By Daniel Hellinger
The new left Causa R party emerged from elections on December 5 as a major force in Venezuela. From merely three deputies and no senators, official results indicated that the labour-based party would claim one-fifth of the seats in each chamber of Congress. This proportion may grow, depending upon how charges of tampering and fraud are resolved.
The Causa presidential candidate, Andres Velasquez, a former steelworker, captured nearly 22% of the vote, finishing fourth. The winner was Rafael Caldera, an elder statesman with a reputation for honesty, who had bolted from one of the two major parties, the Christian Democratic COPEI.
Like Velasquez, Caldera sought the votes of those wishing to repudiate corruption and the orthodox, neo-liberal austerity policies, which are very much associated in the public mind with COPEI and the Democratic Action (AD) party, the largest and most significant party in Venezuelan politics for the last 50 years. The results broke the hegemonic grip on politics previously exercised by AD and COPEI, who together controlled 80% of the seats in the prior Congress and had won every prior presidential election since 1958.
The AD campaign was burdened by public revulsion for former President Carlos Andres Perez. Perez sparked riots shortly after his inauguration in February 1989 by announcing his intention to sign an agreement with the International Monetary Fund despite having campaigned in a populist style. Two military coups in 1992 failed to dislodge the unpopular Perez but induced an alarmed Congress to remove him from office in May 1993 through a dubious constitutional manoeuvre. Perez, as well as his predecessor in office, still faces corruption charges.
In its ideology and its relationship to unions, neighbourhood associations, religious base communities and other social movements, Causa R resembles parties such as the Workers Party in Brazil and the Democratic Revolutionary Party of Cuauhtmoc Cardenas in Mexico. The party presented a program, "A Political Project for a New Venezuela", envisioning "an accelerated and urgent process of rectification" based upon "a radical cultural transformation and formulation of a productive revolution".
It calls for democratisation of local government, media, and unions; an overhaul of the relationship between the government and the state-owned oil company to improve the latter's competitiveness; tax reform; and many other wide-ranging proposals.
Origins
Causa R originated as one of several projects launched in the 1970s by former guerillas in the aftermath of an unsuccessful attempt to replicate the Cuban revolutionary experience. Unlike other leftist parties, including the Movement toward Socialism (MAS), which backed Caldera lost its place as the largest leftist party in the recent election, Causa R has eschewed democratic centralism as a principle of internal organisation. Rather than view itself as a stereotypical vanguard party, the Causa presents itself as a party composed of workers, aiming to bring workers themselves into power.
The Venezuelan political system shares many characteristics with the Mexican system, with a major variation: two parties, AD and COPEI, rather than one, have exercised hegemony over civil society, allocating smaller portions of influence to others, including MAS. The first challenge to this system emerged in the heavy industrial region of Ciudad Guayana, in the east, in the form of demands for democratic control of the unions, dominated by AD.
Velasquez emerged as a leader of this movement by leading a reform slate to victory in the local steelworkers' union, the largest in the country. However, the new leadership was removed from office in 1982 by the national Confederation of Venezuelan Workers, under control of AD.
Velasquez and his colleagues were fired from their jobs to make them ineligible to run again, but in subsequent elections the reform movement won again, proving that it did not revolve around the leadership of a single individual. Meanwhile, Velasquez and his party moved from union politics into the wider municipal arena, utilising contacts built with other social sectors in the course of labour struggles.
Velasquez was elected governor of the state of Bolivar in 1989, and was re-elected in 1992 with over 70% of the vote. The Causa appeal widened as women's groups, Catholic base communities, environmentalists, neighbourhood associations and other groups, though still suspicious of parties, found it an alternative to the traditional parties, including MAS.
The party began to attract support from the Venezuelan middle class for its honest stewardship over social and economic services, whose function had become more vital as neo-liberal economic policies, the debt and declining oil prices ravaged its standard of living. The Causa even attracted some business support by breaking the system which restricted government contracts to a few cronies of the party apparatus.
Except for a few barrios in the capital, Caracas, the Causa had little organisational base elsewhere in the 1980s, but the success in Bolivar caused many to examine it more closely. A stunning victory by the Causa candidate in the elections for Caracas mayor and city council in December 1992 suggested it would be a force in the elections, but few could have expected such an explosive growth in its appeal.
For refusing to make alliances with other leftist parties as well as with AD and COPEI, the Causa has been labelled sectarian by some. However, the key to the success of Causa R has been its ability to present itself as an option capable of generating leadership, morale and solutions to problems not through preconceived formulas but through the involvement of large numbers of people in different social arenas under the umbrella of a political party respectful of the autonomy of organisations in civil society.
Now, however, the Causa must find a way to conduct itself as a party with a quota of power without appearing to be merely playing the game repudiated in the recent elections. For example, there is significant evidence that much of the Causa vote was siphoned off through electoral chicanery. In one instance, sanitation workers discovered hundreds of ballots in a land fill after observing several army trucks dumping bags and boxes in the area. Causa officials are claiming that an honest count would result in it gaining 70 seats in the lower house, establishing it as the largest force in Congress.
By complaining loudly and insistently in the media and by organising popular protests in several areas of the country, the party has been vulnerable to charges that it is disturbing the political scene for its own narrow purposes. On one television program a reporter asked the mayor of the municipality of Caroni whether the noisy Causa protests were not unsettling to a country looking for social peace. To which the mayor, Clemente Scotto, responded, "Senorita, do you think peace with corruption is going to cure our troubles?"
Success brings new challenges. Although there are sectors of the military sympathetic to Causa R, much of the high command is compromised with the system of corruption and fearful that younger officers, many of whom participated in the two coup attempts of 1992, may gravitate toward the party. Internally, the party must find a formula for building an organisation capable of purging opportunists and permitting new leadership to emerge without losing the confidence of social movements suspicious of party discipline.
The surge in support for the Causa should be placed in a context of encouraging electoral results in Italy, New Zealand, Germany and other parts of the world. The common factors in these advances seem to be popular revulsion at the greed and corruption associated with the unbridled capitalism and the realisation by many on the left that participatory democracy, not an immediate leap into statist socialism, now thoroughly in disrepute after the collapse of Soviet communism, is the most effective way to appeal to such a public.
[Daniel Hellinger is author of Venezuela: Tarnished Democracy (1991), a general survey of Venezuelan politics and history.]