COLLISION IN VENEZUELA
GREGORY WILPERT
What has lain behind the massive social conflicts that have unfurled round the Chávez regime? The spurious and real reasons for the rampage of Venezuelan managers, media and middle class against the country’s elected President. Oil, land and urban rights as the stakes in a social war of colour and class.
Few contemporary political upheavals have been as dramatic as the events that have convulsed Venezuela in the past five years. In 1998, former paratroop colonel Hugo Chávez was elected President by a landslide majority, on a platform calling for a fundamental reconstruction of the whole political framework of the country. Within two years, he successfully pushed through an ambitious new Constitution, and was reelected President for six more years, equipped with an even larger majority—some 60 per cent of the vote—and a Congress dominated by his supporters. By the autumn of 2000, the country seemed to be at his feet. [1] Eighteen months later, he faced a general strike and massive street demonstrations against his rule, swiftly followed by a military coup that deposed and imprisoned him. Despite being restored to power by popular counter-demonstrations and a revolt against his ouster originating within the armed forces themselves, Chávez was under siege again in less than a year.
This time he confronted the largest and longest employer/trade-union confederation strike in Latin American history, mobilizing virtually the entire mass media and a galvanized middle class that proved capable of remarkable—even sacrificial—levels of militant collective action, backed by a wide spectrum of senior commanders. Lasting from 2 December 2002 to 2 February 2003, this vast battering-ram paralysed Venezuela’s oil industry, its key economic sector, for seven weeks, leading to widespread expectations of the final demise of Chávez’s meteoric Presidency. But once again his popular and military support held firm, and after inflicting savage blows to the state’s finances, the strike collapsed. The opposition fronde has by no means given up its aim of driving Chávez from office, but for the moment he sits more securely in the Miraflores Palace than for many months.
Read the complete article. New Left Review 21, May-June 2003