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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" dir="ltr">August 2, 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"><div><p><img width="423" height="238" src="https://orinocotribune.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/IMG_7494.jpeg" alt="People in Caracas, Venezuela cheer on Nicolás Maduro's speech on victory night outside Miraflores palace. Photo: Zoe Alexandra/People’s Dispatch" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 0px;"></p>
<p><span></span></p><p>
People in Caracas, Venezuela cheer on Nicolás Maduro's speech on victory
night outside Miraflores palace. Photo: Zoe Alexandra/People’s Dispatch</p>
<p></p></div><div id="gmail-content"><div><p>By Vijay Prashad – Jul 30, 2024</p><p><strong>About
half of Venezuela’s voting population is reliably wedded to the
Bolivarian project. No other political project in Venezuela has the kind
of election machine built by the forces of the Bolivarian revolution</strong></p><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 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.</p><p><strong>Europe needs Venezuelan oil<br>
</strong>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.</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><p><strong>The US and the Venezuelan far-right<br>
</strong>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>This article was produced by <a href="https://globetrotter.media/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Globetrotter</a></p><p>(<a href="https://peoplesdispatch.org/2024/07/30/the-venezuelan-people-stay-with-the-bolivarian-revolution/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">People’s Dispatch</a>)</p><div id="gmail-mab-4845675019"><p><span><img width="150" height="150" src="https://orinocotribune.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/b86d631d8a293bf06ef229ea9599ea8d_400x400-150x150.jpeg" alt=""></span></p><div><p></p><h5><span>Vijay Prashad</span></h5><p></p><p>Vijay
Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing
fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter, a project of the
Independent Media Institute. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Booksand
the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has
written more than twenty books, including The Darker Nations: A People’s
History of the Third World (The New Press, 2007), The Poorer Nations: A
Possible History of the Global South (Verso, 2013), The Death of the
Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution(University of California
Press, 2016) and Red Star Over the Third World (LeftWord, 2017). He
writes regularly for Frontline, the Hindu, Newsclick, AlterNet and
BirGün.</p></div></div></div></div></div></div>
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