During this year, relations between the Brazilian government of Lula da
Silva and the Venezuelan government of Nicolas Maduro have been shakenand appear to be on a collision course. The last page of this script was
Lula's refusal to allow Venezuela to join the BRICS bloc. The distancing
began last year with Brazilian criticism of the various sanctions
imposed by the Venezuelan government on the candidacy of Maduro's
opponents for the presidency of the Republic, and continued in 2024 with
the Brazilian call for transparency in the electoral process. Maduro's
victory by a narrow margin of votes was contested by the OAS
(Organization of American States) and almost all external observers,
including Celso Amorim, Lula's special advisor on international affairs
and a former defender of "Bolivarian socialism". The Lula government has
requested proof of the regularity of the elections, the electoral
minutes with the voting map, which have never been sent by the
Venezuelan Supreme Court, which is responsible for the elections.
As if that were not enough, six opponents of the Maduro regime have
taken refuge in the Argentine embassy in Caracas, which, after the
expulsion of its diplomats by the Venezuelan government, has been taken
into custody by Brazil. The attempted invasion of the embassy by
Bolivarian military forces and militias was denounced by Brazil to the
OAS, worsening the crisis between the two governments. In an escalation
of provocations, the Venezuelan government has accused Lula of having
been co-opted by US imperialism and, more recently, both he and Chilean
President Boric have been accused of being CIA agents. Maduro avoids
breaking diplomatic relations with Brazil, which would almost completely
isolate him on the continent, and Lula avoids taking a more drastic
position towards Maduro due to pressure from his party, the PT, which
not only recognized Maduro's election but considers Venezuela an example
of democracy. How did we get to this point in the historical
relationship between what would be two movements of the Latin American
left? As a historian, I invite you to retrace some events of the last 25
years, from a, let's say, libertarian point of view.
President Hugo Chavez took political power in Venezuela in 1999,
succeeding the government of Rafael Caldera, heir to the liberal
Salinas, tainted by the historic massacre of people in the Caracazo in
1989 (The massacre occurred on February 28, when public security forces
from the Metropolitan Police (PM), the National Army of Venezuela and
the National Guard (GN) took to the streets to control the situation.
Although official figures speak of 300 dead and just over a thousand
injured, some unofficial sources estimate the victims at 3,500 - from
Wikipedia, ed.). Chavez, a career soldier, has always been aligned with
left-wing nationalist positions, naming his movement after the father of
Our America, Simón Bolivar. It is worth noting that Bolivar was never a
socialist, nor could he have been 200 years ago, but only a liberal
criollo (white man born in America) who excluded blacks and indigenous
people from citizenship in independent Venezuela. Chavez has always
enjoyed very high popularity thanks to a series of inclusive social
policies that have raised the standard of living of the population base,
which has allowed him to bring about a profound social transformation
during his two terms.
The so-called Bolivarian Socialist Revolution was not an armed
revolution like the Cuban one or many others, but an internal and
permanent process of institutional restructuring of the country. To
ensure the continuity of the ongoing political process, Chavez moved on
two fronts. First, he established a public policy with a strong
nationalist appeal, militarizing the country with a significant increase
in the budget of the Armed Forces and the creation of the Bolivarian
Nationalist Volunteer Militia, which reached 4 million members. The huge
military spending, with the increase in salaries and the assignment of
career personnel to key government posts, guaranteed him the
unconditional support of this class. The capillarization of the militia
in the neighborhoods and rural communities ensured permanent vigilance
against possible political opposition and the establishment of a system
of complaints that walled off internal dissent and closed down the media
that remained opposed to the government. To complete the new
institutional model that supports the Bolivarian regime, the judicial
system was largely transformed with the presidential appointment of new
judges aligned with the new government practice.
Economically, the redistributive policy was not implemented by
expropriating the resources of Venezuelan capitalists, but by increasing
state spending, funded primarily (over 90%) by the wealth generated by
the exploitation and export of oil by the state-owned PDVSA. Chavez rode
the wave of Chinese economic growth in the first decade of the new
century, sustained until the 2008 crisis and then confirmed by the
global economic recession of the following decade. In addition to oil,
the Venezuelan economy revolves exclusively around the exploration and
extraction of mineral resources, located in biomes of great diversity,
where most of the country's native populations live, the segment of the
population most attacked by the government. This also explains one of
the latest "anti-imperialist" actions of the Maduro government, which
declared a state of war against Guyana in 2023 for the possession of
Essequibo, a territory with a very low population density (indigenous)
and very high mineral and oil wealth, assigned to the neighboring
country since 1898, when it was still a British colony (Venezuel claims
159,000 square kilometers out of a total of almost 215,000 of Guyana, ed.).
The regime transition occurred with the death of Chavez, who had been
elected for a third term, and the installation of his vice president,
Nicolas Maduro, confirmed by the polls in 2013. Maduro's arrival in
power, however, occurred at a time when the local economic crisis was
worsening due to the fragile management of the Venezuelan government, in
a context of increased public spending to maintain its popularity and
reduction in revenues from oil exports. The result is known. A dizzying
inflation, which turned into hyperinflation towards the end of the last
decade, followed by a shortage of basic products, which led to the first
major protests in 2014 and the mass exodus of the population to
neighboring countries (about 5 million Venezuelans emigrated). Since
then, unlike the creator of Bolivarianism, Maduro has governed with
little popularity, forcefully managing internal crises, bureaucratizing
the government and increasing censorship.
The Brazilian case is completely different. Lula rose to political power
in 2002 in a coalition regime with the center-right, under the command
of the center-left. He implemented a government, let's say,
liberal-social, because he did not fight the sectors of income and
speculation in society, but limited himself to balancing them, expanding
redistributive and social inclusion policies (minimum income programs
and quotas for underrepresented ethnic groups). Like Venezuela,
moreover, it has sailed on the favorable winds of Chinese economic
expansion, which has guaranteed its export base of minerals and
agricultural products. Likewise, although the PT government has sold an
image of defense of the environment and biodiversity internationally, in
practice it has maintained the old policy of national development. The
expansion of energy, mining and the agricultural frontier has advanced
into pristine areas of the Amazon and to the detriment of indigenous
populations. Unlike Venezuela, however, the country's geopolitical
importance and its strong ties to Western liberal democratic models have
prevented the PT government from implementing internal institutional
reforms at the same level that Chavez has achieved. The repercussions of
the global crisis have been delayed in Brazil, which began to suffer
them more acutely from 2012, under the leadership of Dilma Roussef, who
succeeded Lula without the same popularity and capacity for political
articulation. In this context of decreasing inflows from abroad, Roussef
had to face the political corporatism of the right-wing base in power in
Congress and lost. Her impeachment in 2016 can be attributed to the
gamble of a fragile coalition regime that collapsed when the public
budget shrank.
The history of left-wing governments in both countries shows these
significant differences. Chavez and Maduro have implemented a
bureaucratic institutional transformation that allows them permanent
political continuity. Venezuela is, in fact, a dictatorship with an
ultra-nationalist left-wing government, supported by the subsoil
resources extracted by a mega-state company that is confused with the
nation itself.
Brazil, on the other hand, is a liberal democracy, although it may not
seem so to foreigners from developed capitalist countries. The regime of
political alternation and parliamentary coalition government are its
distinctive features, which tend to be much more difficult when the left
is in power. This distinction is what currently affects the relationship
between Brazil and Venezuela.
The two countries have always been very close since 2000, when in the
wake of the No Global demonstrations, which in Latin America were
animated by the fight against NAFTA and the FTAA and by the criticism of
the Washington Consensus. The creation of the World Social Forum in
Porto Alegre in 2001, in opposition to the World Forum in Davos, the
birth of the São Paulo Forum, and the proliferation of autonomous
grassroots organizations brought the left back onto the Latin American
map in its political plurality in that decade. The conquest of political
power in 2002 by the Brazilian left, however, was not able to promote
internal structural changes such as those led by Chavez. From an
external point of view, to increase the redistributive capacity of the
planet, Lula, through his symbolic power, intervened in global
governance organizations such as the G-20, in the creation of the BRICS,
with an active presence in Davos. Abandoning the transformation from
below by the grassroots organizations that gave initial support to the
PT government, he moved to promote global inclusion from above, with
only rhetorical criticisms of US imperialism and the West, bringing
together emerging global economies, all economically dependent on
Chinese growth.
In reality, the anti-imperialist discourse of the BRICS has been a
chimera since its inception, whose claim for a more equitable
participation of the different economies in global trade has served to
deepen the exercise of a less liberal and more statist model of
capitalism, led by China. Even from the geopolitical point of view of
each participant, BRICS cannot constitute a unit, because while two of
its main members are clearly autocrats, Russia and China, the others,
Brazil, India and South Africa, more or less, are liberal democracies.
The recent expansion of the group with the inclusion of Iran, Egypt,
Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia is a clear demonstration of China's strategic
interest in having preferential access to energy markets, and this
explains the current attempt to include Venezuela, alongside absolutely
antagonistic regional powers, such as Iran and Saudi Arabia. It is at
this point that Brazil's situation is embarrassing because, as a liberal
democracy that defends the values of individual freedoms to the fullest,
it finds itself surrounded by autocratic governments in which these are
tenuous or non-existent. And this also reflects Brazil's ambiguous
position, practiced by a leader specialized in balancing on a tightrope.
What seems to be there is the difficulty of left-wing governments to
manage the new global configuration that has been established especially
after the rise of the right with Trump in 2016. The institutional
stability of democratic principles makes it clear that the right can win
elections in times of crisis. Venezuela has prevented this by corroding
its institutions by coupling them with Bolivarianism, distorting
electoral practice. The PT cannot do the same in Brazil, which due to
its size, tradition and geopolitical position in the West requires
maintaining a system of free elections. Likewise, neither South Africa
nor India, it seems, are thinking of becoming autocracies. The other
members of the BRICS, as nations with a long autocratic tradition, have
no problem with this issue. The future of the BRICS, if Venezuela were
to join thanks to pressure from the majority of its members, will be
that of a bloc that unites around common economic interests, and not of
a bloc that fights imperialism. On the contrary, the BRICS are already a
bloc that gravitates towards a new form of imperialism, the Chinese one.
Is there anything positive in this global reconfiguration? Yes, to the
extent that we no longer have an exclusive capitalist economic model
directed by an accumulative logic of Protestant and liberal origin that
confuses democracy, which is always relative, with the accumulative
practice of capital and can open or close its markets according to its
needs. On the other hand, no, because the economic otherness brought by
the new agents of global imperialism ignores, through exclusionary
political systems, the liberating agency of race, gender and religion.
In this sense, Brazil's position with respect to Venezuela and the BRICS
is delicate. Brazilian foreign policy has always avoided expressing
itself on the internal practices of other countries, but in this
regional case of Maduro's Venezuela it can no longer abstain from doing
so, given the evidence of his unequivocal authoritarianism. The balance
between economic interests and political context seems a little
schizophrenic, but Maduro has become a problem for Brazilian foreign
policy, especially for a left-wing government. If he is supported, his
clear defense of dictatorships as political power will weigh on him. On
the other hand, within the increasingly small groups of the global left,
such as part of the PT, which even consider Putin's government to be
left-wing, not supporting Maduro means definitively bowing to the
interests of US capitalism. The situation imposed by the new global
political reconfiguration is not an easy task for the democratic left,
and even more difficult for the Lula government.
Carlo Romani
https://umanitanova.org/i-rapporti-della-sinistra-tra-brasile-e-venezuela/
_________________________________________
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