Venezuela’s
‘National Strike’ has been going on for over a month.
The opposition, who attempted a military coup in April 2002,
has attempted to shut down the economy, and especially the oil
industry, of the country in order to try to oust the elected
government of Hugo Chavez. In
response, a movement of supporters of the government’s program has
come out, as they did in April, to defend the government, the
constitution, and its reforms.
The reforms are part of the ‘Bolivarian
Process’. Named after
‘the liberator’ of Latin America, Simon Bolivar, the Bolivarian
movement aims at redistribution of the wealth of the country for the
benefit of its poor majority-- including land reform and reform of the
state-owned oil company-- and greater Latin American integration.
The Bolivarian movement has also opened up space for democratic
participation with constitutional reforms and assistance for community
media, community self-organization, co-operative economic projects,
and more.
This is an immensely popular program with the
poor majority, but it enrages elites in Venezuela and in the United
States. The media in
particular have been active in presenting the government as
anti-democratic and in distorting the popularity and strength of the
opposition and their strike. The
Venezuela Solidarity Group (VSG) based in San Francisco is one group
from the US that has sent its second delegation to meet with
Venezuelans and see what’s really happening on the ground, with a
view to building solidarity between movements in Venezuela and the US.
Diana Valentine is one of the activists on the delegation.
She was interviewed by phone, in Caracas.
The strike in Venezuela has been going
on for quite some time. Is
it growing in size and strength, or is it failing?
Is it shutting down the country as is being reported?
The majority of people here think that the notion
that there even is a general strike is laughable.
The graffiti on the walls says so, with lines like:
“This is the strike of the rich”.
The media uses all kinds of tactics to make the
strike and the opposition seem bigger than it is.
One of the trademarks of the opposition demonstrations has
become pot-banging. They
have recorded pot-banging on CDs, and play it on loudspeakers, to make
it sound like there’s more pot-banging going on than there actually
is.
But even though the country hasn’t been shut
down, there are effects that you can see.
It’s difficult to get gasoline.
The gas stations have military guards in front of them.
There is a bank strike starting this week, and the announcement
of that caused a bit of a run on the bank.
The poor were hurt the worst, as always, but
things have been getting better.
The lines for gasoline are much shorter than they were.
But Brazil has donated some oil, and the government has gone to
great lengths to provide provisions to prevent hunger.
The main sectors that are still on strike are
things like McDonald’s, Burger King, and the corporate chains in
malls. These are closed,
but those who could afford to go shopping at these establishments are
mostly of the class that supports the opposition in any case.
The poor shop at the markets, in the small shops, and those are
still open. The beer and
cigarette industries are on strike, so it’s hard to get these
things. But the Chavistas
have adapted. The latest
chant has been: “No queremos cerveza, queremos una nueva PDVSA”—“We
don’t want beer, we want a new oil company”.
We’ve been telling our hosts and counterparts that a strike
in the United States that shut down beer, cigarettes, and McDonald’s
would be a political victory.
On the street, people are out.
Even the opposition is going about their business.
So you don’t think that this general
strike could force Chavez from power?
What is the opposition’s plan?
Could they overthrow Chavez this way?
No. The
strike has been most felt in the oil sector and even there, the effect
has been an increase in activism around the state oil company, the PDV.
There are forums, people educating themselves constantly,
around the oil company. They
are on to the opposition, and if the strike is making them suffer,
they know who is responsible. The
public calls it for what it is: an attack on Chavez and on the basic
services needed by the Venezuelan people.
It’s certainly not turning them away from Chavez.
The sentiment described to us from the poor
neighbourhoods is—we might hunger, we might thirst, but we still
support Chavez. This
process, this government, gives us hope.
People here have suffered poverty for so long, they have been
disempowered for so long, and they know for certain that the
opposition has no intention of changing that.
They have faith that the Bolivarian movement, in what they call
‘el proceso’, will change that.
There is no false idealism that it will happen overnight.
They are committed to it for the long haul.
The danger though is that the opposition could
aggravate itself. Today,
the poor are suffering but their belief in ‘el proceso’, the
process, means that they are working patiently, preparing.
Mutual aid and co-operative organization have helped
communities share their oil resources more efficiently.
The opposition is arming itself and working itself into a
frenzy, which is what happened in April and just last week on January
3, when the mayor of Caracas, Alfredo Pena, sent his police to kill 2
Chavistas. The media lies
and repeats the lie that these were opposition members who were
killed, but everyone knows that they were Chavistas.
The military is pro-Chavez.
Some civilians are armed as well, and angry.
But the public is fully aware that the opposition is trying to
bait them into a violent confrontation and provoke a ‘state of
siege’, a possible intervention, and a repeat of April 2002.
The general tone is one of trying to maintain the peace.
Chavez called for this in a speech on January 5.
We met with a government specialist on social
management, Jesus Salazar, at the Palacio Nacional.
He says that the Bolivarians recognize that this is a long-term
project. They know
Venezuela’s problems are centuries old.
They know the opposition is blaming Chavez for problems they
(they elite) have created.
What are some of the effects of the
‘Bolivarian’ reforms that you’ve seen?
One of the more amusing commercials the
opposition shows on the TV has a white screen.
The voiceover says: “Take the next 10 seconds to think about
what Chavez has done for you in the past 4 years.”
The clock ticks off ten seconds, and the voiceover returns to
say: “Nothing, right?”
But there has been more housing built in the past
3 years than in the 20 years before that.
Since Chavez took office, there are 1 million more children in
school. One thing that
many of the poor will think of during that commercial is the
difference between having a home and not having one.
There are basic needs and rights that are addressed and planned
for: housing, health, food, water, but there’s also an even more
important psychological element.
Being here you get the feeling that the way the
Bolivarian movement describes it—‘el proceso’—is exactly
right. They are in the
middle of a process of organizing themselves.
We know about the marches.
But it’s difficult to describe as someone from North America,
where the left is divided and quite alienated from the public, this
process where political action and social awareness are integrating
themselves into daily life.
It isn’t just about tens of thousands of people
in the street, or even the constitutional changes that empower people.
In everyday encounters there’s this spirit of change—after
greeting each other on the street people will immediately start
talking about the projects they’re organizing, all the organizing
that they’re doing, studying the constitution, establishing
co-operatives.
This started with Chavez’s own attempted coup
in 1992. To the public,
Chavez has represented an opportunity to actually utilize the
government to change their own lives.
The 80% that live in poverty knew frustration, disempowerment.
The Chavez government gave them an opportunity to meld their
anger with an opportunity to act.
An organizer with the Women’s Popular Circles (“Circulos
Femeninos Populares”) told me “Before, politics was a dirty word.
We had no faith in any of it.”
How dependent are these movements on
the government and on Chavez? Has
the government been devolving power to these ‘Bolivarian circles’?
Chavez is a leader who is looked up to.
But the people who went out in millions to bring him back
didn’t do that for love of Chavez, but for the movement, their own
movement, for the power they felt they had won.
When the opposition ousted Chavez, they felt they had ousted
the people as well. With
his humble, indigenous and afro-Venezuelan roots, they feel that he
really represents them.
In that sense it is a government of the people.
People talk about it that way—that Chavez has made it
possible for them to reclaim their power.
They view the constitution as a tool that belongs to them.
They describe participation and cooperation, the people leading
themselves. The movement
is much more than a political party, and it’s much more than Chavez.
These might sound like anarchist slogans, but the people deny
that they’re influenced by anarchism or communism—the movement is
coming from them. Chavistas
say they are are too busy working to study and adopt the labels of
academic circles from North America or Europe.
We visited a co-operative called ‘Fuerza y
Poder’ in a very poor neighbourhood called Pinto Salinas.
For many of the 30 members, this was their first job.
Many were quite young. The
co-operative’s work is maintaining and renovating a city park.
But they also co-ordinate marches.
They have a motor brigade, and do security at marches,
emergency transportation at demonstrations.
Some members are assigned with helping others complete school,
or help the children of members stay in school.
The group, like every group, has a contingent working to
analyze the constitution. People
actually wave the constitution at demonstrations.
The co-operative receives government funding, but
you can see that the group is organized, it makes proposals to the
government: it is not a paternalistic relationship.
The government is able to fund co-operatives like these because
it has cut a lot of bureaucracy.
The number of bureaucrats was cut in half and the workers’
salaries raised threefold. There
are no bosses, no overhead costs in the bureaucracy, so the government
is able to fund a lot more small projects like these.
How much of the government is against Chavez?
The military is overwhelmingly pro-Chavez.
You’ll see off-duty soldiers at the pro-Chavez
demonstrations. There is
a small (though highly publicized) opposition faction in the military.
The situation in the police is more complicated.
Caracas is divided into boroughs.
Some of these are pro-Chavez, and the police are pro-Chavez.
In Libertador municipality, for example, you have Chavista
police who the poor aren’t afraid of.
At the funeral of the two murdered Chavistas there were police
from Libertador, who were in uniform and warmly welcomed.
The Chavistas were murdered by Alfredo Pena’s police, who
have jurisdiction to operate in any of the boroughs.
Pena is mayor of the entire city of Caracas.
He’s also a rabid member of the opposition.
Predictably, government bureaucracy is the
slowest to change. Members
of the Congress and ministries are still opposition.
This is inhibiting the implementation of the reforms.
Richard Gott in a recent article in the
Guardian suggests that the opposition is partly motivated by ‘racist
rage’. Do you see a
racial element in this conflict?
Absolutely.
Venezuela is a country of many, many skin tones.
But at the funeral for the murdered Chavistas, the tones were
on the darker side. The
opposition leaders, on the other hand, are primarily white.
It’s not a clear-cut line.
There are some in the upper-middle class who are quite dark and
anti-Chavez. It’s not
sharp. But the
description of Venezuela as a country with a majority that’s poor,
brown, black, or indigenous and an elite that’s wealthy and white,
is accurate. Chavez is
proud of his indigenous and African roots.
When the opposition press attacks him, they use words like
‘savage’. He
represents the majority, and the majority understands that when the
opposition demonstrates its contempt and hatred for Chavez, it’s
also demonstrating its contempt and hatred for them.
The new constitution includes indigenous rights
right in its preamble. Chavez,
and ‘el proceso’, give the poor, the victims of institutionalized
racism, a voice they’ve never had before.
The elites respond by lashing out.
It’s a process of slow, low-intensity, so-far largely
bloodless, class warfare.
Diana
Valentine is an activist based in San Francisco.
Justin Podur is a writer and volunteer for ZNet. To reach
the Venezuela Solidarity group, email venezuelasolidarity@hotmail.com
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