Beware the man on horseback
By Ravi Dev
Kaieteur News
December 17, 2006
A recent KN editorial in the KN reminded us of the proclivity of most Guyanese to give short shrift to matters of national security, even though it will affect each and every one of us in the end – if not sooner. Take, for instance, the recently concluded elections in our neighbour to the west, Venezuela: it passed with nary a ripple over here, even though the results have very serious implications for our national security.
In those elections of December 3rd, the incumbent President of Venezuela, Mr Hugo Chavez, secured a massive 63% of the vote, which will guarantee him another six-year term, which will keep him at the helm of his country until 2013. Now, Venezuela is not just our neighbour to the west; it is a neighbour that still occupies our half of the island of Ankoko, which it grabbed by force back in 1966. This was the year in which we had just become independent, and the seizure was not a mere coincidence: it was meant to brutally remind us that their claim to Essequibo, more than two-thirds of our national territory, was alive and well.
That claim still stands for Venezuela, and even though there was a national consensus at the time (“not a blade of grass”) in Guyana (it was one of the few times that Burnham and Jagan literally stood shoulder to shoulder) that we should proceed vigorously to reclaim our territory, this pledge seems to have been forgotten. The resounding vote for Mr. Chavez should be a wake-up call for us in Guyana that there is still a threat hanging over us from the west; a threat that will erupt in the wake of the inevitable floundering of the revolution that Mr Chavez in fomenting in Venezuela.
The secret of Mr. Chavez's success at the polls is a populism centred on mobilising the poorer sections of his society to support his calls for what he has nebulously defined as a “Bolivarian Revolution,” in which he will create a “socialism for the 21 st Century”. His vision is remarkably similar to the vision of our very own Mr. Forbes Burnham and his thrust to create a socialist state in Guyana based on co-operativism. Co-operativism is also high on Mr Chavez's agenda as he seeks to eliminate “capitalism” in Venezuela. According to one source, during the Chavez Presidency, the number of cooperatives in Venezuela has increased, from about 800 in 1998 to over 100,000 in 2005, an over 100-fold increase in seven years. Over 1.5 million Venezuelans are thus now involved in cooperatives, which represents about 10% of the country's adult population.” So here we have another experiment to overcome the profit incentive at the base of capitalism.
Mr Chavez has already announced, a la Mr. Burnham in 1978, that the new Assembly's first task should be to dissolve both the Congress and Supreme Court, and assume legislative and judicial powers, along with the job of drawing up a new constitution more in consonance with his vision. What this really means is that Mr Chavez will most likely use the occasion to institutionalise his personal power that is at the heart of his “Bolivarian Revolution”. We know where that will lead. One certain change is to remove the term limits for presidential elections: Mr Chavez has publicly declared that he would like to be there until 2021. Imagine the consequences of this in a country where the government already controls the judiciary and the other institutions of the state. One of the proposals is to change the name of the country from Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela to Socialist and Bolivarian Republic. Sounds familiar?
Like our failed co-operative experiment, Mr Chavez is also attempting to alter Venezuela's fundamental internal economic relations by giving the state a bigger stake in the ownership of capital. The linchpin, of course, of the Venezuelan economy is oil, with its burgeoning revenues from historic high prices. Mr Chavez has brought the semi-autonomous oil company PDVSA totally under direct governmental control, much as with the electricity company CADAFE, and the aluminum production plant, Alcasa. The state has also set up enterprises in the areas of telecommunications, air travel, and petro-chemicals. So, on to the “commanding heights of the economy”.
The most serious innovation for us is the gradual militarisation of the Venezuelan society and the state. The military is one of the most nationalistic of Venezuelan institutions. Mr.Chavez has already placed thousands of his former military colleagues in key government positions, and has embarked on the creation of a massive, armed Peoples Militia (reserves) that brings into the power equation the masses of poor who have been attracted to the Bolivarian Revolution through Chavez's massive patronage scheme. Chavez, however, cannot ignore one-third of the country's population, which voted for the opposition – even though he would certainly like to. That opposition has the support of the US Administration, to which Chavez has declared his total rejection, policies and personnel in toto. The contradictions, that all Guyanese know about from our own Burnhamist experiment, inherent in the course Mr. Chavez has embarked on -- clientism, patronage, nepotism, and witch hunting – will lead to severe internal and external problems. The only course open to Mr Chavez will be the intensification of the Venezuelan nationalism, which already suffuses all talk of the Bolivarian Revolution.
The fly in the ointment for us is that, as mentioned before, a cornerstone of modern Venezuelan nationalism is the claim to our Essequibo. And this claim will rise to the top as Chavez continues to rid his country of what he calls the colonial vestiges of Anglo-American influence. He will not stop at seizing British cattle ranches. One Article of the Venezuelan Constitution that is sacrosanct is Article 7, which declares, “ The national territory is that which belonged to the Captaincy General of Venezuela before the political transformation initiated in 1810, with the modifications resulting from treaties validly concluded by the Republic.” Venezuela, of course, rejects the 1899 Arbitral Award that demarcated our boundary with them.
Those who are taken in by the talk of building a “socialist” fraternity should remember the earlier experience of the USSR, which claimed to be following a similar path in the name of “international proletarianism.” The bottom line then was that the interests of the USSR (read Russsia) took first priority over all. It will be the same for Venezuela in the present experiment. The one issue that all Venezuelans are united in is their claim over Essequibo. All Guyanese should be concerned over our national security as the star of the Venezuelan man on horseback continues to rise.