<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
</head>
<body text="#000000" bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
<div class="container font-size5 content-width3">
<div class="header reader-header" style="display: block;"
dir="ltr"> <font size="-2"><a class="domain reader-domain"
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/interviews/13931">https://venezuelanalysis.com/interviews/13931</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">Venezuela in the Continental Labyrinth:
A Conversation with Amilcar Figueroa</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">By Amilcar Figueroa and Cira
Pascual Marquina - July 11, 2018<br>
</div>
</div>
<hr>
<div class="content">
<div class="moz-reader-content line-height4" dir="ltr"
style="display: block;">
<div id="readability-page-1" class="page">
<div>
<div>
<p><em>In the ‘70s, Amilcar Figueroa was part of the
insurgent Party of the Venezuelan Revolution (PRV),
which split off from the Venezuelan Communist Party
and is widely credited with developing the ideology
of Bolivarianism that influenced President Hugo
Chávez. A committed internationalist, Figueroa
worked with El Salvador’s FMLN (El Salvador) in the
‘80s and, more recently, was honored with a US
Treasury Department sanction for his support of the
Colombian guerrilla. Figueroa was president of the
Latin American Parliament (PARLATINO) between 2006
and 2008. As a historian, he has written several
books including El Salvador: Su historia y sus
luchas (Ocean Sur, 2009) and Chávez: la permanente
búsqueda creadora (Trinchera, 2013). In this
interview with Venezuelanalysis, we asked him to
explain the Bolivarian Process in the current
continental context.</em></p>
<p><strong>Recently, Colombia entered NATO and soon Ivan
Duque, an ultraconservative close to former
president Alvaro Uribe, will become the country’s
new head of state. Can you analyze the consequences
of this, both on the continental level and
specifically for Venezuela?</strong></p>
<p>The triumph of Ivan Duque must be situated, just like
the Venezuelan situation, in the complex panorama of
the Latin American situation, which unfolds in the
context of an overarching struggle between reform and
counter-reform, revolution and counterrevolution.
Moreover, all this push and pull must be understood in
the context of the United States’ recolonizing
offensive.</p>
<p>Regarding Colombia, it’s clear that the most
reactionary right has long been in control of the
state. The Colombian state was reactionary,
anti-popular and pro-imperialist with Alvaro Uribe,
with Juan Manuel Santos, and it will be so with Ivan
Duque. The differences between the three leaders are
subtle.</p>
<p>Obviously, for reasons that must be examined with
precision, the Santos government facilitated – or
rather allowed – the conversations and the peace
dialogue in Havana. As is well known, the outcome of
the dialogues was the incorporation of the FARC into
electoral politics. But let’s not be fooled: the
Santos government was a warmongering one, wielding
constant violence and repression against the popular
movement.</p>
<p>The issue now is whether the Duque government will
recognize the Havana agreements, which were already
being cast aside by sectors of the Colombian
establishment and were being systematically broken by
the Colombian state even under Santos’s presidency.</p>
<p>It’s true that the peace so desired by the Colombian
people scored some important successes with the Havana
agreements, but the overall situation of violence and
social injustice remains in place. Now that Duque, a
representative of the most retrograde sector of
Colombian politics, has taken center stage, we are
likely to see an even more complete rollback of the
peace agreements. That, in turn, could send the
Colombian nation back into an overt conflict of large
dimensions.</p>
<p><strong>Will Duque’s presidency alter the relations
of the Colombian government vis-a-vis Venezuela? </strong></p>
<p>Things are not going to change much: Duque, Santos
and Uribe share the same views regarding geopolitics.
The latter two represented a continental vanguard in
their anti-Bolivarian (and anti-Venezuelan) project,
and Duque will continue to be part of this drive. It
is not, in the end, a question of individuals but of
the Colombian state, which has long been in the
service of US interests.</p>
<p>The incorporation of Colombia into NATO (an issue
that, by the way, had been brewing for a while)
further threatens peace in the continent. For
Venezuela, this is quite serious, since it reinforces
the offensive against its government.</p>
<p>In the last few years, Venezuelans have repeatedly
experienced the consequences of Colombia’s being the
US’s beachhead on the continent. Colombia joining NATO
was the logical step after installing seven US bases
in its territory in 2009 and making additional
agreements (less public but disclosed) between the US
military and Colombia that turn Colombian territory
into a potential platform for US Southern Command’s
military actions.</p>
<p>However, we should keep in mind that in the June 17
elections more than eight million Colombians rejected
Duque and also said no to war; they did so by voting
for Gustavo Petro. Those eight million votes do not
even express all the dissent, since the electoral
system in Colombia is highly problematic. This means
that the parliament is not going to be absolutely
submissive to Duque’s project. They won’t give him a
blank check, neither for the reactionary
establishment’s agenda regarding Colombia’s internal
politics nor its agenda regarding Venezuela.</p>
<p><strong>It is evident and worrisome that so many
people point the finger at Colombia to explain all
Venezuela’s problems. According to this way of
thinking, everything bad – from violence to
smuggling – is caused by Colombia. Could you tell us
something about this?</strong></p>
<p>Leaving aside national chauvinism, which is surely a
problem in Venezuela, the spilling over of
paramilitary practices from Colombia to Venezuela is
real and a very serious concern. It endangers spaces
of popular organization.</p>
<p>As far as smuggling is concerned, there has always
been an illegal market on the Colombia-Venezuela
frontier. It only exists because there is complicity
on both sides of the border and from both states.
Smuggling is a practice that has a direct relation
with private appropriation and accumulation of wealth
in a lumpen or mafioso context.</p>
<p><strong>Latin America is in a process of political
regression and the Bolivarian Process’ leadership
generally espouses a kind of “realist” reformism
which erodes the original revolutionary project. Can
you talk to us about the relationship between the
overall continental regression and the Venezuelan
leadership’s tepidness?</strong></p>
<p>The reactionary counteroffensive taking place in the
continent must be examined with care and precision. It
began in 2008 with the coup d’etat in Honduras, and
from then on we have seen imperialist interests
advancing in a series of big steps. This led to a new
balance of forces in the continent. In Venezuela,
things began to change with the September 2010
parliamentary elections, in which we lost the popular
vote. Whether people acknowledge it or not, that event
initiated an internal shift. Then, in 2014, there was
a real turning point in the Bolivarian Process.</p>
<p>That March, negotiations began between key
representatives of Bolivarian Government and the
bourgeoisie. The most powerful capitalist in
Venezuela, Lorenzo Mendoza, became the public
spokesperson for “production,” and the government made
tremendous concessions to the sector that he
represented. The new balance of forces coupled with
the fascist right’s violent emergence in the 2014
guarimbas was what immediately triggered the
negotiations. However, it was the financial boycott
and the war on different fronts against Venezuela that
caused the Bolivarian leadership to assume that
backing off on revolutionary goals was the only way to
maintain control of the government.</p>
<p>The death or even assassination of Chavez – who had
an impressive capacity to find creative (and popular)
ways out of difficult situations – has had an enormous
impact on the revolutionary process. Henceforth, with
an unfavorable correlation of forces, reformist
positions became hegemonic within the government.
Furthermore, this revolutionary to reformist shift is
not confined to Venezuela. I believe that, as a whole,
the continental left’s leadership assumes that there
are no conditions to advance. Their analysis fails to
take into account that a profound capitalist crisis of
global dimensions spawns tremendous violence and
enormous suffering, thus creating exceptional
conditions for an anti-systemic struggle. On the other
hand, the Bolivarian Process' leadership (and that of
the continental left) assumes that capitalism is very
strong. As a consequence, to avoid social
confrontation, they think that changes can only be
small and gradual.</p>
<p><strong>How would you characterize the Bolivarian
government today?</strong></p>
<p>When Chavez was leading the revolution there was a
constant creative search that proposed profound
reforms. He opened a path of deep revolutionary
transformations. But after his death, and when the
correlation of forces became unfavorable, much of the
left and its leadership assumed an attitude of class
reconciliation. With this shift, the Bolivarian
Process abandoned its radical character and began
sliding towards a Keynesian model and a social
protectionist project. For example, there are many
discourses in which Nicolas Maduro calls himself “the
protector of the people.” In other words, the
government’s objective now is not that people take
power and transform the social and economic
structures. No, it is rather to generate social
welfare policies from above.</p>
<p>Of course, this is not the whole story. Those in
power do not constitute a perfect and unified bloc.
However, there is no question that reformist positions
are the most common ones in our political leadership.</p>
<p><strong>How can we imagine a “left-solution” to
Venezuela’s current crisis?</strong></p>
<p>To imagine renewing the strategic path towards a
revolutionary horizon with mass participation has much
to do with making advances, taking spaces, and
developing concrete work from a class-based
perspective.</p>
<p>Working people must take on many tasks. The
proletariat in this stage has to accumulate forces.
That is because – whatever our aspirations and
critical analysis of the situation – it’s impossible
to do anything without organization. No matter how
much imperialism has advanced on the continent and
reformism has spread in the country, we need to
develop a conception that allows new political
referents to emerge: leaders who will take up working
people’s revolutionary goals.</p>
<p>Thus, our tasks include building an overarching
movement that consolidates the spaces that the popular
resistance movement has created. This would be a
movement influenced by Chavez’s proposal of popular
power, the commune and workers’ councils. All this has
to be consolidated to defend what has already been
achieved at the same time as the great objectives of
the revolution are revived. Simultaneously, there
needs to be a process of political education focused
on the historical revolutionary process and on
bringing back to the foreground the desires that were
unleashed by Chavez, which are latent in much of the
Venezuelan population.</p>
<p>The truth is that most of the people of Venezuela do
not want to return to the past and they aspire to
build a society of equals.</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div> </div>
</div>
<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863.9977
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://freedomarchives.org/">https://freedomarchives.org/</a>
</div>
</body>
</html>