EDITORIALS

After Chvez
Why has the Bolivarian spirit in Venezuela not endured after Chvez?

e are far away from Latin America (LA), and yet the
region and its people are not lost in our thoughts
and feelings. 1 April marked the 50th anniversary of
the military coup in LAs largest country, Brazil, a seizure of
power that subjected the people over there to 21 years of the
outsized reality of brutal dictatorship backed by Washington.
And yet not a single official of that savage period has been held
accountable for the crimes committed. Towards the end of that
cruel chapter, with Ronald Reagan in the White House, the US
Congress created the National Endowment for Democracy
(NED), funded by the US government, with a board of directors
that included Henry Kissinger, to promote democracy around
the world.
The right local elites are now funded to attain positions of
authority in civil society; certain politicians are supported to
channel popular mobilisation and mass movements in a direction
that Washington would approve of. Indeed, as one official of the
NED once put it, a lot of what the NED now does was done covertly
by the Central Intelligence Agency in the past. So NED became the
new tool of Empire. Wonder how Gabriel Garca Mrquez, Gabo
as he was affectionately called, who passed away on 17 April,
would have brought this development into his literature in the
genre of magical realism. After all, were not the reality and the
magical elements of his magical realism created in the setting of
US imperialism and all that went with it? As much as Hugo Chvez
wished and worked for LA to leave behind its hundred years of
solitude, that is still a long way off. Mrquez always hailed the
Cuban revolution, and so did Chvez, for they knew that that
act cemented LAs political sovereignty and gave its literature
a distinct identity. But the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela
under the presidency of Nicols Maduro has been under siege
since mid-February from forces of the right-wing, backed by NED.
US Secretary of State John Kerry surely must be strongly backing the most right-wing faction of the opposition coalition, the MUD
(in English, the Democratic Unity Roundtable), for he has made
groundless allegations against Maduro that he is running a terror
campaign against his own people, the peaceful protestors,
when he knows how violent they have been, even killing policemen.
In fact, despite the continuing violence, or perhaps because of it,
Maduro has sought accommodation with the Venezuelan right,
which has made matters worse by putting forward IMF-style
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proposals that will only worsen inflation and reduce access of the
working poor to essential commodities. Maduro has reportedly
been very accommodative towards big business, for instance, in
dealing with Lorenzo Mendoza of Grupo Polar (a food products
conglomerate) and Jorge Roig, the president of Fedecamaras
(the federation of big business). There was even a plan to trigger
a nationwide upheaval beginning on 20 March and, in the melee,
sections of the military would seize political power, but this was
quashed and the leaders are now being let off the hook due to
pressures from the right-wing opposition. Under UNASUR mediators,
there was even a proposal emanating from Brazil to explore the
possibility of forming a coalition government with the right.
Basically, NED and its local Venezuelan right-wing collaborators
want to take democracy away from the Chavistas. They do not like
Chavista democracy; what they want is a return to elite, top-down
democracy, wherein, in effect, the elites first decide and then the
people are presented with options the elites have already approved
of. But in all of this manoeuvring over the last two months,
where are the Chavistas, where are the Chavista trade unions,
the community-level grass-roots organisations, those who democratically run the community councils? Where are the people
from the organisations that were to bring about Bolivarian
socialism? Why are they not taking on the forces arrayed against
Bolivarian socialism in Venezuela? Where is that Bolivarian
fighting spirit that Chvez reportedly revived? Chvez was so keen
to get the unification of LA and the construction of Bolivarian
socialism off the ground. What happened to the organisational
mechanisms, if he did put them in place, to bring these about? It
seemed for a while that under Chvezs leadership power at the
local level did come into the hands of people. Indeed, it even
seemed that Venezuela and some other countries of the region
were extricating themselves from the grip of imperialism.
Now, surely the question will be asked whether it is at all possible to build socialism from the grass roots, and in a profoundly
democratic manner, in the midst of a capitalist system. It seems to
us and we can be totally off the mark for we are so, so far away
from the scene that the Bolivarian Revolution had hardly begun;
the organisational mechanisms to bring it about were not in place.
But we at least expected the Bolivarian spirit to assert itself in
the wake of a right-wing attack. Sadly, the Chavista renaissance
of that spirit does not seem to have endured after Chvez.
may 3, 2014

vol xlix no 18

EPW

Economic & Political Weekly