Home from the Dark Side of Utopia

by Clifton Ross

  As for the return of land to the native people, in Venezuela the “state doesn’t just turn over a space to the indigenous people as part of their original territory. No, rather it’s done as it’s done with campesinos in land reform, that is, they’re given title of land but on the condition that the use of energy and mineral resources remains the option of the state. These lands that are turned back over there are tertiary rights, under a civil code that is a copy of the Napoleonic code. So the indigenous people who are given [back] their land have to respect the rights of tertiary parties, and the tertiaries are the transnationals, the national and international mining companies, the lumber companies, the cattle ranchers, the campesinos, those with farming parcels.” This, said Lusbi, “is an ongoing massacre of the indigenous people.”

  Lusbi said a railway was also planned as part of the IIRSA program. It would run along the foothills of the Sierra de Perijá, carrying phosphate from Táchira, coal from the mines in the foothills and, intersecting with railways from Colombia and eventually terminating in the Puerto America or what is now called Puerto Bolívar. Lusbi said that the planners at IIRSA and big business needed to break “bottlenecks” in transport of raw materials. The Andes and the Amazon presented obstacles to transport between the Atlantic and Pacific.

  What was to be done with the large meandering rivers? Well, of course they would have to be straightened out and made into water highways. The great forests would be penetrated with highways and the mountains… would be blasted away. And so “all this becomes the struggle of the Indigenous people. They are the real ‘vanguard’ of the struggles of the world; they’re the real ecologists and environmentalists; the real anti-imperialists because they oppose the presence of the transnationals, the imperial businesses, in their territories.”

  The IIRSA has a “focus on integration and development hubs (EIDs), new geo-economic referents for South American territorial planning” with the “end of improving competitiveness and promoting sustainable growth in the region” by integrating regional transport, energy, and telecommunications. In this scheme Puerto America will become one such “multimodal port where the oil, the coal, all the coal production from northern Colombia and Santander will leave from,” said Lusbi. But the IIRSA is a regional initiative, and it isn’t discussed inside the countries, but rather at a transnational level.

  “Venezuela,” Lusbi said, “is like a trampoline in this configuration. Not only a trampoline for the drugs that come from Colombia, but it’s a trampoline for all the merchandise that comes out of Colombia through the Free Trade Agreement with the US. Venezuela is a thoroughfare of the IIRSA, an outlet to the Atlantic Ocean, to the US, and Europe. That’s how they’ll carry away the lands of the indigenous people. The great losers will be the rivers, the forests, the indigenous people, the peasants, the people, the fishermen … Because the two most important fishing zones in Venezuela are Sucre and Zulia, the Gulf of Venezuela. And the fishermen will die out, and move to another trade.”

  Post-Panamax ships, which are too large to traverse the Panama canal, according to Lusbi, “will be coming and going, interrupting the spawning of shrimp, the movement of dolphins and big fish, the blue crab. So this fishing zone of great importance for Venezuela will disappear. And what does Venezuela have to sell on these railways and through these ports? Nothing. All Venezuela has to sell is oil, and that goes out by boat, and if it’s gas, it’ll be a pipeline.”

  Who makes all these decisions? It’s not the people, not the Wayuu, the Añu, the Yukpa whose land is being destroyed by all this extractive industry. Rather, it’s the technicians, the World Bank, the Interamerican Development Bank, the US, European, and now Chinese and Iranian capitalists. “So now we’re substituting the US empire with the Chinese empire.”

  Lusbi said that Tarek el Aissami, in his role of Minister of the Interior and Justice of Venezuela began recruiting the caciques mayores (great caciques, or leaders), and began to undermine indigenous authority and traditional forms of organization by imposing community councils on them and selecting the caciques who would go along with their project as mediators.8 “The community councils have nothing to do with the traditions of the indigenous peoples,” Lusbi said. “And then the money came, the community councils were funded with 400, 800 million bolívares and those community councils did what they wanted with it. The caciques bought trucks and houses in Machiques, and some handed out money to their people, an amount that wasn’t enough to do anything with.”

  “The Yukpa, before contact with the Capuchin missionaries and others didn’t have caciques: they were communal people with power residing in families. They’d been struggling since the dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez for their land. But now Tarek El Aissami was able to gain control of indigenous communities through the caciques who essentially became government employees.” Only Sabino, and a small group were left to carry on the fight, Lusbi said.

  “[In Ecuador with President Rafael] Correa you have the same thing; he has the same model. He doesn’t respect the [indigenous] movements or CONAIE or the campesino movements, “Lusbi said, adding that Correa also thinks he is The State, and the Citizen Revolution is based on individualism with no conception whatever of people’s organizations or social rights. It’s an “entrepreneurial state” that sees citizens as employees. Unions aren’t allowed, and “CONAIE means nothing.” “Everything is seen in its function as raw material for the transnationals, who are the real imperialists, all the oil and minerals of Venezuela and Ecuador,” Lubsi said, “It’s the same colonial policy. If it weren’t for these so-called “revolutionary governments” the transnationals couldn’t have moved forward. AD and COPEI couldn’t have managed to get the oil and ironworkers and indigenous people on board with the development proposal, called “Plan de la Patria” (Plan for the Homeland). There had to be a Chávez with a pseudo-left, so-called “revolutionary” proposal, the same with Correa and Kirshner and Lula.

  This “revolutionary” model is what allows the imposition of the IIRSA, which represents the recolonization of America. “All the virgin areas, all the spaces that neither the Spaniards nor Portuguese could destroy will be handed over by the ‘revolutionary’ governments, by these so-called ‘revolutionaries.’ For all this you need a [Rafael] Correa to destroy CONAIE… and a [Hugo] Chávez, since no one else could have the worker’s movement, the ironworkers, oil workers and indigenous people in his pocket.”

  I asked Lusbi if there had really been a revolution in Venezuela. It was the question that had been rumbling around in my mind at that point for nine years.

  “A revolution?” he echoed. “Yes, there was a revolution here. A capitalist revolution, a revolution that Capital needs, that the rich, the entrepreneurs, and modernity all need. It’s the logic of modernity, of positivism. It’s the logic of North American welfare that it wants to impose on the world, on China, the Arab [world], the Wayuu, the Yukpa, the Barí. Whether it be Chávez, Carlos Andrés Pérez, or [Colombian President Juan Manuel] Santos or [former Colombian President Alvaro] Uribe, it’s the same logic of progress of Auguste Comte, of Capital.”

  I asked Lusbi about alternatives. Where would we find the alternatives to all this?

  “The alternative,” he said, “the alternative is community groups. Social groups. What did Chavismo do? It destroyed social organizations by making a formula, a single formula. The micropower, Foucault called it, and micropower is controlled by the community councils. So the campesinos, the indigenous, the neighborhoods all have one formula: community councils. There’s a Law of Community Councils, a ministry that controls it and there’s a Minister of Community Councils, a minister for something more that is the union of community councils with others, which is called communes, so everything is regimented. So life will be as the government says, not according the will of community groups.”

  In Maracaibo, as elsewhere, Lusbi estimated “some 99.9%” of the social movement and community organizations went to work for the Bolivar
ian government. Camera people, sound people, he said, “went to work at the ‘community radios’ which are the government’s, financed by the government, under permission of the government, with the propaganda of the government.” Others went to work in the Bolivarian Universities of Venezuela (UBVs), others with the Universities of the Police, the UNERS, and still others went to the villages… So the whole social movement was defeated; the Left was defeated. Chavismo came along and mounted all this; Chávez took over this social irreverence, he crucified it, cut it up, gave it all a name, put it all under a single law and brought the social movements to an end.”

  Homo Et Natura, Lusbi said, didn’t go along with it, and so the Chavistas said he and those around Homo Et Natura “are ‘imperialist agents,’ ‘escualidos,’ ‘counterrevolutionaries.’ They kicked us out of projects that we were in like Funda Ayacucho where we had a social and cultural project of growing chickens. They kicked us out of all that and they persecuted us, and they still are persecuting us. They built alliances with miners against us, alliances with cattle ranchers, and even sicarios [paid killers] against us, saying we were counterrevolutionaries. They called us paramilitaries because we didn’t form community councils and put ourselves under their formula.”

  “But we defeated the government on the issue of coal mining. We defeated the racist policy of the government in the surveying and about the jurisdiction of indigenous lands. So we’re an example of how a few ‘nobodies’ [can win], of how the real power isn’t in the community councils, or in the city governments or in the ministries. It’s the organized people, the social organizations. These are what [Ecuadoran President Rafael] Correa wants to destroy, and [Colombian President Juan Manuel] Santos wants to destroy, and what they want to destroy in Brazil and here in Venezuela, it’s the social movement organizations: the organizations that aren’t government or state. We aren’t the state. Nor are we enemies of the state. We’re not enemies of the government because if it develops the policies with the people, we accept it and can get along with it.”

  He said there needed to be that “revolution in the revolution: a popular revolution.” And the people needed to have real political power, which meant “the ability to design society, determine the design of a country, the life of a people. That’s power, people deciding for themselves. Chávez should have used all that power to empower the people, not for an office, and a salary, and to fulfill one orientation, but so many schools would develop, many different ideas. Not taking away the microphone from anyone, but having more microphones, making it more complex. But they say ‘no, we can’t do that because then the escualidos would defeat us.’ No. If there’s no diversity of thought, no eternal, ongoing discussion, there’s no revolution.”

  These last words reminded me of Emilio Campos, and his call for more and different points of view to break the Bolivarian plan of “Communicational hegemony.” It also made me think of Margarita López Maya’s defense of liberalism and the need to build a society with plural perspectives, based on respect for differences. Wasn’t that the left I was part of in Berkeley? I thought of Damian Prat. Perhaps he was right that this Bolivarian project was the farcical repetition of the socialism of the twentieth century, the Leninist project of an elite to impose its utopia on people and movements who had their own ideas of what world they wanted to live in.

  It was late morning and Arturo and I had to get to Machiques by the late afternoon so we brought the interview to an end and got on our way. We were to meet Ana María Fernández, a Yukpa woman who had lost two brothers, and would soon lose a third, in a struggle to reclaim their land.

  We spent the next few days in the Sierra de Perijá with Ana María and the Yukpas, recording interviews with them about their struggle to wrest control of their land from the mining interests and cattle ranchers. They hoped the Maduro government would deliver justice, but I wasn’t optimistic, given that elements of the government colluded in the crimes against the Yukpa. In fact, just months after we met, June 24, 2014, two more of Ana María’s brothers were so brutally beaten by National Guardsmen that one, Cristóbal, died.

  It was, indeed, the adventure Arturo had promised it would be, but I was glad to get back to Mérida. We spent a few days in Ejido recuperating at Arturo’s house and, while there, Arturo introduced me to a neighbor of his, Miguel, a former teacher who described himself as “neither of the left nor the right, but a free thinker.”

  We’d gone over to Miguel’s house so I could get online to check and send emails since Arturo didn’t have Internet at home. Miguel welcomed us into his home and served us coffee and we started talking.

  Miguel had clearly been much more allied with the Chavista project at some point in time, especially when he worked with a number of educators at a national level redesigning curriculum for the Bolivarian project. That project fell apart, Miguel noted mysteriously, “as a result of a rumor” and that was the end of his time working with the government.

  “This process is failing,” he said somberly. “It’s reached a ceiling beyond which it cannot go. There has to be a big crisis that blows everything apart so something new can arise from below. I hope we’ll see youth take a leadership role.”

  Miguel mentioned having known Kleber Ramírez Rojas, an important revolutionary thinker from Mérida whose ideas had been a significant influence on Chávez. Miguel talked enthusiastically about Kleber and gave me some electronic documents from his USB drive about which he spoke passionately. After finishing the coffee Arturo and I went home and I left with a strong feeling that this “free thinker” who was neither of the right or left was, nevertheless, of the left, even if he was no longer a believer.

  Arturo’s wife, Mayi, was home for the weekend. She worked for the government in Child Protective Services in El Vigía during the week, barely making enough money to pay her transportation back and forth in collective taxis, but she wouldn’t quit work because, she said, there would be no one to look after the children if she weren’t there. Things had gotten bad for her because she challenged some policies in the office. She was thereafter labeled escualida and no longer was given office supplies and found everything she did blocked or hindered by the Chavistas.

  We flew to Guayana and Carl met us at the airport and brought us back to his posada. The next day he drove Arturo and me around Guayana so we could record images of the city. He dropped us off at Correo de Caroní where we did interviews with Clavel and a Sidor ironworker who happened to be in the office to do another interview. The worker told us we might find Rubén at the Sidor plant since there was an action planned for the afternoon, so we took a bus to the plant.

  We’d been here at the Sidor plant a day or two before and tried to record a gathering in front of the plant, but people had surrounded us and told us to stop recording. A few were quite hostile and wouldn’t listen to us as we explained what we were trying to do. I immediately stopped filming, but Arturo got into an argument with a few people and I had to intervene and tell Arturo to “back off.” I hoped this time around we’d have better luck and Rubén would allow us to film.

  And, indeed, we were in luck; Rubén was meeting with workers outside the plant and we arrived just as everyone was taking a break. Rubén and I recognized each other from a brief meeting in April before the rally with Capriles when I tried unsuccessfully to arrange an interview with him. Neither of us wanted to miss this opportunity so he agreed to do an interview on the spot.

  Rubén said that Venezuela was rich in resources and could sell raw materials to China, but it would, in the process, lose the added value of refining the materials itself. “Refined, hot-briquetted iron can sell for up to $300 per ton. But raw iron sells for $70–100 a ton. We’re losing two hundred percent by selling raw iron. But what’s happening here is the absence of investment. This government, and for that matter, previous governments have had no investment policy. And that’s another way of saying that we’re ‘underdeveloped.’ We have all the capacity to be developed, all the natura
l wealth to be developed, wealth unlike any other country in Latin America, but we haven’t had a government with that vision; we haven’t had a government that understood this wealth isn’t for them to enrich themselves from but rather to use it to build the wealth of the people.”

  Rubén said that the union had been undertaking protests and actions for a collective bargaining agreement and against the criminalization of protest. “We want the government to obey the Constitution and the labor laws and deal with collective contracts. We want an end to blackmail, attacks and persecution, because this is what we’ve been subject to. Our struggle has been, simply put, for respect. We’d love to see some reforms, but more importantly, we just want [the Venezuelan state] to fulfill its obligations under the law.”

  Rubén also insisted that the wages needed to be tied to inflation so there wouldn’t be a constant deterioration of acquisitive power that has “unfortunately left workers in the state of misery that they’re in today.”

  Arturo asked about the attempts of the government to impose its own union on the workers of Sintraferrominera (the independent union that Rubén leads) and Rubén said that, yes, some people from the government union movement had come around, but the workers had ignored them. “The workers here are clear that they didn’t represent their interests, but rather the interests of the government.” He took this further when he said that “the FBST (Fuerza Bolivariana Socialista de Trabajadores, Bolivarian Socialist Worker’s Force) and Movimiento 21 are part of the government and they’re traitors to the workers’ movement. The government locates them in all the industries to divide workers.”

  I asked Rubén about the previous encounter Arturo and I had had with workers in front of the entrance and Rubén was apologetic. “You have to understand that you’ve come into a situation where workers have suffered from great disrespect and many injustices, such as being subjected to judicial proceedings by the political authorities and so the workers are predisposed to be suspicious, especially since the government has also been recording events and using those recordings to bring people to the tribunals.”