I want the Bolivarian socialist revolution to succeed — unequivocally, quickly, and peacefully. At present, however, Venezuelan cities and towns are erupting, with the police, military, and paramilitary clashing, at times with violence and repression, with various factions, including students and conservative political opposition to the Maduro administration. Some are protesting high rates of crime, scarcity, and inflation; the opposition is protesting – often resorting to and inciting violence – the democratically-elected administration of Nicolás Maduro. Student movements have a long history in Venezuela and have in the last few years mobilized against issues including underfunding of universities and government legislation to democratize university administration. Student and opposition organizing can be easily conflated, and so in recent years, the opposition moved quickly to co-opt and appropriate the student protests.
The Bolivarian socialist revolution, Hugo Chávez’s (Maduro’s predecessor) organizing principle, quickly eased the grip of poverty nationwide, which is especially remarkable in a country whose income inequality was once among the highest in the region. Within a few short years, illiteracy was eradicated, and most of the population has unprecedented access to basic healthcare, education, and housing. The revolution struggles, however, due in part to a historical context that paved the way for a crisis of leadership and to developed countries’ – including, of course, the US – continued interference in its political and economic sovereignty. Venezuela is one of many nations struggling with a legacy of colonization that built police, military, and government systems of control and exploitation in service of a numerically tiny oligarchic elite. These systems and the elite they served, at independence, were then supposed to represent and protect rights, transparency, accountability, and equality for all; in fact, the survival of the rest of the populace depended upon resistance, avoidance, and circumvention by any means (collusion, bribery, deception, and so on) of these systems. The systems are meant to be corrupt, autocratic, and cynical and so, therefore, to ensure their existence, both cause and require a crisis of leadership; conversely, leadership is defined, limited, and seduced by what is essentially a conservative project to reform these systems.
Venezuela occupies an especially awkward place in the legacy of South America, in that we are the homeland of “el Libertador,” Simon Bolívar, who is largely credited the rhetoric and strategies that ended Spanish rule in much of the region. Bolívar himself was aristocratic and white – put simply, his liberation did not mean that of brown and black enslaved people. Just this one thread of our historical context binds us today – it has been “natural” that over the last 200 or so years, wealth and power is concentrated in the hands of a tiny, white (or, later, “mestizo,” which is our preferred racial equality myth) elite, often with powerful overseas connections and interests. We, as did other nations in the hemisphere, handily predated the US in electing in Chávez a president who was born to a poor family and identified as African and indigenous, who was promptly and execrably pilloried by a national press using “monkey” and other racially-charged, explicitly anti-Black, and classist aggressions. It is not coincident that President Maduro is of the Chávez legacy, and Leopoldo López, the opposition leader, is descended from the first president of Venezuela and perhaps from Bolívar. Of the many ironies extant, the Venezuelan elite, which historically gave rise to the larger crises of leadership, employs its resources to instigate and perpetuate this current crisis through, for example, manipulating consumer and foreign currency markets to create and control many of the current shortages and inflation, and shifts the blame for it to the Bolivarian socialist revolution while portraying itself as the brave and besieged defender of democracy. One could argue instead that their tactics and logic comprise a fine defense and use of capitalism.
The relationship between Venezuela and the US, and its interstices, also illustrates that democracy is not synonymous with capitalism. US interests supported the 2002 short-lived coup against Chávez (as did López), which effectively cemented Chavez’s justifiable and scathing rejection of US foreign policy in the region and derailed the chances to longer-term mending of fences, especially as private – of the ilk of the Cato Institute, formerly known as the Charles Koch Foundation – and government US interests continue to this day to fund “youth outreach” and opposition political parties in Venezuela, while trivializing the administration. And note that the 2002 coup is but one attempt to overthrow or undermine the Bolivarian socialist revolution – the opposition has tried a recall referendum, election boycotts, and, after the last presidential election, recount after recount even after independent election observers corroborated Maduro’s victory. Because Venezuela is, by many accounts, a strong and vibrant democracy. President Jimmy Carter, who has monitored elections in countries around the globe, describes Venezuela’s as “the best in the world.” The current administration’s United Socialist Party won 73% of local municipalities in December 2013 midterm elections, likely fueled by its ongoing efforts to build a direct and participatory democracy, which has birthed numerous communal councils, communes, and worker-run cooperatives. US action in and toward Venezuela is and historically has been driven by its capitalist, not its democratic, claims, which begs the question of the integrity and consistency of its democratic logic.
There is, of course, much more to consider – the nature of Venezuelan media, for example, is an object of fiery debate, which is influenced by very subjective judgments of the nation’s global status and ethos and the global news media’s countermanded needs to garner public attention and shape its opinions. Some would say the government is censoring the opposition; others point to the fact that about 75% of print and television in Venezuela is privately-owned, much of it by opposition interests. And, according to a Carter Center review of Nielsen ratings in Venezuela in 2013, State-owned television counts on about 8.4% of the viewership. This is not to say that the media owned by the government is any more balanced and accountable than private outlets, only that the government’s control of public debate appears debatable in scale and influence. Public and private media hold López responsible for planning an attack on the Attorney General’s office that followed, and quickly overshadowed, the peaceful protests on February 12, the Day of Youth; the violence culminated in the deaths of a Chavista organizer and an opposition protester. Contemporary news media, at least that which dominates the global markets, is, unfortunately, hugely self-referential and inured to its own classist privileges. In other words – private Venezuelan media claims it is threatened by the government and global media largely picks up and repeats these claims. Most Venezuelan media (public and private) is not attributing the broader violence to either side, but there are a few private, pro-opposition outlets blaming the government; again, correspondingly, global media tilts toward this interpretation. As social media is increasingly conflated with news media, global media is increasingly driven by capitalist underpinnings; both beg the question of the integrity and consistency of the journalistic ethic.
Although limited frameworks, the principles of sovereignty, human rights, and democracy to which most of those opining or acting upon Venezuela claim to cleave make clear there can be no shortcuts to effecting change. At first glance, the potential outcomes seem poor – violent regime overthrow, increasing inequality and instability, a stagnant status quo. But because the truths of what is happening are more and deeper, so too are the options and the choices to be made.
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