When people make their move

April 17, 2002
By Bukka Rennie

Many were of the view that Hugo Chavez was a "goner" when sections of the armed forces moved against him. The situation had been building for some time.

Chavez, ex-paratrooper and one time insurrectionist, was elected President of Venezuela via the democratic process.

Over a period he had worked his way into the minds and hearts of the Venezuelan masses, assuming a Simon Bolivaresque mystique, and being acclaimed as the one who had come to right the many wrongs and to rid the country of the legacy of the corrupt Carlos Andres Perez regime, which was the main conduit to enriching the elites and keeping the poor in "persistent poverty".

Once he assumed political power Chavez began to work and to agitate for constitutional reform that would place power in the hands of the people rather than in the hands of the elite, who dominated all the state institutions.

It is always difficult to inherit intact a state apparatus and then try peacefully to transform that which has for years been designed to work in the interest of particular social groupings.

One needs to understand that the State itself is by nature conservative and its inherent dynamism would tend always to reaffirm the given status-quo and in itself be self-perpetuating.

Social transformation in such a case has to be massaged diplomatically with an approach that utilises moral persuasion and re-education and appeals to people's sense of patriotism and nationalist pride.

Chavez, truth to say, was almost like a "bull in a china shop".

With his mannerisms, his quest for rapid changes, his foreign policies and alliances, particularly his friendship with Cuba and Iraq and his insistence on loyalty to OPEC's production ceilings and quotas, he ruffled the feathers of many of the people who headed key institutions.

Many of them began to organise opposition to his "edicts and proclamations" which they felt were not in their interests, but which were nevertheless ratified by the National Assembly that had been constituted to reflect a different class bias.

The middle classes were mobilised against Chavez and some 150,000 of them took to the streets.

In the course of the protest 11 people were shot. Who issued such orders, no one knows.

The channels of military authority were severely breached. Obviously by unknown agents-provocateurs.

But that was the signal for certain elements of the military leadership to move to arrest Chavez on the grounds that the shooting of unarmed people could not be tolerated. Within hours a new President was worn in.

To many people the world over it was deja-vu, reminiscent of the situation in Chile when the middle classes took to the streets, women waving empty pots and pans, as the start to the chain of events leading to the overthrow and assassination of the progressive Allende and the installing of the backward Pinochet, backed of course by the USA.

Well, we know how that story played out: Pinochet served to visit upon the people of Chile the most vicious period of bloodshed and plunder that they have ever known.

The Venezuelans obviously have learnt from the Chilean situation.

The right-wing coup against Chavez was not allowed to proceed. The people, from all the hills around Caracas, the paratroopers, the rank and file of the army and air force, the rank and file of the trade unions, etc, moved in greater numbers and shut the coup down. The people intervened and reinstated Chavez.

Let us hope that he has learnt that it is the people in their mass movements that make the difference. And most of all that social transformation is a patient process involving all the people in educational self-activity rather that a mere combination of edicts and proclamations.

And one may well ask what of Palestine?

Why have there not been such interventions by mass movements of the people bringing reason and wisdom to the agenda?

The answer is that the Palestinians are a "stateless" people, who have been in that quagmire for the past 50 years, some four million of them existing in refugee camps all over the Arab world, reduced to such destitution by a nuclear armed State of Israel backed by the USA.

Israel was brought into existence only in 1948 by European Jews fleeing the racist anti-Semitism of fellow and brother Europeans and could not have wrought such havoc and genocide on an Arab people in an Arab region without the might of America.

Israel is not interested in a peace process. They are interested in a process of total subjugation or liquidation.

What obviously is posed here, to quote one commentator, are "the nuclear arsenal of the obscenely powerful and the destructive power of the utterly hopeless..."

No wonder the masses of Palestinians sometimes intervene through pretty little girls with bombs in their panties.