***** WBAI Radio's Building Bridges: Your Community & Labor Report
- Gobal Edition Produced & Hosted by Mimi Rosenberg & Ken Nash
Venezuela, What's Really Happening?
To read the commercial news reports from Venezuela, one might think
there is a popular labor "strike" that has brought an "authoritarian"
regime to its knees, and that the Chavez government is
anti-democratic. But, factual information continues to accumulate on
the side of constitutional rule and against destabilizing coup
attempts.
To find out what's really happening we talked with Oswaldo Vera,
Pres. of the Employees of the Simon Bolivar University & Deputy in
the Venezuelan Assembly, Gregory Wilpert, journalist living in
Venezuela and author of an upcoming book on the Chavez Presidency and
Mark Weisbrot, Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy
Research, who had just returned from Venezuela .
To listen or download this 28 min radio program at 24 kbps click below
http://la.indymedia.org/uploads/bb_12-23a.mp3
at 80 kbps click below:
http://www.laborradio.org/audio/bbridges/bb12-23a.mp3
Building Bridges is regularly broadcast over WBAI, 99. FM on Mondays
from 7-8 PM EST. It is streamed over the web at:
http://www.2600.com/offthehook/hot2.ram
To listen to archived program go to
www.buildingbridgesradio.org *****
***** ZNet Commentary
Of "Lungos" & "Senoritos"
A Colombian View Of Venezuela
January 02, 2003
By Hector Mondragon
At the petroleum refinery of Barrancabermeja the workers who are
consigned to hard manual labour are called 'lungos'. There are a lot
of them and they earn very little. They are almost all temporary
labourers and they live in the poor neighbourhoods. When the 'lungos'
go on strike, technology guarantees that production doesn't totally
stop -- so even when the majority of the workers are united in
protest, if they can't actually stop the plant from functioning, the
engineers, supervisors, and managers can keep the refinery going
under 'contingency plans'.
Right now the oil-workers union of Colombia, USO (Union Sindical
Obrera), is getting ready to go on strike in response to the Uribe
government's offensive. That offensive is headed by Isaac Yanovich, a
businessman from the private banking sector who has been named
president of the state oil company. The workers, who struggled and
won the creation of a national oil company (Ecopetrol), have resisted
its privatization for the past 25 years. They have paid a terrible
price for their resistance: 100 union leaders and activists
assassinated (4 during 2002, which saw 160 Colombian unionists
killed), 2 disappeared, 10 kidnapped, 31 imprisoned (6 of whom are
still in prison), and 250 fired (11 of whom were fired just a few
days ago).
It is in such difficult conditions that the Colombian oil-workers are
preparing their strike for the beginning of 2003. The victory of
their movement will depend on their ability to halt production. For
this reason the union and the government are both putting forth
massive efforts to win the engineers and supervisors to their side.
If the union is unable to win these over, the workers will have no
option but to occupy the plant. This will mean that they will face
military repression like they did in 1971. In that year, as workers
in the union remember well, worker Fermin Amaya was murdered as he
was about to stop production at the Barranca refinery.
Next door in Venezuela, the world is flipped entirely upside down.
There, the 'lungos' are working intensely while the call to strike is
followed with fervour and without hesitation by the managers. On
December 2 the managerial body of Venezuela's state oil company, PDV
(Petroleros de Venezuela), blocked the entrance to the refinery and
used their vehicles to stop the workers, the 'lungos' -- who had
showed up to work in massive numbers -- from entering.
The same managerial body was joined by the executive of labour
relations in its attempts to bar the entry of workers.
But the real strength of the strike in Venezuela has been in the
computers that control the giant and highly automated petroleum
industry. Even though the PDV is nominally state-owned and run, the
computer system is in the hands of the 'mixed' (public-private)
enterprise Intesa. The party with the technical skill in the
partnership is the Science Applications International Corporation
(SAIC)-a transnational computing company. Among its directors: ex-US
Secretaries of Defense William Perry and Melvin Laird; ex-directors
of the CIA John Deutsch, Robert Gates; Admiral Bobby Ray Inman
(ex-director of the National Security Agency); other retired military
staff including Wayne Downing (former commander in chief of US
Special Forces) and Jasper Welch (ex-coordinator of the National
Security Council).
The hold-up of the oil-tankers was directed from these computing centers.
The hold-up was welcomed by various captains, but the tankers were
forced to shore in any case: nothing moves without direction from the
computers, which also stopped key operations in the refineries and
the entry of vital gas for the iron and steel industries of eastern
Venezuela. 'Lungos' from Guayana had to recover the gas.
The high salaries, privileges, and commissions of the managers,
labour relations chiefs, systems engineers, and tanker captains has
become a useful weapon of political control for the transnational
corporations who seek to privatize Venezuela's (and Colombia's,
Ecuador's, and Brazil's) petrol industry.
This 'middle' class with its disposable income is the political base
of the right in Colombia and Venezuela (and its heroes are Bush,
Aznar, or Berlusconi). It is the electoral force behind Colombia's
president Alvaro Uribe Velez and behind the coup in Venezuela.
Washington uses the mailed fist in Colombia and the velvet glove in
Venezuela, but in both cases its local support is from these 'middle'
classes who, like Bush himself, are too deaf to hear of the
assassinations of unionists in Colombia but scream in rage if a hair
on the head of a manager or oil-tanker captain in Venezuela is
touched; who are quiet when 2 million Colombians are displaced from
their lands but enraged by the Venezuelan Land Law when it threatens
the unproductive ranches of large Venezuelan landowners....
Hector Mondragon is an economist and activist in Colombia.
[This article was translated from Spanish by Justin Podur.]
[The full article is available at
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/portside/message/3557>.] *****
--
Yoshie
* Calendar of Events in Columbus:
<http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>
* Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/>
* Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/>
* Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio>
* Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>
