Venezuela: the death of the "process", the weight of the warlord
By Rafael Uzcátegui


On the last February 15 Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez won the approval, through an election process, of a constitutional amendment that allows indefinite re-election to all government officials in popular vote public offices.
This result gives different readings. The most obvious is the remaining of a heavy polarization in the country around the figure of the president, whose vote margin percentages have remained relatively stable in recent years. According to official figures of the CNE (National Electoral Council), 54.85% of voters supported the proposal, while the 45.14% of them rejected it, and there was an abstention rate of 29.67% of voters.

One of the most important consequences of these results, from a perspective that gives priority to the ground social movements as engines of change, is the consolidation of the one-man leadership of Hugo Chavez within the Venezuelan bolivarianismo; against the "protagonist and participatory" democracy itself, that was stated by the government to be the main core of the "twenty-first century socialism".
While for many has been clear from the beginning of that process the revitalization of the leader figure (without which it can’t be understandable the history of the Caribbean country) and the gradual concentration of power at the vertex of the government; some have explained what happened in Venezuela as the emergence of popular groups and various actors who, supporting the leadership of the President Chavez, builds a wall of containment “against the right wing and the imperialism" in the construction of a socialist project.
In this description, some pro-government intellectuals have come to say that Chavez share concepts with the altermundismo, or anti-globalization. A "movement of movements".

It is true that the bureaucratic replacement occurred in Venezuela in 1998 (first year of the election victory of Chavez, the unknown lieutenant colonel who staged a coup d’état in1992), engaged many of the activists and social movements that participate in the events of the Caracazo (febreruary1989), whose pressure achieved the necessary ungovernability to undermine the second presidency of Carlos Andrés Pérez (1989-1993).
This oxygenation of the state did promote, from the desks, the impulse to different experiences that were subsidized by the oil income, and that are display as the sample of the alleged conversion occurred in the country.
The streets rejection to the coup d’état seditions in 2002 were carried out by unknown actors: different mass media of community kind, co-negotiate processes of production, people's organizations in the struggle for housing, access to potable water and electricity… among others.
This power of movement was diligently channelled by the managers of the state, securing votes for the "Commander" in successive elections and postponing to a later, which never arrived, their own demands and grievances.






Seven years later the picture is considerably different.
This bunch of initiatives, taking almost without questioning its role in the social polarization of the country, it’s suffering the consequences that were built largely by the cult of personality.
In 2007 the President political priority was the adoption of an amendment to the Constitution of the country, to give it a socialist direction, whose articles were written by a committee whose work of months was maintained in the strictest secrecy. This list of norms, which hypothetically announce the guidelines of the Bolivarian socialism, it was only known by his followers and the rest of the country during his promotional campaign, and these actions of proselytise were euphemistically called "consultations" to promote the illusion that they had been legitimized by the base. The results of these elections, which resulted in the rejection of the constitutional reform, confirmed one of the criticisms made by the anarchists:
In Venezuela there is no revolution or social conscience. There is a Chavismo, which is not same.

The so-called Bolivarian "participatory and protagonist democracy" promoted by their leaders, suffered another setback with the formation of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), for which the president himself asked his followers to dissolve their structures, collectives and trade unions to join the new formation.
Historical organizations, including the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV), discussed what they never did before, disappear by "own initiative".
For the elections of mayors and governors in December 2008, the PSUV launches their “official” list of candidates of the Chavez movement, and the two organizations that resisted the assimilation, Partido Patria Para Todos (PPT) and the PCV itself, launched their own candidacy in regions where they had impact.
This "dissident chavismo," as it was known by the media, attracted more hatred from the official bolivarianismo than the candidates of the reactionary opposition. The president himself, as head of the campaign throughout the country, did not save adjectives against anyone that show any contempt to the line of the PSUV; and urge, like he never did with the candidates from the opposing side, “to turn them into cosmic dust” and be "removed from the political map" (sic).
If the victory of the "dissident chavismo," fuel the diminished ideological discussion within the Bolivarian field and legitimized the existence of trends and nuances, the bellicose attitude of Hugo Chávez exemplified the answer would going to get those who, even if shyly, try to shine with their own light.
The cards were marked: the dissidents electorally got appalled and opponents did win 5 of the 22 governorates of the country, curiously, the ones with the largest population.












After the regional elections, the country believed it was time to worry about the high levels of personal insecurity and inflation, or the local consequences of a global economic crisis. However, political priorities were decreed from the top level.
President Chavez was then and again promoting a constitutional amendment that, until November 24, 2008, was not included in the demanding agenda of any component of the Bolivarian universe. Once again, people's organizations aligned with Chavez mortgaging for a later time their own claims to join the electoral mobilizations.
The victory of the Yes on the amendment reinvigorates the leadership of President Chavez within their ranks, setting in the facts that the "Bolivarian process" is a movement of a single man.

Venezuela faces a cloudy 2009 in the economic sphere. The national budget provides for the oil, the country main export, an average price of $ 60 per barrel; an optimistic estimate that ignores the global contraction of oil, which by the time of writing this article, it was estimated to be less than $ 40.
Gone are the days when President Chavez had the political control of all institutions by the hand of the greater economic prosperity of the country. If in that golden age he was unable to make structural changes and increase significantly, away from his
myth mania propaganda, the quality of living of the population; the real change looks much farther now when the fireworks of their own revolutionary movement is deflated, when he have to share spaces of local power with his opponents and when the diminished oil revenues will not allow him, as it use to, to have a large capacity of maneuver and the establishment of strong patronage networks within and outside the country.
Moreover, if all statements about the culture of the Venezuelan people are true, his high-motivation to work in the short term and his reluctance of the sustained efforts over the time; one might argue that the entire popular energy of early years has squandered and perverted within time, and that, as the campaign for constitutional amendment suggests, the State needs to invest more money in the mobilization of their support bases.

The previous economic crisis, visible in the so-called black Friday of 1983, undermined the foundations of the “take turns” pact and governance generated in 1958 after the fall of Dictator Marcos Perez Jimenez.
If any positive trends can be developed with a new recession, these are the rupture of the false social consensus and the policy of spectacle subsidized by the dance of the petrodollars. This should catalyze the autonomous and belligerent capacity of the downtrodden and oppressed of any sign in Venezuela, as well as the mobilization against all and every one of his enemies.
At least, this is the bet of the anarchists: to foster grassroots movements with horizontal solidarity independents from power and parties, and setting a shortcut alternative to the intra-bourgeois confrontation- the boliburguesía (the new bolivarian bourgeoisie in power) and the stale bourgeoisie displaced- that has marked the Venezuelan history in the last decade.

Translation: Julio Pacheco