Latin America: the hidden war on democracy by John Pilger

In an article for the New Statesman, John Pilger argues that an unreported war is being waged by the United States, and Britain, to restore power to the privileged classes at the expense of the majority. 24 April 2008

Beyond the sound and fury of its conquest of Iraq and campaign against Iran, the world’s dominant power is waging a largely unreported war on another continent – Latin America. Using proxies, Washington aims to restore and reinforce the political control of a privileged group calling itself middle-class, to shift the responsibility for massacres and drug trafficking away from the psychotic regime in Colombia and its mafiosi, and to extinguish hopes raised among Latin America’s impoverished majority by the reform governments of Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia.

In Colombia, the main battleground, the class nature of the war is distorted by the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as the Farc, whose own resort to kidnapping and the drugs trade has provided an instrument with which to smear those who have distinguished Latin America’s epic history of rebellion by opposing the proto-fascism of George W Bush’s regime. “You don’t fight terror with terror,” said President Hugo Chávez as US warplanes bombed to death thousands of civilians in Afghanistan following the 11 September 2001 attacks. Thereafter, he was a marked man. Yet, as every poll has shown, he spoke for the great majority of human beings who have grasped that the “war on terror” is a crusade of domination.

Almost alone among national leaders standing up to Bush, Chávez was declared an enemy and his plans for a functioning social democracy independent of the United States a threat to Washington’s grip on Latin America. “Even worse,” wrote the Latin America specialist James Petras, “Chávez’s nationalist policies represented an alternative in Latin America at a time (2000-2003) when mass insurrections, popular uprisings and the collapse of pro-US client rulers (Argentina, Ecuador and Bolivia) were constant front-page news.

”It is impossible to underestimate the threat of this alternative as perceived by the “middle classes” in countries which have such an abundance of privilege and poverty. In Venezuela, their “grotesque fantasies of being ruled by a ‘brutal communist dictator’”, to quote Petras, are reminiscent of the paranoia of the white population that backed South Africa’s apartheid regime. Like in South Africa, racism in Venezuela is rampant, with the poor ignored, despised or patronised, and a Caracas shock jock allowed casually to dismiss Chávez, who is of mixed race, as a “monkey”.

This fatuous venom has come not only from the super-rich behind their walls in suburbs called Country Club, but from the pretenders to their ranks in middle-level management, journalism, public relations, the arts, education and the other professions, who identify vicariously with all things American. Journalists in broadcasting and the press have played a crucial role – acknowledged by one of the generals and bankers who tried unsuccessfully to overthrow Chávez in 2002. “We couldn’t have done it without them,” he said. “The media were our secret weapon.”

Many of these people regard themselves as liberals, and have the ear of foreign journalists who like to describe themselves as being “on the left”. This is not surprising. When Chávez was first elected in 1998, Venezuela was not an archetypical Latin American tyranny, but a liberal democracy with certain freedoms, run by and for its elite, which had plundered the oil revenue and let crumbs fall to the invisible millions in the barrios. A pact between the two main parties, known as puntofijismo, resembled the convergence of new Labour and the Tories in Britain and Republicans and Democrats in the US. For them, the idea of popular sovereignty was anathema, and still is.

Take higher education. At the taxpayer-funded elite “public” Venezuelan Central University, more than 90 per cent of the students come from the upper and “middle” classes. These and other elite students have been infiltrated by CIA-linked groups and, in defending their privilege, have been lauded by foreign liberals.

With Colombia as its front line, the war on democracy in Latin America has Chávez as its main target. It is not difficult to understand why. One of Chávez’s first acts was to revitalise the oil producers’ organisation Opec and force the oil price to record levels. At the same time he reduced the price of oil for the poorest countries in the Caribbean region and central America, and used Venezuela’s new wealth to pay off debt, notably Argentina’s, and, in effect, expelled the International Monetary Fund from a continent over which it once ruled. He has cut poverty by half – while GDP has risen dramatically. Above all, he gave poor people the confidence to believe that their lives would improve.

The irony is that, unlike Fidel Castro in Cuba, he presented no real threat to the well-off, who have grown richer under his presidency. What he has demonstrated is that a social democracy can prosper and reach out to its poor with genuine welfare, and without the extremes of “neoliberalism” – a decidedly unradical notion once embraced by the British Labour Party. Those ordinary Venezuelans who abstained during last year’s constitutional referendum were protesting that a “moderate” social democracy was not enough while the bureaucrats remained corrupt and the sewers overflowed. This critique of Chavez's "Bolivarian Revolution" from the barrios was drowned in the Venezuelan and foreign media's unrelenting propaganda that he was planning a dictatorship.

Across the border in Colombia, the US has made Venezuela’s neighbour the Israel of Latin America. Under “Plan Colombia”, more than $6bn in arms, planes, special forces, mercenaries and logistics have been showered on some of the most murderous people on earth: the inheritors of Pinochet’s Chile and the other juntas that terrorised Latin America for a generation, their various gestapos trained at the School of the Americas in Georgia. “We not only taught them how to torture,” a former American trainer told me, “we taught them how to kill, murder, eliminate.” That remains true of Colombia, where government-inspired mass terror has been documented by Amnesty, Human Rights Watch and many others.

In a study of 31,656 extrajudicial killings and forced disappearances between 1996 and 2006, the Colombian Commission of Jurists found that 46 per cent had been murdered by right-wing death squads and 14 per cent by Farc guerrillas. The paramilitaries were responsible for most of the three million victims of internal displacement. This misery is a product of Plan Colombia’s pseudo “war on drugs”, whose real purpose has been to eliminate the Farc. To that goal has now been added a war of attrition on the new popular democracies, especially Venezuela.US special forces “advise” the Colombian military to cross the border into Venezuela and murder and kidnap its citizens and infiltrate paramilitaries, and so test the loyalty of the Venezuelan armed forces. The model is the CIA-run Contra campaign in Honduras in the 1980s that brought down the reformist government in Nicaragua.

The defeat of the Farc is now seen as a prelude to an all-out attack on Venezuela if the Venezuelan elite – reinvigorated by its narrow referendum victory last year – broadens its base in state and local government elections in November.America’s man and Colombia’s Pinochet is President Álvaro Uribe. In 1991, a declassified report by the US Defence Intelligence Agency revealed the then Senator Uribe as having “worked for the Medellín Cartel” as a “close personal friend” of the cartel’s drugs baron, Pablo Escobar. To date, 62 of his political allies have been investigated for close collaboration with paramilitaries and their death squads. A feature of his rule has been the fate of journalists who have illuminated his shadows. Last year, four leading journalists received death threats after criticising Uribe. Since 2002, at least 31 journalists have been assassinated in Colombia. Uribe’s other habit is smearing trade unions and human rights workers as “collaborators with the Farc”.

This marks them. Colombia’s death squads, wrote Jenny Pearce, author of the acclaimed Under the Eagle: US Intervention in Central America and the Caribbean (1982), “are increasingly active, confident that the president has been so successful in rallying the country against the Farc that little attention will shift to their atrocities”.

Uribe was personally championed by Tony Blair, reflecting Britain’s long-standing, mostly secret role in Latin America. “Counter-insurgency assistance” to the Colombian military, up to its neck in death-squad alliances, includes training by the SAS of units such as the High Mountain Battalions, condemned repeatedly for atrocities. On 8 March, Colombian officers were invited by the Foreign Office to a “counter-insurgency seminar” at the Wilton Park conference centre in southern England. Rarely has the Foreign Office so brazenly paraded the killers it mentors.

The western media’s role follows earlier models, such as the campaigns that cleared the way for the dismemberment of Yugoslavia and the credibility given to lies about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. The softening-up for an attack on Venezuela is well under way, with the repetition of similar lies and smears.On 3 February, the London Observer devoted two pages to claims that Chávez was colluding in the Colombian drugs trade. Similarly to the paper’s notorious bogus scares linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda, the Observer’s headline read, “Revealed: Chávez role in cocaine trail to Europe”. Allegations were unsubstantiated; hearsay uncorroborated. No source was identified. Indeed, the reporter, clearly trying to cover himself, wrote: “No source I spoke to accused Chávez himself of having a direct role in Colombia’s giant drug trafficking business.”

In fact, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime has reported that Venezuela is fully participating in international anti-drugs programmes and in 2005 seized the third-highest amount of cocaine in the world. Even the Foreign Office minister Kim Howells has referred to “Venezuela’s tremendous co-operation”. The drugs smear has recently been reinforced with reports that Chávez has an “increasingly public alliance [with] the Farc” (see “Dangerous liaisons”, New Statesman, 14 April). Again, there is “no evidence”, says the secretary general of the Organisation of American States.

At Uribe’s request, and backed by the French government, Chávez played a mediating role in seeking the release of hostages held by the Farc. On 1 March, the negotiations were betrayed by Uribe who, with US logistical assistance, fired missiles at a camp in Ecuador, killing Raúl Reyes, the Farc’s highest-level negotiator. An “email” recovered from Reyes’s laptop is said by the Colombian military to show that the Farc has received $300m from Chávez. The allegation is fake. The actual document refers only to Chávez in relation to the hostage exchange. On 14 April, Chávez angrily criticised the Farc. “If I were a guerrilla,” he said, “I wouldn’t have the need to hold a woman, a man who aren’t soldiers. Free the civilians!”

However, these fantasies have lethal purpose. On 10 March, the Bush administration announced that it had begun the process of placing Venezuela’s popular democracy on a list of “terrorist states”, along with North Korea, Syria, Cuba, Sudan and Iran, the last of which is currently awaiting attack by the world’s leading terrorist state.

Report from Caracas: After referendum, Chavez pledges to continue struggle by John Riddell & Suzanne Weiss, Caracas

John Riddell and Suzanne Weiss traveled to Venezuela at the end of November, as participants in a tour organized by the Australia-Venezuela Solidarity Network (. The authors are members of the editorial team of Canadian publication Socialist Voice (http://www.socialistvoice.ca).

Responding to what he termed a “photo finish” defeat in Venezuela’s December 2 constitutional referendum, President Hugo Chavez pledged to continue the struggle for the measures that were presented to voters.

Announcing the results on national TV, he accepted “the decision made by the people” and thanked all voters, both those who voted “Yes” and those in the “No” camp. But he called for his movement to stay on course. “I do not withdraw a single comma from the proposal”, he added. “The proposal is still on the table.”

Chavez also recalled the words he used after the failure of the Bolivarian movement’s initial bid for power: “As I said on February 4, 1992, we could not do it – for now.” On that occasion, the Venezuelan masses seized on the words “for now’ (por ahora) as a commitment to fight on until victory was won.

Chavez closed by saying that a major proposal in the constitutional reform project — the expansion of social security to include workers in the informal economy and housewives — does not require a constitutional amendment and would be carried out as soon as possible.

The right-wing victory in the vote was paper-thin: 51% to 49%. The “No” camp increased its vote only marginally (about 2%) from the opposition’s score in last year’s presidential elections. The big change was the abstention of more than a third (38%) of those who voted for Chavez last year. Unconvinced of the reform proposals but unwilling to associate
themselves with the opposition, they chose this time to stay at home.

Profile of the reform

Chavez announced plans to reform Venezuela’s 1999 constitution shortly after his re-election in December 2006, as a way to open the road for the country’s advance to socialism. On August 15, 2007, he proposed amendments to 33 articles of the constitution. This triggered an extensive public debate in all parts of the country.

Following this discussion, on November 2, the National Assembly adopted a package that included not just Chavez’s amendments, but others affecting another 36 articles. The referendum followed automatically 30 days later.

The reform’s main provisions can be grouped under six headings:

Popular power: Creation of a new level of government consisting of communal and other councils that would receive at least 5% of the national budget and would take decisions not through elected representatives but through assemblies of all members.

Non-capitalist economic development: Provisions for new forms of collective, social, and public property alongside private ownership; subjection of the central bank to government direction; stronger measures for land reform and against capitalist speculation.

Deepening social inclusion: A variety of measures to counter
discrimination, democratise higher education, and move towards a 36-hour work week.

New territorial divisions: New presidential powers to channel resources to designated regions with special needs.

A stronger presidency: Removal of the two-term limit on a president’s time in office; provision for suspension of freedom of information during a state of emergency (a response to the capitalist media’s role in organising the unsuccessful 2002 military coup); and other measures.

Socialism as the goal: The amendments proclaimed a socialist society as Venezuela’s goal, without specifying what that would mean in practice.

(For a detailed account that goes through each of the proposed reforms, see Greg Wilpert’s article posted on Venezuelanalysis.com, .

The view from the streets

When we arrived in Caracas, 12 days before the vote, the streets in downtown and working-class areas were lined with banners, posters, and graffiti calling for a “Yes” vote (“Si con Chavez”). The “No” campaign conceded the streets, relying instead on its vise-grip on the media — the strongest instrument of political control.

We saw little evidence of public discussion. Efforts were being made to circulate the text of the reforms, which filled several dozen pages of legalistic prose. But at first, we saw these distributions only close by the National Assembly. Not until the last few days did we see “red points” — with tables, banners, and music — carrying out the distributions across the city. In the last week, a “dual-column” version was also distributed. We spent time pouring over it, trying to grasp the changes, but it was slow going.

Only in the final few days before the vote did we see flyers that attempted to summarise the changes. Just back from a lengthy trip abroad, Chavez spoke stirringly during the final week in defense of the reform.

Nonetheless, on the whole, we did not see any concerted effort to explain why the changes were necessary.

A loaded debate

Most of criticisms we heard from “No” supporters were based on obvious distortions of the reform, including claims that the changes would abolish private property, end free bargaining for employment contracts, make Chavez president for life, abolish elections and end free speech.

Other charges were even more fanciful: the government was arming criminal gangs and promoting incursions of Colombian paramilitaries, planning to take children from their parents, and preparing to convert Venezuela into a “totalitarian” state like Cuba or North Korea.

Such accusations were usually delivered in a scattergun style that made reasoned response difficult.

The whole debate was loaded against the Chavez supporters — to vote “Yes”, you had to support a wide range of proposals which were individually and collectively difficult to understand. But to vote “No” or abstain, you only needed to object to a single proposal, or just feel uneasy or uncertain. The capitalist media made certain that everyone
heard plenty of reasons for unease and uncertainty.

The ‘Yes’ campaign

During our two-week stay, we talked to many hundreds of “Yes” supporters. In the two mass demonstrations we attended, we carried a banner reading, in Spanish, “Canadians in support of the Bolivarian revolution”. Marchers crowded round to greet us, talk to us, and express their internationalist convictions.

Given the complexity of the issues, it was striking how well and thoroughly these “Yes” supporters understood the reform. Whenever we asked, “Which change is the most important?” we got specific and thoughtful responses, often quoting the constitutional paragraph number, and often taking up complex topics remote from the speaker’s immediate experience.

Partisans of the “Yes” often over-estimated our knowledge of the changes. On a voting lineup in Barrio 23 de Enero in western Caracas, a “Yes” supporter, asked which change was the most important, replied, “Well, I’d say article 115, but also articles …” and he reeled off a series of article numbers, far too quickly for us to jot down.

We took part in a pro-reform student demonstration of more than 60,000 — the largest such action so far — and a campaign wind-up that mobilised some 750,000 in downtown Caracas. Both actions were far larger than anything the “No” forces managed. At both events the mood was confident, joyous, and militant.

And as Chavez points out, the vote of 4.3 million for reforms that endorsed a course toward socialism is a historic achievement.

The impact of our discussions with “Yes” supporters was overwhelming and is hard to convey to those who have not witnessed revolution. Here we have a revolutionary vanguard of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, experienced in struggle, wise, passionate, and determined, that has several times rallied a decisive majority to beat down attacks of
the imperialist foe.

Defections from the Bolivarian camp

Yet again and again, “Yes” activists told us that support for the reform in their milieus was noticeably less than support for Chavez in the presidential elections last year. This uncertainty in the progressive camp was reinforced by a series of much publicised defections, including the social democratic Podemos party (which scored 8% in last year’s vote) and former defence minister and army chief Raul Baduel. Many Bolivarian activists told us that the reform faced possible defeat.

In this context, it seemed to us that the revolutionary forces urgently needed to organise an intensive dialogue with those in Bolivarian rank-and-file who were uncertain about the reform. We expected to see efforts to canvass working-class areas similar to what took place earlier this year, when over five million people signed up to support the project of a new unified socialist party — the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV). But we saw no such initiative.

A PSUV meeting we attended in the Catia district of Caracas, a week before the vote, concerned itself with the organising of scrutineers at polling places — a crucial and complex task — rather than with organising discussions with voters in its region and getting out the “Yes” vote. For the newly formed party branch we visited, just getting the scrutineers in place and provided with logistical backup was a major
challenge. The party shows great promise, but did not play a strong visible role in the campaign. (See “The Battle for the United Socialist Party of Venezuela”, , by Kiraz
Janicke.)

Hammer of counterrevolution

The opposition campaign proceeded along two parallel tracks. On one hand, “No” spokespersons — with Baduel and Podemos in the lead — cloaked themselves in the mantle of the 1999 constitution, an early Bolivarian achievement, claiming they merely wanted to defend the movement’s
original goals (although in fact, the opposition at that time had bitterly opposed that progressive document).

At the same time, the opposition readied its “Plan B”. Opposition groups engaged in repeated violent provocations against “Yes” supporters, including three wanton killings of Chavez supporters. Elements of the right-wing student movement that is strong in the country’s traditional upper-class universities were prominent in the disorders. There was talk
of insurrection if “Yes” forces won.

Opposition leaders did little to disavow and prevent such actions. During the campaign they did not pledge to accept a “Yes” victory. All this reinforced fears about voting.

In the aftermath of the vote, some opposition leaders made conciliatory gestures, clearly seeking to build a bridge to more conservative forces within the government. Yet the entire course of the opposition since Chavez’s election in 1999 has aimed not just at halting the Bolivarian process but at forcibly destroying the revolution root and branch — and fully restoring US domination and oligarchic rule. In view of
Venezuela’s oil wealth and world political influence, the opposition’s masters in Washington can settle for nothing less.

If the opposition can preserve its control of Venezuela’s most powerful social institutions, starting with the private economy and the media, it has good reason to hope that over time they can divide, grind down, and crush the revolution.

This fact was a central motivation for the constitutional reform proposals. The Bolivarian movement’s socialist course is not a change from its original goals, which included national sovereignty, a break from neoliberalism, endogenous development, popular democracy, equality and the well-being of the working masses. Rather, as Chavez has stated, these goals can be achieved only through a fundamental re-organisation of society along socialist lines.

However, many supporters of the Bolivarian cause preferred to stand pat on the social achievements of their movement, rather than risking an uncertain advance toward socialism. The dynamics of elections under capitalism, which isolate working people from each other while maximising the impact of hostile media, reinforce such conservative impulses.

Yet the revolutionary process has as yet been able only to slightly alleviate the grinding poverty of the Venezuelan masses. Society has only begun to recover from the devastation of neoliberalism. A still-dominant capitalist class conspires to heighten instability, while seizing on it to discredit the government.

The revolution cannot stand pat. It must advance — or ultimately lose all.

That choice will be made not in parliament, but in the arena of mass social struggles, where the multi-millioned Bolivarian vanguard, if successfully deployed, has decisive political weight.

The referendum’s outcome is a serious setback. But the resolute response of Chavez, plus the vigor and determination of the Bolivarian ranks, provide good reason to believe that the revolution will resume its forward march.

From: International News, Green Left Weekly issue #735 12 December 2007.

Venezuela: Democracy or dictatorship? by James Jordan

Much coverage of the Venezuelan revolution in the corporate-owned media presents a severely distorted picture of what is occurring in Venezuela and the nature and actions of the government of President Hugo Chavez. James Jordan, the emergency response coordinator for the US-based Venezuela Solidarity Network (), attempts to answer some of the key lies and distortions.

What’s wrong with Hugo Chavez and his country? Every time I turn on the news, I see another negative report! Why do the Venezuelan people keep electing him?

Maybe it is time we stopped believing the corporate media. Was corporate media telling the truth when it repeated every lie that took us into war in Iraq? The fact is the Venezuelan people do keep electing Chavez and his supporters to power. That’s called democracy, and whether the US government likes it or not.

Is it true that democracy is being threatened in Venezuela?

Before Chavez was elected president, politics was dominated by two official parties (sound familiar?) that represented the interests of the wealthiest Venezuelans, but ignored the needs of the 80% who were living in poverty. When Chavez was elected, it was due to a coalition of popular forces that rejected “business as usual”. Corporate heads and corrupt union leaders tried to overthrow Chavez in 2002, but masses of people took to the streets to defend their democracy. In the last election, Chavez won with nearly 63% of the vote.

Communities are being given direct power to administer many social programs and the government is supporting an explosion of cooperative enterprises — from worker-run
factories to tens of thousands of cooperatives. In a recent poll of South American countries, Venezuelans had the highest percentage of those who said that their country is “totally
democratic”.

Why is Chavez trying to eliminate political parties, remove term limits, and ensure that he will be elected president for life?

Chavez is seeking to have the 24 parties that have supported the Bolivarian process unified into one party. This has no effect whatsoever on opposition parties, who are still free to
organise and to run for office.

One of the reforms would remove presidential term limits. If anything, this is moving in the opposite direction of restricting democracy. If a country wants to keep reelecting someone for president, why shouldn’t they have that choice? Most countries do not have term limits for their heads of state, and in the case of countries like Britain and Australia, the general public doesn’t even get to vote for their top leader!

But won’t the proposed constitutional reforms limit people’s power and pave the way to dictatorship?

If anything, the constitutional reforms would broaden democracy by giving more power to community and worker councils. This is one of the core differences between representative democracy versus participatory democracy (which is what Venezuela is developing). In participatory democracy, the direct involvement of communities is maximised, rather than minimised in favour of bureaucracies and government officials, which is how representative democracy works.

The constitutional reforms also would require a much needed overhaul to humanise Venezuelan jails, make central bank management answerable to elected officials, recognise the historic and cultural importance of Afro-Venezuelans, and outlaw discrimination based on sexual orientation. These
reforms will be subject to a popular vote, just like the constitution was.

How can we talk about democracy in Venezuela when there is so much repression of the media?

Just go to Venezuela and you’ll never ask that question again. You cannot walk around Caracas or any other Venezuelan city without hearing political discussion and debate. Kiosks sell copies of the constitution and most of the newspapers and magazines are corporate-owned and pro-opposition. Turn on the TV and you’ll find more of the same. Furthermore, the government is providing millions of dollars in funding for community-owned and-operated media.

There was a lot of noise made about the “closing” of RCTV, an opposition-aligned station. The fact is it was never closed, and is still available on cable and satellite. However, when RCTV’s license to use the public airwaves, free of charge, came up for renewal, it was denied. Considering that RCTV helped carry out the coup against Venezuelan democracy in 2002, one can only be amazed that this is the only restriction they have received.

I hear that runaway spending to support social programs is unsustainable because of Venezuela’s dependency on oil. Is Chavez ruining Venezuela’s economy?

It’s good to remember that social spending that educates people, keeps people healthy, and increases the buying power of the populace is basically good for the economy. In Venezuela, health care is being made available to everyone, the society is highly literate, and the buying power of the average Venezuelan is increasing. The Venezuelan economy has been steadily growing ever since workers broke the economic sabotage at the start of 2003.

Last year, for the first time since the oil boom of the ’70s, oil money has provided less than half of Venezuela’s national budget. Oil money is being used to diversify the economy. For instance, Venezuela is especially vulnerable in its agricultural development. However, since land reform laws were adopted under Chavez, 5 million acres of fallow land,
plus training and farming equipment, have been given to cooperatives.

Isn’t it true that Chavez and the Venezuelan government are ignoring environmental concerns and pushing oil development without concern for its impact on nature? Isn’t it also true that the communities that suffer most from oil and mining development are indigenous communities, since so much resources are located on indigenous lands?

Venezuela, like other countries, has ecological problems. Most of these precede the Bolivarian revolution. Also, it is impossible to develop oil and mining resources without doing damage to the environment. Nevertheless, the seeds of ecological revolution can be found within the
Bolivarian process.

One of the reasons Venezuela has given for demanding majority control of oil development is because of the bad environmental record of big oil companies. Venezuela is prioritising
environmental restoration after undertaking new oil or mining projects, particularly in regards to protecting and restoring rivers. For the first time in Venezuelan history, affected indigenous communities are involved in all decisions about whether or not to develop these resources.

Venezuela has a policy of regarding its natural resources as being for the benefit of all the people. A percentage of oil profits are required by law to go into social programs, and oil money is funding many environmental protection and rehabilitation programs. Only the most foolishly idealistic would fail to see that it is Venezuela’s oil and mineral wealth that provides the funds necessary to move
beyond oil dependency and toward environmental sustainability.

Bolivarian Venezuela has made a commitment to its indigenous communities, returning hundreds of thousands of acres of ancestral land and enacting constitutional protections that are an example to other American nations. Likewise, Venezuela has made a strong ecological commitment, actively
seeking to raise consciousness throughout the nation. Environmental initiatives include efforts to plant young trees around the country, to expand public transportation, to restore urban waterways, support sustainable agriculture, and to restrict heavy industrial fishing. Venezuela has begun programs such as the Revolutionary Light Bulb programs, wherein people can trade in bags of garbage for food, and old, energy wasteful light bulbs for newer, more efficient ones.

What is the relationship of Venezuela and Iran, and why is Chavez so friendly with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?

Venezuela and Iran have a long history of relations that precedes the election of either Chavez or Ahmadinejad. This relationship was solidified by the founding of OPEC. This
relationship is economic, not ideological, and has been maintained throughout ideological shifts in both countries. Besides, Venezuela does not make the mistake of identifying a current leader with a whole nation. For instance, even though Venezuela is outspokenly opposed to the policies of the Bush administration, it still maintains a high level of trade with
the US, and even provides humanitarian assistance to poor communities in the US.

Venezuela also recognises that Iran is being targeted for possible acts of aggression by the US and others, and is standing in solidarity with the people of Iran against a possible invasion or bombing campaign. Those who carry on the most about Chavez making state visits to Iran are the most interested in going to war with Iran and with overthrowing democracy in Venezuela.

Why does Chavez hate the US?

Any US citizen who believes this should go to Venezuela
and experience the warmth and generosity of its people. US citizens who travel to Venezuela report the same experience, over and over again: Venezuelans approaching them on the streets, in meetings, at various gatherings, telling them to let the people of the US know that Venezuela is not their enemy.

[Visit to find out about the solidarity campaign in Australia.]


From: International News, Green Left Weekly issue #734 5 December 2007.

Venezuela After the Referendum By Tariq Ali

Hugo Chavez' narrow defeat in the referendum was the result of large-scale abstentions by his supporters. 44 percent of the electorate stayed at home. Why? First, because they did not either understand or accept that this was a necessary referendum. The measures related to the working week and some other proposed social reforms could be easily legislated by the existing parliament. The key issues were the removal of restrictions on the election of the head of government (as is the case in most of Europe) and moves towards 'a socialist state.' On the latter there was simply not enough debate and discussion on a grassroots level.

As Edgardo Lander, a friendly critic pointed out:

"Before voting in favour of a constitutional reform which will define the State, the economy, and the democracy as socialist, we citizens have the right to take participate in these definitions. What is understood by the term socialist state? What is understood by the term socialist economy? What is understood by the term socialist democracy? In what way are these different to the states, economies, and democracies that accompanied socialism of the 20th century? Here, we are not talking about entering into a debate on semantics, rather on basic decisions about the future of the country."

And this was further amplified by Greg Wilpert, a sympathetic journalist whose website, venezuelaanalysis.com, is the best source of information on the country:

"By rushing the reform process Chavez presented the opposition with a nearly unprecedented opportunity to deal him a serious blow. Also, the rush in which the process was pushed forward opened him to criticism that the process was fundamentally flawed, which has become one of the main criticisms of the more moderate critics of the reform."

Another error was the insistence on voting for all the proposals en bloc on a take it or leave it basis. It's perfectly possibly that a number of the proposals might have got through if a vote on each had been allowed. This would have compelled the Bolivarians to campaign more effectively at grassroots level through organised discussions and debates (as the French Left did to win the argument and defeat the EU Constitution ). It is always a mistake to underestimate the electorate and Chavez knows this better than most.

What is to be done now? The President is in office till 2013 and whatever else Chavez may be the description of 'lame-duck' will never fit him. He is a fighter and he will be thinking of how to strengthen the process. If properly handled the defeat could be a blessing in disguise. It has, after all, punctured the arguments of the Western pundits who were claiming for the last eight years that democracy in Venezuela was dead and authoritarianism had won.

Anyone who saw Chavez' speech accepting defeat last night (as I did here in Guadalajara with Mexican friends) will not be in any doubt regarding his commitment to a democratically embedded social process. That much is clear. One of the weaknesses of the movement in Venezuela has been the over-dependence on one person. It is dangerous for the person (one bullet can be enough) and it is unhealthy for the Bolivarian process. There will be a great deal of soul-searching taking place in Caracas, but the key now is an open debate analysing the causes of the setback and a move towards a collective leadership to decide on the next candidate. It's a long time ahead but the discussions should start now. Deepening popular participation and encouraging social inclusion (as envisaged in the defeated constitutional changes) should be done anyway.

The referendum defeat will undoubtedly boost the Venezuelan opposition and the Right in Latin America, but they would be foolish to imagine that this victory will automatically win them the Presidency. If the lessons of the defeat are understood it is the Bolivarians who will win.

Tariq Ali's new book, Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope, is published by Verso. He can be reached at: tariq.ali3@btinternet.com