Hugo Chavez applauds OWS protesters, condemns police violence

[This article originally appeared in Green Left Weekly]

Sunday, October 16, 2011

By Owen Richards

 

Venezuela’s socialist president Hugo Chavez has likened the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States to Venezuela’s February 1989 Caracazo riots against neoliberal policies that are widely seen as the start of Venezuela's revolutionary process.

Chavez made the comments by phone on the television program Dando y Dando on October 5.

Chavez also expressed solidarity with the protesters and condemned police repression of peaceful protest. “This movement of popular outrage is expanding ... and the repression is horrible, I don’t know how many are in prison now,” he said.

Discussing the roots of the popular explosion, he said: “Poverty’s growing. The misery is getting worse”.

The Caracazo broke out across Venezuela after a “shock package” of neoliberal reforms was introduced by then-president Carlos Andres Perez involving drastic price hikes in fuel and transport costs. 

It was a popular explosion of anger by Venezuela’s working people and destitute masses. It marked the beginning of the end of the rule of Venezuela’s capitalist oligarchy. 

Three years later, Chavez lead a failed military rebellion aimed at toppling the Andres Perez regime and establishing a popular revolutionary government. The attempt failed, but it earned Chavez and his military comrades immense respect among Venezuela’s poor majority. On the back of this mass support, Chavez was elected president in December 1998.

In his comments, Chavez characterized the Caracazo as “a forerunner to what we are seeing in Europe, and in North America, huge protests” against neoliberalism. In the Caracazo, “the Venezuelan people struck out against neoliberalism, against the Washington consensus, and here a revolution broke out”.

Venezuela has provided an example of an alternative approach to neoliberialism. The Chavez government has continued to nationalise more and more of Venezuela’s productive forces, starting with the biggest monopoly corporations in areas such as steel, electricity and telecommunications, to benefit Venezuela as a whole, not just the rich.

Venezuelanalysis.com said on October 11 that Chavez announced that houses built illegally on the Los Roques islands would be nationalised and turned into holiday resorts for workers and the poor. Until now, the archepelago has been frequented by Venezuela’s rich and international tourists.

Commenting on the nationalisation, Chavez said: “The upper class bourgeoisie privatised all of that, and that’s what we are going to expropriate.” 

He also announced that yachts appropriated from fugitive bankers would be used for sight-seeing tours in the region.

[Owen Richards is the author of the Venezuela: translating the revolution blog.]

Differences between February 4, 1992 and February 27, 1989

The following is an excerpt from Hugo Chavez’s February 4, 2011 speech commemorating “4F” – the February 4 military rebellion he led in 1992. It touches on the “Un Grano de Maiz¹” column I translated in the previous post. 

Differences between February 4, 1992 and February 27, 1989

Translated by Owen Richards

“Those that die for life cannot be said to be dead”. The army and I would like to emphasize this quote, 19 years after that patriotic day, a day which we should call the revolution of the 4th of February, it was within the national army where that force was nurtured ...

Yesterday I was reading, as I do almost every day, the "A grain of corn" column that an old comrade,Toby Valderrama, publishes in the Diario Vea [newspaper], and he makes a very interesting point there, as far as I understand it. He clearly establishes the differences that there was and are in history, for the lessons that history offers us, between that tremendous jolt, that tremendous rebellion of the 27th of February, that of the 28th of February, the Caracazo, and the revolution of the 4th of February.

Nobody planned the Caracazo. The Caracazo exploded in a spontaneous way, but it had no leadership, it had no political project, the people did not go towards the centre of power, no, they dispersed, they were massacred.

The 4th of February on the other hand obeyed a thought-out project, planned for several years. Right here in Valencia there were many meetings, near the hippodrome, this hippodrome that I know so well. There we frequently met with young officers—I'm talking about 1978. The first cells existed of what later would become the Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement 200.

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Chavez (standing, left) and his MBR-200 comrades

It was the end of the seventies and the eighties passed by in the same way. And within the National Army a force was amassing, growing in the Army. Meanwhile, nearly all the revolutionary political forces dispersed, dissolved, extinguished. And I remembered last night one of Simon Bolivar's phrases, in some document that Bolivar wrote: “the Army is the people that can”. That's how it happened here. This expression of Bolivar has its context, but I think that it was perfectly applicable to the context of Venezuela in the seventies, in the eighties and in the nineties – “the people that couldn't”, “the people that had no way”. That was shown perfectly by the Caracazo, the people couldn't, they didn't have power to influence the situation neither via the fixed, faked, manipulated elections, nor via other ways. The people could not through guerrilla war, the people could not in the factories, the working class could not, the campesinos could not, the students could not, in spite of their immense sacrifice.

The people could not. They kept bashing themselves against the wall, falling, picking themselves up and bashing against the wall again. And then the Bolivarian phrase - “the army is the people that can” - became a reality, and that was shown on the 4th of February, 1992.

But today the phrase has been transformed. We're no longer in 1992. It was the army, “the people that could”, because we are the children of the people that were in the army and we constitute a vanguard movement. It was a vanguard that set out at midnight on that 3rd of February, and that is another of the ideas that Toby Valderrama yesterday touched on in his "A Grain of Corn" column, and I think it’s really timely for the debate that we are having on the Strategic Lines of Political Action, because a vanguard is always needed.

There are those that proclaim anarchist ideas, that deny the need for organization, that deny the role of the vanguard. But in reality, Venezuelan history shows that the people without a vanguard is manipulated. A people without a conscious and committed vanguard tends to get lost in the spaces of the struggle.

The vanguard must be maintained, it must be strengthened. Today the vanguard is the party, it has to be a coherent organisation, with an ideological, political project. The Socialist Party must become a great vanguard. And, I’m going to say as well, the Army. The Army. And when I say the Army, I’m of course also referring to the Navy, the Air Force, the National Guard, and the Militia.  The Army has to continue to be a revolutionary vanguard of the people. 

Sourced from : Debate Socialista 

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¹ The “Un Grano de Maiz” ("A grain of corn") blogsite by Toby Valderrama (Antonio Aponte) takes its name from a quote by 19^th century Cuban independence hero, Jose Marti. Warning revolutionaries against striving for personal glory, Marti wrote: “All the glory in the world fits into a grain of corn”.

The 4th is not the child of the 27th

This article from the 'Grano de Maiz' blogsite discusses the relationship between the spontaneous mass uprising of February 27, 1989 - known as the Caracazo - and the Chavez-led military rebellion of February 4, 1992.

President Chavez discussed the issues raised by this blog post in his recent speech commemorating the February 4 rebellion. I will translate some excerpts of his speech in subsequent posts.

The 4th is not the child of the 27th, on the contrary, it refutes it

Un grano de maiz, Wednesday January 2, 2011

Translated by Owen Richards

Continuing to comment on the first of the Five Strategic Lines in the document proposed by the PSUV leadership for discussion, it's timely to refer to a paragraph that without doubt influences the rest of the document, determines its vision. 

The document says: "after the civic-military rebellions of the 4th of February and the 27th of November 1992, daughters of the popular rebellion of the 27th of February of 1989…"

Consideration of this point is of vital importance for the progress of the revolution, because the positions we take, the ideologies we have, will determine the function of the party – as either a vanguard or a mere electoral machine.

Let's analyse what happened.

The Caracazo, Feb 27, 1989

February 27 was a "popular revolt", without any political aim or organisation.  It revealed the failure of a left wing leadership that was defeated, exhausted, and had succumbed to the comfort of the oligarchy's table, or taken refuge in anarchistic positions denying the role of leadership, the role of political and social organization, leaving the masses without a compass, without a vanguard. That formidable explosion did not go beyond being a "jacquerie", a riot, when it could and should have been the seizure of government, the start of the revolutionary road.

By contrast, the 4th of February was an eminently political action, an action of the vanguard aimed at raising the awareness of the people, at leading them.  It was a return to being, and leading, a defeat of  the renunciation of leadership, a victory over the anarchistic ideology that failed on the 27th of February.

The tank smashing through the doors of Miraflores is symbolic, a clearly political action, seizing power, and its defence.

Tank smashing through the doors of Miraflores Palace, Feb 4 , 1992

So to say, as the document does, that today we analyse the 4th of February as the child of the 27th, is to agree with the anarchistic current - that it's not necessary to organise and politicise the masses, and worse still, that a vanguard is not necessary. On the contrary they combat it because it could become a "church".

It is to endorse this anarchistic petit-bourgeois current, and add obstacles to the further strengthening of the party.  If the 27th is the way to go...  then what good is the party?  It will be at best a "transmission belt".  This position obscures the strong need for a vanguard party to lead the people in combat.

It's revolutionary to think that the 4th of February surpasses the 27th's dispersion and lack of leadership.  It demonsatrates the need for a vanguard.

A crucial issue thus emerges in the discussion: Is a vanguard necessary? What is the party for?

We think it is [necessary].  Without a vanguard party leading the battle the people won't be able to advance. It is possible to build it without privileges, without it being turned into a church - that is the challenge.  To strengthen it we need to defeat the anarchistic ideology that impedes its concretion. Our flaws are firstly ideological; and then organisational.

Antecedents of Bolivarian Socialism

[This is the second and final section of the  'Introduction' to the PSUV's 'Libro Rojo']

Antecedents of Bolivarian Socialism

Translated by Owen Richards

The Caracazo (1989) and the military rebellion of the 4th of February, 1992

The collapse of the Washington consensus and the failure of neo-liberalism brings to light and obliges a revision of its true political face: the old liberal bourgeois democratic model based on representative and fundamentally political democracy, where the right to elect, to be elected and to vote are sufficient.  In the name of these "freedoms", in the name of this formal democracy, the process of capital accumulation was assured, favouring the few amidst growing poverty, social exclusion and an enormous cost on account of the destruction of nature.

Capitalist expansion demands the imposition of a free-market and in consequence the dismantling of the National State, obliging our countries to pay the so called external debt, condemning our people to exploitation, to hunger and to misery.  Seeking this objective they imposed on us the recipe book of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).  Our people were to suffer the impact of the privatisations of state enterprises, labour deregularisation, the elimination of subsidies, the liberation of prices and interest rates, substantial increases in the cost of public services, the loss of social security gains, the reduction of social investment, among others.  The application of these measures affected the conditions of life of the great majority, generalising the discontent and provoking the reaction of the people.  The people lost their confidence in governments, in parties, and in all institutions; the despairing people took it upon themselves to exercise justice by their own hands.

In Venezuela this phenomenon was definitively expressed on the 27th of February, 1989; the historic event known as the Caracazo.  The uprising of the people began in the city of Guarenas (Miranda State) and from there spread to Caracas and to the rest of the cities of the nation.  The popular masses, without any direction, without identified leaders, poured out on to the streets. The people in the streets sought justice.

The Caracazo

The government reacted by protecting the interests of the oligarchy and the elites and ordered the National Armed Forces and police to crack down on the indignant people.  This produced one of the most bloody acts known in our history, the people were massacred; no one knew the number of victims; it was necessary to bury many of the dead without identification in mass graves sadly known as "The Stench".

The Caracazo, as an historic event, was a crack in the consciousness of all sectors of Venezuelan society, including the National Armed Forces with the consequent reaction of the young officers, who refused to participate in this crime against the people.  This accelerated the process of discontent that already existed within the FAN [National Armed Forces] that was expressed through the organisation of a movement of the patriotic sectors. This movement, led by Comandante Hugo Chavez, took up arms in favour of the people in the insurrection of the 4th of February, 1992.

The people immediately and fully identified with Comandante Chavez who, imprisoned and not having reached "for now" the planned objectives, as he himself revealed to the nation, kept hope alive with the prediction that there would come new moments to advance towards the Homeland.

Hugo Chavez on national television after his failed coup attempt of 1992.

Comandante Hugo Chavez and a group of officials and patriotic soldiers revealed to the people their identity, their pride, their hope and the people stayed in the streets tirelessly pressing to achieve the release of their Comandante from the "prison of dignity" and from there to the 1998 electoral victory that took him to the presidency of the Republic and the summoning of a National Constituent Assembly that resulted in the Constitution of 1999.  There is contained the project of change and  the consciousness of the people that has irreversibly ensured that the revolution that we live through today, led by Comandante Chavez, advances towards Bolivarian socialism. The United Socialist Party Of Venezuela (PSUV), in the framework of the bicentennial era that has begun, assumes as vanguard the commitment of leading the struggles to come, towards definitive liberty, independence, sovereignty and social justice for our people, under the following principles:

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