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From the
February 2002 issue of
World Press Review
(VOL. 49, No. 2)
Venezuela
Will Chávez Strike
Out?
Robert
Taylor
World Press Review Contributing Editor
The uncommon show
of business and labor unity in mobilizing a general strike that
effectively shut down Caracas and other major Venezuelan cities
on Dec. 10 poses the most serious political challenge to President
Hugo Chávez since his accession to power three years
ago.
Mariela Leon, correspondent for El Universal (Dec. 11),
reported that leaders of the nation’s leading business
chambers and trade unions estimated that the strike halted more
than 90 percent of all productive and labor activity in the
nation. “We are no longer weak or imperceptible, we are
a force in the country that must be taken into account—and
things must be set right,” strike organizer Pedro Carmona
told Leon.
The flashpoint that ignited the December protest was Chávez’s
unilateral decision to exercise extraordinary decree powers
to implement a package of 47 laws without congressional review
or approval, including a controversial land reform that authorizes
the government to determine whether private landowners are keeping
their property in productive use.
The specter of expropriations has chilled the climate for private
investment and eroded business confidence, exacerbating the
present economic slowdown and further diminishing “the
probability of a genuine dialogue on the reforms,” observed
Orlando Ochoa in El Universal (Dec. 13). “It appears
that Chávez has in mind a social and economic scheme
which no one except himself, the poorest sectors..., and the
national armed forces supports.”
El Universal cautioned in an editorial (Dec. 11) that
the decree laws marked “the point of no return” in
a campaign by Chávez to “seize power and use it
in an absolutely discretionary manner behind the back of the
majority....These nearly three years of Chávez’s
mandate have passed from crisis to crisis, driven by the conflict-oriented
rhetoric of the president.”
In the wake of the president’s contemptuous refusal to
negotiate with opponents of the decree laws, “the democratic
disguise has fallen away...[and] the masks are off,” El
Universal said. Domingo Alberto Rangel argued in Quinto Día
(Dec. 7) that neither the Chávez government nor the opposition
coalition of business, labor, and civic organizations can claim
the moral high ground in the present political showdown. “There
is no divergence in the confrontation..., of ideological character
or antagonistic class positions,” he asserted. “It
is a question of a clear and simple struggle between cliques
for the control of power.”
As a result, he said, “there is a growing sense in Venezuela
of disillusionment with all politics. “Lamentably, since
[the country’s founder Simón] Bolívar died,
the so-called republican alternation of power has amounted to
the rotation of rascals in ransacking the budget. Civilians
and military alike have succumbed to this weakness....As the
gospel said, let he who is without sin cast the first stone,”
Rangel wrote. 
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