Venezuela

Revolution as Spectacle

Rafael Uzcategui, Chaz Bufe

• Publisher: See Sharp Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781937276164
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

A critical look at the Chavez regime from a leftist Venezuelan perspective, this account debunks claims made by Venezuelan and U.S. rightists that the regime is antidemocratic and dictatorial. Instead, the book argues that the Chavez government is one of a long line of Latin American populist organizations that have been ultimately subservient to the United States as well as multinational corporations. Explaining how autonomous Venezuelan social, labor, and environmental movements have been systematically disempowered by the Chavez regime, this analysis contends that these movements are the basis of a truly democratic, revolutionary alternative.

CHAPTER 1

Leftist Reaction to the Bolivarian
Revolution

Noam Chomsky’s vision of Venezuela is shared in large part by leftist intellectuals and political and social organizations throughout the world. This is no accident. The American writer and academic, whose discoveries in the field of linguistics are an important contribution to contemporary science, is one of the keenest critics of U.S. foreign policy. His critiques of the imperialist maneuvers originating in Washington, DC, and played out in the rest of the world, are a guidepost for dozens of revolutionary publications, hundreds of web sites, and innumerable individuals.

The political process that has played out in Venezuela since 1999 has been among those analyzed by this MIT professor. However, some of the data cited by the author of Manufacturing Consent are incorrect, and have affected his conclusions. At the same time, many of his assertions about the anti-capitalist nature of the present Venezuelan government are contradicted by a broad spectrum of Venezuelan revolutionary and anti-capitalist organizations, ranging from traditional marxist-leninist, to (Che) guevarist, to trotsky-ist, to anarchist. Why has an intellectual of the stature of Noam Chomsky misread the situation in Venezuela?

In many writings and interviews, Chomsky has constructed an image of Venezuela for American and European leftists. In describing this image, we’re synthesizing six of Chomsky’s declarations on the topic that are available in Spanish.¹ These are its features:

1) Venezuela remains in the United States’ backyard;

2) From approximately1920, with the discovery of major petroleum deposits, Venezuela has been part of the area controlled by the U. S.;

3) The strategy for this control unfolded in different parts of Latin America rich in natural resources;

4) Those resources have provided a good part of the United States’ wealth;

5) Venezuela is the only Latin American member of OPEC and has by far the largest petroleum reserves outside of the Middle East;

6) for this reason it has been an important source of oil for the U.S. since the middle of the twentieth century;

7) Venezuelan petroleum has both enriched the local elites and flowed via the transnational corporations to the West, where it has contributed to industrial development;

8) In Venezuela the petroleum economy has produced a handful of the super-rich, but at the same time fully a quarter of Venezuelan children under 15 go hungry.

There is little to object to in this general characterization of Venezuela. The problems commence when Chomsky gets more specific about the present situation. To sum up his position: Owing to the democratic election of leftist governments in several countries in South America, the continent’s countries have begun to move toward varying degrees of independence— which Washington can’t tolerate—and for the first time in its history South America has begun political integration.

Historically, Latin America has had enormous resources, extreme inequality, oppression, violence, and very little interaction among its peoples, but that is starting to change. And of all the Latin American governments, Hugo Chavez’s has delivered the greatest blow against U.S. domination—for the first time, Venezuela is using its energy resources for its own development. Only now have public health services begun to become a reality for a majority of the poor in the rich but profoundly divided country; since Chavez became president there has been slow but perceptible progress in the public health and social assistance services, which have so poorly served the people. Venezuela is smashing the model imposed by the U.S., breaking with the so-called Washington Consensus (neoliberal economic “reforms”) and utilizing its resources for the benefit of its people. As a demonstration of the transformation and democratization the country is undergoing, a certain measure of workers’ control of the oil industry—the principal source of revenue for the Caracas government—has been introduced.

Remember that this description of Chomsky’s position is taken from six interviews translated into Spanish, in which the MIT professor places Venezuela in the vanguard of what can be termed the outcry against the system of U.S. domination. And if this outline of Chomsky’s thought seems a bit hazy, a bit general, it’s simply because there is no more precise elaboration.

If the Venezuelan government is neither a dictatorship nor a replica of Cuban-style Communism—as the conservative opponents of President Chávez say—neither is there substantive evidence that the country is undergoing a revolutionary transformation, whatever that term might mean. Despite Chomsky’s having recognized, barely, that the so-called Bolivarian Process has authoritarian tendencies, there is no doubt that he’s become a promoter of the “great goals of the Bolivarian Revolution” and has become a tactical ally of the Venezuelan government, as can be seen in the costly ads in Venezuelan periodicals featuring the prominent linguist’s image, his appearances in the U.S. at presentations on Venezuela, and the continual diffusion of his speeches and interviews by the various ministries and governmental institutions in Venezuela. Nonetheless, Chomsky’s opinions are based almost exclusively on secondary sources, such as the mass communications media in the U.S., and on information supplied by the governmental bureaucracy in Venezuela. Chomsky has spent only two days in Venezuela, in August 2009.

In contrast with Chomsky, there are activists interested in the “Bolivar-ian Process” who have directly investigated the construction of “twenty-first century socialism.” Some of them have taken the officially sanctioned tours and have gone to various social enclaves supported by the government. The circuit of such tours includes campesino start-ups, “domestic developments,” and urban and rural (indigenous) sites where the tourist can sample “the flavor of the Venezuelan Revolution.” Other travelers come in search of a more authentic vision of the situation, one based in the daily life of the people.

Gabriel Muzio, an Italian documentary filmmaker, was one of these travelers. He’s a member of the militant film production company, Gattacicova Films, whose focus is on documentaries about popular movements in Latin America. Muzio won a degree in economics in England, worked for years as a banker in London and Paris, where from the belly of the beast he witnessed “the [ongoing] great wave of financial innovation that took place in the capitalist world beginning in the 16th century,” that is to say, the present-day reality of speculative capital operating without borders in a globalized economy.²

But Muzio retired from that comfortable life and returned to the passion of his youth: supporting popular movements in Latin America. In Columbia he began to tie together the issues of biological and cultural diversity, issues that would help humanity survive the depredations of capitalism. After eight years of crisscrossing the continent, attending conferences, and realizing the connections between the fate of the Amazon jungle, indigenous peoples, biodiversity, and the political/social-resistance community, he participated in the Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil in January 2005.

I interviewed Gabriel one hot afternoon in March 2005, shortly after the premiere of his second documentary on Venezuela, Nuestro petróleo y otros cuentos (Our Oil and Other Tales, Gattacicova Films, 2004). In the heart of the Sarria barrio in Caracas, Gabriel related his initial fascination with and subsequent disillusionment with the potential revolutionary qualities of the so-called Bolivarian Process. From Columbia, he had closely followed the Caracazo popular uprising that took place in February 1989,³ as well as the two attempted coups d’etat that took place in 1992, the first of which was led by Hugo Chávez. Years later, back in Italy, he watched the coup attempt in April 2002. In June 2002 he visited Venezuela for five days: “I met many people then, and became convinced that something new was going on here.” Upon returning to his native country, the filmmaker attempted, without much success, to convince the Italian left to turn its attention to Venezuela.

Then, following an encounter with video-activist Max Pugh, who showed how quickly video documentaries can be made with the aid of digital technology, he turned to that medium, because “there was no other way to convince people that what was happening in Venezuela was different from what was being described in the corporate media.” This was the origin of his first film on Venezuela, Venezuela: otro modo es posible (Another Way is Possible … in Venezuela, Gattacicova Films, 2002), which was produced in only five weeks of shooting and editing.

This film was made in a moment of intense social-movement support for President Chávez. At the same time, many popular organizations were attempting to bring about new social forms that, in the view of Muzio, deserved support: “Our film became, to a certain extent, a type of rallying flag. It circulated in many countries and was translated into five languages. It helped to organize groups in Europe and, especially, in the United States that supported the Bolivarian Revolution.”

Despite the dizzying schedule of presentations of the Venezuela documentary, Muzio and his team recorded two more documentaries on conflicts in Latin America: Bolivia no se vende (Bolivia Is Not for Sale, Gattacicova Films, 2003); and Como Bush ganó las elecciones en Ecuador (How Bush Won the Ecuadoran Elections Gattacicova Films, 2003). However, Muzio’s heart remained in Venezuela. During the filming of these other documentaries, he returned to Venezuela in order to follow the evolution of events and to meet with the various social groups and movements with which he was in contact. Also, as the producer of Another Way is Possible … in Venezuela, he was welcomed with open arms by several Venezuelan governmental institutions. His film, along with Chavez: The Film (Bartley & O’Brien, Ireland, 2003) and Puente Llaguno: Claves de un Masacre (Puente Llaguno: Keys to a Massacre, Angel Palacios, Venezuela, 2002), was part of the invariable trilogy shown at the time at forums and video showings organized by the state, and also by support groups, both inside and outside of Venezuela.

But Muzio was becoming uneasy about some of the things going on in the country. He commented, in 2005, on his personal journey of encountering the contradictions inherent in the Chavez movement:

In those times, especially in 2004, I saw things that I didn’t like at all. Things were moving away from autonomous movements, away from the idea of popular power, and toward a situation in which the bureaucracy and, especially the political parties, were delivering favors, dispensing with what little there was of power sharing [with the people]. It was totally the reverse of what was happening in 2002, when things seemed like they were flowing from the bottom up…. We’ve returned to a top-down situation, in which the political parties and president choose the candidates, and then the political parties decide where local power lies, who controls it, where economic resources go, etc. Where PDVSA (Petroleos de Venezuela, Sociedad Anonima)—the Venezuelan state petroleum company—is the entity that delivers the money for social investment, they deliver it as if it were a form of charity. Everything is from the top down.

For Muzio, it wasn’t sufficient to visit Venezuela for five or thirty-five days in order to get an idea of what was going on in the country. Neither did he take a photo or make another film at a specific moment and then insist that it was the immutable reality in the country, while receiving the applause of the international leftist audience. The economist and video activist compared what appeared in his 2002 film with developments he observed directly--not from an office in American academia. And when things had taken a turn in a different direction than that portrayed in his first film on Venezuela, Muzio decided that the hour had come to make a second film to bring his audience up to date on what he had seen:

People in far off lands had begun to look at Venezuela through the lens of our [2002] film, believing in what was really a snapshot of a dynamic, of a movement. And then, with the passage of time, I simply had to better things…. People weren’t bothering to investigate what was going on. They were looking at the situation in Venezuela uncritically, without raising doubts or questions. It was simply support! support! support! It was as if people always need to have some kind of faith.

The second film focused on the matter which concerns Chapter 3 of this book: Petroleum. Muzio puts it like this:

It’s said, “PDVSA is of the people.” But at the same time it makes agreements with international petroleum companies without consulting the people. Bolivia, at the end of 2003, had a popular revolt against the delivery of natural gas to the United States via a pipeline that ran through Chile. The Bolivian president was removed, but here in Venezuela, at the same time, [PDVSA] signed over the Deltana Platform, which has more natural gas than in all of Bolivia, to Chevron-Texaco, and nobody said anything.

Political reasons weren’t Muzio’s only motivation for making Nuestro petróleo y otros cuentos:

When I took my first journey through the petroleum-producing zone in the state of Zulia, on the eastern side of Lake Maracaibo, I was absolutely astonished by what I saw, by the misery, the resignation of the public, the public health problems, the environmental degradation. It was incredible. Then I thought, “The great majority of Venezuelans don’t know about this.” I wanted to shine a light on the costs of petroleum, because all people ever hear about are its benefits. If people continue to think that the Venezuelan model, the extractive model, should be that which reigns, I don’t see any [chance of] change.

The Gattacicova film group changed its perspective: if the purpose first film was intended to inform the world about what was occurring in Venezuela, the purpose of the second was to introduce a heterodox viewpoint about the Bolivarian Revolution. Nuestro petróleo y otros cuentos is a 90-minute documentary that provides a quick history of the Venezuelan energy industry, and then builds upon that to cover the energy-company policies of President Chávez, including a subject that has become taboo among state functionaries: the environmental costs of energy extraction, with, as Muzio puts it, a focus on “the daily life of the communities that live and die by petroleum.” The images are eloquent, contrasting clips of speeches by President Chávez and his ministers with clips taken at the conclusion of negotiations between the Venezuelan government and multinational corporations such as Chevron, Repsol YPF, and British Petroleum—negotiations at which the parties acknowledged that their commercial relationships are profound and historic. As Noam Chomsky explained in another context, in order to maintain the propaganda line that Venezuela resists U.S. domination “it’s necessary to suppress a great number of facts.” ⁴

The response of high government officials to the new documentary was furious. Francisco Sesto, then-Minister of Culture, called the documentary “intellectual yellow journalism and a manipulation of reality.” In addition, given that a number of official institutions had partially financed the film, he asked that the institutions withdraw their logos [from the credits], and that state television refrain from showing the film. He added, “[Muzio] was not sufficiently professional, in the sense of abiding by the rules of the game, to be honest about his intentions.” ⁵ Other statements by government officials suggested that the producers of the film had been bribed, that it was advancing the dark agenda of the opposition political parties, or that, simply and plainly, the producers were “counter-revolutionaries.” One official asserted that Venezuelan problems were no business of foreigners. Néstor Francia, former leftist intellectual and later the spokesman for PDVSA, called the film “an act of piracy,” assuring listeners that revolutionary marxists, such as himself, were “struggling against the deviations of the ultra-left.”⁶

But we should clarify the nature of then-Minister of Culture Sesto’s accusations, since they’re good examples of the manner of debate typical of the politics of the so-called Bolivarian Process. Let’s remember that Gabriel Muzio’s film crew had the institutional approbation of the Bolivarian government, owing to its having produced Another Way Is Possible … Venezuela and its other previous documentarie...