Vol. 79/No. 47      December 28, 2015

 
(front page)

Venezuelan opposition wins vote
amid deep economic crisis

 
Battered by the capitalist economic crisis ravaging the country, Venezuelans voted overwhelmingly for the pro-imperialist coalition opposed to President Nicolás Maduro and his United Socialist Party in the Dec. 6 legislative elections.

The Democratic Unity Roundtable, which includes two dozen capitalist parties, won 56 percent of the vote and 112 of the National Assembly’s 167 seats, giving it a two-thirds “supermajority.”

The opposition coalition even won in many working-class areas that had voted for Maduro and his predecessor Hugo Chávez for the past 17 years. More than 74 percent of those eligible voted.

Maduro took office in 2013 after the death of Chávez, who was first elected in 1998. Chávez was popular among working people for advocating radical change, criticizing U.S. imperialist arrogance toward Latin America, promising land for landless peasants, expanding social welfare benefits funded out of oil profits, and establishing programs set up with the aid of revolutionary Cuba that improved health care and education for millions in Venezuela.

These same measures earned Chávez and Maduro the enmity of Washington. The U.S. government backed more than one attempt to overthrow Chávez, including a 2002 coup that was reversed after thousands of working people took to the streets. In March this year, the Barack Obama administration imposed sanctions on a number of officials and issued an executive order declaring that Venezuela was a “threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”

From the beginning Chávez — and then Maduro — rejected emulating the example of the Cuban revolution. They organized to administer and regulate capitalism, calling their course the Bolivarian Revolution and 21st Century Socialism, instead of building a proletarian party that could mobilize Venezuela’s workers and farmers to overthrow the dictatorship of capital.

“We accept the results,” Maduro said in a Dec. 6 speech. He blamed the defeat on the “economic war” waged by Venezuelan capitalists and imperialism, charging that businesses hoarded goods or sold them on the black market to avoid price controls and rationing as well as to deliberately create shortages to increase popular discontent.

Deepening economic crisis

Production of oil, which accounts for 95 percent of Venezuela’s export earnings, has dropped by 350,000 barrels a day since 2008. Both supporters and opponents of the government attribute this to corruption and mismanagement. The economy has been further battered by the worldwide plunge in oil prices, which dropped more than 60 percent in the last year alone, to less than $40 a barrel Dec. 8. This has left the government with less hard currency to fund social programs.

Inflation is estimated to be as much as 200 percent annually, the highest in the world, and the gross domestic product is projected to contract 10 percent this year.

While many basic items including eggs, rice, flour, cooking oil, and detergent are regulated, working people must spend hours in line to purchase them at the official price — if they are available — or buy them on the black market at double, triple or five times the cost.

The new legislature takes office Jan. 5. The opposition says it intends to end price and currency controls. They also say they will pass an amnesty for leaders of the opposition who were arrested and accused of carrying out violent actions aimed at overthrowing the Maduro government in 2014.

Divisions within opposition

The opposition coalition is not united in its approach on how far and how fast to move. Some factions want to launch a recall campaign to force Maduro out of office.

But Henrique Capriles, who lost to Maduro in the 2013 presidential election, told the Wall Street Journal that going after Maduro and his supporters “would be the worst thing that could happen.”

While saluting the election results, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry called for a “dialogue among all parties in Venezuela.”

So far the opposition has been vague about continued cooperation with Cuba. Cuban internationalist missions, including tens of thousands of health care workers and teachers, are popular among working people. Cuban volunteers provide medical care in the poorest neighborhoods and most isolated regions, where doctors trained in Venezuela do not go. Before the arrival of the Cuban volunteers, health care services “were practically nonexistent” in the shantytowns of Caracas, Spain’s El País daily notes. “If the Cubans leave, the health system for the poor would collapse.”

The opposition has said they want to “review” Petrocaribe, the government program that subsidizes oil sales, not just to Cuba but to 17 Caribbean and Central American nations.

U.S. Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes announced Dec. 9 that those governments shouldn’t expect U.S. help. “We’re not going to be able to simply substitute American oil for Venezuelan oil,” he said.  
 
 
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