FRFI 216 August/September 2010

Venezuela: key elections imminent

On 26 September 2010 Venezuela will hold elections for the National Assembly. These will be decisive for the path towards socialism in the republic and in the continent as a whole. SAM MCGILL reports.

Until 1999, Venezuela had a corrupt congress where former presidents were awarded lifetime senate seats and only the Accion Democracia and COPEI ruling class political parties were permitted to participate in elections. Then the Movement for the Fifth Republic (MVR), led by Hugo Chavez, demanded proportional representation and popular democracy, initiating a new Bolivarian constitution and National Assembly. Now the Assembly has 110 deputies elected via first-past-the-post elections in 87 different electoral circuits, 52 deputies elected via state-based lists, to ensure an element of proportional representation, and three indigenous representatives selected by indigenous peoples themselves (The indigenous population forms approximately 2% of the Venezuelan people).

The September elections will be the third National Assembly elections since the approval of the Bolivarian constitution. In 2000 the MVR won 56% of the Assembly. In 2005 the opposition boycotted the elections. The MVR won 69% of the vote, securing the legislative power of the revolution for five years. In 2007 MVR merged with other parties to create the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV). This year the opposition is participating and could make gains that threaten the revolution.

The Roundtable of Democratic Unity is the opposition’s attempt to form a united base to challenge the Chavista alliance. It contains new and old bourgeois parties including the social-democratic PODEMOS. The opposition held primary elections in May to select candidates for the assembly. However, this achieved a turnout of less than 10% and was only conducted in 15 out of 67 districts.

The Guarimba plan

The Guarimba plan became infamous in February 2004 when Cuban exile Robert Alonso urged right-wing groups to engage in widespread civil disobedience and violence in the streets in order to provoke a reaction by state forces that would allow the groups to justify cries of human rights violations and lack of constitutional order. Although the plan failed to destabilise the revolution and only lasted four days, many opposition groups continue to seek to disrupt basic services and create disillusionment among the people. Elements of this plan are visible in recent suspected sabotage incidents. Eight former Colombian soldiers were detained in April on suspicion of spying; they possessed satellite equipment and camera images of electricity stations, transmission lines and transport infrastructure in Venezuela. There were three fires in the central electricity plant in Carabobo state. The 21 March 36-hour transport strike in Caracas was a bosses’ lockout, where the owners of private transportation tried to shut down travel. However, workers in the United Transport Union of Caracas rejected the call, and only 5% of the workers joined the strike.

On 1 July, Francisco Chavez Abarca was detained and extradited to Cuba after confessing to being contracted by Luis Posada Carriles and the Miami-based counter-revolutionary Cuban American Foundation to carry out sabotage prior to the elections. Carriles is a naturalised Venezuelan wanted for a bomb attack on a Cuban plane in 1976 that killed 73 passengers; he currently walks free in the US despite Venezuelan demands for his extradition. When interviewed, Abarca responded that he was planning ‘Riots...tyre burning... riots in the street...the other thing that could be done is attack one political party...so the [pro-Chavez] parties start fighting’.

International media attacks

Venezuela continues to face a torrent of media attacks. In The Guardian (17 June 2010) Rory Carroll wrote ‘Venezuelan TV boss flees “regime of terror”’, about Guillermo Zuloaga, president and owner of 70% of the prominent opposition news network Globovision. In reality Zuloaga fled the country to avoid arrest on charges of conspiracy and usury. Despite persistent claims of restricted freedom of expression in Venezuela, Globovision continues to broadcast with a free public licence granted by the state, and its reporters freely criticise the government. Seven of the top ten newspapers in Venezuela openly support the opposition, and estimates of the extent of private control of television range between 75% and 95%.

The US State Department has channelled over $4 million to private media outlets through intermediaries over three years. More than 150 Venezuelan journalists have been trained by US agencies from part of the $40m invested by US, European and Canadian agencies in funding opposition groups as set out in Venezuela: assessing democracy assistance, published by the National Endowment for Democracy’s World Movement for Democracy and Spain’s FRIDE Institute in May 2010.

The struggle within the revolution sharpens

The Chavista alliance needs to win two-thirds of the seats to retain control of the National Assembly. If the opposition gains 33% it can block new legislation and halt political progress. Until recently the alliance included the PSUV, the Communist Party of Venezuela and Homeland for All (PPT). However, PPT recently broke from the alliance and the Governor of Lara state, Henry Falcon, resigned from the PSUV to join the PPT in February after resisting government attempts to expropriate an industrial area belonging to the millionaire Mendoza (the owner of the Polar food and beverage chain found to be hoarding rice). The PPT promotes reconciliation with the opposition.

Within the PSUV the struggle between the revolutionary left and bureaucratic reformist right has sharpened. On 2 May the left wing, backed by Chavez, won the battle for open primary elections to select National Assembly candidates for the first time. Previously nominations had been hand-picked. Now nominations are open to any PSUV member and direct internal elections have taken place to choose candidates. 2.5 million members, 38% of the registered PSUV membership, voted for 3,500 candidates in 87 different electoral circuits. Of the 220 selected, 44 are members of the PSUV Youth. The internal primary elections represent a significant step forward and go hand-in-hand with the participatory democracy being developed by the 30,179 community councils organising in their own areas.

However, well-resourced bureaucrats are accused of trying to undermine the election of revolutionary candidates. Protests against the reported fraud in the primary elections pushed Cecilia Flores, vice-president of the Party to initiate an investigation. Chavez denounced the bureaucratic attempts to control the elections demanding, ‘You must put yourself at the service of the people, not of yourselves, nor of a governor or a mayor, but of the people who are still suffering.’

Prominent revolutionaries did get nominated, including Andreina Tarazon of the M-28 student movement and PSUV. Activists with the left-wing Apporea website and the Lucha de Clases newspaper have launched a campaign to accelerate the nationalisation of banks, healthcare, industry and land.

The struggle against corruption continues as workers march in protest against speculation and for workers’ participation. There has been a crack-down on corruption in state-owned food production and distribution. In June, the president of the state-run supermarket chain PDVAL, Luis Pulido, was charged with hoarding food after the National Intelligence Service found food rotting in 2,000 industrial crates in Carabobo state. Grassroots workers groups such as the Popular Organised Anti-Corruption Interrogation network have formed informal intelligence networks to uncover the ‘food mafia that has been growing within all the public institutions dedicated to the distribution and mass marketing of foods.’

The left wing in the PSUV, the Revolutionary Youth Movement and the workers movement are organising against the opposition and the corrupt bureaucratic element within the state apparatus. Their struggle is essential to securing the gains the Bolivarian Revolution has made so far and will be decisive for the outcome of the elections in September.