Photo composition showing on the left the cover for the paper written by Francisco Dominguez, next to a photo of a mural in Venezuela with the caption: "Chavez: I swear my vote goes to Maduro," by Wilfredor/CC. Photo: MorningStar.
By Francisco Dominguez – Sep 8, 2023
A paper written by Francisco Dominguez on the Bolivarian Revolution, Venezuela’s struggles with imperialism and the Legacy of Chavismo.
1. Introduction
When, by a narrow margin, Nicolas Maduro was elected president of Venezuela in April 2013, the mainstream media, echoing the opposition’s routine false allegations, depicted his victory as fraud. Henrique Capriles, the right wing candidate, refused to accept the result and called on supporters to give vent to their rage by staging protests, which turned extremely violent, leading to the death of 14 people. Conservative currents internationally, especially in the US, thought that after Hugo Chavez’s premature death, Maduro’s presidency represented the Bolivarian Revolution’s last leg (The Economist, 14/12/2013, labelled it “Maduro’s hollow victory.”). In short, for the US, its European accomplices and Venezuelan proxies, this was the Bolivarian Revolution’s beginning of the end. Thinking the moment had arrived for a final push, at the behest of the U.S. State Department, the opposition embarked on an incessant number of offensives aimed at the violent ousting of the Bolivarian government, the Bolivarian constitution and the eradication of Chavismo from the face of Venezuela. One such episode in 2014, dominated by opposition street violence, lasted six months; another in 2017, even more violent, also six months long, during which people were burned alive for being dark-colored, i.e., Chavistas.
Notwithstanding their length and violent nature, these attempts failed. The latter in 2017 was unleashed in the context of a growing economic crisis brought about by domestic economic sabotage and US unilateral coercive measures (aka sanctions). In March 2015, Obama had formalized a regime of US sanctions against Bolivarian Venezuela by declaring it “an unusual and extraordinary threat” to US national security. As under Allende, economic warfare deliberately brought about shortages of essential necessities – especially food, three-digit levels of inflation, and general economic dislocation, all aimed at sowing maximum social discontent. The consequence was a brutal attack on the standard of living of millions of Venezuelans leading to a resounding opposition’s victory at the December 2015 parliamentary elections, who came within an inch of winning two thirds of the National Assembly. The newly-elected opposition president of parliament announced the removal of President Maduro “within six months.” The end looked definitely nigh and the next batch of US-led aggression looked like inexorably leading to it. With the election of Donald Trump the US massively intensified the ongoing multifaceted warfare on the people of Venezuela. It involved a crippling economic, trade and financial blockade combined with dangerous militaristic adventures, including a terrorist attack with explosives and a mercenary incursion both aimed at the physical elimination of the civil and military leadership of the Bolivarian Revolution.
By 2020, US wide-ranging blockade had led to a 99 percent fall of oil revenues and well over one hundred thousand unnecessary deaths. Since they all failed, in despair, the US resorted to create a parallel Venezuelan government leading to Guaidó’s self-proclamation as ‘interim president’, which also failed. Before the end of a very harsh an eventful 2013-23 decade for Venezuela had gone by, in March 2021, a confident President Maduro – presiding over an economy set to grow in double digits – welcomed at Miraflores Palace a hat-in-hand Biden delegation rather desperate for Venezuela’s oil thus confirming the Bolivarian government’s successful resistance to imperial aggression.
In this document we chart (a) the cruel tests President Maduro and the people of Venezuela had to face during the intense US ‘regime change 2014-2023 period of aggression, (b) how Venezuela under Maduro managed not only to survive the onslaught but keep Chavismo in power as the hegemonic political force it was under Hugo Chavez and playing a leading role in the struggle for socialism. No mean feat. The seeds planted by Hugo Chavez’s Bolivarian Revolution had laid deep roots, turning Venezuela into a beacon of anti imperialist resistance against twenty-two years of US-led aggression.
2. US aggression against Bolivarian Venezuela
US aggression against Bolivarian Venezuela goes back to 1998, year Hugo Chavez was elected. Between 1999 and 2003 US hostility took the form of a ‘blitzkrieg’: a fulminating, internationally supported, mobilization of civil society to swiftly oust the ‘abhorrent’ presidency of Hugo Chavez depicted as an utter anomaly that needed to be thoroughly extirpated. Media demonization of Chavez, who had been inaugurated in February 1999, began as early as August that year prompted by his initiative to furnish Venezuela with a new constitution through a Constituent Assembly.
Chavez won the referendum (April 1999) for the Constituent Assembly with 92% and 86% for the election method with his supporters winning 125 of the 131 assembly seats. The new constitutional text was approved with 72% of the votes in a second referendum in December 1999. Thus, whilst the people of Venezuela got busy refounding their broken society, the NYT penned an editorial warning Venezuelans to be “…wary of the methods Mr. Chávez is using. He is drawing power into his own hands, and misusing a special constitutional assembly meeting now in Caracas that is composed almost entirely of his supporters […] Mr. Chávez, a former paratroop commander who staged an unsuccessful military coup in 1992, has so far shown little respect for the compromises necessary in a democracy, which Venezuela has had for 40 years.”
The NYT and the US political establishment knew that the new Constitution had not only expropriated the old pro-US Venezuelan elite from the levers of power but had equipped the emerging Bolivarian Venezuela with a anti-neoliberal constitutional instrument. Enacting such a constitution in 1999 in a Latin America that, with the exception of a heavily isolated post-USSR Cuba, was a sea of neoliberalism is a testament to the Comandante’s political audacity. Given the strategic importance of oil revenues both for US’s geopolitical dominance and Chavez’s programme of social redemption, the Bolivarian Constitution by stipulating the oil industry to be a crucial state asset that could not be privatized, unavoidably led to a confrontation between Washington and Caracas that was to exacerbate with the election of George W Bush in 2000. By 2001 State Dept. officials were frequently meeting with opposition leaders, dissident military officers, business leaders and many others. At the time the NYT quoted a US Defense official saying, “We were sending informal, subtle signs that we don’t like this guy [Chavez]”. Large amounts of money began to pour into Venezuela’s opposition outfits mainly through the National Endowment for Democracy and various other shadier channels. The strategic battle between Bolivarianism and Monroism had begun in earnest whose most immediate manifestation was the April 2002 coup d’état.
Venezuela’s elite, fully aware they had the complicity and support of the United States, unleashed a ‘Chilean strategy’ of mass protests aimed at creating the political conditions to overthrow the government and by enticing the military to stage a coup. As in Allende’s Chile, the elite mobilized middle class women, landowners, university students, the Catholic Church, business associations, right wing political parties, journalists and the elite-owned media and dissident military officers. They managed to stage a ‘national stoppage’ in December 2001.
The April 2002 coup d’état was defeated by mass mobilization in just 47 hours. The ink in the world mainstream media’s printed celebrations had not yet dried when the people of Venezuela and majority sections of the army had rescued Chavez from detention, reinstated him in Miraflores making the coup-mongers run like rats from a sinking ship (https://cepr.net/the-venezuela-coup-20-years-later/). The coup defeat did not deter the US and Venezuela’s elite in their efforts to bring about chaos to oust Chavez. Counting on the support of the oil engineers and the traitorous CTV trade union federation, in 2003 the elite carried out a 68-day oil lockout of the state oil company (PDVSA) aimed at crushing the economy that led to losses of over US$14 billion.[1] On the positive side, by the defeat of the 2002 coup the elite lost its long-held control over the armed forces, and the defeat of the oil lockout allowed Chavez to take control over PDVSA, hitherto ‘a state within the state’ (https://nacla.org/article/venezuela%27s-revolution-and-oil-company-inside).
On 9th May 2004 eighty-eight Colombian paramilitaries – several wearing Venezuelan military uniforms – were arrested in Caracas “while training for an assault on a military installation”. The training center was a farm estate owned by a Cuban exile and leader of the opposition coalition “Democratic Coordination”. A few hours later 32 more were arrested outside Caracas. They planned to assault the Urban Security Command of the National Guard to capture weapons aimed at arming 1,500 more paramilitaries with the objective of toppling the government of Chavez, including his assassination. The Colombian and US governments, strongly suspected of being the mastermind, denied any involvement (https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/coup-foiled-in-venezuela/).
Later in 2004 Venezuela’s right wing activated the recall referendum, a constitutional provision (unique in the world) that allows for a referendum against the president (or any other elected authority) to face a national vote halfway their mandate that could force them out of office if the authority in question loses the vote. Openly supported by the US, the opposition turned the referendum campaign of ‘civil disobedience’ into another wave of violence, leading to the death of at least ten people. Chavez won a resounding victory, which the opposition again attributed to fraud, promising on 15th August 2004 they would produce the evidence. We are still waiting.
After decisively winning the 2006 presidential election (63 percent against 3 percent of opposition candidate), Chavez took the decision to deepen the Bolivarian process through a constitutional referendum, held in December 2007, which was defeated by very thin margin. The opposition, enjoying huge external support, unleashed a nasty but effective campaign of lies falsely claiming the reform intended to eliminate private property, install Chavez as dictator-for-life and even that parents would lose their legal parental rights over their children to the state. This was supplemented by yet another violent campaign of civil disobedience carried out primarily by opposition university students: buses were burned, motorways blocked, and there were street confrontations with the police that the mainstream media depicted as authoritarian repression.[2]It did the trick: many Chavista voters did not turn up to vote.
This was followed in 2008 by a coup attempt by disaffected military officers, including three generals who, in September that year, reportedly, planned to take over the presidential palace. Chavez denounced the plot as having the approval of the US government and took the decision to expel Patrick Duddy, US Ambassador to Venezuela. Ever since, diplomatic relations between Caracas and Washington have been tense and tenuous.
Having failed so many times to dislodge Chavez from power, the election of ultra right politician and staunchly pro-US Alvaro Uribe as Colombia’s president in 2008, led Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to get the US to adopt an overtly military approach. By the signing of the Defence Cooperation Agreement (DCA), Colombia allowed the US to establish seven more military bases, ostensibly justified to strengthen ‘bilateral cooperation’ to fight against drug trafficking, terrorism and the like, but it was evident the real target was Bolivarian Venezuela. A special pamphlet of the Venezuela Solidarity Campaign (VSC)[3] issued at the time concluded ‘…the DCA has been signed not in order to carry counternarcotic operations but in order to hugely increase air mobility reach on the South America continent, with Venezuela, objectively, as the primary target.” This was combined with aggressive US militaristic provocations of US warplanes violating Venezuela’s airspace at least 14 times. Such provocations went on throughout 2010, 2011 and 2012. But to no avail, Venezuela was not intimidated and in October 2012, Hugo Chavez was re-elected president with a convincing 55 percent.
His victory was, tragically, short-lived; in June 2011 Chavez was operated from a cancerous tumor that was followed by chemotherapy. Then, throughout 2012 and also in 2013 he repeatedly went back to Cuba to undergo surgery to remove cancerous tumors followed by radiotherapy treatment. Until that fateful 5th March 2013 when he died from cancer at the premature age of 58.[4] The US and its accomplices breathed a sigh of relief and rubbed their hands with glee since they thought that with Chavez gone, the Bolivarian Revolution would also go with him. But they had another thing coming.
In this period (1999-2010), US strategy sought to create either a chaotic civil war atmosphere or, ideally, an actual civil war hoping the induced instability would lead to the ousting of Chavismo or to conditions conducive to an external (US-led military) intervention. According to a Report by ‘NGO’, PROVEA[5], between 1999 and 2010 there were 19,250 protests in Venezuela: 5,913 road blockings, 5,093 demos, 1,290 marches, 1,185 stoppages, 1,506 occupation of premises, plus 4,263 of other forms of protests. There is a strong correlation between this golpista opposition hyperactivity and monies disbursed by the US through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Between 2002 and 2012, the NED injected more than US$100 million to fund ‘NGOs’ and opposition groups.[6]
3. Post-Chavez US ‘regime change’ efforts
With the premature death of Hugo Chavez, the US intensified the multi-pronged hybrid war unleashed to destroy the revolution. It was ratcheted up on 9 March 2015 with Obama’s signing Executive Order 13692 characterizing the Government of Venezuela “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States”, leading the US president “declare a [US] national emergency to deal with that threat.” The Order included provisions for the U.S. to appropriate all Venezuelan “property and interests” located in US territory.
Obama’s Executive Order 13692 both provided a legal fig leaf for and was the corollary of a relentless crescendo of aggression against the Bolivarian government. The aggression would be massively intensified by Trump from 2017 all the way to March 2022, when President Biden, desperate for oil supplies, sent an official US delegation to talk to President Maduro. As early as July 2017, six months after being inaugurated, Trump summarized the real US intention toward Venezuela by stating that to oust the Maduro government “all options are on the table.” This overtly military threat would be incessantly repeated by Trump himself, and regularly parroted by fanatical cold warriors such as John Bolton, throughout his administration.
The 2009 US-Colombia Defense Cooperation Agreement had been a stepping-stone toward a ‘military solution’ of the US ‘Venezuelan problem’. Consistent with this, the State Dept. took on the propaganda task to falsely depict Bolivarian Venezuela as a state sponsor of terrorist organizations. Already by 2004, the US State Dept. Country Reports on Terrorism stated, “Venezuelan counterterrorism cooperation continued to be inconsistent at best”. The 2005 Report went further: “Venezuelan cooperation in the international campaign against terrorism remained negligible.”
In 2014 Venezuela was charged by the US State Dept., for the ninth consecutive year, as not cooperating fully with U.S. counterterrorism efforts and that it allowed for support of activities of FARC, ELN, ETA and Hezbollah.[7] In 2011, the U.S. re-imposed sanctions against a state Venezuela arms factory, followed by the U.S. blocking arm sales to Venezuela in 2015, and in the same year, the then vice-president Joe Biden visited the Caribbean to pressurize countries to leave Petrocaribe suggesting that Maduro had little time left. In the 2020 Country Report on Terrorism, the US State Dept. for the umpteenth time reiterated the false charge that “Venezuela remained a permissive environment of known terrorist groups, including dissidents of the FARC, the Colombian-origin ELN, and Hizballah sympathizers.”
Furthermore, from 2004 the U.S. carried out an intense campaign falsely depicting the Bolivarian government as the main hub of narco-trafficking, propaganda spewed primarily by SOUTHCOM, thus adding a further military dimension to US aggression against Venezuela. In 2004, in a report to the Senate, SOUTHCOM Commander, General James Hill, amalgamated drug trafficking, radical populism and guerrilla groups into the scope of US counterterrorism policies as major threats to the Western Hemisphere, pointing to Venezuela, Bolivia and Colombia as sources for these problems. In 2021, Admiral Craig Faller, SOUTHCOM Commander told the Senate Armed Services Committee “Venezuela has become a paradise of impunity for narcotraffickers…”
In other words, a sustained campaign of demonization that throughout 2004-2022, was almost daily parroted by the mainstream media with alacrity and unjournalistic colorfulness. A shameful example is a piece of ‘investigative journalism’ published, of course, in the Guardian/Observer (03/02/2008) with the title Revealed: Chavez role in cocaine trail to Europe. The demonization of Bolivarian Venezuela was spiced up with depicting its government as a brutal dictatorship. The Economist, for example, wrote editorial piece (24 January 2019) with the title “How to hasten the demise of Venezuela’s dictatorship”.
In this period, the violent aggressions against Venezuela included the six-month long waves of opposition violence of 2014 and 2017. The two episodes of ‘civil disobedience’ and street violence were characterized by a campaign of intense hatred against Chavistas and Chavismo such that opposition thugs sought to set on fire as many institutions associated with Chavismo as they could. It was called La Salida (The Ousting), launched with the explicit purpose to overthrow democratically elected President Nicolas Maduro, extreme right-wingers, Leopoldo Lopez, Maria Corina Machado and Antonio Ledezma, led it and it lasted six months (January-June). There were reported instances of violent attacks (usually with fire or explosives) on ministry buildings, health clinics, public transport (setting fire to a public transport bus with passengers inside), other public buildings, social programme offices, buildings of left wing parties, electricity stations, siege on the state TV station, attempt to pour diesel in sources of drinking water, and an attempt to set on fire the ministry of housing office in Caracas with 1,200 employees inside including 89 children’s in the ministry’s crèche.
This was supplemented with well-planned, well-funded and well-synchronized street barricades – known in Venezuela as guarimba – and the opposition wanton violence, which the media (especially the Guardian) glorified[8], led to the death of 43 people, which the media falsely attributed to government repression.[9] Then in 2017 there was another guarimba, also explicitly aimed at violently overthrowing the democratically elected government, which also lasted six months (April-September) and that was even nastier than the one in 2014. As in 2014, the violent offensive meant the erection of road blockades and barricades, the sabotage of public electricity installations, health centers, maternity hospitals, many public buildings, the state television channel, vehicles transporting food supplies, a military base, ambulances, pedestrians and passers-by, an indigenous radio station, police stations, children nurseries, and state-run factories were viciously attacked. Dozens of public transport buses, fuel tanker trucks and police vehicles were burned with people inside, police officers were fired on, human excrement and bombs were thrown to police officers on motorbike, opposition demonstrators used home-made bazookas and suspected Chavista supporters were gang beaten stripped naked, tied to lampposts or trees and were nearly lynched.
The novelty in the 2017 guarimba was the extensive use of fire against over 30 people with the intention to burn them alive – a ‘deed’ that was successfully achieved with Orlando Figuera – most of those attacked were so for their Chavista ‘outlook’, i.e., being dark-skinned, crimes that cannot be characterized other than as hate crimes.[10] The mainstream media yet again glorified the 2017 opposition violence,[11] as a result of which 172 people were killed out of which, as reported by the then president of the National Assembly, Delcy Rodriguez, 50 percent of whom were not participating in the demonstrations, either in favor or against the government.[12]
With the failure of domestic mass mobilization as the means to bring about ‘regime change, the US decided to take things directly in its own hands, embarking on a series of militaristic adventures, which we summarily chart below. First, there was the violent sabotage to the 2018 national election; the successful lobbying for US and EU sanctions; the assassination attempt on President Maduro and the revolution’s politico-military high command with drones loaded with explosives in August 2018; the induced exodus of huge number of Venezuelans in 2018; Guaidó’s self-proclamation as ‘interim president’ in 2019; the violent effort to force food through the Colombia-Venezuela border in Cucuta, an operation to militarily penetrate Venezuela with paramilitaries with the support of Colombia’s police and armed forces in February 2019; a cybernetic attack on the national electricity grid bringing about a total blackout in March 2019; a failed coup d’état in April 2019; a Rambo style attack on Venezuela aimed at ousting the government and the assassination of President Maduro in May 2020[13]; also in May 2020 the Trump government indicted President Maduro (and other high officials) on charges of “narco-terrorism” offering a bounty of US$15 million reward for information leading to his arrest and conviction; and the US kidnapping of Venezuela’s Special Envoy, Alex Saab, in June 2020 whilst in transit trough Cape Verde, entrusted with obtaining food and medicines whose supply has been gravely affected by US unilateral coercive measures (aka ‘sanctions’).
To get a sense of the thinking going into US policy towards Venezuela, immediately after Guaidó self-proclaimed ‘interim president’ in January 2019, Trump’s State Secretary, Mike Pompeo, appointed Elliott Abrams, as Special Envoy to steer US towards the Maduro government. Abrams is a diplomat convicted over the Iran-Contra scandal, a specialist on dirty wars in Central America in the 1980s, who fought to cover-up the worst massacre in Latin America, in El Mozote in El Salvador when about 1000 innocent civilians (including children and women) were murdered by forces trained and equipped by the U.S.[14]
The 2011-2021 decade was dominated by US-led and US-financed destabilization through the intense mobilization of ‘civil society’ (US Venezuelan proxies). The US-funded Observatorio Venezolano de Conflictividad Social registered a total of 92,719 public protests (an average of over 9,000 per year).[15] The summary of the episodes of putschist seditious violence referred to above plus the amazingly high levels of opposition-generated social unrest, showed what the people of Venezuela endured.
Despite Adversities, Majority of Venezuelans Support Chavismo
4. US sanctions as a means of economic destruction
Since 2014 Venezuela has been inflicted 927 illegal unilateral coercive measures (aka sanctions) by the U.S. and its European accomplices: 477 against persons (mostly government officials), 169 directed against public bodies and private companies, 69 against national and foreign cargo ships as part of the US naval blockade, 58 against planes, and, crucially, 164 aimed at freezing assets and liquid funds held in various countries around the world (notably 31 tons of gold held in the Bank of England).[16]
As a result Venezuela has lost US$232 billion in oil revenues. This in a context where through direct aggression – or the bullying of third parties threatened also with sanctions –, the US has managed to totally exclude Venezuela from the international financial system. This has actually meant, for example, that when the Venezuelan government sought to pay any debt or purchase anything, the payment made not only was not processed but also, by the threat of US punitive action, was not returned to Venezuela.
Thus, during 2019, Portugal’s Novo Banco S.A. for example, did on three occasions prevent the Government of Venezuela from paying 4.7 million euros to the Italian Foundation for Bone Marrow Transplantation to provide treatment to 26 Venezuelan patients, including children and adolescents affected by severe health problems. In May 2019 alone five of these children died waiting to undergo the transplant. Currently, the Novo Banco has blocked or frozen US$1.5 billion that belong to the people of Venezuela.[17]
The US-sponsored and US-enforced illegal blockade was total: banks the world over, cowed by US pressure, froze virtually all Venezuelan accounts and retained its financial deposits. Oil exports and imports of oil-related spare parts and refining chemicals were completely blocked thus making oil and gasoline output collapse. Food and medicine – right in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic – were also targeted with the explicit aim to drive people to despair and causing the unnecessary death of well over one hundred thousand of the most vulnerable (chronically ill, children, cancer patients, pregnant women, the elderly, etc.). The export of gold and other minerals that Venezuela is rich on, were also targeted.
At this moment perhaps the best solution would be to accelerate the collapse [of Venezuela], even if it produces a greater period of suffering, whether for months or years.
William Brownfield, ex US ambassador to Venezuela; interview Voice of America, October 2018.
The US and its accomplices were, however, thoroughly frustrated by the political courage of the Bolivarian government that, despite the sanction’s devastating effects, never buckled under the pressure, and also by the heroic resilience of the people of Venezuela that, being painfully aware of the consequences, were the Maduro government to be ousted, remained supportive of their revolution. A 2019 study of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) concluded that between 2017 and 2018 alone, US sanctions inflicted an estimated 40,000 deaths, that in 2018 there were 85 percent shortages of essential medicines thus more than 300,000 people were at risk due to lack of access to medicines or treatment (80,000 with HIV, 16,000 who needed dialysis, 16,000 people with cancer and 4 million with diabetes and hypertension).[18]
Realizing the blockade by itself, no matter how devastating its effects were, would not bring about the desired ‘regime change’, the US and its European accomplices combined economic warfare with stronger-arm tactics. First in 2018 with the use of multilateral bodies such as the Organization of American States (OAS) whose infamous Secretary General, Luis Almagro feverishly sought to adopt resolutions to intervene in Venezuela. When this failed, Almagro, instructed by the US, set up the Lima Group whose exclusive remit was to accelerate Maduro’s downfall. This also failed. In January 2019, Trump went for the illegal confiscation of a PDVSA company in the U.S., CITGO, and the freezing of all Venezuelan accounts in the US. In September 2019, Almagro got majority support to activate the possible application of the 1947 Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (TIAR) to Venezuela. This raised the specter of military intervention against Bolivarian Venezuela whose crisis, argued the OAS resolution (voted only by 12 countries), has a destabilizing effect and represented a threat to peace and security in the region. US extreme right wing Senator Marco Rubio (Florida-R), welcome the OAS resolution because Venezuela is the object of foreign intervention by China, and Russia. A small number of right wing governments in Latin America verbally supported the TIAR threat but refused to commit to military action, as the US wanted.
In its efforts to strangle Venezuela’s economy the US hoped to lead people to such levels of despair that they, spurred by the opposition, would stage an uprising bringing about chaos, riots, looting and violence to justify the so desired ‘external’ (US-led military) intervention. The State Dept. plotted the kidnapping of Special Envoy, Venezuela diplomat, Alex Saab precisely to stop the supply of food and medicines to Venezuela altogether. Saab was illegally arrested in Cape Verde in June 2020 whilst in transit travelling on a mission to obtain food and medical supplies for his country. He was illegally imprisoned in Cape Verde and eventually extradited to Florida in the US in October 2021, where he has been charged with conspiring to launder US$350 million. Saab’s diplomatic immunity has ben grossly violated, action that represents a flagrant violation of international law by the US; his arrest warrant was issued the day after his arrest; he was extradited even though Cape Verde has no extradition treaty with the US and despite rulings against Saab’s arrest and extradition issued by the West African regional Court and the United Nations Human Rights Committee that he should be released.[19] Saab’s plane, having ‘coincidentally’ been denied refuelling in Morocco and Senegal was forced to land in Cape Verde. In his book, Never Give An Inch (2023), Mike Pompeo, admits the US plotted Saab’s kidnapping: “No other nation has global reach to interrupt an Iranian-Venezuelan plot in real time and convince a small island nation to hold a wanted man.” It would seem the US’s ‘global reach’ got to Morocco, Senegal and Cape Verde.[20]
Yet, astonishingly, despite the colossal might of the US the Bolivarian government, led by Nicolas Maduro firm steering, has not only survived the onslaught, it also managed to recoup the nation’s economy from US-induced collapse, both weakening the right wing opposition and substantially strengthening Chavismo in the process.
Only a government committed to building a socialist society, organizing and mobilizing the working class and its allies, linking up with other socialist governments and socialist mass parties, as well as an array of anti-imperialist forces in Latin America and internationally, has the necessary ingredients to resist the levels of imperialist aggression described above. Feat unimaginable in a government committed to neo-liberalism. The first thing neoliberal governments sacrifice to multinational capital and imperialism is their national sovereignty, amply demonstrated by neoliberal governments in Latin America and by the European Union’s abject submissiveness to Washington. It is, therefore, preposterous to label the Maduro government, neoliberal. No neo-liberal government would systematically build a state designed to construct and defend the building of a socialist society and play a leadership role in the global struggle against imperialism and capitalism.
5. Venezuela’s leading role in world and Latin American affairs
Well before Chavez’s rise to the presidency he had a continental and international perspective. In December 1994 as a Fidel Castro guest Chavez’s address to the Cuban authorities at the University of Havana presented his vision of a single, united, socialist Patria Grande. Based on the ideas of Bolivar, Marti and Mariátegui. This was, in his view, the logical and necessary solution of the situation the continent required on the eve of the 21st century.
Chavez’ election to the presidency in 1998, in the context of the severe contradictions and inequities generated by neoliberalism in the 1980s and 1990s, contributed decisively to trigger the golden decade of Latin America’s regional integration. From Bolivarian Venezuela Hugo Chavez spearheaded the creation of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), the Commonwealth of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), PetroCaribe, Operation Miracle, a number of other integrationist initiatives, and almost established a common currency and a regional central bank (Bank of the South).[21]
Venezuela’s Bolivarian leadership built very strong links with Cuba and the Cuban leadership, notably between Fidel and Chavez, then between Raul and Nicolas Maduro and now between the latter and President Diaz-Canel. Venezuela’s ruling party, the PSUV, the Cuban Communist Party (CCP) and Brazil’s Workers Party (PT) have played a central role in helping shape the politics of Latin America’s Sao Paulo Forum, established in 1990. The Forum coordinates all the mass parties of the Latin American Left such as Cuba’s CCP, Brazil’s PT, Venezuela’s PSUV, Bolivia’s MAS, Nicaragua’s FSLN, Honduras’ LIBRE, Mexico’s MORENA, Kirchner Peronistas, and St Lucia’s Labour Party, all parties in government. And also El Salvador’s FMLN, Paraguay’s Frente Guasu, and Uruguay’s Broad Front that are not in government[22], to mention the ones with a mass following, whose combined membership is millions, and whose electoral strength runs in the tens of millions (the PT alone got 60 million votes in the 2022 election). The Forum also coordinates dozens of smaller left parties, many with elected deputies in national parliaments, mayors in key cities and councilors in hundreds of municipalities in the region.
There is also the Puebla Group set up primarily at the initiative of Mexico’s President Lopez Obrador that includes other presidents such as Bolivia’s Luis Arce, Argentina’s Alberto Fernandez, but also former presidents, including Spain’s Jose Zapatero, Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff, Dominican Republic’s Leonel Fernandez, Paraguay’s Fernando Lugo, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Colombia’s Ernesto Samper, Panama’s Martin Torrijos, Uruguay’s Pepe Mujica, Honduras’ Manuel Zelaya, plus a large number of former ministers, parliamentarians, political leaders and so forth. Though there is no Venezuelan in this coordination, the Grupo holds strong progressive views, it opposes US sanctions against Venezuela and supports Maduro’s dialogue initiatives in which Zapatero plays an important facilitating role. The Bolivarian government has robust links with the left wing presidents’ members of the Grupo. Thus, Venezuela’s interests are strongly present in the Grupo’s views and concerns whose objective consequence is opposition to imperialist aggression.
A sample of the significance of Bolivarian Venezuela in Latin America was the XXII International Encounter of 78 Communist and Workers Parties from 60 countries, held in Havana between 27 and 29 October 2022. In point 7 of the approved Plan of Action, they included the cruel imperialist aggression inflicted on Venezuela and its people:
“To promote solidarity with the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela in the face of the aggression and illegal sanctions imposed by U.S. and European imperialism. To carry out actions demanding the immediate lifting of the illegal coercive measures and the return of the assets owned by Venezuela, which have been usurped by the imperialist power.”
The above demonstrates, that apart from genuine tactical and ideological differences, the overwhelming majority of the Left in Latin America, especially its mass parties, have a strong affinity with the government of President Nicolas Maduro, broadly share its objectives, draw inspiration from its exemplary struggle against, and resistance to, imperialist aggression. None of them subscribe to the cartoonish characterization of ‘neoliberal’ hypocritically used against Maduro’s government by pro- neoliberal media outfits (e.g., Bloomberg) and by marginal, fossilized doctrinaires. Standing on Chavez’s legacy, Maduro’s defiance to US aggression is seen as exemplary well beyond Latin America, especially among progressive forces in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.
Furthermore, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela is a member of and holds a leading role in key international bodies where it plays a highly progressive role in favor of its own people, Latin America, and the peoples of the world who suffer imperialist oppression and exploitation. And, as part of the G77+China, Bolivarian Venezuela under Maduro’s presidency continues to play a leading and active role opposing US and EU unilateral coercive measures.[23]
Bolivarian Venezuela’s initiatives have achieved substantial political victories against US aggression. For example, in March 2018, at Venezuela initiative, whilst holding the presidency of the G77+China, the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), adopted a historic resolution condemning unilateral coercive measures. Togo and Jordan sponsored the resolution.
At the behest of Bolivarian Venezuela, at its 2016 summit held in Margarita (Venezuela) the G77+China (then called Non-Aligned Movement – NAM), condemned the unilateral coercive measures for negatively affecting people’s human rights and preventing the full social and economic development of the peoples who suffer them. Furthermore, NAM foreign ministers issued the New York Political Declaration in September 2017 confirming the view adopted in Margarita the previous year.
In 2019, when US-led mainstream media demonization was raging against Bolivarian Venezuelan, its government got a seat in the UN Human Rights Council, thanks to the support of the G77+China countries, despite strong US opposition. Thus confirming Venezuela’s progressive role in the UN. In 2019 and also at the initiative of Bolivarian Venezuela, the UN Human Rights Council at its 42nd ordinary session condemned the negative impact of the unilateral coercive measures applied by the US government.
In February 2021, UN Human Rights expert and UN Special Rapporteur, Alena Douhan delivered a conference with details of the negative consequences of the unilateral coercive measures on the people of Venezuela and urged the US and the EU to lift them. And in March 2022, the UNHRC adopted again a resolution submitted by the NAM condemning the negative consequences of the unilateral coercive measures by a wide majority. Unsurprisingly, all European countries and the US voted against.
In September 2021 Bolivarian Venezuela took the initiative to propose the creation of the Group of Countries in Defense of the UN Charter to oppose all unilateral coercive measures for usurping the UN Security Council authority and use such measures to force the sovereign will of other states. Venezuela’s political leadership in Latin America is also prominent.
Under Chavez Venezuela was central to the establishment of UNASUR and CELAC, and many of the other regional integration institutions and bodies. They have remained central part of President Maduro’s government regional strategy. Their functioning, however, was severely impaired during the US regional counteroffensive that led to the ousting and defeat of left wing governments in Honduras (2009), Paraguay (2012), Argentina (2015), Brazil (2016), Ecuador (2017), Bolivia (2019), El Salvador (2019), and Uruguay (2020). All coupled with intense US economic warfare and US efforts to violently overthrow the governments of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. Yet, the continental right wing, despite withdrawing from some was unable to abolish the established institutions of regional integration.
During this difficult period (2009-2020), under Maduro’s presidency Venezuela led the opposition to OAS interference, its cadre, diplomats and representatives at every level rigorously demolished all false charges concocted by OAS Secretary General, Luis Almagro against the government, which eventually led Venezuela to leave the OAS.[24] Maduro successfully resisted and defeated the US-installed, now deceased, Lima Group.
With the ongoing political recovery of the Left in Latin America, Venezuela has joined left governments efforts to fully re-establish UNASUR and CELAC. With the election of Lula to Brazil’s presidency, the return of UNASUR is imminent. CELAC’s 6th summit (Sept 2021) invited China’s President Xi Jinping who, via videoconference, called for wider China-CELAC cooperation and stressed that relations with CELAC “are of utmost importance to China.” At CELAC’s 7th Summit (January 2023), with the second pink tide in full swing and at the invitation of host President Alberto Fernandez, China’s President Xi Jinping delivered another video message stating “We highly value our relations with CELAC, and take CELAC as our key partner in enhancing solidarity among developing countries and furthering South-South cooperation.”
Furthermore, Venezuela was the locale for the holding of the First International Conference of Afro-descendants on 10-12 November 2019, with representatives from 43 countries, around a hundred international delegates and more than 300 Afro-Venezuelans. The Conference discussed among other issues, racism and discrimination against Afro-descendant women. It reported the number of Afro-descendants in the American continent to be 130 million and Sub Saharan Africans living in Africa and Europe to be about one thousand million. It also discussed the struggle of Afro-descendants against neoliberalism in Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, Haiti and Honduras. Previously, on 31st August 2019, Venezuela’s National Assembly, in unanimous decision, had declared that day as the International Day of Afro-descendants. Typically, Venezuela, under Chavez and under Maduro, follows statements of principle with political deeds. This year (2023) the Third Afro-Venezuelan National Congress was held on February 24, which, “within the spirit of the Bolivarian Revolution, will work towards dismantling 530 years of colonialism, slavery, racism and discrimination.”[25]
Chavismo under Maduro’s political leadership went into full gear when Gustavo Petro was elected president of Colombia in June 2022. With the keen collaboration of Petro’s government, a raft of decisions were undertaken aimed both at initiating economic, political and military collaboration with Petro’s government, normalizing relations between the two countries, including fully reopening the common border and restoring their diplomatic relations. This has enormously facilitated Petro’s efforts to bring about peace in Colombia whose government requested Venezuela to act as a guarantor of the peace negotiations he has begun with the ELN guerrilla group, whose leadership travelled to Caracas where the negotiations began. Cuba, as is well known, is also playing an important role. Their relationship has evolved to the signing in February 2023 of a bilateral trade agreement.[26]
The Bolivarian government has appointed Felix Plasencia, former minister of foreign affairs, as Secretary General of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America – Peoples’ Trade Treaty (ALBA-TCP). Plasencia replaces, Bolivian diplomat Sacha Llorenti. The ALBA-TCP 18th Summit of Heads of State and Governments, held in December 2022, was addressed by President Nicolas Maduro. The Summit Declaration reiterates its commitment to “the development and welfare of our nations, as well as to the defense of national sovereignty without any foreign interference” and “reject the colonialist and interfering postulates of the Monroe Doctrine, used to justify destabilizing and interventionist practices in Latin America and the Caribbean”[27]
Bolivarian Venezuela also plays a leading role in the area of socialist education with the production of a number of publications aimed primarily at Venezuela, but that also have a regional and broader international reach. Among them, to mention the most important ones, we have Cuatro F (struggle for socialism in Venezuela)[28], Memorias de Venezuela[29] (radical take on Venezuelan history), and Economía Política y Revolución[30] (theoretical and political issues pertaining to the political economy of the Bolivarian Revolution).
Issue 107 of Economía Política y Revolución, for example, has nine articles dedicated to US-led NATO as the principal source of military aggression and wars in the world. Regular contributors and leading writers for this journal are Jesus Faria Tortosa and Ricardo Melendez (ministers for foreign trade and investment and planning, respectively), both architects of Venezuela’s policies that led to the country’s economic recovery. In issues 53, 54, and 56 there are discussions and explanations about the Anti-Blockade Law that has been used to falsely label Maduro’s policies as neoliberal.
In the international arena we have Correo del Alba[31] (politics, culture, art and current affairs in Latin America, the Caribbean and the world) that focuses on exposing neoliberalism, imperialism, and the manifold manifestation of the struggle for socialism and for a better world. Likewise with America XXI[32] that published 154 issues (2003-2018) to then become a news website with a fortnightly bulletin. Issue 154 – April 2018 – demonstrates how pre-Petro Colombia was a Washington proxy against revolutionary Venezuela, but it also carries an in-depth article on Engels’ The origin of the family, private property and the state. When Venezuela’s right won an overwhelming majority in parliament, one of the worst moments for the Bolivarian government, issue 114-115 –Jan 2015 – carries an image of President Maduro, clenched fist, with the slogan ‘Deepening Socialism in Action’.
6. How did President Maduro manage Venezuela’s economic recovery?
The announcement by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) that Venezuela’s economy would grow for the first time since 2014 by 5 percent in 2022 (one of the highest in the region), came as an unexpected shock to many, but when Credit Suisse predicted the growth to be 20 percent[33], the country’s economic recovery became a certainty. By June 2022, even the BBC had published an analysis pinpointing the manifestations of this recuperation: end of hyperinflation, increase in oil output, improvement in the supply of everyday consumption goods and the return of airlines and international artists.[34]
The country’s rate of hyperinflation had come from a predicted 10 million percent (as reported by the IMF in 2018[35]) to 7.1 percent in September 2021 and 1.4 percent in March 2022, though the economy still faces inflationary pressures, hyperinflation has been stopped. Furthermore, it was reported that the output of essential goods of daily consumption had increased substantially: corn (essential for Venezuela’s staple food – arepas) by 60 percent, beef 50%, sugar 30 percent, milk 31 percent, rice 24 percent, chicken 23 percent and so forth. In January this year (2023), in his state-of-the-nation speech to the National Assembly, President Maduro informed that Venezuela produces 94 percent of the subsidized food that goes into thee food programme for the poor[36] and the more general shortages of all goods has been reduced by over 95 percent.
In April 2022 President Maduro even took the decision to cancel St Vincent and the Grenadines $70 million debt and reduced by half the debt of countries belonging to the Organization of the Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) to PetroCaribe.[37] He also restarted the agreement with the countries affiliated to PetroCaribe with a 35 per cent discount in the price of oil. By March 2022, it was reported that Venezuela’s non-oil exports had increased by 76 percent.
In Venezuela economic policy is developed and implemented within the framework the state monopoly over the country’s crucial foreign revenue sources (oil, gold, rare minerals, foreign trade and so forth), which when added to President Maduro government’s deftness, decisively contributed to produce these impressive results, persistent US economic aggression notwithstanding.
Given Venezuela’s economy lost 99 percent of its oil revenues, because of US sanctions, it makes economic sense to draw and harness existing private sources of capital to generate productive activity, employment and value added that contribute to improving people’s living standards. The Bolivarian government has actively sought this investment, thus, in a tour to Eurasia at the beginning of 2022 President Maduro increased Venezuela’s trading partners in the world, adding to the already strong economic links with China and Russia, he visited Turkiye, Algeria, Iran, Kuwait, Qatar, and Azerbaijan. Venezuela’s vast assets and the anti-blockade legislation make its economy attractive to foreign investment that could not be attracted without the Venezuelan state creating incentives for profit and investment, investment which, at any rate, will operate under the aegis of the Bolivarian state.
The mainstream media cynically have welcomed the policies of the governments of Venezuela and Cuba to attract foreign investment as an inexorable prelude to capitalist restoration, even though they are fully conscious they are dictated by the exogenously generated crisis in these nations and not as steps towards embracing capitalism. The corporate media have been quick to attribute Venezuela’s economic recovery to the supposedly capitalistic nature of Maduro’s strategy. Spain’s intensely anti-Chavista El País (May 26 2022), for example, characterized Venezuela’s recovery as “rampant capitalism.” US imperialism, however, shelter no illusions about capitalist restoration: Biden excluded Venezuela, Cuba and also Nicaragua from the 9th Summit of the Americas held in Los Angeles (6-10 June 2022) that, though it badly backfired on the Biden, it confirmed US imperialism does not think Cuba and Venezuela efforts to attract foreign investment represent a return to capitalism. Biden’s tactical contacts with Maduro’s government and the election of Petro in Colombia prompted The Economist (18/08/22) to comment: “…the quest for cheap oil is not the only reason […the US] will also not want to strain relations with the growing ranks of left-wing governments in the region…”
In Cuba foreign investment was upgraded from being an Investment Law (2014) to be recognized in the new constitution in a context of initiatives aimed at attracting foreign investment like the Mariel Special Development Zone, which allows for 100 percent foreign ownership. The law already guarantees foreign companies benefits, protection against expropriation without due process, plus tax and other assurances. Foreign investment has been encouraged by Cuba since the collapse of the USSR by Fidel in 1991, then Raul after 2008 and now Diaz-Canel.
Though not identical, the Anti-Blockade Law (ABL) approved by Venezuela’s National Assembly (May 2021) provides similar incentives with the same objective: to attract foreign investment. The ABL also has constitutional status and necessarily contains clauses of confidentiality to circumvent US sanctions to protect state assets and the identity of domestic and foreign investing companies plus furnishing similar guarantees as in Cuba. Additionally, an Observatory to supplement the ABL has been established to monitor its application and implementation, which specifically upholds Art.303 of the Constitution that stipulates total state control over PDVSA, the state oil company. And as in Cuba, Venezuela also adopted a very similar law for the creation of special economic zones (ZEE in its Spanish acronym).
Furthermore, PDVSA, the state oil company, all basic enterprises, the Caracas Metro, electricity, telecommunications and water, just to mention a few examples, are firmly in state hands. William Serafino aptly formulated how fallacious is the charge of neoliberalism against President Maduro’s economic policies, “It is an absurd contradiction to qualify a government as neoliberal if it has a wide range of taxes to strengthen its revenue collection, sustain subsidies to public services, and a massive food program: the CLAP, whose acquisition cost for the population is far below market prices. It is simply nonsense to call this neoliberalism. In fact, it is the opposite of neoliberalism.”[38]
No class lines have been crossed either by Cuba or Venezuela. By February 2021 President Maduro informed to have received over 200 private investment proposals from all over the world. Venezuela’s opposition leader, Jorge Luis Borges, aware of their highly positive economic potential, sought to discredit both the ABL and ZEE by falsely suggesting the government ‘aims at strengthening corruption and organized crime’. Had this been the case, it would have had both his, the opposition’s, and the US’s enthusiastic support. And in case there was any doubt, in March 2021, extreme right wing US Senators Marco Rubio, Rick Scott, Jacky Rosen and Thom Tillis introduced the “Banning Operations and Leases with the Illegitimate Venezuelan Authoritarian Regime Act’’ (or ‘‘BOLIVAR Act’’) that aims to prohibit any US federal agency from awarding US government contracts to companies that are engaged in business with the Maduro government. As we can see, all wings of the empire and their ‘operatives’ in Venezuela concur with the Latin American and international left that Maduro’s is a socialist government and has nothing neoliberal about it.
The State, jointly with private initiative, shall promote the harmonious development of the national economy, to the end of generating sources of employment, a high rate of domestic added value, raising the standard of living of the population and strengthen the economic sovereignty of the country. Article 299, Bolivarian Constitution
The government of President Maduro has maintained Hugo Chavez’s and the Bolivarian Revolution’s commitment to social justice as a central ethical tenet that guides its politics and actions. Confirming this, domestic consumption has been expanded through an array of government bonuses (Christmas; gasoline; family economy; lactating and pregnant women, single mothers, the elderly, youth apprenticeships and much more), all paid electronically. Additionally, 76 per cent of the national budget was devoted to social expenditure in 2021, with 77 per cent for 2022.
To top it all up, President Maduro put forward a budget for fiscal year 2023, smaller than the 2022 one due to temporary appreciation of the dollar that nevertheless, in line with the overall approach of the Bolivarian government, devoted 77 per cent to social expenditure, with health care and education assigned 23 and 20 per cent, respectively. The National Assembly approved it with only one vote against. And, in December 2022 President Maduro informed of the completion of 4.4 million houses for the poor, a feat not achieved by any neoliberal government anywhere in Latin America or the world.
At the core of Venezuela’s economic revival lies the digitalization of its economy and the huge number of small and medium-sized productive enterprises. In 2020 there were 121,432,000 digital transactions that increased to 201 million in 2021, covering 80 percent of the domestic transactions (they have further increased ever since). The Servicio Autónomo de Registros y Notarías (SAREN in its Spanish acronym), body responsible for registering and processing authorization to set up small businesses, reports that 7,657 small enterprises were registered in 2020, 19,284 in 2021, and, by the end of May 2022, 13,096. These small-sized enterprises are private, cooperative and communally owned.
Benefitting from the vigorous development and expansion during the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic by the Bolivarian government[39], the Homeland Card — a personalized QR identity available to all citizens — and a generous policy of state credit for new small entrepreneurs have greatly facilitated both the establishment and consolidation of the small enterprises but also the digitalization of transactions.
An article I wrote summarizes the central components of President Maduro’s strategy that explain Venezuela’s extraordinary economic recovery:
[…] Bolivarian Venezuela has guaranteed food security to all — but particularly its most vulnerable citizens; has protected the population from the ravages of the Covid-19 pandemic and kept key public services functioning; has deftly circumvented the global minefield of US sanctions including challenging US prohibition to trade with Iran, Russia, China and others; has increased oil and other exports, attracted foreign capital while ensuring state pre-eminence over such investment to protect national sovereignty; has sustained and expanded domestic consumption while simultaneously bringing hyperinflation under control and has delivered 4.1m new houses. Venezuela has achieved all of this while at the same time has vastly expanded, strengthened and empowered the mass organizations of the working class, peasants, and grassroots communal bodies not only as a means of mass political mobilization but as a deterrent to militaristic, terrorist adventures unleashed from Colombia by Washington’s “regime change” machinery.”
Description that led me to conclude: “This is Bolivarian socialism at work.[40]
Book Launch on Hugo Chávez’s 69th Birthday: ‘Chavismo as a Political Identity’
7. The nature of the Bolivarian Revolution
The Bolivarian revolution is a novelty in that it has sought to bring about a socialist transformation of society, politics and economy without a revolutionary assault on the state. This has meant that the political rights of bourgeois opposition parties, the capitalist associations, the right wing media, and so forth have been respected and upheld even when they have engaged in insurrectionary tactics and treason, something they have consistently and systematically perpetrated since 1998. Another specificity unique to Venezuela, unlike the progressive and revolutionary governments of the first and second pink tide (Cuba excepted), is the strong civic-military alliance that lies at the foundation of the emerging Bolivarian state.
This uniqueness has also determined that the transition to bring about the socialist transformation of society, economy and state has been taking place much more slowly than in a conventional revolution (if such a thing exists). In Venezuela this feature has been compounded by its overarching century-long overspecialization as an oil exporting economy that has left an intractable legacy of economic, political and social distortions. Chavistas (and others) refer to this hefty obstructive ‘inheritance’ with its sequels of swathes of chronic poverty, a culture of corruption and inefficiency, client politics, opportunism and treason, as rentismo (rentier capitalism). Juan Pablo Perez Alfonso, Venezuela’s oil minister in the 1960s and a member founder of OPEC, realized early the tribulations caused by Venezuela’s immense economic dependency on oil that brought waste, corruption, consumption, inefficiency, and debt. Thus, in his view, oil was not black gold; he called it ‘the devil’s excrement.’
The enormous changes Venezuela’s economy has undergone since 1999 under Chavismo notwithstanding, there is a generalized consensus among friends and foe that its capitalist nature, though greatly weakened, has not yet been fully overcome. All of this has been further compounded by the misuse and abuse the right wing opposition makes of its political rights. Bolivarian respect for democracy manifests itself in over 30 electoral processes that, in the context of sustained and brutal US aggression, give the right wing opposition regular opportunities (almost every year) to destabilize and endeavor to overthrow the Bolivarian government. For this unconstitutional and seditious aim the right wing enjoys the unconditional and solid political, financial, and media support and the assistance of US imperialism and its European accomplices. The slowness of the socialist transition, besides, allows the right wing to use its still abundant means to confound, contaminate, corrupt individuals and coopt sections of the social movements.
Yet, no matter how much has US imperialism tried through its Venezuelan proxies to oust the Bolivarian government for nearly 25 years it has hit an unbreakable revolutionary wall of mass organization and mass mobilization in defense of the Bolivarian government, the revolution and participatory democracy, defeating every attempt. Defeats that have had three components, first, the political skill of Chavez and Maduro in leading the Bolivarian movement, secondly, the vast network of social organizations that identify themselves as Chavistas and who willingly follow the political lead given by President Maduro, and, thirdly, the PSUV, the hegemonic political party of the Bolivarian process.
The social movements at the base of Bolivarianism are painfully aware not only of the devastating consequences they will suffer if the Maduro government were overthrown. They also know that when the economy nearly collapsed as a result of US sanctions, it was the policies implemented by the Bolivarian government, especially on health and food that crucially helped alleviate their plight. In that context of dire need the continuation of social progress, especially the vigorous housing, subsidized food and free health care programmes, persuaded them that their revolution was suffering a temporarily setback but was not defeated.
This attitude of the Chavista mass of the people, the government’s progressive policies and its continuous quest to support progressive developments in the region and internationally informs the stance taken by the Latin American and international Left towards Venezuela under President Maduro. This is not only correct from a practical but also from a principled viewpoint. The most important historical gain made by the people of Venezuela is the Chavista government, assertion that should be extended to the governments of Lula in 2002, Evo in 2005, and Correa in 2006, but also to the political instruments that made them possible, namely Brazil’s Workers Party, Bolivia’s MAS, Venezuela’s PSUV and the Citizen Revolution Movement party under Correa, to mention a few examples.
The mass movements in these countries, having a clear understanding of the significance of their progressive governments, fought hard to recover them in Brazil and Bolivia, as they are fighting to recover the citizen’s revolution government in Ecuador[41]. Therefore, the Left in Latin America and internationally have adopted the correct principled position, namely, to provide solid support for historic gains of such magnitude, regardless of differences that do exist among and within these political parties. Apart from many progressive features, these parties share a strong resolve to work together not only on immediate practical matters but also to jointly develop a strategy to construct an economically and politically integrated Patria Grande.
In 1998 Hugo Chavez Bolivarian Revolution brought about a revolutionary transformation turning Venezuela not only into a beacon of hope for the struggle against neoliberal immiseration and imperialist pillage for the world over, but especially in Latin America, where it became a source of inspiration. Venezuela’s successful resistance against a decade of intensified US aggression under President Maduro’s leadership is in itself a strong source of inspiration for the struggle against neoliberalism in the region. Furthermore, his determination and ability to continue and deepen what Hugo Chavez began, substantially contributes to galvanize the existential battle between Bolivarianism and Monroism that lies at the heart of Latin America’s struggle for its second independence. This was confirmed by none other than John Bolton, Trump’s National Security Advisor, who, in April 2019, addressing a group of Bay of Pigs veterans in Miami, told them “Today, we proudly proclaim for all to hear: the Monroe Doctrine is alive and well.”
8. Conclusion
When Nicolas Maduro won the April 2013 presidential election against right wing candidate Henrique Capriles by a narrow margin, The Economist (20/04/2013) labelled it ‘Maduro’s lousy start’. And the NYT’s assessment of Maduro’s chances to succeed (14/04/2013) were summed up as follows: “Yet even his supporters say that Mr. Maduro lacks his predecessor’s sharp political instincts and magnetism, and many questions remain about how effectively he will lead at home and abroad.” By 2013 the mainstream media, well before the torrent of sanctions that would be inflicted on Venezuela by Obama and specially Trump, did not give its economy under Maduro too many chances. In November 2013, for example, The Guardian (20/11/2013) was quoting opposition figures that argued that unless he moved to the right the economy would collapse like a “house of cards.”
By the beginning of 2016, the Washington Post (29/01/2016) declared Venezuela to be “on the brink of a complete economic collapse.” No wonder in 2017 The Economist asked (11/05/2017), “Why is Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro still in power?” In 2018 after Trump had applied hundreds of sanctions, the Washington Post (21/08/2018) reported Venezuela to be “swept by economic chaos” with inflation “hurtling toward 1 million percent and hunger spreading nationwide.” By 2019, The Economist (24/01/2019) was advising “How to hasten the demise of Venezuela’s dictatorship”, approvingly saying, “Recognizing an interim president instead of Nicolas Maduro is a start”. The Economist’s advice merits to be quoted in full: “America and the European Union should use all the tools at their disposal to promote peaceful change by boosting Mr Guaidó’s parallel government. That could include putting some of the money paid for oil exports into an account reserved for the national assembly, and using the threat of further sanctions to encourage defections from the regime.”[42] Though the mainstream media acknowledged that Venezuela was subjected to sanctions, they deviously blamed the country’s severe economic problems on the Bolivarian Revolution and, specially, Hugo Chavez,[43] and Nicolas Maduro’s government was to come to an end as night follows day.
By the end of 2020, the corporate media began to change its tune, no more predictions of the imminence of Maduro’s downfall. The focus turned to the predicament of “Venezuela’s opposition splits over taking part in coming elections” (NYT, 19/09/2020). Previously, not recognizing election results, let alone accepting the country’s electoral system had been a matter of ‘ethical principle’ for the US, the EU, Venezuela’s opposition and the corporate media. Later that year there was an almost positive NYT piece (19/11/2020) about the president’s decision, titled “Venezuela’s President Maduro Pardons 100 Political Opponents.” In January 2021, with Venezuela’s economy in serious recovery, the media looked for scapegoats, thus this Washington Post piece (19/01/2021), “Trump’s bluster failed Venezuela. Biden must use diplomatic and economic levers to address the crisis.” By May the year after (17/05/2022) the Post reported, “Biden administration begins easing restrictions on Venezuela oil.” By August, The Economist (19/08/2022), in characteristic biased language, began admitting ‘regime change’ failure: “Venezuela’s dictator is less isolated than he once was.”
US foreign relations think tank par excellence, Council of Foreign Relations (04/11/2022), went even further by asking “Do US sanctions on Venezuela work?” concluding they don’t since they “have contributed to the suffering of Venezuelan people and failed to unseat Maduro.”[44] Reuters registered the failure and the economy’s recovery (12/01/2022) with “Venezuelan economy grew above 15% in 2022” as reported to the National Assembly by President Maduro, and with another article the year after (23/08/2022) with “Venezuela’s economy grew 17% in Q1, says central bank president.” Venezuela’s economy recovered not because of the ‘easing’ of US sanctions, since the economy showed strong signs of recovery already in 2021.
By October 2022, the NYT in Opinion Editorial article (08/10/2022) finally came out with what everyone already knew: “The U.S. Cannot Uphold the Fiction that Juan Guaidó Is the President of Venezuela”, forcefully arguing “It is time for the Biden administration to accept that the Guaidó gambit has failed and that most Venezuelans, and most of the international community, have moved on. The White House needs a Venezuela policy based on fact, not fiction. And the fact is that Mr. Maduro is president of Venezuela and Mr. Guaidó is not.” At the end 2022, the NYT (30/12/2022) informed, “Guaidó is voted out as leader of Venezuelan opposition” and as ‘interim president’. The order to remove Guaidó, as the order to self-proclaim ‘interim president’ that most certainly came from Washington, led to his removal with the same ease as a US disposable human asset (what some people refer to as ‘puppets’) is discarded. To crown it all, confirming Maduro’s political success in the colossal battle with the empire, on 9th February 2023 the Washington Post published “How Maduro Beat Guaidó and the US in Venezuela’s Long Standoff.”
Maduro’s leadership qualities notwithstanding, none of this would have been possible without Venezuelan people’s resilience. But, a precision is necessary, ‘the people of Venezuela’ in 2022 have enormously advanced and politically matured from what they were at the time of their spontaneous 2002 mobilization to rescue Chavez back to power, and thereby defeating the coup. They are now organized in tens of thousands of well-structured grassroots committees and organization covering every aspect of societal importance (health, water, education, land, food distribution, women, youth, communal councils, cooperatives, and much more). This universe of grassroots bodies gives tangible corporeity to Venezuela’s constitutional principle that lies at the heart of its political system, namely, participatory democracy. The latter includes the armed forces, key component of the socialist Bolivarian state, in the unbreakable civil-military alliance, dimension that is completed with the people’s militia.
The instrument that articulates and harmonizes this complex social coalition of workers, peasants, women, youth, the military, and so forth that has guided it for over two-decades of Bolivarian Revolution is twofold: Hugo Chavez evolving into the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV). The PSUV enjoys Gramscian political and cultural hegemony in Venezuela by virtue of its intellectual and moral leadership over the majority of the (specially working) population. The PSUV hegemony was brought about primarily by the Bolivarian reinterpretation of the history of the class struggle in Venezuela since national independence lucidly formulated by Hugo Chavez as the ideological foundation from which to transform society, whose first concrete manifestation, after the 1992 rebellion with the ‘por ahora’ that shook the nation, was the 1999 Bolivarian constitution.[45] The PSUV is able to exert hegemony as the guiding force of the Bolivarian Revolution by virtue both of its structural bonds with and for being integral part of the historic bloc that drives the revolution forward.
The above sketchy selection of media headlines chart the relentless ordeal Bolivarian Venezuela was subjected to by US brutal hybrid war. It shows the evolution of the decade-long almighty struggle president Nicolas Maduro had his hands full with in defending his nation and his people, never giving an inch but skillfully navigating the highly dangerous wuthering waters of imperialist hostility and aggression. The result is rather impressive and it would be no exaggeration to assert that Maduro at the helm of the state, leading the Chavista mass movement, is ready for another decade of Bolivarian socialist and anti-imperialist struggle.
[1] Bart Jones, The Hugo Chavez Story, The Bodley Head, 2008, p.386.
[2] A Report by PROVEA, an opposition, US-funded ‘NGO’ registered that between 1999 and 2007 there were 11,157 different forms of protests against the Bolivarian government, that is, about 1400 per year on average (La Protesta Política en Venezuela (2001-2007, p.80).
[3] No to the US Militarization of Latin America, Venezuela Under Threat, Venezuela Solidarity Campaign, 2009.
[4] From 2011 but also in 2012, Latin America’s left wing leaders, Lula, Dilma, Cristina Kirchner, and Paraguay’s Fernando Lugo contracted cancer; raising strong suspicions that Chavez’s cancer could have been deliberated caused.
[5] Venezuela: Una década de protestas 2000-2010; that is an annual average of nearly two thousands.
[6] Eva Golinger, The Dirty Hand of the NED in Venezuela, Counterpunch, 25 April 2014, (https://www.counterpunch.org/2014/04/25/the-dirty-hand-of-the-national-endowment-for-democracy-in-venezuela/)
[7] U.S. State Dept., Country Reports on Terrorism 2014, Western Hemisphere.
[8] Guardian, ‘Demonstrations sweep across Venezuela – in pictures’, 20/02/2013, https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2014/feb/20/demonstrations-sweep-across-venezuela-in-pictures
[9] At the time Mark Weisbrot wrote an op-ed in the Guardian’s Opinion section with the interesting title Venezuela is not Ukraine (4/03/2014) stating, “Venezuela’s struggle is widely misrepresented in western media. This is a classic conflict between right and left, rich and poor.” (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/04/venezuela-protests-not-ukraine-class-sturggle)
[10] Lenin Brea, Venezuela: Crímenes de odio y violencia incediaria 2017, El Perro y la Rana, 2017 (this volume contains distressing images, caution advised – http://www.elperroylarana.gob.ve/venezuela-crimenes-de-odio-y-violencia-incendiaria-2017/)
[11] See, for example, “On the frontline of Venezuela’s punishing protests”, Guardian, 25 May 2017, (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/25/venezuela-protests-riots-frontline-caracas-nicolas-maduro). For a rigorous statistical and content analysis shows the strong anti-Chavista bias of seven highly influential newspapers (The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Miami Herald, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent and The Times). In Alan Macleod, Bad News from Venezuela, Routledge, 2018.
[12] Almelina Carrillo Virguez (47), a housekeeper, died on 19 April 2017 in Caracas whilst walking near a pro-Maduro demonstration by being hit by a bottle with frozen liquid thrown from a building by oppositionist Jesus Abi Zambito (42), a lawyer.
[13] Francisco Dominguez, US imperialism’s decomposition accelerates: outsourcing ‘regime change’, PRRUK, May 2020.
[14] Francisco Dominguez, Meet Elliott Abrams, the war criminal enlisted to ‘steer US Venezuela policy’, Morning Star (https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/meet-elliott-abrams-war-criminal-enlisted-‘steer-us-venezuela-policy’)
[15] 10 años de protestas en Venezuela 2011-2021, 15 February 2022 (https://www.observatoriodeconflictos.org.ve/informes-anuales/10-anos-de-protestas)
[16] Observatorio Venezolano Antibloqueo, Los números del bloqueo CIIP.p15 (https://observatorio.gob.ve/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/NUMEROS-BLOQUEO.pdf)
[17] See Venezuela Solidarity Campaign, Briefing: The effects of the economic blockade of Venezuela, February 2020, https://www.venezuelasolidarity.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Updated-briefing-18-02-2020-final-The-effects-of-the-economic-blockade-of-Venezuela-1774.pdf
[18] Mark Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs, Economic Sanctions as Collective Punishment: The Case of Venezuela, CEPR, April 2019, p.15; see also “The effects of the economic blockade of Venezuela”, Venezuela Solidarity Campaign Briefing, September 2019, https://www.venezuelasolidarity.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/The-effects-of-the-economic-blockade-of-Venezuela-8771.pdf
[19] John Perry, Diplomatic Immunity, London Review of Books, 27 January 2023, https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2023/january/diplomatic-immunity
[20] See details of the case in US National Lawyers Guild International Committee, Calls for immediate release of Venezuela diplomat Alex Saab, https://orinocotribune.com/national-lawyers-guild-calls-for-the-immediate-release-of-venezuelan-diplomat-alex-saab-statement/
[21] Chávez’s banking plans cause apprehension, FT, 22 May 2007, https://www.ft.com/content/d3f56d06-d8b2-11db-a759-000b5df10621
[22] The left has been in office in these three countries (El Salvador, 2009-2014; Paraguay, 2008-2012; Uruguay, 2005-2020).
[23] The Group of Seventy-Seven (G77) was established on June 15, 1964, which has since expanded to 134 member countries but the original name has been retained because of its historical significance.
[24] Alexis Rodriguez, New OAS report on Venezuela: Is anything that Almagro says reliable at this point in the game?, El Ciudadano, https://www.elciudadano.com/en/new-oas-report-on-venezuela-is-anything-that-almagro-says-reliable-at-this-point-in-the-game/12/04/
[25] Orinoco Tribune, 25th February 2023, https://orinocotribune.com/3rd-afro-venezuelan-national-congress-begins-in-caracas/
[26] Presidents of Venezuela and Colombia Sign Trade Agreement, Telesur, 16 February 2023, https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Presidents-of-Venezuela-and-Colombia-Sign-Trade-Aggrement-20230216-0015.html
[27] ALBA-TCP, Declaration of the 22nd ALBA-TCP Summit on its 18th Anniversary, 14 December 2023, http://www.minci.gob.ve/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/ENG-DECLARACIÃ_N-Cumbre-XXII-ALBA-TCP-VFF.pdf
[28] http://www.psuv.org.ve/publicaciones/cuatrof/
[29] http://www.papelesdesociedad.info/IMG/pdf/revista_memorias_de_venezuela.pdf
[30] https://ecopoliticarevolucion.blogspot.com
[31] https://correodelalba.org/category/impreso/
[32] https://issuu.com/americaxxi
[33] Bloomberg, 7 April 2022, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-06/venezuela-s-economy-may-expand-20-in-2022-credit-suisse-says
[34] BBC Mundo (in Spanish), 13 June 2022
[35] Reuters, 9 October 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/venezuela-economy-idINKCN1MJ1YX
[36] They are the CLAP boxes that benefit and ensure subsidized food protection to about 7 million families; furthermore, Venezuela as a nation used to import 80-85 percent of the food it consumed.
[37] This is driven by Venezuela’s revolutionary solidarity, inspired by Hugo Chavez’s political and ethical vision whose tradition President Maduro, leading the PSUV and the Bolivarian revolution, has maintained.
[38] William Serafino, Maduro’s Neoliberal Turn?, Orinoco Tribune, 19 February 2023, https://orinocotribune.com/maduros-neoliberal-turn/
[39] Venezuela’s successful battle against the Covid-19 pandemic scored one of the best performances in the region and the world — 5,716 deaths, that is, 20.1 per 100,000 inhabitants compared with 304.18 per 100,000 in the US.
[40] Francisco Dominguez, Understanding Maduro’s successful socialist economic strategy, Morning Star, 9 August 2022, https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/understanding-maduros-successful-socialist-economic-strategy
[41] On 5th February 2023, the Citizen Revolution Movement, led by Rafael Correa, inflicted a heavy defeat to right wing neoliberal Ecuador’s president, Guillermo Lasso both at the local elections and his thoroughly manipulated referenda (https://peoplesdispatch.org/2023/02/07/progressive-comeback-in-ecuadors-local-elections/)
[42] In all their punditry, these media studiously avoided either mentioning the devastating effects of US sanctions or they pretended there was no connection between them and the grave economic situation Venezuela was under.
[43] On 2nd February 2019, The Economist attributed the original cause of the crisis to be in “the socialist dystopia created by the late Hugo Chavez”.
[44] Council of Foreign Relations went even further by asking “Do US sanctions on Venezuela work?”, https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/do-us-sanctions-venezuela-work
[45] John Bellamy Foster, Foreword to the Summer Issue, Monthly Review, 1 July 2010 (https://monthlyreview.org/2010/07/01/foreword-to-the-summer-issue/); it provides an illuminating analysis of the historical and intellectual process that shaped Chavez’s radical reinterpretation of Venezuelan history to produce Bolivarianism.
Francisco Dominguez
Francisco Dominguez, a former refugee from Chile in the UK, is Head of the Centre for Brazilian and Latin American Studies at Middlesex University, London, United Kingdom.
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