The official result of the July 28 Presidential election in Venezuela, in which the incumbent Nicolás Maduro was declared the winner by a margin of 51% over the main opposition candidate´s 44%, is being hotly contested by a broad array of social and political forces. Both internationally and within the region itself, including some of Maduro´s traditional allies, there has been a broad appeal for transparency via the publication of verifiable electronic data that would ordinarily be available from each polling station. In the absence of this, the opposition’s claims of electoral fraud have gained ever greater credence, particularly given the existence of exit polls which had indicated a resounding victory for the opposition.
In the last week alone there have already been a series of mass protests, some of them emanating from traditional Chavista strongholds in the sprawling slums which skirt the capital city of Caracas. This was recorded by two journalists in Caracas reporting in the August 3 edition of The Guardian:
“We’ve had enough! Enough!” shouted Rafael Cantillo, 45, who came down from a Petare favela called El Campito to demonstrate last Monday.
“There are people here from Mariche, from Petare, from El Campito, from Valle-Coche, from Caucagüita, from everywhere,” he said, reeling off the names of Caracas’s sprawling low-income communities where hundreds of thousands live.”
This is now Maduro’s biggest fear, that the main pillars of support for Chavismo are not only crumbling but emerging as part of the opposition. In response, he has launched a ferocious wave of repression using uniformed goon squads to beat up and arrest opponents. As part of the stock in trade of capitalist rulers - like the recently deposed PM of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina - Maduro has labelled the opposition as terrorists and fascists. As such they face lengthy prison sentences simply for participating in street protests. Maduro himself has said that 2,000 people have already been arrested and will face “maximum punishment”.
Whilst the Venezuelan army has so far proved loyal to the Maduro regime, the conditions are clearly ripening of the top military brass to step in. The main spokesperson for the opposition, Maria Corina Machado, has already called on the military to intervene to uphold what she claims are the real results of the election:
"A message for the military. The people of Venezuela have spoken: they don't want Maduro," she said earlier on X. "It is time to put yourselves on the right side of history. You have a chance and it's now."
Whatever the immediate outcome, the fallout from the electoral conflict is testimony to a growing class polarisation fueled by the pro-capitalist economic and social programme pursued by Maduro and the governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV). Under the banner of the so-called Bolivarian revolution, hailed as a third way between capitalism and communism, the Maduro regime has been an undiluted disaster for working people.
The question is not whether Chavismo will come to an end, but when and at whose hands.
Crisis of capitalism
The unparalleled mass exodus of nearly 8 million people fleeing poverty and hunger in Venezuela over the past 10 years, is symptomatic of one the most acute crises of capitalism ever experienced in Latin America. This particular crisis has been accentuated by Washington’s sanctions - begun by Obama, extended and codified by Trump and maintained by Biden - which have further crippled a nation beleaguered by capitalist underdevelopment before, during and after Chávez’s ‘Bolivarian revolution’.
As the government of Nicolas Maduro presses ahead with a more explicit pro-capitalist agenda and seeks a greater accommodation with Washington and big business in Venezuela, the historical coalition of forces that coalesced around the ‘Bolivarian revolution’ has now fractured beyond repair. The Biden administration which began to relax sanctions in return for guarantees of a democratic election has now openly backed the opposition candidate as the winner.
Today, as was the case before Chávez’s electoral victory in 1999, Venezuela stands as an example of a rentier economy serving the needs of global capital. After almost a quarter of a century of “revolution’, it is dependent almost entirely (96%) upon revenues from oil
to service the needs of its own capitalist economy, one which is stunted by a weak and feeble bourgeoisie and continues to service the needs of foreign based multinationals.
Up to the time of Chávez´s death, Venezuela was a haven for US and European multinationals. Amongst the US based multinationals were the big hitters such as Liberty Mutual, Colgate, Procter & Gamble, Ford, General Motors, Coca-Cola, Clorox, Bridgestone, Pepsi, and airlines such as Delta, United, and American. Not only did these companies benefit from low taxes, basement level wages and skyrocketing rates of profit, their Venezuelan operations in most cases also provided a more favourable export platform for the Latin American market.
This was true also for the big capitalist corporations from Spain which, by the year 2000, had begun to challenge US imperialist hegemony in the region. As of 2017, Spain alone had an estimated €5 billion at stake, with investments made by 100 different companies in sectors ranging from banking and insurance to telecom, construction, oil and gas, renewable energy, hotels, clothing, and food and beverage.
The plummeting oil prices impacted Venezuela´s capitalist market with a tsunami wave of hyperinflation, calculated by the Venezuelan central bank as 274% in 2016, 863% in 2017 and 130,060% in 2018, before reaching a record high of 344509.50 percent in February of 2019. It has since dropped to 51.4% in June 2024, but the cumulative effect on prices and supplies of basic goods and services has been devastating for workers and sections of the lower middle class.
For the multinationals, who were governed by the overriding drive to repatriate their profits, this threatened to decimate their dollar income. After the Central Bank of Venezuela devalued its local currency (the bolivar, Bs.F) by nearly 97%, the 2018 exchange rate between the bolivar and the dollar bottomed out at Bs.F 248,832 = US$1, making it the least-valued circulating currency in the world based on official exchange rates.
The capitalist market went haywire as most of the multinationals either exited Venezuela or significantly downsized their operations in the hope of better times in the future. As the flight of foreign capital accelerated, the Maduro government stood by as millions of Venezuelan workers were drowned by the fallout.
The sanctions imposed by Trump only served to hit working people even harder, with millions struggling to feed or clothe themselves and to buy essential medicines and hygiene products. This was an absolute catastrophe for those who have had to survive on the minimum wage which despite some increases, stood at less than $6 per month in 2023 – the lowest throughout Latin America.
The overall social consequences of this capitalist crisis have been utterly devastating. In addition to spiraling levels of poverty, the long-term effects since the crisis began in 2013 have already registered significant health defects. According to a recent report in the Spanish newspaper El País, a study by Dr. Huniades Urbina, a pediatrician and board member of Venezuela’s National Academy of Medicine, revealed that:
“children born during the crisis have had their growth stunted by about 5 to 6 cms (2 to 2.4 inches) on average due to poor nutrition.”
In the same vein, a 2022 UN Regional Overview of Food, Security and Nutrition, reported that Venezuela had the highest prevalence of undernourishment in South America. Alongside this galloping hunger, there has been a resurgence of malaria, diphtheria and measles, a contagion registered before U.S. imperialism implemented any major sanctions.
The legacy of Chávez
The dramatic crisis of Venezuelan capitalism which engulfed the country from 2013 onwards, revealed the extreme limitations of Chávez’s reformist experiment. There was no revolution in Venezuela, Bolivarian or otherwise. As a military officer, Chávez rode to power on a tidal wave of mass protests that shook the system and threatened to overthrow it, particularly the Caracazo of 1989 and the popular mobilisations against the attempted coup of 2002.
This demonstrated the potential for a revolutionary movement that could rally the popular masses against the capitalist system and all the state institutions which stood to uphold it.
However, the Venezuelan state and all its fundamental institutions – the judiciary, army, police and federal government structures – remained intact.
Although Chávez convoked a new constituent assembly, it was merely a repackaging of old wine in a new bottle, albeit one that enshrined the principles of parliamentary democracy and separation of church and state. Whilst codifying the right to public health and education, the new constitution also invoked the free market as the motor force of economic development.
Tied as it was to global capitalism, this free market economy headed inexorably towards its first recession of the 21st century, In Venezuela this led to a wave of factory occupations by workers against closures and for payment of salary arrears. By September 2003 no less than 63 businesses had been taken over by workers demanding their reopening or, failing that, outright nationalisation. The most notable of these were the occupations of the Pepsi Cola and Venepal factories which wrested some concessions from the bosses. Despite the workers’ demands, neither of these companies was nationalised .
Chávez did renationalise some businesses in key sectors such as electricity, telecommunications, water, ports, airports, airlines, oil, gold and steel which had been privatised in the nineties. As some of the more levelheaded economists noted at the time however, those businesses comprised a relatively modest share of the economy. In essence, they were no different from nationalisations of similar sectors in the advanced capitalist countries of Western Europe following WW2. These occurred not as anti-capitalist measures but as a means of servicing private capital in the more lucrative sectors.
This was illustrated in a 2008 report issued by the Venezuelan government’s National Statistics Institute (INE)., which showed that of the 28,222 economic units corresponding to industrial activity, only 1.2% were in the hands of the public sector. As for commercial activity and services, just 0.12% and 0.88%, respectively, belonged to the public sector.
The booming oil prices were a bonanza for big capital in Venezuela with a huge surge in profit rates which increased by a reported 144% between 2003 and 2008, registering the highest historical levels since 1970. It was this which enabled Chávez to mask his otherwise pro-capitalist agenda using windfall profits to launch numerous initiatives, including state-run food markets, new public housing, free health clinics and education programs. He also carried out a significant land reform that benefited thousands of small farmers and encouraged urban workers to plough the land left idle by absentee or unproductive latifunidistas.
It is this latter measure which is frequently paraded as the flagship of the Bolivarian revolution and, as such, it merits more detailed analysis.
The Land Question
Venezuela is a semi-colonial country whose peasantry shares a similar fate to billions of people in the semi-colonial world: a world where rural areas are marked by extreme poverty and inequalities in land ownership. However, as one of the most urbanized countries in the region, Chávez came to power in a country with only 12% of the population living in rural areas, compared with 35% in 1960
In the twentieth century practically every Latin American country implemented a programme of state-led redistributive land reform. It was a top-down attempt to modernize agriculture by breaking up inefficient colonial estates, increase production, reduce rural poverty, mobilize political support for governments, and undercut potential support for armed revolutionary groups in the aftermath of the Cuban revolution.
Venezuela was no exception: official figures claimed that almost 14 million hectares of land were distributed to 371,814 families from 1958 to 2000, well before the start of Chávez agrarian reform programme. Although some peasants benefited from reforms, the majority remained mired in poverty or migrated into urban dwellings to feed off the peripheral benefits of the oil industry. The numbers were impressive, but the reforms failed to tackle the underlying class structure and the increasing dependency of Venezuela on oil production.
When Chávez came to power in 1998, land tenure in Venezuela was still defined by the old latifundia structures that had survived from the colonial period. Some 75% of the country's private agricultural land was owned by only 5% of the landowners, while 75% of the smaller landowners owned only 6% of the land. Even from a capitalist perspective this was an historical anachronism, which increased Venezuela’s almost absolute dependency on food imports.
It was this which Chávez sought to end. His agrarian reform programme started at a snail’s pace in 2001, mainly by using state owned land to encourage rural resettlement. It was not until 2005 that the reform began redistributing private lands. Even then it was marked by constant conflict between the latifundistas and peasants, in the face of which the government either stood by or sometimes intervened to dispossess peasant occupations. Some 9 years after the first land reform, the agricultural census showed that only one million hectares of private land had been redistributed and that, out of 2445 existing estates, less than 1% occupied 7 million hectares.
Chávez’s rhetoric that ‘el pueblo manda’ (the people rule), was taken at its face value by thousands of peasants who became the real protagonists and drivers of land redistribution. The slow pace of reform from above by the INTI meant that peasants had to wait months just for the paperwork to be processed, and longer still for adjudication. In the states of Apure, Cojedes and Yaracuy in particular, this led to a wave of occupations by landless peasants.
‘We campesinos are the true soldiers of the revolution’, a campesino explained, ‘because we are the only ones who are fighting our own government for it’.
The landlords reacted through a combination of legal injunctions, enforced by the police and National Guard, alongside the use of goon squads to terrorise the occupiers. Between 2003 and 2011, an estimated 256 campesinos were killed by such squads. The legal impunity enjoyed by these goon squads highlighted the economic power of landowners and the influence they continued to hold in some areas of government and judiciary. Whereas many peasant leaders wanted the National Guard to act as security for the occupations, state governors frequently declared the occupations illegal, and the National Guard would violently evict them.
For Chávez and his government, land reform was something to be administered from above and, wherever possible, in agreement with the latifundistas. The occupations, regardless of the legitimacy of land claims, undermined this top-down, reformist approach. Commenting on an occupation in Yaracuy in 2005 the regional director of INTI declared,
‘We know that this land is for the… cooperatives, but we do not support the seizure of the hectares in this way; they are making a grave mistake’
To this date, it is estimated that some 6.5 million hectares of land have been redistributed, benefiting over 200,000 peasant families. However, the evidence also shows that under both Chávez and Maduro, the true axis of their agrarian policy has been a multi-class alliance allegedly embracing rich and poor, as well as medium sized farms that contribute towards the goal of food self-sufficiency. This was highlighted by Chávez himself when celebrating the first anniversary of the “Great AgroVenezuela Mission” launched in January 2011.
“We are committed to raising agricultural production, livestock production, agricultural production (…) the cornerstone of the new model of development, the productive economy, the socialist economy”
The limits of cooperativism
Whilst boosting credits and technical support for new cooperatives, the thrust was clear: the agrarian reform and the transformation of relations of production were to become increasingly marginalized by targets based solely upon productivity and profitability.
The expropriation of some idle lands and their transformation into cooperatives did not represent a socialist revolution in the countryside. Whilst the co-ops benefited many working families, they remained tied to capitalist relations in which the supply chain, production of machinery, spare parts, feed and fertiliser were mostly in private hands. This was confirmed by the catastrophic collapse of the economy which began in 2013, leading to huge food shortages, exacerbated by hoarding and price hikes that contributed to widespread hunger and malnutrition.
Even outside such catastrophic crises, co-ops by their very nature are curtailed and conditioned by the pressures of competition and marketing in a profit-driven economy. This includes the drive to cut costs, skimp on quality, hold back wages, curtail the number of employees, and so on.
Chávez’s championing of cooperatives as the supposed seeds of a rural socialism is not new. It was already advanced by the liberal left in the 19th century and challenged as such by Karl Marx in Volume 3 of Capital:
“The cooperative factories of the labourers themselves,” he wrote, “represent within the old form the first sprouts of the new, although they naturally reproduce, and must reproduce, everywhere in their actual organisation all the shortcomings of the prevailing system”
The accuracy of this observation was confirmed more than a century later by the experience of workers in Argentina.
In the wake of Argentina’s economic collapse in the early 2000s, many workers took over their factories and formed co-ops. After a while, many of these were consumed by the logic of capitalist relations. One worker who was part of a co-op there, put it this way:
“We took it over. We were so excited. We made our wages equal. We instituted democracy. We had a workers’ council. We made our decisions democratically. And after a period of time, all the old crap came back. All the old alienation came back, and now it just feels the way it used to feel.”
Maduro follows in Chávez’s footsteps
Nicolás Maduro was Hugo Chávez´s nominated heir and the undisputed champion of the Venezuelan left. There is no question but that he faithfully followed in Chávez’s footsteps as he sought to build the multi-class alliance represented by the ‘Bolivarian revolution’. Baptised as a form of “socialism for the 21st century” and hailed as a third way between capitalism and communism, it had barely found its feet before merging into an unfolding global energy crisis, one produced by the very capitalist forces which Chavismo declaimed against but embraced at the same time.
At no stage in the crisis which has racked the country did Maduro and his supporters challenge the prerogatives of the big banks and capitalist enterprises which dominated manufacturing, food production and the supermarket supply chain.
Even in the eye of the economic storm, the private sector did not stop earning profits and taking oil currencies. According to data provided by the Venezuelan Central Bank, (BCV), the private sector repatriated (took out of the country) some US$ 46,109 million in profits between 2013 and 2018. A report issued by the World Bank one year later, calculated that the private sector in Venezuela accounted for about 70% of the country's GDP.
An essential feature of Maduro’s compliance with the interests of big capital, has been the increased dependency on exploitation of Venezuela’s mineral resources as a fundamental driver of development. This began under Chávez with the granting of licences to US and European multinationals to exploit the vast deposits of hydrocarbons particularly in the Orinoco belt in Central Venezuela. By 2005 this led to an estimated 60 foreign companies from 14 different countries participating in one or more aspect of Venezuela’s hydrocarbon sector.
In effect, this accentuated the oil extraction-rentier model which first led to the very crisis from which Chávez himself would later emerge as its declared antagonist. By opening up even more of Venezuela’s fossil fuel reserves to private investment, Maduro has attempted to follow the same path.
In response to the shortfall in supplies caused by Russia’s war in Ukraine in 2022, Maduro gave the following assurances to the global capitalist market:
“Venezuela is ready and willing to fulfil its role and supply, in a stable and safe way, the oil and gas market that the world economy needs,”
During the visit of the OPEC representative, he specifically called on oil companies from China, Russia, India, Turkey, Europe and even the United States to join a “win-win partnership” in a plan to extract more than 3 million barrels a day from the vast reserves of heavy-duty crude oil still untapped in the Orinoco Belt region.
The potential for generating skyrocketing profits, not to mention carbon emissions, was hailed by the regime on the basis that this intensive extraction could last for the next 300 years. With an almost cavalier disregard for the environmental consequences, Maduro boasted that this giant oil field could accommodate nearly 11,000 oil wells, some 282 simultaneous drills, and would require 2,470 kilometres of pipeline to maximise operations.
All of this in a region which is home to one of the largest wetlands in the South American continent and is a reservoir for a great diversity of both Venezuelan and international fauna and flora. Oil spills in the area have already been reported but the state run oil company, PDVSA, has not issued an environmental impact assessment since 2016.
Capitalism runs wild in Amazon River basin
South of the Orinoco Belt in the states of Bolivar and Amazonas, lies the Amazon River basin. Described by some as a paradise on earth, the basin is home to an ecosystem renowned for both its immense biodiversity as well as being home to 16 officially recognized indigenous peoples. It includes the Orinoco River, the world’s third largest river whose waters and hundreds of tributaries not only feed the region’s biodiversity but provide a livelihood to the many indigenous communities who inhabit its banks.
The state of Bolivar alone contains two vast national parks,one of which - the Parque Nacional Canaima - is the sixth largest in the world. It is populated with vast forests, flat-topped plateaus, fantastic cliffs, and boasts the world’s tallest uninterrupted waterfall. Complementing this astonishing landscape is a plethora of fauna including jaguars, giant otters, armadillos, anteaters and sloths. It is currently classified as a UNESCO World Heritage site.
But here’s the rub: it also stands upon a vast substratum housing enormous deposits of gold, diamonds and other rare minerals which the Venezuelan state values more than its inhabitants.
In 2016 Maduro created the Orinoco Mining Arc, comprising an area bigger than either Portugal or Cuba and representing around 12% of the Venezuelan territory. This mining zone overlaps both the legally protected environmental zones as well as the indigenous territories recognised in the Venezuelan constitution.
The rich pickings from this area were first earmarked by Chávez himself shortly before his death. However, it was Maduro who began the feeding frenzy by means of a presidential decree that lacked any parliamentary scrutiny or environmental impact assessment. As for the Indigenous communities affected by this, they were given no say whatsoever. Given the huge stakes involved, this was scarcely surprising.
The potential profit bonanza for mining corporations and gold traders to exploit this region was outlined by the investigative journalist, Jean Freddy Gutierrez Torres, as follows:
“Besides the projected US $100 billion in coltan, Venezuelan authorities optimistically estimate that up to 7,000 tons of gold could be certified within the Orinoco Mining Arc, which would make it the second biggest gold reserve in the world, worth $200 billion dollars, calculated at a price of US $1,200 per ounce.
“The government also estimates there to be three billion carats in diamonds in the region, and at least 300 thousand metric tons of rare earth elements: cerium, lanthanum, neodymium and thorium.”
Alongside a bevy of multinational corporations - hailing primarily from Canada, China, South Africa and Switzerland – private Venezuelan mining corporations such as Ecomine, Supracal, Hidroca and the Faoz Corporation, managed to get in on the act as part of a “mixed-company” model in which the state retained majority control but licensed immense private profits. In the latter case, the Faoz corporation was created on July 29, 2016, with the express purpose of signing a deal with the government. It had no known experience in mining.
Things did not stop there. Maduro also urged small scale mining businesses to join up as part of a target to generate revenues of some $2,000 million by 2018. By that time the number of “alliances” with small mining companies rose to 295. It was not quite the equivalent of Thatcher’s Big Bang deregulation of the London Stock Exchange in 1986. However, there was no denying or stopping the frantic clamour that ensued as thousands of mining operations invaded the indigenous homelands.
Hundreds of companies were drawn into "strategic alliances:” which were assigned individual areas to secure and exploit by whatever means they could, in exchange for sharing a percentage of the production with the Venezuelan Mining Corporation, the agency charged with maintaining the flow of gold to Venezuelan state coffers. In 2018, the Ministry for Ecological Mining Development had registered 295 such agreements in Bolívar. One year later, this had risen to over 1,000. Like the Faoz corporation, few of these companies had any mining experience.
Added to the mix were hundreds of other “illegal” enterprises, frequently sheltered by corrupt government and military officials turning a blind eye in exchange for a percentage of the profits. Rogue units of the Colombian guerrilla organisations – the FARC and ELN – also got in on the act.
It was as if the scenes from America’s 19th century Wild West capitalism were being re-enacted on a 21st century economic canvass. Within a year of the decree, the government news agency reported that the number of small-scale miners could be as high as 40,000. As the rush for gold and diamonds reached fever point, the region became a battle ground between rival gangs, corrupt government and army officials and a vast array of small-scale mining operators competing for short term enrichment.
With Maduro becoming increasingly desperate to meet his targets of gold bullion production, the “strategic alliances” often meant working in cahoots with the armed gangs to secure enough ore supplies for the manufacturing companies.
The project has only been 7 years in the making but it has already exacted a heavy toll, As the rush for gold and diamonds escalated it was accompanied by a spiraling malaria epidemic alongside high incidences of mercury contamination.
Mercury is used in small scale mining to extract gold from ore and remove most of the impurities from the gold but it has long been the subject of an international ban on the grounds of its health risks.Tests of populations from the Guainía, Inírida, and Atabapo rivers revealed they had 60 to 109 times more mercury in their blood than the safety limit prescribed by the World Health Organization. Mercury can cause birth defects which can be inherited for two or more generations, neurological damage, autism, damage to the digestive system, destruction of organs and premature death.
In addition, no less than 92 percent of indigenous women tested in the Caura River basin had mercury levels above the limit of 2 milligrams per kilogram established by the World Health Organization, and 37 percent of Women in the villages of Yé'kuana and Sanema had birth complications related to mercury exposure.
The clamour for gold is also behind a skyrocketing outbreak of Malara. According to a report in the May 2020 edition of Malaria Journal:
“Malaria incidence has reached staggering numbers in Venezuela. Commonly, Bolívar State accounted for approximately 70% of the country cases every year.”
The 2020 World Malaria Report estimated that 467,421 cases of malaria occurred in Venezuela in 2019 - a 1200% increase compared with the year 2000. Whilst deforestation caused by mining is the main driver of this epidemic, it is also due to a significant lack of primary health care and disease control programs in the region.
In total there are 198 indigenous communities in Bolívar state alone. Their people, mostly small-scale farmers, have been drawn from their croplands to enter the Mining Arc.
It is mostly men who work the gold, coltan and diamond claims, but indigenous women also toil in and around the mines, preparing and selling food, cleaning accommodations and working as prostitutes. According to Al Jazerra around 1,000 children are working in gold mining.
The gold rush has now spread southwest into the neighbouring state of Amazonas where 54 percent of the state’s inhabitants are indigenous, the highest percentage of any Venezuelan state.
Though Amazonas is not yet officially listed on Maduro’s national mining agenda, the state has already been occupied by an estimated 10,000 to 12,000 illegal miners, resulting in significant deforestation – estimated at 1,870 acres - of the Yapacana National Park.
The latest government budget in 2022 estimated income from gold royalties equivalent to $232 million, 70 times higher than 2021 gold projections. None of this is benefiting the indigenous communities who have tried to resist the project from the outset.
Local resistance
When one company began mining in an area called Las Brisas-Las Cristinas, believed to contain the country’s largest gold deposits, there was an immediate protest.
“We demanded to talk with the person in charge,” said Pasiano Elliman, a leader of the Pemon tribe, “and told him that his workers couldn’t do anything in our territory without the approval of the community’s legitimate authorities’
“Since they didn’t listen, the next day we returned with the support of all eight native communities in San Isidro. We took our bows and arrows; we showed them our unity and strength. That’s when they shut down the works.”
In the face of this resistance, the government has bought off some of the indigenous leaders, such as Piaroa chief Enrique Gordons who has insisted that the mining project is supported by most tribes and that they benefit from associated social programmes.
Franklin Quiñones, the leader of Fundo Nuevo, a Piaroa community, vigorously disputes this and, along with 16 other Piaroa leaders, is campaigning for Gordons removal.
“We’re campaigning to replace Enrique Gordons,” he says. “He betrayed our people; the government bought him. Gordons doesn’t care that mining is weakening our struggle for these lands, increasing insecurity in the area, and polluting our water.
“We’re not miners, we’re farmers. The Orinoco Mining Arc means the destruction of our Piaroa culture. If those men keep coming with their companies and machines, they’d destroy what the Piaroa people have preserved for generations: the jungle. Rivers and their springs would be polluted. We drink that water, we bathe there.
“Free land and free water. That’s what the Piaroa people want, to preserve our environment,” he says.
Women’s oppression intensifies
In the first 5 years of Chávez rule, reforms were introduced to address some aspects of women’s oppression in Venezuela. A special government office - the Women and Gender Equality Ministry - was established, followed shortly thereafter by parliamentary legislation outlawing male violence against women. This was quite advanced for its time as it included such activities as sexual and verbal assault, forced prostitution, and trafficking.
However, neither of these measures resulted in any material change to their second class status, quite the contrary. At a political level, this is underlined by a huge gender imbalance in parliament where just 20 percent of deputies are women. Within the government itself only 5 out of 31 cabinet members are women. The imbalance in representation is notable amongst both opposition and pro-government deputies.
As the capitalist crisis developed, it is working class women who have borne the brunt of it.
According to a report in the digital publication Women Across Frontiers and authored by a quartet of feminist organisations in Venezuela and Latin America:
“Four out ten households are headed by a female, and seventy percent of them are women without partners. Women are the first to leave the labor market in order to either line up for hours in front of supermarkets or look after children, the elderly, the sick and/or the disabled; they are the first to walk around in search of medical attention or scarce medicines for themselves or their families; and many work odd jobs where they can combine work and family but lack social protection and are vulnerable to exploitation and disease.”
Another report entitled Women on the Edge showed the extent of this:
“From the shortage of contraceptives and menstrual hygiene supplies to the numerous obstacles to their access to justice when they are victims of sexist violence, women face numerous challenges in the full enjoyment of their most basic rights without the State taking effective measures in this regard.”
Central to this dual oppression both as workers and as women, is the acute shortage of contraceptives and the absence of any choice when it comes to abortion. Abortion in Venezuela is illegal except in cases where the life of the woman is in danger. The harsh penalties against abortion set Venezuela at the extreme right of Latin American legislative framework on this issue. Unsafe abortions are responsible for an estimated 20% of maternal deaths in Venezuela, according to a 2019 report from the United Nations High Commissioner, Michelle Bachelet. The law is also one of the factors contributing to Venezuela having the third-highest rate of teen pregnancy in Latin America, after Ecuador and Honduras.
The government of Nicolas Maduro has not only been indifferent to the plight of Venezuelan women in this respect, but has sought to sanctify their primary status as broodmares at the service of the nation. The official discourse reinforces and promotes a vision in which women are mothers before anything else. In speech after speech and proposal after proposal, the role of women as child bearers and caregivers gets highlighted as if it is the only life option available.
“Give birth!”, said Maduro at a televised event promoting a women’s healthcare plan on 3 March, 2022. “Every woman is to have six children! Every one! For the good of the country!”
Embracing religion
As he jockeyed for prime position in the 2024 presidential race, Maduro appealed more and more to traditional values of family and religion to bolster his overtly pro-capitalist economic policies.
Besides eulogising the virtues of motherhood and advocating large families, he began to cosy up to the Venezuelan evangelical movement. Having previously espoused atheism and separation of church and state, he suddenly boasted of a Damascus-type conversion.
In late January 2023, standing before a crowd of more than a hundred evangelical Christians and pastors, Maduro affirmed his faith in Christ and publicly ordered his staff to prioritize evangelical churches’ access to radio stations. He also announced that his government would start a welfare program to renovate churches and give bonuses to pastors.
Since then he has allocated public funds towards the refurbishment of 2,500 houses of worship, followed by a direct payment of almost $10 each to 13,000 registered pastors.
Like many a caudillo before him, Maduro is a cunning opportunist with a keen sense of political survival. He is aware that some 21 deputies in the current parliament – including four from his own party, the PSUV – are evangelists. In addition, one of his previous opponents in the 2018 presidential election was an evangelical pastor, Javier Bertucci, who garnered over a million votes.
Moreover, as a direct consequence of his policies, the evangelical movement’s ranks are being swelled by hundreds of thousands of working people driven to despair out of a merciless impoverishment.
His rank opportunism did not go unnoticed, however. Even a leading evangelist could not but help but issue a damming indictment of his raft of pro-evangelical measures.
“More than worrying about requesting the construction and/or fitting out of our temples, our prayers go out to the public clamor for the provision of equipment to hospitals and schools, salary adjustments for teachers and doctors, among others, and other issues that are priority issues for the good of the Venezuelan population.”
A win-win situation for imperialism and capitalism
As part of the regime’s commitment to capitalism as the driver of economic growth and prosperity, Maduro began transferring state assets back into the hands of private owners.
“Saddled with hundreds of failed state companies in an economy barreling over a cliff,” wrote Caracas-based journalists Fabiola Zerpa and Nicolle Yapur, “the Venezuelan government is abandoning socialist doctrine by offloading key enterprises to private investors, offering profit in exchange for a share of revenue or products,”
According to Rodrigo Agudo, head of the Venezuela Food Network, the regime instituted “a wild capitalism” by ceasing the collection of taxes on certain companies, liberalizing licensing on imports, and convincing military and other connected officials to invest in certain businesses.
This surreptitious introduction of neoliberal policies was facilitated by the de facto redundancy of Venezuela’s national currency, the Bolivar, and the dollarisation of the economy. Following the decriminalisation of the dollar, it was estimated that by the end of 2020, between 60% and 80% of the transactions in the country were made in US greenbacks.
From a capitalist standpoint, this process was summed up in a March 2021 report in the online journal, Doing Business. Entitled Venezuela: land of risks and business opportunities, the report concluded:
“In general, after the control and criminalization of foreign exchange ceased, after foreign currency became available, after price control was left out and investment was favored, a strengthening of the private sector may be noted in light of a number of necessities of the people that were not satisfied for months and are now generating business niches and job opportunities. “
The resulting bonanza for the capitalist and middle classes was highlighted by a 2022 report in the Spanish daily newspaper, El Pais.
“Traffic in the capital”, said the report, “has been restored to the diabolical levels of any major Latin American city whereas previously, due to a lack of gas, the roads were practically empty. Entrepreneurs are opening nightclubs, restaurants, supermarkets, stores and pharmacies. Internationally famous singers are returning to perform. One of the trendiest spots, Bar Caracas, has a price list identical to clubs in New York.”.
“Today in Caracas’” according to another 2023 despatch, “there are signs everywhere of a capitalist’s playground: Long-empty storefronts have transformed into made-for-Instagram coffee shops, high-end clothing stores and fancy restaurants where patrons arrive with armed bodyguards.
“Many of those belong to a nouveau riche class of individuals who leveraged political connections to the powerful elite and were able to access lucrative opportunities – contravening Chávez’s assertion that “being rich is bad.”
“Meanwhile socialist propaganda, once ubiquitous, is disappearing, too. Advertisements for stores, plastic surgeons and A-list concerts have replaced images of Chávez on billboards. Some of his once-colorful murals are fading.”
Special economic zones
In an effort to attract foreign investment the Venezuelan National Assembly approved legislation establishing “Special Economic Zones” (SEZ). The new law was endorsed by the PSUV as well as by right-wing opposition deputies. Special Economic Zones are defined as geographical areas with exceptional rules and regulations governing salaries and taxation. Private investment in these economic enclaves will be fast tracked with legal guarrantees of a host of tax breaks or exemptions.
Any ideological justification within the framework of the Bolivarian revolution was at best diluted. This was recorded in an extensive report by Al Jazerra.
“The terminology about socialism or transition to socialism, frequent in the political discourse of the government and the ruling United Socialist Party, is absent from the legislation of the SEZs and from the repeated calls for private capital.
"The example of China is being followed, as it is by other countries, in using the SEZs as a showcase for heterodox forms of capital accumulation, in a process of progressive neoliberalization of the economy, as the oil model of production and distribution of wealth is being exhausted,"
The report underlined the appearance of “zones of social and environmental sacrifice, with a new political geography of dispossession, and with the cheapening of labor, especially that of women workers."
Maduro himself modelled the SEZs on their supposed success in China, Vietnam, Singapore and South Korea
Attacks on labour movement and democratic rights
Maduro’s opening up of the economy to enrich big capital has been accompanied by a wholesale attack on free speech, democracy and independent working class forces In an attempt to decapitate any meaningful opposition, he has resorted to widespread repression including arbitrary arrests, long term imprisonment, torture and the most blatant abuse of power resulting in the arbitrary removal of elected leaders of opposition parties.
The clearest and most recent example of this was the disqualification of the main opposition electoral candidate Marian Corina Machado on the grounds of her support for US sanctions and possible military intervention. Machado was never prosecuted for any of these statements and was the outstanding candidate in the opposition primary elections where she gained 2.4 million votes. Despite this, Maduro urged the Supreme Court to nullify the result which forced the opposition to nominate another candidate, Edmundo González. González, who effectively stood as a surrogate for Machado.
The bourgeois opposition has not been the only victim of Maduro’s crackdown. Following criticism of the regime’s pivot to the right, a petition was presented to the Supreme Court claiming that the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV) had “strayed from the precepts that govern the organization.” As a result, the Supreme Court imposed Henry Parra, a pro-Maduro communist, as the de jure President of the PCV. This came on the heels of a previous ruling in the November 2021 regional elections when14 candidates on the PCV ticket were disqualified by the country’s Electoral Council.
The same heavy hand had already descended on two other parties in 2020, when the Supreme Court suspended and replaced the board of directors for the Justice First party and suspended the leadership of Democratic Action, one of Venezuela's oldest parties.
This outlandish and arbitrary abuse of power was but one of several repressive measures used in response to a growing wave of labour resistance, particularly in the public sector where many workers are on minimum wage deals.
During the first semester of 2023, the Venezuelan Observatory of Social Conflict recorded 4,351 protests throughout the country, of which over 3,100 were labour disputes particularly around the question of the minimum wage. Part of Maduro’s response to these mobilisations has been a crackdown on trades union militants. This included 16-year jail terms for 6 union activists who took part in worker protests demanding higher wages during 2022. They were all arrested and charged under anti-terrorism legislation and subsequently sentenced on the basis of “conspiracy to cause subversion”, a catch-all clause used universally to silence and intimidate dissidents and political opponents.
Maduro’s pivot towards neo-liberalism and his attempted rapprochement with Washington has strained relations to breaking point with his traditional allies on the left. Having stuck with Maduro’s capitalist government through thick and thin, the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV) began to align itself with the growing labour resistance. This was expressed in a statement by PCV leader Héctor Rodríguez at an international conference in Havana in late 2022:
“Venezuela’s recent experience reveals the limits of progressivism. It has abandoned anti-imperialist policies of nationalizing strategic industries, confronting large landowners, and defending social and labor rights in favor of a neoliberal economic agenda of privatization, price liberalization, landowner capitulation, labor deregulation and the dismantling of social achievements.”
Maduro was the unrivalled prodigy of Chávez, recommended by him to be his successor as he lay on his death bed. At the time, and for many years afterwards, he was unequivocally lauded as the continuity president by all the forces of the left both inside and outside of Venezuela. The clearest expression of this was the Simón Bolívar Great Patriotic Pole, a revamped version of the Spanish Popular Front, formed to support the re-election of Chávez in 2012 and which continued in place for the next ten years.
This has now fractured beyond repair, leaving Maduro and the PSUV facing opposition from both the left and right. However, none of these forces present a working class alternative to the world capitalist crisis which has wreaked so much havoc and misery on ordinary people.
In the case of the bourgeois opposition represented by Machado, they have nothing to offer apart from a bigger and faster dose of neoliberal medicine. This would include re-alignment with the structural adjustment programmes of the World Bank and the IMF, privatising the state-run oil industry, and greater freedom and guarantees for private investment.
As for the left opposition, such as the PCV, the Patria Para Todos and Podemos parties, their basic axis is for a return to the heyday of Chavismo and its false promise of a radical redistribution of wealth and power.
For a Workers’ and Farmers’ Government
Neither wing of the opposition to Maduro offers a solution to the catastrophic crisis of Venezuelan capitalism that would not entail continued misery and emigration for millions of workers and peasants. As things stand, the huge class inequalities mean that of the country’s 28 million population, 76% live in extreme poverty, rendering Venezuela as the most unequal nation in Latin America. However, this makes Venezuela unique only in terms of scale. Otherwise, it is but one more example of a Latin American country scarred by extreme poverty, underdevelopment and class exploitation. The uniqueness appears all the more vivid given that the scale of misery and exploitation has developed under the auspices of a government and system that has claimed to be revolutionary and socialist.
Whether it be by means of land seizures, strikes, factory occupations or the type of mass mobilisations that stymied the military coup d’etat in April 2002, the Venezuelan working class and peasants have exhibited a tremendous capacity for struggle. However, rather than mobilizing and leading working people to overturn capitalist relations and take their future into their own hands, Chávez and his successor Maduro used the government to try to regulate and manage capitalism, to restrict independent working class initiatives in favour of modernising the system rather than overthrowing it.
This is the opposite of how Fidel Castro and the July 26 Movement led Cuban workers and farmers to take political power into their own hands, using the government as a means of organising and mobilising millions into militias, literacy brigades, and neighbourhood committees as the driving force of Cuba´s socialist revolution.
When Che Guevara replaced Felipe Pazos as the head of Cuba’s national bank in November 1959, it marked the appearance of a workers and peasants’ government that stood up to imperialism and enacted a series of measures leading to the overthrow of capitalism in Cuba. Standing at the head of an insurgent people, it eliminated the old state apparatus, set up a people’s militia that was overwhelmingly working class and peasant in composition and proceeded to expropriate large landed and commercial interests.
The appearance and necessity for such a government had already been anticipated by the early communist movement. At its Fourth Congress in 1922, when it was still an extraordinary tribune for oppressed peoples throughout the world, the Communist International discussed the call for such a government at some length. Its main characteristics were described in its Theses on Tactics as follows:
“The overriding tasks of the workers’ government must be to arm the proletariat, to disarm the bourgeois counterrevolutionary organisations, to introduce the control of production, to transfer the burden of taxation to the rich and to break the resistance of the counterrevolutionary bourgeoisie.
“Such a workers’ government,” it declared,” is only possible if it is born out of the struggle of the masses, is supported by workers’ bodies which are capable of fighting, bodies created by the most oppressed sections of the working masses.”
It is highly likely, although not inevitable, that the rightist forces in Venezuela will gain the upper hand in the short term. Nevertheless, regardless of the immediate outcome, there will be new battles ahead in which class conscious fighters can regroup, form new organisations, gain inspiration from the Cuban revolution and chart a course towards victory.
Fighting for a workers and peasants government, independent of imperialism and the Venezuelan bourgeoisie. will be an essential component of such a perspective.
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