By Joaquín Roy
MIAMI, Apr 14 2015 (IPS)

U.S. President Barack Obama has earned a place in history for taking the first steps towards rectifying a policy that has lasted over half a century without ever achieving its primary goal of ending the Castro regime in Cuba.

At the Seventh Summit of the Americas, held in Panama City Apr. 10-11, Obama set aside the tortuous negotiations with his Cuban counterpart Raúl Castro and the impossible pursuit of consensus with his domestic opponents. Going out on a limb, he made an unconditional offer. He knew, or he sensed, that Castro would have no option but to accept.

Joaquín Roy

The Cuban economy is on the verge of collapse and the regime is receiving subtle pressure from a population that has already endured all manner of trials.

Signs of weakening in Venezuela, its protector, with which it exchanged social favours (in the fields of health and education) for subsidised oil, are gathering like hurricane storm clouds over the Raúl Castro regime

Instead of shaking the tree to knock the ripe fruit to the ground, Obama chose to do the unexpected: to prop it up and instead encourage its survival.

Obama is committing to stability in Cuba as the lesser evil, compared with sparking an internal explosion, with conflict between irreconcilable sectors and the imposition of a military solution more rigid than the current level of control. Washington knows that only the Cuban armed forces can guarantee order. The last thing the Pentagon aspires to is to take on that unenviable role.

Thus, between underpinning the Raúl Castro government and the doubtful prospect of attempting instantaneous transformation, the pragmatic option was to renew full diplomatic relations and, in the near future, lift the embargo.

Raúl Castro, for his part, yielded ground on the oft-repeated demand for an end to the embargo as a prior condition for any negotiations, and has responded wisely to the challenge. He contented himself with the consolation prize of reviewing the history (incidentally, an appalling one) of U.S. policy towards Cuba, in his nearly one-hour speech at the Summit.

“Obama is committing to stability in Cuba as the lesser evil, compared with sparking an internal explosion, with conflict between irreconcilable sectors and the imposition of a military solution more rigid than the current level of control”
To sugar the pill, however, he generously recognised that Obama, who was not even born at the time of the Cuban Revolution, shares no blame for the blockade. In this way, Castro contributed decisively to Obama’s triumph at the summit.

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has emerged from this inter-American gathering as the clear loser. The key to his failure was not having calculated his limitations and having undervalued the resources of his fellow presidents. Initially, Maduro logically exploited Obama’s mistake in decreeing that Venezuela is a “threat” and imposing sanctions on seven Venezuelan officials.

A large number of governments and analysts criticised the language used in the U.S. decree. In the run-up to the summit, Obama publicly recanted and admitted that Venezuela is no such threat to his country.

Maduro’s weak showing at the Summit was due to a combination of his own personality, the reactions of important external actors (significantly distant from the United States), the weak support of many of his traditional allies or sympathisers in Latin America, and the absence of unconditional support from Cuba.

It should be noted that the United States barely made its presence felt over this issue, although U.S. State Department counsellor Thomas Shannon made an effort to smooth over Maduro’s excesses and visited the Venezuelan president in Caracas ahead of the summit.

Maduro’s actions were already burdened by the imprisonment of a number of his opponents on questionable charges. As a result, protests spread worldwide, especially in Latin America, but also in Europe.

A score of former Latin American presidents signed a protest document which was presented at the summit.

Although these former presidents might be regarded as conservative and liberal, they were joined by former Spanish president José María Aznar (a notorious target of attacks by the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez and, afterwards, Maduro himself) and former Spanish socialist president Felipe González, who offered to act as defence lawyer for Antonio Ledezma, the mayor of Caracas, who is one of those imprisoned by the Venezuelan regime.

Maduro’s attempt to have a condemnation of the U.S. decree included in the summit’s final communiqué ended in another defeat. Although efforts were made to eliminate direct mention of the United States, the outcome was that the summit issued no final declaration because of lack of consensus.

In spite of the loquacity of its partners and protégés in the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), Venezuela’s Latin American supporters showed caution and avoided direct confrontation with Washington.

The same was evidently true of the Caribbean countries; fearful of losing supplies of subsidised Venezuelan oil, they made their request to Obama for preferential treatment by the United States at the meeting of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) in Jamaica earlier in the month.

But Maduro’s main failure was not realising that Raúl Castro would have to choose between fear of diminished supplies of cheap Venezuelan crude and rapprochement with Washington. It remains unknown how Cuba will be able to continue supplying Cuban teachers and healthcare personnel to Venezuela, until now the jewel in the crown of the alliance between Havana and Caracas in the context of ALBA.

Translated by Valerie Dee/Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Joaquín Roy can be contacted at jroy@Miami.edu

Excerpt:

Ernesto “Che” Guevara delivers his famous speech on Aug. 8, 1961 at the Inter-American Economic and Social Council in the Uruguayan city of Punta del Este. This was the last continental forum Cuba attended before being excluded until the Seventh Summit of the Americas, to be held Apr. 10-11 in Panama City. Credit: Public domain

By Patricia Grogg
HAVANA, Apr 8 2015 (IPS)

U.S. President Barack Obama was only four days old when Comandante Ernesto “Che” Guevara publicly castigated the United States’ policy of hostility toward Cuba at an inter-American summit, reiterated then Prime Minister Fidel Castro’s willingness to resolve differences through dialogue on an equal footing, and held secret conversations with a Washington envoy.

More than half a century later, the U.S. president accepted the challenge of pursuing rapprochement with the Caribbean island country, overcoming conflicts, mutual resentment and tensions, and initiating the still precarious process of normalising bilateral relations.

On Apr. 10 and 11 he will come face to face with Cuban President Raúl Castro at the Seventh Summit of the Americas in Panama City.

Guevara addressed the meeting of the Inter-American Economic and Social Council of the Organisation of American States (OAS) on Aug. 8, 1961, on behalf of the Cuban government of Fidel Castro, his leader and comrade-in-arms in the guerrilla revolt that deposed Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista on Jan. 1, 1959.

The summit meeting, held in the Uruguayan resort city of Punta del Este, was the last time Cuba participated in an inter-American forum, as the island nation was suspended from the OAS in January 1962, a measure that was officially lifted in June 2009.

At the Punta del Este conference the United States formally established the Alliance for Progress, launched by U.S. President John Kennedy (1961-1963) months earlier to counteract the influence of the Cuban Revolution in the region, after his government’s frustrated attempt to invade the island in April 1961.

Behind the scenes of that conference the Argentine-born Guevara held a confidential meeting in Montevideo on Aug. 17 with Richard Goodwin, Kennedy’s special counsel for Latin American affairs, regarded by Cuban media as the first high level contact between authorities of both countries since bilateral relations had been broken off in January 1961.

Five days later the White House issued a statement describing the meeting as “a casual cocktail party conversation in which Goodwin restricted himself to listening.”

Since then there have been numerous unsuccessful attempts to secure closer ties, until after Fidel Castro’s retirement in 2006, his brother and successor Raúl together with Obama surprised the world on Dec. 17, 2014 with their announcement of the joint decision to restore diplomatic relations.

Hence a lot of attention in the run-up to the Seventh Summit of the Americas is being focused on the two heads of state. It will be Obama’s third attendance at a Summit of the Americas, while Cuba has been excluded until now. Cuba’s presence at this Summit is the result of a diplomatic strategy that led to unanimous support from countries of the region for its reinstatement, and that brought about the thaw with the United States.

Cuban political scientist and essayist Carlos Alzugaray regards the growing autonomy of the region as a factor in the process. “It could be said that the United States has lost the initiative and its room for manoeuvre” south of the Rio Bravo or Rio Grande, he told IPS.

After the first Summit of the Americas which took place in 1994 in the U.S. city of Miami, successive meetings revealed that Latin America was increasingly unwilling to accept U.S. dominance. This came to a head with the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), a star concept at early summits but which fell out of favour in just over a decade.

It was at the Fourth Summit, in the Argentine city of Mar del Plata in 2005, that the host country and other South American nations rejected attempts by the United States and Canada to impose the FTAA. Leftwing or centre-left leaders had come to power in the south of the hemisphere, like Hugo Chávez of Venezuela (1999-2013), who called on the Mar del Plata meeting “to be the tomb of FTAA.”

As a regional counter-proposal, in December 2004 Chávez and Fidel Castro launched what is now known as the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), made up of Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Ecuador, Dominica, Antigua and Barbuda, Saint Lucia, Grenada and Saint Kitts and Nevis.

Three years later, the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) was founded in order to encourage integration, social and human development, equity and inclusion in the region. Its members are Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay and Venezuela.

All the countries of the Americas except the United States and Canada came together in 2011 to form the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC). This forum reinstated Cuba as a full member of the regional concert of nations, in the absence of Canada and the United States.

While Cuba basks in this new international context, Alzugaray itemised internal changes put in motion by the government of Raúl Castro since 2008 to modernise the socialist development model, as well as “overall changes arising from the growing presence in the region of China, above all, and also of Russia.”

But the Panama Summit, convened formally to satisfy the region’s demand to end Cuba’s ostracism from the bloc of the 35 independent states in the Americas, and to take a significant step toward normalisation of relations between Havana and Washington, may need to shift its attention to the crisis between the United States and Venezuela.

Obama issued an executive order on Mar. 9 declaring that the situation in Venezuela, governed by socialist President Nicolás Maduro, is a “threat to the national security of the United States,” and he imposed several of the country’s senior officials. The measure met with the disapproval of the majority of Latin American countries.

“No country has the right to judge the conduct of another and even less to impose sanctions and penalties on their own,” said UNASUR Secretary General Ernesto Samper, a former president of Colombia. In his view, unilateralism will prevent Washington from maintaining good relations with Latin America.

“Under these circumstances, it will be very difficult for the United States to develop a strategy in the region that takes into account Latin American and Caribbean interests and allows for natural adaptation to change,” said Alzugaray.

In his opinion, Obama has made “a serious mistake” in the run-up to a meeting that was supposed to celebrate hemispheric reunion. “The region will overwhelmingly support Cuba and Venezuela,” Alzugaray predicted.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Valerie Dee

Relatives and students march with a banner naming people killed in the protests, in a mass opposition demonstration in Caracas on Saturday Feb. 22. Credit: Estrella Gutiérrez/IPS

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Feb 27 2014 (IPS)

Fifteen dead, dozens injured, some 500 arrested and denunciations of torture, illegal repression by security forces and irregular groups and attacks on the press are the fruits of over two weeks of political confrontation in the streets of some 30 Venezuelan cities. 

The state “has tossed the United Nations basic principles on the use of force and firearms [approved in Havana in 1990] into the waste bin, with regulatory bodies like the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Ombudsman’s Office treating them with contempt,” Marino Alvarado, coordinator of the human rights organisation Provea, told IPS.  "In the absence of the state, parapolice bands control certain urban spaces, call themselves collectives and act as an armed wing of the government..." -- Luis Cedeño of Paz Activa

According to eye-witnesses, press investigations and videos circulating on the social networks, several protesters were shot to death by plain-clothes police, by armed groups that intimidated protesters and initiated violent incidents, or by pellets allegedly fired by members of the militarised Bolivarian National Guard.

One of the fatalities, on the morning of Monday Feb. 24, was 34-year-old Jimmy Vargas, who was allegedly attacked with pellets and tear gas by members of the National Guard. He fell from the second floor of a building in San Cristóbal, the capital of the state of Táchira, in the southwestern Andes mountains on the border with Colombia.

To defuse the crisis, President Nicolás Maduro decreed a holiday from Thursday Feb. 27, the 25th anniversary of the protests that left more than 300 dead in Caracas in 1989, to Mar. 5, the first anniversary of the death of former president Hugo Chávez (1999-2013).

This week pro-government and opposition demonstrations continued, and looting and vandalism broke out in cities like Maracay, in the north.

On Sunday Feb. 23 systems engineer Alejandro Márquez was killed, allegedly beaten to death by national guards when he was using his mobile phone to film incidents near a barricade in central Caracas.

Victims of acts of vandalism by demonstrating groups are also among the dead.

On Friday Feb. 21, 29-year-old supermarket worker Elvis Durán died on returning to his home on his motorbike and collided with a wire apparently strung by opposition activists across the street where he lived.

In Valencia, an industrial city west of Caracas, among the denunciations of torture was the story of Juan Carrasco, who was sodomised with a rifle barrel. “My son was brutalised, raped, humiliated by the soldiers in green. They destroyed his life and that of other youngsters,” complained his mother, Rebeca González de Carrasco.

Geraldine Moreno Orozco, a student, died from pellets fired at point-blank range into her face, after she had already fallen to the shots.

In several cities there were reports that young detainees were soaked with gasoline and threatened with being set alight, or were tortured with electric prods. There were also reports of security agents throwing tear gas canisters into homes.

The first protesters to be killed, at the end of a march in Caracas on Feb. 12, died in shooting involving members of the Bolivarian Intelligence Service (political police) who were disobeying an order of confinement to barracks, President Maduro said.

Maduro claimed that 30 people have died because the “guarimbas” (barricade shelters) have prevented them from receiving timely medical care.

The Foro Penal Venezolano and the Fundación para los Derechos y la Equidad, two associations of human rights lawyers, are keeping track of complaints of rights violations to present to international bodies. “Government officials responsible could be accused of crimes against humanity,” lawyer Elenis Rodríguez told IPS.

The wave of demonstrations began on Feb. 6 in the capital of Táchira province with a student protest against crime, after the attempted rape of a university student on campus.

The protests expanded when the initial demonstration was harshly put down. In the subsequent demonstrations against the repression, some hotheads threw stones at the residence of Táchima Governor José Vielma, a retired soldier and member of the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV).

Three young men were apprehended, prosecuted and sent to a prison in the northwestern city of Coro. As a result, student protests demanding their freedom spread like wildfire to other cities, and in the Andes region local people turned out in their thousands in solidarity.

On Feb. 12, Youth Day in Venezuela and the bicentennial of a battle in the war of independence, student movements organised marches all over the country, and a sector of the opposition coalition Mesa de Unidad Democrática (Democratic Unity Roundtable), led by Leopoldo López, called for “The Exit” of Maduro’s government.

There were huge rallies led by young people and the middle classes, which political analysts say are motivated by discontent with the government’s erratic policies in the face of the shortage of basic products, inflation and surging crime.

Although the vast majority of demonstrations are peaceful, some are accompanied with stone-throwing, setting fire to improvised barricades built of trash set up in the streets, and other acts of vandalism.

The government issued an arrest warrant for López, of the small centre-right opposition party Voluntad Popular (Popular Will), accusing him of inciting unrest and street violence by calling for “The Exit”. He gave himself up in front of crowds at a rally in Caracas.

Meanwhile, combat planes and military helicopters were sent to Táchira where they overflew the street demonstrations. A parachute battalion was dispatched to clear access roads to San Cristóbal.

A novel element that has emerged is the armed “collectives,” irregular groups usually on motorbikes, who clash with protesters and create trouble in opposition residential areas in cities like Caracas and Mérida (in the southwest), shooting at or destroying vehicles and windows.

In Alvarado’s view, they are “leftwing paramilitaries” who hide behind the cloak of social work in the shanty towns of Caracas and other cities but exercise violence in favour of the government. Maduro has warned against “demonising the collectives” and has praised them in a number of his speeches.

Not all Chavista (supporters of the president Hugo Chávez, 1999-2013) or revolutionary (pro-government) collectives are armed and violent.

Luis Cedeño of Paz Activa, an NGO which works on security issues, told IPS that “in the absence of the state, parapolice bands control certain urban spaces, call themselves collectives and act as an armed wing of the government, in order to benefit from a certain amount of legitimacy and impunity.”

Disarming and dissolving these collectives has become a rallying cry of the opposition.

Alvarado criticised “the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Ombudsman’s Office, which should act ex officio, but have turned a deaf ear, improperly issuing opinions ahead of time in favour of the government and blaming opposition leaders, and also remaining silent when evidence was contaminated by executive branch officials.”

Rodríguez and Alvarado deplore the violations by security forces and other public powers of the Law to Prevent and Punish Torture, approved unanimously by parliament less than a year ago.

“There is no torture in Venezuela,” Maduro said at a press conference on Saturday Feb. 22.

The media have also taken some punches. Journalists’ organisations have denounced 62 cases of aggression during the protests this month. Colombian cable news channel NTN24 was pulled off the air and the same threat hangs over CNN en Español.

In Alvarado’s view, the Southern Common Market (Mercosur) made up of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela, and the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) “could make a contribution as mediators, based on the clauses in favour of democracy, human rights and political dialogue in their founding documents.”

Youth rally in Plaza Venezuela, Caracas. Credit: FCU-UCV

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Feb 17 2014 (IPS)

Violence on the streets of Venezuela, with anti-government protests in the capital and 12 other cities, is a sign of hardening stances by both the government and its opponents as President Nicolás Maduro takes a trial-and-error approach to the economy in crisis.

Opposition student protests continued over the weekend in Caracas and other cities, while on Saturday some 15,000 pro-government supporters turned out for a peace demonstration called by the president.“We are living in the turbulence produced by the discontent and unmet demands of Venezuelan society." -- Margarita López Maya

Opposition leader Leopoldo López has an arrest warrant out against him, but he called on government opponents to join him in another march on Tuesday, Feb. 18, to the interior ministry, saying he would be available to the authorities and had nothing to fear.

Three people, two students and a member of a pro-government militia (known as “colectivos”), were shot dead at the end of marches in Caracas on Wednesday Feb. 12. There were dozens injured and some 100 arrests, with complaints that detainees were being held incommunicado, tortured and treated inhumanely.

The protests, paradoxically, began with students complaining that insecurity and violent crime on the streets were invading their schools and universities.

“We are facing a coup d’etat against democracy and the government I preside over,” said Maduro, who was elected in April to succeed the late Hugo Chávez (1954-2013), in his first speech after hearing that unknown persons had fired on dispersing protesters in central Caracas.

The president accused “ultra-rightwing fascist groups” that he said were following “the same script as in April 2002,” when a huge opposition march in Caracas ended with shootings that left 19 civilians dead and sparked a brief coup against Chávez.

On Sunday Feb. 16, Maduro announced the expulsion of three United States consular officials, accused of conspiring against his government, and criticised Washington harshly after Secretary of State John Kerry expressed “deep concern” over the situation in Venezuela and asked for the release of the arrested students.

“The circumstances now are different, and the government either does not know where it stands, which is hard to believe, or is using the outbreak of the crisis to justify the suspension of constitutional rights and govern under a state of emergency,” sociologist Carlos Raúl Hernández, who teaches a doctorate in political science at the Central University of Venezuela, told IPS.

In Hernández’s view, the massive support for the student protests is due to the “enormous discontent growing even in Chavist [pro-government] sectors because of the economic mega-crisis and its appalling mismanagement.”

Venezuela has one of the highest inflation rates in the world, at 56 percent, and over 70 percent in food prices, as well as a severe shortage of basic products, ranging from milk and flour to toilet paper and newspapers, and including medicines, air fares, industrial inputs and car parts.

State controls are increasingly tightened on access to foreign exchange earned by oil exports, and inspections are made and fines levied on commercial and industrial firms. For its part, the business community is demanding payment of millions of dollars in debts acquired under the exchange control regime.

According to historian Margarita López Maya of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO), “once the spells woven by the words and presence of the charismatic Chávez were lost, reality has become undeniably stark and unpromising.”

“We are living in the turbulence produced by the discontent and unmet demands of Venezuelan society, which have been gathering force in recent months as a result of long term economic and social upsets,” said López Maya.

With the backdrop of this discontent, the students received support from other citizens when they began their protests in early February in the southwestern Andes.

Three young men, accused of attacking the regional governor’s residence, were sent to a prison in Coro, in the extreme northwest of the country, pending trial.

The protests then intensified.

Leaders of a sector belonging to the opposition coalition, the Mesa de Unidad Democrática (Democratic Unity Roundtable), called for mass protests on Wednesday Feb. 12, the bicentennial of a battle in the war of independence against Spain in which young students joined the patriot army and achieved victory.

The date is celebrated as Youth Day, charging the demonstrations and their violent end with emotional and political overtones.

On Friday Feb. 14, while street protests continued in Caracas and other cities in defiance of Maduro’s announcement that demonstrations would have to have prior authorisation, it was reported that the young people imprisoned in Coro had been released.

This may be a first step towards taking the pressure off the protests, and it coincides with many calls from the international community supporting dialogue and respect for the human rights of all involved in the Venezuelan political conflict.

In Venezuela, human rights organisations like Provea and the Red de Apoyo por la Justicia y la Paz (Justice and Peace Support Network) emphasised the need to investigate and punish those responsible for the deaths and injuries that followed the protests on Feb. 12.

Journalists on the ground documented with eyewitnesses, photographs and videos how allegedly pro-government “colectivos” burst in, stirred up violence and used firearms in areas where people were shot.

In dispensing blame, Maduro accused international media of instigating violence through their reporting and opinion on events.

He suspended the Bogotá-based news channel NTN24 from cable TV and delivered a harsh warning to the French news agency AFP.

In spite of the vividness of the images, Hernández does not believe that the protests will lead to significant political change. Instead they may only stiffen the positions and cohesiveness of the parties in conflict.

“Mass movements only achieve major political change when they are combined with powers that can bring about a military uprising, and this is not about to happen in Venezuela,” Hernández said. “From this point of view, they are street games without a clear end in sight,” he concluded.

Military parade in Caracas. Credit: Venezuelan Ministry of Defense

By Walter García and Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Oct 18 2013 (IPS)

A Venezuelan government decree to control information and “internal and external enemy activity” appeals to concepts of the national security doctrine, which various right-wing military dictatorships in Latin America invoked in the 1970s and 1980s.

Through the decree, left-wing President Nicolás Maduro established the Strategic Centre for Security and Protection of the Fatherland (CESPPA), which “will request, organise, integrate and evaluate information of interest to the nation at a strategic level, related to internal and external enemy activity, coming from all of the state’s security and intelligence bodies and other public and private entities.”

These actions will be carried out “as required by the political-military leadership of the Bolivarian Revolution” – which does not exist either in the constitution or in the country’s laws – and public and private institutions “will be under the obligation to provide all of the information required by CESPPA in the exercise of its functions,” the decree says.

The new office will also have the authority “to declare as reserved, classified or of limited dissemination any information, development or circumstance that CESPPA learns about in compliance with its functions or that is processed by CESPPA.”

Maduro designated, as the first head of CESPPA, Major General Gustavo González López, a former commander of the Bolivarian Militia, a force created by the late Hugo Chávez (1999-2013) to support the army, navy, air force and national guard in interior defence tasks.

CESPPA “brings echoes – both because of its character as a potential censorship body and, even more serious, of an intelligence body oriented towards controlling supposed internal enemies – of the national security doctrine that prevailed in the region in the 1970s and 1980s,” Argentine political scientist Andrés Serbin told IPS.

“It is also highly worrisome that no kind of oversight by the public or by civil institutions, including parliament, is contemplated, and that its first director will be a member of the military,” said Serbin, president of the Regional Coordinator of Economic and Social Research, founded in Managua in 1982 and based today in Buenos Aires.

Fransisco Leal, a political science professor at the University of Los Andes in Colombia, has written that the national security doctrine “maintained the idea that, by guaranteeing the security of the state, the security of society is ensured. One of its main innovations was to consider that in order to achieve that objective, the military control of the state was necessary. Another was substituting the external enemy with the internal enemy.”

The doctrine was part of the U.S. strategy to prevent the spread of communism in the Americas after World War II, according to historian Edgar Velásquez, of the University of Cauca in Colombia.

Through this doctrine, Washington “consolidated its domination over the countries of Latin America, engaged in the Cold War, set specific tasks for the armed forces and stimulated a right-wing current of political thought in countries in the region,” Velásquez wrote in the article “History of the National Security Doctrine” published in 2004 in the magazine Estudios Latinoamericanos of the University of Nariño, Colombia.

One of its characteristics was the training in repression received by members of the military and police from different Latin American countries in the U.S. School of the Americas in Panama.

The wave of democratisation that began to sweep the region in the second half of the 1980s threw the doctrine into question. But there have been no profound reforms of the armed forces.

And once again under the influence of Washington, the armed forces have begun taking on internal security and policing tasks in several countries – this time against the ever-present enemies of drug trafficking and crime.

Going down that path poses “the risk that, in a below-the-surface and not visible manner, the national security doctrine could reemerge on the Latin American scene,” states an essay on the impact on penal law in the region, written by legal expert Mario Zamora, currently minister of public security in Costa Rica.

Under the umbrella of that doctrine, the armed forces heading right-wing dictatorships repressed their political opponents as “internal enemies,” leaving tens of thousands dead, forcibly disappeared and tortured in a number of countries.

Venezuela did not follow that same path. And since 1999, it has had left-wing governments purusing “21st century socialism”, first under Chávez and now under his successor, Maduro.

CESPPA has been created against a backdrop of reiterated denunciations by the authorities of supposed acts of sabotage in the electric system and the economy. On Sept. 30, Maduro ordered the expulsion of three U.S. diplomats who he linked to these developments and the far-right in Venezuela.

Spokespersons for the government and the governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) have kept silent about CESPPA since the decree was published on Oct. 7.

IPS sought, without success, comments from several PSUV legislators, including two members of the People’s Power and Media commissions, who declined to comment on the decree until they had “studied it in greater depth.”

CESPPA is described as a body that will coordinate “the working policies of the institutions responsible for security, defence, intelligence and internal order, foreign relations and others that have an impact on the security of the fatherland, in order to provide timely, quality information to the president of the republic.”

Rocío San Miguel, director of the non-governmental organisation Control Ciudadano para la Seguridad, la Defensa y la Fuerza Armada, has said that “the objectives of this body include turning some citizens into vigilantes and informers [who report on] the rest.”

“All bodies and people will be obliged to supply information that CESPPA requires on practically anything,” she told IPS. “And the decree has not taken into account constitutional provisions, such as the one that establishes that only a law can create regulations for the classification and secrecy of official documents,” San Miguel added.

The Alianza por la Libertad de Expresión (Alliance for Freedom of Expression), which brings together organisations of journalists and civil rights activists, called for “the immediate repeal of the decree….because it runs counter to constitutional guarantees of the right to information and the prohibition of censorship.”

Carlos Correa, coordinator of the Espacio Público organisation, said “the most serious thing is the notion of ‘internal enemy’, because any Venezuelan critical of the government, or any opponent of the government, would fall under that label.”

That definition “used to be used as a rhetorical expression under a logic of war,” he commented. “But now it appears to be a presidential decree, based on regulations.”

The United States has expelled Venezuela’s chargé d’affaires and two other diplomats in Washington in reprisal for the expulsion of three U.S. diplomats from Caracas, both countries said late Tuesday.

The tit-for-tat move comes a day after the expulsion of the Americans, accused of plotting acts of sabotage against the government, the Foreign Ministry in Caracas said.

The ministry called the U.S. move unjustified, saying the Venezuelan diplomats had not been meeting with people opposed to President Barack Obama.

In Washington, a State Department official confirmed the Venezuelan chargé d’affaires Calixto Ortega Rios and the other two had been advised Monday they had 48 hours to leave the United States.

“It is regrettable that the Venezuelan government has again decided to expel U.S. diplomatic officials based on groundless allegations, which require reciprocal action,” the official said.

“It is counterproductive to the interests of both our countries and not a serious way for a country to conduct its foreign policy,” the official.

Venezuela has accused Ambassador Kelly Keiderling and two others of meeting with the Venezuelan far right — the government’s term for the opposition — to finance President Nicolas Maduro’s opponents and “encourage actions to sabotage the power system and the economy”.

The two countries — at each other’s throats politically but eager supplier and buyer of Venezuelan oil — have not had ambassadors in each other’s capitals since 2010.

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the allegations were related to the U.S. Embassy workers’ travel to Venezuelan state of Bolivar, home to troubled state-owned foundries and Venezuela’s main hydroelectric plant.

“They were there conducting normal diplomatic engagement, as we’ve said in the past and should come as no surprise,” Psaki said.

Venezuela’s economy is struggling ahead of the Dec. 8 elections. Annual inflation is at more than 45 percent and the government is running short of foreign currency.

The oil-rich OPEC member country has been plagued by worsening power outages since 2010. The opposition blames neglect and poor maintenance, while alleging mismanagement and corruption at struggling state-owned aluminum, iron and bauxite foundries in Bolivar.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Hugo Chavez’s hand-picked successor, blamed sabotage by the “extreme right” for both the blackouts and food shortages, but has provided no evidence. Like his predecessor, Maduro has a history of making unsubstantiated accusations against the U.S. and his political opponents.

In a news conference in Caracas, Keiderling said she and the other diplomats would leave Venezuela on Wednesday before the 48-hour deadline expired. “The work of the embassy will continue. It doesn’t matter very much if it is one person or another” doing it, she said.

She said that if the accusation against them was that they had met with Venezuelans then “it is true. We met with Venezuelans.”

“These meetings with civil society can be with [the independent election monitoring group] Sumate, they can be with a group of women, with mothers who have lost children or with an environmental group that wants to lobby for cleaning a park,” she said. “If we aren’t talking with these people, we aren’t doing our jobs.”

U.S. officials said they may take reciprocal action in accordance with the Vienna Convention on diplomatic relations and on consular relations.

“While the government of the United States does not understand that it has to respect our country’s sovereignty there will be simply be no cordial relations nor cordial communication,” Maduro said, speaking from the governmental palace on Tuesday.

“The day that the government of President Obama rectifies the situation we will establish new points of contact to discuss common issues,” said Maduro.

Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

By Clara Nieto
BOGOTA, May 7 2013 (IPS)

The crisis in Venezuela caused by the violent opposition of followers of Henrique Capriles, who is accusing President Nicolás Maduro of election fraud, and peace talks between the Colombian government and the FARC guerrillas in Havana, are occupying the attention of national and foreign media.

Cuba and Norway are guarantors of the Colombian peace negotiations, and Venezuela and Chile are observers. Commentators and analysts of all stripes are wondering about the role of Venezuela and its late president Hugo Chávez (who died of cancer Mar. 5), and of Cuba and the Castro brothers, in this process that aims to end 50 years of armed conflict.

Achieving peace is a priority for Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos.

Bogotá and the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) chose Havana as the location for the talks. Cuba has been a friendly nation to the guerrillas, which gives them confidence and a sense of security.

Clara Nieto. Credit: Margarita Carrillo/IPS

However, according to José Arbesú, a high-ranking official in the Communist Party of Cuba, his country has not given the Colombian insurgents arms or funding, as it did in the case of Central American rebels decades ago when they were involved in civil wars against brutal and corrupt dictatorships.

Santos sought an understanding with Cuba, talked of inviting the country to be an observer at the Fifth Summit of the Americas, a United States-backed project that excluded the Caribbean island nation, and sought the support of Fidel Castro and President Raúl Castro to hold secret exploratory talks with the FARC in Cuba. These led to a 10-point agenda that is the basis of the current negotiations.

Venezuela and Chávez supported Colombia in this. Santos reestablished good bilateral relations with Venezuela, broken off during the government of former president Álvaro Uribe, and created an atmosphere of peace and collaboration. Recently he stated that this support was crucial for achieving essential agreements in Havana.

Chávez, a friend to the FARC, regarded the Colombian conflict as a threat to the security of Venezuela. A solution was necessary to remove a pretext for the United States to intervene in their countries, he said. Venezuela is surrounded by U.S. military bases in the Caribbean, including seven in Colombian territory that former president Uribe ceded to the United States.

Peace in Colombia is a security issue for Venezuela, and also for Ecuador. Leftist insurgents and far-right paramilitaries cross their porous borders freely, and thousands of undocumented Colombian refugees flock to the neighbouring nations, fleeing the conflict and the chemical spraying intended to eradicate coca crops (ordered by the United States) that poisons their families and animals, and destroys the soil and subsistence crops.

Chávez, the main challenger to Washington’s influence in Latin America, was the architect, along with former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, of regional integration systems that exclude the United States (such as the Union of South American Nations, UNASUR).

Chávez was more than a pebble in Uncle Sam’s shoe, and it is in the U.S.’s interests to eradicate Chavismo. This poses a major threat to President Maduro, his successor.

The Venezuelan right, headed by Capriles and supported by the international far right, is already on the move against the new president, purportedly “in defence” of Venezuelan democracy which it claims was violated and abused by “the dictator” Chávez.

Meanwhile, the moment is ripe for Colombia’s peace plans. The most influential leftwing leaders in the continent, Chávez and Fidel Castro, repeatedly stated that the time for armed struggle was over. Chávez asked the FARC to release their hostages unconditionally and to end the fighting.

The conservative Santos, for his part, has co-opted some of the leftwing rebels’ core demands, such as redistribution of land to the destitute and to those whose land was taken by paramilitaries and guerrillas, and offering compensation for victims.

Times have indeed changed.

Uribe’s government, in which Santos was defence minister, hit the FARC hard and killed several of its top leaders. The guerrillas were not defeated, but they have been weakened.

The negotiations are taking place in the midst of conflict, and peace would be a boon. But they are demanding structural changes to ensure an equitable country – Colombia is the most unequal country in Latin America – with opportunities, land, health and education for all.

The Colombian far right, with Uribe at the head, is mobilising against the peace process, and encouraging discontent in the armed forces against the government.

And, if not U.S. President Barack Obama himself, the U.S. Southern Command is also active. General John Kelly, its commander, spoke at length in a presentation to Congress on Mar. 20 about the regional danger represented by the FARC, saying they had acquired surface-to-air missiles and submarines that could reach Florida, Texas or California in 10 to 12 days, and could travel as far as Africa.

Such statements could influence the Colombian military, which is hostile to negotiations with the guerrillas, and undermine the peace process. Kelly mentioned the joint operations carried out with the Colombian army against the FARC – an intervention in internal affairs and public order in the country – and he spoke in favour of the continuation of military action against the guerrillas.

The media are closely observing both these conflicts. In Colombia, most media outlets support the peace process. In Venezuela it remains to be seen whether Chavismo, without Chávez, will fully back Maduro, who is faced with a difficult scenario. There are many who are trying to not let him govern. Colombia needs peace in its important neighbour, and ought to have Venezuela’s support. Maduro has promised that it will.

* Clara Nieto is a writer and diplomat, former Colombian ambassador to the United Nations and author of the book “Obama y la nueva izquierda latinoamericana” (Obama and the New Latin American Left).

Excerpt:

By Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, Apr 23 2013 (IPS)

The challenge for Venezuela is to strengthen democracy, and for its new president, Nicolás Maduro, it is to overcome a potential recall referendum and to further the interests of his political supporters, Marcelo Serpa, of the Latin American Association of Election Campaign Researchers (ALICE), told IPS.

Chavismo, “the political movement that awakened Venezuela,” will remain in force for many years to come, although “it will not rule forever,” said Serpa, a Brazilian economist with a doctorate in communication from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. “But no government that does not pay attention to the poorest sectors will be possible,” he said.

Maduro was elected on Apr. 14 as the candidate of the governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), founded by Hugo Chávez (1954-2013) who was president since 1999 and died of cancer on Mar. 5.

Marcelo Serpa has worked on several election campaigns in Venezuela. Credit: UFRJ

President Maduro must consolidate his administration and face up to hazards such as the appearance of Chavista dissidents within the leftwing Bolivarian movement, said Serpa, who has worked on several electoral campaigns in this country and has just published the book “Eleiçoes Espetaculares – Como Hugo Chávez conquistou a Venezuela” (Spectacular Elections: How Hugo Chávez Conquered Venezuela) in Brazil.

Q: How did Chávez manage to conquer Venezuela and win the affection shown by so many people, even after his death?

A: He tried two ways: the old Latin American-style coup d’état (as an army lieutenant-colonel in 1992), and after doing jail time and being amnestied, he converted his Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement-200 (MBR-200) into a party to reach power in a democratic manner, almost as the saviour of the country.

Q: What was the context in Venezuela when Chávez emerged on the political scene?

A: There were several other attempted coups apart from Chávez’s. Venezuela’s recent history is marked by political instability.

The socio-demographic profile when Chávez became president was this: (the upper-income) categories A, B and C together made up four percent of the population, and the rest belonged to (the lower-income) classes D and E, in an economy that was wholly dependent on oil.

Q: How was he able to attract so many followers?

A: During the two years that he was in prison (after his aborted military uprising), he drew up a government plan and several proposals, including a reform of the system that would take into account the rentier privileges from oil.

The country’s economic model was focused then on oil, which was in the hands of a small élite. Chávez wanted to end the rentier economy, and he wanted all the profits from PDVSA (the state oil company) to go towards spending in Venezuela aimed at putting an end to poverty.

With the new constitution rewritten in 1999, Chávez appropriated those resources for the social programmes and managed, for instance, to eradicate illiteracy.

Q: There has been a great deal of speculation about the lack of transparency in the handling of information about the illness and death of Chávez. What is your analysis of this communication process?

A: I have been to Venezuela several times, and have worked during elections as a communication professional, and in my view the information flow has always been very good.

Chávez had a problem with the international media in particular, and then with the closure of RCTV, the main Venezuelan television channel.

That was controversial, but I have never seen greater freedom of the press than in Venezuela. To say that the press there is not free is not true. Chávez gave interviews to all journalists and gave press conferences every Sunday. He was greatly misunderstood by the international media.

Q: What is his legacy to his political successor?

A: Before Chávez, Venezuela was impoverished; the recipients of oil rents were wealthy, but none of that wealth went to the poor. Today Venezuela still has many problems, but the poorest classes have their needs met to a certain extent. They receive enormous assistance from the state thanks to the oil resources.

Private enterprise has shrunk, which has compelled the state to take on certain functions and commitments that are beyond its possibilities.

Q: What is your view of the Apr. 14 presidential elections?

A: The victory of Chavismo came about on the back of a spectacle-ridden discourse, in which emotion was frankly predominant over reason. When Chávez announced he had to go (to Cuba) for further surgery and that, if he were unable to govern, the people should elect Maduro, polls indicated that 35 percent of Venezuelan respondents did not know who Maduro was.

In October 2012, Chávez beat (opposition candidate Henrique) Capriles by a difference of 10 percentage points. But in this election, it was difficult for Chávez’s prestige to be transferred wholesale to Maduro. I had already forecast a difference of two percentage points between the two candidates.

Q: What is your view of the role of the opposition in this process?

A: The opposition made the same mistake as Chávez: it tried to get to power first by force, and then by democratic means.

Venezuelan politics are aggressive. The opposition was never silenced. Capriles himself was imprisoned (for alleged involvement in a violent protest outside of the Cuban embassy after the 2002 failed coup against Chávez) and then amnestied by Chávez. But the opposition was absent for a long time, and is now trying to reconstruct itself and paying a high price for it, which allowed Maduro’s victory.

Q: What do you predict for the future?

A: A new era is beginning, of Chavismo without Chávez. Venezuela’s path is to strengthen democracy. Chavismo will not remain in government eternally. After so many years of rule, it has a problem of image attrition.

But another kind of government, that does not pay attention to the poorest sectors, will not be possible. A number of (social) programmes have been installed that will have to be maintained. Chavismo has made its mark and will continue to be present for many more years. It was certainly Chavismo that awakened Venezuela.

The presidential term is six years, and a constitutional provision allows for a recall referendum after the halfway mark, in certain circumstances. It is probable that the opposition will try to hold a referendum against Maduro.

What is at stake is whether Maduro is capable of surviving, as much by maintaining his mandate as by furthering the interests of his party. There may even be some Chavismo dissidence within leftwing Bolivarian socialist thought.

Excerpt:

UNASUR presidents back Nicolás Maduro’s triumph and fly to Venezuela for the inauguration. Credit: Presidenty of Peru

By Ángel Páez
LIMA, Apr 19 2013 (IPS)

Nicolás Maduro was recognised as president-elect of Venezuela by a Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) emergency summit held in Lima to discuss the situation in the highly polarised country, where a narrow electoral result triggered social and political tension.

Meanwhile, Venezuela’s electoral authority said it would audit the ballots that were not already scrutinised on election night, in response to opposition demands.

It was after 1:00 AM Friday when Peruvian President Ollanta Humala announced, at the end of a nearly three-hour debate behind closed doors, the bloc’s support for Venezuela’s election authorities, who had declared Maduro the winner of the Sunday Apr. 14 elections.

Humala publicly congratulated the leftwing Maduro, the political heir of the late Hugo Chávez (1954-2013), who stood by his side smiling and looking clearly relieved. On Friday Maduro will be sworn in.

“With this consensus agreement we want to express UNASUR’s position that we will always be involved in the task of accompanying, strengthening and cooperating in the processes of fortifying the democracy that we have today in the region of South America,” Humala said.

“The idea and spirit of UNASUR is to contribute to and cooperate in the solution of problems that can affect democracy,” he added.

A Peruvian official then read out the summit statement, whose second point indicated that UNASUR urged all sectors that took part in Venezuela’s presidential elections to respect the official results announced by the National Electoral Council (CNE).

The meeting hosted by Humala was attended by presidents Cristina Fernández of Argentina, Evo Morales of Bolivia, Dilma Rousseff of Brazil, Sebastián Piñera of Chile, Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia, José Mujica of Uruguay, and Maduro himself, as president-elect of Venezuela.

Vice President Jorge Glas represented Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa, who is on a tour of Europe, and ambassador Marlon Faisal Mohamed-Hoesein took part in representation of Suriname. The only active member of the bloc not represented at the meeting was Guyana.

Paraguay is still suspended over the June 2012 removal of President Fernando Lugo by the country’s legislature.

The chairman of Peru’s parliamentary commission on foreign relations, Víctor Andrés García Belaúnde of the opposition Popular Action party, stressed the significance of the emergency summit given the political standoff in Venezuela.

“The case of Venezuela is not similar to that of Honduras (where President Manuel Zelaya was ousted in 2009) or Paraguay. Venezuela is the fourth-largest economy in Latin America, and it is also a member and promoter of the creation of UNASUR, and this decision by the bloc will have repercussions throughout the entire continent, if not the world,” García Belaúnde told IPS.

The third point of the Lima announcement ratified what was stated in the Apr. 15 Declaration of the UNASUR Electoral Mission to Venezuela: that any complaint, question or request for an extraordinary procedure raised by any participant in the electoral process should be channelled and resolved within the existing legal framework and the democratic will of the different parties.

It went on to “take positive note of the CNE decision to use a methodology that would permit the total audit of the polling stations.”

In Venezuela, electronic voting machines produce a paper receipt, which voters deposit in boxes. On Sunday, 54 percent of the boxes were automatically scrutinised. The CNE has now agreed to audit the remaining 46 percent.

In the elections, Maduro took 50.8 percent of the vote, compared to 49 percent for opposition candidate Henrique Capriles, a difference of 270,000 votes. On Monday Capriles called publicly for a total recount, and thousands of opposition protesters took to the streets to back that demand. On Wednesday he filed a formal request with the CNE.

The decision to audit the rest of the ballot receipts, which according to the CNE is the only option provided in the regulations for the law on electoral processes, was accepted by Capriles, who said “with this we are where we want to be.”

In the end, the opposition leader did not fly to Lima as had been speculated ahead of the UNASUR meeting.

The fourth point of the UNASUR declaration called for a halt to any “attitude or act of violence that jeopardises the social peace of the country”. It also expressed “solidarity with the injured and the families of the fatal victims of Apr. 15, 2013” and called for dialogue and the “preservation of a climate of tolerance for the good of the entire Venezuelan people.”

Seven people were killed and 61 injured during the unrest on Monday, according to Attorney General Luisa Ortega.

After the UNASUR declaration was read out, Maduro lifted his right fist and hit his chest in a sign of victory.

While the summit was taking place, a group of Venezuelans gathered outside of Peru’s presidential palace, beating pots and pans and waving signs protesting the presence of the president-elect. But they were drowned out by a larger number of Peruvian sympathisers of Maduro and the late Chávez (who died of cancer on Mar. 5, after 14 years in power).

Legislator Freddy Otárola Peñaranda of Peru’s governing Nationalist Party, a member of the foreign relations commission, said UNASUR’s decision was in line with the fundamental principle that each country must resolve its own domestic problems.

“With this resolution, UNASUR is helping our Venezuelan brothers and sisters to find peaceful solutions to their problems under the principle of respect for the self-determination of peoples, “he told IPS.

“Venezuelans have to work out their own internal questions, without meddling by anyone,” he added.

Farid Kahhat, head of the international politics department at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, said that once Venezuela’s CNE agreed to audit the boxes with the ballot receipts, a UNASUR declaration was no longer necessary.

But he told IPS it was important that the bloc called for dialogue between the Venezuelan government and the opposition, and that it did not merely back Maduro’s victory.

By Diana Cariboni
MONTEVIDEO, Apr 17 2013 (IPS)

When the left was in opposition in Latin America, it never tired of repeating that true democracy was not limited to electing governments at the ballot box. Democracy was also needed in the distribution of rights and riches.

Now that self-described leftwing governments predominate in the region, the catch is to make that maxim their political practice. They must fulfil the formality of celebrating clean, fair and transparent elections that produce governments of the majority that do not trample on the minority, nor prevent them from exercising their role of social control.

In the last 15 years in Venezuela – ever since the late Hugo Chávez won his first presidential elections – there have been many elections and popular consultations based on the referendum, recall and plebiscite mechanisms provided in the constitution.

Diana Cariboni. Credit: Courtesy of the author

But there was also a failed coup d’état and an oil industry lockout with the same aim: to overthrow the government.

Meanwhile, the country developed an automated voting system described by the electoral authorities as “perfect,” and praised by institutions above suspicion of authoritarian conspiracy, like the Carter Center.

But the country’s democracy is far from being perfect, and further still from being predictable.

Only six months ago, Chávez gained a comfortable majority with 55 percent of the vote (more than eight million votes) against a rival, Henrique Capriles, who won a not inconsiderable 44 percent (over 6.5 million votes).

On Sunday Apr. 14, Chávez’s heir-apparent Nicolás Maduro secured a victory for the governing party, but with a margin of only 270,000 votes ahead of Capriles.

A number of relevant factors influenced the mood of voters in the last six months: the death of Chávez, after an illness surrounded by questions and secrecy, an economy facing difficulties, and a general climate of uncertainty about the prospects of the Bolivarian revolution in the absence of its leader.

And then on Sunday Apr. 14 a different and complex snapshot was taken of the citizenry, requiring a close reading by government leaders and the opposition.

The voting system was the same on both occasions. But the narrow margin of the result and a list of 3,200 alleged irregularities gave the opposition an opportunity to cast it into doubt.

The authorities claim the system is reliable and accurate. All eyes are on the boxes containing the paper receipts issued by the voting machine when voters cast their electronic votes – basically, ballot boxes full of votes.

There are allegations that some of these boxes have been found on roadsides, containing ballots for Capriles. And he is demanding a “vote by vote” recount.

Electoral fraud is a familiar problem in Latin America, where there is a whole repertory of actions to sway citizens’ votes, most of them taking place before polling occurs.

From Mexico southwards, the tradition of vote-rigging includes transporting voters, impersonation, abduction, forgery of identity documents, coercion, threats, violation of voting secrecy and vote-buying.

In some rural areas of Colombia things have reached such a point that, as polling day draws near, votes command increasingly higher bribes in goods and services on the informal local market, such as bricks, tiles and fuel, as well as cash.

In last year’s presidential elections in Mexico, alleged vote-buying, especially attributed to the victorious Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), took the form of vouchers for consumption of goods in certain shopping centres being handed out almost openly.

But none of this generates much concern abroad, nor is it a hurdle to international recognition of the governments that emerge from these elections.

Did electoral fraud of this kind occur in Venezuela? The opposition has denounced a series of irregularities. And the electoral authorities say they will investigate them when they receive the formal complaints, but that no recount will change the result declared on Monday Apr. 15. So there will be no total recount.

The opposition is accusing the government of misappropriation of state resources during the electoral campaign. The government replies that opposition parties represent large economic powers with vast resources and private media outlets at their service.

Meanwhile, although Maduro and Capriles have both called repeatedly for “peace,” violence has taken over the streets. There have been fatalities, and dozens of people have been injured.

Amid the commotion, something has been lost from view: Venezuelan society has long wanted to put an end to decades of apparent democracy, and oil profits for only a few.

In the last 15 years, the country has made strides in poverty reduction, and many marginalised people were able to learn to read and write, and gained access to education and health care. They were also empowered to speak up, and to feel that one of their own, someone close to them, represented them in the presidency.

But it cannot be forgotten that Venezuela today has serious problems, such as a high crime rate, a weak economy and excessive dependence on oil.

If they do not understand the electoral snapshot represented by Sunday’s results, Maduro and Capriles risk riding the roller coaster of setting at odds the two halves of their nation, instead of leading them to a mirror and showing them the need to coexist and understand each other.

“Venezuela has enormous possibilities. The main problem is for it to find itself,” said Uruguayan President José Mujica, interviewed on Tuesday Apr. 16 by the Telesur television chain. “Human progress is the offspring of labour, and requires stability and commitment,” he said.

“It’s important for the Venezuelan people to learn to walk together, with differences, but with points of agreement. They can’t expect to be exactly the same,” he said. “A nation is a collective message.”

* Diana Cariboni is Associate Editor in Chief of IPS.

Excerpt:

Noisy pot-banging protests broke out in Venezuela’s cities to demand a recount of the votes from Sunday’s presidential elections, which leftwing candidate Nicolás Maduro won. Several people have been killed in violent incidents.

In upscale neighbourhoods in the main cities, residents took to the streets Monday night in favour of opposition candidate Henrique Capriles, who took 48.97 percent of the vote compared to Maduro’s 50.75 percent.

But pots were also banged in poor neighbourhoods and small towns, traditional strongholds of the governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) of late president Hugo Chávez (1999-2013), who died of cancer on Mar. 5.

Demonstrations in several cities, in some of which the protesters numbered in the thousands, ended in clashes with the security forces. Seven people were killed and 61 injured, according to Attorney General Luisa Ortega.

The interior minister, General Néstor Reverol, said two PSUV supporters were shot by motorists who were apparently opposition sympathisers.

Protests were also held Tuesday in a dozen cities in the interior, in front of the offices of the National Electoral Council (CNE), which were heavily guarded by the military National Guard.

“We’re tired of being told lies,” 41-year-old schoolteacher Olga Hernández, beating an old pan in the working-class district of El Valle on the southwest side of Caracas, told IPS. “If the government says it won, why don’t they hold a vote-by-vote recount?”

The pot banging protests, which have been common in Venezuela since 1992, became especially popular during the acute political crisis of 2002-2004, when the opposition attempted to oust Chávez by means of street protests, business shut-downs and a frustrated coup d’etat.

The protests that broke out Monday were in response to Capriles’ call for a recount. But
Attorney General Ortega said the candidate had not filed any formal request, and was “inciting the citizens to take to the streets on the basis of arguments that he should set forth to the CNE.” She said his calls for protests were “destabilising acts.”

She also pointed out that in many countries, presidential elections have been won with a 0.5 percent difference.

On Monday, the CNE proclaimed Maduro the winner with 7,563,747 votes, against 7,298,491 for Capriles, after nearly 100 percent of the ballots had been counted, with the exception of 60,000 cast by Venezuelans living abroad.

Voters in Venezuela use electronic machines that generate a voter-verified paper trail. The voter deposits the paper ballot in a ballot box, and random audits can be carried out.

Based on 3,200 irregularities that Capriles claims were documented, the opposition candidate demanded a total recount instead of the random audits.

On Sunday night, Maduro said he would accept a vote-by-vote recount. But on Monday, the CNE declared him president-elect without responding to the demand. PSUV leaders said the electoral authorities had not responded because no formal request had been filed.

“Everyone knows who is responsible for this violence,” said Maduro, alluding to Capriles. “He will have to answer for the dead that we are mourning. They want to create outbreaks of violence around the country, like in Syria or Libya. But we call on people to reject hatred; we are calling for peace.”

Capriles, meanwhile, said “the illegitimate (candidate Maduro) ordered all this violence to avoid a recount. They are responsible.”

He insisted that “we called for peaceful protests, we are enemies of violence. No to violence!”

A march to CNE headquarters called by the opposition for Wednesday will not be allowed, Maduro said.
.
“You people aren’t going to go to the centre of Caracas to fill it up with death and blood. I won’t allow it. I am going to take a firm stance against fascism and intolerance. If they want to overthrow me, they can come for me. Here I am, with the people and with the armed forces,” he said.

“That march won’t enter Caracas. They are trying to get people killed, to massacre their own people, and then look for an active military officer. I won’t allow it, period,” said Maduro.

The president-elect confirmed reports that some military officers who had reportedly contacted opposition leaders had been detained as part of investigations.

With respect to coverage of the events, he told Venevisión and Televen, the leading TV stations, “Define who you are with, the fatherland, peace and the people, or once again on the side of fascism.”

Meanwhile, Maduro ordered a national broadcast Tuesday of official ceremonies in a health centre and with oil industry workers, which kept the leaders of the opposition from airing their own messages on TV and the radio.

“We are calling for serenity, because what would happen if we marched on your (opposition leaders’) houses? Nothing would be left,” Maduro said.

He was referring to the throngs of pot-banging protesters who gathered outside the homes of the president of the CNE, Tibisay Lucena, and governing party leader William Izarra, in Caracas.

Besieging these homes “is inappropriate behaviour and should not be happening,” said human rights activist Liliana Ortega. “Privacy must be respected.”

The head of the opposition campaign, Henri Falcón, met with Catholic Church bishops Tuesday to ask them to mediate in the crisis.

Nicolás Maduro beat Henrique Capriles in Sunday’s elections. Credit: Courtesy of Maduro and Capriles campaigns

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Apr 15 2013 (IPS)

The political polarisation in Venezuela became even more marked as the country emerged from Sunday’s elections basically divided in half, between two sectors that are antagonistic and reluctant to try to understand each other.

Nicolás Maduro, of the leftwing governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV),
the political heir to late President Hugo Chávez (1954-2013), won the elections with 7,559,349 votes, or 50.75 percent, the National Electoral Council announced after counting 99 percent of the ballots.

But the results were challenged by his main rival Henrique Capriles, the candidate of the heterogeneous opposition coalition, the Mesa de Unidad Democrática (MUD), who garnered 7,296,876 votes, or 48.98 percent. He said he would only accept the outcome of a total recount.

The opposition say there were 3,200 cases of irregularities. They are also demanding scrutiny of some 60,000 ballots cast by Venezuelan voters abroad.

Maduro immediately accepted the call for a recount, although he said: “We have a just, legal, constitutional and popular electoral triumph. We respect the seven million who voted for the opposition; you must respect our seven and a half million.”

The candidate, who has been acting president since Chávez died of cancer on Mar. 5, called for “peace,” and said “I believe in peace as the path to prosperity and socialism.”

He added that “a new stage in the Bolivarian revolution is starting, with greater efficiency, honesty and popular power, for an in-depth rectification.”

Capriles said he would resort to “all constitutional means” to challenge the results. “Electoral irregularities are part of a system that is crumbling like a sand castle,” he maintained.

Groups of voters demonstrated outside of government offices in several provincial cities Monday to demand that the National Electoral Council carry out a recount.

“The game isn’t over yet,” said Capriles, adding that “the government should reflect on what kind of country we have,” in view of the narrow margin.

Under the constitution, the winner of Sunday’s elections will complete the 2013-2019 term to which Chávez had been reelected on Oct. 7 with nearly 8.2 million votes – 55 percent – compared to Capriles’ 6.6 million – 44 percent.

Sunday’s results indicate that the opposition gained nearly 700,000 votes compared to the October elections, while Chavismo lost a similar number.

“Chavismo is no longer the overwhelming force it was for 14 years (since Chávez won for the first time in 1998) and it leaves the country politically split now exactly in half,” sociologist and political analyst Tulio Hernández told IPS.

In any democratic country, “even a narrow win, like Maduro’s, would grant legitimacy, but would require a forging of channels to reach governance pacts with the opposition,” said Hernández. “But this government with authoritarian and statist tendencies won’t do that,” he added.

Carlos Romero, professor of graduate studies in political science in several universities, said he preferred “not to talk about a divided country, but about one represented by two sectors. And the fact that Maduro did not have a comfortable majority doesn’t mean he won’t be able to govern.”

“Of course, for Maduro himself it would be beneficial to recognise that the other half exists, and extend bridges of understanding, because he should take measures in the face of the country’s basic problems like inflation, shortages, drug trafficking and insecurity,” Romero told IPS.

Hernández said Sunday’s elections “show a distancing from Chávez as the big political landmark, with the forces aligned depending on their proximity to or distance from him. They also drew a new political map.”

He pointed out that Capriles won in several of the most populous states with the most commercial and industrial activity, in Caracas and in the 10 biggest provincial capitals, while Maduro was victorious in smaller towns and rural areas.

“The equation is that Chavismo won wherever there is more poverty, more rural population and greater dependency on the state as a source of resources, and Capriles triumphed where there is more private sector activity, higher incomes and more urban life,” the analyst said.

Hernández believes Chavismo will become, in the absence of its late leader, a large political force, but lacking in ideology, “because Chávez’s was like a patchwork quilt,” without a solid party of the kind the communists, social democrats or Christian democrats have, and with several different leaders who could invoke the words of Chávez in different ways.

Diosdado Cabello, the first vice president of the PSUV and the leader of the retired military officers who supported Chávez, has already stated that “we must carry out a critical and self-critical review of why so many poor people continue to vote for the candidates of the bourgeoisie.”

The opposition as well, according to Hernández, “now that it is a real alternative with possibilities of governing, has the challenge of giving greater consistency to the amalgam of parties that comprise it and conducting an ideological debate to figure out what it offers the country in terms of state, market, private property, oil and the fight against exclusion and poverty.”

On the international front, there was an unusual break with the traditional automatic recognition of the results and greetings to the winner.

Governments allied with Chávez, such as those of Argentina, Bolivia, Cuba and Ecuador, in Latin America, as well as China and Russia, immediately congratulated Maduro. But others, like the governments of the United States, Spain and France, as well as European Union and Organisation of American States officials, urged a recount.

“The results have surprised the international community,” said Romero. “Most of the governments expected a comfortable win by Maduro, and now it is time for them to reflect on why they did not take a position that was equally distant from the two political camps.”

Nicolás Maduro and Henrique Capriles will face off on Sunday. Credit: Courtesy of Maduro and Capriles campaigns

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Apr 12 2013 (IPS)

Venezuelans will cast their ballots this Sunday to elect a successor to late president Hugo Chávez. The choice is between his political heir Nicolás Maduro – the front-runner in the polls – and the leader of the revitalised opposition, Henrique Capriles.

In the presidential elections that will inaugurate the post-Chávez era, voters will opt for continuity of the late leader’s “21st Century Socialism” or support Capriles’ campaign platform, which promises social and economic progress.

The campaign has been dominated by the figure of Chávez and the powerful wave of grief in the wake of his passing on Mar. 5, 21 months after he was diagnosed with abdominal cancer.

Maduro was foreign minister from 2006 to 2012, vice president after October 2012, and interim president since Chávez travelled to Cuba for his last bout of treatment.

Maduro, the candidate of the governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), “has not had the time to build his own image and leadership style; he is dissolved in the legacy, and his style is a kind of ‘copy and paste’ version of his late leader’s,” Mariana Bacalao, an expert on political communication, told IPS.

Analyst Manuel Malaver, an opposition sympathiser, said “the competition is between a very powerful government with a very bad candidate, and a weak opposition with an excellent one…I believe if the campaign were longer, Capriles could well beat Maduro, but its brevity gives Maduro a big advantage.”

Nicmer Evans, a government-leaning political scientist, said “there are three actors in the race: Maduro, Capriles and also Chávez, who is the main candidate in these elections, because what is being debated is whether or not his vision for the country will be accepted.”

Chávez won a new presidential term for 2013-2019 in the October elections, with nearly 8.2 million votes, equivalent to 55 percent. His chief rival, Capriles, the candidate of the Democratic Unity Coalition (MUD), received 6.6 million votes, or 44.3 percent.

The Venezuelan constitution states that if a president dies within the first four years of taking office, elections for a successor must be called within 30 days. This stipulation left the candidates with only 10 days to campaign across this country of 916,000 square kilometres, 24 states, 333 municipalities and 30 million people.

Both Maduro and Capriles have been travelling at top speed from one end of the country to another, visiting up to three cities in a single day, in a bid to galvanise first and foremost their faithful supporters among the electorate, which remains highly polarised.

The candidates are attracting crowds to their rallies that are as or more numerous than they were in the 2012 campaign, presaging another high turnout rate, although experts expect that it will not reach the October record of 81 percent. Voting in this country is not compulsory.

“If Capriles increases his share of the vote a bit, and part of the Chavista electorate abstains (studies show that one in four do not want Maduro), the chances for the opposition are very real,” Carlos Ocariz, coordinator of Capriles’ campaign, told foreign correspondents when the campaign got under way.

The polls published up to last weekend (Apr. 6-7), based on surveys carried out in March, put Maduro in the lead, between seven and 18 percentage points ahead of Capriles.

“None of our scenarios contemplates a possible victory for Capriles,” pollsters Germán Campos of Consultores 30.11 and Jesse Chacón of GIS XXI told IPS.

Around 57 percent of Consultores 30.11 respondents said they would vote for Maduro, while the study by GIS XXI concluded there would be a repeat of the results of October, 55 to 44 percent.

The most traditional polling firms, like IVAD and Datanálisis, also predicted a comfortable win for Maduro. But they declined to report new results once the campaign had started. The electoral laws forbid the publication of polling estimates in the week prior to the elections, and all campaign activity had to end Friday Apr. 12.

Just hours before the pre-election media blackout came into force, polling firms DatinCorp and Datamática found a rise in Capriles’ popularity and a decline in support for Maduro.

The gap between voter intentions for Maduro and Capriles found by some of the more traditional polling firms was cut in half five days before the elections, IPS was told.

Because of the brevity of the campaign, both candidates have behaved aggressively towards their rivals, accentuating the acute polarisation that has marked politics in Venezuela since Chávez first became president in 1999.

“Little Petulant Man, Little Bourgeois,” Maduro taunted his rival, while Capriles accused him of “Fresh Lies” and they heaped insults on each other. They also berated the Electoral Council and called on the public to keep alert for possible tricks and supposed plans on the part of the loser to dispute the results.

Maduro, a 50-year-old former bus driver, is married to fellow PSUV leader Cilia Flores. He mocked the 40-year-old Capriles’ status as a bachelor, while Capriles taunted Maduro’s mistakes in Venezuelan geography and his anecdote about feeling the presence of Chávez in the form of a little bird.

“The language the two main presidential candidates have been using is deplorable. They have been banking on polarisation, which has caused so much damage,” complained Marino Alvarado of Provea, a human rights organisation.

“In a country racked by violence on all sides, we have a political leadership that is not setting a good example, with language that contributes nothing to concord or the peaceful solution of conflicts,” he told IPS.

“Let’s hope there is a clear victory for the winner, rather than a narrow difference, for the sake of peace in the country,” said analyst Jesús Seguías of DatinCorp.

Chacón said, “if there is a wide gap, Maduro’s government can begin more comfortably; it will have the challenge of being more efficient, otherwise the voters will call it to account,” while the opposition would be able to regroup.

In Malaver’s view, “if the result of the vote is tight, even if the government party wins, the confrontation in society will remain. These elections will be like the first round, waiting for a final round, because the part of the country that did not accept the concentration of military and state power under Chávez will accept it even less under Maduro.”

The São Paulo Forum expressed its support for Nicolás Maduro in the upcoming presidential elections in Venezuela. Credit: Raúl Limaco/IPS

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Apr 2 2013 (IPS)

The São Paulo Forum, which groups leftist political parties and organisations of Latin America and the Caribbean, sees a victory by Venezuela’s acting President Nicolás Maduro in the Apr. 14 elections as key to the future of the left in the region, and to “containing the right”.

Maduro, the new leader of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), and Henrique Capriles, the candidate of the heterogeneous opposition coalition, will face off at the polls to win the six-year term to which the late Hugo Chávez (1954-2013) had been re-elected in October.

“For us the elections here are key, because an eventual defeat (of Chavismo) in Venezuela would mean a setback in the regional process of integration,” historian Valter Pomar, executive secretary of the Forum and a leader of Brazil’s governing Workers Party (PT), told IPS.

“It’s not the Brazilian or Argentine economy that would be affected in the case of a defeat (of Maduro) – which won’t happen – but the entire economy of Latin America, especially the weakest countries or the ones that are lagging the most in terms of industrial development,” Pomar said.

Parties that belong to the Forum, created in 1990 in São Paulo on the initiative of Brazil’s PT – in opposition at the time – currently govern Bolivia, Brazil, Cuba, Dominica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela.

Several of those countries belong to the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), Latin America’s alternative integration bloc founded by Venezuela and Cuba, or are beneficiaries of Venezuela’s Petrocaribe programme, which provides oil to 17 Caribbean and Central American nations under preferential payment conditions.

According to the Forum, Chávez’s initial election as president, in December 1998, marked the start of the rise to power of several of the group’s member parties. And since then, it says, none of them have been defeated in elections.

That does not count Chile’s Socialist Party, defeated by rightwing President Sebastián Piñera in 2010, because it was just one member of the centre-left Coalition of Parties for Democracy that governed since 1990.

The Forum working group, with 38 delegates from 27 parties in 18 countries, met Monday Apr. 1 in Caracas to pay homage to Chávez – who died of cancer on Mar. 5 – and express support for Maduro.

“This is an excellent show of support, which indicates to the popular movements of Latin America and the Caribbean that Venezuela is strategic and that the victory of Nicolás (Maduro) will also be a victory for the people,” Rodrigo Cabezas, a PSUV leader and Latin American Parliament lawmaker who hosted the gathering in Caracas, told IPS.

Maduro, meanwhile, said “this is the time of the greatest expansion of the struggles for the new independence of Latin America from U.S. hegemony and imperial domination. The road is just beginning in this new phase.”

The acting president and candidate, who joined delegates to the Forum in a visit to the mausoleum that holds Chávez’s remains in Caracas, expressed “special recognition of the Cuban revolution, as a forerunner to this Latin American and Caribbean process…It drove in the first peg, liberated the first territory, and generated the dynamic of resisting, fighting and winning,” he said.

“Yes, we are worried that the right is setting up an international operation, not only national operations, to deal us a blow. There is a counteroffensive by the right in the region, as seen in Honduras and Paraguay – the latter involving a coup by parliament,” Pomar said.

He was referring to the Jun. 28, 2009 coup that overthrew Honduran President Manuel Zelaya and the Jun. 22, 2012 toppling of Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo.

Nevertheless, “we see a situation of equilibrium. The right has failed to defeat us in the main countries where we govern, and we have not managed to get them out of power in Mexico, for example. But this relative equilibrium will not last forever,” Pomar said.

According to the Brazilian politician, “what could work in our favour is accelerating the changes in each country and deepening integration, a fundamental issue, because for many countries in the region it is impossible to forge ahead with the processes of change in an isolated manner. That’s why the presidential election in Venezuela is essential for us.”

This is reflected by the fact that the Forum has focused more on the vote in Venezuela than the Apr. 21 presidential elections in Paraguay, where the left is participating without a real chance of winning against the front-runners, who belong to the country’s traditional political forces: the Colorado and Liberal parties.

The Forum working group’s meeting also briefly discussed other international events, particularly the threats to global peace posed by the heated situation between South Korea and North Korea, the conflict in Syria and Iran’s nuclear programme.

Although the group agreed to protest what it called the provocation caused by U.S. military activities in South Korea, there were also voices in the meeting that complained that North Korea’s behaviour “facilitated” Washington’s alleged provocation.

In the debate on the situation in the Korean peninsula, the theory was set forth that the conflict there strengthens U.S. protagonism in the Asia-Pacific region to the detriment of China and its partners in the BRICS bloc – Brazil, Russia, India and South Africa – of emerging powers.

On the regional front, the meeting agreed that the most urgent situation involves the peace talks between the Colombian government and the FARC rebels, taking place in Havana.

As in nearly every Forum meeting, the Puerto Rican independence activists, this time through the words of Héctor Pesquera of the Hostosian National Independence Movement, insisted that the fight against the remnants of colonialism in Latin America not be forgotten, and called for the release on humanitarian grounds of Oscar López Rivera, who has spent nearly 32 years in maximum security prisons in the United States on charges of seditious conspiracy and armed robbery.

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Mar 19 2013 (IPS)

What is Hugo Chávez’s legacy to Latin America? The best way to evaluate a head of state is to examine what is left behind after his or her death. In the case of Chávez, his image is obscured by a series of ideological and cultural prejudices that hide a clear perception of who he was.

Chávez’s obvious faults have been exaggerated out of proportion by the ideological radicalisation that accompanied him. He was provocative to the point of using Iran, Libya and Syria to symbolise his independence from the United States.

However, his goal was not to find legitimacy as an international leader, but as a regional one. For this reason, he tried to highlight everything that could show up Washington’s impotence and decline.

His foreign policy, focused essentially on Latin America, was very simple: let us recover the message of our liberator, Simón Bolívar, to unite our peoples and free ourselves from the historic domination of the United States.

The arrival of former U.S. president George W. Bush was providential for Chávez: as the worst face of the United States, he was a useful confirmation of the Venezuelan president’s denunciations. With President Barack Obama, in contrast, he had to tone down his criticism.

His reputation as an international pariah was not due to his support for Cuba, which today is not regarded by anyone as a revolutionary or terrorist threat.

But a head of state who embraces “representatives of evil” like (the late Libyan leader) Muammar Gaddafi or (Iranian President) Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is bound to spark rejection throughout the West, not only in the United States.

This was combined with a lack of understanding of Venezuela, since Chávez’s verbosity and his use of language that was neither elegant nor formal, but appropriate for stimulating the participation and identification of the poorest classes – his real political target – was interpreted in the West as demagoguery rather than as a means of communication. But this was the way Chávez was able to reach the popular classes not only in Venezuela, but also in Latin America as a whole.

Almost 200,000 poor Latin Americans recovered their sight thanks to Chávez, who paid for cataract operations in neighbouring countries, carried out by brigades of Cuban doctors. (People in Cuba were disconcerted to learn that one of the beneficiaries in Bolivia turned out to be sergeant Mario Terán, who killed revolutionary icon Che Guevara in La Higuera).

It is a fact that, thanks to Chávez, Latin America has made great strides towards integration. His name is associated with the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our Americas (ALBA), the Bank of the South (BanSur) and the boost that Venezuela’s incorporation has given to the Southern Common Market (Mercosur).

It is easy to brand all this as populism. But labels do not cancel an uncomfortable reality: in Latin America, the middle class is greatly outnumbered by the poorer classes. And traditional politicians were only interested in the middle class (if not merely the elites).

The region’s shift to the left in the last decade is surely due to the brutal impact of the neoliberal policies of the previous decade; but also to the entry of native peasants and the poorest segments of the population into the political arena.

This is why Chávez’s legacy is much greater than it might appear. It seems inevitable that Venezuela will have to cut back on its international solidarity (a worrying prospect for Cuba, in particular) and will cease to be a paradigm in the regional political scenario.

On the other hand, in this era of globalisation, the effort to take up again the ideals of Bolívar is inescapable and represents a true alternative to the betrayal of the liberators by the elites of the times. (Bolívar himself, in a famous phrase, said “he who serves a revolution ploughs the sea.”)

Only the selfishness of the elites can explain why Latin America, a substantially homogeneous region, more so than Europe and Africa, let alone Asia, has not integrated so as to compete more strongly and effectively at a global level.

While geopolitical influence in this century is swinging towards Asia, where China and India individually are more powerful than all of Latin America, it is in this region where new policies and pathways to more participative democracy are being forged, not in Europe, Africa or Asia.

It is hard to say whether Latin America will ultimately discover the road to unity. Chávez has done much more in this direction than any other head of state in recent history. This is his legacy. Time will tell whether, like Bolívar, he has ploughed the sea.

If he has, Hugo Chávez will go down in history as a frustrated dreamer, and details like his friendship with Ahmadinejad, his excessive verbosity or his vulgar language will not help explain the failure of Latin American unity. That will be the responsibility of the entire political class and its national egocentricities.

Excerpt:

Cuba’s Cienfuegos refinery, revived thanks to support from Venezuela. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Mar 18 2013 (IPS)

Venezuela’s economic challenges, more than the uncertainty over who will succeed late president Hugo Chávez, could threaten the oil diplomacy he practiced in the region.

Cuba is the most obvious example. Oil imports from Venezuela cover half of the country’s energy needs, and have made Venezuela the Caribbean island nation’s top trading partner.

Cuba’s foreign trade grew fourfold between 2005 and 2011, to 8.3 billion dollars. And Venezuela’s share of the total increased from 23 percent in 2006 to 42 percent in 2011, according to an online article by Cuban economist Carmelo Mesa, who lives in the United States.

Cuba’s growing dependence on Venezuela has raised fears of a repeat of the severe shortage of essential goods, as well as frequent, lengthy blackouts, that Cuba suffered during the economic crisis of the 1990s triggered by the collapse of the Soviet Union and East European socialist bloc.

Cuban economist Pável Vidal, a professor at the Javeriana Pontifical University in Cali, Colombia, said “Venezuela today represents around 20 percent of Cuba’s total trade in goods and services, while the Soviet Union represented 30 percent, and dependence was even stronger.”

This means the actual risk is lower, although “a decline, even a gradual one, in the links with Venezuela would spark a recession,” he told IPS in an email exchange.

He said an econometric projection indicates that a decline in Venezuela’s trade with Cuba could lead to a contraction of up to 10 percent of GDP and a two to three year recession as a result of a drop in foreign revenue and investment, external financial restrictions, and more costly imports, without payment facilities for oil.

A crisis of this kind would require “a complex and painful adjustment process,” Vidal said.

But technological dependence is not as marked as it was with the Soviet Union, Cuba’s foreign trade has diversified, and Cuba now has a strong tourism industry, which did not previously exist, as well as new instruments of macroeconomic regulation, he added.

However, the country is not in a position to weather a new crisis, he stressed. “Public wage earners and pensioners paid for the adjustments made to survive the crisis of the 1990s, but they could not do so today, because their buying power is just 27 percent of what is was in 1989,” Vidal said.

Furthermore, the state, pressured by “growing foreign debt,” cut social spending, as reflected in a decline in health and education services. Against that backdrop, the economist said, it would be difficult to identify “who could shoulder the cost of a new crisis.”

But researcher Carlos Alzugaray is confident that bilateral ties will remain strong, because “they have gradually been institutionalised, and they benefit both parties.” He also said “the opposition in Venezuela would not be so irresponsible as to destroy them,” in the unlikely event of an opposition triumph in the Apr. 14 presidential elections.

While Cuba buys oil from Venezuela on preferential terms, it sends over 50,000 doctors, teachers, agronomists and sports coaches to Venezuela. The export of medical services, including some 30,000 physicians, is worth some 1.2 billion dollars a year.

The sudden return of so many people to Cuba would be another risk, but at the moment that is in the realm of pure speculation.

According to Cuban analysts, six years more of a Chavista government would be essential to allow Cuba to seek out new suppliers of oil on terms similar to those provided by Venezuela – possibly Angola or Algeria; make progress in developing its own oil industry; and expand on reforms that have already begun to be implemented.

In Nicaragua, another country that has benefited from Venezuela’s oil-discount programme, drastic changes are not expected as a result of the 58-year-old Chávez’s death from cancer on Mar. 5

Oil supplies, which since 2007 have been worth 500 million dollars a year, have enabled the impoverished Central American country to stabilise its economy and turn around the fiscal deficit, according to independent economist Adolfo Acevedo.

The country’s newfound economic fortitude, also achieved thanks to compliance with the recommendations of international financial bodies, would help Nicaragua withstand any change in Caracas, Acevedo told IPS.

Venezuela provided 2.56 billion dollars in oil cooperation to Nicaragua between 2007 and June 2012, according to Nicaragua’s Central Bank.

Both Bayardo Arce, economic adviser to Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, and Venezuelan ambassador in Managua, José Arrúe, said that cooperation would not be affected because it was based on agreements that were reached before Chávez came to power in 1999.

The San José agreement, under which Mexico and Venezuela jointly supplied oil on preferential terms to 11 Central American and Caribbean nations, was signed in 1980, the diplomat noted.

But Chávez drastically increased that development cooperation with the creation of Petrocaribe in 2005.

Venezuela also planned to build a 6.6 billion dollar refinery in Nicaragua – plans that will have to be renegotiated with the winner of the Apr. 14 elections, who is expected to be acting President Nicolás Maduro.

In Brazil, which does not depend on Venezuelan oil, economic problems in the neighbouring country would affect exports, which grew sixfold in the last 10 years, as well as the investments of transnational companies.

Trade with Venezuela represents just 1.3 percent of Brazil’s foreign trade. But it is important because it is fast-growing and due to the trade surplus, which stood at 4.06 billion dollars last year and is only smaller than the country’s surplus with China, said Rubens Barbosa, a retired Brazilian ambassador who now presides over the São Paulo Industrial Federation’s Foreign Trade Council.

Venezuela’s economic challenges could affect Brazil’s interests because Caracas “will have to adopt some measures” against the high inflation rate and hefty public debt, including unpopular ones like tax hikes and a gasoline price increase, Barbosa told IPS.

But he said no economic collapse would occur in Venezuela as long as oil prices remained high.

Barbosa said Brazilian construction companies were executing projects worth some 20 billion dollars in Venezuela.

In comparison, he said, Caracas provides Cuba with a total of seven billion dollars a year in oil at discounted prices and financial aid.

Economic interests link Brazil and Venezuela, above and beyond political considerations, neighbourly relations, the fact that they share the Amazon jungle, and the focus on regional integration, said another retired ambassador, Marcos Azambuja.

Under Maduro, there would be a “more rational” government, with no disadvantages for Brazil, he said. “The Venezuelan economy is a sub-product of oil” and Caracas will be able to “continue to be reckless” without sinking its economy as long as a barrel of oil costs more than 100 dollars, Azambuja said.

But Brazil has already suffered losses because of that “recklessness,” he said. He was referring to the Abreu e Lima refinery under construction in the northeast Brazilian state of Pernambuco, which is at least three years behind schedule and has cost eight times more than the initial projection.

Part of the problem, he said, was due to the failure to comply with an agreement by Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA, which was to provide 40 percent of the investment.

The delays in construction of the refinery, which is to be completed in 2016, has other costs for Brazil as well, which must import large quantities of gasoline and gasoil at high prices, even though it produces crude, which it exports at lower prices.

* With reporting by Patricia Grogg in Havana and José Adan Silva in Managua.

Hundreds walk in Paseo de los Próceres in Caracas on Mar. 10 to pay their respects to the late Hugo Chávez in the funeral chapel. Credit:Raúl Límaco/IPS

By Adrián Bonilla
SAN JOSE, Mar 15 2013 (IPS)

Although there is plenty of speculation about what will happen now President Hugo Chávez is gone, the likelihood of change in Venezuelan politics and society is low.

To gauge the significance of the upcoming elections, to be held on Apr. 14, the results of the last three presidential elections over the past 12 years must be analysed. The electorate’s vote in favour of Chávez was a constant factor while the opposition’s performance was uneven.

The best result for Chávez was in 2006, when he garnered 62.8 percent of the vote against 36.9 percent for the opposition. Six years earlier, Chávez took a slightly lower proportion of the vote: 59.8 percent, while the opposition’s figure was similar to the 2006 tally, at 37.5 percent.

In 2012 Chávez won again, but this time his proportion of the vote fell by four percentage points with respect to the result in 2000, to 55.1 percent, while the opposition vote grew by eight points, to 44.3 percent. In all three elections the number of invalid votes was insignificant, and in 2012 it was less than two percent.

Analysed over time, these results reveal at least three trends.

In the first place, the electoral advantage of the government forces is a historical constant. The narrowest margin over the opposition was 11 percent, huge in political terms, while the widest was a whopping 36 percent. The results of the upcoming elections could lie between these two figures, if there is no major change in the trends.

A second inference that can be made is the high level of politicisation of Venezuelan society, reflected in the high turnout at elections and the low numbers of sceptics who have made their point with blank or spoiled ballot papers.

A third trend is the way voters are lined up for and against Chávez, with three different main opposition candidates, who were however strong enough to obliterate minor candidates.

With these facts, we can ask ourselves whether an event of such magnitude as the death of the Venezuelan president can alter the electoral scenario and the trends that have been consolidated over the last 12 years, and the answer is that this appears unlikely, for several reasons.

In first place, the polarisation of society must be reckoned with. In Venezuela there have only been two political positions: for or against Chávez, who managed to maintain his support base throughout his administration.

Chávez’s personality was so strong that the opposition, originally heterogeneous and with an ideological spectrum ranging through almost all possible positions from left to right, united in order to act as a suitable counterweight, whatever its members’ views on development and the economy.

Chavismo was also made up of different positions that came together around the figure of the president himself. Both government and opposition forces have kept to stable positions, and that stability appears likely to continue after the forthcoming elections.

In second place, the electoral spectrum cannot have varied greatly since the last election (in October 2012). Turnout and voter intentions will probably be quite similar. The government candidate (acting president Nicolás Maduro) is different, but the vote for Chávez has been consistent, and in addition, regional elections in Venezuela have amply proved that votes for the presidential candidate are, in fact, transferred to other candidates close to the president.

The government candidate will appeal to the memory of the deceased president and will legitimately present himself as the person who represents continuity. There are plenty of reasons for this argument, including his close ties (as vice president) to the administration, as well as the fact that Chávez himself explicitly urged people to vote for him.

The opposition has no other choice than to remain the opposition, although this may sound like a tautology. In other words, in terms of images there is also a stability about the Venezuelan election campaign: the political actors are the same, and their discourse has not changed.

Finally, the resources available to both candidates, their advertising potential, territorial organisation and electoral dynamics have not changed either. These aspects of their positions – asymmetrical or not – remain unaltered.

All this leads to the supposition that a reversal of the trends, and of the way Venezuelan politics has been organised for over 10 years, is highly unlikely.

Neither is the continuity in the political sphere going to change dramatically when it comes to Venezuela’s public policies and international agenda.

It should be remembered that the present government team in Venezuela has been working together, making large and small decisions for at least the time during which the president was critically ill.

Clearly, the most urgent item on the agenda is the economy, which needs to stabilise its resources in order to maintain the government’s set of social programmes and public works.

In the international arena, there is probably no reason for altering the recent Venezuelan position of adhering to and promoting multilateral organisations.

Caracas will continue to support the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), and will maintain its commitment to the Bolivarian Alliance of the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), a strategic bloc in which it has a central position.

In other words, the passing of Chávez, while an event of historical significance for Venezuela and Latin America, will apparently not bring about short-term changes in domestic policy, nor in the traditions and behaviours exhibited by Caracas on the international scene.

The stability of this scenario will clearly be an advantage for the rest of the countries in the hemisphere.

* Adrián Bonilla is secretary general of the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO) and has a doctorate in international relations from the University of Miami.

Presidents Santos and Chávez at a 2010 Colombia-Venezuela summit en Santa Marta, Colombia. Credit: Constanza Vieira/IPS

By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTA, Mar 15 2013 (IPS)

Late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez played a key role in the current attempt to negotiate peace in Colombia. Along with Cuban President Raúl Castro, he confidentially urged the FARC guerrillas to agree to Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos’s secret proposal for peace talks.

For years, the late Venezuelan president and Cuba’s Fidel Castro had argued that armed struggle was a thing of the past. And Raúl, Fidel’s successor, took the same stance.

Chávez,who governed Venezuela since 1999 and died on Mar. 5, also provided the logistics to transport the FARC’s negotiators abroad incognito during the preliminary talks, when Santos decided that the contacts should no longer take place in Colombia.

Getting the two sides together “was the hardest past,” according to political scientist Ronal Rodríguez, a professor and researcher at the Venezuela Observatory of the private University of Rosario, in Bogota. Once that was achieved, Norway and Cuba assumed the role of guarantors and Venezuela apparently took a backseat, as a facilitator, along with Chile.

“In politics, only what has already happened is certain,” former Colombian minister Horacio Serpa told IPS. But the most likely scenario is that acting president Nicolás Maduro will be elected president of Venezuela in the Apr. 14 elections.

“In that case, as he has specifically stated, he will continue along the lines followed by President Chávez in this matter,” Serpa said.

“We Colombians hope that Venezuela will continue to help, and continue creating conditions so we can make peace…and that whatever the outcome of the elections, Venezuela will continue cooperating towards that end.”

Rodríguez said that in any case, “Venezuela has already played the most important role it could play with respect to peace in Colombia, by getting the FARC to have the confidence and trust to sit down at the table for peace talks.”

“The challenges that lie ahead mainly concern the negotiating parties, so Venezuela’s role will not be as important as it has been up to now,” he said.

But he said that if Maduro is elected, it would “give continuity to the process” and would give the FARC confidence regarding Venezuela’s presence as one of the guarantors that the peace talks would continue to move ahead.

He said, however, that if opposition candidate Henrique Capriles won the elections, Venezuela’s support for the talks would continue, because for Venezuela, Colombia’s peace process “is a structural, state question that goes beyond the differences between Chavismo and the opposition.”

Rodríguez noted that Colombia’s decades-long armed conflict “has already had a contagion effect across the border in Venezuela,” which suffers “kidnapping, extortion and all those dynamics that the armed actors (from Colombia) have brought.”

Like the FARC, a smaller rebel group, the National Liberation Army (ELN), has also been active in Colombia since 1964. And far-right paramilitary groups, which were partially dismantled in 2006 after closed-door negotiations with the Colombian government, are another actor in the conflict.

“As in the case of all borders during wars, cross-border routes are sought for smuggling arms, provisions of all kinds and financing by means of legal and illegal operations,” former minister Camilo González, director of the Institute of Studies for Development and Peace, told IPS.

González added that “not only has business activity been affected, with negative effects for local residents, traders and producers on both sides of the border, but in several Venezuelan states, the insecurity associated with the presence of the FARC or the ELN has had an impact on many sectors.”

According to accounts gathered by IPS along the border in November, remnant or regrouped paramilitary bands are also active in the Venezuelan border cities of Ureña, San Antonio and San Cristóbal, the capital of the state of Táchira, where they extort local traders and businesses.

González said that “Venezuela in the post-Chávez era will continue collaborating with the peace process in Colombia,” because putting an end to the armed conflict “is in the interests of all sectors of society in Venezuela.”

“I think there will be continuity,” said Carlos Velandia, known as “Felipe Torres” when he was a member of the ELN national leadership. Now he is dedicated to research and consulting on peace.

His arguments are based on Maduro’s close involvement “in the construction of Venezuela’s willingness to support a political solution to the conflict” and the fact that “the conflict has leaked across the border, and also affects Venezuelan territory.

“And the only way to put an end to it is to negotiate peace here in Colombia,” he added.

“The presence of foreign forces is disturbing Venezuela’s democratic stability,” Velandia said.

In Venezuela, he said, “there are factions in the military that want to fully live up to the constitutional mandate to defend sovereignty and territorial integrity. And it’s really hard for a member of the military to see foreign forces in his country and look the other way.”

That means that “Venezuela has no alternative other than supporting a political solution in Colombia, because its security and tranquillity depends on that,” the former guerrilla said.

Alfredo Molano, a Colombian sociologist and writer, went a step further. He said that “if Chavismo collapses in Venezuela and a military dictatorship is established to, let’s say, avoid civil war, what prospects would the FARC have with regard to their own future?”

He said Chávez played the role of a peace-maker “in a clean, transparent fashion, which infused the different parties with confidence.”

But above all, “he was able to show the FARC that the conditions were in place to lay down their weapons, without renouncing their political objectives. Chávez established himself in power without weapons, simply with votes, and with them he subordinated the Venezuelan armed forces,” he told IPS.

“When they agreed to peace talks, the FARC had the Chavismo model in mind. They decided to trade bullets for votes because it is possible – as shown by Venezuela (where Chávez, as an army lieutenant colonel, led a failed coup attempt in 1992). But if that door is closed, the peace talks in Havana will fall apart,” Molano said.

Christian Völkel, a Colombia analyst with the International Crisis Group, takes a less pessimistic view. “Regardless of how important Venezuela’s participation was in the secret phase of talks, the negotiations now have enough momentum of their own to sustain them,” he told IPS.

“Chávez, without a doubt, was the politician that the FARC respected the most,” but that doesn’t mean his death “will have a dramatic effect,” he argued.

“The two sides have been negotiating in Havana for five months, and it looks like they’re already moving towards agreements,” said Völkel, referring to progress that has apparently been made on the issue of land ownership, the first question on the six-point agenda for the talks.

Cuba’s Cienfuegos refinery, revived thanks to support from Venezuela. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños /IPS

By Marianela Jarroud
SANTIAGO, Mar 14 2013 (IPS)

Venezuela will keep in place the regional energy integration policies promoted by the late president Hugo Chávez if he is succeeded by acting president Nicolás Maduro, experts on regional relations told IPS.

It will do this in spite of the growing internal economic difficulties that could complicate the country’s ability to maintain external cooperation commitments.

“It’s possible that Venezuela might reduce aid to other countries in order to deal with internal problems, but not if it risks losing its regional and international influence and leadership role,” Sébastien Dubé, an expert in political science at Chile’s Diego Portales University, told IPS.

Dubé said he had no doubt that if Maduro wins the presidential elections on Apr. 14, as expected, there will be continuity in Venezuela’s foreign policy and especially its external energy cooperation.

Maduro’s rival will be Henrique Capriles, the governor of the central state of Miranda, who was defeated by Chávez in the Oct. 7, 2012 elections. Analysts predict that the wave of grief over the 58-year-old Chávez’s death from cancer on Mar. 5, and the strong majority support that he enjoyed, will carry his chosen successor, vice-president Maduro, into office – bar surprises.

“Maduro will want to maintain the geopolitical influence that Chávez’s leadership brought to Venezuela,” Dubé said, pointing out that Maduro was foreign minister from 2006 until January this year.

In his view, “the strong ideological focus of the Venezuelan government indicates that if implementing its political strategy means continuing to run a fiscal deficit, so be it.”

Regional energy integration was one of the key focuses of Chávez, who governed the South American oil-producing country since 1999.

By means of the policy of energy integration and cooperation promoted by the state oil company Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. (PDVSA), Chávez distributed energy in the region in order to boost the development of the countries that had the most difficulty paying their energy bills.

The foremost example is the Petrocaribe energy alliance, created in 2005 and involving 18 countries to which Venezuela supplies up to 185,000 barrels per day (bpd) of crude.

Petrocaribe offers financing for up to 50 percent of the value of the oil, payable over 25 years at an interest rate of two percent.

The Petrocaribe programme extended new benefits to more countries than came under the San José agreement, signed in 1980, under which Mexico and Venezuela jointly supplied oil on preferential terms to 11 Central American and Caribbean countries.

In the view of economist Manuel Riesco, of the National Centre for Alternative Development Studies (CENDA), Chávez, “as a good soldier and exceptional disciple of (independence hero Simón) Bolívar, gave due importance to a key element of state developmentalist strategy in Latin America: regional integration.

“Integration is inevitable in Latin America, partly to compensate for the enormous gravitational attraction exerted by our giant neighbour to the North (the United States), which constantly draws our countries individually into its orbit,” he said.

It is also essential “in order to create the conditions to be able to compete in the global market of the 21st century, made up of huge market-states with hundreds of millions of people,” he added.

Over the last decade, Venezuela has also signed special energy cooperation agreements with Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Uruguay. In addition, a partnership was formed between PDVSA and Petrobras, the Brazilian state oil company, to build the Abreu e Lima Refinery in Brazil.

Thanks to high oil prices, Venezuela “may have provided relief for the countries of Latin America that had preferential access to its crude, but it remains to be seen whether this policy is sustainable over time,” according to economist Alfonso Dingemans, who has a doctorate in Americas studies from the Institute of Advanced Studies of the University of Santiago.

Only time will tell whether Venezuela’s political and economic circumstances will allow “what has been maintained only by the charisma and leadership of Hugo Chávez to be institutionalised,” he told IPS.

“I doubt Maduro has the same political capability to continue developing the Bolivarian programme (of energy cooperation), or that the Venezuelan people would accept all the costs implied,” he commented.

“At some point the costs will become unsustainable,” he said.

In Dubé’s view, in contrast, for a future Maduro administration “to break its commitments would be a sign of failure, which the government will try to avoid at any cost.

“The calculation is that oil prices may rise again,” above 100 dollars a barrel because of growth in world demand, and that would enable Venezuela to keep its agreements intact, “an important factor in maintaining its ties and the influence it has over the countries that benefit from its assistance,” he said.

Dubé said that Chávez’s successor will also face greater difficulties on the domestic front, because of the demands of the Venezuelan public, in an economic environment in which several problems have accumulated, such as a high rate of inflation, the impact of the currency devaluation in February and the loss of purchasing power.

“The scenario in Venezuela is complex,” and that could cause problems for the countries that benefit from its cooperation, he said. “No other country in ALBA (the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America) has the energy or financial capacity to provide the support that Venezuela is giving them now,” he said.

ALBA, which currently has eight full member countries, was formed in 2004 on Chávez’s initiative, and focuses on the struggle for social inclusion and “21st century socialism”.

One of the members, Cuba, could find itself particularly affected by a change of strategy in Venezuela’s integration policy. At present it receives at least 53,000 bpd of oil on preferential terms, as part of a series of bilateral cooperation agreements.

“Aid from the Chávez administration was quite important for the Cuban economy, and the danger is that if that support disappears or diminishes, the island’s economy will take a nosedive again,” Dingemans said.

Riesco stressed that the energy agreements established by the Chávez government were not unilateral subsidies granted by Venezuela to other countries.

For instance, he said, “the favourable but reasonable long-term prices for oil supplied to Cuba are partly compensated by the significant and valuable contribution of Cuban doctors working in Venezuela.”

Dubé said as well that cooperation between Caracas and Havana is mutual, and that both countries will continue to need each other. “In political terms, Maduro needs the strategic, political and ideological support of the Castro brothers (Fidel and Raúl) to maintain his regional influence,” he said.

However, in his view, a victory for opposition candidate Capriles could bring about “a radical change in Venezuela’s foreign policy, realignment with the United States and countries with liberal (free market) economies, and an end to subsidies for Cuba and the ALBA countries.”

Riesco predicted that the policies of integration promoted by Chávez will continue in one form or another, because “they reflect the deepest strategic interests of the region and of Venezuela.”

By Clara Nieto
BOGOTA, Mar 11 2013 (IPS)

The world has been shaken by the death of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, one of the most influential Latin American leaders in recent decades, as well as one of the most controversial and maligned figures on the planet.

He was hounded particularly by Colombia under the administration of former president Álvaro Uribe. When Juan Manuel Santos took over the presidency and embraced Chávez as his “new best friend,” it marked the beginning of one of the best eras in Colombian-Venezuelan relations.

Chávez, who died of cancer on Tuesday, Mar. 5, was adamant about the need to achieve peace in Colombia, in order to remove the pretext for the United States to meddle in its affairs. Santos has recognised that Venezuela’s devotion and interest have been decisive in helping the peace talks between the Santos administration and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) rebel group progress.

Great uncertainty hangs over the future of Chávez’s Bolivarian revolution. Intelligent analysis, slanted suppositions and plain speculation fill the global media about what might happen now that his leadership is gone: whether in the forthcoming elections his vice president Nicolás Maduro will win, or whether opposition candidate Henrique Capriles will wrest the presidency from him.

Perhaps the voters who gave Chávez overwhelming electoral victories – a large majority of the population – and who re-elected him even while knowing he was fighting for his life are not interested in a change.

His regime brought immense benefits to the country. He talked of “21st century socialism” as his government’s goal, and countered criticism from the Catholic Church hierarchy saying they should look for socialism in the Bible and the gospels.

He also curtailed neoliberal policies, recovered state control of the country’s natural resources, including oil and the state oil consortium PDVSA, and used its vast resources to carry out “missions” – social programmes – in favour of the poor.

Poverty fell from 49.4 percent in 1999, when he first took office, to 27.8 percent in 2010, and extreme poverty declined from 21.7 percent to 10.7 percent. With the help of Cuba, he made major progress in health and education, especially in eradicating illiteracy.

Chávez was responsible for the biggest geopolitical change in the history of Latin America: regional integration.

He proposed the creation of a regional body that would exclude the United States. Then president of Brazil Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva supported him, and South American integration was born: they created the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), the South American Defence Council and the Bank of the South (BancoSur), Chávez’s initiative to isolate the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, both of which have deplorable records in the region.

The jewel in the crown was the inaugural meeting of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) in February 2010, convened by Lula, without the United States or Canada, in which all the regional nations took part, including Cuba.

“(It) has been one of the most important geopolitical changes over the last decade,” said Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Washington-based Centre for Economic and Policy Research.

In the international arena, Chávez was an influential voice. He was the first to criticise the handover of seven Colombian military bases for use by the United States as a surrender of national sovereignty and a threat to the region, especially for Venezuela which is already surrounded by U.S. bases. The concession caused a scandal across the region.

Chávez forged ties with China and agreed to sell it large volumes of oil to counteract Caracas’s dependence on the U.S. market, where Venezuela is the chief supplier, although the trade with the U.S. is mutually beneficial.

When the Colombian army made incursions into Ecuador to hunt down and kill the FARC’s number two commander and in the process killed 25 people, most of them guerrillas, Quito broke off relations with Bogotá – and Chávez, too, froze ties with Colombia.

When Bolivian President Evo Morales expelled the U.S. ambassador in La Paz for allegedly plotting against his government, Chávez did the same with the U.S. ambassador in Caracas, in a show of solidarity. Both presidents expelled the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) from their countries.

Chávez also took action in other conflicts: he rejected the overthrow of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, and broke off relations with the subsequent regime in Honduras; when Israel launched Operation Cast Lead against the Palestinian territory of Gaza, resulting in immense destruction, thousands of deaths and global censure, Chávez called Israel “murderous” and expelled its ambassador.

Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina and Ecuador expanded their diplomatic and trading relations to far-off countries like China, Russia and Iran.

When it came to Iran, with which Washington has been in conflict since the occupation of the U.S. embassy and the hostage crisis in Tehran, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned Venezuela and Bolivia (she didn’t dare take a stab at Brazil) to “take a look at what the consequences might well be for them” and to “think twice.”

U.S. President Barack Obama, who had awakened so much hope in Latin America, maintained the hostile rhetoric of George W. Bush against Chávez, calling him a destabilising force.

Chávez and Obama met for the first time in Trinidad and Tobago at the Fifth Summit of the Americas, where they exchanged pleasantries and shook hands. Chávez commented that the meeting was cordial, but added: “Don’t be fooled, the empire is still alive and kicking!”

Chávez was more than a minor irritation to Uncle Sam. He was enormously popular in the region, and took over Cuba’s leadership role due to the immense economic resources at his disposal to make his voice heard, in contrast to Havana’s dearth.

His agreements to supply oil to different nations, to be paid for in kind, provided crude to friendly countries at preferential prices.

Bush supported a failed coup against Chávez in 2002, and the Venezuelan leader intensified his diatribes against the then U.S. president. He regarded him as “an idiot.” Obama inherited the conflict and kept it going.

Chávez’s legacy to his country and to the world is solid and invaluable: a shift from capitalism to socialism, a change of life for broad sectors in Venezuela; and consolidation of political and economic independence in the region, free from domination by Washington. It will be difficult to reverse these achievements. May he rest in peace.

Excerpt:

Thousands of people line up to enter the Military Academy chapel where the body of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez lies in state. Credit: Raúl Límaco/IPS

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Mar 8 2013 (IPS)

The struggle against poverty was the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez’s top political priority, and at the same time a tool to consolidate his power and project his strategies abroad.

As well as drawing attention to the plight of the poor and placing them at the centre of the national agenda, his administration left a mixed legacy with positive and negative aspects, overshadowed by an economy dependent on oil as its sole resource, and political action marked by acute polarisation and the burning of bridges for dialogue with the opposition.

“Chávez cared about us, he made us visible, he spoke up for us, he launched health programmes, provided low-cost food and gave us housing,” Gregorio Sánchez, a street vendor and one of the hundreds of thousands of followers who formed long lines Thursday to say a last goodbye to “my commander-in-chief,” who died Tuesday, told IPS.

Chávez first became president in 1999 and was embattled early in his presidency with opposition business shut-downs, protests and a short-lived coup. From 2003 on, Chávez adopted a broad range of “missions” or social programmes in the areas of health, literacy, education, nutrition, work grants, and aid to poor mothers and the extremely poor, with which he consolidated a consistent electoral majority in his favour.

Over the last decade, according to official figures, the 1998 poverty rate that stood at 48 percent and the extreme poverty rate of 20 percent were each halved.

Under Chávez, 1.5 million adults in this country of 30 million people learned to read and write, 700,000 completed primary education, and 600,000 extremely poor people received assistance.

Sixty percent of the population buys subsidised food in government outlets, 7,000 health centres were opened in economically depressed areas, 200,000 families received farmland and another 200,000 received urban housing without paying a cent up front.

Adamant critics like former socialist leader Teodoro Petkoff have told IPS that Chávez’s chief merit was his support for the poor and marginalised, calling attention to their situation and attending to their most pressing needs.

The political opposition, which made inroads to the point of capturing 45 percent of the vote for their candidate Henrique Capriles in the presidential election against Chávez last October, gave up their blanket criticism of the government’s social programmes and promised to maintain them, although they said they would improve them and make them more sustainable.

“(Chávez’s) merit is that he took up poverty as a major issue when, at the end of the 20th century, most political organisations, and not only in Venezuela, had abandoned it and embraced the (free market) liberal ideas of the Washington Consensus,” Alexander Luzardo, former head of the association of sociologists and anthropologists, told IPS.

“The diagnosis of global poverty already existed, arrived at by the system of United Nations conferences in the 1990s, and Chávez made it the main focus of his political strategy,” Luzardo said.

“He battled against the prescriptions of liberals and social democrats in the international arena, and domestically he used his gifts as a communicator to turn the poor into political protagonists; hence his strength,” Luzardo said.

His political heirs want to take up the baton and are proposing to “listen to the demands of the poor” – the majority of the mourners filing past his casket – and modify the constitution in order to put his remains to rest immediately in the National Pantheon beside those of liberation hero Simón Bolívar, instead of waiting 25 years as prescribed by law.

The other side of this coin is that Chávez had fantastic wealth at his disposal, over a trillion dollars, more than all the Venezuelan governments of the 20th century together – according to former Central Bank president José Guerra – arising from the oil bonanza that provided up to 95 percent of the country’s foreign revenue and anchored the monoproducing and monoexporting economy more than ever.

President Chávez oversaw the nationalisation of some 1,500 companies ranging from banking, the steel industry, fossil fuels, electricity and telecommunications to modest food outlets. The country also has tight exchange and price controls in operation.

However, 40 percent of the economically active population works in the informal sector; inflation is the highest in the Americas at over 20 percent a year; and after 10 years of land reform and the expropriation of more than three million hectares that were in private hands, over half of the food consumed in Venezuela is imported.

Jorge Botti, president of the employers’ association Fedecámaras, told journalists that in 2002 there were 614,000 businesses in Venezuela and by the end of 2012 there were only 377,000.

Public sector debt has increased five-fold to over 150 billion dollars, while the debt of state oil giant PDVSA has multiplied almost 10 times, to 40 billion dollars, said economics Professor Orlando Orchoa. The company is having difficulty coming up with the amount previously agreed on with Petrobras, Brazil’s state oil company, for investing in a refinery in the northeast of Brazil.

Amid voracious consumerism – with the cheapest gasoline in the world, at two cents of a dollar per litre, as its emblem – Chávez strove, unavailingly so far, to build a “socialist economic sector” based on barter and cooperatively owned businesses.

Another black mark in a decade and a half of government is the rise in crime, with between 16,000 and 20,000 homicides a year, three times the rate before 1999, and deplorable prison management with an overcrowded inmate population of 45,000 and an average of at least one prisoner murdered per day.

Luzardo gave credit to Chávez for “promoting a new constitution in 1999 that expanded rights, particularly for indigenous people and the environment, but only on paper because the government’s approach to the oil and mining industries is developmentalist (focused on economic growth), and it has not carried out the constitutional provisions for demarcating the territories of native peoples.”

On the political front, Chávez’s legacy is his ideology of “21st century socialism” and his United Socialist Party of Venezuela, which attempt to combine the ideas of Bolívar with Marxist principles and the causes closest to the heart of the Latin American left throughout the 20th century.

However, they obviate the trade unions and instead seek an alliance between the populace and the armed forces.

Chávez was criticised for preferring rhetoric and confrontational behaviour to dialogue, a trait that intellectuals like writer Alberto Barrera explain by saying “polarisation brought him political dividends and was the basis of his electoral strategy.”

The Venezuelan leader was victorious in 15 out of the 16 elections held since he first won the presidency in 1998.

By Johan Galtung
ALFAZ, Spain, Mar 8 2013 (IPS)

That his life and his deeds had black dots is part of the story but should not prevent us from seeing the greatness of a maker of history. First, in his own country, Venezuela, Hugo Chávez lifted those at the bottom up from misery, into economic wellness, political participation, cultural pride (in their often African, or Indian, blood), social dignity – going far beyond Gini coefficients to measure increasing equality.

Johan Galtung

Second, he did the same for Latin America, he helped lift the bottom countries up, under the name of the iconic Simón Bolívar: Cuba and Nicaragua, Ecuador and Bolivia, Brazil…to mention some.

Of course the two policies are related. Colombia, with its long record of violence from 1948 to 2013, is a pariah country and can only be lifted up by lifting up those at the bottom, attacking flagrant inequality. Chávez and his fellow leaders, Fidel Castro and Daniel Ortega, Rafael Correa and Evo Morales, Lula da Silva, are on line.

A formidable team, doing far more than the European leaders who are trying to manage their crisis. The late essayist-journalist Christopher Hitchens interviewed Chávez some years ago, asking him about his similarities and differences with Fidel Castro. Chávez answered that when it came to U.S. imperialism they were of one mind, in complete solidarity.

But then he added: however, Fidel is a communist who believes in a one-party state headed by the communist party; I am a democrat to the left, believing in a multi-party state and free elections; Fidel is a Marxist who believes in the public, state sector of the economy only; I believe in a mixed economy, public and private; Fidel is an atheist, believing in scientific atheism; I am a Catholic and take note of the fact that Jesus lived among the poor.

Too dissonant for some Anglo-American minds to handle. Very meaningful in Latin America, however, particularly when so many leave the Catholic Church, joining the evangelicals.

The Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5, as a political programme: not lifting the bottom up to Heaven, but to a better reality in this world. Many countries have the oil money to do so, and the majority of poor to give them democratic legitimacy. But Chávez did it, inspiring and sharing with other Latin American leaders and peoples, and beyond, the world.

Is Venezuela economically sustainable? The economy is in trouble, there is a lack of investments, debt to the Chinese is piling up (a minor point as long as oil flows to China rather than to a U.S. now turning tar sands into sink holes).

The key factor is to make former marginalised, excluded slum dwellers contribute to the economy, strengthening both production, supply, and demand. Many feel threatened by the poor and the race factor, including Chávez himself: “Will they treat us the way we treated them?” And, will they outcompete us?

Some will sabotage — too late to kill Chávez, but maybe some of the economy. Many countries will feel threatened by poor countries coming up, for the same reasons and one more: will that inspire our own downtrodden people to do the same?

Could blacks in the U.S. and Gulf states be interested in a (con)federation with Caribbean countries populated the same way, by slavers from Liverpool?

Somebody is working 24/7 for Venezuela not to succeed, for sure. But it may be too late. The egg has been stood on its end, and it was Chávez who did it.

There are questions beyond Venezuela’s future on the horizon. It will be difficult for economists to stick to their trickling down illusions given Chávez’s bold moves. But positive discrimination is sometimes an indispensable shock therapy to lift up those in misery — women all over the world, non-whites, Malays in Malaysia, dalits in India, even if it “destroys market mechanisms” – for the short time it took to have an effect in Venezuela.

Economists should help with lifting up those at the bottom, including in countries that do not have oil wealth, not only to show the problems, but also because it will be difficult for Christian theologians to disregard this challenge: Jesus lived among the poor, not only preaching on the Mount, but feeding, nursing, comforting, with compassion, on earth.

Chávez was not a theologian entering that intellectual landscape, mined for two millennia where every step is wrong, for some, for many. He acted.

This eternal debate inside the church is by no means new, as Hans Kung writes in his superb “Is it time, at last, for a Vatican Spring?” (International Herald Tribune, Mar. 1, 2013). If not, says Kung, “the church will fall into a new ice age, shrinking into an increasingly irrelevant sect”.

Kung himself could turn it around, as pope, for the whole world. It will also be difficult for left wing extremists to see Fidel Castro’s line as the only possible one. Western democratic legitimacy, diverse-symbiotic economy and strong ethical motivation may carry us further.

But the West has a tendency to confuse violence with conflict, ceasefire and disarmament of “rebels” with solutions, multi-party electoral democracy with mediation; and the rule of law leaves out acts of omission and human rights leave out people’s rights. A genius makes us think, and act, differently, thereby making history. Chávez was one. Thank you, Hugo!

(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

Chávez and Castro in Havana's Revolution Square in February 2006, when Chávez was presented with the UNESCO José Martí Award. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Patricia Grogg
HAVANA, Mar 7 2013 (IPS)

Hugo Chávez of Venezuela was the president who made the most visits to Cuba, where flags are flying at half-mast in official mourning for his death Tuesday Mar. 5, and where his friend and political mentor, Fidel Castro, survives him.

The extremely close economic ties between the two countries arose from a comprehensive agreement signed Oct. 30, 2000, which gave Cuba access to the benefits of the Caracas Energy Cooperation Agreement for supplying oil and fuel on preferential terms also enjoyed by other countries in the Caribbean region.

Together with concerns over the possible economic repercussions of Chávez’s death in this Caribbean island nation, there was anxiety in some quarters over Castro’s health. “How sad, I wonder how Fidel is taking it,” said one woman buying the state newspaper Granma, which on Wednesday devoted six of its eight pages to Chávez.

“The first reaction, certainly, is the feeling of grief over the loss of a great Latin American leader and one of Cuba’s best friends in Venezuela,” essayist and researcher Carlos Alzugaray told IPS. “Personal, political and social” links between Cubans and Venezuelans “date from a long time ago,” he added.

Chávez promoted new kinds of participative processes, and “in spite of the aggressiveness that characterises Venezuela’s bourgeoisie, his attitude was always one of dialogue and he strengthened democracy in his country,” said Reina Fleitas, a university professor.

Based on the wishes of both governments to establish, sustain, develop and expand cooperation for their mutual benefit, making the most of the potential and comparative advantages of each country, a new style of political relations was established in the region, some analysts say.

Others hold the view that the Chávez government merely became a substitute for the aid from Moscow that was the backbone of the Cuban economy until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the worst effect of which was, precisely, the loss of oil supplies.
Venezuela is at present a key pillar of the Cuban economy, which receives between 90,000 and 100,000 barrels per day of crude from the South American country.

In exchange for this strategic supply, some 50,000 Cuban experts in education, health, sports and other fields, such as communications, intelligence and the military, are living and working in Venezuela.

Venezuela has thus become Cuba’s main trading partner, and trade has grown to more than three billion dollars a year.

Furthermore, around a hundred cooperation projects in different sectors of the economy are worth over 1.3 billion dollars, according to 2011 figures.

Given the importance of these ties, some segments of the Cuban population may be anxious about the possible economic consequences of Chávez’s death, Alzugaray said.

However, “it is highly probable that the continuers of Chavez’s policies will remain in government in Venezuela, since under his leadership there were strong demands and progressive, popular, left-wing political forces that have combined to form a powerful mass movement,” he said.

People should also understand that economic relations have become increasingly institutionalised and are beneficial to both countries, he said.

“I don’t think the opposition in Venezuela will be able to seize the leadership from Chávez’s followers in the short term, nor that they will be so irresponsible as to destroy Cuban-Venezuelan relations in the unlikely event that they do take power, which is only a possibility in the medium to long term but not in the immediate future,” he said.

Cuban journalist Boris Caro, who lives in Canada, said the impact of Chávez’s death would depend on the result of the forthcoming Venezuelan elections, which must be called within 30 days.

“If Nicolás Maduro – the interim president and Chávez’s anointed successor – defeats (opposition presidential candidate Henrique) Capriles, there will be no major changes to the rate of economic reforms on the island,” he wrote on the interactive section Café 108 on the IPS Cuba web site.

But an electoral victory for the opposition would bring the Cuban government to the verge of another energy crisis, he said. “Without the 90,000 barrels of oil per day subsidised by Caracas, the island’s economy would fall into even deeper recession,” he said.

Caro agreed with other sources in hoping that the Cuban authorities had a “Plan B”, since they were well aware that Chávez was expected to die. “They have had two years in which to prepare. Hopefully this new situation has not taken them by surprise,” he said.

Castro and Chávez met in Havana on Dec. 14, 1994, when Chávez, then leader of the Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement-200, visited the Cuban capital at the invitation of Eusebio Leal, the Havana City historian. He was met and embraced at the airport by then President Fidel Castro.

Eight months earlier, the young paratrooper lieutenant-colonel had been freed after serving two years in prison for leading a failed attempted coup against president Carlos Andrés Pérez (1974-1979 and 1989-1993), who restored diplomatic relations with Cuba in 1974 after they were broken off by Rómulo Betancourt in 1960.

The idea had been to make a discreet exploratory visit, but Castro took the reins and treated Chávez as a head of state. About the same time, Venezuelan president Rafael Caldera was publicly receiving Jorge Más Canosa, the rabidly anti-Castro head of the Cuban American National Foundation.

Eighteen years after their first meeting, Castro described his first conversations with Chávez as lasting for hours. “I was far from imagining that those soldiers branded as coup plotters by the news agencies, who sowed their ideas with so much discretion for years, were a select group of Bolivarian revolutionaries,” he wrote in a letter to Maduro.

Between 2006 and 2011, when word of Chávez’s ailment was made public, the Venezuelan president made a score of private, working and official visits to Cuba, which became opportunities for improvised discussions of bilateral, regional and international issues.

On one of those trips, in 2007, Chávez declared that “deep down, we are one government,” and that the two countries were advancing towards a “confederation of Bolivarian (after South American independence hero Simón Bolívar), Martían (after Cuba’s national hero José Martí), Caribbean and South American republics.”

Chávez chose to be treated in Cuba for the cancerous tumour that he announced had been diagnosed in June 2011 at the CIMEQ Hospital in Havana, where he underwent his fourth operation on Dec. 11, 2012.

During the convalescence of Castro, who became seriously ill in 2006, Chávez officiated as his international spokesman. And Castro, in turn, was attentive to the health of his Venezuelan guest right to the end. Two days of official mourning and a day of national mourning have been declared in Cuba from Wednesday to Friday.

Nicolás Maduro, seen here at the United Nations when he served as foreign minister, is virtually certain to emerge as Venezuela's next president. UN Photo/Mark Garten

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Mar 7 2013 (IPS)

While the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama says it would like to improve relations with Venezuela in the aftermath of the death Tuesday of President Hugo Chávez, officials and independent analysts here believe any rapprochement will take time and faces political obstacles both here and in Caracas.

Given the wave of sympathy from which his hand-picked successor is expected to benefit, as well renewed divisions among the major opposition parties and the degree of the government’s control over the electoral process and influence with the media, experts here also believe that Vice President Nicolás Maduro is virtually certain to emerge triumphant in an election that could take place as early as four weeks from now.If Maduro were to be elected and lead a government with a broad consensus, it is likely that relations with the U.S. would improve.

“The opposition lost in (the) October (presidential election) and lost again in the (regional elections) in December, and now they’re pointing blame at each other,” according to Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue (IAD), a Washington-based hemispheric think tank. “I think Maduro is in a very strong position.”

But, in order to secure his victory, the vice president will likely seek to consolidate his political base which shares their late leader’s anti-U.S. sentiment, according to analysts here.

On Tuesday, Maduro announced the expulsion of two U.S. military attaches charged with trying to destabilise the country and suggested that Washington may have played some role in infecting Chávez with his fatal cancer.

“The timing certainly made it look like Maduro was using (the charges against the military attaches), as well as the suggestion that Chávez’s cancer had been caused by a foreign conspiracy, to circle the wagons and create unity before what they knew was the imminent death of Chávez,” said David Smilde, a senior fellow at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), who moderates the Venezuela Politics and Human Rights Blog.

“I think yesterday was a part of an election campaign, and therefore not necessarily directly related to the process we’ve had of trying to improve the relationship,” one senior State Department official, who called the Maduro’s charges “outrageous”, told reporters in a teleconference Wednesday.

“(I)t may be a difficult campaign for many. We will no doubt continue to hear things about the United States that will not help improve this relationship,” the official, who insisted on not being identified by name, said.

Still, most observers believe that Maduro will be more willing to engage Washington on a number of issues than Chávez, who had initially welcomed Obama’s election in 2008 but quickly grew disillusioned with the new president and declared Washington’s ambassador in Caracas persona non grata in 2010.

For instance, in late November, Maduro reportedly conducted a cordial telephone conversation about possible ways to improve bilateral ties with Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemispheric Affairs Roberta Jacobson.

“If Maduro were to be elected and lead a government with a broad consensus, it is likely that relations with the U.S. would improve,” noted Smilde.

“On the one hand, Maduro is a negotiator and was significant in a breakthrough in diplomatic relations with Colombia. One can imagine a similar improvement with the U.S.,” he noted. “On the other hand, the conceptual anchor of Maduro’s ideology is an anti-imperialism in which the U.S. is the more important symbolic foil.

“Maduro will obviously have to govern in a very different way from Chávez. He doesn’t have the same charisma or appetite for control and power,” Shifter told IPS.

“He’s a union leader with a lot of experience in negotiations, so we’ll see a different style that could offer some opportunity for the United States – not to have a warm and close relationship with Venezuela but at least to open up channels of communication and have ambassadors in both capitals. That would be a step forward from what we have now.”

At the same time, however, Shifter warned that the White House itself will likely move very slowly, so as not to provoke right-wingers in Congress who greeted Chávez’s long-awaited demise with undiluted enthusiasm.

They called, among other things, for the administration to retaliate for the two expulsions, a step which State Department officials said they were reviewing Wednesday.

“Hugo Chávez was a tyrant who forced the people of Venezuela to live in fear,” said Rep. Ed Royce, who has just succeeded the fiercely anti-Chávez and anti-Castro Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen as chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “His death dents the alliance of anti-U.S. leftist leaders in South America. Good riddance to this dictator.”

“The problem on the U.S. side of the bilateral relationship is going to be some members of Congress who will be very critical of any sign of rapprochement between the administration and Maduro,” Shifter said. “And they’re not going to want to fight with members of Congress over Venezuela. So they’re going to try to explore these openings but will be quite cautious and careful about doing so.”

Indeed, despite Chávez’s hostility toward the U.S., which reached its zenith after the George W. Bush administration endorsed a failed coup attempt against him in 2002, strong trade relations never suffered during his 14-year tenure.

As noted by Shannon O’Neil, a senior fellow for Latin American studies at the influential Council on Foreign Relations, in an op-ed for BBC Wednesday, the U.S. buys more oil from Venezuela than any other country, while Caracas has been a major consumer of U.S. manufactured exports, particularly automobiles.

“(A)s subsequent Venezuelan governments look to adjust their economic policies in the coming months and years, the experience of their (South American) neighbours provide incentives to forge a more amicable bilateral relationship,” wrote O’Neil.

Since November’s exchange between Maduro and Jacobson, lower-level Venezuelan and U.S. officials have reportedly held occasional meetings in Washington to further explore opportunities for renewing cooperation in what the State Department official called “a little bit of a rocky road”.

“We didn’t really begin the substantive portion of those conversations, …so we really hadn’t gotten very far and were not sure whether the government of Venezuela wanted to continue that road when yesterday occurred,” the official added in reference to Chávez’s death.

The official suggested that possible cooperation on counter-narcotics, counter-terrorism, citizen security, and economic and commercial issues would serve the two countries’ mutual interests.

The official said Washington will likely send a delegation to Chávez’s funeral Friday and will push Caracas to permit international election monitors, as well as domestic groups, to observe the preparations for and the conduct of the upcoming elections.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

A huge crowd accompanied Chávez’s body Wednesday Mar. 6, 2013 from the Military Academy hospital. Credit: Agencia AVN

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Mar 6 2013 (IPS)

Part of the legacy left by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, who died Tuesday, was his determined struggle for the integration of Latin America independent of the standards and models of the industrialised North, and for the reinvigoration of left-wing radicalism in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Chávez forged ahead in the field left open by the end of the Cold War, using as a tool the oil and financial resources that he employed in an almost discretionary manner in Venezuela, and with a charisma and gift for communication not seen in a leftist leader since Cuba’s Fidel Castro.

“When it seemed that Castro’s leadership abilities would not be seen again, Chávez showed up to display a new manifestation of the radical left and encourage that tendency throughout the region,” Carlos Romero, director of graduate studies in political science at the Central and Simón Bolívar universities in Caracas, told IPS.

Elected and re-elected several times as president of Venezuela since 1998, Chávez “felt called upon by destiny to follow the path of (independence hero) Simón Bolívar and be a kind of revolutionary leader in the world against the empire, the United States – something more rhetorical than practical,” Demetrio Boersner, who taught diplomacy and political science to several generations in Venezuela, told IPS.

His election preceded that of Evo Morales in Bolivia, Rafael Correa in Ecuador and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, whose countries are partners of Venezuela, Cuba and several Caribbean island nations in the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA).

He was also in power before the current and former left-leaning governments of Venezuela’s allies in the Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR), an integration scheme in which Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay were joined by Venezuela after Chávez pulled the country out of the Andean Community, made up of Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru.

In the international arena, Chávez “leaves several big assets, like the projection of his political approach not only in the region but also reaching out to distant countries, encouraging other actors, like Russia and China, to get more involved in this region,” Romero said.

“Another was the integration, with ideas that were not necessarily correct but were novel, based on more authentic models than those promoted by the West,” he said.

Besides founding ALBA, Chávez played a key role in the creation of the recently established South American Community of Nations (UNASUR) and Community of Latin American and Caribbean State (CELAC), and of the regional Latin American TV network Telesur, the Banco del Sur (Bank of the South), and an incipient regional currency, the sucre, to facilitate intra-regional trade without the need for euros or dollars.

A third asset was “the use of oil as a key instrument of cooperation, as Petrocaribe used it, to balance the national accounts and boost the energy capacity of many countries in the region,” Romero said.

Petrocaribe supplies 18 countries in the region with Venezuelan oil on easy payment terms,” and should be maintained and improved as a cooperation scheme,” Boersner said.

But the academic drew a line, saying “Chávez talked about integration, but with his ideological intransigence, he tended to divide nations and governments into two blocs, supposedly made up of good guys on the left and bad guys on the right.”

By doing so, “Chávez became the heir to the ideas of Soviet-type bureaucratic collectivism, whose failure was demonstrated by the fall of the Berlin Wall, but which survived in Cuba, precisely under his mentor and inspiration, Fidel Castro,” Boersner said.

Romero said Chávez managed to “reinvigorate Marxist radicalism in Latin America, but with populist and authoritarian elements mixed in. But with that he managed to confront (free market) liberalism and social democracy in the region.”

Former Salvadoran guerrilla fighter Joaquín Villalobos wrote in the Spanish newspaper El País that Chávez was “the first left-wing leader with revolutionary aims to have an enormous amount of cash at his disposal. Other populist experiments did not enjoy such a lengthy boom period, and the communist countries were never rich.”

Chávez was always able to back up his integrationist or redemptive message with funds, whether they went to health or literacy programmes, refineries in Brazil, Nicaragua or Ecuador, fuel for poor neighbourhoods in the United States, military cooperation, food purchases or loans to businesses far outside of Venezuela’s borders.

Romero believes it is still too early to say who will pick up the baton as a new reference point for Latin America’s left, while Boersner says there are still “two lefts” in the region.

“One would fit with social democracy, with a capitalist economy but with a social redistribution of income, as in the case of Brazil and Uruguay, and the other was represented by Chávez, the heir to the bureaucratic collectivism that failed,” said Boersner.

The image or even silhouette of Chávez, who was prone to hours-long, vigorous speeches in favour of the poor and against imperialism and the elites, are increasingly visible all over, on posters, t-shirts and on-line social networks, as symbols of the Latin American left.

Hugo Chávez greeting a little girl in a campaign rally. Credit: Carabobo Comando in the 2012 election campaign.

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Mar 6 2013 (IPS)

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez died Tuesday in the Military Hospital of Caracas after a long battle with cancer in his abdominal region, which was diagnosed in June 2011.

Born on Jul. 28, 1954 in Sabaneta, a small town in Venezuela’s southwestern plains, Chávez was the second of the six sons born to rural schoolteachers Hugo de los Reyes Chávez and Elena Frías.

Raised mainly by his grandmother, the young Hugo was passionately devoted to baseball. At the age of 17, after graduating from high school, he entered the Military Academy.

As a lieutenant in the army, he founded the Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement-200, a political and social movement, in 1982, influenced by his older brother Adán, an active member of the Venezuelan Revolution Party headed by guerrilla leader Douglas Bravo.

Chávez first made history on Feb. 4, 1992, when he surrendered after leading a failed uprising by several army battalions against then president Carlos Andrés Pérez (1974-1979 and 1989-1993).

Wearing combat fatigues and a red paratrooper’s beret and walking calmly among the jittery officers who arrested him, he gave an improvised 70-second speech addressing his fellow troops involved in the uprising, which had an immediate impact on millions of Venezuelans watching the live TV coverage.

“Lamentably, for now, our objectives were not achieved…But the country has to take the road to a better destiny, and I assume responsibility…for this Bolivarian movement,” he said, calling for his companions to lay down their arms to avoid further bloodshed.

Instead of blood, ink ran, as analysts discussed how, in a country where millions of people were marginalised from the oil economy and where leaders who acknowledged the shortcomings of the political system were lacking, a young army officer had assumed responsibility for the attempted coup in the name of a movement that invoked independence hero Simón Bolívar (1783-1830).

Chávez’s legend was thus born, and his popularity began to grow. After spending two years in prison he was pardoned by then president Rafael Caldera (1969-1974 and 1994-1999) of COPEI, Venezuela’s Christian Democratic party, and began to travel the country raising hopes of a new uprising.

But in 1996, on the advice of veteran left-wing politicians like Luis Miquilena, his political mentor, he decided to seek power at the polls.

Chávez founded the Fifth Republic Movement (MVR), which grew and grew while the traditional parties that had ruled since 1959 went into decline. He won the Dec. 6, 1998 presidential elections with 56 percent of the vote.

In 15 other elections held between 1999 and 2012, the proportion of voters who backed Chávez and his supporters remained fairly steady at that level. From the start, his main voting base was made up of the poor.

The hope of the poor

To the economic, social and cultural reasons that explain this support were added “the hope of justice that lives always in the depths of the soul of the poor,” as well as Chávez’s charisma, former socialist leader Teodoro Petkoff told IPS.

People of “mestizo” or mixed-race heritage identified easily with Chávez, who looked like them. Other aspects of his charismatic personality were a casual, accessible approach, a powerful stage presence and commanding voice, and a speaking style that at times had a trace of the preacher. His speeches were splattered with references to Bolívar and to the independence and land reform struggles of the 19th century.

Since taking power, he made 2,200 nationwide broadcasts and nearly 400 editions of his Sunday show “Aló Presidente”, where he discussed political questions, aspects of his military career, or history, largely unscripted and for several hours, in colloquial language.

Chávez supported left-wing causes and governments throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, had a close alliance with Cuba, and described Fidel Castro as his mentor.

He had the constitution rewritten and approved by voters in 1999 and amended in 2009.

In 2001, land laws aimed at redistributing unused rural property unleashed a backlash from the moneyed classes and prompted constant protest marches by Venezuelans calling for him to step down.

On Apr. 11, 2002, the largest opposition march to date ended with gunfire near the house of government that claimed the lives of 19 people and left many more injured – an incident that was never clarified.

The military high command, backed by powerful civilian elites, staged a coup against Chávez, and Pedro Carmona, the head of Fedecámaras – the main business association – was declared president and immediately dissolved most of Venezuela’s democratic institutions, including Congress.

But loyal members of the military, along with tens of thousands of supporters who surrounded the government palace and military institutions in Caracas, put Chávez back in power less than 48 hours after he was ousted.

In late 2002 and early 2003, a lockout by top management of the PDVSA oil company and by private firms aimed at toppling Chávez caused extensive damage to the economy. But the two-month business shutdown failed and the country’s democratic institutions remained stable.

In August 2004, the opposition organised a recall referendum asking Venezuelans whether Chávez should leave office immediately. But 59 percent of voters said he should continue to govern, in a transparent vote overseen by the Organisation of American States and the Carter Centre, among other observers.

With support from Cuba, the Chávez administration introduced a broad range of social programmes, known as “missions”, bringing healthcare, dental care, education, subsidised food, literacy programmes and direct financial aid to the poor, along with employment and housing plans, outside of the traditional bureaucratic channels.

According to the World Bank, between 1999 and 2012, poverty was reduced to 28.5 percent, from at least double that. In addition, per capita GDP increased from 4,105 dollars to 10,810 dollars in 2011, according to World Bank figures.

After his re-election in December 2006, the president stepped up his verbal and diplomatic confrontation with the United States, forged closer ties with countries outside the region like Russia, China and Iran, broke off relations with Israel, and declared that his aim was “21st century socialism”.

Chávez invariably defined himself as Bolivarian, to the point that he officially named the country the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, and used the term in the names of his works and proposals. But he also described himself as Christian, humanist, Marxist, socialist, anti-imperialist, pro-indigenous and pro-worker.

The high price of oil, which accounts for 40 percent of Venezuela’s budget revenue, made it possible for him to nationalise a number of companies and place the economy under tight controls, starting with exchange controls. But he failed to curb the heavy dependence on the importation of foodstuffs or Venezuelans’ rampant consumerism.

After a new constitutional reform was voted down in 2007 by a narrow majority, he had to wait until 2009 to push through the possibility of indefinite re-election for the presidency and other posts.

Long before, in a brief conversation with IPS in 2003, Chávez had said that he did not want to govern forever, “just for two terms, until January 2013, and after that another revolutionary will do so.”

But he changed his mind later, arguing that he needed to stay in power in order to usher in the necessary changes, saying the constant shifts in administration in Latin America and the Caribbean had thwarted similar initiatives.

His effort to be elected to a fourth term apparently had an impact on his health. Doctors said it was extremely negative for him to dedicate himself to the government and the election campaign simultaneously in 2011 and 2012, while neglecting his health.

Only in extremis, after his health took a turn for the worse in December 2012, did he decide to name a chosen successor: Nicolás Maduro, his candidate to replace him in the presidency.

The first big question mark is whether his political heirs will inherit the leadership role and popular support he enjoyed for 20 years, 14 of them in the government.

Another question is whether “Chavismo” will give rise to a strong political movement, along the lines of Peronism in Argentina after the death of Juan Domingo Perón (1895-1974), or whether Chávez will become a cult figure for the left like Argentine-Cuban guerrilla Ernesto “Che” Guevara (1928-1967).

Chávez frequently said that when he reached old age he imagined himself retired, under the shade of a tree on the Venezuelan plains where he was born, teaching children, and perhaps cultivating one of his passions: the “copla” music of the plains region.

A born warrior, a “simple soldier” as he liked to say, with combat terms always on hand to explain any situation, who defeated almost all of his rivals, a true winner in politics, Chávez was unable to win the final battle against cancer that brought him down at the age of 58.

Governments of countries in the Americas are relying on the passage of time and a relatively peaceful political atmosphere to sort out the unprecedented institutional situation in Venezuela, whose ailing president Hugo Chávez is out of the country, while the executive team tasked with carrying out his former mandate continues in office.

The attitude of these states apparently explains their prompt acceptance of the premise that Chávez’s government is a continuation of his previous term of office, which has been backed by a Supreme Court decision. However, some countries have hinted that it would be better if new elections were called to legitimise the new order.

“Criticisms from the opposition in Venezuela and from a large number of legal experts, contending that the steps taken are contrary to the constitution, have not been echoed by any country,” Carlos Romero, a professor of postgraduate studies in political science and international relations at several Venezuelan universities, told IPS.

Elsa Cardozo, head of the School of Liberal Studies at the Metropolitan University in Caracas, held similar views. The countries of the hemisphere “are witnessing a situation that is obviously not normal, but they prefer to wait and let time pass, while saying that it is not up to them to interpret the Venezuelan constitution,” she told IPS.

The first aspect of the situation, said Cardozo, is that the re-elected president is seriously ill and is undergoing treatment for cancer. He is convalescing in Havana from his fourth surgery since June 2011.

Chávez was re-elected in October to his fourth term of office, and was due to be sworn in on Jan. 10. Instead, Nicolás Maduro, the vice president (who, in Venezuela, is appointed by the president rather than elected by popular vote), inaugurated the six-year term with the tacit blessing of the Supreme Court, accompanied by the previous cabinet of ministers, while the single-chamber legislature declined to declare the president absent.

If the legislature had declared the president absent, the speaker of the Venezuelan parliament, Diosdado Cabello, would have taken over as interim president and new presidential elections would have been called immediately.

In contrast, according to the ruling of the Supreme Court and the view of parliament, there is no deadline for Chávez’s swearing-in as president for the 2013-2019 term.

Cardozo said, “Foreign countries do not buy the idea that there is no deadline. Spokespersons from Brazil, Colombia and the United States have said that as soon as advisable, if President Chávez is unable to return to his post, elections should be called.”

In her view, the United States particularly will maintain “a low profile” with respect to Venezuela, because “it clearly understands that for a number of (reasons), its words could well be counterproductive.”

Romero agrees with Cardozo that “with the start of new government terms in the United States and Venezuela”, Washington’s priorities are aimed rather at reestablishing diplomatic relations at ambassador level and “a climate of normality, so that U.S. capital can participate in the oil industry and the countries can work together against drug trafficking.”

As for Latin America and the Caribbean, the experts concur that there is no uniform position with respect to the situation in Venezuela.

Romero divides countries into three groups. The first is made up of the closest political allies, like Cuba, Bolivia, Ecuador and Uruguay “that explicitly support continuity and the consolidation of Chávez’s policies, and believe there should be no going back on the changes effected so far.”

“A second group – the majority – whose most visible exponents are Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Peru, do not necessarily support Chavist domestic and international policies, but they do not want any kind of disorder, nor for the president’s absence to cause political instability or military unrest,” he said.

Street protests against the government formula led by Maduro have been few and far between, mounted almost exclusively by groups of students, while armed forces commanders have stated that they will not only obey, but will also enforce, the decisions of parliament and the Supreme Court.

According to Romero, the third group is comprised of “countries that wash their hands” of the whole business. “They do not have marked affinity or common interests with the Chávez administration, but they prefer to keep quiet rather than act, and this group includes Guatemala, Panama, Mexico and Chile,” he said.

Attending a mass rally held Jan. 10 in front of the presidential palace, presidents Evo Morales of Bolivia, Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, Desiré Delano Bouterse of Suriname and José Mujica of Uruguay, along with high-level representatives of Argentina, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Haiti and St. Vincent and the Grenadines showed their support for the continuity of the mandate and for Maduro’s leadership.

Later on, messages acknowledging the Venezuelan government leadership formula arrived from all over the continent. The official line, without there ever having been an official medical bulletin about his state of health, is that Chávez, convalescing in Havana, continues “in the full exercise of his functions” as president, while his reinauguration for a new term of office is pending.

Meanwhile, Maduro is in practice the head of government, but although he receives recognition as such, he refuses to be called the acting or interim president.

A kind of collegial government is operating, with consultations and joint public appearances by Maduro, Cabello, Rafael Ramírez, president of the state oil company PDVSA, and Elías Jaua, foreign minister and former vice president.

Completing the political scenario, the leaders closest to Chávez, especially those in public office, travel continually to Havana where, according to their reports, they visit the ailing president, and also meet with historic Cuban leader Fidel Castro, his brother Cuban president Raúl Castro, and several ministers.

Among those who have travelled to Havana in order to gain first-hand information about the situation in Venezuela are Argentine president Cristina Fernández, Peruvian president Ollanta Humala, and Marco Aurélio García, the influential foreign policy adviser to Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff.

Brazilian officials told the press that the Rousseff administration has suggested that Venezuelan leaders hold elections “as soon as possible” if Chávez dies or becomes incapable of carrying out his presidential functions.

On Jan. 17, Brazilian foreign minister Antonio Patriota said: “We trust the situation in Venezuela, whatever the outcome, will evolve according to the institutions with minimal shock, so that Venezuelan society can reorganise itself as quickly as possible.”

Outgoing U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton met with Colombian Foreign Minister María Ángela Holguín in Washington on Jan. 15, and they concluded that “a political transition of any kind needs to happen in accordance with the Venezuelan constitution and needs to be democratic”, according to the state department spokeswoman.

A few days later, Holguín came to Caracas for talks with Maduro and Jaua about joint programmes for the development of border areas, she said, and to wish Chávez a speedy recovery, but she did not refer to any “transition” in Venezuela.

Maduro and Jaua will be able to gauge regional perceptions of the Venezuelan situation more directly and privately when they attend the summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) and the European Union-CELAC summit, to be held in Santiago de Chile Jan. 25-27.

(END)

Chávez created ALBA, described by analysts as "an alternative project to capitalist globalisation." Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jan 12 2013 (IPS)

A lot of water has passed under the bridge in Latin America since Hugo Chávez first took office as president of Venezuela in 1999, with left-wing and centre-left governments coming to power and the emergence of paths toward integration that exclude the United States.

The regional identity that Chávez has been instrumental in building is now suffering the vicissitudes of uncertainty arising from the Venezuelan leader’s serious illness. Chávez, re-elected Oct. 7 for the period 2013-2019, is in Cuba convalescing from his fourth surgery for a cancer diagnosed in June 2011.

The folkloric spectrum of the left in all its ideological shades is reflected in the region, from the Cuban model that adapted and survived, and has the support of Chávez, to newer manifestations like “Kirchnerism” in Argentina, “Lulaism” in Brazil, and the movements led by presidents Evo Morales of Bolivia, Rafael Correa of Ecuador, and former guerrillas Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua and José Mujica in Uruguay.

Brazilian peasant leader Joao Pedro Stédile, of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) which is allied to Chávez for land reform projects, said that when the Venezuelan president came to power it was “the beginning of the defeat of neoliberalism (free market dogma) in Latin America”.

“After he took office, a wave surged all over the continent. And the people, aware of the evils of neoliberal policies, elected anti-neoliberal candidates in the majority of the countries,” he told IPS.

Chávez laid the first foundations for an alternative for the region, quoting emblematic figures like Simón Bolívar, Ernesto “Che” Guevara and Juan Velasco Alvarado, who inspired his obsession with creating a common front in Latin America outside the U.S.-proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).

The Venezuelan president founded the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), described by Stédile as “an alternative project to capitalist globalisation”, and he worked tirelessly to strengthen other integration instruments like the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC).

International analyst Sébastien Dube, of Diego Portales University in Chile, said Chávez had played a “determining” role.

“His leadership role was at a level no Venezuelan and very few Latin American leaders had ever reached before on the regional and international stage. He played a key role in the failure of the FTAA; he questioned the weak institutions of the inter-American system; and he proposed an alternative project to the neoliberal model, taking advantage of the limits of the latter,” he said.

Although “his own project, ALBA, shows more signs of failure than of success, Chávez’s radical criticisms have had the effect of legitimising and opening up spaces for moderate leftwing leaders (like former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, 2003-2011) to criticise the neoliberal model and for their voices to be heard,” he said.

Venezuela has also joined the Southern Common Market (Mercosur), originally made up of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, seeing it as having potential for the economic integration of all of South America.

“Venezuela was already committed to integration before Chávez came to power, but he was decisive in turning the country’s gaze toward the Southern Cone of South America, instead of only looking toward the Andean countries,” Gabriel Puricelli, head of the Laboratorio de Políticas Públicas (LPP), a progressive think tank in Argentina, said in an interview with IPS.

This commitment was also essential in Venezuela’s help to regional neighbours during economic crises, such as Argentina’s debt bond placements and fuel oil imports.

Chávez’s Venezuela also supplied oil to other friendly countries like Cuba, Uruguay and Nicaragua, a clear demonstration of the traditional concept of “revolutionary solidarity between peoples,” or economic “complementarity” in less politically loaded terms.

Social researcher Roberto Laserna, who studies democracy and development in Bolivia, told IPS that Chávez’s financial support contributed “decisively to shape Morales’ presidential ‘caudillismo’ (charismatic populism and personalist style of government).”

Laserna reasoned that this support allowed Morales enough available funds, free from budget restrictions, tendering and project approval proceedings, for a government programme called “Bolivia Cambia, Evo Cumple” (Bolivia Changes, Evo Delivers).

“Those funds and projects have been used to maintain a sort of permanent electoral campaign with personal canvassing in different parts of the country,” he said.

The “Bolivarian” model was politically driven, as is reflected in Chávez’s support for peace talks in Colombia, but oil was also an essential factor.

International Chilean analyst Guillermo Holzmann said the model “has a characteristic that is by no means unimportant: it is one of only a few that have the resources to finance a revolution like the one Chávez is building.

“He has been able to forge alliances by virtue of the resources he can offer, in order to maintain a sort of integration based on cooperation, which often favours the poorest countries, but in practice does not lead to a productive integration,” he told IPS.

With stronger economies, like Brazil’s, Venezuela has applied the principle of “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.” Big Brazilian infrastructure companies operate in Venezuela, and energy projects with the Venezuelan state oil company have been announced in Brazil.

Brazil, regarded by the United States as the barometer of the Latin American left, showed its gratitude through foreign policy actions. Not only did it chaperone Venezuela’s entry to Mercosur, but it was also the first country publicly to support the extension of Chávez’s mandate when it became apparent he would not be able to take the oath of office for his new term on the appointed date, Jan 10.

Integration under its own steam

With the prospect of Chávez’s possible absence from the front line, as well as Lula taking a back seat, and the death of former Argentine president Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007), a highly influential trio at the 2005 summit that said “No to FTAA” appear to have left the scene. The big question now is whether integration can make it under its own steam.

In Holzmann’s view, the case of Argentina has shown that “‘Kirchnerism’ can survive without him,” as a force to structure political and economic proposals.

“Lula’s model has also managed to survive and undergo significant development. So much so that when we add in Chavism, we see them together in UNASUR and Mercosur,” he said.

“In spite of the fact that neither Brazil nor Argentina belongs to ALBA, they do have a pragmatic relationship with Caracas on trade matters, and they deal with ideological issues case by case. Clearly, the existence of Venezuela, with Chávez or even without him, is advantageous to Argentina and Brazil according to their own lights,” he said.

Dube concurred, but from a different point of view. “The problems of Latin American integration go further than the roles or the obstacles put in place by each of the political leaders,” he said.

According to Puricelli, the future of regional integration as well as other integration processes depends more on “the devil in the details of regional trade” than on “visible political leadership.”

However, Stédile maintains that Chávez’s leadership has played a vital role. “His personality and determination have set a fast pace without hesitation for necessary changes,” he said.

The peasant leader said he is confident that there will be continuity in Venezuela.

“As we all know, popular leaders have a fundamental role to play in history, but they cannot effect changes on their own. Chávez knows this, which is why throughout his political career he has always promoted and stimulated popular organisations and mass movements as the necessary political forces to build an alternative social project,” he said.

*With additional reporting from Marianela Jarroud in Santiago, Franz Chávez in La Paz and Sebastián Lacunza in Buenos Aires.

Venezuela has entered a political transition marked by uncertainty over President Hugo Chávez's future. Credit: Ukberri.Net/CC-BY-2.0

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Jan 9 2013 (IPS)

While Hugo Chávez is being treated for serious illness in Havana, the premise of government “continuity” is winning out in his home country, along with plans to postpone his swearing-in ceremony for a new term as president of Venezuela, due to take place on Thursday Jan. 10.

Venezuela has entered a sort of political transition marked by uncertainty over Chávez’s future, with tension, fencing and occasional bluffing between his civilian and military supporters, his opponents and the interests of his international allies.

Appearing jointly before supporters, Vice President Nicolás Maduro and Diosdado Cabello, the president of the single-chamber legislature, maintained that Chávez would continue to serve as president of Venezuela despite the “formality” of the date set for his swearing-in for the 2013-2019 six-year term.

Their insistence that Chávez is “fully exercising” his presidential office can be explained, according to analysts, by their loyalty and also by the need to buy time so that his political heirs can successfully take up the reins of the country.

Chávez, who was diagnosed with cancer of the pelvic region in June 2011 and has been recovering since Dec. 11 from his fourth surgery, has a “lung infection” and “severe respiratory insufficiency,” according to government announcements.

“The plan is to buy time while Maduro is groomed as a second Chávez,” in case new presidential elections are called this year, political commentator Eduardo Semtei told IPS.

Maduro, Cabello and other close collaborators of Chávez met in private in Havana in the closing days of 2012 and the first few days of this year, where they presumably discussed the strategy to be followed while the re-elected president remains on his sick-bed.

The Brazilian presidential adviser on foreign policy, Marco Aurélio Garcia, after meeting Maduro, historic Cuban leader Fidel Castro and Cuban President Raúl Castro on Dec. 31 in Havana, said he had received assurances that, should Chávez remain absent, “there is constitutional provision” and “there will not be political instability in Venezuela”.

Article 231 of the constitution stipulates: “The candidate elected shall take office as President of the Republic on January 10 of the first year of his constitutional term, by taking an oath before the National Assembly (parliament).

“If for any supervening reason, the person elected President of the Republic cannot be sworn in before the National Assembly, he shall take the oath of office before the Supreme Tribunal of Justice (Supreme Court),” the constitution says.

Maduro and Cabello’s proposal is that if Chávez cannot be sworn into office before parliament on Thursday Jan. 10, he can do so later on before the Supreme Court.

In this case “the constitution does not say when or where” he should do this. “This means the re-elected president is in possession of his office; he has express permission from parliament to receive treatment for his health, and when he is able to do so he will take the oath when he is already functioning as president,” Maduro explained.

Cabello, for his part, told a rally of supporters: “Chávez is still the president and he will continue to be beyond Jan. 10. Anyone who opposes this will be met by the people in the streets and they will rue the day they were born, because we will be here knee to the ground, our rifles to our shoulders and bayonets fixed.”

According to the constitution, in the case of “absolute absence” of the president-elect – expert lawyers consider that this includes failure to be sworn in, although others disagree – the president of parliament (Cabello) must take over as head of the executive branch and new elections need to be called within 30 days.

When Chávez left for Cuba on Dec. 8, he said, “As the constitution says, if there is any supervening circumstance that prevents me from carrying on, Nicolás Maduro must not only serve out this period (2007-2013) but when new presidential elections have to be called, my irrevocable opinion is that you should elect Nicolas Maduro as the president.”

In the view of Enrique Sánchez, a professor of constitutional law at the Central University of Venezuela, “swearing-in is an essential requirement for taking possession of the office” of president.

“Chávez will cease to be president at the end of the 2007-2013 period, and he must take office for the following term. It can hardly be said to be a formality, when the constitution dictates the starting date of the term of office,” he said.

“If Vice President Maduro remains in his post after Jan. 10, without an express order from Chávez, we would have a situation of usurpation of presidential functions, that is, a coup d’état,” Sánchez told IPS.

The opposition coalition Mesa de Unidad Democrática (MUD, Coalition for Democratic Unity) said “the premise of continuity violates the constitution.” They said an independent medical panel should review and certify Chávez’s state of health and accused Cabello and Maduro of “trying to cover up his infirmity with the virulence of their discourse.”

MUD coordinator Ramón Guillermo Aveledo wrote to the secretary general of the Organisation of American States, José Miguel Insulza, warning that “continuity” would violate the constitution and the Inter-American Democratic Charter.

Meanwhile, Catholic bishop Diego Padrón, the president of the Venezuelan episcopal conference, said after a meeting of the bishops that the constitution is clear that one presidential term ends and another begins on Jan. 10. “Altering the constitution to achieve a political goal is morally unacceptable,” the bishops said in a statement. “The nation’s political and social stability is at serious risk.”

While opposition groups discuss tactics in the face of the alleged violation of the constitution, the governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) remains unyielding, and its leaders have rejected calls for dialogue to formulate solutions in concert with opposition lawmakers.

If it comes to the crunch, the Supreme Court is expected to rule in favour of Maduro’s administration. A good number of its judges are politically identified with the governing party and will back the executive branch in their decisions.

As for the armed forces, their commanders have reiterated their loyalty to Chávez’s leadership, programme and decisions. Dozens of active and retired members of the military have high office in public administration and 11 were elected governors only three weeks ago as PSUV candidates.

Analysts linked to the opposition maintain that the Maduro-Cabello duo represent the main groups, civil and military respectively, competing for power. They say their show of unity, with the leaders constantly hugging each other in public, is maintained at present only in order to prevent the party ranks from becoming demoralised.

Cabello has called for a mass rally to be held in front of the government palace on Thursday Jan. 10, which will be attended by allies of Chávez in order to lend support to Maduro. Uruguayan President José Mujica will be the first to arrive in Caracas on Wednesday Jan. 9, followed by Bolivian President Evo Morales.

(END)

When 12 Colombian soldiers were killed by FARC insurgents a stone’s throw away from the northern border with Venezuela, the consequences included military cooperation that reinforces the political, diplomatic and trade-related links that have developed over the past two years between Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos and Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.

Santos said that after the attack on Monday he spoke to Chávez, who immediately “ordered the deployment of two brigades to the border zone, with instructions to try to locate” the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) column that attacked a Colombian army unit.

“If they manage to find them, they will capture them. If they resist, they will open fire. They will shoot them down,” Santos said.

He said Chávez told him over the phone, “Our position is the same as it has been since you and I restored dialogue (in August 2010, when Santos took office as president) and we began our cooperation: we will not tolerate incursions by any illegal armed force, whatever its nature, into Venezuelan territory.”

The left-wing Venezuelan president said on television that his government would not allow “irregular groups, whatever side they are on, to use Venezuela as a camping site, a training ground, or a base to attack forces of other countries, in this case Colombia.

“We cannot allow ourselves to be mixed up in a conflict that is not our own,” Chávez said.

The attack took place at dawn on Monday May 21, in Colombian territory but very close to Guana, a Venezuelan village of 300 people located 200 metres from the border in the northern peninsula of La Guajira.

A Venezuelan army contingent was in position there by sunset.

The people of Guana, still frightened by the intense gunfire and explosions, spent several nights away from their homes, staying in nearby villages, the local press reported.

“Santos has persuaded Chávez to start pursuing the guerrillas. Now Chávez will ask Santos to pursue the criminal gangs (based in Colombia) smuggling gasoline, trafficking drugs and engaging in extortion rackets” in Venezuela, said Ariel Ávila, head of the Armed Conflict Observatory of the Bogotá think tank Corporación Nuevo Arco Iris (CNAI).

In Ávila’s view, Chávez’s decision is “a setback” for the FARC, because “the guerrillas need a rearguard territory to retreat to.” He said “cooperation between the armed forces of the two countries will mean the FARC will be hit hard,” as well as the other Colombian left-wing insurgent group, the smaller National Liberation Army (ELN).

Colombian Defence Minister Juan Carlos Pinzón said the FARC unit responsible for the attack “has probably been based in Venezuela for a considerable time.”

General Sergio Mantilla, the Colombian army chief, said the FARC rebels “presumably came from Venezuela and fled back there” after the attack.

Mantilla said he had personally verified that the body of one of the dead soldiers was in Colombian territory, barely 150 metres from the boundary between the Colombian department (province) of La Guajira and the Venezuelan state of Zulia.

These statements have not been denied by the Venezuelan authorities.

Venezuelan opposition leaders like presidential candidate Henrique Capriles and Zulia state Governor Pablo Pérez have said it has long been known that Colombian irregulars operate all along the border.

“Why is the Venezuelan army not fulfilling its primary function of guarding the border?” asked Pérez, while Capriles maintained that “the places where the FARC operates in our border states are known, and the government is complicit in this situation.”

In the past few years, IPS correspondents visiting Venezuelan border areas to report on problems facing indigenous communities, shopkeepers or Colombian refugees have gathered testimonies about the presence of guerrillas or far-right paramilitaries from Colombia.

Rocío San Miguel, head of Citizen’s Control for Security, Defence and the Armed Forces, a Venezuelan NGO, told IPS that earlier cooperation mechanisms “have not worked because they did not give rise to clear and effective instructions that could be followed by middle-ranking officers of military units.

“This is apparent from the (Venezuelan) response arising from a telephone conversation between the presidents,” San Miguel said.

However, “the Venezuelan military deployment on the border is not credible,” she argued.

“The Venezuelan defence minister, General Henry Rangel, has talked of mobilising up to 140,000 troops, when the strength of the country’s entire armed forces is 124,000,” she said.

“The only way to address the problem in a consistent fashion is through effective cooperation between units led by middle-ranking officers, with permanent patrolling, and cooperation on intelligence and communications with the Colombian side, instead of sporadic actions,” said San Miguel.

The military cooperation against the guerrillas comes on top of agreements between Chávez and Santos on trade, which have paved the way for Venezuela’s pending debt to Colombian exporters to be paid, as well as reciprocal arrangements for handing over people wanted for drug trafficking and insurgency.

Colombia and Venezuela have also entered into a diplomatic understanding, in particular to buttress the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), which brings together the 12 countries of the region.

Their amicable relationship apparently continues to flourish, in spite of the ideological differences between the two presidents which led to confrontation in the past.

When the conservative Santos was defence minister in the government of former right-wing president Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010), Chávez described the Colombian guerrilla groups as “political forces with a Bolivarian ideology” and said they deserved the status of legitimate belligerents because they “control territory” in Colombia. (END)

After Colombia’s attorney general announced that she was bringing charges against a former government peace commissioner for his role in a staged surrender of a fake guerrilla unit, he called for an investigation of her husband – which she promptly ordered.

Saying she “cannot be blackmailed,” attorney general Viviane Morales launched an investigation of her husband, former guerrilla and former senator Carlos Alonso Lucio.

She had announced on Monday that her office would seek the arrest of Luis Carlos Restrepo, a former high peace commissioner under then president Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010).

According to Restrepo, Morales “lashed back because I know a secret story about her husband.”

Restrepo will face charges for the case of Cacica Gaitana, which according to military intelligence was a Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) unit that operated in the central province of Tolima.

The Cacica Gaitana unit demobilised with great fanfare on Mar. 7, 2006 in the middle of the campaign for the re-election of Uribe, and even surrendered a plane that was supposedly used by FARC founder Manuel Marulanda, who died in 2008.

A U.S. embassy cable leaked by the whistleblower website WikiLeaks, dated Mar. 22, 2006, raised doubts about the “veracity” of the demobilisation, and said Restrepo “was warmly congratulated by senior military officials.”

The Cacica Gaitana unit in fact never existed. The demobilisation of some 70 purported guerrillas was a farce that received wide media coverage. Around 15 of them were FARC deserters, and the rest were unemployed or homeless people recruited for the fake surrender operation.

The “leader” of the false unit, alias Saldaña, had been in prison for two years. Part of the weapons surrendered apparently came from a cache of the far-right paramilitary militias, and the plane had been in government custody since 2003.

“Unemployed people were picked up, armed, given military supplies and instructed about FARC ideas, and then they ‘surrendered’,” José Alfredo Pacheco, a former FARC insurgent who took part in the farce told La FM radio station in 2008. “Demobilisations of this kind have always been carried out in coordination with the army.”

After a 10-month investigation, the attorney general’s office plans to issue an arrest warrant for Restrepo on Jan. 20 and charge him with fraud, conspiracy to commit a crime, and trafficking of arms.

Army colonels Hugo Castellanos and Jaime Ariza will also be accused, along with Pacheco and other participants, and drug trafficker Hugo Rojas – now in prison in the United States, where he was extradited – who reportedly financed the sham with between 500,000 and one million dollars.

Retired Colonel Castellanos was the liaison officer between then peace commissioner Restrepo and the defence ministry, to deal with the demobilisations of paramilitaries and guerrillas that were frequent during the Uribe administration. And Colonel Ariza was regional head of military intelligence in Tolima.

Restrepo said military intelligence informed him in 2006 of the imminent demobilisation of the Cacica Gaitana unit, and added that the report was “confirmed by then army chief (General) Mario Montoya,” who assigned a helicopter to carry reporters to cover the event.

He also said “the high command were there. What were they doing in that area? Several top generals were in the area where the demobilisation occurred.”

Without going into detail, he said the defence ministry “knows that it was a military operation whose results are secret. Since it involves documents pertaining to national security, they cannot hand them over,” Restrepo said, adding that the classified documents are necessary for him to defend himself in court.

“Why do they insist on keeping that information classified? Why do they deny it? Tell us everything,” Restrepo said in an explosive interview Monday night with the RCN radio station.

He declared himself “opponent number one” of President Juan Manuel Santos, who was Uribe’s defence minister, and asked “What is Santos afraid of? That maybe one of his brilliant officials who are now in the presidency and who were involved with the Cacica Gaitana case until well into 2010, under his ministry, will end up being implicated?

“Yes, there were many military operatives with them,” he added, referring to the fake guerrillas who surrendered with Cacica Gaitana, “and there were high-level defence ministry officials working with them.”

Restrepo urged the government to reveal who in the defence ministry “worked with these gentlemen after and during the ministry of Santos, and what they were involved in.” He also did not rule out the possibility that military intelligence was “deceived.”

Former government minister Camilo González, director of the Institute of Studies for Development and Peace (INDEPAZ), said the Cacica Gaitana demobilisation was not the only sham.

According to the Uribe administration, some 52,000 armed fighters laid down their weapons in eight years.

That total includes 32,000 members of the far-right paramilitary militias who surrendered in collective demobilisation ceremonies after controversial negotiations with the Uribe administration.

But only 15,000 people actually handed over weapons in these high-profile ceremonies: 10,000 armed combatants and 5,000 people close to them, who were recruited for the purpose, according to a civil society monitoring committee of which INDEPAZ formed part.

“There were 17,000 false paramilitaries who ‘demobilised’,” said González.

“The demobilisation of Cacica Gaitana was a total parody,” he told IPS. “But that was not the main problem. The big sham was (the paramilitary demobilisation) which was of such dimensions that it was impossible for the highest spheres of government not to know.”

In González’s view, the Uribe government “formed part of the entire farce.”

The demobilised paramilitary chiefs confessed to the prosecutors that the militias “had training schools where the people who showed up at the last minute put on uniforms, got haircuts, and learned to describe where they patrolled, what paramilitary front they were in, and what they did.”

Restrepo, meanwhile, argues that attorney general Morales, to whom he sent a letter containing his accusations, should herself be investigated because she took part in a public forum in Santa Fe de Ralito, where the government and the paramilitaries negotiated the demobilisation agreement.

He also maintained that it was a crime for her husband to be an adviser to paramilitaries and guerrillas, in the search for reconciliation. He alleged that Lucio was involved in negotiations with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez – who helped broker releases of hostages by the FARC – and Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

In response to his letter, Morales ordered the investigation of her husband, in which she said she would not take part. She also wondered why Restrepo only called for an investigation of Lucio after the attorney general’s office announced that charges would be brought against the former high peace commissioner.

The leaders of South America’s Mercosur trade bloc decided to set up a committee to facilitate the incorporation of new members, adopt a mechanism to defend democracy in case of a coup, and ban vessels from the Malvinas/Falkland Islands from docking in member countries’ ports.

Mercosur leaders express solidarity with Argentina's historic claim to the Malvinas/Falkland Islands. Credit: Office of the Uruguayan president

At Tuesday’s summit, the presidents of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay also signed a free trade agreement with Palestine, seen as mainly symbolic, and expanded the list of products from outside the bloc that will pay import tariffs.

In their speeches, the Mercosur (Southern Common Market) leaders acknowledged the contradictions and hurdles faced by the region’s largest trade bloc, while stressing the need to continue to forge ahead with the process of integration.

At the bloc’s headquarters in Montevideo, host President José Mujica met Cristina Fernández of Argentina, Dilma Rousseff of Brazil and Fernando Lugo of Paraguay, as well as Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and Rafael Correa of Ecuador, whose countries are in the process of joining as full members.

“Our path is full of contradictions and difficulties,” Mujica said. “Woe to us if the contradictions disillusion us and we abandon this project. We would soon become a leaf in the wind, in this world of colossal forces.”

The Uruguayan president emphasised that the bloc represents not only economic, but political, integration. “Without politics, there will be no Mercosur in the long run, and there will be no convergence, because this is not only an economic equation.

“Alas for us if we fail to understand that the underlying issue is a question of power, and that this question makes it necessary to move towards convergence,” he said.

Mujica also confirmed the creation of a high-level committee to analyse the admission of Venezuela and Ecuador as full members.

Venezuela, whose admission process began in 2006, is only awaiting approval by the Paraguayan Congress, where legislators opposed to the left-leaning Lugo hold a majority. For its part, Ecuador formally requested full membership on Tuesday.

Chávez said the incorporation of his country as a fifth full member has been blocked “by just five lawmakers” in Paraguay.

“These people who have been opposing (Venezuela’s admission) for five years, I don’t know if they are aware of the harm they are causing, not to Venezuela, but to everyone, to the Paraguayan people themselves,” he said. “There are only five people who don’t want it. I think that behind them there must be a very powerful hand, moving who knows what mechanisms of pressure,” he maintained.

Chávez underlined that Venezuela’s incorporation would mean “opening Mercosur to the Pacific.

“We are members of OPEC (Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Companies), we have gas and energy reserves, we have things to contribute,” he added. “We have to expedite this, spurred on by the global crisis that is threatening us.”

Lugo also referred to the case of Venezuela and the resistance put up by a handful of legislators in his country.

“This government of Paraguay is respectful of its institutions, but it is making an effort to strengthen integration. The incorporation of Ecuador and Venezuela would work in favour of our bloc,” he said.

Rousseff, meanwhile, highlighted the agreement reached at the summit “to expand the list of products included in the common foreign tariff” applied to imports from outside Mercosur, and to adopt various mechanisms to foment intra-bloc trade.

Correa, for his part, stressed the signing of the “Montevideo Protocol”, a mechanism providing for a mutual response in defence of democratic institutions in case of a coup d’etat in any of the member countries.

The summit agenda, which was to include public ceremonies, such as the signing of the agreement with Palestine – signed in private in the end – was interrupted by the tragic news of the death of Argentina’s deputy trade secretary, 33-year-old Iván Heyn. The newly appointed official was found hanged in his room in the Montevideo hotel where most of the Argentine delegation was staying. The police said his death appeared to be a suicide, but that the investigation continued.

When Fernández was notified, she was so upset that her private doctor was called to attend to her.

Malvinas/Falklands

The summit also approved a resolution to close the bloc’s ports to vessels flying the Falkland Islands flag. The islands, known as the Malvinas in Argentina, have been held by Britain since the 1830s, and were the subject of a brief war between the two countries in 1982, when Argentina sought to assert its sovereignty over them.

In a column posted on the Uruguayan president’s web site Tuesday, Mujica explained his decision to ban the boats from docking in Uruguay, arguing that his country’s foreign policy has always been based on national interests, but also on the principle of solidarity with the region.

Mujica said solidarity with Buenos Aires also benefited Montevideo. “Uruguay’s political history shows that every time relations with Argentina have soured, the economy and labour have been enormously impaired,” he wrote.

Fernández expressed her appreciation for the member countries’ decision to block boats from the Malvinas.

The Malvinas “are not just an Argentine cause, but a global cause, because (the British) are taking oil and fishing resources, and when they need more resources, whoever is the strongest will go to find them whenever and however,” she said, as Rousseff nodded.

“When they sign something involving the Malvinas, they are doing so as if the Malvinas belonged to them. There are many countries here with great natural wealth, and this wealth must be defended. Let’s be smart enough to understand that, by taking care of each other, we are taking care of ourselves,” she added.

At the end of the summit, Mujica handed over the rotating six-month presidency of the bloc to Fernández.