Veneuzuela faces US plots to overthrow Maduro

The US State Department is at it again, supporting attempts to overturn the results of the Venezuelan election and plotting against the United Socialist Party government.

The election held following the death of Hugo Chavez was won by vice-president Nicolas Maduro. But US secretary of state John Kerry is supporting opposition calls for a recount.

As soon as the result was announced, opposition candidate Henrique Capriles presented a series of claims of fraud to the electoral commission. Maduro agreed to a recount, but the electoral commission turned Capriles down. Analysis shows that all the claims he made were entirely false.

In fact, it is virtually impossible to rig a Venezuelan election (unlike in the United States where George Bush was gerrymandered into power by election fraud courtesy of “hanging chads” and the Supreme Court).

There are no "hanging chads" in Venezuela which has a bang up-to-date touch screen voting system. The voter touches the screen to record their vote electronically and then gets a paper receipt which they verify and put in a ballot box.

The electronic tally is then compared with the paper ballot. To rig the result you would have to first somehow hack into the central computer of the electoral commission and then interfere with the paper ballots to make sure they matched.

The fact that his claims were shown to be false didn't stop Capriles appealing to the Supreme Court, which also turned him down. The court's president said the request was nothing more than "a deceit of the people" aimed at destabilising the country.

Seven government supporters have been killed and 60 injured in demonstrations and semi-riots organised by the opposition. Maduro has now publicly voiced his view that the United States and the opposition are planning a rerun of the 2000 coup attempt to topple Chavez.

So just how close is this election result? Well not as close as the one that gave Kerry his chance at the State Department.

Maduro won 50.66% of the vote on a turnout of 78% of the electorate. In the 2012 US election Obama won 51.1% of the vote on a turnout of 57.5%.  Some 93 million eligible Americans did not vote. So which leader has a stronger mandate?

In Venezuela, 97% of eligible voters are on the register whereas in the US a dozen states have been pushing through laws on identity, birth certificates and education, specifically designed to deprive poor voters of their rights.

The US embassy in Caracas is full of CIA spooks and agents provocateurs, as was proved by State Department cables published on Wikileaks. One cable sent in November 2006 details how dozens of non-government organisations (NGOs) were financially maintained by the US government-funded Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI).

This included “over 300 Venezuelan civil society organizations”, ranging from disability advocates to education programs. All very well-intentioned you might think.

However the real purpose was revealed by then-US ambassador to Venezuela William Brownfield as “penetrating Chavez’s political base... dividing Chavismo... protecting vital US business ...[and] isolating Chavez internationally”. The strategic objective was to develop "opposition-aligned civil society organisations".

So far Capriles is the closest the US has got to achieving this. He is a relatively astute, Columbia University-educated tax lawyer who comes from a wealthy family. He has recognised that there is no way to win elections on a platform of dismantling the social and political achievements of the Chavez era, so he claims he will continue them.

His main target is Venezuela's oil and other resources, which he would make “more efficient” by transferring them to the private sector and opening them up to exploitation by the big oil corporations.

Although the Wikileaks cable refers to a period when George W. Bush was in the White House, there can be little doubt that the Obama administration’s reactionary foreign policy continues his predecessor’s policy of destabilisation. For Washington, democracy is alright – unless you don’t get the result you want.

Penny Cole

Venezuelans choose Chavez over the corporations

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.

Venezuela has the world’s largest oil and gas reserves, and the corporations have been greedily eyeing this prize for years and hate Chavez for keeping it from them. Because of limited access to expertise, it has proved hard for the Venezuelan state oil corporation to improve oil facilities and infrastructure. The explosion at the Amuay refinery in August in which 42 people were killed underlined this.

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.

Venezuela is not immune to the problems of bureaucracy that afflict all attempts to build socialism centred not on popular ownership but on state control. Inflation is high and rising, and many state-owned industries are inefficient and corrupt.

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

Stalemate in Venezuela

The narrow 51%-49% defeat for Hugo Chavez in a referendum on the constitution is a potentially dangerous moment for Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution. Emboldened by their victory, the anti-Chavez movement will undoubtedly look to the United States for support in yet another attempt to overthrow the president.

The vote represents the first major electoral defeat for Chavez after nine years in which he has won three general elections and two referendums. During this time, Chavez has tried to develop an accountable state that could facilitate a process of transition from reform to revolution. Sunday’s referendum was intended to approve Chavez’s plans to run for re-election indefinitely, give him increased powers and create the structure for what he called a socialist state in Venezuela. The reforms also included stronger powers for the president to seize private property and to censor the media during emergencies. There were also proposals to cut the working day from eight hours to six, extend social security benefits to informal workers, such as street vendors and lower the voting age to 16.

While the middle class in the shape of some students, business groups, opposition parties, the media and the Roman Catholic Church all lined up against Chavez ahead of the referendum vote, his support amongst the poor and the working class failed to be mobilised in sufficient numbers. There were reports that his own supporters were more concerned about soaring crime, inflation and food shortages. In the end, about 56% of voters turned out.

The political stalemate in Venezuela is connected to the unwillingness by Chavez to acknowledge the strategic necessity of a qualitative break with the capitalist state and its replacement with truly democratic alternative structures in the hands of the masses. Impressive reforms in education and health, and the curbing of big business, have led to the notion that the state can be transformed into an instrument of the revolution. But the basic objective fact is that the economy remains dominated by the role of the transnational corporations and global capital. At best, Chavez has been able to negotiate better terms with the TNCs, which have indeed brought benefits to the people, but the basic domination of capital over labour remains intact.

The ruling class of Venezuela is disgruntled because they perceive the state to be no longer acting in their overall social interests. They have been prepared to give support to various attempts to overthrow the Chavez regime in order to regain control of the state. So, what we have is an extremely complex and dialectical situation whereby the capitalist state is weakened, and yet in the last analysis it still remains a bourgeois state. For the revolution to consolidate its gains, this is what has to change. The democratic constitution has to be transformed from a formal document into a reality by the mass action of workers and peasants. People should not wait for a lead from Chavez. The same goes for the issue of challenging capital. If the state is unwilling to challenge the power of the TNCs, the working class should take a lead and develop real workers’ control, the revolutionary alternative to co-management.

The calling of a representative conference to develop a strategy for implementing the constitution in a complete way, could show that its aims can only be realised through the overthrow of the power of the TNCs. There is no doubt that Chavez’s reforms have increased workers’ confidence in their abilities, and sense of material well-being. But these advances can only develop further if the limitations of utilising the existing state are understood and a conscious struggle for revolutionary change is prepared.

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor