran for President in 1996 and lost, ran for democratically provided elections in 2001 and lost. Because he came in second place both times, however, Nicaraguan law gave him a seat in the national assembly where he has served as an opposition leader. Then he ran for President again in 2006 and won. Now, shouldn’t that alone make us want to go to Nicaragua or call him up and say, We asked you, we asked everybody in Latin America, to get elected. You ran four times and finally you got elected. Let’s at least talk. No? We are on his case. In fact, we are linking him to terrorist organizations in this resolution.
Rafael Correa, President of Ecuador, elected in free and fair elections January 15 of this year. He is a U.S.-trained economist. What does that mean? That he learned what he knows about what he wants to put in practice in Ecuador in American schools. So shouldn’t we be applauding that? Shouldn’t we be applauding the fact that he got elected democratically? He is Ecuador’s eighth President in 10 years. The instability has been horrible. Maybe there could be stability now. We should be supportive of that. He defeated Alvaro Noboa, a wealthy banana magnate, in a run-off election held in 2006. Contrary to our predictions, he got 57 percent of the vote.
Now, the one that we attack the most, of course, is President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. Well, let’s review this for a second. President has won elections in 1998, in 2000, and in 2006. In other words, he got elected in 1998. He then went out and had his coalition elect delegates to a constitutional convention. Those delegates wrote a new constitution that, and listen to this revolutionary idea, gave power to the poor and to the indigenous people. They changed the constitution to do that, and they put it before the people. The constitution was passed by the people. So I’d say that that is another referendum on Chavez. Then the new constitution said that he had to cut his 6-year term short and run right away. So he ran in 1998; then he had to run again in 2000.
Then in 2006 in between the opposition again with support from outside forces, a lot of them based right in the State of Florida, they held a referendum. He submitted himself to that referendum to be recalled as the President. He wins in 1998. He doesn’t finish his full term. He goes again in 2000. But by 2004 they were ready to kick him out, the opposition. They hold a referendum. And he wins it big. The recall, he wins it big. In 1999, as I said, he won a referendum for a new constitution. And in 2005 his coalition of parties won election for the Parliament, for the Congress.
Now, here’s the question I have: Didn’t we tell Latin American countries to use the democratic process? Isn’t that what we always said was the bottom line? Everything else could be negotiable, we said at times. But democracy was the bottom line. Even when we didn’t practice it, as I said before, we did say this is what you must do. Now I just read you three examples of people who have used the democratic system to reach their positions. So why are we attacking them continuously on the House floor? Once a month we get a resolution here attacking somebody in Latin America instead of getting close.
Now, what we don’t understand is that this whole situation with Latin America’s electing people who are left of center is because the people are tired of the poverty, tired of the pain, and they now have leaders who at least in what they have attempted to do up to now indicates that they want to balance off the wealth of those countries. Balance off.
We don’t celebrate the fact that Hugo Chavez comes from poverty, reaches the presidency, and has been elected three times himself and his government another five times totaling eight elections since 1998. We don’t celebrate the fact that in over close to 500 years, the people of Bolivia, a country mostly made up of indigenous people, what we call Indians, elected for the first time an Indian, Evo Morales. We don’t celebrate that.
I felt so good when I saw this man take the oath of the presidency dressed in the native dress of his people. I thought it was a great day. Our comments right away were, what is he going to do with the gas industry? Well, he did what we expected. He told some of the gas companies this is a very poor country. We have a lot of natural resources here. We are going to start sharing some of those profits with the people. Oh, he’s a communist. We have got to get rid of him. He’s a problem. So now in this resolution we lump him together with the President of Iran.When you do that, you immediately make enemies of the American people and those people.But you also make a very serious mistake, and this is perhaps the most important thing that we have to pay attention to. When you reject the electoral victories of these folks; when you don’t celebrate the fact that people from the lower class, economic class, that people of darker skin of indigenous people are being elected; when you as the American Government, the greatest and largest government in the world, don’t celebrate that and, in fact, spend a lot of time trying to bring them down; when you don’t do that, it is natural that you drive them to places where you don’t want them to be.
Now, when you are a Member of Congress and you stand up in front of the House and people may watch you on TV, you are supposed to speak as exactly that. My problem, or my strength, is that I so often remind people that I grew up in a public housing project. And in the projects you have certain rules of behavior. And one is that if somebody is trying to do you in and that person is stronger and bigger than you, you go find someone who can help you confront that person. That’s a fact of life for survival. Most Members of Congress, most American elected officials don’t talk about the rule of the projects because they didn’t grow in the projects. I am not saying that makes them worse than me, just different. So I use that as a point of understanding. Again, I grew up in the South Bronx in a public housing project. If you came after me, if you came after my mother, my sister, my cousin, you were my enemy.
Well, when President Chavez came to the U.N., our country was outraged. And I was not happy with what he said. He called President Bush the devil, and that was enough for us to go to war. But let’s talk about a little history now. There was a coup attempt on President Chavez by members of the military and members of the elite. All of Latin America, most of Europe, some folks in the Middle East all got up and said you can’t do that. You can’t do that. That man was elected. He’s got to serve his term. What did the United States say? Well, at the White House some folks said publicly he brought it on himself. No, you can’t say that, he brought it on himself. You don’t bring on a coup against your government.
In Latin America they said that our fingerprints were all over that attempted coup; that if we actually did not participate in it, we gave aid to it through our comments and said it was okay. Now, when I met President Chavez when he came to visit the Bronx, he spoke to us for a couple of hours. He’s famous for speaking a couple of hours. He told us about all the things I have mentioned here. But he said when they took him out of the presidential palace, the “White House,” if you will, took him up to the mountains, he knew he was going to die. He knew he was going to get killed. And you can imagine what is going through his head because he doesn’t know what is happening in Washington. He found out later that what was happening to him and when he thought he was going to get killed, he thought the whole world was outraged.
He found out later that Washington was basically saying we’ll figure it out. And we didn’t say anything when the guy who took over for him momentarily suspended the Congress, suspended the constitution, and that’s when the people reacted to it. Of course, Chavez came back because two things happened. One was the folks from the mountain side, the poor folks, the dark-skin folks, the indigenous people found out and they started running to the city and demanding to have their President back. The people won, the power didn’t. But we didn’t say anything.
And he tells us that when he goes there, a young soldier, he’s sitting in a room and opens the door and he hears the rifle load up and he thinks he’s going to get shot right there, and the soldier says, If our President is killed, we will all be killed here. And that did a turnaround where the young soldiers told the older soldiers, We’re not going back to those days. This man was elected and he has to serve his term.
Now, let’s go back a second to my focal point of growing up in the projects. They tried to kill the man and he came back into power. He thinks a few people were involved in it. He calls our President the devil as a representative of the country that didn’t help him during that time. We don’t appreciate having our President called the devil. We don’t encourage that and we all denounced it. But in the projects if you try to bump me off, the least I am going to call you is the devil. In fact, the ramifications may be even more dangerous. So I think it was really a light comment compared to what he felt was happening to him.
Now, there is another issue here that has been discussed a lot. We all heard about how recently President Chavez closed a TV station in Venezuela, and we were outraged. Nobody likes to do that. But what we were not told here is the history behind that. I’m not suggesting it was a good move. If I had been his adviser, I would have said leave it alone. But do you know who was on in the middle of the attempted coup against President Chavez in the Venezuela equivalent of the White House? The owner of the TV station that lost its license a few months ago. He was there as part of the coup to overthrow this government.
Now, listen to me. I don’t support most of the policies of President Bush. But if I heard that CBS, ABC, CNN, anyone tomorrow was involved in a coup against President Bush, I would ask that their license not be renewed because that is not freedom of speech. That is violence against the government.
And you can’t treat them any differently than you would treat someone. I would say we have to seriously consider not allowing them to continue in that role because they just attempted to overthrow a government by force.
Also, they refused to televise the coup. And when they did televise, they only televised the opposition; they never televised the people. The country never knew that Chavez was gone because they didn’t want the people to know. And when he came back, they didn’t know that either, although they had televised part in the middle of the coup because they were supposedly playing cartoons and movies on TV because they didn’t want to support the government in any way. That is the truth behind that licensing situation.
Now, what is the danger in what we’ve done today? Today, we committed the mistake of allowing our emotions on the issue of Cuba to blind us into attacks on Latin American countries, blanket attacks on many countries. And in this resolution we make claims on issues that in no way can be proven.
We’re suggesting that Iran is going to fund terrorist organizations in Latin America. These are some of the same folks that told us there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. How many of us have forgotten those words, “weapons of mass destruction”? They also told us that Iraq was tied to al Qaeda. They also told us that Iraq helped al Qaeda in the 9/11 attacks. Even the White House has now admitted that most of that, if not all, was not true. So, I can’t understand this desire to lump this together with Iran, present bad information, if not outright lies, and begin to move us towards a confrontation with Latin America at the same time we have confrontation with Iran.
But look at some of the silly things that the resolution says. It says, Whereas, at the Iranian Conference on Latin America, Iran announced that it would reopen embassies in Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Uruguay, and send a representative to Bolivia. And what is wrong with that? Don’t we want people to talk to each other? Don’t we have relations with most of the countries of the world? But when Iran does it, just to reopen relations they had before, re-establish, we get upset. Well, that’s an acceptable action for a sovereign state.
Now, I spoke about the various leaders, and I neglected to remind us that the President of Bolivia was elected on December 18, 2005, with a record 85 percent of the Bolivian people voting in the elections. They were deemed by world organizations to be free and fair. He won a convincing victory, getting 54 percent of the vote, compared to 29 percent for his opposition. Although a lot of people were predicting that he would win, no one thought that he could win this big.
Now, here’s another part of the resolution. And I leave it to the people watching or listening to this to try to figure out what this means, because I don’t know what the crime is here. It says, Whereas, routine civilian airline flights have been established from Tehran, Iran directly into Caracas, Venezuela, and the Government of Venezuela has been found to be indiscriminate in the issuance of Venezuelan passports and other identifying documents to people coming on those flights. So, they’re allowing people to fly directly to them, and they are allowing Iran to fly direct flights. Well, we have direct flights all over the world. What is the issue?
Now, here is the most dangerous one: Whereas, Iran and Hezbollah were involved in the two deadliest terrorist attacks in Argentina, and we all know that this is true, now they claim that Hezbollah is setting up in Latin America with the support of Iran. Well, my God, if that is true, why are we waiting until this particular resolution, which passed in what one could call the quickness of the afternoon without a vote, to bring up such a serious situation? If it’s true that Hezbollah is involved in Latin America setting up bases, recruiting people, shouldn’t we be outraged and really consider how to address that rather than just as a throw-away line in a resolution? This is so much more of this attempt to link Iran to Latin America.
And let me reach the last few minutes here by telling you why I think this is extremely dangerous.
It is pretty clear around here that we are beating the drum towards war with Iran. That’s no longer an alarmed behavior. I’m not trying to alarm people into feeling nervous, but I think most American people are hearing a lot of what they heard before we went to Iraq. And you know that Iraq has been a very, very difficult situation for us, and we don’t know when we will be able to get out of Iraq. And now there is this drumbeat, both inside and outside the Congress, throughout the country, but coming from the government, from the White House, coming out of the President’s office, coming out of the Vice President’s office, that we have to somehow confront Iran. That’s a problem all by itself. And it’s a horrible problem that we could be discussing here for hours.
But my concern, and my reason for speaking on a resolution today, a resolution which was introduced primarily by Democrats, and I know this is not something we usually do, speak against members of our own party, but we can all be nervous about a situation because on both sides of the aisle people are marching forward to war with Iran.
So, now we link these other countries. What does that mean? Does that mean that we now have an excuse to go and try military action against Bolivia? against Argentina? against Ecuador? against Venezuela? Is it because, indeed, they’ve earned the right, if you will, of having us react that way, or is it because we’re using Iran as an excuse to deal with other things we wanted to deal with in the first place, which is getting at these folks.
And so, I go back to my initial statement, that the same lobby group that has been directing our policy towards Cuba and preventing us from making changes in that policy, that same group has been intelligent enough, enabled enough to now direct our attention towards Latin American leftist leaders because they’re friendly to Cuba, and what best way to get at them? To link them to Iran, the ugly country for us right now.
And I’m not suggesting, by the way, that we should not have some concerns, if not serious concerns, about the behavior of Iran. That’s not the issue here. I don’t want people tomorrow saying, oh, he was defending Iran. No. I’m defending no one. What I’m defending is the right of the Latin American people to make their own democratic choices, if you will, and that we will respect that. But by linking them, I have to ask the question, if we go after Iran, and we just finished saying this afternoon that these Latin American countries are tied into Iran’s behavior, aren’t we also giving ourselves the opportunity, the reason, the power to go after these countries, too? That’s my concern.
Let me conclude by speaking to a subject that I know well. You don’t have to live in Latin America to know how Latin Americans feel about the United States or about American people. This may sound like a joke, it may even sound sarcastic, but it is honestly true. All you have to live is in southern Maryland, in northern Virginia, in D.C., in New York, in LA, in Houston, in Dallas, in any city, any suburb in this country that has the growing number of immigrants from Latin America, whether documented or not, they’re here for a reason. And if we were discussing immigration, I would tell you that they’re here because they like this country. They want to work. They want to feed their families. But that is no different than how people in Latin America feel about us. To link them with a group of folks in the Middle East who have openly said, not all of them, but some, who have openly said that they don’t like us, to link them to that is to make two horrible mistakes. One is to have bad information again put forth about a people who actually like us, and also, the worst mistake of all, to drive them into the arms of people we don’t like. Because as I told you before, when you pick on someone and you’re the toughest guy on the block, that person is going to have to find someone to help them out.
So, instead of reaching out to Latin America, we say to them, you’re as bad as the other guy. And we hate the other guy, and we’re going to eventually take action against the other guy, so you know what you can expect. And even if that’s not our intent, it will only make them think that that is our intent, and they will have to try to drum up new relationships. Because they’re not going to give into us, they’re not going to leave office and say we’ll go back to the days when the general ran the country.
Latin Americans, my friends, can be found in any city, any suburb, any neighborhood. And so many of them have such a close relationship to the people back home that they want to do nothing in this country to jeopardize the ability to continue to deal with their family back home. And their family back home will never allow any behavior in those countries that can hurt us. They need us and we need them.And so, when you speak to Latin Americans in our communities, you never hear hatred of the United States as you do in some other countries. They are materially poor, yes, suspicious of America’s intentions in their hemisphere, yes, but interested in making common cause with Hezbollah and other foreign movements to target American interests?
Never. Let me repeat that. They would never team up with a terrorist organization against the United States. They don’t have anything against us of that nature. They just don’t like our rhetoric and our indifference to them, but they’re not going to team up with anybody to hurt us, because most of those countries have so many of their people living here that it would be like attacking another part of your neighborhood. Because to hurt the American interests would almost certainly hurt their own. Money that flows from here to there would be cut off from relatives. Those family ties of people living and working in the United States would be gone.A broad cultural admiration for the U.S. have knit together places like Caracas, Quito, and New York. One of the ironies of the current immigration debate is how folks often evoke how immigration from Latin America is changing this country. What they forget is how that same phenomenon is changing Latin America, which, despite its general political rejection of this administration, is growing ever closer in its embrace of a Pan-American culture and a Pan-American economy.
For many thousands of people in Venezuela, Ecuador and Nicaragua, Americans are their cousins, their siblings and their children. They can be our greatest allies in the world if we don’t continue to push them into the embrace of hostile regimes with foolish resolutions like this one.Mr. Speaker, it wasn’t easy for me to decide to speak on this today. As I said, this resolution was presented by many Democrats, well-intentioned folks. I just see us going down a dangerous road here, a very dangerous road. If we have a problem with Iran, deal with that problem. Don’t link the poor people of Latin America who have nothing against us.
We have tried to export democracy to Latin America, and I think finally it is working. But we don’t like the results. We have tried to export capitalism, and in many ways what they do with each other by trading oil for doctors and oil for technology is capitalism at its best. I often joke, but profoundly so, I think, that we exported baseball to Latin America. I don’t have to tell you how well that is doing in Latin America and doing right here. I am a Yankee fan. But just ask the Boston Red Sox how they feel about Latin American ballplayers and Latin American baseball.So these folks don’t dislike us. But they are going to be troubled tomorrow morning when they find out what we did here in Congress today. They are going to be troubled that we are linking them with people we hate and they don’t want to be hated by us.
So I hope we can spend some time reviewing this, thinking about it, and perhaps understanding that in our desire to do what is right for us and to protect our great country, this country I love, this country in whose Army I served proudly, this country whose Congress I serve proudly, this country that I would give my life for, that as you love your country, you don’t love it different from a child. When that child is not doing the right thing, you have to correct that child. And our country is wrong right now in its desire to treat Latin America with hate and disdain and to make of it something that it is not. They are our neighbors and our friends. We should treat them as such. We should extend our hand to them and tell them, you are our neighbor, you are our friends, you are, in fact, members of this family in more ways than one, and we are members of yours. Let’s work together. Let’s not show a lack of respect for each other.
Speech on
U.S. policy Towards Latin America
November 12th 2007, by José Serrano
U.S. Representative from New York, José Serrano Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak about an issue that troubles me quite a bit and I think should trouble a lot of the American people. Certainly it should concern Members of Congress.
A resolution was passed this afternoon by voice vote dealing with the alleged involvement and behavior of the President of Iran, therefore, the Government of Iran, in Latin America and supporting, according to this resolution, terrorist activities in Latin America.
Let me briefly read the opening statement of this resolution, the title, if you will: expressing concern relating to the threatening behavior of the Iranian regime and the activities of terrorist organizations sponsored by that regime in Latin America.
Well, just to deal with language itself, we know that when our government calls another government a regime, it is not saying anything positive about it. It is, in fact, confronting it in some way. But I think that as unnoticed as this went by, as I said it was passed on a voice vote, as unnoticed that this went by, this puts us in a situation, the Congress, the American people, our Nation, on a road, on a path to a very dangerous situation in the future, perhaps in the near future.
We all know how concerned the administration is and how concerned some Members of Congress are about the possibility that Iran could be involved in activities that would be hurtful to us. I want to correct that. I think all Members of Congress are concerned about that possibility.But I think we are also concerned about the fact, many of us, that there seems to be a drumbeat towards war with , a drumbeat that says, basically, some of the same things that were said when we were taken off to war against Iraq. Just about everything that was told to us at that time happened not to be true. History will tell whether, in fact, we were lied to, or whether the information was so bad that the administration had no choice but to pass that on to us thinking that it was correct.
But there are many who feel that we were lied to. Again, history will have to deal with that.My concern is that this resolution today moves away from just a concern about the behavior of the Government in Iran and begins to suggest that there are neighbors of ours, and, yes, I say neighbors, because that’s what the Latin American people are, neighbors of ours, that could be involved in this behavior, behavior which would be dangerous to the United States, behavior which we all should be concerned about, behavior that, perhaps, would lead us to get involved in Latin America in a way that we haven’t been involved for a long, long time.
But I think in order to understand where we are with this issue, we also have to have, I think, an understanding of how history repeats itself, how some things that we are hearing now we have heard before. For close to 50 years now, we have had a very strong lobbying effort in this country against a Cuban Government. The so-called anti-Castro lobby has been very strong, and that lobby has been very influential in getting many Members of Congress and Presidents, present and past, to feel that the only path towards changes in Cuba is to continuously attack and confront the Cuban Government. To the dismay of many people, I am sure, and with all due respect to many people, it is no secret that for the most part that lobby, this effort, has come out of anti-Castro groups who, for the most part, live in the State of Florida.
Well, something very interesting has happened in the last few years. As Latin America has elected leftist-leaning leaders, people who propose to put forth a modern-day socialism, as they call it, 21st-century socialism, but people who have been elected and reelected as they have emerged, they have decided that it would not be improper for them as leaders of those countries to have a relationship with the Cuban Government.
Well, that upsets the same people who have been upset with the Cuban Government. The fact that some new governments in Latin America would now be friendly to the Government in Cuba would upset these folks.
Our policy towards Cuba has been heavily influenced by this anti-Castro movement. I can’t tell you how many times in the 17 years that I have been in Congress and have tried to change that policy. I have been told by Members of Congress on both sides, Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, I have been told by them, I agree with you, you are right with this policy having to change.
But I think we have to continue it, and most of them will tell you, because the lobbying effort, out of a couple of communities in this country is so strong, that I really don’t want to face that. Right on the House floor they have told me, I don’t want to face that, I will just go along with this policy, as outdated as this may be, as inefficient as that may be, because it hasn’t changed anything in Cuba, not that we should necessarily be changing things in another country. But now we find that those same folks have now picked new targets.
Chief among those targets, top of the list, is the President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, who has over and over again shown his friendship to President Castro of Cuba, and that irritates the folks who support ending Mr. Castro’s stay in Cuba. Those folks then have started to say the same things that they have said for years about Mr. Castro.
Now, the fact of life is that the Cuban Government, the system in Cuba, and the system in Venezuela, for instance, are totally different, totally different. But not to those folks who simply would want to get rid of one. They now feel that they have a target which is the President of Venezuela.
That target then, I think, leads us to situations like today, where a resolution presented here speaks of putting together all these groups who have one thing in common. They speak out against our government, they say things we don’t like, and who happen to have been visited or received telephone calls or offers of help from Iran.
Now, Communist China, and I use that title, that phrase, that word, so we understand what we are talking about, are involved in the economy of every country in Latin America; but you don’t see a resolution on the House floor condemning Communist China for being involved in Latin America.
Why? Because they’re a big trading partner of ours. And secondly, let’s be honest, because there is no Chinese American lobby in this country influencing how we behave in Congress. And so we could deal with China every day and they could do whatever they want in their country, and we will never say more than maybe say every so often, behave yourself.
And there are countries in the Middle East who treat their folks in ways that you could spend every day in Congress condemning them, but we won’t do that because we have a relationship with them.
But nothing, and I say this with great admiration, nothing is as strong as the anti-Castro lobby, which has made it clear that the leadership in Latin America that is friendly to Mr. Castro must pay a price, and one of the prices you pay is to lump them together as this hate group that is now going to be involved in terrorist activities in Latin America.
We have democratically elected leaders in Latin America that have these friendly relations with the Cuban Government. That doesn’t matter to us that these folks were elected and re-elected. As long as they are friendly to Cuba, Miami hates them. And as long as Miami hates them, then Congress must hate them too.
So when you hear comments about Chavez, when you hear comments about Evo Morales, the President of Bolivia, when you hear comments about President Correa in Ecuador, understand, when you hear these comments, or about any one of the other left-leaning presidents in Latin America, that you’re basically hearing from the same playbook, the comments that you heard about Cuba for all these years.
But please understand something, that you are not hearing direct attacks on those governments; you’re still hearing an attack on the Cuban Government. It is just being played out in this new scenario called the other countries in Latin America.
Now, it is true that we have, or they have elected leaders in Latin America that are not happy with the U.S. Government and that words have been strong at times towards us. But some of this rhetoric has a history behind it.
While our country paid a great deal of attention to Asia, Europe and the Middle East, we neglected Latin America. That is a fact. That is not Congressman Serrano from the Bronx, New York, just making those comments to sound nice at this time of night. That’s a fact. We neglected Latin America, and they suffered, and still do, through some very difficult periods.And during the Cold War, it was really interesting. We would go to Latin America and we would say, General So-and-So, Senor, do you support communism in the Soviet Union or do you support our style of government? And those generals would say, oh, no; we support your style. We would say, great, you’re our friend. We’ll see you in a couple of years. And meanwhile, they mistreated their folks; they ransacked the country. But it didn’t matter to us because they were not for communism. They were not to the left of the political spectrum. They were not for socialism.
During that time, however, we would say something very positive. Every so often we would kind of knock them on the shoulder and say democracy is the most important thing. Nothing is as important as democracy.
Well, you know something? They’ve tried it all in Latin America. They tried military dictatorships. The people didn’t try it. They were the victims of it, and it didn’t work. Then they tried regular dictatorships, if there’s such a thing different from a military dictatorship. But it didn’t work either. The people suffered, but the ones who tried it didn’t work. Then they tried something new for Latin America in many cases, new to some countries, new to many countries. They tried democracy. They elected folks. But they elected folks who were very much tied to international corporate interests, who got elected, many in questionable elections, and then neglected the people, neglected the people. And the people found out that they had elected people, they had done everything they were asked to do, and they were getting poorer and poorer every day. So what have they done in the last couple of years? They’ve elected left-of-center candidates in Chile, in Argentina, in Ecuador, in Bolivia, in Venezuela. And these folks have been, and are, revolutionaries. They, themselves, claim to be revolutionaries, and that, again, we hear that word, that upsets us. We forget that this great system we have here was created through a revolution against the British. But we were the last ones to use that word in a way that we liked it. Now anybody who calls himself a revolutionary we get upset about. But these people are revolutionaries. They’re trying something new in Latin America. Embarrassing as it may seem, it is new to many countries in Latin America, this whole notion that the person at the bottom, the person who’s been suffering for years, the indigenous people, the darker skinned people, that they would now have an opportunity to have something better.
Now, and this is important what I just mentioned about the fact that in Latin America, the darker skinned folks are beginning to feel that they have a stake in their system.
When Secretary of State Colin Powell, one of the greatest Americans, left the administration at the last, the end of the last term, he came before our Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, State, and I was the ranking member at that time. And he said to us something very important when he was talking about Latin America. He said, the big change in Latin America, and what we Americans need to understand, now he didn’t say it was good. He didn’t say it was bad. He didn’t say it was a problem for us. He just said it was something that was happening in Latin America, that we as Americans have to pay attention to. He said, those folks are beginning to elect people who look like themselves. Now, that’s a heck of a statement by a very intelligent man who has a good understanding of the world. I don’t know if that upsets some of us, but I think it does upset some folks in this country and throughout the hemisphere, that countries that are composed primarily mostly of indigenous people and people of color have now decided to elect people who look like themself, people who come from them. And when they decide to make changes that are very dramatic and, yes, very revolutionary, we get upset because it doesn’t serve the corporate interests of a lot of American corporations.
So Hugo Chavez in Venezuela decides that he’s going to revolutionize the way Venezuela behaves. He came to the Bronx. He visited the Bronx. He spoke to us and he said something very interesting. He told us who he was. And you never hear about this in this country. He told us he was a kid, very poor, who didn’t have shoes until he was a teenager, walked barefoot, who wanted only one dream in life, to become a major league baseball pitcher. And he was pretty good. But from where he lived, to be seen by major league scouts, he had to go to Caracas. And he was told that the only way to get to Caracas was to join the Army. So he joined the Army. He jokes that it was the worst mistake his country ever made, letting him join the Army, because when he began to travel with the Army he noticed something very interesting of Venezuela. He noticed that people who looked like him were very poor, and other folks who didn’t look like him were living in a country with a lot of oil and a lot of money. He also noticed that not all neighborhoods were like his. He thought all of Venezuela was like his neighborhood, and it wasn’t. It had serious pockets of serious money. So he began to grow a conscience about that; became a military leader, eventually led him into politics. He got elected. And when he got elected he immediately set out to change the way Venezuela behaves. And the opposition to him knows that. That’s why they all admit that he’s so popular within his country, by the folks who are at the bottom.
But, you know, I get to watch Spanish television from Latin America on my cable system in the Bronx, and you know, as tough as we are in American politics, some of the stuff you hear about President Chavez from the owners of these stations who open up their morning programming by reminding people that their President has curly hair and is dark skinned, as if that was a sin, but it’s such a revolutionary thing that has happened in Latin America that some people still can’t get over it. So he’s an idiot. He’s crazy. He’s corrupt.
But even the opposition, at times, in attempting to say something against him, really says dumb things. I wish I had the name of the person, although I wouldn’t use it on the House floor, but during the last elections in Venezuela when the polls indicated that President Chavez was at 62 percent of the vote, one of the New York Times reporters, I think it was, asked this leader of the opposition, Why do you think he’s so popular? And the gentleman said, and this has to be the dumbest statement ever made by a politician in the history of the world, the gentleman said, You would be popular too if you were always building schools and hospitals for the poor. Well, to that I say, what American teenagers taught us to say, duh. I mean, isn’t that the reason why you elect people to take care of those in the society who need help amongst others? Because you don’t play class warfare. So they’re saying that because he’s building hospitals and because he’s building schools, he’s very popular. Well, yeah, Mr. Opposition. Why didn’t you try that when you were in power for the last couple of hundred years to do some of that?
Now, these leaders in Latin America that we attack, it’s important to know how they got to that point of being the leaders of these countries. For instance, in this resolution, it says, whereas in January of 2007, the President of Iran made his second visit to Central and South America in 5 months to meet with Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela, to visit Daniel Ortega, President of Nicaragua, and to attend the inauguration of Rafael Correa, President of Ecuador.Well, if we’re going to be technical about this, the fact is he went there for the President’s inauguration, something we all did. I mean, every country in the world sent a representative. I imagine our Ambassador was there. If he wasn’t, he should have been there because this was an elected President of Ecuador.
When you make those visits, as our President does, and I commend him for it, you go and you take the time that you’re in that country and you visit neighboring countries if you don’t get a chance to meet with everybody. That’s something you do.
But we attack these people in this resolution that we passed today, this, in my opinion, dangerous resolution, and that’s why we’re here today. We’re here today because Congress passed a resolution today condemning Iran’s involvement in Latin America and suggesting that these progressive leftist semi, if you want to call them, socialists in Latin America have a bond going with the President of Iran to create havoc for us and to fund terrorist organizations.
But there’s something we forget. Let’s look at Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua. He was elected in a free and fair election, recognized by world organizations. As part of the Central American peace plan, Ortega’s Sandinista government agreed to internationally monitored democratic elections in 1990.
Now, this guy we don’t like submitted himself to elections in 1990 and he lost, and peacefully, after having won a revolution, peacefully turned his government over to Violetta Chamorro, who was the victor, with our support, heavily with our support, because all the arguments in those days about how much money we sent into her campaign.
Now, can you imagine if somebody from another country sent money to one of our Presidential campaigns, another government, what we would do with that candidate in this country? But we do that.
Ortega ran for President in 1996 and lost, ran for democratically provided elections in 2001 and lost. Because he came in second place both times, however, Nicaraguan law gave him a seat in the national assembly where he has served as an opposition leader. Then he ran for President again in 2006 and won. Now, shouldn’t that alone make us want to go to Nicaragua or call him up and say, We asked you, we asked everybody in Latin America, to get elected. You ran four times and finally you got elected. Let’s at least talk. No? We are on his case. In fact, we are linking him to terrorist organizations in this resolution.
Rafael Correa, President of Ecuador, elected in free and fair elections January 15 of this year. He is a U.S.-trained economist. What does that mean? That he learned what he knows about what he wants to put in practice in Ecuador in American schools. So shouldn’t we be applauding that? Shouldn’t we be applauding the fact that he got elected democratically? He is Ecuador’s eighth President in 10 years. The instability has been horrible. Maybe there could be stability now. We should be supportive of that. He defeated Alvaro Noboa, a wealthy banana magnate, in a run-off election held in 2006. Contrary to our predictions, he got 57 percent of the vote.
Now, the one that we attack the most, of course, is President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. Well, let’s review this for a second. President has won elections in 1998, in 2000, and in 2006. In other words, he got elected in 1998. He then went out and had his coalition elect delegates to a constitutional convention. Those delegates wrote a new constitution that, and listen to this revolutionary idea, gave power to the poor and to the indigenous people. They changed the constitution to do that, and they put it before the people. The constitution was passed by the people. So I’d say that that is another referendum on Chavez. Then the new constitution said that he had to cut his 6-year term short and run right away. So he ran in 1998; then he had to run again in 2000.
Then in 2006 in between the opposition again with support from outside forces, a lot of them based right in the State of Florida, they held a referendum. He submitted himself to that referendum to be recalled as the President. He wins in 1998. He doesn’t finish his full term. He goes again in 2000. But by 2004 they were ready to kick him out, the opposition. They hold a referendum. And he wins it big. The recall, he wins it big. In 1999, as I said, he won a referendum for a new constitution. And in 2005 his coalition of parties won election for the Parliament, for the Congress.
Now, here’s the question I have: Didn’t we tell Latin American countries to use the democratic process? Isn’t that what we always said was the bottom line? Everything else could be negotiable, we said at times. But democracy was the bottom line. Even when we didn’t practice it, as I said before, we did say this is what you must do. Now I just read you three examples of people who have used the democratic system to reach their positions. So why are we attacking them continuously on the House floor? Once a month we get a resolution here attacking somebody in Latin America instead of getting close.
Now, what we don’t understand is that this whole situation with Latin America’s electing people who are left of center is because the people are tired of the poverty, tired of the pain, and they now have leaders who at least in what they have attempted to do up to now indicates that they want to balance off the wealth of those countries. Balance off.
We don’t celebrate the fact that Hugo Chavez comes from poverty, reaches the presidency, and has been elected three times himself and his government another five times totaling eight elections since 1998. We don’t celebrate the fact that in over close to 500 years, the people of Bolivia, a country mostly made up of indigenous people, what we call Indians, elected for the first time an Indian, Evo Morales. We don’t celebrate that.
I felt so good when I saw this man take the oath of the presidency dressed in the native dress of his people. I thought it was a great day. Our comments right away were, what is he going to do with the gas industry? Well, he did what we expected. He told some of the gas companies this is a very poor country. We have a lot of natural resources here. We are going to start sharing some of those profits with the people. Oh, he’s a communist. We have got to get rid of him. He’s a problem. So now in this resolution we lump him together with the President of Iran.When you do that, you immediately make enemies of the American people and those people.But you also make a very serious mistake, and this is perhaps the most important thing that we have to pay attention to. When you reject the electoral victories of these folks; when you don’t celebrate the fact that people from the lower class, economic class, that people of darker skin of indigenous people are being elected; when you as the American Government, the greatest and largest government in the world, don’t celebrate that and, in fact, spend a lot of time trying to bring them down; when you don’t do that, it is natural that you drive them to places where you don’t want them to be.
Now, when you are a Member of Congress and you stand up in front of the House and people may watch you on TV, you are supposed to speak as exactly that. My problem, or my strength, is that I so often remind people that I grew up in a public housing project. And in the projects you have certain rules of behavior. And one is that if somebody is trying to do you in and that person is stronger and bigger than you, you go find someone who can help you confront that person. That’s a fact of life for survival. Most Members of Congress, most American elected officials don’t talk about the rule of the projects because they didn’t grow in the projects. I am not saying that makes them worse than me, just different. So I use that as a point of understanding. Again, I grew up in the South Bronx in a public housing project. If you came after me, if you came after my mother, my sister, my cousin, you were my enemy.
Well, when President Chavez came to the U.N., our country was outraged. And I was not happy with what he said. He called President Bush the devil, and that was enough for us to go to war. But let’s talk about a little history now. There was a coup attempt on President Chavez by members of the military and members of the elite. All of Latin America, most of Europe, some folks in the Middle East all got up and said you can’t do that. You can’t do that. That man was elected. He’s got to serve his term. What did the United States say? Well, at the White House some folks said publicly he brought it on himself. No, you can’t say that, he brought it on himself. You don’t bring on a coup against your government.
In Latin America they said that our fingerprints were all over that attempted coup; that if we actually did not participate in it, we gave aid to it through our comments and said it was okay. Now, when I met President Chavez when he came to visit the Bronx, he spoke to us for a couple of hours. He’s famous for speaking a couple of hours. He told us about all the things I have mentioned here. But he said when they took him out of the presidential palace, the “White House,” if you will, took him up to the mountains, he knew he was going to die. He knew he was going to get killed. And you can imagine what is going through his head because he doesn’t know what is happening in Washington. He found out later that what was happening to him and when he thought he was going to get killed, he thought the whole world was outraged.
He found out later that Washington was basically saying we’ll figure it out. And we didn’t say anything when the guy who took over for him momentarily suspended the Congress, suspended the constitution, and that’s when the people reacted to it. Of course, Chavez came back because two things happened. One was the folks from the mountain side, the poor folks, the dark-skin folks, the indigenous people found out and they started running to the city and demanding to have their President back. The people won, the power didn’t. But we didn’t say anything.
And he tells us that when he goes there, a young soldier, he’s sitting in a room and opens the door and he hears the rifle load up and he thinks he’s going to get shot right there, and the soldier says, If our President is killed, we will all be killed here. And that did a turnaround where the young soldiers told the older soldiers, We’re not going back to those days. This man was elected and he has to serve his term.
Now, let’s go back a second to my focal point of growing up in the projects. They tried to kill the man and he came back into power. He thinks a few people were involved in it. He calls our President the devil as a representative of the country that didn’t help him during that time. We don’t appreciate having our President called the devil. We don’t encourage that and we all denounced it. But in the projects if you try to bump me off, the least I am going to call you is the devil. In fact, the ramifications may be even more dangerous. So I think it was really a light comment compared to what he felt was happening to him.
Now, there is another issue here that has been discussed a lot. We all heard about how recently President Chavez closed a TV station in Venezuela, and we were outraged. Nobody likes to do that. But what we were not told here is the history behind that. I’m not suggesting it was a good move. If I had been his adviser, I would have said leave it alone. But do you know who was on in the middle of the attempted coup against President Chavez in the Venezuela equivalent of the White House? The owner of the TV station that lost its license a few months ago. He was there as part of the coup to overthrow this government.
Now, listen to me. I don’t support most of the policies of President Bush. But if I heard that CBS, ABC, CNN, anyone tomorrow was involved in a coup against President Bush, I would ask that their license not be renewed because that is not freedom of speech. That is violence against the government.
And you can’t treat them any differently than you would treat someone. I would say we have to seriously consider not allowing them to continue in that role because they just attempted to overthrow a government by force.
Also, they refused to televise the coup. And when they did televise, they only televised the opposition; they never televised the people. The country never knew that Chavez was gone because they didn’t want the people to know. And when he came back, they didn’t know that either, although they had televised part in the middle of the coup because they were supposedly playing cartoons and movies on TV because they didn’t want to support the government in any way. That is the truth behind that licensing situation.
Now, what is the danger in what we’ve done today? Today, we committed the mistake of allowing our emotions on the issue of Cuba to blind us into attacks on Latin American countries, blanket attacks on many countries. And in this resolution we make claims on issues that in no way can be proven.
We’re suggesting that Iran is going to fund terrorist organizations in Latin America. These are some of the same folks that told us there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. How many of us have forgotten those words, “weapons of mass destruction”? They also told us that Iraq was tied to al Qaeda. They also told us that Iraq helped al Qaeda in the 9/11 attacks. Even the White House has now admitted that most of that, if not all, was not true. So, I can’t understand this desire to lump this together with Iran, present bad information, if not outright lies, and begin to move us towards a confrontation with Latin America at the same time we have confrontation with Iran.
But look at some of the silly things that the resolution says. It says, Whereas, at the Iranian Conference on Latin America, Iran announced that it would reopen embassies in Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Uruguay, and send a representative to Bolivia. And what is wrong with that? Don’t we want people to talk to each other? Don’t we have relations with most of the countries of the world? But when Iran does it, just to reopen relations they had before, re-establish, we get upset. Well, that’s an acceptable action for a sovereign state.
Now, I spoke about the various leaders, and I neglected to remind us that the President of Bolivia was elected on December 18, 2005, with a record 85 percent of the Bolivian people voting in the elections. They were deemed by world organizations to be free and fair. He won a convincing victory, getting 54 percent of the vote, compared to 29 percent for his opposition. Although a lot of people were predicting that he would win, no one thought that he could win this big.
Now, here’s another part of the resolution. And I leave it to the people watching or listening to this to try to figure out what this means, because I don’t know what the crime is here. It says, Whereas, routine civilian airline flights have been established from Tehran, Iran directly into Caracas, Venezuela, and the Government of Venezuela has been found to be indiscriminate in the issuance of Venezuelan passports and other identifying documents to people coming on those flights. So, they’re allowing people to fly directly to them, and they are allowing Iran to fly direct flights. Well, we have direct flights all over the world. What is the issue?
Now, here is the most dangerous one: Whereas, Iran and Hezbollah were involved in the two deadliest terrorist attacks in Argentina, and we all know that this is true, now they claim that Hezbollah is setting up in Latin America with the support of Iran. Well, my God, if that is true, why are we waiting until this particular resolution, which passed in what one could call the quickness of the afternoon without a vote, to bring up such a serious situation? If it’s true that Hezbollah is involved in Latin America setting up bases, recruiting people, shouldn’t we be outraged and really consider how to address that rather than just as a throw-away line in a resolution? This is so much more of this attempt to link Iran to Latin America.
And let me reach the last few minutes here by telling you why I think this is extremely dangerous.
It is pretty clear around here that we are beating the drum towards war with Iran. That’s no longer an alarmed behavior. I’m not trying to alarm people into feeling nervous, but I think most American people are hearing a lot of what they heard before we went to Iraq. And you know that Iraq has been a very, very difficult situation for us, and we don’t know when we will be able to get out of Iraq. And now there is this drumbeat, both inside and outside the Congress, throughout the country, but coming from the government, from the White House, coming out of the President’s office, coming out of the Vice President’s office, that we have to somehow confront Iran. That’s a problem all by itself. And it’s a horrible problem that we could be discussing here for hours.
But my concern, and my reason for speaking on a resolution today, a resolution which was introduced primarily by Democrats, and I know this is not something we usually do, speak against members of our own party, but we can all be nervous about a situation because on both sides of the aisle people are marching forward to war with Iran.
So, now we link these other countries. What does that mean? Does that mean that we now have an excuse to go and try military action against Bolivia? against Argentina? against Ecuador? against Venezuela? Is it because, indeed, they’ve earned the right, if you will, of having us react that way, or is it because we’re using Iran as an excuse to deal with other things we wanted to deal with in the first place, which is getting at these folks.
And so, I go back to my initial statement, that the same lobby group that has been directing our policy towards Cuba and preventing us from making changes in that policy, that same group has been intelligent enough, enabled enough to now direct our attention towards Latin American leftist leaders because they’re friendly to Cuba, and what best way to get at them? To link them to Iran, the ugly country for us right now.
And I’m not suggesting, by the way, that we should not have some concerns, if not serious concerns, about the behavior of Iran. That’s not the issue here. I don’t want people tomorrow saying, oh, he was defending Iran. No. I’m defending no one. What I’m defending is the right of the Latin American people to make their own democratic choices, if you will, and that we will respect that. But by linking them, I have to ask the question, if we go after Iran, and we just finished saying this afternoon that these Latin American countries are tied into Iran’s behavior, aren’t we also giving ourselves the opportunity, the reason, the power to go after these countries, too? That’s my concern.
Let me conclude by speaking to a subject that I know well. You don’t have to live in Latin America to know how Latin Americans feel about the United States or about American people. This may sound like a joke, it may even sound sarcastic, but it is honestly true. All you have to live is in southern Maryland, in northern Virginia, in D.C., in New York, in LA, in Houston, in Dallas, in any city, any suburb in this country that has the growing number of immigrants from Latin America, whether documented or not, they’re here for a reason. And if we were discussing immigration, I would tell you that they’re here because they like this country. They want to work. They want to feed their families. But that is no different than how people in Latin America feel about us. To link them with a group of folks in the Middle East who have openly said, not all of them, but some, who have openly said that they don’t like us, to link them to that is to make two horrible mistakes. One is to have bad information again put forth about a people who actually like us, and also, the worst mistake of all, to drive them into the arms of people we don’t like. Because as I told you before, when you pick on someone and you’re the toughest guy on the block, that person is going to have to find someone to help them out.
So, instead of reaching out to Latin America, we say to them, you’re as bad as the other guy. And we hate the other guy, and we’re going to eventually take action against the other guy, so you know what you can expect. And even if that’s not our intent, it will only make them think that that is our intent, and they will have to try to drum up new relationships. Because they’re not going to give into us, they’re not going to leave office and say we’ll go back to the days when the general ran the country.
Latin Americans, my friends, can be found in any city, any suburb, any neighborhood. And so many of them have such a close relationship to the people back home that they want to do nothing in this country to jeopardize the ability to continue to deal with their family back home. And their family back home will never allow any behavior in those countries that can hurt us. They need us and we need them.And so, when you speak to Latin Americans in our communities, you never hear hatred of the United States as you do in some other countries. They are materially poor, yes, suspicious of America’s intentions in their hemisphere, yes, but interested in making common cause with Hezbollah and other foreign movements to target American interests?
Never. Let me repeat that. They would never team up with a terrorist organization against the United States. They don’t have anything against us of that nature. They just don’t like our rhetoric and our indifference to them, but they’re not going to team up with anybody to hurt us, because most of those countries have so many of their people living here that it would be like attacking another part of your neighborhood. Because to hurt the American interests would almost certainly hurt their own. Money that flows from here to there would be cut off from relatives. Those family ties of people living and working in the United States would be gone.A broad cultural admiration for the U.S. have knit together places like Caracas, Quito, and New York. One of the ironies of the current immigration debate is how folks often evoke how immigration from Latin America is changing this country. What they forget is how that same phenomenon is changing Latin America, which, despite its general political rejection of this administration, is growing ever closer in its embrace of a Pan-American culture and a Pan-American economy.
For many thousands of people in Venezuela, Ecuador and Nicaragua, Americans are their cousins, their siblings and their children. They can be our greatest allies in the world if we don’t continue to push them into the embrace of hostile regimes with foolish resolutions like this one.Mr. Speaker, it wasn’t easy for me to decide to speak on this today. As I said, this resolution was presented by many Democrats, well-intentioned folks. I just see us going down a dangerous road here, a very dangerous road. If we have a problem with Iran, deal with that problem. Don’t link the poor people of Latin America who have nothing against us.
We have tried to export democracy to Latin America, and I think finally it is working. But we don’t like the results. We have tried to export capitalism, and in many ways what they do with each other by trading oil for doctors and oil for technology is capitalism at its best. I often joke, but profoundly so, I think, that we exported baseball to Latin America. I don’t have to tell you how well that is doing in Latin America and doing right here. I am a Yankee fan. But just ask the Boston Red Sox how they feel about Latin American ballplayers and Latin American baseball.So these folks don’t dislike us. But they are going to be troubled tomorrow morning when they find out what we did here in Congress today. They are going to be troubled that we are linking them with people we hate and they don’t want to be hated by us.
So I hope we can spend some time reviewing this, thinking about it, and perhaps understanding that in our desire to do what is right for us and to protect our great country, this country I love, this country in whose Army I served proudly, this country whose Congress I serve proudly, this country that I would give my life for, that as you love your country, you don’t love it different from a child. When that child is not doing the right thing, you have to correct that child. And our country is wrong right now in its desire to treat Latin America with hate and disdain and to make of it something that it is not. They are our neighbors and our friends. We should treat them as such. We should extend our hand to them and tell them, you are our neighbor, you are our friends, you are, in fact, members of this family in more ways than one, and we are members of yours. Let’s work together. Let’s not show a lack of respect for each other.
lunes, 21 de abril de 2008
Fidel, Pope Peace and Prosperity
REFLEXIONES DEL COMPAÑERO FIDEL
“PAZ Y PROSPERIDAD”
El Papa Benedicto XVI destronó a Brown, Primer Ministro inglés, quien sustituyó a Blair, al que conocí y con el que hablé unos minutos durante un receso de la Segunda Conferencia de la OMC en Ginebra hace 10 años, después de su discurso, expresándole mi discrepancia a causa de una falsa frase suya sobre el estado social de los niños ingleses. Por la voz, los argumentos y el tono de Brown en su conferencia de prensa en presencia de Bush, me pareció tan autosuficiente como su antecesor en la dirección del Partido Laborista. La actividad del nuevo Primer Ministro de Gran Bretaña, al coincidir con la visita del Papa, era igual a la del jefe de gobierno de una república bananera.
Benedicto XVI prestó especial atención al 13 de abril, cuando ocurrió hace 65 años la incineración de más de mil prisioneros en el pueblo de Gardelegen, y se convirtió en el día que recuerda el martirologio sufrido por el pueblo judío en la Alemania nazi, una tragedia humana que duró años.
Bush lo recibió en la Base Andrews de la Fuerza Aérea norteamericana, gesto inusual. Benedicto XVI, a lo largo de su actividad como Obispo alemán, fue conservador y alérgico a los cambios en la política social y en las normas internas que rigen su iglesia. La gran prensa de Estados Unidos inicialmente fue implacable, a partir de las indisciplinas contra las normas establecidas para los creyentes, calificando a la Iglesia Católica como religión decadente.
Su visita coincidió también con el 81 aniversario de su nacimiento. Bush, solícito y complaciente, le cantó Las mañanitas el propio día 16.
El Papa fue sin duda inteligente. Contraatacó desde el inicio de la visita. A pesar de los 81 años que cumpliría horas más tarde, bajó del avión deslizando apenas sus manos por las barandas de las empinadas escaleras, y en los últimos peldaños ni eso hizo. Es de talla baja y, a ojos vista, pesa la mitad que lo que Bush. Camina ligero. No abandonó un minuto la sonrisa y el brillo de los ojos, y se dedicó de inmediato a cumplir un programa que con 18 años de edad habría agotado a cualquier visitante. Los medios televisivos hicieron zafra.
El Papa visitó universidades, un centro cultural católico edificado expresamente para la ocasión; se reunió con representantes de cientos de escuelas y universidades católicas del enorme país. El jefe del imperio no se atrevería a exigir al Estado del Vaticano “nueva constitución y elecciones libres” como él las concibe para Cuba.
Como líder de una iglesia en medio de la guerra desatada por Estados Unidos contra los musulmanes, su mensaje fue ecuménico y favorable a la paz.
Se reunió con representantes de cultos cuyas iglesias influyen en miles de millones de personas. Los líderes de la religión judía lo recibieron con calor. Desde luego, estos idealizaron el sistema capitalista de Estados Unidos. Uno de los rabinos de Miami afirmó que el 90 por ciento de los judíos de Cuba se trasladaron a aquella ciudad; debió aclarar que no ocurrió así porque los persiguiéramos o les dieran visa en Estados Unidos, sino porque optaron por el derecho a viajar por vía segura que abrió la Revolución y ―como muchos cubanos de otros orígenes étnicos― buscaban ventajas materiales que no habían podido alcanzar en la Cuba colonizada.
Aquí permaneció abierta y respetada la sinagoga judía, y sus representantes se reúnen, junto a las demás iglesias, con los líderes del Partido y el Gobierno Revolucionario, incluidos sus niveles más altos.
En Estados Unidos se exaltó mucho la visita del Papa a la sinagoga. Es la tercera vez que tiene lugar una visita papal a esos centros religiosos judíos. La primera fue la de Juan Pablo II a una sinagoga de Polonia; después, la de Benedicto XVI a una en Alemania; y esta, a la de Nueva York, que es a su vez la primera en ese país.
Particular importancia tiene demandar, en nombre del derecho a creer, el derecho a vivir. En su condición de líder religioso de una iglesia poderosa y fuertemente arraigada en muchos pueblos del mundo, Benedicto XVI habló ante la Organización de Naciones Unidas:
“…el deseo de la paz, la búsqueda de la justicia, el respeto de la dignidad de la persona, la cooperación y la asistencia humanitaria, expresan las justas aspiraciones del espíritu humano.”
“…los objetivos del desarrollo, la reducción de las desigualdades locales y globales, la protección del entorno, de los recursos y del clima, requieren que todos los responsables internacionales actúen conjuntamente y demuestren una disponibilidad para actuar de buena fe, respetando la ley y promoviendo la solidaridad con las regiones más débiles del planeta.”
“Nuestro pensamiento se dirige al modo en que a veces se han aplicado los resultados de los descubrimientos de la investigación científica y tecnológica.”
“…estos derechos se basan en la ley natural inscrita en el corazón del hombre y presente en las diferentes culturas y civilizaciones.”
“…la máxima no hagas a otros lo que no quieres que te hagan a ti en modo alguno puede variar, por mucha que sea la diversidad de las naciones.”
“Mi presencia en esta Asamblea es una muestra de estima por las Naciones Unidas y es considerada como expresión de la esperanza en que la Organización sirva cada vez más como signo de unidad entre los Estados y como instrumento al servicio de toda la familia humana.”
Al concluir, exclamó en inglés, francés, español, árabe, chino y ruso: “¡Paz y prosperidad con la ayuda de Dios!”
Aunque no es fácil desentrañar el pensamiento del Vaticano sobre los espinosos temas que se abordan en un mundo donde el Presidente de Estados Unidos y sus aliados ricos y desarrollados han impuesto una guerra sangrienta contra la cultura y la religión de más de mil millones de personas en nombre de la lucha contra el terrorismo, e impera la tortura, el saqueo y la conquista por la fuerza de los hidrocarburos y las materias primas, lo que expresó el Papa es la antítesis de la política de brutalidad y fuerza que aplica el cantor de Las Mañanitas.
En los próximos días, los pueblos de América Latina están a punto de afrontar dos tragedias: la de Paraguay y la de Bolivia. Una de ellas, por las elecciones que tienen lugar hoy domingo 20 de abril, donde un antiguo Obispo católico cuenta con la mayoría abrumadora del pueblo, según encuestas serias, y es seguro el rechazo a un fraude electoral; otra, por la amenaza de desintegración real de su territorio, que conduciría a luchas fratricidas en el sufrido país.
Benedicto XVI regresa hoy a Roma. Los bellos e impresionantes cantos han cesado en los templos. Ahora se continuará escuchando el odioso e incesante estampido de las armas.
Fidel Castro Ruz
20 de abril de 2008
7 y 42 p.m.
“PAZ Y PROSPERIDAD”
El Papa Benedicto XVI destronó a Brown, Primer Ministro inglés, quien sustituyó a Blair, al que conocí y con el que hablé unos minutos durante un receso de la Segunda Conferencia de la OMC en Ginebra hace 10 años, después de su discurso, expresándole mi discrepancia a causa de una falsa frase suya sobre el estado social de los niños ingleses. Por la voz, los argumentos y el tono de Brown en su conferencia de prensa en presencia de Bush, me pareció tan autosuficiente como su antecesor en la dirección del Partido Laborista. La actividad del nuevo Primer Ministro de Gran Bretaña, al coincidir con la visita del Papa, era igual a la del jefe de gobierno de una república bananera.
Benedicto XVI prestó especial atención al 13 de abril, cuando ocurrió hace 65 años la incineración de más de mil prisioneros en el pueblo de Gardelegen, y se convirtió en el día que recuerda el martirologio sufrido por el pueblo judío en la Alemania nazi, una tragedia humana que duró años.
Bush lo recibió en la Base Andrews de la Fuerza Aérea norteamericana, gesto inusual. Benedicto XVI, a lo largo de su actividad como Obispo alemán, fue conservador y alérgico a los cambios en la política social y en las normas internas que rigen su iglesia. La gran prensa de Estados Unidos inicialmente fue implacable, a partir de las indisciplinas contra las normas establecidas para los creyentes, calificando a la Iglesia Católica como religión decadente.
Su visita coincidió también con el 81 aniversario de su nacimiento. Bush, solícito y complaciente, le cantó Las mañanitas el propio día 16.
El Papa fue sin duda inteligente. Contraatacó desde el inicio de la visita. A pesar de los 81 años que cumpliría horas más tarde, bajó del avión deslizando apenas sus manos por las barandas de las empinadas escaleras, y en los últimos peldaños ni eso hizo. Es de talla baja y, a ojos vista, pesa la mitad que lo que Bush. Camina ligero. No abandonó un minuto la sonrisa y el brillo de los ojos, y se dedicó de inmediato a cumplir un programa que con 18 años de edad habría agotado a cualquier visitante. Los medios televisivos hicieron zafra.
El Papa visitó universidades, un centro cultural católico edificado expresamente para la ocasión; se reunió con representantes de cientos de escuelas y universidades católicas del enorme país. El jefe del imperio no se atrevería a exigir al Estado del Vaticano “nueva constitución y elecciones libres” como él las concibe para Cuba.
Como líder de una iglesia en medio de la guerra desatada por Estados Unidos contra los musulmanes, su mensaje fue ecuménico y favorable a la paz.
Se reunió con representantes de cultos cuyas iglesias influyen en miles de millones de personas. Los líderes de la religión judía lo recibieron con calor. Desde luego, estos idealizaron el sistema capitalista de Estados Unidos. Uno de los rabinos de Miami afirmó que el 90 por ciento de los judíos de Cuba se trasladaron a aquella ciudad; debió aclarar que no ocurrió así porque los persiguiéramos o les dieran visa en Estados Unidos, sino porque optaron por el derecho a viajar por vía segura que abrió la Revolución y ―como muchos cubanos de otros orígenes étnicos― buscaban ventajas materiales que no habían podido alcanzar en la Cuba colonizada.
Aquí permaneció abierta y respetada la sinagoga judía, y sus representantes se reúnen, junto a las demás iglesias, con los líderes del Partido y el Gobierno Revolucionario, incluidos sus niveles más altos.
En Estados Unidos se exaltó mucho la visita del Papa a la sinagoga. Es la tercera vez que tiene lugar una visita papal a esos centros religiosos judíos. La primera fue la de Juan Pablo II a una sinagoga de Polonia; después, la de Benedicto XVI a una en Alemania; y esta, a la de Nueva York, que es a su vez la primera en ese país.
Particular importancia tiene demandar, en nombre del derecho a creer, el derecho a vivir. En su condición de líder religioso de una iglesia poderosa y fuertemente arraigada en muchos pueblos del mundo, Benedicto XVI habló ante la Organización de Naciones Unidas:
“…el deseo de la paz, la búsqueda de la justicia, el respeto de la dignidad de la persona, la cooperación y la asistencia humanitaria, expresan las justas aspiraciones del espíritu humano.”
“…los objetivos del desarrollo, la reducción de las desigualdades locales y globales, la protección del entorno, de los recursos y del clima, requieren que todos los responsables internacionales actúen conjuntamente y demuestren una disponibilidad para actuar de buena fe, respetando la ley y promoviendo la solidaridad con las regiones más débiles del planeta.”
“Nuestro pensamiento se dirige al modo en que a veces se han aplicado los resultados de los descubrimientos de la investigación científica y tecnológica.”
“…estos derechos se basan en la ley natural inscrita en el corazón del hombre y presente en las diferentes culturas y civilizaciones.”
“…la máxima no hagas a otros lo que no quieres que te hagan a ti en modo alguno puede variar, por mucha que sea la diversidad de las naciones.”
“Mi presencia en esta Asamblea es una muestra de estima por las Naciones Unidas y es considerada como expresión de la esperanza en que la Organización sirva cada vez más como signo de unidad entre los Estados y como instrumento al servicio de toda la familia humana.”
Al concluir, exclamó en inglés, francés, español, árabe, chino y ruso: “¡Paz y prosperidad con la ayuda de Dios!”
Aunque no es fácil desentrañar el pensamiento del Vaticano sobre los espinosos temas que se abordan en un mundo donde el Presidente de Estados Unidos y sus aliados ricos y desarrollados han impuesto una guerra sangrienta contra la cultura y la religión de más de mil millones de personas en nombre de la lucha contra el terrorismo, e impera la tortura, el saqueo y la conquista por la fuerza de los hidrocarburos y las materias primas, lo que expresó el Papa es la antítesis de la política de brutalidad y fuerza que aplica el cantor de Las Mañanitas.
En los próximos días, los pueblos de América Latina están a punto de afrontar dos tragedias: la de Paraguay y la de Bolivia. Una de ellas, por las elecciones que tienen lugar hoy domingo 20 de abril, donde un antiguo Obispo católico cuenta con la mayoría abrumadora del pueblo, según encuestas serias, y es seguro el rechazo a un fraude electoral; otra, por la amenaza de desintegración real de su territorio, que conduciría a luchas fratricidas en el sufrido país.
Benedicto XVI regresa hoy a Roma. Los bellos e impresionantes cantos han cesado en los templos. Ahora se continuará escuchando el odioso e incesante estampido de las armas.
Fidel Castro Ruz
20 de abril de 2008
7 y 42 p.m.
Venezuela: Democracy, Socialism and Imperialism
Jump to navigation Jump to content Homepage News Opinion and Analysis Newsbriefs audio Featured articles Contact
Menu
us online - donate to Venezuela Analysis
Home » Opinion & Analysis » The Bolivarian Project
Venezuela: Democracy, Socialism and Imperialism
April 18th 2008, by James Petras - Globalresearch.ca
Introduction
Venezuela ’s President Hugo Chavez remains the world’s leading secular, democratically elected political leader who has consistently and publicly opposed imperialist wars in the Middle East, attacked extra-territorial intervention and US and European Union complicity in kidnapping and torture.
Venezuela plays the major role in sharply reducing the price of oil for the poorest countries in the Caribbean region and Central America, thus substantially aiding them in their balance of payments, without attaching any ‘strings’ to this vital assistance. Venezuela has been in the forefront in supporting free elections and opposing human right abuses in the Middle East, Latin America and South Asia by pro-US client regimes in Iraq , Afghanistan and Colombia.
No other country in the Americas has done more to break down the racial barriers to social mobility and the acquisition of land for Afro-Latin and Indio Americans. President Chavez has been on the cutting edge of efforts toward greater Latin American integration – despite opposition from the United States and several regional regimes, who have opted for bilateral free trade agreements with the US .
Even more significant, President Chavez is the only elected president to reverse a US backed military coup (in 48 hours) and defeat a (US-backed) bosses’ lockout, and return the economy to double-digit growth over the subsequent 4 years.
1 President Chavez is the only elected leader in the history of Latin America to successfully win eleven straight electoral contests against US-financed political parties and almost the entire private mass media over a nine-year period. Finally President Chavez is the only leader in the last half-century who came within 1% of having a popular referendum for a ‘socialist transformation’ approved, a particularly surprising result in a country in which less than 30% of the work force is made up of peasants and factory workers.
President Chavez has drastically reduced long-term poverty faster than any regime in the region,
2 demonstrating that a nationalist-welfare regime is much more effective in ending endemic social ills than its neo-liberal counterparts. A rigorous, empirical study of the socio-economic performance of the Chavez government demonstrates its success in a whole series of indicators after the defeat of the counter-revolutionary coup and lockout and after the nationalization of petroleum (2003).
GDP has grown by more than 87% with only a small part of the growth being in oil. The poverty rate has been cut in half (from 54% in 2003 at the height of the bosses’ lockout to 27% in 2007; and extreme poverty has been reduced from 43% in 1996 to 9% in 2007), and unemployment by more than half (from 17% in 1998 to 7% in 2007). The economy has created jobs at a rate nearly three times that of the United States during its most recent economic expansion. Accessible health care for the poor has been successfully expanded with the number of primary care physicians in the public sector increasing from 1,628 in 1998 to 19,571 by early 2007. About 40% of the population now has access to subsidized food. Access to education, especially higher education, has also been greatly expanded for poor families. Real (inflation adjusted) social spending per person has increased by more than 300%.
3 His policies have once and for all refuted the notion that the competitive demands of ‘globalization’ (deep and extensive insertion in the world market) are incompatible with large-scale social welfare policies. Chavez has demonstrated that links to the world market are compatible with the construction of a more developed welfare state under a popularly-based government
The large-scale, long-term practical accomplishments of the Chavez government, however have been overlooked by liberal and social democratic academics in Venezuela and their colleagues in the US and Europe, who prefer to criticize secondary institutional and policy weaknesses, failing to take into account the world-historic significance of the changes taking place in the context of a hostile, aggressively militarist-driven empire.
4 No reasonable and rigorous contemporary analysis can seriously provide an accurate assessment of Venezuela while glossing over the tremendous accomplishments achieved during the Hugo Chavez presidency.
It is within the framework of Chavez’ innovative and courageous political-social breakthroughs that we should proceed to an analysis of the advances, contradictions and negative aspects of specific political, economic, social and cultural policies, practices and institutions.
The Advances and Limitations of Economic Policy
Venezuela has made tremendous advances in the economy since the failed coup of April 11, 2002 and the employers’ lockout of December 2002-February 2003, which led to a 24% decline in the GDP.
5 Under President Chavez’ leadership and with favorable terms of trade, Venezuela grew by over 10% during the past 5 years, decreasing poverty levels from over 50% to less than 28%, surpassing any country in the world in terms of the rate of poverty-reduction. The economy has, in contrast to the past, accumulated over $35 billion dollars in foreign exchange reserves despite a vast increase in social spending and has totally freed itself of dependence on the onerous terms imposed by the self-styled ‘international banks’ (IMF, World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank) by paying off its debt.
6 The government has nationalized strategic enterprises in the oil and gas industries, steel, cement, food production and distribution, telecommunications and electricity industries. It has passed new excess profits taxes, doubling its revenues. It has signed new petroleum and gas joint ventures with over a dozen European, Asian and Latin American multinationals giving the Venezuelan state majority control. It has expropriated several million acres of uncultivated farm land from speculators and absentee owners and, more recently, an additional 32 under-producing plantations.
7 The importance of these structural changes cannot be understated. In the first place they increased the capacity of the Chavez government to make or influence strategic decisions regarding investment, re-investment, pricing and marketing. The increase in state ownership increases the flow of revenues and profits into the federal treasury, enhancing financing of productive investments, social programs and downstream processing plants and services. The government is slowly diversifying its petroleum markets from a hostile adversary (the USA ) to trade and investment with countries like China , Brazil , Iran and Russia , thus reducing Venezuela ’s vulnerability to arbitrary economic boycotts.
The government has started a large-scale, long-term project to diversify the economy, and especially to become food self-sufficient in staples like milk, meat, vegetables and poultry.
8 Equally important investments in processing raw petroleum into value-added products like fertilizers and plastics are now operative, albeit at a slow pace. New refineries are on schedule to substitute dependence on US based operations and to add value to their exports. New public transport systems are advancing as is visible in the new metro being built in Caracas , which will lessen the traffic jams and air pollution. Over 2.5 billion Strong Bolivars, the new Venezuelan currency (over $1 billion dollars) has been allocated in the form of incentives, credit and subsidies to promote the increase in agricultural production and processing.
9 Investments in new lines of production linked to social programs are underway, including new enterprises manufacturing 15,000 prefabricated houses per year.
10 Venezuela, like the rest of the world (China, EU, USA, Australia and so on) is deeply affected by inflation, especially of imported food. Inflation has escalated over the last 3 years rising from 14% in 2005, to 17% in 2006 and 22% in 2007, threatening to undermine the gains in living standards made over the last 5 years.
11 Government attempts to impose price controls has had limited effect as big food producers have cut back on production, food distributors have decrease shipments and even hoarded essential goods and retail sellers have traded on the black market. On the surface, the problem is that consumer power has increased faster than productivity, increasing demand relative to supply. However, the deeper structural reason is the decline in capitalist investment in production and distribution – despite high profits. Many capitalist food producers and food processors have diverted their profits into investments in speculative activity, including imports of luxury goods and real estate where there is a higher rate of return. Some have lessened investment because of opposition to the government, others because of fears of agrarian reform, while all complain about ‘price controls’ leading to a ‘profit squeeze’. These complaints do not account for low productivity, which existed before price controls and continued even after the government lifted the controls. Inflation and the resultant negative impact is one of the principal reason for popular abstention during the December 2007 referendum and is the cause of popular discontent today in Venezuela . Both the far right and the ultra-left (especially in some neighborhoods and trade unions) have been exploiting this discontent.
Inflation is one of the principal reasons for the decline of the popularity of various regimes (Left, Center and Right) throughout history in Europe, as well as in Latin America .
12 In large part this is because the great majority of workers in Venezuela are self-employed and have no organization or wage and income indexes to keep up with the rise in prices. In Venezuela , even the major industries, like petroleum, steel and aluminum, have ‘sub-contracted’ most of their workers who lack any power to negotiate for wage increases tied to inflation. Government subsidies and promotional incentives to industrial and agricultural capitalists to promote productivity has led to increased profits – without commensurate increases in wage income.
During the period from February to April 2008, the state intervened directly in the productive process, through the takeover of unproductive companies and farms. New worker and peasant demands include ‘opening the books’ of the profitable firms and farms in pursuit of wage and collective bargaining negotiations, re-opening closed firms and investments in new public enterprises. Chavez recognized that the problem of production (supply) will continue to lead to too many Bolivars chasing too few consumer goods – inflation, discontent and political vulnerability – unless he accelerates the nationalization process and deepens public ownership.
To effectively intervene and take control of strategic economic sectors, the government requires working class organizations, cadres and leaders able to co-manage the enterprises, ‘opening the books’ on investments, profits and wages and establish work discipline. Under present capital-labor relations, capitalists totally neglect investment in technology and innovations, employ temporary or contingent workers under precarious conditions and depend on the Venezuelan state to enforce harsh labor codes.
In advancing the Bolivarian road to Socialism, President Chavez has to deal with incompetent and reactionary officials in his own government. For example, prior to Chavez’ nationalization of the major steel multinational SIDOR, the Minister of Labor, an incompetent and inexperienced functionary with no prior relation to labor, sided with the company and approved of the Governor of the state of Bolivar in calling out the National Guard to break the strike. Throughout 2007-2008, management of SIDOR refused to negotiate in good faith with the unions, which provoked strikes in January in February and March 2008. The intransigence of the steel bosses increased the militancy of the workers and led to Chavez’ intervention. In defense of his order to nationalize, Chavez cited the positive role of the steel workers in opposing the coup, the ‘slave-like’ work conditions and the export strategies, which denied the domestic construction industry the steel it needed for high-priority homebuilding. He called on the nationalized industry to be run under ‘workers councils’ in a efficient and productive manner.
13 Government repression of strikes provoked regional union solidarity and worker-led marches against the National Guard and calls for the resignation of the ineffective Labor Minister. After Chavez nationalized steel, trade unions from major industrial sectors met to coordinate support for President Chavez and press for further moves toward public ownership. Equally ominous, brutality and excess use of force ordered by the general in charge of the National Guard is indicative of a profoundly anti-working class, pro-big business bias of the Guard officers, a potentially dangerous threat to the Chavez government in the future.
14 By confronting the problem of inflation and the overvalued, strong Venezuelan Bolivar Chavez is dealing with an issue that is real and deeply felt by most workers. Failure by the government to deal with its structural roots makes it vulnerable to demagogic appeals by the right and the sectarian ultra-left and its principle beneficiary, the US imperialism.
New public investments in fertilizer plants, prefabricated housing, positive measures reducing inflation by one third in the first 2 months of 2008 and policies sharply increasing food supply by 20% indicate that the Chavez government is beginning to confront some of the economy’s weak points. In visits to several public and private retail markets during the last part of February and early March, we did not find any shortages of essential items, contrary to the opposition, and the US and European media reports. An opposition organized protest of shortages of liquid gas in Catia (a popular neighborhood in Caracas ) was front-page news (with blown-up photos) in the opposition daily, El Universal, but with no follow up reports when the government sent in supplies the next day.
15 By the beginning of 2008, public spending, which is not always efficiently invested or entirely free of corruption, reduced unemployment 8.5%, the lowest in decades.
16 However a government goal of 5.5% seems over optimistic, especially in light of the fall-out from the US recession and decline in European demand.
The big challenge to Chavez’ economic policy in 2008, a year of important state and local elections in November, is to ensure that the inevitable mid-year increase in public spending is directed toward productive investments and not to populist short-term programs, which will ignite another wave of inflation. We can expect that, as the elections approach, the capitalist class will once again resort to ‘planned shortages’, distribution blockages, as well as other politically induced economic problems in order to blame and discredit the government.
Unless the government reduces its reliance on the private sector for investments, employment, production, finance and distribution, they will be forced into taking costly and improvised measures to avoid electoral losses and popular abstention. The indivisible ties between private business control over strategic economic decisions and their paramount interest in pursuing political measures designed to undermine the Chavez government, means that the government will remain under constant threat unless it takes control of the commanding heights of the economy. In recognition of those structural factors Chavez has announced plans to nationalize strategic sectors. The Chavez government has become pro-active, anticipating shocks from the economic elite and displacing them from power. Depending on the private sector will force the government to continue to be ‘reactive’, improvising responses to economic attacks during and after the fact and suffering the negative political consequences.
Politics: The Chavistas Strike Back
During the latter half of 2007, in the run-up to the referendum, and early 2008, the rightwing offensive (aided by the ultra-left) took hold and put the government on the defensive. Early March 2008, the pro-Chavez forces regrouped and launched a new political party – The Venezuelan United Socialist Party (PSUV) at a national convention in Maracaibo . In response to the defeat of the referendum, President Chavez called on his supporters to engage in a ‘Three R’s Campaign’: Review, Rectify and Re-launch. This initiative has led to the election of new party leaders, a decline in old guard paternalistic bosses in the leadership of the PSUV, a rejection of sectarianism toward other pro-Chavez parties and a revitalization of grass roots activism.
17 The party is intended to oversee the mobilization of the Chavez supporters and to educate and organize potential working and lower middle class constituents. The party is mandated to evaluate, criticize and correct the implementation of policies by local officials and engage the mass social movements in common struggle. To succeed the party must organize local popular power to counter-act corrupt Chavez-affiliated as well as opposition policy-makers, press local demands and initiatives, counter rightwing infiltration of neighborhoods by Colombian and local terrorists and turn out the vote at election time.
For the PSUV to succeed as a political organization it needs to take power away from the local clientelistic political machines built around some of the state, regional and municipal level Chavista officials. It needs to overcome the tendency to appoint leaders and candidates from above and to deepen rank and file control over decisions and leaders.
18 Even during the founding congress of the PSUV several delegations criticized the process of electing the national leadership – for neglecting popular representation and overloading it with much criticized political officials.
19 Active communal councils under democratic control have been effective in giving voice and representation to a large number of urban and poor neighborhoods. They have secured popular loyalty and support wherever they have delivered needed services and led struggles against incompetent or recalcitrant Chavista officials.
Violence, crime and personal insecurity are major issues for most poor and lower middle class supporters of the Chavez government and the police are viewed as ineffective reducing crime and securing their neighborhoods and as, at times, complicit with the gangsters.
20 Proposals by the government for greater cooperation between neighborhood committees and the police in identifying criminals have had little effect. This is in part because police have shown little interest in developing on-the-ground, day-by-day relations in the poorer barrios, which they tend to view as ‘criminal breeding grounds’.
Armed gangs controlling the poor neighborhoods commit most of the crime. Local residents fear retaliation if they cooperate or worse, they think that the police are complicit with the criminals. Even more seriously reports from reliable intelligence sources have identified large-scale infiltration of Colombian death squad narco traffickers who combine drugs peddling and rightwing organizing, posing a double threat to local and national security. While the government has taken notice of the general problem of individual insecurity and the specific problem of narco-political infiltration, no national plan of action has yet been put into practice, apart from periodic routine round-ups of low-level common criminals.
21 Venezuela should learn from the example of Cuba, which has had successful crime fighting and anti-terrorist programs for decades organized around a tight network of local ‘committees to defend the revolution’ and backed by a politically trained rapid action internal security force and an efficient judiciary. Individual security and political freedom depends on the collective knowledge of crime groups’ infiltration and the courage of local committees and individuals. Their cooperation requires trust in the integrity, respect and political loyalty of the internal security forces. Their intelligence, evidence collection and testimony depend on the protection of local citizens by the internal security forces against gangster retaliation.
A new type of ‘police official’ needs to be created who does not view the neighborhood and its committees as hostile territory – they must live and identify with the people they are paid to protect. To be effective at the local level, the Chavez government must display exemplary behavior at the national level: It must prosecute and jail criminals and not grant amnesty or give light sentences to coup-makers and economic saboteurs, as Chavez did in early 2008. The failure of the current Attorney General to pursue the murderers of her predecessor, Attorney General Danilo Anderson, was not only a shameful act but set an example of incompetent and feeble law enforcement which does not create confidence in the will of the state to fight political assassins.
22 ‘Popular power’ will only become meaningful to the mass of the poor when they feel secure enough to walk their streets without assaults and intimidation, when the gangs no longer break into homes and local stores, and when armed narco-traffickers no longer flaunt the law. In Venezuela , the struggle against the oligarchs, George Bush and Colombia ’s Uribe begins with a community-based war against local criminals, including a comprehensive tactical and strategic sweep of known criminal gangs followed by exemplary punishment for those convicted of terrorizing the residents. This is one way to make the government respected at the grass roots level and to re-assert and make operative the term popular sovereignty. In every barrio today it is not only the ‘right wing NGO’s’, which challenge Chavez’ authority, it is the armed criminal elements, increasingly linked with reactionary political groups. To successfully confront the external threats, it is incumbent on the government to defeat the gangsters and narco-traffickers that represent a real obstacle to mass mobilization in time of a national emergency, like a new coup attempt.
Failures by some middle level Chavez officials to ensure security and resolve local problems have eroded popular support for political incumbents. The majority of local residents, popular leaders and activists still voice support for President Chavez even as they are critical of the ‘people around him’, ‘his advisers’, and ‘the opportunists’.
23 How this will play out in the November election is not totally clear. But unless fundamental changes take place in candidates and policies, it is likely that the opposition will increase their current minimal representation in state and municipal governments.
Social and Cultural Advances and Contradictions
Venezuela , under the leadership of President Chavez, has made unprecedented social and cultural changes benefiting the broad majority of the urban and rural poor, and working and lower middle classes. Nine new Bolivarian universities and dozens of technical schools have been established with over 200,000 students.
24 Over 2.5 million books, pamphlets and journals have been published by the new state-financed publishing houses, including novels, technical books, poetry, history, social research, natural sciences, medical and scientific texts.
25 Two major television studios and communitarian-based TV stations provide international, national and local news coverage that challenges opposition and US-based (CNN) anti-government propaganda. A major news daily, Vea, and several monthly and weekly magazines debate and promote pro-Chavez politics.
26 Several government-funded missions, composed of tens of thousands of young volunteers, have reduced urban and (to a lesser degree) rural illiteracy, extended health coverage, while increasing local participation and organization in the urban ‘ranchos’ or shantytowns. Major cultural events, including musical, theater and dance groups regularly perform in working class neighborhoods. The Ministry of Culture and Popular Power has initiated a vast number of overseas and local programs involving the Caribbean and Latin American countries.
27 Sports programs, with the aid of Cuban trainers, have received large scale government funding for physical infrastructure (gymnasiums, playing fields, uniforms and professional trainers) and have vastly increased the number of athletes among the urban poor. Major funding to defend and promote indigenous and Afro-Venezuelan culture is in the works, and some movement to ‘affirmative action’ is envisioned, though cultural representation in fields other than sports, music and dance is still quite limited. There is no question that Venezuela is going through a ‘Cultural Revolution’ – reconstructing and recovering its popular, historical and nationalist roots buried below the frivolous and imitative artifacts of a century of culturally colonized oligarchs and their middle class followers.
Cultural Contradictions and Challenges
While the Venezuelan cultural reformation has made a massive impact in raising educational and cultural levels, it has not yet decisively displaced the cultural hegemony of the bourgeoisie and US imperialism. The latter still holds sway over the vast majority of the upper and affluent middle class professionals, Central University academics and students, and important sectors of the public and especially private professional groups (doctors, lawyers, publicists, engineers etc). Despite substantial pay increases and additional stipends, these middle class professionals still cling to their reactionary beliefs in a fit of ‘status panic’.
President Chavez, speaking at the first graduating class of the new inclusive (open admission) Venezuelan Bolivarian University, cited a doctoral thesis which found that 94% of students at the tax-payer funded elite ‘public’ university, Venezuelan Central University (UCV), were from the upper and middle class, while 99% of the students at the private Simon Bolivar University (SBU) were from the same privileged classes. What was especially disturbing was the increasingly exclusive and privileged nature of the UCV and SBU: in 1981 the UCV enrolled 21% from the lower classes compared to 6.5% in 2000; the SBU went from 13% to 1% in the same period. To open higher education to the working class, the poor and the peasants, the Chavez government has begun the construction of 29 public universities, upgrading 29 vocational-technical schools into Polytechnic Universities, and increasing the number of full scholarships from 6,000 to 10,000.
While the vast number of lower class neighborhoods and individuals have benefited from state health, educational and cultural programs, popular education in creating collective solidarity and class consciousness still has had a limited impact. Some individuals from the lower class who had set up economic cooperatives were either incapable of operating them or absconded with state funds. Similar theft and corruption afflicted some of the ‘missions’, where poor accounting practices facilitated waste and losses. Populist paternalism and official negligence (and corruption) weakened the effort to create a new nationalist class-consciousness linked to a new popular hegemony. On the other hand, President Chavez’ intervention in nationalizing the steel industry during the labor-capital dispute heightened class-consciousness and factory worker identification with the Venezuelan road to socialism.
Over the past 5 years the state-financed television programs have greatly improved in terms of their professionalism and programming. They still have not fully overcome the continued hegemonic hold of the bourgeois media over sectors of the popular majority. In terms of entertainment and breaking news coverage, especially during the run-up and the day of the December 2, 2007 referendum, the bourgeois media dominated public attention due, in large part, to the absence of pro-government media coverage.
One of the least effective pro-government print media is the daily newspaper Vea, which is read by few people because of its poor news reporting (big headlines, no content) and mediocre columns and essays. The Minister of Culture and Popular Power told me that substantial changes would soon take place.
28 The wide reaching cultural programs have improved cultural levels but has not led to the growth of mass Chavista cultural movements. Less than 10% of the students at the Central University of Venezuela (UCV) are active members of Chavista student movements or affiliated organizations (according to a Chavista student leader), despite significant improvements in university salaries and facilities.
29 Apparently family and class identification takes precedence over cultural egalitarianism. The vast majority of students and professors at the UCV are apolitical, indifferent or into strictly vocational training and individual mobility. An active minority supports opposition groups; some are linked to US universities and CIA-funded ‘leadership training’ programs while small Trotskyist, Maoist and other sects agitate against the government.
The emergence of the autonomous pro-Chavez communal councils, linked to the Ministry of Culture and Popular Power, is probably the most effective counter-hegemonic movement. The political and social activities of party activists and leaders of the PSUV can succeed in creating a new class consciousness so long as they involve the masses in solving their own practical problems and assume local responsibility for their actions.
Chavista cadres, which act paternally, create patron-client consciousness vulnerable to quick switches to oligarchic-client relations. The key contradiction in the cultural reformation is in the ‘middle class’ Chavista configuration which carries over its paternal orientation in implementing its ‘class conscious programs to the popular classes.
There is a great need for recruitment and education of young local cadres from the barrios, who speak the language of the people and have the class bonds to integrate the masses into a nationalist and socialist cultural-social program. The government’s cultural and popular power movement is a formidable force but it faces tenacious opposition from the virulent and disreputable mass media aligned with the oligarchy.
As the Venezuelan process moves toward egalitarian socialist values, it faces the more subtle but more insidious opposition of middle class students, professors and professionals who in the name of ‘liberal democracy’ and ‘pluralism’ seek to destroy cultural class solidarity. In other words, we have a struggle between the progressive minority from the middle class in the government against the majority of reactionary liberal middle class individuals embedded in academic institutions and in the community-based NGO’s. Only by gaining the support of the people outside the middle class, that is, the radical and exploited popular classes, can the cultural reformists in the Culture Ministry create a dominant popular hegemony.
Social Change: the Struggle of Popular Social Movements versus the Reactionary Middle Class Movements
To discuss the highly polarized social confrontation between the pro-Chavez popular movements and the US-backed oligarch-supported middle class movements, it is important to contextualize the social, political and economic relations, which preceded the ascendancy of the Chavez government. The United States was the key determinant of the economic conditions and the principal point of reference of Venezuela ’s oligarchy and middle class. US-Venezuelan relations were based on US hegemony in all spheres – from oil to consumerism, from sports to life style, from bank accounts to marriage partners. The role models and life styles of the Venezuelan middle class were found in the upscale Miami suburbs, shopping malls, condos and financial services. The affluent classes were upper class consumers; they never possessed a national entrepreneurial vocation.
The oil contracts between US and European firms and the PDVSA were among the most lucrative and favorable joint ventures in the world. They included negligible tax and royalty payments and long term contracts to exploit one of the biggest petroleum sites in the world (the Orinoco ‘tar belt’). The entire executive leadership of what was formally described as a ‘state enterprise’ was heavily engaged in dubious overseas investments with heavy overhead costs, which disguised what was really executive pillage and extensive cost overruns, that is, massive sustained corruption.
30 From the senior oil executives, the pillaged oil wealth flowed to the upper middle class, lawyers, consultants, publicists, media and conglomerate directors, a small army of upscale boutique retailers, real estate speculators and their political retainers and their entourage among middle level employees, accountants, military officials, police chiefs and subsidized academic advisers. All of these ‘beneficiaries’ of the oil pillage banked their money in US banks, especially in Miami, or invested it in US banks, bonds and real estate. In a word, Venezuela was a model case of a rentier-bureaucratic ruling class profoundly integrated into the US circuits of petroleum-investment-finance. Systematically, culturally and ideologically they saw themselves as subordinate players in the US ‘free trade-free market’ scheme of things. Chavez’ assertions of sovereignty and his policies re-nationalizing Venezuelan resources were seen as direct threats to the upper-middle class’ essential ties to the US , and to their visions of a ‘ Miami ’ life style.
This deep subordinated integration and the colonized middle class values and interests that accompanied it, was deeply shaken by the crash in the Venezuelan economy throughout the 1980’s and 1990’. Emigration and relative impoverishment of a wide swath of public employees, professionals and previously better-paid workers seemed to ‘radicalize’ them or create widespread malaise. The profound downward mobility of the impoverished working class and lower-middle class, as well as professionals, led to the discredit of the endemically corrupt leaders of the two major political parties, mass urban riots, strikes and public support for an aborted Chavez-led military uprising (1992). These events led to his subsequent election (1998) and the approval of the referendum authorizing the writing of a new, more profoundly democratic constitution. Yet the middle class rebellion and even protest vote in favor of Chavez, was not accompanied by any change in political ideology or basic values. They saw Chavez as a stepladder to overcome their diminished status, and paradoxically, to refinance their ‘ Miami ’ life-style, and gain access to the US consumer market.
Time and circumstance would demonstrate that when push came to shove, in November 2001-April 2002, when the US confronted and was complicit in the short-lived, but failed coup, the bulk of the middle class backed the US-Venezuelan elite.
31 The US-backed coup was a direct response to President Chavez’ refusal to support the White House-Zionist orchestrated ‘War on Terror’. Chavez declared, ‘You don’t fight terror with terror’ in answer to President Bush’s post-September 11, 2001 call to arms against Afghanistan . This affirmed Chavez’ principled defense of the rights of self-determination and his unwavering stand against colonial wars. US Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, Mark Grossman personally led an unsuccessful mission to Caracas in the fall of 2001 to pressure Chavez to back down.
32 Chavez was the only president in the world prepared to stand up to the new militarist Bush doctrine and thus was designated an enemy. Even worse, from the point of view of the Bush Administration, President Chavez’ nationalist policies represented an alternative in Latin America at a time (2000-2003) when mass insurrections, popular uprisings and the collapse of pro-US client rulers (Argentina, Ecuador and Bolivia) were constant front-page news.
In the run-up to the April 2002 coup, the policies of the Chavez government were extremely friendly to what are reputed to be ‘middle class’ values and interests -- in terms of democratic freedoms, incremental socio-economic reforms, orthodox fiscal policies and respect for foreign and national property holdings and capitalist labor relations. There were no objective material reasons for the middle classes or even the economic oligarchy to support the coup except for the fact that their status, consumerist dreams, life style and economic investments were closely linked with the United States .
In a word, the US exercised near complete hegemony over the Venezuelan upper and middle classes. As a result, its policies and its global interests became identified as ‘the interests’ of the wealthy Venezuelans. Venezuelan elite identification with US policy was so strong that it compelled them to back a violent coup against their own democratically elected government. The Caracas ruling class supported the imposition of an ephemeral US-backed dictatorial political regime and an agenda, which, if fully implemented, would have reduced their access to oil revenues, and the trade and socio-economic benefits they had enjoyed under Chavez. The brief coup-junta proposed to withdraw from OPEC, weakening Venezuela’s bargaining position with the US and EU, expel over 20,000 Cuban physicians, nurses, dentists and other health workers who were providing services to over 2 million low income Venezuelans without receiving any reciprocal compensation from Washington.
33 The economic elite and the middle class’s second attempt to overthrow President Chavez began in December 2002 with a bosses and oil executive lockout. This lasted until February 2003 and cost over $10 billion dollars in lost revenues, wages, salaries and profits.
34 Many Venezuelan businessmen and women committed economic suicide in their zeal to destroy Chavez; unable to meet loan and rent payments, they went bankrupt. Over 15,000 executives and professionals at the PDVSA, who actively promoted the strike and, in a fit of elite ‘Luddite’ folly, sabotaged the entire computerized oil production process, were fired. The principal pro-US and long time CIA funded trade union confederation suffered a double defeat for their participation in the attempted coup and lockout, becoming an empty bureaucratic shell. The upper and middle classes ultimately became political and social losers in their failed attempts to recover their ‘privileged status’ and retain their ‘special relation’ with the US . While the privileged classes saw themselves as ‘downwardly mobile’ (an image which did not correspond with the reality of their new wealth especially during the commodity boom of 2004-2008), their frustrations and resentments festered and produced grotesque fantasies of their being ruled by a ‘brutal communist dictator’. In fact, under Chavez’ presidency (after 2003), they have enjoyed a rising standard of living, a mixed economy, bountiful consumer imports and were constantly entertained by the most creatively hysterical, rabidly anti-government private media in the entire hemisphere. The media propaganda fed their delusions of oppression. The hardcore privileged middle-class minority came out of their violent struggle against Chavez depleted of their military allies. Many of their leaders from the business associations and moribund trade union apparatus were briefly imprisoned, in exile or out of a job.
On the other hand, the pro-Chavez mass supporters who took to the streets in their millions and restored him to the Presidency and the workers who played a major role in putting the oil industry back in production and the factories back to work, provided the basis for the creation of new mass popular movements. Chavez never forgot their support during the emergency. One of the reasons he cited for nationalizing the steel industry was the support of the steel workers in smashing the bosses’ lockout and keeping the factories in operation.
Venezuela is one of the few countries where both the Left and the Right have built mass social movements with the capacity to mobilize large numbers of people. It is also the country where these movements have passed through intense cyclical volatility. The tendency has been for organizations to emerge out of mass struggle with great promise and then fade after a ‘great event’ only to be replaced by another organized ‘movement’, which, in turn, retains some activists but fails to consolidate its mass base.
In effect what has been occurring is largely sequential movements based on pre-existing class commitments which respond in moments of national crises and then return to everyday ‘local activities’ around family survival, consumer spending, home and neighborhood improvements. While this cycle of mobilization ‘ebb and flow’ is common everywhere, what is striking in Venezuela is the degree of engagement and withdrawal: the mass outpouring and the limited number of continuing activists.
Looking at the big picture over the past decade of President Chavez’s rule, there is no question that civil society activity is richer, more varied and expressive than during any other government in the last sixty years.
Starting from the popular democratic restoration movement that ousted the short-lived military-civilian junta and returned Chavez to power, local community based movements proliferated throughout the ranchos (slums) of the big cities, especially in Caracas . With the bosses lockout and actual sabotage, the factory and oil field workers and a loyal minority of technicians took the lead in the restoration of production and defeating the US-backed executive elite. The direct action committees became the nuclei for the formation of communal councils, the launching of a new labor confederation (UNT), and new ‘electoral battalions’, which decisively defeated a referendum to oust Chavez. From these ‘defensive organizations’ sprang the idea (from the government) to organize production cooperatives and self-governing neighborhood councils to by-pass established regional and local officials. Peasant organizing grew and successfully pressured for the implementation of the land reform law of 2001. As the left organized, the right also turned to its ‘normal institutional base’ – FEDECAMARAS (the big business association), the cattle and large landowner organizations, the retailers and private professionals in the Chambers of Commerce and toward neighborhood organizations in the up-scale neighborhoods of the elite centered in Altimar and elsewhere. After suffering several demoralizing defeats, the right increasingly turned its attention toward US funding and training from NGO’s, like SUMATE, to penetrate lower class barrios and exploit discontent and frustrations among the middle class university students whose street demonstrations became detonators of wider conflicts.
35 The Chavistas consolidated their organizational presence with health clinics, subsidized food stores and coops and educational programs. The Right consolidated its hold over the major ‘prestigious’ universities and private high schools. Both competed in trying to gain the allegiance of important sectors of the less politicized, sometimes religious low-income informal workers and higher paid unionized workers – both focused on immediate income issues. The Chavistas secured nearly 50% of the vote among the voters in a radical referendum spelling out a transition to socialism, losing by 1%. The right wing capitalized on the abstention of 3 million, mostly pro-Chavez, voters to defeat the referendum.
36 The right wing, via violence and sustained disinvestment in the country has polarized Venezuela despite nearly double-digit sustained growth over a 5 year period. This basic contradiction reflects the fact that the ‘socialist’ project’ of the government takes place in the socio-economic framework in which big capitalists control almost all the banking, financing, distribution, manufacturing, transport and service enterprises against the gas-oil-telecom, electricity, steel, cement and social service sectors of the government. In April 2008, Chavez launched a major offensive to reverse this adverse correlation of economic power in favor of the working classes by expropriating 27 sugar plantations, food distribution networks, meat packing chains, as well as the major cement and steel complexes.
In 2008 Chavez recognized that the populace mobilized ‘from below’ was stymied by the ‘commands’ issued by the economic elite ‘from above’. Whether it is food distribution or production, job creation or informal/contingent employment, funding small farmers or speculative landlords trading in bonds or financing oil derivative plants – all of these strategic economic decisions which affect class relations, class organization, class struggle and class consciousness were in the hands of the mortal enemies of the Chavez government and its mass base. By directly attacking these crucial areas affecting everyday life, Chavez is revitalizing and sustaining mass popular organization. Otherwise to remain subject to elite economic sabotage and disinvestment is to demoralize and alienate the popular classes from their natural gravitation to the Chavez government.
US-Venezuelan Relations
More than in most current Latin American societies, the Venezuelan ruling and middle classes have demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice their immediate economic interests, current remunerative opportunities, lucrative profits and income in pursuit of the high risk political interests of the US . How else can one explain their backing of the US-orchestrated coup of April 2002 at a time when Chavez was following fairly orthodox fiscal and monetary policies, and had adopted a strict constitutionalist approach to institutional reform? How else can one explain engaging in an executive and bosses 2-month lockout of industry and oil production, leading to the loss of billions in private revenues, profits and salaries and ultimately the bankruptcy of hundreds of private firms and the firing of over 15,000 well-paid senior and middle level oil executives?
Clearly the ‘ultra-hegemony’ of the US over the Venezuelan elite and middle class has a strong component of ideological-psychological self-delusion: a deep, almost pathological identification with the powerful, superior white producer-consumer society and state and a profound hostility and disparagement of ‘deep Venezuela ’ – its Afro-Indian-mestizo masses.
Typifying Theodor Adorno’s ‘authoritarian personality’, the Venezuelan elite and its middle class imitators are at the feet and bidding of those idealized North Americans above and at the throat of those perceived as degraded dark-skinned, poor Venezuelans below. This hypothesis of the colonial mentality can explain the pathological behavior of Venezuelan professionals who, like its doctors and academics, eagerly seek prestigious post-graduate training in the United States while disparaging the ‘poor quality’ of new neighborhood clinics for the poor where none had existed before and the new open admission policies of the Bolivarian universities – open to the once marginalized masses.
The deep integration – through consumption, investments and vicarious identification – of the Venezuelan upper and middle classes with the US elite forms the bed-rock of Washington ’s campaign to destabilize and overthrow the Chavez government and destroy the constitutional order. Formal and informal psychosocial ties are strengthened by the parasitical-rentier economic links based on the monthly/yearly consumer pilgrimages to Miami . Real estate investments and illegal financial transfers and transactions with US financial institutions, as well as the lucrative illegal profit sharing between the former executives of PDVSA and US oil majors provided the material basis for pro-imperialist policies.
US policy makers have a ‘natural collaborator class’ willing and able to become the active transmission belt of US policy and to serve US interests. As such it is correct to refer to these Venezuelans as ‘vassal classes’.
After the abject failures of Washington ’s vassal classes to directly seize power through a violent putsch and after having nearly self-destructed in a failed attempt to rule or ruin via the bosses’ lockout, the US State Department oriented them toward a war of attrition. This involves intensified propaganda and perpetual harassment campaigns designed to erode the influence of the Chavez government over its mass popular base.
Imperial academic advisers, media experts and ideologues have proposed several lines of ideological-political warfare, duly adapted and incorporated by the Venezuelan ‘vassal classes’. This exercise in so-called ‘soft-power’ (propaganda and social organizing) is meant to create optimal conditions for the eventual use of ‘hard power’ – military intervention, coup d’etat, terror, sabotage, regional war or, more likely, some combination of these tactics.
37 The predominance of ‘soft power’ at one point in time does not preclude selective exercises of ‘hard power’ such as the recent Colombian cross-border military attack on Venezuela ’s ally Ecuador in March 2008. Soft power is not an end in itself; it is a means of accumulating forces and building the capacity to launch a violent frontal assault at the Venezuelan government’s ‘weakest moment’.
Imperial-Vassal
Three Part ‘Soft Power’ Campaign: Drugs, Human Rights and Terrorism
In the period between 2007-2008, the US and the Venezuelan elite attempted to discredit the Venezuelan government through the publication and dissemination of a report fabricated to paint Venezuela as a ‘narco-center’. A DEA (US Drug Enforcement Agency) report named Venezuela as a ‘major transport point’ and ignored the fact that, under Washington ’s key client in Latin America President Alvaro Uribe, Colombia is the major producer, processor and exporter of cocaine, is beyond bizarre. Blatant omissions are of little importance to the US State Department and the private Venezuelan mass media. The fact that Venezuela is successfully intercepting massive amounts of drugs from Colombia is of no importance. For US academic apologists of empire, lies at the service of destabilizing Chavez are a virtuous exercise in ‘soft power’.
38 The US, its vassal classes and the Washington-financed human rights groups have disseminated false charges of human rights abuses under Chavez, while ignoring US and Israeli Middle East genocidal practices and the Colombian government’s long-standing campaigns of killing scores of trade unionists and hundreds of peasants each year.
Washington ’s attempt to label Venezuela as a supporter of ‘terrorists’ was resoundingly rejected by a United Nation’s report issued in April 2008.39 There is no evidence of systematic state sponsored human rights violations in Venezuela . There are significant human rights abuses by the opposition-backed big landowners, murdering over 200 landless rural workers. There are workplace abuses by numerous FEDECAMARAS-affiliated private employers.40 It is precisely in response to capitalist violations of workers rights that Chavez decided to nationalize the steel plants. No doubt Washington will fail to properly ‘acknowledge’ these human rights advances on the part of Chavez.
The point of the ‘human rights’ charges is to reverse roles: Venezuela, the victim of US and vassal class’ coups and assassinations is labeled a human rights abusers while the real executioners are portrayed as ‘victims’. This is a common propaganda technique used by aggressor regimes and classes to justify the unilateral exercise of brutality and repression.
In line with its global militarist-imperialist ideology, Washington and its Venezuelan vassals have charged the Venezuelan government with aiding and abetting ‘terrorists’, namely the FARC insurgency in Colombia . Neither the Bush or Uribe regimes have presented evidence of material aid to the FARC. As mentioned above, a UN review of the Washington-Uribe charges against the Chavez government have rejected every allegation. This fabrication is used to camouflage the fact that US Special Forces and the Colombian armed forces have been infiltrating armed paramilitary forces into Venezuela ’s poor neighborhoods to establish footholds and block future barrio mobilizations defending Chavez.
The Hard Power Campaign - Three Part Strategy: Economic Boycotts, Low Intensity Warfare and the Colombia Card
Complementing the propaganda campaign, Washington has instumentalized a major oil producer (Exxon-Mobil) to reject a negotiated compensation settlement, which would have left the US oil giant with lucrative minority shares in one of the world’s biggest oil fields (the Orinoco oil fields). All the other European oil companies signed on to the new public-private oil contracts.
41 When Exxon-Mobil demanded compensation, PDVSA made a generous offer, which was abruptly rejected. When PDVSA agreed to overseas arbitration, Exxon-Mobil abruptly secured court orders in the US , Amsterdam and Great Britain ‘freezing’ PDVSA overseas assets. A London court quickly threw out Exxon-Mobil’s case. As with other countries’ experiences, such as Cuba in 1960, Chile in 1971-71 and Iran in 1953, the oil majors act as a political instrument of US foreign policy rather than as economic institutions respecting national sovereignty. In this case, Washington has used Exxon-Mobil as an instrument of psychological warfare – to heighten tensions and provide their local vassals with an ‘incident’ which they can elaborate into fear propaganda. The Venezuelan private media cite the threat of a US oil boycott and evoke a scenario of a collapsing economy causing starvation; they attribute this fantastic scene to the Chavez government’s ‘provocation’. By evoking this illusion of US power and Venezuelan impotence, they obfuscate the fact that the new oil contracts will add billions of dollars to the Venezuelan Treasury, which will benefit all Venezuelans.
US military strategy options have been severely limited by its prolonged and open-ended wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and its military-buildup threatening Iran . As a result, US military strategy toward Venezuela involves a $6 billion dollar military build-up of Colombia over the last eight years, including arms, training, combat advisers, Special Forces, mercenaries and logistics. US advisers encourage Colombian armed forces to engage in cross frontier operations including the kidnapping of Venezuelan citizens, armed assaults and paramilitary infiltration capped by the bombing in Ecuador of a campsite of a FARC negotiating team preparing a prisoner release. The US dual purpose of these low intensity military pressures is to probe Venezuela ’s response, its capacity for military mobilization, and to test the loyalties and allegiances of leading intelligence officials and officers in the Venezuelan military. The US has been involved in the infiltration of paramilitary and military operatives into Venezuela , exploiting the easy entrance through the border state of Zulia, the only state governed by the opposition, led by Governor Rosales.
The third component of the military strategy is ‘to integrate’ Venezuela’s armed forces into a ‘regional military command’ proposed by Brazilian President Lula da Silva and endorsed by US Secretary of State Condeleeza Rice.
42 Within that framework, Washington could use its friendly and client generals to pressure Venezuela to accept US military-political hegemony disguised as ‘regional’ initiatives. Unfortunately for Washington , Brazil ruled out a US presence, at least for now.
The US military strategy toward Venezuela is highly dependent on the Colombian Army’s defeat or containment of the guerrillas and the re-conquest of the vast rural areas under insurgent control. This would clear the way for Colombia ’s army to attack Venezuela . A military attack would depend crucially on a sharp political deterioration within Venezuela , based on the opposition gaining control of key states and municipal offices in the up-coming November elections. From advances in institutional positions Washington ’s vassals could undermine the popular national social, economic and neighborhood programs.
Only when the ‘internal circumstances’ of polarized disorder can create sufficient insecurity and undermine everyday production, consumption and transport can the US planners consider moving toward large-scale public confrontation and preparations for a military attack. The US military strategists envision the final phase of an air offensive -Special Forces intervention only when they can be assured of a large-scale Colombian intervention, an internal politico-military uprising and vacillating executive officials unwilling to exercise emergency powers and mass military mobilization. The US strategists require these stringent conditions because the current regime in Washington is politically isolated and discredited, the economy is in a deepening recession, and the budget deficit is ballooning especially its military expenditures in Iraq and Afghanistan . Only marginal extremists in the White House envision a direct military assault in the immediate future. But that could change to the degree that their vassals succeed in sowing domestic chaos and disorder.
Diplomatic and Economic Confrontation: Chavez Versus Bush Diplomatically and economically, President Chavez has gained the upper hand over the Bush Administration.
No country in Latin America supports Washington ’s proposals to intervene, boycott or exclude Venezuela from regional trade, investment or diplomatic forums. No country has broken diplomatic, economic or political relations with Caracas – nor has the US , despite strong moves in that direction by Bush in March 2008 (by labeling Venezuela a ‘terrorist’ country). Even Washington ’s principal vassal state, Colombia , shows no enthusiasm for shedding its $5 billion dollar food and oil trade with Venezuela to accommodate Bush. Chavez has successfully challenged US hegemony in the Caribbean . Through Petro-Caribe, numerous Caribbean and Central American states receive heavily subsidized oil and petroleum products from Venezuela , along with socio-economic aid in exchange for a more favorable diplomatic policy toward Caracas . The US no longer has an automatic voting bloc in the region following its lead against a targeted country.
The Venezuelan government has successfully contributed to the demise of the US-led Free Trade for the Americas (ALCA) proposal and has substituted a new Latin American free trade agreement (ALBA) with at least 6 member states. Venezuela ’s proposal for a Latin American Bank of the South, to bypass the US influenced IDB (BID) has been launched and has the backing of Brazil , Argentina and a majority of the other Latin American states.
43 Washington ’s arms embargo, that included Spain , has been a failure, as Venezuela turned to arms purchases from Russia and elsewhere. Washington’s effort to discourage foreign investment, especially in oil exploration is a complete failure, as China, Russia, Europe, Iran and every major oil producer has invested or is currently negotiating terms.
Despite vehement US opposition, Venezuela has developed a strategic complementary link with Cuba , exchanging subsidized oil and gas sales and large-scale investment for a vast health service contract covering Venezuela ’s needs in all poor neighborhoods.44 Venezuela has consolidated long-term finance and trade ties with Argentina through the purchase of Argentine bonds, which the latter has had difficulty selling given its conflict with the Paris Club.
Venezuela had significantly improved its image in Europe through Chavez’ positive role in mediating the release of FARC prisoners while the US vassal Uribe regime is perceived in Europe as a militaristic, dehumanized narco-driven entity. US militarism and its economic crisis have led to a sharp decline in its image and prestige in Europe , while eroding its economic empire and domestic living standards. Chavez’ opposition to Bush’s global war on terror and his calls for upholding human rights and social welfare has created a favorable international image among the poor of the Third World and within wide circles of public opinion elsewhere.
Vulnerability, Opportunities and Challenges
Presently and for the near future, Venezuela is vulnerable to attack on several fronts. It is experiencing several internal contradictions. Nevertheless it possesses strengths and great opportunities to advance the process of economic and social transformation. Key weaknesses can be located in the state, social economy and national security sectors.
In the sphere of politics, the basic issue is one of democratic representation, articulation and implementation of popular interests by elected and administrative officials. Too often one hears among the Chavista masses in public and private discussions that, ‘We support President Chavez and his policies but…’ and then follows a litany of criticism of local mayors, ministry officials, governors and Chavez’ ‘bad advisers’.
45 Some – not all – of the elected officials are running their campaign on the bases of traditional liberal clientele politics, which reward the few electoral faithful at the expense of the many. The key is to democratize the nomination process and not simply assume that the incumbent in office – no matter how incompetent or unpopular– should run for office again. Clearly the PSUV has to break free from the personality-based electoral politics and establish independent criteria, which respond to popular evaluations of incumbents and party candidates. Communal councils need to be empowered to evaluate, report and have a voice in judging inefficient ministries and administrative agencies which fail to provide adequate services.46 The dead hand of the reactionary past is present in the practices, personnel and paralysis of the existing administrative structures and worst of all influences some of the new Chavista appointments.
The tactic of creating new parallel agencies to overcome existing obstructionist bureaucracies will not work if the new administrators are ill prepared (late or miss appointments, derelict in rectifying problems, fail to meet commitments etc.). Nothing irritates the Chavista masses more than to deal with officials who cannot fulfill their commitments in a reasonable time frame. This is the general source of mass discontent, political alienation and government vulnerability. In part the issue is one of incompetent personnel and, for the most part, the solution is structural – empowering popular power organizations to chastise and oust ineffective and corrupt officials.
In the economic sphere there is a need for a serious re-thinking of the entire strategy in several areas. In place of massive and largely wasted funding of small-scale cooperatives to be run by the poor with little or no productive, managerial or even basic bookkeeping skills, investment funds should be channeled into modern middle and large scale factories which combine skilled managers and workers as well as unskilled workers, producing goods which have high demand in the domestic (and future foreign) markets. The new public enterprise building 15,000 pre-fabricated houses is an example.
The second area of economic vulnerability is agriculture where the Agriculture Ministry has been a major failure in the development of food production (exemplified by the massive food imports), distribution networks and above all in accelerating the agrarian reform program. If any ministry cost Chavez to lose the referendum, it was the Agriculture Ministry, which over 9 years has failed to raise production, productivity and availability of food. The past policies of controlling or de-controlling prices, of subsidies and credits to the major big producers have been an abysmal failure. The reason is obvious: The big land-owner recipients of the Government’s generous agricultural credits and grants are not investing in agricultural production, in raising cattle, purchasing new seeds, new machinery, new dairy animals. They are transferring Government funding into real estate, Government bonds, banking and speculative investment funds or overseas. This illegal misallocation of Government finance is abundantly evident in the gap between the high levels of government finance to the self-styled agricultural ‘producers’ and the meager (or even negative) growth of production-productivity on the large estates.
47 In April 2008, President Chavez recognized that fundamental changes in the use and ownership of productive land is the only way to control the use of government credit, loans and investment to ensure that the funds actually go into raising food and not purchasing or investing in new luxury apartments or real estate complexes or buying Argentine bonds. In March and April 2008, President Chavez, with the backing of the major peasant movements and workers in the food processing industry, expropriated 27 plantations, a meat processing chain, a dairy producer and a major food distributor. Now the challenge is to ensure that competent managers are appointed and resourceful worker-peasant councils are elected to insure efficient operations, new investments and equitable rewards. What is abundantly clear is that President Chavez has recognized that capitalist ownership even with government subsidies is incompatible with meeting the consumer needs of the Venezuelan people.
Thirdly, as mentioned above, inflation is eroding popular consumer power, fomenting wage demands by the unionized workers in the export sector while eroding wages and income for contingent and informal workers. The government has announced a decline in the rate of inflation in January-February 2008 (2.1%). This is a positive indication that urgent attention is being paid. The outrageous rates of profit in both consumer and capital goods industries has increased the circulation of excess money, while the lack of investment in raising productivity and production has weakened supply. The inflationary spiral is embedded in the structure of ownership of the major capitalist enterprises and no amount of regulation of profit margins will increase productivity. President Chavez moves into 2008 to accelerate the socialist transformation through the nationalization of strategic industries.
The key is to invest large sums of public capital in a vast array of competitive public enterprises run with an entrepreneurial vision under workers-engineers control. Relying on ‘incentives’ to private capitalists in order to increase productivity has run afoul in most instances because of their rentier, instead of entrepreneurial, behavior. When the government yields to one set of business complaints by offering incentives, it only results in a series of new excuses, blaming ‘pricing’, ‘insecurity’, ‘inflation’, and ‘imports’ for the lack of investment. Clearly counting on public-private cooperation is a failed policy.
The basis of the psychological malaise of business can be boiled down to one issue: They will not invest or produce even in order to profit if it means supporting the Chavez government and strengthening mass support via rising employment and workers’ income.48 They prefer to merely maintain their enterprises and raise prices in order to increase their profits.
In the social sphere, the government faces the problem of increasing political consciousness and above all encouraging the organizing of its mass supporters into cohesive, disciplined and class-conscious organizations. The government’s socialist project depends on mass social organizations capable of advancing on the economic elite and cleaning the neighborhoods of rightwing thugs, gangsters and paramilitary agents of the Venezuelan oligarchs and the Uribe regime.
The peasant movement, Ezequiel Zamora, is establishing the kind of political-educational cadre schools necessary to advance the agrarian reform. By pressuring the Agrarian Reform Institute, by occupying uncultivated land, by resisting landlord gunmen from Colombia , this emerging movement provides a small-scale model of social action that the government should promote and multiply on a national scale.
The principle obstacle is the counter revolutionary role of the National Guard, led by General Arnaldo Carreño. He directed a raid on the peasant training and educational school with attack helicopters and 200 soldiers, arrested and beat educators and students and wrecked the institute. No official action against the military officers responsible for this heinous action was taken.
49 Apart from the reactionary and counter-revolutionary nature of this assault on one of the most progressive Chavista movements, it is indicative of the presence of a military sector committed to the big landlords and most likely aligned to the Colombian-US military ‘golpistas’.
Labor legislation still lags. The new progressive social security law is tied up in Congress and/or buried by the dead hands of the Administration. Contingent (non-contracted, insecure) workers still predominate in key industries like oil, steel, aluminum, and manufacturing. The trade unions – both the pro-Chavez and the plethora of competing tendencies and self-proclaimed ‘class unions’ – are fragmented into a half dozen or more fractions, each attacking the other and incapable of organizing the vast majority (over 80%) of unorganized formal and informal workers. The result has been the relative immobilization of important sectors of the working class faced with big national challenges, such as the 12/2 referendum, the Colombian-US military threats and the struggle to extend the agrarian reform, public enterprises and social security.
The government’s relative neglect of the organized and unorganized manufacturing workers has changed dramatically for the better, beginning in the first half of 2008. President Chavez’ forceful intervention in the steel (Techint Sidor), cement (CEMEX), meatpacking and sugar industries has led to massive outpouring of worker support. A certain dialectic has unfolded, in which militant worker conflicts and strikes against intransigent employers has induced President Chavez to intervene on their behalf, which in turn has activated the spread and depth of worker and trade union support for President Chavez. This dialectic of reinforced mutual support has led to meetings of inter-sector union leaders and militants from the transport, metallurgic, food processing and related industries. In response to increased trade union organized support, Chavez has raised the prospect of nationalizing banks and the rest of the food production and distribution chain. Much depends upon the unification and mobilization of the trade union leaders and their capacity to overcome their sectarian and personalistic divisions and turn toward organizing the unorganized contingent and informal workers.
The sectarianism of the ultra-leftist sects and their supporters among a few trade union bureaucrats leads them to see Chavez and his government and trade union supporters as ‘the main enemy’ leading them to strike for exorbitant pay increases. They organize street blockades to provoke ‘repression’ and then call for ‘worker solidarity’. Most of the time they have had little success as most workers ignore their calls for ‘solidarity’. The unification of pro-Chavez union leaders around the current nationalizations and the growth of a powerful unified workers’ trade union movement will isolate the sects and limit their role. A unified working class movement could accelerate the struggle for social transformation of industry. It would strengthen the national defense of the transformative process in times of danger.
The National Security Threats The multi-country surveys reveal that most people in almost all countries think the US is the biggest threat to world peace. This is especially the case in Venezuela, a Caribbean country which has already been subject to a US-backed and orchestrated coup attempt, a employers and executives lockout of the vital petroleum industry, a US-financed recall-referendum, an international campaign to block the sale of defensive weapons and spare parts accompanied by a massive sustained military build-up of Colombia, its surrogate in the region. The violent efforts of the US to overthrow President Chavez have a long and ugly pedigree in the Caribbean and Central America . Over the past half century the US has directly invaded or attacked Guatemala, Panama, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Nicaragua and El Salvador; it organized death squads and counter revolutionary surrogate armies n Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Honduras, which murdered nearly 300,000 people.
50 The US assault against Venezuela includes many of the strategies applied in its previous murderous interventions. Like in Guatemala , it has and continues to bribe, cajole and subvert individuals in the Venezuelan military and among National Guard officers. Their plan is to use Venezuelan military officials to organize a coup, collaborate with Colombian cross border infiltrators and to encourage defections to the pro-US opposition. Like in Central American , US operatives have organized death squad killers to infiltrate the Venezuelan countryside to attack peasant movements pursuing land reform and to consolidate support among big landowners.
Like in Nicaragua , the US is combining support for the systematic sabotage of the economy by the business elite to foment discontent while financing opposition electoral campaigns to exploit the unstable economic circumstances. Like its economic blockade of Cuba, the US has organized a de facto arms and parts embargo as well as an international ‘freeze’ on Venezuela’s PDVSA overseas assets through international court processes initiated by Exxon-Mobil. Colombia ’s cross-border bombing of Ecuador is as much a ‘test’ of Venezuela ’s preparedness as it is an overt aggression against Ecuador ’s President Correa’s nationalist government’s cancellation of the strategic US military base in Manta ( Ecuador ).
Venezuela had taken several measures to counter the US-Colombian-Venezuelan Fifth Column threats to national security.
Following the coup President Chavez ousted several hundred military officers involved in the overthrow and promoted officers loyal to the constitution. Unfortunately the new group included several pro-US and anti-leftist officers open to CIA bribes, one of whom even became the Minister of Defense before he was ‘retired’ – and became a virulent spokesperson against Chavez’ transformative referendum.51 Worse still, Chavez amnestied the military and civilian coup makers and economic ‘lock-out’ saboteurs after they had served only a small fraction of their sentences – to the utter shock and dismay of the mass of popular forces that shouldered the burden of their violent coup and economic sabotage and who were not consulted.
Venezuela has purchased some light weapons (100,000 rifles and machine guns) and a dozen submarines from Russia and helicopters from Brazil to counter Colombia ’s $6 billion dollar light and heavy arms build-up. Clearly that is a step forward, but it is still inadequate given the massive arms deficit between the two countries. Venezuela needs to rapidly build up its ground to air defenses, modernize its fighter jets and naval fleet, upgrade its airborne battalions and vastly improve its ground forces capacity to engage in jungle and ground fighting. Colombia ’s army, after 45 years of counter-insurgency, has the training and experience lacking in Venezuela . Venezuela has taken positive steps toward organizing a mass popular militia – but the advances have a very mixed record, as training and enlistment lag far below expectations for lack of political organization and politico-military leadership.
While President Chavez has taken important steps to strengthen border defenses, the same cannot be said about internal defenses. In particular, several generals in the National Guard have been more aggressively dislodging peasant land occupiers than in hunting down and arresting landlord-financed gunmen who have murdered 200 peasant activists and land reform beneficiaries. Extensive interviews with peasant leaders and activists indicate active collaboration between high military officers and right-wing cattle barons, calling into question the political loyalties of rural based Guard garrisons.
There is an urgent need to accelerate the expropriation of big estates and to arm and train peasant militias to counter-act Guard complicity or negligence in the face of landlord-sponsored violence. There are thousands of peasants ready and willing to enlist in militias because they have a direct stake in defending their families, comrades and their land from the ongoing paramilitary attacks.
Today the most immediate and enduring threat to internal security takes the form of a blend between a mass of hardened Venezuelan criminal gangs and narco-paramilitary infiltrators from Colombia , which are terrorizing the populace in low income neighborhoods. Police investigations, arrests and government prosecution are inadequate, incompetent, and corrupt and occasionally point to complicity. To this day the infamous broad daylight assassination of the respected Attorney General Danilo Anderson has not been solved and the current Attorney General has essentially buried the investigation and, even more importantly, buried the investigation into the economic elite networks planning future coups that Anderson was carrying out at the time of his murder.
Anderson was the chief investigator of the forces behind the April 2002 failed coup, the economic sabotage and a series of political assassinations. Venezuelans close to the case state that Anderson had compiled extensive documentation and testimony implicating top opposition political, economic and media figures and some influential figures in the Chavez administration. With his death, the investigations came to an end, no new arrests were made and those already arrested were subsequently granted amnesties. Some of Anderson ’s top suspects are now operating in strategic sectors of the economy. There are two hypotheses: Either sheer incompetence within the office of the new Attorney General, the Ministry of Justice and related agencies of government has derailed the investigation; or there is political complicity on the part of high officials to prevent undermining the present socialization strategy. In either case the weakness of law enforcement, especially with regard to a dangerous capitalist class operating an extensive network supporting the violent overthrow of the elected government, opens the door to a re-play of another coup. Indeed the amnesty of the elite coup-makers and economic saboteurs and the case of Danilo Anderson weighs heavily on the minds of militant Venezuelans who see it as an example of the continued impunity of the elite.
Factory and anti-crime ‘neighborhood watches’ and defense militias are of the utmost importance given the rising internal and external national security threats and crime wave. With the greater cooperation of communal councils, sweeps of local gangs is a top priority. Neighborhood police and militia stations must saturate the poor neighborhoods. Large-scale lighting must be established to make streets and sidewalks of the ranchos safer. The war against drug traffic must delve into their bourgeois collaborators, bankers and real estate operators who launder money and use illegal funds to finance opposition activities. Petty and youth delinquents should be sentenced to vocational training programs and supervised rural and community service. Large-scale illegal financial transactions must be prosecuted by the confiscation of bank accounts and property. National and internal security is the sine quo non of maintaining any political order dedicated to transforming the socio-economic system.
On April 9, 2008 President Chavez took a major step toward reducing crime, strengthening community-police relations and improving the security of the people by passing a National Police Law through presidential law decree. Under the new law, a new national revolutionary police of the people will be established ‘demolishing the old repressive police model with education, conscience, social organization and prevention’. He contrasted the past capitalist police who abused the poor with the new communal police who will be close to the citizens and dialogue oriented. To that end the newly formed communal councils will be encouraged to join and help select a new type of police based on rigorous selection process and on their willingness to live and work with the neighborhood. The PSUV and the communal councils will become the backbone of creating the new political solidarity with the newly trained police from the neighborhoods. Chavez’ recognition of the security issue in all its political and personal dimensions and his pursuit of democratic and egalitarian approach highlights his commitment to both maintaining law and order and advancing the revolutionary process.52
Conclusion: Advantages and Opportunities for Socialist Transformation
Venezuela today possesses the most advantageous economic, political and social conditions for a socialist transformation in recent history despite the US military threats, its administrative weaknesses and political institutional limitations.
Economically, Venezuela’s economy is booming at 9% growth, world prices for exports are at record levels (with oil at over $100 a barrel), it has immense energy reserves, $35 billion dollars in foreign exchange reserves and it is diversifying its overseas markets, although much too slow for its own security.53 With the introduction in April 2008 of an excess profit tax which will take 50% of all revenues over $70 dollars a barrel and an additional 60% of all revenues over $100 a barrel, several billion dollars in additional income will swell the funds for financing the nationalization of all strategic sectors of the economy.
Venezuela benefits from a multi-polar economic world eager to purchase and invest in the country. Venezuela is in the best possible condition to upgrade the petroleum industry and manufacture dozens of downstream petrochemical products from plastics to fertilizers – if public investment is efficiently and rationally planned and implemented. Venezuela has over a million productive landless workers and small farmers ready and willing to put the vast tracts of oligarch-owned under-utilized lands to work and put Venezuela on the road to food self-sufficiency – if not an agro-exporting country. Millions more hardworking Colombian refugee-peasants are eager to work the land along side their Venezuelan counterparts. There is no shortage of fertile land, farmers or investment capital. What is needed is the political will to organize expropriations, cultivation and distribution.
Politically, President Chavez provides dynamic leadership backed by legislative and executive power, capable of mobilizing the vast majority of the urban and rural poor, organized and unorganized workers and youth. The majority of the military and the new academy graduates have (at least up to now) backed the government’s programs and resisted the bribes and enticements of US agents. New Bolivarian-socialist military instructors and curricula and the expulsion of US military ‘missions’ will strengthen the democratic link between the military and the popular government.
The intelligence and counter-intelligence services have detected some subversive plots but remain the weakest link both in terms of information collecting, direct action against US-Colombian infiltration, detecting new coup plans and providing detailed documentation to expose US-Colombian assassination teams. Clearly housecleaning of dubious and incompetent elements in the intelligence agencies is in order. New training and recruitment processes are proceeding, rather slowly and have to demonstrate competence.
Socially the Chavez government retains the support of over 65% of the electorate and nearly 50% of the people were in favor of an overtly socialist agenda in the referendum of December 2, 2007. If the communal councils take off, and the militias gain substance and organization and if the PSUV develops mass roots and the popular nationalization accelerates, the government could consolidate its mass support into a formidable organized force to secure a huge majority in a new referendum and to counter the US-backed counter-revolution.
A lot will depend on the government’s deepening and extending its social-economic transformation – increasing new public housing from 40,000 to 100,000 a year; reducing the informal labor sector to single digits and encouraging the trade unions to organize the 80% of the unorganized labor force into class unions with the help of new labor legislation.
Given the availability of mass social support, given the high export earnings, given the positive social changes, which have occurred, the objective basis for the successful organization of a powerful pro-socialist, pro-Chavez movement exists today.
The challenge is the subjective factor: The shortages of well trained cadres, political education linked to local organizing, the elaboration of a socialist political-ideological framework and the elimination of personality-based liberal patronage officials in leading administrative and party offices. Within the mass Chavista base, the struggle for a socialist consciousness is the central challenge in Venezuela today.
NOTES:
1 Weisbrot, Mark and Luis Sandoval 2008, “Update: The Venezuelan Economy in the Chavez Years”, Washington D.C. Center for Economic and Policy Research.
2 Mark Weisbrot, “An Empty Research Agenda: The Creation of Myths About Venezuela :, March 2008. Center for Economic and Policy Research, Washington D.C.
3 Ibid. Also see “Letter From Venezuela’s Communication Minister to the Washington Post”, March 26, 2008 by Andres Izarra printed on March 28, 2008.
4 A good example can be found in the Socialist Register 2008. For an example of rampant propaganda disguised as ‘scholarship, see Francisco Rodriguez, “An Empty Revolution: The Unfulfilled Promises of Hugo Chavez”, Foreign Affairs March/April 2008.
5 Weisbrot, Op cit page 10.
6 Weisbrot, Op cit
7 Interview with peasant leaders of the Frente Nacional Campesino Eqzquiel Zamora in Caracas , Feb. 27, 2008. Boston Globe April 11, 2008
8 Interview with President Chavez, Caracas , March 2,2008
9 Dario Vea, February 25, 2008 p.2
10 Interview with President Chavez, March 2, 2008
11 Weisbrot, Op cit
12 Hyperinflation brought down the social democratic Alfonsin regimes in Argentina (1989) and Garcia in Peru (1990); weakened the Allende regime in 1973 and led to right wing take over. Hyperinflation has also led to the collapse of right wing regimes in China (1945-49) and the rise of Communism as well as regime change in Brazil in the 1990’s.
13 Reuters News Service April 9, 2008; BBC News April 2, 2008.
14 “La grave represion de los trabajadores siderúgicos” Argenpress March 24, 2008.
15 El Universal, March 5, 2008. page 1.
16 Izarra, Op cit
17 ‘Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela: Herramiento de Masas in Gestión’, Rebelion, March 25, 2008.
18 ibid
19 Interview in Caracas with PSUV delegates, March 1, 2008.
20 Interviews and meetings of neighborhood delegates of Communal Councils, February 29, 2008.
21 Interview with Minister of the Interior Ramon Rodriguez Chacun, La Jornada, March 31, 2008.
22 Interview with Communal Councils, February 29, 2008. According to a poll by the respected polling group, Barometro, in early April 2008, 66.5% of Venezuelans approved Chavez presidency.
23 Commentaries from Communal Council delegates and peasant activists in Caracas , ‘Popular Power Meeting’ at the Ministry of Culture and Popular Power. February 29, 2008
24 Interview with Carmen Boqueron, Ministry of Culture, February 25, 2008.
25 Interview with Miquel Marquez, President Editorial El Perro y la Rana, State Publishing House, March 5, 2008.
26 See La Plena Voz, Memórias, Política Exterior y Soberania, among other magazines.
27 Interview with Carmen Boquerón, February 26, 2008
28 Interview with Minister of Culture, March 1, 2008.
29 Interview February 29, 2008. Even at the new Bolivarian Universities, only a minority of working class students are involved in political activities, most concentrate on their studies and future job prospects. However among active students at the new universities, the great majority are pro-Chavez.
30 From the beginning of the first nationalization in 1976 under President Carlos Andres Perez, the fundamental question was ‘nationalization for whom?’ In the 1970’s to the re-privatizations, the answer was the wealthy elites. See James Petras, Morris Morley and Steven Smith, The Nationalization fof Venezuelan Oil, (New York Praeger Press. 1977)
31 Eva Golinger’s detailed documentary study based on files secured from the US Government through the Freedom of Information Act which provide ample evidence of US intervention.
32 Interview with Venezuelan Presidential adviser, Paris November 2001.
33 http://www.rebelion.org/ April 13, 2002
34 Weisbrot Op cit
35 Eva Golinger, The Chavez Code: Cracking US Intervention in Venezuela ( Havana : Cuba Book Institute 2005). Golinger provides extensive documentation of US financing of the self-styled NGO’s through AID and NED (National Endowment for Democracy, a government conduit for destabilizing regimes critical of the US ).
36 For a more detailed analysis, see James Petras “El referendo Venezolano: analisis y epilogo”, http://www.rebellion.org/ Dec 17, 2007.
37 The phrase ‘soft power’ is credited to Harvard political science professor and long time US presidential adviser, Joseph Nye, who offers his expertise on empire management and the uses of imperial power. See Joseph Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics 2004
38 Venezuelan drug interdiction has captured 360 tons of drugs between 2000-2007, according to the National Anti-Drug Office, January 2008.
39 On the Colombian State ’s mass terror, see the annual reports of the International Labor Organization, Via Campesino, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.
40 Interview with peasant leaders from the Frente Nacional Campesino Ezequiel Zamora, February 27, 2008.
41 Throughout the dispute between Exxon-Mobil and the PDVSA, the European press sided with their more conciliatory multi-nationals while the Washington Post, NY Times and Wall Street Journal engaged in vituperative attacks on Venezuela .
42 While Condeleeza Rice gave her backing to the ‘Regional Command’, Lula immediately informed her that the US was not part of it.
43 The Bank of the South is already financing development projects without the usual onerous conditions imposed by the World Bank and IMF.
44 In interviews with both Fidel Castro (Feb 10, 2006 Havana ) and with Hugo Chavez (March 2, 2008) both confirm the long-term, large-scale ties, which bind them in a strategic alliance.
45 The testimony of a militant female peasant leader at a meeting organized by the Ministry of Popular Power was very demonstrative: ‘We support President Chavez; we defend President Chavez; but he has to replace those incompetent officials in the ministry who fail to provide us with credit so we can buy seed and fertilizer in time to plant our crops.’ February 27, 2008. Ministry of Popular Power
46 While I have noticed improvements in the punctuality and preparation of more agency officials, there are still too many highly placed functionaries who fail to keep appointments, comply with their professional responsibilities or inform themselves about the subject matter of their ministries.
47 The anti-production behavior of the big land owners and cattle barons has been the practice for decades. Back in the mid-1970’s, President Carlos Andres Perez also pumped hundreds of millions into ‘making Venezuela food self-sufficient’ in a program he called ‘ploughing the oil wealth into agriculture’ with the same miserable results as the present. The reason is clear, many of the big landlords are the same people. The lessons from the past are very clear: As long as the present government tries to develop agriculture through the existing land owners it is doomed to repeat the failures of the past.
48 Interview with an oil executive from British Petroleum, Caracas , March 6, 2008.
49 ‘El Frente Nacional Campesino Ezequiel Zamora es atacado por militares’ March 22, 2008 report from the FNCEZ.
50 See Petras and Morley, Empire or Republic (NY Routledge 1995).
51 General Baduel was always a virulent anti-communist who is said to have received a seven-figure payoff and threats of exposure of unseemly personal revelations if he didn’t ‘turn’ against Chavez.
52 James Suggett, “Venezuela Passes National Police Law”, http://www.venezuelanalysis.com// April 11, 2008.
53 See Weisbrot, Op cit
Source:
GlobalResearch.ca
Printer-friendly version
Bookmark/Search this post with:
Related Articles
Venezuela Six Years after the Coup
United Socialist Party of Venezuela is an Instrument for Socialism
Venezuela: Revolution, Party and a New International
Venezuelan Socialists Discuss the Struggle for Revolutionary Party
Why the Barrios Still Love Hugo
Opinion & Analysis
The Bolivarian Project
Venezuela: Democracy, Socialism and Imperialism
James Petras - Globalresearch.ca
The Bolivarian Project
Venezuela Six Years after the Coup
Jorge Martín
International Relations
Bush Administration, More Isolated in Latin America, Cries "Terrorism"
Mark Weisbrot - San Diego Union Tribune
Political Developments
Radical Chavismo Bares Its Teeth
George Cicariello-Maher
Labor
Chavez Emboldens Venezuelan Workers with Takeover Precedent
Frank Jack Daniel - Reuters
Media Watch
BBC v. Hugo Chavez
Stephen Lendman
International Relations
Vote for My Colombia Deal or I'll Brand You a Chavez Supporter!
Nikolas Kozloff - CounterPunch
International Relations
U.S. Native Americans Lead Opposition to Designation of Venezuela as Terrorist Nation
Gale Courey Toensing - Indian Country Today
Economy
The Booming Venezuelan Economy, and how it affects Monte Carmelo
Steve Brouwer - Venezuelanotes
International Relations
Venezuela Steps Up Efforts To Thwart Cocaine Traffic
Juan Forero - Washington Post
License
This article is not a work of venezuelanalysis.com. For that reason we cannot assign a license.More info about Creative Commons Licensing
venezuelanalysis.com :: website realized with drupal using free software only :: site best viewed with mozilla firefox
Menu
us online - donate to Venezuela Analysis
Home » Opinion & Analysis » The Bolivarian Project
Venezuela: Democracy, Socialism and Imperialism
April 18th 2008, by James Petras - Globalresearch.ca
Introduction
Venezuela ’s President Hugo Chavez remains the world’s leading secular, democratically elected political leader who has consistently and publicly opposed imperialist wars in the Middle East, attacked extra-territorial intervention and US and European Union complicity in kidnapping and torture.
Venezuela plays the major role in sharply reducing the price of oil for the poorest countries in the Caribbean region and Central America, thus substantially aiding them in their balance of payments, without attaching any ‘strings’ to this vital assistance. Venezuela has been in the forefront in supporting free elections and opposing human right abuses in the Middle East, Latin America and South Asia by pro-US client regimes in Iraq , Afghanistan and Colombia.
No other country in the Americas has done more to break down the racial barriers to social mobility and the acquisition of land for Afro-Latin and Indio Americans. President Chavez has been on the cutting edge of efforts toward greater Latin American integration – despite opposition from the United States and several regional regimes, who have opted for bilateral free trade agreements with the US .
Even more significant, President Chavez is the only elected president to reverse a US backed military coup (in 48 hours) and defeat a (US-backed) bosses’ lockout, and return the economy to double-digit growth over the subsequent 4 years.
1 President Chavez is the only elected leader in the history of Latin America to successfully win eleven straight electoral contests against US-financed political parties and almost the entire private mass media over a nine-year period. Finally President Chavez is the only leader in the last half-century who came within 1% of having a popular referendum for a ‘socialist transformation’ approved, a particularly surprising result in a country in which less than 30% of the work force is made up of peasants and factory workers.
President Chavez has drastically reduced long-term poverty faster than any regime in the region,
2 demonstrating that a nationalist-welfare regime is much more effective in ending endemic social ills than its neo-liberal counterparts. A rigorous, empirical study of the socio-economic performance of the Chavez government demonstrates its success in a whole series of indicators after the defeat of the counter-revolutionary coup and lockout and after the nationalization of petroleum (2003).
GDP has grown by more than 87% with only a small part of the growth being in oil. The poverty rate has been cut in half (from 54% in 2003 at the height of the bosses’ lockout to 27% in 2007; and extreme poverty has been reduced from 43% in 1996 to 9% in 2007), and unemployment by more than half (from 17% in 1998 to 7% in 2007). The economy has created jobs at a rate nearly three times that of the United States during its most recent economic expansion. Accessible health care for the poor has been successfully expanded with the number of primary care physicians in the public sector increasing from 1,628 in 1998 to 19,571 by early 2007. About 40% of the population now has access to subsidized food. Access to education, especially higher education, has also been greatly expanded for poor families. Real (inflation adjusted) social spending per person has increased by more than 300%.
3 His policies have once and for all refuted the notion that the competitive demands of ‘globalization’ (deep and extensive insertion in the world market) are incompatible with large-scale social welfare policies. Chavez has demonstrated that links to the world market are compatible with the construction of a more developed welfare state under a popularly-based government
The large-scale, long-term practical accomplishments of the Chavez government, however have been overlooked by liberal and social democratic academics in Venezuela and their colleagues in the US and Europe, who prefer to criticize secondary institutional and policy weaknesses, failing to take into account the world-historic significance of the changes taking place in the context of a hostile, aggressively militarist-driven empire.
4 No reasonable and rigorous contemporary analysis can seriously provide an accurate assessment of Venezuela while glossing over the tremendous accomplishments achieved during the Hugo Chavez presidency.
It is within the framework of Chavez’ innovative and courageous political-social breakthroughs that we should proceed to an analysis of the advances, contradictions and negative aspects of specific political, economic, social and cultural policies, practices and institutions.
The Advances and Limitations of Economic Policy
Venezuela has made tremendous advances in the economy since the failed coup of April 11, 2002 and the employers’ lockout of December 2002-February 2003, which led to a 24% decline in the GDP.
5 Under President Chavez’ leadership and with favorable terms of trade, Venezuela grew by over 10% during the past 5 years, decreasing poverty levels from over 50% to less than 28%, surpassing any country in the world in terms of the rate of poverty-reduction. The economy has, in contrast to the past, accumulated over $35 billion dollars in foreign exchange reserves despite a vast increase in social spending and has totally freed itself of dependence on the onerous terms imposed by the self-styled ‘international banks’ (IMF, World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank) by paying off its debt.
6 The government has nationalized strategic enterprises in the oil and gas industries, steel, cement, food production and distribution, telecommunications and electricity industries. It has passed new excess profits taxes, doubling its revenues. It has signed new petroleum and gas joint ventures with over a dozen European, Asian and Latin American multinationals giving the Venezuelan state majority control. It has expropriated several million acres of uncultivated farm land from speculators and absentee owners and, more recently, an additional 32 under-producing plantations.
7 The importance of these structural changes cannot be understated. In the first place they increased the capacity of the Chavez government to make or influence strategic decisions regarding investment, re-investment, pricing and marketing. The increase in state ownership increases the flow of revenues and profits into the federal treasury, enhancing financing of productive investments, social programs and downstream processing plants and services. The government is slowly diversifying its petroleum markets from a hostile adversary (the USA ) to trade and investment with countries like China , Brazil , Iran and Russia , thus reducing Venezuela ’s vulnerability to arbitrary economic boycotts.
The government has started a large-scale, long-term project to diversify the economy, and especially to become food self-sufficient in staples like milk, meat, vegetables and poultry.
8 Equally important investments in processing raw petroleum into value-added products like fertilizers and plastics are now operative, albeit at a slow pace. New refineries are on schedule to substitute dependence on US based operations and to add value to their exports. New public transport systems are advancing as is visible in the new metro being built in Caracas , which will lessen the traffic jams and air pollution. Over 2.5 billion Strong Bolivars, the new Venezuelan currency (over $1 billion dollars) has been allocated in the form of incentives, credit and subsidies to promote the increase in agricultural production and processing.
9 Investments in new lines of production linked to social programs are underway, including new enterprises manufacturing 15,000 prefabricated houses per year.
10 Venezuela, like the rest of the world (China, EU, USA, Australia and so on) is deeply affected by inflation, especially of imported food. Inflation has escalated over the last 3 years rising from 14% in 2005, to 17% in 2006 and 22% in 2007, threatening to undermine the gains in living standards made over the last 5 years.
11 Government attempts to impose price controls has had limited effect as big food producers have cut back on production, food distributors have decrease shipments and even hoarded essential goods and retail sellers have traded on the black market. On the surface, the problem is that consumer power has increased faster than productivity, increasing demand relative to supply. However, the deeper structural reason is the decline in capitalist investment in production and distribution – despite high profits. Many capitalist food producers and food processors have diverted their profits into investments in speculative activity, including imports of luxury goods and real estate where there is a higher rate of return. Some have lessened investment because of opposition to the government, others because of fears of agrarian reform, while all complain about ‘price controls’ leading to a ‘profit squeeze’. These complaints do not account for low productivity, which existed before price controls and continued even after the government lifted the controls. Inflation and the resultant negative impact is one of the principal reason for popular abstention during the December 2007 referendum and is the cause of popular discontent today in Venezuela . Both the far right and the ultra-left (especially in some neighborhoods and trade unions) have been exploiting this discontent.
Inflation is one of the principal reasons for the decline of the popularity of various regimes (Left, Center and Right) throughout history in Europe, as well as in Latin America .
12 In large part this is because the great majority of workers in Venezuela are self-employed and have no organization or wage and income indexes to keep up with the rise in prices. In Venezuela , even the major industries, like petroleum, steel and aluminum, have ‘sub-contracted’ most of their workers who lack any power to negotiate for wage increases tied to inflation. Government subsidies and promotional incentives to industrial and agricultural capitalists to promote productivity has led to increased profits – without commensurate increases in wage income.
During the period from February to April 2008, the state intervened directly in the productive process, through the takeover of unproductive companies and farms. New worker and peasant demands include ‘opening the books’ of the profitable firms and farms in pursuit of wage and collective bargaining negotiations, re-opening closed firms and investments in new public enterprises. Chavez recognized that the problem of production (supply) will continue to lead to too many Bolivars chasing too few consumer goods – inflation, discontent and political vulnerability – unless he accelerates the nationalization process and deepens public ownership.
To effectively intervene and take control of strategic economic sectors, the government requires working class organizations, cadres and leaders able to co-manage the enterprises, ‘opening the books’ on investments, profits and wages and establish work discipline. Under present capital-labor relations, capitalists totally neglect investment in technology and innovations, employ temporary or contingent workers under precarious conditions and depend on the Venezuelan state to enforce harsh labor codes.
In advancing the Bolivarian road to Socialism, President Chavez has to deal with incompetent and reactionary officials in his own government. For example, prior to Chavez’ nationalization of the major steel multinational SIDOR, the Minister of Labor, an incompetent and inexperienced functionary with no prior relation to labor, sided with the company and approved of the Governor of the state of Bolivar in calling out the National Guard to break the strike. Throughout 2007-2008, management of SIDOR refused to negotiate in good faith with the unions, which provoked strikes in January in February and March 2008. The intransigence of the steel bosses increased the militancy of the workers and led to Chavez’ intervention. In defense of his order to nationalize, Chavez cited the positive role of the steel workers in opposing the coup, the ‘slave-like’ work conditions and the export strategies, which denied the domestic construction industry the steel it needed for high-priority homebuilding. He called on the nationalized industry to be run under ‘workers councils’ in a efficient and productive manner.
13 Government repression of strikes provoked regional union solidarity and worker-led marches against the National Guard and calls for the resignation of the ineffective Labor Minister. After Chavez nationalized steel, trade unions from major industrial sectors met to coordinate support for President Chavez and press for further moves toward public ownership. Equally ominous, brutality and excess use of force ordered by the general in charge of the National Guard is indicative of a profoundly anti-working class, pro-big business bias of the Guard officers, a potentially dangerous threat to the Chavez government in the future.
14 By confronting the problem of inflation and the overvalued, strong Venezuelan Bolivar Chavez is dealing with an issue that is real and deeply felt by most workers. Failure by the government to deal with its structural roots makes it vulnerable to demagogic appeals by the right and the sectarian ultra-left and its principle beneficiary, the US imperialism.
New public investments in fertilizer plants, prefabricated housing, positive measures reducing inflation by one third in the first 2 months of 2008 and policies sharply increasing food supply by 20% indicate that the Chavez government is beginning to confront some of the economy’s weak points. In visits to several public and private retail markets during the last part of February and early March, we did not find any shortages of essential items, contrary to the opposition, and the US and European media reports. An opposition organized protest of shortages of liquid gas in Catia (a popular neighborhood in Caracas ) was front-page news (with blown-up photos) in the opposition daily, El Universal, but with no follow up reports when the government sent in supplies the next day.
15 By the beginning of 2008, public spending, which is not always efficiently invested or entirely free of corruption, reduced unemployment 8.5%, the lowest in decades.
16 However a government goal of 5.5% seems over optimistic, especially in light of the fall-out from the US recession and decline in European demand.
The big challenge to Chavez’ economic policy in 2008, a year of important state and local elections in November, is to ensure that the inevitable mid-year increase in public spending is directed toward productive investments and not to populist short-term programs, which will ignite another wave of inflation. We can expect that, as the elections approach, the capitalist class will once again resort to ‘planned shortages’, distribution blockages, as well as other politically induced economic problems in order to blame and discredit the government.
Unless the government reduces its reliance on the private sector for investments, employment, production, finance and distribution, they will be forced into taking costly and improvised measures to avoid electoral losses and popular abstention. The indivisible ties between private business control over strategic economic decisions and their paramount interest in pursuing political measures designed to undermine the Chavez government, means that the government will remain under constant threat unless it takes control of the commanding heights of the economy. In recognition of those structural factors Chavez has announced plans to nationalize strategic sectors. The Chavez government has become pro-active, anticipating shocks from the economic elite and displacing them from power. Depending on the private sector will force the government to continue to be ‘reactive’, improvising responses to economic attacks during and after the fact and suffering the negative political consequences.
Politics: The Chavistas Strike Back
During the latter half of 2007, in the run-up to the referendum, and early 2008, the rightwing offensive (aided by the ultra-left) took hold and put the government on the defensive. Early March 2008, the pro-Chavez forces regrouped and launched a new political party – The Venezuelan United Socialist Party (PSUV) at a national convention in Maracaibo . In response to the defeat of the referendum, President Chavez called on his supporters to engage in a ‘Three R’s Campaign’: Review, Rectify and Re-launch. This initiative has led to the election of new party leaders, a decline in old guard paternalistic bosses in the leadership of the PSUV, a rejection of sectarianism toward other pro-Chavez parties and a revitalization of grass roots activism.
17 The party is intended to oversee the mobilization of the Chavez supporters and to educate and organize potential working and lower middle class constituents. The party is mandated to evaluate, criticize and correct the implementation of policies by local officials and engage the mass social movements in common struggle. To succeed the party must organize local popular power to counter-act corrupt Chavez-affiliated as well as opposition policy-makers, press local demands and initiatives, counter rightwing infiltration of neighborhoods by Colombian and local terrorists and turn out the vote at election time.
For the PSUV to succeed as a political organization it needs to take power away from the local clientelistic political machines built around some of the state, regional and municipal level Chavista officials. It needs to overcome the tendency to appoint leaders and candidates from above and to deepen rank and file control over decisions and leaders.
18 Even during the founding congress of the PSUV several delegations criticized the process of electing the national leadership – for neglecting popular representation and overloading it with much criticized political officials.
19 Active communal councils under democratic control have been effective in giving voice and representation to a large number of urban and poor neighborhoods. They have secured popular loyalty and support wherever they have delivered needed services and led struggles against incompetent or recalcitrant Chavista officials.
Violence, crime and personal insecurity are major issues for most poor and lower middle class supporters of the Chavez government and the police are viewed as ineffective reducing crime and securing their neighborhoods and as, at times, complicit with the gangsters.
20 Proposals by the government for greater cooperation between neighborhood committees and the police in identifying criminals have had little effect. This is in part because police have shown little interest in developing on-the-ground, day-by-day relations in the poorer barrios, which they tend to view as ‘criminal breeding grounds’.
Armed gangs controlling the poor neighborhoods commit most of the crime. Local residents fear retaliation if they cooperate or worse, they think that the police are complicit with the criminals. Even more seriously reports from reliable intelligence sources have identified large-scale infiltration of Colombian death squad narco traffickers who combine drugs peddling and rightwing organizing, posing a double threat to local and national security. While the government has taken notice of the general problem of individual insecurity and the specific problem of narco-political infiltration, no national plan of action has yet been put into practice, apart from periodic routine round-ups of low-level common criminals.
21 Venezuela should learn from the example of Cuba, which has had successful crime fighting and anti-terrorist programs for decades organized around a tight network of local ‘committees to defend the revolution’ and backed by a politically trained rapid action internal security force and an efficient judiciary. Individual security and political freedom depends on the collective knowledge of crime groups’ infiltration and the courage of local committees and individuals. Their cooperation requires trust in the integrity, respect and political loyalty of the internal security forces. Their intelligence, evidence collection and testimony depend on the protection of local citizens by the internal security forces against gangster retaliation.
A new type of ‘police official’ needs to be created who does not view the neighborhood and its committees as hostile territory – they must live and identify with the people they are paid to protect. To be effective at the local level, the Chavez government must display exemplary behavior at the national level: It must prosecute and jail criminals and not grant amnesty or give light sentences to coup-makers and economic saboteurs, as Chavez did in early 2008. The failure of the current Attorney General to pursue the murderers of her predecessor, Attorney General Danilo Anderson, was not only a shameful act but set an example of incompetent and feeble law enforcement which does not create confidence in the will of the state to fight political assassins.
22 ‘Popular power’ will only become meaningful to the mass of the poor when they feel secure enough to walk their streets without assaults and intimidation, when the gangs no longer break into homes and local stores, and when armed narco-traffickers no longer flaunt the law. In Venezuela , the struggle against the oligarchs, George Bush and Colombia ’s Uribe begins with a community-based war against local criminals, including a comprehensive tactical and strategic sweep of known criminal gangs followed by exemplary punishment for those convicted of terrorizing the residents. This is one way to make the government respected at the grass roots level and to re-assert and make operative the term popular sovereignty. In every barrio today it is not only the ‘right wing NGO’s’, which challenge Chavez’ authority, it is the armed criminal elements, increasingly linked with reactionary political groups. To successfully confront the external threats, it is incumbent on the government to defeat the gangsters and narco-traffickers that represent a real obstacle to mass mobilization in time of a national emergency, like a new coup attempt.
Failures by some middle level Chavez officials to ensure security and resolve local problems have eroded popular support for political incumbents. The majority of local residents, popular leaders and activists still voice support for President Chavez even as they are critical of the ‘people around him’, ‘his advisers’, and ‘the opportunists’.
23 How this will play out in the November election is not totally clear. But unless fundamental changes take place in candidates and policies, it is likely that the opposition will increase their current minimal representation in state and municipal governments.
Social and Cultural Advances and Contradictions
Venezuela , under the leadership of President Chavez, has made unprecedented social and cultural changes benefiting the broad majority of the urban and rural poor, and working and lower middle classes. Nine new Bolivarian universities and dozens of technical schools have been established with over 200,000 students.
24 Over 2.5 million books, pamphlets and journals have been published by the new state-financed publishing houses, including novels, technical books, poetry, history, social research, natural sciences, medical and scientific texts.
25 Two major television studios and communitarian-based TV stations provide international, national and local news coverage that challenges opposition and US-based (CNN) anti-government propaganda. A major news daily, Vea, and several monthly and weekly magazines debate and promote pro-Chavez politics.
26 Several government-funded missions, composed of tens of thousands of young volunteers, have reduced urban and (to a lesser degree) rural illiteracy, extended health coverage, while increasing local participation and organization in the urban ‘ranchos’ or shantytowns. Major cultural events, including musical, theater and dance groups regularly perform in working class neighborhoods. The Ministry of Culture and Popular Power has initiated a vast number of overseas and local programs involving the Caribbean and Latin American countries.
27 Sports programs, with the aid of Cuban trainers, have received large scale government funding for physical infrastructure (gymnasiums, playing fields, uniforms and professional trainers) and have vastly increased the number of athletes among the urban poor. Major funding to defend and promote indigenous and Afro-Venezuelan culture is in the works, and some movement to ‘affirmative action’ is envisioned, though cultural representation in fields other than sports, music and dance is still quite limited. There is no question that Venezuela is going through a ‘Cultural Revolution’ – reconstructing and recovering its popular, historical and nationalist roots buried below the frivolous and imitative artifacts of a century of culturally colonized oligarchs and their middle class followers.
Cultural Contradictions and Challenges
While the Venezuelan cultural reformation has made a massive impact in raising educational and cultural levels, it has not yet decisively displaced the cultural hegemony of the bourgeoisie and US imperialism. The latter still holds sway over the vast majority of the upper and affluent middle class professionals, Central University academics and students, and important sectors of the public and especially private professional groups (doctors, lawyers, publicists, engineers etc). Despite substantial pay increases and additional stipends, these middle class professionals still cling to their reactionary beliefs in a fit of ‘status panic’.
President Chavez, speaking at the first graduating class of the new inclusive (open admission) Venezuelan Bolivarian University, cited a doctoral thesis which found that 94% of students at the tax-payer funded elite ‘public’ university, Venezuelan Central University (UCV), were from the upper and middle class, while 99% of the students at the private Simon Bolivar University (SBU) were from the same privileged classes. What was especially disturbing was the increasingly exclusive and privileged nature of the UCV and SBU: in 1981 the UCV enrolled 21% from the lower classes compared to 6.5% in 2000; the SBU went from 13% to 1% in the same period. To open higher education to the working class, the poor and the peasants, the Chavez government has begun the construction of 29 public universities, upgrading 29 vocational-technical schools into Polytechnic Universities, and increasing the number of full scholarships from 6,000 to 10,000.
While the vast number of lower class neighborhoods and individuals have benefited from state health, educational and cultural programs, popular education in creating collective solidarity and class consciousness still has had a limited impact. Some individuals from the lower class who had set up economic cooperatives were either incapable of operating them or absconded with state funds. Similar theft and corruption afflicted some of the ‘missions’, where poor accounting practices facilitated waste and losses. Populist paternalism and official negligence (and corruption) weakened the effort to create a new nationalist class-consciousness linked to a new popular hegemony. On the other hand, President Chavez’ intervention in nationalizing the steel industry during the labor-capital dispute heightened class-consciousness and factory worker identification with the Venezuelan road to socialism.
Over the past 5 years the state-financed television programs have greatly improved in terms of their professionalism and programming. They still have not fully overcome the continued hegemonic hold of the bourgeois media over sectors of the popular majority. In terms of entertainment and breaking news coverage, especially during the run-up and the day of the December 2, 2007 referendum, the bourgeois media dominated public attention due, in large part, to the absence of pro-government media coverage.
One of the least effective pro-government print media is the daily newspaper Vea, which is read by few people because of its poor news reporting (big headlines, no content) and mediocre columns and essays. The Minister of Culture and Popular Power told me that substantial changes would soon take place.
28 The wide reaching cultural programs have improved cultural levels but has not led to the growth of mass Chavista cultural movements. Less than 10% of the students at the Central University of Venezuela (UCV) are active members of Chavista student movements or affiliated organizations (according to a Chavista student leader), despite significant improvements in university salaries and facilities.
29 Apparently family and class identification takes precedence over cultural egalitarianism. The vast majority of students and professors at the UCV are apolitical, indifferent or into strictly vocational training and individual mobility. An active minority supports opposition groups; some are linked to US universities and CIA-funded ‘leadership training’ programs while small Trotskyist, Maoist and other sects agitate against the government.
The emergence of the autonomous pro-Chavez communal councils, linked to the Ministry of Culture and Popular Power, is probably the most effective counter-hegemonic movement. The political and social activities of party activists and leaders of the PSUV can succeed in creating a new class consciousness so long as they involve the masses in solving their own practical problems and assume local responsibility for their actions.
Chavista cadres, which act paternally, create patron-client consciousness vulnerable to quick switches to oligarchic-client relations. The key contradiction in the cultural reformation is in the ‘middle class’ Chavista configuration which carries over its paternal orientation in implementing its ‘class conscious programs to the popular classes.
There is a great need for recruitment and education of young local cadres from the barrios, who speak the language of the people and have the class bonds to integrate the masses into a nationalist and socialist cultural-social program. The government’s cultural and popular power movement is a formidable force but it faces tenacious opposition from the virulent and disreputable mass media aligned with the oligarchy.
As the Venezuelan process moves toward egalitarian socialist values, it faces the more subtle but more insidious opposition of middle class students, professors and professionals who in the name of ‘liberal democracy’ and ‘pluralism’ seek to destroy cultural class solidarity. In other words, we have a struggle between the progressive minority from the middle class in the government against the majority of reactionary liberal middle class individuals embedded in academic institutions and in the community-based NGO’s. Only by gaining the support of the people outside the middle class, that is, the radical and exploited popular classes, can the cultural reformists in the Culture Ministry create a dominant popular hegemony.
Social Change: the Struggle of Popular Social Movements versus the Reactionary Middle Class Movements
To discuss the highly polarized social confrontation between the pro-Chavez popular movements and the US-backed oligarch-supported middle class movements, it is important to contextualize the social, political and economic relations, which preceded the ascendancy of the Chavez government. The United States was the key determinant of the economic conditions and the principal point of reference of Venezuela ’s oligarchy and middle class. US-Venezuelan relations were based on US hegemony in all spheres – from oil to consumerism, from sports to life style, from bank accounts to marriage partners. The role models and life styles of the Venezuelan middle class were found in the upscale Miami suburbs, shopping malls, condos and financial services. The affluent classes were upper class consumers; they never possessed a national entrepreneurial vocation.
The oil contracts between US and European firms and the PDVSA were among the most lucrative and favorable joint ventures in the world. They included negligible tax and royalty payments and long term contracts to exploit one of the biggest petroleum sites in the world (the Orinoco ‘tar belt’). The entire executive leadership of what was formally described as a ‘state enterprise’ was heavily engaged in dubious overseas investments with heavy overhead costs, which disguised what was really executive pillage and extensive cost overruns, that is, massive sustained corruption.
30 From the senior oil executives, the pillaged oil wealth flowed to the upper middle class, lawyers, consultants, publicists, media and conglomerate directors, a small army of upscale boutique retailers, real estate speculators and their political retainers and their entourage among middle level employees, accountants, military officials, police chiefs and subsidized academic advisers. All of these ‘beneficiaries’ of the oil pillage banked their money in US banks, especially in Miami, or invested it in US banks, bonds and real estate. In a word, Venezuela was a model case of a rentier-bureaucratic ruling class profoundly integrated into the US circuits of petroleum-investment-finance. Systematically, culturally and ideologically they saw themselves as subordinate players in the US ‘free trade-free market’ scheme of things. Chavez’ assertions of sovereignty and his policies re-nationalizing Venezuelan resources were seen as direct threats to the upper-middle class’ essential ties to the US , and to their visions of a ‘ Miami ’ life style.
This deep subordinated integration and the colonized middle class values and interests that accompanied it, was deeply shaken by the crash in the Venezuelan economy throughout the 1980’s and 1990’. Emigration and relative impoverishment of a wide swath of public employees, professionals and previously better-paid workers seemed to ‘radicalize’ them or create widespread malaise. The profound downward mobility of the impoverished working class and lower-middle class, as well as professionals, led to the discredit of the endemically corrupt leaders of the two major political parties, mass urban riots, strikes and public support for an aborted Chavez-led military uprising (1992). These events led to his subsequent election (1998) and the approval of the referendum authorizing the writing of a new, more profoundly democratic constitution. Yet the middle class rebellion and even protest vote in favor of Chavez, was not accompanied by any change in political ideology or basic values. They saw Chavez as a stepladder to overcome their diminished status, and paradoxically, to refinance their ‘ Miami ’ life-style, and gain access to the US consumer market.
Time and circumstance would demonstrate that when push came to shove, in November 2001-April 2002, when the US confronted and was complicit in the short-lived, but failed coup, the bulk of the middle class backed the US-Venezuelan elite.
31 The US-backed coup was a direct response to President Chavez’ refusal to support the White House-Zionist orchestrated ‘War on Terror’. Chavez declared, ‘You don’t fight terror with terror’ in answer to President Bush’s post-September 11, 2001 call to arms against Afghanistan . This affirmed Chavez’ principled defense of the rights of self-determination and his unwavering stand against colonial wars. US Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, Mark Grossman personally led an unsuccessful mission to Caracas in the fall of 2001 to pressure Chavez to back down.
32 Chavez was the only president in the world prepared to stand up to the new militarist Bush doctrine and thus was designated an enemy. Even worse, from the point of view of the Bush Administration, President Chavez’ nationalist policies represented an alternative in Latin America at a time (2000-2003) when mass insurrections, popular uprisings and the collapse of pro-US client rulers (Argentina, Ecuador and Bolivia) were constant front-page news.
In the run-up to the April 2002 coup, the policies of the Chavez government were extremely friendly to what are reputed to be ‘middle class’ values and interests -- in terms of democratic freedoms, incremental socio-economic reforms, orthodox fiscal policies and respect for foreign and national property holdings and capitalist labor relations. There were no objective material reasons for the middle classes or even the economic oligarchy to support the coup except for the fact that their status, consumerist dreams, life style and economic investments were closely linked with the United States .
In a word, the US exercised near complete hegemony over the Venezuelan upper and middle classes. As a result, its policies and its global interests became identified as ‘the interests’ of the wealthy Venezuelans. Venezuelan elite identification with US policy was so strong that it compelled them to back a violent coup against their own democratically elected government. The Caracas ruling class supported the imposition of an ephemeral US-backed dictatorial political regime and an agenda, which, if fully implemented, would have reduced their access to oil revenues, and the trade and socio-economic benefits they had enjoyed under Chavez. The brief coup-junta proposed to withdraw from OPEC, weakening Venezuela’s bargaining position with the US and EU, expel over 20,000 Cuban physicians, nurses, dentists and other health workers who were providing services to over 2 million low income Venezuelans without receiving any reciprocal compensation from Washington.
33 The economic elite and the middle class’s second attempt to overthrow President Chavez began in December 2002 with a bosses and oil executive lockout. This lasted until February 2003 and cost over $10 billion dollars in lost revenues, wages, salaries and profits.
34 Many Venezuelan businessmen and women committed economic suicide in their zeal to destroy Chavez; unable to meet loan and rent payments, they went bankrupt. Over 15,000 executives and professionals at the PDVSA, who actively promoted the strike and, in a fit of elite ‘Luddite’ folly, sabotaged the entire computerized oil production process, were fired. The principal pro-US and long time CIA funded trade union confederation suffered a double defeat for their participation in the attempted coup and lockout, becoming an empty bureaucratic shell. The upper and middle classes ultimately became political and social losers in their failed attempts to recover their ‘privileged status’ and retain their ‘special relation’ with the US . While the privileged classes saw themselves as ‘downwardly mobile’ (an image which did not correspond with the reality of their new wealth especially during the commodity boom of 2004-2008), their frustrations and resentments festered and produced grotesque fantasies of their being ruled by a ‘brutal communist dictator’. In fact, under Chavez’ presidency (after 2003), they have enjoyed a rising standard of living, a mixed economy, bountiful consumer imports and were constantly entertained by the most creatively hysterical, rabidly anti-government private media in the entire hemisphere. The media propaganda fed their delusions of oppression. The hardcore privileged middle-class minority came out of their violent struggle against Chavez depleted of their military allies. Many of their leaders from the business associations and moribund trade union apparatus were briefly imprisoned, in exile or out of a job.
On the other hand, the pro-Chavez mass supporters who took to the streets in their millions and restored him to the Presidency and the workers who played a major role in putting the oil industry back in production and the factories back to work, provided the basis for the creation of new mass popular movements. Chavez never forgot their support during the emergency. One of the reasons he cited for nationalizing the steel industry was the support of the steel workers in smashing the bosses’ lockout and keeping the factories in operation.
Venezuela is one of the few countries where both the Left and the Right have built mass social movements with the capacity to mobilize large numbers of people. It is also the country where these movements have passed through intense cyclical volatility. The tendency has been for organizations to emerge out of mass struggle with great promise and then fade after a ‘great event’ only to be replaced by another organized ‘movement’, which, in turn, retains some activists but fails to consolidate its mass base.
In effect what has been occurring is largely sequential movements based on pre-existing class commitments which respond in moments of national crises and then return to everyday ‘local activities’ around family survival, consumer spending, home and neighborhood improvements. While this cycle of mobilization ‘ebb and flow’ is common everywhere, what is striking in Venezuela is the degree of engagement and withdrawal: the mass outpouring and the limited number of continuing activists.
Looking at the big picture over the past decade of President Chavez’s rule, there is no question that civil society activity is richer, more varied and expressive than during any other government in the last sixty years.
Starting from the popular democratic restoration movement that ousted the short-lived military-civilian junta and returned Chavez to power, local community based movements proliferated throughout the ranchos (slums) of the big cities, especially in Caracas . With the bosses lockout and actual sabotage, the factory and oil field workers and a loyal minority of technicians took the lead in the restoration of production and defeating the US-backed executive elite. The direct action committees became the nuclei for the formation of communal councils, the launching of a new labor confederation (UNT), and new ‘electoral battalions’, which decisively defeated a referendum to oust Chavez. From these ‘defensive organizations’ sprang the idea (from the government) to organize production cooperatives and self-governing neighborhood councils to by-pass established regional and local officials. Peasant organizing grew and successfully pressured for the implementation of the land reform law of 2001. As the left organized, the right also turned to its ‘normal institutional base’ – FEDECAMARAS (the big business association), the cattle and large landowner organizations, the retailers and private professionals in the Chambers of Commerce and toward neighborhood organizations in the up-scale neighborhoods of the elite centered in Altimar and elsewhere. After suffering several demoralizing defeats, the right increasingly turned its attention toward US funding and training from NGO’s, like SUMATE, to penetrate lower class barrios and exploit discontent and frustrations among the middle class university students whose street demonstrations became detonators of wider conflicts.
35 The Chavistas consolidated their organizational presence with health clinics, subsidized food stores and coops and educational programs. The Right consolidated its hold over the major ‘prestigious’ universities and private high schools. Both competed in trying to gain the allegiance of important sectors of the less politicized, sometimes religious low-income informal workers and higher paid unionized workers – both focused on immediate income issues. The Chavistas secured nearly 50% of the vote among the voters in a radical referendum spelling out a transition to socialism, losing by 1%. The right wing capitalized on the abstention of 3 million, mostly pro-Chavez, voters to defeat the referendum.
36 The right wing, via violence and sustained disinvestment in the country has polarized Venezuela despite nearly double-digit sustained growth over a 5 year period. This basic contradiction reflects the fact that the ‘socialist’ project’ of the government takes place in the socio-economic framework in which big capitalists control almost all the banking, financing, distribution, manufacturing, transport and service enterprises against the gas-oil-telecom, electricity, steel, cement and social service sectors of the government. In April 2008, Chavez launched a major offensive to reverse this adverse correlation of economic power in favor of the working classes by expropriating 27 sugar plantations, food distribution networks, meat packing chains, as well as the major cement and steel complexes.
In 2008 Chavez recognized that the populace mobilized ‘from below’ was stymied by the ‘commands’ issued by the economic elite ‘from above’. Whether it is food distribution or production, job creation or informal/contingent employment, funding small farmers or speculative landlords trading in bonds or financing oil derivative plants – all of these strategic economic decisions which affect class relations, class organization, class struggle and class consciousness were in the hands of the mortal enemies of the Chavez government and its mass base. By directly attacking these crucial areas affecting everyday life, Chavez is revitalizing and sustaining mass popular organization. Otherwise to remain subject to elite economic sabotage and disinvestment is to demoralize and alienate the popular classes from their natural gravitation to the Chavez government.
US-Venezuelan Relations
More than in most current Latin American societies, the Venezuelan ruling and middle classes have demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice their immediate economic interests, current remunerative opportunities, lucrative profits and income in pursuit of the high risk political interests of the US . How else can one explain their backing of the US-orchestrated coup of April 2002 at a time when Chavez was following fairly orthodox fiscal and monetary policies, and had adopted a strict constitutionalist approach to institutional reform? How else can one explain engaging in an executive and bosses 2-month lockout of industry and oil production, leading to the loss of billions in private revenues, profits and salaries and ultimately the bankruptcy of hundreds of private firms and the firing of over 15,000 well-paid senior and middle level oil executives?
Clearly the ‘ultra-hegemony’ of the US over the Venezuelan elite and middle class has a strong component of ideological-psychological self-delusion: a deep, almost pathological identification with the powerful, superior white producer-consumer society and state and a profound hostility and disparagement of ‘deep Venezuela ’ – its Afro-Indian-mestizo masses.
Typifying Theodor Adorno’s ‘authoritarian personality’, the Venezuelan elite and its middle class imitators are at the feet and bidding of those idealized North Americans above and at the throat of those perceived as degraded dark-skinned, poor Venezuelans below. This hypothesis of the colonial mentality can explain the pathological behavior of Venezuelan professionals who, like its doctors and academics, eagerly seek prestigious post-graduate training in the United States while disparaging the ‘poor quality’ of new neighborhood clinics for the poor where none had existed before and the new open admission policies of the Bolivarian universities – open to the once marginalized masses.
The deep integration – through consumption, investments and vicarious identification – of the Venezuelan upper and middle classes with the US elite forms the bed-rock of Washington ’s campaign to destabilize and overthrow the Chavez government and destroy the constitutional order. Formal and informal psychosocial ties are strengthened by the parasitical-rentier economic links based on the monthly/yearly consumer pilgrimages to Miami . Real estate investments and illegal financial transfers and transactions with US financial institutions, as well as the lucrative illegal profit sharing between the former executives of PDVSA and US oil majors provided the material basis for pro-imperialist policies.
US policy makers have a ‘natural collaborator class’ willing and able to become the active transmission belt of US policy and to serve US interests. As such it is correct to refer to these Venezuelans as ‘vassal classes’.
After the abject failures of Washington ’s vassal classes to directly seize power through a violent putsch and after having nearly self-destructed in a failed attempt to rule or ruin via the bosses’ lockout, the US State Department oriented them toward a war of attrition. This involves intensified propaganda and perpetual harassment campaigns designed to erode the influence of the Chavez government over its mass popular base.
Imperial academic advisers, media experts and ideologues have proposed several lines of ideological-political warfare, duly adapted and incorporated by the Venezuelan ‘vassal classes’. This exercise in so-called ‘soft-power’ (propaganda and social organizing) is meant to create optimal conditions for the eventual use of ‘hard power’ – military intervention, coup d’etat, terror, sabotage, regional war or, more likely, some combination of these tactics.
37 The predominance of ‘soft power’ at one point in time does not preclude selective exercises of ‘hard power’ such as the recent Colombian cross-border military attack on Venezuela ’s ally Ecuador in March 2008. Soft power is not an end in itself; it is a means of accumulating forces and building the capacity to launch a violent frontal assault at the Venezuelan government’s ‘weakest moment’.
Imperial-Vassal
Three Part ‘Soft Power’ Campaign: Drugs, Human Rights and Terrorism
In the period between 2007-2008, the US and the Venezuelan elite attempted to discredit the Venezuelan government through the publication and dissemination of a report fabricated to paint Venezuela as a ‘narco-center’. A DEA (US Drug Enforcement Agency) report named Venezuela as a ‘major transport point’ and ignored the fact that, under Washington ’s key client in Latin America President Alvaro Uribe, Colombia is the major producer, processor and exporter of cocaine, is beyond bizarre. Blatant omissions are of little importance to the US State Department and the private Venezuelan mass media. The fact that Venezuela is successfully intercepting massive amounts of drugs from Colombia is of no importance. For US academic apologists of empire, lies at the service of destabilizing Chavez are a virtuous exercise in ‘soft power’.
38 The US, its vassal classes and the Washington-financed human rights groups have disseminated false charges of human rights abuses under Chavez, while ignoring US and Israeli Middle East genocidal practices and the Colombian government’s long-standing campaigns of killing scores of trade unionists and hundreds of peasants each year.
Washington ’s attempt to label Venezuela as a supporter of ‘terrorists’ was resoundingly rejected by a United Nation’s report issued in April 2008.39 There is no evidence of systematic state sponsored human rights violations in Venezuela . There are significant human rights abuses by the opposition-backed big landowners, murdering over 200 landless rural workers. There are workplace abuses by numerous FEDECAMARAS-affiliated private employers.40 It is precisely in response to capitalist violations of workers rights that Chavez decided to nationalize the steel plants. No doubt Washington will fail to properly ‘acknowledge’ these human rights advances on the part of Chavez.
The point of the ‘human rights’ charges is to reverse roles: Venezuela, the victim of US and vassal class’ coups and assassinations is labeled a human rights abusers while the real executioners are portrayed as ‘victims’. This is a common propaganda technique used by aggressor regimes and classes to justify the unilateral exercise of brutality and repression.
In line with its global militarist-imperialist ideology, Washington and its Venezuelan vassals have charged the Venezuelan government with aiding and abetting ‘terrorists’, namely the FARC insurgency in Colombia . Neither the Bush or Uribe regimes have presented evidence of material aid to the FARC. As mentioned above, a UN review of the Washington-Uribe charges against the Chavez government have rejected every allegation. This fabrication is used to camouflage the fact that US Special Forces and the Colombian armed forces have been infiltrating armed paramilitary forces into Venezuela ’s poor neighborhoods to establish footholds and block future barrio mobilizations defending Chavez.
The Hard Power Campaign - Three Part Strategy: Economic Boycotts, Low Intensity Warfare and the Colombia Card
Complementing the propaganda campaign, Washington has instumentalized a major oil producer (Exxon-Mobil) to reject a negotiated compensation settlement, which would have left the US oil giant with lucrative minority shares in one of the world’s biggest oil fields (the Orinoco oil fields). All the other European oil companies signed on to the new public-private oil contracts.
41 When Exxon-Mobil demanded compensation, PDVSA made a generous offer, which was abruptly rejected. When PDVSA agreed to overseas arbitration, Exxon-Mobil abruptly secured court orders in the US , Amsterdam and Great Britain ‘freezing’ PDVSA overseas assets. A London court quickly threw out Exxon-Mobil’s case. As with other countries’ experiences, such as Cuba in 1960, Chile in 1971-71 and Iran in 1953, the oil majors act as a political instrument of US foreign policy rather than as economic institutions respecting national sovereignty. In this case, Washington has used Exxon-Mobil as an instrument of psychological warfare – to heighten tensions and provide their local vassals with an ‘incident’ which they can elaborate into fear propaganda. The Venezuelan private media cite the threat of a US oil boycott and evoke a scenario of a collapsing economy causing starvation; they attribute this fantastic scene to the Chavez government’s ‘provocation’. By evoking this illusion of US power and Venezuelan impotence, they obfuscate the fact that the new oil contracts will add billions of dollars to the Venezuelan Treasury, which will benefit all Venezuelans.
US military strategy options have been severely limited by its prolonged and open-ended wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and its military-buildup threatening Iran . As a result, US military strategy toward Venezuela involves a $6 billion dollar military build-up of Colombia over the last eight years, including arms, training, combat advisers, Special Forces, mercenaries and logistics. US advisers encourage Colombian armed forces to engage in cross frontier operations including the kidnapping of Venezuelan citizens, armed assaults and paramilitary infiltration capped by the bombing in Ecuador of a campsite of a FARC negotiating team preparing a prisoner release. The US dual purpose of these low intensity military pressures is to probe Venezuela ’s response, its capacity for military mobilization, and to test the loyalties and allegiances of leading intelligence officials and officers in the Venezuelan military. The US has been involved in the infiltration of paramilitary and military operatives into Venezuela , exploiting the easy entrance through the border state of Zulia, the only state governed by the opposition, led by Governor Rosales.
The third component of the military strategy is ‘to integrate’ Venezuela’s armed forces into a ‘regional military command’ proposed by Brazilian President Lula da Silva and endorsed by US Secretary of State Condeleeza Rice.
42 Within that framework, Washington could use its friendly and client generals to pressure Venezuela to accept US military-political hegemony disguised as ‘regional’ initiatives. Unfortunately for Washington , Brazil ruled out a US presence, at least for now.
The US military strategy toward Venezuela is highly dependent on the Colombian Army’s defeat or containment of the guerrillas and the re-conquest of the vast rural areas under insurgent control. This would clear the way for Colombia ’s army to attack Venezuela . A military attack would depend crucially on a sharp political deterioration within Venezuela , based on the opposition gaining control of key states and municipal offices in the up-coming November elections. From advances in institutional positions Washington ’s vassals could undermine the popular national social, economic and neighborhood programs.
Only when the ‘internal circumstances’ of polarized disorder can create sufficient insecurity and undermine everyday production, consumption and transport can the US planners consider moving toward large-scale public confrontation and preparations for a military attack. The US military strategists envision the final phase of an air offensive -Special Forces intervention only when they can be assured of a large-scale Colombian intervention, an internal politico-military uprising and vacillating executive officials unwilling to exercise emergency powers and mass military mobilization. The US strategists require these stringent conditions because the current regime in Washington is politically isolated and discredited, the economy is in a deepening recession, and the budget deficit is ballooning especially its military expenditures in Iraq and Afghanistan . Only marginal extremists in the White House envision a direct military assault in the immediate future. But that could change to the degree that their vassals succeed in sowing domestic chaos and disorder.
Diplomatic and Economic Confrontation: Chavez Versus Bush Diplomatically and economically, President Chavez has gained the upper hand over the Bush Administration.
No country in Latin America supports Washington ’s proposals to intervene, boycott or exclude Venezuela from regional trade, investment or diplomatic forums. No country has broken diplomatic, economic or political relations with Caracas – nor has the US , despite strong moves in that direction by Bush in March 2008 (by labeling Venezuela a ‘terrorist’ country). Even Washington ’s principal vassal state, Colombia , shows no enthusiasm for shedding its $5 billion dollar food and oil trade with Venezuela to accommodate Bush. Chavez has successfully challenged US hegemony in the Caribbean . Through Petro-Caribe, numerous Caribbean and Central American states receive heavily subsidized oil and petroleum products from Venezuela , along with socio-economic aid in exchange for a more favorable diplomatic policy toward Caracas . The US no longer has an automatic voting bloc in the region following its lead against a targeted country.
The Venezuelan government has successfully contributed to the demise of the US-led Free Trade for the Americas (ALCA) proposal and has substituted a new Latin American free trade agreement (ALBA) with at least 6 member states. Venezuela ’s proposal for a Latin American Bank of the South, to bypass the US influenced IDB (BID) has been launched and has the backing of Brazil , Argentina and a majority of the other Latin American states.
43 Washington ’s arms embargo, that included Spain , has been a failure, as Venezuela turned to arms purchases from Russia and elsewhere. Washington’s effort to discourage foreign investment, especially in oil exploration is a complete failure, as China, Russia, Europe, Iran and every major oil producer has invested or is currently negotiating terms.
Despite vehement US opposition, Venezuela has developed a strategic complementary link with Cuba , exchanging subsidized oil and gas sales and large-scale investment for a vast health service contract covering Venezuela ’s needs in all poor neighborhoods.44 Venezuela has consolidated long-term finance and trade ties with Argentina through the purchase of Argentine bonds, which the latter has had difficulty selling given its conflict with the Paris Club.
Venezuela had significantly improved its image in Europe through Chavez’ positive role in mediating the release of FARC prisoners while the US vassal Uribe regime is perceived in Europe as a militaristic, dehumanized narco-driven entity. US militarism and its economic crisis have led to a sharp decline in its image and prestige in Europe , while eroding its economic empire and domestic living standards. Chavez’ opposition to Bush’s global war on terror and his calls for upholding human rights and social welfare has created a favorable international image among the poor of the Third World and within wide circles of public opinion elsewhere.
Vulnerability, Opportunities and Challenges
Presently and for the near future, Venezuela is vulnerable to attack on several fronts. It is experiencing several internal contradictions. Nevertheless it possesses strengths and great opportunities to advance the process of economic and social transformation. Key weaknesses can be located in the state, social economy and national security sectors.
In the sphere of politics, the basic issue is one of democratic representation, articulation and implementation of popular interests by elected and administrative officials. Too often one hears among the Chavista masses in public and private discussions that, ‘We support President Chavez and his policies but…’ and then follows a litany of criticism of local mayors, ministry officials, governors and Chavez’ ‘bad advisers’.
45 Some – not all – of the elected officials are running their campaign on the bases of traditional liberal clientele politics, which reward the few electoral faithful at the expense of the many. The key is to democratize the nomination process and not simply assume that the incumbent in office – no matter how incompetent or unpopular– should run for office again. Clearly the PSUV has to break free from the personality-based electoral politics and establish independent criteria, which respond to popular evaluations of incumbents and party candidates. Communal councils need to be empowered to evaluate, report and have a voice in judging inefficient ministries and administrative agencies which fail to provide adequate services.46 The dead hand of the reactionary past is present in the practices, personnel and paralysis of the existing administrative structures and worst of all influences some of the new Chavista appointments.
The tactic of creating new parallel agencies to overcome existing obstructionist bureaucracies will not work if the new administrators are ill prepared (late or miss appointments, derelict in rectifying problems, fail to meet commitments etc.). Nothing irritates the Chavista masses more than to deal with officials who cannot fulfill their commitments in a reasonable time frame. This is the general source of mass discontent, political alienation and government vulnerability. In part the issue is one of incompetent personnel and, for the most part, the solution is structural – empowering popular power organizations to chastise and oust ineffective and corrupt officials.
In the economic sphere there is a need for a serious re-thinking of the entire strategy in several areas. In place of massive and largely wasted funding of small-scale cooperatives to be run by the poor with little or no productive, managerial or even basic bookkeeping skills, investment funds should be channeled into modern middle and large scale factories which combine skilled managers and workers as well as unskilled workers, producing goods which have high demand in the domestic (and future foreign) markets. The new public enterprise building 15,000 pre-fabricated houses is an example.
The second area of economic vulnerability is agriculture where the Agriculture Ministry has been a major failure in the development of food production (exemplified by the massive food imports), distribution networks and above all in accelerating the agrarian reform program. If any ministry cost Chavez to lose the referendum, it was the Agriculture Ministry, which over 9 years has failed to raise production, productivity and availability of food. The past policies of controlling or de-controlling prices, of subsidies and credits to the major big producers have been an abysmal failure. The reason is obvious: The big land-owner recipients of the Government’s generous agricultural credits and grants are not investing in agricultural production, in raising cattle, purchasing new seeds, new machinery, new dairy animals. They are transferring Government funding into real estate, Government bonds, banking and speculative investment funds or overseas. This illegal misallocation of Government finance is abundantly evident in the gap between the high levels of government finance to the self-styled agricultural ‘producers’ and the meager (or even negative) growth of production-productivity on the large estates.
47 In April 2008, President Chavez recognized that fundamental changes in the use and ownership of productive land is the only way to control the use of government credit, loans and investment to ensure that the funds actually go into raising food and not purchasing or investing in new luxury apartments or real estate complexes or buying Argentine bonds. In March and April 2008, President Chavez, with the backing of the major peasant movements and workers in the food processing industry, expropriated 27 plantations, a meat processing chain, a dairy producer and a major food distributor. Now the challenge is to ensure that competent managers are appointed and resourceful worker-peasant councils are elected to insure efficient operations, new investments and equitable rewards. What is abundantly clear is that President Chavez has recognized that capitalist ownership even with government subsidies is incompatible with meeting the consumer needs of the Venezuelan people.
Thirdly, as mentioned above, inflation is eroding popular consumer power, fomenting wage demands by the unionized workers in the export sector while eroding wages and income for contingent and informal workers. The government has announced a decline in the rate of inflation in January-February 2008 (2.1%). This is a positive indication that urgent attention is being paid. The outrageous rates of profit in both consumer and capital goods industries has increased the circulation of excess money, while the lack of investment in raising productivity and production has weakened supply. The inflationary spiral is embedded in the structure of ownership of the major capitalist enterprises and no amount of regulation of profit margins will increase productivity. President Chavez moves into 2008 to accelerate the socialist transformation through the nationalization of strategic industries.
The key is to invest large sums of public capital in a vast array of competitive public enterprises run with an entrepreneurial vision under workers-engineers control. Relying on ‘incentives’ to private capitalists in order to increase productivity has run afoul in most instances because of their rentier, instead of entrepreneurial, behavior. When the government yields to one set of business complaints by offering incentives, it only results in a series of new excuses, blaming ‘pricing’, ‘insecurity’, ‘inflation’, and ‘imports’ for the lack of investment. Clearly counting on public-private cooperation is a failed policy.
The basis of the psychological malaise of business can be boiled down to one issue: They will not invest or produce even in order to profit if it means supporting the Chavez government and strengthening mass support via rising employment and workers’ income.48 They prefer to merely maintain their enterprises and raise prices in order to increase their profits.
In the social sphere, the government faces the problem of increasing political consciousness and above all encouraging the organizing of its mass supporters into cohesive, disciplined and class-conscious organizations. The government’s socialist project depends on mass social organizations capable of advancing on the economic elite and cleaning the neighborhoods of rightwing thugs, gangsters and paramilitary agents of the Venezuelan oligarchs and the Uribe regime.
The peasant movement, Ezequiel Zamora, is establishing the kind of political-educational cadre schools necessary to advance the agrarian reform. By pressuring the Agrarian Reform Institute, by occupying uncultivated land, by resisting landlord gunmen from Colombia , this emerging movement provides a small-scale model of social action that the government should promote and multiply on a national scale.
The principle obstacle is the counter revolutionary role of the National Guard, led by General Arnaldo Carreño. He directed a raid on the peasant training and educational school with attack helicopters and 200 soldiers, arrested and beat educators and students and wrecked the institute. No official action against the military officers responsible for this heinous action was taken.
49 Apart from the reactionary and counter-revolutionary nature of this assault on one of the most progressive Chavista movements, it is indicative of the presence of a military sector committed to the big landlords and most likely aligned to the Colombian-US military ‘golpistas’.
Labor legislation still lags. The new progressive social security law is tied up in Congress and/or buried by the dead hands of the Administration. Contingent (non-contracted, insecure) workers still predominate in key industries like oil, steel, aluminum, and manufacturing. The trade unions – both the pro-Chavez and the plethora of competing tendencies and self-proclaimed ‘class unions’ – are fragmented into a half dozen or more fractions, each attacking the other and incapable of organizing the vast majority (over 80%) of unorganized formal and informal workers. The result has been the relative immobilization of important sectors of the working class faced with big national challenges, such as the 12/2 referendum, the Colombian-US military threats and the struggle to extend the agrarian reform, public enterprises and social security.
The government’s relative neglect of the organized and unorganized manufacturing workers has changed dramatically for the better, beginning in the first half of 2008. President Chavez’ forceful intervention in the steel (Techint Sidor), cement (CEMEX), meatpacking and sugar industries has led to massive outpouring of worker support. A certain dialectic has unfolded, in which militant worker conflicts and strikes against intransigent employers has induced President Chavez to intervene on their behalf, which in turn has activated the spread and depth of worker and trade union support for President Chavez. This dialectic of reinforced mutual support has led to meetings of inter-sector union leaders and militants from the transport, metallurgic, food processing and related industries. In response to increased trade union organized support, Chavez has raised the prospect of nationalizing banks and the rest of the food production and distribution chain. Much depends upon the unification and mobilization of the trade union leaders and their capacity to overcome their sectarian and personalistic divisions and turn toward organizing the unorganized contingent and informal workers.
The sectarianism of the ultra-leftist sects and their supporters among a few trade union bureaucrats leads them to see Chavez and his government and trade union supporters as ‘the main enemy’ leading them to strike for exorbitant pay increases. They organize street blockades to provoke ‘repression’ and then call for ‘worker solidarity’. Most of the time they have had little success as most workers ignore their calls for ‘solidarity’. The unification of pro-Chavez union leaders around the current nationalizations and the growth of a powerful unified workers’ trade union movement will isolate the sects and limit their role. A unified working class movement could accelerate the struggle for social transformation of industry. It would strengthen the national defense of the transformative process in times of danger.
The National Security Threats The multi-country surveys reveal that most people in almost all countries think the US is the biggest threat to world peace. This is especially the case in Venezuela, a Caribbean country which has already been subject to a US-backed and orchestrated coup attempt, a employers and executives lockout of the vital petroleum industry, a US-financed recall-referendum, an international campaign to block the sale of defensive weapons and spare parts accompanied by a massive sustained military build-up of Colombia, its surrogate in the region. The violent efforts of the US to overthrow President Chavez have a long and ugly pedigree in the Caribbean and Central America . Over the past half century the US has directly invaded or attacked Guatemala, Panama, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Nicaragua and El Salvador; it organized death squads and counter revolutionary surrogate armies n Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Honduras, which murdered nearly 300,000 people.
50 The US assault against Venezuela includes many of the strategies applied in its previous murderous interventions. Like in Guatemala , it has and continues to bribe, cajole and subvert individuals in the Venezuelan military and among National Guard officers. Their plan is to use Venezuelan military officials to organize a coup, collaborate with Colombian cross border infiltrators and to encourage defections to the pro-US opposition. Like in Central American , US operatives have organized death squad killers to infiltrate the Venezuelan countryside to attack peasant movements pursuing land reform and to consolidate support among big landowners.
Like in Nicaragua , the US is combining support for the systematic sabotage of the economy by the business elite to foment discontent while financing opposition electoral campaigns to exploit the unstable economic circumstances. Like its economic blockade of Cuba, the US has organized a de facto arms and parts embargo as well as an international ‘freeze’ on Venezuela’s PDVSA overseas assets through international court processes initiated by Exxon-Mobil. Colombia ’s cross-border bombing of Ecuador is as much a ‘test’ of Venezuela ’s preparedness as it is an overt aggression against Ecuador ’s President Correa’s nationalist government’s cancellation of the strategic US military base in Manta ( Ecuador ).
Venezuela had taken several measures to counter the US-Colombian-Venezuelan Fifth Column threats to national security.
Following the coup President Chavez ousted several hundred military officers involved in the overthrow and promoted officers loyal to the constitution. Unfortunately the new group included several pro-US and anti-leftist officers open to CIA bribes, one of whom even became the Minister of Defense before he was ‘retired’ – and became a virulent spokesperson against Chavez’ transformative referendum.51 Worse still, Chavez amnestied the military and civilian coup makers and economic ‘lock-out’ saboteurs after they had served only a small fraction of their sentences – to the utter shock and dismay of the mass of popular forces that shouldered the burden of their violent coup and economic sabotage and who were not consulted.
Venezuela has purchased some light weapons (100,000 rifles and machine guns) and a dozen submarines from Russia and helicopters from Brazil to counter Colombia ’s $6 billion dollar light and heavy arms build-up. Clearly that is a step forward, but it is still inadequate given the massive arms deficit between the two countries. Venezuela needs to rapidly build up its ground to air defenses, modernize its fighter jets and naval fleet, upgrade its airborne battalions and vastly improve its ground forces capacity to engage in jungle and ground fighting. Colombia ’s army, after 45 years of counter-insurgency, has the training and experience lacking in Venezuela . Venezuela has taken positive steps toward organizing a mass popular militia – but the advances have a very mixed record, as training and enlistment lag far below expectations for lack of political organization and politico-military leadership.
While President Chavez has taken important steps to strengthen border defenses, the same cannot be said about internal defenses. In particular, several generals in the National Guard have been more aggressively dislodging peasant land occupiers than in hunting down and arresting landlord-financed gunmen who have murdered 200 peasant activists and land reform beneficiaries. Extensive interviews with peasant leaders and activists indicate active collaboration between high military officers and right-wing cattle barons, calling into question the political loyalties of rural based Guard garrisons.
There is an urgent need to accelerate the expropriation of big estates and to arm and train peasant militias to counter-act Guard complicity or negligence in the face of landlord-sponsored violence. There are thousands of peasants ready and willing to enlist in militias because they have a direct stake in defending their families, comrades and their land from the ongoing paramilitary attacks.
Today the most immediate and enduring threat to internal security takes the form of a blend between a mass of hardened Venezuelan criminal gangs and narco-paramilitary infiltrators from Colombia , which are terrorizing the populace in low income neighborhoods. Police investigations, arrests and government prosecution are inadequate, incompetent, and corrupt and occasionally point to complicity. To this day the infamous broad daylight assassination of the respected Attorney General Danilo Anderson has not been solved and the current Attorney General has essentially buried the investigation and, even more importantly, buried the investigation into the economic elite networks planning future coups that Anderson was carrying out at the time of his murder.
Anderson was the chief investigator of the forces behind the April 2002 failed coup, the economic sabotage and a series of political assassinations. Venezuelans close to the case state that Anderson had compiled extensive documentation and testimony implicating top opposition political, economic and media figures and some influential figures in the Chavez administration. With his death, the investigations came to an end, no new arrests were made and those already arrested were subsequently granted amnesties. Some of Anderson ’s top suspects are now operating in strategic sectors of the economy. There are two hypotheses: Either sheer incompetence within the office of the new Attorney General, the Ministry of Justice and related agencies of government has derailed the investigation; or there is political complicity on the part of high officials to prevent undermining the present socialization strategy. In either case the weakness of law enforcement, especially with regard to a dangerous capitalist class operating an extensive network supporting the violent overthrow of the elected government, opens the door to a re-play of another coup. Indeed the amnesty of the elite coup-makers and economic saboteurs and the case of Danilo Anderson weighs heavily on the minds of militant Venezuelans who see it as an example of the continued impunity of the elite.
Factory and anti-crime ‘neighborhood watches’ and defense militias are of the utmost importance given the rising internal and external national security threats and crime wave. With the greater cooperation of communal councils, sweeps of local gangs is a top priority. Neighborhood police and militia stations must saturate the poor neighborhoods. Large-scale lighting must be established to make streets and sidewalks of the ranchos safer. The war against drug traffic must delve into their bourgeois collaborators, bankers and real estate operators who launder money and use illegal funds to finance opposition activities. Petty and youth delinquents should be sentenced to vocational training programs and supervised rural and community service. Large-scale illegal financial transactions must be prosecuted by the confiscation of bank accounts and property. National and internal security is the sine quo non of maintaining any political order dedicated to transforming the socio-economic system.
On April 9, 2008 President Chavez took a major step toward reducing crime, strengthening community-police relations and improving the security of the people by passing a National Police Law through presidential law decree. Under the new law, a new national revolutionary police of the people will be established ‘demolishing the old repressive police model with education, conscience, social organization and prevention’. He contrasted the past capitalist police who abused the poor with the new communal police who will be close to the citizens and dialogue oriented. To that end the newly formed communal councils will be encouraged to join and help select a new type of police based on rigorous selection process and on their willingness to live and work with the neighborhood. The PSUV and the communal councils will become the backbone of creating the new political solidarity with the newly trained police from the neighborhoods. Chavez’ recognition of the security issue in all its political and personal dimensions and his pursuit of democratic and egalitarian approach highlights his commitment to both maintaining law and order and advancing the revolutionary process.52
Conclusion: Advantages and Opportunities for Socialist Transformation
Venezuela today possesses the most advantageous economic, political and social conditions for a socialist transformation in recent history despite the US military threats, its administrative weaknesses and political institutional limitations.
Economically, Venezuela’s economy is booming at 9% growth, world prices for exports are at record levels (with oil at over $100 a barrel), it has immense energy reserves, $35 billion dollars in foreign exchange reserves and it is diversifying its overseas markets, although much too slow for its own security.53 With the introduction in April 2008 of an excess profit tax which will take 50% of all revenues over $70 dollars a barrel and an additional 60% of all revenues over $100 a barrel, several billion dollars in additional income will swell the funds for financing the nationalization of all strategic sectors of the economy.
Venezuela benefits from a multi-polar economic world eager to purchase and invest in the country. Venezuela is in the best possible condition to upgrade the petroleum industry and manufacture dozens of downstream petrochemical products from plastics to fertilizers – if public investment is efficiently and rationally planned and implemented. Venezuela has over a million productive landless workers and small farmers ready and willing to put the vast tracts of oligarch-owned under-utilized lands to work and put Venezuela on the road to food self-sufficiency – if not an agro-exporting country. Millions more hardworking Colombian refugee-peasants are eager to work the land along side their Venezuelan counterparts. There is no shortage of fertile land, farmers or investment capital. What is needed is the political will to organize expropriations, cultivation and distribution.
Politically, President Chavez provides dynamic leadership backed by legislative and executive power, capable of mobilizing the vast majority of the urban and rural poor, organized and unorganized workers and youth. The majority of the military and the new academy graduates have (at least up to now) backed the government’s programs and resisted the bribes and enticements of US agents. New Bolivarian-socialist military instructors and curricula and the expulsion of US military ‘missions’ will strengthen the democratic link between the military and the popular government.
The intelligence and counter-intelligence services have detected some subversive plots but remain the weakest link both in terms of information collecting, direct action against US-Colombian infiltration, detecting new coup plans and providing detailed documentation to expose US-Colombian assassination teams. Clearly housecleaning of dubious and incompetent elements in the intelligence agencies is in order. New training and recruitment processes are proceeding, rather slowly and have to demonstrate competence.
Socially the Chavez government retains the support of over 65% of the electorate and nearly 50% of the people were in favor of an overtly socialist agenda in the referendum of December 2, 2007. If the communal councils take off, and the militias gain substance and organization and if the PSUV develops mass roots and the popular nationalization accelerates, the government could consolidate its mass support into a formidable organized force to secure a huge majority in a new referendum and to counter the US-backed counter-revolution.
A lot will depend on the government’s deepening and extending its social-economic transformation – increasing new public housing from 40,000 to 100,000 a year; reducing the informal labor sector to single digits and encouraging the trade unions to organize the 80% of the unorganized labor force into class unions with the help of new labor legislation.
Given the availability of mass social support, given the high export earnings, given the positive social changes, which have occurred, the objective basis for the successful organization of a powerful pro-socialist, pro-Chavez movement exists today.
The challenge is the subjective factor: The shortages of well trained cadres, political education linked to local organizing, the elaboration of a socialist political-ideological framework and the elimination of personality-based liberal patronage officials in leading administrative and party offices. Within the mass Chavista base, the struggle for a socialist consciousness is the central challenge in Venezuela today.
NOTES:
1 Weisbrot, Mark and Luis Sandoval 2008, “Update: The Venezuelan Economy in the Chavez Years”, Washington D.C. Center for Economic and Policy Research.
2 Mark Weisbrot, “An Empty Research Agenda: The Creation of Myths About Venezuela :, March 2008. Center for Economic and Policy Research, Washington D.C.
3 Ibid. Also see “Letter From Venezuela’s Communication Minister to the Washington Post”, March 26, 2008 by Andres Izarra printed on March 28, 2008.
4 A good example can be found in the Socialist Register 2008. For an example of rampant propaganda disguised as ‘scholarship, see Francisco Rodriguez, “An Empty Revolution: The Unfulfilled Promises of Hugo Chavez”, Foreign Affairs March/April 2008.
5 Weisbrot, Op cit page 10.
6 Weisbrot, Op cit
7 Interview with peasant leaders of the Frente Nacional Campesino Eqzquiel Zamora in Caracas , Feb. 27, 2008. Boston Globe April 11, 2008
8 Interview with President Chavez, Caracas , March 2,2008
9 Dario Vea, February 25, 2008 p.2
10 Interview with President Chavez, March 2, 2008
11 Weisbrot, Op cit
12 Hyperinflation brought down the social democratic Alfonsin regimes in Argentina (1989) and Garcia in Peru (1990); weakened the Allende regime in 1973 and led to right wing take over. Hyperinflation has also led to the collapse of right wing regimes in China (1945-49) and the rise of Communism as well as regime change in Brazil in the 1990’s.
13 Reuters News Service April 9, 2008; BBC News April 2, 2008.
14 “La grave represion de los trabajadores siderúgicos” Argenpress March 24, 2008.
15 El Universal, March 5, 2008. page 1.
16 Izarra, Op cit
17 ‘Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela: Herramiento de Masas in Gestión’, Rebelion, March 25, 2008.
18 ibid
19 Interview in Caracas with PSUV delegates, March 1, 2008.
20 Interviews and meetings of neighborhood delegates of Communal Councils, February 29, 2008.
21 Interview with Minister of the Interior Ramon Rodriguez Chacun, La Jornada, March 31, 2008.
22 Interview with Communal Councils, February 29, 2008. According to a poll by the respected polling group, Barometro, in early April 2008, 66.5% of Venezuelans approved Chavez presidency.
23 Commentaries from Communal Council delegates and peasant activists in Caracas , ‘Popular Power Meeting’ at the Ministry of Culture and Popular Power. February 29, 2008
24 Interview with Carmen Boqueron, Ministry of Culture, February 25, 2008.
25 Interview with Miquel Marquez, President Editorial El Perro y la Rana, State Publishing House, March 5, 2008.
26 See La Plena Voz, Memórias, Política Exterior y Soberania, among other magazines.
27 Interview with Carmen Boquerón, February 26, 2008
28 Interview with Minister of Culture, March 1, 2008.
29 Interview February 29, 2008. Even at the new Bolivarian Universities, only a minority of working class students are involved in political activities, most concentrate on their studies and future job prospects. However among active students at the new universities, the great majority are pro-Chavez.
30 From the beginning of the first nationalization in 1976 under President Carlos Andres Perez, the fundamental question was ‘nationalization for whom?’ In the 1970’s to the re-privatizations, the answer was the wealthy elites. See James Petras, Morris Morley and Steven Smith, The Nationalization fof Venezuelan Oil, (New York Praeger Press. 1977)
31 Eva Golinger’s detailed documentary study based on files secured from the US Government through the Freedom of Information Act which provide ample evidence of US intervention.
32 Interview with Venezuelan Presidential adviser, Paris November 2001.
33 http://www.rebelion.org/ April 13, 2002
34 Weisbrot Op cit
35 Eva Golinger, The Chavez Code: Cracking US Intervention in Venezuela ( Havana : Cuba Book Institute 2005). Golinger provides extensive documentation of US financing of the self-styled NGO’s through AID and NED (National Endowment for Democracy, a government conduit for destabilizing regimes critical of the US ).
36 For a more detailed analysis, see James Petras “El referendo Venezolano: analisis y epilogo”, http://www.rebellion.org/ Dec 17, 2007.
37 The phrase ‘soft power’ is credited to Harvard political science professor and long time US presidential adviser, Joseph Nye, who offers his expertise on empire management and the uses of imperial power. See Joseph Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics 2004
38 Venezuelan drug interdiction has captured 360 tons of drugs between 2000-2007, according to the National Anti-Drug Office, January 2008.
39 On the Colombian State ’s mass terror, see the annual reports of the International Labor Organization, Via Campesino, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.
40 Interview with peasant leaders from the Frente Nacional Campesino Ezequiel Zamora, February 27, 2008.
41 Throughout the dispute between Exxon-Mobil and the PDVSA, the European press sided with their more conciliatory multi-nationals while the Washington Post, NY Times and Wall Street Journal engaged in vituperative attacks on Venezuela .
42 While Condeleeza Rice gave her backing to the ‘Regional Command’, Lula immediately informed her that the US was not part of it.
43 The Bank of the South is already financing development projects without the usual onerous conditions imposed by the World Bank and IMF.
44 In interviews with both Fidel Castro (Feb 10, 2006 Havana ) and with Hugo Chavez (March 2, 2008) both confirm the long-term, large-scale ties, which bind them in a strategic alliance.
45 The testimony of a militant female peasant leader at a meeting organized by the Ministry of Popular Power was very demonstrative: ‘We support President Chavez; we defend President Chavez; but he has to replace those incompetent officials in the ministry who fail to provide us with credit so we can buy seed and fertilizer in time to plant our crops.’ February 27, 2008. Ministry of Popular Power
46 While I have noticed improvements in the punctuality and preparation of more agency officials, there are still too many highly placed functionaries who fail to keep appointments, comply with their professional responsibilities or inform themselves about the subject matter of their ministries.
47 The anti-production behavior of the big land owners and cattle barons has been the practice for decades. Back in the mid-1970’s, President Carlos Andres Perez also pumped hundreds of millions into ‘making Venezuela food self-sufficient’ in a program he called ‘ploughing the oil wealth into agriculture’ with the same miserable results as the present. The reason is clear, many of the big landlords are the same people. The lessons from the past are very clear: As long as the present government tries to develop agriculture through the existing land owners it is doomed to repeat the failures of the past.
48 Interview with an oil executive from British Petroleum, Caracas , March 6, 2008.
49 ‘El Frente Nacional Campesino Ezequiel Zamora es atacado por militares’ March 22, 2008 report from the FNCEZ.
50 See Petras and Morley, Empire or Republic (NY Routledge 1995).
51 General Baduel was always a virulent anti-communist who is said to have received a seven-figure payoff and threats of exposure of unseemly personal revelations if he didn’t ‘turn’ against Chavez.
52 James Suggett, “Venezuela Passes National Police Law”, http://www.venezuelanalysis.com// April 11, 2008.
53 See Weisbrot, Op cit
Source:
GlobalResearch.ca
Printer-friendly version
Bookmark/Search this post with:
Related Articles
Venezuela Six Years after the Coup
United Socialist Party of Venezuela is an Instrument for Socialism
Venezuela: Revolution, Party and a New International
Venezuelan Socialists Discuss the Struggle for Revolutionary Party
Why the Barrios Still Love Hugo
Opinion & Analysis
The Bolivarian Project
Venezuela: Democracy, Socialism and Imperialism
James Petras - Globalresearch.ca
The Bolivarian Project
Venezuela Six Years after the Coup
Jorge Martín
International Relations
Bush Administration, More Isolated in Latin America, Cries "Terrorism"
Mark Weisbrot - San Diego Union Tribune
Political Developments
Radical Chavismo Bares Its Teeth
George Cicariello-Maher
Labor
Chavez Emboldens Venezuelan Workers with Takeover Precedent
Frank Jack Daniel - Reuters
Media Watch
BBC v. Hugo Chavez
Stephen Lendman
International Relations
Vote for My Colombia Deal or I'll Brand You a Chavez Supporter!
Nikolas Kozloff - CounterPunch
International Relations
U.S. Native Americans Lead Opposition to Designation of Venezuela as Terrorist Nation
Gale Courey Toensing - Indian Country Today
Economy
The Booming Venezuelan Economy, and how it affects Monte Carmelo
Steve Brouwer - Venezuelanotes
International Relations
Venezuela Steps Up Efforts To Thwart Cocaine Traffic
Juan Forero - Washington Post
License
This article is not a work of venezuelanalysis.com. For that reason we cannot assign a license.More info about Creative Commons Licensing
venezuelanalysis.com :: website realized with drupal using free software only :: site best viewed with mozilla firefox
Suscribirse a:
Entradas (Atom)
