BY CHRISTIANO KERRILA
On the evening of December 2, tens of thousands of working-class supporters of Venezuela's radical left president, Hugo Chavez, poured into the streets of the country's capital, Caracas, to celebrate the defeat of the right-wing opposition's attempt to gather 2.4 million signatures required to force a recall referendum.
"We have won", they shouted, according to a December 3 report on the Venezuelanalysis.com web site. "Many of those in the streets believed the government's claims that the opposition had not gathered enough signatures to reach the 2.4 million needed to request the recall referendum", the reported added. "Others believed that if they were to reach that amount, it was because of rampant fraud and sabotage of the signature process."
The radical reforms implemented by the popularly elected Chavez government have provoked repeated attempts by Venezuela's ruling capitalist oligarchy to oust him from power. These attempts have included "general strikes" (employer shutdowns), capital flight, media manipulation, mass rightist demonstrations and two attempted military coups.
The first coup was initially successful, only to be reversed 48 hours later by an enormous worker-soldier uprising. The second coup attempt again failed to oust the government but it did temporarily succeed in shutting down the country's vital oil industry. The government's response to the oil bosses' strike was to organise oil production workers to "re-nationalise" the nominally state-owned oil industry by removing its managers, who were drawn from the families of the capitalist oligarchy.
At the same time, the government has promoted the emergence of popular organs of power, which have created an impressive network of grassroots communication and mobilisation that can serve as the foundation of a future political system based on participatory democracy, which is a constant theme of the Chavez government.
The "Bolivarian Circles" (neighbourhood-based open activist committees) now have millions of members and enjoy a close relationship with a large revolutionary current inside the military. These organs of popular power have been forged through worker and urban poor struggles to defend the Chavez government from military coups and in the struggle for land reform.
Following the failure of the bosses' oil strike earlier this year, the capitalist oligarchy has centred its attempt to oust the Chavez government on securing a recall referendum on the rule of President Chavez. The opposition needs to collect signatures from 20% of the electorate in order to force a referendum.
For the opposition to succeed in using the referendum to remove Chavez from the presidency, it would have to secure both a majority of votes and more votes than Chavez received in his original electoral mandate.
It is unclear whether Chavez could constitutionally run for president again if he were recalled. However, if he were able to, he would most likely do so and probably win because the heavy defeats suffered by the ruling class have deepened the internal divisions within its discredited political representatives. Opinion polls show that unless the opposition can unite behind one popular leader (which they do not have), then they will lose any presidential election held in the near future.
Such an electoral defeat at this stage would be a huge blow to the opposition in Venezuela and its backers in Washington. Even the prospect of such a defeat has led to a split in the opposition over strategy. One group, ironically naming itself as the Democratic Bloc, has split from the main opposition coalition and has run advertisements in the media calling for a "civil-military" overthrow of the government — a military coup — by the end of 2003.
There is growing evidence that Â鶹´«Ã½ of the capitalist ruling class are plotting to carry out another coup attempt. According to a November 25 Venezuelanalysis.com report, the Venezuelan National Police have made a number of raids on large supplies of weapons and ammunition.
At the end of October, two pro-Chavez legislators presented recorded phone conversations in which opposition leaders mentioned plans to destabilise the government. One conversation took place between the former president of the country's pro-capitalist union federation CTV, Carlos Ortega, now in self-imposed exile in Costa Rica, and the federation's current president, Manuel Cova, in which they talk about when and how Ortega should return to Venezuela, and that when he arrives there would be a "civil rebellion" — the term the opposition used for the April 2002 military coup).
The legislators also presented a recording of a conversation between an adviser to the CTV and Carlos Fernandez, the former president of the chamber of commerce, Fedecamaras, which led the April 2002 coup and the shut-down of Venezuela's oil industry in late 2002. In the course of the conversation, they mention the need to talk to the CIA and to various branches of industry, such as transportation, presumably to convince them to participate in another bosses' lock-out.
On November 26, at a joint press conference held by the Venezuelan justice minister Lucas Rincon, Forensic Police (Cicpc) director Marcos Chavez and police commissioner Miguel Rodriguez, evidence was presented implicating ex-military officers (who were fired after their involvement in the April 2002 military coup) in 37 acts of terrorism over the period of 2002-03. Among these acts were explosions in the embassies of Colombia and Spain, a grenade that exploded in a pro-Chavez demonstration, the murder of three soldiers and the attempt to demolish an electricity tower during the oil industry shut-down.
According to a December 3 report on Venezuelanalysis.com by US sociologist Gregory Wilpert, on December 1, "the last day of the petition drive, opposition leader Henry Ramos Allup indicated that the opposition had collected four million signatures. Then, Tuesday morning, one of the major dailies, El Nacional, ran a headline saying that there were 3.8 million signatures. Later that day, Enrique Mendoza, representing the opposition coalition Democratic Coordinator said that the correct number is 3.6 million."
Sumate, a US government-funded outfit that organised a petition drive against Chavez last February and which provided logistical support to the petition drive this time, said that the figure was 3.4 million.
"Finally", according to Wilpert's report, "opposition leader Henrique Salas Romer, who has been steering a somewhat independent line from the rest of the opposition, said that the real figure is at 2.8 million.
"Government supporters, of course, provided their own figure, based on figures collected by their petition observers, which said that the total number of votes was 1.95 million (adjusting it downwards from an earlier figure of 2.2 million)."
Already, evidence has emerged that many of the signatures were obtained through fraudulent tactics. These include reducing the number of places to sign in order to increase the length of the lines and give the appearance of larger numbers in front of the international corporate media which have eagerly cooperated with the opposition campaign.
While some signature sheets had been reserved for absentee votes, it appears that the opposition abused this by using pressure tactics on vulnerable people. For example, Professor Michael Lebowitz, an electoral observer, has noted that up to 18% of signature spaces had been reserved for people in hospitals despite the fact they represent a far smaller fraction of the population. In fact, hospital patients complained of being told that they must sign the petition if they wished to receive treatment.
According to a November 28 Venezuelanalysis.com report, trade unions claimed that employers forced workers to sign absentee signature cards in their workplaces.
While a number of electoral observers, both Venezuelan and foreign have claimed that they have been harassed by opposition supporters, the observers from the Organisation of American States and the Atlanta-based Carter Center (set up by former US president Jimmy Carter) claimed that there were no problems with the signature collection. These claims have been given credence by the international media, which has dismissed claims of fraud as "government propaganda".
Wilpert noted that there are two indicators which give support to the actual figure being closer to the government's rather than the opposition's claim.
The first is that "on the last night of the opposition's petition drive, there was practically no media coverage of the opposition's victory celebration. In the past, whenever there was any kind of opposition demonstration, the media would devote all of their programming to it (think of the post-election parties that take place all around the world after an election, which the media almost always cover, whether the party lost or won). This, at first, seemed an indication of the opposition's possible demoralization or confusion over the actual numbers of the petition."
The second is that "the turnout for the four days of the petition drive did not seem like what it would have to be for the opposition to collect over three million signatures". While on the first day there was a large turnout throughout Caracas, on the second to fourth days the turnout in the city's poorer neighbourhoods — where 80% of its residents live — dwindled to almost nothing. Wilpert reported that there is photographic evidence.
Ultimately, it is up to the National Electoral Council (CNE) to pronounce the verified number of signatures that the opposition collected in the petition drive. The CNE has 30 days in which to validate the signatures after they are delivered this week.
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, December 10, 2003.
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