H 23°, L 4° | Tomorrow: 
H 21°, L 6°Last week, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez suffered his first major defeat at the ballot box. Voters rejected a set of constitutional reforms that the U.S. press described as the penultimate stage in Chavez's plot to become president for life. However, Chavez lost, and unlike more authoritarian nations (think close to home), Chavez did not have a compliant supreme court to fix the results. Early Sunday morning, the man who many already consider a dictator conceded defeat and congratulated his opposition. "Ambition," Shakespeare said, "should be made of sterner stuff." However, the vote was a blow to the Venezuelan Left and throws several problems of the Chavismo movement into sharper relief.
While the U.S. press, ever vigilant stenographers of the American government, accused Chavez of trying to make a power grab, many of the referendum's proposals were enviable. Far from establishing a dictatorship, the reforms would have established public financing of political campaigns, lowered the voting age from 18 to 16 and guaranteed gender parity in government and political parties. The referendum proposed to reduce the work week to 36 hours, provide free university education and outlaw discrimination against gays and lesbians. If this is "Chavismo," we could use a little here in the United States.
However, Chavez also made a strategic blunder that clearly alienated his base. In last year's presidential election Chavez won 63 percent of the vote with a 74 percent turnout, but 3 million of his supporters abstained from the referendum vote. Many Chavistas expressed ambivalence or hostility to a set of reforms that would expand Chavez's power, including lifting a restriction on presidential term limits and making it harder to have a recall election. Chavez did not improve the situation by personalizing the vote, saying "It's black and white: A vote against the reform is a vote against Chavez." Not wanting to vote against Chavez, but not convinced to vote "yes," many Venezuelans stayed home.
Chavez's decision to mix progressive reforms with increased executive powers into one referendum confused many casual observers, and the explanation has to do with the various powers acting on Venezuela. On one hand, Chavez is rightfully afraid of a right-wing backlash against his program. In 2002, a coup attempt supported by Venezuelan capitalists and the Bush administration briefly ousted Chavez from power and abolished the legislature. Just before the referendum, the Venezuelan government intercepted a CIA memo from the American embassy, detailing a plan called "Operation Pliers" to destabilize the vote.
However, Chavez has avoided a direct confrontation with Venezuelan capitalists. So far, he has paid for all his social programs with revenue from the state oil company, not through higher taxes on the rich. "We have no plans to eliminate the oligarchy, Venezuela's bourgeoisie," he said in June. Unfortunately, the oligarchy has declined to extend the same courtesy to Chavez. Thus, Chavez's only option is to try to consolidate more power in the event he must defend himself from another coup attempt. In a catch-22, these measures have infuriated and remobilized the right wing. Ultimately, Chavez cannot resolve the conflict between his social programs and capitalism. Just as they defeated the 2002 coup attempt, Venezuelan workers must organize independently to defend the socialist movement.
In the near future, the showdown with the oligarchy Chavez has tried to avoid may arrive. Venezuelan food companies have been withholding their products from stores, and there are shortages of milk, sugar, beef, chicken and other essentials. The food industry intends to punish Chavez for price controls that have eaten away at their profits. These tactics have a chilling similarity to the economic sabotage that occurred before the 1973 coup in Chile that killed socialist president Salvador Allende and brought fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet to power. If Chavez is unable or unwilling to fix the shortages, the Venezuelan workers may take matters into their own hands and expropriate the relevant factories and farms. However, due to a lack of a unified socialist party outside of Chavez's United Socialist Party of Venezuela, this task may be difficult or impossible.
With the capitalists creating food shortages, a slowly growing opposition and the CIA prowling in the shadows, Venezuelan workers are in for a fight. This coming crisis reveals the limitations of Chavez's plan to impose socialism from the top. As the socialist president of a capitalist country, Chavez cannot stop the capitalists from sabotaging the economy, as they are doing through the food shortage. Also, as the referendum revealed, his attempts to defend himself from another coup can give ammunition to the right wing to paint him as a dictator. Only the workers, who have the ability to strike and expropriate their workplaces from the owners, can fend off this assault. Only time will tell whether they possess the will and organization to do so.
Paul Pryse
([email protected]) is a senior majoring in journalism. He is also a member of the International Socialist Organization.
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Dude you are such a moron!! Someday you will read the crap you wrote ain college and just cringe. Stop writing just go back to milking cows.
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Great Article!!
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We have some friends from Venezuala. They are now in the US (legally) trying to become citizens because of the likes of Chavez. Hugo is proof that one can rise to power if he can find a way to make the majority of citizens do nothing for a living. He has found a way to take over the oil wealth and distribute it. There is a cost, which is oppression of free thought and opposing points of view (sounds like the ISO).
They have lost many citizens with technical backgrounds, they have lost many of the productive members of their society because of his policies (they have left the country as our friends have or are in prison for dissent). If and when their oil money dries up, they will be nothing. He has run the country into the ground, but can afford to do so with the now state run oil industry acting as the cash cow.
Socialism may work in a society where there is a resource in global demand, such as oil (remember, the resource will go away in time). In a society that relies on human productivity, socialism is a destructive force and has proven so time and time again.
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Really stupendous article, Paul.
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Chavez thought about declaring victory in the referendum before the Venezuelan military threatened a coup. Instead, he changed the results to make the loss look close.
And if you think that the United States is more authoritarian than Venezuela, you’re more than welcome to move to Caracas.
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After studying sociology at the UW, one thing that always bothered me in all of the research that compares U.S. policies versus other countries’ is that you have to compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges. So great, all these European countries offer such great benefits and health insurance and assistance for mothers, but nobody else’s population is as diverse as ours. We have so many people at all levels of the economic and ethnic spectra that policies that work in other countries just wouldn’t be feasible here. The number of immigrants that our country still sees (despite our rather harsh treatment of them) far exceeds that of other countries. So great for Venezuela, and yes those socialist principles work alright there for this season, but there’s no way, from the policy level, that those things could be implemented at every level of our society. Can you imagine a free college education for every child? Not gonna happen…
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What evidence is there whatsoever that Chavez changed the results?
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Actually, making every public university in the country free would only cost 35 billion dollars, which is nothing compared to what we spend on war…
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“unlike more authoritarian nations (think close to home), Chavez did not have a compliant supreme court to fix the results”
Statements like this often get thrown into arguments uncontested, but they are enfuriatingly WRONG!
The US supreme court has never “compliantly fixed results” of any election. When the Supreme Court ruled in the 2000 presidential election, EVERY SINGLE RECOUNT showed that Bush won the majority vote in Florida. Also, after the election was over, many independent recounts were performed, EVERY SINGLE ONE showing that Bush had won the popular vote in Florida. So, THERE IS NO DEBATE! The Supreme Court didn’t act in a biased or currupt way whatsoever, and people need to stop misrepresenting history.
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“The US supreme court has never compliantly fixed results” of any election.”
Well, there’s also Mexico, that’s technically close to home. That Supreme Court struck down recounts that would have pronounced Lopez Obrador the winner, rather than Calderon, and ignored well-documented cases of vote stuffing and the destruction of ballot boxes, and irregularities in the vote tabulations (like large spikes and a huge favoring of Calderon at the very end).
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This is indeed a great article. If you want to see a good documentary about the right-wing shenaningans that militated against a victory for the “yes” vote during the December 2nd referendum, check out Chris Carlson’s blog—Gringo in Venezuela. He posted a documentary made by a Spanish journalist that laid bare the viciousness of the right-wing student thugs from mainly Catholic universities. (See http://www.gringoinvenezuela.com/#nuevascaras).
As Eric Wingerter at the blog Borev.net put it, “Chalk it up to being a student-leader, but from a PR perspective I don't think student-leader Ronel Gaglio probably should've been bragging so hard about all the "support" he and his friends have received from "right-wing sectors" in the European government. Or how Silvio Berlusconi's political party paid for them to learn the ways of the color revolutions at a camp in Serbia. Or how crazy ass Cardinal Renato Martino (best known for telling observant Catholics they shouldn’t give money to Amnesty International) officially high-fived them at the Vatican.
It also includes footage of these crazy kids trying to torch the ‘pro-Chavez students at the Central University while chanting the quaint refrain ‘Your gonna Die, You're gonna Die, the Chavistas are going to die’”
Nice students those, hey? And, of course, the US media (and most of the European media, too) portrayed these thugs as saints!
Do check out the video, though. Chris did a good job of subtitling it in English. He is an American getting a Master’s degree in Political science throught the University of the Andes in Mérida, Venezuela.
One cannot say it enough, but the media in the US tirelessly, continually, and shamelessly lie to people here.
You want to believe the media? Go right ahead. Remain ignorant.
Fortunately, the mainstream media is consistently losing readership/viewership when they fail to take into account the vast majority of people who choose not to believe them and get their information elsewhere.
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“One cannot say it enough, but the media in the US tirelessly, continually, and shamelessly lie to people here.”
Even BBC, unfortunately. Comparing the anti-Chavez demonstrations with those against Bush throughout Latin America and especially in Merida, two completely different languages are applied to “leftist” and “anti-leftist” protest. In the case of the anti-Bush (and similarly other anti-capitalist or otherwise leftist protest like in Chiapas, Guerrero, and Oaxaca, Mexico) protests, media ignores state-sponsored campaigns of terror against populations leading up to the protest, during, and afterwards, including random house searches, death threats, arbitrary detention, and beatings; and even more troubling yet completely ignored, is the systematic rape of female protesters captured during protest events and the torture of all detainees over the period of weeks. And by torture, I mean the extreme level of torture that makes water-boarding look like a birthday party— one such example is flying the detainee over the ocean in a helicopter, holding him out by the ankles, and telling him that after he dies, they will murder his family. And this is committed by members of police, military, and official paramilitary forces, which largely utilize vehicles and weaponry supplied by the US government. All the while, “liberal” outlets like BBC and NYT mistakenly label protesters as Marxist-Leninist (they generally aren’t) and even have the audacity to call protesters “violent” (police are rarely injured, while protesters often are killed).
In the case of Venezuela (and to some degree Cuba and now Bolivia too), anti-Chavez protesters have fired into crowds of Chavez sympathizers, yet in this case, the police response is considered to be unnecessarily repressive and violent. Additionally, no ideological qualifiers are attached to protesters, or else they are labeled “pro-democracy” or “dissident”. This coverage systematically ignores that the student protesters are largely the children of the old aristocracy/landowners/oil barons, who lost considerably when Chavez was elected (yet are still very well off) and have much to gain with his defeat. These are the same families that manufactured the coup several years ago. This is systematically—and I might even say deliberately—ignored by the “liberal” media.
The fact that these two different approaches are applied along a particular faultline is incredibly troubling. Read BBC or WaPo or the Times for different stories on protest, and that faultline should become evident. At the risk of sounding Marxist, it seems like the cut-off is capitalist democracy. Pushes for democracy are fine, as long as it doesn’t challenge the economic order. Anything challenging anti-capitalist regimes, or those regimes (Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Venezuela) that lean towards socialism, are fair game and will generally receive media support. Anything challenging imperialism or capitalism will be attacked, delegitimized, and misrepresented by the media (See Merida and the rest of Bush’s Latin America tour, the Juan Carlos-Chavez spat, transantiago and anti-LOCE protests in Chile, the student protests in Guerrero and Mexico City, and the US’s attacks on Fernandez de Kirchner in Argentina). It’s really that simple.
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There is a reason that socialism never has and never will work. It goes against both human and economic nature.