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Racist rage of the Caracas elite Venezuela's Embattled
President Faces a Pinochet-Style Opposition Pilin Leon, a former Miss Venezuela, was busy judging the Miss World competition in London on Saturday when the oil tanker that bears her name, illegally at anchor in Lake Maracaibo (principal source of Venezuela's oil), was boarded by Venezuelan marines. The end of history was supposed to mean an end to class struggle, but the current political conflict in Venezuela suggests it is alive and well. When the captain of the Pilin Leon first dropped anchor, he was expressing his solidarity with the anti-government strike in Caracas. But the tanker's crew were opposed the strike and their captain's piratical action. When the marines boarded, on the orders of the embattled president Hugo Chávez, only the captain needed to be replaced. For the past year or more, Venezuela's upper and middle classes, opposed to Chávez's government, have protested in the wealthy new neighbourhoods of Caracas, while the poor (the vast majority of the city's population) have come from their shantytowns and demonstrated to defend "their" president. Chávez celebrated his overwhelming electoral victory of four years ago at the weekend, at the end of a week-long insurrectionary strike designed to force him to resign, and so far he has displayed a Houdini-like capacity to escape from tight situations. In April, a similar scenario led to a brief coup d'etat, from which he was rescued by an alliance between the poor and the armed forces, and this time, the president says, he will not allow himself to be surprised. The opposition has been hoping to repeat in December what it failed to achieve in April, but the situation is no longer the same. The armed forces are now more solidly behind the president than before. The most conservative generals no longer hold important commands; those involved in the April coup attempt have all been sent into retirement. The international situation is different, too. The US welcomed the April coup, but this time, with more important problems elsewhere, Washington is being more circumspect. It has publicly thrown its weight behind the negotiations being conducted by Cesar Gaviria, the Colombian ex-president who leads the Organisation of American States. Perhaps even more significant than the changing attitude of the military and of the US is the fact that the poor are more mobilised now, to such an extent that there is talk of a possible civil war. Until the April coup, the poor had voted for Chávez repeatedly, but his revolutionary programme was directed from above, without much popular participation. After the coup, which revealed that the opposition sought to impose a regime on Pinochet lines, the people realised that they had a government that they needed to defend. The opposition's protest marches have now conjured up a phenomenon that most of the middle and upper classes might have preferred to have left sleeping - the spectre of a class and race war. Opposition spokesmen complain that Chávez is a leftist who is leading the country to economic chaos, but underlying the fierce hatred is the terror of the country's white elite when faced with the mobilised mass of the population, who are black, Indian and mestizo. Only a racism that dates back five centuries - of the European settlers towards their African slaves and the country's indigenous inhabitants - can adequately explain the degree of hatred aroused. Chávez - who is more black and Indian than white, and makes no secret of his aim to be the president of the poor - is the focus of this racist rage. The trump card of the opposition, in April as in December, has been the state-owned oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela, often described as the fifth largest oil exporter in the world, and an important supplier to the US. Nationalised more than 25 years ago, it has been run over the years for the exclusive benefit of its employees and managers - its profits being invested everywhere except Venezuela. Before the arrival of Chávez, it was being prepared for privatisation, to the satisfaction of the engineers and directors who would have benefited. But with a block placed on privatisation by the new Venezuelan constitution, the company's middle class and prosperous elite has been happy to be used as a shock weapon by the leaders of the Pinochet-style opposition, and they have tried to bring their entire industry to a halt. The vital task for Chávez is to bring the oil company back under government control, replacing the conservative management with the radical executives who had been forced out in earlier internal struggles. If he is to support the crews loyal to the government on tankers such as the Pilin Leon, he may yet need to impose a state of emergency to regain the upper hand.
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·Richard Gott (RWGott@aol.com) is the author of In
The Shadow of the
Liberator: Hugo Chávez and the Transformation of Venezuela. You can read this article at the www.guardian.co.uk _____________ Why Are the Coup Plotters So Impatient? And How Venezuela Can Defeat Them Legallyby Heinz Dieterich Steffan from Rebelion.org (8 December 2002) The constitutional government of Hugo Chávez faces its fourth assault in eight months. The April 11th coup d'etat launched a chain of mob acts that were repeated under the banner of "civic" or "labor strikes," all of them programmed with high levels of physical violence and media manipulation. This high pro-coup intensity against Venezuelan democracy enters a new paradox. The Bolivarian Constitution of 1999, born from the breast of a Constituent Assembly and approved by referendum of the citizens is, without a doubt, the most democratic in Latin America. As such, it provides for removal of elected public officials. Its Article 72 stipulates that "all posts and magistrates that are popularly elected are revocable," as of halfway though the term for which they are elected. Applying this Article to President Chávez, the possibility of removing him by recall referendum opens up in August 2003, under the terms of the Magna Carta. That is to say, there is an institutional path to change leadership - that, according to opposition members is the goal of their street actions - whose utilization would protect the life of citizens, strengthen the democratic government and civic exercise of power and improve the national economic situation. President Chávez has publicly affirmed that he will submit himself to this constitutional instrument and the international mediators of the conflict, like César Gaviria, secretary general of the Organization of American States (OAS), have insisted that the adequate mechanism to resolve the country's problems is the institutional path. However, the "strikers" dismiss the constitution and the hemispheric political institution, insisting on an extra-constitutional solution and on street violence. The question that this situation raises is the following: Why don't the "strikers" wait eight months to reach their goal through peaceful and institutional routes? What is the urgency that makes them act desperately fomenting chaos, ungovernable situations and military coup instead of working toward August? The reasons for this behavior are obvious and can be summed up by three points: Since the April 11th coup d'etat, which was their maximum point of power, the conspirators have been weakened in two key ways. A. They have lost internal unity and fight among themselves for power, and, more importantly, B. They have lost a fundamental part of their social base in the middle classes. During the 24 hours they were in power, during the April 11th coup d'etat, it became clear that the middle classes had been used as cannon fodder in a transnational dictatorial project. And the previous mob actions via "civic strikes" only deepened the erosion of the pro-coup clique 's legitimacy, supported from foreign lands by Otto "Third" Reich and recycled Spanish Franco fascism. The second reason for the pro-coup haste is the entrance in vigor of various important laws that come into effect on January 1, 2003, that touch vital interests of the economic elite: Among them, the Land Law that affects not just the large plantation owners in the country but also real estate speculators and vacant lots in urban zones. The Hydrocarbon law is even more important because it will permit the dismantling of the meta-State of the petroleum business PdVSA, the corrupt oil group that controls the economic life of the country and that is an integral part of the New World Energy Order of George Bush. Today, only 20 percent of the income of this mega-company goes to the State. Eighty percent goes to "operating costs" that enrich secret accounts of the beneficiaries of this economic cancer. The power of this petroleum "steal-ocracy" has become propped up progressively during recent decades. In 1974, the company delivered 80 percent of its income to the State and kept 20 percent ("operating costs"). In 1990, the ratio tied at 50 to 50 percent and in 1998 it reached the ratio of 80 to 20 percent. It's logical that they are going to fight to the death - of the nation - to defend "their" black gold. Today, only 20 percent of the income of this mega-company goes to the State. Eighty percent goes to "operating costs" that enrich secret accounts of the beneficiaries of this economic cancer The third reason the pro-coup forces are in a hurry is found in their doubts about being able to win a recall referendum. Article 72 places three conditions to revoke the term of the president. 1. A number of no less than 20 percent of the voters signing petitions is necessary to call the referendum. 2. The voter turnout must be 25 percent or more. 3. The number of voters who vote for the recall have to be equal or more than the number of voters who elected the official. Since Chávez was elected with 57 percent of the vote, the "strikers" will have to meet or supercede this percentage in the August referendum. There is an aggravating situation for the pro-coup forces. During the period for which the official is elected "there can not be more than one recall referendum on his term" according to the Magna Carta. Thus, an eventual failure of the referendum will use up all institutional possibilities of overthrowing the Bolivarian government. In the current phase of the conflict, the clique that runs PdVSA and the mass media in Venezuela are two fronts of the internal battles where the destiny of the Bolivarian experiment is being decided. Having lost their pro-coup nucleus in the Armed Forces and part of their social base in the middle class, the conspirators have made the decisive battle of this mob action that they call "an active strike with an ingredient of gasoline." That is to say: Control of the petroleum steal-ocracy. To defeat the attempt at strangulation by energy by the subversives opens the door to the firing of the directorship of PdVSA and the recuperation of the company for the nation. This will be the means of triumph or failure by the government. All compromise with the conspirators on this point will maintain the economic-union center of the counter-revolution alive and weaken the popular process. To defeat the conspiracy through legal, but firm, opportune and audacious measures would reduce the internal hydra to just one head: the media octopus. The politics of this octopus is explained by multiple economic and political interests of wide influence, among which the quartet of (former president) Carlos Andrés Pérez, Gustavo Cisneros (of Venevision TV), Jesús Polanco (of the daily El País in Spain) and (Spanish politician) Felipe González figure prominently. That will be the theme of another analysis _____________
This article also appears in The Narco News Bulletin, 11 December 2002, Issue #26.
NarcoNews.comFor daily news from Venezuela, published by supporters of the popularly-elected
government, visitVheadline.com
[Articles are presented for informational purposes. Opinions are the author's own.
--Editor]
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