[Marxism] Venezuela - An Embryonic Workers and Peasant State

[Fred Fuentes <fred.fuentes@xxxxxxxxx>]

The Revolutionary Process in Venezuela: An Embryonic Workers and Peasant State
by Coral Wynter

This article first appeared in Links: International Journal of
Socialist Renewal, issue #26 http://www.dsp.org.au/links/index.htm

On February 27, 1989, in the poor hillside barrios that surround
Caracas, Monday morning began like any other. As they made their way
down the precipitous paths and stairways to the main roads, they found
that bus fares had doubled and student discount fares were no longer
valid. An elderly President Carlos Andrés Pérez had been elected three
months previously to the presidency for the second time in twenty
years. Obeying the dictates of the IMF and the World Bank, Pérez had
increased the price of petrol overnight. Arguments started at the bus
stops, and the first violence erupted at the Nuevo Circo bus station
in the city centre. Buses were overturned and burned. Within hours,
Caracas was gripped by insurrection. The police happened to be on
strike for a pay increase and were ill prepared for a riot. Some
members of the armed forces, sympathetic to the misery of the poor,
helped to organise an orderly looting of supermarkets. Grateful slum
dwellers passed presents through the smashed shop windows to the
soldiers.
Major Francisco Cardenas told his troops, "Hands up here those who are
mem-bers of the Country Club [an exclusive club for the very rich]!"
No one put their hand up. They all remained silent. Cardenas told
them, "The people who livehere are like us, they are the people, our
brothers. No one must fire without authorization. No one must shoot
unless we are attacked." (1) When the television showed people pushing
trolleys crammed with food, white goods and clothes and the police
standing around, people in other cities saw it as an invitation to
join in. Protests had spread to every major city by the afternoon,
Maracay, Valencia, Barquisimeto, Cuidad Guyana and Merida.
After two days in which the government didn't know what to do, because
the National Guard refused to enter the barrios, a massive military
operation retook control of the streets on the orders of President
Pérez. The armed forces arrested thousands as they swept through the
barrios searching for stolen goods. People who appeared suddenly at
windows in the poor shanties were shot dead by nervous troops. The
government admitted to only 372 deaths, but the real number was closer
to 3000 with at least 2000 dead in Caracas and thousands more wounded.
None of this was reported in the West or it appeared as a paragraph in
a column of world news on the back pages. It was the year of the fall
of the Berlin Wall, and this was Venezuela, a small Latin American
country where such things are expected to happen.
But the Caracazo, as it became known, was the beginning of the end of
Venezuela as the playground of the corrupt bourgeois-democratic
parties, Acción Democrática (AD) and COPEI [Social Christian Party].
The Caracazo was to have a dramatic effect on the political events of
the next decade in Venezuela. Venezuela, a country of 24 million
people, is a huge melting pot, with a large population of Black
Africans imported as slaves who worked on sugar plantations or who
escaped from the West Indian islands of Trinidad and St. Lucia. Some
seventy per cent of the population define themselves as mixed race.
The country is blessed with one of the world's largest oil deposits
under Lake Maracaibo, and new deposits have been discovered in the
Caribbean. However, none of the poor eighty per cent have benefited
from this vast wealth since its discovery in 1917. Former caudillos
and politicians live a fabulous life on this stolen wealth.

read the rest at
<http://www.venezuelasolidarity.org/index.php?module=pagemaster&PAGE_user_op=view_page&PAGE_id=49&MMN_position=63:63>
or download pdf at
<http://www.venezuelasolidarity.org/pdf%20resources/coral.PDF>

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