"Chávez has compromised with
International Viewpoint #323 July-August 2000
Venezuela * VENEZUELA under President Hugo Chavez- is undergoing a political-institutional transition characterized by the breakup of the traditional bi-partyism, a sharp economic crisis (nearly 80% of the population lives below the poverty level) and by power vacuums. On May 28th, in line with the new constitution, presidential, legislative, regional and municipal elections were due to take place, but they were postponed at the last minute. Eleven million electors (including soldiers, allowed to vote for the first time were due to elect a president for a 6 year
NATIONAL sovereignty is undoubtedly the dearest inheritance of our nationality, transmitted by the patriots of the 21st century. And with it the value of liberty in its different expressions, the exercise of the rights of citizens, the unending democratization of power, the reinforcement of human dignity, constitute the foundation of our behavior. Our people have always shown a significant capacity for resistance and integrity throughout its history.
DOUGLAS BRAVO
THANKS to this capacity, the popular forces rose up on February 27,
1989 in the most splendid, legitimate and radical insurrection of the
Venezuelan 20th century.4 This event inaugurated a new role for the people in that the immediate response to the implementation of the model of neoliberal globalization unleashed by Carlos Andrés Pérez constituted a new reawakening of the people.
It is for this reason that February 27,
1989 was the real point of departure for the new revolutionary changes that the impoverished masses of our country demand today. That is why we arrive in year 11 of the new cultural, political, economic, social, religious and military confrontation, the most important of our recent history, led by the forces of emancipation and sovereignty, popular fervor and dignity and authentic patriotism, on the one hand, and the forces of globalization, oppression and humiliation on the other.
Reality
Such is the reality, the fundamental historic conflict of these last ten years, not yet resolved and in virtue of which our coun try has lived, lives and will continue to live under tension.
President Hugo Chávez, with a considerable skill which must one day exhaust itself, adopts a double language which is increasingly discredited among the public. On the one hand there is his apparently redemptive role. On the other, the reality of his political project is found in the agreements with the multinationals, the antinational sectors of the Venezuelan bourgeoisie like the Cisneros, the US and the World Bank to whom he has guaranteed a continuity in their regime so that they can continue to devastate our basic wealth, hold us in poverty and limit our sovereignty.
### Referendum
The decree for the convocation of the referendum in favor of the National Constituent Assembly has legalized the international agreements which affect our sovereignty, accords signed by Calderas with the transnationals in the matter of oil, mining and forestry exploitation, which had been challenged before the old Supreme Court of Justice. Now, paradoxically, with the misnamed peaceful revolution carried out by the commandant, our sovereignty is — as the writer Luis Brito Garcia puts it — dismembered.
Little by little, we are today less independent and less sovereign than before. "The Decree enjoying the status of law on the protection of investments authorizes foreigners to buy Venezuela and modify the laws as they see fit. The treaty on dual term, 166 members of parliament, 223 regional deputies, 23 governors and 333 mayors, as well as some hundreds of municipal councillors.
The electoral contest takes place against a background of a crisis and fractures inside the Fifth Republic Movement (Movimiento V República, MVR) and the Patriotic Pole (Polo patriótico - PP). Last March some commandants who had fought with Chávez in the uprising of 1989 broke with him and one of them, Francisco Arias Cárdenas, is a presidential candidate, with an anti-corruption and neoliberal discourse.
Meanwhile, Country For All (Patria para todos, PPT), one of the main left forces making up the Patriotic Pole2 distanced itself from Chávez. Aristobulo Isturiz, a leader of the PPT, announcd the intention of his organization to leave the PP coalition, saying that Chávez could "go to the devil". Pablo Medina? added "we will leave PPT militants without a candidate and everyone can do as they wish".
"Super Chávez" must then face tensions with his allies of yesterday whereas at the same time there are social tensions appearing and some trade unions are entering into resistance. It seems improbable that he can repeat the electoral score of more than 70% he recorded in the last elections.
The article presented here offers some explanations of the political panorama and the Chávist project. Above all, it is a very hard and critical assessment coming from the left. Its author is a former leader of the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion Nacional (FALN), a Venezuelan guerilla organization of the 1960s. * Ernesto Herrera.
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the dominant class"
* Venezuela taxation authorizes foreigners not to pay the taxes that they should on the wealth that they have accumulated in Venezuela. These two norms submit the country to the judgment of foreign tribunals or commissions of arbitration. We can neither freely adopt laws, nor apply them, nor interpret them."
### Privatization
To these two aspects described by Brito Garcia we could add the incessant privatizations of the essential enterprises of Guyana, the agricultural legislation which places the lands in the hands of the big capitalists of the agro-alimentary industry, and on the military level the acceptance of overflying by US forces on the pretext of the struggle against the drugs trade, with the new plans for strategic occupation of our territories concealed behind this.
We quote again from Luis Brito Garcia: "After the overflying comes the bases, after the bases the reinforcements, then the continuous military presence, then the "joint maneuvers" and our real subjection to the strategies of the power of occupation." (El Nacional, March 4, 2000).
As to the the struggle against corruption, it is obvious that until now nobody has been jailed for this. The big capitalists who have indebted the country and posses bank accounts abroad which bring them substantial interest continue to enjoy a good financial health and freedom of
Not one of our super-devalued bolívars has been recovered from the suspect coffers of the corrupt rich. Nothing significant has happened except the simple change of an institutional name, of judicial power and the removal of some former judges and civil servants to be replaced by others who have shown themselves to be less honest and more perverse than their prede-
In this way the aspirations of the poor and the middle class of Venezuela are again cheated. Indeed, what is imposed today is the economic, social, cultural, political and military model of globalization and the persistence of corruption, reflected inevitably by the chronic presence of poverty with the specter of unemployment, promiscuity, hunger and criminality. Inflation, lack of housing, insecurity, demoralization, stress and collective neurosis, despair and psychic and spiritual depression haunt the existential landscape 20 International Viewpoint #323 July-August 2000 of our people as evidence of the new fraud perpetrated by a government which has not even honored its first image as rebel son of the Republic and inheritor of the army of Bolivarian liberation.
Faced with this pathetic reality, some sectors of the popular forces have begun to sketch out some kind of alternative. Concretely, it amounts to the struggles of indigenous and peasant communities for the recovery of lands where the conceptions of collective property - maintenance of the soil, forms of conviviality, organization and struggles — correspond to alternative viewpoints and aspirations for a change of society.
In the same way, in the different towns of the country, organized communities in the neighborhoods, student sectors, workers, ecologists and other are no longer content to wait and lead important struggles around demands. On the political terrain, one observes that the regroupments of parties has degenerated into bureaucratic battles to gain a little more power.
On the other hand, some patriotic and revolutionary sectors appear so confused as not to have clearly identified the fundamental historic enemy at this stage. It is obvious that the old pact of Punto Fijo approved by AD and COPEI is no longer the main political enemy, even if they are still there, as the guardians without scruples of globalised capitalism.
### Globalization
It is then necessary to state that the main enemy of the Venezuelan people and the sovereignty of the country is globalization because its unique and absolute law is that of the limitless gain and accumulation of capital and power, that is why its nature is anti-popular and anti-national. President Chávez remains at the Palace of Miraflores precisely because he has compromised himself with certain sectors of the dominant classes and carries out the essential projects of globalization.
Thanks to this, he enjoys the support of big multinational capital, the conservative high command of the armed forces and the most illustrious sectors of the Pentagon. The prolonged fight against Puntofijism? was a farce through which the president sought to disqualify the revolutionary dissident sectors and catalogue them as Puntofijists. It is an old strategy which seeks to neutralize the opposition while advancing the alliance with the oil companies and the US.
Today, we are in a situation where vanguards exist with a new emancipatory thought, with real roots in significant sectors of the population and intellectuals sensible to the manifestations of the sovereign power of the organized communities. Today, unlike the past, many of us understand that the revolution is above all a gradual process of the struggle of values against other values, in which is forged and emerges a new civilization, that the main contradiction of our society is between emancipation and globalization.
That the concepts on which the new civilization is built are: the entire sovereignty of the people faced to any oppressor, foreign or national, economic and social self-management to build a proper and technologically independent economy, the direct exercise of political, social and military power by the organized communities, the preservation, care and defence of natural resources and of the environment,
We start from the conviction that the apprenticeship of the peoples is not static but dynamic. It is opportune to recall again the credo of the poet Aquiles Nazoa to confirm our faith in the creative power of the people. Around the mega-elections, it is obvious that a pitiless bureaucratic competition is underway, revealing the political mediocrity and personal appetites which reign inside the leadership of the PP and
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Arias Cardenas and the group which follows him, they are like Chávez very far from the programme and the postulates that the country had hoped for on February
4 1992.8
As they say, the struggle continues. It is then, up to the sectors and forces of emancipation to assume the decisions, compromises and risks that the moment demands of us. In the first place, we must recover the slogans and ideas for philosophical and political reinforcement of the popular vanguards.
To develop a plan for the resurgence of the popular movement through the organization of struggles for its own demands. To impel all possible demonstrations, firm and resolute, for the salvaging of the sovereignty and independence of our country. To stimulate, create, support, consolidate all the forms of construction of the new civilization, which has as its foundation the age-old aspiration to liberty and happiness. We are in a time where false myths fall because of their own falseness and where the true myths resurge in the paradox of human existence.
Neither the democracy of the old pact of Punto Fijo, nor the globalised militarism of Chávez guarantees the happiness of the people. A new social, political, military and cultural regime of the organized communities is the way to refine the utopia where dreams meet reality and the people are absolute masters of their destiny. Chávez has capitulated. The struggle continues. Until victory. * 1. President Hugo Chávez was elected on December 6 1998 with 56.2% of the vote 2. The Patriotic Pole is a coalition comprising the Fifth Republic Movement, the PPT and the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS), founded in 1971 by former guerilla Teodoro Pettkoff. 3. Historic leader of Causa Radical, a radical left organization which split during the presidential campaign of 1998. 4. Following an austerity plan imposed by president Carlos Andrés Pérez, the poor rioted in Caracas, looting the shops. Ferocious repression (246 deaths officially, 500-1,200 according to the opposition) followed, but hunger riots took place again in 1990. 5. Rafael Caldera Rodriguez was president from 1974 to1978 under the label of Democratic Action and again from 1994 to 1998 under the label of Democratic Convergence, a coalition of 17 parties (including the conservatives, the MAS and the CP). 6. Democratic Action (AD, social democratic) and the Committee of Political Organisation of Independent Electors (COPEI, Christian Democratic) are the two traditional bourgeois political parties. Their unlimited corruption and aggressively neoliberal policy lost them all legitimacy, opening the way to the victory of Hugo Chávez in the presidential election of 1998. 7. Adjective derived from the Pact of Punto Fijo, signed October 31, 1958 between he three parties who were going to support Romule Betancourt (AD, COPET and the URD, the latter reduced to the role of "small party") which instituted the "Venezuelan model of democracy", a de facto bipartite system which collapsed in 1998. 8. Reference to February 4, 1992, day of the arrest of 1,098 soldiers during the defeated coup d'etat of Hugo Chávez.
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