Venezuela: Thousands mark uprising, protest economic war

Lucas Koerner writes that Thousands mark uprising, protest economic war in Venezuela.

The 23rd of January is an historic date in which Venezuelans annually take to the streets to honor those fallen in the struggle against the Péres Jiménez dictatorship.

However, for the thousands assembled in El Calvario on January 23, the 23rd of January is also a date which commemorates the more than 5000 revolutionaries assassinated by the governments that succeeded Pérez Jiménez during Venezuela’s 40-year long era of “pacted democracy,” known as the Fourth Republic. This era came to a close with late president Hugo Chávez’s election in 1998.

A significant proportion of these political killings occurred during the 1989 rebellion by the popular classes against neoliberal austerity measures, known as the Caracazo, in which as many as 3000 people were gunned down by the Venezuelan army.

Nonetheless, for those attending the march, this commemoration is anything but merely historical, but, on the contrary, has real implications for the present conjuncture.

For Antonia Díaz, 40, the stakes are high: “If we allow this revolution to be lost, the same people [in power] during those years [of dictatorship] will come after us, the people, of Chávez … We will defend this process to the death.”

According to PSUV (United Socialist Party of Venezuela) youth leader Brian Mirandés, 21, the danger of returning to this not-so-distant past of brutal state repression is hardly abstract: “In the past, many comrades died as a consequence of the repression of the Fourth Republic, comrades disappeared, one of the closest [fallen comrades], that we have now is Robert Serra, with whom I had the opportunity to work alongside, who was assassinated by the Right, by Imperialism.”

Emphasis Mine

The Venezuelan army used to be an agent of repression, but now it is a defender of the Boliveran Revolution. This change came about through its officers' training courses wherein the students and faculty reflected upon Venezuela's revolutionary ideals during the war of national liberation. It was there in the military academy that Hugo Chávez began his radical career.

A similar thing happened during the February Revolution in Russia. There the Cossacks, who were the reliable agents of repression, suddenly become passive in the face of the popular protests. They refused to shoot or run down the protestors. Leon Trotsky tried to understand why this happened, but could only guess that it was something to do with what was happening back in the steppes. The Cossacks did turn against the Russian Revolution at a later stage, but they were passive long enough for the workers to seize power and overthrow the monarchy.

Now, we will see what the Greek military will do in the face of SYRIZA's victory. It is possible that the alliance with Anel, who have a strongly nationalist agenda, will quell any thoughts by the military about a coup. This coalition puts a nationalist cloak on SYRIZA's radical agenda, and the military cannot be seen to be acting in the interests of foreign powers, especially Germany.

The problem will come later when SYRIZA takes on the Greek oligarchy. As the real rulers of Greece, they will not cede power easily. They will portray themselves as the embodiment of Greece, and therefore any attack on their interests is an attack on Greece itself. And they would probably call upon the Greece military to do its job and defend Greece (that is, the oligarchy) from attack.