Nacla -Report by Max Ajl

Venezuela: Local Reactions to the Re-Election Reform


Jan 26 2009
Max Ajl
Following close on the United Socialist Party of Venezuela's (PSUV) electoral victory in the November 23 regional elections, Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez re-proposed a constitutional reform that would allow indefinite re-election. The first attempt, bundled with various constitutional amendments that would have accelerated economic restructuring, was defeated 51 to 49 percent in December 2007.

Predictably, a furiously anti-Chávez foreign press corps and commentariat recoiled at the idea, denouncing the Chávez presidency as so much "authoritarianism and incompetence" and Chávez as a""strongman" and "caudillo."

For the moment, let us ignore such commentary. Unlimited re-election is not precisely an import from Planet Stalin. England and France, reputed to be democracies, have provisions for indefinite re-election, while New York's mayor Michael Bloomberg's call for a third term was not said to be the forerunner of fascism in New York. And as Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva recently pointed out, "No one is asking [Colombian President Álvaro] Uribe why he wants a third term."

Chávez's recent suggestion that indefinite re-election be extended to all elected posts alongside the already-existing mechanism for recalling all elected officials (rarely do recall referendum mechanisms have such enormous scope) suggest a wide space for purely electoral democratic participation. Such tools—alongside a mobilized and educated citizenry—are valuable ones.

Still, re-election could pose problems for the Venezuelan process. Some argue that the call for indefinite re-elections is symptomatic of existing problems, such as excessive personalism and the failure to cultivate new leadership. Thus far more fascinating than Western or world reaction, and far more important for understanding Bolivarian Venezuela, has been the native reaction.

The first observation is that the re-election proposal's proponents and detractors have not split along the by-now-familiar lines of the Venezuelan class system. Polls vary widely: positive support ranges from 53 to roughly 30 percent, negative support from 61 percent to 42 percent, with the undecided making up the rest. But all suggest some chavista disapproval of the reform; or at best, attenuated support. This includes the "yes, but" position, which supports the amendment but has a distinct political program.

Fiercely pro-Chávez writer Henry Escalante offers a gushing defense of the reform and Chávez's axial role in the Venezuelan revolutionary process, naming him as the begetter of so much that has been good in Venezuela in the last decade: initiatives towards regional integration, the PSUV, the new constitution. Suggestive, too, are the parallels Escalante makes with another leader—echoing Trotsky's assessment of Lenin—arguing, "Lenin's role could not have been duplicated."

Venezuelan radical sociologist Javier Biardeau gives voice to one of the most sophisticated stances of critical approval, in noting, "When a revolution depends on one leader, it depends, simply, on a precarious, fragile, and skinny thread." Nonetheless, he maintains that support for the amendment is important, not so that Chávez can be eternal leader, but so that by keeping Chávez, the people secure a space and buy time for the emergence of "collective leadership, organically structured." Biardeau goes on to say that "there must be a qualitative jump in consciousness and organization."

Anarchist journalist Jose Roberto Duque neatly complements the argument, suggesting that Chávez's continuance in power merely constitutes so much scaffolding and protection for the project. Duque sees the project as revolutionary, but unlike most he sees it as largely occurring outside the sphere of the state. Under the Chávez government, writes Duque, the population "has conquered space to organize and self-govern. So I prefer a democrat like Chávez for 20 years in Miraflores" to the old two-party system of alternating COPEI and AD malgoverance.

Others sharing the "yes, but" position have other perspectives. Venezuelan intellectual Luis Fuenmayor Toro, writing in the leftist daily Últimas Noticias , supports Chávez because the population does, viewing Chávez's personal popularity as a political vehicle capable of slamming down the opposition in frontal electoral contests.

Whereas Biardeau and Escalante note Chávez's other qualities, Toro reduces the phenomenon to pure charisma, affirming that Chávez is "indispensable," but not because of "the inexistence of persons with superior talents and knowledge of how to run the country." (Escalante bombards this argument, citing it as so much diluted anti-revolutionary sentiment.)

So the range of opinion extends roughly from pure Leninist messianism, to a sophisticated understanding of the Chávez government as incubator of a far more radical project, to a resigned pragmatism.

And the "No" vote? Caracas Chronicles, an opposition blog, gives voice to an often even-tempered opposition sentiment. There, Chávez is described as "sounding halfway between desperate and deranged," as he pushes for the amendment. One of the blog's contributors adds, "The real reason indefinite re-election does not mark France or Britain as dictatorships is that those countries have functioning, stable, independent institutions." The tacit assumption is that Venezuela does not, a frequent and discredited fiction often bandied about by the Venezuelan opposition.

The tacit conclusion is that the specter of indefinite re-election marks Venezuela as a dictatorship. This is wrong in two respects.

One, Venezuela is, as Human Rights Watch concedes, a relatively open society." The congress and the judiciary are institutionally independent. They simply are not controlled by the hard-right opposition. There is, in a word, no pluralism.

And two, as Venezuela scholar Julia Buxton notes, there is something "fundamentally wrong in thinking that democracy is judged through reference to the procedural mechanics of liberal democracy," which is often understood as demanding pluralism, in which the opposition controls some political levers. Buxton argues that democracy simply is not measurable using the yardstick of mainstream U.S political science, and that it should be understood as popular control of decision-making and popular engagement within the society as a whole. On those scales, Venezuela is no lightweight.

Meanwhile, the only effective counterweight to Venezuela's more revolutionary processes is what George Ciccariello-Maher calls the "endogenous right." He defines this group as a "well-known bloc of moderate, centrist, bureaucratic-minded Chavistas, landing a series of body blows to more leftist elements, threatening internal democracy and the radicalism of the Revolution in the process." These "chavista" officials are not remotely interested in radical change, speaking in the name of the Revolution but subverting it at every step.

Meanwhile, what of the groups that engineered the 2002 coup d'état, closed congress, and installed a real dictatorship? They are far from power, and won't regain it without a political program more detailed than calling for the use of the guillotine on Chávez. Boohoo.

Que frio que hace.

Queridos amigos--

Espero mucho que estéis absolutamente genial por allá.
Ya llevo casi una semana estando aquí en Winona, Minnesota, con mis padres. Ha estado tranquilo en la ciudad... mi primer fin de semana fue bien porque mucha de la ciudad asistía un festival de películas independientes que se ubico en la universidad de Winona. Estuvimos viendo pelis por todo el sábado y domingo... al final termine los días estando arta de sentarme en frente de una pantalla. ;) Bueno y además fue difícil salir de los edificios porque el frío fue bastante amargo y desagradable.

Casi todos mis amigos ya se han vuelto a sus universidades, empezando el nuevo semestre; así que me quedo aquí solita... jaja pues la verdad es que no es tan terrible; tengo una buena amiga aquí por lo menos por unos dias y hemos estado visitando unos de nuestros cafés favoritos juntas, etc... Ya me da mas tiempo estar con mi ritmo, leyendo, organizando unas cosas antes de que me vaya el 26 de febrero. Aun, la realidad triste es que, claro, me hace falta estar allá en España.

Todavía tengo planeado llamar algunos de vosotros, así que espero que eso ocurra pronto... porque ya sabemos como me pongo distraida bastante facilmente...;)
Pues mi madre ya quiere irse-- tenemos que ver mi padre esta noche en su show de música... a ver si tardaremos un poco...

Mis saludos y tanto amor...

Back in the MN snow

When I look out my window and directly see a mound of snow piling up, reaching high to block the view of the next door building's windows... then I realize I'm back in MN. When my bare feet walk across our cold, creaking wood floors then I know I'm back in Winona, back in my house...that of my parents. Waking up and drinking a full glass of Minute Maid orange juice, eating a substantial bowl of Honey Bunches of Oats with a banana on the side - this is all a morning ritual that becomes common when I'm back here. Hopefully at least the jet lag will wear off so that when I do all this it won't be at four o'clock in the morning...
It's a little odd but for some reason, after being gone for five months it feels natural to be back in my hometown. I am not surprised by too many things...after all, Winona is not so large so any shocking changes that would occur are few. The one thing that never ceases to surprise me, though, is when I walk downtown for the first day in a while and realize the amount of people that pass by and say hello to one another. This is welcoming. But I do have to laugh, though, when I have the natural reaction to go up to each person that I recognize and give them a kiss on both cheeks... a European country will do that to you I suppose.
Although the environment here comes to me natural, that does not mean the heartbreak of leaving another home abroad is not present. Lately I have been trying to figure out how to better maintain these "different lives" in a connected manner - More to come on that...

"It is non-violence or non-existence."
-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

In Honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Democracy Now! does a wonderful presentation on their site today, commemorating the legacy and mission of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his monumental movement for civil rights. Some of King's last speeches are aired, as well as an address to the nation he gave explaining why he opposed the war in Vietnam. Check out their website at democracynow.org and click "today's show", "listen." It's well worth it and a more-than-important grab back to the world's reality and the pertinence of history - our present, ongoing connection with that history.

Check it out on YouTube

"Duo Guardabarranco" by Katía Cardenal... extremely highly recommended.
Katía is Nicaraguan and music runs in her family. She sings much about solidarity and different Latin American political and social movements, supporting various revolutionary movements specifically across Central America.

Estar consciente

Plan Mexico and Central American Migration
Jan 12 2009
Susan Fitzpatrick Behrens

The porous 600-mile border between Guatemala and Mexico offers Central American immigrants a ready passage to "el norte"—the United States. It includes 63 uncontrolled transit points, 44 of which can be passed in a vehicle.

The same conditions attracting Central American immigrants also make the Guatemala-Mexico border region home to a thriving drug trade. Guatemala’s La Prensa Libre, recently reported that Guatemala's three departments (or states) bordering Mexico—San Marcos, Huehuetenango, and the Petén—have come under the direct control of violent drug cartels.

For $1.33 ferries made of inner tubes offer passage across the Suchiate River in Tecún Umán (San Marcos department), which doubles as the Mexico-Guatemala border. (By Susan Fitzpatrick Behrens)

In San Marcos, a single drug lord, Juan Ortiz Chamalé, owns virtually all of the properties on the frontier. Huehuetenango is the site of an increasingly violent conflict between Mexican and Guatemalan drug lords. The latest incident there involved a wholesale massacre of 17 to 40 people (estimates vary) at a horserace organized by narcos. While in the Petén, drug mafias, supported by the police, have forced small and large landowners to sell their lands.

Violence, promoted by the drug trade, delinquency, and death squads has become a part of daily life in these Guatemalan departments. Bodies riddled with bullet holes regularly appear by the sides of roads, along riverbeds, and in open fields. Well-documented evidence demonstrates that police and military forces are directly engaged in this violence through their links to drug cartels, the maras (gangs), and death squads.

Undocumented Central American immigrants, fleeing the struggling economies of their respective countries, are often victimized by this violence. And their plight is about to get worse. The recently implemented U.S.-Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) will surely devastate what is left of rural livelihoods. And, what's more, the conditions that make the Guatemala-Mexico border an immigrant corridor and a Mecca for drug trafficking also make it a central target of Plan Mexico, the U.S.-financed anti-drug militarization program, pushed through the U.S. Congress by President George Bush in June 2008.

Undocumented Central American immigrants, already subjected to subhuman conditions in their search for viable livelihoods, now face the oppressive confluence of these powerful transnational forces—the drug trade, militarization, and free trade.

Plan Mexico

The U.S.-backed Plan Mexico, known as the “Mérida Initiative” in policy circles, provides $1.6 billion of U.S. taxpayer money to Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. The stated intention of the program involves "security aid to design and carry out counter-narcotics, counter-terrorism, and border security measures.”

U.S. Congressional leaders complained about the secrecy of negotiations for Plan Mexico and the absence of human rights guarantees, but they did nothing more than demand the paltry sum of $1 million in additional funding to support human rights groups in Mexico.

Researcher Laura Carlsen has noted that Plan Mexico is the "securitized" extension of trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement and CAFTA. Indeed, Plan Mexico is the successor project to the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), a post-9/11 initiative negotiated by the NAFTA countries. The State Department's Thomas Shannon made the link between free trade and security explicit: "We have worked through the Security and Prosperity Partnership to improve our commercial and trading relationship, we have also worked to improve our security cooperation. To a certain extent, we’re armoring NAFTA.”

Evidently, neoconservative policy framers have purposefully coupled free trade and security. Free trade agreements promote the free circulation of goods, while prohibiting the same circulation by workers. Since neoliberal trade deals eliminate agricultural subsidies and open poor countries to a flood of cheap imported goods, economically displaced workers will naturally seek new sources of income—even if that means crossing borders.

Militarizing borders and identifying undocumented workers who cross them as criminals ("illegal") are the logical—though sordid—next steps in anticipating and "guarding against" the effects of free trade. The militarization of borders has done nothing to stop immigration, which provides an essential labor force to the United States. But the criminalization of undocumented mobile immigrant workers has deprived them of basic rights of citizenship, thereby making them vulnerable to increasing levels of violence and human rights violations.

The U.S.-driven designation of "internal enemies"—in this case immigrants—as a rationale for building an already mushrooming security apparatus and militarizing societies is, of course, nothing new, especially in Latin America. What is new is that this militarization has become nearly void of any social content. Even during the Cold War, U.S. "national security" doctrines were generally accompanied by social programs, such as the Alliance for Progress and the Peace Corps, which in small measure alleviated poverty and explicitly recognized economic conditions as a root of "the problem."

The end of the Cold War eliminated an even token emphasis on poverty and with it, all but the most minimal efforts to offer social assistance. The Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) found that the Bush administration granted $874 million in military and police assistance to Latin America in 2004 an amount almost equal to the $946 million provided in economic and social programs. WOLA reported that with the exception of Colombia, military and police aid has historically been less than half of the total provided for economic and social aid. Moreover, military and police aid used to be directed by the U.S. State Department, assuring a degree of congressional oversight. Now, foreign policy is increasingly managed by the Department of Defense, thereby eliminating this oversight and effectively making militarization the predominant rationale of U.S. foreign policy.

Living on the Border

The situation of Central American immigrants on Mexico’s southern border illustrates the central problems and contradictions of Washington's emphasis on free trade and militarization. And the situation is certain to get worse as thousands of immigrants are deported by the United States to their countries of origin in Central America.

Mural depicting the distinct modes of passage used by immigrants traveling to "el Norte" in Casa del Migrante in Tecún Umán, Guatemala. (By Susan Fitzpatrick Behrens)

Immigrants are fully aware of the risks they take, but economic conditions leave them few alternatives. With a look of desperation following a three-day journey from his home, one Honduran immigrant in the Mexican border town of Tapachula explained, “We don’t do this by choice. We don’t want to leave our families. But imagine a man looking at his children and seeing them hungry." Back home, he faces wages averaging $6 per day in Honduras and a scarcity of opportunities.

When asked about the dangers they anticipate on their journey north, Central American immigrants offer a catalog of terrors: beatings, sexual assaults, robberies, kidnappings, and murders. Ademar Barilli, a Catholic priest and director of the Casa del Migrante in Guatemala’s border town of Tecún Umán, observed, “Immigrants almost expect that their rights will be violated in every sense because they are from another country and are undocumented.”

Heyman Vasquez, a Catholic priest who directs a shelter for migrants in the town of Arriaga in Chiapas, Mexico, maintains detailed records of the violations suffered by migrants passing through his shelter. In a five-month period in 2008, a third of the men and 40% of the women he serves reported assault or some other form of abuse in their 160-mile journey from the Mexico-Guatemala region to Arriaga.

Police are often the perpetrators of these violations. In Guatemala, Father Barilli and others described cases of police forcing Salvadoran and Honduran immigrants to disembark from buses, where they take their documents and demand money. Once they make it into Mexico, immigrants are subject to abuse by Los Zetas, a notorious drug-trafficking network composed of former law enforcement and military agents linked with the Gulf Cartel.

Los Zetas are known to work with Mexican police in the kidnapping of immigrants to demand money from their family members in the United States. Immigrants also report robberies, beatings, and rapes at the hands of Los Zetas. Recently, in Puebla, Mexico, 32 undocumented Central Americans were kidnapped and tortured by the Zetas with the support of municipal police. In this case, after the migrants escaped, local community members captured a number of the responsible police agents and held them until Federal authorities arrived.

A U.S. State Department report on human rights in Mexico from 2007 concluded, "Many police were involved in kidnapping, extortion, or providing protection for, or acting directly on behalf of organized crime and drug traffickers. Impunity was pervasive to an extent that victims often refused to file complaints.”

That impunity means abused migrants have few places to turn is painfully obvious to one Salvadoran immigrant in the Mexican border town of Tapachula. He had just been deported from the United States, where his wife, a legal resident, and two U.S.-born children live in Los Angeles. “The police are involved. You can’t file complaints,” he said. Besides, the wheels of Mexican justice turn notoriously slow—if at all.

Despite the dire scenario, it is not uncommon for many Central American immigrants to receive a helping hand along the way in their journey to El Norte, whether its food, water, money, or shelter. As one undocumented Honduran explained in Tapachula, “Almost everyone has someone in their family who has migrated. Most understand the need.”

"Security" and Violence

Security initiatives in Central America are notoriously violent and further militarized societies still recovering from decades of brutal civil wars. And, historically, when the Pentagon gets involved, repressive tactics increase.

The Bush administration's principle security concerns in Central America of drug trafficking and “transnational gangs” have led to a series of “security cooperation” agreements. The first regional conference on “joint security” was chaired by El Salvador’s president, Tony Saca, who first introduced the "Mano Dura" (Iron Fist) initiative—a package of authoritarian militarized policing methods aimed at youth gangs adopted throughout the region. In attendance was then-U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, responsible for advocating torture of prisoners in Guantánamo.

The conference took place in El Salvador in February 2007 and resulted in the creation of a transnational anti-gang unit (TAG), which El Salvador’s justice and security minister, René Figueroa described as “an organized offensive at a regional level,” with the US State Department and the FBI coordinating with national police forces. Gonzales, promised Washington would finance a new program to train regional police forces and this promise has been fulfilled partially with the establishment of a highly controversial police-training academy in El Salvador, which is closed to public scrutiny and includes little support for human rights.

Hundreds of Central American migrants ride atop freight trains leaving Arriaga, Mexico en route to the United States. Among other dangers, hundreds have lost limbs as a result of falling onto the tracks below. (By Carlos Bartolo Solis, Hogar de la Misericordia, www.migrantearriaga.org.mx)

In many ways, Plan Mexico, is a mano dura campaign writ large. For 2008, Plan Mexico will provide $400 million to Mexico and $65 million to Central America. More than half of the total funds will go directly to providing police and military weapons and training, even though the police and military in these countries have been implicated in crime and human rights violations.

As Plan Mexico arms and trains military and police forces implicated in violent crime, it also provides millions of dollars for an immigration institute responsible for tightening Mexico’s southern borders through monitoring, bio-data collection, a Guatemalan guest-worker program, and border control.

Undocumented immigrants will be caught in the web of this violence, particularly since Plan Mexico also continues the trend toward the criminalization of migrants. As Laura Carlsen, observes, "By including 'border security' and explicitly targeting 'flows of illicit goods and persons,' the initiative equates migrant workers with illegal contraband and terrorist threats."

The dehumanization of undocumented immigrants in the United States, and elsewhere, and the growing infringement of their basic rights should serve as a dire warning to all "citizens." The undocumented are the canaries in the coalmine: the violation of their rights signals a growing repressive climate that jeopardizes everyone's liberties.

Fire on the Border

Free trade agreements create the conditions that force people to migrate to the United States as an underpaid, politically disenfranchised, and therefore unprotected labor force. Now the economic crisis in the United States has increased pressure to expel undocumented workers, violating a host of human rights standards in the process. Deportations also increase labor pressure in immigrants’ countries of origin, where the global economic crisis stands to further decrease the already limited opportunities for work in “legitimate” industries.

From a purely humanitarian perspective, the governments of the United States, Mexico, and Central America need to address this crisis by developing policies that improve the conditions of poverty that cause immigration. Throwing guns at the problem will only make things worse.

Sure, drug lords are firmly entrenched in the Guatemala-Mexico border region. But Plan Mexico will no more eliminate their presence, than the Mano Dura campaigns eliminated the gangs. Or, for that matter, any more than the militarization of borders has eliminated immigration. Instead, Plan Mexico, like its predecessors, will increase the level of violence in the region by providing more weapons to corrupt police and military forces.

As more and more resources shift toward militarization, policing and surveillance, fewer resources are available for programs that ease pressure to emigrate—namely, education, jobs, medical care, food subsidies, housing, and legal recourse. Meanwhile, governments are increasingly ceding responsibility for protection of even narrowly defined human rights to under-funded non-governmental organizations.

Repressive immigration policies, narcotrafficking, and free trade all combined to form a combustible situation along the Mexico-Guatemala border. Plan Mexico is the spark, and once the flames start, no one will be able to put out the fire. And it's the undocumented migrants who will continue to get burned.



Susan Fitzpatrick Behrens is a NACLA Research Associate currently based in Central America. Christine Kovic contributed reporting for this article.

What Retiro presented and shared with me

Can I please say that the park, Retiro, in Madrid is absolutely precious...? It is harmonic!!! Its beauty is filled with those rollerblading, who - even with a bit of snow scattered and melting from the prior day - make it through the crowds and across the sloshing, slick ice. Its statues are accented by those observers, those who pause for moments, whose eyes are captured - locked into the grooves of the stone...maybe even in wonder, for those moments just allowing themselves to be in their own pequeño mundo... Accompanied by a partner or solo, just lift your face up to ark back toward the warm beams of the sun... the warm beams that counter all the other senses of the body... those that tell you you should naturally feel anything but the kind reflection of the sun on your skin that gives you oh some sort of sentido tan agradable... but then you walk and walk and cannot help but be simply, maybe even blissfully, caught in the environment.

Manifestaciones contra Israel en Gaza

It has been amazing to see the number of banners I have seen listing different manifestations that are to take place here in various Spanish cities against the US support of Israel and against the war on Gaza as a whole. Solidarity definitely is present. Tonight there was a rally at 7:30 in Jaén, Jaén. That happily surprised me to find out about such action occurring in Jaén... many people tend to regard the city as one without much action, one without much spirit. It is, and must be, evident that we must stop living in our individual worlds and begin living in the world's reality.

Snow in Madrid

Today, the first day in 23 years, it has snowed in Madrid. All throughout the day various news stations aired different images filled with white backgrounds highlighted by the weather.
My friend called me from Madrid before arriving to class and told me that he and some others had made a snow person... This was the first time in his life and he was loving it. Coming from Minnesota, I had to remember that many places in Spain barely ever see any snow (although many others in the North and in the Sierra Nevada do), therefore I couldn't take this weather lightly being here in Spain. I guess after not having been in Minnesota for many months it has been refreshing and somewhat joyful to be a part of this weather excitement here. But on the other side the snow is slowing things up (maybe we need a little more of that in life...) - Renfe (train), schools, airplanes, and highways are all delayed. We'll see if this snow keeps up and affects my flight on the 20th...!