Last week, we published a readers’ panel on the Venezuelan protests, sourced via GuardianWitness and Guardian comments sections. We sought to hear from those who were taking part in the protests, and those who supported them. We received many responses.
At the same time, a social media campaign was taking off, using#SOSVenezuela on Twitter and Facebook in particular, to highlight the situation in the country.
We’ve also been keen to hear the other side of the story, away from the social media narrative that can be dominated by people sympathetic to the opposition and by those with the media and language skills to get their message out. On Monday, the Guardian published a letter signed by a range of figures including former London Mayor Ken Livingstone and the filmmaker John Pilger denouncing the violence, and pointing to the links between prominent opposition leaders and the attempted coup of 2002.
Below are a selection of accounts from those in Venezuela who did not protest, with their own takes on the current situation in the country.
“Under Chávez’s government we improved as a society”
We would like the opposition to accept that Nicolás Maduro won in fair elections in April last year. We would also like the opposition leaders to call the youth and anyone involved in violent actions to stop, they also have to call out any night time demos, since increases the chances of criminal actions and make people fearful.
People of the humbler social classes are not protesting because they have jobs, their children get schooling and a general access to healthcare, also public transport has remained cheap thanks to the precise intervention of the State authorities. One must remember that the increase in bus fares was the final detonator for social unrest on Monday 27 February 1989.
As a student in the nineties I participated in several demos. We used to fight for free access to education, healthcare and such. Under Chávez’s government we improved as a society in many of these aspects. There are still many challenges ahead: one of them is the economy and the final consolidation of Popular Power in the Communal State, as Chávez proposed in El Plan de la Patria 2013-2019.
Coromoto Jaraba Pineda, blogger
“Venezuela is not Ukraine”
Venezuela is not Ukraine. This is the same Venezuela we had at the end of the eighties. Venezuelans have had always these very same problems:
a) Dollar acquisition issues. Exchange rate controls
b) Price controls. Regulation on prices
c) Periodic problems with scarcity of supplies (consequently)
d) People getting rid of money in order to save (by buying goods)
e) And, I’m sorry to say, a tendency to dismiss stable ways of making money and instead a preference for ‘the easy way’. Importing goods has always been preferred to manufacturing, for example. Hence the usual pressure on acquiring dollars.
Venezuelans are intelligent and capable and hard workers when needed but since the seventies a corruption in their culture has taken over and Chávez did not help with that, unfortunately.
Venezuela looks like a playing ground for the current war between leftist and rightist ideologies but you’ll find that if the right wing comes to power their problems will not end.
I’m a Venezuelan living in Canada and I’ve supported Chávez. But the guy disappointed me by forgetting that Marx was an expert in classical economics. I don’t think Marx would have any of their a) or b) measures above.
Actually, to match their current idiosyncrasies, Venezuela would do better by becoming more like Panama.
People there are currently making claims on Freedom and Democracy. But those are false. Maduro is not as ‘open’ as Chávez but that’s only because he’s more of an asshole. I hope the Guardian will not be swayed by that.
“The ideal that everything is going to be perfect if Maduro goes is stupid”
There are lots of reasons to protest, but if the political actors are said to be the leaders, it makes no sense because the real reasons are distorted only to take power. It is the perfect situation for radicals and guns. Then protests can take place in any street, blocking them, taking this ‘fight’ next to houses and residential buildings, at day and night, without any permission, burning anything that is available in the streets, sometimes also cars, and they think that have the right to do this, that they have the truth, and that they are the majority.
La Guardia Nacional (security force) arrives with perdigones [pellets] and lacrimogen bombs [tear gas] and arrest people from these protests, and then they protest again because some of their people are arrested. Security forces for sure have committed many excesses, as in each part of this earth, also in England, but there is no clear evidence that they have used guns. Only the first day (night) of protests Sebin (Servicio Bolivariano de Inteligencia) officers had guns, and there is a video where a person died while they were shooting. After that Maduro took down the Sebin director from his functions, and Sebin officers didn’t appear again in the next days of protests.
Doing all this for the ideal that everything is going to be perfect if Maduro goes is stupid: corruption, economic situation and insecurity are deep problems that comes from Venezuelan culture, including the economical situation, because inflation and shortages are a result of speculation and corruption.
Ana Maria Castro via GuardianWitness, 22 February 2014
“Reality is distorted”
Us Chavistas who support Maduro do not go out and protest because we are aware that the current problems arise from our internal contradictions, that is, we know that the dominant class remains the owner of the means of production and, as a result, is directly responsible for the current shortages. They are making sure that the scarcity of basic food basket goods becomes a source of anxiety and discontent among the population, in order to bring about the objective conditions for a coup d’état and thus restore their dominance on power.
During conversations with the different people who hop in my taxi, from your everyday workers to frequent international travellers, I listen to their points of view and each puts them forward according to their personal, especially economic, interests. Your more down-to-earth workers say they have been included through the social policies of today’s Venezuelan state, whether through free education, health, housing, sports and culture, without any distinction, as well as social security pensions, where I also find myself included, despite being an informal worker. Among the latter group, I sense a great deal of influence of the media’s negative portrayals: reality is distorted, overlooking information of events actually taking place in the country.
Juan Contreras, taxi driver and grassroots organiser, Caricuao, Caracas
“I was present when they cleaned the street at the Primer Viaducto”
I am in Merida (municipalidad Libertador) living all this first hand. I am in an opposition neighbourhood that has barricaded itself off from the city, shutting access to the main roads in and out. I have been able to confirm that other parts of Merida are normal and not part of the protest. Today the protest leaders did allow the municipal trash trucks in to take out two weeks worth of trash that was making the place unbearable. People were taking to burning their trash on the street, generating clouds of acrid smelling burning plastic bags and trash. Many people who are not protesters are walking around with surgical masks because of the contamination. There is resentment growing among residents against the protests.
The Guardia has attempted to clean the streets on many occasions, and soon as they do, a handful of the protestors find refuse and block it again. I was present when they cleaned the street at the Primer Viaducto, and witnessed opposition women hitting the Guardia with their spoons on their helmets and was surprised by the Guardia’s inaction.
Roberto, Venezuela
“We are not in opposition, as before, but are constituent power”
The question [of why I have not protested] has an implicit false premise. Why say the Bolivarians do not protest? Yes I protest a lot. The way this question is worded reveals the Guardian’s assumptions about the revolution in Venezuela. It is a bit of a leading question. Great Britain does not have problems? Approaching our revolution from the hegemonic narrative prevents those who do not live here to understand what is happening in Venezuela. You think from your own reality without realising that today, the popular (poor) sectors have direct access to the government. We are not in opposition, as before, but are constituent power. Probably when you read my answer you are going to say that I have been ‘co-opted’, but for the first time in my long life my opinion is heard by those in government. When we have something to protest against, individually or collectively, we look for a popular channel to express a policy change but, additionally, we are making proposals. The political framework of Venezuela is a participatory democracy, not only representative.
Unless we change the way we think we are destined and doomed to repeat the reality and we cannot transform our country. Venezuela needs to go through an educational process that allows the entire country to have the cognitive tools to carry out the cultural revolution that we need to exit the contemporary framework of global capitalism and build a socialism linking humans with their own power. I want an eco-socialist, feminist revolution that informs answers from our history and desires to depatriarchalise and decolonise us.
Sandra Angeleri, ethnic studies professor, Central University of Venezuela
“Corruption and socialism don’t work. Neither do corruption and capitalism for that matter”
A few days ago I completed a border run from Los Llanos – the baking and arid Venezuelan plains – to Colombia: a 20 hour round trip by car more or less. Stayed the night in the border town, San Antonio, and crossed over to Cucuta in Colombia and came back the same day. No ‘riots’ on the Venezuelan side just burned rubbish strewn across the main thoroughfares by the guarimbas – or saboteurs – as they are called by the government and Chavistas.
There were some protesters in San Antonio. They had signs like ‘end the shortages’ (here here), ‘Maduro should get an education’ (possibly – he is a former bus driver) and ‘Cubans go home’ (I still don’t get what they have against the Cubans). They were painting cars (without permission) with anti-Maduro slogans. I am told these protesters are students. They looked well off and far from emaciated and destitute. Not the indignant proletariat ready to cast off their chains.
Obviously there are shortages here in Venezuela and, as Obama correctly said (I am paraphrasing), ‘the Venezuelan government should stop accusing the US and listen to the legitimate concerns of its people’. Maduro spoke of dialogue in one of his speeches but there is no dialogue between the left and right. The views of each side are too entrenched. If the opposition focused on legitimate concerns, perhaps they might be worth listening to.
I should mention that Americans are not allowed to cross the border where I crossed, or at least this is what I was told by one border guard who offered us coffee and chatted to us and cracked jokes at 4am while he checked our car for drugs from Colombia. Indeed, this would be my biggest issue with the government: lack of information and lack of accountability. They give few reasons for the cuts beyond sabotage and the Colombian smugglers but there does seem to have been a dip in production as well. There should also be accountability when it comes to corruption. Corruption and socialism don’t work. Neither do corruption and capitalism for that matter. Too much money has been siphoned off and no accountability.
If I were protesting, this is what I would be calling for – more transparency and more accountability. Something which one could call for with far too many governments these days, the British government included.
Lee Mackenzie (read his full story on GuardianWitness)
“There were no proposals regarding economic demands”
The set of economic policies that were implemented by the Bolivarian Government at the end of 2013 took place in a context of systematic harassment and hostilities against Venezuela’s economic stability. Nevertheless, efforts continue to be made to ensure the advancement of social achievements in a context which Chavismo has been termed ‘Economic War’. During the march of 12 February 2014 and the whole of the violent protests that followed it the following days, it became obvious that there were no proposals regarding economic demands or the defence of student rights or any other sector of society affected by any specific political or economic reality. They are not protesting about these issues because they lack their own social and political agenda, but rather they are integral part to national and international plans that seek to overthrow the Bolivarian government.
Pablo Giménez, economist, Bolivarian University of Venezuela
Original Article
Source: theguardian.com/
Author: James Walsh, Philippa Law and Guardian readers
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