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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