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VENEZUELA: New Wave of Protests - By Government Supporters This Time
By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Oct 14 (IPS) - Despite its broad range of social programmes financed by windfall oil profits, the administration of President Hugo Chávez in Venezuela has been facing a new wave of protests. But this time they are led by supporters of the government.
Although the demonstrations have been small, they have been staged in different parts of the country by indigenous communities, street vendors, storm victims, transport workers, teachers, university students, public employees, pensioners and trade unionists, who have put forth a variety of demands.
On the eve of the Day of Indigenous Resistance - as the Chávez administration has dubbed Oct. 12, the anniversary of the Spaniards' arrival in the Americas û dozens of Wayúu, Yucpa and Barí Indians from the Sierra de Perijá mountains on the northern border with Colombia, gathered in Bolívar Plaza in Caracas to protest a plan to mine for coal in their territories as of next year.
"They are going to exhaust the sources of water that supply the (northwestern city of) Maracaibo (the second-largest city in Venezuela), and for every ton of coal that is removed for the Brazilian company (Vale Do Rio Doce), they will destroy 70 tons of forest," Lusbi Portillo, one of the organisers of the protest, told IPS during the demonstration.
The indigenous people "are asking President Chávez to choose water over mines. We don't want to be miners; we are shepherds, livestock breeders, farmers, weavers and fisherpersons," said Wayúu tribal leader Ángela González.
Street hawkers also held sometimes unruly demonstrations last month and this month in several outlying districts of Caracas, protesting municipal measures aimed at relocating them from busy streets.
And in Maracay, an industrial city 60 km west of the capital, people whose homes were damaged in recent flooding are demanding compensation. In their demonstrations, they blocked roads in the city centre and even brought traffic completely to a halt on one occasion.
On Oct. 6, teachers in Maracay also protested the government's alleged failure to respect their collective work contract, while university students threw up road blockades of burning tires and destroyed a vehicle to protest the dismissal of a regional official who had been responding to their grievances and demands.
The Education Ministry has also been the target of demonstrations. On Oct. 4, hundreds of the ministry's employees gathered outside the building to demand that they also be paid back wages, as the government has done in different sectors of the public administration, paying off hundreds of millions of dollars so far in wage backlogs.
"Thousands of us are still on temporary contracts and are paid less than the minimum wage (180 dollars a month)," one of the activists, Omaira Matos, told IPS.
The government's social programmes û which include a network of shops where the poor buy food at subsidised prices, community soup kitchens, a massive adult literacy drive, loans for microenterprises set up by the poor, financing for cooperatives, property title deeds in rural and urban areas, and projects that have brought primary health care and dental care to the slums û have improved the lives of millions of poor Venezuelans.
But the notion that Venezuela, the world's fifth-largest oil exporter, is enjoying an endless influx of "petrodollars" at this time of record high oil prices seems to be spurring on demands for more funds.
The National Workers' Union, a labour confederation that supports the government, organised a march in Caracas during the first week of October in which hundreds of public employees demanded compensation because of the government's delay in discussing a new collective bargaining agreement.
And on the east side of Caracas, taxi and bus drivers, who are the frequent victims of robberies, blocked roads several times in the past few weeks to protest the lack of safety.
Early this month, law enforcement officers evicted 300 families who had occupied incomplete apartments and were protesting irregularities in assigning the units by the government agency Fontur.
By contrast with its predecessors, the current government has put a priority on making decent housing available to the poor. An estimated 1.5 million dwellings are needed in this country of 6.5 million households.
But Chávez has admitted that the housing deficit is the Achilles' heel of his administration.
Two months ago, he sacked the housing minister after criticising the ministry's performance in his Sunday radio and TV programme, "Aló Presidente".
The programme is the president's favourite channel for announcing the assignation of funds for different social plans or problems, spending that is made possible by the soaring prices, as well as record tax collection and the use of part of the Central Bank's foreign reserves.
Nonetheless, the government has failed to keep everyone satisfied.
On Sept. 29, dozens of retired city government pensioners marched down a central Caracas avenue demanding the payment of pension backlogs.
And in the poor neighbourhood of 23 de Enero, for decades a bastion of the left in western Caracas, dozens of protesters gathered for hours on Oct. 5 outside of the Housing Council, a government body, to protest the delay in the start of promised infrastructure work.
In Valencia, a manufacturing town 90 km west of Caracas, a small group protested because around 80,000 elderly people have no pension whatsoever, according to the Foundation of Friends of the Elderly.
In Ocumare del Tuy, a dormitory city 40 km southeast of Caracas, residents from La Veraniega, a poor neighbourhood, demonstrated outside town hall on Oct. 3 over delays in sewage and power projects that had already been given the green light.
In towns in the east, like Barcelona and Puerto La Cruz, numerous demonstrations have been held to protest deficient electric power service, while in Ciudad Guayana, 500 km southeast of the capital, workers from Orinoco Steelworks blocked roads demanding that the government make good on promises made during a visit by Chávez.
After that company, the country's largest steel factory, was privatised in 1997, between 10 and 20 percent of the shares were to be distributed among the workers, who have not yet received their dividends.
A "summit" meeting of trade unions in the southeastern state of Guayana, many of whose leaders sympathise with the government, also protested what they described as "harassment" of some of their leaders, and announced that they would not allow their loyalty to the process of change led by Chávez to silence their complaints and demands on behalf of the workers.
One common denominator in the recent wave of protests is that they are not led by the opposition, but by social leaders and activists who identify with the leftist government.
In the past, the opposition movement held massive protests against the president. But the movement weakened and began to run out of steam after Chávez's smashing victory in a presidential recall referendum and the triumph of his supporters in municipal and regional elections, and as his popularity increased dramatically in the polls.
One emblematic case of these new protests was a controversy that reached cyberspace, especially the pro-Chávez web site Aporrea, when the international news programme Dossier, which was broadcast by Channel 8, a public TV station, was taken off the air after its presenter, Uruguayan-born veteran journalist Walter Martínez, criticised government officials.
"There are people who wear the red beret (Chávez's trademark) to steal," said Martínez in what would become the last episode of his nightly programme, in which he also criticised public TV's coverage of a United Nations General Assembly session in which Chávez spoke.
When government supporters expressed their agreement with Martínez, during another programme, Chávez personally telephoned the station, said he had inside information on the case, and publicly demanded that his followers respect the decisions taken by the state TV station, in a disciplined manner.
Martínez, who also left his programme on the government Radio Nacional station, has kept silent on the whole issue. But Aporrea was buzzing with comments from dozens of the president's supporters, with two out of three defending the journalist and criticising Chávez.
But in the midst of the wave of protests, hundreds of small farmers and thousands of Chávez supporters from Caracas and nearby towns marched on Oct. 8 and 9 in the capital in support of the government's controversial new crusade against the latifundio (large landed estate).
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(END/2005)
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