[ex-ussr-left] Fw: ['spotters] venezuela: What happened?

["Peter Krasnopyorov" <peterk@interstar.com.ua>]

----- Original Message -----
From: Tron Øgrim <tron@newmedia.no>
To: <leftist_trainspotters@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Monday, April 15, 2002 9:24 PM
Subject: ['spotters] venezuela: What happened?


> Hola List
>
> Two great articles on the struggles in Venezuela
>
> lots to learn here, I think!
>
> togrim
> Oslo
>
> rom: Jon Beasley-Murray <jon.beasley-murray@man.ac.uk>
>
> http://www.art.man.ac.uk/spanish/jbm.html
> http://www.art.man.ac.uk/lacs/
>
> ------
>
> "The Coup *Will* be Televised: Hugo Chavez's Downfall and the Venezuelan
> multitude"
>
> by Jon Beasley-Murray
>
>
> So this is how one lives a modern coup d'tat: watching television.
> Venezuela's coup (and coup it is, make no mistake) took place in the
> media, fomented by the media, and with the media themselves the apparent
> object of both sides' contention.  But while South America's
> longest-standing democracy was brought down in the confused glare of media
> spectacle, any attempt to turn this spectacle into narrative or analysis
> must also take into account, first, oil and, second, the general breakdown
> of Latin American political legitimacy, of which this coup has been just
> one (particularly bloody) symptom.
>
> In Caracas, Venezuela's capital, everyone has been watching television
> over the past few days: every restaurant, shop, and business has had a
> television on, showing almost constant news coverage, and diners and
> shoppers have been dividing their attention between what they are
> consuming and what they are seeing of developments in the ongoing crisis
> that came to a head last night with the overthrow of president Hugo
> Chavez.
>
> For several months now, support for (now former) president Chavez's once
> overwhelmingly popular regime has been in steady decline, in part as a
> result of a relentless assault by both the press and the television
> networks.  In response, Chavez took to decreeing so-called "chains," in
> which he obliged all the networks to broadcast his own--often long and
> rambling--addresses to the nation.  The media only redoubled its
> opposition, subverting the broadcasts by superposing text protesting
> against this "abuse" of press freedom, or for instance by splitting the
> screen between Chavez's speech on the one side and images of
> anti-government demonstrations on the other.  Moreover, through the media
> came more and more calls for the president's resignation or, failing that,
> for the intervention of the military.
>
> The military has now answered these calls.  The trigger for the most
> recent convulsions has been (predictably enough) a battle for control of
> Venezuela's oil.  The country is the world's fourth largest producer, and
> the third largest exporter of oil to the United States; the state oil
> company, PDVSA (the world's largest oil company and Latin America's
> largest company of any kind), is crucial to the economy as a whole, and
> among Chavez's policies had been the attempt to rejuvenate OPEC and to run
> PDVSA according to national and political priorities rather than simply
> acceding to market demands.  Two weeks ago, the president sacked several
> members of the company's board of directors, replacing them with his own
> allies.  The management immediately cried foul, initiating a production
> slowdown, and taking up a position at the vocal centre of anti-government
> protest.  At the weekend, Chavez replaced more board members, and on
> Monday the union federation Confederacion de Trabajadores de Venezuela
> (CTV) and the national chamber of commerce, FEDECAMERAS, allied with the
> oil industry's management and joined to call a general strike for Tuesday
> 10th.  While the opposition gathered to demonstrate around the
> headquarters of PDVSA, in Caracas's opulent East Side, those loyal to the
> government congregated around the presidential palace in the more working
> class and dilapidated city centre.  Tuesday night Chavez decreed another
> chain, declaring to the nation that the strike had been a failure; in
> response, the coalition of union, business, and oil management declared
> that the strike had been 100% successful (of course, the truth was
> somewhere in between) and announced, first, another day's general strike
> and, then, the following day, that the strike would be indefinite.
>
> The atmosphere in the city became palpably tenser.  Opposition supporters,
> mainly from the middle and upper classes, drove through the city, the
> national flag and the black flag of opposition waving from the electric
> windows of their four-wheel drive vehicles, while a broader spectrum of
> opponents added to the cacophony by banging pots and pans from their
> windows (exchanging shouted insults with government supporters) either
> when Chavez appeared on television or, on those days when he was off the
> screen, at pre-arranged times in the evening.  Encouraged by this show of
> support, anti-Chavez forces called for a march within the East Side for
> Thursday morning.  On the day of the march, the two hundred thousand
> demonstrators then continued on beyond their stated destination, heading
> for the city centre and the core of the president's power base.
> Undoubtedly this was a provocation (and almost certainly planned in
> advance), but at this point the two sides had become so polarised that
> confrontation was inevitable.
>
> The final moments of Chavez's regime began that afternoon as the president
> tried to take over the television networks literally as well as
> symbolically.  At around 1:30pm he appeared on the airwaves, broadcasting
> from his office in the palace, declaring calm and that his government
> continued in control, well able to deal with the vociferous minority
> demanding his resignation.  As the broadcast started, I was finishing
> lunch with friends at a restaurant; at all the tables there was a sudden
> silence, all present recognising that Venezuela's crisis had entered its
> end-game.  Over the next hour or so, as the president continued talking
> (sometimes chiding, sometimes patronising), one by one the terrestrial
> channels were taken off the air, leaving only the government station
> available to those who did not have cable.  For some time, a surreal
> dialogue ensued, as the private channels (now visible only to cable
> subscribers) split their screens once more, showing mute and confused
> images of rioting taking place outside the palace, commenting upon these
> events with superimposed text, while Chavez spoke calmly from behind his
> desk while from off-screen aides periodically passed him notes updating
> him about and allowing him to respond to the images and text added by the
> television stations to the official discourse.
>
> Then the chain broke and, for all intents and purposes, the game was up.
> The networks abandoned Chavez and dedicated themselves to the pictures
> (often repeated, often out of synch) of what had been happening in the
> city centre as the president's discourse had dominated the airwaves.
> Confused and disorganised images of stone-throwing youths, the injured
> carried away on stretchers, Chavez loyalists apparently returning fire,
> the first dead bodies, troops and tanks mobilising, and various military
> officials making statements all marked a coup in progress.  I was driven
> back to another friend's house as darkness fell, and we as well as the few
> other road-users ran every red light in our way.  As the night wore on,
> the government television screened old nature documentaries, and then went
> off the air completely as private channels regained their full
> broadcasting capabilities.  Eventually the entire military high command
> declared themselves against the president.  Grainy images of government
> jets leaving the darkened city centre airfield with all lights off
> strengthened rumours that the president might have fled, but then the
> different forces seemed to have hunkered down until, at 1:30 in the
> morning, the sound of pots and pans and fireworks greeted the news that
> Hugo Chavez was now in custody.  But nobody went out into the street.  We
> turned the television off.
>
> It is only today that the coup's fall-out is becoming clear, just as the
> choppy, confused television images are being re-written as linear,
> coherent newspaper narrative.  Adherents of the former government are (in
> their entirety) being accused of perpetrating the massacre of at least
> thirteen unarmed protesters yesterday--when it is far from clear (and
> indeed, most unlikely) either that all the dead are protestors or that the
> protestors were all unarmed.  With this justification, however, (and with
> the false notion that Chavez's regime was characterised by repression) all
> traces of the past three years are rapidly being erased.  It seems
> probable that Chavez's democratising constitution will be revoked (it has
> already been utterly breached), and that the country will return to the
> constitution of 1961, and perhaps to the entrenched social inequalities of
> the 1960s and 1970s, too.  Much of the opposition, united only in its
> rejection of Chavez, may find cause to regret the manner of the old
> regime's passing, and the shape of the regime now in formation.  At
> present, the "transitional" government (which has promised new elections
> "within a year") is the product of a pact between the military and
> business: the new president, Pedro Carmona, is the former head of the
> chamber of commerce, and in the televised announcement in which his new
> position was announced, he was flanked by the collected heads of the
> various armed services.  Meanwhile, the police are conducting raids in the
> city centre, (democratically elected) provincial governors are being
> detained and stripped of power, and all those who sympathised with or
> worked for the former government face an uncertain future; some have
> already gone into hiding.
>
> The previous regime had many faults: after an auspicious beginning (and
> 80% support in the polls), it failed to mobilise the mass of the people
> towards its stated aim of transforming what, for all its oil resources, is
> still a country with considerable poverty.  The regime's prospects (and
> the prospects for any social change) came to depend all too much on the
> figure of the president himself, at best a maverick, at worst
> authoritarian in style (and probably in fact quite incompetent), whose
> personal charisma would inevitably wane.  As Chavez's personalism allowed
> for no competition, when Chavez's popularity declined, there were no
> alternatives left to those who believed in the generally progressive
> causes advanced (if intermittently) by his government.  "Chavismo" itself
> came to create the political vacuum that has allowed the far right pact of
> arms and commerce now to take control.
>
> At the same time, under Chavez, Venezuela constituted a dissident
> exception to the contemporary prevalence of a neoliberalism that has only
> accentuated the divide between rich and poor throughout Latin America.  If
> Chavez was not the way forward, he was rather a throwback, a (somewhat
> hokey) mix both of the nineteenth-century liberators he revered--he went
> so far as to rename the country the "Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela," in
> honour of Simon Bolivar, the leader of the Latin American independence
> movement--and of early twentieth-century populists such as Argentina's
> Juan Peron.  Briefly, at least, Chavez seemed to demonstrate that other
> models were possible--and, in his attempts to make OPEC a force of third
> world producers allied against a global system heavily weighted in favour
> of first world consumers, that another form of globalisation might be
> imagined.
>
> Now, however, Venezuela has rejoined the Latin American "mainstream."
> This mainstream is characterised by the almost complete breakdown of any
> semblance of a social pact.  One sign of this breakdown is the perceived
> dramatic rise in delinquency or common crime--Caracas is a city in which
> cars abound with a surplus of security devices, the many high-rise
> residential buildings that characterise its urban growth all have guards,
> and people are weighed down by the number of keys required to operate
> lifts and open doors, gates, and pass through other protective cordons.
> Another sign of this breakdown is the withdrawal of any popular
> legitimation for political systems--the clamour in Peru, Argentina, and
> now Venezuela (among other countries) has been against politicians of any
> kind, all of whom are regarded as equally corrupt, equally inefficient,
> and equally inadequate to the needs and demands of the multitude.
> Venezuela's coup is simply another sign of the disappearance of the former
> contract (however illusory that contract may have been) between people and
> nation.  Hugo Chavez tried to reconstruct that contract by televisual
> means, but the medium itself (unsuited to such simple narratives) rebelled
> against him.  The current regime lacks any legitimacy, however much it may
> have paraded invented rituals for the cameras, and will survive only
> through repression or apathy.  But the multitude is waiting for other
> alternatives, and other possibilities.
>
> Jon Beasley-Murray
> University of Manchester
> jon.beasley-murray@man.ac.uk
>
> Caracas, 12th April 2002
>
>   ----------
>
> >From Per.Inge.Mathisen@idi.ntnu.no Mon Apr 15 18:41:23 2002
> Date: Mon, 15 Apr 2002 18:35:52 +0200 (MEST)
> From: Per I. Mathisen <Per.Inge.Mathisen@idi.ntnu.no>
> To: klassekampen-forum@aksess.no
> Subject: [kkf] The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
>
> From: Jon Beasley-Murray <jon.beasley-murray@man.ac.uk>
>
> http://www.art.man.ac.uk/spanish/jbm.html
> http://www.art.man.ac.uk/lacs/
>
> -----
>
> "The Revolution Will Not be Televised: Hugo Chavez's Return and the
> Venezuelan multitude"
>
> So this is how a modern coup d'etat is overthrown: almost invisibly, at
> the margins of the media.  Venezuela's return to democracy (and democracy
> it is, make no mistake) took place despite a self-imposed media blackout
> of astonishing proportions.  A huge popular revolt against an illegitimate
> regime took place while the country's middle class was watching soap
> operas and game shows; television networks took notice only in the very
> final moments, and, even then, only once they were absolutely forced to do
> so.  Thereafter television could do no more than bear mute witness to a
> series of events almost without precedent in Latin America--and perhaps
> elsewhere--as a repressive regime, result of a pact between the military
> and business, was brought down less than forty-eight hours after its
> initial triumph.  These events resist representation and have yet to be
> turned into narrative or analysis (the day after, the newspapers have
> simply failed to appear), but they inspire thoughts of new forms of Latin
> American political legitimacy, of which this revolt may be just one
> (particularly startling) harbinger.
>
> By Friday night, Caracas, Venezuela's capital, seemed to be returning to
> normal the day after the coup that had brought down the increasingly
> unpopular regime of president Hugo Chavez.  In the middle classes'
> traditional nightspots, such as the nearby village of El Hatillo, with its
> picturesque colonial architecture and shops selling traditional
> handicrafts, the many restaurants were full and lively.  Those who had
> banged on pots and pans over the past few months and marched the previous
> day to protest against the government seemed to be breathing a sigh of
> relief that the whole process had eventually been resolved so quickly and
> apparently so easily.  "A Step in the Right Direction" was the banner
> headline on the front page of one major newspaper on the Saturday, and the
> new president, Pedro Carmona (former head of the Venezuelan chamber of
> commerce), was beginning to name the members of his "transitional"
> government, while the first new policies were being announced.  Control
> over the state oil company, PDVSA (the world's largest oil company and
> Latin America's largest company of any kind), had been central to the
> ongoing crisis that had led to the coup, and its head of production
> announced, to much applause, that "not one barrel of oil" would now be
> sent to Cuba.  Not all was celebration, it is true: the television showed
> scenes of mourning for the thirteen who had died in the violent end to
> Thursday's protest march, but the stations also eagerly covered live the
> police raids (breathless reporters in tow) hunting down the Chavez
> supporters who were allegedly responsible for these deaths.
>
> Elsewhere, however, another story was afoot, the news circulating
> partially, by word of mouth or mobile phone.  Early Saturday afternoon, I
> received three phone calls in quick succession: one from somebody due to
> come round to the place I was staying, who called on his mobile to say he
> was turning back as he had heard there were barricades in the streets and
> an uprising in a military base; another from a journalist who also
> cancelled an appointment, and who said that a parachute regiment and a
> section of the air force had rebelled; a third from a friend who warned
> there were fire-fights in the city centre, and that a state of siege might
> soon be imposed.  My friend added that none of this would appear on the
> television.  I turned it on: indeed, not a sign.  Other friends came by,
> full of similar rumours, and with word that people were gathering outside
> the national palace.  Given the continued lack of news coverage, we
> decided to go out and take a look for ourselves.
>
> Approaching the city centre, we saw that indeed crowds were converging.
> But as we drove around, we saw almost no sign of any police or army on the
> streets.  In the centre itself, and at the site of Thursday's
> disturbances, some improvised barricades had been put up, constructed with
> piles of rubbish or with burning tyres, marking out the territory around
> the national palace itself.  The demonstration was not large, but it was
> growing.  We then headed towards the city's opulent East Side, and came
> across a procession of people advancing along the road towards us, people
> clearly poorer and more racially mixed than the East Side's usual
> inhabitants.  They were chanting slogans in favour of Chavez, and carrying
> portraits of the deposed president.  This march was clearly headed towards
> the city centre, as were a stream of buses apparently commandeered by
> other chavistas.  Neighbourhood police were eyeing them carefully, but
> letting them pass.  If this number of demonstrators were arriving from the
> eastern suburbs, then many more must be converging on the palace from the
> working class West.  We doubled back and tracked the march from parallel
> streets, watching as the numbers grew, as passers-by were called to join
> in this unexpected protest.
>
> Meanwhile, we were listening to the radio.  Some reports were arriving of
> the crowds on the streets, but mainly we heard official pronouncements.
> First the army chief spoke, and we heard the signs of incipient splits
> among the forces behind the ruling junta: the army would continue to
> support interim president Carmona only if he reinstated Congress as well
> as the other democratically elected regional governors favourable to the
> previous regime who had been (unconstitutionally) deposed the previous
> day.  But if Congress were reinstated then, according to the constitution,
> and in the absence of the previous president and vice-president, the head
> of Congress should rightfully be next in line as head of state.  Then
> Carmona himself was interviewed, by CNN.  He declared that the situation
> in the city was absolutely calm and under his control, denied that he had
> been forced to take refuge in any army base (clearly CNN knew something we
> did not), downplayed any insubordination among other sectors of the armed
> forces, and announced that his next step might be to fire some of the
> military high command.  Finally, the head of the national guard then
> pronounced that respect and recognition needed to be shown to those who
> had supported--and continued to support--the deposed president, Chavez.
> The pact between military and commerce was beginning to unravel.  We
> decided to head home.
>
> We turned on the television.  Every Venezuelan commercial station was
> continuing with normal programming (and the state-owned channel had been
> off the air since Thursday's coup).  However, as we had access to cable,
> from BBC World and CNN "en espanol" we started to receive reports of
> disturbances in various parts of Caracas that morning, and some details
> about the parachute regiment's refusal to surrender arms to the new
> regime.  More mobile phone calls assured us that the crowd outside the
> palace was still growing, and still peaceful.  The BBC had a reporter in
> the crowd, and spoke of thousands of people gathered.  Darkness fell, and
> still no word from any of the national networks.  At one point the CNN
> anchor pointedly asked its Caracas correspondent whether or not local
> television was covering this tense situation: no, he replied, despite
> these same channels' protests over alleged censorship under the previous
> regime.  Now the self-censorship of soap operas and light entertainment
> stood in the way of any representation of what was slowly emerging as a
> pro-Chavez multitude.
>
> Indeed, the private networks had previously protested loudly and bitterly
> about the former president's policy of decreeing so-called "chains," in
> which he obliged all the networks to broadcast his own--often long and
> rambling--addresses to the nation.  Now the networks had instituted their
> own chain, the apparent diversity of variety shows masquerading a uniform
> silence about what was happening on the streets.
>
> Then a development: suddenly one channel broke its regular programming to
> show scenes of the street outside its own headquarters.  A group of thirty
> to forty young and mobile demonstrators, on motorcycles and scooters, were
> agitating outside the plate glass windows.  Some rocks were thrown, some
> windows smashed and graffiti sprayed, and suddenly a new chain was formed
> as all the networks switched to the same image of demonstrators apparently
> "attacking" the building.  But the group moved on and the soap operas
> resumed.  Until a similar group turned up at another channel's
> headquarters, then another, then another.  No more stones were thrown, but
> the demonstrations could now at least be glimpsed, in fragments (the
> channels splitting their screens into three, and, as one of the images
> turned out to be an image of the television screen itself, further still,
> into an endless regress of fuzzy images snatched through cracked windows
> and over balconies).  A local pro-Chavez mayor who had been in hiding from
> the repression was briefly visible, apparently calling for people to
> remain calm.  But no camera teams ventured outside, and we still had
> little idea as to what was happening at the presidential palace.
>
> We were switching rapidly between channels: to CNN and the BBC at the top
> of the hour, and then through the various commercial channels to try to
> see at least a partial view of the multitude that must now be on the
> streets.  The international channels were showing footage shot during the
> day, of police repression of protests in the poorer neighbourhoods--the
> footage was out there, but had not been screened or discussed on any
> private channels.  At around 10:30pm, on one of these searches through the
> cable stations, we saw a channel that had been dark had now come back to
> life.  A friend phoned almost immediately: "Are you watching channel
> eight?"  Yes, we were.  State television had, amazingly, come back onto
> the airwaves.
>
> The people who had taken over the state television station were clearly
> improvising, desperately.  The colour balance and contrast of these studio
> images was all wrong, the cameras held by amateur hands, and only one
> microphone seemed to be working.  Those behind the presenters' desk were
> nervous, one fiddling compulsively with something on the desk, another
> shaking while holding the microphone, but there they were: a couple of
> journalists, a "liberation theology" priest, and a minister and a
> congressman from the previous regime.  The minister spoke first, and very
> fast.  She gave a version of the violent end to Thursday's march that
> differed absolutely from the narrative the media had put forward to
> justify the coup that had followed: the majority of the dead had been
> supporters of Chavez (not opposition protesters), and the snipers firing
> upon the crowds were members of police forces not under the regime's
> control.  Moreover, the former president had not resigned; he was being
> held against his will at a naval base on an island to the north.  The
> current president, Carmona, was illegitimate head of a de facto regime
> that was product of a military coup.  Thousands of people were on the
> streets outside the presidential palace demanding Chavez's return.  A
> counter-narrative was emerging.
>
> The congressman appealed directly to the owners and managers of other
> television stations to portray what was happening in Caracas.  No change
> on those other channels, however, most of which had returned to their
> regular programming.  And then the state channel went off the air.
>
> Over the next few hours, channel eight would go on and off the air several
> times.  Each time the immediate fear was that it had been forcibly closed
> down again; each time, it turned out that technical problems were to blame
> as the channel was making do with a team unaccustomed to the equipment.
> Several times the channel attempted to show images from inside the
> presidential palace, but these were eventually successfully screened first
> on CNN: the "guard of honour" defending the palace was declaring its
> loyalty to Chavez.  Later, around 1am, amid the confusion, we saw pictures
> of the vice-president, Diosdado Cabello, inside the palace, being sworn in
> as president.  Venezuela now had three presidents simultaneously: Hugo
> Chavez, Pedro Carmona, and Cabello.  The situation was extremely confused,
> the majority of the channels were still transmitting none of this, and
> rumours reported on the BBC suggested that two of the three--Carmona as
> well as Chavez--were currently being detained by different sectors of the
> armed forces.  But the balance of power seemed to have shifted to
> supporters of the previous regime.  The only question remaining, the
> questioned posed by the thousands at the gates of the presidential palace
> and still besieging the private television stations (by now some had been
> forced to interview spokespeople from the crowd, while at least one had
> simply switched to the feed provided by channel eight), was: would we see
> Chavez?
>
> And so the apparently unthinkable happened.  As all the armed forces as
> well as the seat of power effectively passed back to the control of those
> loyal to the deposed regime, shortly before 3am, Hugo Chavez, president of
> Venezuela, returned to the presidential palace, mobbed as soon as he left
> his helicopter by the thousands of supporters who were now in a state of
> near delirium.  All the television stations were now running the images
> provided by channel eight--a new chain had formed, as commercial
> television lapsed into a new form of stunned silence.  The president
> returned to the office from which he had been broadcasting on Thursday
> afternoon, when he attempted to close down the private stations and as the
> coup was unfolding.  This time, however, he was no longer alone behind his
> desk, but flanked by most of his ministers and in a room crowded with
> people, buzzing with excitement and emotion.  We turned the television
> off.
>
> Today the fall-out from this revolt is far from clear, just as the
> partial, confused television images have yet to be re-written as linear,
> coherent newspaper narrative.  What is becoming clearer are the lineaments
> of the coup that the revolt overthrew--though even here rumours abound,
> such as the notion that it had been planned for three months, or about the
> extent of possible US involvement.  If it had been planned for three
> months, then it was badly planned over that time: above all, those who led
> the coup were always uncertain as to whether or not they wished to present
> the coup for what it was.  Had they decided to go through unashamedly with
> a coup d'etat (in, for instance, the Pinochet style), they would have been
> more thorough-going and widespread in their repression (though as it was,
> more people were killed during the illegitimate regime's brief existence
> than were killed in Thursday's demonstration, let alone by Chavez's
> security forces over the past three years); they would have detained more
> chavistas, rather than leaving key (former) ministers to pay a part in the
> revolt (though as it was, they used extreme force in raiding several
> ministers' homes, and detained, for instance, up to sixty people at the
> country's largest university); and they would have decisively secured the
> state television and no doubt imposed a state of siege.  Yet had they
> decided to preserve at least a facade of legitimacy, they would have made
> some effort to extract some kind of (written or televised) resignation
> from Chavez, would have not dissolved the Congress, would have not
> detained and stripped of power (democratically elected) provincial
> governors, and hence would not have so utterly breached the constitution.
>
> As it was, the pact between military and business that engineered the coup
> was weak, and could survive only through repression or apathy.  But the
> military was split, and (especially) the front-line forces unwilling to go
> through with repression--even while the business component refused to
> negotiate with the other anti-Chavez sectors of society, nominating a
> cabinet almost exclusively composed of figures from the extreme right.
> More importantly still, the coup plotters were surprised to discover that
> they were received not with apathy, but with an extraordinary and
> near-spontaneous multitudinous insurrection.
>
> The fate of Chavez's government, and indeed also of Chavez himself,
> remains uncertain.  Support for what was once an overwhelmingly popular
> regime had been in steady decline, in part as a result of a relentless
> assault by both the press and the television networks, but also because it
> had so far failed to achieve its stated aim of transforming what, for all
> its oil resources, is still a country with considerable poverty.  Now
> (despite an initial concession of reversing the interventions in PDVSA
> that had triggered the most recent convulsion), Chavez still has a large
> proportion of the middle classes firmly set against him, people who
> supported the coup; he must negotiate with them without at the same time
> betraying--and indeed while starting to fulfil--the desires of the
> multitude that overthrew it.  The government has a golden opportunity--it
> is now more clearly legitimate than at any time since its auspicious
> beginnings (when it had 80% support in the polls), whereas the commercial
> media that so fomented his downfall are patently in disgrace.  Yet the
> government could so easily blow that opportunity, especially if it
> continues (as before the coup) to depend all too much on the figure of the
> president himself, at best a maverick, at worst authoritarian in style
> (and probably in fact quite incompetent), whose personal charisma is
> already lost on the middle classes.  As Chavez's personalism allows for no
> competition, it leaves few alternatives to those who believe in the
> generally progressive causes advanced (if intermittently) by his
> government.  "Chavismo" itself came to create a political vacuum that
> briefly allowed the far right pact of arms and commerce to take control.
>
> In the event, however, the multitude came to fill that political
> vacuum--silently at first, almost invisibly, at the margins of the media.
> Though Chavez (and chavismo) claims to represent that multitude,
> yesterday's insurrection should be the signal that the regime is in the
> end dependent upon (constituted by) that multitude.  Chavez should not
> repeat the mistake--made both by the nineteenth-century liberators he
> reveres and the early twentieth-century populists he resembles--that he
> can serve as a substitute for that multitude, or that he can masquerade
> their agency as his own.  For in the tumultuous forty-eight hours in which
> the president was detained, it became clear that "chavismo without Chavez"
> has a power all of its own, apt to surprise any confused attempt at
> representation.
>
> Thanks to that multitude, Venezuela continues to constitute a dissident
> exception to the contemporary prevalence of a neoliberalism that has only
> accentuated the divide between rich and poor throughout Latin America.  It
> is not so much, perhaps, that Chavez demonstrates that other models are
> possible--though his unpredictable foreign policy (embracing figures as
> diverse as Saddam Hussein and Fidel Castro), as well as his more coherent
> attempts to make OPEC a force of third world producers allied against a
> global system heavily weighted in favour of first world consumers, do help
> to suggest that another form of globalisation might be imagined.  Rather,
> it is that the multitude suggests another possible, liberatory, side to
> the almost complete breakdown of any semblance of a social pact that
> characterises the Latin American "mainstream."
>
> One sign of this breakdown is the perceived dramatic rise in delinquency
> or common crime--Caracas is a city that abounds with a surplus of security
> devices (people are weighed down by the number of keys required to operate
> lifts and open doors, gates, and pass through other protective cordons)
> that regulate the middle class's comings and goings in line with this fear
> of latent social disorder.  But yesterday's events suggest another side to
> this apparent disorder, both on the one hand that it is a criminological
> demonisation of a sector of society that (it is presumed) has to be
> systematically cleansed from social spaces; and on the other that it is a
> glimpse of a desire to go beyond such enclosures.  The criminalisation of
> mobility is a reaction to a force that no longer "knows its place."
> Another sign of this breakdown is the withdrawal of any popular
> legitimation for political systems--the clamour in Peru, Argentina, and
> now Venezuela (among other countries) has been against politicians of any
> kind, all of whom are regarded as equally corrupt, equally inefficient,
> and equally inadequate to the needs and demands of the multitude.  But the
> breakdown of any representation of yesterday's insurrection might also
> point towards a politics that is itself beyond representation, beyond a
> set of systematic substitutions of people for politicians.
>
> Venezuela's coup, and the revolt that overturned it, constitute simply
> another sign of the disappearance of the former contract (however illusory
> that contract may have been) between people and nation.  Hugo Chavez tried
> to reconstruct that contract by televisual means, but the medium itself
> (unsuited to such simple narratives) rebelled against him, and it will
> continue to do so.  The current regime has legitimacy, but this legitimacy
> does not come from paraded invented rituals for the cameras; it comes from
> the multitude's constituent power.  And the multitude is also waiting for
> other alternatives, and other possibilities.
>
> Jon Beasley-Murray
> University of Manchester
> jon.beasley-murray@man.ac.uk
>
> Caracas, 14th April 2002
>
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
>
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