Venezuela is facing a total US blockade. The sanctions are, in effect, an act of terrorism, designed to strangle the Venezuelan economy, cut off access to vital medicines and starve its people into submission. They are a key weapon in imperialism’s drive to overthrow the United Socialist Party (PSUV) government, smash the Bolivarian revolutionary movement and roll back the hard-won gains of the last 20 years’ struggle for socialism. SAM McGILL reports.
The US has applied 150 measures against Venezuela, confiscating its oil subsidiary CITGO worth $7bn, freezing accounts, blocking international transactions and pressuring companies and other nations to shun trade. Venezuela estimates $30bn of assets have been confiscated, with $5.5bn frozen in international accounts across 50 financial institutions. Britain is complicit: the Bank of England illegally withholds $1.3bn of gold. Belgian financial services company Euroclear has frozen $1.2bn in payments for food and medicine. Citibank refused to process transactions for tonnes of insulin. 24 Venezuelans await bone marrow transplants, the funds for their treatment frozen by Portugal’s Novo Banco. Three children have died waiting. Economists Jeffrey Sachs and Mark Weisbrot estimate that sanctions killed 40,000 Venezuelans in 2018, with 300,000 at imminent risk due to lack of dialysis and treatments for cancer and HIV.
As oil makes up 95% of Venezuela’s export earnings, 2019’s oil blockade will have devastating effects, decimating foreign currency reserves. The US was Venezuela’s single biggest market, representing 35% of oil exports. It was also Venezuela’s main supplier of the diluents needed to produce petrol and lighter grades of oil. Petrol shortages have spiked, especially outside the capital, Caracas. In Merida, fuel is rationed, with drivers sleeping on roadsides in week-long queues. 20 litres of fuel on the unofficial market costs three months’ minimum wage, perpetuating corruption and creating a split between those who pay and those who queue. With scarce fuel for harvesting and transport, farmers estimate 60% of crops will be lost in the region. Francisco Rodriguez, an economist with the investment bank Torino Capital, reports that imports dropped to $303m in April, 64% down on 2018’s average and 93% less than in 2012.
Weaponising human rights
Alfred de Zayas, who as UN rapporteur visited Venezuela in 2017, has compared sanctions to mediaeval sieges, which ‘attempt to bring not just a town, but sovereign countries to their knees’. Unilateral US actions are illegal according to the Charter of the United Nations and De Zayas recommends the International Criminal Court investigate them as crimes against humanity.
Yet this point is not even mentioned in the report produced by the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, following her visit to Venezuela in July. Instead Bachelet merely notes, almost as an aside: ‘the [Venezuelan] government has assigned blame for the economic crisis on sanctions’. That the US has dedicated resources and funds to regime change in Venezuela since at least 2001 and that former President Obama ludicrously declared Venezuela a ‘threat’ to US national security in order to legitimise sanctions is ruthlessly ignored. The report relies on 558 interviews, 460 from outside Venezuela, heavily weighted to the opposition. Fundalatin, the country’s oldest human rights NGO, sharply criticised the failure to represent those killed by violent opposition protests and destabilisation. Bachelet met with family members of several victims, including the mother of Orlando Figuera, a young black street vendor beaten and burnt alive on an opposition protest. These facts are completely omitted, as are arson attacks on maternity hospitals, food distribution networks, medical missions and housing projects, flagships of the Bolivarian revolution’s social justice projects. Instead, Bachelet reserved her condemnation for the death in custody of a senior military officer, jailed for his involvement in plotting a coup. While the question of any state forces acting extrajudicially is a serious one, the immediate arrest and charging of the two officers linked to the death of Captain Rafael Acosta show that the Venezuelan authorities do not allow such acts to take place with impunity.
As De Zayas points out, Bachelet’s report is ‘methodologically flawed… relying overwhelmingly on unverified allegations by opposition politicians and advocates of regime change who are only interested in weaponising human rights’.
Aid embezzlement scandal
Whilst the UN report provides a veneer of legitimacy for further intervention, the political coup is floundering. Six months have passed since US puppet Juan Guaido declared himself ‘President’ of Venezuela and resolved to overthrow Nicolas Maduro’s PSUV government.
Guaido had it all: the backing of Latin America’s resurgent right-wing, the recognition of 50 predominantly Western governments, a total propaganda blitz in the media, the threat of US invasion and seemingly unlimited US funds. In February, Richard Branson swanned in from his private Caribbean island, pledging to raise $100m through ‘Venezuela Live Aid’, supporting the attempt to force USAID trucks through the border in a politicised charade rejected by the Red Cross, War Child and Oxfam. The concert raised a paltry $2.5m, barely covering running costs. The plot failed, the aid left to rot in the tropical heat to avoid the PR gaffe of distributing goods to desperate Colombians and Venezuelans on the ‘free’ side of the border. April’s putsch was a similar disaster. Guaido declared he had ‘liberated’ the Carlota airbase in Caracas in the ‘final stages’ of Maduro’s overthrow. A few hours later the claim was proven to be a media stunt and hundreds of angry soldiers abandoned their posts upon realising they had been duped in a fake training exercise. The US conspiracy is unravelling. Guaido’s protests dwindle, international support is disintegrating with Germany ‘normalising’ relations with PSUV, and the Organisation of American States reaching out to Cuba to support negotiation.
Guaido’s reputation has been hit further in a string of scandals exposed by the PanAm Post. Living it up in Colombia, Rossana Barrera, Guaido’s chief of staff and Kevin Rojas, regional coordinator of his Popular Will party, racked up over $125,000 of expenses on luxury goods, designer clothes, night clubs, lavish food and drink. This money was intended to be spent on hotels, schools, medical care and work for Venezuelan soldiers who defected, crossing the border into Colombia in return for a promised amnesty. Despite Rojas and Barrera claiming expenses for double the 700 known defectors, by March the funds dried up and the soldiers were evicted from their UN shelters, abandoned by Guaido’s team, left with a sleeping mat and $100, their children and pregnant wives denied medical care in Colombia.
In July it emerged that the US had diverted some $41.9m of humanitarian aid earmarked for Central America to Guaido, in a desperate attempt to boost his flagging campaign.
¡Comuna o nada!
Though Venezuela has been out of hyperinflation for four consecutive months, the purchasing power of wages has been decimated. Communal councils and communes, neighbourhood building blocks of participatory democracy, have been pushing for collective solutions to meet immediate needs. These collective organisations have legal recognition, with late socialist leader Hugo Chavez spurring their creation in 2006. However, they often find themselves in conflict with formal state structures such as established mayors, governors and ministers who view popular power as a threat to their comfortable positions. The PSUV is a cross-class alliance of revolutionaries, socialists, grassroots activists, and the so-called ‘revolutionary bourgeoisie’, capitalists who seek lucrative state contracts. The fight for socialism depends on the balance of class forces in the PSUV and the wider Bolivarian movement.
June saw the culmination of months of communal debate in Caracas, producing a document[1] which argued for a Chavista response to the crisis: ‘We are united by the conviction that it is possible to advance in the accumulation of popular power…the experience of collective self-managed, communalised or workers’ control has been proved to produce solutions to the problems of collective life.’ Demands include:
- an end to the ‘increasing privatisation of public property’;
- restoration of labour rights and collective bargaining undermined by economic reforms and hyperinflation;
- collective management of community goods and services;
- prioritisation of communal food production over agribusiness;
- social control of land and inputs;
- public and social audits of state companies
- an end to impunity and police violence against the popular sectors.
This reflects current popular struggles. Hundreds of farmers have marched to picket the Venezuelan Land Institute, demanding it keep promises made last year to halt violent evictions, end bureaucratic delays in establishing land titles and act over the assassinations of campesinos.
Housing activists have rallied outside the National Constituent Assembly, demanding new legislation to increase community control of house building. Since 2010 the government’s Great Housing Mission has built over 2.5 million homes for poor families at little or no cost. The majority of these are built by private companies contracted by the state, something activists say opens the door to corruption and graft. They want a new law expanding the 37% of homes currently built by communes and housing assemblies to 50%, increasing grassroots control of land plots and construction materials.
Communal responses to shortages highlight the potential of grassroots organisation. Previously, Venezuela manufactured basic medicines, sold at subsidised prices, but while Venezuela has the means to produce 70% of the medicine it needs, access to raw materials is blocked. In response, the Altos de Lidice commune in Caracas has launched a neighbourhood pharmacy, collecting international donations of medicines and working with Cuban doctors in three Barrio Adentro health clinics to distribute them in the community.
Water storage facilities are working at 50-60% capacity. Flow into Caracas has been reduced by nearly 30% in the last three years because of failing infrastructure. In Petare, eastern Caracas, hundreds of thousands are cut off as pumping stations lack the parts needed to pump the water up the hills to the poor barrios. As Maria Flores of state company Hidrocapital, explained, ‘we have had situations where we have the pumps and the motors and they are about to ship and then comes the all-powerful hand of the United States and they block the money in the bank or sanction the company that is working with us, just for selling us this equipment.’[2] Despite the difficulties, water working groups organise collective responses, meeting with Hidrocapital representatives to find solutions, such as installing cisterns on rooftops.
US sanctions have taken aim at food imports for the country’s network of local committees of supply and production, which provide subsidised food boxes to six million families a month. Additionally, school programmes provide food for four million schoolchildren and a further 750,000 vulnerable people are fed at food centres. Supplements are distributed to 1.6 million infants, pregnant women and pensioners. Whilst the food committees mainly distribute state imports, links have been forged between rural producers and urban communes forming ‘people to people’ networks or organising regular communal food fairs.
In order to boost production in key sections of the economy, the Workers’ Productive Army organises regular voluntary brigades. The Workers’ Army has supported ‘recovered, occupied and nationalised’ factories taken under worker control after facing closure, as well as state oil refineries and ministries. One organiser of the units, Sergio Requena, told Venezuelanalysis, ‘What we want to do is to create complementary relations between state companies instead of the capitalist relations which currently exist … everyone looking for their own benefit, even at the expense of sister companies right next door’.
These collective, communal solutions challenge the very fabric of Venezuelan capitalism; holding the key to whether Bolivarian revolution is able to defy US imperialism, survive the economic crisis and find a progressive way out of a political stalemate. As another Workers’ Army coordinator Edimar Martinez put it, ‘we are revolutionaries who have Chavismo beating in our chests and the will to see the revolution continue.’
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 271, June/July 2019
[1] Dialogue for a Chavista overcoming of the crisis
[2] See The Real News Network for Michael Fox’s series of short documentaries on community organisation around water, food and medicine at www.therealnews.com
