Ten days of demonstrations, led by wealthy students, against the Venezuelan government’s refusal to renew RCTV’s broadcasting licence in May, have fizzled out. The protestors rejected an opportunity to debate the issue in the National Assembly on 7 June, where they would have been mercilessly exposed as frauds. ALVARO MICHAELS reports.
The US government has been funding, through USAID, training seminars for student leaders with the objective of promoting ‘student activism’ in political life. Antonia Ledezma, now an opposition spokesperson for ‘democracy’, was the governor of Caracas in 1992-93. This hypocrite prohibited all student protests in the street that year. Some groups and individuals that participated in the RCTV protests had received training with US bodies such as the Albert Einstein Institute and the International Centre on Non-Violent Conflict. These were responsible for helping to promote, fund and advise the ‘coloured revolutions’ in Eastern Europe, the Ukraine, Serbia, Yugoslavia and Georgia. They failed in Belarus and began working in Venezuela in April 2003.
A new TV channel TEVES, or Venezuelan Social Television, has begun broadcasting in place of the RCTV drivel. To meet its constitutional obligations, Public Service Radio will be introduced for the first time next year, which indicates the previous and present unhealthy dominance of private interests in the communications industry.
The United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV)
Since last April, 5.7 million of the 7.3 million Venezuelans who voted for Chavez in December’s Presidential elections have registered to be members of the new party (2.88 million men and 2.78 million women). In June a national meeting of candidates for PSUV militants took place in Caracas. President Chavez explained to 15,000 party militants that the PSUV aimed to consolidate the revolution, which could not rely on the leadership of only one man. This is the start of the second phase in the creation of the party. More than 25,000 party ‘promoters’ will create and organise over 20,000 assemblies, or ‘socialist battalions’, in communities across the country. These are made up of 300 candidates each and will debate and discuss the political programme of the new party. Ideas of democracy, socialism, sovereignty and anti-imperialism will be discussed. The promoters receive training on the assemblies’ procedures and organisation. After three assembly meetings starting on 21 July, party members will elect representatives for the party’s founding congress, which will be convened in August and last for three months. One third of party members are under 30 years old. The entry of thousands of youth under 18 years will be agreed after the President received a letter signed by thousands of teenagers asking for the right to join the new party.
Due to the high participation in the party, replacing 24 smaller pro-Chavez parties, the president noted that it would be ‘the biggest party not only in Venezuelan history, but in all of Latin America…It will be a party of organised masses, of organised fronts, of mass movements, of big groups and of different political blocs,’ he said. Proposed reforms to the 1999 Bolivarian Constitution will be debated at the National Assembly in late July, including removal of the limitation on the number of re-elections for the president of the republic.
Alvaro Michaels
FRFI 198 August / September 2007
