[Mb-civic] Venezuela: Why Hugo Chávez is heading for a stunning victory

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

http://www.counterpunch.org/avnery08032004.html

***

Loathed by the rich

Why Hugo Chávez is heading for a stunning victory
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1278213,00.html
Richard Gott in Caracas
Saturday August 7, 2004
 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/> The Guardian

To the dismay of opposition groups in Venezuela, and to the surprise of
international observers gathering in Caracas, President Hugo Chávez is
about to secure a stunning victory on August 15, in a referendum designed
to lead to his overthrow.

First elected in 1998 as a barely known colonel, armed with little more
than revolutionary rhetoric and a moderate social-democratic programme,
Chávez has become the leader of the emerging opposition in Latin America
to the neo-liberal hegemony of the United States. Closely allied to Fidel
Castro, he rivals the Cuban leader in his fierce denunciations of George
Bush, a strategy that goes down well with the great majority of the
population of Latin America, where only the elites welcome the economic
and political recipes devised in Washington.


While Chávez has retained his popularity after nearly six years as
president, support for overtly pro-US leaders in Latin America, such as
Vicente Fox in Mexico and Alejandro Toledo in Peru, has dwindled to
nothing. Even the fence-sitting President Lula in Brazil is struggling in
the polls. The news that Chávez will win this month's referendum will be
bleakly received in Washington.


Chávez came to power after the traditional political system in Venezuela
had self-destructed during the 1990s. But the remnants of the ancien
régime, notably those entrenched in the media, have kept up a steady fight
against him, in a country where racist antipathies inherited from the
colonial era are never far from the surface. Chávez, with his black and
Indian features and an accent that betrays his provincial origins, goes
down well in the shanty towns, but is loathed by those in the rich white
suburbs who fear he has mobilised the impoverished majority against them.

The expected Chávez victory will be the opposition's third defeat in as
many years. The first two were dramatically counter-productive for his
opponents, since they only served to entrench him in power. An attempted
coup d'état in April 2002, with fascist overtones reminiscent of the
Pinochet era in Chile, was defeated by an alliance of loyal officers and
civilian groups who mobilised spontaneously and successfully to demand the
return of their president.

The unexpected restoration of Chávez not only alerted the world to an
unusual leftwing, not to say revolutionary, experiment taking place in
Venezuela, but it also led the country's poor majority to understand that
they had a government and a president worth defending. Chávez was able to
dismiss senior officers opposed to his project of involving the armed
forces in programmes to help the poor, and removed the threat of a further
coup.


The second attempt at his overthrow - the prolonged work stoppage in
December 2002 which extended to a lockout at the state oil company,
Petróleos de Venezuela, nationalised since 1975 - also played into the
hands of the president. When the walkout (with its echoes of the
CIA-backed Chilean lorry owners' strike against Salvador Allende's
government in the early 1970s) failed, Chávez was able to sack the most
pampered sections of a privileged workforce. The company's huge surplus
oil revenues were redirected into imaginative new social programmes.
Innumerable projects, or "missions", were established throughout the
country, recalling the atmosphere of the early years of the Cuban
revolution. They combat illiteracy, provide further education for school
dropouts, promote employment, supply cheap food, and extend a free medical
service in the poor areas of the cities and the countryside, with the help
of 10,000 Cuban doctors. Redundant oil company buildings have been
commandeered to serve as the headquarters of a new university for the
poor, and oil money has been diverted to set up Vive, an innovative
cultural television channel that is already breaking the traditional US
mould of the Latin American media.


The opposition dismiss the new projects as "populist", a term
customarily used with pejorative intent by social scientists in Latin
America. Yet faced with the tragedy of extreme poverty and neglect in a
country with oil revenues to rival those of Saudi Arabia, it is difficult
to see why a democratically elected government should not embark on crash
programmes to help the most disadvantaged.


Their impact is about to be tested at the polls on August 15. Vote "Yes"
to eject Chávez from the presidency. Vote "No" to keep him there until the
next presidential election in 2006. The opposition, divided politically
and with no charismatic figure to rival Chávez to front their campaign,
continue to behave as though their victory is certain. They discuss plans
for a post-Chávez government, and watch closely the ever-dubious and
endlessly conflicting opinion polls, placing their evaporating hopes on
the "don't knows". They still imagine fondly that they can achieve a
victory comparable to that of the anti-Sandinistas in Nicaragua in 1990.


Yet their third attempt to derail the government is clearly doomed. The
Chávez campaign to secure a "No" vote has struck the country like a
whirlwind, playing to all his strengths as a military strategist and a
political organiser. A voter registration drive, reminiscent of the
attempt to put black people on the election roll in the United States in
the 1960s, has produced hundreds of thousands of new voters. So too has a
campaign to give citizenship to thousands of long-term immigrants. Most
will favour Chávez, and Chávez supporters are already patrolling the
shanty towns and the most remote areas of the country to get the vote out
on August 15. One unexpected bonus for Chávez has been the dramatic and
perhaps semi-permanent increase in the world oil price. As he explained to
me a few days ago, he is now able to direct the extra revenues to the
poor, both at home and abroad, for Venezuela supplies oil at a discount
price to the countries of Central America and the Caribbean, including
Cuba. Chávez celebrated his 50th birthday last month, and he has talked of
soldiering on as president for years in order to see through the reforms
he envisages. That is not such an improbable proposition.


He has also been helped by the changing political climate in Latin
America. Other presidents have been climbing over themselves to be
photographed with him. He has patched up relations with Colombia and
Chile, hitherto cool, and last month reinforced his friendly relations
with Brazil and Argentina by signing an association agreement with the
Mercosur trading union that they lead. Once perceived by his neighbours as
a bit of an oddball, he now appears more like a Latin American statesman.
Up and down the continent he has become the man to watch.


Faced with a Chávez victory, the opposition may yet turn in desperation to
violence. His assassination, hinted at recently by former president Carlos
Andrés Pérez, or the deployment of paramilitary forces of the kind
unleashed in recent years in Colombia, is always a possibility. Yet the
more civilised sectors of the opposition will set themselves, with luck,
to the difficult task of organising a proper electoral force to challenge
Chévez in 2006. When I asked an uncommitted bookseller whether he would
vote to sack the president in mid-term, he replied: "No, they should let
him get on with the job."


· Richard Gott is the author of In the Shadow of the Liberator: Hugo
Chavez and the Transformation of Venezuela, published by Verso; his
latest book, Cuba: A New History, will be published next month by Yale
University Press

-- 
You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action Network email list, option D 
(up to 3 emails/day).  To be removed, or to switch options (option A - 
1x/week, option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option D - up to 3x/day) 
please reply and let us know!  If someone forwarded you this email and you 
want to be on our list, send an email to ean at sbcglobal.net and tell us which 
option you'd like.



Action is the antidote to despair.  ----Joan Baez
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20040808/7463f703/attachment.html