VENEZUELA
Venezuela exploded with a force unseen for 30 years, since the overthrow of the dictator Pérez Jimenez. It is estimated that more than a million families came onto the streets of Caracas and other cities, sweeping everything before them, storming the supermarkets, burning luxury cars, confronting the police, the National Guard and the army with stones and firearms. It took the forces of order two days to regain control of the situation, after slaughtering 500
"FOR A LONG TIME, the Sandinistas were hard-nosed, dogmatic, totalitarian....Their economy is in ruins. The democratic solution is the only way out." That was the message trumpeted in November by Carlos Andrés Pérez
("CAP"), then presidential candidate of Democratic
Action (a party belonging to the Socialist International).
He was elected on December 4 with 54% of the vote, as against 43.7% for his Christian Democratic rival
Fernandez and 2.7% for the candidate of the Movement
Toward Socialism (MAS), Petkoff. In February, only 25 days after his inauguration, Pérez — called "the great hope of Latin America" — was responsible for the slaughter of more than 500 people who rebelled against his austerity policy.
"CAP" doubtless inherited this particular way of
"restoring order" from his predecessor, Lusinchi, a member of the same party. In November 1988, the latter's political police (Disip) and army slaughtered 14 fishermen who were accused of "aiding the Colombian guerrillas." In the wake of this, they opened fire on students who were demonstrating to protest against these murders, killing two of them and wounding dozens of others. This, it seems, is what passes for "social democratic" methods in Latin America.
SERGIO CABRERA
IT WAS all laughs, back slapping, champagne and big promises on February 2 when the president elect was inaugurated. It was a lavish celebration, marked by a week of parties in which millions of dollars were squandered.
Shortly before the December 4 elections,
Pérez granted an exclusive interview to
UNO-Review of the Americas, in which he presented his program in the following terms: "My first measure will be to define an overall economic policy. In order to have an effect on a pluralist and capitalist economy like Venezuela's, it will have to be the product of a concentration of the private economy and of the labor of the workers in the cities and the countryside. On the economic level, my administration will be based on these two sectors."
Asked whether he would maintain "the marked social emphasis" of his previous
10 term as president, Pérez said: "In the present circumstances, there will be serious
International Viewpoint #161 • April 17, 1989 financial difficulties, but in any case a social emphasis must be the central axis of any democratic movement." (UNO 2,
Obviously, Pérez has a peculiar notion of the "social emphasis" his government is supposed to have. On February 16, exactly two weeks after taking the oath, the "social democratic" president announced his first economic measures - floating the exchange rate for the dollar, opening the way for a devaluation of the bolivar that might exceed 100%, ending controls on interest rates and prices and eliminating subsidies for necessities.
The first symptoms of discontent were the strikes of teachers, court employees and threats of work stoppages in other sectors. But the "sensible" Pérez did not stop there. He could not because of the accords with the IMF. On Monday, February 27, gasoline went up by 90%, transport fares by 30%, and the prices of necessities doubled.
people and arresting thousands, by establishing a curfew and suppressing all democratic rights. Savage repression meted out by Perez
The fury against the big stores and shops had a specific cause. At the speed things were moving, Venezuela was on the brink of a breakdown of supply. Knowing that prices were going up, the merchants had hoarded all the products. With his savage repression, the "social democrat" Pérez refreshed the memory of Venezuelans, who had called him "the trigger" at the beginning of his political career when he was minister of the interior in the Romulo Betancourt's government in the early 1960s.
Parallel to these events, the government rushed to offer some wage increases and to announce (and later deny) that it would not pay the foreign debt. It dumped the responsibility for the massive and spontaneous rebellion against its economic program on the developed countries to which Venezuela owes $32 billion.
What has become of the populist Pérez who governed the country from 1974 to 1976, who nationalized the oil and steel industries and brought a lot of currency into the country? Is this really the same Pérez who today is applying the IMF's savage policy? Certainly he is the same person. The present situation, moreover, is largely due to the policy his government pursued in that period and to that of the following Social Christian government of Luis Herrera Campis (1979-1983). The same policy was continued up until February 2 by President Lusinchi, a member of Pérez' party.
The times are not favorable for populism, as they were in the 1940s and 1950s when the big raw-material producers were able to take advantage of the post-war boom. The heyday of the oil bonanza that Venezuela enjoyed as Latin America's biggest producer has also passed.
At the time of Pérez' inauguration, Spanish premier Felipe Gonzalez compared Venezuela with Nicaragua and Cuba in the following terms: "There are some countries that are working, and others that are not." So, Venezuela was supposed to be a counry that was "working."
In what state did Pérez' first administration leave Venezuela? In November 1979, the UN Economic Commission for Latin America published some eloquent facts
April 17, 1989 • #161 International Viewpoint about Venezuela in its report entitled "Latin America on the Threshold of the 1980s." For example, 25% of Venezuelan families were below the poverty line. "Relative poverty" (an average level of satisfaction of needs) marked 38% of households. Ten per cent of households got 36% of total income, while the poorest 40% got only 9.8% of income.
This situation has grown worse with the years, and today it is estimated that 1,900,000 homes are "poor,' " and that 500,000 are unhealthy. Half of the latter are in the gigantic shanty-town belts, the ranchitos that surround the cities in the shadow of the the oil magnates' mansions.
In Venezuela, "spectacular" economic growth has never been synonymous with "development" in the broad sense, in terms of not just economic but also social and human aspects, improvement in the quality of life and so on. Venezuela is a clear example of those countries that seek development in the image of the imperialist centers, that adopt "an imitative capitalism of the periphery,' " that "nationalize dependency, with the process of transnationalization of economic relations.
According to Raul Prebisch in Latin America in the possible scenarios of a widening income gap, "the consumer society created by imitative development is incompatible with integrating into the system the vast masses that are vegetating in a society of underconsumption. The cause of this is that the fruits of increased productivity, which accompanies the spread of technologies from the centers to the countries of the periphery, tend to concentrate largely in the higher-income levels, above all because of the economic power of these strata."
Populist alternatives are fading
Despite the nationalization of hydrocarbons, their sale remains in the hands of multinationals. The irrationality of the first Pérez government and its successors in seeking to channel the considerable income obtained during the oil boom to advance
Venezuela toward economic independence has been compounded by indescribable waste, a massive currency flight, and a "Miami"-type life style for some privileged natives. The latter collected the profits, bought homes in the United States, and built luxurious "clubs," arousing stronger and stronger social hostility.
The Venezuelan case is not new in Latin
America. We have seen evidence of this in
Mexico and Brazil. Populist alternatives are fading; the "democrats" and "social democrats" are showing their true nature, and anger is rising like a wave among the disinherited of Latin America. *
• From the March 9 issue of Combate, newspaper of the LCR, Spanish state section of the Fourth International.