Hugo Chavez’s fourth election victory in a row was achieved
on a turnout of 81% of the 19 million Venezuelans registered to vote, which is
in stark contrast to falling turnouts in Britain
and the upcoming US
presidential election in which 50% may stay at home.
Chavez is a real hate figure not only for the right
everywhere, but also for the liberal press in Britain . The Guardian has been predicting his imminent demise at every election
since the first and published dire predictions of violence if there was a close
result – all proved 100% wrong!
The Independent
reports claims that Chavez bribed people to vote for him by “spending heavily
on public housing and bankrolling expanded social programmes”. Apparently,
during the first quarter of 2012, the construction sector expanded by nearly
30% compared with the same three months of 2011.
Sitting here in the UK where Osborne is about to
announce another £12bn of cuts, you have to say: “Why can’t we have such bribes
– we have oil and gas reserves too.”
Well, now I’ll do a bit of Independent/Guardian style speculative reporting. Whilst Henrique
Capriles, a right-wing businessman, presented himself as left of centre and
insisted he would not privatise oil and halt the social programmes, I say he
would have!
He would have stopped the oil-for-loans programmes, abandoned
existing contracts and brought in the big corporations like BP and Shell. He
would have turned the 100,000 state oil corporation workforce over to them to
deal with as they saw fit. He would have given them access to unlimited
profits, in return for small percentage payments to his government and big
bribes to his friends. Just as well he didn’t win and have the chance to prove
me right.
It has not even begun exploiting its gas reserves, and with
refining capacity limited, this energy-rich country struggles to ensure power
supplies and affordable energy. Petrol prices are extremely low but only
because of a state subsidy.
To afford extensive social programmes and universal health
and welfare benefits, the MVR government has been pushed to all sorts of fixes
and deals. It has had $42bn in loans from China over the last five years. Of
the 640,000 barrels of oil a day that Venezuela
exports to China ,
200,000 of them service this debt.
Chavez’s manoeuvring has, however, made him an apologist for
reactionaries like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran
and Vladimir Putin of Russia ,
party because those countries will make oil deals with Venezuela
without demanding entry into the unregulated global market.
But Venezuela
is not some Stalinist state whatever liberal critics claim. The constitution
has been reformed and there are popular committees with a real say. A recent
poll showed that half the population of Venezuela agrees with the idea of
building a socialist country, against 29% who opposed it.
Since Chavez became president in 1999, income inequality in Venezuela has been declining, and it has the
fairest income distribution in Latin America .
Government expenditure has risen 30% in real terms in the last year, whilst GDP
increased by 5.4%.
Chavez has tried to follow a path that avoids putting the
global corporations in control of his country’s assets, and to use them,
however imperfectly, to improve life for the people.
That makes him a thorn in the side not only of the right,
but of so-called liberal media who hate trade unions, mock socialism, despise
universal benefits and continually tell us such things are hopelessly out of
date and unattainable.
Penny Cole
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