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<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://peoplesdispatch.org/2024/07/30/the-venezuelan-people-stay-with-the-bolivarian-revolution/">peoplesdispatch.org</a>
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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">The Venezuelan people stay with the Bolivarian Revolution</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Vijay Prashad</div>
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<div class="gmail-reader-estimated-time">July 30, 2024<br></div>
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<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><p>People
in Caracas, Venezuela cheer on Nicolás Maduro's speech on victory night
outside Miraflores palace. (Photo: Zoe Alexandra)
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<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <i>Chavismo</i> 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 <i>Chavismo</i>
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.</p>
<h3><b>Europe needs Venezuelan oil</b></h3>
<p>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.<span> </span></p>
<p>In June 2022, the US government <a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/exclusive-us-let-eni-repsol-ship-venezuela-oil-europe-debt-sources-2022-06-05/">allowed</a>
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.</p>
<h3><b>The US and the Venezuelan far-right</b></h3>
<p>The emergence of <i>Chavismo</i>—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 <a href="https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09CARACAS1408_a.html">described</a>
as arrogant, vindictive, and power-hungry”). Ledezma moved to Spain in
2017 and was—with Corina Machado—a signatory of the far-right <a href="https://foromadrid.org/">Madrid Charter</a>,
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.</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/venezuelas-u-s-backed-opposition-removes-juan-guaido-as-its-leader-11672441327">removed</a>
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.</p>
<p>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
<a href="https://www.crisisgroup.org/es/latin-america-caribbean/andes/venezuela/barbados-deal-sets-venezuela-rocky-path-competitive-polls">resulted</a>
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.</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://x.com/VP/status/1817687288056303648">tweet</a>
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<a href="https://peoplesdispatch.org/2024/07/28/latin-american-right-unites-against-the-bolivarian-revolution/"> turned</a>
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 <i>guarimba</i> (barricade) disruptions of 2017.</p>
<p><em><strong>Vijay Prashad</strong> is an Indian historian, editor,
and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at
Globetrotter. He is an editor of <a href="https://mayday.leftword.com/">LeftWord Books</a> and the director of <a href="https://thetricontinental.org/">Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research</a>. He has written more than 20 books, including <a href="https://smile.amazon.com/Darker-Nations-Peoples-History-Third/dp/1595583424/?tag=alternorg08-20">The Darker Nations</a> and <a href="https://smile.amazon.com/Poorer-Nations-Possible-History-Global/dp/1781681589/?tag=alternorg08-20">The Poorer Nations</a>. His latest books are <a href="https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1869-struggle-makes-us-human">Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism</a> and (with Noam Chomsky) <a href="https://thenewpress.com/books/withdrawal">The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power</a>.</em></p>
<p><em>This article was produced by <a href="https://globetrotter.media/">Globetrotter</a>.</em></p>
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