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one In 1992, as a lieutenant colonel in the army, Hugo Chávez led, in the country with the largest oil deposits in the world, Venezuela, a failed coup attempt. As a result, he spent two years in prison, amnestied. In 1998 he was elected president of Venezuela, against the traditional parties and with a defense agenda for the most disadvantaged. In 1999, after a referendum that he promoted and won, the constitutional order was changed. Venezuela is renamed the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, the parliamentary system is no longer bicameral and becomes unicameral. Presidential and executive powers are greatly expanded to the detriment of parliamentarians. After the new Constitution comes into force, and with the calling of new elections, he is reelected and Parliament approves greater powers for the president: he can legislate by decree. There are nationalizations and agrarian reform. In 2002, there was an attempted coup with the aim of replacing Chávez, probably with US support. In 2004 a referendum is held, internationally recognized as democratic, which guarantees his continuity in power. He wins the 2007 presidential election, the year in which he decides to close the oldest and most popular television channel in the country, which disputes it, replacing it with a state-controlled channel.
At the same time, in terms of wealth distribution, Chávez promotes policies that reduce poverty and improve Venezuela’s Human Development Index.
Hugo Chávez died in 2013, the year in which oil prices -which represent more than 90% of Venezuelan exports- suffered a sharp drop (a trend that became systemic in the following years). He is replaced in the presidency by the vice president, Nicolás Maduro, who, still in that year, is elected president. In 2015, the opposition wins the parliamentary elections, in a convulsive political, social and economic context.
To elude the opposition, which seeks to remove him, in 2017 Maduro convenes a Constituent Assembly, removing powers from the elected parliament. In the convulsed presidential elections of 2018, the Electoral Commission is declared President-elect. But opposition political parties and opposition leaders were unable to run. Maduro was not recognized as the winner of this election by either the Organization of American States or the European Union.
At the beginning of 2019, Maduro takes office, legitimized by the Supreme Court of Justice. And Juan Guaidó, president of the National Assembly, is declared, by the majority of the parliamentarians of the National Assembly, acting president, being recognized in that statute by more than 50 countries, among which is Portugal. In July of this year, Nicolás Maduro calls elections to the National Assembly for next December.
two Venezuela is currently the country with the highest inflation rate in the world: 2358% per year. According to Amnesty International, in a 2019 report: “Venezuela continues to experience an unprecedented human rights crisis. Extrajudicial executions, arbitrary arrests, excessive use of force and illegal killings by the security forces continue as part of a policy of repression to silence dissidents. The political and institutional crisis deepened in the first months of the year, resulting in an increase in tensions between the Executive of Nicolás Maduro and the Legislative one headed by Juan Guaidó. The growing social protest faced a wide range of human rights violations and an intensification of the policy of repression by the authorities. Prisoners of conscience face unfair criminal prosecutions. Freedom of assembly and expression continued to be under constant threat. Human rights defenders were stigmatized and faced increasing obstacles in carrying out their work. (…) Interference with judicial independence continued and the isolation of regional human rights forums left victims of human rights violations with few avenues to seek justice. The authorities refused to acknowledge the true magnitude of the humanitarian emergency and the deterioration of living conditions. The population faces severe shortages of food, medicine, medical supplies, water and electricity. At the end of 2019, the total number of people who fled the country in search of international protection reached 4.8 million ”.
In fact, to these 4.8 million refugees, according to the United Nations, there are 650,000 Venezuelans seeking political asylum and 2 million who live in other countries of America under “other legal forms of stay.”
Also according to Amnesty International, in February 2019, “in the city of Santa Elena, on the border with Venezuela and Brazil, the Bolivarian National Guard used excessive force against indigenous people who were heading to the border to receive humanitarian aid. . OHCHR confirmed that seven people died and 26 were injured by gunfire by military forces. Due to the lack of medical supplies, the wounded were transferred to a Brazilian hospital ”.
3 Boaventura Sousa Santos, a great admirer of Hugo Chávez and the “Bolivarian revolution”, is director emeritus of the Center for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra. Recently, he wrote an article in the Public newspaper entitled “The hour of the left: now or a long time ago”, about the current political situation in Portugal. In this article, he defends the need for a parliamentary agreement between the PS, PCP and BE in the approval of the State Budgets of 2021, at a time that will correspond to “a new period of structural change” (the previous ones would have been 1986-1996 and 2011-2015, “Dominated by Right Forces”).
Returning to Venezuela: in a 2017 article, titled “In defense of Venezuela,” says Boaventura Sousa Santos: “I am shocked by the bias of the European media, including Portuguese, about the crisis in Venezuela.” He also says: “Venezuela is going through one of the most critical moments in its history. I have followed the Bolivarian revolution critically and in solidarity from the beginning. The social achievements of the last two decades are indisputable ”.
In an article from early 2019, titled “New Cold War and Venezuela,” he says: “It is not difficult to conclude that the defense of Venezuelan democracy is not at stake. What is at stake is the oil of Venezuela ”.
At the end of 2019, in an open letter to the president of Colombia, he said, regarding the interventions of the Colombian government with respect to indigenous populations: “I am not exaggerating, Mr. President, by saying that what we see in Colombia is an ethnocide against a specific part of the the population. ”.
4 What I want to draw from here are facts and conclusions: Boaventura Sousa Santos publicly criticizes the action against indigenous people in Colombia, but does not hear a single word about the murder of indigenous people perpetrated by government forces in Venezuela. He criticizes the European media and does not mention the control of communication in Venezuela. It highlights the social and economic achievements of the most disadvantaged population in Venezuela between 2000 and 2010 and completely ignores the situation of hunger that has been experienced since 2012. It defends the existence of a democracy in Venezuela to legitimize government decisions, but omits police repression . illegal arrests, silencing opponents of the regime. He defends the existence of a new Constituent Assembly in Venezuela, but forgets the legitimacy of a democratically elected National Assembly. It affirms that the United States is behind the instability in Venezuela and that it seeks to encourage illegal actions to take power, but it certainly knows that Hugo Chávez attempted, in 1992, a coup d’état.
This duplicity is unsustainable in academic and public debate. In fact, as with other Portuguese academics, under university coverage Boaventura Sousa Santos declares with the authority of science what demagoguery is. Show us the world with single vision glasses. And now he comes, as an inspiring intellectual of the left, to ask for his union in Portugal. In order, he says, to promote the centrality of the State, in a period of pandemic, energy transition, mobility models, in food policy.
We know the Venezuelan model of “Bolivarian democracy” that it defends so much: a nationalized country, dependent on oil exports, undermined by hunger and from which almost a third of the population has fled in the last six years, in an unprecedented exodus. .
We already know the movie. But there are those who insist on its reiteration, on an unsustainable denial of reality.
But, more than the Costa Silva Plan -criticized but detailed- it is the Boaventura Plan -which is reduced to one sentence- that will save us: give all power to the State.
It is, as he says, “the hour of the left”. Let the state control all political, economic and social systems. And that the Left is in charge of the State. And everything will be resolved.
Whoever does not believe this is, of course, a reactionary. Here or in Venezuela.
We have to change glasses.
