The lionising of Venezuela betrays a preference for the idea of ‘socialism’ over actually fighting inequality, writes James Bloodworth
Venezuela has been rocked by anti-government protests in recent months. Demonstrators have taken to the streets to vent their frustration at shortages, rampant crime and the increasingly authoritarian tendencies of the government. Already a deeply polarised country, its president, Nicolas Maduro, has exacerbated divisions by responding heavy-handedly to demonstrators and seeking to delegitimise the opposition as ‘fascists’ and ‘terrorists’.
As the Venezuelan economy disintegrates and violence in the country escalates, there will be attempts to pin the blame for the crisis squarely on Maduro. It will once again be a case of the revolution betrayed, with Hugo Chavez, like Che Guevara and Leon Trotsky before him, fortunate enough to die before his ideas have reached fruition. Yet anyone who has been following events in Venezuela for the past decade or so should have seen this coming; for in truth the direction of travel has been clear for many years.
The first and closest alliance formed by the Venezuelan government shortly after Chavez came to power in 1999 was with the Brezhnevian dictatorship in Cuba. Five thousand Cuban military and ideological specialists were incorporated into Venezuelan government offices and military bases and Chavez regularly played host to the notorious Cuban minister of the interior, Ramiro Valdes (Valdes was the minister responsible for Cuba’s labour camps which imprisoned homosexuals and religious believers). Medical personnel were also sent to Venezuela in large numbers. In return Chavez helped prop up the Castros with shipments of oil, in the process shutting down fledgling liberalisation on the island. As the Cuban dissident blogger Yoani Sanchez has noted, it was the rise to power of Chavez which was a key element in putting a halt to government reforms. ‘With a powerful and nearby partner lavishly giving us oil, why continue to deepen the process of relaxations that resulted in a loss of power?’, Sanchez wrote.
As well as offering life-support to the elderly Stalinist gargoyles in Havana, the close relationship between the two governments led to the adoption in Venezuela of some of the ‘democratic’ methods of its northern Caribbean neighbour. Yet, unlike Cuba, which long ago became something of an embarrassment to all but the Stalinist fringes of British politics, Venezuela retained the affections of many western leftists. Indeed, those usually keen to cite human rights organisations and evoke ‘international law’ when applicable to the west have been happy to ignore the things the same groups have been saying about the governments of Chavez and Maduro.
In its annual report in 2011 Amnesty International described Venezuela under Chavez as a country where ‘those critical of the government were prosecuted on politically motivated charges in what appeared to be an attempt to silence them’. Human Rights Watch was even more damning, and said that the ‘accumulation of power in Venezuela’ had allowed the government to ‘intimidate, censor, and prosecute critics and perceived opponents in a wide range of cases involving the judiciary, the media, and civil society’. In one particularly egregious violation of democratic norms, in 2009 the government jailed Maria Lourdes Afiuni, a judge, after she made a decision to follow United Nations guidance on sentencing which angered Chavez. She subsequently spent four years in jail and was only released last year – after the former president had died.
Far from being a nascent workers’ democracy, the Venezuelan government also takes a dim view of independent trade unionism. According to the International Trade Union Confederation, hardly a hotbed of anti-worker reaction, during 2012 ‘anti-union discrimination, violations of collective bargaining rights and the non-respect of collective agreements were frequent and persistent in both the public and private sector’.
Yet, despite all of this information being freely accessible at the click of a mouse, many western leftists still believe, as Owen Jones approvingly put it, that Venezuela is a ‘progressive alternative to neoliberalism’.
The Chavez government was certainly popular at the ballot box. The failure on the part of his cheerleaders has been in recognising that democracy is as much about what takes place in between elections as what happens on polling day. As should be obvious, the mere existence of elections means very little, and there is not a dictatorship or banana republic in the world which does not at least maintain a pretence of democracy.
Too often abuses in Venezuela have also been interpreted as a response to opposition provocation (which they sometimes are), rather than as manifestations of the autocratic form of government created by Chavez. For example, the censure of private media is often blamed on the behaviour of certain media outlets at the time of the 2002 anti-democratic coup. Yet the removal of television stations from the air more than a decade later has more to do with the state’s attempt to gain a monopoly over information, as was outlined by the Information Ministry in 2007, when it said that the government’s objective must be to achieve ‘communicational and informational hegemony of the state’.
To put it in ungenerous terms (for there is not really another way to say it), many fellow travellers have been willing to turn a blind eye to government repression in Venezuela so long as the government appeared to be helping the poor. Yet, embarrassingly, the ‘socialism’ they invested so much hope in appears to have been built on an economic foundation of sand.
Venezuela is the fifth largest economy in Latin America but during the last decade it has been the worst performer in GDP per capita growth. Anyone who does not believe such things matter may wish to consider how this sort of economic mismanagement plays out in practice. As Rory Carroll put it in his book, Comandante: Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela, after a decade and a half of Chavismo Venezuela is a land of ‘power cuts, broken escalators, shortages, queues, insecurity, bureaucracy, unreturned calls, unfilled holes, uncollected garbage’.
Add to the mix a 56 per cent rate of inflation and one of the highest crime rates in the world and it seems clear that it is not only ‘fascists’ who have something to protest about.
What is interesting is the level of western sympathy for the Venezuelan government in comparison with, say, that of the government of Brazil, which has embarked on its own social transformation in recent years. Indeed, many of Venezuela’s neighbours have made a much better fist of dragging their poorest citizens out of the gutter than the Venezuelan government has – and with a lot less repression of dissent. Between 2007 and 2011 there was a reduction in poverty in Venezuela of some 38 per cent. Impressive, no doubt. However, the percentage of people who escaped poverty in Brazil during the same period was 44 per cent, in Peru 41 per cent and in Uruguay 63 per cent. None of these countries possess anything like Venezuela’s oil wealth, yet all managed to lift their poorest citizens out of beggary without emasculating the judiciary and falling foul of just about every human rights organisation.
The fact that over the past decade it has been Venezuela rather than Brazil, Peru or Uruguay that has been lionised breeds a suspicion that it is the ‘idea’ of socialism, rather than the hard-headed business of helping the poor, which really appeals to some. For those genuinely interested in furthering the cause of social democracy, Venezuela should offer a stark lesson in how not to do things. Closer to home, it should also demonstrate that there are some among us who still view liberty as an aside in the struggle for greater equality, rather than as an absolutely fundamental part of it.
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James Bloodworth is a contributing editor to Progress and editor of Left Foot Forward
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Photo: ruurmo
No, the first thing Chavez did when he came to power was to kick out the Israeli ambassador. Now the Venezuelan fascists are calling the opposition fascists! Chavez was a brutal thug, an antisemite but with the same populist ploys that Margaret Thatcher employed, bribing the poor with their own money. His successor threw the leader of the opposition into jail, mainly because he is of Jewish extraction! Venezuela was once a prosperous country, before it had oil; now it has the biggest oil reserves in the world and is in dire poverty. What does that tell you about the rulers – whether they are Marxists, Communists or even Poussadists, they are irreconcilably corrupt and greedy, and that is why the regime has utterly failed, as it did in the USSR. High principles are one thing, but merely writing them on paper will not make them happen.
http://archive.progressonline.org.uk/2014/04/16/a-poor-excuse/
Chavez was elected in 1998 and was inaugurated in 1999. The Israeli ambassador was expelled in 2009.
Leopoldo López Mendoza does not have any Jewish ancestry. He is currently in custody awaiting trial for inciting violence. A crime in the UK http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-14551582 for which you can be jailed for many years.
Why does this author keep writing about the country as though he knows better than the citizens of Venezuela? This attitude is really quite condescending to a people who have spent decades fighting for a more just society and have seen major changes since the Bolivarian revolution.
Most of Venezuela does not support the current protests – lots of private polling organisations have shown this to be the case.
All countries of the OAS (Apart from US, Canada, Panama) have supported a statement calling for the protection Venezuelan democracy – which means supporting the people and the government.
Most of the country opposes the protests. Most governments on the continent oppose the protests. But do keep writing about how you think the government is becoming a dictatorship – that’s totally original.
“private polling orgnisations”! LOL
Yes…Hinterlaces for example
http://www.avn.info.ve/contenido/interlaces-87-venezolanos-rechaza-guarimbas-como-instrumento-protesta
Obviously the Chavista propaganda machine works quite well, doesn’t little Joe D? You being a prime example of the intended audience. BTW if Simon Bolivar knew that his name was being used by a bunch of thugs to further their own agenda, he would be rolling in his grave. But you probably don’t even know who El Libertador was.
What a moron you are, bolivarian revolutions means misery, death, Venezuela right now is a total mess. Inflaction over 60% one of the highest all over the world, more than200,000 people have been killed since that idiot named hugo chavez became president, there is a shortage of basic needs, people have to wait hours to get a can of milk, or 2 packages of sugar when they are available. Right now most of venezuelan oppose nicolASNO and his accolytes. Most presidents of Latin America are the procurers of the politics.
Those chavistas supporting the present regime are mostly the worst educated citizens of the country and they are attracted by the prospect of living off of someone else’s money. Your claim of these persons comprising MOST of the population is somewhat in question.
A parallel to the situation can be found here in the U.S. where obummer is holding out a carrot to anyone ignorant enough to vote for him. If you substitute the references to Venezuela in the above article to the U.S., you will be able to understand to what a miserable situation we are sinking into due to our own socialist leaning administration.
A study of the current situation in Venezuela should serve as a warning to U.S citizens who value the good life that we have heretofore enjoyed.
Your characteriszation of Venezuela is close to the mark, but you do miss on one important feature. The poor there do make up a majority of the population. And on that one important sticking point you then build a completely ignorant characterazation of how the situations are similar in the U.S. and Venezuela. If you want to criticise the President go ahead, but stick to making comparisons to topics you have a better understanding of.
You have no idea what you are talking about.
The author of the article is incredibly correct in stating the situation as it truly is, both in terms of the government repression and the view from the left of the socialist “idea”. The repression and economic failure in Venezuela has been in the making for many years, starting under the Chavez regime. Now the thug’s name is Maduro, who I believe is more interested in his own benefit than that of the poor.
I have family and many friends from and still living in Venezuela. What has happened in that country in the past decade and a half is truly tragic. Any of Chavez’s “accomplishments” were built on a foundation of quicksand, that is rapidly sinking under the feet of Maduro. Unfortuneately the supporting rope that Venezuelan oil is providing to Cuba, is also proving to be the major prop in supporting the Chavistas. Without Cuban military “advisors” I doubt the current government would last as long as it has.
Please
let us be clear:
1. Nicolas Maduro is not president of Venezuela. There is clear
evidence that is “election” was a lie. I live in the USA, I have not
voted in any Venezuelan Elections since I was 18 years old. Yet, a man in Coro,
Falcon State has my same identification number and he voted.
2. There is clear and irrefutable evidence that many Chavistas
have more htan one Identification ID and number.
3. During the last elections, many were photographed with packs
of Venezuelan ID.s, as well many boxes were found in the remote wilderness with
Venezuelan votes that were not counted.
4. There is a witness and testimony in the person of Uberto
Mario, a former Cuban intelligence/infiltrator that worked in the instruction
of communism in Venezuela, and who is now exiled in MIAMI. He recounts, over,
and over, and over, in many YOUTUBE videos the truth about his infiltration and
mission in Venezuela.
5. The USA has already been invaded and compromised in the form
of CITGO.com Please check this investigative report, and check how in big huge
trouble the USA is already with Venezuelan oil industry in CUBAN hands, Cubans
are seeking the destruction of the USA, is the best form of vengeance there is,
and American completely unaware of it.
https://www.facebook.com/aida.tessie/media_set?set=a.10152102205048953.1073741854.726793952&type=1
Anonymous is quite right. And the Camden branch of the Cooperative Party donates money to Venezuela! Only £30.00, the chavistas won’t get far on that but it is the thought that counts. When I protested, the chair, who rules with an iron rod, just shut me up. No doubt Momentum will be passing round the hat to help . As for knowing better than the citizens of Venezuela, one of my best friends used to live there, but fled when Chavez came to power, due to his antisemitism.