August 2004
Hugo Chavez defeats recall effort in Venezuela
by Gerry Foley
http://www.geocities.com/mnsocialist/chavez1.html
The referendum held Aug. 15 in Venezuela, backed by the U.S. rulers and their
local supporters, to oust Hugo Chavez from the presidency of the of the country,
was a key test for initial challenges to the neoliberal imperialist offensive in
Latin America that we have seen in recent years. Venezuela
But it was only the opening of a new stage in the confrontation. On the morning
after the vote, with 94 percent counted, the National Electoral Commission
registered more than 58 percent opposing the recall of the president. However,
the imperialist-backed opposition was refusing to accept the result, alleging
fraud.
Even the right-wing British business magazine The Economist noted that vote
rigging on that scale was hardly likely. The attitude of the opposition shows
the depth of the polarization in the country and raises the specter of new
attempts by the right to oust the Chavez regime by violence.
The Chavez government is by far the most defiant of the populist governments
that have been put in office by the mass rebellion in Latin America against the
imperialist onslaught. Even the more conservative populists like Lula in Brazil
and Kirschner in Argentina apparently feel threatened by the imperialist
campaign against Chavez .
In its July 31 issue, the Mexico City daily La Jornada reported on an editorial
in one of the major Argentine bourgeois papers, La Nacion, that attacked
Kirchner for "extending his long arm of support" to Chavez.
The Venezuelan ambassador responded, denouncing the right-wing newspaper for
publishing a provocative article linking Chavez and Kirschner, when it failed to
comment on an article by the former Venezuelan president, Carlos Andres Perez,
in the Caracas daily El Nacional proclaiming that violence would be necessary to
oust Chavez and suppress his supporters. Perez’s repressive forces killed 5000
Venezuelans during the 1989 uprising in Caracas against the austerity measures
imposed by the International Monetary Fund.
During the general strike organized a year and a half ago by corrupt union
bureaucrats, which aimed to force Chavez out by cutting off the country’s
petroleum production, Lula sent a symbolic shipment of oil from Brazil. In fact,
the imperialist campaign against Chavez illustrates the determination of the
U.S. rulers and their local stooges to resist at all costs any concessions to
the rising mass revolt against the neoliberal attacks on the livelihoods of
Latin American working people.
Moreover, the imperialists and their local supporters are clearly determined to
punish Chavez for defending Cuba against the U.S. blockade.
The temporary victory of a coup d’etat against Chavez two years ago was
accompanied by rightist attacks on the Cuban embassy in Caracas. "Venezuela
will restore friendly ties with its main oil client, the United States, and
scale back relations with Cuba if opponents of President Hugo Chavez win,"
Reuters reported July 8. The wire service was citing statements by Alejandro
Armas, a leader of the so-called Coodinadora Democratica. Armas referred to
relations between the Chavez government and Cuba as "a sinister
alliance."
The hypocrisy of the imperialist campaign against Chavez is mind-boggling.
For example, The Washington Post, one of the more liberal and supposedly
objective of the U.S. capitalist newspapers, claimed that the fact that the
Chavez government was investigating a Venezuelan opposition organization for
accepting money from a "congressionally funded" U.S. foundation, the
so-called National Endowment for Democracy, was a sign that Chavez was
"flirting with outright political repression." The paper proclaimed
that Chavez "does not genuinely accept democracy or the rule of law."
Moreover, the Washington Post said nothing about Carlos Andres Perez’s call
for a violent overthrow of the Chavez government and the establishment of a
repressive regime, or about the connections of the opposition with the attempted
military coup against Chavez two years ago or the rightist military conspiracies
that have come to light since.
In fact, the political polarization in Venezuela has long since reached the
stage of a latent civil war. The stakes in the conflict are extremely high.
The country is one of the major petroleum powers in the world, the third largest
supplier of oil to the United States. It also supplies cut-rate oil to Cuba, in
defiance of the U.S. economic blockade.
The Chavez regime’s proclamations of its independence from the United States,
are also encouragements to other Latin American governments to try to achieve at
least some margin of maneuver in their economic and political relations with the
United States.
Because of its oil wealth, Venezuela has a larger middle class than other Latin
American countries and one that has been very tightly interlinked with U.S.
imperialism. It was this corrupt layer that was the base of the old bourgeois
parties that Chavez routed in the 1998 election. It is now the mass base of the
big-business-led opposition to his regime.
This layer may represent 10 percent of the population. Because of its economic
resources, and the domination of the society by right-wing pro-imperialist
ideology, it has been able to pull a larger section behind it. But the basic
fact it is that it represents a minority that will be sidelined if the
disadvantaged majority mobilizes.
According to a 1996 study (Fundacredesa, Estudio Nacional de Crecimiento y
Desarrollo Humanos), about 80 percent of the population is impoverished. And the
attacks of the right and the imperialists have forced Chavez more and more to
call on the poor masses to mobilize in his defense.
It is notable, moreover, that as the confrontation has sharpened Chavez has
poured increasing amounts of money into social programs. In the Aug. 7 British
Guardian, Richard Gott, a veteran reporter on the Latin American left, wrote:
"Innumerable projects, or ‘missions,’ were established throughout the
country, recalling the atmosphere of the early years of the Cuban revolution.
They combat illiteracy, provide further education for school dropouts, promote
employment, supply cheap food, and extend a free medical service in the poor
areas of the cities and the countryside, with the help of 10,000 Cuban doctors.
"Redundant oil company buildings have been commandeered to serve as the
headquarters of a new university for the poor, and oil money has been diverted
to set up Vive, an innovative cultural television channel that is already
breaking the traditional U.S. mould of the Latin American media."
However, this is all social spending financed from huge oil revenues, swollen by
big rises in the world oil price. Gott himself pointed out in his book on Chavez,
"In the Shadow of the Liberator," that the Venezuelan populist
president has religiously shunned any attempt to attack the capitalist system as
such.
In the present confrontation, Chavez has appealed for the support of the
"national businessmen." This call was noted in the Aug. 7 issue of the
Cuban daily Granma. But the Cuban revolutionists learned that there was no
national capitalist class in Latin America able to stand up to imperialist
pressure. That lesson is inscribed in the Second Declaration of Havana.
In view of the stakes involved in the confrontation, there is no way it is going
to be resolved by an election. To one degree or another, that has been
acknowledged by both sides. In fact, the history of Latin America is full of
examples in which winning an election has been a death sentence for a reformist
government. The prime example is the Allende regime in Chile. Its victory in the
March 1973 congressional elections induced the right wing to prepare for the
military coup it launched in September of that year, which resulted in the
slaughter of tens of thousands of people.
The Venezuela elections were a test of organizational strength in which the
right held many advantages, in particular the vestiges of the old bourgeois
electoral machinery. And the great bulk of the media remains in the hands of the
right.
Chavez in fact accepted the most unfavorable ground possible to fight for the
life of his reformist experiment. But given his determination not to challenge
the capitalist system as such, he really had no choice. The only alternative
would have been to call for the masses to organize their own government from the
bottom up and arm themselves to defend it, and that would mean a socialist
revolution.
Chavez has taken some steps to defend himself, calling for the formation of
militias and increasing the size of the reserves relative to the regular army.
But that is unlikely to be enough to defeat a determined military strike by the
right, backed by U.S. imperialism.
Chavez’s attitude is similar to that of the government of the Spanish Popular
Front in 1936. It knew that a military coup was coming. It took some steps to
arm its supporters, but too little and too late. Nonetheless, in the decisive
areas of the country, when the rightists launched their coup, the working people
rose up and defeated the military.
But then, the fact that the masses did not replace the Popular Front government,
which was determined not to challenge the capitalist system, condemned their
struggle to defeat.
In the rightist military coup of April 2002, Chavez was saved only by
spontaneous mass mobilizations and the resistance of the lower ranks of the army
radicalized by the desperation of the sections of society from which they come.
But as the confrontation deepens, spontaneous mobilizations are likely to prove
less effective against well-organized force by the right and the imperialists.
It is to be hoped that in the radicalization that has advanced over the past two
years that leaderships are emerging in the mass movement that will not depend on
Chavez and not accept the limits he has set for his regime but can take up the
life-or-death challenge that the Venezuelan masses now face.
The article above first appeared in the August 2004 issue of Socialist
Action newspaper.
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