Reviewing George Ciccariello-Maher’s “We Created Chavez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolu
Reviewing George Ciccariello-Maher’s “We Created Chavez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution”
By Joe Emersberger, October 4th 2013
In 1958, a dictatorship was overthrown in Venezuela but, unfortunately, replaced by a corrupt “democracy” dominated by an elite. “We Created Chavez” is Ciccariello-Maher’s account of how political movements in Venezuela have fought since 1958 to add substance to that hollowed out democracy. The past 15 years, since Hugo Chavez was first elected in 1998, have brought huge success to those movements. Predictably, that success has been continuously lied about and caricatured by the international media. In one variant of the caricatures, Venezuelans were hypnotized by a charismatic thug and tricked into voting for their own ruin and oppression. Ciccariello-Maher refutes the caricatures by providing a detailed history the “Chavista” movements that long predated Chavez. I’ll outline the story Ciccariello-Maher tells, and which he sums up as "a history of failure, of defeat, but one in which those very defeats provide fodder for subsequent victories"
Inspired by the Cuban revolution of 1959 and disastrously misled by foreign analyses of it (particularly the one offered by former French radical Regis Debray), Small groups of Venezuelan leftists attempted to ignite an armed revolution in the 1960s. They took to rural areas in the mountains where it was theorized they would have the best chance. After all, didn't Che and Fidel start off in the Cuban countryside? The Venezuelan rebels didn't join battles in which the peasants were already engaged. They assumed the peasants would follow their lead. By the mid-1960s the rebels were thoroughly isolated from the people they wished to inspire and well on their way to defeat.
One of the lessons that Douglas Bravo, a rebel leader, took from the failure was the importance of developing secret allies within the military. Venezuela's armed forces - unlike most in Latin America – offered significant potential in that way. In a bigger way, rebels like Bravo concluded that they didn't know their own terrain and their own history well enough. Bravo was expelled from the Venezuelan Communist party in 1966, and quickly founded another party, the PRV. Its leaders intensely studied Venezuelan history, the history of Afro-Venezuelan and indigenous struggles, and dabbled in Liberation Theology. One PRV leader, Adan Chavez, would prove very well positioned to recruit secret allies though his younger brother Hugo who was in the military. Anyone familiar with Hugo Chavez speeches will immediately recognize his PRV roots as Ciccariello-Maher points out.
In the 1970s armed rebels shifted to doing urban operations which seemed to make sense given the torrid pace at which Venezuela was urbanizing. The most famous of these operations was the kidnapping of US business executive William Niehous in 1976. Along with Niehous, the rebels seized documents from Niehous' employer (Owens Illinois) revealing corruption at the highest levels of the Venezuelan government. The kidnappers made three demands:
1) Owens-Illinois was to pay each of its 1600 Venezuelan workers a $116 bonus
2) Distribute 18,000 packages of food to poor families
3) Buy newspaper space so that the rebels could address the public
More:
http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/10068
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