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Now
Anyone paying attention to the Venezuelan
press in recent weeks will not be able to ignore a shift in the
tenor of the electoral campaign. Weeks and months of straightforward
campaign rhetoric and poll results has given way to a more sinister
tone, as the discussion has shifted away from the voting process
on December 3rd and toward what will be done on December 4th.
This shift originates in the rhetoric of an increasingly-desperate
opposition which hopes to have its cake and eat it too, that
is, to simultaneously contest elections and discredit
the process. But this rhetoric has found its echo of resistance
in similar plans for "the day after" by different sectors
of the Bolivarian Revolution: efforts to organize themselves
on the local level to defend against attacks on Venezuelan sovereignty.
Plan
B
After much uncertainty, it
now seems that-despite running consistently 20-30% behind Chávez
in the polls-opposition candidate Manuel Rosales will not be
pulling out of the election. And this despite the fact that sectors
of the opposition like the Acción Democrática Party
(AD) and Antonio Ledezma's Alianza Bravo Pueblo have still refused
to support the process and are calling for abstention. While
the Rosales campaign has not denied the claims of such groups,
and while he can be heard to echo the claims of abstentionists
that the "electoral conditions are insufficient," and
that the fingerprint machines used in the voting process have
"no function except to frighten the electorate," Rosales
has not been sufficiently consistent with this theme to justify
withdrawing from the elections. Given his rhetoric, quite simply,
withdrawing would be not be a credible decision: it's too late
for that.
But unfortunately, this doesn't
mean that the opposition will be passively accepting their electoral
defeat on December 3rd. Instead, rather than complaining of electoral
conditions beforehand and talking the abstentionist talk, the
opposition is rallying around the slogan of "defend the
vote." This vague slogan has some clear consequences, as
became clear when opposition ideologue Rafael Poleo appeared
recently on Globovisión. Poleo, who has links to the Bush
clan and the CIA, who was thoroughly implicated in the April
2002 coup, and whose daughter has been directly implicated in
the assassination of Danilo Anderson, the judge whose job it
was to collect evidence against the coup-plotters, laid out the
strategy of the radical opposition in the clearest of terms on
November 6th: "On the 3rd, it is up to the citizens to align
themselves with the opposition, they need to go and vote. On
the 4th, it's up to Manuel Rosales to lead the protests against
the fraud that has been set up. And on the 5th, it's up to the
Armed Forces to decide if it will continue forcing those in the
Venezuelan opposition to put up with a shameful regime."
According to Poleo, Rosales
could be the most important Venezuelan of the 21st century "if
he does what he needs to do." The Electoral Committee (CNE)
"will announce the victory of Hugo Chávez, regardless
of what the numbers say," and "at 6am on the 4th, the
streets will fill with people decrying fraud, and then we will
see the true size of Rosales." Revealingly, Poleo declares
that "that day after, the 4th, will be even more important
than December 3rdOn the 4th, it's up to the people to do
what the Ukranians did, to carry out an 'Orange Revolution,'
to hurl themselves onto the streets, because the fraud has already
been arranged, they already have the numbers ready." The
Chavistas will not abandon power for the simple reason that "they
are Nazis." A coup attempt is in the works, and it has been
publicly announced beforehand (all claims of a lack of press
freedom in Venezuela thereby proven false).
While Poleo seems uncertain
about which path Rosales will choose, the ground is already being
laid for his participation in this coup attempt. Hence, Rosales
has been clearly evasive when faced with questions about his
recognition of the election results: when Chávez publicly
agreed to respect the results of the election and challenged
his opponent to do the same, the response from Rosales echoing
the "democratic" doublespeak of the Northern superpower.
Rosales made the very question sound silly: Venezuela is, according
to Rosales, the "only country on earth" in which there
would even exist a doubt regarding the recognition of elections,
but despite this the opposition candidate would not agree to
accept these results without the significant caveatthat
said results must be fair. In terms of the second step
of the plan-appeals to the military-Rosales even beat Poleo to
the punch, openly calling on November 5th for a meeting with
the military high command, a request which was flatly denied
by Minster of Defense General Raúl Baduel on the basis
that such a meeting would constitute an unconstitutional intervention
of the military into the electoral process.
In addition, Nestor González
González, the baldheaded military leader of the April
2002 coup, has crawled out of his hole to release an audiotape
calling for the same sequence of events. While the opposition
press wouldn't touch this tape with a ten-foot pole, the rhetoric
is the same as that of Poleo: defending the vote, and thereby
defending "civil society." As Mario Silva, the fiery
host of Chavista evening program La Hojilla makes clear,
talk of civil society operates here as a subsititute for talk
of the pueblo, the people, for the simple reason that
"they don't have a people." Silva's response: "They
shall not pass," and if the opposition attempts to spread
destabilization and violent blockades known as guarimbas
outward from their wealthy refuge, "they won't get out of
the Eastern part of the capital."
This entire strategy, moreover,
has been developing slowly through the political interventions
of certain polling agencies whose fidelity to the opposition
is clear, and whose polls range from the bad to the worse to
the patently made-up. The now-infamous American firm Penn, Schoen,
and Berland-most famous for its coup-mongering through polling
in Venezuela and Serbia-has stepped into the fray as expected.
Perhaps wary of repeating their exaggerated performance in the
2004 recall election, Penn and Schoen have released polls showing
Chávez with a slender 6-point lead, but here's the kicker:
due to some dubious claims about how the undecideds (the "ni-ni,"
or "neither-nor" as they are called here) will eventually
vote, the results have been deemed "a technical tie."
Moreover, the "Hannah
Arendt Center" has nominally interrogated but subtly reinforced
another alibi of the opposition by relasing a poll under the
patently politicized slogan of the "Survey Without Fear."
Respondents were allegedly given different colored pencils bearing
either Chavista or opposition slogans, or no slogan at all, and
the fact that their responses shifted according to the pencil
used allegedly "proves" that fear is present.
The pollsters don't see fit
to explain how this fear operates, why it is that the "Chavista"
pencil doesn't merely operate as a reminder of the accomplishments
of the revolutionary government, or most importantly why it is
that the fact that the opposition pencil yields more support
for Rosales isn't also a result of "fear" of the opposition.
But to ask such questions of these polls is to take them too
seriously: as Mario Silva reveals, again on La Hojilla,
the so-called "Hannah Arendt Center" is directly linked
to the head of the Rosales campaign team. Such polls constitute
little more than direct interventions in support of this three-step
plan laid out by Poleo.
Plan
C
In response to this chatter
from the opposition press, Chávez has made very clear
how he would respond to an attack on the constitutional order
after the elections are held. In a speech on November 4th, Chávez
preempted the opposition by announcing that any "Plan B"
would represent yet another attempt by the United States to topple
his regime and replace it with something friendlier (to foreign
capital). Since resistance to Chavismo is fundamentally international,
according to Chávez, so too should be the response, and
he therefore announced plans to unilaterally terminate petroleum
shipments to the United States if "actions similar to those
of 2002 were to occur." This is, in his words, the "Plan
CH" to the opposition's "Plan B" (unfortunately,
translation loses the fact that, when pronounced, "ch"
sounds strikingly like the name of an Argentine revolutionary
that some might have heard of): "We will give them a knockout
at the polls, but if they activate their Plan B of violence,
electoral guarimbas, and the rejection of the results,
if they attempt to sabotage oil installations or attempt a coup
d'etat, we will give them a double knockout with Plan CH."
In terms of a specific response
to the predictable tactics of the opposition, Vice President
José Vicente Rangel made clear on November 13th that the
goal of the opposition is to provoke a violent response through
guarimbas. According to Rangel, such plans won't work,
since "we aren't going to give them the pleasure because
we can control problems of public order with the word, with the
voice, with the example." Order, however, will be maintained:
"aside from the soldiers who will go out to defend the Chávez
government, it will be the people who immediately hit the streets
without any need for us to call upon them, as happened on April
13th 2002." As has often been said by the President, "if
they come at us like the 11th (of April), we'll give them the
13th."
Chávez himself has echoed
this sentiment more recently in a speech on November 17th, in
which he asks of the opposition: "don't force me to take
drastic measures to safeguard the sovereignty and the stability
of the country." Attempts at destabilization would be met
with firmness, since "that permissive Chávez was
left behind that night in 2002." Chávez concludes:
"We won't allow Venezuela to be filled with bloodshed again."
Plan
D
As suggested by the Vice President,
Plan C (or "CH") isn't as important as Plan D: the
autonomous organization of Chavistas to defend their revolution.
So we shouldn't be surprised to find that the most radical sectors
of Chavismo are also making plans. Specifically, several armed
self-defense organizations rooted in the Tupamaro movement and
largely-defunct Bolivarian Circles, which claim a particularly
powerful following in the barrios of western Caracas,
are preparing plans for the defense of Chavista neighborhoods.
Such plans are centered in
the historically revolutionary neighborhood of 23 de Enero (January
23rd), in the climbing foothills in western Caracas. 23 de Enero
has long represented the organizational "brain" of
radical Caracas, as opposed to the "heart" of revolt
represented by the slums of Petare, that powderkeg standing far
to the east of the city which gave rise to the epic 1989 Caracazo
riots. The spirit of revolt has often been sparked in the utter
destitution of Petare, the largest and most dangerous of Caracas'
slums, but the organizational structure which fans the flames
can generally be found in 23. In the short lived April 2002 coup
against Chávez, several ministers were spirited away for
safe keeping in the "bunker" of 23 de Enero, only to
reemerge and participate in the efforts to recover the president.
Given this role as radical
safe haven, the many radical armed groups populating the neighborhood-from
the Carapaica, who made their plans public in local newspapers,
to Cepa Cartolini, to the Colectivo Alexis Vive (most of these
groups descended from the earlier Coordinador Simón Bolívar
and later Tupamaros)-think first of protecting the "bunker":
a source close to sectors of the Tupamaros tells me that "the
general line is that, in the event of trouble, if it's a confrontation
with lead, they'll guard 23 de Enero, keep in contact with other
organizations, and mobilize resistance." Specifically, I
am told, most organizations have adopted a bifurcated approach
to resisting the "Plan B" of the opposition: half of
their forces will be devoted to rearguard defense of the bunkers,
while half will form "mobilization groups" traveling
throughout the city.
It should be pointed out that,
while the Metropolitan Mayor's office has "fulfilled a necessary
support role" by providing logistical support to radical
neighborhoods (cellphones, motorcycles), this role is precisely
that: support. That is to say, these neighborhood organizations
are best considered as "base movements" engaged in
a revolutionary process of local administration. In the words
of one participant, the resistance to threats from the opposition
has led these groups to "create new forms for organizing
the local self-defense of sovereignty." These new forms
are not limited to urban areas, either: from the Ezequiel Zamora
National Campesino Front-several thousand of whom marched through
the city in military formation on November 20th-to the much more
shadowy rural resistance army deemed the "Bolivarian Liberation
Front," grassroots resistance to any efforts to put the
brakes on the revolutionary process is ubiquitous.
What history has in store for
December 4th is difficult to predict. Chávez will win
the election, this much seems clear, but beyond that several
scenarios could play out. The strength of the revolutionary regime
is more consolidated than it was during the coup and the oil
strike of 2002, and so on the surface we might have little reason
to worry. But what is difficult to predict, and indeed decisive,
is not how these contingency plans are formulated, but how they
collide with one another in practice. Of most interest, then,
are the points of contact between the opposition "Plan B"
and the "Plan D" of radical Chavistas.
It now seems that this confrontation
may not wait until the election after all. The opposition, I
am told, is "totally infiltrated by Chavistas," and
this infiltration has yielded some results: evidently, there
exist plans to mount guarimbas, or violent disruptions,
throughout the city on the weekend of November 25th-26th. Lina
Ron claims that these plans hope to provoke a Sacudón
Político (a political "shock" or "crash")
under the title "Plan Hemoglobin" or "Operation
Red Dawn." There are reports that an opposition march scheduled
for November 25th will be diverted to Fuerte Tiuna-a sprawling
military base in southern Caracas and home of the military high
command-in the hopes of encouraging soldiers to abandon their
commander-in-chief in the days and weeks to come. Additionally,
Aporrea.org reports that a far right Cuban-American website
has issued instructions aimed at the Venezuelan opposition explaining
both the constitution of armed cells and the construction and
planting of explosive devices in Caracas.
History tells us that this
collision will occur-whether before the election or in its aftermath-around
the seat of political power in the old city center which geographically
divides western barrios from the wealthy east of the city,
thereby inevitably drawing in some components of "Plan C."
What happens then is anyone's guess.
George Ciccariello-Maher
is a Ph.D Candidate
in Political Theory at the University of California, Berkeley.
He can be reached at: gjcm@berkeley.edu
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