NEITHER DICTATORSHIP NOR REVOLUTION
Domingo Alberto Rangel

If you hear to people of the party Primero Justicia, they will get to think that Venezuela lives under a cruel dictatorship. The same sensation will feel if it stops to listen the merchants of the party Proyecto Venezuela. More discreet, the copeyanos speak of the abuses of the Government. And still more discreet, the adecos reproach to the government of Chávez their Advantage or its excesses. In front of this picture of reactions so varied between the opponents, anyone it would have right to ask itself if the government of Chávez is or it is not a dictatorship, or if bullshit is hardly arbitrary to the way of those that take advantage of their advantages to perpetrate some abuse.

This government of Hugo Chávez is loafer or funny, but he is not dictatorial. It has the barracks abuses that are characteristic in the Latin American military. But it is not and it will be never a dictatorship. The leaders of Primero Justicia, most similar to those gentlemen that call the French "vert gallant", would have to ask to him Pompeyo Marquez, now near them, what thing is a dictatorship. Then Pompeyo Marquez would say to them that a dictatorship is a regime without habeas corpus, without shelter resources, without Parliament for the investigations nor presses for the denunciations and where the political prisoners spend years whole, in interminable succession, without nobody can visit them at least to alleviate to them to the average nights of solitude or the half days of sadness. That is a small dictatorship. Who says that in the Venezuela of today the dictatorship reigns or is mentally ill a mental one or does not know to catalogue the political regimes.

They want to know the dictatorship?
In order to illustrate to the dandies of the Coordinadora Democratica I will say to them that in a dictatorship, like which I fought and suffered now and speak in first person because moral authority exceeds to me, the jails count me per years. I fell imprisoned in April of 1950, one night thick illuminated only by the lightning of the Catatumbo, and left in January of 1954. Throughout the year of 1951 I was undergoing a regime of solitary confinement in a bend of the Prison of San Juan de los Morros, that the common prisoners called the "Sing-Sing". Then I was put under in military opinion, but never I saw the judge of the process nor had defender or prosecutor. All that happened under the government of two I illustrate the military: Thin Carlos Chalbaud and Marcos Perez Jiménez.

Years later, between 1963 and 1966, I returned to the jail and I did not have judgment either, I never saw the judge of the cause, if it is that this one existed, and I had patience to support that republican farce. I must say that in my two long prisons, altogether near eight years, I did not receive the solidarity of a single newspaper, was no journalist that goes to visit to me or sent a slip of paper of consolation or breath to me and what he is more serious, between great existing newspapers at those times, no demonstrated to the smaller affection or charity towards those who we could in the jails.

It is that when there is a dictatorship, all, except a handful, know to put their horse armor in soaking. Chávez and his is idiot, but not mercenary. Here mask of disguised clowns, merchants of the leaders.

The chavista revolution
The Bolivarian revolution is a complete swindle. We could say that in the Venezuela of today there is no a dictatorship, but less, much less, there is a revolution. A revolution does not take the name of no leader because a revolution is something innovating like anything. And less of leader as preservative as it was Simón Bolivar. Bolivarian revolution is a contradiction in its own terms, is like speaking of the hot ice or the frozen fire. The revolutions take control of highest doses of violence because they are ruptures of the social order, insurgencies of the dark mass that, armed and solved, devastates yet. A revolution is violent or it is not revolution.

To speak of pacific revolution is already to confess one funny, to surround a contraband bad lucking with an honorable pavilion. It is to be a dork. I am not making Gallic of dogmatism or sectarianism. Hardly elementary concepts of political science. From Hugo Grocio, in the dawn of the Modern Age, a process of social rebellion, of armed insurgency is understood by revolution in which the mass demotes to the dominant classes, it snatches his properties, it dissolves the military apparatus to them and it restores a new social ordering. These concepts are not exclusive of Marx, Lenin, Mao or Fidel Castro. You consult the thought of Oliverio Cromwell or Maximiliano Robespierre, bourgeois personages both, creators of insurgencies that they looked for to establish the capitalist regime and they will see that in anything they differ of whatever I am maintaining. To speak of pacific revolution since Chávez and its acolytes do, is a tacit confession of fiendish trick and is something worse, to take to the others by stupid idiot.

Not even anti-imperialist
This regime not even is anti-imperialist. The newspaper El Libertario, the only thing that survives in the UCV with brave and the horizontal of other times because the others are all rotten one, publishes the list of Yankee, English, French, Spanish and Brazilian the companies oil that have received here concessions able to be shine al very same Juan Vicente Gomez.

Nobody, from the death of the meritorious one, has been so conditional and generous, so prodigal and so friendly with oil imperialism like Hugo Chávez. But Chávez is so vivacious that, after pleasing to trust North American until astonishing to the same father of George W. Bush, it releases an anti-imperialist speech. Chávez is a devout one that pronounces an atheistic speech in the doors of a cathedral, a alien that speech of human rights, a smuggler with a decorated affluent flag.

Here there is not dictatorship, as they maintain the stupidity of the Primero Justicia party, but is revolution either. We have a regime demagogue and means nasty, are everything.

> GLOBALIZATION TO PASSAGE OF WINNERS
Rafael Uzcátegui

In our country the agenda of the movement is fulfilled antiglobalization by those who before the world says leaders of the fight against the neoliberalism. When Chávez and the rest of their civil employees make incendiary proclamations against the "Empire" and the "Neoliberalism", to the few days they sign generous contracts with directors of multinationals. In a Caribbean country called Venezuela, the coherence between which it says and what it becomes surpasses the revelations of Ripley. The 27 of February of 1989 the first scrambled one of spread against the application of the neoliberalism policies was made in Venezuela. That was not product of the chance, was the result of an increasing conscience between ample layers of the population that a way to order the society was arriving at its aim. That went a rejection to the results of the friendship agreement and governability made between the political parties of the status, the Armed Forces and the Church made specific in the call Pacto de Punto Fijo, after the fall of the dictatorship of Marcos Perez Jiménez in 1958. The democratic formalities could sustain during four decades thanks to the operation of the wealth of the country and the restoration of networks friendship between the governing party and the rest of the population. The promise "to seed petroleum" only served to fatten the pockets of minority sectors of the nation.

Chávez managed to capitalize those yearnings of change of the Venezuelan society to its favor, being elect president with a heavy margin from the electorate who endorsed in him a "check in target" to remove above from the unfortunate bipartisanism of Accion Democratica and COPEI. In spite of its military origin and its leftwing speech, its millionaire electoral campaign was paid for by local and international capitalist sectors that saw in him, the opportunity to assure the governability and to continue its businesses in the territory. They were not mistaken in its prognoses. After five years of government the chavismo has declared him a war without quarter to the traditional sectors of the Venezuelan bourgeoisie - Fedecamaras -, recovering the agendas of the social movements agglutinated to his around to wear away them in rounds of shade against the ghosts of the puntofijismo. Next to this, the mediatic amplification of the most preservative sectors of the country and its reiterating - and more and more solitary -, called to the coup d'etat have served the government to distract the attention of the true problems of the country and to disguise the millionaire businesses done by the multinational companies in Venezuela, contracts that, and this have to a separate analysis, has been viable by the disarticulation of good part of the qualitative hardened a soldier to fire social movement and quantitatively after the experience of the "Caracazo".

The true "foreign intervention"
Ample sectors of the Venezuelan and world-wide left have been represented by the fluid and generous verb of Chávez commander, verbal his top guy and his repetition of the common places of the own revolutionary speech of the Cold War. It is pitiful speech supposedly "critics" in the world have been let enchant by the songs of siren of the self-appointed "Bolivarian Revolution", whereas in the reality - small detail anticipated by the Hugo rhetoric Rafael Chávez has not deepened the relation of Venezuela with the economics tendencies of the globalization to the Latin American nation in its paper of safe supplier of energy and resources to the buyers of the first world, beginning of course with the United States. While the project of country of the "left-handed person of Sabaneta" is a question mark, the denominated "Process" needs ample flows of foreign investment to pay for the millionaire programs Populists and friendship relation that assures their permanence in the power. We understand that these words are impossible to understand for those who have believed without the fiction of a revolution in Venezuela. We enumerated data, completely verifiable by the peculiar ones in the subject, of how the economic Globalization advances to passage of winners in the today key sectors of the world-wide economy.

Petroleum
Although the state petroleum company appears like "the New Pdvsa", their deals do not differ substantially from the strategy assumed by previous administrations, which assured in the best terms for the masters of the North the hydrocarbon flow. Not even during the last war of Iraq, when some social sectors of the country suggested their cease like measurement of protest by the invasion, the petroleum spurt let provide to the ports with the Uncle Sam. This way Alí Rodriguez Araque, president of the state petroleum company, announced that according to numbers confirmed by the Department of Commerce of the United States in the year 2003 PDVSA were the second world-wide company in positioning of crude in the U.S.A. This means more than 47 million sold barrels of crude Venezuelan to the United States, with a value of thousand 333 million dollars. Venezuela is and will be a reliable supplier of energy for its main buyer. The sentence comes from the own Chávez which declared 9 of March the past "we do not have nor picks to damage it - the relation with the USA -, in 5 years we have been supplying of constant and safe way, every day of those 365 years from petroleum to the United States". The individual of this declaration is that it takes place 9 days after, presiding over a "anti-imperialist march" (worthy of Ripley, we repeated) the same Chávez affirmed the opposite: "Mr. Bush Must know who if it happens oneself to him madness (...) to invade to Venezuela (...) knows the town of the United States that lamentably nor a drop of petroleum will arrive to them from Venezuela". According to the informed bulletin of the own Pdvsa, "Outstanding personalities of the Department of Energy and the Agency of Power Information, as well as of the Corporation for the Private Investment the International, Exim Bank, World Bank, IFC, International Monetary Fund, Inter-American Development Bank and advisory companies of governmental organisms, investors and industrialists received, with noticeable interest, information of first hand on the operational, commercial and financial present time of PDVSA, as well as on their direction of businesses towards the medium term". The search of foreign investment has shown its fruits. Shell and Exxon Mobil will participate in the projects of crude operation and exploration of heavy that are in Petroliferous Faja of the Orinoco where the greater concentration of resources of the hemisphere exists, because reserves of 275 billion barrels are considered. Petroleum of Venezuela and the Italian company ENI (Ente Nazionale Indrocarburi) subscribed an understanding memorandum to develop and to operate outposts of extra-heavy crude gas and technologies processing.

Gas
Minister of Energy and Minas Rafael Ramirez announced that Venezuela will begin to place natural gas in the American market in 2008, like part of his plans to fortify his image of "reliable power source". In order to fulfill the objective the present gas production of 7 billion cubical feet to the day will be increased in 60%. This way the projects in march by Pdvsa are the following ones: Jose 250 (450 million $), Gas Anaco, Gasoducto of Guajira (255 million $) in the Colombia-Venezuela Interconnection; ICO (510 million $), Group Yucal Trio to please (TotalFinalElf, Repsol, Inepetrol, Otepi), investments considered in 400 million $ and Repsol-Area Ravines (225 million $). Between the investments opportunities count, among others, the Project Marshal Sucre. Deltana Platform: Chevron-Texaco received the concession to make workings of exploration and gas operation in the third block of the Platform Deltana, area located in the bordering marine areas with Trinidad and Tobago with reserves considered in 38 trillions of cubical natural gas feet. Ramirez informed that the Chevron will initiate in June of 2004 the perforations with a considered investment of 170 million dollars. The company has three of the five segments of the Deltana Platform and in its operation Pdvsa will work along with and the international partnerships British Petroleum, Totalfinalelf and Statoil, which according to the estimations began to produce the gas as of the 2009.

Project Gas Anaco: Pdvsa received from the Society General and ING. Bank an additional loan of 125 million dollars for the financing of the project Gas Anaco. The same one was contracted under favorable terms by means of Citibank like bank leader of the union, amortizable every six months, in a lapse of five years and to an interest rate of around 1, 72%.

Marshal Sucre: Venezuela will sign an agreement with the Anglo-Dutch giant Royal Dutch/Shell to develop natural the gas project liquefied (GNL) Marshal Sucre. Royal Dutch/Shell would head the development of Marshal Sucre, a project of 2.7 milliards of dollars that includes perforation outside coast for natural gas extraction, a liquefied natural gas pipe line and plant in the Peninsula of Pariah to the east of the country. On the other hand, Pdvsa, Shell and Mitsubishi, reaffirmed the commitments subscribed in November of 2002 for this project.

Petrochemical
Pequiven - filial of Pdvsa- and Exxon Mobil they project to construct a plant of oleo fines altogether - raw material for the industry of plastic-in the industrial complex of Jose, Anzoátegui state. According to commentaries of the authorities of the MEM so project will become the angular stone of the development plan of the national petrochemical sector, creating 200,000 jobs in a lapse of between four and five years. The global investment to carry out the development ascends to 2.65 milliards of dollars and will have like objective to feed the market of the national and international plastic, reaching according to the projections annual productions of 1 million tons of ethylene, 780,000 tons of polyethylene’s and 400,000 tons of glycols. In year 2000 the company/signature in the agreement for the construction of the plant of olefins announced. The execution chronogram underwent a delay due to the process of fusion of the oil Americans Exxon and Mobil. In order to initiate the project it was needed to be able 60% of the resources by interval of international the banking financing, approximately 1.5 milliards of dollars. After as much time, according to the valuation of the economic magazine Venezuelan Quantum (paradoxically of pro-government tendency), "the concretion of this project could interpret like the intention of the Ministry of Energy and Mines" to compensate "to Exxon Mobil, after it to have disqualified like partner of natural the gas project liquefied Marshal Sucre, and after this company decided not to actively participate in the licitation of the areas for the exploration and advantage of natural gas reserves the existing in the Deltana Platform".
Coal
The 13 of November of the 2003 Hugo Chávez announced the elevation of the coal production in the state Zulia to 36 million metric tons, a decision framed in the call project "America Port", a work valued in 60 million dollars nailed in the Island of San Bernardo, big port key by their strategic proximity to the Southeastern of the United States. The production of the mineral has as destiny to the multinational companies of the Anglo coal American, RAG Coal, Take, Excel and Anti-American Coal. The announcement makes deaf ears of the repeated denunciations on the contamination, the ecological devastation and the presence of diseases product of the carboniferous industry of the region.

Telecommunications
According to preliminary estimations of Product Intern Brute (PIB) presented/displayed by the Central bank of Venezuela, the sector of the Telecommunications registered to the 2003 closing a growth of the 1.9%, locating to the sector in the greater rank of positive variations with respect to the rest of the activities. The activity communications as opposed to demonstrated a fast recovery the difficulties presented/displayed at the beginning of the 2003; in the last registering quarterly of the year a growth of 4.6% with relation to the same period of 2002. It will be necessary to remember that the main companies of the sector are multinational like Telcel Bellsouth?

External debt
In spite of being one of the electoral promises of the Chávez candidate, president Chávez has been like precise a payer front the commitments contracted by the country with the multilateral organisms of financing. In a granted interview to Marta Harnecker in August of the 2002, it declared that "I do not believe that a revolutionary process must, necessarily, to be it, to not know subjects commitments like the one of the external debt; or assumed others with institutions, corporations or countries of the world." In that same conversation, Chávez suffers of one interested amnesia: "" we never said in the electoral campaign that we were not going to pay the debt. There was the rumor, commentaries of press, et cetera. Yes we said that we would propose a scheme to reconstruct the external debt and in that it has not been possible to advance”

Water
With only 40 legislators of the 165 of the National Assembly (43 less del quorum of half plus one necessary one), of as 36 they were chapistas (although you do not create it), in two hours were approved 87 articles of the Statutory law of the Public Property Estate in the second fortnight of March del 2004. Article 6 of this Law attributes to the States two categories of goods: those of the public dominion that "son inalienable and imprescriptibly" and they cannot be sold, yielded nor acquired by prescription, and those of the deprived dominion, that yes can be sold or be alienated. The waters happen to the private dominion. It adds this article that the no alienable goods of the public dominion "Can to acquire the condition of alienable properties by means of sanctioned to request of the governor, by Agreement of the Legislative Council with the favorable vote of the two third parts of their members. In the file the opinion of the Solicitor of the state and the Contralor of the Estate" must consist;. With this regulation, as an intellectual related to the Process declared Luis Britto Garcia, "Forty legislators of few Legislative Advice could raise their hands so that they were saleable the Lake of Maracaibo, the Lagoon of Valencia, Apure, the Caroní, the Orinoco, the Delta and in general the hydroelectric power plants of Guayana and of the country. They would not lack forty buyers".

Transgenic
In October of the 2003 the Law of Biological Similes and Inhumes for the Reproduction was promulgated on the part of the National Assembly Animal. For the environmentalist organizations, as the case of MOVES and its spokesman Leobardo Acurero, "it is not another thing that the legal seal that will allow the entrance to Venezuela of the dangerous transgenic seeds. At heart one is the most novel and terrible form of colonization to consolidate the agro-alimentary dependency like mission of the mercantilist globalize that gigantic North American companies like MONSANTO and CARGIL are promoting ". Acurero has made a detailed study of the referred Law, which can be asked for to the email xx move heads an initiative to reject the measurement: "a law of seeds like which it approved the Assembly National that it allows the transgenic in Venezuela, opposite to the National interest is expressed in the Constitution with sustainable agriculture, therefore the next step that we must give as Venezuelan is to oppose by unconstitutional this law antilife, before the Constitutional Room of the Supreme Court of Justice TSJ".

Mining
Propped up by the Ministry of the Atmosphere a proposal of territorial ordering has taken shape and standard of the area of Imataca, that as we will remember, lodges to more than 3 million forests and is inhabited by 26,000 inhabitants of 7 indigenous ethnic groups in the Southeastern of the country. The same one would destine a forest use of 61.5% of the territory and a mining use of 12%. In march are the projects Nickel Hill (530 million dollars), of exploration in Small cuttlefish 10 in the Callao (70 million dollars) and the Camorra Venezuelan Hecla (50 million dollars). The projects in promotion are: Miner of Block B, State Bolivar (600 million dollars), Plant Friable Quartzite (211 million dollars) and plants iron and steel by 1,172 million dollars



> EL LIBERTARIO # 38
Editorial, june-july 2004, Venezuela

Against wind and tide, this newspaper from the Anarchist Relationships
Commision from Venezuela is out on the streets, fighting the phony manicheism
which dominates the country's political scene today, and advocating alternatives based upon freedom, equality and solidarity.

With the call for a referendum which would revoke the mandate of the President and many deputies, we begin an election period which will last -taking all its stages into account- at least three years. And so begins a dark time for all social movents in the country, because turning the crisis into an election only legitimates the leaderships of the two neoliberal camps (chavism and its media oposition) competing to control the country. This has many consequences, but we shall discuss only two of them: the worsening of uncritical "us" vs "them" mentality, and the subordination of concrete, popular demands to the supreme logic of political party power grabbing.

One of the achievements of the guardians of power on both sides, is to have
manufactured the consensus of a political polarization of the venezuelan people; a false manicheism, since both of them favour international capital, presenting towards foreign investors an image of stability, governability, and democratic formality. With a discourse empty of proposals and content, every side demonizes its opponent and promotes itself as the guarantor of abstract values -"the revolution" or "freedom"- promoted through the media. If we see every conglomerate as a political party, we can easily see how every one of them demands blind allegiance from its followers, and that every mistake or blunder is always due to an eternal conspiracy from the other side. Self-critical questions, whenever arise, do so in a whisper; if mentioned too loud, your own peers shut them up with the retort "don't give ammunition to the enemy". So,
with Esprit De Corps, honest grassroot militants have perverted themselves, by
justifying the unjustifiable or, at their worst, tolerate within their own ranks the actions they claim to oppose from the others, in order to achieve the "final victory". If even the slightest dissidence used to be quickly labeled as "treason", in the coming days they will be effectively self-censored from the start.

The political elites on every camp need their followers to participate - when it suits them. The goals of every social movement, as well as their autonomy, are sacrificed in order to follow policies decided from above. Every one of them concentrate their efforts in legitimating their side as "the majority", delaying their own goals until a future time that will never come: the so-called "deepening the Revolutionary Process" or "winning Freedom back". The true popular movements have yielded to blackmail, and have become a mere cog in a machinery that legitimizes the State and its institutionalized participation mechanisms; a very short-legged participation, we insist. After the learning experienced since 1992 -after the Caracazo, with an increasingly rebellious
attitude-, since 1998, venezuelans are consulted only to perform in the election circus, stick posters, and recruit voters. The political autonomy of the oppressed collectives -and their own political agenda- is set aside, when it isn't being explicitely co-opted or stifled. In that sense, aborted experiences like the occupation of the Central University in March 2001, or the nine factories "taken" by the workers, the so-called "Oil Constituyente", the squatting of urban buildings, and the assemblies of neighbors, should teach us which is *not* the way.

The most important work to be done now is to reinforce the social networks of
ordinary people, of the oppresed and the minorities, building here and now the social relationships which shall liberate us from all the miseries that afflict us. To denounce those who aspire to persuade us to choose the "lesser evil" and to postpone out desires until a hipothetical tomorrow as what they are: bureucrats, -actual or aspiring ones- seeking only a piece of the pie. To revoke a mandate, leaving the structures of domination intact, is to allow Power to rebuild itself in new forms, perpetuate misery, unemployment, social insecurity, and sell out our salaries and wealth to global capitalism, so well represented by the two struggling camps.

Self-government, autonomy and self-management, ¡Now!