[News] The Venezuelan people stay with the Bolivarian Revolution

[Anti-Imperialist News]

peoplesdispatch.org
<https://peoplesdispatch.org/2024/07/30/the-venezuelan-people-stay-with-the-bolivarian-revolution/>
The Venezuelan people stay with the Bolivarian Revolution
Vijay Prashad
July 30, 2024
------------------------------

People in Caracas, Venezuela cheer on Nicolás Maduro's speech on victory
night outside Miraflores palace. (Photo: Zoe Alexandra)

On July 28, the 70th birthday of Hugo Chávez (1954-2013), Nicolás Maduro
Moros won the Venezuelan presidential election, the fifth since the
Bolivarian Constitution was ratified in 1999. In January 2025, Maduro will
start his third six-year term as president. He took over the reins of the
Bolivarian Revolution after the death of Chávez from pelvic cancer in 2013.
Since the death of Chávez, Maduro has faced several challenges: to build
his own legitimacy as president in the place of a charismatic man who came
to define the Bolivarian Revolution; to tackle the collapse of oil prices
in mid-2014, which negatively impacted Venezuela’s state revenues (over 90%
of which was from oil exports); and to manage a response to the unilateral,
illegal sanctions deepened on Venezuela by the United States as oil prices
declined. These negative factors weighed heavily on the Maduro government,
which has now been in office for a decade after being re-elected through
the ballot box in 2018 and now in 2024.

>From Maduro’s first election victory in 2013, the increasingly far-right
opposition began to reject the electoral process and complain about
irregularities in the system. Interviews I have held over the past decade
with conservative politicians have made it clear that they recognize both
the ideological grip of *Chavismo* over the working class of Venezuela and
the organizational power not only of Maduro’s United Socialist Party of
Venezuela but of the networks of *Chavismo* that run from the communes (1.4
million strong) to youth organizations. About half of Venezuela’s voting
population is reliably wedded to the Bolivarian project, and no other
political project in Venezuela has the kind of election machine built by
the forces of the Bolivarian revolution. That makes winning an election for
the anti-Chávez forces impossible. To that end, their only path is to
malign Maduro’s government as corrupt and to complain that the elections
are not fair. After Maduro’s victory—by a margin of 51.2% to 44.2%—this is
precisely what the far-right opposition has been trying to do, egged on by
the United States and a network of far-right and pro-US governments in
South America.
*Europe needs Venezuelan oil*

The United States has been trying to find a solution to a problem of its
own making. Having placed severe sanctions against both Iran and Russia,
the United States now cannot easily find a source of energy for its
European partners. Liquified natural gas from the United States is
expensive and not sufficient. What the US would like is to have a reliable
source of oil that is easy to process and in sufficient quantities.
Venezuelan oil fits the requirements, but given the US sanctions on
Venezuela, this oil cannot be found in the European market. The United
States has created a trap from which it finds few solutions.

In June 2022, the US government allowed
<https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/exclusive-us-let-eni-repsol-ship-venezuela-oil-europe-debt-sources-2022-06-05/>
Eni SpA (Italy) and Repsol SA (Spain) to transport Venezuelan oil to the
European market to compensate for the loss of Russian oil deliveries. This
allowance revealed Washington’s shift in strategy regarding Venezuela. No
longer was it going to be possible to suffocate Venezuela by preventing
exports of oil, since this oil was needed as a result of US sanctions on
Russia. Since June 2022, the United States has been trying to calibrate its
need for this oil, its antipathy to the Bolivarian Revolution, and its
relations with the far-right opposition in Venezuela.
*The US and the Venezuelan far-right*

The emergence of *Chavismo*—the politics of mass action to build socialism
in Venezuela—transformed the political scenario in the country. The old
parties of the right (Acción Democrática and COPEI) collapsed after 40
years of alternating power. In the 2000 and 2006 elections, the opposition
to Chávez was provided not by the right, but by dissenting center-left
forces (La Causa R and Un Nuevo Tiempo). The Old Right faced a challenge
from the New Right, which was decidedly pro-capitalist, anti-Chavista, and
pro-US; this group formed a political platform called La Salida or The
Exit, which referred to their desired exit from the Bolivarian Revolution.
The key figures here were Leopoldo López, Antonio Ledezma, and María Corina
Machado, who led violent protests against the government in 2014 (López was
arrested for incitement to violence and now lives in Spain; a US government
official in 2009 said he is “often described
<https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09CARACAS1408_a.html> as arrogant,
vindictive, and power-hungry”). Ledezma moved to Spain in 2017 and was—with
Corina Machado—a signatory of the far-right Madrid Charter
<https://foromadrid.org/>, an anti-communist manifesto organized by the
Spanish far-right party, Vox. Corina Machado’s political project is
underpinned by the proposal to privatize Venezuela’s oil company.

Since the death of Chávez, Venezuela’s right wing has struggled with the
absence of a unified program and with a mess of egotistical leaders. It
fell to the United States to try and shape the opposition into a political
project. The most comical attempt was the elevation in January 2019 of an
obscure politician named Juan Guaidó to be the president. That maneuver
failed and in December 2022, the far-right opposition removed
<https://www.wsj.com/articles/venezuelas-u-s-backed-opposition-removes-juan-guaido-as-its-leader-11672441327>
Guaidó as its leader. The removal of Guaidó allowed for direct negotiations
between the Venezuelan government and the far-right opposition, which had
since 2019 hoped for US military intervention to secure them in power in
Caracas.

The US pressured the increasingly intransigent far-right to hold talks with
the Venezuelan government in order to allow the US to reduce sanctions and
let Venezuelan oil go into European markets. This pressure resulted
<https://www.crisisgroup.org/es/latin-america-caribbean/andes/venezuela/barbados-deal-sets-venezuela-rocky-path-competitive-polls>
in the Barbados Agreement of October 2023, in which the two sides agreed to
a fair election in 2024 as the basis for the slow withdrawal of the
sanctions. The elections of July 28 are the outcome of the Barbados
process. Even though María Corina Machado was barred from running, she
effectively ran against Maduro through her proxy candidate Edmundo González
and lost in a hard-fought election.

Twenty-three minutes after the polls closed, US Vice President Kamala
Harris—and now a presidential candidate in the November elections in the
United States—put out a tweet <https://x.com/VP/status/1817687288056303648>
conceding that the far-right had lost. It was an early sign that the United
States—despite making noises about election fraud—wanted to move past their
allies in the far-right, find a way to normalize relations with the
Venezuelan government and allow the oil to flow to Europe. This tendency of
the US government has frustrated the far-right, which turned
<https://peoplesdispatch.org/2024/07/28/latin-american-right-unites-against-the-bolivarian-revolution/>
to other far-right forces across Latin America for support, and which knows
that its remaining political argument is about election fraud. If the US
government wants to get Venezuelan oil to Europe it will need to abandon
the far-right and accommodate the Maduro government. Meanwhile, the
far-right has taken to the streets through armed gangs who want to repeat
the *guarimba* (barricade) disruptions of 2017.

*Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a
writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of
LeftWord Books <https://mayday.leftword.com/> and the director of
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
<https://thetricontinental.org/>. He has written more than 20 books,
including The Darker Nations
<https://smile.amazon.com/Darker-Nations-Peoples-History-Third/dp/1595583424/?tag=alternorg08-20>
and The Poorer Nations
<https://smile.amazon.com/Poorer-Nations-Possible-History-Global/dp/1781681589/?tag=alternorg08-20>.
His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for
Socialism
<https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1869-struggle-makes-us-human> and
(with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the
Fragility of U.S. Power <https://thenewpress.com/books/withdrawal>.*

*This article was produced by Globetrotter <https://globetrotter.media/>.*
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