[News] Ten Proposals for Chavismo in the Face of Our Defeat

[Anti-Imperialist News]

  Ten Proposals for Chavismo in the Face of Our Defeat

By Luis Britto Garcia, December 17th 2015

*http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/11777*

There was no popular defeat harder than the 27th of February, 1989*.

Rebelling against the economic measures levied by the International 
Monetary Fund, thousands were murdered in the streets, while neither the 
left nor any patriotic officials were able to coordinate efforts to 
defend them.

Almost as serious as the above was the defeat of February 4th, 1992*. 
Neither the masses nor the left wing managed to organize manifestations 
in their support; dozens of patriotic military officials lost their 
lives or careers; the triumph of the right seemed definitive.

For now.*

Let’s not fool ourselves. The dispute for political power in Venezuela 
is only a medium for controlling a fifth part of the planet’s hydrocarbons.

To that end the opposition has just obtained 112 of the 167 seats in the 
National Assembly. Three of them correspond to indigenous 
representatives to whom Bolivarianism granted more rights than any 
previous government.

This is even more than the two-thirds and three-fifths [majorities] that 
the Constitution demands for extremely serious measures. And it doesn’t 
correspond to a growth of the right wing, considering that in the 
presidential election of 2013 the right obtained 7,363,980 votes 
compared with the recent 7,707,322 - only a 4.22% increase. This is 
about about an abstention in the Bolivarian vote in response to the 
inaction of the government faced with corruption, speculation and hoarding.

In [this excerpt from] his book Los Cuentos del Arañero, Hugo Rafael 
Chavez recounts how Fidel (Castro) told him -

/“Look, here’s a conclusion I’ve come to; you said in your speech…”. And 
he scoured my speech, which he had a complete copy of, with a summary 
and analyses noted in his own hand, along with footnotes. He told me, 
‘You said in your speech a sentence, a statistic, that ten years ago 
there were 600,000 university students in Venezuela, and today there are 
2.4 million.’ And it’s true, there was a growth of 400 percent./

/But he had a long list of advances in eduction, health, and everything 
we had achieved - all the other social advances of those ten years. He 
said to me, ‘I’ve come to the conclusion, Chavez. No revolution that I 
know of, not even the Cuban one, was able to do so much socially for its 
people in so short a time as the Bolivarian Revolution […] And I’ve 
concluded you don’t want to take political advantage of these social 
advances.”’/

Ideological formation. There have not been consistent experiences in 
terms of training revolutionary cadres. The people have been given 
everything: free medical attention and medicine, subsidized fuel, 
900,000 furnished homes in the past few years, 350,000 pensions, 
thousands of new taxis, computers for primary school students and 
tablets for students of higher education, almost all of which is 
completely free. Due to the lack of an educational campaign, a part of 
the people have come to believe that this all fell from the sky, and 
that it wasn’t the result of a lot of work nor is it necessary to defend 
it - that the first neoliberal demagogue who exchanges promises for 
votes could better it.

The government’s abstention in combatting corruption, speculators, and 
hoarders led directly to the people’s abstaining from the vote.

But the ultra-right works incessantly, with its errors favoring the 
left. One year remains before the elections of state governors and the 
state legislative assemblies.

During this scarce year the right will continue its uninterrupted 
mission of the past 17 years to destroy Bolivarian power. It will argue 
that the [electoral] defeat of the Bolivarians is a plebiscite which 
should oblige the president to step down; it will convoke a referendum; 
it will remove vice-presidents and ministers with motions of censure; it 
will refuse resources for the Budget Law and additional credits; it will 
eliminate the Enabling Law and all that makes up social benefits; it 
will withhold its authorization for contracts in the national interest; 
it will refuse permission to designate new chiefs of permanent 
diplomatic missions. It will name new members of the Supreme Court, new 
rectors of the CNE, new public spending auditors and public defenders as 
soon as the allotted period for those authorities expires - unless they 
are able to to remove them under any other pretext. They will legislate 
the restitution of those senior officials of the upper echelons of PDVSA 
who tried to destroy the company. They will promote the re-privatization 
of all strategic national companies. They will try to remove the 
president by means we will not explain here so as not to give them ideas.

But in this one year before the governor and state legislative assembly 
elections, the right may chase away all the votes it disingenuously 
obtained by applying again those neoliberal measures that lost them the 
power in the first place and which they cannot cease to apply. They will 
continue raising prices to unobtainable levels while hoarding, 
disappearing goods and speculating. Convenient laws will eliminate 
current social benefit measures for workers, they will consecrate the 
bosses’ right to fire at whim, and reestablish indexed credits, with 
interests upon interest. Other norms will liberate prices, rent, and 
interest rates, while they will progressively annihilate free education, 
subsidies, and missions and will reformulate the national budget to 
reduce the 61% of public spending dedicated to social investment by 
half. Amnesty laws will give liberty to terrorists, corrupt officials, 
assassins, banker delinquents and paramilitaries. The impunity of the 
para-police [a form of paramilitarism] will occupy an established role 
in the institutional block, ready to create a frame of violent 
confrontation which will serve as pretext for a foreign intervention.

The lack of sanctions for corruption, speculators and smugglers may have 
given rise to the loss of Venezuela and Latin America. It’s unimaginable 
just how much the impunity of those companions have cost us!

But before we ask ourselves what the right has in store, let us resolve 
what the progressive forces should do.

First: Exercise the right of presidential veto against laws that destroy 
social rights or institutions indispensable to our sovereignty.

Second: End impunity for the corrupt; hoarders, speculators, smugglers, 
and sanction in an exemplary and implacable manner to prove to the 
abstaining electorate that there is no complicity between those 
delinquents and the government.

Third: Reform the communicational apparatus in charge of efficiently 
explaining to the people the true sense and advantages of socialism, and 
make clear what neoliberalism will take from them.

Fourth: Put in motion the struggles of social movements, unions and 
other organizations against the forthcoming neoliberal assault which 
will mean mass firings and the rollback of labor rights and pensions.

Fifth: Make use of the constitutional regulations which legislate that 
social achievements as irreversible.

Sixth: Maximize the police and security measures against paramilitarism, 
which has profiled itself as the armed hand of neoliberalism.

Seventh: Initiate a profound restructuring of the Socialist Party of 
Venezuela (PSUV) and other organizations of the Patriotic Pole, to 
correct errors, inefficiencies, bureaucracy and the opportunist uses of 
power.

Eighth: Radically dispose of any ideas of pacts or “pragmatic” 
agreements with the business class and the right, in sight of the 
catastrophic results our cohabitation has so far seen.

Ninth: Reinforce the ideological formation of militants and the people 
in general.

Tenth: Teach through the most convincing argument: the example.

*Here the author is referring to the Caracazo, when thousands of 
Venezuelans were slaughtered when they took to the streets to protest 
against economic restructuring by the IMF

*The attempted coup carried out by Hugo Chavez’s secret MBR-200 movement 
from within the Venezuelan military

*After the 1992 coup attempt by rebel soldiers and led by Hugo Chavez 
failed, Chavez famously said “Compañeros, for now, our objectives were 
not reached.”

/Translated by Venezuelanalysis/

Source: 10 correctivos que debe tomar el chavismo después del #6D 
<http://www.analitica.com/actualidad/actualidad-nacional/luis-britto-gracia-y-los-10-correctivos-que-debe-tomar-el-chavismo-tras-el-6d/>
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