[R-G] Venezuela Solidarity Symposium

[Anthony Fenton]

Venezuela Solidarity Symposium
By Marc Becker
http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/6781/1/330/

Leading academic scholars and grassroots activists gathered at  
historic Howard University in Washington, DC, from April 18-20 for the  
national symposium “What’s Up With Venezuela: Participatory Democracy  
or Democracy as Usual?” The meeting provided an opportunity for 200  
solidarity activists from across the United States to study the  
revolutionary changes sweeping through Venezuela.

In 1998, Venezuelans elected Hugo Chavez as a left-populist president  
to lead the country. Since then, he has worked toward regional  
integration and against US domination of Latin America. This has  
placed Venezuela on a collision course with the US. “Chavez is  
threatening,” political scientist Steve Ellner argued, “because he  
shows that there are viable alternatives to neoliberalism.” In a  
region that seems to produce its share of bad news, Venezuela is an  
example of hopeful and positive change.

A principal theme that ran throughout the symposium was that the  
Bolivarian Revolution (so named after Venezuela’s independence leader  
Simon Bolivar) is not a movement built around one person. James Early,  
Director of Cultural Heritage Policy at the Center for Folklife and  
Cultural Heritage at the Smithsonian Institution, said “Chavez is not  
the revolution, but a conduit for it.” Supreme Court justice Fernando  
Vegas explained institutional divisions of power in Venezuela to make  
his point that Chavez is not a dictator and does not control  
everything in the country.

Instead of emphasizing Chavez’s role, most of the presenters stressed  
the importance of constructing a participatory and protagonistic  
democracy to build new relations between the government and popular  
organizations. “Democracy is not just formal institutions,” labor  
leader Gonzalo Gomez with the National Union of Workers (UNT) said,  
“but also the mobilization of people.” Venezuela Solidarity Network  
organizer James Jordan argued that participatory democracy begins with  
organizing at the grassroots level.

While the presenters defended Chavez, they did not give him their  
uncritical and unqualified support. Gomez argued that much of the  
positive progress that has been made in Venezuela is not due to  
Chavez’s leadership, but from dedicated activists pushing him in a  
leftward direction.

Jorge Guerrero, Venezuelan Consul in New Orleans, explained the  
growing role of communal councils that are leading toward self  
government. In the future, Guerrero predicated, they would not need  
mayors because people will solve their own problems. Julio Chavez, the  
mayor of Torres, Venezuela, said that he was one of those working to  
realize that goal. “How can they accuse of us being authoritarian and  
centralist,” Chavez asked, “when we are giving power to the people?”

The communal councils are only one example of the many fundamental  
transformations in Venezuela. Antonio Gonzalez from the Southwest  
Voter Registration Education Project (SVREP) noted that Venezuela’s  
wedding of multi-party, participatory elections with a socialistic  
redistributive process is rather unique. Not only has this led to  
success for the Bolivarian Revolution, but hopefully it will also make  
it much more difficult for the United States to justify an invasion of  
the country.

Although there have been significant advances, there are still  
numerous bureaucrats from previous governments who are still in  
positions of power. Perhaps more dangerous are political opportunists  
who paint themselves as Chavistas (supporters of President Hugo  
Chavez), but are not ideologically committed to the Bolivarian  
Revolution. Increasingly, however, career diplomats and government  
bureaucrats are being replaced by movement activists who are committed  
to pushing the country toward socialism.

In addition, institutional interests can also place a break on  
revolutionary change. The Venezuelan Embassy’s Labor Attaché Marcos  
García emphasized that leftward pressure comes from people (workers)  
rather than institutions (labor unions) that too often become bogged  
down in bureaucratic concerns. Social movements are important so that  
the government does not sell out a revolutionary and socialist  
project. Gonzalo Gomez called these social movements the “motor of the  
revolution.”

Clara Herrera from Venezuela’s Central University observed that Chavez  
is just the tip of the iceberg of changes sweeping through the country  
as people become increasingly energized through grassroots popular  
movements. Omar Sierra and Jorge Guerrero from the Boston and New  
Orleans consulates discussed the roles of Indigenous peoples and Afro- 
descendants in the Bolivarian Revolution. Sierra said that changes in  
Venezuela are not the will of only one man, but the result of 500  
years of Indigenous struggle.

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Guerrero presented Chavez as a tool that embodies the hopes and  
aspirations of historically oppressed and excluded peoples to build a  
new protagonistic and participatory system. Imperialists are opposed  
to the Venezuelan government because it has allied with the  
downtrodden. This extends to international policies, as Venezuela has  
significantly expanded its diplomatic relations with Africa and the  
Caribbean. For example, students from Mali are studying textile  
manufacturing in Venezuela so that they can help their country gain  
value from cotton production rather than exporting the raw materials.  
These are not vertical relationships of domination, but horizontal  
ones built around ideas of solidarity.

Economists Adina Mercedes Bastidas and Mark Weisbrot presented data  
that illustrates dramatic recent economic growth in Venezuela.  
Chavez’s economic priorities have led to notable increases in health  
care, education, and employment. Weisbrot responded to an essay that  
Francisco Rodríguez published in Foreign Affairs that maintained that  
the poor have been hurt by Chavez’s policies. In a detailed analysis  
on the Center for Economic and Policy Research website (http://www.cepr.net/ 
), Weisbrot shows how Rodríguez cherry-picked his data to reach  
misleading conclusions. In fact, poverty has dropped in half. Some of  
the current economic problems, such as a high inflation rate, are the  
result of long-term structural problems that cannot be turned around  
overnight.

Miguel Rodríguez, Vice-Minister for the Environment, discussed the  
challenges of attempting to improve standards of living while still  
preserving the environment. Venezuela is energy rich, and seeks to  
develop a sustainable economy. Although as a petroleum exporter  
gasoline is cheap, the government has emphasized public transit and  
produces most of its electricity from hydroelectric dams. Furthermore,  
the government emphasizes conservation as a way to meet peoples’  
needs. “Socialism of the twenty-first century has to be ecological,”  
Rodríguez said, “and it also has to be materially possible.”

The US government and mainstream media, both in Venezuela and  
internationally, have engaged in a relentless disinformation campaign  
against the Bolivarian Revolution. Steve Ellner said that the  
hostility has little to do with Chavez’s style, but rather his  
economic and social policies. In Venezuela, the intransigent  
opposition to Chavez is based on conservative support for neoliberal  
policies that advocate shifting resources from the poor and  
marginalized and back towards the wealthy and privileged elite classes.

During the 1980s, Venezuelan governments engaged in blatant censorship  
of the media. Today, that does not happen, and there are more press  
freedoms than at any other point in the country’s history. The press  
remains overwhelmingly in private hands, owned by a wealthy elite  
deeply antagonistic to Chavez’s socialist project.

Mark Weisbrot gave Francisco Rodríguez’s essay in Foreign Affairs as  
one example of the constant barrage of misinformation. Without a  
popular media, Gonzalo Gomez said, a participatory and protagonistic  
democracy will not be possible. This does not happen automatically,  
but we need to get people accustomed to using these tools. The  
Venezuelan government has facilitated a move in this direction by  
creating spaces for community radio. “If the press is less anti- 
Chavez,” Olivia Burlingame Goumbri from the Venezuela Information  
Office contended, “it is because of growing popular support for Chavez.”

Journalist and sociologist Greg Wilpert explained how Venezuela has  
one of the most safe and secure voting systems in the world.  
Perceptions of fraud or a politicized electoral council are not based  
in fact. Wilpert positioned himself as a free speech advocate, and  
argued that the media is too important to be held in private hands  
that respond to corporate interests. Rather, public accountability is  
important to democratize the means of communication.

Attorney Eva Golinger explained how the attacks on Venezuela increased  
dramatically in 2005 when Condoleezza Rice was elevated to Secretary  
of State in the United States. The United States creates and funds a  
right-wing opposition in Venezuela through institutions such as the  
National Endowment for Democracy.

Venezuelan lawyer José Pertierrra pointed to the hypocrisy in US  
attempts to classify Venezuela as a state sponsor of terrorism. While  
there is no evidence that Venezuela sponsors or engages in terrorism,  
the US military is in the midst of its own torture scandals at Abu  
Ghraib and Guantanamo. More blatant is the case of Luis Posada  
Carrilles who blew up a Cuban airliner with a toothpaste bomb in 1976  
as it left Venezuela. Not only was Posada Carrilles a CIA operative,  
he also currently lives freely in the US. Refusals to extradite him to  
Venezuela means that the US supports terrorism.

The symposium ended with a Lobby Day, with participants taking what  
they learned to Congressional Representatives on Capitol Hill.

The Venezuela Solidarity Network (http://vensolidarity.net/) sponsored  
the symposium. The purpose of VSN is to increase communication among  
groups that oppose US intervention in Venezuela, support the right of  
the Venezuela people to self-determination, and support the Bolivarian  
revolution.


Marc Becker is a Latin American historian and a member of Community  
Action on Latin America (CALA), in Madison, Wisconsin. Photos from the  
symposium are available at http://picasaweb.google.com/marcbecker2/VenezuelaSymposium 
.