The Real Venezuela: Making Socialism in the 21st Century

By Iain Bruce

Venezuela has become a huge source of hope and inspiration for the Left throughout the world. Some see it as a shining example of how to begin building a successful socialist state, but Western leaders see it as a dangerous enemy and accuse Chávez of being a dictator. This book reveals the truth by examining the country from the ground up.

Iain Bruce explores the political changes underway in Venezuela at the level of the lives of ordinary people. Through grassroots investigations and extended interviews, he explores a series of key transformations in Venezuela: a new social economy around a network of co-operatives; workplace democracy; popular education; radical agrarian reform; participatory budgets and community planning. The result is a clear picture of everyday life in Venezuela.

No other book on the country has this level of detail; it will be a key text for students of Latin American politics and social movements and of interest to anyone following the fortunes of the Bolivarian Revolution.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Release date: Dec 20, 2008
• ISBN: 9781783715978

Iain Bruce

Iain Bruce is a British journalist and filmmaker who has made documentaries for Channel 4 and the BBC. During 2004 and 2005 he was BBC correspondent in Caracas, Venezuela. Currently he is an adviser to Telesur, the Latin American news channel based in Venezuela. He is the author of The Real Venezuela (Pluto, 2008) and The Porto Alegre Alternative: Direct Democracy in Action (Pluto, 2004).

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THE REAL VENEZUELA

The Real Venezuela

Making Socialism in the Twenty-first

Century

Iain Bruce

First published 2008 by Pluto Press

345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA

www.plutobooks.com

Copyright © Iain Bruce 2008

The right of Iain Bruce to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7453 2737 2 Hardback

ISBN 978 0 7453 2736 5 Paperback

ISBN 978 1 7837 1597 8 ePub

ISBN 978 1 7837 1598 5 Mobi

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin. The paper may contain up to 70% post consumer waste.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Designed and produced for Pluto Press by

Curran Publishing Services, Norwich

Printed and bound in the European Union by

CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

This book is dedicated to Sofia Lashley, Marta Garcia, Maria Herrera and the many thousands of women, in the barrios and countryside of Venezuela, who have been the backbone of the Bolivarian experience. If socialism means anything in the twenty-first century, it will carry their seal.

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It is impossible to thank by name all the people who made this book possible. In every place and in every sphere, dozens and dozens have gone out of their way to help. But some it is impossible not to name – their efforts went so far beyond anything I had the right to expect. At ALCASA, Marivit Lopez and Edgar Caldera took me under their wing, opened doors, and organised logistics; mayors Julio Chavez and Rosa Leon and their respective staff, in Carora and La Victoria, did the same – a special thank you for the hospitality given to me there. Jesus Ayala of the Urban Land Office gave up days to accompany me up and down the ranchos of Carapita. In Santo Domingo and Caracas, the unlimited generosity and friendship of Adele Williams, Claudia Jardim and Jorge Silva gave me both the space and the support to research and to write. Similarly, Carol Delgado and Greg Wilpert have been endlessly available to answer my many irritating questions. Finally, I want to thank my son, David, for patiently traipsing after me from one end of Venezuela to the other, sitting without complaint through hour after hour of interviews; and above all, my partner, Maria Esperanza Sanchez. She not only put up with my obsessions over the last two years, she both encouraged them and scrutinised them, demanding clarification and justification where these were long overdue. She is not responsible for the contents of this book. But without her contribution, it would be a lot worse.

Iain Bruce

VENEZUELA COUNTRY FACTS

Population

27.7 million (2007, UN estimate)

This makes Venezuela the fifth most populous country in Latin America, after Brazil, Mexico, Colombia and Argentina.

At a bit over half a million, the indigenous population is only slightly larger than it was when the Spanish invaded at the end of the fifteenth century. It includes large, developed communities in the western, Andean highlands, as well as the almost totally quarantined and un-assimilated Yanomami in the southern Amazonian rainforest.

Venezuela had few large colonial plantations, so there are few black communities of almost exclusively African ancestry. The great majority of the Venezuelan people are of mixed ancestry, mostly African and indigenous, with a smaller European component. This is the overwhelming character of the ‘Bolivarian’ people that feature in this book.

Venezuela is almost the only country in Latin America to have experienced sizeable European immigration in the second half of the twentieth century. Poor white families, mainly from Spain, Portugal and Italy, came to make their fortune, drawn by Venezuela’s oil wealth. They became the backbone of the country’s burgeoning middle class. The latent racism in some of these sections of the population became a particularly ugly aspect of the anti-Chavez opposition.

Geography

Total land area: 882,050 square kilometres

Just over twice the size of California, and nearly a third larger than France, Venezuela includes everything from Caribbean coastline to high Andean peaks, from the cattle ranches of the vast central plains to dense Amazonian rainforest and the hauntingly beautiful savannah and table-top mountains of the Gran Sabana. It has land borders of over 2,000 kms each with Colombia and Brazil, and of almost 800 kms with Guyana, but the latter two are scarcely inhabited.

It has abundant mineral resources (oil, gas, coal, bauxite, iron ore, gold, diamonds), as well as water (80 per cent of domestic electricity comes from large hydroelectric plants on the Caroní river in south-east Venezuela) and high-quality agricultural land. However, less than a third of Venezuela’s 2.85 per cent of ‘arable’ land is cultivated, and that arable area could arguably be greatly extended by reducing the large landholdings given over to cattle or left idle, and by making moderate investments in irrigation, etc.

Economy

Non-oil exports

Aluminium and bauxite, steel, cement, agricultural commodities. (The government’s demands that more be sold domestically was one issue feeding into the nationalisations of steel and cement plants in April 2008.)

Soaring international oil prices, and the highly political disputes over oil statistics, mean Venezuela’s economic indicators have been hard to pin down in recent years.

Oil

Since the 1920s Venezuela’s economy has depended massively on oil, which in 2007 represented:

NB: These numbers do not account for the fact that much of the rest of the economy – e.g. banking – essentially ‘services’ oil or redistributes the revenue from oil.

For almost three decades, until 1970, Venezuela was the world’s biggest oil exporter. In recent years, Venezuela’s position in the world oil industry has been described as:

The Venezuelan government claims it has the largest oil reserves in the world, including the estimated 130 to 270 billion barrels of super-heavy crude in the Orinoco Belt, currently classified as ‘non-conventional’ oil and not included in OPEC figures. Figures below are from OPEC’s 2006 annual statistics and PDVSA:

In 2005, before the government retook majority control of its various agreements with foreign oil companies, Venezuela’s oil production split roughly as follows:

VENEZUELA’S RECENT HISTORY: A BRIEF TIMELINE

VENEZUELA

ACRONYMS AND OTHER TERMS

INTRODUCTION

SNAPSHOT 1: PORTO ALEGRE, SOUTHERN BRAZIL, 30 JANUARY 2005

It was back in January 2005 that President Hugo Chavez first announced that the goal was socialism. I was there, along with 13,000 others, in the Gigantinho sports hall in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre. Another 5,000 were watching on a giant screen outside. It was a moment that spoke volumes about Latin America’s growing movement against neoliberal globalisation, and about Venezuela’s special part in it.

It had been one of Porto Alegre’s hottest summers on record. Dripping in perspiration, we’d already been waiting hours for the Venezuelan leader to turn up to this final session of the Fifth World Social Forum. But the political temperature was even hotter. People had high expectations of Chavez. And most of them expected something very different from Brazil’s President Lula. Three days earlier, Lula had been booed in the same hall at the beginning of this annual gathering of the global justice movement. As the best known leader of the Brazilian Workers’ Party, Lula had been one of the stars of the previous Forums in Porto Alegre. For 15 years or more, he and his party had been just about the brightest beacon around for the left in Latin America, even worldwide. But now, exactly two years into his first term as the country’s first working-class president, many of Lula’s former supporters were disappointed and angry. They felt betrayed by his refusal to break with the shibboleths of neoliberal economic policy – what in Latin America had become known as the Washington Consensus.

In fact, on just about every one of the big themes developed by the global justice movement and the World Social Forums since Seattle, the Lula government had gone backwards. He’d kept interest rates and the budget surplus painfully high to service the national debt. He’d squeezed public spending and pushed through a reform of pension rights. Further market-friendly reforms were at different stages of preparation or completion. He’d lifted a ban on the planting of genetically modified soya by large-scale agribusiness, but made little progress in redistributing land to poor peasants and landless workers. He’d struck deals left, right and centre with the Brazilian political establishment to ensure support in Congress – although the full extent of the political corruption surrounding some of these deals only began to come to light a few months later. Perhaps most humiliating of all, his government had been repeatedly praised by the US Treasury and the State Department, the Wall Street Journal and the Economist, by Tony Blair, Condoleezza Rice and even Donald Rumsfeld, as a responsible and moderating influence in the region. And to prove it Lula had sent Brazilian troops to support an international military intervention in Haiti.

President Chavez, it seemed, was different – although it hadn’t always been that way. A former colonel in the parachute regiment, he had led a failed coup attempt in 1992, spent two years in prison, and then won a decisive victory in presidential elections in December 1998 on a rather moderate, nationalist programme. After the oil boom of the 1970s, Venezuela had been suffering from a long but deep slide towards poverty. A turn to neoliberal austerity policies in 1989 had triggered an uprising – the Caracazo – that was bloodily put down. The country’s two-party system of controlled, representative democracy, initiated with the Punto Fijo pact of 1958 and often presented as the most stable in Latin America, had all but collapsed in a heap of corruption and ineptitude.

Chavez promised a new start. He even called it a Bolivarian revolution. But it didn’t look like a very radical one. The emphasis was on a thorough overhaul of the old, corrupt political system, as well as on education, national sovereignty and Latin American integration – all themes that went down well enough with Venezuela’s disenchanted middle classes, who had voted for him en masse. It was only when Chavez really did call a constituent assembly to rewrite the constitution, began to curb the old elite’s exclusive control of the oil industry and institutions like the Supreme Court, and introduced legislation on land reform that Venezuela’s conservative establishment really smelt a rat, and began to draw most of the middle class back into its orbit.

Initially, this sharpening polarisation had had little impact outside the country. During his first three years in office, Hugo Chavez’ government had stirred only a lukewarm response around the region. His military background was anathema to most of the left in Latin America, and in Europe and North America too. And anyway, Venezuela was a country where ‘nothing much ever happened’. This attitude had begun to change,