Miraflores Press

Soldiers examine damage from September 19 explosion at the presidential palace in Caracas

Officials of the government of President Hugo Chávez blamed the pro-imperialist opposition for creating a climate that encourages such actions. National Assembly delegate Tarek William Saab, of the governing Fifth Republic Movement (MVR), said the bombing could be attributed to “the desperation of individuals who want to cause destabilization,” according to the online publication Venezuelanalysis.com.

The attack on Miraflores was the first since April 11, 2002, when a third of the military’s top-ranking generals staged a coup, taking over the presidential palace and attempting to oust Chávez. The coup, which had Washington’s tacit support, was short-lived, however. Chávez was back in Miraflores within two days. The Venezuelan bourgeoisie made a second attempt to topple Chávez’s nationalist government with a two-month bosses’ “strike” last December and January.

Both times, mass mobilizations by workers and peasants turned back the employers’ moves.

The bombing of Miraflores took place one week after the pro-imperialist opposition suffered a third major blow. On September 12, the country’s National Elections Commission rejected a petition for a referendum to recall the president. The effort was organized by the opposition coalition Coordinadora Democrática (Democratic Coordination), whose heart and soul is Fedecámaras, Venezuela’s main big-business association.

“The opposition miscalculated,” said Antonio Aguillón, a unionist in Caracas, in a September 22 telephone interview. “They were pushed by Washington again and again to try to overthrow Chávez. They have failed, and they are desperate. We can expect more bombings and assassination attempts.”

In recent trips to Colombia, U.S. secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld and other U.S. government and military officials have praised Bogotá for its fight against “narcoterrorists” in Colombia and have stated that the Venezuelan government is not doing its part to fight “terrorism.” These veiled threats have been made at a time when Washington is taking steps to strengthen its military presence in Latin America. Caracas charged that 15 U.S.-made Black Hawk helicopters flown by the Colombian military violated Venezuela’s airspace September 9. Such incidents indicate that Washington may be trying to embroil Venezuela in a regional conflict.

The day before the attack on Miraflores, Chávez announced the cancellation of his impending trip to the United States. He had been scheduled to visit the country September 25-29 to address the United Nations General Assembly in New York, among other activities. At a September 17 lunch meeting with foreign journalists in Caracas, Chávez cited security concerns for canceling the trip, and said his government would not provide details at this point. He stated that he regretted most not being able to speak at a public meeting in Manhattan. A coalition to welcome Chávez, made up of Venezuela solidarity groups and other organizations in New York, had organized a September 26 event featuring the Venezuelan president at New York’s Riverside Church.

According to the online publication Vheadline.com, police investigators in Caracas said it was a stroke of luck that the September 19 blast caused only limited damage. The bomb thrown into the compound missed the military fuel tanks by 44 yards and came very close to hitting the main munitions storage area.

On September 19, Caracas suspended oil shipments to the Dominican Republic because traders handling them were allegedly involved in a plan to assassinate Chávez, said Venezuela’s energy and mines minister, Rafael Ramírez, according to Reuters. The Venezuelan government has accused Carlos Andrés Pérez, the country’s former president under the reign of the social democratic Democratic Action party, of being involved in this plot. Pérez, who has a mansion in the Dominican Republic, along with homes in Miami and elsewhere in the United States, has denied the charge.

Chávez’s regime has drawn the ire of the big majority of the country’s capitalist class for taking measures that have cut into the prerogatives of finance capital and raised the expectations of working people. These include an agrarian reform law, a bill that benefits working fishermen to the detriment of large commercial fishing companies, legislation strengthening state control of the country’s national patrimony in oil and natural gas, and allocation of state funds for cheap housing and other social programs.

Washington and the local bourgeoisie are also hostile to Chávez because of his government’s closer economic and political ties with revolutionary Cuba. These include Havana’s assistance in Venezuela’s current massive literacy campaign and a project to send hundreds of Cuban volunteer doctors to offer medical services in the poorest neighborhoods of Caracas and other cities and rural areas, where residents have had virtually no access to health care.  
 
Mission Robinson
At ceremonies throughout Venezuela in September, Chávez and other government officials handed literacy certificates to 200,000 people who graduated from literacy classes. According to the Cuban daily Granma, some 300,000 Venezuelans had completed the program as of September 21.

In one such event at Miraflores, Jesús Serpa, a peasant from the mountainous areas in the state of Miranda, said that no other government had paid attention to the needs of working people in the countryside, such as teaching everyone how to read and write.

“We have with us here the teacher Leonola Relys,” Chávez said in response, according to Granma, “representing the Cuban people, Fidel [Castro], and this army of collaborators who are helping us to achieve what seemed unthinkable.”

The literacy campaign launched at the beginning of this year is called Mission Robinson. It was named after Simón Rodríguez, a nationalist poet and schoolteacher in Caracas who used the pseudonym Robinson Crusoe. Rodríguez served as a teacher to Simón Bolívar—Venezuela’s national hero and a leader of the struggles against Spanish colonialism in Latin America.

Mission Robinson’s goal is to eliminate illiteracy in the country. As of the end of last year, some 2 million people did not know how to read and write—12 percent of the country’s adult population. To accomplish this goal, about 100,000 volunteers are being organized across Venezuela. So far, at least 60,000 have signed up, overwhelmingly college and high school students.

Joel Pantón, 26, who recently graduated from medical school at the University of Carabobo in Valencia, Venezuela’s third-largest city, is one of these volunteers. Cuba has helped the literacy campaign “in a way that increases our self-confidence,” he said in a September 14 telephone interview with the Militant. “Cuba didn’t send thousands to ‘indoctrinate us about communism,’ as the escuálidos charge,” he stated. He was using a derisive term—literally the “squalid ones”—employed widely in Venezuela to refer to the pro-imperialist opposition. “Cuba sent 25 instructors to share their experience in wiping out illiteracy in the first years of the revolution, along with contributing all the TV sets, VCRs, videocassettes, and printed material we now use to teach people how to read and write.”

In September 1960, a year and a half after the triumph of the revolution that overthrew the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship and established a workers and farmers government, Fidel Castro—Cuba’s prime minister at that time—addressed the United Nations General Assembly, announcing to the world: “In the coming year, our country intends to wage its great battle against illiteracy with the ambitious goal of teaching every single illiterate person in the country”—one million Cubans, roughly one-third of the adult population then—“to read and write.” That’s what they did, as some 100,000 young people, most of them teenagers, went to the countryside and lived and worked alongside peasant families, eliminating illiteracy by the following year and learning much in the process themselves.

Knowledge about this accomplishment of the Cuban Revolution has been spreading through Venezuela’s fishing villages, farm cooperatives, and working-class neighborhoods for the last two years. During a visit to Cumaná, a fishing center on Venezuela’s northern coast in July of last year, this reporter got such evidence firsthand. Delia Bermúdez, the mother of two fishermen interviewed by the Militant, said she had heard from Cuban physical education teachers and doctors who had done volunteer stints in the area that illiteracy had been eliminated in Cuba within one year. “I don’t know how they did it,” Bermúdez said, “but that’s what we need here.” Rommel and Yorbanis Bermúdez, her sons, explained that illiteracy is detrimental to their daily lives. They would no longer let their father go to the market to sell the day’s catch, they said, because the middlemen robbed him doubly “since he doesn’t know how to read and write.”

These conditions are now being confronted across the country.

Pantón said that he and other volunteers use community centers, schools, and people’s homes to teach literacy classes in the evenings. The campaign has received such enthusiastic support among working people across Venezuela that even some businesses are trying to get at least a little of the credit for the massive effort, according to Pantón. “McDonald’s has offered its fast-food stores as places that can be used for literacy classes,” he stated.  
 
‘In the Heart of the Barrio’
Plan Barrio Adentro (In the Heart of the Neighborhood) is similarly popular among working people but has come under intense fire from Venezuela’s medical association and big business.

“We’d never thought we’d get a doctor around these parts,” Yanis Narváez, 26, told Associated Press reporters August 7. Narváez lives in the Resplandor neighborhood of Caracas, where many homes are made of cardboard and tin. Vivian Iglesias, a Cuban volunteer doctor offering basic medical services in that area, was taking the temperature of Narváez’s feverish toddler that day. “I don’t think she is doing anything bad, like a lot of people say, just because she is Cuban,” Narváez said about Iglesias.

She was referring to slanders in the big-business media about the program that has brought 1,000 Cuban doctors and nurses so far to serve as volunteers in the poorest working-class neighborhoods, mostly around Caracas up till now. The opposition is charging that this program “is proof that Chávez wants to impose a communist system like that of his friend and mentor, Cuban president Fidel Castro,” according to AP.

“I never imagined things would be like this,” Iglesias said of the living conditions in Resplandor. “But I like the Venezuelans. I like how they talk, their sayings, and if I can help, that’s great.”

Iglesias and the other Cuban medical personnel volunteering in Venezuela get a stipend of $250 per month, a fraction of what most Venezuelan doctors make.

Responding to the accusation that these volunteers are there to spread communism among the poorest layers of the country’s toilers, another Cuban doctor, Roberto Hernández, who serves in the San Pablito barrio of Caracas, told the Washington Post on August 24, “I am here only as a doctor. When I talk politics, it’s only when I have been asked about my country. And I tell them that I hope Fidel lasts another 100 years.”

The 45,000-member Venezuelan Medical Federation has also claimed that doctors like Iglesias and Hernández are taking jobs away from 8,000 unemployed local physicians.

“That’s a big lie,” said Pantón, who has just started practicing medicine in Valencia and volunteers at a community clinic like the Cuban doctors. “Most of the Venezuelan doctors don’t want to ever set foot in neighborhoods like Resplandor or Catia. They call them ‘slums.’ They despise the people living there. Many of them live to make money, not to save lives. The government appealed to Venezuelan doctors to join the program along with the Cubans. Less than 100 have volunteered.”

Responding to virulent attacks on Plan Barrio Adentro by Venezuelan Medical Federation president Douglas León Natera, Freddy Bernal, the pro-Chávez mayor of the Libertador municipality of Caracas, announced in a TV program September 16 that his office was organizing a march to show the popularity of the project and denounce the federation’s demands to dismantle it. “I invite Mr. Natera,” Bernal said, according to a news report in the Venezuelan web site aporrea.org, “to go to the barrios himself. I’ll wait there for him along with the people. We are not going to allow a bunch of tramps, which is what most members of the Federation are, to come and rob the Venezuelan people of this dream.”  
 
Politicization of working people
Under these conditions of sharpening class confrontation, a rapid politicization of the toilers is taking place. As the Militant reported last week (see “Pro-imperialist opposition is dealt blow in Venezuela” in the September 29 issue), dozens of factories shut down by the owners during the bosses’ lockout early this year have been occupied by the workers who are running production, in some cases for months now. Peasants have stepped up land takeovers, forcing government authorities to accelerate implementation of the new agrarian reform law passed in 2001. Many of these actions by working people have been attacked, as employers have used police units loyal to them and private thugs to murder militants. More than 70 peasant leaders have been killed in such incidents the last two years, according to interviews with peasants in several states.

Most organizations in the labor movement have shattered and new ones are being formed. The top leadership of the Confederation of Venezuelan Workers (CTV)—the country’s largest trade union federation until last year—backed the bosses’ “strike.” It has since become a shell of its former self. CTV president Carlos Ortega has fled the country and is currently in Costa Rica.

A new union federation, the National Union of Workers (UNT), was formed in August. A report in Venezuelanalysis.com said the following about the conclusion of the UNT meeting: “Nationalize the banks! Take over the enterprises that have shut down and have them run instead by workers! Refuse to pay the foreign debt and use the funds to create jobs! Reduce the workweek to 36 hours! Create new enterprises under workers’ control!—These are some of the demands that emerged from the action program workshop, which were enthusiastically endorsed by the First National Congress of the National Union of Workers (UNT) of Venezuela August 1-2.” The gathering was attended by 1,300 delegates, representing 120 unions and 25 regional federations.

SUTISS, the steelworkers union, which was among the largest industrial unions in the CTV, however, did not join the UNT as its organizers earlier expected. SUTISS president Ramón Machuca and other unionists across the country who have been part of the Bolivarian Workers Force—a labor federation tied to the governing Fifth Republic Movement—are focusing their efforts on launching a political organization, the Workers Party (PT) of Venezuela. The PT’s first national assembly is set to take place in the city of Guyana, Bolívar state, September 27.  
 
Washington’s destabilization campaign
This political ferment among the toilers is at the heart of what’s fueling Washington’s campaign to destabilize and eventually topple the Chávez government.

During a visit to Bogotá August 19, U.S. secretary of state Donald Rumsfeld praised Colombian president Alvaro Uribe for an “excellent job” in combating “narcoterrorism.” Rumsfeld was referring to the regime’s war on government opponents, some of whom are waging a guerrilla struggle led by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and by the smaller National Liberation Army (ELN).

In a similar visit to Bogotá a week earlier, Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, “compared Venezuela to Iraq’s neighbors that allow ‘weapons or fighters’ to cross the border,” according to Dow Jones reporter Charles Roth. “It’s not helpful when countries don’t fully support the antiterrorism fight,” Myers reportedly said in reference to the Venezuelan government.

In January, Gen. James Hill, chief of the U.S. Southern Command, told a conference in New York that “narcoterrorists” and Islamic groups were using Venezuela’s Margarita Island to launder money, according to Dow Jones.

These statements by White House and Pentagon officials have been made as Washington re-launched its effort, put on the back burner the first half of this year, to strengthen its military intervention in Latin America, particularly in Colombia, which shares a 1,400-mile-long border with Venezuela.

The Colombian military, which has been receiving training from hundreds of U.S. Special Forces troops, has accused Caracas of permitting Colombian guerrillas to use its territory as a base of operations—a charge the Venezuelan government denies.

In mid-July, former Colombian finance minister, Juan Manuel Santos, told an audience in Caracas that Venezuela is trying to buy 50 MiG fighter jets from a Russian manufacturer. Venezuelan ambassador to Colombia Carlos Rodolfo Santiago immediately denounced him as a “cynical and irresponsible liar.”

These accusations are accompanied by other provocations, which pose the prospect of a regional conflict between the two countries. On September 9, Venezuelan foreign minister Roy Chaderton told reporters that 15 U.S.-made Black Hawk helicopters flown by the Colombian military had violated his country’s airspace at Los Bancos near Guasdualito on Venezuela’s southwest frontier with Colombia.

Washington, which is behind this aggressive stance by Bogotá toward Caracas, has also become more open in the last two months in its desire to get rid of Chávez. The Venezuelan president assailed interference by U.S. ambassador to Venezuela Charles Shapiro in favor of the faltering opposition efforts to organize a referendum to oust Chávez. Shapiro visited the country’s National Elections Commission and held a news conference at the board’s offices, offering U.S. “technical assistance” for the poll.

“This is a sovereign nation, ambassador, and you must respect this country and your government must respect this country,” Chávez said in response. “What prerogative does ambassador Shapiro have to visit them?”

There are also indications that Washington may be contemplating putting economic pressures on Venezuela. For the first time in 50 years, U.S. companies did not import any reformulated gasoline from Venezuela in July, while importing other petroleum products.

Faced with this increasingly overt campaign of destabilization by U.S. imperialism, the Venezuelan government has continued to stand up to Washington in the international arena, including in opposing the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq, even if cautiously.

On September 22, the Venezuelan delegation to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) said it was unacceptable for the Iraqi delegation to attend that week’s OPEC output policy talks as a voting member. Iraqi delegates from the U.S.-picked Governing Council in Baghdad were scheduled to attend an OPEC meeting for the first time since U.S. and British forces toppled the Saddam Hussein regime and began a long-term military occupation of the country.

“Our position is clear,” said Rafael Ramírez, according to the Associated Press. “Venezuela hopes to have Iraq included within OPEC, but the internal situation of Iraq should be resolved, and there should be recognition by the UN.”
 
 
Related article:
Meeting in solidarity with Venezuela and other political events  
 
 
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