>Conservative attempts to engineer the overthrow of President Chavez have
>radicalised his supporters
>
>Richard Gott
>Friday January 17, 2003
>The Guardian
>
>The extraordinary and unprecedented events in Venezuela in recent weeks
>that have sent the world oil price soaring (though controlled this week
>by an Opec decision to permit a small increase in production) appear to
>be concluding with President Hugo Chavez ever more firmly in the saddle.
>
>When the conservative opposition to his radical government embarked on a
>nationwide and open-ended strike at the beginning of December,
>accompanied by the almost daily mobilisation of its supporters in the
>streets of Caracas and other major towns, the purpose was to bring about
>the president's downfall, through resignation or military coup d'etat.
>Yet although this strategy has done immense damage to the economy,
>almost bringing the all-important oil industry to a halt, Chavez has
>never shown the slightest sign of giving in.
>
>Since the new year, he has been fighting back with vigour, leaving a
>divided and leaderless opposition - who never expected their strike to
>last beyond Christmas - with an uncertain future. Chavez is a popular
>and democratically elected president, and he is firmly backed by the
>armed forces. A former army officer himself, he has an intimate
>knowledge of the institution, and he is well aware that the opposition's
>attempt to cripple the nationalised oil industry - the icon of the
>country's nationalists - has not been popular with the soldiers.
>
>He has now been given carte blanche to crush the strike, and has stepped
>up his rhetoric accordingly. The period of dialogue and conciliation,
>embarked on after an unsuccessful coup attempt last April, is over. More
>than a thousand strikers in the oil industry have been sacked (mostly
>those in the managerial class); the army has been brought in to guard
>installations, ports and pipelines; the company itself has been
>reorganised and split into two regional entities; and the street
>demonstrations - for and against - are now being tightly controlled by
>the national guard.
>
>Last weekend, a newly confident Chavez announced that he would send in
>the troops to stop the hoarding of food, and to keep schools and banks
>open. He has threatened to revoke the licences of four private
>television channels that have been campaigning for his overthrow. An
>upbeat oil minister claims that oil production should be nearly back to
>normal within a month.
>
>This change of mood in Venezuela is a reflection of a change that is
>sweeping Latin America, coupled with an atmosphere of uncertainty in
>Washington, whose chief strategists have preoccupations elsewhere. The
>election of leftwing presidents in Brazil and Ecuador provides a beacon
>of hope for Chavez, if not necessarily a lifeline. Luiz Inacio Lula da
>Silva was inaugurated in Brasilia on New Year's Day, and Lucio Rodriguez
>(another progressive former colonel) took office this week. The
>gathering of Latin American presidents in Ecuador for this ceremony has
>seen the formation of a group of "friends of Venezuela", designed,
>through the good offices of the Organisation of American States, to find
>a peaceful solution to the Venezuelan crisis.
>
>Meanwhile, the trumpet in Washington sounds with an unsure tone. The
>departure of Otto Reich, who failed to secure the support of Congress
>for his appointment as the government's chief Latin American operative,
>was a blow to the neo-conservatives in government, as is the resignation
>of Mexico's pro-American foreign minister Jorge Castaneda. Democrats in
>Congress are also making themselves heard - a group of them came out
>this month with a message of support for Chavez.
>
>Chavez, to the dismay of the opposition, is now embarked upon a
>radicalisation of what he has always perceived as "a revolution". The
>country's poor majority is mobilised behind him in a way that was
>unimaginable a year ago. When schools joined the strike last week,
>parents and pupils in the poorer shanty towns organised to keep them
>open. Banks, newspapers and television channels now live under threat of
>expropriation.
>
>The opposition, caught on the back foot, is still a formidable force. It
>consists of a bizarre assortment of discredited politicians and trade
>unionists from the ancien regime, oil executives from the nationalised
>oil company, important business interests, media magnates and large
>swaths of a middle class with its feet in Venezuela and its head in the
>suburban culture of the US.
>
>Much of this middle class has been led by the media and opinion polls,
>and by the large size of its protest demonstrations, into believing that
>it forms the majority of the country, and is justified in demanding the
>president's resignation. Yet demonstrations are a notoriously inadequate
>guide to voting intentions in Latin America, and opinion polls in third
>world countries rarely reflect the views of the shanty towns.
>
>By conjuring up the country's forgotten underclass, the poor and the
>hitherto politically invisible, Chavez has unleashed forces that will be
>difficult for him, or an alternative government, to put back into the
>bottle.
>
>· Richard Gott is the author of In the Shadow of the Liberator: Hugo
>Chavez and the Transformation of Venezuela (Verso)