At the same time, millions of workers, peasants, students, small businesspeople, and others have continued to push back against the effort to oust Chávez. Workers at oil wells and refineries have steadily increased production despite sabotage by their former bosses. Toilers and young people from around the country now guard oil-producing facilities, alongside National Guard troops. Landless peasants have accelerated their efforts to gain land titles in some areas. Under increasing popular pressure, the government threatened January 10 to take over privately owned food production plants currently shut by their owners in support of the opposition-led "general strike," which began December 2.

"Many believed economic and political pressure would force [Chávez] to agree to a vote--or even resign--by Christmas," AP reported from Caracas January 10. "But Chávez has the backing of Venezuela’s military--armed forces purged of dissidents after a brief April coup. General after general has declared loyalty to the constitution and to a democratically elected government. Chávez also is stubborn in a crisis where other leaders might feel threatened. After oil production was paralyzed, eliminating the source of half of government revenue and 80 percent of export earnings, he fired 1,000 people from the state-owned oil monopoly and vowed to tighten gov-ernment control over the company."  
 
Opposition lost control of oil company
"No one believed a couple of months ago that the government and the people would be able to take control of PDVSA [the state-owned Petróleos de Venezuela oil company]," said Claudia Orsini, a national leader of the Fifth Republic Revolutionary Youth (JVR), in a January 9 phone interview from Caracas. "But it’s now basically done. The entire previous management of the state oil company, where the opposition had its strongest base with people stealing millions from national resources for their individual enrichment, is now gone. [Progovernment] Bolivarian circles, some trade unions, peasant organizations, associations of professionals, and others now guard oil refineries and other installations. The pressure from gasoline shortages has begun to ease in some states. We’ve got them on the defensive now."

According to this and other interviews, technicians from other countries have come to help put production back to prestrike levels. Venezuela used to produce some 3 million barrels of oil per day (bpd). In mid December, production fell to one-twelfth that level--250,000 bpd. It is now back up to 1 million barrels, according to the Venezuelan government. Opposition leaders admit to half a million barrels.

Despite media claims that the overwhelming majority of PDVSA’s 40,000 workers have joined the "strike," many people interviewed by the Militant insist that only 20 percent to 50 percent of the 30,000 production workers did so, in contrast to the 10,000 administrative-technical personnel, who in their majority backed the pro-employer stoppage. "It is these workers, along with the National Guard and other specialists, who are pushing ahead with production, despite all the sabotage caused by the former executives," said Yhonny Garcia, a unionist from Maracaibo in Zulia state, where much of the country’s oil drilling and production is concentrated.

"Specialists from Brazil’s Petrobras are now in several refineries," said Feveres Garspe, a radio newscaster in Valencia, the country’s third-largest city, in a January 9 interview. "Algeria is also sending technicians."

Help from Brazil’s new Workers Party government of president Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, came after Chávez visited Brazil for da Silva’s inauguration on New Year’s Day, where he also met with Cuba’s president Fidel Castro.

At the same time, peasants, students, and others are taking action to further their struggles against big business and counter the effects of the bosses’ stoppage.

"I just came back from a conference of 600 peasants and our families," said Armando Serpa, in a January 9 phone interview from his home. Serpa, who had first met Militant reporters during their trip to Venezuela in July, farms a small plot of land on the outskirts of San Carlos, Cojedes state, a largely agricultural area. "Adina Bastidas presented 300 titles to land for peasant families who have occupied them for years. Now they can get credit and other things."  
 
Conflict over land law
Adina Bastidas is a former vice president in the Chávez government who is now involved in helping to implement the Law on Land and Agricultural Development. Signed in November 2001, this is one of the most controversial measures undertaken by the government. Among other provisions, the new legislation allowed the state to confiscate some idle private farms of more than 12,000 acres, and distribute the land to the peasants. "The Supreme Court declared two of the most important provisions of this law unconstitutional in November," said Bastidas in a January 9 phone interview. "So the land redistribution process will be a long struggle."

Speaking to peasants and thousands of other supporters in San Carlos January 10, Chávez said he is ready to send troops to take over food production plants shut by their owners in the month-and-a-half long stoppage. "This is an economic coup. They are trying to deny the people food, medicine, and even water," Chávez said. "They won’t succeed."

Elsewhere, students are organizing assemblies demanding the reopening of universities shut down by opposition supporters. "Today, 2,000 students met at the University of Carabobo here demanding the dean reopen the school and classes resume," Felipe Pantoja, a medical student in Valencia, told the Militant on January 9.

According to Pantoja, Orsini, and others interviewed, popular anger across the country at the opposition-led stoppage is growing. "This was evident when 14,000 people marched in Caracas for the funeral of two people shot dead by the police January 5," Orsini said. The two died from police gunshots after an opposition march on military headquarters in Caracas was confronted by hundreds of Chávez sympathizers. The Caracas police are under the control of Mayor Alfredo Peña, a fierce opponent of Chávez and a figure in the pro-imperialist opposition.

Opposition forces are demanding Chávez’s resignation and early elections, which the president has refused. Now these forces are witnessing the dwindling of some of the support they had had among working people and larger backing among middle-class layers.

"On the long lines to get gasoline, the talk by almost everyone is that Carlos Fernández and Carlos Ortega are to blame for this crisis," said Garspe. "The opposition is losing." Carlos Fernández is the president of Fedecamaras, Venezuela’s main business association, which is the motor force behind the drive to oust Chávez. Ortega is the president of the Confederation of Venezuelan Workers (CTV), which is backing the bosses’ strike.  
 
Basis of opposition forces
At the core of the Democratic Coordinator opposition coalition are business figures and other leaders of the social democratic Democratic Action (AD) party and the Social Christian COPEI. These two parties alternated in the government for decades before Chávez was elected president in 1998. In the eyes of millions of working people, these politicians are responsible for the impoverishment of the majority of Venezuelans and the brutality with which the ruling class kept the status quo in place prior to Chávez’s election.

Venezuela is the world’s fifth-largest oil-producing country. It has many mineral resources and a relatively high level of industrialization for Latin America. At the same time, its population of 23 million is riven by gross inequalities of wealth and income. While the top 10 percent of the population receives half the national income, 40 percent live in "critical poverty," according to a 1995 estimate.

An example of what this opposition is associated with is a rebellion, known as the Caracazo. It broke out in 1989, when the government of Carlos Andrés Pérez of Democratic Action doubled bus fares and hiked prices of gasoline and other essential goods. An urban revolt then engulfed Caracas and many of the country’s major cities. Working people from city slums burned buses, broke into supermarkets and took food, and marched onto the rich neighborhoods.

In response, the social democratic regime sent in the army, shooting at anything that moved. As many as 2,000 died in Caracas alone. Thousands were wounded. While Pérez succeeded in staying in power for a few more years through this ruthless repression, the events marked the beginning of the breakup of the two-party system that had ruled Venezuela for decades.

Top CTV officials are part of the Democratic Coordinator opposition coalition. The CTV is the largest of the country’s union federations. Its officers are an encrusted bureaucracy with its social base in a narrow layer of better paid workers. CTV president Ortega, one of the main figures in the opposition that’s trying to oust Chávez, still describes himself as a member of Democratic Action. Many workers in Venezuela often tell stories of how the CTV leadership supported police repression against militant workers and restrictions by the bosses on organized labor during the reign of AD and COPEI. These labor officials sat on their hands for decades in face of attacks by the employers on wages and working conditions while keeping a bureaucratic lid on workers’ struggles.

Chávez is a bourgeois nationalist figure who became popular as a military officer when he led a failed 1992 coup to oust the Pérez regime. He was elected president in 1998 with huge popular support against the discredited traditional capitalist parties. He was reelected in 2000, using pro-working-class demagogy and promising to use executive power to deal with the corrupt elite. Capitalist market relations have remained intact under his administration, with economic power remaining firmly in the hands of the capitalist class.

At the same time, the government has aroused the ire of the capitalists with some limited measures that impinge on their prerogatives. Aside from the land expropriation law, recent measures include protection for working fishermen from overfishing by large commercial companies, and use of some state funds for cheap housing and other social programs.

Worried about the increased expectations of workers and farmers generated by Chávez’s election and some of the measures taken by his government, the dominant section of the Venezuelan rulers have set about overthrowing it. Last April, about a third of the military’s high command, with support from the dominant capitalist families and Washington, ousted Chávez in a coup. This proved short-lived, however. Chávez returned to power in two days, after huge mobilizations by working people forced divisions in the military.

"A new contentious measure is now being debated in the National Assembly," said Yhonny Garcia, the unionist in Maracaibo, Zulia state, in a January 9 telephone interview. "A new law on social security would nationalize health insurance and eventually make it free for all. The bankers, insurance companies, and big business don’t like this. It’s one of the reasons they tried to spread their strike to the banks. But they have an uphill battle."  
 
 
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