By VALERIO ARCARY*
The US has no political or moral authority to denounce the Venezuelan regime as a dictatorship
“Don’t light a fire you can’t put out”
(Portuguese popular proverb).
The controversy over the results of the Venezuelan elections divides the Brazilian and international left. But the dispute is not about democracy. “Whoever plays with fire can get burned”, teaches popular wisdom. If the far-right opposition prevails, make no mistake, it will not hesitate to use its power to guarantee a shock program of privatizations and persecution. The conflict should not be reduced to a fight between Chavistas and anti-Chavistas.
There are those who do not identify themselves as Chavista, but denounce that the campaign to overthrow the government is reactionary, therefore, that the PSUV's victory must be recognized. An immense majority of those who denounce that Nicolás Maduro engineered a fraud and must accept defeat are not remotely left-wing. The bottom line is oil.
Venezuela is an independent country, or as close to it as is possible in the contemporary world, which is intolerable for the US. The real alternative is national sovereignty or recolonization. Those on the left who are convinced that there was fraud, for whatever reason, should ask themselves about the consequences of a far-right government.
There is no dictatorship, stricto sensu in Venezuela, but there is no liberal-democratic regime either. What is unavoidable is that the alternative to Nicolás Maduro is the neofascist opposition. Edmundo González is a puppet of Maria Corina. She is, in turn, a puppet of the USA. If they come to power, Venezuela's destiny will be similar to that of Iraq twenty years ago: a North American protectorate.
Then, yes, the most likely thing will be a dictatorship and, possibly, a civil war, because the scenario of armed resistance in the face of the promise of privatization of PDVSA and the arrest of Chavista leaders seems inescapable. The dispute is not over electoral transparency, but over control of PDVSA. It's not about electoral fairness. The extreme right has no commitment to liberal democracy. It has an inviolable alliance with the USA and, in particular, with Donald Trump. Behind Maria Corina are Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, José Antonio Kast in Chile, Javier Milei in Argentina, and Álvaro Uribe in Colombia.
After twenty-five years of political conspiracies and economic siege, despite a dubious or very risky strategic bet, such as preserving a capitalist economy so as not to antagonize the USA head-on, as Cuba did in 1961, the regime was not defeated. It made dangerously wrong decisions, such as suspending the freedom of organization of other leftist currents, a policy of fiscal shock to contain superinflation, favoring a civil-military caste that holds great privileges, but the government did not fall.
He carried out more than twenty elections based on the criterion of universal suffrage, despite sanctions and a criminal siege that reached the absurdity of appropriating reserves in US banks, and tons of gold deposited in London, but he lost only one of them, which led to Guaidó to proclaim himself president. It is not reasonable to conclude that Nicolás Maduro has no legitimacy, and would be a “grotesque warlord” supported by a military “kleptocracy”.
The political regime hardened and assumed authoritarian Bonapartist forms. However, it is not based solely on control of the Armed Forces and the police, because it disputes political hegemony. It accepted the holding of elections after the Barbados agreement, to exit isolation, facilitate the end of sanctions, and open a path for its reintegration into the world market.
It preserves an implantation between sectors of workers and the popular classes, despite the social weight, also, of the far-right opposition, especially in the middle classes. The country is fractured and divided. There has not been an uninterrupted revolutionary process since 2002, when the coup against Hugo Chávez was defeated. But the country preserved its independence, and that is no small feat.
The United States' strategy for Latin America was, during the interval between 1948 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the capitalist restoration and the end of the USSR (1989/1991), to defend regimes and governments that had unconditional loyalty to their interests against what they interpreted as the “communist danger”. Árbenz in Guatemala in 1952, Getúlio in Brazil in 1954, Péron in Argentina in 1955, Jango in 1964, among many others, were displaced by coup campaigns. Dictatorial regimes were defended, whether by Republicans like Eisenhower or Nixon or Democrats like Kennedy or Lindon Johnson. Monsters like Trujillo, Somoza, Stroessner, Médici, Pinochet and Videla were protected.
The possibility of liberal-democratic regimes only came to be admitted at the end of the eighties, after the pacts with Mikhail Gorbachev. The US has no political or moral authority to denounce the Venezuelan regime as a dictatorship. Washington is a stronghold of imperialist capitalism. The USA, even when it is managed by the Democratic Party, only defends liberal democracy as long as it is certain that its interests will not be harmed.
National sovereignty in dependent countries on the periphery is not possible without an anti-imperialist rupture. Not a single peripheral nation in Asia or Africa, which were colonies under military occupation until the end of the Second World War, left its peripheral condition, or even the extreme periphery, patiently accepting its place in the world. Not even in Latin America, where national independence occurred two hundred years ago, was an independent insertion in the world market possible. Not even Brazil, the largest and most complex country.
No nation has managed to level its economic and social conditions with the standards of central countries by accepting the impositions of the world order. Those that emancipated themselves, even partially, did so through revolutions. The imperialist order has never peacefully accepted the liberation of a former colony without terrible reprisals.
The current experience of Venezuela – the country with the largest confirmed oil reserves – is just one more example. Even though military or institutional coups were incomparably more moderate, there were military or institutional coups against the governments of Dilma Rousseff in Brazil in 2016, Evo Morales in Bolivia in 2019, and Pedro Castillo in Peru in 2022.
Breaking with the limits of the imperialist order may not be enough in peripheral countries, in the space of a generation, to raise the quality of the living conditions of the majority of the people to the levels of countries that are in the center, but it has proven to be a condition for the accelerated reduction of extreme poverty and social inequalities. Coldly, evolutionarily, without challenging the imperialist centers, it was never possible. Venezuela was the Latin American country that went the furthest and paid the price for it. Underestimating the strategy of the counterrevolution is naive.
The struggle for national independence in the contemporary world is the culmination of the democratic struggle. All nations have the right to have control over their destinies. Nothing is more democratic than liberating a people dominated and oppressed by much richer and more powerful states. Although most countries on the periphery are formally independent, they do not have full sovereignty. Because a global market was built: a space where capital, labor, natural resources and technologies move on a scale that humanity has never known before.
No nation can exist outside this world market. Any illusion about the possibility of “autarky” in the contemporary world is a dangerous illusion. Without integration there is no possibility of development and, therefore, of poverty reduction. But there is an insurmountable obstacle to accessing this global market. There is no world “government”, but there is a very rigid and unfair international order. At its center is the Troika, the alliance of the European Union, the United Kingdom and Japan with the inviolable leadership of the United States. Anyone who does not submit, unconditionally, to his supremacy will be persecuted.
Trade relations on the world market are unequal. Peripheral countries, even the strongest ones, such as Brazil, a nation with a more advanced degree of industrialization, are dependent on the export of raw materials with little added value and desperately need access to goods that incorporate cutting-edge technologies such as machines of last generation and, above all, capital. Exchange relationships are asymmetrical and unfair. The periphery sells its commodities at prices that are established on stock exchanges, like in Chicago, for example.
The central countries are capital exporters and creditors, and the peripheral countries are importers and debtors. By blocking access to the world market, as punishment for daring national independence, central countries condemn rebellious nations to economic asphyxiation.
Economic strangulation produces social crisis because the lives of the popular masses, which were already very precarious, become unsustainable. In these terrible conditions, elections take place under dramatically unfavorable conditions. The countries in which anti-imperialist revolutions triumphed found themselves, without exception, faced with the dilemma of extending their revolutions to their surroundings, a dynamic of permanent revolution, or tightening their regimes.
China faced a civil war and the revolution won, but it was blocked. North Korea was invaded by the USA, Vietnam resisted war for three decades, Cuba remains, dramatically, isolated, surrounded, blockaded. All moved beyond capitalism, but any possibility of initiating a transition to socialism was halted. Capitalism has been restored, or is in the process of being restored, with the possible exception of Cuba, perhaps. The struggles to change the world are brutal and merciless. They have a heroic beauty, but they are violent.
* Valerio Arcary is a retired professor of history at the IFSP. Author, among other books, of No one said it would be Easy (boitempo). [https://amzn.to/3OWSRAc]
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