The Militant (logo)  
   Vol.66/No.40           October 28, 2002  
 
 
Venezuela: massive protest
counters coup plans
(front page)
 
BY ARGIRIS MALAPANIS  
MIAMI--Hundreds of thousands of working people took to the streets of Caracas, Venezuela’s capital, October 13 in one of the largest mobilizations in years. The action marked six months since President Hugo Chávez returned to office after a U.S.-backed military coup ousted him for two days in early April. Protesters also denounced an ultimatum by the pro-imperialist opposition that Chávez resign or call immediate elections.

Opposition forces had mounted their own rally three days earlier. This action, dominated by professionals and other middle-class layers, drew between 500,000 and 1 million people, many of them banging pots and pans. Leaders of Fedecámaras, the country’s main bosses’ association, and top officials of the Confederation of Venezuelan Workers (CTV), the country’s largest trade union federation, declared at this rally they will call a general strike beginning October 21 to try to bring down the government if Chávez doesn’t step down immediately.

Tensions mounted the week leading up to October 13. The government claimed October 6 that it had foiled a feeble coup attempt after security officers raided the house of Enrique Tejera, a former foreign minister, and seized documents that supposedly implicated him in a plot.

On October 9, an antigovernment mob of hundreds prevented police from arresting Manuel Rosendo, an army general who called on the military to disobey any orders to suppress the following day’s opposition march. Rosendo is among 300 military officers under investigation for their involvement in the April coup. They have been sidelined from active command duties but none have been convicted so far. Leading up to and during the October 10 opposition rally, the government deployed hundreds of troops and tanks on the streets of Caracas. The mobilizations took place largely without violent clashes.

"There are already enough people here for a march twice the size of the opposition demonstration," said journalist Tibisay Franquis in a telephone interview on the afternoon of October 13 as she was covering the pro-Chávez action. Franquis works for CATIATV, a local television station based in Catia, the largest working-class barrio of Caracas, that broadcasts mostly in such neighborhoods.

"Catia, the January 23 barrio, and many other areas of the city--the poorer areas--are virtually empty. People have poured into the downtown area. Three days ago it was the richer suburbs that were empty during their rally. Today’s march is at least 16 kilometers [10 miles] long. And there’s many people from other areas of the country here."  
 
Peasants’ land aspirations
For example, thousands of people from San Carlos, the capital of Cojedes, a largely agricultural state, went to Caracas for the October 13 march, said Armando Serpa, a farmer who lives on the outskirts of the city. Among them were 400 peasants. Serpa gave a phone interview from his home the same afternoon. "I had an accident, broke my leg and I could not go," he said, "but I am watching it on TV. It’s the biggest march we’ve had since 1998."

Militant reporters had met Serpa and other peasants in the area during a visit in mid-July. "Since then, people feel we may have a little wind in our sails," he said. "Most of us who were promised titles to land are still waiting. But the opposition failed to ‘reform’ the agrarian reform law. And those who had claims as part of the estate of the Yauques got their titles."

Serpa was referring to the Law on Land and Agricultural Development. It was signed by the government in November of last year. Along with the Law on Fishing and Aqua-culture, the new agrarian law is among the most contentious measures taken by the Chávez government. It allows the state to confiscate some idle private farms of more than 12,000 acres and distribute the land to the peasants. It also lays out procedures for peasants and indigenous people to place claims for stolen lands.

Members of the Yauques, a family of indigenous people, filed documents under this law showing a legal claim to some 153,000 acres of land in Cojedes, granted to their tribe in the 19th century. Big landowners forcibly seized the land over the last half century, members of the Yauques said. Joining forces with peasant organizations, the Yauques won their claim, according to Serpa. They turned over the land to the state, which distributed it to landless peasants from the area over the last two months.

"For the first time, the majority, I would say more than 60 percent, at the march were young people," said Claudia Orsini, in a telephone interview the evening of October 13, as the pro-Chávez rally was winding down. "High school and college students, artists, young professionals, and workers, you name it." Orsini is a national leader of the Fifth Republic Revolutionary Youth (JVR), a pro-Chávez youth group. She spoke as many people around her at Bolívar Avenue in central Caracas could still be heard chanting, "Chávez is here to stay."

Orsini and others interviewed that day by phone said some 2 million marched. The big-business press reported substantially smaller participation.

Orsini pointed out that for the first time virtually all TV and radio stations, which are mostly private and in the hands of opposition forces, carried live coverage of the pro-government action. Chávez had threatened to take these stations off the air after their technicians reportedly tried to scramble the signal of Venezuelan TV, the only state-controlled channel. Their management had also announced it would boycott the October 13 action, after it gave wide coverage to the opposition march three days earlier. These channels also showed repeatedly an interview with Navy officer Alvaro Martín Fossa, a vice-admiral who called on Chávez to resign.

Chávez addressed the rally, rejecting the call to step down as undemocratic and unconstitutional. He maintained his previous offer to call a referendum in August 2003 over whether he should remain president or call early elections before his term expires in 2007.

"We still have to assess the results," said Orsini, "but many of us are coming out of this march feeling that we are stronger." She said the mobilization put in a better position those fighting "for the ownership of the land to be turned over to the people, the ownership of the factories to be turned over to the people, the ownership of the services to be turned over to the people. It’s not enough to have elected a government we support, or at least that we oppose it being brought down by force by the rich minority who still control the economy. We need the economic power too. That’s what we thought was the president’s most important message at the rally."  
 
Most workers oppose CTV strike call
Ismael Hernández did not share Orsini’s view that Chávez made such statements in his October 13 speech. "What I heard him saying is that if some bosses boycott the economy he won’t oppose efforts to take over those businesses," Hernández said in a telephone interview that evening. A member of the textile workers union, a CTV affiliate, Hernández had just gotten off the bus returning from the Caracas march to Valencia, the country’s third largest city and biggest industrial center. Some 40,000 people from Valencia--mostly auto, textile, health care, and other workers--joined the Caracas rally, he said.

"The problem for the CTV tops and the bosses is that more and more people believe they should do what Claudia said. In the factories, most workers oppose the CTV call for a general strike. They [the CTV officials] did it without consultation with us, the workers, which flies in the face of their claims for democracy. This week, the textile workers and other unions here have planned meetings. These assemblies are supposed to authorize takeovers of the companies if the CTV gets its way in supporting the bosses’ strike, where factories close despite the wishes of the majority of workers."

Such views have spread well beyond Valencia, Hernández said. They are part of the reason for divisions within the trade union tops and the bourgeois opposition over the CTV-Fedecámaras call for a strike to oust Chávez.

Officials of Venezuela’s largest oil union, Fedepetrol, for example, stated they would not join the reactionary strike after the government agreed to a 35 percent wage raise.  
 
Pro-imperialist opposition divided
An article in the October 10 Washington Post, titled "Weak economy pinches Venezuelan opposition," pointed to some other factors. Venezuela is gripped by a worsening economic crisis, mostly as a result of the workings of the capitalist system and the effects of imperialist domination. The country’s gross national product shrank 7 percent in the first half of this year, according to government figures, the Post reported. Nearly half a million people have lost their jobs in the same period, bringing unemployment to about 20 percent. Foreign investment has virtually dried up, while the bolivar, the national currency, has lost more than half its value against the dollar this year. Inflation is running at nearly 25 percent. Food purchases are down 10 percent compared to the same period in 2001.

Bourgeois opposition forces that vehemently oppose Chávez for backing measures that cut into the prerogatives of big capital--such as the agrarian and fishing laws--and for closer ties with Cuba’s revolutionary government are "also wary of a money-losing national strike that would be the third in less than a year," the Post said. "A poll released this week by the independent firm Consultores 21 showed that 60 percent of the population opposes a strike.... [Henrique] Salas Romer, a likely opponent for Chávez in a coming election, is among a growing number of opposition leaders who have split from the Fedecámaras-CTV formula for driving Chávez from office."

Under these conditions, Washington has muted its earlier not-so-hidden support for efforts to oust Venezuela’s president. Following the October 10 opposition rally, U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said, "It’s important for both sides to use the opportunity to resolve those issues democratically and through dialogue." An article in the October 8 St. Petersburg Times stated that U.S. government officials have smoothed somewhat relations with Chávez as part of guaranteeing petroleum shipments from Venezuela, from where 30 percent of U.S. oil is imported. "This is not an embrace of Chávez," the article quoted Michael Shifter, of the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue, saying. "But there is clearly a distancing from the opposition."

The U.S. rulers are worried that resistance to "market reforms" and expectations for better living standards among working people in Venezuela, heightened with the coming to power of Chávez, may spread elsewhere in Latin America. Pointing to the first-round victory in recent presidential elections in Brazil of Ignacio Lula da Silva, the candidate of the Workers Party, an editorial in the October 10 New York Times said, "If free-market reforms are to prevail in Latin America, more effort must be made to extend their benefits beyond a narrow elite to the tens of millions whom Mr. da Silva attracted. Such an impoverished majority put Hugo Chávez into power in Venezuela and seems likely to be a majority force in next year’s Argentine presidential election."  
 
 
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