8-22-05, 2:44 pm
If you only listen to what the Bush administration or the corporate media have to say about what is happening in Venezuela, you probably have a distorted view of that country. What you may not know is that since 1998 seven nationwide elections and referenda have shown that support for President Hugo Chavez and his Bolivarian Revolution has steadily grown. His movement’s reform programs, Constitutional revisions, and strong opposition to US policies in Latin America and elsewhere have seen increasing support.
Through more than six years of well-financed opposition (including millions from US sources), electoral fraud aimed at stealing elections from Chavez and his supporters, a corporate media war designed both to undermine his support and aid his ouster, the 2002 Bush-backed coup, and the US-funded recall referendum last year, President Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela have fought for an independent, anti-imperialist agenda. The goal is the basic transformation of capitalist, oligarchical Venezuela into one that belongs to the whole people.
Having wrestled political power from the ultra right oligarchs who, closely aligned with the US, were not above widespread human rights abuses, assassinations of leftist leaders, violent political repression of their opposition, and other fascist tactics to keep control over Venezuela’s oil sector, Chavez began his presidency with a reform of the Constitution in 1999. Chavez rose to popular acclaim as the leader of an anti-fascist movement in the military and a symbol of reclaiming Venezuelan sovereignty in the mid-1990s. He ran his campaign in 1998 on a reform platform that promised fundamental change for Venezuela.
The new Constitution, written and adopted by a National Assembly and Constitutional Assembly composed by a large majority of his supporters (elected by the people), expanded civil rights and protections, institutionalized the rights of Venezuela’s indigenous peoples, protected and broadened workers’ rights and deepened political democracy through direct participation rather than forcing people to rely solely on political parties that usually did not serve their interests.
The new Constitution also mandated the provision of basic services, including free education from the lowest levels through the university and free public health care. In sum, the new basic legal instrument of Venezuela was based primarily on forging a balance between freedom and justice, i. e. that one person or group’s freedom could not become another’s injustice.
Following the passage of the new Constitution, another national election was held as a result of new provisions that altered the terms of many of the national offices. President Chavez and a large majority of his supporters were elected or re-elected by wide margins in 1999. Chavez won with 60 percent of the vote. In the 2004 recall referendum, Chavez won 6 million of the ten million votes cast (a Venezuelan record for votes in a national election). Today, public opinion polls place his coalition’s popular support at about 70 percent.
To abide by the new Constitutional provisions that ordered the creation of basic services, Chavez wrote 49 laws in December 2001. These laws, among other things, ordered the restructuring of Venezuela’s publicly owned oil enterprise (PDVSA). The new laws required the repatriation of much of the profits from oil and brought direct control of the enterprise under his administration. Prior to this, despite the company's public status, the oligarchs who controlled it were the exclusive beneficiaries from oil produced and refined in Venezuela. Chavez’s goal was to use the returned funds as an economic basis for other social reforms.
Another of the 49 laws was the so-called land law. This law allowed the government to expropriate unused private land with compensation (a version of eminent domain) or tax unused private land. The expropriate land would be turned over to small farmers or agricultural cooperatives and collectives for their use. Additional tax money raised would subsidize their efforts.
The oil sector reform and the land law aroused the hate and venom of the anti-reform business elite who set the events in motion for the illegal US-backed April 2002 coup just weeks later.
Social missions, mainly initiated in the last two years, have been among the most significant new programs adopted by the Bolivarian Revolution. In line with the new Constitutional requirements of provision of basic services to the people, social missions cover different aspects of life in poor communities. Some of the missions are aimed at abstract concepts (though they have had a profound impact on real life) such as justice, rights and equality. Others are more directly concrete, such as the provision of education, food and nutrition, health care, jobs, protection of indigenous and national culture and more. For example, Mission Robinson is a program that has established hundreds of small schools in poor working class communities that teach basic education (language, math, reading, history) to all age groups. Missions Ribas and Sucre established free education at the secondary and university levels.
Other missions focus on health care. Mission Barrio Adentro is a network of small clinics, mainly in local neighborhood homes and staffed by medical experts, that provide primary care to local community members. Other levels of this program provide more complex medical services. In conjunction with Mission Milagro, the Venezuelan government has established over 100 technologically equipped, well-staffed people’s clinics in Caracas and other urban areas and aims to build as many as 500 more throughout the country. Barrio Adentro and Milagro are regarded as the foundation of Venezuela’s free national health care system in the making.
Both programs have been enormously aided by 14,000 volunteer Cuban doctors and medical experts who have staffed many of the new clinics and are training Venezuela’s new corps of doctors, nurses and medical technicians.
In addition to basic food needs, health care, and education, other Bolivarian missions fight poverty through economic development, establish worker cooperatives, factories, and fight unemployment, focus on sustainable development, rebuild the crumbling homes of the urban poor, and draw a closer link between the military and the people, forming a people-oriented and democratic army. (This latter point is crucial as the US has up until 2002 had very strong influence over Venezuelan military leaders, a fact that played a significant role in the 2002 coup.)
But Chavez regards Venezuela’s national mission as more than its own internal development. The Bolivarian Revolution is sweeping Latin America. Since the illegal US-backed coup in 2002 (which was overturned by the will of the people), the Chavez administration called for the investment of billions into a Venezuela-based television network called Telesur that has been described as “Latin America’s CNN.” Because the corporate media in Venezuela and globally has been overtly hostile Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution, going so far as to support the illegal coup, supporters of the Telesur initiative say it will bring balance and truth to reporting in Latin America.
Telesur is only one ingredient in the Bolivarian project of integrating Latin America. Chavez has long been outspoken in his opposition to so-called free trade agreements, especially the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). Critics of this deal, which has been pushed heavily by the Bush administration, see it as spreading the worst effects of NAFTA to all of the Western Hemisphere. Countries like Venezuela would see increases of low-wage foreign-owned production in their countries at the expense of local industry and agricultural production.
The Bolivarian missions would be jeopardized as FTAA would force economic emphasis and public subsidies away from local and internal development to the import/export sector of the economy – the sector with the least direct benefits for the working class and small farmers. For less economically viable countries without Venezuela’s oil production capacity, complete submission to an export economy would ruin local production and enrich foreign corporate interests. Mexico, despite being an oil producing country, is a prime example of the negative effects of free trade
In addition to sour economic effects, FTAA would also eliminate or seriously undermine workers’ rights protections codified by the Bolivarian Revolution.
To counter FTAA, the Chavez administration has proposed the Bolivarian Alternative for Latin America (ALBA) as a means of integrating the Latin American economy. The basic concept of this agreement is that trade should be based on comparative advantage, economic cooperation, hemispheric consensus and democratic principles not on the needs of a handful of transnational corporations or the interests of one dominant country.
More than that, ALBA is meant to counter the hegemony of US-dominated trading blocs. It is designed to extend the concept of the Bolivarian social missions internationally and, contrary to the basic structure of neoliberalism that denies the provision of basic services, would in fact insist on it. In essence, ALBA is what opponents of “free trade” call “fair trade” on steroids.
But Chavez’s opposition to FTAA and neoliberalism isn’t just negative criticism of policies emanating from Washington. And aside from his principled stand against political and economic policies that are meant to subvert his country’s sovereignty, its right of self-determination and free development, and the needs of its people, Chavez sees Venezuela’s mission as an international one as well.
In a speech delivered to the Anti-imperialist Tribunal, a people’s court that has indicted US imperialism for crimes against humanity, in Caracas earlier this month as part of the activities of the 16th World Festival of Youth and Students, Chavez denounced Bush’s foreign policy. Chavez called Bush Mr. Danger, playing on the title of a novel by Venezuelan novelist and former leftist president Romulo Gallegos, titled Dona Barbara.
But, Chavez added, “I’ve come not to accuse a single person, but the imperial logic of the US.”
Venezuela’s mission, and that of all the progressive forces of the world, isn’t just to oppose Bush. “We must save the world,” Chavez exhorted his multinational audience, “because the world is in peril, the world is in danger.”
The choice we face is between US hegemony and survival. More specifically, the choice, Chavez added, “is between socialism and barbarism.”
“Either we dismantle US imperialism or US imperialism will do away with this planet; this is the dilemma.”
But the struggle against imperialism isn’t intended to be a direct military battle with the US. Far from it; despite provocations and military posturing by the Bush administration in Colombia and other parts of the world. In fact, Chavez sees the main fight as an ideological struggle against the erroneous notion that US-dominated neoliberal policies and structures are the only means of bringing economic development.
It is a battle against the tradition of US intervention in Latin America and the idea that Latin America is incapable of independent and sovereign development. US imperialism, like all systems of empire, is based on the distortion of human nature as stupid, incapable, and evil requiring a pure group of elites to control the whole destiny. Chavez thundered, “Let’s demonstrate that human beings are better than cockroaches.”
Victory will not require military might, but the unity of the peoples and nations against imperialism, the formation of viable alternatives that create cooperation and the free development of each nation as a condition for the development of all. “The peoples of the world,” Chavez insisted, “conscious and united, can topple empires.”
--Joel Wendland is the managing editor of Political Affairs and can be reached at jwendland@politicalaffairs.net.
