by Clifton Ross
I asked Rubén about his support for Chavismo and he said that, like many in Venezuela, he’d initially supported a project that broke with the hegemony of the AD and COPEI as the two ruling parties. But then the new government under Chávez mismanaged the economy and wasted the windfall from the historic oil boom. And then in the midst of all this, Chávez had him jailed for seventeen months “just for doing my job in the union and defending the rights of workers.” Those experiences have made him a more critical activist as now, “we don’t defend any process, or any person blindly. Here we work with a clear and conscious grasp of the reality that we’re living. And the reality is that here there is a generalized deterioration and if we defend this government, we’re defending the generalized deterioration of this company. So what do we want? Let me be frank. This government isn’t going to change its policies because they’re not the losers in this. They’ve all become multimillionaires while the poor are poorer by the day and the only thing that concerns them is ‘governability.’ Meanwhile we live in a situation here that is ‘asphyxiating.’ In this adversity God has given us the creativity to meet it, so we’re going to take one step up on the ladder to victory. We can’t be afraid because dignity is priceless.”
Arturo asked him about the so-called “economic sabotage” and the narrative of the “economic war” against Venezuela and Rubén responded with a wry smile. This narrative of sabotage and economic war is a “generalized misconception across the country, and it reflects very bad politics. Remember, politics is the art of governing, but governing with efficiency, transparency, and quality. The politics [of the present government] is expressed in the art of lying. In other words, all the industries of the government, including those they ‘rescued,’ are all in deterioration and approaching bankruptcy. That’s the situation of PDVSA, Sidor, Bauxilum, Alcasa, Ferrominera, Carbonorca, etc. In other words, we have the same thing across the entire country and it’s not the fault of the workers or the ‘right wing’ but rather those in government, who never thought of governing, but rather of enriching their little group in power. They never invested in these businesses, but totally bled them dry. They themselves are the saboteurs.” He noted that, “of course if you say this they accuse you of being in the opposition. But I’m not with the opposition nor the government. I’m a social [movement] worker who sees things clearly and if it were the bad policies of the opposition, I’d also denounce them the same way. And I’m not saying I’m always right: I make my mistakes. But the important thing is when we make mistakes to recognize them because that’s the only way we can correct our ways.”
At this point Rubén said he had to end the interview and get on with his work so we thanked him and left. I had completed my work in Guayana; now I could go home.
We had Carl take us to the bus station and Arturo got his ticket back to Ejido and I managed to get the last seat on a night bus headed to Cúcuta. I said goodbye to Arturo and settled into my seat just as the rain began pouring down.
We rode all night and the next day through a succession of intense rainstorms. A few miles from the border our bus was stopped at a military checkpoint so the soldiers could check IDs. When they came to me, the soldier handed me my passport back and sent me into the station. There were a couple of other people in front of me, but when the officer saw me he sent them back to the bus. He asked me the usual set of questions and I remained calm, and alternated between acting bored and indignant that I’d been pulled from the bus. In fact, I was really worried about the interviews I had on my camera. I’d downloaded a number of them, nearly all of them, in fact, onto a hard drive which I had well-hidden in my suitcase in the luggage hold of the bus, but if they found the footage on the camera in my pack, they’d certainly be motivated to go through my suitcase. But after some ten or so minutes of questions, they let me go and I ran back through the rain to re-board the bus.
I arrived in San Cristóbal in the late afternoon and caught the bus to San Antonio and crossed over into Colombia where a taxi driver waved at me and asked me if I wanted a ride into Cúcuta. We agreed on a price and I put my bags in his trunk and got in the car. The cool breeze was a relief from the late afternoon heat. I heaved a huge sigh of relief.
“They say Colombia is a country you have to worry about, but I feel so much relief when I leave Venezuela behind, and come back to Colombia,” I said to the driver.
He laughed. “Colombia is safe, man. But Venezuela…” he just shook his head.
Then I noticed a wad of bills in his window visor.
“You just leave your money there?” I asked incredulously.
The driver smiled and shrugged. “Why not? It’s easier to get at there.”
“You wouldn’t do that in Venezuela,” I said.
He looked at me as if to say, “are you crazy?”
“Ni modo! No way!” he laughed. “I wouldn’t carry money there.” Then he told me about a friend of his, also a taxi driver, who was robbed twice in one day in Venezuela. At gunpoint. He was lucky both times. They didn’t kill him.
Chapter Twenty: Putting the Puzzle Together
Cúcuta again, and what a welcomed sight! Here I was able to wander around carefree for a day or so before my flight out, and it was a perfect place to assimilate all the contradictions of the country I’d just left behind and compare them with the paradoxes of the country I’d just entered. After all, the border between Venezuela and Colombia is the fault line where a rising capitalist Colombia and Venezuela in the throes of a failing utopian project collide like two tectonic plates. In this collision, Colombia definitely comes out the winner, and how this dramatic encounter plays out also reveals a very different view of the world than the one the Bolivarian government tries to pass off as the reason for the collapse of Chávez’s vision of “Twenty-First Century Socialism.”
The narrative the Bolivarian government and its supporters offer about why the economy of Venezuela is becoming one of the world’s great disasters is very simple and unoriginal, but its very simplicity and familiarity make it appear credible. This view was captured in a statement one solidarity activist, who had been in Chile during the coup that overthrew Salvador Allende in 1973, made to me, “what’s happening in Venezuela is a repeat of what happened in Chile.” He was, of course, referring to the CIA destabilization activities that eroded Allende’s popularity, from black propaganda in newspapers to planning, logistics, and material support to the military in the coup. This, and other anti-democratic, illegal and, in some cases genocidal, covert operations for which the CIA came to be known, give credence to the claim that the same thing has been going on in Venezuela under the Bolivarians.
Nevertheless, Venezuela is not Chile, nor are Maduro or Chávez Salvador Allende, and even the United States government is not the same government that helped overthrow Allende. While it seems probable that the Bush administration encouraged and supported the coup against Chávez in April 2002, no one has offered credible evidence of CIA plots against the Bolivarian government since that time, nor even that the Bush administration was a major player in that coup attempt.1 Moreover, given the very different international context (the absence of a Communist bloc, and the end of the Cold War), a very different executive branch under Obama, with a focus quite different from that of Richard Nixon’s, the narrative seems distinctly outdated. This is not by any means to say that imperialism is no longer a factor in international politics, but that in the post-Cold War world it uses other (mostly international) mechanisms, strategies, and tactics.
What Bolivarians can point to, with compelling evidence, are programs that fit with the post-Cold War US government policy of “democracy promotion” in Latin America or what is in fact polyarchy, “a system in which a small group actually rules, and participation in decision making by the majority is confined to choosing among competing elites in tightly controlled electoral processes.”2 Bolivarian supporters point to the $15 million-dollar-a-year program the US government has for training Venezuelan oppo
sition activists in the use of social media or the $5 million per year to “help civil society to promote institutional transparency, engage diverse constituencies in the democratic process, and defend human rights.”3 As threatened as some activists might feel by money the US spends on promoting “transparency” and engaging “diverse constituencies in the democratic process” or defending human rights in Venezuela, it’s not out of proportion to what the US spends in other countries of Latin America.4 Indeed, as Corrales and Penfold write, “aid provided by the United States to non-state actors in Venezuela seems puny in comparison to aid allocated to other nations, and to the level of funds the Venezuelan government itself has spent abroad.”5
As an example of the latter we could cite the Bolivarian funding of the internal opposition—in the US. Perhaps the most egregious incident of Bolivarian lobbying went through CITGO as it sought to hinder provisions in the Clean Air Act perceived to negatively affect its interests. In that particular case the amount came to well over US $100,000 paid out to the Dukto Group, subsidiary of DCS, according to Casto Ocando.6 Compare that to the $53,400 the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) funneled to the Venezuelan opposition during the Referendum against Chavez in 2004.7 While there is always the possibility the US has a “black budget” for destabilizing the Bolivarian government, what it spends publicly to fund “democracy promotion” projects in Venezuela is chump change compared to what Chávez was tossing around in the US during the oil boom: In 2004 alone he spent over ten times that, precisely US$553,699.43, funding the Washington-based Venezuelan Information Office for salaries and expenses in order to improve his image in the US.8 And then there’s the case of Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu who seems to have been key to the vetoing of a US Senate bill to sanction Venezuelan human rights violators after she was lobbied by Patton and Boggs, a firm representing CITGO in the US.9 In all, Casto Ocando’s research on the Bolivarian “interventions” in the US total over 500 pages and he estimates from the information he compiled that the Bolivarian government has spent over US $300 million, lobbying, influencing, propagandizing, and otherwise “interfering in the internal affairs” of the United States.10 At current rates of US funding to “democracy” programs in Venezuela, it would take sixty years to catch up to what Chávez spent on influence in the US.
Bolivarian oil money appears to have paid off in the US left’s media reporting on Venezuela. In an email Z Magazine sent out as a fundraising plea, editor Michael Albert acknowledged that, starting in mid 2014, when student demonstrations and protests were still ubiquitous in Venezuela, Z Magazine began receiving up to $10,000 per month from TeleSur, an amount that Albert openly admitted had sustained the magazine through that time.11 TeleSur is a television channel started by Hugo Chávez and supposedly funded by various governments in South America, although 70% of its start-up money and, more importantly, its direction and its political “line,” come from the Bolivarian government.12 Whether or not, or to what degree these Bolivarian petrodollars shaped Z Magazine’s political line is an open question, but it’s noteworthy that its communications site, Znet, only published its first article critical of Venezuela after the money was cut off.13 In any case, money that came into the coffers of left media has served to shore up a solid pro-Bolivarian consensus on the international left that only began to crack with Chávez’s death.
Evidence is fairly strong that United States policy under Obama has been much less ideological and far more pragmatic toward Bolivarian Venezuela. In fact, US anti-Venezuelan pronouncements had already declined dramatically as early as 2006 as a result of US policy even as “some of the most antagonistic policies adopted by Venezuela occurred after 2006.”14 Less than two months after the April 2013 presidential elections in Venezuela, US Secretary of State John Kerry met with Venezuelan counterpart Elías Jaua in Guatemala to discuss closer relations between the two countries.15 Notably, no high-level US government official met either before or after those elections with Venezuelan opposition presidential candidate Henrique Capriles.
The US continues to be Venezuela’s number one trading partner with $41.4 billion in annual trade that drops some US$30 billion petro-dollars into the Bolivarian government’s bank account. The fact that democratic institutions are being undermined by the Bolivarian government, and that Venezuela is rapidly morphing from a petro-state into a narco-state and that its economic policies are so destructive of the country that it now faces a humanitarian crisis apparently are concerns of the US government, as all that could destabilize the region and put a great burden on neighboring governments.16 But these are also issues that should worry humanitarians and solidarity activists.
There are many indications that the nature of US imperial interest in Latin America has changed since the days of the Cold War when the US government saw “red” whenever anyone in its “sphere of influence” raised a hand in protest to capitalism. Communism is no longer a credible threat in the Americas, especially as even Cuba is returning to the fold of those operating with capitalist market economies. The US government under Obama, as it has shown in normalizing relations with Cuba, is far more interested in economic globalization under the transnational treaties and agreements than in engaging in ideological wars that pay no interest or dividends.
Indeed, the “left” governments of Latin America, as Raúl Zibechi told us when we visited him in Montevideo, and has amply detailed his writings, have been a perfect tool for the transnational corporations to manage populations while they continue extraction of resources. Left and environmental activists will think twice, and very carefully, before attacking a “left” or “progressive” president over concessions given to transnational corporations to extract public resources and damage the environment in the process: consider the delicate, cautious, and sympathetic approach of US environmentalists to Obama’s fracking (even if Obama is arguably neither “left” nor “progressive”). The same concerns social movements in Venezuela have, as Rafael Uzcátegui so clearly pointed out, that left criticism will play into the hands of the right wing, are also at work in the minds of US activists.
No doubt the US has several contingency plans for Venezuela as the Bolivarian project unwinds due to incompetence, corruption, mismanagement, and plummeting oil prices, and among those, no doubt, would include the search for an alternative elite to replace the Boligarchy. But I see no convincing evidence of US interest over the past decade in destabilizing the Bolivarians—to the contrary, at least in the short term, US farmers, business, and corporate interests have benefited greatly as Venezuela increased imports from the US under the Bolivarians which now include even oil17 and gasoline (in 2013 it imported double the amount of gas that it exported18). If the US threw in $5 million per year to fund “democracy” programs in Venezuela perceived to benefit the opposition, it poured $30 billion into Venezuelan government coffers buying its oil.
Considering all this, blaming the economic and political disaster on US interference just doesn’t wash. But that has been the core of the Bolivarian and left solidarity argument to explain the failure of the Bolivarian project, and essentially the only argument most left media has been willing to entertain. James Petras went so far as to assert “Washington… encouraged hoarding and price gouging by commercial capitalists (supermarket owners). It encouraged smugglers to purchase thousands of tons of subsidized consumer goods and sell them across the border in Colombia.”19 According to the Bolivarian narrative that Petras and other solidarity activists like him also promote, the problems facing Venezuela today are almost entirely the result of imperialist policies and a malicious capitalist class.
Petras’s argument may be patronizing in its portrayal of the Venezuelan opposition as passively awaiting orders from Washington, but it also dovetails perfectly with the Bolivarian argument of a presumed “economic war” in which the Venezuelan money (bolívar) is being “attacked” in undefined ways by speculators, and the scarcity of products is the result of “sabotage” by manufacturers
and those who traffic goods into neighboring countries to sell at higher prices, or those who “hoard” products.
No doubt there are Venezuelans who profit from activities that damage the country’s economy, but there is strong evidence that the government and its supporters have the greatest share of the responsibility, and this is in keeping with the views of a majority of Venezuela’s best economists, including Chavistas like Nicmer Evans and Felipe Pérez Martí.20 They would all agree that this narrative is a complete reversal of logic, making effects responsible for causes. They argue that the real cause of Venezuela’s economic woes are government and ruling-party corruption, impunity, incompetence, cronyism; bad economic policies, especially price and currency controls; lack of investment in nationalized industries; bad management and administration and a complete lack of accountability; the absence of “rule of law” and protection of property rights; and other misguided government policies. It would require another book to do justice to these issues but we could at least consider a few of them here.21
Price and currency controls are part of an economic program implemented in Venezuela in 2003. Currency controls were put in place ostensibly to prevent capital flight and to protect national industries after the PDVSA “oil strike” (or “lockout”), and price controls were imposed to protect the poor from the impact of inflation in basic necessities that could result from currency controls.
In such a situation, unless all the controls are very stringently enforced, the economy can become extremely distorted as the money becomes overvalued, giving rise to inflation, and the “decreed” prices of commodities become unrealistically low. This situation gives rise to two black markets: one in currency that is artificially overvalued, and another in the marketplace where products are artificially undervalued.
