Racist rage of the Caracas elite
Venezuela's embattled president faces a Pinochet-style opposition
Richard Gott
Tuesday December 10, 2002
The Guardian
Pilin Leon, a former Miss Venezuela, was busy judging the Miss World
competition in London on Saturday when the oil tanker that bears her
name, illegally at anchor in Lake Maracaibo (principal source of
Venezuela's oil), was boarded by Venezuelan marines. The end of
history was supposed to mean an end to class struggle, but the
current political conflict in Venezuela suggests it is alive and well.
When the captain of the Pilin Leon first dropped anchor, he was
expressing his solidarity with the anti-government strike in Caracas.
But the tanker's crew were opposed the strike and their captain's
piratical action. When the marines boarded, on the orders of the
embattled president Hugo Chavez, only the captain needed to be
replaced.
For the past year or more, Venezuela's upper and middle classes,
opposed to Chavez's government, have protested in the wealthy new
neighbourhoods of Caracas, while the poor (the vast majority of the
city's population) have come from their shantytowns and demonstrated
to defend "their" president.
Chavez celebrated his overwhelming electoral victory of four years
ago at the weekend, at the end of a week-long insurrectionary strike
designed to force him to resign, and so far he has displayed a
Houdini-like capacity to escape from tight situations. In April, a
similar scenario led to a brief coup d'etat, from which he was
rescued by an alliance between the poor and the armed forces, and
this time, the president says, he will not allow himself to be
surprised.
The opposition has been hoping to repeat in December what it failed
to achieve in April, but the situation is no longer the same. The
armed forces are now more solidly behind the president than before.
The most conservative generals no longer hold important commands;
those involved in the April coup attempt have all been sent into
retirement.
The international situation is different, too. The US welcomed the
April coup, but this time, with more important problems elsewhere,
Washington is being more circumspect. It has publicly thrown its
weight behind the negotiations being conducted by Cesar Gaviria, the
Colombian ex-president who leads the Organisation of American States.
Perhaps even more significant than the changing attitude of the
military and of the US is the fact that the poor are more mobilised
now, to such an extent that there is talk of a possible civil war.
Until the April coup, the poor had voted for Chavez repeatedly, but
his revolutionary programme was directed from above, without much
popular participation. After the coup, which revealed that the
opposition sought to impose a regime on Pinochet lines, the people
realised that they had a government that they needed to defend. The
opposition's protest marches have now conjured up a phenomenon that
most of the middle and upper classes might have preferred to have
left sleeping - the spectre of a class and race war.
Opposition spokesmen complain that Chavez is a leftist who is leading
the country to economic chaos, but underlying the fierce hatred is
the terror of the country's white elite when faced with the mobilised
mass of the population, who are black, Indian and mestizo. Only a
racism that dates back five centuries - of the European settlers
towards their African slaves and the country's indigenous inhabitants
- can adequately explain the degree of hatred aroused. Chavez - who
is more black and Indian than white, and makes no secret of his aim
to be the president of the poor - is the focus of this racist rage.
The trump card of the opposition, in April as in December, has been
the state-owned oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela, often described
as the fifth largest oil exporter in the world, and an important
supplier to the US. Nationalised more than 25 years ago, it has been
run over the years for the exclusive benefit of its employees and
managers - its profits being invested everywhere except Venezuela.
Before the arrival of Chavez, it was being prepared for
privatisation, to the satisfaction of the engineers and directors who
would have benefited. But with a block placed on privatisation by the
new Venezuelan constitution, the company's middle class and
prosperous elite has been happy to be used as a shock weapon by the
leaders of the Pinochet-style opposition, and they have tried to
bring their entire industry to a halt.
The vital task for Chavez is to bring the oil company back under
government control, replacing the conservative management with the
radical executives who had been forced out in earlier internal
struggles. If he is to support the crews loyal to the government on
tankers such as the Pilin Leon, he may yet need to impose a state of
emergency to regain the upper hand.
* Richard Gott is the author of _In The Shadow of the Liberator: Hugo
Chavez and the Transformation of Venezuela_
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,857027,00.html>
--
Yoshie
* Calendar of Events in Columbus:
<http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>
* Anti-War Activist Resources: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/activist.html>
* Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/>
* Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osu.edu/students/CJP/>
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