by Clifton Ross
The Missions that were conceived in conversations with Fidel Castro were Chávez’s response to a crisis in his popularity in 2004, and they had what Rafael called an “undeniably positive impact” on the poor of the country who had been hardest hit by the drop in oil prices in the 1980s.
Nevertheless, Rafael points to three serious problems with the Missions. First, Rafael agreed with Zibechi that these policies problematize poverty and not wealth. So while there may have been improvements in the quality of life for the poor of the country, the Missions “didn’t address the structural causes” of poverty. A second contradiction was that the programs were of greatest benefit to the urban poor, but Chávez’s greatest popularity was among the rural poor. This had the effect of generating expectations of universal benefits, which were unrealistic given the economic reality of the country. Finally, there was the devastating impact of these policies on the social movements since “all these policies have incorporated under what in Venezuela is called ‘Popular Power’ all the different popular and community organizations to make them agencies for the State social programs. In that sense [the State] has broken, blocked, or dispersed independent grassroots social organizations by getting people in the communities to implement these policies of social assistance in the poorest sectors of society.”
I found the latter point particularly interesting as it fit perfectly with Zibechi’s critique and with what Marcy and I had drawn from all the interviews with Latin American social movements in our book. I also found it very interesting that Chávez had succeeded in implementing, under the name of “Socialism,” the neoliberal program of transferring the social responsibilities of the State to civil society.
In the US this neoliberal agenda of “privatizing” or devolving to the local communities the provision of social services had taken place under the Bush presidencies: first under George H. W. Bush’s program described as “A Thousand Points of Light” then under his son George W. Bush’s “Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.” In the US the program had simply been directed at churches and business interests and NGOs to take on the responsibilities of anti-poverty programs. In Venezuela, Chávez had used social movement actors, first sidelining their organizations, and then recruiting their best and brightest to administer state welfare programs. As I thought of it, in Mérida all the old social movement and guerrilla left cadre were now in charge of one or another Mission, and their organizations were long gone. If there was a conscious plan for disarticulating social movements, it appeared to be one of the very few the Bolivarians had carried out with any success.
This all raised questions about the paternalism in Venezuelan culture. Yes, Rafael said, agreeing with what Emilio Campos told me a few days before, the handouts from what Venezuelans called “Papa State” were “nearly as old as the beginnings of oil exploitation in Venezuela.” The conception around the world that social programs in Venezuela began with Chávez is completely inaccurate. The programs rise and fall with the price of petroleum, and even the conservative Christian Democrats like Rafael Caldera had come into office in good times throwing money down to the poor.
“Already in the Constitution of 1960 education was declared free: it was the obligation of the state to give education to everyone,” Rafael said, and that included college educations. This was all possible due to the mineral wealth, which from the Democratic Revolution of 1958 generated a culture and “a very paternalistic state that takes care of the material necessities of the people and in return asks for political loyalty and payback for the different favors.”
Both parties, COPEI and Democratic Action, worked with “stipends and developed clientelistic networks from the State to all their militants who worked for them, and offered them social benefits,” a culture and policy that Chávez only continued and deepened. But this had not only social costs in an impoverished culture of dependency and “rent chasing.” Under all these governments, but particularly under Chávez, Rafael said, “the social and environmental consequences of a policy based in mega-mining have been ignored; all the environmental and indigenous networks in particular have been coopted and institutionalized by the government of President Chávez. All those movements that we see in other countries of the continent like Ecuador and Bolivia, of communities of indigenous peasants mobilized against the projects of mega-mining, are absent in Venezuela because the state has been particularly intelligent in institutionalizing and coopting all the indigenous and campesino movements of the country.”
I asked Rafael about the unions since I knew very little about the union movement of Guayana. I knew he’d worked with Orlando Chirino and Rubén Gonzalez, two major union leaders who had suffered various kinds of persecution under the Bolivarians because they wouldn’t “submit” to the government. Rafael said that Chávez had come to power criticizing the old institutions of the country, and that included the Venezuelan Workers’ Confederation (CTV) that was the main union of the country, allied with Democratic Action. Chávez set to work to take over the union by introducing his candidate, Aristóbulo Istúriz, into the internal elections, but he lost that bid. Then Chávez took another common course of action, introducing and funding a rival union, the National Workers’ Union (Unión Nacional de Trabajadores, UNT) to draw members away from, and thus weaken, the CTV. The UNT was instrumental in reactivating the oil industry after the Oil Strike (or Lockout) of late 2002. But when Chavez founded the PSUV and required union groups and unions to join, Rafael said that some, like Orlando Chirino, who was one of the national directors of the UNT, “rejected that measure because they thought that unions have to be an autonomous instrument of the working class and shouldn’t be enlisted in the service of any particular political party.” Orlando Chirino felt that unions needed “to have an independent and autonomous line” because “if the State and the President were the main bosses of the country it wasn’t possible for the unions to be under the control of the principle boss.”
After this, Chávez initiated his attacks with what Rafael called “the criminalization of worker and union protests.” He pointed to the case of Rubén González, Secretary General of the union Sintraferrominera and also a member of the PSUV. Rubén was sentenced to seven years in prison for participating in a workers’ strike called to demand a collective contract. He spent seventeen months in prison but this situation gave way to an extraordinary display of working-class unity when both Opposition and Chavista workers and workers’ organizations met in the streets to defend Rubén. The growing unity posed such a serious threat that Chávez had the sentence rescinded. But then Rubén was retried, now in Caracas where he was forced to regularly make the trip from Guayana to present himself before the court.2 Nevertheless, it said a lot about the unpopularity of the government’s tactics and a lot about Rubén himself that in the middle of all this he won reelection as Secretary General.
Rafael said that “this policy of criminalization of protest is important given that workers and unionists are in a state of permanent mobilization for the renewal of collective contracts, since [collective contracts] are one of the main problems here.” In the Basic Industries of Guayana there’s been what Rafael called “a situation of near paralysis of the collective contracts” for years and that has severely worsened living conditions of workers there and around the country.3 In addition to wages eaten up in devaluations and inflation Rafael mentioned the problems of industrial pollution, and reduced health and other benefits as part of the “grave deterioration of working conditions.” On top of this was the increased political pressure on people “who haven’t shown adherence to, or appear to have not voted for the official [PSUV] party” and are therefore threatened with firings. Evidence of this was the incident just a week or so before of Popular Power Minister for Housing and Habitat, Ricardo Molina, being recorded as saying that opposition workers would be fired, regardless of labor law, for their views and activism.4 Naturally, Rafael found it disturbing that a minister of the government would put out “a publicly
stated intention to ignore labor norms that protect labor rights in the country.”
Rafael mentioned the inspiring work of Marcela Masperó who is a member of the UNT and the PSUV but who is also part of what he hopes might be “a new articulation of grassroots union organization to defend workers’ rights.” Nevertheless, the government was continuing a policy of creating parallel institutions to undermine independent union activity. There was, for instance, “the Bolivarian Socialist Workers’ Force (Fuerza Bolivariana Socialista de Trabajadores, FBST) and then the Socialist Workers’ Union (Central Socialista de Trabajadores, CST) and others, created in an artificial manner by decree of the State” but none have been successful in realizing the government’s objectives of subjecting the workers to its rule. All these parallel unions, as they clearly represent the government, and not the workers’, interests, have been “overwhelmingly rejected by the mass of the workers.”
At the same time, this government policy of creating parallel unions that compete with existing independent unions has created violent confrontations between workers, especially in the construction and petroleum labor sectors. Nearly 300 workers had been killed since 2005 in the country in a struggle over jobs. “So we have a unionism that is being perverted and degraded and slowly being turned into just a job generator, a job generator for workers,” Rafael said.
Still, it was a difficult time for workers and those in the union movement, as the high cost of living and wage increases decreed by the government didn’t make up for what was eaten away from salaries by inflation. To this Rafael added the problem of the increasing scarcity of basic necessities and high cost of food, problems which have only sharpened and grown more urgent since this interview. The social security of workers hasn’t been guaranteed, and if “workers or their families get sick they have to resort to private clinics because the hospital system is in terrible condition,” Rafael said. And Venezuela had also become more insecure in other ways: even the government recognized that at least 16,000 people per year, about 43 people per day, are murdered. This, Rafael said, has “the effect of ripping up social relations and the social fabric of the country.”
And finally, this is related to the political polarization that “has created a situation of growing intolerance of people with different political opinions that has endorsed an attitude of extermination, either symbolically or actually, of those who don’t think like you.” He described it as “a sort of political Manichaeism, this dehumanizing and demonizing of adversaries, and there is no longer an attempt to recognize the democratic right of different political actors to express themselves and struggle for their objectives.”
Rafael said that PROVEA promotes dialogue between the Bolivarians and the opposition but the situation is difficult, “for the social movements to reclaim their autonomy and for us to build a revolutionary left alternative. It’s an uphill battle but many of us feel this is the struggle: to build autonomous, independent and belligerent grassroots social movements with their own agendas and demands, separate from the agendas of political parties struggling for power.” This struggle has also been complicated by anti-terrorist legislation, particularly laws passed in January 2012 and applied against social movement activists who weren’t part of the official and state sponsored “social movements.” Rafael said that he’s concerned that the laws “will be applied against union activists, campesino, and indigenous movements who’ll demonstrate for their rights.” The qualification of “terrorist” or “narco-terrorist” is vague and the description of crimes includes “all the historical arms of struggle for the popular movements in Venezuela. They’re all being typified as ‘terrorist:’ closing a road, protesting at a government institution, painting graffiti on the walls of a public building.” He says these laws have “to be rejected, regardless of one’s political persuasion because, as we know, this entire mentality of needing to pass anti-terrorist laws, is a measure or policy implemented by the United States after the September 11 attacks on the Twin Towers.”
In assessing the Bolivarian process initiated by the late President Hugo Chávez, Rafael felt there were some positive aspects that needed to be recognized, such as the emphasis on overcoming poverty, which Chávez had put “at the center of the discussion on public or state policy.” But social movement activists internationally could learn a lesson about “the need to build autonomous spaces” and never allow themselves to be blackmailed or forced to “abandon their critical spirit, their own demands and agendas” in favor of those of an elite in power, as has happened in Venezuela. “We’ve been blackmailed for a long time to quiet our criticisms so as ‘not to give ammunition to the enemy,’ or ‘ammunition to the right wing’ or to ‘imperialism,’” Rafael said. “And as a result of our silence the capitalist mentality, the mentality of economic polarization that has happened here, has resurfaced with new faces and new facets.”
This has led, in Rafael’s view, to “one of the most lamentable aspects of this whole Bolivarian process” which was that “critical thinking has been infantilized” under the Bolivarian government. He believed that “if there were a group of intellectuals or thinking people criticizing so as to advance and improve [government policies] we wouldn’t be in the situation we’re currently in, of open and flagrant contradictions, with a government that says one thing and yet has a contrary practice.”
Rafael’s critique rang true for me: even critical Chavistas rarely, if ever, turned their criticism onto Chávez. But the problem, it seemed to me, was that those who did criticize, even “to advance and improve” the situation, were usually written off by other Chavistas as “escualidos” or counterrevolutionaries and relegated to the opposition. In fact, as I was beginning to discover, there were many revolutionaries who criticized Chávez and his policies over the years—and they were all in the opposition.
Chapter Eighteen: The Hazards of Petro-Socialism
My final interview in Caracas was with Margarita López Maya and it proved true my wife Marcy’s long experience as a journalist. Even when she thinks she has the whole story, and is sometimes ready to ditch the final interview, that last meeting often proves to be the most powerful one. I went online and did some research on López Maya and I was impressed: She’d run for political office on the Patria Para Todos (PPT, Homeland for All, an offshoot of Alfredo Maneiro’s La Causa R, Radical Cause) in the parliamentary elections of September 2010 and when she lost, she returned to her work as a writer, historian, and sociologist. Widely published in Spanish, Portuguese, and English, she matches her scholarly work with a regular column in Ultimas Noticias, a newspaper that at the time had a good reputation for objectivity and its independence (it’s since been rumored to have been bought by Chavistas).
Margarita looked tired when I met her at her apartment. She said she had been working to finish an article for a Brazilian magazine on the recent elections.
We started there, since the elections, even now, more than two weeks later, were on everyone’s mind. Margarita acknowledged that there was, indeed a crisis, and it had to do, more than anything, with how Maduro won the elections. She felt that Chávez had severely weakened the democratic institutions of the country, and this was another blow against them. She felt that Maduro had “competed in a very unequal manner in these elections. As president-in-charge he used all the resources of the state to win these elections,” which, she said, is both “illegitimate and illegal.” As examples of this she pointed to the cadenas, obligatorily broadcasted presidential transmissions on radio and television, as well as “openly using public resources for electoral propaganda to mobilize people; bringing them to meetings; giving them meals, using government transport, and transport from the city governments; using public buildings; and above all, using public media as campaign instruments of an electoral campaign for president.”
Even with all those resources, and an election held on the anniversary of Chávez’s victory over the coup of 2003, Maduro won, if he indeed won, by a 1.5% margin. Marg
arita called this “unconvincing” and “a technical draw.”
In such a situation, Margarita felt it would be appropriate to open a national dialogue, but that didn’t seem to be Maduro’s approach. Worse still, the new president seemed to have no problem with violence perpetrated against the opposition, including the shocking incident in the National Assembly when PSUVistas, in the middle of a session, ganged up and beat six opposition parliamentarians, including María Corina Machado, William Dávila, and Américo De Grazia and others. This appeared to be evidence that the Maduro government would increasingly rely on more authoritarian instruments to rule and continue the process begun under President Chávez’s second government (2006–2012) of “destroying the institutions of the liberal representative,” democratic state.
“The Venezuelan state of the Constitution of 1999 is a combination of liberal representative democracy with direct democracy and with institutions of participatory democracy,” Margarita explained. “The Constitution set out these three forms of democracy. President Chávez in his second government set about to destroy the representative democratic part so as to leave nothing more than the mechanisms of direct democracy and the institutions of participatory democracy. This form of State, that is no longer the State of the Constitution, he called the Communal State. It is a non-liberal State, a State that doesn’t follow the logic of Western democracies. It is a state that is more akin to the socialist states of the twentieth century, the Cuban model, the Soviet model, in which there is no universal, direct and secret voting, no independence and autonomy of public powers. The Communal State has no political pluralism. For one to be recognized by the Communal State, by the Communal Council or the Commune one has to profess the Socialism of the Twenty-First Century. That’s what the law says.”