a gringo in the bolivarian republic

Updates from Occupied California

2009-11-19T11:10:00.000-08:00

I've been so long in posting because of teaching and dissertating duties. The current collapse of the University of California system has not been helping matters in the slightest.

-On September 24th, Students throughout the UC system and especially here at UCSC staged walkouts and occupations of buildings in protest of the UC Board of Regents and the general mismanagement of the University, State and national governments' production of- and response to- the contemporary crisis in global capitalism.

-On November 17th, the UC board of regents met at UCLA to begin a 3 day meeting. The purpose of this meeting is to seal an already promised phase 32% increase in student tuition and fees.

-The California State University (CSU) board is concurrently meeting to pass a similar set of measures that will raise costs and lessen access to public higher education.

-In anticipation and in response to these threats to the very public nature of public education, students staged walkouts and occupations of university space in Santa Cruz (where between 300 and 500 students, faculty and workers shut down campus for 3 hours before staging a takeover of the Kresge Town Hall); Berkeley (an ~1,000 students, faculty and workers walked out and an unknown number of people attempted an occupation of the capital projects building); UCLA (multiple arrests at the regents meeting, ~30 people occupied and renamed Campbell Hall, and where hundreds are currently attempting a campus shutdown); City College San Francisco (hundreds walked out in solidarity with the CSU and UC cuts and actions); and San Francisco State (~150 occupied the administration offices).

-This has shaped up to truly be a 'hot autumn' in terms of student activism here in California. The task now is upon us to match our vigor for tactics with vision. If we really want 'everything' we damn well figure out how to keep it.

AP: Venezuela folk religion seen in secretive rituals

2009-10-14T11:23:00.000-07:00

(Statue of Maria Lionza a few blocks from my old apartment in CCS)

By ARIANA CUBILLOS (AP) – 20 hours ago

SORTE, Venezuela — Thousands of Venezuelans congregated for candlelit rituals on a remote mountainside where adherents make an annual pilgrimage to pay homage to an indigenous goddess known as Maria Lionza.

Many smoked cigars in purification rituals, while others closed their eyes lying face-up surrounded by candles and elaborate designs drawn on the ground with white powder.

Some calling themselves the "Vikings" pricked their tongues with razor blades, drawing blood that ran down their chins and chests. They said they could not reveal the esoteric secrets that govern their traditions.

The rituals, which began late last week and lasted through Monday, are held every year in the name of the indigenous goddess Maria Lionza, who according to legend came from the mountain at Sorte, near the northwestern town of Chivacoa.

Some repeated the word "strength" while dancing atop flaming embers in a ceremony honoring the goddess early Monday at the start of the annual Oct. 12 rituals. Many camped in tents while dedicating several days to the spiritual ceremonies.

The traditions centered on Maria Lionza are hundreds of years old and draw on elements of the Afro-Caribbean religion Santeria and indigenous rituals, as well as Catholicism. Believers often ask for spiritual healing or protection from witchcraft, or thank the goddess for curing an illness.

Venezuela is predominantly Roman Catholic. The church disapproves of the folk religion but has long since abandoned its attempts to suppress it.

A statue on a Caracas highway divider honors Maria Lionza, depicting her naked and sitting astride a wild tapir.

Followers of the sect regularly leave offerings of flowers, liquor, coins or fruit at shrines honoring the goddess or other folk saints.

Repost and Analysis: Venezuela Grants Land to Indigenous Communities On Indigenous Resistance Day

2009-10-14T08:25:00.000-07:00

**Teaching, dissertating, and the collapse of CA have kept me pretty tied up lately. Sorry. Here's a re-post from Kiraz at www.venezuelanalysis.com after a few thoughts on race in historical and contemporary Venezuela.**

'Ain't no black in the Tricolor'?
A few years ago Venezuela renamed Columbus Day -- 'Día de la raza' in the past and in many other Latin American countries, one of the worst euphemisms for rape I've heard -- 'Día de la resístencia indigena,' the day of indigenous resistance. In 2004, the statue of Columbus that once loomed over the central Plaza Venezuela in central Caracas was felled by a number of groups openly claiming responsibility for the action. No one has sought to replace it.

The Bolivarian government has created social missions and National Assembly seats for the native minority, seeking not only to better standards of living for the first nations of Venezuela, but also to raise general culutural awareness of the contribution of indigenous people to Venezuelan identity in the past, present and future.

One of the most striking aspects of the Bolivarian government's commitment to indigenous rights -- once one gets past the shock of a government that is actually concerned with first nations in the first place -- is its disproportion. As the article below notes, though indigenous peoples make up 1.6% of the population, they are constitutionally mandated three seats in the National Assembly. There is no such similar measure for Afro-Venezuelans, though they are estimated to comprise up to 20% of the population (the failed constitutional referendum of 2007 would have corrected this).

Venezuelan statistical and census tools do not measure Afro-Venezuelans as a distinct demographic unit, though activist networks have been organizing to have this changed by the 2010 national census.

Like most countries in Latin America, Venezuelan elites have historically identified with the European and US imaginaries. In the posh east side of Caracas, Basque, Spanish and Portuguese flags are almost as common as the tricolor (and even then, the tricolors flying in Plaza Altamira tend to be the 7-starred flag of the 4th republic).

While Eurocentrism is without doubt the chief factor in the marginalization of Afro (and for that matter, indigenous) Venezuelans, other factors of political history and cultural geography are at play as well. Venezuela is considered by many to be an 'Andean' nation. Past presidents have for the most part come from the mountains or the llanos (Chávez himself is a llanero). This despite the fact that Venezuela enjoys nearly 3,000 km of Caribbean coastline that is much more densely populated than the sparse and ungodly hot llanos (*really, though, Venezuela is an urban nation, with 87% of the population in cities as of 2001).

Venezuelan 'criollo' (creole -- a term that originally and still is anchored to white Venezuelans) elites resisted early 20th century discourses of mestizaje such as Vasconcelos' notion of 'la raza cósmica' in Mexico. These 'positive' eugenics narratives valorized the race-mixing of the colonial and post-colonial Latin America and, despite their offensive essentializations, could be seen as (albeit failed and inadequate) attempts to forge a distinctly American identity and path of development.

The rich and powerful of Venezuela consistently looked instead first to Paris and then to Miami for their orientation. Rather than build a national, Venezuelan culture, they built mega malls and imported modernist architecture à la le Corbusier. In this context, both Afro and Indigenous Venezuelans were marginalized, and continue to be, despite social programs aimed to address material inequality and cultural imperialism.

Indigenous rights movements have a longer history and a continental organizational structure. While this partially explains the results they have been able to garner from the state and society (this both in terms of government misiones and land grants and violent attacks -- like this one yesterday in Zulia -- on indigenous movements that seek to move beyond the symbolic and into the substantive; occupying land, resisting the hacendados, remaking their lives in their own terms), there remains the cultural and historical geography in place to which I referred earlier.

The Andes and the llanos are mostly comprised of mestizos and a few whites. The Caribbean is the center of the Afro-Venezuelan population. The lion's share of historically easy-to-access are in Zulia, around Lake Maracaibo, making the state with the one of the country's largest indigenous population also a center of the nation's wealth. The resulting gap in wealth and living standards is so striking it hurts.

Caracas continues to be a town dominated by the rich and the white and the often explicitly racist; descendants of the mantuano elites of the colonial and post-colonial era.

The barriers to adding some blackness to the increasingly mestizo criolloismo will be hard to overcome. However, advances made by the indigenous populations of the country provide hope for a cautious optimism as the struggle continues.

Venezuela Grants Land to Indigenous Communities On Indigenous Resistance Day

October 13th 2009, by Kiraz Janicke - Venezuelanalysis.com

Caracas, October 13, 2009 (venezuelanalysis.com) - Celebrating 517 years of indigenous resistance to invasion and colonisation Venezuela marked Indigenous Resistance Day on Monday with a street march through the capital, Caracas, the granting of title deeds to indigenous communities, and a special session of the National Assembly.

Across the Americas October 12 is widely celebrated as Columbus Day, the day in 1492 when Christopher Columbus, representing the Spanish Crown, first arrived in the Americas. In 2004 the Venezuelan government officially changed the name to Indigenous Resistance Day.

In Caracas, thousands of members of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), together with members of Venezuela's 44 indigenous groups, marched to the National Pantheon, in order to celebrate achievements for indigenous peoples under the Chavez government and claim their rights as the original inhabitants of the country.

A special session of the National Assembly then took place in the Pantheon, where the remains of 16^th Century Indigenous Cacique (Chief) Guaicaipuro lie as well as those of Venezuelan independence leader Simon Bolivar, who fought against Spanish colonialism.

Also during a special ceremony in Zulia state, Venezuelan Interior Relations and Justice Minister, Tarek el Aissami, handed over title deeds covering some 41,630 hectares of land to three Yukpa indigenous communities in the Sierra de Perija National Park.

"Today we join in this celebration of Indigenous Resistance Day, the day of the dignity of the indigenous peoples of Latin America and particularly of the Bolivarian and Revolutionary Venezuela," stressed the minister.

Yupka community spokesperson Efrain Romero said, "It's historic to receive title to the lands we inhabit," and added, "We reaffirm our fight for this revolution to continue advancing (...) we reaffirm our support for President Hugo Chávez."

In recent years the Sierra de Perija region has been the scenario of a fierce conflict between large "landowners" and the indigenous communities who were forcibly driven off their lands during the Perez Jimenez dictatorship in the 1940s.

The situation came to a head in July 2008 when Yukpa indigenous communities occupied 14 large estates to demand legal title to their ancestral lands. Estate owner Alejandro Vargas and four others, armed with guns and machetes, responded by attempting to assassinate the Yukpa cacique (chief) Sabino Romero, who was leading the occupations, and beat and killed Romero's elderly 109-year-old father Jose Manuel Romero.

Then on August 6 hundreds of armed mercenaries, hired by large landowners, attacked the indigenous communities.

At the time Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez slammed what he described as the "ambiguous attitudes" of some government functionaries in dealing with the land demarcation process and ordered an investigation into the violent attacks.

"There should be no doubt: Between the large estate owners and the Indians, this government is with the Indians" Chavez said.

During his speech today El Aissami emphasised that the delivery of title deeds of land to indigenous peoples is one of the policies promoted by the National Executive to ensure comprehensive recognition of the ancestral territorial rights of indigenous peoples.

Sergio Rodríguez, a spokesperson for the Environment Ministry clarified that other areas belonging to Yukpa communities are yet to be demarcated but said the ministry, together with the indigenous communities and other agencies that comprise the National Demarcation Commission, "will continue to work to resolve the situation. Our goal is to provide land titles to those Yukpa sectors that lack them by the end of the year."

However, another dispute in the Sierra de Perija region between the Barí, Yukpa, and Wayúu indigenous peoples resisting coal mining on their lands on the one hand and the state-owned Corpozulia, still has not been fully resolved.

The government is also expected to hand over title deeds covering 5,310 hectares to the 366 strong Palital community, belonging to the Kari'ña ethnicity in the state of Anzoategui.

Speaking at the closing ceremony of the III Congress of the Great Abya Yala [the Americas] Nation of Anti-Imperialist Indigenous Peoples from the South in the remote Amazonas state, Minister for the President's Office, Luis Reyes Reyes, also granted credits to representatives of indigenous communities to assist in agricultural production.

Despite many unresolved issues, indigenous peoples have made significant advances in Venezuela over the last 10 years. The Bolivarian Constitution adopted in 1999, through Art. 8 specifically emphasises recognition and respect for indigenous land rights, culture, language, and customs. According to the constitution, the role of the Venezuelan state is to participate with indigenous people in the demarcation of traditional land, guaranteeing the right to collective ownership. The state is also expected to promote the cultural values of indigenous people.

Article 120 of the Constitution also states that exploitation of any natural resource is "subject to prior information and consultation with the native communities concerned."

In 2003 the government also initiated the Guaicaipuro Mission, a social program aimed at the promotion and realization of indigenous rights as recognised in the constitution.

Venezuela's indigenous people, who comprise approximately 1.6% of the population, also have three indigenous representatives in the National Assembly.

UC walkout intensifies at UCSC

2009-09-24T23:06:00.000-07:00

Occupy California, a coalition of undergrads and grads has occupied a building in the center of the UC Santa Cruz campus. You can also follow the action here, on twitter.

WALK OUT

2009-09-24T10:59:00.000-07:00

A non-Venezuela (or Honduras) post:

Today, 24 September, faculty, students, grad students and staff across the University of California, California State University, California Community College and many K-12 districts are walking out in protest of the way in which the state has de-prioritized, privatized and all but sought to dismantle public education. As an educator and worker, I stand in solidarity with the walkout, and the need to recognize education as a fundamental right and responsibility for the common good, not a privilege for the elites or an instrumentalized path towards a bigger personal paycheck.

This is bigger than the University of California. Indeed, it is bigger than the United States. The current global crisis in the capitalist system will not get better, the 'belt' won't loosen again after these lean times, and 'we' are not in 'this' together. Once again, the rich expect us to shoulder their burden, expect our kids to forgo an education, expect us to continue living on tenuous health care and precarious employment. No. The crisis is general and the response needs to be general. Today's walkout is but one first step.

(fore more info, visit www.ucfacultywalkout.com)

English video on Zelaya's return and the coup's crackdown

2009-09-23T14:37:00.000-07:00

(Translation) Zelaya confirms that Insulza will arrive in Tegucigalpa this Tuesday

2009-09-21T12:58:00.001-07:00

TeleSUR 21 September, 2009 --- Honduras’s constitutional president, Manuel Zelaya, announced that the Secretary General of the Organization of American States, José Miguel Insulza, will arrive in Tegucigalpa this Tuesday in order to help him in his return to power after confirming that president Zelaya had returned to the capital.

The president said that Insulza had expressed his desire to enter Honduras on the same day, in order to initiate a dialogue oriented toward the recuperation of democracy.

“This morning, secretary Insulza has announced that he wants to come here right now,” said Zelaya from the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa.

Zelaya confirmed that he was in the Brazilian embassy, and thanked president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva for the diplomatic gesture.

He also called on the Honduran people to come to the embassy to accompany him to reclaim constitutional rule in the country after the military coup d’état of last July 28.

This Monday, the Brasilian embassy in Honduras confirmed that the constitutional president was present in the diplomatic complex, after which point Zelaya’s wife, Xiomara Castro, delivered the news to thousands of citizens that were waiting to see Zelaya at the offices of the United Nations in the Honduran capital.

TeleSUR correspondent Adriana Sívori confirmed the presence of the ousted president and then informed that people continued to pour into the areas around the UN offices in order to celebrate the presence of the president [in Tegucigalpa].

[…]

Clinton gets it all wrong (again)

2009-09-17T16:16:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed her concern at Venezuela's ostensible militarization. In the course of a press conference with Uruguayan President Tabaré Vázquez, Clinton hypothesized that Venezuela's plan to purchase defensive armaments from Russia could trigger a 'regional arms race' after she repeated the lie that Venezuela spends more than any other country in South America on the military.

We've heard this before, numerous times in fact, throughout the Bush years. Just to be clear:

Not to mention that the moral concerns of the US in terms of military spending is the definition of hypocrisy:

But even more confusing, if we want to be naïve about this for a moment, is that the only country on the South American continent to recently engage in belligerent activities against its neighbors is not Venezuela, but rather Colombia, the US's closes ally in the region. In March of 2008 Colombia violated Ecuadoran sovereignty in order to assassinate Raúl Reyes, the spokesman of the FARC's (the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia).

Tellingly enough, Clinton did not speculate why it might be that Venezuela thinks it might need to boost its defensive capacities.

Talks broke down today in Quito, Ecuador, as Latin American foreign ministers and military officials met to respond to plans to install a number of US military bases in Colombia. While the talks were able to produce a series of agreements on transparency and mutual non-aggression, Colombia blocked any proposal that might prevent the US plans from being carried out. The United States has been particularly short on friends in the region since the infamously rocky Bush years. Most notably in this particular arena, Ecuador and Paraguay have either ejected or refused to renew contracts that allow US military personnel to be based in their national territory. As a result, the US would have to disproportionately rely on it recently recommissioned 4th fleet which operates in the Caribbean, and whose military exercises near the Dutch colony of Curaçao -- only a few miles off the northern coast of Venezuela -- has been cause for alarm throughout the region.

Hat tip to Inka Cola news on the righteous graphage.

Links between Colombian Intelligence Organisation and Venezuelan Opposition Uncovered (repost from Venezuelanalysis.com)

2009-09-13T17:00:00.000-07:00

September 10, 2009 -- Tamara Pearson

Mérida, September 9th, 2009 (Venezuelanalysis.com) - Rafael Garcia, ex director of information technology of Colombia's main intelligence agency, DAS, revealed that the agency had used its links with the paramilitary in Colombia to participate, together with Venezuelan opposition sectors, in a plot against the current Venezuelan government.

TeleSUR interviewed Garcia, who is currently in jail for 18 years, on Monday morning. Garcia described how the Administrative Department of Security (DAS), which is meant to fight terrorism in Colombia, and the Colombian internal affairs ministry, through their links with the Self-defence Units of Colombia (AUC), participated in a plot driven by Venezuelan opposition sectors against the Chavez government.

The AUC was an illegal paramilitary organisation created in 1997, to unite various paramilitary groups, and it declared itself a "counter-insurgency group" to fight the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN). Both Colombia and the US formally classified the AUC as a terrorist organisation, which, according to the records of one of its leaders, Carlos Castano, was financed by drug trafficking, kidnapping and extorsion.

Garcia explained in the interview that in the lead up to the presidential campaign in 2002, many politicians were supported by the AUC, in its aspiration to have influence in the Congress. Current Colombian president Alvaro Uribe, on being elected, handed out positions, including to some of these "paramilitary-politicians".

"Jorge Noguera [ex DAS director] knew he needed the support of [the North bloc of the AUC] ... and he looked for that support through me, because I participated in their campaigns, I participated in electoral fraud and everything," Garcia said.

Jorge Noguera, director of DAS from 2002-2006, was also head of Uribe's presidential election campaign. He is now in jail over his illegal relationship with the Colombian paramilitary, largely due to testimony by Garcia.

Noguera's arrest was part of what is known in the English world as the Paragate scandal (parapolitica in Spanish- or paramilitary politicians) where, in 2006, several Colombian politicians were arrested for colluding with the AUC. By April 2008, 62 congress members and 33 lawmakers, including Uribe's cousin, were in jail waiting to be tried.

Garcia then described how many of the paramilitary-politicians were present the day after Uribe won the election, in August 2002, and how they asked him to name Noguera for the position of DAS director. The AUC, Garcia explained, wanted influence in DAS, as well as to infiltrate the Attorney General's Office.

"Jorge Noguera, from the start, he said to me.... "Our mission is full collaboration with the AUC"". Garcia also named other people in the DAS who had collaborated with the AUC.

The police had a report pointing to Garcia as a link between Noguera and the AUC, and Noguera told Garcia one day, "Don't worry, because the president and the attorney general are well informed about this and they will protect us when the time comes." Indeed, when the scandal arose, Uribe initially transferred Noguerra to be consul in Milan, Garcia said later on in the interview.

"It's clear that there was a conspiracy plan against the Venezuelan government, in which DAS played a part, as well as the minister Fernando Londoño, who I suppose had friends in Venezuela," Garcia went on.

"Things are being discovered little by little... DAS took ex government employees and put them to work undercover...this is what Jorge Noguera did with Jorge Diaz, they took him from his position of DAS director in Cucuta and they put him to work on clandestine undercover operations in Venezuela."

"He and Jorge Noguera met with Venezuelan military personal. I don't know if these meetings took place here in Colombia or in Venezuela, but I know they took place," Garcia revealed.

In response to the question; do you think the plot you are talking about was initiated by Jorge Noguera and the minister Londoño? Garcia responded, "No, I don't think it was. They were sought after, above all Londoño, was sought after by Venezuelan opposition sectors."

"Over there [in Venezuela] there was an opposition alliance; I think it was called the Democratic Bloc, that had made alliances with factions of the [AUC] in order to conspire against the government of President Chavez."

Venezuelan opposition plans to defeat the Chavez government

"There were concrete plans, this group, the Democratic bloc, I don't remember the exact name, had a plan with three components. [Firstly,] the sabotage of productive apparatus in Venezuela, and as a result of this there was the [oil] strike in 2002 that caused a lot of damage to productive apparatus."

"[The second component of the plan was] media attacks, that is, putting the media against the Chavez government, and [thirdly] they looked at assassinating representatives in order to cause unease in Venezuelan society. In those plans, I know that President Chavez, Jose Vincent Rangel, the minister of justice and internal affairs, Jesse Chacon, and the attorney general, Isaías Rodriguez were included."

Next, Garcia talked about the assassination of Danilo Anderson in November 2004. Anderson was a Venezuelan environmental state prosecutor investigating over 400 people accused of crimes against the state and the Venezuelan people in the failed April 2002 Coup. He was killed by an explosive in his car.

"I didn't know that Danilo Anderson was included in this [list of people to assassinate], never the less it's very likely, given the way he was killed. A lot of explosives were passed on by DAS workers via the border post of Paraguachon, in my presence, I saw it."

The interviewer also asked about the over 100 presumed paramilitaries who have been detained in Venezuela. Garcia responded that, "The border [between Venezuela and Colombia] is imaginary when it comes to the [AUC] appropriating land or intimidating the population."

Garcia then gave the example of one romantic relationship that existed, and how this was used to help get paramilitaries into Venezuela. The woman involved in the relationship lent the AUC a large farm, El Hatillo, where they were later discovered by Venezuelan police.

"I know that in Zulia [state in Venezuela, bordering Colombia] there were a lot of people who collaborated, not just in these activities, but also in drug-smuggling though Venezuela... there was a time when [Noguera] was the authority, just as [he] was in Colombian cities, he was in Maracaibo [capital of Zulia state]."

"The AUC were a phenomenon that was changed by drug-smuggling....so they looked for cultivation and smuggling zones, so this is what permeated the [border] zone, including today [the phenomenon] is still present in [Venezulean border state] Tachira with [paramilitary group] the Black Eagles."

Venezuelan journalist Alberto Nolia, analysing the interview, said, "Its clear the Colombian government was completely involved in the conspiracy...Garcia has linked the government of Uribe with the paramilitaries and with drug smuggling."

The revelations of links between the Colombian government and its institutions with the paramilitary and the Venezuelan opposition's attempts to defeat the Chavez government come at a time when Colombia has just accepted a U.S. military presence on seven of its bases, something Chavez sees as paramount to "talking about war."

On Tuesday the Colombian Supreme Court annulled charges against Noguera, for aggravated murder, bribery and misappropriation, but the charge of coordinating crime remains.

Source URL (retrieved on Sep 13 2009 - 20:00): http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news/4785
License: Published under a Creative Commons license (by-nc-nd). See creativecommons.org for more information.

'South of the Border' Trailer

2009-09-04T09:22:00.000-07:00

Oliver Stone's documentary South of the Border, which he wrote with Tariq Ali, premieres at the Venice Film Festival soon. Here's the trailer:

Teaching responsibilities have kept me away for a while now...and they don't look to be letting up any time soon. However, I plan on writing a few pieces in the upcoming weeks on the ongoing situation in Honduras and US plans to open bases in Colombia and the Venezuelan response.

Honduras: Anti-Chavez ‘free speech’ warriors linked to coup

2009-07-20T22:05:00.001-07:00

From a comrade in Venezuela

Federico Fuentes, Caracas

18 July 2009

The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) is well-known for its mission to expose the Venezuelan government of President Hugo Chavez as a threat to free speech “all over the continent”.

These brave free speech warriors made a big deal this year about how they “dared” to hold a meeting in the Venezuelan capital, “defying” the repression of Chavez’s dictatorial regime.

It turns out that the IAPA has found little to condemn in regards to the dictatorship that has installed itself by military force in Honduras.

This regime has closed many media outlets, threatened and detained journalists, suspended constitutional rights, imposed nation-wide curfews and expelled the broadcasting teams of Latin America-wide station Telesur and Venezuelan state TV channel VTV from Honduras at gunpoint.

While it “condemns” some of the attacks on freedom of speech, it has ittle to say about the coup regime itself.

This is because, for the IAPA, there was no coup.

Its July 14 statement said the democratically elected Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was simply “stood down” — not kidnapped and dumped in a different country by balaclava-clad soldiers.

And if anyone can recognise a dictatorship, it is the IAPA. After all, as it points out, the IAPA has been fighting off dictatorships “for a long time” — in the form of the Chavez administration.

Ironically, the only time in Venezuela that a TV channel was taken off air, constitutional rights suspended, and journalists arrested and assaulted since Chavez’s 1998 election was during the two days when he was removed from power in a short-lived coup in April 2002.

Rather than wait for the IAPA freedom fighters to save them, the Venezuelan people took to the streets, and together with most of the military, defeated the coup regime and restored Chavez to office.

So why are these free speech crusaders so soft on the coup regime in Honduras?

Probably because IAPA representatives in Honduras have been central to the coup.

For instance, Roberto Micheletti, who was installed by the coup as de facto president, is the owner of various companies, including the newspaper La Tribuna.

One of his associates at the newspaper is Edgardo Dumas Rodriguez, a Honduran representative to the IAPA.

Then there is Jorge Canahuati. Two of the most pro-coup newspapers are La Prensa and El Heraldo. Together, they control 80% of newspaper circulation.

Both are majority owned by Canahuati, also president of the IAPA international commission.

So it is no surprise that Dumas Rodriguez told Venezuelan newspaper El Universal on July 5 that “no military coup has occurred” in Honduras.

Not that he is unconcerned with democracy. Dumas Rodriguez said he had information of a lawsuit being filed against a threat to Honduran sovereignty — not his friend and military-installed dictator Micheletti, but Chavez “for the crimes he has committed by intervening in the internal affairs of Honduras and for threatening to overthrow the existing government”!

For this free speech crusader, the real criminal is Chavez and not the coup plotters that overthrew an elected government and suspended all democratic rights — including free speech.

Asked why the IAPA was not criticising Honduran media outlets openly supporting a regime that crushes free speech, IAPA president Enrique Santos said on July 4 that while there may “possibly be newspapers that have been partisans of the change of government”, this was no reason for IAPA to “tell them what to think ... IAPA is not a monolithic organisation, where all partners have to have the same political criteria.”

Within the broad church that is IAPA, fascist coup plotters are more than welcome.

Keep this practice in mind next time the IAPA issues a blistering denunciation of the Venezuelan “dictatorship” — which has closed not one media outlet and where the large majority of the media are vehemently anti-government.

In a Show of Class, de facto Honduran government arrests father of youth slain in pro-Zelaya protests

2009-07-11T09:55:00.000-07:00

TeleSUR 11 July, 2009 – The de facto government of Honduras detained the parent of a child who died last Sunday when military forces loyal to the coup d’état clashed with demonstrators waiting for the return of the legitimate president, Manuel Zelaya, at the Toncontín airport in Tegucigalpa.

José Murillo, father of 19 year-old Isy Obed Murillo, was detained on Thursday in Tegucigalpa by the National Directorate of Criminal Investigation (DNIC, for its initials in Spanish) by order of the de facto government.

A DNIC spokesperson explained that the detention was carried out on a warrant that had existed since 2007 for violations of his parole.

The 2007 finding was based for Murillo’s having “violated a conditional release,” established in 2004 after he was accused of conspiracy to commit homicide. No further details of the potential crime were provided.

A tribunal in Juticalpa (east), which recognizes the de facto government, is now determining whether to release Murillo or to put him in jail.

The Family of José Murillo is looking for a lawyer to argue the case, after being informed of the detention by his daughters.

Isey Obed Murillo died of a gunshot wound last Sunday when Honduran soldiers under the direction of the coup government attacked followers of president Zelaya with weapons’ fire and teargas bombs as the president’s plane attempted to land in Tegucigalpa.

Images released by teleSUR show that the attack was an ambush in which soldiers allowed protesters to enter the Toncontín international airport before attacking them. Soldiers were prepared in combat positions on the runway.

[the article continues with a review of the coup so far...]

Chávez’s Lines: ALBA and The Hour of the Furnaces

2009-07-05T12:28:00.000-07:00

I'm waiting, watching the TeleSUR livefeed on the return of Mel Zelaya to Tegucigalpa. Lots of interviews and pictures of marches and protests...

Since things aren't popping off quite yet, I figured I'd do a quick translation of Chávez's Lines for today, considering the historical importance of 5 July in Venezuela (independence day).

As a quick backgrounder, Chávez has been writing these mini-manifestos every weekend for a few months now. I will try to translate more as we go along. While often situated as ad hoc responses to particular crises, they nonetheless provide important glances into the historical and theoretical legacy being drawn for the (continuing emerging, morphing and advancing) ideology of Bolivarianismo.

***
Chávez’s Lines: ALBA and The Hour of the Furnaces

Today is the 5th of July: one of the most important days in the Patriotic imaginary. 198 years since our Declaration of Independence. The 5th of July on 1811 produced a decisive historic rupture. And it would be decisive: with it, our absolute independence was proclaimed, and our first Republic and Nation State were proclaimed.

A rupture, then, with a clear political sense that had been announced on the 19th of April, 1810.

The spirit of rupture was given life, on the road to the 5th of July, by the real and true revolutionary grouping that was the Patriotic Society and the sustained labor of agitation and radicalizing pressure on our First Congress. The inciting words of Miranda, of Bolívar, of Ribas, of Coto Paúl all gave a tremendous push to the cause of independence.

It was a rupture driven and organized by a small group of Caracas’ elites: that First Republic lacked popular sap. This is of course not to downplay the importance of 1811. Rather, it is necessary that we heed Augusto Mijares’ lucid and passionate reflection: “the total truth is that Venezuela anticipated enough to give its revolution a fervently juridical basis that was demonstrated retroactively in efforts to defend it.”

I would like to return to the profound significance that this date holds for our América by reflecting on the last verse of a song popularized on the streets of Caracas in 1811: “United by the ties/ that the sky has formed/ All of América/ exists as a nation.” The sense is one of a unified nation.

The 1811 Constitution, Our América’s first, declared its precepts inviolable. But, and this is important, it was possible to “alter and move these resolutions so that they conform with the majority of the of the people of Colombia united in a nation body for the defense and conservation of their liberty and independence.” Colombia: we can see here the hand of Miranda. That is to say, Venezuela intended to exist as a free nation, sovereign and independent within a larger unity. That is just how we intend it today. From there to today’s Bolivarian Alliance ALBA. From there to Unasur: “We can only be independent!” Today is the day of the Bolivarian Armed Force. I will give, in my own voice, the testimony of a grateful people that the arms of the Republic remain in their hands. This is a recognition that the people give to the same people: the day of the Bolivarian Armed Force is the today the day of the People Armed.

On this great day, I call on the soldiers of Venezuela to reflect: look at yourself in the painful mirror of Honduras. Look at the abysmal difference that exists between an Armed Force fraternally united with its people, as a people in arms, and an armed force transformed into an occupying army within its own country at the service of a bourgeoisie without country and in service of the countryless bourgeoisies of the world in love with the North.

The unity of Our América consolidates itself, and gains force in the unity of its nations and lifts in flight of freedom.

The neofascist putsch that a group of military and civilian thugs against President Zelaya has to be considered in the following manner: they want to make the Honduran government pay for its incorporation into ALBA, its identification with those who aspire for a more just and dignified world. They want to close the doors to a new history and leave with their hidden privileges for themselves.

But in their blindness, they have not noticed that they are trapped within a fatal anachronism and completely lack any historical sense.

It has been said, with truth, that the coup d’état in Honduras was against all that is embodied in these four letters: ALBA. The Bolivarian Alliance does not just have historical urgency, but is the only and inexorable path in front of the structural crisis of capitalism, and what amounts to the same, the united instrument and political will of the unbreakable unity of Our América.

From there they look to attack us, where we are most vulnerable.

And for that, the most nauseating sectors of Honduran society, at rifle point, woke up last Sunday to celebrate.

But the feeling of a people is unbreakable when it has decided to be free. The desire for change can be felt in the Honduran air, that is what we see on the screens of soldiers looking at a ghostly enemy: the thugs have been ordered to sow terror out of the terror the have of the people.

These traitors to the homeland never will be able to sacred fire of Morazán [Honduran independence hero]. His accusing words from yesterday, today targeted against the thugs and those they represent: “ Men that have abused the most sacred rights of a poele for a sordid and paltry interest, you I call enemies of independence and liberty.”

We recall now as well the voice of a young Simón Bolívar, who said in a public intervention of July 3, 1811 in the Patriotic Society, “to vacillate is to lose.”

“This is the hour of furnaces,” said Martí.

This is the hour of the people! This is the hour of the future! Without vacillation, we will win!

Zelaya to Return to Honduras, with or without the coup's permission

2009-06-29T22:58:00.000-07:00

TeleSUR 29 June, 2009 – The legitimate president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, announced on Monday that he will return to his country to finish his term as president on Thursday after a trip to the United States at the invite of the president of the UN General Assembly, Miguel D’Escoto. He will travel with the secretary of the Organization of American States, José Miguel Insulza.

“I am going to fulfill my mandate of four years, whether they – the coup-plotters – agree or not,” said Zelaya.

By invitation of Miguel D’Escoto [president of the UN General Assembly], the Honduran president will travel on Tuesday to the United States.

“I will return [to Honduras0 by the will of the protection of Christ and the Honduran people. I will return to my country, and I will ask the Organization of American States (OAS) to accompany me. This is an invitation offered by a Head of State and not because of pressing events,” Zelaya added.

Zelaya said that the coup of last Sunday represents a “violent backslide in an epoch of advances of social values in Latin America.”

Zelaya added that those who kidnapped and exiled him hoped to “deny the majority of the [Honduran] population of a better future.”

“We cannot allow brute force to rule over reason. We have either to return to begin anew or return to submit and succumb to force,” Zelaya said.

Zelaya said that the president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, called him on Monday to express his support against the coup in Tegucigalpa [the Honduran capital].

The Brazilian president also expressed that the entire continent was working diplomatically to return [Zelaya] to power.

In a press conference this [Monday] morning, Lula defended, “the isolation [of the coup government] in Honduras, for as long as there is no democratically elected president.”

“We cannot allow, in the 21st century, for there to be a military coup in Latin America. This is unacceptable. We will not recognize a new government. We need to pressure for the return of the democratically chosen government.”

During the meeting [Lula] said that the president of Chile, Michelle Bachelet, was in consultation with the Chilean ambassador in Tegucigalpa, a measure also taken by the governments of Brazil and Mexico.

***

As I noted earlier, member states of the Bolivarian Alternative Alliance for the Americas (ALBA) have cut off diplomatic ties with Honduras. Also, there have been reports that some elements of the military are refusing to acknowledge the new Micheletti government. This would be a key step, as it was in Venezuela during the 2002 media-military-chamber of commerce coup. More details as I can confirm and translate.

Coup in Honduras: Day Two

2009-06-29T12:00:00.000-07:00

TeleSUR is reporting this morning that Honduran Foreign Secretary, Patricia Rodas, has arrived in Nicaragua along with Mexican President Felipe Calderón. Rodas was kidnapped in the course of a military coup in Honduras along with ambassadors from Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua. All officials were out of contact for hours yesterday, which triggered Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez to warn the Honduran coup plotters that Venezuela would take whatever steps necessary to defend its citizens.

The Venezuelan ambassador, according to a TeleSUR report yesterday afternoon, was later discovered on the outskirts of Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, having been beaten and driven out of town.

In Nicaragua, leaders of ALBA (the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas) greeted exiled Honduran president Manuel Zelaya late last night. ALBA nations will be meeting in the Managua along with representatives from the Rio Group and the Central American Integration Group (SICA) to discuss potential responses to the coup.

This morning there have been reports of massive anti-coup demonstrations in Tegucigalpa and a general strike has been called for by organizations aligned with Zelaya. The Honduran congress, for its part, removed Zelaya from power in abstentia yesterday afternoon and named Roberto Micheletti – President of congress and a member of Zelaya’s own Liberal party – interim president.

Every government in the hemisphere, the Organization of American States, the European Union and the United Nations have all denounced the coup and asserted that the only legitimate and constitutional president in Honduras is Manuel Zelaya.

Eva Golinger, live-blogging the coup from Caracas, reads between the State Department’s statements on the coup to find – at the very least – US complacence with the coup. The US and Honduran armed forces have a historically close relationship. Honduras serve as the “aircraft carrier that cannot be sunk” for war fought by the United States against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua in the 1980s. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s Honduras, one of the poorest countries in a rather poor region, has been a key transit point in the hemispheric drug trade, and the US has deployed forces within Honduras as part of its ‘war on drugs.’ Finally, the military leadership of the coup are School of the Americas alumni.

As the current crisis in Honduras has been ramping up, the United States has repeated calls for a ‘peaceful’ solution to conflicts between Zelaya, the military command and the Supreme Court. Golinger asserts that the US could have effectively squashed the coup at any point through its power of the purse. For her, the Obama administrations equivocations during the past three weeks is a tacit approval of the coup plotters machinations.

The coup in Honduras has, if unevenly, been remarkable in the universal condemnation it has engendered. While the White House was initially tepid in its responses, by Sunday afternoon President Obama declared Zelaya to be the only head of state the US would recognize in Honduras. The region’s other right wing heads of state, notably Mexico’s Felipe Calderón, have also condemned the coup in unequivocal terms. Later today, Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, who is in Washington lobbying for a Free Trade Agreement between his country and the United States, will hold a press conference with president Obama. We should expect a bilateral statement against the coup at that point.

However, with images of blockades and protests around the Presidential palace (check out TeleSUR’s live feed here) the true question of this crisis in terms of regional and geopolitics rests more with ALBA , of which Honduras has been a member since October 2008, than with the already overstretched Empire to the North. Venezuela’s Chávez has characteristically been perhaps the most outspoken in his condemnation of the coup, and energetic protests in support of Zelaya have taken place throughout Venezuela’s cities. Chávez and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa scrambled all but immediately to Managua to meet with the exiled Zelaya, but concrete steps have yet to take shape.

UPDATE: The ALBA meeting is currently taking place in Managua. ALBA member states have all recalled their ambassadors from Tegucigalpa and are breaking diplomatic relations with the Micheletti government. They are calling for all other governments and transnational organizations to follow suit.

UPDATE II: Excellent background and analysis by Nikolas Kozloff here. This should be assigned reading for anyone trying to make sense of events in Honduras and their larger hemispheric significance.

UPDATE III: 12:20 (PST) Live feed from Tegucigalpa outside the occupied presidential palace shows troops attempting to disperse protesters with (at least, from what I can see) tear gas and clubs, supposedly in anticipation of de-facto president Micheletti's arrival.

Eva Golinger: Obama's First Coup d'Etat: Honduran President has been Kidnapped

2009-06-28T10:04:00.000-07:00

Caracas, Venezuela - The text message that beeped on my cell phone this morning read "Alert, Zelaya has been kidnapped, coup d'etat underway in Honduras, spread the word." It's a rude awakening for a Sunday morning, especially for the millions of Hondurans that were preparing to exercise their sacred right to vote today for the first time on a consultative referendum concerning the future convening of a constitutional assembly to reform the constitution. Supposedly at the center of the controversary is today's scheduled referendum, which is not a binding vote but merely an opinion poll to determine whether or not a majority of Hondurans desire to eventually enter into a process to modify their constitution.

Such an initiative has never taken place in the Central American nation, which has a very limited constitution that allows minimal participation by the people of Honduras in their political processes. The current constitution, written in 1982 during the height of the Reagan Administration's dirty war in Central America, was designed to ensure those in power, both economic and political, would retain it with little interference from the people. Zelaya, elected in November 2005 on the platform of Honduras' Liberal Party, had proposed the opinion poll be conducted to determine if a majority of citizens agreed that constitutional reform was necessary. He was backed by a majority of labor unions and social movements in the country. If the poll had occured, depending on the results, a referendum would have been conducted during the upcoming elections in November to vote on convening a constitutional assembly. Nevertheless, today's scheduled poll was not binding by law.

In fact, several days before the poll was to occur, Honduras' Supreme Court ruled it illegal, upon request by the Congress, both of which are led by anti-Zelaya majorities and members of the ultra-conservative party, National Party of Honduras (PNH). This move led to massive protests in the streets in favor of President Zelaya. On June 24, the president fired the head of the high military command, General Romeo Vásquez, after he refused to allow the military to distribute the electoral material for Sunday's elections. General Romeo Vásquez held the material under tight military control, refusing to release it even to the president's followers, stating that the scheduled referendum had been determined illegal by the Supreme Court and therefore he could not comply with the president's order. As in the Unted States, the president of Honduras is Commander in Chief and has the final say on the military's actions, and so he ordered the General's removal. The Minister of Defense, Angel Edmundo Orellana, also resigned in response to this increasingly tense situation.

But the following day, Honduras' Supreme Court reinstated General Romeo Vásquez to the high military command, ruling his firing as "unconstitutional'. Thousands poured into the streets of Honduras' capital, Tegucigalpa, showing support for President Zelaya and evidencing their determination to ensure Sunday's non-binding referendum would take place. On Friday, the president and a group of hundreds of supporters, marched to the nearby air base to collect the electoral material that had been previously held by the military. That evening, Zelaya gave a national press conference along with a group of politicians from different political parties and social movements, calling for unity and peace in the country.

As of Saturday, the situation in Honduras was reported as calm. But early Sunday morning, a group of approximately 60 armed soldiers entered the presidential residence and took Zelaya hostage. After several hours of confusion, reports surfaced claiming the president had been taken to a nearby air force base and flown to neighboring Costa Rica. No images have been seen of the president so far and it is unknown whether or not his life is still endangered.

President Zelaya's wife, Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, speaking live on Telesur at approximately 10:00am Caracas time, denounced that in early hours of Sunday morning, the soldiers stormed their residence, firing shots throughout the house, beating and then taking the president. "It was an act of cowardness", said the first lady, referring to the illegal kidnapping occuring during a time when no one would know or react until it was all over. Casto de Zelaya also called for the "preservation" of her husband's life, indicating that she herself is unaware of his whereabouts. She claimed their lives are all still in "serious danger" and made a call for the international community to denounce this illegal coup d'etat and to act rapidly to reinstate constitutional order in the country, which includes the rescue and return of the democratically elected Zelaya.

Presidents Evo Morales of Bolivia and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela have both made public statements on Sunday morning condeming the coup d'etat in Honduras and calling on the international community to react to ensure democracy is restored and the constitutional president is reinstated. Last Wednesday, June 24, an extraordinary meeting of the member nations of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), of which Honduras is a member, was convened in Venezuela to welcome Ecuador, Antigua & Barbados and St. Vincent to its ranks. During the meeting, which was attended by Honduras' Foreign Minister, Patricia Rodas, a statement was read supporting President Zelaya and condenming any attempts to undermine his mandate and Honduras' democratic processes.

Reports coming out of Honduras have informed that the public television channel, Canal 8, has been shut down by the coup forces. Just minutes ago, Telesur announced that the military in Honduras is shutting down all electricity throughout the country. Those television and radio stations still transmitting are not reporting the coup d'etat or the kidnapping of President Zelaya, according to Foreign Minister Patricia Rodas. "Telephones and electricity are being cut off", confirmed Rodas just minutes ago via Telesur. "The media are showing cartoons and soap operas and are not informing the people of Honduras about what is happening". The situation is eerily reminiscent of the April 2002 coup d'etat against President Chávez in Venezuela, when the media played a key role by first manipulating information to support the coup and then later blacking out all information when the people began protesting and eventually overcame and defeated the coup forces, rescuing Chávez (who had also been kidnapped by the military) and restoring constitutional order.

Honduras is a nation that has been the victim of dictatorships and massive U.S. intervention during the past century, including several military invasions. The last major U.S. government intervention in Honduras occured during the 1980s, when the Reagain Administration funded death squads and paramilitaries to eliminate any potential "communist threats" in Central America. At the time, John Negroponte, was the U.S. Ambassador in Honduras and was responsible for directly funding and training Honduran death squads that were responsable for thousands of disappeared and assassinated throughout the region.

On Friday, the Organization of American States (OAS), convened a special meeting to discuss the crisis in Honduras, later issuing a statement condeming the threats to democracy and authorizing a convoy of representatives to travel to OAS to investigate further. Nevertheless, on Friday, Assistant Secretary of State of the United States, Phillip J. Crowley, refused to clarify the U.S. government's position in reference to the potential coup against President Zelaya, and instead issued a more ambiguous statement that implied Washington's support for the opposition to the Honduran president. While most other Latin American governments had clearly indicated their adamant condemnation of the coup plans underway in Honduras and their solid support for Honduras' constitutionally elected president, Manual Zelaya, the U.S. spokesman stated the following, "We are concerned about the breakdown in the political dialogue among Honduran politicians over the proposed June 28 poll on constitutional reform. We urge all sides to seek a consensual democratic resolution in the current political impasse that adheres to the Honduran constitution and to Honduran laws consistent with the principles of the Inter-American Democratic Charter."

As of 10:30am, Sunday morning, no further statements have been issued by the Washington concerning the military coup in Honduras. The Central American nation is highly dependent on the U.S. economy, which ensures one of its top sources of income, the monies sent from Hondurans working in the U.S. under the "temporary protected status" program that was implemented during Washington's dirty war in the 1980s as a result of massive immigration to U.S. territory to escape the war zone. Another major source of funding in Honduras is USAID, providing over US$ 50 millon annually for "democracy promotion" programs, which generally supports NGOs and political parties favorable to U.S. interests, as has been the case in Venezuela, Bolivia and other nations in the region. The Pentagon also maintains a military base in Honduras in Soto Cano, equipped with approximately 500 troops and numerous air force combat planes and helicopters.

Foreign Minister Rodas has stated that she has repeatedly tried to make contact with the U.S. Ambassador in Honduras, Hugo Llorens, who has not responded to any of her calls thus far. The modus operandi of the coup makes clear that Washington is involved. Neither the Honduran military, which is majority trained by U.S. forces, nor the political and economic elite, would act to oust a democratically elected president without the backing and support of the U.S. government. President Zelaya has increasingly come under attack by the conservative forces in Honduras for his growing relationship with the ALBA countries, and particularly Venezuela and President Chávez. Many believe the coup has been executed as a method of ensuring Honduras does not continue to unify with the more leftist and socialist countries in Latin America.

Source URL (retrieved on Jun 28 2009 - 12:57): http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/4554
License: Published under a Creative Commons license (by-nc-nd). See creativecommons.org for more information.

Translation and links: Coup d'état in Honduras

2009-06-28T09:00:00.000-07:00

Given the rather wretched initial coverage of the US media (NYT and NPR reports that fail to include the phrase coup d’état, though CNN’s initial coverage looks downright exhaustive, if still one-sided, in comparison), I thought it would be worthwhile to translate TeleSUR con the developing events (original here).

President Zelaya is assumed to be in Costa Rica

TeleSUR 28 June, 2009 –

Honduran president Manuel Zelaya was taken to Costa Rica by the Honduran military in a coup d’état this Sunday. Meanwhile, Roberto Micheletti, the president of the Honduran congress, has declared himself interim president, an action which has been rejected by thousands of Hondurans who have taken to the streets to demand the return of the democratically elected president.

Honduran government spokeswoman Patricia Rodas informed teleSURE that she has information that president Manuel Zelaya has been presumably taken to Costa Rica. She emphasized that this information has yet to be confirmed, and asked [Costa Rica] to act according to the rule of law and notify the world of the president’s status.

Earlier, the president’s son Héctor Zelaya said to TeleSUR that his father had been forcibly removed from the country. He added that according to the latest information more than 200 soldiers entered the presidential palace and removed president Zelaya in white vehicles.

“In this situation the first thing we lost was communication. The last was that the president was removed from power,” said Héctor Zelaya.

He added that at time that he was speaking from a secure location.

The president’s wife, Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, for her part, told TeleSUR Sunday morning that “in cowardice they took the president from his house, they beat him physically but they also delivered blows to democracy.”

“Today we ask for the freedom of the president, and we urge the Armed Forces to free the president and to guarantee his safety.”

She added that today, when people want to change the history of Honduras and silence the people, “I know that not a single Honduran citizen supports this military coup.”

Masked soldiers have since the early hours of the morning occupied the presidential palace. According to information specially obtained by teleSUR in Honduras, armed soldiers took the president to a military air base, but have yet to determine the exact location of the president. A government spokesperson has denounced the “kidnapping” of Zelaya.

Government spokeswoman Patricia Rodas told teleSUR “soldiers, including snipers, have surrounded my home…they have kidnapped [the president] and we don’t know his whereabouts…our houses are surrounded by the military and we have no idea for how much longer we will be able to speak,” said Rodas.

“They have once again murdered the hope of democracy, of equality, all with this sudden attack of terrorism against our people,” she added.

A popular inquiry to determine if Honduras should convoke a national constituent assembly was to take place this Sunday in Honduras with the opening of voting centers that had been established in the parks of this Central American country’s principal cities.

The inquiry, held after the collection of more than 400,000 signatures, has been a source of significant controversy amongst certain political and social sectors in Honduras, and is presumed to be behind the coup d’état against the president of this country, Manuel Zelaya.

***

Hmmm. Now NPR is reporting that Zelaya has ‘fled’ to Costa Rica. Disappointing stuff from the US media here, again.

Honduras was ruled by a string of military governments from 1963-1981. Throughout the 1980s, the country served as the United States’ base of operations in its covert wars against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, as well as the location from which the US intervened in the civil conflicts which engulfed Central American states for much of the later 20th century.

Zelaya has been a controversial figure in Honduras and elsewhere. He has aligned himself openly with the Latin American left, joining the Bolivarian Alternative for the peoples of América in 2008. He also has been noted for calling a change in the US 'war on drugs' to address the demand-side of the global trade rather than militarizing countries like Honduras, a major transit point for the hemispheric drug trade.

Update: The Great No-Show

2009-05-31T11:45:00.000-07:00

Boo.

Mario Vargas Llosa, et. al. copped out, refusing to attend a debate this morning on President Chávez's weekly television show, Aló Presidente.

I posted the initial story a few days ago and immediately started looking for more details, hoping to write a longer analysis after the event. Chávez had initially proposed to host a debate between "intellectuals who support capitalism, and intellectuals who support socialism," given the fact that two high-profile conferences (representing each tendancy) were taking place that week in Caracas.

Mario Vargas Llosa, world renowned author of the 'boom' generation and outspoken champion of neoliberalism and the Peruvian aristocracy, was quickly identified as the most prominent representative of the right's team.

However, immediately after accepting the invite, Vargas Llosa started adding on conditions, eventually demanding that he and Chávez debate personally rather than the panel-style discussion the Venezuelan president had initially proposed to moderate. In the end, the Peruvian and his cohort simply refused to attend.

This is a shame, but rather indicative of the Venezuelan right's inability to actually battle Chávez on issues and ideas. The reason the opposition, as I have argued numerous times in this blog, have failed to make inroads against the consolidation of Bolivarian hegemony has been, quite simply, that they have absolutely no vision for where to take Venezuela, and no legitimacy in the eyes of the vast majority of the Venezuelan population.

The debate that wasn't also illuminates another misrepresentation of the Venezuelan right. That is, far from the stale slogans they have cut-and-pasted from their National Endowment for Democracy™ coloring books onto webpages and picket signs, Chávez's willingness to host such a debate seriously undermines opposition claims that 'freedom of expression' is being curtailed in Venezuela.

This has happened before. The scenario goes:
1. the opposition cries 'censorship,' 'there is no free speech in Venezuela';
2. the government promises them (and in some cases, has given them) the ability to state their case ON NATIONAL TELEVISION AND RADIO in cadena nacional, meaning by law every broadcaster must put them on the air, live;
3. the government, however, adds the condition that rather than an infomercial, this will be a debate. That is to say, the opposition will get to say their piece, but they have to defend their position;
4. the opposition runs away;
5. Simon Romero at the New York Times reports the following day that Chávez is opening up a gulag somewhere in the Llanos where kittens are ground up into nuclear fissile material that he intends to use in a sneak attack on Israel.

Seriously, this is going to be bigger than Tyson v. Holyfield! Set your TiVo! (geez, I wish I had a TV)

2009-05-29T16:06:00.000-07:00

LET'S GET READY TO RUMBLE!
Chávez v. Vargas Llosa, this could go more than 12 rounds.
Seriously, I've seen Chávez talk FOR HOURS

The Bolivarian News Agency is reporting today that Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez is challenging “rightwing intellectuals” to a debate that will take place on his weekly television program ‘Aló Presidente’ this Sunday. Enrique Krauze, Mario Vargas Llosa (see this, for example) and Jorge Castañeda – all noted international critics of Chávez – have been in Caracas at a conference organized by Cedice (a rightwing Venezuelan think-tank).

The government has also been holding its own concurrent conference, this one organized around the theme of the current global crisis in the capitalist world system.

Last Thursday, Chávez issued his challenge, hoping to commemorate the 10th anniversary of ‘Aló Presidente’ with a vigorous debate on the status of the Bolivarian Revolution. Today the rightwing trio agreed, stipulating the need for ‘clear rules’ and that they would be debating the president alone.

Said Chávez, “I’ll debate with whoever wants to debate me. At 11 in the morning I’ll be waiting, and won’t avoid any topic. Any theme is valid, and if they want, we can make every radio and television in the nation broadcast it.”

Chavista Student Leader's Murder and (more) Lies of the Venezuelan Opposition

2009-05-04T13:34:00.000-07:00

The Bolivarian News Agency report today on the JPSUV and violence against the student movement (the youth wing of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, for its initials in Spanish) was overshadowed by a predawn earthquake near the capital that measured 5.4 on the Richter Scale (no injuries were reported). All the same, this was a key story, one which illuminates both the intensity of mobilization in Venezuela today and the paucity of the opposition’s attempt to paint themselves as victims of a dictatorship.

The Story

Today, Luis Villalta, speaking on behalf of the JPSUV, read a prepared statement exhorting the Venezuelan Attorney General’s office to investigate the death of Yuban Ortega, a student militant from the Andean state of Mérida. Ortega died last Thursday at the hands of officers from the regional police corps.

Today, a series of political and cultural actions are taking place throughout Venezuelan cities and campuses, in memory of Ortega and against the culture of impunity that Villalta described as reminiscent of the (pre-Bolivarian Revolution) Fourth Republic. “We are standing and fighting,” the JPSUV announced, adding “It seems that the bourgeois state has not died yet, and that its repressive arm is still trying to stop us.” The JPSUV statement also warned the ‘rectores golpistas’ (inelegantly translated: coup-monger university rectors) that the Bolivarian Revolution will not be stopped.

The Historical Context

All this may seem odd to those of us who only encounter Venezuela through mainstream US media sources. Here in the United States, we are presented with the picture of Venezuela as a country tottering on the edge of totalitarianism, in which a romantic and battered opposition struggles against an omnipresent megalomaniac and his armed thugs. In particular, since 2007’s non-renewal of the private television network RCTV’s broadcast concession, we have been presented from time to time with images of a ‘student movement’ bravely fighting for freedom of speech and against state repression.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. Indeed, one of the chief complaints I have often heard voiced by Chavistas is that the government is far too lenient on the opposition. While radicals and moderate Chavistas alike are proud of the fact that the Bolivarian Process has been a rule-bound, democratic and open one, they are frustrated at how the opposition has been able to manipulate the rules in order to create instability and maintain their positions of economic and social privilege.

The university system is a key case in point. While in the 1960s and 1970s the Venezuelan public university system functioned as something of a progressive institution (perhaps most notably during the administration of Rafael Caldera, when military officers were trained at Venezuelan Universities rather than the US torture academy – at the time known as the ‘School of the Americas’ – in Ft. Benning, Georgia), with deepening recessions throughout the 1980s and 1990s they increasingly became the exclusive territory of the rich. This in large part is due to the increase in fees, the general economic downturn and the barrier put in place by entrance exams. These factors formed something of a crypto-class credentialing process: with the less money, the burden of travel costs to university and even nominal fees became harder to bear; rather than studying for college entry exams, poor students were required to seek employment, and so forth. As a result, during Venezuela's lost decades, the poor were increasingly denied access to higher education -- and the social mobility it entails.

With the gradual change in the class composition of the University, so too changed the activist orientation of University students. We often (falsely) assume campuses the world over to be hotbeds of radicalism and revolutionary thought. All too often, especially today, this is not the case, but is rather little more than an overly-romanticized memory of the rebellions of 1968.

Thus, while students of the Central University of Venezuela were key in the anti-neoliberal uprisings of 1989 known collectively either as the caracazo or sacudón, by the time of 2007’s campaign to reform the constitution there were sizable blocs of anti-Chavistas violently clashing with pro-government student groups. (Most notoriously misreported in the US was the incident in early November 2007 on the UCV campus in which a group of opposition student protesters surrounded and attempted to burn down a building in which pro-government students were holding a meeting. In the struggles that ensued, guns were drawn by both sides. However, in the US, coverage was almost universally spun along the lines of ‘pro-Chávez student thugs attack pro-democracy students’ – a blatant flipping of Venezuelan reality).

A further complication to the student question in Venezuela has to do with ‘university autonomy.’ Due in large part to a history of police and state repression against (at the time, radical and leftist) student organizations, Venezuela’s legal code prohibits members of the state’s security forces from entering university grounds, even though they are, technically, public institutions. This has allowed violent opposition student groups to use campuses as ‘home bases’ from which they can strike out against the police, resulting in many staged photos which are then distributed worldwide.

Secondly, this question of autonomy has allowed university administrators themselves to turn campuses into islands of opposition power. One of the most obvious and egregious examples came in 2007 when, during the RCTV affair, the rector of UCV canceled classes and encouraged students to take part in anti-government protests.

The government's response to this institutional situation has been to create a series of parallel educational institutions -- from the misiones bolivarianas to the Bolvarian University of Venezuela. Much like the related communal councils, the strategy of the government has here been additive in nature. That is to say, rather than a frontal assault on the existing public university system, dominated as it is by the opposition, the government is attempting to make them obsolete by creating alternatives which are more universally accessible.

The Stakes

Recent violent events in the student scene in Venezuela should be viewed against the backdrop of an upsurge in violence against labor organizers and attempts to establish worker control of factories. They should also be considered against the all but complete lack of state repression against opposition actors who openly and actively have been seeking to destabilize the country (opposition Caracas Mayor Antonio Ledezma’s inciting of a rally last Friday to clash with police being a very recent case in point). What we see, then, is the in part necessary balancing act the Venezuelan state has decided to attempt in order to de-escalate politics in the country and to forge something along the lines of a ‘social peace.’

These events also point to ridiculousness of claim that the Bolivarian Revolution is entering something along the lines of a totalitarian situation. Last November, the opposition gained important institutional positions of power, augmenting their former footholds in the Universities and private media (while the Bolivarian movement has gained key ground in television, the print and radio media, not to mention international and cable-access sources, remain solidly in the hands of the opposition). Rather than a monolithic state and ‘official’ party (the PSUV), contemporary Venezuelan politics are as ever fragmented and antagonistic, with the divisions within the larger Bolivarian movement just as stark as those between Chavistas and the opposition.

Furthermore, with the continued darkening of the economic skies, the Chávez government has fewer resources to spread around, which has already brought about a series of difficult decisions. While they have thus far pledged not to cut social spending, they have still yet to ‘expropriate the expropriators,’ as self-identification as a ‘revolution’ would seem to promise. The government’s first anti-crisis plan has met with a high degree of skepticism on the part of radical chavismo, who see the plan as a significant moderation of the revolutionary process. Some commentators even argue that the plan does more to shore up the national bourgeoisie than actually contribute to the construction of Socialism in Venezuela. Paraphrasing Marea Socialista, a radical current within the PSUV, the government seems to be missing a tremendous opportunity to ramp up the speed of change presented by the global restructuring of the capitalist system.

In other words, the government may indeed be trying to please too many people here – or maybe just the wrong ones.

Carter and Morales, Coca, Peanuts, and the Peacecorps...

2009-05-02T10:30:00.000-07:00

***
(translation from Telesur) -- In La Paz, Ex-President of the United States and Nobel Prize winner Jimmy Carter accepted an invitation from Bolivian President Evo Morales to harvest coca leaves at the Bolivian President’s home in the Andean region of Chapare.

“I hope that on my next visit I can go to Chapare, where he [Morales] will take me to harvest coca leaves,” Carter said through an interpreter during a press conference with the Bolivian president after a private meeting in the Presidential Palace.

Morales, a former leader of coca farmers, made the first invitation among smiles and an announcement that he and Carter had a good meeting that also included Carter inviting Morales to harvest peanuts at his farm in Georgia.

“One time he invited me to visit his family and his home, to harvest peanuts on his land in Atlanta, so now I am inviting him to Chapare to harvest coca…the next time [he visits],” said Morales, without providing details when he would again visit the United states, which triggered laughter from Carter.
***

Morales also denied any intention of expelling the Peace Corps from Bolivia. While Bolivia, like Venezuela, has expelled other US agencies from operating within its national territory (most notoriously in the US, the Drug Enforcement Administration). In the case of the Peace Corps, however, Morales said that he welcomed any organization to Bolivia that had "social ends" and that did not seek to meddle in Bolivian affairs.

The question of the Peace Corps' status in Bolivia has been somewhat in question since February of 2008. At the time, it was revealed that the US Ambassador to Bolivia, Philip Goldberg, had requested that Fullbright Scholars and Peace Corps volunteers spy on Venezuelan and Cuban nationals working in Bolivia. Morales eventually expelled Philip Goldberg, the US Ambassador to Bolivia, in September of last year after he was caught consorting with violent separatist groups in the eastern department of Santa Cruz.

Venezuela expelled its ambassador in solidarity, at the time Chávez said at a rally, "Get out of here, bullshit yankees! We're a dignified people, We are the children of Bolívar, the children of Guaicaipuro, the children of Tupac Amarú, we are free...when there is a new government [in the United States] we will request a new ambassador."

Carter's meeting with Morales is the latest in a series of warming signs that relations between the United States and Latin American democracies. Carter's position today, which tacitly accepts the legitimacy of coca as a crop is significant step in the direction of normalization.

May Day 2009 -- Polarization on the day of the worker

2009-05-01T14:28:00.000-07:00

May Day is traditionally the occasion for mass demonstrations, celebrations, marches and protests throughout much of the world. With the on-going reconfiguration of the global economic order and many central states using public funds to bailout financial institutions deemed ‘too big to fail,’ the stakes and emotions around today’s international day of the worker are as high as ever.

Al-Jazeera reports that throughout the world, tens of thousands of protesters have taken to the street, with significant clashes taking place between demonstrators and police in Germany, Turkey and Greece. In Moscow, many groups marched under the hammer and sickle, calling for a return to communism after the kleptocracy that has defined Russian political economy since the Yeltsin Years.

Venezuela has of course been no exception. The country that has for many reintroduced the question and reinvention of socialism has not been without May Day mobilizations, many of which exemplify the intense political and social divisions within the larger Bolivarian process.

Throughout the country, the Chávez government has sponsored a series of marches and rallies, highlighting the ways in which the still-developing Bolivarian Socialist model has been able to avoid some of the most injurious effects of the global recession through its flotilla of social programs and government-sponsored employment initiatives.

In Caracas (opposition) metropolitan mayor Antonio Ledezma encouraged a legal rally in a park in the capital to continue onward to the National Assembly, at which point white T-shirted youths clashed with a police cordon. (Authorities were concerned that the opposition rally would run into another sanctioned but pro-government rally. Given the intensely polarized nature of Venezuelan politics today, the government often tries to keep pro- and anti-government protesters separated in order to avoid repeats of, for example, violent clashes between students campaigning for and against the constitutional referendum in late 2007).

These clashes (still developing as I write) highlight the high-stakes politics and precedents of public rallies in Caracas and throughout Venezuela. In 2002, an opposition rally and march protesting the sacking of several PDVSA (the state oil company) officials was encouraged to extend their route to Miraflores, the presidential palace, in violation of their parade permits. In the (as it turns out, carefully orchestrated between the then Acción Democratica dominated official trade union, the private media, the national chamber of commerce – FEDECÁMERAS – and elements of the military high command) chaos that ensued, a crisis was precipitated that served as the justification of a military coup.

This strategy aimed at creating crises has become a stand-by for the Venezuelan opposition, and since 2007, a well-trained ‘student movement’ has often emerged as the vanguard of violent clashes against police and Chávez supporters. In one recent and illuminating example from the lead-up to the February 15th referendum on term limits for elected officials, anti-government students attempted to start a forest fire in El Ávila, the national park that borders the city of Caracas to the north.

These sorts of destabilizing tactics on the part of the Venezuelan opposition are intended perhaps more than anything for its own internal audience. By forcing the hand of the state to ‘repress’ them, they produce an image that gives them the moral righteousness of perceived victimhood. For most Venezuelans, however, their actions take on the appearance of the extremism and desperation of an upper class being dispossessed. The net result is thus the further entrenchment of the antagonism and polarization that defines Venezuelan politics.

If only…

However, it is also important to keep in mind that the Venezuelan opposition is a spent force, politically. Outside of the ranks of the upper and upper-middle class, they lack any sort of constituency, due in no small part to their utter lack of a coherent vision for how to take Venezuela forward. Much touted electoral victories in the local and regional elections of November 2008 were the result not of the opposition’s ability to convert Chavistas, but were caused rather by widespread discontent with some of the candidates presented by the PSUV (Juan Barreto, former mayor of the municipality of Caracas who is now under investigation for corruption, being a prime case in point).

The more interesting and important division in Venezuela, the one that will actually impact the future direction of the Bolivarian Revolution, is that within the ranks of Chavismo. This division, which I and many others have identified as between radicals at the base – who tend to be less accomodationist toward the opposition, leery of representative government, and less ambiguously in favor of socialism – and members of the ‘internal rightwing’ is playing out this May Day as well.

In Aragua, members of the National Workers’ Union (UNT) and the United, Revolutionary, Classist and Autonomist Movement (C-CURA) are holding a May Day march in the city of Maracay “independent of the bosses and the government.” The march, in addition to supporting worker-controlled factories and calling for a reassessment of the government’s recently announced anti-crisis plan (which they, as well as Marea Socialista, a radical current within the PSUV, contend is a Bolivarian version of a bailout for the wealthy), is being held in solidarity with public sector workers currently renegotiating their contracts.

The march is also intended to call attention to intensifying conflicts between workers and bosses in Venezuela, most specifically in this rally’s case the as-yet unsolved assassination of three labor organizers in late November of last year.

In their May Day statement, Marea Socialista argues that “this crisis is not just a crisis of the global capitalist system, it is also an enormous opportunity to push forward in the fight for the only alternative model to capitalism that we know, socialism.”

The continue that this, the third phase of the Bolivarian Revolution (the first being the period between the caracazo of 1989 and Chávez’s election in 1998, the second being the period between the ratification of the constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and the passing of the constitutional amendment abolishing term limits this past February) has still been one in which the oligarchy “continues to enjoy intolerable profits,” and that their fight, the fight for socialism is “class war,” or the still lacking consolidation of worker-control in production, the unity of unions in this struggle, and the overcoming of bureaucratic roadblocks on the path to Socialism.

There are then, two types of struggle in Venezuela today. The first is that of the opposition against the government, which is increasingly taking the path of the guarimba -- a series of violent protests orchestrated by the opposition in order to destabilize the state -- and almost always covered with a sympathetic eye by the media in the United States and Europe. The second is the struggle within the Bolivarian Revolution.

This second struggle, between radicals and the 'forces of order' within the state and the PSUV shows little sign of slowing down. Nor, given the electoral inroads made by the opposition in last November's elections and the intransigence of figures such as Ledezma, does the first. While in other circumstances economic policies of the government in response to the crisis (an increase in the added value tax, being the most contentious example) might threaten to further fragment the pro-government bloc -- numerous parties, PODEMOS being the most recent, have jumped from the government's coalition due to the personal ambitions of their leadership -- the spectacular actions of the opposition only serve to reinforce the need for unity within the Bolivarian Revolution.

Corruption, Revolutions within Revolutions

2009-04-28T09:10:00.000-07:00

Venezuela officially rejected the Peruvian government’s decision to grant amnesty to Manuel Rosales yesterday by recalling its ambassador to Lima and “reconsidering its relationship” with the government of Alan García. Rosales, governor of Maracaibo and longtime fixture of the Venezuelan opposition, fled his post earlier this month when he was indicted on charges of corruption.

Last Friday, Maracaibo’s city council named its president, Daniel Ponne (also a member of Rosales’ A New Era party) as temporary mayor given the ‘permanent absence’ of the mayor. Rosales has long been a fixture in the politics of Zulia. He served in the Legislative Assembly from 1983-1994, Mayor of Maracaibo from 1996-2000, and Governor of the state of Zulia for two terms (2000-2008). During the short lived April 2002 coup, Rosales signed the so-called ‘Carmona Decrees’ which named then head of the National Chamber of Commerce president of Venezuela and subsequently abrogated the constitution of 1999. In 2006, Rosales was the first figure of the opposition to recognize Chávez’s democratic credentials, when he conceded defeat in the presidential election. When term limits prevented him from extending his tenure as governor, Rosales hand-picked his successor, Pablo Perez, and ran for the lesser office of city mayor of Maracaibo (again), but this time on a campaign that hailed him as “the leader of Zulia.”

Zulia is Venezuela’s richest state, and the site of a nascent separatist movment.

Peru has been one of the few allies of the United States in the region, and Rosales joins Carlos Ortega (union boss behind the 2002 coup and the lock-out bosses strike of the oil industry in 2002-3), the ex-governor of Yaracuy, Eduardo Lapi (who broke out of prison while being held on charges of embezzlement and corruption – widely believed with the help of state officials – in 2007), as well as two participants in the 2002 mock insurrection/occupation of Plaza Altamira (in Eastern Caracas) by officers in the Venezuela National Armed Force. There are also rumors that Nixon Moreno, long a resident of the Vatican embassy in Caracas, wanted on (among others) sexual assault charges, has resided in Lima since his disappearance last year.

While the Venezuelan opposition (as well as the international media, and it would seem the Peruvian government) claims that the charges against Rosales are political in nature, that Rosales is being persecuted for publicly opposing the government of Hugo Chávez, there is scant mention of other high-profile corruption cases currently underway. Eduardo Manuitt, former Chavista governor of the state of Guarico (and former member of the PSUV) is being investigated for financial irregularities during his tenure, as is Juan Barreto, Chavista stalwart and former Mayor of the Municipality of Caracas (Barreto’s tenure was so lackluster that he was explicitly instructed by the PSUV directorate not to run for reelection in 2008. It is widely held that his poor performance was the direct cause of Caracas falling to Antonio Ledezma in the regional and local elections of that year). Final, Raul Baduel, Chávez’s former minister of defense is being investigated by the military over the disappearance of at least $14 million dollars from the defense budget during his time at the helm. Baduel, a long time supporter of Chávez, was associated with the ‘internal rightwing’ of Chavismo, an accusation bore out when he very publicly broke with the government in the lead up to the 2007 constitutional reform.

Corruption

The most often levied criticisms of the Bolivarian government have to do with corruption and violent crime. Indeed, most people I have interviewed view corruption as a (regrettable) fact of life. I’ve often heard the refrain “they’re corrupt just like everyone, but we get good things accomplished in spite of them.”

A supervisor skims money from the top of a budget for a nice bottle of whiskey here, hires an underqualified relative there, attempts to turn his or her agency into a private fiefdom… What is more, Zulia is seen by many as the epicenter of the most egregious examples of corruption; Casinos along Maracaibo’s Malecón; kidnappings; the porous border with Colombia (and the lurking paramilitaries); the center of PDVSA, that ‘state within a state.’ Holding officials – elected or appointed – is long overdue, and needs to be accelerated. That is to say, according to radical strains within Chavismo, these sorts of investigations (and prosecutions) need to take place when officials are still in power, the long promised ‘revolution within the revolution’ cannot be put off any longer.

While these accountability measures are no doubt welcome to many, they are nonetheless tempered by the expulsion from the PSUV of Vilma Vivas, a Tachirense union director and tireless anti-corruption campaigner. In a statement released by Marea Socialista (MS) – a radical tendency within the PSUV – last week, the arbitrary expulsion of Vivas is described as a dangerous precedent and a roadblock to the formation of the PSUV as a democratic organ of revolutionary transformation. Given the lack of evidence or due process in her case – she was booted by Freddy Bernal almost out of nowhere – MS is forced to conclude that Vivas had become irksome to the directorate of the party.

Of course, these sorts of battles are evidence that the revolution remains alive, if indeterminate. The current context of global financial crisis and a more smiling-faced foreign policy in Washington do not bode well the Bolivarian project. In the near future, I will be posting a few thoughts on the emerging economic policy. While sober (certainly more so than those seen thus far in the US), the trajectory of the plans is ultimately conservative, shoring up the ample social gains the Bolivarian government has made in the past 10 years. In times like these, the ‘forces of right and order’ – the derecha endogena – find their hands strengthened, as are those of the corrupt. It will of course be the task of radicals like Vivas and MS to push through this potentially fatal contradiction on the path to 21st century socialism.

The Declaration of Cumaná

2009-04-25T08:26:00.000-07:00

April 23rd 2009, by ALBA Member Countries

ALBA

Cumaná, Venezuela

We, the Heads of State and Government of Bolivia, Cuba, Dominica, Honduras, Nicaragua and Venezuela, member countries of ALBA, consider that the Draft Declaration of the 5th Summit of the Americas is insufficient and unacceptable for the following reasons:

- The Declaration does not provide answers to the Global Economic Crisis, even though this crisis constitutes the greatest challenge faced by humanity in the last decades and is the most serious threat of the current times to the welfare of our peoples.

- The Declaration unfairly excludes Cuba, without mentioning the consensus in the region condemning the blockade and isolation to which the people and the government of Cuba have incessantly been exposed in a criminal manner.

For this reason, we, the member countries of ALBA believe that there is no consensus for the adoption of this draft declaration because of the reasons above stated, and accordingly, we propose to hold a thorough debate on the following topics:

1. Capitalism is leading humanity and the planet to extinction. What we are experiencing is a global economic crisis of a systemic and structural nature, not another cyclic crisis. Those who think that with a taxpayer money injection and some regulatory measures this crisis will end are wrong. The financial system is in crisis because it trades bonds with six times the real value of the assets and services produced and rendered in the world, this is not a “system regulation failure”, but a integrating part of the capitalist system that speculates with all assets and values with a view to obtain the maximum profit possible. Until now, the economic crisis has generated over 100 million additional hungry persons and has slashed over 50 million jobs, and these figures show an upward trend.

2. Capitalism has caused the environmental crisis, by submitting the necessary conditions for life in the planet, to the predominance of market and profit. Each year we consume one third more of what the planet is able to regenerate. With this squandering binge of the capitalist system, we are going to need two planets Earth by the year 2030.

3. The global economic crisis, climate change, the food crisis and the energy crisis are the result of the decay of capitalism, which threatens to end life and the planet. To avert this outcome, it is necessary to develop and model an alternative to the capitalist system. A system based on:

- solidarity and complementarity, not competition;
- a system in harmony with our mother earth and not plundering of human resources;
- a system of cultural diversity and not cultural destruction and imposition of cultural values and lifestyles alien to the realities of our countries;
- a system of peace based on social justice and not on imperialist policies and wars;
- in summary, a system that recovers the human condition of our societies and peoples and does not reduce them to mere consumers or merchandise.

4. As a concrete expression of the new reality of the continent, we, Caribbean and Latin American countries, have commenced to build our own institutionalization, an institutionalization that is based on a common history dating back to our independence revolution and constitutes a concrete tool for deepening the social, economic and cultural transformation processes that will consolidate our full sovereignty. ALBA-TCP, Petrocaribe or UNASUR, mentioning merely the most recently created, are solidarity-based mechanisms of unity created in the midst of such transformations with the obvious intention of boosting the efforts of our peoples to attain their own freedom. To face the serious effects of the global economic crisis, we, the ALBA-TCP countries, have adopted innovative and transforming measures that seek real alternatives to the inadequate international economic order, not to boost their failed institutions. Thus, we have implemented a Regional Clearance Unitary System, the SUCRE, which includes a Common Unit of Account, a Clearance Chamber and a Single Reserve System. Similarly, we have encouraged the constitution of grand-national companies to satisfy the essential needs of our peoples and establish fair and complementary trade mechanisms that leave behind the absurd logic of unbridled competition.

5. We question the G20 for having tripled the resources of the International Monetary Fund when the real need is to establish a new world economic order that includes the full transformation of the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO, entities that have contributed to this global economic crisis with their neoliberal policies.

6. The solutions to the global economic crisis and the definition of a new international financial scheme should be adopted with the participation of the 192 countries that will meet in the United Nations Conference on the International Financial Crisis to be held on June 1-3 to propose the creation of a new international economic order.

7. As for climate change, developed countries are in an environmental debt to the world because they are responsible for 70% of historical carbon emissions into the atmosphere since 1750. Developed countries should pay off their debt to humankind and the planet; they should provide significant resources to a fund so that developing countries can embark upon a growth model which does not repeat the serious impacts of the capitalist industrialization.

8. Solutions to the energy, food and climate change crises should be comprehensive and interdependent. We cannot solve a problem by creating new ones in fundamental areas for life. For instance, the widespread use of agricultural fuels has an adverse effect on food prices and the use of essential resources, such as water, land and forests.

9. We condemn the discrimination against migrants in any of its forms. Migration is a human right, not a crime. Therefore, we request the United States government an urgent reform of its migration policies in order to stop deportations and massive raids and allow for reunion of families. We further demand the removal of the wall that separates and divides us, instead of uniting us. In this regard, we petition for the abrogation of the Law of Cuban Adjustment and removal of the discriminatory, selective Dry Feet, Wet Feet policy that has claimed human losses. Bankers who stole the money and resources from our countries are the true responsible, not migrant workers. Human rights should come first, particularly human rights of the underprivileged, downtrodden sectors in our society, that is, migrants without identity papers. Free movement of people and human rights for everybody, regardless of their migration status, are a must for integration. Brain drain is a way of plundering skilled human resources exercised by rich countries.

10. Basic education, health, water, energy and telecommunications services should be declared human rights and cannot be subject to private deal or marketed by the World Trade Organization. These services are and should be essentially public utilities of universal access.

11. We wish a world where all, big and small, countries have the same rights and where there is no empire. We advocate non-intervention. There is the need to strengthen, as the only legitimate means for discussion and assessment of bilateral and multilateral agendas in the hemisphere, the foundations for mutual respect between states and governments, based on the principle of non-interference of a state in the internal affairs of another state, and inviolability of sovereignty and self-determination of the peoples. We request the new Government of the United States, the arrival of which has given rise to some expectations in the hemisphere and the world, to finish the longstanding and dire tradition of interventionism and aggression that has characterized the actions of the US governments throughout history, and particularly intensified during the Administration of President George W. Bush. By the same token, we request the new Government of the United States to abandon interventionist practices, such as cover-up operations, parallel diplomacy, media wars aimed at disturbing states and governments, and funding of destabilizing groups. Building on a world where varied economic, political, social and cultural approaches are acknowledged and respected is of the essence.

12. With regard to the US blockade against Cuba and the exclusion of the latter from the Summit of the Americas, we, the member states of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Peoples of Our America, reassert the Declaration adopted by all Latin American and Caribbean countries last December 16, 2008, on the need to end the economic, trade and financial blockade imposed by the Government of the United States of America on Cuba, including the implementation of the so-called Helms-Burton Act. The declaration sets forth in its fundamental paragraphs the following:

“CONSIDERING the resolutions approved by the United Nations General Assembly on the need to finish the economic, trade and financial blockade imposed by the United States on Cuba, and the statements on such blockade, which have been approved in numerous international meetings.

“WE AFFIRM that the application of unilateral, coercive measures affecting the wellbeing of peoples and hindering integration processes is unacceptable when defending free exchange and the transparent practice of international trade.

“WE STRONGLY REPEL the enforcement of laws and measures contrary to International Law, such as the Helms-Burton Act, and we urge the Government of the United States of America to finish such enforcement.

“WE REQUEST the Government of the United States of America to comply with the provisions set forth in 17 successive resolutions approved by the United Nations General Assembly and put an end to the economic, trade and financial blockade on Cuba.”

Additionally, we consider that the attempts at imposing the isolation of Cuba have failed, as nowadays Cuba forms an integral part of the Latin American and Caribbean region; it is a member of the Rio Group and other hemispheric organizations and mechanisms, which develops a policy of cooperation, in solidarity with the countries in the hemisphere; which promotes full integration of Latin American and Caribbean peoples. Therefore, there is no reason whatsoever to justify its exclusion from the mechanism of the Summit of the Americas.

13. Developed countries have spent at least USD 8 billion to rescue a collapsing financial structure. They are the same that fail to allocate the small sums of money to attain the Millennium Goals or 0.7% of the GDP for the Official Development Assistance. Never before the hypocrisy of the wording of rich countries had been so apparent. Cooperation should be established without conditions and fit in the agendas of recipient countries by making arrangements easier; providing access to the resources, and prioritizing social inclusion issues.

14. The legitimate struggle against drug trafficking and organized crime, and any other form of the so-called “new threats” must not be used as an excuse to undertake actions of interference and intervention against our countries.

15. We are firmly convinced that the change, where everybody repose hope, can come only from organization, mobilization and unity of our peoples.

As the Liberator wisely said:

Unity of our peoples is not a mere illusion of men, but an inexorable decree of destiny. — Simón Bolívar

Floorplan of disaster

2009-04-22T09:02:00.000-07:00

This, in a nutshell, is why your retirement plan just disappeared. The arrows and numbers represent the degree and quantity to which these financial services companies are into each other, and how they're linked to 'normal' banks (how, precisely, not so sure...but don't you love the way it looks like a mushroom cloud?)

Rosales Located...in Lima

2009-04-21T08:56:00.000-07:00

Opposition leader and mayor of Maracaibo Manuel Rosales, who has been absent from his post for the past few weeks after being indicted on charges of corruption dating to his time as governor of Zulia state, has been found in Lima, Peru.

On Tuesday, the Peruvian newspaper El Comercio cited annonymous diplomatic sources that Rosales "has been in Lima since this past Sunday." The daily, a long-standing critic of the Venezuelan government under Chávez, claimed that the Rosales was in Peru in order to flee repression in Venezuela. Peruvian authorities, however, have been clear that no request for political asylum has either been made or approved.

Along with Mexico and Colombia, Peru is one of the few governments left in Latin America that openly consorts itself with the US and its hemispheric policies.

Rosales is under investigation for misappropriating funds from the state lottery and for multiple property ventures in the United States. His departure from the mayor's office comes amidst heightened tensions between the central government of Caracas and several municipal and state level opposition officials. Earlier this month, the opposition-dominated legislature of Zulia state and its governor Pablo Perez -- Rosales' hand-picked successor -- declared itself 'in rebellion' to the Bolivarian government, and several other mayors including Antonio Ledezma of the Distrito Capital in Caracas, have sought to impede government attempts to reorganize and redistribute power throughout the country.

Pigs fly in Port of Spain?

2009-04-17T18:01:00.000-07:00

Just before proceedings began at today's summit of the Americas in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, monkeys flew out of my butt.

Apparently Obama and Chávez approached one another, and this happened:

Whether or not this will translate into a thaw in US-Venezuelan affective relations, of course, remains to be seen.

The ties of oil have always lurked just beneath the war of words between Bush and Chávez of the last 8 years. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, "Venezuela supplies about 1.5 million barrels of crude oil and refined petroleum products to the U.S. market every day, according to the EIA. Venezuelan oil comprises about 11 percent of U.S. crude oil imports, which amounts to 60 percent of Venezuela’s total exports. PDVSA also wholly owns five refineries in the United States and partly owns four refineries, either through partnerships with U.S. companies or through PDVSA’s U.S. subsidiary, CITGO." The possibility of a US military intervention aimed at ensuring the flow of oil (especially during the nadir of the Iraq occupation and resistance for the empire) has always been a source of anxiety for Bolivarian policymakers and activists alike.

In the lead up to the conference, Chávez and several other Latin American leaders argued that the true test of the Obama administration vis-a-vis its standing among them would be how quickly it moved to end its blockade of Cuba. Apparently, this is also in the offing -- though the extent to this normalization (and whether or not it will be tied to new, less overt and militaristic attempts to take down the Cuban Revolution) has yet to be put into any sort of detail.

Indeed, this question of 'what is to come' in the event of normalization has long been an issue of concern with Cubans. While the island is most certainly divided on the question, legacy and future of the revolution (and what society isn't, revolutionary or no?), there is something of a consensus against the transfer of social power to a repatriated Cuban exile community in Miami.

All this aside, I remain a bit shocked. Both Obama and Chávez are master political craftsmen, but this first series of gestures was by no means inevitable (recall Obama's Venezuela-baiting during the presidential debates). The biggest danger here is that a cooling down of the rhetorical clash between Washington and Caracas might translate into a further consolidation of the power of conservatives in the Bolivarian movement, especially in this time of economic crisis.

Obama is of course doing a lot of repair work here. Eight years of Bush not only alienated most of Latin America from the US in terms of foreign policy (through arrogance, belligerence and outright negligence as the whole of Washington became obsessed with its 'war on terror') it also allowed for China to make significant inroads in the region. Just in the past few months, China has signed several joint development agreements with countries in the region. Russia too has signed military agreements with Venezuela and Bolivia, in no small part spurred on by the recommissioning of the US fourth fleet in the Caribbean and its increased use of Curaçao (only a few miles off the coast of Venezuela).

In this geostrategic and economic light, Obama's gesture today should be seen less as some sort of beneficent act and more one of desperation. The US's major allies in the region (Mexico, Colombia, Peru) are in the grips of civil wars, economic collapse, and serious deficiencies in terms of democratic legitimacy. The rest of the region is (to vastly varying degrees, to be sure) is pursuing a pluripolar world, building South-South ties rather than begging for bigger crumbs at the WTO. Brazil is emerging as a new regional superpower, filling the void left by the US in the past 8 years. Chávez continues to enjoy massive popular support at home and abroad (as far abroad as Palestine.

In other words, Obama should be seen as a savior here only insofar as he is trying to slow down the accelerating slide of US hegemony.

BUT THEN AGAIN: Chávez also reiterated that these sorts of international events, and the US-founded groupings which spawn them, are ultimately oriented towards 'free trade' and the continuation of US economic dominance in the region and the world. ALBA (The Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas) has been holding concurrent meetings in Venezuela while the OAS sponsored Summit of the Americas was held in Trinidad. Cuba is a member of ALBA, it has not been a member of the OAS since 1962.

In this regard, and vis-a-vis the most recent Summit in Port of Spain, Chávez emphasized that the choice of governments like Venezuela, Bolivia and Cuba to resist OAS 'declarations,' which continue to ostracize Cuba and continue to push for the longevity and extension of US-dominated 'free trade' agreements, is a 'sovereign' one. Perhaps the most important thing to watch for in the days following the summit will be the extent to which the Obama administration accepts this right of sovereign states. We know it doesn't want to, the question is whether it thinks it still can.

Every 11th has its 13th

2009-04-11T09:53:00.000-07:00

Seven years ago today, a coalition of the Venezuelan military high command, the privately-owned media and the national chamber of commerce forced Hugo Chávez from power after precipitating a series of crisis that ended in the Puente Llaguno massacre. Elements of the Metropolitan Police force involved in the shootings were recently sentenced for up to 30 years, the first and only prosecutions that have taken place since the media-orchestrated coup.

When Chávez was elected in 1998, the Venezuelan political scene was in complete disarray. The traditional political parties which had run the country since 1958 (and excluded all competition) were completely discredited, and while they persist to this day, they are but emaciated echoes of their former selves. Without an effective or organized opposition, the privately run media and many US-funded NGOs stepped in, decrying the country's march towards 'socialism' long before socialism was on the agenda. (Indeed, many commentators describe the Bolivarian Revolution as a situation of 'counter revolution and radicalization,' where overzealous opposition tactics have pushed the government aligned forces leftward.

This has not, however, translated into something of a purge of these elements. Rather, the leftward shift has taken the form of ramping up the process of creating socialism for the 21st century. (Much to the chagrin of the most radical elements of Chavismo, who often remark that the deepest weakness of the revolution is its tolerance of an intolerant and foreign-backed opposition).

On the 13th, the poor of Caracas, along with a regiment of paratroopers who had refused to follow the orders of the mutinous high command, swarmed the city center and demanded the return of Chávez. The coalition behind the coup disintegrated as the business elites at its head overplayed their hands and alienated the military support they so desperately needed. In the end, they slinked away to the city's eastern districts or Miami, decrying the 'dictatorship' to this day.

Since then, the opposition's flimsy justifications have been thoroughly debunked and recognized as fraudulent by all but the Bush administration and the oppos in Venezuela. The explosion of popular power that was the 13th has since defined the imaginary of the Bolivarian Revolution. (Indeed, the revolution's official historiography is one marked by such eruptions: 1989's Caracazo, the 2002 countercoup, the rolling back of the 2003 lockout).

I would tentatively suggest on this anniversary that the revolt of the 13th undermines any 'hard' rendering of the 'counter-revolution and revolt' thesis. While the opposition's political suicide put an end to Chávez's early coalition politics, it was the force of Venezuela's poor who have pushed the government down the revolutionary road. The government needs to keep this in mind, always. always. always.
*
If you have an hour and a half, this is an incredible documentary (in english) on the 2002 coup, the role of the media, and the insurrection that brought Chávez back to power.

Venezuelan Opposition Leader Rosales in Hiding to Avoid Corruption Charges

2009-04-02T16:36:00.000-07:00

Any longtime readers of the blog will be familiar with Manuel Rosales, who was for a time the ostensible figurehead of the Venezuelan opposition. Representatives in the National Assembly have been pressing for investigations into alleged corruption during his tenure as the governor the Zulia, Venezuela's richest and westernmost state. He has recently fallen off the face of the earth, seemingly to avoid facing court proceedings that would look into the sources of his foreign holdings (including property investments in the United States).

Here's the full article from Venezuelanalysis.com (and feel free to mine the archives of this blog if you want more dirt on Rosales):

Mérida, April 1st 2009 (James Suggett, Venezuelanalysis.com) -- In Venezuela, a controversy has arisen over the unknown whereabouts of a prominent opposition leader and mayor of Maracaibo, Manuel Rosales, who faces corruption charges and is suspected to have fled the country.

National Assembly Legislator Carlos Escarrá, who is also a vice president of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), said in an interview on the state television station on Monday that Rosales secretly fled the country to Panama and may soon re-locate to Miami.

“This person has in a cowardly way fled the country to avoid trial. This attitude is unforgiveable, from my point of view,” said Escarrá, without specifying the source of the information.

Rosales participated in the April 2002 coup d’état against President Hugo Chávez, then ran against Chávez in the 2006 presidential election, which Chávez won in a landslide. Rosales is also the former governor of Zulia state, which produces approximately a third of Venezuela’s daily oil exports and borders Colombia.

Last December, national anti-corruption investigators from the Attorney General’s Office presented evidence that Rosales had illicitly used public funds to accumulate private land and fill offshore bank accounts, and offered and accepted bribes related to public contracts.

The investigation had been prompted by President Chávez’s public declaration that Rosales should be convicted and put in jail for corruption and aiding the infiltration of Colombian paramilitary soldiers in Venezuela.

Based on the investigations, Venezuelan prosecutor Katuiska Plaza filed corruption charges against Rosales two weeks ago in a Zulia state court, and requested an arrest warrant for Rosales. A hearing has been scheduled for April 20th during which the court will decide whether to issue the warrant.

The president of Rosales’s political party A New Era (Un Nuevo Tiempo), Omar Barboza, said it is “totally false that Rosales has fled the country,” and that instead Rosales has gone into hiding in “a safe place in Zulia” to avoid what Barboza called political persecution. “The UNT is taking all necessary actions to protect and assure the physical and personal safety of Manuel Rosales,” Barboza added.

According to Barboza, Rosales has been followed by unidentified armed civilians and national investigators, and several of his private airplane landing strips have been occupied by government security forces. “It is not possible for Manuel Rosales to exercise his right to defense in Venezuela,” said Barboza. “He will not turn himself in to the pack of hounds that is pursuing him until it is possible for him to defend himself.”

On Wednesday, Venezuela’s top public defense attorney, Gabriela Ramírez, assured that all of Rosales’s civil rights including due process have been and will continue to be respected.

The controversy around Rosales comes amidst a broader political clash between the Chávez administration and a group of opposition governors and mayors who were elected last November.

In Zulia, the opposition-dominated state legislature, with the support of Governor Pablo Pérez, declared itself in “rebellion” against the national government recently in reaction to the transfer of the administration of strategic transportation hubs to the national government.

Following this, Rosales’s case was transferred to a Caracas court on the grounds that the political unrest in Zulia would impede a fair trial.

On Wednesday, the president of the National Assembly, Cilia Flores, said the judicial process established in Venezuela’s Constitution and laws should proceed as usual with regard to Rosales. “The judicial process should continue. Security forces should implement a search plan to determine where he is,” said Flores.

Flores added that if Rosales is absent from his post as mayor of Maracaibo for more than 90 days, he will be considered to have abandoned the office, and the people of Maracaibo may elect a new mayor in a popular vote.

A referendum on the future of Globovisión?

2009-04-02T12:19:00.000-07:00

Today a representative in the National Assembly, Ricardo Capella (Yaracuy) proposed to the national commission of science, technology and social means of communication that a consultative referendum be held in order to “determine the fate” of Globovisión, a Venezuelan 24 hour news network.

If something like this goes through, we can expect the usual melodrama from Washington and its NGO lackeys. However, it is important to note, and will be important to reiterate ad nauseum, that Globovisión is not your average TV channel.

Indeed, in making the proposal, Capello suggested that the broadcaster had definitively jumped from being a member of the media to being a political actor when its director traveled with opposition politicians to Puerto Rico to coordinate their actions and receive State Department funds in the lead up to February’s constitutional referendum.

The general director of the channel, Alberto Federico Ravell was caught on camera in the international airport by a community journalist when he reentered Venezuela alongside the directors of Venezuela’s main opposition parties. Ravell flipped out, cussing out the reporter and threatening him. Here’s the vid, worth watching even for the non-Spanish speakers:

(My favorite moment comes around minute 1:50, when the reporter asks Julio Borges, leader of Primero Justicia, a party all but founded by the US, if he was away ‘fighting for Puerto Rican independence.’)

The media in Venezuela was for a long time the stand-in for a domestic opposition. Chávez was initially elected after the complete disintegration of the political structure of the country, meaning there was little in the way of an organized challenge to his mandate. The media quickly filled this gap, most notoriously in the brief coup of April 2002.

This situation has been changing over the past 2 years, perhaps most significantly with the end of RCTV’s concession over channel 2 in spring of 2007. Since then, Globovisión has effectively been the last remaining television oppo-soapbox, though the print media is still by and large anti-Bolivarian.

If this proposal goes through, this would be quite an interesting step in the democratization of the airwaves, though it will no doubt be decried as further support for the argument that Chávez is leading an attack on freedom of speech that Globovisión and the State department have been repeating for quite some time now. Of course, such an almost offensively absurd position only holds if one considers the previous state of things, in which access to the media was determined by one’s financial rotundity.

Instead, today in Venezuela, there has been a concerted effort by the government to develop ‘social’ means of mass communication. One way in which this commitment has taken shape in community programs spearheaded by the Nucleos de Desarollo Endógeno (NUDES, yes, I know…) that train barrio kids in video and television production and the opening of the airwaves to these projects.

While the social communications projects of the governments do not yet (by any means) compete with the 'traditional' media's normal course of telenovelas, car chases and overdubbed US movies in terms of their popularity, they do represent a radical rethinking of what 'freedom of speech' actually entails.

Scenes from the Recession

2009-03-25T15:23:00.000-07:00

I am copping this from Infinite Thought.

A series of images published earlier this month, dramatizations of the contemporary global financial crisis, most certainly worth looking over.

Fox News really just claimed CNN is a communist plot.

2009-03-18T08:32:00.000-07:00

...no, really. And they 'oopsied' that Ceasar 'the lettuce guy' (no lie, direct quote) Chávez is the president of Venezuela.

Here is a gem from Fox news (which I discovered on BoRev.net), aired the morning after Mauricio Funes won the Presidency in El Salvador last Sunday.

How Fox news can be seen as anything other than an elaborate 24 joke at this point is quite beyond me.

I'm sure I'm the millionth person to post this

2009-03-13T09:46:00.000-07:00

Possible symptoms to be smiled upon:

Some of you might have picked up on this week's battle between Jon Stewart and Jim Cramer. Daily Show vs. CNBC's cheerleading us to the current clusterfuck that we call an economy. There are some real gems here: Stewart gets flustered beyond belief numerous times, but perhaps more importantly, there are a few moments at the end of the second link where: 1. Stewart describes the US as 'a nation of workers' in an attack on the financialization of contemporary markets; and 2. Stewart reaches out to his 'other' base and talks about the innocent traders on Wall Street who are also getting, in his words, 'fucked' in this mess.

In a very real way, Stewart is doing two kinds of work here: he is not only repeating the refrain of the mainstream press and politicians in the US that this crisis is the bad result of the actions of bad men. However, if this were all he were up to, we would have seen an entire program dedicated to Bernard Madoff and Shinanigans reminiscent of his appearance in 2004 on CNN's crossfire. Instead, we see the second type of work, pointing towards a (but not coming out and saying it?) systemic logic underlying this mess.

http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=220252&title=cnbc-gives-financial-advice

http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes/index.jhtml?episodeId=220533

Two rather different 'Nationalizations' in less than a week.

2009-03-03T10:51:00.000-08:00

Venezuela...The US...

In the US, when you run your firm such that you threaten the very financial fabric of the entire universe, you get nationalized...by which of course we mean the Obama administration gives you even more of the public's money.

In Venezuela, when you run your firm in a way that threatens the health and safety of your fellow citizens in the name of 'the laws of the market,' you get nationalized...by which of course we mean that the government plans on socializing the 'goods' of the company in question, not just the fallout.

NYU Occupation Smashed by Administration

2009-02-21T10:19:00.000-08:00

The occupation has been broken. Students were driven to their dorms and told to remove their belongings and were removed from campus immediately. Mass support is necessary to demand that these students be granted amnesty. Please get as many people to email NYU as possible and show that we will stand together with the students and not be turned back.

Email NYU Administrators. Demand amnesty and no suspensions:
NYU President John Sexton: john.sexton@nyu.edu
John Beckman, NYU Spokesperson: jhb5@nyu.edu
Office of the Provost: provost@nyu.edu
Office of the Vice President: evp@nyu.edu

Today New York University has shown its true face more than ever. Claiming to be a "private university in the public service," it is clearly not even in the service of those students whose tuitions allow it to exist.
Earlier today, NYU cut power to all outlets in the occupied space and turned off the wireless internet. Obviously this was an attempt to silence and intimidate the occupiers who have broad-based support.
Then, NYU said it would negotiate and instead detained and suspended the student negotiators when they showed up. Security has now broken through the barricade and people are being detained and suspended.
Instead of dialog and negotiation, the NYU administration has shown they prefer the authoritarian, dissent-quashing, dictator route. It is a true reflection of how they run their university. Nothing but thugs with suits on, interested in getting rich under the guise of "education."
Be prepared to defend any individual or group that is targeted academically or legally for their role in the occupation. Widespread support for the occupation and its demands will not be extinguished by NYU's hypocritical, tyrannical behavior.
Come out to 60 Washington Square South if you can.
Email NYU Administrators. Demand amnesty and no suspensions:
NYU President John Sexton: john.sexton@nyu.edu
John Beckman, NYU Spokesperson: jhb5@nyu.edu
Office of the Provost: provost@nyu.edu
Office of the Vice President: evp@nyu.edu

Obama avec Zizek?

2009-02-20T14:24:00.000-08:00

avec

...having nothing to do with Zizek's endorsement...

Last week, US President Barack Obama responded to the comparison of (or call for) current US plans regarding the banking system to ‘the Swedish model’ in what many economists describe as ‘ambiguous.’ Obama didn’t necessarily close the door on nationalization of financial institutions, but he did call into question its likelihood here in the US [check out the interesting interview with a Swedish central banker on the inappropriateness of the comparison here]. Here is his response:

“The scale of the US economy and the capital markets are so vast, and the problem in terms of managing and overseeing anything of that scale, I think...wouldn’t make sense. And we also have different traditions in this country and we want to retain a strong sense of private capital fulfilling the core investment needs of our country.”

There are a few things going on here that are worth noting above and beyond any ostensible ‘Swedish nationalization’ that might or might not be in the offing. First, Obama chalks up faith in market-response and of private capitalists righting what they have made oh-so wrong as a cultural artifact of the United States. But this is a rather static notion of culture, one which resists any sort of change even in the face of crisis. This of course is deeply wrong on a number of levels, but if nothing else an interesting example of the ‘cultural turn’ in politics – we are the product of traditions, not of ‘rational choices’ or calculations.

Obama then goes on to undermine his cultural determinism. “…we want to retain a strong sense of private capital fulfilling…” This is not the same sort of orthodoxy that we got with his inauguration speech, in which he announced the question of the ‘free market’ was not in point of fact a question at all in that it has ‘proven’ its unequaled ability to spread wealth and freedom (which triggered sincerely confused expressions on the faces of my students). Rather, this is Obama exposing the bald-faced ideological nature of the relationship to capitalism this country has: if you repeat something enough it is true. During the tech-bubble of the 1990s, I often heard people who were by no means benefiting directly from the assets boom repeat the “the economy is booming” conclusion aired 24-7 by media outlets, politicians and economists. Through the repetition of this mantra, the non-beneficiary takes part in the reproduction of capital. Put differently, it is an (or yet another) example of the excluded, poor or oppressed subject actively colluding in their own exclusion, dispossession or oppression.

‘The sense’ is here the obverse of the ‘as if’ of ‘false consciousness’ – where I act as if x were the case, even though it isn’t, because there is some sort of cultural production barring my access to ‘the truth’ (Superstructure hides base). Here, ‘the sense’ is not the illusory representation of reality, but is rather the act which allows the very constitution of reality. We desire ‘the sense’ that capital can unfuck us, and in so desiring we structure social reality itself.

There is an interesting postscript to this line of analysis, that only came up in the course of talking with Kim. I have noticed over the past few weeks an increase in this sort of speech on the part of politicians, pundits and economists: "We are a capitalist country"; "We believe in the free market"; and so forth (again, Obama's inauguration speech is a perfect example). This should be recognized for the phenomenon that it indeed is, in that it is a manifestation directly related to the crisis. Put differently, put symptomatically, we can echo Hamlet: "The lady doth protest too much, methinks." The repetition of 'we are the market' is meant to reassure the speaker, the iterated ideological reconstruction of reality speeds up in this moment of crisis -- as it must.

Silvio Berlusconi

2009-02-19T15:46:00.000-08:00

I mean, seriously, fuck this guy.

Some of you may have heard that Italy's capo, Silvio Berlusconi, has recently gotten into hot water for 'making light' of Argentina's Dirty War. Specifically, he referenced those 'good old days' when the army used to snatch dissidents from the streets, put them in planes, and drop them over the Atlantic -- often while the victims were still alive.

Wow.

¡Si! Wins

2009-02-15T18:16:00.000-08:00

With a 70% turnout, the Chavista ¡Si! campaign to lift term limits for elected officials won by 10 points this Sunday. With this latest electoral test out of the way, we can focus on the need to foster a 'revolution within the revolution' -- the campaign that really matters

¿Enmienda hoy, y socialismo mañana?

2009-02-15T11:40:00.000-08:00

A useful article by George Ciccariello-Maher on today's vote in Venezuela, coverage thereof here in the US (especially the New York Times) and the context in Venezuela:

http://counterpunch.com/maher02132009.html

The point that Ciccariello-Maher raises, and which is being raised by many observers even within the Obama administration is that term limits in and of themselves by no means make democracy. This was even registered, albeit briefly, in an otherwise horrible article by Simon Romero in today's NYT

"The Obama administration seems to have adopted a nonbombastic approach to dealing with Venezuela, even as it was faced with questions over the referendum campaign. “That’s an internal matter with regard to Venezuela,” Robert Wood, a State Department spokesman, said when asked this month about the referendum."

That Venezuela's sovereignty is for the moment being respected by Washington is a good thing indeed. How long it will last remains to be seen. The deepening economic crises in the US and throughout the capitalist core economies mean that less time and resources can be spent interfering with governments in Venezuela and throughout Latin America, a trend that was established early on in the Bush presidency. After initially promising to focus on hemispheric relations, the Bush administration all but turned its back on the region. Its now ‘normal’ meddling in the internal affairs of Central American and South American democracies was increasingly outsourced to NGOs funded in part by the National Endowment for Democracy and other ‘civil society’ projects. The ‘internal oppositions’ that emerged in the shadow of the empire, especially in Venezuela and Bolivia, turned out to be inept and overconfident, weakening their position with every misstep. Other regimes in the region’s so-called ‘pink tide’ have been less plagued by the fading empire’s bumbling – getting ignored in reward for their milktoast politics.

Hillary Clinton's first trip as Secretary of State to Asia signals a continuation of Bush-era policies in the region. The focus continues to be the poorly executed neoconservative plan to establish ‘footholds of democracy’ in the Middle East in order to contain Russia and China. While the plan’s execution will no doubt be less ragingly bellicose than that of the Bush team, 8 years have made it a fait accompli. There is no other choice but to continue apace as the Empire crumbles, or so the logic goes. US financial power has definitively passed on, the stimulus will fail (David Harvey’s thoughts on the scheme here: <a href="http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/bullet184.html">), and thus it needs something to leverage a smoother collapse. What emerges in the aftermath of the US’s dominant position in the capitalist world system remains uncertain.

All this begs the question, especially vis-à-vis Venezuela: whither socialism?

Chávez has been in power for 10 years now. The Bolivarian Revolution – a social process that needs to be understood in its longue durée as having kicked off with 1989’s Caracazo rather than with the 1999 Constitutional Referendum – has put the question of socialism back in the imaginary of Venezuelans and the poor throughout the world. However, and this is key, in the 4 years that the Revolution’s trajectory has been nominally ‘socialist,’ ‘Socialism’ has stubbornly persisted in being something of an empty signifier. Finding content, defining ‘socialism,’ is an intense physical and theoretical struggle that continues in Venezuela today and is quite distinct from the question of term limits or the institutions of democratic governance.

Chávez is, without a doubt, central to the revolutionary process in Venezuela. In the first and most important aspect, he has been able to balance the forces at play in the country, steering the country clear of the civil war that has been in the offing for at least 30 years. Secondly, he has provided an institutional umbrella under which progressive forces have been able to make unprecedented headway. The hope here is that by the time he would come up for re-election in 2024, he wouldn’t be necessary. Better, the office of the president would no longer be called for, as the parallel institutions currently gestating in the country will by then have developed beyond the constraints of representative liberal democracy.

It is, in other words, a generational question both in the sense of creating the new as well as of years. Either way, the question is bigger than Chávez.

2 Auto workers killed by state police as workers demand nationalization

2009-01-30T15:34:00.001-08:00

On the afternoon of Wednesday, January 29th, two workers of an occupied factory in Anzoateguí state were killed by state police acting on the orders of a local judge. Pedro Suarez, a worker in the occupied Mitsubishi factory (MMC) and José Marcano, a worker in the auto parts company Macusa were among the hundreds of workers occupying the Mitsubishi since January 22nd.

The conflict arouse with the company fired 135 contract workers of the Induservis firm. In a mass assembly, Mitsubishi workers voted 863 in favor, 21 against and 4 abstentions to occupy the factory to demand the return of fired workers, linking their collective demands with those of VIVEX, Franelas Gotcha, INAF and ACERVEN, who have been pressuring for the nationalization under worker control of their respective employers.

From the original article published at www.aporrea.org:
“The brutal attack by the Anzoategui police was the result of a judge’s order to vacate the premises. The workers refused, at which point the police opened fire with live ammunition, killing two workers and leaving others wounded. The situation lasted until the National Guard arrived to halt the police’s attack against the workers. The workers remain inside the factory, but the judge insists on the execution of the eviction order, resulting in a very tense situation.
“The governor of Anzoategui is Tarek William Saab, a ‘Bolivarian.’ This brutal action of the judge and the police is totally unjustified. Last year, the Anzoategui state police were involved in attacks against petrol workers fighting for collective bargaining rights…the police keep behaving in a pre-revolutionary manner. The governor and the national government of President Chávez need to immediately open an investigation to put this situation to a stop and bring those responsible for this brutal murder to justice.
“The immense majority of the Mitsubishi workers are Bolivarians and many have been working actively on the campaign in favor of the constitutional referendum this February 15. They have already received the support for their actions from the workers’ movement of Anzoategui, and have received delegations of workers from Toyota and Ford, whose unions are discussing a possible occupation of their factories in solidarity with the workers at MMC and VIVEX.

“We are making an urgent call to all worker activists, youth, revolutionaries and of the international solidarity movement to:

- send a message of support and condolence to the workers through Freteco: frentecontrolobrero@gmail.com, and to the Sindicato Nueva Generación, MMC: sindicatonuevageneracion@gmail.com.

- send messages to the governor of Anzoategui demanding an immediate end to workers and eviction threats against the workers and that those responsible for these murders be brought to justice: despacho@tarekrindecuentas.com, rima.saab@tarekrindecuentas.com, dalia.vega@tarekrindecuentas.com, despacho@gobernaciondeanzoategui.com, info@gobernaciondeanzoategui.com

- send messages to the Bolivarian Government of Venezuela, embassies and consulates, asking for an end to the violence against workers at MMC, the arrest of those responsible, the nationalization of Vivex and a resolution to the demands of MMC workers: dggcomunicacional@presidencia.gob.ve, and drsociales@presidencia.gob.ve

have since last year already had a role in attacks anti-petrol worker attacks as

Speaking at UCSC, Tuesday Feb 3rd

2009-01-28T15:30:00.000-08:00

Beyond the ‘3 Rs’?
Year Ten of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution

Tuesday, February 3rd 4:00-6:00 pm
Baobab Lounge, Merrill College, UCSC

After the failed constitutional referendum of 2007, 2008 was to be a year of reexamination, rectification and the relaunching of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela. Building on research conducted while in Venezuela throughout 2007 and 2008, this talk will examine the phases leading up to the present moment in Venezuelan politics and the open-ended questions of revolutionary politics today.

Donald Kingsbury is a PhD. Candidate in the Department of Politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His work centers on the relation between constituent power and the modern state form in contemporary Venezuela and its implications for political thought.

This talk is sponsored by the Department of Politics and the Venezuelan studies research cluster.

President Chávez’s First Column

2009-01-23T12:15:00.000-08:00

Author:
Hugo Chávez Frías

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez announced Tuesday that he will write a new opinion column titled "Chávez's Lines," the first of which was published today. Every Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday, twenty-eight newspapers across the country including Venezuela's largest newspaper, Ultimas Noticias, will publish the column, according to the Ministry of Communication and Information. Two predominant newspapers considered to sympathize with the opposition, El Universal and El Nacional, will not publish the column, but have written reviews of this first one. Last weekend, Chávez temporarily suspended his weekly Sunday talk show, "Aló Presidente," in which he addresses the public directly for many hours, in order to dedicate himself to the campaign for a constitutional amendment that would abolish the two-term limit on all elected offices if it wins the majority of votes in a national referendum this coming February 15th. President Chávez said his new column would be charged with "the force of ideas and the passion for homeland, which like fire I carry in my soul, and the patriots of Venezuela carry in our hearts." Below is a translation of the first column, "Chávez's Lines #1."

Chávez's Lines

My strongest hits as a baseball player always went to the right field.

Now, on the playing field of politics and revolution, these hits that begin today will go toward every field with the same force as my hits.

Only, now they go with the force of ideas, of convictions, and of passion for the homeland.

I am, in essence, a soldier. And as such, I was shaped in the school of commitment and obedience to legitimate power that orients the collective force in pursuit of tactical objectives and strategic goals.

The circumstances and conditions that marked my life converted me early on into a revolutionary soldier. From that point on, I recognized as legitimate and superior the sovereign power of the Venezuelan people, to which I am now absolutely subordinated. And I will be for the rest of my days.

I say this today amidst events that mark the beginning of 2009, as the political battle that was unleashed in our homeland two centuries ago intensifies. Some, the majority of us, want national independence; others, the minority, want to convert Venezuela once again into a colony, into an imperial subordinate, a sub-republic.

There are no other paths to achieving Venezuelan independence than national revolution.

There are no other paths toward the great homeland than this path toward socialism on which we have already embarked; our Bolivarian Socialism, Socialist Democracy!

The other path, on which the Yankee-following colonialists want to take us, would condemn our country to handicap, to insignificance, and the historical tomb; it is the path of capitalism and its political expression, "bourgeois democracy."

We, the independence fighters, carry an oath; that which our leader, Simón Bolívar, took on the Sacred Mount on August 15th, 1805. We, the patriots, have a project, we bear a flag.

They, the colonialists, have no oath, have no project, have no flag. Or better said, as we have seen in several of the Yankee-followers' activities, their flag is reversed, turned upside down, with seven stars and not eight as our Bolívar commanded in Angostura. That says it all: they represent what is contrary to the homeland, they are the anti-flag, they are the anti-Venezuela, they are anti-Bolívar. They are the negation. They are the no-homeland.

And I want to express this in my lines, especially now, when we are in full campaign headed into the referendum on February 15th.

February, February once again! I have felt for years now that my life is powerfully linked to this month, the month of the festivities of the savannah and the gusts of dry season wind: February 27th, February 4th, February 2nd!

And now: February 15th.

Twenty years after the Caracazo[1] that bred me, seventeen years after the Bolivarian Military Rebellion[2] that gave birth to me, and ten years after my inauguration that brought me here, I once again place my life and my entire future in the hands of the people and their sovereign decision. This revolutionary soldier will do as the people command.

If the majority says no, then I will leave in another February, that of 2013.

On the other hand, if the majority of you, Venezuelan men and women, support the amendment with a ‘Yes' vote, then it is possible that I could continue in front of the wheel beyond 2013.

But this is not what is truly most important. Here and now, what is essential is that if the ‘No' wins, a colony will be imposed, the anti-homeland. And if the ‘Yes' wins, independence and homeland will prevail.

That is why I repeat to you, men and women, Venezuelan youth:

Those who want a homeland, come with me!

Those who come with me, you will have a homeland!

Introduction and Translation by James Suggett

[1] Caracazo is the name given to the wave of spontaneous protests, riots and looting that occurred on February 27, 1989 in the Venezuelan capital Caracas and surrounding towns against free-market reforms proposed by then social democrat President of Venezuela Carlos Andrés Pérez, who followed the recommendations of the IMF. These expressions of popular discontent extended for five days and were violently repressed by police and military forces.

[2] On February 4, 1992, by-then army officer Hugo Chávez led a military uprising against the neoliberal government of Carlos Andrés Pérez at a time when the government had lost all legitimacy due to the Caracazo and other acts of repression.

U.S.-Venezuela Relations Uncertain as Obama and Chávez Intensify Rhetoric

2009-01-20T15:31:00.000-08:00

Author:
James Suggett - Venezuelanalysis.com
Mérida, January 19th, 2009 (Venezuelanalysis.com)-- In statements to the press over the weekend, the president-elect of the United States, Barack Obama, and Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez intensified their critiques of each other while reiterating their mutual desire to improve relations, leaving much uncertainty as to how diplomatic relations will take shape following Obama’s inauguration as the 44th president of the U.S. Tuesday.

In the wake of widely-circulated news about meetings between opposition leaders and U.S. State Department officials in Puerto Rico last week, Chávez expressed skepticism toward the incoming Obama administration, demanding actions that show that the U.S. will put a halt to its long history of interventions in the affairs of its southern neighbors.

“I demand of the new president of the United States that he does not mess with Venezuela, because Venezuela is a free and sovereign country,” said Chávez, whose administration has purchased the majority share of all oil production in Venezuela and who strongly denounces U.S. government funding for domestic opposition groups.

Chávez alleged that several of those who met in Puerto Rico have now met with U.S. officials in New York to plan strategies to defeat a referendum to allow the Venezuelan president to be re-elected without term limits, which will face a national vote next month.

“Obama has decided to meddle in the battle [over the referendum],” said Chávez, who hopes to be able to run for re-election to a third term in 2012 in order to advance what many call “Socialism of the 21st Century” in Venezuela. He accused the president-elect of “following a campaign format that is dictated to him by the Pentagon, where the real imperial power lies.”

Obama, who advocates new energy sources to help the U.S. depend less on the million barrels of Venezuelan oil it imports daily, responded to a question on Venezuela in an internationally televised interview Sunday.

“Venezuela is a country of critical importance to commerce in the region, it is an important provider of petroleum. We are willing to begin diplomatic conversations about how to improve relations,” said Obama. He added that “all countries in the region of have something of importance to contribute.”

Obama included Cuba among the countries with which he would meet, as long as Cuban President Raúl Castro “is also willing to develop personal freedoms on the island.” He mentioned more flexible travel and remittance laws between the U.S. and Cuba, but denied an end to the U.S.-imposed embargo against the communist island nation.

The governments of Venezuela, Brazil, Bolivia, and several other Latin American nations view an end to the embargo against Cuba as a necessary step for the U.S. to prove it is serious about improving hemispheric relations.

Asserting that he desires “a change” in U.S.-Latin American relations, President-Elect Obama said, “Our responsibility as Americans is not to dictate policies… but to find cooperation and mutual interest.”

Obama then re-hashed previous remarks that “Chávez has been a force that has impeded progress in the region.”

Echoing the “War on Terror” rhetoric of outgoing U.S. President George W. Bush, Obama declared, “We must remain firm when we see the news that Venezuela is exporting terrorist activities,” referring to allegations by the Colombian government that the Chávez administration finances the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a Colombian guerrilla army. “This is not good international behavior,” Obama said.

Chávez responded in kind Monday, calling the U.S. the world’s top exporter of terrorism. He harshly criticized Obama’s silence about the bloody invasion of Gaza by Israel, the U.S.’s principal ally in the Middle East. “You ask [Obama] his opinion about the massacre of innocent children in Palestine, and he does not respond,” Chávez said.

If under Obama’s administration the U.S.’s wars and interventions in foreign states continue as they have under the Bush administration, said Chávez, this will be “a new fiasco for his own people and for the world.”

“If you want good relations, not only with Venezuela, but with Latin America, I recommend that you review things a little, and take your role seriously,” Chávez advised Obama. “I hope I am wrong,” said Chávez, “I already think that Obama will come to be the same miasma… it will be up to him to demonstrate the opposite.”

Vote on Presidential Re-election Reform to be Held Nest Month

2009-01-16T08:54:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, amidst opposition student protests in the capital and university centers throughout Venezuela, the National Assembly passed the resolution necessary to amend the constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela concerning the re-election of public officials. With only 6 votes against (all by representatives of the center-left party PODEMOS, which left the Bolivarian bloc in late 2007), the election will be held in February, with campaigning for or against the measure mandated to end on the 13th.

With the amendment the term limits for all elected officials -- from the office of the president to town mayor -- would be lifted. Opposition student groups, fresh from a weekend meeting of Venezuelan opposition officials and representatives of the US government in Puerto Rico, attempted to block Caracas's main thoroughfare but were dispersed with water cannons and tear gas.

While I am still rather confident that Chávez will win this vote handily, I should also point out that the last time the opposition held the political territory it does today was in 2002. In 2002, folks should remember, the Venezuelan opposition, major media outlets, and chamber of commerce launched a failed coup and orchestrated a devastating financial shut down. With the emergence and seeming consolidation of violent shock troops in the country's major universities, anything is once again possible.

Venezuelan Opposition Attacks Chavistas during Governor’s Swearing in Ceremony

2009-01-10T11:33:00.001-08:00

...in another stunning show of the Venezuelan opposition's democratic credentials...

Author:
Tamara Pearson - Venezuelanalysis.com

Mérida, January 9, 2009 (venezuelanalysis.com)-- Over 40 United Socialist Party (PSUV) supporters have been injured by members of the opposition during the swearing in of the newly elected governor of Tachira state, according to national assembly member, Iris Varela.

Cesar Perez Vivas, who was also the general secretary of COPEI, Venezuela’s main Christian democratic party, recently won the governorship in the regional elections of November 23 of last year with 49% of the vote. Various supporters and a range of national governors including the new opposition mayor of Caracas, Antonio Ledezma, attended the ceremony, which took place in the main plaza of the state capital.

Varela called for protection for the workers in the social missions who have lately been attacked by opposition groups and announced that the National Assembly will start an investigation into the aggressions in Tachira.

Immediately after the ceremony in the main plaza, the opposition group beat up people identified as pro-Chavez. The outgoing governor, Ronaldo Blanco was escorted by the National Guard to his vehicle, to protect him from attacks. One 65 year-old woman was stripped of her t-shirt which had a pro-amendment slogan on it, and her other clothing and the opposition members tried to undress 10 other female Barrio Adentro health mission workers.

The opposition members also threw large rocks, homemade explosives and other blunt objects. One witness said they wanted “to burn Chavismo and they wanted to burn more than 60 people who were in the bus.” The bus had taken Chavistas to the event to support the outgoing governor.

The legislator Ligia Montoya received bruises on her head from a shovel and legislators Nayibert Lugo and Jonathan Garcia received bruises on their arms and legs caused by impacts with shovels and bars. Others received a range of lesions, bruises, and some internal injuries. Six vehicles were also damaged.

The opposition group then headed for the legislative building of Tachira, “the Palace of Lions,” where they tried to knock down the doors of the judicial office and were blocked by the National Guard.

However, the general secretary of the new state government has rejected the denunciations that were made, saying “It’s true that there were skirmishes, we won’t deny it, because there was provocation… in a formal event like that the outgoing governor and all the legislators came dressed in red with their insignias of the [United Socialist Party] PSUV, disrespecting the solemnity of the event.”

Speaking at a press conference this morning, Freddy Bernal, vice president of the PSUV for the Andean region (Tachira, Merida and Trujillo states) complained of the lack of coverage by national and regional media.

Bernal said the events on Wednesday “are indicative of the character of the government of Cesar Perez Viva, who in his discourse called for unity and conciliation, the fascist gangs who supported him for election in Tachira state assaulted members of the PSUV indiscriminately and wildly.”

(translation) Venezuela to initiate a humanitarian airlift to Gaza

2009-01-06T14:18:00.000-08:00

Telesur, 6 January 2009 -- Venezuela announced the beginning of humanitarian airlifts this Tuesday to help civilians affected by Israeli aggression in the Gaza Strip which has resulted in more than 600 Palestinian casualties.

In a communiqué, a Venezuelan spokesperson said, “the government has decided to initiate a humanitarian airlift together with the Arab and Muslim community, as well as with other Latin American countries, to provide medicine, food, water, milk and other necessities [to the Palestinian people].”

According to the notice, the [Venezuelan] state will establish contacts with various global humanitarian organizations as well as with governments in the Middle East and the Palestinian people in order to deal with the current crisis.

Caracas also condemned Tel Aviv’s aggression that has already caused the deaths of more than 600 Palestinians and exhorted the United Nations to adopt resolutions which might aid the Palestinian people.

Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez said on Tuesday that it was necessary to establish a humanitarian airlift to Gaza because “the Israelis have blocked the Red Cross and other humanitarian aid. This is barbarism.”

In a speech to the media, Chávez said that the Israeli president, Shimon Peres, should be chargd by the International Criminal Court together with outgoing US president George Bush, “if this world has any sense of shame.”

“The world needs to call on Israel to take care of the children, to respect international laws. From my own modest voice I am asking, how much longer must the children of Palestine suffer?”

Chávez added that the Israeli soldiers, “are cowards, bombing a people as they sleep, exhausted, innocent, vulnerable.”

He also called on the Israeli people to mobilize against its government, “to put their hands on their hearts and put an end to this madness.”

At the same time, he expressed his hope that the Jewish community in Venezuela would speak out against the massacre of the Palestinian people.

“You who forcefully reject every act of persecution, should, you are justified. We have hope in our hearts for the children because the children are the heart of the world.”

***

Brazil also announced today that they will send 14 tons of food and other humanitarian aid to Palestine this Friday.
Way to lead by example guys.

Optimism and Responses to Economic Crises in the New Year

2009-01-04T15:06:00.000-08:00

Numbers
The vast majority of Venezuelans are supportive of President Chávez’s administration and are optimistic about the Bolivarian project of 21st century Socialism, according to 2 polls published today. According to Grupo de Investigación Social XXI (GIS) and the Instituto de Análisis de Datos (IVAD), 74.9% and 64.9% of Venezuelans approve of the Chávez government, respectively. The GIS survey also reports that 47.4% of Venezuelans are ‘optimistic’ regarding the economic future of the country this coming year – in stark contrast to similar polls that have recently reported rather gloomy outlooks in the centers of global capitalism.

These numbers bode well for Chávez, who has signaled that he would like the plebiscite for a constitutional amendment to allow for perpetual reelection of the presidency to take place on the upcoming 27th of February (the 20th anniversary of the Caracazo). If these numbers maintain, as we should expect, Chávez will win his bid to initiate the ‘fourth stage’ of the Bolivarian Revolution in the presidential elections of 2012. (The first stage, according to Chávez’s chronology, began with the popular rebellion against neoliberalism and the death knell of the puntofijo system in the Caracazo of 1989. The second stage was initiated with his election in 1998 and included the first steps toward ‘Socialism for the 21st century.’ The third, which started last year and continues to this day Chávez considers to be a stage of deepening and institutionalizing revolutionary hegemony. The fourth stage, envisioned to begin in the next ten years, is to be the final transition to a distinctive Bolivarian Socialism in Venezuela).

Until the regional elections in late November of last year (which saw a record turnout of 65.5%) one could see three related aspects – positive and negative – of Chávez’s overwhelming popularity. First, the popularity of Chávez reflects a more general symptom of contemporary democracy. Disproportionate attention and weight is placed on the chief executive, in an often times auto-reproducing dynamic that year after year increases the imaginary and actual power of the president. Area studies specialists have for a long time argued that the resulting ‘presidentialism’ is an endemic trait of Latin American politics (though they are often less apt to recognize the same dynamic in the post-FDR United States). While it must be noted that Chávez has perhaps been more willing to use this centralizing trend to democratize the Venezuelan state than any of his predecessors, the strength of the executive has nonetheless been cause for concern among left and right commentators.

Secondly, Chávez’s continued popularity underlines the perceived direct link between himself and the people. While political scientists have been quick to locate in this relation a recurrence of ‘populism’ of the Peronist or caudillo variety, their analysis misses the racial and economic components of Venezuelan politics. Whereas Peron and other examples of ‘classical populists’ were almost exclusively of the dominant racial group and spoke the language of national unity (de la Hoya in Peru being perhaps the most striking example here), Bolivarian discourse is one of a politics of antagonism and partisanship. While Chávez is indeed (perhaps before all else) a nationalist, the Bolivarian government is perhaps the only one in the world that orients itself toward the betterment of the poor and the interests of those marginalized by contemporary global capitalism. (not to mention the fact that the Chavista government of the past 10 years has delivered – increasing the quality of life, the purchasing power, and the access to social goods and services for Venezuelans on a scale never before seen).

Thirdly, and perhaps most disconcertingly, is the identification of Chávez with the revolutionary project itself – that only he can carry forward the transformation of Venezuelan society. The reasons for this are of course many, not the least of which is that many ‘Bolivarian’ politicians have ambiguous revolutionary credentials at best. The most significant problem with this identification has less to do with the norms of representative democracy than with practical concerns. If the Bolivarian movement cannot get beyond the centrality of Chávez, it will not be able to permanently transform Venezuela.

The hope – or my hope, in any event – is that the formation of parallel institutions and the deepening of popular power will be able to preclude this practical concern. The deepening of the role of the communal councils, the formation of the PSUV, and the continued work of the missions are gestures toward a fluid institutionality, a form of political power capable of adapting and escaping the inevitable entropy of the state and its subsidiary social formations. In this case, the hand wringing of allies and enemies of the Bolivarian Revolution vis-à-vis the centrality of Chávez would amount to a series of ill-formed questions.

Different numbers
On numerous recent occasions, Chávez and his ministers have argued that the global economic crisis triggered by the collapse of the US housing market will affect Venezuela less than it will other countries. Today communications minister Jesse Chacón declared “the global economic crisis will affect us less than other countries and we have sufficient savings to go on unaffected even if the price of a barrel of oil falls to $0.00.”

In another reaction to global market turmoil, members of ALBA (The Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas – Venezuela, Bolivia, Honduras, Nicaragua and Cuba) will be meeting this week in Caracas to discuss the formation of a new, regional, currency and a new monetary standard and system intended to replace the continued dominance of the US dollar in financial matters. While simply changing currencies cannot hope to dislodge the United States’ central and commanding position in Latin America (paraphrasing Eduardo Galleano: “When the United States sneezes, Latin America as a whole catches pneumonia”), such a gesture would be a powerful symbolic blow to the Washington Consensus.

However, there remains much work to be done. One the whole, I find talk of the ‘pink tide’ of ostensibly left-wing governments in Latin America to be overexcited. There is simply too much variation among the governments in question to make any solid links (though it must be admitted that there is more in common between Venezuela and, say, Brazil than between Bolivia and Mexico or Colombia in terms of economic and social policy). What is more, ALBA has yet to truly emerge as more than a symbolic force, with even Ecuador refusing to join. The alliance’s vision and program will continue to gain popularity throughout Latin America and the rest of the world during this most recent crisis in global capitalism. However, if it hopes to combat the inevitably approaching ‘green Keynesianism’ of capital’s response, it will not only have to expand but also offer a concrete and antagonistic analysis of precisely the sorts of reformism making up the majority of ‘pink tide’ economies – a seemingly impossible and unlikely task.

Adventures in Gringolandia...

2008-12-23T06:16:00.000-08:00

I'm back in the US after 10 days of Trini monsoons and plenty of soccer with my godson.

St. Louis, from where I am writing this, is a cold, windy hell of a place that makes me think maybe the invites for xmas in Venezuela weren't such a bad idea (nothing like the midwestern banshee whissssshhhhh of wind against a drafting hotel window to make you want to strip off your clothes and start chanting USA! USA! USA!).

...and i leave for Duluth in a few days, that oughtta be a whole hell of a lot better!

coming soon:

- polished-ish entries on enmity and Venezuela, the regional autonomy movement in Zulia, Venezuela, and analysis of the upcoming constitutional reform on presidential reelection.
- I also hope to broaden the scope of this blog a bit, as i'm no longer in Venezuela. I'll continue to write on the Bolivarian Revolution, but want to weigh in on other 'pressing and asinine' issues of the day, since, heh, this is a blog, right?

Yadda, yadda, yadda

2008-12-10T06:51:00.000-08:00

Leaving Venezuela is a strange feeling, again.

I’ve done what I came to do, seen more than I ever hoped to see, and have my work cut out for me when I return to the lab after the holidays. The last days are, like they were last year, a mix of ‘what should I be sure to see,’ entropy and exhaustion, and the frantic search for gifts and random bullshit trophies for the folks back home…(never my favorite part of travel, the obligatory flag keychain search)…

Travelogue
My trip out west was incredible. Maracaibo is the coldest city in Venezuela (only because everyone and everywhere is ridiculously air conditioned). One of my projects for back in the states is an essay on the regional autonomy movement in the state of Zulia, of which Maracaibo is the capital city.

I got to visit a massive commune being built outside the city by PDVSA, the state oil company and talked with Nelson Sanchez -- an old school guerrilla and early influence on Chávez's socialism in the 1980s. Today he is in charge of the 'ideological development' of PDVSA employees (not as spooky as it sounds. He oversees things like the distribution of funds to the building of the commune, producing pamphlets on Feminism and the like).

Mérida, a university town in the Andes, reminded me a bit of Santa Cruz – hippies, spoiled college brats and the climate and all.

Barinas, the birthplace of Chávez located in the upper Llanos, was an eye-opener. Chávez’s family runs the place, and no one is happy with them – especially not the reds. I heard more than once the expression “Aqui hay Chavismo, pero no hay la revolución” (We have Chavismo here, but we don’t have the Revolution). part of this has to do with the fact that Chávez’s dad, who was governor for 8 years, is old, and has been rather ill for the past 4 years. But part of it also has to do with the corruption of his brother, Adán, or so many tell me.

But at the same time, Barinas is something of a boom town, and has only really entered the map in the past 10 years. The problems of the city – infrastructure, especially – are thus perhaps inevitable. For example, the power was continuously going out while we were there – the city is building new malls but not updating its electric girds accordingly. These two conflicting social and political pressures will certainly have an impact on the future of the revolution both in that state and in the country more generally.

I was drunk all weekend, what’d I miss?
---Importantly, in the regional elections of 23-N, two prominent figures of the ‘internal right’ – Diosdado Cabello and Jesse Chacón – lost election bids for a second term as governor of Miranda state and mayor of Sucre Municipality, respectively. Many of us hoped that this sort of popular rejection would FINALLY wake up Chávez and we could be done with these shits. Unfortunately no. Cabello was named minister of infrastructure (a particularly disconcerting appointment, given his poor performance as governor) and Chacón retaind his previous seat as minister of communications.

---Since the elections, there has been a spate of violence in Aragua state. Bosses have assassinated four radical labor organizers. So far, one person has been detained in relation with the hired homicides, but the killings continue.

---Chávez is on the campaign trail again, pushing for a constitutional amendment that will allow him to run for president again in 2012. I’m reasonably confident he’ll win this, and barring catastrophe, will win the presidency again (most like running against Henrique Capriles Radonski, of the US-funded party Primero Justicia, the ultra right ‘homeland, family and property’ movement, infamous leader of an attack on the Cuban embassy during the 2002 coup and newly elected governor of Miranda)…

Off to Roti-landia
To Trinidad tomorrow morning. I’ll try to post again when I’m back in the states. cheers.

Numbers, Enmity, y una Pausa

2008-11-26T10:28:00.000-08:00

Numbers:
The final numbers for all the races from last Sunday are finally being published. All in all, the news remains mixed. The PSUV, in all the races, won with approximately 53%, or 5,073,774 votes. The opposition took 3,948,912 or 42%. If we compare these numbers to those of the failed recall referendum of last December, the Chavistas were able to mobilize more of the base, while the opposition did significantly worse than they did during the ‘no’ campaign.

The PSUV also dominated the mayoral seats up for grabs, winning 263 (in many key cities) compared to the opposition’s 48. Where the PSUV lost its most significant ground, in Caracas, (including the post of Alcaldía Mayor, mayor of Sucre and governor of Miranda) the blame can only lie with the performance of the previous Chavista Alcalde Mayor Juan Barreto, whose performance was so poor he was basically told by Chávez not to stand for reelection, even though he was eligible.

It looks as if the mobilization of the middle and upper middle classes against the PSUV was decisive last Sunday. Venezuela is thus as polarized as ever. The poor majority backs the Socialist project en masse, while the business classes remain fearful of Socialism on an abstract, ideological level. PSUV candidate of the ‘internal right’ (and loser in the municipality of Sucre) Jesse Chacón lamented this fact yesterday, suggesting that the middle and upper middle classes weren’t sufficiently convinced that “socialism also includes them.”

Enmity:
The elections went off peacefully enough, and the aftermath has been uniformly tranquil in all but a few places throughout the country. Here in Caracas, the opposition victors have been sounding a conciliatory tone, promising to govern ‘for all caraqueñas and caraqueños.’ Symbolically, Antonio Ledezma, the metro mayor elect, is calling for the city to be cleaned of election propaganda, to wipe away the appearance of a divided city. However, some Chavistas are already preparing for the worst. Members of the ‘hot corner collective,’ who meet in Plaza Bolívar (which is also the location of the metro mayor’s offices) held a meeting on Monday in which they reminded themselves and the public of the last time Caracas had an opposition mayor.

Describing the mayor-elect as a ‘coup monger, yankee wannabe, and guarimbero (a proponent of the violent street protests and blockades mobilized by the opposition in 2004),’ the collective expressed the fear that the hard rightwing opposition will feel emboldened and protected by the mayor. This is a pretty common fear among Chavistas, and the next few years promise to be interesting, to say the least.

However, I can’t help but see a silver lining in all this. Throughout the past ten years of Chavismo, every radicalization of the movement has been triggered by the opposition’s missteps and attacks. With the likelihood of an emboldened opposition and the loss in stature of rightwing Chavistas like Chacón – whose above quote suggests he has a rather weak notion of what Socialism entails – the possibility of deepening the Bolivarian Revolution may have increased in the past few days.

The key contradiction to pay attention to, however, is that between the politics of enmity – which on an affective level are quite intense here in Venezuela – and the faith in democracy and the rule of law exhibited by nearly all quarters of national politics. That is to say, the politics of enmity calls for the eradication of the enemy, for the creation of a space devoid of their presence, where as democracy in its western liberal guise (including Venezuela’s radical and more direct democracy) is based on a formal pluralism which puts a premium on tolerance. And we see this daily in Venezuelan politics. The constitution is one of the most common political props in the land, and all PSUV victory or concession speeches have included a phrase along the lines of “we respect the constitution, we are democrats.”

Yet, at the same time, Venezuela is one of the most partisan places in the world (in both the stupid sense of US politics as well as in the notion of militancy and one sidedness that transcends mere party platforms and competitions). Chavistas and opposition alike see their other as a blight on the country and the world. The difference of course is that the opposition’s position is of necessity agonistic in that their notion of enmity requires the maintenance of the poor (who else would clean their toilets?) whereas the Chavistas hold a very real antagonism that goes beyond bourgeois dialectics. Their fight is that absolute and destructive one that desires a world without the bourgeoisie, without this particular generation of domestic opposition, without the class structure that persists in Venezuela despite four years in the pursuit of 21st century socialism.

Y una Pausa:
I’m off to the west of the country for a week or so. I’ll be in Maracaibo (center of the opposition’s strength) and Mérida, in the Andes. I’m not taking my computer, so I’ll also most likely not post until I’m back in Caracas. Cheers.

Not Venezuela Related, but

2008-11-25T11:19:00.000-08:00

...worth posting.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/11/20/sarah-palin-holds-news-co_n_145375.html

The Next Day

2008-11-24T13:18:00.000-08:00

While I slept, the National Electoral Council announced that Carabobo and Táricha went to the opposition. If you’ve read the NYTimes triumphalist take on it, then you already know that this effectively means that the opposition won the major population centers in Venezuela. Overall, the PSUV took roughly 5,300,000 votes while the opposition won about 4,000,000 – which is a few hundred thousand less than they garnered in the 2007 constitutional referendum.

All told, Chavistas now control 17 states, and the opposition 6.

Venezuela Before

Venezuela After (note the ‘media luna’ in the West to which I referred last entry)

So, what does this mean? The major surprise of the day was clearly the lost of Aristobúlo Istúriz, who was seen not only as a ‘candidate for everyone,’ but was a fairly decent Chavista. His loss really needs to be chalked up to the utter failure of Juan Barreto, the current Alcaldía Mayor. Though Barreto is popular in many sectors of Caracas, many others think he took the money that should have been spent on the city’s roads, schools and security and inhaled it nasally through gold plated million dollar bills. The fact that Caracas still ranks among the world’s murder capitals and that its infrastructure remains insufficient for its population meant any Chavista candidate would have a lot of explaining to do in his or her campaign. But no one – not even Antonio Ledezma, the opposition candidate himself – thought the PSUV would lose in Caracas, and certainly not by a 7.5 point margin.

The next few days will of course be filled with reflection and self-criticism on the part of PSUV militants and directors, as they should be. The loss of Caracas is huge, but not the end of the world. Zulia and Carabobo were always going to be difficult. The danger in the latter case is that, knowing Carabobo was going to be a rough fight, the PSUV opted to run Mario Silva, host of Venezuela Television’s ‘La Hojilla’ (The Razorblade). Silva and ‘La Hojilla’ (in which Silva and guests mock, debunk and threaten the opposition) are popular amongst hardline Chavistas, and to say the least, he is a divisive character – loved by militants, loathed by the middle class and the opposition. The hope, I assume, was that Silva the firebrand would be able to mobilize more of the base than he would alienate the ‘ni-ni’ crowd, especially considering the fact that his opponent was a mafioso. That obviously failed, though it is worth noting that the ostensible PSUV vote was split between Silva and outgoing governor Luis Acosta, who was expelled from the party and ran as an independent. With the votes that went to Acosta, Silva would have carried the day.

The failure of this strategy could strengthen the hand of conservative Chavistas, adding punctuation to their calls for moderation and dialogue.

Chavistas will be happy that they were able to mobilize more than a million more voters than they were able to last December (this is still, predictably, less than turned out for Chávez’s reelection in 2006). In Chávez’s words at last night’s press conference, “This was the first trial by fire for the PSUV, and we triumphed.”

This was Venezuela’s 12th election since Chávez took office, and the second moment in which Chávez had to acknowledge gains made by the opposition. Playing the president, he congratulated the victorious opposition candidates, and asked them to do what is right for Venezuela and not “fall back” into their old, anti-democratic and oligarchic ways. Holding up a copy of the constitution, he asked who could still call Venezuela a dictatorship.

Noting the distinctly red hue of the Venezuelan map, he repeated his call for a ‘Revolution within the Revolution’ and a deepening of the democratic process in Venezuela.

The PSUV’s vicepresident, Alberto Müller Rojas, also congratulated opposition victors, but remained militant. When a reporter from Globovisión – a virulently anti-Chávez news network – asked how the government would deal with the overwhelming victory (!) of the opposition, and if it would be willing to dialogue with opposition governors, he had to quiet down the ire PSUVistas in attendance. He then responded, “Of course we’ll work with them. But this is not a dialogue, this is a debate, and it will be a polemic. Venezuela will never go back to the way it was in the 1980s and 1990s. It will be a debate because we have very different visions for Venezuela, we have very different visions for Latin America, for the world, and for humanity.”

However, the opposition most likely won’t show up to the party – their only platform is anti-Chavismo. In the debate between socialism – however defined – and neoliberal capitalism – which is their fundamental goal – they know they will always lose amongst the majority of Venezuelans. They tend to copy Chavista social programs, as I’ve written on before in this blog, and run on ‘quality of life’ issues foreign to the majority of Venezuelans.

The following months are most likely going to present some rather difficult choices for the Bolivarian Revolution. Declining world market prices in oil and the intensifying global economic crisis will negatively impact the government’s ability to fund its social programs without radically altering the fundamental class structures and distribution of wealth in Venezuela. Inflated oil prices throughout the past 10 years have allowed the government to democratize consumption without any sort of corresponding social revolution or transformation. That is to say while rich have retained the overall percentage of income in Venezuela throughout the Bolivarian Revolution’s various phases – they have in no way been expropriated – the poor majority of Venezuelans have seen their share of the national wealth increase in terms of purchasing power and social programs. The days of this political luxury may be nearing their end.

The choice for the government in the face of this situation will be one of who to choose. With less money, they will have to decide in which direction to redistribute wealth.

Opposition governors in control of the key money making sectors of Venezuela – Caracas, Carabobo and Zulia – is a practical obstacle, but perhaps a strategic benefit. In the first case, state level positions are powerful in Venezuela, and can allow the opposition to block government attempts to channel oil money to the poor or to take over factories. At the same time, an obvious enemy is a good thing, especially now that He™ will be replacing Bush in 2 months. Opposition sabotage will only further mobilize and more deeply commit the base of the PSUV. One can only hope that the leadership of the party will be up to the challenge.

See also:

http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news/3983

Exhausted and back in my room after a looooooooong day.

2008-11-24T00:27:00.000-08:00

(First, immediate-reaction post election post)

A recent Latinobarometro poll (a polling firm based in Chile) has once again found that Venezuelans, on average, have more faith in democracy than any other national group questioned (link, with more links en español aquí http://www.borev.net/2008/11/again_with_the_venezuelans_and.html)..and today was certainly no exception in the now twelve (12!!!) elections that have taken place in "the Chávez era..."

Cutting to the Chase Department: The local and regional elections resulted in an at best mixed result for the PSUV. At the gubernatorial level (the only numbers I have at the moment) the PSUV took 17 of 23 seats. Two governorships are, as of 3:00 am Caracas time, too close to call. The problem is that the Chavistas lost Miranda state – part of which includes sectors of Caracas – and failed to gain Zulia – center of petroleum production in the country. Even worse, the states that hang in the balance are Tachira and Carabobo. Tachira shares a border with Zulia and Colombia in the west of the country. Carabobo is a chief center of Venezuelan industry: tires, petrochemicals, paper, and more. If the opposition gains the former, the possibility of a ‘media luna’ situation a la Bolivia’s separatist movement is quite real. If they take Carabobo, they then have an opportunity to grab the purse strings of the revolution.

Caracas Department: Also announced this evening were the results of the two city level positions in the capital that Chavistas hoped to retain: Libertador (one of the city’s largest municipalities) and the ‘Alcaldía Mayor’ (Caracas has 6 mayors, 5 for the municipalities that make up the city, and one ‘city mayor’ – both were previously in Chavista hands). The PSUV candidate for the Libertador race, Jorge Rodriguez, won. The problem is that he is rather solidly a face of the ‘internal right’ of Chavismo, i.e., his revolutionary credentials and his vision of where the country needs to go are decidedly wanting. The PSUV candidate for Alcaldía Mayor, Aristobúlo Istúriz, lost. This was a major blow. Not only has he been saying all the right things throughout the campaign – about the necessity of ‘deepening’ the revolution, a key phrase for radical Chavistas – he was seen by many as a possible successor to Chávez should the fight for his reelection fail to bear fruit. A possible silver lining to this major, major loss is that Diosdado Cabello, current governor of Miranda state and perhaps THE person who best defines the ‘endogenous right’ lost, meaning his political aspirations have suffered a significant setback.

Turnout Department: I spent the entire day on the pavement, doing my own work and sending field reports to the good folks at http://radiovenezuelaenvivo.blogspot.com -- and for future events, if you dare, these are the folks to listen to on the interweb about all things venezuelan), walking across the city center and back and then halfway back again. Of the voting centers visited, lines were consistently various magnitudes of huge. Opposition and middle-of-the-road media all warned of a major ‘tropical depression’ that was soon to add to the city and country’s woes. This was a potentially dangerous thing, as the PSUV’s greatest foe in these elections was always going to be abstention (which is what caused the failed reforma last December). But the inundation didn’t show. Despite the heat and the often direct sunlight, folks in their lines seemed calm – annoyed at the wait, for sure, but not stone-throwing annoyed.

I went to vote with a friend of mine. We stood in line for over 2 hours. However, when her time finally came, she was in and out in 5 minutes. The wait gave us plenty of time to compare US and Venezuelan electoral systems, during which time I tried my best to explain to her the Electoral College. I quickly realized how difficult that particular institution is to explain in English, let alone Spanish.

All told, 65.45% of eligible voters turned out. A record.

End of the Day Department: After walking the city, I somehow magically ended up in the PSUV press headquarters. And I ended up there for six (6) hours. It was good to have a finger directly on the pulse of the situation, if a bit boring during the intervals between statements from Alberto Müller Rojas, the PSUV’s octogenarian (and fully kick-ass) vice president. I smoked too many cigarettes, talked to too many members of the opposition media (they still suck), and my dogs is tired!

The High and the Low Department: Of course, the Low/FUCK THE PO-LICE first. Rather early in the day, while I was checking out polling places in a relatively middle-class part of town, I got stopped for a ‘routine drugs and alcohol search’ by two members of the Caracas police. The ‘dry laws’ (written about in a previous post) have been enforced a helluva lot more than I ever could have imagined, knowing Caracas. OF COURSE you can find something somewhere if you look, but I haven’t encountered the same quantity of dudes drinking beer in their cars or walking down the street to which I’ve become accustomed.

Anyway, while one cop was checking my water bottle, his partner nicked BsF. 100 (I dunno...~$US 20) out of my ‘emergency pocket’ – always a good idea to keep money in a few places on your person whilst traveling, right? Just to be clear, let me repeat that: I got robbed by the police. I’m that effing gringo. The great thing is that every Venezuelan to whom I told my tale of woe responded almost 100% in the same manner: “Those motherfuckers. Fuck them. Assholes. Of course, that happens a lot.”

High point: whilst at the PSUV press conference, just after the national electoral council announced the results, the place started swarming with GI JOEs. I thought something was amiss. When I asked a friend, he responded rather matter-of-factly, “Chávez is probably coming.”

And everyone else had the same intuition. A gauntlet quickly formed, with inner-circle folks forming a human chain to keep up the barriers on either side. We moved to the aisle that was formed, and sure enough, 15 minutes later, doors opened and out came Chávez, surrounded by security and scrambling reporters. (I have photos, but left the connecting cable for camera-computer in California…I’ll post a pile when I get back in touch with it…) long story short:

Me: “Epale hermano presidente”

Chávez: (grasping my outstretched hand) “Epale, hermano”

Yup.

The president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, one Mister Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías shook the hand of the dirtiest gringo in the room. I tried to get a comment from the President, to gauge how he was affected by the situation, but he was too awestruck by the honor bestowed upon him to express himself properly.

And in other news, here’s the state-by-state breakdown as we have it now:
65% turnout
Yaracuy chavismo
Delta Amacuro chavismo
Vargas chavismo
Zulia opposition
Apure chavismo
Aragua chavismo
Barinas chavismo
Bolivar chavismo
Cojedes chavismo
Falcon chavismo
Guarico chavismo
Lara chavismo
Merida chavismo
Miranda opposition
Monagas chavismo
Nueva Esparta opposition
Portuguesa chavismo
Trujillo chavismo
Sucre chavismo
Anzotegui chavismo
Libertador chavismo
Alcaldia Mayor opposition
Carabobo and Tachira too close to declare winner

see also:
"Chávez Supporters Win 17 out of 23 Venezuelan States, but Lose 3 Most Populous"
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news/3979

Of Refugee centers and Alí Primera on Election's Eve

2008-11-23T05:59:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, as I was wandering around talking to Caraqeños about the elections and the rain (most were just as worried about the latter as they were about the former) I received a message from a friend inviting me to “an event” at a center for those displaced by the rains. Twenty minutes later, I was piled in the back of a pickup truck flying down the Francisco Fajardo Freeway talking with Communist Party militants about elections, Alí Primera, and – strangely enough – Pearl Jam.

What turned out to be the first center we would visit was a factory that had been occupied by the community and transformed into a community center in the Antimano district. There were medical staff, a non-perishable and hot food distribution center, many many beds and a table where refugees could have replacements made of their identification cards. (Absolutely NOTHING gets done here without ID (Cédula) – I tried to but a falafel the other day and they asked me for mine. When I told them I was a foreigner and didn’t have one, the clerk was a bit put off but settled for my passport!)

There were kids everywhere, faces freshly painted by some roaming clown, playing soccer with any bit of detritus that could be kicked, screaming through the din of adult conversations and organizational meetings. Really, kids the stuff of poetry, bouncing red balloons through groups of tired faced adults and laughing laughing laughing. Playing through the puddles of a converted factory floor.

It was only after 15 minutes after arriving or so that I gathered the event that was taking place was to be put on by the group on to which I had attached myself. Embarrassingly, it was ½ hour after that that realized that the event was in large part centered around a performance by Sandino Primera. Embarrassing, because I was talking, playing soccer, and laughing with him for a bit without realizing who he is and why everyone wanted to say hello to him.

His father, Alí, was a folk singer (“The People’s Singer,” in fact) who died in a car accident in 1985. A Communist Party militant known for playing in factories, barrios, schools and streets – in addition to festivals like the Central American Peace Concerts held in Managua in 1983 (during which time he unapologetically defended the Sandinistas against the United States) – this refugee center would have been precisely the place where Alí would have appeared. When his son, Sandino played classics by his father like ‘Disparos’ everyone not only sang along, they rocked the house in a manner you might not expect to see in a refugee center. When he played ‘Techos de Cartón’ (lyrics below), a particularly pertinent song in the given situation, I almost cried. (Anyone who has seen the Mexican film 'Voces Inocentes' about the civil war in El Salvador is familiar both with the song and the sentiment).

Next we were off to another refugee center, this one in Catia. It was a similar situation, as far as services are concerned. However, this center was rather different. Built precisely for this sort of situation, this structure had family dormitories (men and women were separated at the previous site) a cafeteria and sporting fields. In all between the two centers, we encountered hundreds of families displaced by the deadly rains of 2008.

Techos de Cartón (Alí Primera)

Que triste se oye la lluvia
En los techos de carton
Que triste vive mi gente
En las casas de carton

Viene bajando el obrero
Casi arrastrando sus pasos
Por el peso del sufrir
Mira que mucho ha sufri..
Mira que pesa el sufrir

Arriba deja la mujer preñada
Abajo esta la ciudad
Y se pierde en su maraña
Hoy es lo mismo que ayer
Asunto sin mañana

Que triste se oye la lluvia
En los techos de carton
Que triste vive mi gente
En las casas de carton

Niños color de mi tierra
Con sus mismas cicatricez
Millonarios de lombrices
Y por eso
Que tristes viven los niños
En las casas de carton
Que alegres viven los perros
Casa del explotador
Usted no lo va a creer
Pero hay escuelas de perros
Y les dan educacion
Pa’ que no muerdan los diarios
Pero el patron!
Hace años muchos años
Que esta mordiendo al obrero

Que triste se oye la lluvia
En los techos de carton
Que lejos pasa la esperanza
En las casas de carton

... and the english translation:

How sad does the rain sound
On the roofs made of cardboard
How sad it is, the way my people live
In houses made of cardboard

Here comes the worker
Practically dragging each step
Carrying the weight of suffering
Look how much he’s suffered
Look at the weight of such suffering

He leaves his woman pregnant
Down there is the city
And he loses himself in his maze
Today is the same as yesterday
A situation without a tomorrow

How sad does the rain sound
On the roofs made of cardboard
How sad it is, the way my people live
In houses made of cardboard

Children the same color of my country’s earth
With their same scars
Millions of worms
And because of that
How sad it is, the way the children live
In houses made of cardboard
How happy do dogs live in the
House of the employer
You won’t believe it
But there are schools for dogs
Where they receive education
So they won’t bite the newspapers
But the employer!
For years, many years
Has been biting the worker

How sad does the rain sound
On the roofs made of cardboard
How far away, does hope pass by
In the houses made of cardboard

During Elections, Caracas is Soaked, Caracas is Dry

2008-11-21T14:57:00.000-08:00

Many of my plans for this research jaunt have been complicated by two serious factors: I’ve basically been sick since I landed: first with the flu, then with a mild case of food poisoning. Secondly, and more disconcerting, it has been raining almost without pause.

Today, I had plans to attend an event at the central university, but it was cancelled because yesterday the rains were so intense that at least 5 people died in Caracas proper, and over 150 were displaced in one zone of the city alone due to landslides, the collapse of containing walls, and floods. The paper reports today that the subsoil is 90% full to the brim and the drainage systems are over capacity.

People are starting to compare these pre-election rains to the monsoons that came before the 1999 constitutional referendum, which left thousands dead and still missing when entire mountainsides decided to relocate. (At the time, the archbishop of Caracas said that god was punishing the citizens of Venezuela for voting for Chávez’s constitutional reform. Similarly, officials of the church blamed Venezuela’s Declaration of Independence from Spain for the 1812 earthquake that leveled Caracas…)

Also today, the campaign season officially ended at 6 am. It is now constitutionally prohibited for candidates or parties to hold rallies, speeches, etc in their pursuit of public office.

And at 2:00, the lamest weekend in the world officially kicked off as liquor stores closed their doors. Walking through central Caracas, I saw oh-so-many blokes wandering around with cases of beer on their shoulders and bottles of Something Special™ tucked into their back pockets…pobrecitos. At the Mercado on the corner nearest my apartment, the owners had taped cardboard over the beer cooler with “No se vende licores. Ley Seca.” We’ll see, however, how long this lasts. The thing about ‘black’ or ‘parallel’ markets (and in Venezuelan, the informal economy is larger than the official one) is that they tend not to follow the rules. The ‘dry laws’ might effectively mean that beers on the street will run at concert prices…

Either way, elections aside, this’ll be the first time in the history of the world where everyone will be counting the seconds until Monday.

(translation) Manuel Rosales’ Business Networks Exposed

2008-11-20T12:24:00.000-08:00

Deputy Mario Isea, who resides over the National Assembly’s Oversight committee, held a press conference on Wednesday [18 November] in which he presented documents, photographs and registrations of the businesses and properties of Manuel Rosales and his foreign business partners. Rosales will have to give explanations about this network of properties when he appears before the Oversight committee on the 28th of November.

Presa Web YVKE, Wednesday 19 November, 2008 – Isea presented the business registrations of the present governor of Zulia, Manuel Rosales, as well as those of his family, his secretary Maritza Bastidas and his friends in Orlando, Florida (USA). Several businesses are known to make up the network, and the investigative committee does not yet know if all pertinent information has come to light. Apart from the RT International Group and the Agricultural company ‘La Milagrosa’ – both of which Deputy Mario Isea already addressed in a press conference last Friday – figure others with strange names such as MR & M, New World International Reality Inc., New World Investments Reality Inc., etc.

Set up of the Rosales’ businesses was always the same: first the company would be put under the name of Maritza Bastidas of a third party, and then the directorate and headquarters of the company would be changed, generally to an office property owned by Rosales. The names which appear most often [in the documents] are Rosales, Tata, Bastidas, and others tied to the Governor of Zulia.

Isea presented photographs of the mansions and real estate purchased by Bastidas and Rosales, and explained that the two airplanes in which Rosales habitually flies are owned by Tobías Carrero, who is also a part of this network.

“This man is not a politician, he’s a scoundrel,” concluded Deputy Isea. “This is an international crime ring. I am making a call to all the opposition: don’t put your political future in the hands of this sort of man.”

Isea also affirmed that “the automatic solidarity of countries [opposed to the Bolivarian Revolution] with Rosales compromise themselves. All who express an automatic solidarity with Rosales without investigating any of this make themselves suspect.”

Dry Laws, Public Order and Military Protection in Advance of Local and Regional Elections

2008-11-19T13:34:00.000-08:00

Caracas, 19 November, 2008—In a press conference yesterday, Interior and Justice Minister Tarek el Aissami announced that all police will be on stand-by in their precincts from Saturday the 22nd and that the sale of alcohol will be prohibited from 2 pm on Friday the 21st until 2 pm on Monday the 24th of November in preparation for local and regional elections on Sunday.

Aissami noted that in Venezuela there are 121,506 police functionaries organized in 123 bodies. This call to the barracks will not impact services, Aissami assured, but will make the police better prepared to respond to crises that might emerge around the elections for mayors, governors and city council members on the 23rd of this month.

Aissami also announced that police will be allowed to vote, and vote in uniform, but will not be able to do so while armed.

The measures announced yesterday by Aissami are in line with the ‘Plan Republica,’ which coordinates the actions of municipal police and the military to maintain peace on election day. Recent turmoil in the aftermath of elections in Bolivia and Nicaragua as well as the violent history of the domestic opposition here in Venezuela has been the cause of much concern amongst government supporters throughout the course of the campaign.

In other public order related election news, Minister of Defense, General Gustavo Rangel Briceño reiterated that the military has not been politicized and that “there has been no campaign in the barracks.” Briceño continued, “the functions of the National Armed Force (FAN, for its initials in Spanish) are restricted to three specific areas. First is the security and care of electoral spaces, persons, authorities and materials; the second is the transport of ballots to the places where they will be analyzed; and certainly, public order is the most important job.”

Briceño also noted that the FAN has begun the process of transforming schools throughout Venezuela into voting sites. “On Wednesday we will begin taking over schools in order to set up the antennas that will broadcast the results; we hope to begin the installation of voting booths on Friday; Saturday will be dedicated to final revisions and inspections and on Sunday from 5 am on we will be waiting for the poll workers to open the vote.”

See also:
“Venezuela Ready for first Completely Automated Election.” http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news/3959

“Plan República will Guarantee Security and Order during the Elections”
http://gringo-venezolano.blogspot.com/2008/11/translation-plan-repblica-will.html

(This post includes translations from two stories in today's Últimas Noticias: "Cero caña y armas desde el viernes 21 a las 2pm" by Eligio Rojas; and "'El Ejército no hace campaña en los cuarteles'" by Lexander Loaiza)

(translation) ‘Plan República” Will Guarantee Security and Order during the Elections

2008-11-19T13:33:00.001-08:00

Major General Jesús González González informed the program “The Window” on Friday that all the details have been tied together in order to guarantee order and the respect of the law during elections on the 23 of November. More than 140,000 security personal will be under the orders of the Bolivarian National Armed Force (FANB, in Spanish) in order to respond to any eventuality.

Prensa Web YVKE, Friday 14 November, 2008 – On the program “La Ventana” on YVKE Mundial Randolph Borges and Enza Garía had Major General Jesús González González on as a guest, who spoke about the Plan República, in which the FANB will be stationed at all election sites to guarantee security and order during and after the elections.

“Whoever would like to promote disorder is going to meet the firm conviction of the FANB,” assured Major General González González. “We have 140,000 officers committed to security, and in each jurisdiction we have a reserve of officers ready in their barracks.”

Major General González González explained that “all security bodies on that day will stay in the barracks awaiting orders.” This includes not only the police, but also the investigative police corps, firefighters, intelligence officers, civil protection and other security bodies, that are grouped under the name “unified command.”

“The idea has been circulating that the police are going to stay at home, and that isn’t true. The police are going to stay from the first hour [of voting] in the barracks under order of their commanding officer. It will be him that will have control over security in the jurisdiction on election day.”

González González also said that on Thursday [14 November] there was a meeting at Strategic Operational Command with 27 barracks chiefs and the 5 commanders of strategic regional integral defense. “We made final revisions to the plan which we have been working on since August for the elections of 23 November and we tied together all that we had to for the upcoming electoral process.”

Letter from Caracas: Remembering Danilo Anderson

2008-11-18T18:34:00.000-08:00

The memories of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution at the close of election season

Caracas, 18 November, 2008 – Walter Benjamin famously reversed Marxism’s traditionally forward looking temporal politics (“let the dead bury the dead”) when he wrote, in the 12th of his Theses on the Philosophy of History:

In the course of three decades [social democracy] succeeded in almost completely erasing the name of Blanqui, whose distant thunder [Erzklang] had made the preceding century tremble. It contented itself with assigning the working-class the role of the savior of future generations. It thereby severed the sinews of its greatest power. Through this schooling the class forgot its hate as much as its spirit of sacrifice. For both nourish themselves on the picture of enslaved forebears, not on the ideal of the emancipated heirs.

Benjamin reminds us of the importance of our revolutionary heritage in the formation of our present struggles. We are driven by ghosts – who we know – towards the future, which we cannot. Class hatred, love of a possible humanity; these are fed on the memories of what we have crossed to get here, not by the prospect of future obstacles or battles.

Benjamin’s intervention resonates today in Venezuela, as the Bolivarian Revolution readies itself for its first electoral test since the failed constitutional reform of December, 2007. Worse than the loss in terms of legislation which would have fortified and encouraged the transition away from capitalism, the failure of the reforma came about because the Chavistas were unable to mobilize for the yes vote. Memories of this self-imposed defeat have been weighing heavily on the minds of militants and speeches of candidates as the regional and local elections to be held on 23 November approach.

In a rally held today at Caracas’ Poliedro stadium, though, another memory was promient, as militants of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV for its initials in Spanish) took a moment to remember a fallen comrade of the Bolivarian Revolution. Today marks the forth anniversary of the death of Danilo Anderson, one of Venezuela’s leading judicial prosecutors, who was assassinated in what remains a point of intense point of contention in Venezuelan politics. In fitting fashion, at today’s rally the PSUV’s candidates in Caracas, President Hugo Chávez requested the assembled party members and militants to rise, and after a few words of remembrance, to raise the roof for a minute of celebration in honor of Anderson.

Anderson, initially an environmental prosecutor, was killed when two charges of plastic explosives exploded his SUV while on his way home from postgraduate studies in the Chaguaramos sector of Caracas (www.counterpunch.com was one of the few western media sources to cover the incident at the time. You can read Toni Solo’s original article at: http://www.counterpunch.org/solo11272004.html ). At the time, Anderson was the chief prosecutor in cases against key opposition figures of the 2002 coup and the failed recall referendum of August, 2004. Among the defendants were:

- 8 metro police accused of murder in the Puente Llaguno massacre (the direct trigger for the April coup);
- Private television stations that both fomented and colluded in the April coup;
- Opposition mayor of Baruta (a posh and very anti-Chavista sector of Caracas) Henrique Capriles, who led an attack on the Cuban embassy during the coup;
- Signatories of the infamous ‘Carmona decrees’ – named for the president of the national chamber of commerce who was installed as president after Chávez’s kidnapping on April 11 – which not only rolled back Chávez’s economic reforms but also rescinded all civil liberties;
- The NGO Súmate, the body funded by the (US based) National Endowment for Democracy, which spear-headed the 2004 presidential recall referendum.

In other words, Danilo had enemies that spanned the entirety of the Venezuelan opposition and on to the heart of US hemispheric designs. With his death, official investigations into the 2002 coup all but came to a standstill. More importantly, the Bolivarian Revolution lost one of its most dedicated, courageous and brightest minds.

The subsequent investigation into the murder of Danilo Anderson continues to be a major controversy in Venezuela. While the physical authors of the crime were eventually prosecuted and sentenced, Chavistas maintain that the true masterminds remain at large.

“Danilo Vive! La Lucha Sigue!” (Daniel Lives! The Struggle Continues!) echoed beyond the honorary minute today, and Anderson’s memory punctuated the rest of the afternoon’s speech by Chávez as a stark reminder of the enemies facing the Bolivarian Revolution. Just as importantly, Anderson as martyr and as symbol of a continuing struggle reminds us of the intensely democratic and deeply legal nature of the Bolivarian Revolution. Rather than rounding up the leaders of the 2002 coup and incarcerating them without trial in some Guantánamo-esque scheme, the government initiated investigations and followed constitutional procedure – even when that entailed the acquittal of officers involved directly in the temporary overthrow of Chávez.

To say that the struggle continues while invoking the spirit of Danilo Anderson thus entails an announcement of the Revolution’s continued fidelity to legality, to legislative means of social transformation, and – within these boundaries – to an untiring antagonism towards the opposition and their desire to block Venezuela’s current attempts to build a socialism for the 21st century. And in this context it is worth rehearsing the long and violent path the Venezuelan opposition chose before considering electoral competition as a means to end the Chávez presidency. The attempted coup of April 2002. The lock-out carried out by anti-Chavista state oil industry executives from December 2002 to January 2003. The infamous plan guarimba in which major thoroughfares of the Capital were blocked and police and Chavistas were attacked by roving opposition thug units. Continued collusion with the US government in the so-called ‘student movement’ of 2007 and in the major oppositions parties…

Also circulating throughout Caracas these weeks has been the specter of post-election violence in sister countries Bolivia and Nicaragua. In both cases, US-backed opposition movements launched violent protests against the government when the vote failed to go their way resulting in injuries, deaths, and damages.

The fear of this sort of thing happening in Venezuela again was piqued over this past weekend. Opposition candidate for governor of the state of Carabobo Alada Makled was arrested when police discovered hundreds of pounds of cocaine, airplanes and a clandestine airstrip in his ranch. On Saturday, an arms cache capable of arming a small army was discovered in a house in the upscale Baruta district of Caracas. Opposition leader (if one can really speak of the ever-fractious Venezuelan opposition having a ‘leader’) Manuel Rosales continues to refuse to respond to congressional subpoenas concerning his misallocation of funds in his current role as the governor of Zulia – one of the country’s richest states. In short, despite the continued deepening of Chavista hegemony, the opposition remains a threat that echoes less and less hollow on today’s grim anniversary.

In the midst of this abundance of memories, the revolution presses on. At today’s rally, Chávez argued that the real work of the revolution will begin after the victory at this Sunday’s polls. “After this electoral stage, we need a revolution within the revolution,” and he emphasized the need for revolutionaries to stamp out the corruption, bureaucratism and careerism that has persisted within the revolution. While the opposition remains something of a destabilizing force in the country, they enjoy absolutely no legitimacy amongst the vast majority of Venezuelans. Their constituency is static, as has been evidenced in every election, and they have failed to present any coherent vision for Venezuela in the course of their fractious and lackluster campaigns.

The real work of the Bolivarian Revolution, in other words, is that of constructing socialism for the 21st century, and socialism, it is worth underlining, does not grow out of the ballot box alone. The ‘deepening’ of the revolution called for by radical sectors of Chavismo and echoed by Chávez today can only take place with the further development of parallel institutions such as the communal councils, the centers for endogenous development, and the Bolivarian misiones. That is, 21st century socialism – if socialism is to mean anything in the 21st century – must come from the base, not from the experts and bureaucrats of the state apparatus. This effectively means, that the ‘red machine’ assembled today and mobilizing this election season has to find a way to keep up their momentum past Sunday’s elections and transfer their offensive against the conservative and statist sectors within Chavismo.

Sufficient revolutionary momentum, in this regard, cannot simply come from the vague hope for economic and political models in the distant future down the road. As Benjamin advised us decades ago, revolutionary energy hungers for stronger sustenance. In Venezuela, today’s dark anniversary reminds the Bolivarians of the exact nature of their enemies. It will be memories of fallen comrades like Danilo Anderson and that of the generations subjected to the slow systemic genocide of capitalism that will allow them to overcome their more intractable, intra-Bolivarian foes.

(translation) US polling firm predicts PSUV to win 21 governorships.

2008-11-16T10:50:00.000-08:00

This strikes me as a bit optimistic. If you watch the full video (follow the link, en español), the firm predicts that Rosales will lose his bid for mayor of Maracaibo, and that the PSUV will pick up seats in some of the poshest sectors of Caracas. If anyone reading this (is anyone reading this?) has their hands on other pre-election polling data, I'd love to see it.

the article:

(ABN/VTV/Aporrea.org – 15 November 2008)
http://aporrea.org/actualidad/n124108.html -- with video at the link!

Caracas, 15 November, ABN – The general director of the polling firm North American Opinion Research, Carlos Sánchez, assured this Saturday that the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) will be victorious in 21 governorships, while the opposition will only win two.

Concerning candidates for mayor, Sánchez said that 329 (that is, 67% of those running in the regional elections) will go to Bolivarian candidates of the PSUV, while 110 will be won by opposition parties.

The polling firm North American Opinion Research has participated in various opinion polls in Argentina, Brasil, Colombia, Bolivia, Chile, Perú, Paraguay, Uruaguay y Venezuela, among other countries.

Al carajo! Yanqui de mierda!

2008-11-16T10:28:00.001-08:00

Last night I went to a concert in the east of the city which culminated a series of nation-wide events sponsored by the youth wing of the PSUV (J-PSUV) meant to mobilize the vote. The PSUV campaign to this point seems to be taking on Obama-esque proportions, with a strong youth mobilization, interactive web presence, and the use of robo-text messaging to not only get people out to the polls, but to defend them from opposition sabotage. With the recent Nicaraguan elections fresh in the memory, where charges of vote fraud and US interference resulted in days of social unrest, the Chavista bloc is preparing itself for the worst while hoping for the best.

Anecdotally, this plays out like last night. At a friend’s house before the show, we sat and talked about the vote, about Manuel Rosales’ campaign for mayor of Maracaibo (the slogan isn’t ‘vote for me for mayor’ but rather ‘Manuel Rosales: the leader of Zulia’). Then we watched live news coverage of a police raid on an arms cache in Baruta, an upscale and rather anti-Chavista zone of Caracas. The rifles, side arms and ammunition were discovered in a house under dual ownership, and one of the owners was supposed to be in the United States at the time of the raid. As I wrote on Friday, an opposition candidate was arrested for alleged drug trafficking (and that story deepens as well: Makled, the man detained, owns the Makled Group, a pharmaceutical and chemical company that has long been accused of basing its income on making materials necessary to process coke). In other words, things are heating up.

But then there was the concert, which was a return to the festive side of the Bolivarian Revolution. Three bands played: The Whalers (of the Marley family line fame), Molotov (from Mexico), and Ska-P (from Spain). The weather behaved, the beer was sold at inflated prices, and the crowd was wonderful and full of life even as my crew and I snuck out around 2:30 in the morning.

A common theme throughout the evening was something on the order of ‘fuck imperialism,’ and my Venezuelan friends had ample opportunity to point at me and laugh, token gringo that I was and am. Ska-P, whose arrival in Caracas was widely anticipated and who as a band have been outspoken supporters of the Bolivarian Revolution, had one particular performance in which a band member dressed as Uncle Sam on stilts, wielding a giant scythe and threatening the crowd.

All of this awareness, this intense anti-imperialism, and the condemnation of Yankees, and I have never been maltreated in Venezuela (with the exception of a bureaucrat where I worked last year, and that had more to do with her petty tyrannical nature than with my place of origin). That is to say, there has always been, in my experience, a line dividing the US foreign policy machine and individual citizens. I’m not always sure this is a good thing. On the one hand, making links among people without the abstractions of states and ruling classes is a good thing, to be encouraged and fostered. On the other, it aids and perhaps even deepens the ‘not my president’ logic of detached and sarcastic inaction that has festered in the US until this most recent election cycle.

In a parallel between the United States and Venezuela, youth and traditionally underrepresented demographics played key roles in the rejection of a broken system. In the US, youth and people of color mobilized as never seen before to elect Barack Obama (…he only he were the socialist-terrorist-black power radical the Republicans made him out to be!!!). In Venezuela, it has been radical youth and the country’s historically marginalized poor majority that has pressed the Bolivarian Revolution forward. In both cases as well, it is precisely these mobilized blocs that hold the future. When Barack Obama inevitably makes the rightward shift that is de rigueur in US politics, the question will be whether or not the millions who mobilized for ‘change’ will be able maintain their momentum in spite of the dear leader. In Venezuela’s case, it is precisely these blocs who have the power to reverse the gains made by the endogenous right in the past year, and to deepen the revolution.

(translation) Opposition Mayoral Candidate for Valencia Detained on Drug Trafficking Charges

2008-11-14T12:30:00.001-08:00

Prensa Web YVKE (Patricia Rivas)
Viernes, 14 de Nov de 2008. 2:59 pm

Abdala Makled, candidate for mayor of Valencia (Carabobo State), was arrested today for alleged narcotrafficking. The businessman was arrested in a hacienda he owned, where aircraft and a clandestine airstrip were also discovered, which is suspected to have been the origin of nearly 400 kilos of cocaine intercepted by authorities this morning at El Rosario, a property belonging to the candidate’s brother Walid Makled, who was also arrested.
More:
Minister of Popular Power for Interior Relations and Justice, Tarek El Aissami, confirmed on Friday in an interview with the VTV program ‘La Noticia,’ that there had been a raid on the Haciend El Rosaria, in the municipality of Libertador, where Abdala Makled, mayoral candidate in Valencia and a strong collaborator of governor Acosta Carlez, was arrested. Makled’s brother, Betsi, was also detained, as were three functionaries of the Carabobo Regional Police found guarding the hacienda.

The operation against this narcotrafficking nework that today captured 392 kilos of what is assumed to be cocaine, has so far resulted in 13 detentions. The minister did not rule out that the raid could result in new arrest orders considering the discovery of a clandestine airstrip, planes, fuel and signal lights, which the alleged narcotraffickers appeared to be readying to use to transport the drugs.

(translation) Congressional Finance Commission Summons Manuel Rosales

2008-11-14T11:42:00.000-08:00

***a few interesting things here: first of all, Manuel Rosales, leader of the opposition party ‘Un Nuevo Tiempo’ and opposition candidate for president in 2006, has long been accused by the government of having ties to kidnapping rings, drug producers and distributors and right-wing Colombian paramilitary organizations – not that this is an exhaustive nor mutually exclusive list. Zulia is Venezuela’s westernmost state, and it shares a long, rather porous border with Colombia. Colombia is along with Peru the chief ally of the United States in the region, and its peasant-insurgent-trade unionist-killing president Álvaro Uribe and Chávez have at times been rather intense enemies. In 2004 and 2007 the Venezuelan military has discovered and detained members of Colombian paramilitary groups around Caracas – who in one case were located on the property of outspoken anti-Chavista Robert Alonso (brother of actress María Conchita Alonso, who is also a virulent US-based anti-Chavista). Given that Colombian foreign policy vis-à-vis Venezuela is by and large written by the US state department, and given Rosales’ frequent trips to Washington D.C., he has perhaps become a legitimate target of government suspicion.
So, he’s under investigation by the National Assembly. Will he show up? Nope, no he didn’t (http://www.minuto59.com/politica/manuel-rosales-no-responde-a-la-citacion-a-la-asamblea-nacional/ ). As a result, the president of the commission has announced Rosales will be summoned a second time, but after the elections to be held November 23 (!!! Obviously, this is an iron-fisted dictatorship that brooks no insubordination!!!).

The other thing…Rosales is currently the governor of Zulia. Not bad. You done good, son. Then he got smashed in the 2006 presidential election (drawing just under 37% of the vote to Chávez’s nearly 63%). Too bad, so sorry. So now what? Running for mayor of the city you ran BEFORE becoming governor (from 1996-2000)? In most circles, that'd be a bit of a disappointment. In Venezuela, however, it points to the tenaciousness (ineffective as it may be) of the opposition – on which I will write in a few moments.

The article:

[Staff. Úlitmas Noticias 14 November 2008, pg. 17]

Caracas—The president of the National Assembly’s finance commission, Julio Moreno, issued a summons yesterday for the testimony of Zulia’s governor Manuel Rosales.

The summons obliges the participation of Rosales regarding: alleged corruption in the Zulia lottery and in the drawing of contracts for the lottery; the allegation made by a deputy concerning the donation and then sale of a car to a regional police functionary with ties to the governor.

Moreno indicated that he hoped that [Rosales], who is currently also a candidate for mayor of Maracaibo [capital of Zulia state] will assist the commission and give pertinent explanations, and did not rule out the possibility of Rosales’ testimony being made public.

[Moreno] said the commission had followed all the requirements for notifying Rosales of the subpoena. “The commission obeyed with what was established in the Law of Testimony, 72 hours he was sent a request via fax, and carried out the logistical support of a security corps to notify the governor of the proceedings.”

[Moreno] noted that to this point there has been no confirmation of attendance from the governor, but that the date of the hearing will be on the morning of 14 November.

A few musings on Coffee and Endogenous Development…

2008-11-14T10:35:00.001-08:00

Last I was here, there were periodic shortages of basic foodstuffs: cooking oil, black beans, beef, milk – items considered integral to the Venezuelan diet. The reasons for these shortages were more often than not a convergence of two factors. First, the government had essentially followed policies increasing the purchasing power of the majority of Venezuelans. As a result, folks were buying more of the ‘cesta básica’ than before: supply didn’t rise apace with increased demand.

The opposition, of course, tried to blame this on government mismanagement, corruption, and the inherent evils associated with centralized or planned economies. They argued that the government simply could not provide for the citizenry better than the ‘invisible hand’ of the market.

Secondly, there was an active campaign on the part of importers and producer cartels to ‘prove’ this criticism of the opposition by holding back their distribution of basic items (so much for the invisible hand!). This is why, of course, one could find ostensibly ‘scarce’ items in restaurants and cafés. The government responded to this tactic with denunciations and attempts to procure the items through alternative means – their effective position being the second strategy disproved the opposition’s criticisms and put in stark relief the need NOT to ‘trust’ the market to provide.

This time around, the absentee necessity is coffee. I have been to three markets in the past 2 days, no coffee to be found. Well…that is an exaggeration. There was coffee, but it was decafinated and/or instant. (And any seasoned gringo wanderer knows these are NOT viable alternatives. More importantly, these items are much more expensive than regular, good old fashioned coffee for Venezuelans). Yet, my local café has plenty to be consumed in the ubiquitous little plastic Dixie cups of the average Venezuelan coffee connoisseur – but again this is option is more expensive than making your wakey-uppy at home.

The numbers I was able to dig up show that coffee production (in terms of export production) for the period 2001-2005 spiked in 2002-3, and has since declined by nearly US$ 13 million. According to the US state department in their 2008 backgrounder on Venezuela, agricultural production only makes up 4% of GDP (the petroleum industry, in contrast, makes up 28%). The irony, perhaps, is that prior to the discovery and industrialization of oil after 1914, Venezuela was a largely agricultural economy, exporting cacao and coffee to Europe and the United States. In fiscal year 1897-1898, coffee made up 83% of Venezuela’s exports. This figure declined by 1908-1909 to 48.4% due to a general decline in prices felt throughout the region. This decline in coffee’s dominance in the Venezuelan economy intensified with the country’s increased dependence on oil. As oil came to dominate, so too did the ‘Dutch Disease’ (the tendency of governments in petrol-exporting countries to neglect all but completely all other sectors of the economy, resulting in the dominance of the import economy in the provision of basic products, foodstuffs and etc). As a result, Venezuela regularly imports on average 2/3 of its food (more on bad weeks).

This has of course been a concern of the government, who has tried to balance the needs of increasing the quality of life for the majority of Venezuelans (through what I describe as a democratization of consumption) while pursuing food sovereignty. The project, described here in slogans and banners as ‘endogenous development’ comes in fits and starts, as the government has privileged to this point communal and social entrepreneurship – an uncertain proposition without a real map or model to follow. As recently as two days ago, Chávez acknowledged that a reduction in global oil prices could negatively impact Venezuela. However, in a speech broadcast nationally last night in ‘cadena nacional’ (meaning it was carried by all television networks) which took place in a recently finished fishing and processing cooperative, he argued that the socialized economy under construction here will allow Venezuela to weather the ever deepening crisis of the global economy.

This position will likely become an increasing necessity in the time to come, as increasing numbers of experts are diagnosing a global recession and the shift away from capitalism’s neoliberal phase. While speculation continues in the US as to the likelihood of a new (or green?) new deal, Venezuela persists in its pursuit of new modes of production, though it must be admitted that these have by and large been facilitated by its status as a major oil producer. If the Bolivarian Revolution is to be successful – and its protagonists are quite aware of this – it must deepen the development of non-capitalist modes of production and its pursuit of food sovereignty and continue the forging of regional and global trade coalitions based on solidarity and justice rather than trickle-down ‘development.’

In other words, the moderating strategy of the ‘endogenous right’ is precisely the wrong medicine for the present. In their calls to forge partnerships with the ‘progressive bourgeoisie’ and to slow the pace of nationalization in order to make Venezuela less of a ‘risk’ for investors, they are effectively asking the country to reattach itself to the very Titanic from which the Bolivarians have fought so hard to escape. De-linking has never been more important.

(translation) The Chaos of Downtown Caracas has moved to Catia

2008-11-13T11:04:00.000-08:00

First of the promised translations...already since returning I have noticed a discursive shift vis-á-vis the informal economy -- which likely outstrips the 'formal' one here -- in Caracas. Now dubbed the 'popular economy,' the mayor of Libertador, Freddy Bernal, has been spearheading projects to relocate informal workers (who clog many of the capital's thoroughfares, are often associated with petty crime, and who -- perhaps more importantly, are themselves the victims of extortion, insecurity and precariousness) to locations where services, amenities, and security are available. There have been, however and of course, been bumps in the road, as the following translation suggests.
A deeper question worth pondering of course is how to categorize the 'informal sector' or the 'popular economy' (whichever you prefer) vis-a-vis socialism in the 21st century. Do they represent the petty bourgeoisie (a social bloc that Chávez yesterday lambasted as inherently counter-revolutionary)? Are they simply victims of decades of petrol-driven maldevelopment? Are they entrepreneurs? Opportunists? Revolutionaries? While the Buhoneros clearly by and large come from the social bloc that has been the base of Chávez's support, the question remains -- to paraphrase Lenin -- whether their consciousness is fundamentally socialist, or fundamentally bourgeois.
Anyway, the article:

Fereira, Lorena (2008). Últimas Noticias 13 November, pg. 3

Caracas--The number of informal merchants that have taken up residence on Catia Boulevard has increased significantly in the last two months.
“Since the beginning of October, many aisles are full of people displaced from the city center who have become tired of waiting for their relocation and have decided to look for a small hole in the avenue [to reopen their businesses],” according to one informal worker.

Two months ago there were a few vacant stalls [in the area], but now they are full of occupants and merchandise. Apparently, they spaces were rented by informal merchants that left the city center.

December’s approach has increased the number of informal workers posted in the entrances and exits of the metro. One can see fruit vendors, telephone stalls, food sellers, and even Christmas items that are offered without any sort of control in the area.

Pedestrians are the only ones who complain. They note that, in an election season, “the informal merchants [make up the numbers necessary] to win, and no authority will threaten them for fear of losing votes.”

One group of informal merchants said that in the meetings they have had with government officials, they have been told that in January they will be able to leave their current places of business. “We want to leave here, but also that we can be put in dignified markets without the delay that has occurred with [Chavista mayor of the Libertador parish] Freddy Bernal.”

With the exodus of informal merchants from the center of the city, Catia has turned into a giant garbage heap. The boulevard has turned into giant difficulty, and what is more, full of sewage, since most of the drains are so full that the rain water has no where to go.

This situation caused traffic to come to a standstill in front of the Plaza Sucre metro station, where a full drain left a tremendous amount of water in the street.
Another grave problem is noise pollution, that has tormented those living in the area. This is because sellers of pirated CDs play their equipment at maximum volume. These locations are also favorites for pickpockets, who use the confusion caused by the loud music to surprise their victims.

Insecurity continues, despite the presence of members of the National Guard in plaza Pérez Bonalde. “The boulevard is very big, and they cannot cover the entire area,” commented one worker.

It is estimated that there are currently 3,500 informal merchants around Catia boulevard. Last year, the figure was around 3,000, according to Fundacaracas [an office of the mayor of Caracas concerned with monitoring and executing infrastructure and service projects]. The neighbors [in Catia] argue that the mayor of Libertador parish moved the problem of the informal economy from the center to this sector. “There was no planning, and the issue simply slipped through their hands,” commented a businessman who wished to remain anonymous.

Decree: In January of this year, the mayor of Libertador, Freddy Bernal, dislocated informal workers from the central zone and signed a decree prohibiting them from setting up their shops on Baralt, San Martín, Sucre de Catia, la Candelaria avenues as well as Sabana Grande boulevard. He did the same for Francisco Solano Lópe and la Casanova avenues.
The decree provided that, once finalized, the mayor would return to issue a new decree to provide permanence for those who make their livings in the informal economy.

HA! if only...

2008-11-13T10:18:00.001-08:00

http://nytimes-se.com/

Caracas, a city on wheels...

2008-11-13T09:48:00.000-08:00

This is only my second full day back in the Bolivarian Republic, but I am amazed at my ability to forget just how bloody motorized this city is. It seems like everyone is driving, all the time, and the incredible and inevitable traffic jam forms something of a beehive in the streets, with motorcycle messengers (not to mention the 'mototaxis' -- who, for a small fee will perch you on the back of a dirt bike and give you a new appreciation to life) darting through what passes for lanes. On the freeways, informal sellers walk between the cars with food, coffee, razors and just about any other random bullshit you could imagine.
I love this city, and always will, but the idea of riding my bike here gives me tremors -- unforgiving roads, air you can see and taste, mototaxis...

Interestingly enough, opposition candidates in the east of the city (a stronghold of the upper classes and Anti-Chavistas) are actually campaigning on this, with one poster I saw yesterday declaring "you have the right to cross the street without having to hurry and without fear." These sorts of "quality of life" issues seem to be defining much of the campaign, and observers on the right and left both domestically and internationally have observed that insecurity and crime top the list of complaints all Venezuelans have against the government.

The difference, of course, lies in precisely how they plan to deal with it. A non-Caracas example can be seen in the campaign for mayor of Valencia (Venezuela's third largest city).

The opposition candidate, Miguel Cocchiola, is running on his experience as a businessperson, arguing that "Valencia needs a manager." He is arguing for increased motorized and foot police patrols to cut down on crime as well as more effective and efficient collection of garbage and recycling. Paradoxically, he also avers that his mayorship will integrate the poorer parts of the city in the south with the more affluent parishes, with the catchy if somewhat meaningless 'we don't want a Berlin wall [between the parts of our city]." How, exactly, criminalizing the south will do this, he leaves to question.

PSUVista candidate Edgardo Parra for his part, is arguing that each communal council should "promote a committee for integral security, which will build a social intelligence network in each community, and then we can create communal police forces...[that can] coordinate with the metropolitan police." Parra is, in other words, campaigning on the notion that the communities most impacted by crime should organize to solve the problems they face.

On a completely different note, given the insane rains that take up a decent part of the day this time of year, I'm going to try to start translating newspaper articles and posting them to fill my time. I'll try to also keep up the analytical posts as well as the anecdotal ones, but we'll see.

Historical Materialism: Done.

2008-11-10T07:26:00.000-08:00

Just getting done with the Historical Materialism conference in London, and then I'm off to Caracas (tomorrow morning...)
A few folks asked me to post the paper I gave, so...

Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution and the Post (neo)Liberal State

Prepared for Historical Materialism
7-9 November, 2008

There is an increasing though rather unfinished literature in social science and area studies circles on so called ‘post-liberal regimes.’ Writing in this vein runs the gamut from the pejorative – as with Larry Diamond’s (Diamond, 2002) notion of ‘pseudo-democratic,’ ‘electoral authoritarian’ or otherwise hybrid regimes that fail to live up to the criteria of good governance established in the United States and most of Europe – to the speculative and hopeful – in the analytical position outlined by Benjamin Arditi (Arditi, 2003). Both perspectives note the ways in which the positions and institutions of modern liberalism – as a political praxis dominant in the west based at a minimum on a strong sense of individualism, formal-legal equality, limited government, free markets, and religious and ideological tolerance – are seemingly on the wane or losing their hegemonic position in the political imaginary.
Better, both of these poles characterize what is consistent throughout the literature on post-liberalism, though from different political positions. That is to say, the era of the ideological emphasis of freedom first with unfettered transnational capital, and only then with western style formal political equalities (to say nothing of substantive, abilities-needs fairness or justice) – has ended or as at the very least entering a major crisis. While this may or may not signal the end of ‘liberalism’ as a legitimating discourse entwined with the modern state and capital, neoliberalism has certainly sustained a substantial blow to its short and medium term credibility.
However, any triumphalism in the face of the contemporary crisis of global capitalism, its deployment of the modern state form and the obfuscatory discourses of liberalism would be well served to recall C.B. Macpherson’s (Macpherson, 1965) observation that states were states before they were liberal, liberal before they were democratic, and finally that liberalism itself was liberal before it was democratic. The collapsing of these categories which has been the steady work of the 20th century’s long project of making the world safe again for capitalism may be less possible today than in 1994, but this does not mean the critical work of highlighting the contradictions within these and emerging forms of class domination are no longer needed. Quite the contrary. Nowhere is this more pressing than in the consideration of the state form and its relation to a potentially reinvented class struggle. This is my present task.
My wager in this paper is that the Bolivarian Revolution is in the process of building a new type of state power in Venezuela. The at times inconsistent and at present precarious nature of this project is in part due to the state culture and the form of capitalism developed by the previous, Fourth, Republic. In large part, this history helps explain the centrality of the state in the pursuit of 21st century socialism. However, the extent to which this new role for the state is feasible is directly contingent upon the ability of the Bolivarians to resist the entropy and alienation of the modern state form. That is to say, the ability of the Bolivarian Revolution to create a new form of state power – one that emerges from the post-liberal moment de-linked from the requirements and domination of modern capitalism – is directly tied to its ability to move beyond the very notion of the state itself.
The revolutionary process in Venezuela has decidedly yet to take the form of a frontal assault on the most sacred institutions of liberal capitalism, but has rather of necessity been much more tentative and ad hoc than definitive; more additive than destructive. Far from exiling or attacking core liberal values like private property and individual liberty, the Venezuelan government has for at least the last 5 years attempted to augment such conventions. The chief means through which this has taken place has been through massive increases in social spending – effecting a partial democratization of consumption rather than fomenting a social revolution. While these measures are in no doubt long overdue, their revolutionary importance is decidedly lesser than the creation of parallel institutions such as the consejos comunales (neighborhood based legislative, cultural and budgetary bodies), and the misiones sociales (an armada of educational, nutritional, health, collective-entrepreneurial and cultural projects).
The original aims of the misiones and the consejos was one of building direct democracy, decentralizing political power and the construction of a more fair economy. However, with the steady radicalization of the Chávez government – spurred on by what Gregory Wilpert describes as an opposition that was preemptively reactionary (Wilpert, 2007) – these parallel institutions were increasingly seen as capable of replacing the traditional and alienating bodies of liberal democracy. This radicalizing trend, and the potential for building a revolutionary counterpower within the revolution has been put into question in the aftermath of the failed Constitutional Reform of December 2007.
Within Chavista ranks a so-called ‘endogenous right’ made up of bureaucrats and largely middle-class supporters of the government has been able to expand its position, arguing for a slower, more defensive and conservative pace to the Revolution. This moment, or so their logic goes, is one in which the government needs to make friends amongst the upper and middle classes, to make gestures toward the progressive bourgeoisie, to forge public-private partnerships and work towards the integration of the opposition into the government. These conservative elements by and large see the consejos and the misiones as supplements to the pre-existing order – something akin to welfare programs designed to catch those who have ‘fallen through the cracks’ of contemporary society (Ellner, 2008). In other words, their vision of socialism for the 21st century is rather closer to European social democracy than to communism of the Soviet or Cuban varieties.
At the same time, radical elements in the base have argued in essence that the best defense is a good offense. They rightly locate the failure of the 2007 reforma not in the opposition’s ability to convert the government’s supporters but rather in the failure of the Chavistas to mobilize their own base. More fundamentally, they point to a faltering in the parallel institutions such as misión ribas and misión barrio adentro as key reasons why Venezuelans did not turn out in the same numbers for the reforma as they did for the re-election of Chávez merely a year earlier. Their strategic position is in essence rather similar to that of the Lenin of Dual Power (as George Ciccariello-Maher has argued in the pages of the Monthly Review), that the state is necessary only insofar as it can be used to attack the enemies of the revolution but that it cannot and should not be mistaken for the substance and ultimate aim of the revolution. Rather that the state must be ultimately overtaken by the armed and organized force of the revolutionary proletariat. Even though both wings of the Bolivarian Revolution have been impeccably democratic – in Chávez’s words, “peaceful, but armed” – this bloc is much less accomodationist than the endogenous right and much more skeptical of the existing state structure. As such, they have envisioned the parallel institutions of the Bolivarian Revolution as tools to create political, social and economic powers capable of overcoming the inherently corrupt institutions of bourgeois liberal democracy (Ciccariello-Maher, 2007).
This particular task of the radicals is made all the more difficult given the nature of the Venezuelan state and its relation to the economic life of that nation. The extent of this difficulty defies a quick simplifying gloss. It entails a history spanning the long marches of Simón Bolívar’s liberating armies in the early 19th century to the bloody Caracazo uprising against the neoliberal reforms of president Carlos Andrés Peréz and the collapse of the Venezuelan political establishment in and after 1989. I will do my best to highlight a few key moments in this history in the hopes of better contextualizing my concluding remarks on the transformation of the state in the Bolivarian Revolution.
The centralization of military, economic and political power in Venezuela truly came to its maturity during the Vicente Gómez years (1909-1935), a process which was greatly expedited with the discovery and state control of access to oil starting in 1914. Having dispossessed the caudillos both militarily and politically, Vicente Gómez exercised complete control over oil concessions, removing their economic power as well. It was also in this moment that the bases of power and the shape of Venezuelan society shifted from the countryside to the cities, and the beginning of a distinctly Venezuelan model of capitalism and the modern state form.
The modern sovereign state emerged at the same time as did Venezuela’s capitalist economy – it was not a holdover from an absolutist ancien régime but rather in many ways its commencement. This economy, from the beginning, was based not on the capture of labor power, but rather on the capture of oil rents levied upon foreign petrol companies, a process which was monopolized by the state. It is thus rather difficult to locate sociologically something on the order of a distinct ‘ruling class’ that could wield state power in any sort of ‘instrumental’ fashion in that the state itself was the owner of the ‘means of production.’
Thus against traditional liberal and Marxist historiography of the modern state and capitalism which rely heavily on the emergence and consolidation of an indigenous bourgeoisie in the interstices of the absolutist state and the eventual emergence of a disciplined if oppressed working class (Koselleck, 1988; Marx, 1978), the primary indicator of social power in 20th century Venezuela was political rather than propertied in nature (Coronil, 1997; Hein, 1980). At precisely the moment in which a central state emerged which was strong enough to protect the country’s fledgling industries, Venezuela threw itself headlong into oil production just in time for the Second World War. Subsequent intensification of the petrol industry further weakened what few autonomous social and economic forces remained, strengthening the power of the central state as it brokered the contracts of the foreign-dominated extraction process. Thus something of ‘the Dutch Disease’ avant la lettre took hold in Venezuela for political as well as economic reasons. As a domestic strategy of control it endured the pacted transition to democracy in 1958, just as the consequences of uneven internal economic development persist for the population to this day.
This enduring trait of Venezuelan political economy is worth drawing out in more detail, as it is key to any attempt to think the state-form of the Bolivarian Revolution. While the transition to democracy energized and expanded its atrophied and exiled ‘civil society,’ it did little to counter what Fernando Coronil (Coronil, 1997) has described as the ‘magical’ or ‘shamanistic’ nature of the Venezuelan state. In Coronil’s estimation, this phenomenon, specific to the expanded opportunities afforded by oil wealth, was ‘magical’ in that the state literally transformed ‘nature’ (his word) into the physical and material traits of an imagined –and deeply desired – modernity. This persistent trait of Venezuelan political economy was intensified during the dictatorship years, as General Marcos Pérez Jiménez (1948/52-1958) adopted policies of intense infrastructure development – building highways, universities and housing on a scale never before seen in the country – and which arguably has lasted until the present government’s attempts to build collective and communal forms of property and industry. (Anecdotally, “Sembrar el petroleo” Arturo Úslar Pietri, Diario Ahora 1936…lack of tax collection…).
With democratization came a deepening of the Venezuelan form of the ‘Dutch disease,’ as the parties which dominated the structurally exclusionary democratic system known as the ‘puntofijo pact’ tightly controlled unions and social organizations (García-Guadilla, 2007) and the dominance of the oil sector led to consistent annual declines in domestic industrial and agricultural productivity (Karl, 1997). There was thus little space for autonomous power to be built against either the state or the ruling class by the bourgeoisie. Even less so was there much hope for economic counter-systemic organization amongst workers outside of state run industries (oil, aluminum, and steel) with the explosion of the informal sector beginning in the 1970s and continuing to the present (Orlando, 2001). The global boom in oil prices around that time contributed to a spike in urbanization without industrialization. Unable to compete with subsidized imports, the inhabitants of the Venezuelan countryside flocked to a few key cities in order to find employment in the interstices and service economies around the oil sector. By 1992 informality so dominated employment and housing in Caracas that, Aristóbolo Istúriz, then the recently elected mayor lamented that his administration had no clue how many people lived in the constantly growing city, let alone how to provide them with basic services (Harnecker, 2005). The deepening of the social crises surrounding consecutive rounds of structural adjustments in 1989 did little to improve this situation, though they did hasten the collapse of the fourth republic, by which time the Venezuelan state could be considered to have transitioned from a liberal or quasi-liberal state to a neoliberal one.
In 1871, writing on the Paris Commune, Marx warned that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes” (pg. 629) a caution that has dominated subsequent Marxist thought on the role of the state in revolutionary transformation. It is precisely this warning which inspired the Leninist concept of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ and of ‘dual power,’ as well as the often (incorrectly) opposed Gramscian formulations of hegemony and War of Position. The state, they argued, was a powerful element of class warfare, either as the instrument of the ruling class (Lenin) or as a complex series of relationships capable of either crushing or neutralizing class struggle (Gramsci). In either case, the present liberal-bourgeois state would have to be done away with in the pursuit of socialism, and the party – in different ways – was precisely the body to take on this historical task.
This approach to the state was by and large eclipsed by the post-Soviet renaissance of ‘radical democracy,’ a slogan that often took the place of Socialism, Marxism or communism in the imaginaries of university leftists and the so-called ‘anticapitalist globalization movements.’ Within this line of thought, the state is often seen as a highly likely if not inevitable harbinger of Stalinist statism. The state is thus for this tendency uniquely a power-over, antithetical to the spirit of anticapitalism. More troublingly, in its abandonment, the net result of the actions of these tendencies often result in little more than appeals for a kinder, gentler, perhaps more inclusive capitalism. The principle, then, of radical democracy when delinked from the pursuit of state power (pursuit as in the Leninist or Gramscian sense of ending the liberal bourgeois model of political power) comes down to little more than a democratization of consumption or the naïve faith that the principles of liberalism and the promise of the egalitarian, democratic state are sound if ill executed. If anything, current events have eroded this position’s theoretical coherence, if not torn it completely asunder.
If the Bolivarian Revolution is to be successful, it must capitalize on the uncertainty of this post (neo)liberal moment and end this substitution of radical democracy for the communist imperative that the liberal state is a lie, and must therefore go. It is, however, a rather difficult task in that the historical identification of the Venezuelan state with capital favors a political approach in the Poulantizian sense of the state as a field ‘traversed’ by struggle (Poulantzas, 2008 pg. 367). The problem is deepened still more given the persevering political and economic consequences of the ‘Dutch Disease.’ A historically weak working class, the absence of a peasantry and the ubiquity of the informal economy all make a rallying organizational praxis along the lines of ‘all power to the soviets’ something of a ridiculous proposition. In its place – and this has been the strategy of the radical base of Chavismo against the endogenous right – the strategy must be ‘all power to the communal councils,’ locating the terrain of the struggle against state domination and capitalist exploitation in the social.
In order to avoid the theoretical and strategic circle such a series produces, there is little other choice than to rely on the state to engender and protect the antagonistic force of the poor. And in this light, despite the present uncertainty and its rather uneven progress, Venezuela should be seen as building just such a state. It has, however, been able to do so for the past 5 years almost in spite of itself, given the tragicomic ineptitude of the opposition which all but gave Chavistas not only state power, but hegemony. The upcoming elections of 23 November put this luxury in question. While an opposition rout is highly unlikely, the reemergence of opposition lawmakers would strengthen the hand of the endogenous right’s calls for moderation and a slowing of the pace of the Bolivarian Revolution. In other words, the capacity of the hard line Chavista project of ending the substitution of radical democracy and the democratization of consumption for social revolution remains suspended in the balance. Such is the uncertainty of the post (neo)liberal constellation, the situation we now face in Venezuela and throughout the world and where, I unfortunately, must conclude.

Arditi, B. (2003). The Becoming-Other of Politics: A Post-Liberal Archipelago. Contemporary Political Theory, 2, 307-325.
Coronil, F. (1997). The magical state : nature, money, and modernity in Venezuela. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Diamond, L. (2002). Thinking About Hybrid Regimes. Journal of Democracy, 13(2), 21-35.
García-Guadilla, M. P. (2007). Social Movements in a Polarized Setting: Myths of Venezuelan Civil Society. In S. Ellner & M. Tinker Salas (Eds.), Venezuela : Hugo Chávez and the decline of an "exceptional democracy" (pp. 140-154). Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Pub.
Harnecker, M. (2005). Haciendo Camino al Andar. Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores Latinoamerican CA.
Hein, W. (1980). Oil and the Venezuelan State. In P. Nore & T. Turner (Eds.), Oil and Class Struggle (pp. 224-251). London: Zed Books.
Karl, T. L. (1997). The paradox of plenty : oil booms and petro-states. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Koselleck, R. (1988). Critique and crisis : enlightenment and the pathogenesis of modern society (1st MIT Press ed.). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Macpherson, C. (1965). Post-Liberal Democracy? New Left Review, 1(33), 3-16.
Marx, K. (1978). The Civil War in France. In R. Tucker (Ed.), The Marx-Engels Reader, Second Ed. (pp. 618-652). New York: Norton Publishers.
Orlando, M. B. (2001). The Informal Sector in Venezuela: Catalyst or Hindrance for Poverty Reduction? Paper presented at the Asociación Civil para la Promoción de Esutios Sociales. Retrieved October 27, 2008.
Thomas, P. (1994). Alien Politics: Marxist State Theory Retrieved. New York: Routledge.
Wilpert, G. (2007). Changing Venezuela by taking power : the history and policies of the Chavez government. London ; New York: Verso.

obama, oh, oh, obama...really?

2008-11-07T17:33:00.000-08:00

apropos of a longer, though plannedly 'tentative' meditation on what an Obama presidency might mean for Venezuela and the rest of Latin America...some thoughts from a fellow traveler.

story (thanks to abiding in Bolivia!):
Are you over your hangover from partying up Obama tuesday night? Good, because here are some sober thoughts on Obama from Bolivia.
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What could President Obama mean for improving US - Bolivian relations after Bush sent Goldberg to support a bunch of fascist coup plotters? Well if Obama´s current advisors signify anything, not much. A while back Gringo Tambo dug up this video of Obama´s Bolivia advisor, Greg Craig speaking about the possible extradition of Bolivia´s ex-Pres "Goni" Sanchez de Lozada for his role in the 2003 El Alto Gas War in which more than 60 civilian protesters were shot dead by the national military. Summerized:
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“we do not accept your characaterization of those events as a massacre.” He says there were no crimes against humanity, genocide, disappearances, or torture, but rather, “tragically, civil disturbances which cost lives.”
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Oh, did I forget to tell you?, that in addition to advising Obama on Bolivia, Craig is also Goni´s legal representive. Conflict of interst. What conflict of interest?
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But hey, Bolivia is a small poor country anyways. Who cares? Obama is awesome, smart, unifying, and "transhistorical"- MLK´s dream fulfilled. Except Bolivians, like Americans, also elected in 2005 their first President from a group historically enslaved, racially segregation, and widely discriminated against. So Bolivia has been living a "postracial" politics ever since, right?
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I am sorry to say this folks, but if Bolivia and Morales are any gauge, what we saw during the McCain-Palin rallies ain´t nothing compared to what is down the road in an Obama Presidency. Dig in, beacuse now is the time when the real work of progressives starts.

link:
http://casa-del-duderino.blogspot.com/2008/11/note-of-caution.html

What do John McCain, Barack Obama™ and Hugo Chávez have in common?

2008-11-03T06:24:00.000-08:00

lefties, all of ‘em.

For anyone who still might be subscribed to this blog, I’m back up and running – or will be soon. I’ll be back in Venezuela for most of November and December, writing about the regional and local elections and trying to stay in as much trouble as I can.

Beating a Dead Horse

2007-10-13T06:26:00.000-07:00

I know, I know, I keep bringing this up, but new examples keep poping up.

In the US and elsewhere, Chávez is often depicted as a manipulative and paranoid 'populist.' The idea here is that he follows a familiar pattern of social spending and antagonistic (though baseless) rhetoric. According to this analysis, Chávez has been so effective in uniting a solid majority of the population in large part through constituting 'the people' as opposed to 'the oligarchy' (Venezuelan old money) and 'the Empire' (the United States). He then ostensibly tells 'the people' that they are perpetually under attack from these looming and united dangers. Hence anything he does is justified.

Which, our friends in the State Department and the New York Times tell us, is hogwash. The sentiment is repeated ad nauseum by oppos here in Venezuela, who constantly chant 'We're not coup-mongers, we're (insert issue or identity group here)"

Unfortunately for them, however, they keep shoving their feet in their mouth.

Example du jour: Manuel Rosales, of Un Nuevo Tiempo and governor of Zulia (richest state in VZ) fame, is in Washington D.C. holding meetings with Thomas Shannon (assistant secretary of state for Latin American affairs), asking for the US to 'exert international pressure against the constitutional reform in Venezuela."

I mean, seriously, it really seems like the oppos here WANT to fail.

Either that, or maybe that Chávez guy isn't so crazy for thinking the interests of the rich and of the US government are working against him...

and i'm off...

2007-10-02T04:56:00.000-07:00

...seeing as how i'm a no good,shiftless, unemployed freeloader layabout, i'm going to take a va-cay.
i'll be back from trinidad in a week to ten days, hopefully with my position on the 2010 world cup team cemented and some dish on what Venezuela's neighbors think about the BoRev.
(okay, birchill i'm not, but if that cracker can make the TT team, who's to say i can't?)

Make Abortion Safe and Legal in Venezuela (...and everywhere)

2007-09-29T07:43:00.000-07:00

(poster from a successful Mexico City campaign to legalize abortion)

Yesterday in Plaza Bolívar, just off of the Asemblea Nacional, a group of pro-choice activists called attention to a glaring gap in the advances made by the Bolivarian Revolution. Despite one of the more progressive Constitutions of recent vintage, the 1999 Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela does not include among the rights of women the right to decide whether or not to carry a pregnancy to full term. In fact, in the Latin America and the Caribbean, abortion is legal only in Mexico City, Cuba and Guyana.

The assembled activists ask the government to add to the Reforma proposed by President Chávez changes to Articles 76 and 84 of the constitution. In the current constitution, article 76 guarantees the rights of both parents regardless of their marital status to their children. It also guarantees parents the right to decide for themselves the size of their families, and obliges the state to provide pre and post-natal care. Activists would amend the article to “recognize the right of women to voluntarily interrupt their pregnancy for reasons of physical or mental health and in the case of rape, congenital birth defects, hereditary illnesses, or in the case when the parents do not have the economic capacity to guarantee the development of the child.” Finally, they would mandate that abortions be timely and performed without any form of discrimination against the women in question.

Article 84 currently obliges the state to provide a national health care system in order to care for the body politic. Proposed changes here would include attention to sexual and reproductive health. Furthermore, they would make family planning, reproductive health and contraception usage subjects to be included in the national educational system.

In other words, much like Chávez’s own reforms, the reforms sought by these activists seek to push the potentials of the 1999 constitution further in their intended direction.

In Venezuela just as anywhere else, abortion is just as much about class and race as it is about the rights of women to control their own bodies. One activist remarked “Rich women get abortions in private clinics, or go abroad, while the poor have them in their houses or in clandestine locations where they use complicated or unsafe methods.”

The lack of legal status makes official statistics for the consequences of clandestine abortions hard to come by. However, one central Caracas maternity hospital reports that annually 24 young women (between the ages of 16 and 24) arrive with complications arising from illegal abortions.

Of those 24, 20 die.

This is clearly a place where the creativity and leadership of the Bolivarian Revolution is in need. The current policy, even more outdated than the 4th Republic, only serves to reinforce lines of class privilege. Keeping abortion illegal keeps the lives of poor women of lesser value than those of the rich. It reinforces a capitalist cultural perrogative that money is the final arbiter of ability. Furthermore, it treats women who have neither resources nor health to carry a pregnancy to term as penalized individuals -- that is, as liberal subjects of the old order rather than as the new protagonists of a developing collective creating not only a new society, but a new form of sociality based on equality and solidarity rather than competition and exclusion.

And until this situation is rectified, the Bolivarian Revolution will always be incomplete.

Accion Democratica and 'the good old days'

2007-09-28T14:55:00.001-07:00

Caracas in general is covered in some rather incredible political graffiti from all sides of the political spectrum. When I have access to a faster internet connection, I’ll post a collection of the photos I’ve taken throughout my time here.
(the painted text reads, more or less, 'away with the reform' -- referencing the recent flotilla of 33 reforms to the 1999 constitution announced by president Chávez.)(The stencils read: 'The time has come' and the images on the wheat-pasted flyers are of Romúlo Betancourt)
As of late, however, ‘AD’ agitprop has been fairly ubiquitous. ‘AD’ of course refers to Acción Democrática, one of the two parties which made up the ‘Puntofijismo’ system of Venezuela’s 30 some year long ‘exceptional’ democracy. Within social science and ‘latin americanist’ area-studies circles in the US, Venezuela was until slightly before the 1997 elections considered to be the only stable democracy in a troubled region. Colombia and Peru had their civil wars, southern-cone states like Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Chile had their notorious dictatorships. Bolivia and Ecuador, both politically unstable, were poster children for the extreme poverty of the region.

Venezuela was seen as ‘special’ because since the fall of the Marcos Peréz Jimenéz on January 23, 1958, there had been BOTH relatively uninterrupted economic growth AND ‘smooth’ democratic transitions between presidents of different political parties. The details of this era of ‘exceptional’ democracy in Venezuela, however, make it look more like an oligarchic dictatorship which engaged in democratic theater than the ‘democracy with adjectives’ of political scientists in the north.

(The former view has prevailed among most in Venezuela since the 1990s, whereas the notion of ‘democracy with adjectives’ – ‘pacted,’ ‘partial,’ ‘incomplete,’ ‘formal,’ and so forth – continues to spawn cottage industries among political scientists in US academia.)

The upsurge of AD graffiti has been occasioned by the party’s 66th anniversary, but it also dovetails with a few other undercurrents circulating today throughout Venezuelan society. The first has to do with the euphoria of the current oil boom, which has some rich Venezuelans longing for the AD presidency of Carlos Andrés Peréz (his first time in Miraflores), when many though one had to ‘try NOT to make money’ here. The difference between this oil boom and that of the 1970s is that this time money is being invested in social programs and infrastructural development rather than financing the artificial boom of a cultural and economic elite.

The second has to do with the (opposition) perception that the current polarization of Venezuelan society requires the ‘return of sanity’ and the mediation of a wise leader. Such a position is of course like the image of two people fighting in the street, all the while shouting one at the other ‘you must see reason and stop fighting!’ while doing nothing themselves to cease hostilities. Such is, of course, the necessary line to take according to the protocol of a respectable representative liberal democracy – use the façade of political cordiality to obscure the raw brutality of class domination. Bolivarians are on the other hand on the whole concerned either with consolidating their power (especially so for the moderate sectors of the movement) or pressing the potentials of 21st century Socialism evermore deeper and more radical. The opposition position of course idealizes its own past, however, in that it fails to recognize the key role the military has always played in the rise to political and economic power of the national bourgeoisie. Today, the military is all but completely aligned with the Bolivarian revolution.

Such can explain the choice of Romúlo Betancourt in the commemorative graffiti accompanied by the exhortation “Countrymen: The Time has come.” This choice is perhaps also forced upon them in that Andrés Peréz is now more associated with his second presidency [1989-1993]. During this second time in office he imposed a harsh neoliberal adjustment package, sent the military into the streets to bloodily repress the popular uprising in response to it (the infamous ‘Caracazo’ of February 1989), and was ultimately impeached for corruption in 1993. He left in his aftermath a completely decimated political scene and would be the last AD politician to be elected president. Since an association of AD’s with the opulence of an oil boom is all but out of the picture, the party hopes to align itself with the ostensible return of stability and democratic calm to the country.) However, a look back at AD’s actual history, as well as that of the Puntofijismo system it inaugurated, might make them reticent to encourage such associations.

The Strange ‘Democratic’ Prehistory of ‘Puntofijismo’

In 1935, Juan Vicente Gomez, president of Venezuela since 1908, died in his sleep of natural causes. His rule saw the beginning and intensification of Venezuela’s shift from an agro-export based economy (largely coffee and sugar) to a petrol-producing state. It also brought about the end of nearly a century of civil war and local caudillo politics through the rationalization and centralization of rule in Venezuela and, perhaps paradoxically, the identification of political power with the figure of the president. Gomez accomplished all of this through a rather iron-fisted approach to domestic politics, banning political parties, assassinating or exiling opponents, and carefully controlling access to oil concessions and other key aspects of the developing economy.

Another decade of rule by the military followed his death until a group of development-minded young officers led by Marcos Peréz Jiménez overthrew his second successor, Isaías Medina Angarita. The junta then installed Romúlo Betancourt (who founded Acción Democratica in 1941 along with other members of the so-called ‘Generation of 28’) as president. AD was a rather attractive choice for the officers, in that its version of ‘social democracy’ was limited to the formal-institutionalization of the Venezuelan state and did not extend to the social reforms proposed by such groups as the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV). In other words, AD promised both to ‘modernize’ state institutions within the bounds of contemporary liberal democracy while containing the potentially destabilizing effects of social reformers such as the PCV. (Indeed, Betancourt would continue to outdo himself in his demand that AD – a member of the socialist international to this day – distance itself from and marginalize ‘radical’ elements such as the PCV).

Betancourt led the junta until 1948, at which time his teacher, the author Romúlo Gallegos, was elected president by a landslide. However, by the time of the so-called ‘telephone coup’ which saw him deposed NINE MONTHS LATER, nary a person took to the streets to defend Venezuelan democracy. When the exiled AD leadership called for its unions to lead a general strike the following year, the military junta easily crushed the sparsely attended events and declared all AD-affiliated unions as illegal as the party with which they were associated.

How could this have been?

Put simply, AD’s three years in power saw them use the office of the presidency not to extend Venezuelan democracy nor to ‘modernize’ the state apparatus, but rather to turn Venezuela into a single party state. It consolidated its control of trade unions in the burgeoning oil sector, tempered the potential unpopularity of limiting constitutional rights and guarantees with handouts from oil profits and made a constitutional institution of the presidential appointment of governors and mayors (which is ironic, given this is precisely what many ADecos (erroneously) accuse Chávez of doing with his proposed constitutional reforms today) – among other examples. In other words, AD used its first three years of executive power to build itself as a party, and subordinated the mobilization and ‘development’ of the population to this end. It furthermore ‘did not play well with others,’ doing all it could to keep other parties such as COPEI and the CPV as far from power as possible.

Romúlo Betancourt was the chief architect of this process.

As it built itself as a party, AD also managed to alienate significant power brokers in Venezuelan society – such as the Catholic Church and rural landowners. This did not sit well with the military officers who installed AD into power with the promise of returning ‘decency’ and ‘patriotism’ to the country. In other words, the 1948 coup as well as the lack of any substantive resistance thereto was made possible by the cynicism AD’s behavior inspired vis-à-vis ‘democracy’ among Venezuelans.

‘Puntofijo’On the 23rd of January, 1958 Marcos Peréz Jiménez was overthrown by what Fernando Coronil describes as
“neither a traditional military coup nor a mass uprising from below. Rather it was, in a peculiar but real way, the crystallization of collective discontent – from different classes, sectors, and bulwarks of power, including the military – against the increasingly arbitrary and personal rule of Pérez Jiménez. Peculiar, because these groups had not participated in common struggles and were not linked by interdependent sectoral interests. Real, because they were nevertheless united in their opposition to an unresponsive government and shared an interest in a state that would use the nation’s fiscal resources on their behalf. Despite their sharp economic and ideological differences, these groups formed a community of interests and ideals on the basis of a shared orientation toward the state as the main source of collective and individual welfare.”
In October of that year, the ‘Puntofijo’ pact (named for the house was owned by COPEI founder Rafael Caldera in which it was signed) was signed between representatives of AD, COPEI and the URD (Comité de Organización Política Electoral Independiente –Christian Democratic—and Unión Republicana Democratica – slightly to the left of AD, a Social Democratic party—respectively. By 1960 URD quit the pact). ‘Puntofijo’ was necessitated by the excessive sectarianism of AD’s first three years in power. All it really amounted to, however, was an extension of who was allowed to participate in the same old scheme. Puntofijo consisted in
1. The exclusion of the Communist party from Venezuelan politics;
2. An agreement among the signatories to respect the constitutionality of elections (i.e. not to take part in the military adventurism that defined the political past of Venezuela); 3. An agreement to rule through national unity governments. That is to say, not to exclude absolutely the parties which lost elections;
4. An agreement to establish – before any election – an accord of minimum agreement among the contestants.

In other words, Puntofijo extended the single-party rule of AD’s idyllic first triennium into a two-party rule that would last until 1993. As with any such arrangement, the democratic potential of any election or other institutionally-minded reform was always already neutered. It guaranteed that any change in government would not bring about significant changes in policy or policy-orientation, nor in the socio-political ‘status quo’ – an agreement as mutually beneficial to all the signatories as it was harmful to the majority of Venezuelans.

In this way, Puntofijo offered a democratic-veneer to the authoritarian system it ostensibly replaced. Its record of economic mishandling (I am not the first to wonder how a country that “during the oil boom of the midseventies…obtained more dollars from its oil exports than those given to all European nations by the Marshall Plan” could by 1995 have “the highest inflation and lowest growth rate in Latin America.”), nepotism and clientelism doomed it to failure almost from the outset. What is amazing is that it lasted as long as it did.

AD will always be associated with this order. Romúlo Betancourt was the first president elected under this scheme as well as one of its principle architects. Carlos Andrés Peréz was the last (but more on Andrés Peréz in another post). The excesses of the former during the first AD triennium brought about the ‘hiatus’ of the Marcos Peréz Jiménez dictatorship. The neoliberal reforms of the latter brought about the deaths of the Caracazo and the political and economic chaos of the 1990s. Worse, for opposition politicos and constituents, Andrés Peréz made the Bolivarian Revolution not only possible, he made it necessary.

Today again

I would like to return to the commemorative graffiti I encountered earlier today.The composition of the agitprop is ambiguous in temporal and spatial terms, confusing the orientation of both the message and the party it represents in a cacophony of symbols and referents.

First, we have Betancourt in the background, mid-sentence, gazing with a sort of certainty into the future. In this sense Betancourt – as well as the party and the legacy which he represents – is ready and waiting to return, uninterrupted, to bring a ‘better’ future to Venezuela. In this sense, ‘the time has come’ signals the ostensible ripeness of this particular political conjuncture for AD’s return.

However, the black and white of the image conjures a sense of return more than it does a time to move forward. In this sense, the image refers to the return to a past when AD’s constituency held control over economic and political power in Venezuela. In this sense it directly addresses the personal economic and social interests of the observer. If the viewer is an ADeco, or of the class position to make them potentially so, it signals their personal return to power and ‘stable’ prosperity. It promises the return to a ‘simpler’ time in which AD guaranteed 'stability' and a clear path to the future.

However again, the party’s shield is the only vibrantly-colored aspect of the image, in the blue-yellow-and red of the national flag. Its contrast to the black and white of image and text suggest that the party is both of the past and of the future, that it is in effect a force of both ‘modernization’ and all that was good about a bygone era. This visual content is reinforced by the stately bronze of the 66 of the party’s anniversary, which represents AD’s wisdom, age, and experience.

The heavy elipsis following 'the time has come' at the image's center again leaves much room for play. The only certainty of what precisely the time has come FOR is that it has to do with AD. Whether this means a return to 1941 or blazing forward to 2008 and beyond is intentionally open. The time for what? Certainly more than merely the 66th anniversary of the party? For an AD-led ‘democratic rebirth’? For a new puntofijo? Or, for another coup to be followed by AD rule a la 1945-48?

The choice of ‘Conciudadanos’ (‘fellow citizens’ or ‘countrymen’) provides the key to this mystery. First, note that ‘conciudadanos’ is left in the masculine form, whereas it is becoming more and more common for political discourse in Spanish speaking parts of América to differentiate the gender of terms – saying, for example ‘Ciudadano y Ciudadana’ in order to be more inclusive and, dare I say, ‘politically correct.’ In other words, the image/text is interpolates not only a particular audience or observer (one who can even recognize the image) but also all of their father fantasies. Betancourt is in this image the fantasy father who can be chosen by the son. And as such, a doubly-invested masculine figure of robust individualism at the heart of most notions of contemporary liberal democracy and the fetish of ‘choice.’

The hailing that takes place in the title ‘conciudadano’ is an obvious interpellation of the observer, but it is important to note that it is one which operates on the register of the formal-political. That is, it calls for the passersby to recognize in the image and in themselves an ostensibly shared legal-juridical identity. This stands in direct contrast to the rhetoric of the Bolivarian revolution which is all but always articulated in collective-nationalist (that of ‘Pueblo’) or classist (that of ‘Companer@’) terms. The contrast between the two couldn’t be starker, and ultimately serves to filter who can and who cannot receive the content of the message. By addressing the ‘citizen’ the image appeals to the individual – to the autonomized member of the modern nation state which AD ostensibly helped make of Venezuela. This individual is a far cry from the collective identity being forged by the Bolivarians.

The image, like AD, ultimately fail in this attempt to present themselves as of the past and the sole road to the future. One is tempted to remember Bob Dole’s failed US presidential campaign of 1996, where he countered Bill Clinton’s ‘Bridge to the 21st Century’ slogan with his own ‘Bridge to the past’ – a gaff which just reinforced the public’s perception that he was a past his prime politician. In much the same way, the AD image’s ambiguity and dissonance make it positively productive only to its ever-dwindling constituency.

One can just as easily (perhaps even more easily) from an opposition perspective read the ‘the time has come’ as the time to close the book on AD completely. Indeed, as reinforced by the expectant image of Betancourt, one is reminded that AD founded and ended the system which made the Bolivarian Revolution all but inevitable.

La Reforma. Or, yet another (self-imposed) Opposition defeat

2007-09-28T10:10:00.000-07:00

I am still not sure where I stand on the issue of the up and coming Constitutional Reforms to the Bolivarian Constitution (which I'm sure is keeping a lot of folks up at at night in Miraflores). As I have said before, I think it dramatically heightens the dialectic between the president and the populace in a way that can either deepen democracy in Venezuela and push the revolution to its most radical potentials or reproduce in a more robust form the centrality of the executive which has defined past regimes.

What I can definitively say at this early point in the proceedings (the public will vote on the reforma this upcoming December 2nd) is that the Venezuelan opposition is doing its normal shoddy job of organizing and furthering their position. On the one hand, they have allowed themselves to be forced into the position of defending the 1999 constitution, which brought about the advent of the ‘5th Republic’ of the (now renamed) ‘Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela’ – a document they have heretofore cited as an example of Chávez’s abuse of power and the fraudulent basis of the Bolivarian Revolution. Furthermore, the strategy they have been pursuing is doing rather little to make me (or, so it seems, many others) want to see their side of things.

(an interesting comparison: Opposition anti-Reforma propaganda (on the left) using a familiar Chavista motif (below). The world bubble and the red in both images are almost always exclusively signals to the observer that the message or meaning to the propaganda are associated with Chávez or Bolivarianismo.)

Predictably, the organized political opposition is substantively focusing on the proposed indefinite reelection of the President (which would not extend to other elected officials). Much like the RCTV fiasco earlier this year, this particular issue is a ready-made ‘winnable’ issue for the anti-Chavista parties, at least in terms of international opinion. That is to say, it fits into the (Washington-made) international perception of Chávez as a megalomaniacal dictator in actuality or in waiting. According to this narrative, the Bolivarian Revolution comes not from actual historico-political conditions (the collapse of the Venezuelan political system at the end of the 20th century, the excesses of neoliberal structural readjustment and exacerbation of the gap between the poorest and richest Venezuelans throughout the 1980s and 90s, and so forth), but rather from the cult of personality around one Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías.

(It should be noted that Chávez himself has not done much to hinder this perception. He has repeatedly stated that he will stand for no changes nor additions to his 33 proposed reforms in any manner whatsoever. The Reforma occupies a prominent place among the ‘5 motors’ of the path to Bolivarian Socialism, and since he ‘is not here to do anything by halves’ they are absolute, to be voted in a bloc, and not to be adulterated in any way whatsoever.)

This has proven to be a bit problematic for reasons other than the top-down manner in which the reforms have been handled. For example, proposed changes to labor laws, which would reduce the working day to 6 hours and the working week to 36 (which, as I have pointed out, could have potentially little impact in an economy so dominated by the informal sector) have been written vaguely enough so as to allow employers to extend the (albeit 36 hour) workweek to 7 days. Bolivarian trade unionists have demanded clarifications to the reform to keep the working week 5 days long at maximum, and to guarantee workers days where they do not have to sell their labor in order to survive. Chavista legislators and others in support of the reforms have stated that no one intends for this particular reform to be used to harm workers, but this is of course the problem with relying so heavily on the laws and constitutionalism to bring about social change. The danger here is, in much the same way as RICO laws in the US were originally intended to attack organized crime but are more often used against activists and labor unions, laws can remain in place long after their original time and context have passed.

But like I originally mentioned, the opposition has not been using these opportunities to their advantage. Yesterday provided us with a clear example. Manuel Rosales (president of Un Nuevo Tiempo (UNT), governor of Zulia state, 2006 candidate for president), who is seen as many as the ‘head’ of the opposition held court in the Portuguese embassy with representatives from all European Union (EU) ambassadors in the country. His line: “Chávez’s perpetual reelection will harm your interests and your liberty in this country.”

He also complained that the opposition doesn’t have the same influence over the population as the government and insisted that they are not forming a ‘plan B’ as was widely circulated around the 2006 elections. (Far-right politicos and websites such as www.NoticieroDigital.com made many ominous statements in the lead up to the elections such as ‘December 3rd [election day] is not as important as what we do on December 4th [the day after what the opposition announced avant la lettre would be a fraudulent election].’ The plans included among other things the return of opposition ‘guarimbas’ –violent street blockades and destabalization efforts— which played a prominent role during the bosses' strike of 2002-3. For more detail, see George Ciccariello Maher's analysis in 'Plans B, C and D' at http://www.counterpunch.org/maher11252006.html). As always, however, Rosales here gives the lie to himself. Venezuelans sympathetic to the Bolivarian Revolution often see the opposition as both 1.) so without domestic support that they must depend on foreign allies such as the United States, the Vatican, and etc; and 2.) culturally made up either of European immigrants brought over during the dictatorships and the oil booms to fill an immediate need for highly skilled in the petrol and financial sectors of the economy OR (and perhaps more importantly) as a self-styled elite demographic centered in Caracas and Maracaibo who see themselves as White, European, and entirely above the mestizo and black majority of the country.(Coup-Monger Rats! The Pueblo will not forget!)

(it must be noted that both of these perceptions are, one has to admit after study and reflection, by no means without warrant. In this blog I have provided numerous accounts of this phenomenon. When one looks at the cultural imaginary elite Venezuelans project of themselves in the mass media, for example, one is presented with an image of Venezuela as a white republic of European ‘moderns.’ Eva Gollinger’s work (author of ‘The Chavez Code’ and ‘Bush vs. Chavez’) has definitively highlighted the anti-Bolivarian link between Washington and Venezuelan ‘Civil Society.’ More on this another time.)

So…how does Rosales rectify this situation? He holds a meeting with foreign diplomats and warns them that their interests are in danger??!?!?!??!?!!?!?!?!

Rosales has also (perhaps understandably) raised concern with the reform’s remapping of the political map of Venezuela and the introduction of the President’s ability to name special officials in charge of regions, tasks, or emergencies. For Rosales, this signals the end federal autonomy for states vis-à-vis the central government and further limits the ability of the opposition to win any toehold on power. However, coming from a man who has openly sided with Zulia-secessionists and sought US-backing for an ‘independent’ Zulia (see one of my first entires ‘Opposition Games’), this comes off as self-serving and disingenuous to most.

Primero Justicia (PJ), the Washington-founded opposition party has been focusing on the ostensible constitutionality of the reforms being voted en-bloc rather than one-by-one. Their position is that the supreme court needs to rule on the ambiguously worded Article 344 of the existing constitution which allows for the reform to be voted upon in either manner. They have conducted national surveys, held rallies, marches, press conferences – the normal course of events in a political campaign – missing the opportunity to actually debate the issues of the reform.

In the absence of any actual opposition criticism of substance to the reform, debates have been occurring within the Bolivarian bloc. The Partido Comunista de Venezuela (PCV) recently announced the proposed reforms they are in accordance with and suggested some reforms of their own (including reducing the voting age to 16), as has Patria Para Todos (PPT) (including the extension of potentially perpetual reelection to all elected officials). Trade Unions are pointing out the inconsistencies or vagueries in labor-related proposals. In the absence of properly ‘political’ leadership, business groups have made entreaties to the Asemblea Nacional to strengthen protections for private property in the face of the reform’s introduction of social and communal property-forms into the constitution. In short, not only is this moment deepening the democratic potentials of the Bolivarian Revolution, it is also exposing the extreme baselessness of opposition claims that the ‘dictatorship’ has stifled ‘civil society’ and ‘dissent.’

If the Reforma is rejected this December, it will have little to do opposition attempts to win over the population. Rather, it will ironically have come about as a result of the democratic energies unleashed by the revolution itself. (‘Only the Pueblo can save the Pueblo, Homeland, Socialism, or Death.’ The image of one fist pounding into another is that of the Unidad Popular de Venezuela, an ultra Bolivarian party headed by Lina ‘you can’t have a revolution without violence’ Ron. Ron has taken it upon herself to organize the ‘malandros’ (hoodlums, more or less) and outcasts of Venezuelan society to defend the Revolution by any means necessary.)

Evo Morales on Daily Show

2007-09-26T14:05:00.000-07:00

Here's the Youtube link.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=PVjhNWmslKg

there are also, as always, more goodies on all things Bolivian at :

www.boliviarising.blogspot.com

and

http://gringadiary.blogspot.com/

Evo takes a bit to warm up, but it is most certainly worth the wait...I've become a bit accustomed to hearing presidents admit that the problems of today have come about due to the excesses of capitalism, living here in Venezuela and all...but it was still strange to see it on US television.

Especially important was the point where Evo pointed out, after Stewart soft-balled him the (inevitable) question on Chávez and Fidel, that there are countries which send their soldiers out to heal people, and countries that send soldiers out to kill them...I really wanted him to then slap the table and yell 'boo-yaaaaah, beeeeeeeeyyyyyyaaaaaaaacccccchhhhhh!' but alas, presidentailism prevailed.

On a less happy note, Caracas dailies reported that the Movimento al Socialismo (MAS) -- the party Evo heads -- is considering junking the constitutional reform project, which has been stalled by a strong (and much less stupid, when compared to their Venezuelan counterparts) opposition and regional separatist movements.

On a completely different note:

2007-09-26T04:20:00.000-07:00

(graf from Oaxaca, summer 2006 reads: 'Turist, kill the bad governmnet. Support the APPO' the model is some homeless guy I paid 30 pesos to to provide perspective.)

File this under why the NYTimes IS NOT your friend...

Today's online edition features an 'article' by James C McKinley Jr. and Antonio Betancourt about recent attacks on natural gas lines by the 'shadowy' (sic.) Ejército Popular Revolucionario (EPR). The article, whose source is all but exclusively a federal prosecutor, alleges that the EPR is a glorified kidnapping ring before coming out with this gem:

"Mexican law enforcement officials say the guerrillas are using the men’s disappearance as a pretext to destabilize Mexico and set off a leftist revolution. The bombings, they theorize, probably stem from anger among radical leftists over the federal crackdown on violent political protests in Oaxaca last year and the outcome of the presidential election, in which the leftist candidate narrowly lost."

Okay, aside from the fact that i'm STILL scratching my head as to what exactly a 'leftist revolution' means (I mean, come on, the democratic canidates in the US practically say more of substance than that...), is the blatant smear on the APPO. This is is textbook media manipulation 101. By calling the protests of the summer and fall of 2006 'violent' one immediately conjures in their head the image of black masked anarchist testosterone machines duking it out with cops like a bunch of gringo highschool football players.

In other words, one gets the completely wrong impression.

What really happened was a group of teachers' unions, most prominently Section 22 of the SNTE (Sindicato Naciónal de Trabajadores Educativas), who were occupying the zocalo (or town square) were forcibly removed by the municipal police in June of 2006.

(The zocalo is traditionally the centerpoint of any Mexican city's political and economic culture, not to mention just a damn nice place to eat an ear of corn and watch children play -- traditionally in Mexico, when a group or party or assembly of aggrieved persons wishers their voices to be heard, they occupy the zocalo of their city. The zocalo in the center of the captial, D.F., for example, is occupied by parties of all stripes more often than it is clear enough to chase pigeons or take a photo beneath the impossibly large tricolor).

The teachers' unions, bolstered by sympathetic sectors of Oaxaqueño society at large, retook the zocalo, and kept the police completely out of the city center until November of 2006. In the course of the prolonged 'hot' and 'cold' conflict between what became the Asemblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca (APPO) and the Oaxaqueño and the Federal state, hundreds of APPO members have been injured by indiscriminate police violence and at least 15 have died (including a gringo journalist, which drew the attention of the mainstream US public for the first time in October).

This is of course a long line in misinformation and malandering on the part of the NYT. Less we forget its coverage of quasi leftist Mexican PRD candidate Andrés Manuel López Obredor during the last (fraudulent) elections in that country, its editorial line in support of the 2002 April coup in Venezuela, its repeated (and often fabricated) denunciations against Chávez written directly from the poshest sectors of Caracas...

Venezuelan Government Overrun with Stinking Hippies

2007-09-21T11:28:00.000-07:00

President Hugo Chávez raised eyebrows the world over when he announced recently that Venezuela would change the time here to bring the 'legal' day in line with the 'natural' one (obviously, when a country changes the clocks once or, say, twice annually, it MUST be run by some strange Kim Jong-il/Michael Jackson freak-o-dictator hybrid).

I was personally looking quite forward to the day, September 23, when i'd get to sleep-in an extra half hour, as I've still yet to completely readjust my internal clocks after a recent visit to the US.

However, news came from the Neverland Ranch that the time change would in fact NOT take place this sunday (dammit) but would be moved to be more in line with the upcoming solstice. Fucking hippies. I bet the next thing will be mandatory drum circles and the world's biggest burning man.

Misiones, State and Revolution, pt 2: Social Reproduction

2007-08-31T11:06:00.000-07:00

A while ago, I wrote an entry concerning the 5 ‘motors’ of the Bolivarian Revolution. More than an organizing thematic or a template for nifty billboards, these 5 motors are reminders of is so revolutionary about the Bolivarian project. Case in point: today's installment of my series of entries re-thinking the state through the misiones Bolivarianas.

One doesn't have to have read Foucault to appreciate that capitalism and the state (to the extent that the two can be separated) do not reproduce themselves through blatant and obvious shows-of-force. Indeed, the most effective use of power, its most efficient production, occurs when state and capital can mold willing subjects, cloak our subjection (meant in both registers--subjection as in being subject-to as well as in being created as a subject) in the robes of 'choice' and 'liberty' (ahh...liberalism!). While "capital-p-Power" certainly retains the capacity to use violent and immediate force (indeed, it remains defined by such expressions), the use of violence by the state all too often signals a weak point, or at the very least the incapacity of the state to rule through its ideological and consent regimes. (There is a reason, after all, that the first thing Pedro Carmona and the other coup-mongers did back in 2002 is send the military to the streets to kill off uppity Bolivarians).

All of this is to say that the Bolivarian Revolution carries with it an authentically revolutionary appreciation of the situation in Venezuela, and the conditions underwhich it can be successful. Transforming the Fourth Republic reality of Venezuela they have inherited requires more than rewriting the constitution, more than establishing laws that are more favorable to the majority of Venezuelans. While these reforms of the state are indeed necessary and provide the necessary space for actual change to occur, the process can only be successful in the reproduction of capital and state Power is disrupted. This is the long, hard work of revolution, without which the Bolivarian Revolution is doomed to being referred to as 'an experiment' by future generations of Venezuelans and others who want to create a better world.

In this regard, the 5 motors provide us with a roadmap of what is to be done, and the misiones allow us to make it happen.

The First Motor, the enabling laws, is nothing new to Venezuela or the region. They have been used by every president since the end of the Pérez-Jiménez dictatorship either to get rid of urban guerrillas through various constitutional and unconstitutional means (Raphael Caldera's first presidency, 1969-74), nationalize important sectors of the economy (Carlos Andrés Pérez’s first presidency, 1974-79) or privatize them (Andrés Pérez’s second time around [1989-1993]). The difference between these past examples and those of Chávez has been that Chávez is looking not to avert an immediate crisis (Caldera), hand out benefits in order to gain popularity (Andrés Pérez) or meet the demands of international financial institutions (Andrés Pérez again) but rather to bring about a future where these sorts of measures are no longer necessary.

The second motor, constitutional reform, looks to make the potentials of the 1999 constitution reality, and to deepen the revolutionary process.

The fourth, the new geometry of power, is an authentic decentralization. That is, whereas previous rounds of decentralization allowed for more formal democratic participation by allowing local and regional officials to be popularly elected (previously, they were appointed by the president), this more often than not just made for the localization of strong man politics and more intense nepotism. This motor calls for power to be exercised in the country outside of Caracas and Maracaibo. It replaces ‘liberal’ or ‘representational’ with protagonistic democracy.

The third and fifth motors are absolutely essential for understanding the role of education and social reproduction in the Bolivarian revolution.

Third and fifth motors

The third constituent motor of Bolivarian Socialism, ‘Moral y Luces’ emphasizes the necessity of education and revolutionary commitment in the construction of a new society. Like Che Guevara’s much toted ‘New Man’ of the post-revolutionary period, the Bolivarians recognize and emphasize that the world they have inherited and been formed by – the morality, instrumental rationality and social hierarchies of the fourth republic in Venezuela and neoliberal capitalism the world over – are neither desirable nor sustainable for the vast majority of the world’s human and non-human population. In order to change this reality, to make a new society, one needs to produce new men and women.

These new men and women, full social beings respected for more than their capacity to sell labor and die quietly are the propellants of the fifth motor, the explosion of communal power. This, the most radical of the motors, is the real withering of the state which is taking place more and more with every new project planned and executed ‘from below’ here in Venezuela. This is what is most threatening to the opposition and their masters in Washington. That is to say, that is to say, aside from the explicitly racial formation of anti-Chávez and anti-Chavista sentiment, the most threatening aspect of the Bolivarian Revolution is the intense dialectic being formed between the extreme poles of constituting and constituted power in Venezuela. Political power is increasingly tending towards Chávez or the base communities, all mediating institutions and positions are being pushed aside.
(Hence the seemingly asinine response of the opposition to Chávez’s constitutional reforms proposed recently. Rather than arguing that the proposals should be approved or disapproved en bloc as demanded by Chávez, the opposition is demanding the proposals be voted on one by one. Three important things here: first, they know they cannot win an outright victory against Chávez by voting the entire package down. Separating out the reforms allow them to put all their energy into attacking those reforms that are most noxious to their interests, such as redrawing the political-territorial map of the country or the end of an autonomous central bank. Secondly, debating the proposals one by one can perhaps buy them a bit of the appearance of rationality, which have heretofore been sorely lacking. Third and finally – and here members of Chávista-affiliated parties like Patria Para Todos (PPT) and PODEMOS have just as much at stake as opposicionistas – such a maneuver makes them and their function look necessary. If developments continue apace in Venezuela, with Chávez announcing x, y, or z reform which the population at large can either approve or disapprove, or with the Communal Councils of x, y, or z municipality directly designing policies or infrastructural development without having to go through layer upon layer of absentee ‘representatives’ or state bureaucrats, the National Assembly may become all but obsolete.)

The Educational Misiones: Robinson, Ribas, and Sucre

These three misiones, like misión Barrio Adentro, are perhaps the most well known of the Bolivarian missions. By 2005, Misión Robinson I, a basic literacy curriculum, succeeded in making Venezuela an ‘illiteracy free’ country, having sent hundreds of thousands of soldiers and volunteers into the most dangerous and underdeveloped parts of the country as teachers.Misión Robinson II extends part I’s scope to cover primary school subjects like math, geography, literature, science and social studies. Students are often ‘non-traditional’ in their age and background, being predominantly adults from the sectors of Venezuelan society traditionally excluded from educational opportunity.
Misión Ribas (in which I teach English in La Vega, a large barrio in the south western part of Caracas) offers secondary education to graduates of Misión Robinson. In addition to directly providing education to students and citizens, the misión provides resources and scholarships as their studies require more and more attention. Misión Sucre does similar things for higher education, pursing and guaranteeing access to private and public universities. Sucre also includes the foundation and development of the Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela in Caracas in 2003, though perhaps more importantly the misión includes the formation of more than 20 university level specialization and regional schools throughout the country.

Related to the concrete developments of the educational misiones has been the call by the government to end the entrance exam regimens for the nation’s private and public schools. It is telling, then, that the so-called ‘student movement,’ which discredited themselves as tools more quickly than any movement in the history of moving, has shifted the focus of their ire from the ‘closing’ of RCTV to Primero Justicia’s ‘Misión Vida’ and the demand for ‘autonomy’ of the university from the state in policy if not funding. This is classic class power at work. As the Bolivarians rightly point out, the ostensible ‘meritocracy’ of university admission is actually a rather robust filter that works to keep the majority of the poor out of universities. The fact that the revolution takes education so seriously (perhaps because, rumor has it, Chávez is up reading Negri long after I’ve fallen asleep watching illegal downloads of US-cooking shows) is both a testament of its recognition of the import of education to maintaining the current formation of class power as well as an absolutely necessary component of the building of a new society.

Misión Vuelvan Caras/Che Guevara

The terrain of Misión Che Guevara (formerly known as Misión Vuelvan Caras) is the very reproduction of the socio-political reality of Venezuela and the way it is and will be imbricated in global capitalist production. It not only argues that capitalism is fundamentally bad for human development, it seeks to produce actual and actualizable alternatives. The misión starts from an analysis of the role of poverty and unemployment in capitalism, human tolls it contends are the consequence of a social system that treats things like people and people like things. From the text of the misión’s mission statement:

“Unemployment and poverty are the main problems associated with capitalist production. The dependency produced by an import and mono-productive economy based in oil has made many nations forget the fruits of the earth and the creative capacity of their people, putting in place a market that only benefits the most powerful, pushing to the side small and medium sized productors.
“Misión Che Guevara is a program that celebrates the creative power of the people, through their protagonistic participation in the production of goods and services. In this way, the Bolivarian Government is pursuing a new model of development – from within the people – whose objective is to advance national production.”

That is, the new path initiated by Misión Che Guevara is one where the path of development emphasizes living labor, whereas capitalist development emphasizes commodity production. It furthermore extends this fundamental Marxist insight into the nature of capitalist society to the trap of monoproduction suffered by so many postcolonies in general and oil economies like Venezuela in particular. This is key. The Bolivarian revolution seek to redistribute the wealth of the oil economy, this much is obvious. However, the truly revolutionary task being undertaken is the redistribution of national production tout court – the transformation of what Venezuela ‘does.’ Without changing the composition of productive processes within the Venezuelan economy, the Bolivarian Revolution’s ability to provide for the poorest Venezuelans will be determined by the demands of the international market. More importantly, without changing what it means to work – that is, without changing the role of human labor power and creativity from its current position as an alienated commodity sold to an exterior force and inserted like so much machinery into the productive process to that of protagonist within the productive process, affirming rather than negating its creative capacity through human interaction – the Bolivarian Revolution will limit itself by failing to adequately diagnose the task it faces.

Thus, Misión Che Guevara emphasizes ‘endogenous development’ by which it means
“to develop all that we need to live from inside our society, without having to depend on other countries. [Endogenous Development’ is the social, cultural and economic transformation of our society, based in taking back our traditions, respect for our environment and egalitarian relations of production, allowing us to transform our natural wealth into products we can consume, distribute, and export to the outside world. It is also:
“To facilitate the ability of communities to develop the agricultural, industrial and touristic potentials of their regions.
“To incorporate persons who have up to this point in history been excluded from educational, economic, and social systems.
“To build productive networks where we all participate in an equality of conditions where we have access to knowledge and technology.
“To put the infrastructure of the state which have to this point been abandoned (state industries such as industrial cities, factories, idle lands, among others) at the service of the people in order to produce goods and services.
“It is, finally, to transform ourselves in order to transform society.”

‘Endogenous development’ thus not only means (finally) bucking the ‘why build it when you can buy it’ mentality of petro-states, it also means the revolutionary integration of economic and socio-cultural aspects of human life.
(One of my favorite examples from within Caracas: the predominantly youth-based artists' collective "Tiuna, el fuerte." And! they're online at www.eltiuna.org)
Projects which fall within the ambit of Misión Che Guevara range from artists’ collectives and youth hip-hop organizations in urban Caracas to agricultural centers in Aragua. Participants in the Misión also take part in other misiones – in the educational misiones as students or in Misión Arbol as organizers and workers, for example. The point that is always emphasized, however, is the trading of the egoistic pursuit of individual gain for the furtherance of the collective both in means and ends. Traditional wage labor structures are replaced by communally owned and directly democratic workplaces, cities transformed from what is increasingly a collection of privatized and fortified pods of nuclear families and smaller to sites which foster the participation of whole communities, and so forth.

The misiones in general, and these 4 (5, if you want to count both stages of Robinson separately) recognize that the terrain of contemporary anti-capitalism is the terrain of social reproduction. Leninist models of a dialectic between the seizure of state power and the distribution of power to workers' soviets, while important precedents, cannot obtain in Venezuela without significant adaptation. Work here is so informalized, so pre- and post- industrial (to the extent that such temporal descriptions edge on the absurd, and not just for 'industrial'--categories like the 'modern' and 'colonial' need to be used with rather heavy qualification in Venezuela if not the world over) that previous strategies and tactics of the class struggle should be seen as fellow travellers' examples rather than necessary antecedents and roadmaps. By centering so much energy and focus in 'the social,' the Bolivarian Revolution allows for a more fluid and expansive disruption of Capitalism in Venezuela, openning up more space for positive transformation and more occasions for victory celebrations.