Da: "Nello Margiotta" A: Oggetto: Fw: Venezuela: Chavez calls for counter-mobilizations; bosses' united front fractures Data: venerdě 30 novembre 2001 19.50 From: "Jose G. Perez" Subject: Venezuela: Chavez calls for countermobilizations, bosses' united front fractures Despite the claims that the bosses' cartel fedecamaras represent all economic activity in the country and that they are all 100% behind the Dec. 10 general lockout, various fedecamaras sectors are OFFICIALLY dropping out of the planned action, and it remains an open question how many workplaces will heed the call to shut down even in those sectors which haven't formally reneged. The latest to turn tail and run are the airlines. Below I''ll reproduce the AP wire. In addition, NOT participating in the lockout are the radio and TV stations, the petroleum industry and, of course, government ministries and offices. Meanwhile, President Chávez has announced a series of mass countermobilizations to the capitalist's campaign. The popular offensive will begin December 6, third anniversary of Chávez's (first) election as President, with a nationwide address by Chávez and will culminate December 17 with a relaunching of the Movimiento Revolucionario Bolivariano 200. Along the way there will be a night-time vigil December 6, a "conquest of Caracas" by peasants and workers on Dec. 9 and 10, the formal signing of the agrarian reform merasure that has provoked the ire of the oligarchy on the 10th itself, and a summit of the Association of Caribbean States on the 11 and 12th. Everything appears to suggest that the package of economic and other laws recently promulgated by Chávez, with the agrarian reform as its centerpiece, could be a turning point in the evolution of the process opened by Chávez's elections three years ago, and one which brings to the fore in a much clearer way the social forces involved. On one side are the tattered remnants of the traditional bourgeois political parties, the news media, and the bosses. Allied with the former are the international news media and the United States, which is carrying out a provocative campaign of little-noticed (by the media in the US) statements trying to force Chávez to recant his criticism of the U.S. was against the people of Afghanistan. On the other side are the working people of Venezuela, with growing sympathy from working people all over Latin America. There are several historical references from post-WWII Latin American history that it would be useful to keep in mind in thinking about the Venezuelan process. One, obviously, is Cuba, but also the Allende experience in Chile, the Perón period in Argentina, the Bolivian revolution of the 1950s, the Arbenz government in Guatemala, and the Nicaraguan revolution. The point isn't so much that the latter processes were reversed, but rather, that this kind of movement for national salvation are not at all uncommon in Latin America. The Cuban revolution taken as a whole is misleading because we know how the story comes out: the establishment of a socialist country led by conscious Communists in a process where the fundamental social classes were the peasants and workers. But looked at as it was in 1959 and the first half of 1960, the Cuban process seemed as undefined and incoherent as Venezuela might appear to many today. It was through a series of political battles and confrontations that the worker-peasant social character of what may have seemed at first just a revolt against a dictatorial regime and for clean government emerged.