Note: This text should not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without citation or permission by the author. It was written prior to the death of Hugo Chávez Frías.
Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela
By
Charles McKelvey
Copyright © 2014 Charles McKelvey
Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela
By
Charles McKelvey
Copyright © 2014 Charles McKelvey
In 1990, after the fall of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall, North American imperialism, feeling victorious, attacked and took the offensive, and decreed the “end of history,” the end of the ideologies. Today, scarcely fifteen years later we have to say to them, as says an old song, “The ideologies are not dead, they are out partying.” They decreed the end of socialism. Today one must say: Socialism was not dead, it was out partying, and we socialists are here raising our flags again. -- Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, Address to the Third Summit of the Peoples of America, Mar del Plata, Argentina, November 4, 2005
Martin Luther King was right. . . . We have to demand the end of all wars and demand that all the economic resources that the peoples produce, the economies, be dedicated to the struggle against poverty, against misery, against death, against illness. That is the true war that we need: war against misery, against hunger, against poverty. – Hugo Chávez, Forum on Poverty and Justice in our Globalized World, New York City, September 17, 2005
History will absolve us who struggle for the good of humanity, who struggle to save the world, who struggle in truth for a better world of equality, justice, and freedom. -- Hugo Chávez, XVI World Festival of Youth and Students, Caracas, Venezuela, August 13, 2005
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Hugo Chávez
Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías was born in Sabaneta, a rural village of Venezuela, on July 28, 1954. His father was a school teacher who earned his teaching diploma by studying part-time for years. Chávez describes his family as a poor peasant family. Although his mother and father lived nearby, he was principally reared by his grandmother, a peasant woman who was half indigenous. He describes himself as a mixture of indigenous, African, and European (Guevara 2005:14-15, 71-72, 76).
In 1971, at the age of 17, he entered the Military Academy of Venezuela, through which he earned a commission as a Second Lieutenant in 1975. Prior to his arrival at the military academy, there was little indication of his revolutionary vocation, and his motivation for entering the military academy was to facilitate his going to Caracas, and his principal passion was baseball. However, his study during his years in the military academy established the foundation for his revolutionary formation. During this period of his life he read: the speeches and letters of Simón Bolívar; the political, philosophical, and military writings of Mao Tse Tung; and the writings of Che Guevara. As a result of this study, he developed an interpretation that he describes as a synthesis of Bolivarianism and Maoism. He investigated these themes further in a master´s program in political science as Simón Bolívar University, which his political career interrupted before he was able to finish his thesis. He continuously has read books of historical, political, social, and literary significance during his military and political careers, and he has advised young people to develop the habit of reading as a form of relaxation. He often recommends particular books in his discourses (Guevara 2005:78-79; Chávez 2006:104).
His career as a military officer also was central to his formation. His experiences included postings in small rural towns, and he developed relations of dialogue with persons connected to a guerrilla movement. During the 1970s and 1980s, he had considerable success working with young officers in the development of a reform movement within the military (Guevara 2005:26-30).
On February 4, 1992, with the participation of approximately 100 fellow officers, he directed an attempted coup d´état, with the intention of overthrowing the government and convening a constituent assembly. The coup failed, and he spent two years in prison. Upon his release, he resigned from the military and formed the Bolivarian Fifth Republic Movement, again with the intention of convening a constituent assembly, but this time seeking to attain power through the electoral process. Taking advantage of the deteriorating economic situation in the nation and the rising popular tide in opposition to the neoliberal project, he was elected President of Venezuela in 1998, in spite of the ignoring of his candidacy by the mass media. He assumed the presidency on February 2, 1999. He immediately issued a decree calling for a constitutional assembly. Elections for a new constitution were held, and a new constitution was approved, establishing the Fifth Republic. In 2000, he was elected to a six year term as president under the new constitution, and he was subsequently elected, with nearly 63% of the vote, to a second term from 2007 to 2013 (Guevara 2005:9-13, 18-23, 39-39).
Hugo Chávez believes that underdevelopment and development are interrelated, and that the underdevelopment of the peoples of Latin America, Africa, and Asia is a consequence of colonial domination. Citing Andre Gunder Frank, he asserts: “Underdevelopment is a characteristic of development. Our underdevelopment is a consequence of the development of the imperialist countries. They only arrived at the level of development that they have after having invaded and sacked immense territories of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. If not, they would not be at the level of development that they are” (Chávez 2006:132).
Chávez rejects neoliberalism. “It is practically and ethically inadmissible to sacrifice the human species appealing in a crazy manner to the validity of a socioeconomic model with an enormous destructive capacity. It is suicidal to insist on disseminating it and imposing it as the infallible remedy for the ills for which it is, precisely, the principal cause. . . . What neoliberal capitalism, the Washington Consensus, has generated is a greater degree of misery and inequality and an infinite tragedy for the peoples of this continent.”
In an address at the United Nations on September 20, 2006, citing the book Hegemony or Survival by the well-known U.S. intellectual Noam Chomsky, Chávez asserted that U.S. imperialist policies are a threat to the survival of the human species. “The hegemonic intention of North American imperialism puts at risk the very survival of the human species. We continue alerting over this danger, and we are making a call to the people of the United States and to the world to stop this threat that is like the very sword of Damocles” (Chávez 2006:346).
U.S policies are designed, Chávez believes, to maintain U.S. hegemony in the world. Referring to the address to the United Nations the previous day by U.S. President George W, Bush, Chávez asserts: “As spokesperson for imperialism he came to give his recipes to try to maintain the present scheme of domination, of exploitation, and of plundering of the peoples of the world. . . . North American imperialism, and here Chomsky says it with profoundness and clarity, is making desperate efforts to consolidate its hegemonic system of domination. We cannot permit this to occur, that the world dictatorship be installed, that the world dictatorship be consolidated” (Chávez 2006:346-47).
Chávez views U.S. imperialism as hypocritical, claiming to be democratic, as it imposes its version of democracy through force. “The discourse of the world “tyrant” president, full of cynicism, full of hypocrisy, is the imperial hypocrisy, the intent to control all. They want to impose the democratic model as they conceive it, the false democracy of the elites. It is in addition a democratic model very unique, since it is imposed by explosions, bombers, at the point of invasions and cannon shot. What democracy! One would have to review the theses of Aristotle and of the first who spoke of democracy in Greece in order to see what model of democracy is that, which is imposed at the point of marines, invasions, aggressions, and bombs” (Chávez 2006:347).
Chávez believes that the U.S. Empire is not only the most powerful and most brutal in human history, it also is the most hypocritical. “It speaks of democracy, and it stabs democracy; it speaks of human rights, and it runs over human rights; the Roman Empire did not speak of human rights, it simply appropriated them as an empire. . . . But these hypocrites speak of human rights and bomb entire cities; they speak of liberty of expression and imprison journalists for not revealing their sources; they speak of democracy and prepare coups d´état against the peoples. They speak of the war against drugs and utilize the war against drugs in order to run over the sovereignty of the peoples and to run over the independence of nations; they speak of a war against drugs, but they do nothing to combat drug trafficking there in their cities, in their great cities; they do nothing about the drug trafficking money that is in the large banks of the North. They are the kings of hypocrisy” (Chávez 2006:192).
Chávez criticizes the Latin American elites and governments for participating in the imposition of the neoliberal project, with its devastating consequences for the people. “How much damage was done to the peoples of Latin America by the initiative of the Americas, neoliberalism, the Washington Consensus, and the well-known package of measures of the International Monetary Fund. And in this continent nearly all the governments were kneeling, one must say it in this way, the elites of the peoples were kneeling undignified, or better said not the elites of the peoples but the elites of the republics, were kneeling before the empire, and in this manner the privatization orgy began like a macabre wave in these lands, the selling of very many state companies” (Chávez 2006:263-64).
Chávez believes that we are at a critical and decisive time in human and world history. He observes that Rosa Luxemburg, citing Marx´s phrase “socialism or barbarism,” had written that one day in the future men and women will have to choose their political, economic, and social system, and they will find themselves in a situation in which they will be obligated to make a historic decision to assure the survival of the human species. In our times “the capitalist model, the developmentalist model, the consumerist model, which the North has imposed on the world, is putting an end to the planet Earth” (Chávez 2006:256). We can observe such phenomena as global warming, the opening of the ozone layer, an increasing intensity of hurricanes, the melting of the ice caps, and the rising of the seas. Moreover, in the social sphere, rather than accepting their superexploitation and social exclusion, the peoples of the world are increasingly in rebellion. And so in both ecological and social terms, we are at a critical moment in human history. Whereas Marx and even Luxemburg had the luxury of thinking in terms of centuries, we do not. Humanity is approaching a critical point, in which “in the first five decades of the XXI century it will be decided if in the future there will be life on this planet or if their will not be life. Socialism or barbarism” (Chávez 2006:195).
Chávez maintains that in this critical moment in human history, the peoples in movement in Latin America are saying “no” to imperialism and are casting aside the Latin American elites who betrayed them. The day of liberation is arriving. “Simon Bolívar, nearly dying and alone, defrauded, betrayed and expelled, said, “The great day of South America has not yet arrived.” Two hundred years later, we believe that now the great day of America has arrived, and more than of America, the great day of the peoples, the great day of the peoples. The great day of liberty, equality, and justice is arriving” (Chávez 2006:198).
United and determined, the peoples have the capacity to overcome imperialism and to save the species, to establish the sovereignty of the nations and to protect the rights and needs of the people. “We ought to leave North American imperialism, if it has not disappeared, as a true paper tiger. Let the peoples of the earth everywhere rise up, like tigers of steel, defending sovereignty, life, dignity, the future. We the peoples are tigers of steel. There is no imperialism that has survived when we the peoples decide to be free” (Chávez 2006:259).
Chávez affirms that “we can save this planet and life on this planet” (Chávez 2006:194). “I am sure that we can save life for future generations and that we will have a better world, but we are called to the battle” (Chávez 2006:257).
Chávez promotes a concept of autonomous economic development that he describes as “a model of endogenous development that is not imposed on us by anyone, neither the Creole elite nor the imperialist elite, our own economic development” (Chávez 2006:319). This model seeks to develop national production, giving emphasis to the development of energy, agriculture, and basic industry, and providing support for small and medium producers. He considers the model developed by Paraguay in the 19th century, destroyed by the War of the Triple Alliance, which he calls “the triple infamy” (Chávez 2006:124), to have been an earlier development project consistent with the concept of autonomous development. Endogenous development is rooted in the cultures and traditions of the peoples, particularly the indigenous peoples, and it has to be developed with a consciousness of history. The study of history often has been only partially developed in the educational systems of neocolonial republics, and historical consciousness also has been undermined by the ideologies of the empire. History must be rediscovered.
Chávez has proclaimed that the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela is constructing “Socialism of the XXI Century.” Socialism of the 21st century will not be the same as the socialisms of the 20th century. It will be “a socialism renewed for the new era, for the XXI century” (Chávez 2006:193). “It will not have only one road; it will have many roads. It will not have one model; there will be many variants of socialism. It will have to adapt to the circumstances of each country, of each region. I believe that one of the tragedies of socialism of the XX century was its trying to copy models. Armando Hart in his words a short time ago was reminding us of the great José Carlos Mariáteugi, socialism for Latin America cannot be a replica, it has to be a great and heroic creation, a heroic construction of our peoples” (Chávez 2006:193).
Socialism of the XXI century is based on a renewed formulation of traditional values. “Socialism of the XXI century ought to begin to consolidate new values that are not new, they are old values but one must renew them, one must strengthen them. . . . For us here in Venezuela, for example, and I believe that it is valid for a good part of Latin America and the Caribbean, Christianity is a current that pushes and feeds our socialism in construction. This socialism of the XXI century has much of Christianity for the Venezuelans, as it has much of Bolivarianism and Marxism” (Chávez 2006:200).
There is a fundamental difference between capitalism and socialism in regard to moral principles. Socialism is based on solidarity and love, but capitalism is based on egoism, voracity, and exploitation. “Socialism is love of the human being by the human being. Socialism has a foundation in love, and capitalism in ambition and hatred. New values: solidarity; true and authentic spontaneous fraternity; so that this is one of the lines of work in the construction of the new socialism: morality” (Chávez 2006:200).
Chávez is a professing Christian, who believes that Jesus of Nazareth “came to announce the reign of equality, the reign of justice and peace,” and that he was “the first great socialist of our era” (Chávez 2006:257). He maintains that even as a child, prior to his revolutionary formation, he viewed Christ as a rebel (Chávez 2006:226). His understanding of Christianity is in the tradition of liberation theology. “I believe that when he said, “My reign is not of this world,” Christ was leaving it to posterity, and he was not saying that it was another world beyond, beyond the clouds, no. The Reign of God ought to be here, attained here, as say well the theologians of liberation, Leonardo Boff and others. The Reign of God is here, the reign of equality and justice. Christ said that his reign is not of this world, it is of the future world that is coming. . . . It will be our descendants that will see that world, but one must march toward it, right now, that certainly is necessary, one must point in that direction, one must make battle in that direction” (Chávez 2006:235).
Chávez believes that the peoples of the world have the right to self-defense. “The people have the right to war if it is attacked, if it is invaded. It is the right of self-defense, and it pertains also to the individual terrain. The individual has a right to his defense and to use violence in his own defense, if someone attacks him violently. . . . The same thing happens with the peoples, but the use of violence is only justified for the defender, for the attacked, not for the aggressor” (Chávez 2006:236).
National control of natural resources
We have seen that in the development of the modern world system, the colonized regions of the world had imposed on them a distorted development, in which resources and institutions are organized for the exportation of raw materials. In the case of Venezuela, the principal raw material has been petroleum.
Petroleum has particular characteristics that make it different from other raw materials. It is found in limited areas of the world, and the global demand for petroleum products is very high, particularly in the developed countries. These characteristics establish the possibility that a country with petroleum reserves can obtain high levels of income, relative to other raw materials, in exchange for this valuable product. OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) symbolizes this potential.
However, in Venezuela during the period of 1917 to 1960, the country and the government received little income from petroleum, as the petroleum countries were foreign owned, and there was little regulation of them. In response to this situation, popular movements demanded greater national control of this natural resource, giving rise after 1960 to what came to be called petroleum nationalism, where the state seeks to maximize its income from the exportation of petroleum.
The era of petroleum nationalism culminated with the nationalization of the petroleum companies in Venezuela in 1976. A state petroleum company, Petróleos de Venezuela, Sociedad Anónima (PDVSA), was formed. Ironically, nationalization had the consequence of creating more autonomy for the petroleum industry and more influence for the international petroleum companies. Distinct from the nationalization of the petroleum industry in Mexico in 1938, the nationalization in Venezuela was gradual, and it occurred with the cooperation of the international petroleum companies in Venezuela. By the time of the nationalization in Venezuela in 1976, the management of the companies was Venezuelan, as a consequence of Venezuelan pressure during the era of petroleum nationalism. So the nationalization of 1976 had the effect of changing ownership from international petroleum companies to the Venezuelan state, but the management of the companies in Venezuela did not change. And the Venezuelans that managed the companies had been socialized into the norms and values of the international petroleum companies, and they had internalized the perspective of international capital.
After nationalization, the Venezuelan state relaxed its oversight of the petroleum companies, believing that the industry was now securely in Venezuelan hands. But this turned out to be a mistaken belief, as the Venezuelan managers directed the PDVSA from the perspective of the international petroleum companies and did not seek to utilize petroleum income to promote national development. Seeking to reduce payments to the Venezuelan state, PDVSA did not seek to maximize profits, which would result in higher payments to the Venezuelan state. Instead, PDVSA adopted a strategy of channeling surpluses to investments in production and sales, in order to minimize profits and corresponding payments to the state.
In the 1980s, PDVSA adopted a policy of internationalization in order to avoid payments to the state. The maneuver involved buying refineries and distributorships in other countries in order to transfer surpluses out of the country, beyond the reach of the Venezuelan state. Some of the workings of this maneuver can be seen in the case of the CITGO Company, a Venezuelan owned company in U.S. territory that consists of eight large refineries and 14,000 gas stations with an estimated combined value of 8 to 10 million dollars. Yet in spite of this significant investment by PDVSA, the Venezuelan state never received any income from CITGO. All of the profits remained in the United States. Chávez estimates that Venezuela gave to the United States billions of dollars through “the perverse business of the CITGO Company” (Chávez 2006:142, 321).
As a dimension of the neoliberal project, the government of Venezuela greatly relaxed its regulation of foreign investment in Venezuela in 1989. PDVSA was given by the government responsibility for supervising the “opening” of the country to foreign investment as it pertained to the petroleum industry. Under PDVSA supervision, many international petroleum companies formed joined ventures, with terms highly favorable to the investors, and without consideration of national development.
PDVSA, therefore, had emerged as a state within the state, with significant autonomy and with limited control by the state. Its approach was to create a climate favorable to foreign investment. It did not seek to develop an approach that would seek to attract foreign investment in a form integrated with a project for national development.
The government of Hugo Chávez sought to reduce the autonomy of PDVSA and to incorporate its resources into a project of national development. The Chávez government appointed new directors of PDVSA, replacing the directors appointed by previous governments. With the new leadership of PDVSA, the income to the state from petroleum became significantly higher, and these funds are directed toward various social projects and toward elimination of the foreign debt. As Chávez has expressed, “We have stopped being a petroleum colony, and we have begun to comply with that desire of the eminent Venezuelan Artuo Úslar Pietri: ‘One must sow the petroleum,’ he said. We have begun to sow the petroleum, to utilize the petroleum wealth as a lever for social development and for economic development” (Chávez 2006:318-19).
The measures taken by the Chávez government generated conflict. The U.S. government and the international petroleum industry as well as the Venezuelan petroleum management were opposed to the measures, given that these measures sought to eliminate control of Venezuelan oil by the international petroleum industry. To some extent, workers in the Venezuelan oil industry were opposed to change, since their wages reflected international levels in the industry, far above the wages earned by workers in other industries in Venezuela.
Interrelated with the issue of control of the production and commercialization of petroleum by the Venezuelan state, there is the issue of Venezuelan participation in OPEC. Venezuela (along with Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, and Kuwait) had been one of the five founding members of OPEC in 1960. At that time, government income from oil production in the oil producing countries represented no more than 6 or 7% of the final price for a barrel of oil. OPEC was formed with the intention of breaking with the neo-colonial system of foreign control of petroleum production and exportation, establishing a just price for the petroleum and facilitating the economic independence of the oil producing and exporting countries. During the 1960s, OPEC was able to become stronger by incorporating new members. Following a strategy of controlling production in order to protect prices and conserve petroleum reserves, it declared higher prices in 1973, generating the first oil price shock, as oil prices nearly quadrupled during 1973 and 1974 (Pichs 2006:152-54).
Simply changing production levels and prices, however, does not break with the neocolonial system. The transnational petroleum companies, who control the refining and commercialization of the final product, passed the higher prices to the consumers. And rather than investing the new income in the economic and social development of their countries, the governments of OPEC deposited the new funds in the banks of the North. Between 1974 and 1982, the OPEC countries registered a financial surplus of 471 billion dollars, four-fifths of which wound up in the countries of the North, and only 15% of which remained in the Third World. As we have seen, this phenomenon generated a surplus of capital in the banks of the North, becoming a source of an expansion of Third World debt, which also would become, through the payment of interest, a mechanism for the flow of capital from the impoverished nations of the Third World to the wealthy nations of the North (Pichs 2006:154-55).
At the same time, the nations of the North were able to rapidly adjust to the higher petroleum prices by adopting programs of conservation and savings of energy as well as searching for alternative sources of energy. The underdeveloped nations of the Third World, by virtue of their limited resources, were less in a position to make these kinds of adjustments. As a result, the higher oil prices had a negative impact on the non-oil producing and exporting nations of the Third World (Pichs 2006:154-55).
The Chávez government developed new policies in relation to OPEC. During the 1970s, although Venezuela had played a central role in the development of OPEC, PDVSA was functioning as a state within a state, and it tried to avoid OPEC quotas by investing in production outside of Venezuela. During the neoliberal era, the government of Venezuela had been cooperating with the Washington policy of breaking OPEC by flooding the oil market. Venezuela was producing four million barrels of oil a day. Meanwhile, succumbing to the pressure of the Washington consensus toward the “free market,” OPEC had abandoned control of production and prices in 1985, leading to a period of low oil prices from 1986 through 1998. In the case of Venezuela, when Chávez assumed the presidency in January, 1999, the price of oil was $7 per barrel, and the government budget was based on the assumption of a price of $14 per barrel. In response to this situation, the Chávez government immediately cut back on production, and Chávez visited OPEC leaders, informing them that Venezuela would respect OPEC quotas and asking them to also reduce production. This produced results, and by the end of 1999, the price of oil was at $16 per barrel, and there began a period of higher prices for petroleum (Pichs 2006:157-58, 162; Guevara 2005:24, 36).
But the policy of the Chávez government goes beyond efforts to resurrect OPEC control of producing and pricing. Unlike OPEC nations in the 1970s, the Chávez government is investing the petroleum income in the development of Venezuela. Other nations of OPEC also are beginning to take steps in this direction, in part as a consequence of the impact of the Islamic Revolution. Moreover, rather than only selling the petroleum to the consumerist societies of the North, the Chávez government is seeking to develop mutually beneficial social and economic accords with the nations of the South as a dimension of a general orientation of South-South cooperation. It sells oil to nations of Latin America and the Caribbean with terms more favorable than the international market: ninety-day credit for a payment of 75% of the international market value, with the remaining 25% financed over fifteen years at a fixed rate of 2% annual interest, with payments to begin after two years and with the option of making payments in goods or services, such as rice, corn or maize. Breaking with the historic peripheral role as supplier of raw materials for the core, ships with Venezuelan oil for the first time have docked in Uruguay and Argentina, as a result of mutually beneficial accords signed by Venezuela with these nations. And Venezuela has formed Petrocaribe, dedicated to addressing the energy needs of the nations of the Caribbean (Chavez 2006: 149-51).
Alongside these efforts to take control of the petroleum industry, the Chávez government also sought to recover state control of other sectors of the economy. During the neoliberal era, Venezuelan governments had privatized the universities, the health system, educational system, water, electricity, and public services. For its part, PDVSA had entered into joint ventures that effectively involved privatization. The Chavez government reversed these privatizations, and these entities were again placed under government control (Guevara 2005:39, 45; Chávez 2006:111, 141).
Social Missions
The additional income to the Venezuelan state from petroleum is used by the Chávez government to finance projects in education, health, and housing as well as to increase wages and to provide financial assistance to those in need. Most of the projects are designated as “missions.”
Prior to the Chávez government, there were unnecessary obstacles to education, such as dress codes and enrollment fees. In an interview with Aleida Guevara, Chávez stated: “Some schools told kids, “You can’t come if you don’t have any shoes.” I asked, “Why are shoes so important?” If they had insisted that I wore shoes when I was a kid, I would never have made the sixth grade. I used to go to school in homemade sandals, and when those broke, I went barefoot. At high school in Barinas, I used to wear rubber boots, and my clothes were usually tattered and torn. Why should we now demand that kids wear shoes? Let them go barefoot, let them go in shorts. If they don’t have any uniforms let them go in whatever they do have” (Guevara 2005:37).
Eliminating enrollment fees, the Chávez government anticipated that national school enrollment would increase to 300,000, but in fact enrollment increased to 600,000. To adjust to the unexpected demand, more teachers were hired, teachers agreed to teach with lower wages, retired teachers gave classes free, and soldiers taught classes. The government budget for education doubled (Guevara 2005:37).
A literacy program was developed with Cuban support. It was named Mission Robinson, after Simón “Robinson” Rodríguez, who was Simón Bolívar’s teacher. During a six-month period in 2003, one million people were taught to read (Guevara 2005: 50-51,)
Other missions in education emerged. Mission Ribas, named after independence hero José Felix Ribas, is a program for the completion of high school. Mission Sucre, named after Antonio José Sucre, one of the heroes of the Latin American revolution of 1810-24, is a scholarship program for university education. Mission Vuelvan Caras provides opportunity for vocational training (Guevara 2005:51-54, 141).
Chávez views popular education as integral to popular participation. Shortly after his election to a second term, he proclaimed: “We are going to launch a national day for the entire year of 2007, we will call it Morality and Light, for popular education everywhere: in the home, the school, the workshop, the factory, the country, the neighborhood, everywhere; education, education, education; we have many advances but still we have to deepen education, culture, science, technology, consciousness, ideology, values, values, values, the new values; one must demolish the old values of individualism, of capitalism, and egoism; one must create new values, and that that can only be attained through education.”
Mission Barrio Adentro is a medical mission that is financed by the Venezuelan state and relies upon the participation of 20,000 Cuban doctors, who are living and working in Venezuela, providing health care services in the poorest regions and neighborhoods. In 2004, Mission Barrio Adentro attended 50 million cases, providing free health care services and medicine (Chávez 2006:110-11). Following the Cuban model, Venezuela with Cuban aid is developing a Latin American School of Medicine, with plans to educate and train 200,000 doctors in its first ten years (Chávez 2006:241-42).
The Chávez government has raised the minimum wage by 30% in 2004 and 26% in 2005, and made corresponding adjustments in the salary scale for government employees (Chávez 2006:336-37). It has developed a program of financial assistance to single mothers in need (Chávez 2006:339), and a housing cooperative program for housing construction and housing repair and projects of potable water (Chávez 2006:202). Mission Mercal provides food at subsidized prices in poor neighborhood (Guevara 2005:58, 142). Misión Negra Hipólita attends to the needs of people in the streets: beggars, children, alcoholics, and drug addicts (Daher 2008:34).
For Chávez, the missions “are cancelling the gigantic social debt” that has accumulated for centuries (Chávez 2006:137). It is a question of transforming a system characterized by “social exclusion,” in which hundreds of thousands of children are excluded from primary school, hundreds of thousands of youth are excluded from secondary education, millions of youth are excluded from university education, and millions of persons are excluded from health care (Chávez 2006:318).
Financing social mission through petroleum income is a less radical approach than one which redistributes land. Thus far the land reform program of the Chávez government has been limited, in that it redistributes only unused land. The Land Law of 2001 decreed that rural property with more than 5000 hectares must utilize the land in a productive way. Unproductive hectares would be expropriated, with compensation. Utilizing the new Constitution of 1999 and the Land Law of 2001, the government has distributed in five years more than 2 million hectares to 130,000 families. In spite of the limited nature of the land reform, the estate bourgeoisie has been one of the leading forces of the opposition. Chávez proposed in 2007 an amendment to the 1999 Constitution that would have prohibited large estates, but this proposal was defeated in a popular referendum.
In general, the Latin American anti-neocolonial movement has arrived at the understanding that the redistribution of land is a necessary component for the autonomous development of Latin American nations. Land reform would establish a higher wage and salary level for the countryside and thus would give the domestic market the strength that it needs to feed and sustain industrial development. Land reform is generally a difficult step politically, because of the intense opposition of the rural landholding class.
Each country, however, has its particular characteristics. Because of the significant reserves of petroleum and the strength of the petroleum industry, it may be that in Venezuela the petroleum can feed industrial development, and a limited agrarian reform program is workable as a component of autonomous economic development in Venezuela.
Popular participation
The Chávez government has sought to strengthen the process of the popular participation that had been emerging during the 1980s and 1990s. The government is developing a structure of Popular Power that will include community councils, workers’ councils, student councils, and councils formed by small farmers. The government is forming a confederation of community councils that would be a confederation of local, regional, and national councils. Chávez sees this as an on-going process of gradually incorporating popular councils as an integral part of the state, “progressively transforming the bourgeois state into an alternative state, socialist and Bolivarian” (Chávez 2006:317, 325-27).
The modern state is a centralized administrative-political structure, characterized by control from above. A level of centralization is necessary in order to obtain goals and to complete tasks with efficiency. But the popular counsels have another dynamic of democracy from below. The incorporation of the popular counsels into the state represents the possibility of establishing a balance between the organization from above and democracy from below.
The transformation of a neocolonial army into an army of the people
During the 1970s and 1980s, Chávez developed a reform movement in the Venezuelan military. Chávez notes that “we built a new army, little by little, via collective effort, the credit is not mine alone. We spent many years sowing the seed of doubt among the ranks; we built consciousness” (Guevara 2005:26).
A key moment in the process was the swearing of an oath in 1982 by officers in the movement. Chávez recounts: “We swore an oath beneath a tree, a very famous tree here in Venezuela: the samán, which as history records Bolívar once camped under. The huge tree [with branches stretching 260 feet] is over 300 years old, and we swore our oath there, pledging ourselves to the construction of a Bolivarian movement within the army” (Guevara 2005:27-28).
The movement gathered strength during the 1980s, and it particularly grew after 1989, when there occurred a popular uprising and its repression by the military. In the attempted coup led by Chávez in 1992, he was able to bring together about 100 officers. So that when Chávez was elected president in 1998, he had been the central figure in a movement of reform in the military that had been developing for twenty years.
Chávez notes that the reform movement within the military had been particularly strong among the officers of his generation. “There is a marked difference between the generations within the movement. Until very recently, and even in the early years of the Bolivarian government, the vast majority of the armed forces commanders were from a different era. In contrast, the military leaders are now all from my generation; the majority of them are my contemporaries and comrades. General Baduel, for example, the commander-in-chief of the army, was one of those who took the oath under the samán in 1982. The air force commander, General Cordero, a fighter pilot, also took the oath—in an air base one long night back in the 1980s. The navy commander is the same, as well as his wife, who is a captain and has been a revolutionary for years. Not to mention the head of the National Guard. All the way down the military pyramid you will find that Bolivarian ideas are everywhere. To give you further examples, almost all of today’s battalion commanders joined the movement, either directly or indirectly, when they were very young. They joined a movement that fully appreciated the importance of using the military academy and main military bases as forums for debate and discussion. To create civic-minded soldiers and military-conscious civilians has always been our aim” (Guevara 2005:28).
Note here the duality of this conception: Chávez refers not only to civic-minded soldiers, but also to military-conscious civilians. Perhaps the latter phrase can be interpreted as civilians who are prepared in the techniques of self-defense and who form popular militias, engaging in cooperative and guided exercises of national self-defense, and who are available as a popular army when the situation requires it. Popular militias of this kind have been developed in revolutionary Cuba. The capacity of a nation to raise popular militias can be a deterrent to a superpower with intentions to establish a global military dictatorship. Although, as Fidel Castro has recently noted, the principal weapons of the present time are ideas, and not arms, it would nonetheless seem that the capacity of a people for armed self-defense continues to be necessary, given the present structures and strategies of global neocolonial domination.
About 70 generals and admirals were behind the attempted coup against Chávez on September 11, 2002, but they couldn’t get any battalions to follow their orders, except those that they directly commanded. The generals and admirals behind the coup were captured by the troops. “So you can see that it is natural that the Venezuelan armed forces are now committed to the revolutionary process, to the Bolivarian project for social justice” (Guevara 2005:31).
Transformation of constitutional institutions
The central proposal of Chávez’s Bolivarian Fifth Republic Movement was the establishment of a constitutional assembly to bring to an end the Fourth Republic of Venezuela, which was adapted to neocolonial domination and to rule by a Venezuelan elite, thus establishing a new republic, the Fifth Republic. When Chávez assumed the presidency on February 2, 1999, one of his first acts was to sign a decree calling for a constitutional referendum. The opposition sought to annul the decree through challenges to the Supreme Court, but the referendum was held, a Constitutional Assembly was elected, and a new Constitution was developed and approved. Chávez terminated his presidency under the Fourth Republic after only two years and ran for president under the new Constitution. In 2000, he was elected under the new Constitution to a six-year term from 2001 to 2007. In 2006, he was elected (with nearly 63% of the vote) to a second term from 2007 to 2013.
However, Chávez was not fully satisfied with the results of the new constitution. He himself was not directly involved in the drafting of the Constitution, and he considered that it has some problems (Guevara 2005:33-34). In 2007, Chávez presented to the National Assembly a proposal for the reform of the Constitution. The proposal sought to reform 33 articles of the Constitution, dealing with such themes as popular power, socialism and social property, the various forms of property, the economy, the mission, poverty in the cities, the work day, petroleum, the Central Bank, and the armed forces.
Seeking to amend the Constitution in accordance with the vision of socialism for the XXI century, the proposed constitutional reform named various forms of social property: communal financial organizations; communal cooperatives; communal savings associations and savings banks; networks of associated free producers; communal companies; state property; and joint ventures with the mixed participation of the state, the private sector, and communal associations. In accordance with the belief that socialism includes medium and small-scale private property within a socialist society, the proposal affirms private property as a recognized form of property. Chávez considers the development of national agricultural and industrial production by small-scale and medium-scale producers to be an integral part of national development, particularly important in the providing of fundamental human needs such as food, clothing, and housing.
Neither the Constitution of 1999 nor the proposed reform recognizes large-scale private property in industry or in agriculture. The proposal by Chávez sought to strengthen the language of the constitution in regard to large-scale property. Whereas the 1999 Constitution states that “large estates are contrary to the social interest,” the Chávez proposal asserted that “monopolies are prohibited,” and “large estates are prohibited.”
The Chávez proposal also treated the theme of the work day. With the intention of permitting workers sufficient time for the integral development of the person, the proposal placed a daily limit of the work day of 6 hours and a weekly limit of 36 hours. Chávez noted that he expected this provision to generate new shifts that would open more jobs in the formal economy, thus reducing the informal economy.
The Chávez proposal was comprehensive, treating a variety of themes, including: the need to integrate the cities into the national economic and political structures, in order to overcome urban poverty; the importance of national control of petroleum; the role of the Central Bank in financial regulation; and the reform of the Armed Forces. It represented an effort to deepen the Bolivarian Revolution through constitutional and institutional reform.
The opposition was able to mobilize sufficient votes defeat this proposal in a very close vote in a popular referendum on December 2, 2007.
International projection of the Chávez government
The government of Chávez was the leading force in opposition to the U.S. proposal to establish the FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas), a proposal that was defeated as a result of the opposition of Venezuela, Argentina, and Brazil. The Chávez government also has been opposed to the various FTAs (Free Trade Agreements) that the United States has signed with some Latin American countries.
Speaking at the 2004 Summit of the Americas, in which 35 presidents and heads of state were present, Chávez expressed his clear opposition to the FTAA. He asserted that “we ought to declare a social emergency on the continent,” and we ought to adopt a “social contract,” which would guarantee social and economic rights to all persons in Latin America. And he proposed the establishment of an “International Humanitarian Fund,” utilizing money obtained through a reduction in military expenses. He observed that the mechanisms of inequality can be reversed only by setting aside the neoliberal model.
Chávez has protested U.S. interference in the internal affairs of Venezuela through various forms of support for opposition groups. Chávez maintains that the political-economic systems and the foreign policies of the nations of Latin America ought to be formulated by the peoples and governments of these nations. No nation should be subjected to pressure from the United States or any other government or international agency in the development of its political-economic system or of its foreign policy.
Seeking to end the peripheral role historically assigned by colonial and neocolonial structures to Latin American, Chávez has sought to develop commercial and social relations among the various nations of Latin America. This process has become fairly advanced, and it is generally referred to as the process of Latin American integration, although Chávez himself has stated that he prefers the designation “Latin American union.”
As a dimension of this quest for Latin American integration and union, Chávez proposed in 2001 the formation of the Alternativa Bolivariana para las Américas (ALBA). This proposal was put into practice with an agreement in December 2004 between Cuba and Venezuela. The joint declaration rejected the FTAA proposed by the United States as “the most recent expression of its appetites of domination over the region that, if put into practice, would constitute a deepening of Neoliberalism and would create levels of dependency and subordination without precedent. In addition, the Declaration maintained that the historic process of Latin American integration, as distinct from the present one, “has served as a mechanism to deepen dependency and foreign domination.” The Declaration declared that in contrast to FTAA, “ALBA has as its objective the transformation of Latin American societies, making them more just, cultured, participatory, and characterized by solidarity, and therefore, it is conceived as an integral process that ensures the elimination of social inequalities and promotes the quality of life and the effective participation of the peoples in the formation of their own destiny.”
By 2007, Cuba and Venezuela had signed 385 social, economic, and technological projects of collaboration. Criticized for the relation with Cuba by the government of the United States, Chávez has defended the relation as a “new type of relation based in reciprocal solidarity, where Venezuela provides access to petroleum in exchange for Cuban aid in education, medical attention, and sports training.”
In the act of signing of the ALBA accords, Chávez explained his preference for the phrase Latin American union, as against Latin American integration. “No one would find the word integration in a discourse of Bolívar, Martí, Miranda or Sucre.” Their concept was “the profound concept of union, and that is a very different things from the concept of integration that is capitalist and neoliberal.” Neoliberal integration, for Chávez, seeks “the formation of areas of free commerce, the integration of markets, where the strongest always wins.” The neoliberal strategy is “to absorb markets, to eliminate any vestige of sovereignty, and beyond that to eliminate any possibility for true development and for the independence of our countries. What they want is a new colonial period, what they want is for colonialism to become established.”
Chavez believes that the process of Latin American union is winning the battle against neoliberalism. He believes that neoliberalism is the last phase of capitalism, that capitalism will collapse, and that the U.S. Empire will fall in the first decades of the 21st century, if the peoples continue with their activism, raising consciousness and constructing an alternative.
For Chávez, the new process of Latin American union respects cultural differences and the sovereignty of each country. “We have a single project, but the particularities of each country and the sovereignty of each country remain intact.” The cooperation includes many areas, according to the needs of each country: food, science and technology, telecommunications, energy.
Chavez believes that the process of Latin American union will succeed. “We are not going to leave to our descendents a new colonial period. We are going to leave a ‘Gran Patria:’ Our America united, developed, and free. And in Venezuela as in Cuba, we say socialism. That is the road to save our countries, our peoples, and more, to save all of humanity.”
Above and beyond the nations of ALBA, the Chávez government has developed significant economic and social relations with other nations of the region, especially Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and the nations of the Caribbean. It also is developing significant relations with China and with the Islamic Republic of Iran. These steps represent practical development of the principles of Latin American union and South-South cooperation.
Along with other nations of the Non-Aligned Movement, Chávez calls for democratic reform of the United Nations. In an address to the United Nations on September 22, 2005, Chávez called for: the expansion of the Security Council, so that it would include underdeveloped countries; an increased transparency and the elimination of proclamations being imposed without the adequate participation of the nations of the Third World; the suppression of the veto in the Security Council; and an increase of the authority of the Secretary General.
The Opposition
There are important sectors in Venezuelan society whose short-term interests are in opposition to the social transformations sought by the Bolivarian Revolution: (1) The technocratic elite that managed the petroleum industry prior to 1998; (2) the business elite, who are organized in Fedecamaras, an organization formed in 1944 that represents more than one million business persons; (3) leaders of the union of petroleum workers; (4) the landed estate bourgeoisie; and (5) the traditional political parties. The opposition controls the private media of communication, and they have the support of the United States, represented by the active engagement with financial support of the U.S. embassy. These sectors seek to obtain support from what Leon Trostky called the great reserves of the counterrevolution: the middle-sized agricultural and industrial producers, the middle class, and the intellectuals (cited in Hassaan 2009:90).
Since the election of Chávez in 1998, there have been five organized efforts by the opposition to place constraints or overthrow the Bolivarian Revolution. (1) Opposition to the new Constitution of 1999. The movement was able to overcome the opposition and establish a new constitution, but it contains some limitations from the point of view of the revolutionary process. (2) In April of 2002, there was an attempted coup d’état in which 70 military generals participated, and Chávez was taken prisoner. But there were mass demonstrations calling for the return of the president to the presidential palace, and the mass mobilization was supported by loyal officers. The coup was reversed in three days. (3) In January of 2003, the petroleum managers brought production and exportation to a halt, seeking to generate chaos in the country. Production and commerce was restored by the oil workers and the armed forces. (4) In 2004, the opposition obtained sufficient signatures to obtain a vote for a recall of the President. But on August 15, 2004, fifty-nine percent of the voters supported Chávez in the presidential recall referendum.
(5) In 2007, the opposition opposed the constitutional reforms proposed by Chávez, and they were able to block these reforms through a popular referendum on December 2, 2007. It was the first, and to date only, electoral victory of the opposition over Chávez. There was some sentiment in the Bolivarian movement that the proposal was overly complicated, and there was not sufficient mobilization of the people. The movement is working toward attaining these constitutional reforms piecemeal or attaining them in essence through executive and/or legislative action.
The capacity of the opposition to present obstacles is a constant challenge to the revolutionary process. The opposition does not confine itself to reasoned public discourse: it often uses disruptive strategies; and it offers a discourse that distorts reality and that draws upon ideologies that are the legacy of a century of neocolonial domination. The battle of ideas is unfolding, a battle between neocolonial hegemony and the popular counter-hegemony.
In the battle of ideas, the counterrevolutionary forces are advantaged by their control of the mass media. Olga González of the Cuban Center for U.S. and Hemispheric Studies that the privately-owned media companies in Venezuela operate in a context in which six U.S. media giants control the Latin American market. These companies are limited in their capacity to produce programming, and thus they are dependent on U.S. and European programming. A variety of alliances and commercial accords exits between Latin American and U.S. companies. Although having a dependent relation in with United States, the Venezuelan media companies also are concentrated, and they are influential in Venezuela. They have become political actors in opposition to the government, rejecting any pretense to neutrality. The Venezuelan government is reluctant to take steps against them, sensitive that there would be accusations of violation of freedom of the present, although it recognizes that there also are issues here of national sovereignty and cultural autonomy as well as responsible journalism. The government thus far has following the path of seeking to alternative public and community television and radio programming that functions as an alternative to the concentrated and private Venezuelan television that is under the control of U.S. corporations (González 2010:10-19).
References
Guevara, Aleida. 2005. Chávez, Venezuela, and the New Latin America. Melbourne: Ocean Press.
Chávez Frías, Hugo. 2006. La Unidad Latinoamericana. Melbourne: Ocean Sur.
Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías was born in Sabaneta, a rural village of Venezuela, on July 28, 1954. His father was a school teacher who earned his teaching diploma by studying part-time for years. Chávez describes his family as a poor peasant family. Although his mother and father lived nearby, he was principally reared by his grandmother, a peasant woman who was half indigenous. He describes himself as a mixture of indigenous, African, and European (Guevara 2005:14-15, 71-72, 76).
In 1971, at the age of 17, he entered the Military Academy of Venezuela, through which he earned a commission as a Second Lieutenant in 1975. Prior to his arrival at the military academy, there was little indication of his revolutionary vocation, and his motivation for entering the military academy was to facilitate his going to Caracas, and his principal passion was baseball. However, his study during his years in the military academy established the foundation for his revolutionary formation. During this period of his life he read: the speeches and letters of Simón Bolívar; the political, philosophical, and military writings of Mao Tse Tung; and the writings of Che Guevara. As a result of this study, he developed an interpretation that he describes as a synthesis of Bolivarianism and Maoism. He investigated these themes further in a master´s program in political science as Simón Bolívar University, which his political career interrupted before he was able to finish his thesis. He continuously has read books of historical, political, social, and literary significance during his military and political careers, and he has advised young people to develop the habit of reading as a form of relaxation. He often recommends particular books in his discourses (Guevara 2005:78-79; Chávez 2006:104).
His career as a military officer also was central to his formation. His experiences included postings in small rural towns, and he developed relations of dialogue with persons connected to a guerrilla movement. During the 1970s and 1980s, he had considerable success working with young officers in the development of a reform movement within the military (Guevara 2005:26-30).
On February 4, 1992, with the participation of approximately 100 fellow officers, he directed an attempted coup d´état, with the intention of overthrowing the government and convening a constituent assembly. The coup failed, and he spent two years in prison. Upon his release, he resigned from the military and formed the Bolivarian Fifth Republic Movement, again with the intention of convening a constituent assembly, but this time seeking to attain power through the electoral process. Taking advantage of the deteriorating economic situation in the nation and the rising popular tide in opposition to the neoliberal project, he was elected President of Venezuela in 1998, in spite of the ignoring of his candidacy by the mass media. He assumed the presidency on February 2, 1999. He immediately issued a decree calling for a constitutional assembly. Elections for a new constitution were held, and a new constitution was approved, establishing the Fifth Republic. In 2000, he was elected to a six year term as president under the new constitution, and he was subsequently elected, with nearly 63% of the vote, to a second term from 2007 to 2013 (Guevara 2005:9-13, 18-23, 39-39).
Hugo Chávez believes that underdevelopment and development are interrelated, and that the underdevelopment of the peoples of Latin America, Africa, and Asia is a consequence of colonial domination. Citing Andre Gunder Frank, he asserts: “Underdevelopment is a characteristic of development. Our underdevelopment is a consequence of the development of the imperialist countries. They only arrived at the level of development that they have after having invaded and sacked immense territories of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. If not, they would not be at the level of development that they are” (Chávez 2006:132).
Chávez rejects neoliberalism. “It is practically and ethically inadmissible to sacrifice the human species appealing in a crazy manner to the validity of a socioeconomic model with an enormous destructive capacity. It is suicidal to insist on disseminating it and imposing it as the infallible remedy for the ills for which it is, precisely, the principal cause. . . . What neoliberal capitalism, the Washington Consensus, has generated is a greater degree of misery and inequality and an infinite tragedy for the peoples of this continent.”
In an address at the United Nations on September 20, 2006, citing the book Hegemony or Survival by the well-known U.S. intellectual Noam Chomsky, Chávez asserted that U.S. imperialist policies are a threat to the survival of the human species. “The hegemonic intention of North American imperialism puts at risk the very survival of the human species. We continue alerting over this danger, and we are making a call to the people of the United States and to the world to stop this threat that is like the very sword of Damocles” (Chávez 2006:346).
U.S policies are designed, Chávez believes, to maintain U.S. hegemony in the world. Referring to the address to the United Nations the previous day by U.S. President George W, Bush, Chávez asserts: “As spokesperson for imperialism he came to give his recipes to try to maintain the present scheme of domination, of exploitation, and of plundering of the peoples of the world. . . . North American imperialism, and here Chomsky says it with profoundness and clarity, is making desperate efforts to consolidate its hegemonic system of domination. We cannot permit this to occur, that the world dictatorship be installed, that the world dictatorship be consolidated” (Chávez 2006:346-47).
Chávez views U.S. imperialism as hypocritical, claiming to be democratic, as it imposes its version of democracy through force. “The discourse of the world “tyrant” president, full of cynicism, full of hypocrisy, is the imperial hypocrisy, the intent to control all. They want to impose the democratic model as they conceive it, the false democracy of the elites. It is in addition a democratic model very unique, since it is imposed by explosions, bombers, at the point of invasions and cannon shot. What democracy! One would have to review the theses of Aristotle and of the first who spoke of democracy in Greece in order to see what model of democracy is that, which is imposed at the point of marines, invasions, aggressions, and bombs” (Chávez 2006:347).
Chávez believes that the U.S. Empire is not only the most powerful and most brutal in human history, it also is the most hypocritical. “It speaks of democracy, and it stabs democracy; it speaks of human rights, and it runs over human rights; the Roman Empire did not speak of human rights, it simply appropriated them as an empire. . . . But these hypocrites speak of human rights and bomb entire cities; they speak of liberty of expression and imprison journalists for not revealing their sources; they speak of democracy and prepare coups d´état against the peoples. They speak of the war against drugs and utilize the war against drugs in order to run over the sovereignty of the peoples and to run over the independence of nations; they speak of a war against drugs, but they do nothing to combat drug trafficking there in their cities, in their great cities; they do nothing about the drug trafficking money that is in the large banks of the North. They are the kings of hypocrisy” (Chávez 2006:192).
Chávez criticizes the Latin American elites and governments for participating in the imposition of the neoliberal project, with its devastating consequences for the people. “How much damage was done to the peoples of Latin America by the initiative of the Americas, neoliberalism, the Washington Consensus, and the well-known package of measures of the International Monetary Fund. And in this continent nearly all the governments were kneeling, one must say it in this way, the elites of the peoples were kneeling undignified, or better said not the elites of the peoples but the elites of the republics, were kneeling before the empire, and in this manner the privatization orgy began like a macabre wave in these lands, the selling of very many state companies” (Chávez 2006:263-64).
Chávez believes that we are at a critical and decisive time in human and world history. He observes that Rosa Luxemburg, citing Marx´s phrase “socialism or barbarism,” had written that one day in the future men and women will have to choose their political, economic, and social system, and they will find themselves in a situation in which they will be obligated to make a historic decision to assure the survival of the human species. In our times “the capitalist model, the developmentalist model, the consumerist model, which the North has imposed on the world, is putting an end to the planet Earth” (Chávez 2006:256). We can observe such phenomena as global warming, the opening of the ozone layer, an increasing intensity of hurricanes, the melting of the ice caps, and the rising of the seas. Moreover, in the social sphere, rather than accepting their superexploitation and social exclusion, the peoples of the world are increasingly in rebellion. And so in both ecological and social terms, we are at a critical moment in human history. Whereas Marx and even Luxemburg had the luxury of thinking in terms of centuries, we do not. Humanity is approaching a critical point, in which “in the first five decades of the XXI century it will be decided if in the future there will be life on this planet or if their will not be life. Socialism or barbarism” (Chávez 2006:195).
Chávez maintains that in this critical moment in human history, the peoples in movement in Latin America are saying “no” to imperialism and are casting aside the Latin American elites who betrayed them. The day of liberation is arriving. “Simon Bolívar, nearly dying and alone, defrauded, betrayed and expelled, said, “The great day of South America has not yet arrived.” Two hundred years later, we believe that now the great day of America has arrived, and more than of America, the great day of the peoples, the great day of the peoples. The great day of liberty, equality, and justice is arriving” (Chávez 2006:198).
United and determined, the peoples have the capacity to overcome imperialism and to save the species, to establish the sovereignty of the nations and to protect the rights and needs of the people. “We ought to leave North American imperialism, if it has not disappeared, as a true paper tiger. Let the peoples of the earth everywhere rise up, like tigers of steel, defending sovereignty, life, dignity, the future. We the peoples are tigers of steel. There is no imperialism that has survived when we the peoples decide to be free” (Chávez 2006:259).
Chávez affirms that “we can save this planet and life on this planet” (Chávez 2006:194). “I am sure that we can save life for future generations and that we will have a better world, but we are called to the battle” (Chávez 2006:257).
Chávez promotes a concept of autonomous economic development that he describes as “a model of endogenous development that is not imposed on us by anyone, neither the Creole elite nor the imperialist elite, our own economic development” (Chávez 2006:319). This model seeks to develop national production, giving emphasis to the development of energy, agriculture, and basic industry, and providing support for small and medium producers. He considers the model developed by Paraguay in the 19th century, destroyed by the War of the Triple Alliance, which he calls “the triple infamy” (Chávez 2006:124), to have been an earlier development project consistent with the concept of autonomous development. Endogenous development is rooted in the cultures and traditions of the peoples, particularly the indigenous peoples, and it has to be developed with a consciousness of history. The study of history often has been only partially developed in the educational systems of neocolonial republics, and historical consciousness also has been undermined by the ideologies of the empire. History must be rediscovered.
Chávez has proclaimed that the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela is constructing “Socialism of the XXI Century.” Socialism of the 21st century will not be the same as the socialisms of the 20th century. It will be “a socialism renewed for the new era, for the XXI century” (Chávez 2006:193). “It will not have only one road; it will have many roads. It will not have one model; there will be many variants of socialism. It will have to adapt to the circumstances of each country, of each region. I believe that one of the tragedies of socialism of the XX century was its trying to copy models. Armando Hart in his words a short time ago was reminding us of the great José Carlos Mariáteugi, socialism for Latin America cannot be a replica, it has to be a great and heroic creation, a heroic construction of our peoples” (Chávez 2006:193).
Socialism of the XXI century is based on a renewed formulation of traditional values. “Socialism of the XXI century ought to begin to consolidate new values that are not new, they are old values but one must renew them, one must strengthen them. . . . For us here in Venezuela, for example, and I believe that it is valid for a good part of Latin America and the Caribbean, Christianity is a current that pushes and feeds our socialism in construction. This socialism of the XXI century has much of Christianity for the Venezuelans, as it has much of Bolivarianism and Marxism” (Chávez 2006:200).
There is a fundamental difference between capitalism and socialism in regard to moral principles. Socialism is based on solidarity and love, but capitalism is based on egoism, voracity, and exploitation. “Socialism is love of the human being by the human being. Socialism has a foundation in love, and capitalism in ambition and hatred. New values: solidarity; true and authentic spontaneous fraternity; so that this is one of the lines of work in the construction of the new socialism: morality” (Chávez 2006:200).
Chávez is a professing Christian, who believes that Jesus of Nazareth “came to announce the reign of equality, the reign of justice and peace,” and that he was “the first great socialist of our era” (Chávez 2006:257). He maintains that even as a child, prior to his revolutionary formation, he viewed Christ as a rebel (Chávez 2006:226). His understanding of Christianity is in the tradition of liberation theology. “I believe that when he said, “My reign is not of this world,” Christ was leaving it to posterity, and he was not saying that it was another world beyond, beyond the clouds, no. The Reign of God ought to be here, attained here, as say well the theologians of liberation, Leonardo Boff and others. The Reign of God is here, the reign of equality and justice. Christ said that his reign is not of this world, it is of the future world that is coming. . . . It will be our descendants that will see that world, but one must march toward it, right now, that certainly is necessary, one must point in that direction, one must make battle in that direction” (Chávez 2006:235).
Chávez believes that the peoples of the world have the right to self-defense. “The people have the right to war if it is attacked, if it is invaded. It is the right of self-defense, and it pertains also to the individual terrain. The individual has a right to his defense and to use violence in his own defense, if someone attacks him violently. . . . The same thing happens with the peoples, but the use of violence is only justified for the defender, for the attacked, not for the aggressor” (Chávez 2006:236).
National control of natural resources
We have seen that in the development of the modern world system, the colonized regions of the world had imposed on them a distorted development, in which resources and institutions are organized for the exportation of raw materials. In the case of Venezuela, the principal raw material has been petroleum.
Petroleum has particular characteristics that make it different from other raw materials. It is found in limited areas of the world, and the global demand for petroleum products is very high, particularly in the developed countries. These characteristics establish the possibility that a country with petroleum reserves can obtain high levels of income, relative to other raw materials, in exchange for this valuable product. OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) symbolizes this potential.
However, in Venezuela during the period of 1917 to 1960, the country and the government received little income from petroleum, as the petroleum countries were foreign owned, and there was little regulation of them. In response to this situation, popular movements demanded greater national control of this natural resource, giving rise after 1960 to what came to be called petroleum nationalism, where the state seeks to maximize its income from the exportation of petroleum.
The era of petroleum nationalism culminated with the nationalization of the petroleum companies in Venezuela in 1976. A state petroleum company, Petróleos de Venezuela, Sociedad Anónima (PDVSA), was formed. Ironically, nationalization had the consequence of creating more autonomy for the petroleum industry and more influence for the international petroleum companies. Distinct from the nationalization of the petroleum industry in Mexico in 1938, the nationalization in Venezuela was gradual, and it occurred with the cooperation of the international petroleum companies in Venezuela. By the time of the nationalization in Venezuela in 1976, the management of the companies was Venezuelan, as a consequence of Venezuelan pressure during the era of petroleum nationalism. So the nationalization of 1976 had the effect of changing ownership from international petroleum companies to the Venezuelan state, but the management of the companies in Venezuela did not change. And the Venezuelans that managed the companies had been socialized into the norms and values of the international petroleum companies, and they had internalized the perspective of international capital.
After nationalization, the Venezuelan state relaxed its oversight of the petroleum companies, believing that the industry was now securely in Venezuelan hands. But this turned out to be a mistaken belief, as the Venezuelan managers directed the PDVSA from the perspective of the international petroleum companies and did not seek to utilize petroleum income to promote national development. Seeking to reduce payments to the Venezuelan state, PDVSA did not seek to maximize profits, which would result in higher payments to the Venezuelan state. Instead, PDVSA adopted a strategy of channeling surpluses to investments in production and sales, in order to minimize profits and corresponding payments to the state.
In the 1980s, PDVSA adopted a policy of internationalization in order to avoid payments to the state. The maneuver involved buying refineries and distributorships in other countries in order to transfer surpluses out of the country, beyond the reach of the Venezuelan state. Some of the workings of this maneuver can be seen in the case of the CITGO Company, a Venezuelan owned company in U.S. territory that consists of eight large refineries and 14,000 gas stations with an estimated combined value of 8 to 10 million dollars. Yet in spite of this significant investment by PDVSA, the Venezuelan state never received any income from CITGO. All of the profits remained in the United States. Chávez estimates that Venezuela gave to the United States billions of dollars through “the perverse business of the CITGO Company” (Chávez 2006:142, 321).
As a dimension of the neoliberal project, the government of Venezuela greatly relaxed its regulation of foreign investment in Venezuela in 1989. PDVSA was given by the government responsibility for supervising the “opening” of the country to foreign investment as it pertained to the petroleum industry. Under PDVSA supervision, many international petroleum companies formed joined ventures, with terms highly favorable to the investors, and without consideration of national development.
PDVSA, therefore, had emerged as a state within the state, with significant autonomy and with limited control by the state. Its approach was to create a climate favorable to foreign investment. It did not seek to develop an approach that would seek to attract foreign investment in a form integrated with a project for national development.
The government of Hugo Chávez sought to reduce the autonomy of PDVSA and to incorporate its resources into a project of national development. The Chávez government appointed new directors of PDVSA, replacing the directors appointed by previous governments. With the new leadership of PDVSA, the income to the state from petroleum became significantly higher, and these funds are directed toward various social projects and toward elimination of the foreign debt. As Chávez has expressed, “We have stopped being a petroleum colony, and we have begun to comply with that desire of the eminent Venezuelan Artuo Úslar Pietri: ‘One must sow the petroleum,’ he said. We have begun to sow the petroleum, to utilize the petroleum wealth as a lever for social development and for economic development” (Chávez 2006:318-19).
The measures taken by the Chávez government generated conflict. The U.S. government and the international petroleum industry as well as the Venezuelan petroleum management were opposed to the measures, given that these measures sought to eliminate control of Venezuelan oil by the international petroleum industry. To some extent, workers in the Venezuelan oil industry were opposed to change, since their wages reflected international levels in the industry, far above the wages earned by workers in other industries in Venezuela.
Interrelated with the issue of control of the production and commercialization of petroleum by the Venezuelan state, there is the issue of Venezuelan participation in OPEC. Venezuela (along with Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, and Kuwait) had been one of the five founding members of OPEC in 1960. At that time, government income from oil production in the oil producing countries represented no more than 6 or 7% of the final price for a barrel of oil. OPEC was formed with the intention of breaking with the neo-colonial system of foreign control of petroleum production and exportation, establishing a just price for the petroleum and facilitating the economic independence of the oil producing and exporting countries. During the 1960s, OPEC was able to become stronger by incorporating new members. Following a strategy of controlling production in order to protect prices and conserve petroleum reserves, it declared higher prices in 1973, generating the first oil price shock, as oil prices nearly quadrupled during 1973 and 1974 (Pichs 2006:152-54).
Simply changing production levels and prices, however, does not break with the neocolonial system. The transnational petroleum companies, who control the refining and commercialization of the final product, passed the higher prices to the consumers. And rather than investing the new income in the economic and social development of their countries, the governments of OPEC deposited the new funds in the banks of the North. Between 1974 and 1982, the OPEC countries registered a financial surplus of 471 billion dollars, four-fifths of which wound up in the countries of the North, and only 15% of which remained in the Third World. As we have seen, this phenomenon generated a surplus of capital in the banks of the North, becoming a source of an expansion of Third World debt, which also would become, through the payment of interest, a mechanism for the flow of capital from the impoverished nations of the Third World to the wealthy nations of the North (Pichs 2006:154-55).
At the same time, the nations of the North were able to rapidly adjust to the higher petroleum prices by adopting programs of conservation and savings of energy as well as searching for alternative sources of energy. The underdeveloped nations of the Third World, by virtue of their limited resources, were less in a position to make these kinds of adjustments. As a result, the higher oil prices had a negative impact on the non-oil producing and exporting nations of the Third World (Pichs 2006:154-55).
The Chávez government developed new policies in relation to OPEC. During the 1970s, although Venezuela had played a central role in the development of OPEC, PDVSA was functioning as a state within a state, and it tried to avoid OPEC quotas by investing in production outside of Venezuela. During the neoliberal era, the government of Venezuela had been cooperating with the Washington policy of breaking OPEC by flooding the oil market. Venezuela was producing four million barrels of oil a day. Meanwhile, succumbing to the pressure of the Washington consensus toward the “free market,” OPEC had abandoned control of production and prices in 1985, leading to a period of low oil prices from 1986 through 1998. In the case of Venezuela, when Chávez assumed the presidency in January, 1999, the price of oil was $7 per barrel, and the government budget was based on the assumption of a price of $14 per barrel. In response to this situation, the Chávez government immediately cut back on production, and Chávez visited OPEC leaders, informing them that Venezuela would respect OPEC quotas and asking them to also reduce production. This produced results, and by the end of 1999, the price of oil was at $16 per barrel, and there began a period of higher prices for petroleum (Pichs 2006:157-58, 162; Guevara 2005:24, 36).
But the policy of the Chávez government goes beyond efforts to resurrect OPEC control of producing and pricing. Unlike OPEC nations in the 1970s, the Chávez government is investing the petroleum income in the development of Venezuela. Other nations of OPEC also are beginning to take steps in this direction, in part as a consequence of the impact of the Islamic Revolution. Moreover, rather than only selling the petroleum to the consumerist societies of the North, the Chávez government is seeking to develop mutually beneficial social and economic accords with the nations of the South as a dimension of a general orientation of South-South cooperation. It sells oil to nations of Latin America and the Caribbean with terms more favorable than the international market: ninety-day credit for a payment of 75% of the international market value, with the remaining 25% financed over fifteen years at a fixed rate of 2% annual interest, with payments to begin after two years and with the option of making payments in goods or services, such as rice, corn or maize. Breaking with the historic peripheral role as supplier of raw materials for the core, ships with Venezuelan oil for the first time have docked in Uruguay and Argentina, as a result of mutually beneficial accords signed by Venezuela with these nations. And Venezuela has formed Petrocaribe, dedicated to addressing the energy needs of the nations of the Caribbean (Chavez 2006: 149-51).
Alongside these efforts to take control of the petroleum industry, the Chávez government also sought to recover state control of other sectors of the economy. During the neoliberal era, Venezuelan governments had privatized the universities, the health system, educational system, water, electricity, and public services. For its part, PDVSA had entered into joint ventures that effectively involved privatization. The Chavez government reversed these privatizations, and these entities were again placed under government control (Guevara 2005:39, 45; Chávez 2006:111, 141).
Social Missions
The additional income to the Venezuelan state from petroleum is used by the Chávez government to finance projects in education, health, and housing as well as to increase wages and to provide financial assistance to those in need. Most of the projects are designated as “missions.”
Prior to the Chávez government, there were unnecessary obstacles to education, such as dress codes and enrollment fees. In an interview with Aleida Guevara, Chávez stated: “Some schools told kids, “You can’t come if you don’t have any shoes.” I asked, “Why are shoes so important?” If they had insisted that I wore shoes when I was a kid, I would never have made the sixth grade. I used to go to school in homemade sandals, and when those broke, I went barefoot. At high school in Barinas, I used to wear rubber boots, and my clothes were usually tattered and torn. Why should we now demand that kids wear shoes? Let them go barefoot, let them go in shorts. If they don’t have any uniforms let them go in whatever they do have” (Guevara 2005:37).
Eliminating enrollment fees, the Chávez government anticipated that national school enrollment would increase to 300,000, but in fact enrollment increased to 600,000. To adjust to the unexpected demand, more teachers were hired, teachers agreed to teach with lower wages, retired teachers gave classes free, and soldiers taught classes. The government budget for education doubled (Guevara 2005:37).
A literacy program was developed with Cuban support. It was named Mission Robinson, after Simón “Robinson” Rodríguez, who was Simón Bolívar’s teacher. During a six-month period in 2003, one million people were taught to read (Guevara 2005: 50-51,)
Other missions in education emerged. Mission Ribas, named after independence hero José Felix Ribas, is a program for the completion of high school. Mission Sucre, named after Antonio José Sucre, one of the heroes of the Latin American revolution of 1810-24, is a scholarship program for university education. Mission Vuelvan Caras provides opportunity for vocational training (Guevara 2005:51-54, 141).
Chávez views popular education as integral to popular participation. Shortly after his election to a second term, he proclaimed: “We are going to launch a national day for the entire year of 2007, we will call it Morality and Light, for popular education everywhere: in the home, the school, the workshop, the factory, the country, the neighborhood, everywhere; education, education, education; we have many advances but still we have to deepen education, culture, science, technology, consciousness, ideology, values, values, values, the new values; one must demolish the old values of individualism, of capitalism, and egoism; one must create new values, and that that can only be attained through education.”
Mission Barrio Adentro is a medical mission that is financed by the Venezuelan state and relies upon the participation of 20,000 Cuban doctors, who are living and working in Venezuela, providing health care services in the poorest regions and neighborhoods. In 2004, Mission Barrio Adentro attended 50 million cases, providing free health care services and medicine (Chávez 2006:110-11). Following the Cuban model, Venezuela with Cuban aid is developing a Latin American School of Medicine, with plans to educate and train 200,000 doctors in its first ten years (Chávez 2006:241-42).
The Chávez government has raised the minimum wage by 30% in 2004 and 26% in 2005, and made corresponding adjustments in the salary scale for government employees (Chávez 2006:336-37). It has developed a program of financial assistance to single mothers in need (Chávez 2006:339), and a housing cooperative program for housing construction and housing repair and projects of potable water (Chávez 2006:202). Mission Mercal provides food at subsidized prices in poor neighborhood (Guevara 2005:58, 142). Misión Negra Hipólita attends to the needs of people in the streets: beggars, children, alcoholics, and drug addicts (Daher 2008:34).
For Chávez, the missions “are cancelling the gigantic social debt” that has accumulated for centuries (Chávez 2006:137). It is a question of transforming a system characterized by “social exclusion,” in which hundreds of thousands of children are excluded from primary school, hundreds of thousands of youth are excluded from secondary education, millions of youth are excluded from university education, and millions of persons are excluded from health care (Chávez 2006:318).
Financing social mission through petroleum income is a less radical approach than one which redistributes land. Thus far the land reform program of the Chávez government has been limited, in that it redistributes only unused land. The Land Law of 2001 decreed that rural property with more than 5000 hectares must utilize the land in a productive way. Unproductive hectares would be expropriated, with compensation. Utilizing the new Constitution of 1999 and the Land Law of 2001, the government has distributed in five years more than 2 million hectares to 130,000 families. In spite of the limited nature of the land reform, the estate bourgeoisie has been one of the leading forces of the opposition. Chávez proposed in 2007 an amendment to the 1999 Constitution that would have prohibited large estates, but this proposal was defeated in a popular referendum.
In general, the Latin American anti-neocolonial movement has arrived at the understanding that the redistribution of land is a necessary component for the autonomous development of Latin American nations. Land reform would establish a higher wage and salary level for the countryside and thus would give the domestic market the strength that it needs to feed and sustain industrial development. Land reform is generally a difficult step politically, because of the intense opposition of the rural landholding class.
Each country, however, has its particular characteristics. Because of the significant reserves of petroleum and the strength of the petroleum industry, it may be that in Venezuela the petroleum can feed industrial development, and a limited agrarian reform program is workable as a component of autonomous economic development in Venezuela.
Popular participation
The Chávez government has sought to strengthen the process of the popular participation that had been emerging during the 1980s and 1990s. The government is developing a structure of Popular Power that will include community councils, workers’ councils, student councils, and councils formed by small farmers. The government is forming a confederation of community councils that would be a confederation of local, regional, and national councils. Chávez sees this as an on-going process of gradually incorporating popular councils as an integral part of the state, “progressively transforming the bourgeois state into an alternative state, socialist and Bolivarian” (Chávez 2006:317, 325-27).
The modern state is a centralized administrative-political structure, characterized by control from above. A level of centralization is necessary in order to obtain goals and to complete tasks with efficiency. But the popular counsels have another dynamic of democracy from below. The incorporation of the popular counsels into the state represents the possibility of establishing a balance between the organization from above and democracy from below.
The transformation of a neocolonial army into an army of the people
During the 1970s and 1980s, Chávez developed a reform movement in the Venezuelan military. Chávez notes that “we built a new army, little by little, via collective effort, the credit is not mine alone. We spent many years sowing the seed of doubt among the ranks; we built consciousness” (Guevara 2005:26).
A key moment in the process was the swearing of an oath in 1982 by officers in the movement. Chávez recounts: “We swore an oath beneath a tree, a very famous tree here in Venezuela: the samán, which as history records Bolívar once camped under. The huge tree [with branches stretching 260 feet] is over 300 years old, and we swore our oath there, pledging ourselves to the construction of a Bolivarian movement within the army” (Guevara 2005:27-28).
The movement gathered strength during the 1980s, and it particularly grew after 1989, when there occurred a popular uprising and its repression by the military. In the attempted coup led by Chávez in 1992, he was able to bring together about 100 officers. So that when Chávez was elected president in 1998, he had been the central figure in a movement of reform in the military that had been developing for twenty years.
Chávez notes that the reform movement within the military had been particularly strong among the officers of his generation. “There is a marked difference between the generations within the movement. Until very recently, and even in the early years of the Bolivarian government, the vast majority of the armed forces commanders were from a different era. In contrast, the military leaders are now all from my generation; the majority of them are my contemporaries and comrades. General Baduel, for example, the commander-in-chief of the army, was one of those who took the oath under the samán in 1982. The air force commander, General Cordero, a fighter pilot, also took the oath—in an air base one long night back in the 1980s. The navy commander is the same, as well as his wife, who is a captain and has been a revolutionary for years. Not to mention the head of the National Guard. All the way down the military pyramid you will find that Bolivarian ideas are everywhere. To give you further examples, almost all of today’s battalion commanders joined the movement, either directly or indirectly, when they were very young. They joined a movement that fully appreciated the importance of using the military academy and main military bases as forums for debate and discussion. To create civic-minded soldiers and military-conscious civilians has always been our aim” (Guevara 2005:28).
Note here the duality of this conception: Chávez refers not only to civic-minded soldiers, but also to military-conscious civilians. Perhaps the latter phrase can be interpreted as civilians who are prepared in the techniques of self-defense and who form popular militias, engaging in cooperative and guided exercises of national self-defense, and who are available as a popular army when the situation requires it. Popular militias of this kind have been developed in revolutionary Cuba. The capacity of a nation to raise popular militias can be a deterrent to a superpower with intentions to establish a global military dictatorship. Although, as Fidel Castro has recently noted, the principal weapons of the present time are ideas, and not arms, it would nonetheless seem that the capacity of a people for armed self-defense continues to be necessary, given the present structures and strategies of global neocolonial domination.
About 70 generals and admirals were behind the attempted coup against Chávez on September 11, 2002, but they couldn’t get any battalions to follow their orders, except those that they directly commanded. The generals and admirals behind the coup were captured by the troops. “So you can see that it is natural that the Venezuelan armed forces are now committed to the revolutionary process, to the Bolivarian project for social justice” (Guevara 2005:31).
Transformation of constitutional institutions
The central proposal of Chávez’s Bolivarian Fifth Republic Movement was the establishment of a constitutional assembly to bring to an end the Fourth Republic of Venezuela, which was adapted to neocolonial domination and to rule by a Venezuelan elite, thus establishing a new republic, the Fifth Republic. When Chávez assumed the presidency on February 2, 1999, one of his first acts was to sign a decree calling for a constitutional referendum. The opposition sought to annul the decree through challenges to the Supreme Court, but the referendum was held, a Constitutional Assembly was elected, and a new Constitution was developed and approved. Chávez terminated his presidency under the Fourth Republic after only two years and ran for president under the new Constitution. In 2000, he was elected under the new Constitution to a six-year term from 2001 to 2007. In 2006, he was elected (with nearly 63% of the vote) to a second term from 2007 to 2013.
However, Chávez was not fully satisfied with the results of the new constitution. He himself was not directly involved in the drafting of the Constitution, and he considered that it has some problems (Guevara 2005:33-34). In 2007, Chávez presented to the National Assembly a proposal for the reform of the Constitution. The proposal sought to reform 33 articles of the Constitution, dealing with such themes as popular power, socialism and social property, the various forms of property, the economy, the mission, poverty in the cities, the work day, petroleum, the Central Bank, and the armed forces.
Seeking to amend the Constitution in accordance with the vision of socialism for the XXI century, the proposed constitutional reform named various forms of social property: communal financial organizations; communal cooperatives; communal savings associations and savings banks; networks of associated free producers; communal companies; state property; and joint ventures with the mixed participation of the state, the private sector, and communal associations. In accordance with the belief that socialism includes medium and small-scale private property within a socialist society, the proposal affirms private property as a recognized form of property. Chávez considers the development of national agricultural and industrial production by small-scale and medium-scale producers to be an integral part of national development, particularly important in the providing of fundamental human needs such as food, clothing, and housing.
Neither the Constitution of 1999 nor the proposed reform recognizes large-scale private property in industry or in agriculture. The proposal by Chávez sought to strengthen the language of the constitution in regard to large-scale property. Whereas the 1999 Constitution states that “large estates are contrary to the social interest,” the Chávez proposal asserted that “monopolies are prohibited,” and “large estates are prohibited.”
The Chávez proposal also treated the theme of the work day. With the intention of permitting workers sufficient time for the integral development of the person, the proposal placed a daily limit of the work day of 6 hours and a weekly limit of 36 hours. Chávez noted that he expected this provision to generate new shifts that would open more jobs in the formal economy, thus reducing the informal economy.
The Chávez proposal was comprehensive, treating a variety of themes, including: the need to integrate the cities into the national economic and political structures, in order to overcome urban poverty; the importance of national control of petroleum; the role of the Central Bank in financial regulation; and the reform of the Armed Forces. It represented an effort to deepen the Bolivarian Revolution through constitutional and institutional reform.
The opposition was able to mobilize sufficient votes defeat this proposal in a very close vote in a popular referendum on December 2, 2007.
International projection of the Chávez government
The government of Chávez was the leading force in opposition to the U.S. proposal to establish the FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas), a proposal that was defeated as a result of the opposition of Venezuela, Argentina, and Brazil. The Chávez government also has been opposed to the various FTAs (Free Trade Agreements) that the United States has signed with some Latin American countries.
Speaking at the 2004 Summit of the Americas, in which 35 presidents and heads of state were present, Chávez expressed his clear opposition to the FTAA. He asserted that “we ought to declare a social emergency on the continent,” and we ought to adopt a “social contract,” which would guarantee social and economic rights to all persons in Latin America. And he proposed the establishment of an “International Humanitarian Fund,” utilizing money obtained through a reduction in military expenses. He observed that the mechanisms of inequality can be reversed only by setting aside the neoliberal model.
Chávez has protested U.S. interference in the internal affairs of Venezuela through various forms of support for opposition groups. Chávez maintains that the political-economic systems and the foreign policies of the nations of Latin America ought to be formulated by the peoples and governments of these nations. No nation should be subjected to pressure from the United States or any other government or international agency in the development of its political-economic system or of its foreign policy.
Seeking to end the peripheral role historically assigned by colonial and neocolonial structures to Latin American, Chávez has sought to develop commercial and social relations among the various nations of Latin America. This process has become fairly advanced, and it is generally referred to as the process of Latin American integration, although Chávez himself has stated that he prefers the designation “Latin American union.”
As a dimension of this quest for Latin American integration and union, Chávez proposed in 2001 the formation of the Alternativa Bolivariana para las Américas (ALBA). This proposal was put into practice with an agreement in December 2004 between Cuba and Venezuela. The joint declaration rejected the FTAA proposed by the United States as “the most recent expression of its appetites of domination over the region that, if put into practice, would constitute a deepening of Neoliberalism and would create levels of dependency and subordination without precedent. In addition, the Declaration maintained that the historic process of Latin American integration, as distinct from the present one, “has served as a mechanism to deepen dependency and foreign domination.” The Declaration declared that in contrast to FTAA, “ALBA has as its objective the transformation of Latin American societies, making them more just, cultured, participatory, and characterized by solidarity, and therefore, it is conceived as an integral process that ensures the elimination of social inequalities and promotes the quality of life and the effective participation of the peoples in the formation of their own destiny.”
By 2007, Cuba and Venezuela had signed 385 social, economic, and technological projects of collaboration. Criticized for the relation with Cuba by the government of the United States, Chávez has defended the relation as a “new type of relation based in reciprocal solidarity, where Venezuela provides access to petroleum in exchange for Cuban aid in education, medical attention, and sports training.”
In the act of signing of the ALBA accords, Chávez explained his preference for the phrase Latin American union, as against Latin American integration. “No one would find the word integration in a discourse of Bolívar, Martí, Miranda or Sucre.” Their concept was “the profound concept of union, and that is a very different things from the concept of integration that is capitalist and neoliberal.” Neoliberal integration, for Chávez, seeks “the formation of areas of free commerce, the integration of markets, where the strongest always wins.” The neoliberal strategy is “to absorb markets, to eliminate any vestige of sovereignty, and beyond that to eliminate any possibility for true development and for the independence of our countries. What they want is a new colonial period, what they want is for colonialism to become established.”
Chavez believes that the process of Latin American union is winning the battle against neoliberalism. He believes that neoliberalism is the last phase of capitalism, that capitalism will collapse, and that the U.S. Empire will fall in the first decades of the 21st century, if the peoples continue with their activism, raising consciousness and constructing an alternative.
For Chávez, the new process of Latin American union respects cultural differences and the sovereignty of each country. “We have a single project, but the particularities of each country and the sovereignty of each country remain intact.” The cooperation includes many areas, according to the needs of each country: food, science and technology, telecommunications, energy.
Chavez believes that the process of Latin American union will succeed. “We are not going to leave to our descendents a new colonial period. We are going to leave a ‘Gran Patria:’ Our America united, developed, and free. And in Venezuela as in Cuba, we say socialism. That is the road to save our countries, our peoples, and more, to save all of humanity.”
Above and beyond the nations of ALBA, the Chávez government has developed significant economic and social relations with other nations of the region, especially Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and the nations of the Caribbean. It also is developing significant relations with China and with the Islamic Republic of Iran. These steps represent practical development of the principles of Latin American union and South-South cooperation.
Along with other nations of the Non-Aligned Movement, Chávez calls for democratic reform of the United Nations. In an address to the United Nations on September 22, 2005, Chávez called for: the expansion of the Security Council, so that it would include underdeveloped countries; an increased transparency and the elimination of proclamations being imposed without the adequate participation of the nations of the Third World; the suppression of the veto in the Security Council; and an increase of the authority of the Secretary General.
The Opposition
There are important sectors in Venezuelan society whose short-term interests are in opposition to the social transformations sought by the Bolivarian Revolution: (1) The technocratic elite that managed the petroleum industry prior to 1998; (2) the business elite, who are organized in Fedecamaras, an organization formed in 1944 that represents more than one million business persons; (3) leaders of the union of petroleum workers; (4) the landed estate bourgeoisie; and (5) the traditional political parties. The opposition controls the private media of communication, and they have the support of the United States, represented by the active engagement with financial support of the U.S. embassy. These sectors seek to obtain support from what Leon Trostky called the great reserves of the counterrevolution: the middle-sized agricultural and industrial producers, the middle class, and the intellectuals (cited in Hassaan 2009:90).
Since the election of Chávez in 1998, there have been five organized efforts by the opposition to place constraints or overthrow the Bolivarian Revolution. (1) Opposition to the new Constitution of 1999. The movement was able to overcome the opposition and establish a new constitution, but it contains some limitations from the point of view of the revolutionary process. (2) In April of 2002, there was an attempted coup d’état in which 70 military generals participated, and Chávez was taken prisoner. But there were mass demonstrations calling for the return of the president to the presidential palace, and the mass mobilization was supported by loyal officers. The coup was reversed in three days. (3) In January of 2003, the petroleum managers brought production and exportation to a halt, seeking to generate chaos in the country. Production and commerce was restored by the oil workers and the armed forces. (4) In 2004, the opposition obtained sufficient signatures to obtain a vote for a recall of the President. But on August 15, 2004, fifty-nine percent of the voters supported Chávez in the presidential recall referendum.
(5) In 2007, the opposition opposed the constitutional reforms proposed by Chávez, and they were able to block these reforms through a popular referendum on December 2, 2007. It was the first, and to date only, electoral victory of the opposition over Chávez. There was some sentiment in the Bolivarian movement that the proposal was overly complicated, and there was not sufficient mobilization of the people. The movement is working toward attaining these constitutional reforms piecemeal or attaining them in essence through executive and/or legislative action.
The capacity of the opposition to present obstacles is a constant challenge to the revolutionary process. The opposition does not confine itself to reasoned public discourse: it often uses disruptive strategies; and it offers a discourse that distorts reality and that draws upon ideologies that are the legacy of a century of neocolonial domination. The battle of ideas is unfolding, a battle between neocolonial hegemony and the popular counter-hegemony.
In the battle of ideas, the counterrevolutionary forces are advantaged by their control of the mass media. Olga González of the Cuban Center for U.S. and Hemispheric Studies that the privately-owned media companies in Venezuela operate in a context in which six U.S. media giants control the Latin American market. These companies are limited in their capacity to produce programming, and thus they are dependent on U.S. and European programming. A variety of alliances and commercial accords exits between Latin American and U.S. companies. Although having a dependent relation in with United States, the Venezuelan media companies also are concentrated, and they are influential in Venezuela. They have become political actors in opposition to the government, rejecting any pretense to neutrality. The Venezuelan government is reluctant to take steps against them, sensitive that there would be accusations of violation of freedom of the present, although it recognizes that there also are issues here of national sovereignty and cultural autonomy as well as responsible journalism. The government thus far has following the path of seeking to alternative public and community television and radio programming that functions as an alternative to the concentrated and private Venezuelan television that is under the control of U.S. corporations (González 2010:10-19).
References
Guevara, Aleida. 2005. Chávez, Venezuela, and the New Latin America. Melbourne: Ocean Press.
Chávez Frías, Hugo. 2006. La Unidad Latinoamericana. Melbourne: Ocean Sur.