by Clifton Ross
A little less than a month after the murder of Spear, students gathered to protest insecurity in San Cristóbal, Táchira after an attempted rape on the university campus. Police response was violent, and hundreds of students were arrested. Outrage increased after national, intelligence, and military police, in a joint operation with paramilitaries, killed three people on February 12.10 In a bizarre twist, two days later the government issued orders for the arrest of opposition leader Leopoldo López, holding him responsible for the violence.11
What had been a student rebellion soon drew in other sectors of society, like journalists whose newspapers were being forced to close as they were deprived of newsprint by the government agency in charge of distribution (this was a tactic the government used to effectively destroy the opposition press); workers whose wages were no longer adequate to put food on the family table; the middle-class, which had seen its prospects disappear, along with its democratic rights. The poor, government workers, and others dependent for their lives on subsidies or patronage, for the most part preferred to sit this one out rather than be identified as “escualidos” (opposition) and lose every possibility of survival in an increasingly grim situation.
Censorship, even of social media like Twitter, became more strict as the government began censoring the Internet, and imprisoning people on charges of “cyber terrorism for tweeting.”12 The “head of the National Telecommunications Commission (Conatel) warned journalists that any coverage of violent events was banned, and that anyone contravening the prohibition would be punished”13 under the very strict 2004 Law on Social Responsibility in Radio, Television, and Electronic Media (Resorte Law).14
Police and military response was brutal from the first moments of the outbreak. From testimony, human rights reports put out by PROVEA and others, and from what could be seen from videos online, police and national guard rampages all over the country were common, and, like in April 2013 in the aftermath of the Presidential elections, the “colectivos” emerged, now clearly acting as a paramilitary force of the government.15 Those demonstrators arrested faced torture and mistreatment and other human rights abuses at the hands of the police and National Guard, according to Amnesty International.16
There were two responses to the government repression. First, was an extension and broadening of the peaceful protest movement. According to the Venezuelan Social Conflict Observatory some 2,248 protests occurred in the country throughout February, with a total of 9,286 for the year, the largest number of protests in Venezuelan history.17
Secondly, some in the opposition undertook more violent tactics at the guarimbas (or barricades), arming themselves with guns and other deadly weapons, and stringing wires across the road to protect themselves from the colectivos, known for their use of motorcycles in their actions. This violence upped the ante, took more lives, and it also caused division in the opposition.
I was surprised to see the socialist and solidarity left in the United States and much of the world backing the Bolivarian government as it carried out the repression against the demonstrators. Amy Goodman highlighted the Bolivarian perspective on her show, Democracy Now, and the demonstrators were written off in other left media as “middle-class” and “fascist” and “ultra-rightists” (these latter two being President Nicolás Maduro’s qualifications). The usual pro-government propaganda, and nothing else, poured out of all the places where I’d previously published, but now most didn’t want to hear any other perspective, much less the perspective of social movement activists under the club. In keeping with the Leninist heritage of much of the socialist left media, only the views of the “vanguard” in power in “socialist” Venezuela mattered and only those social forces that backed the “vanguard in power” were to be recognized.
I managed to post a few things at the Latin American Solidarity listserve, which were attacked, but I considered the discussion, even if most of it coming at me was ad hominem, to be positive, since at least there was some discussion. Then I posted my translation of a piece that Rafael Uzcátegui wrote about censorship in Venezuela and, ironically, that was when I received an email from the moderator of the listserve, Stansfield Smith, dated 2/24/14, saying, “Because of the right-wing disinformation you post on the LASC list, those on the LASC Coordinating Committee voted to unsubscribe you. You can still send things in to be posted, but we will read them first and decide it if merits being posted. Bye, Stan Smith LASC list moderator for LASC-CC.”18 It was evidently pointless to make any further submissions there.
It’s part of the official narrative to blame the current economic woes of Venezuela on the late-2014 drop in oil prices, but that doesn’t account for the decline in living standards that were already well underway several years before. Indeed, as I noted earlier, there were significant shortages even after the April 2013 elections, and poverty had been increasing even before that. This was made evident by a joint study of the University of Simón Bolívar, Central University of Venezuela and Andrés Bello Catholic University, on living conditions in Venezuela, conducted between August and September 2014, when the price of oil was still over $100/barrel. The study was based on information from the government’s own National Statistics Institute (Instituto Nacional de Estadística) and it concluded that the poverty rate, including the extremely poor and the poor, was then 3.4% higher than it was in 1998, the year Chávez won the presidency. According to the “Poll on the Conditions of Life in Venezuela 2014” (Encovi, for its name in Spanish) 48.4% of households were poor or extremely poor, compared to 45% in 1998. Most significantly, extreme poverty rose from the pre-Chávez figure of 18.7% to 23.6%.
The later 2015 study by Encovi showed that the drop in oil prices had, indeed, taken its toll with 73% of Venezuelan households now in poverty and of that number, 49% were in extreme poverty. Notably, in 1989, the year of the “Caracazo” when the country exploded after the price of oil dropped and Venezuela was under a neoliberal structural adjustment program (SAP) the number of households in poverty was “only” 58.9%.19 In other words, seventeen years of the “socialist” project of the Bolivarians, many of those years with historically high oil prices, ultimately brought greater poverty to the country than a Neoliberal SAP.20
In 2015 the lines outside of supermarkets grew exponentially for scarce items, but the regular demonstrations never grew to the size they had in February of the previous year. Everyone appeared to be waiting patiently to make their anger known at the polls in the December elections.
The judicial persecutions also continued, with the most egregious example being the conviction of opposition politician Leopoldo López on charges that he “incited Venezuelans to violence through subliminal messages.”21 “The 13 years and nine months prison sentence against a Venezuelan opposition leader without any credible evidence against him shows an utter lack of judicial independence and impartiality in the country,” Amnesty International’s Americas Director Erika Guevara-Rosas wrote on the organization’s website. “The charges against Leopoldo López were never adequately substantiated and the prison sentence against him is clearly politically motivated. His only ‘crime’ was being leader of an opposition party in Venezuela,” Guevara-Rosas said.22 As Lopez supporters awaited the verdict outside the courtroom on September 10th, mobs of Chavistas armed with sticks and called in by Chavista Parliamentarian Jacqueline Faría, attacked the peaceful crowd, injuring many, and killing one person.23
All this led inexorably up to the December 6, 2015 elections for the National Assembly, on which the country pinned its hopes for change. They came at a time when nine of ten Venezuelans saw the country as being on a bad course, and Maduro’s popularity was hitting rock bottom. This election would become the turning point of the Bolivarian process, when even the clientelistic networks cultivated over the years failed to bring out voters for the PSUV. Many reacted like Ezequiel Montero, a Chavista who abstained from voting because, as he wrote in the popular Chavista website, Aporrea, “I consider the present PSUV directorate, alo
ng with the great bureaucratic band that goes from the ministers to the directors in ministries and institutes and, to my great pain, a good part of regular chavistas organized in the community councils and other forms of social organization, to be infested, rotten with corruption. With exceptions, but the rot has advanced to such a form over the years that soon there won’t be a single healthy person. I don’t say this pointing fingers, but with a deep sadness, and even more, with great concern.”24
On the other side, however, the opposition led an inspired, and well-organized campaign that drew in a new generation of committed activists. Some of these activists took great risks as poll-watchers. They refused to allow the government to perpetrate a fraud by illegally keeping the polls open after hours so it could bring in its people for a “second round of voting.”25
With a 74.25% turnout (the largest turnout for a parliamentary election since 1983 when voting was still compulsory), the opposition Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD) won a qualified majority and a mandate to take the country on a new course. The reconstruction of the country after fifteen years of populist economics is guaranteed to be long and rocky but Venezuela’s resource gift—or “curse,” depending on your perspective—would make it possible for the country to make an economic recovery with less pain than most other countries that have undergone the national delirium that populism represents.26
The opposition in Venezuela has changed considerably from what it was in the first years of the century, and at present one could only qualify it as “right wing” out of ignorance or pure demagoguery. While there are right wing parties in the coalition of parties grouped together under the Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD), there are also centrist and left parties like Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), Radical Cause (LCR) and the far left Red Flag (BR). The bulk of the opposition, at the time of this writing, could be characterized as social democratic and would include parties like Popular Will (VP), Democratic Action (AD), A New Era (UNT) and others. Indeed, the coalition is so diverse—including in its ranks, for instance, the first transgender member of a national assembly in Latin America— that maintaining unity in the medium or long-term will likely be an issue. The only unifying objective appeared to be the restoration of democratic processes after many years of increasingly autocratic rule under the hybrid populist regime of a caudillo.
The December 2015 elections represented another battle in the ongoing struggle in Venezuela between advocates for liberal democracy and its associated institutions, including checks and balances, separation of powers, accountability, rule of law, etc. on one hand and, on the other, populist corporatism under a caudillo with a strong role for the military in governance, centralized power, organized in clientelistic networks.
While liberal democracy was first established in Venezuela in 1958, the corporatist rule by caudillo goes back to the time when Venezuela was a colony of Spain and it was reinforced by Simón Bolívar.27 As Hal Draper noted, quoting Bolívar, “the people are in the army” and “as for others ‘Their only right is to remain passive citizens.’”28 Former Lt. Colonel Hugo Chávez represented a reintroduction of this model of military rule by caudillo after forty years of liberal democracy. As president he brought 1614 military officers into the government, even as the rest of Latin America was removing the military and military juntas from power.29
The new National Assembly met toward the end of the first week to hash out a work plan for their first meetings in January. Contrary to fears they would impose a “neoliberal” package on the people (which some still consider to be worse than the economic chaos generated by the Bolivarian government), Jesus Torrealba, the former Communist and Secretary General of the MUD “gave priority to the recovery of an agenda of social priorities.” In doing so, he emphasized “universalizing” the Missions and removing the clientelist elements from them; giving titles and services to those who received housing from the Housing Mission; ensuring that salaries and pensions be paid; reactivating national industry and production; passing a law of amnesty (and the release of Leopoldo López) and focusing on “reconciliation.”30
The PSUVistas apparently had no interest in “reconciliation” or governing with the new opposition National Assembly. In the final weeks of December 2015 they forced judges out of their Supreme Court (Tribunal Supremo de Justicia) and, with their lame duck parliament, illegally packed that branch of government with their people.31 The TSJ, if the ploy were to succeed (and it apparently did), would be able to annul any or all laws passed by the National Assembly. And so, among the first acts of the TSJ was a refusal to recognize three National Assembly representatives from the state of Amazonas, an act aimed at weakening the two-thirds majority of the opposition.32 The new TSJ would soon become a major weapon in a battle to destroy the power of the National Assembly.33 After all, in a 2014 study of the court, in over 45,000 cases, it had yet to go against the Bolivarian government in a single ruling.34
Even as the MUD became more conciliatory (for instance, accepting the TSJ ruling on the representatives from Amazonas), Maduro and the hardline Chavistas took an increasingly more uncompromising stance. PSUVista Ministers called before the National Assembly refused to appear; initial laws passed were struck down by the PSUVista-packed TSJ; and President Maduro was able to use the TSJ to uphold Economic Emergency Decree 2184 over the veto of the National Assembly and to impose a State of Exception in Decree 2323 in May of 2016. Confrontations between the two political elites appeared likely to increase, despite calls from the opposition MUD for unity to resolve the country’s severe problems.
Most Venezuelans, weary from the long lines for scarce products at supermarkets, inflation, a general deterioration in the standard of living, crime and insecurity, seemed only to want some form of normalcy restored. But after seventeen years of the Bolivarian project, it was anyone’s guess what “normalcy” could possibly mean in Venezuela. Meanwhile, despite the Economic Emergency Decree, Maduro made nothing but small and superficial economic changes (such as raising the price of gas, further devaluing the Bolívar to 10 to the dollar and allowing one exchange system to “float” and then changing the names of the new exchange rates to DIPRO and DICOM, respectively). And few expected anything to come of the State of Exception, and military maneuvers that cost the country an estimated $20 million, but more repression as the calls for a referendum on Maduro’s government increased.35
In February 2016, Felipe Pérez Martí said “Maduro won’t last another five months.” Martí believed that Maduro was at the center of a “hard core” of six people but that other factions and a majority in the PSUV are more rational and willing to work with the opposition to try to correct the problems the country faces. He felt that the moderate sectors of Chavismo could and should be included in a new government, and that some institutions, such as the community councils and communes could play a positive role in rebuilding Venezuela, neighborhood by neighborhood, after the hegemony of the Bolivarians comes to an end. He was optimistic that with its extraordinary resources Venezuela could rebuild from the ruins of this populist project some were convinced represented “Twenty-First Century Socialism.”36
It’s never a good idea to make predictions in politics, and even less so when political systems appear to be descending into chaos, as is presently happening in Venezuela. The ruling Bolivarian elite is desperate to maintain its impunity and continue to maintain and increase its power and wealth; the Bolivarian base has mostly fallen away, but a hard-core continues to advocate for “deepening the process.” On the other hand, the overwhelming majority just wants the new start the National Assembly they voted in had promised them.
But opportunities to correct the situation and avoid the disaster scenarios of civil war, an outright military dictatorship or a failed state are vanishing. By spring of 2016 Venezuela appeared to be entering a death spiral. Lootings and spontaneous food riots became pandemic as desperate Venezuelans found government market shelves empty, the normal markets crumbling, and both being
replaced with black markets that sold products illegally at many times their legal market price. Plunder began to replace shopping as a means of sustenance, especially as food prices rose so high that by May 2016 a family of five required more than eighteen minimum wages simply to feed itself.37
Rolling blackouts, due to government neglect of the national electrical system, pulverized what was left of the productive economy.38 Scarce food resources that required refrigeration spoiled during prolonged blackouts and the darkness offered cover for more looting, which, in turn, became a process for acquiring products for sale on the growing black market. The opposition hoped to be able to stave off a violent finale to the crescendo of misery, violence, disintegration and lawlessness and resolve the issues politically with a referendum on the President later in the year, Maduro and his packed court permitting. But the problems all fed into each other in an increasingly tense social context that seemed destined to explode. By mid-year, the only question seemed to be: Who would remain standing after the conflagration?
The issue of how to respond to the Venezuelan crisis has become even more urgent, given this dramatic turn of events. The complex, contradictory and unpleasant reality of what’s going on in the country needs to be faced honestly, fearlessly, and without ideological agendas. The conflict, for one thing, is not between the “left” and the “ultra right” but rather between an elite that is equal parts a holdover of Leninist socialism and a decaying populist movement united by a dead caudillo (the Bolivarians) and a very mixed opposition united tenuously by a desire to restore liberal democratic processes and governance (and, no doubt, in many cases, to regain power).