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<h1 class="title">Ten Proposals for Chavismo in the Face of Our
Defeat</h1>
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<p class="byline"> By <span class="author">Luis Britto Garcia</span>,
<span class="date">December 17th 2015</span> </p>
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<div class="block-inner"><b><small><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/11777">http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/11777</a></small></small></small></b><br>
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<p>There was no popular defeat harder than the 27th of February,
1989*.</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>For now.* </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>In [this excerpt from] his book Los Cuentos del Arañero, Hugo
Rafael Chavez recounts how Fidel (Castro) told him -</p>
<p><em>“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.</em></p>
<p><em>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.”’</em></p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>The government’s abstention in combatting corruption,
speculators, and hoarders led directly to the people’s abstaining
from the vote.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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!</p>
<p>But before we ask ourselves what the right has in store, let us
resolve what the progressive forces should do.</p>
<p>First: Exercise the right of presidential veto against laws that
destroy social rights or institutions indispensable to our
sovereignty. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Fifth: Make use of the constitutional regulations which legislate
that social achievements as irreversible. </p>
<p>Sixth: Maximize the police and security measures against
paramilitarism, which has profiled itself as the armed hand of
neoliberalism. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Ninth: Reinforce the ideological formation of militants and the
people in general.</p>
<p>Tenth: Teach through the most convincing argument: the example. </p>
<p>*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 </p>
<p>*The attempted coup carried out by Hugo Chavez’s secret MBR-200
movement from within the Venezuelan military</p>
<p>*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.”</p>
<p><em>Translated by Venezuelanalysis</em></p>
<div id="articlesource"><span class="label">Source:</span> <span
class="source"><a
href="http://www.analitica.com/actualidad/actualidad-nacional/luis-britto-gracia-y-los-10-correctivos-que-debe-tomar-el-chavismo-tras-el-6d/"
title="Source: 10 correctivos que debe tomar el chavismo
después del #6D">10 correctivos que debe tomar el chavismo
después del #6D</a></span></div>
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