The significance of Venezuela’s and Ecuador’s nationalizations

During a January 10 swearing-in ceremony in Caracas, Venezuela’s re-elected president, Hugo Chavez, announced plans to nationalize CANTV, the country’s national telephone company, which was privatized in 1991, together with the power industry. He also announced plans to increase state control over the country’s oil fields.

“All of that which was privatized, let it be nationalized,” declared Chavez. “We’re heading toward socialism, and nothing and no one can prevent it,” he added, declaring at one point, “I’m very much for [Leon] Trotsky’s line—the permanent revolution.”

In Ecuador, Rafael Correa assumed power on January 15 in a ceremony in which he announced plans to initiate a “radical revolution” and declared his adherence to the “new socialism” which he said was spreading throughout the region. He has threatened to limit payments on Ecuador’s crushing foreign debt and renegotiate foreign oil contracts. He has also threatened to close down the US military air base at Manta.

Speaking to an audience that included 17 heads of state, including Chavez, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega (the Sandinista leader was himself inaugurated just days earlier), Bolivia’s Evo Morales and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, Correa declared, “The citizens’ revolution has just begun, and nothing and nobody can stop it.”

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