Fw: VENEZUELA STARTS LAND REFORM, ENDS TIES TO U.S. MILITARY

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

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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Sept. 27, 2001
issue of Workers World newspaper
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VENEZUELA STARTS LAND REFORM, ENDS TIES TO U.S. MILITARY

By Andy McInerney

On Sept. 4, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez announced a new
land law to favor poor farmers. According to a 1998
government census, 60 percent of Venezuela's arable land is
owned by 1 percent of the population. Close to 10 million
out of 11.5 million hectares of land distributed in a 1961
land reform had "somehow," in the words of a Sept. 4
Associated Press dispatch, "ended up in the hands of large
plantation owners."

According to the new land law, the government would
immediately expropriate idle land from big absentee
landowners.

Chavez also announced plans to pull government funds from
private banks found to engage in currency speculation. "I
don't want to do that because more than one bank would
disappear. In large part they live off this blood," the
Venezuelan president declared.

Both of these moves strike deep at the heart of the
traditional economic elite. They are signs that the process
unleashed by Chavez's election is beginning to spill over
the borders of a political revolution into a genuine process
of social transformation. Private property is standing in
the way of that transformation.

The base of Chavez's support is the 80 percent of
Venezuelans living in poverty. Millions of Venezuelans have
never seen benefits from the oil wealth that has made the
country's tiny economic elite fabulously rich.

MASS ORGANIZATIONS SET UP TO DEFEND REVOLUTION

In late spring, the Chavez government announced plans for
the creation of "Bolivarian circles," popular mass
organizations set up to defend the revolution. They take
their name from Simón Bolívar, the great leader of Latin
America's wars for independence from Spain and a revered
symbol of Latin American unity and anti-imperialism.

The move toward creating the Bolivarian circles coincided
with what Guillermo Garcia Ponce, a leader of the Bolivarian
Revolutionary Movement, called in June "a thrust toward the
economy, toward social solutions."

Key to the success of that process, though, is the
mobilization of the Venezuelan workers and peasants,
organized and unorganized, employed and unemployed. The
Bolivarian circles are a move in that direction, although on
a popular, not a class basis.

Another move of vital importance to the success of the
Venezuelan revolutionary process is taking place in the
trade unions. The traditional Venezuelan Confederation of
Workers (CTV) is deeply tied to the old and corrupt
political elite, especially the Democratic Action (AD)
party.

A December popular referendum mandated new elections on Oct.
25 for the union federation. A new movement, the Bolivarian
Workers Front, is waging a strong challenge for the
leadership. Its candidate, Aristobulo Isturiz, is leading in
preliminary polls.

Isturiz won the mayoral election in Caracas in 1993
representing the Causa R party, a union-based communist
party. He is now a leader in the Homeland for All (PPT)
party, one of the leftist parties in Chavez's coalition.

"We urgently need a powerful political and revolutionary
labor movement that is unified in the street defending the
revolution--pushing it forward, controlling it, watching
over it," Chavez told a union rally on Sept. 2.

U.S. MILITARY MISSION SENT PACKING

Chavez was elected in December 1998 with mass popular
support, promising a "peaceful revolution" against the U.S.-
backed Venezuelan elite that had run the country for
decades. Since his election, he has steered the country out
of the orbit of the U.S. towards an anti-imperialist foreign
policy.

Ties with revolutionary Cuba have grown substantially.
Venezuela is now Cuba's largest source of foreign oil,
amounting to 30 percent of Cuba's supply. Chavez and Cuban
President Fidel Castro frequently make joint appearances and
announcements.

In 2000, Chavez became the first head of state to visit Iraq
since the U.S.-led Gulf War. The visit was seen as a
challenge to the U.S. economic sanctions that have cost the
lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians.

And the Venezuelan president has challenged U.S. military
designs in Latin America. Early in his tenure he refused
U.S. military flights over Venezuelan territory aimed at
neighboring Colombia.

In August, the Venezuelan government evicted a U.S. military
mission from a Venezuelan base in the capital city of
Caracas.

That move was followed by a Sept. 5 announcement by
Venezuelan Foreign Minister Vicente Rangel that Venezuela
would not renew a 1951 military cooperation agreement
between the U.S. and Venezuela.

The Venezuelan leaders must certainly know that U.S.
military missions have been the vehicle for counter-
revolutionary activity in countries like Chile and Indonesia
in the past. They have helped organize fascistic military
coups that slaughtered the progressive forces. In Venezuela,
several coup attempts had already been reported in recent
months.

Military leaders in both the U.S. and Venezuela sought to
minimize the impact of the recent moves. But the signal was
clear, and elicited howls from the remnants of the rabidly
pro-Washington former Venezuelan ruling elite. That elite
still exercise tremendous influence over Venezuela's largest
press.

The Chavez government's foreign policy initiatives are a
reflection of the deepening revolutionary process underway
within Venezuela, an industrialized country of 23 million
people and a major world oil exporter.

As the process underway in Venezuela deepens--as it
consolidates the support of the working classes and as it
encroaches on the property of the U.S.-backed elite--so
grows the prospect for an open struggle between Chavez's
"Bolivarian revolution" and the old ruling classes.

Venezuelan workers can take heart in the fact that their
revolution has ignited mass support across Latin America.
Their movement is politically nourished by the neighboring
Colombian revolutionary movement, which serves as a
continent-wide example for struggle. It is part of a new
wave of resistance that is sweeping every corner of Latin
America.

How will this resistance be affected by the bellicose
climate in Washington since the attacks on the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon?

"Today's newspaper headlines are announcing the first war of
the 21st Century," Chavez said at a Sept. 14 speech in
Merida, a western state in Venezuela. "Let's hope, by God,
not. Let's ask that any measures taken not provoke a war
between brother peoples."

Chavez's plea for a "mature" and "objective" response was a
rebuke to U.S. President George Bush's call for governments
around the world to line up behind the Pentagon's war moves.
U.S. Secretary of State Gen. Colin Powell warned that
support for U.S. war moves--or lack thereof--would be a "new
way of measuring the relationship" between governments and
U.S. imperialism.

Bush and Powell will certainly try to use the current war
crisis to isolate Chavez, the process he is leading, as well
as all the revolutionary struggles in Latin America. It will
be up to the progressive and anti-war movement in the United
States, despite tremendous challenges, to break that
isolation in the coming period.

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