Chavismo at Its Most Dramatic Hour
The US military attack on Venezuela and the abduction of President Nicolás Maduro pose the gravest challenge to the process begun in 1999
The assault on Fort Tiuna on 3 January, amid a massive operation ordered by Donald Trump, establishes a new and dangerous balance of forces for the Bolivarian Revolution. More than a further step in the escalation that began in September last year, it represents a direct blow to the command of the state by turning President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, into prisoners of war.
More than a hundred men and women were killed during the aggression, most of them heroically resisting the North American incursion. The ineffectiveness of the Chavista leader’s defensive apparatus, however, further intensified the situation. In the first hours, both inside and outside Venezuela, alongside revulsion at the imperialist crime, a climate of doubt and apprehension took hold.
Tudo que a grande mídia não mostra, do seu jeito.
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In the days that followed, the picture became less murky. The White House had been able to strike fiercely at the nerve centre of Chavismo, but without the conditions to establish an alternative locus of power — a new government led by groups loyal to Washington. Trump himself discarded Maria Corina Machado, the most prominent figure of the far right.
On one side, Chavista Venezuela, now without its principal leader, found itself hemmed in by US troops, with their overwhelming air and naval superiority, capable of blockading the country and inflicting severe damage. On the other, the United States demonstrated immense capacity for external pressure, but without the cards required to defeat its enemy strategically, who continues to govern.
O chavismo em sua hora mais dramática
El chavismo en su hora más dramática
This is clearly a situation of precarious equilibrium. As far as it is possible to discern through his erratic ways, the US president, taking advantage of the current upper hand, seeks to extract the most brutal concessions and to demoralise the Chavista government, now led by interim president Delcy Rodríguez. He presents it as a puppet in his hands and fuels the most sordid rumours of betrayal by the new leadership core against Nicolás Maduro.
These baseless rumours are echoed by the Western press and its allies, in an attempt to knock to the canvas the movement created by Hugo Chávez — against which weapons were wielded for so many years, often with the sympathy of left-wing circles influenced by liberal ideas or simply misled by the narrative emanating from the United States and Europe.
Trump has no short-term solution with which to fence against the Chavista government, but he wants to dehydrate it as much as possible until some pathway emerges capable of unifying civilian and military sectors willing to submit to US interests, with sufficient representativeness to consign Chavismo to the past and restore the old oligarchic state.
Interim President Delcy Rodríguez works to keep cohesive the historic Chavista bloc and mobilize its social base
Vice Presidency of Venezuela
Chavismo, for its part, also needs to buy time and avoid an open military confrontation. It is perfectly well known that China and Russia are not available to erect a protective shield, in addition to the damage inflicted on 3 January to the defence system and the inherent difficulties of any frontal clash with a superpower.
The interim president is working to keep the Chavista historic bloc cohesive and its social base mobilised — denouncing the imperialist aggression, reaffirming national sovereignty and demanding the immediate release of the presidential couple. Among her countless tasks, Delcy Rodríguez must keep the state functioning, rekindle the spirit of the streets and heal the wounds left by the attack.
She is also seeking to broaden internal alliances, despite the PSUV’s hegemony over all institutions, pursuing a wider arc of support to defend the nation’s survival. The release of prisoners, already under way, forms part of this strategy of internal détente.
Chavismo is going through a moment that could be compared to that of the Russian Revolution during the Brest-Litovsk negotiations in the first months of 1918, still amid the First World War, when Germany presented absurd demands for an agreement: control over territories containing a third of the Russian population, 50 per cent of industry and 90 per cent of coal mines.
The Bolsheviks had to choose between fighting and negotiating. Lenin assessed that the principal popular aspiration was to end the armed conflict, all the more so with the old Tsarist army shattered and the country militarily weakened. The revolution depended on peace, even if the cost was shameful concessions, in the hope that a popular uprising in Germany itself might loosen the noose around Russia’s neck.
Even so, just two months after the treaty with the Prussian Empire was signed, counter-revolutionary forces would plunge the first socialist state into a brutal civil war, with the invasion of fourteen foreign armies. The Bolsheviks would triumph in 1922, as is well known — but that is another story.
In today’s Venezuela, oil is the price to be paid to buy some respite, until the situation inside and outside the United States might reveal another path. For now, negotiations over this energy wealth are proceeding on relatively traditional commercial terms, but nothing is guaranteed. If it is possible to avert confrontation until the US congressional elections in November, perhaps a less dangerous outlook may take shape, with a potential defeat for the Republicans.
The future of Chavismo and of the Bolivarian Republic will probably depend on infamous but unavoidable negotiations, as occurred more than a hundred years ago with Soviet Russia. As in every revolutionary process, the fundamental question is that of political power. Oil can be lost and recovered, like other riches if need be, provided the state does not return to the hands of the former ruling classes or an imperialist power.
The greatest challenge facing Delcy Rodríguez at this dramatic juncture lies not in the epic, voluntarist gestures that have always been the most seductive face of Chavismo, but in the leadership required to regroup the defensive lines until the emergence of new times — a possibility that does not depend solely on the Venezuelan left.
This orientation was already being implemented by President Nicolás Maduro before his abduction. In the hands of his temporary successor, hardened by many years of struggle at his side, lies the historic mission of steering the ship, in the midst of a storm, into a safe harbour.
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