Venezuela: CIA Targets Chávez
Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 787, 20 September 2002.

The clash between backers and foes of Venezuelan nationalist strongman Hugo Chávez has reached a fever pitch that recalls the atmosphere leading up to last April’s short-lived coup. That military putsch was carried out with the blessing of the U.S. imperialists, who despise Chávez for his populist posture and, above all, his sale of oil and other acts of support to Castro’s Cuba. This summer, as they did before the April coup, hundreds of thousands of middle- and upper-class anti-Chávez demonstrators filled the streets of Caracas calling for the president’s ouster, while his supporters from the city’s slums lined the sidewalks jeering at the marchers. Opposition politicians are openly calling for another military coup or even for Chávez’s death.

The April 12 coup had Washington’s paw prints all over it. In the months leading up to the coup, U.S. officials repeatedly met with Venezuelan business and military leaders who opposed Chávez and later played prominent roles in the military takeover. The budget earmarked for Venezuelan opposition groups by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a CIA front, was quadrupled to more than $877,000. According to the London Guardian (29 April), U.S. navy ships “helped with communications jamming support to the Venezuelan military.” The day of the coup, the head of the International Republican Institute, the Republican Party’s conduit for international political subversion, proclaimed, “The Venezuelan people rose up to defend democracy in their country.” But as the coup quickly unraveled, within two days Washington was furiously backpedaling.

On the ground, the coup was carried out by anti-Chávez businessmen and military officers in an unholy alliance with the notoriously pro-imperialist leadership of the corporatist CTV trade-union federation. The CTV oil union tops and the oil bosses had been staging joint shutdowns and protests for months. After weeks of confrontations triggered by Chávez’s decision to replace executives of the state-owned oil company, on April 9 the CTV and the bosses’ National Chamber of Commerce (Fedecámaras) jointly called a general strike. When gunmen fired on a mass anti-Chávez demonstration, the military high command moved in to arrest Chávez and install Fedecámaras head Pedro Carmona in the Miraflores presidential palace.

But thousands of Chávez’s supporters soon poured out of the wretched slums around Caracas, blockading roads, seizing television stations and surrounding the Miraflores palace. Military officers began shifting their support back to Chávez. According to the London Guardian (13 May), hundreds of pro-Chávez troops were hidden in the cellar of Miraflores. Once Carmona was inside, the commander phoned him “to tell him that, with troops virtually under his chair, he was as much a hostage as Mr Chavez.” The new president resigned less than 48 hours after taking office.

The popular outpouring that helped to bring Chávez back to power was fueled by outrage at the venal Venezuelan ruling class and their imperialist masters in Washington. Over the last century, the enormous income from oil, the country’s principal export, has simply fattened the wallets of the imperialists and their junior partners in Venezuela. Thirty years ago, per capita income in Venezuela was higher than in Japan. Today, 68 percent of the population lives below the official poverty line. Nearly half the workforce ekes out a living on the margins of the economy as street vendors, gypsy cab drivers and day laborers. This desperately poor layer, seeing in Chávez’s populist rhetoric some hope for a decent life, is the base of his “Bolivarian Movement.” They have been used by Chávez as a battering ram against the unions, whose sellout leadership, tied to the capitalists and U.S. imperialism, looks like anything but a champion of the country’s dispossessed.

As in virtually all interventions by U.S. imperialism in Latin America, the wretched bureaucrats of the AFL-CIO, loyal servitors of their capitalist masters, were in the baggage train. The AFL-CIO’s international arm, the American Center for International Labor Solidarity, served as a conduit for NED funds, channeling $154,377 to the Venezuelan CTV. Two months before the coup, the AFL-CIO sponsored a U.S. tour by CTV tops, paid for by the NED. The CTV bureaucrats who participated in a closed forum in Washington reportedly “noted that they were here to discuss the chances for a coup” (Labor Notes, May 2002).

The “AFL-CIA” labor traitors were also involved in the 1964 overthrow of the nationalist Goulart regime in Brazil, the 1965 invasion of Santo Domingo by U.S. Marines and the 1983 invasion of Grenada, among other CIA operations. For decades, the AFL-CIO intervened in Latin America through its “American Institute for Free Labor Development” (AIFLD), a front for anti-labor, CIA-sponsored operations founded in 1962 as an adjunct of the Alliance for Progress, President Kennedy’s response to the 1959 Cuban Revolution. One of the AIFLD’s specialties was organizing strikes to help destabilize regimes that Washington opposed. Its most successful operation was the 1973 truckers “strike” in Chile, which was instrumental in bringing down the Chilean Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende, paving the way for a bloodbath of tens of thousands of workers and leftists under the Pinochet dictatorship.

The U.S. officials who worked with the Venezuelan coup plotters were all veterans of Reagan-era covert operations against leftist guerrillas in Nicaragua. Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Otto Reich, who secretly raised money for the CIA’s Nicaraguan contras in the 1980s and was once U.S. ambassador to Venezuela, met with a number of anti-Chávez figures, including CTV head Carlos Ortega, in the months leading up to the coup. Meanwhile, leading Democrats, while chiding Bush for openly applauding the coup, covered for the administration by claiming that there was “no evidence” that U.S. officials were actively involved. Democratic senator Christopher Dodd, chairman of the Western Hemisphere subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, commissioned a report that concluded that actions by U.S. officials “were consistent with U.S. policy.”

For over a century, U.S. policy in Latin America has consisted of a bloody trail of military interventions, coups and death squads. Under Democrats and Republicans alike, the U.S. imperialists have treated Latin America as their god-given empire to be lorded over and pillaged at will. Today, in the name of the “war on drugs,” Bush has sharply escalated Clinton’s policy of U.S. military involvement in the Colombian government’s dirty war against guerrilla insurgents. Above all, for more than four decades the two parties of American capitalism have sought to roll back the gains of the Cuban Revolution, including through invasion, airplane hijackings, assassinations and other acts of terror, and economic sanctions aimed at starving the population. Down with the embargo! Defend Cuba against imperialist attack and internal counterrevolution! U.S. hands off Latin America!

Chávez: Populist Rhetoric, Petty Changes

Chávez regained the presidency following the short-lived coup chastened by the prospect of losing power and calling for “reconciliation” with the opposition. He withdrew his appointees at the head of the state oil company and named the secretary general of OPEC to run the company. A leader of the coup, General Lucas Romero Rincón, was named to head the armed forces. Chávez toned down criticism of “Plan Colombia,” Washington’s military drive against rebels in that country. He expressed penitence over his earlier diatribes against the Catholic hierarchy. Oil shipments to Cuba were abruptly cut off (they were restored earlier this month). Chávez supporters in the National Assembly promised to “adjust” laws limiting land holdings, restricting foreign investment and increasing royalties paid by foreign oil companies.

But despite his concessions to the U.S. imperialists, Chávez, as demonstrated by the ongoing protests against him, still faces the prospect of an overthrow. Essentially undamaged by the reversal of the April coup, the Venezuelan bourgeoisie maintains its confidence in its ability to oust Chávez.

The measures reversed by Chávez after the coup had been touted as the centerpiece of his “Bolivarian Revolution.” Chávez is a bourgeois populist demagogue who came to power four years ago cynically promising to raise living standards for the poor, increase social benefits and distribute land to the peasants. The Venezuelan masses were fed up with the traditional bourgeois parties, Democratic Action and the pro-Catholic COPEI, which promised pie in the sky when oil prices went up and came down with the naked fist of repression when prices fell. In 1989, hundreds of people were killed in the Caracazo, when the populace of Caracas, enraged by the government’s IMF-imposed austerity program, stormed into the streets. Three years later, Chávez came to prominence by leading a failed coup against that same government.

Chávez won the adoration of many of the country’s poor through his cultivated image of a baseball-loving man of the people and, in a country of glaring racist discrimination, his open pride in his indigenous origins. He played to his base with irreverence toward the worthies of the nation, calling the rich the “squalid ones” and referring to Catholic bishops as “devils in vestments.” He particularly infuriated the church by failing to include an unequivocal ban on abortion in the new constitution. (The church responded by declaring that the floods in 1999 that killed 10,000 people were “the wrath of god” in response to Chávez’s impudence.) Chávez also gained popularity with his gestures of opposition to U.S. imperialism, such as his support to the FARC guerrillas in Colombia, his visit to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and his denunciation of the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan.

The Clinton administration was more or less willing to live with this thorn in their side as long as the oil continued to flow. But even before Bush entered the White House, his aides heralded a harder line toward Chávez. The Bush administration is filled with veterans of U.S. imperialism’s counterrevolutionary terror in Central America in the 1980s, including Elliot Abrams, who presided over the CIA’s contra war in Nicaragua, and current United Nations ambassador John Negroponte, who oversaw savage repression in Honduras. Counterrevolutionary Cuban gusanos (worms), including Reich, hold eight of the top twelve positions in the Latin America sections of the State Department and the Pentagon. The London Guardian (8 February) reported that Reich helped secure the release of Orlando Bosch, who bombed a Cuban airliner in Caracas, adding: “Amazingly, Bosch was granted a pardon by George Bush senior in 1990 and is now in Florida, apparently untroubled by the current president’s commitment to rooting out terrorism in all its forms.”

Upon coming to power, Chávez tried to bring Venezuela’s powerful oil workers union to heel. He assumed office declaring that the CTV “must be demolished.” But a three-day strike by oil workers in October 2000 won a pay raise that Chávez had previously sworn never to accept. Two months later, a union-busting referendum was called by Chávez to place the CTV under his thumb. But the CTV called for a boycott and only 25 percent of eligible voters participated. When chavista thugs in some localities sought to take over union locals, they were driven out by CTV members.

The role of populists like Chávez is to protect the capitalist order by deflecting the just rage of the oppressed masses. While spouting empty rhetoric against the rich, Chávez has deregulated the banking system, privatized the Caracas electrical system and scrupulously respected the agreements with the IMF negotiated by his predecessor. Chávez’s proclamation of an “agrarian revolution” drove the large landowners into a frenzy and raised enormous expectations in a country where a scant 3 percent of farmers own 70 percent of the arable land. But the big estates remain intact, and peasant leaders are being gunned down by the landowners’ hired killers at the rate of a dozen per year.

For Workers Revolution in Venezuela!

Over the past decade, the dominant model for imperialist exploitation in the Third World has been IMF-dictated “free market” neoliberalism and privatization of state industry. The IMF’s ability to dictate draconian economic austerity is in large part based on the absence of the Soviet Union as a counterweight to the imperialists. At the same time, the current economic crisis in Latin America, from Argentina to Mexico, is producing a broader shift in the political-ideological climate away from neoliberalism back toward the nationalist populism espoused by Chávez and identified most closely with Perón’s Argentina in the 1940s and ’50s, where wide sectors of industry were nationalized. While we defend nationalizations carried out against imperialism, these in no sense free those industries from capitalist domination.

The nationalization of Venezuela’s oil industry is a case in point. A decade after oil was discovered beneath Lake Maracaibo in 1917, Venezuela had become the world’s leading exporter of oil. But the beneficiaries of that fabulous wealth were Royal Dutch Shell and Standard Oil. In 1976, the oil industry was nationalized. But the flow of profits to the imperialist corporations was guaranteed through a system of royalties, technology purchases and consulting fees. Petróleos de Venezuela became a state within the state, its policies set largely by the imperialist corporations which bought its output and sold it its capital goods. The autonomous units that made up the new state corporation were the old imperialist subsidiaries under new names (Standard Oil became Lagoven, Mobil was Llanoven, etc.). Even management was left intact.

More generally, as Leon Trotsky pointed out in regard to Mexico’s oil expropriation in the late 1930s, such bourgeois nationalizations are eminently reversible under the pressure of imperialism: “Only lamentable utopians can represent the future of Mexico, as well as any other colonial or semicolonial country, as one of a constant accumulation of reforms and conquests until complete and definite emancipation has arrived” (“Ignorance Is Not a Revolutionary Instrument,” January 1939).

At bottom, populism and economic neoliberalism are simply alternative policies of capitalist rule, often pursued at different times by one and the same person. In Brazil, Luiz Inacio da Silva of the Workers Party (WP), the front-runner in the campaign for next month’s presidential elections, put aside his populist rhetoric this summer to embrace a $30 billion IMF bailout package, promising, if elected, to respect the austerity measures that were part of the deal. At the same time, the U.S. is certainly unhappy at the prospect of “Lula,” as he is known, winning the Brazilian election. Already, major firms closely associated with the Bush administration, like Morgan Stanley Dean Witter and Merrill Lynch, downgraded Brazil’s investment rating because of Lula’s potential victory, sending the Brazilian stock market tumbling and destroying millions in local investments.

Following the collapse of the April coup in Venezuela, the Wall Street Journal (15 April) editorialized:

“The turmoil is also a reminder of Latin America’s dangerous deterioration. Most U.S. media haven’t noticed, but half of that continent is in political or economic trouble, or both, following a decade of U.S. mistakes and neglect. Maybe the Chavez fiasco will alert American elites...to stop indulging Cold War grudges and start addressing current problems in the region.”

This mouthpiece of American finance capital is concerned that years of accumulated social tinder could explode and set all of Latin America aflame. The ongoing collapse of Argentina has triggered crises from Uruguay to Brazil and beyond. In Bolivia, a populist candidate openly hostile to U.S. imperialism nearly finished first in the recent presidential election. In Colombia, the installation of the right-wing Uribe regime and escalating U.S. military intervention could transform the longstanding, low-level guerrilla insurgency into a full-scale civil war.

Crucial to breaking the unending cycle of bourgeois-nationalist demagogues and neoliberal imperialist puppets is the mobilization of the working masses throughout Latin America independently of and against all manner of bourgeois forces, populist or otherwise. Venezuela’s own history demonstrates that the bourgeoisie, irrevocably tied by a thousand threads to its imperialist masters and fearful of and hostile to the proletariat, will not and cannot bring any real solution to the desperate situation of its working people.

It is only the working class, putting itself at the head of the struggle for justice and freedom for the country’s masses of poor and oppressed people, that has the social power to end the rule of the foreign imperialists and their local lackeys. A successful workers revolution that brings the proletariat to power will expropriate the local and imperialist bourgeoisies, give land to the peasants and cancel the country’s foreign debt. The U.S. and other imperialist powers would certainly move to crush such a revolutionary regime. Key to the survival of a workers revolution in Venezuela is its international extension to the rest of Latin America and into the imperialist United States itself.

The burning need in Venezuela and throughout Latin America is the forging of authentic Leninist-Trotskyist parties. Such parties would call for the full independence of the trade unions from the bourgeois state. They would act, in Lenin’s words, as the “tribune of the people,” rallying all those suffering under the capitalist yoke to the cause of the proletariat. They would emblazon on their banners the fight for women’s liberation, combatting machismo and backward Catholic attitudes and raising demands for the full integration of women into the workforce at equal pay. They would fight for free abortion on demand as part of the struggle for free, quality health care for all, and for full democratic rights for homosexuals.

To liberate themselves from Wall Street debt peonage, the workers of Latin America must be won to the principles and program of proletarian internationalism, embodied in the fight to reforge a Trotskyist Fourth International. As the Fourth International stated at its founding in 1938 in “Theses on the World Role of American Imperialism”:

“None of the countries of Latin America or the Pacific which are now under the domination of American imperialism to one degree or another is able either to attain complete freedom from foreign oppression or to retain such freedom for any length of time if it confines its struggle to the efforts of its own self. Only a union of the Latin American peoples, striving towards the goal of a united socialist America and allied in the struggle with the revolutionary proletariat of the United States, would present a force strong enough to contend successfully with North American imperialism.”