On the occasion of the Ecuadorian president’s visit to Venezuela
Latin America and the experience of SIDOR

By: Marina Menéndez Quintero, special reporter
E-mail: mmenendez@jrebelde.cip.cu
August 31, 2008 - 00:40:50 GMT

A CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippmann.

A common page of plundering and struggle: a thumbnail sketch of the plant where Chávez and Correa once again committed themselves to integration.

ORINOCO BELT.— Intended to achieve a political independence impossible to have without economic sovereignty, the leaders of these two nations could not have found a better setting to hold their meeting: the Empresa Siderúrgica del Orinoco, one of the big industries that the Bolivarian government snatched out of foreign capital’s hands, visited on Friday by Hugo Chávez and Rafael Correa as still another step towards integration.

Known as SIDOR and considered the largest of its kind in South America, the giant steelworks was not spared by the disgraceful privatization campaign that neoliberalism decreed throughout this region in the 1980.

The decision to build its first plants here in Bolívar dates back to the 1950s, when a number of iron ore deposits found in the area led the authorities of the moment to request the services of an Italian company. New production lines were assembled with «support» of other European enterprises, and SIDOR grew bigger and stronger… until 1997, when it became Venezuela’s property.

At the time, the spate of privatizations prescribed by the IMF also had an effect on the then president Rafael Caldera, who put SIDOR out to tender, a contract finally won by the consortium Amazonia, which made great profits and left the Venezuelans with barely 20% of the stock!

Disclosed data has it that the factory had been dismantled to justify a handover that was nevertheless protected by the legislation, as many other Venezuelan assets thus sold: the Privatization Law, issued by the Gazette since September 1993.

Such is the recent history of a Latin America where, for the above reasons, Evo Morales had to nationalize the gas industry in order to provide life annuities to the elderly and almost causing an armed conflict with the oligarchy as a result; Cristina Fernández de Kirchner was outbid by a conceited agroindustrial cartel of local growers who favor the highest bidders from other countries over their own people; and a president like Ecuador’s Rafael Correa fights for a new constitution in the name of his state’s pressing need to rule over economic matters.

Venezuela’s recent past is quite similar, and so is SIDOR’s. As it did with assets like oil, electricity, land, the telephone system, cement and others that every nation must keep under its control, this time the Bolivarian government recovered this steelworks, despite legal action over issues like property transfer and compensation started by foreign corporations reluctant to lose their goldmine.

However, Ternium, S.A. –a division of Argentina-based Techint group and the steel maker in charge of SIDOR in the Amazonia– should be more than happy with its compensation. Unofficial figures provided by its workers –and therefore reliable– place in liquid assets the annual profits made by this company from at more than 3 billion dollars 2005 to 2007 alone.

Now, regardless of its legitimacy and worth, the opposition is trying to capitalize on the efforts to recover the plant through manipulation and stirring up fear for the nationalization process with deceitful arguments about the end of private property. In all fairness, it’s merely a matter of rendering unto Venezuela the things which are Venezuela’s. What they don’t say is that the demonic forces were the privatizations that gave everything to the great foreign capital and left the states rundown and defenseless.

How can Latin America develop, improve its social policies –as recommended by Europe– and become independent of the North while the industrialized countries keep growing with what they take away and leaving us without any money for social expenses? For the sake of understanding, suffice it to see all that remains to be done in our nations and the decision of the new nationalist governments to mitigate the huge social debt we have inherited...

The South’s need to recover its possessions seems as clear as dark were the times when previous governments, out of either wickedness or fear, put the continent out for sale.

Having paid giveaway prices for SIDOR and many other similar giants, as well as essential utilities like water and electricity– these transnational corporations become oppressive plundering machines that not only exploit and take with them raw materials that they later on resell to the country of origin as products made of their own riches, they also lean heavily on our people to that end, in the final analysis another reason to take over the running of things.

Latin America still brims with work contracts that the names on the payroll hardly ever match and thus exempt the owners from providing welfare, fair wages and pensions and muddle up the information collected by international institutions, whose databases never record subcontracted or illegal workers as unemployed and yet register informal jobholders as «underemployed». That’s very much the reality underpinning our peoples’ mobilization for change.

As to SIDOR, everything remained unchanged for a State acting in favor of the same man who kept the government’s hands tied while having his 9000 plus employees «outsourced». For 15 months there was no end of strikes against the employers until last April, when the Venezuelan authorities stepped in and announced the nationalization...

«Those were months of hard struggle, since the company always treated us like slaves», labor union leader José Meléndez said that day. «From now on we’ll produce Venezuelan steel for the benefit of the Revolution».

Still, that’s but one of the targets. The ultimate goal is to grow and provide welfare for all… an impossible task without full independence.

An example that illustrates how awful the situation was in Latin America during the last decades was given by one of the Argentinean businessman who signed cooperation agreements with Caracas last Thursday to build the first 20 of more than 200 new factories as part of a plan to foster agricultural and industrial development and produce here many things as yet imported.

Hugo Cerveni, manager of a conglomerate of small and medium enterprises located near the city of Rosario in Argentina, thanked president Chávez for this «opportunity».

«You can’t confront the big corporations on your own», he assured. «And we want to grow together with Venezuela».