Source: Counterpunch
In mid-2008, the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) came under strong criticism from both Brazil’s Lula and Venezuela’s Chavez. Lula said, “The waging of armed struggle as a means of achieving power should end in Latin America. The belief that armed struggle can solve anything is out of date.” Chavez mirrored these views, saying, “The guerrilla war is history. At this moment in Latin America, an armed guerrilla movement is out of place.”
Chavez is no stranger to the armed road. His brother Adan, now a leading Chavista, was a member of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR), a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla organization, and later with the Party of the Venezuelan Revolution, an urban underground organization affiliated with the former guerrilla commander Douglas Bravo.
But, from Adan, Hugo Chavez also saw first hand the limitations of this work. As Adan put it to Alan Woods, “We conducted urban guerrilla work. But because of its clandestine character [of the Party of the Venezuelan Revolution] did not have contact with the masses. Furthermore they were very dogmatic and sectarian. Like the MIR, it split and ended up disappearing. In order to achieve a revolutionary popular movement, which would allow the taking of power, one had to have a strong influence within the popular masses and have support within the Armed Forces.”
Adan’s prognosis mirrors the self-criticism of the Venezuelan Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN), whose leadership wrote in 1964 that they had fallen prey to “infantile subjectivism of petty bourgeois origin – the swollen enthusiasm due to a long chain of successes which we gained for a time, which made us appear each day, in Venezuela as well as abroad, like an almost mythological force of immeasurable power.” This led to an underestimation of the Venezuelan state and a grave overestimation of the fellowship between the masses and the FALN. The assessment is gloomy, but its victim was not simply the guerrilla army. It was equally the Venezuelan Communist Party, which took refuge in a quiescence that led in 1967 to its open break with Fidel Castro.
Hugo Chavez was part of the Venezuelan armed forces, within which he led a small clandestine leftist group. His band attempted a coup in 1992 that failed. Hugo Chavez went on television to tell his comrades to give up, por ahora, for now. That phrase, por ahora, struck a chord. Chavez converted his popularity into a mass movement, into which the small parties and the social movements threw themselves.
I remember meeting various left activists at the Central University of Venezuela in the years between the Chavez coup attempt (1992) and before his eventual electoral victory (1998) – their gloom was evident, nostalgia for Cuba, circa 1959, but desolation for their own future. Guerrilla warfare had ended by the mid-1990s: the leading edge for the Maoists of the continent was the Shining Path of Peru, whose leader, Guzman, was captured by the Peruvian military in 1991, with mopping up operations at work around the Maoists’ stronghold of Ayacucho. The Venezuelan left activists were in small bands, unable yet to see what had begun in the barrios, the slums of the poor that ring the city.
The fatigue with the parties of the Right and the Center-Right and the enthusiasm for the populism of Chavez’ party and his style enabled the first victory. Against US pressure and the machinations of the oligarchy, Chavez’s movement held firm. It then conducted its “long march through the institutions,” bringing the various state agencies in line with the values of the Bolivarian movement. All this culminated in the revision of the Constitution, which now better represented the aspirations of the vast mass of the Venezuelan population. State power was the goal, but it had been clear to the Bolivarian movement that state power does not only mean control of the state apparatus; if it meant only this, then the Bolivarians would have to do the dirty work of the oligarchy’s 1961 Constitution.
To write the new Bolivarian Constitution (1999), the Venezuelan population voted in a Constituent Assembly, who drafted a Constitution which was then ratified in a popular vote, the first time ever in the country’s history. The Constitution draws from a variety of sources, including from Latin America’s revolutionary history (from the liberator Simon Bolivar and the Marxist Jose Carlos Mariategui) and from Marxist theory (notably the remarkable Soviet jurist Evgeny Pashukanis). It is an astounding document, with provisions for deeper democracy at one level, and another for the widest recognition of human rights. The Chavez government had already formed the Barrio Adentro program to provide government-sponsored healthcare for the population. But this would have simply been at the mercy of the government. Now, the Constitution directs the government to provide healthcare, as it is now legally binding. All of this funded, propitiously, by the oil revenues that flooded into Venezuela’s state coffers. Guns remained holstered. The struggle was taken through the ballot box.