Hugo
Chavez Challenges
Bush’s Empire
By Federico Fuentes
08 September, 2006
Green
Left Weekly
The
official August 12 start of Venezuela’s presidential election
campaign has opened a new phase in Washington’s plans to destabilise
the revolutionary government headed by socialist President Hugo Chavez.
Officially, the main opposition
candidate in the December election is Manuel Rosales, the current governor
of the state of Zulia. But the real showdown will be between the unfolding
people’s power revolution led by Chavez and the warmongers in
the Bush administration, who will resist by any means a further blow
to the already shaky empire of US imperialism. With polls showing Chavez
a near certainty to win, his supporters have set themselves a bold goal
— to secure 10 million votes, up from the nearly 5 million Chavez
won last time he faced a ballot.
The US ruling elite fears
the worst: a double victory for Venezuela’s “Bolivarian
revolution”. Not only could a crushing victory in December deliver
Chavez a further mandate to continue to beat back the corporations with
his people-first policies, but Venezuela could be successful in obtaining
a temporary seat on the United Nations Security Council in October.
Having captured the hearts
and minds of the world’s oppressed, particularly after the country’s
strident opposition to Israel’s wars on Lebanon and Palestine,
a growing list of Latin American, Asian, African and Middle Eastern
countries are pledging to support Venezuela’s Security Council
bid.
A victory would further weaken
US attempts to isolate Venezuela internationally and hand the Bolivarian
revolution a powerful platform from which to continue its denunciation
of Washington’s brutal policies and build a bloc of opposition
aimed at breaking the hold of the world’s rogue superpower over
the Third World.
A showdown between Washington
and Caracas is nothing new: the US backed a military coup against Chavez
in April 2002, and a “bosses’ strike” in December
of that year aimed at crippling the economy and driving out Chavez.
The US also supported a referendum that would have recalled Chavez and
forced a new election, and has backed accusations of electoral fraud.
As J. Michael Waller from
the Center for Security Policy — an organisation with direct links
to the Bush administration that counts among its members a who’s
who of former CIA and US government personnel — stated as far
back as May 2005, the re-election of Chavez is something that the US
elite must avoid.
He wrote that “the
remaining hope on the calendar for a peaceful resolution to the ongoing
threat is the Venezuelan presidential election of 2006 ... Time is running
out ... The Bolivarian regime in Caracas presents a clear and present
danger to peace and democracy in the hemisphere. It must change. It
can change on its own, or it can invite hemispheric forces with the
help of Venezuela’s broad democratic opposition, to impose the
changes. Either way U.S. strategy must be to help Venezuela accomplish
peaceful change by next year.”
US strategy
Despite having widely publicised
the scheduling of primary elections in order to select the best candidate
to challenge Chavez, it seemed that overnight the majority of the Venezuelan
opposition fell in behind the candidature of Rosales. The two candidates
who until then had seemed the most likely to run suddenly dropped out
of the race.
The US-funded so-called non-government
organisation Sumate, which was key to the campaign to allege fraud in
the recall referendum and last December’s National Assembly elections,
quickly dropped all talks of a primary in order to back Rosales’s
bid.
Rosales had been hesitant
to run, because he would have had to resign his position as governor
— one of only two out of 24 governorships that the opposition
controls — and even he knew he wasn’t going to win against
Chavez.
The choice of Rosales may
reveal what the US is planning. Rosales has been a firm advocate of
“autonomy” for Zulia, spearheading a move to separate the
oil-rich state from the rest of Venezuela. Bordering Colombia, Zulia
has historically had a strong sense of regional identity. Several times
since the 1820s, there have been moves by the oil elites to push for
the independence of Zulia in order to grab control of 40% of Venezuela’s
oil.
By playing on this, along
with running welfare missions very similar to the national government’s
own social missions, Rosales has been able to gain a high level of support
in Zulia.
Rosales has constantly campaigned
on the issue, and has called for a referendum. An article by respected
Venezuelan historian and journalist Luis Britto Garcia noted that in
Zulia, “printed T-shirts present maps with an Independent Republic
of Zulia, whilst articles from the press and webpages pour out calls
for 'autonomy’, 'sovereignty’ and 'independence’ which
the governor Manuel Rosales himself reiterates, to the point of absurdity,
as he during the January 28 celecbrations of the Day of Zuliandity”.
Garcia wrote that in May
this year the US ambassador to Venezuela, William Brownfield, declared
in Maracaibo, Zulia’s capital: “Twenty-five years ago I
lived for two years in the Independent and Eastern Republic of Zulia.”
The ambassador has made numerous visits to Zulia.
Washington’s
candidate
Although claiming to be independent
from the US, Rosales’ history proves otherwise. He was the only
governor to sign the infamous “Carmona Decree”, issued after
Chavez was briefly deposed during the April 2002 coup. The decree dissolved
the National Assembly and suspended the attorney-general, the ombudsman,
and the governors and mayors elected during Chavez’s presidency.
Rosales signed as a “representative of the state governors”.
Rosales’s party, A
New Time, was one of the last opposition parties to pull out of last
year’s National Assembly elections. It had initially argued against
abstention, knowing that it had a real possibility of winning seats
in Zulia. But in the end, it agreed to forego running in order to side
with Washington’s preferred plan of abstaining in an attempt to
delegitimise the elections.
The fact that the US-funded
Sumate group, along with the US-funded political parties of the right,
have all dropped out of the presidential race to support a candidate
who time and time again has exposed himself to be nothing more than
a puppet of Washington, lends credence to the argument that the real
campaign manager of the opposition is the US empire.
Zulian historian Carlos Morales
Manssur pointed out in a February 26 Prensa Latina article that the
US has much to gain from an independent Zulia: “Washington would
... obtain control of the oil resources of Lake Maracaibo and could
establish an important base of Plan Colombia [the US-funded war against
left-wing guerrillas in Colombia], all at the expense of a government
which it dislikes.”
Well-known Venezuelan activist
and writer Martin Guedez argued in an article posted on Aporrea.org
on August 10 that a plan is underway similar to the opposition’s
campaign around the August 2004 recall referendum, when it hoped to
create chaos on the back of claims of fraud by the government.
Guedez argues that “the
culmination point will be the morning of December 4 ... this time supported
by real votes that the candidate Rosales will obtain in Zulia”.
The plan will be for the
“winner” of one state to claim that he will not accept the
“fraud” committed in the rest of Venezuela and mobilise
regionalist sentiments, declaring himself the president-elect of the
“Autonomous State of Zulia”.
A dangerous situation
It is possible that such
a string of events could be used to generate violence, and “justification”
for US military intervention. Already, Zulia is home to a large number
of right-wing Colombian paramilitaries who have assassinated numerous
peasant leaders and been implicated in destabilisation plans.
On August 23, a convoy of
20 trucks supposedly carrying diplomatic and personal effects for the
US diplomatic mission in Venezuela was intercepted and discovered to
be smuggling detonators and cables used in explosives. Only days before,
four prisoners — some of them linked to Colombian paramilitaries
— who had been involved in attempts to overthrow the government
escaped jail.
The campaign outside Venezuela
has also begun. Victor Ego Ducrot revealed in an August 24 Mercosur
Journalist Agency article that the CIA had put in train a strong anti-Chavez
media campaign.
Beginning with the aid of
the New York Times, which ran an article by Simon Romero linking Venezuela
and Cuba to Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program, the article
was reprinted in a string of important conservative papers in Latin
America.
A number of journalists told
Ducrot that they had been contacted by US “diplomats” with
offers of bribes as part of a systematic campaign of disinformation
run by the CIA. The US recently established a special mission to deal
with Venezuela.
In response, the revolutionary
forces are organising themselves. Chavez has, as he puts it, “unleashed
the Bolivarian hurricane”, in order to obtain the conscious vote
of 10 million Venezuelans in defence of the revolution and its ideals.
To do so, the “Miranda
Command” has been established at the national level and throughout
the country, aiming to organise more than 200,000 people on a polling-booth-by-polling-booth
basis. Like for the recall referendum, each polling booth will have
10 people assigned, whose role is to political convince 10 other people
to not just vote for Chavez, but to integrate themselves into the revolutionary
process and deepen it.
Sectoral teams have also
been organised to promote thorough discussions through permanent assemblies
of workers, campesinos (peasants), women, business owners and other
groups.
A specific challenge will
be the revolution’s relative weakness in Zulia, which both Garcia
and Guedez put down to mistakes by the revolutionary forces, including
divisions based on personalities and clientelism, as well as the imposition
from above of unknown candidates in regional elections, as opposed to
the popular movements selecting real leaders from below.