Vol. 79/No. 9      March 16, 2015

BY SETH GALINSKY
The more than 50 percent drop in crude oil prices worldwide over the past nine months has hit Venezuela especially hard. With oil sales making up 96 percent of Venezuela’s income from foreign trade, plummeting prices have slashed the country’s income, threatening government social programs and placing mounting pressure on workers and farmers.

Venezuela’s toilers were already suffering from the effects of the worldwide crisis of capitalist production and trade and Washington’s hostility and sanctions, ratcheted up since Hugo Chávez was elected president in 1998. He promised radical change and took measures that challenged U.S. imperialist domination of the country.

Bourgeois opposition forces look to the spreading economic crisis to unravel the government of Nicholas Maduro, who replaced Chávez after his death in 2013. However, the main opposition parties, now under the umbrella of the Platform of Democratic Unity, are discredited because most working people see them as craven supporters of Washington’s campaign of intervention in their country and who seek a return to the days when the capitalist bosses and their government shot down protesting workers in the streets.

Maduro continued Chávez’s course of criticizing U.S. imperialist policy around the world, while advocating “21st Century Socialism” for semicolonial nations, rejecting both “savage capitalism” and the example of Cuba’s socialist revolution.

The Chávez and Maduro governments used oil profits to fund social programs aimed at improving the living standards of workers and peasants. They welcomed thousands of Cuban internationalist volunteers who set up health clinics and schools in workers’ barrios and rural areas and continue to do so today.

But Chávez and Maduro let capitalist property relations stand and declined to mobilize Venezuela’s workers and farmers to fight for control. The government announced plans to use oil profits to diversify the economy, but mired in corruption they were never carried out.

Now those social programs are in jeopardy.

Washington despises the collaboration between Caracas and revolutionary Cuba and Havana’s steadfast support for Venezuela. Ever since Chávez was elected, Washington sought to undermine the government, backing a 2002 coup attempt, which failed in the face of widespread resistance by working people, and two other attempts to oust the government. Caracas has continued to provide subsidized oil to Cuba.

Government attempts to ameliorate the crisis through administrative measures and complicated tiered exchange rates for U.S. dollars have exacerbated shortages and rampant corruption. Capitalist bosses claim they can’t get enough hard currency to import goods and spare parts.

In January Maduro traveled to Saudi Arabia, Russia, China and Portugal seeking investments, loans and credits to weather the crisis, as well as a bloc to push oil prices up. He came back with little to show for his efforts.

Even before oil prices plummeted, inflation in Venezuela was running at 63 percent annually and shortages of basic necessities, from toilet paper to chicken and cooking oil, were endemic.

Bosses’ economic war

In early February he ordered a state takeover of the Día a Día supermarket chain. The media broadcast photos of a company warehouse full of goods, along with empty shelves in the stores, saying it showed proof of the bosses’ economic war against the Maduro government.

According to the Washington Post, economic production declined 5 percent in the first half of this year and one-third of key goods are in short supply. Coffee production has dropped, with this year’s harvest expected to be the third-smallest crop since 1961. Previously an exporter of coffee, Venezuela will import 685,000 bags this year.

Maduro announced he is considering raising the price of gasoline, which is subsidized by the state and sells for just 5 cents a gallon, to bolster the government budget.

Washington has continued to intervene in Venezuela’s affairs, meeting with opposition leaders and seeking to foster divisions in the military. Maduro announced March 1 that he was ordering a reduction in the number of U.S. officials at the U.S. Embassy in Caracas. He noted that there are 100 members of the U.S. diplomatic staff in Caracas compared to just 17 Venezuelan diplomats in Washington.

Since December President Barack Obama has banned more than 24 Venezuelan officials or their family members from traveling to the U.S. and frozen their U.S. assets.

“We express vigorous condemnation of the unacceptable and unjustified unilateral sanctions against the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, and the continuing external intervention aimed at creating a climate of instability in this sister nation,” Cuban President Raúl Castro told delegates to a meeting of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States Jan. 28.

Maduro announced Feb. 12 that several high-ranking air force officials had been arrested for plotting to overthrow the government, backed by Washington. Caracas Mayor Antonio Ledezma, a leader of the pro-Washington opposition, was also detained.  
 
 
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