Lee Sustar, Caracas
Venezuela's poor met the news of Hugo Chavez’s referendum victory with joy. Thousands of people from the nearby barrio of Catia jammed the streets around Miraflores, the presidential palace, just as they did in April 2002 to defy — and defeat — a US-backed military coup.
This time, the scene was sheer celebration, with demonstrators dancing in the streets to the music of popular salsa bands. Young people crammed onto the back of pickup trucks.
The numbers in the streets were still growing when Chavez addressed the crowd from the palace balcony, shortly after 4am on August 16. Perhaps the biggest cheer came when he declared, “This is a blow to the centre of the White House”.
“This is a victory for the people”, said Maria Luisa Delgado, a retired teacher, as she and a friend prepared to join a celebration in the midst of opposition territory — the upper middle-class suburb of San Antonio de los Altos. “We have real democracy in Venezuela, participatory and proactive.”
With 94% of the votes counted, the vote count for Chavez was nearly 5 million — an increase of more than 1 million votes over his total in the 2000 presidential election. The opposition had won 3.6 million Yes votes in a turnout initially estimated at 80%. The huge turnout in the barrios made it clear that Chavez still has the backing of the 80% of the population that lives under the poverty line.
In a country that, according to one recent study, has more social inequality than Brazil or South Africa, the wealthy have despised Chavez all along for raising the expectations of the poor. Today, they hate him even more intensely for delivering on his promises, with a series of anti-poverty programs paid for by rising revenues from oil exports.
The US, meanwhile, sees Chavez’s nationalism as a dangerous break with the free-market “neoliberal” policies of the so-called Washington consensus. In a period in which popular rebellions against intolerable economic and social conditions have overturned governments across South America, Chavez is bidding to become a regional leader.
Plus, his regular denunciations of US imperialism have always infuriated US officials — and today carry added weight because of the crisis of the US occupation in Iraq. All this is reason enough for Washington to undermine Chavez.
And since Venezuela is the number one exporter of oil to the US, the situation was even more embarrassing for Washington: Chavez not only regularly pokes Uncle Sam in the eye, he does it with pocketfuls of US dollars. That’s why the US backed the military coup against Chavez in April 2002 — euphemistically referred to as a “temporary alteration of constitutional order” on the US State Department website — and immediately recognised the new government of the coup-makers.
But the opposition immediately showed its true dictatorial colours — provoking a popular rebellion that toppled the new regime within two days and forced the military to allow Chavez’s triumphant return. Now, if a report in the Spanish newspaper El Mundo is accurate, the CIA concluded that Chavez’s victory in the recall vote was inevitable — and that Washington’s spies had met with its Latin American counterparts in Chile to discuss Chavez’s alleged plans to spread his “Bolivarian Revolution” to neighbouring countries.
This, of course, is nonsense — but it provides a pretext for future efforts to isolate and destabilise Venezuela. That will be harder now, however.
El processo
Chavez's supporters describe the political changes in Venezuela as “el proceso” — shorthand for the Bolivarian revolutionary process. “El proceso” — which Chavez called a “third way” between capitalism and “failed” communism — began haltingly when he took office in 1999.
The high-profile Plan Bolivar 2000 put the military in charge of several anti-poverty programs, such as repair of homes, schools and public buildings; medical aid; and food distribution. More far-reaching was land reform.
In a country where 70% of agricultural land is owned by just 3% of the population, Chavez’s government turned over state-owned land to 130,000 families in 2003 (takeover of private land has been authorised, but not implemented). Urban land reform gave property deeds to families in poor neighbourhoods where community organisations organised to request them.
The late 1990s recession, a collapse in oil prices, and capital flight from Venezuela soon limited funds for reform, however. With the economy shrinking, the opposition was able to mobilise a massive anti-Chavez march on April 11, 2002 — which served as the springboard for the failed military coup.
The next blow was the oil industry strike called by the Venezuelan labour federation, the CTV. Oil workers and the military were able to break what amounted to a lockout, but the economy was devastated, shrinking 8.9% in 2002 and another 9.4% last year.
The Economist magazine smugly predicted Chavez’s eventual downfall. But the spike in world oil prices — thanks in part to the US war and occupation of Iraq — has changed all that. The Venezuelan economy is on track to grow by as much as 12% this year.
This allowed Chavez to launch new reform projects, known as “missions”, to bypass the inefficient government bureaucracy and shore up his political support. The programs include subsidised food markets for the poor; medical care in rural areas and urban slums provided by Cuban doctors; and greater access to higher education.
The missions were key to mobilising countless delegations from the barrios for a mammoth pro-government rally August 8 in Caracas — estimated at over 1 million strong.
“The victory of Chavez means that Venezuela is finally coming to use its riches for the well-being of the people”, said 70-year-old Maria Carmen.
Confrontations ahead
The results of Venezuela’s referendum are a victory for everyone opposed to neoliberalism and US imperialism — in Venezuela and around the world. But the polarisation of Venezuelan society reflected in the recall vote won’t be resolved by the election results.
Washington’s intervention will continue. Venezuelan big business and the wealthy may hanker for a military coup like Chile in 1973 — but the armed forces remain loyal to Chavez, so they will have to build an electoral opposition and bide their time.
In an interview after the referendum results were announced, Roland Denis, a former vice-minister for local planning in the Chavez government and an activist with the popular organisations, said that the struggle will intensify after the celebrations are over.
“This is a process that is immensely majoritarian, sustained fundamentally, of course, by the popular classes, and [the election results] show their force”, said Denis, who was reportedly forced from office for being too left wing. “It’s evident, however, that revolutionaries can’t rely on an electoral plan to construct a new society.”
He added that there is a “big contradiction between the policy of the process and its program” — tensions between leading elements who want to slow down the changes, and those who want to break with all limitations and “deepen” the process. This reflects the fact that Chavez has so far been able to balance antagonistic classes — business and the wealthy on one side, workers and the poor on the other.
As in previous elections in Venezuela, the recall vote channelled that conflict into the ballot box. Now, Chavez’s recall victory, along with economic growth and the anti-poverty missions, will raise popular demands for deeper change.
That can bring workers and the poor into struggle for their own interests — faster and more extensive land reforms, rebuilding the traditional health care system, higher wages, more jobs. Such struggles will be met with ferocious resistance by business and the wealthy — and force the Chavez government to choose sides.
In the midst of those battles, the debate over the nature and direction of the revolutionary process in Venezuela will develop — and have an enormous impact across Latin America and around the world.
[Abridged from Socialist Worker, weekly paper of the US International Socialist Organization. Visit <http://www.socialistworker.org>.]
From Green Left Weekly, August 25, 2004.
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