Fw: AMID COUP RUMORS: STRUGGLE SHARPENS IN VENEZUELA

["Nello Margiotta" <animarg@tin.it>]

 Via Workers World News Service
 Reprinted from the July 5, 2001
 issue of Workers World newspaper
 -------------------------
 
 AMID COUP RUMORS: STRUGGLE SHARPENS IN VENEZUELA
 
 By Andy McInerney
 
 Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez promised a "peaceful,
 democratic revolution" to root out the South American
 country's corrupt U.S.-backed political establishment. He
 assumed the presidency with close to two-thirds the popular
vote in the 1998 presidential elections. His mandate was
 reinforced when his coalition won 120 out of 128 seats for
 the National Constituent Assembly in July 1999.
 
 Nearly two years later, reactionary forces backed by the
 U.S. government and opposed to the process that Chavez's
 election has unleashed are gathering strength. At the same
 time, Chavez has called for the creation of "Bolivarian
 circles"--popular organizations to defend the revolution.
 
 For the last year, there have been persistent rumors of
 plots brewing in the Armed Forces to oust Chavez. At least
 since January, a series of "dirty tricks" bearing all the
 hallmarks of the CIA appear to be aimed at provoking
 elements within the Venezuelan Armed Forces to launch a
 coup.
 
 The Jan. 20 edition of the business-oriented magazine The
 Economist ran a small item called "Twist in the knickers."
 "Irritation was unconfined," it said, "when several
 commanders in Venezuela's armed forces recently received
 women's underwear through the post, along with pamphlets
 insinuating that this was all they were fit to wear because
 of their failure to overthrow the country's elected
 president."
 
 But Chavez's opponents don't confine themselves to
 sophomoric and sexist pranks.
 
 In a significant article in Venezuela's Revista Koeyu
 Latinoamericano, journalist Dr. Heinz Dietrich Steffan
 describes the growing coup winds in the country. He reports
 that one attempt was already made as Chavez returned from a
 21-day tour of Asia on June 3.
 
 "Three security cordons, cutting the lights and
 communication, and the deployment of special response units
 frustrated the plans of the plotters," he wrote. "But the
 conspiracy remains latent, and the date foreseen by the coup
 leaders for a new attempt runs from June 20 to July 5."
 
 Steffan bases his article on "multiple interviews with
 civilian, political and military sectors in the country."
 
 The anti-Chavez coalition, he writes, includes the remnants
 of the traditional big-business parties in Venezuela and
 receives support from counter-revolutionary Cubans based in
 Miami. One visible actor in the anti-Chavez mobilizations is
 Hernan Ricardo, a Venezuelan jailed with Cuban terrorist
 Orlando Bosch in the 1976 bombing of a Cuban civilian
 airliner that killed all 73 people aboard.
 
 Steffan notes the "recycling" by the Bush administration of
 some of the most notorious figures of the Reagan-Bush
 administrations. Otto Reich, Bush's nominee to the post of
 Assistant Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere, was
 the U.S. ambassador to Venezuela until 1989.
 
 The article identifies two interrelated tendencies within
 the anti-Chavez forces. One prefers the slow strangulation
 of the Venezuelan economy, hoping to diminish Chavez's
 popularity and avoid creating a martyr. Another is aiming at
 a more immediate attempt on the president.
 
 Four factors underlie the growing audacity of the anti-
 Chavez forces, Steffan writes: the lack of determined
 response by the forces supporting Chavez; the regroupment of
 the old Democratic Action (AD) and Social Christian (COPEI)
 party structures after their 1998 defeat; the growing
 animosity of the U.S. government; and the defection of some
 layers of Chavez's original Popular Pole coalition, in
 particular some elements of the Movement to Socialism (MAS)
 party.
 
 "A military disturbance, whether or not it fails on the
 battlefield, will always be to the political advantage of
 the destabilizers," Steffan writes.
 
 "Of course, the date and the plans of the conspiracy--like
 all of life--may change. One call from Washington,
 government preparations or logistical problems, among other
 factors, could modify the plans. Nevertheless, the threat of
 a coup is a real threat for the whole region."
 
 (Steffan's complete article, in Spanish, is reproduced at
 http://www.eurosur. org/ ebelion/sociales/
 venezuela240601.htm).
 
 Politically, right-wing sectors are trying to mobilize the
 petty bourgeois layers against the "Cubanization" of
 Venezuela, organizing rallies in front of the Cuban Embassy
 in Caracas. The official trade union leadership, with deep
 historical ties to the AD party, has allied itself with this
 right-wing mobilization.
 
 What is Washington saying? The U.S. State Department's Peter
 Romero said on June 5: "[Chavez] has the right to travel
 where he wants and to say what he wants, but what he says
 will have consequences in terms of U.S. perception."
 
 THE CHAVEZ 'THREAT'
 
 Why is the U.S. government aiming at destabilizing--and
 possibly overturning--the Chavez government?
 
 To date, the Chavez "peaceful revolution" has not
 transcended the bounds of bourgeois democracy. The old,
 corrupt ruling parties have been cleaned out of government--
 but they remain free to organize. Slavish, pro-U.S. history
 is being erased from school textbooks and curriculum--but
 the official Catholic Church is allowed to operate its own
 religious schools and to campaign against Chavez. The armed
 forces have been deployed on public works projects.
 
 In particular, the Chavez movement has not yet touched
 private property. The rich still own the main newspapers and
 media. U.S. investment is respected--and in fact courted.
 
 But in the sphere of foreign policy, Chavez has crossed a
 line. He has time and again defied the U.S.--a mortal sin
 for a leader of a country in the U.S. "sphere of influence."
 
 He has refused to allow his territory to be used as part of
 the "Plan Colombia" war against the Colombian insurgencies.
 He traveled to Iraq in defiance of the U.S.-orchestrated
 blockade. He has helped to revitalize OPEC, refusing to
 yield to U.S. demands to increase oil output and lower the
 price U.S. oil companies pay.
 
 Before Chavez assumed the presidency in 1999, Venezuela was
 the biggest oil exporter to the United States--ahead of all
 the Middle East oil powers. After one year, it had dropped
 to the fourth biggest.
 
 What the U.S. government fears most is that the process
 unleashed by Chavez's election will transcend the bounds of
 political reforms, and will pass over to a genuine socialist
 revolution. The Venezuelan masses, 80 percent living in
 poverty amid a sea of oil wealth, have concrete expectations
 that their social demands will be addressed.
 
 THE 'BOLIVARIAN CIRCLES'
 
 The April 16 New York Times reported that Chavez has talked
 of forming a "people's militia" of a million strong. The
 Venezuelan president made this more concrete in mid-June.
 
 On the second anniversary of the elections for the National
 Assembly, Chavez told assembly members that he would again
 launch a "Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement" (MBR). That was
 the name of the movement of mid-level officers he led that
 staged a popular uprising against the Venezuelan government
 in 1992.
 
 Key to the new MBR would be the formation of "Bolivarian
 circles": popular neighborhood-based organizations to defend
 the revolution. They are named for Simon Bolivar, the 19th
 Century Latin American who led the independence wars against
 Spain and advocated a united Latin American nation.
 
 MBR leader Guillermo Garcia Ponce described the circles in
 the June 4 edition of the Caracas-based El Universal: "The
 Bolivarian circles are the organized people in the
 neighborhoods, townships, projects, every place in
 Venezuela, in order to strengthen the revolutionary process,
 to bring the people into the activity of the government, to
 make participatory democracy effective, to carry out the
 Constitution and to defend it.
 
 "We have now finished with the electoral aims and the
 creation of a new [political] institution. We have now
 entered on a thrust toward the economy, toward social
 solutions. For that the greatest unity of political force is
 needed."
 
 On June 9, President Chavez spoke before a plenary meeting
 of over 1,000 delegates of the Communist Party of Venezuela,
   wearing a hammer-and-sickle pin on his trademark red
 beret. "In the revolutionary battle," he told them, "the
 most important thing is revolutionary organization. It is
 not the moment for grandeur, it is the moment for unity, for
 the offensive.
 
 "Let's smash the conspiracy and support the revolution--the
 slogan is exceedingly clear. That's the order of the day."
 
 The mark of a true revolutionary process is the dismantling
 of the old state apparatus--especially the armed forces,
 courts, and police--and the creation of a new one, one that
 reflects the masses of working people and organizes them to
 act in their own interests. That process was not carried
 through in Salvador Allende's Chile of 1973--and a potential
 revolution was drowned in blood by a U.S.-backed coup.
 
 In the face of U.S.-backed efforts to destabilize the
 incipient Venezuelan revolution, this is the most urgent
 task. The anti-war and progressive movement in the United
 States needs to be on the highest alert to defend the
 Venezuelan people's right to build their own future.
 
 - END -