The Chavomadurist dictatorship as a denial of the anarchist ideal

This is a rough translation from an article originally published in Castilian: La dictadura chavomadurista como negación del ideal anarquista.

In sectors, fortunately more and more reduced, which are claimed as an expression of the Latin American anarchist movement, there are still certain confusions about the Venezuelan regime, expressing their sympathies for Chavismo due to conceptual amphibologies of that old left still present in the minds of the region. . A cursory examination of the government's experience throws clarity despite a tip of the iceberg whose appeal is increasingly tarnished. We refer to a picture of slogans and radical slogans concealing a terrible reality, where it is presumed of socialism, social equality, dignity, anti-Yankeeism, protection of the poor, etc. They are expressions made with the purpose of rationalizing the hecatomb provoked in the country by policies harmful to society.

Militarism is the adversary of the libertarian ideal

If there is any doctrine contrary to militarism, it is anarchism. Their multiple versions always coincide in denouncing the administrators of state violence as the most damaging expression of power and of the State. The so-called Bolivarian revolution is based on the armed forces in execution of an antinomic thesis, the civic-military union. The army is the most direct manifestation of the disciplinary power together with the police and the law in the official structure.

Approaches to that supposedly rebellious position speak to us about the convenience of consolidating the Latin American military to avoid the costarriqueñización of reality. They recommend that the existence of an armed autochthonous body is better than a controlling foreign presence, regardless of the fact that any entity with weapons represents the tool of domination of a group over all of society, be it national or international. Additionally, the origin of the Venezuelan uniforms created by a dictator of the magnitude of Juan Vicente Gómez is ignored in the framework of a rigid Prussian conception that has remained in time even in the stage of the delegative democracy born from the fall of the Perezjimenist dictatorship.

The cult of personality is an aberration

The basis of the national political leadership lies in the personality cult of Hugo Chávez. The fixation of his figure is the backbone of an uncritical movement and lacking the most elementary discussion. The symbology of the commander embraces any ideological expression and a strict subjection to his word and action is formed. The problem has been his death and not having built a replacement leadership, having to appeal to simple improvisation and the harshness of the repression. A vision of the world based on freedom can not bet on the conjunction of opinions in a single person because it would be denying the possibility of choice and proposition. It directly clashes with any position other than that of the leader who exercises his command with authoritarianism.

The repressive apparatus and the police state

Copying the Cuban scheme and organized by the G-2, heir of the Stassi and the Gestapo, government management employs the supervision of people through identification agencies, tax, punitive, notarial, registry, ports, airports and other determining factors of the physical and ideological location of the people. Additionally, different police groups have been formed, such as the Bolivarian National Police, Sebin, Dgcim, Conas, FAES, state and municipal police, weaving a preventive and repressive network to support the regime in everything. Besides, there are the TontonMacoutes meaning by the so-called collectives, luck of quasi-criminal gangs operating in many localities, urbanizations and neighborhoods, with total impunity.

The Bolivarian National Guard, part of the armed force, also performs police functions and is seen publicly repressing the demonstrations. Likewise, the Militia, another military auxiliary corps is part of this structure that has managed to form a highly police state, supported by the Ombudsman's Office, the prosecutor's office and the criminal courts. Any mobilization can be classified as violent and disruptive of public order and prosecute its participants for crimes provided in the Code of Military Justice, another procedural delinquency. A ruling of the highest court requires permission from the local authority to be able to hold a public act when the law only establishes it is to notify it. In this way free expression is prevented and criminalized.

The different places of imprisonment are scandalously violators of human rights. There are places known publicly as centers of torture and the modality of disappearances of detainees is used to be able to beat them and not to count any time for the mechanism of presentation before a court. The courts differ the ad infinitum hearings to have more time prisoners to the people. The deaths in the streets for demonstrating, the disappeared, those murdered in the jails for torture, are already part of daily life, trivializing this situation. Crime in the streets, pranes (gang leaders) managing the prisons and a mandatory curfew in the early hours of the afternoon to avoid being assaulted, wounded or killed, complement the ill-fated Venezuelan social situation.

Populism as a means of political operability

The performance of official management translates into the use of populism as a formula for governance. There is no search for solutions for multiple social problems but specific applications to solve them momentarily. It is the short-term sense of this way to materialize the exercise of power. This path has led to the development of welfare programs but not social security, seeking to provide a circumstantial response but not a sustainable panacea. This orientation has led to breaking the unity of the public budget to freely disburse the money and accentuate it, of course, in current spending. It is a gigantic State with more than three and a half million public employees and too many ministries, in addition to plans called missions aimed at one and a half million people with whom they give ephemeral proposals to conjunctural vicissitudes of the population. Accompanying these directions of power is widespread corruption within the state apparatus. It is a monster with a deep existence guaranteed by the impunity granted by the investigative and judicial bodies. And the axis of the financing resides in the international credits arriving the external debt to exponential digits.

The serious social challenges have remained unresolved as that of housing with a deficit of two million residential units; poverty on the rise (more than 85% and criticism transcending 60%), as recognized by the study called Encovi, Surveys of living conditions, carried out by the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello, the Central University of Venezuela and Universidad Simón Bolívar due to the opacity of official statistics, which have been banned for four years; health in a very poor state due to the disqualification of hospitals and the reduction of the Barrio Adentro plan, a Cuban creation; education at an undesirable level with teachers and students fleeing the country; the emigration to all Latin America, the United States and Spain, essentially, as an immediate survival formula without any planning; the slowest internet in the subregion; the absence of food and medicine, using a perverse mechanism such as bags or boxes of food to make the men and women of the State more dependent, are the effluvia of the local hecatomb.

Special mention for its magnitude is the national economic and financial decomposition. Scarcity and shortages, a dynamics that imports and is not productive internally, hyperinflation, sustained recession, stagflation, increase in the banking reserve to prevent loans and the impressive devaluation of Bolívar for exclusively fiscal purposes.

The state as the alpha and the omega of life

If anything characterizes Chavezism, it is in the blind belief in the State when reproducing the Stalinist scheme. The national tradition has turned the domination apparatus into a stellar protagonist of life. It is monstrous since its creation and especially, with the bonanzas that have occurred in the country, especially the oil companies. The economic, social, cultural and financial activity is determined by the centralization of power developed since the Gomez dictatorship. Historically it has been the element of submission by antonomasia, opposed to any libertarian idea. The power is highly unified in the hands of the civic military leadership and the arms race represents a strong financial exaction towards suppliers, Russia and China. Aircraft, war tanks, anti-aircraft missiles, acquired and re-powered ships, machine guns and artillery in general, teach a nation that prefers to buy arms and not food or medicine. It is also a demonstration of state oil capitalism applying neo-Keynesian criteria.

Complement of the State

The Orwellian scheme is reinforced by the foucaultian control function, that is, the communicational hegemony (fortunately there are social networks), the neo-linguistic limiting of minds, the falsification and distortion of history through an epic and militaristic vision of our birth as a country, the facistoid nationalism promoted to the nth degree, the art submitted to official censorship and various forms of sophisticated forms of suffocation of people.

Anti-ecological position

The environmental policies of the State are harmful to the most elementary ecological appreciation. From the barbarian exploitation of the platform deltana, denounced in a documentary called Our Oil and Other Stories, where a group of Italian filmmakers crudely present the oil initiative breaking the official myths, to the barbarism signified in the irrational activities of the auction in the Mining Arc, going through the extraction of coal to open sky in the Zulia state and a precarious attempt to search for energy in plantations in the Guárico state, are indubitable samples of the phobia against Gaia or Pachamama proper to authoritarianism.

It is the fulfillment of the Soviet blueprint of Lenin's expression that socialism is Soviet plus electricity, a glaring example of the positivism of the nineteenth century, which caused the disaster of the Aral Sea, destroyed by the chemical waste inferred from industrial activity and from the Chernobyl catastrophe.

It has been the continuation of the rentier mentality fulfilled by all governments since 1918, when the first Venezuelan bonanza occurred due to exports of coffee and cocoa. In the same way, extractivism is the central line of Chavismo's dialectic. They are traditional and conservative behaviors that have caused profound harm to people.

Racism, homophobia, misogyny and machismo

The State, besieged by authoritarianism and militarized vision of reality, has done very little to confront racism, in its Creole expression as well as its kind the endorsement. It is also possible to understand that the mentality of the people of the city is identified with homophobia, the hidden hatred of women and the ancestral subjectivity of machismo introjected by the conquering Andalusians, which continues in the evolution of our history.

Colophon

The previous dantesco picture is eloquent to understand the Venezuelan military experience of the last twenty years, with precedents well supported since the creation of the independent Venezuelan State. It is a reactionary and totalitarian project with a Stalinist floor and the Castro model, mixed with Peronism, neo-fascism and Nasserism. It is not a different management from the previous ones but with one addition: they have destroyed and demolished the social and trade union movement, wages, social benefits, the economy destroying the only source of foreign exchange, PDVSA, finances, deepened the authoritarianism present in the planes of immanence of society and social resentment accompanied by an equalization by poverty. The escabechina on the country has been total.

A militarist and authoritarian regime is the antipode of an anarchist mind whose teleology is freedom, democracy in its levels of direct participation, self-management in the economic sphere and the extirpation of power relations as a social pattern.

So, we must ask ourselves, how can those who define themselves as anarchists sympathize or defend Chavismo? The answer is varied. In the first place, it is the link with the umbilical cord that existed until the First Workers' International when Marxism and anarchism functioned with great affinity but fortunately ended in a break with the authoritarian socialists. Secondly, the anti-Yankee madurista, historical instrument of cohesion of the left, although it can be a path of the right as Hitler showed. Third, the links with a globalized and private anti-capitalist perspective but not with the statist one, which they justify. Fourth, they are unaware of the great battles achieved in the Spanish Civil War, the Mexican Revolution, the French May, the Paris Commune, the American ecological movement and the Rojava experience in Syrian Kurdistan. Fifth, they ignore all the ideological advance from the worker councilors who realized the dictatorial process of Bolshevism, the advances of the Frankfurt School, the research of French post-structuralism on power, green anarchism, neo-anarchism and the post anarchism. Sixth, the great lobbie exercised by the Venezuelan government on the left of Latin America for the achievement of sympathies acquired by the oil torrent. Seventh, are positions closer to Marxism, Stalinism and totalitarianism. They should open up and locate themselves in the most compatible spaces, that is, chavism, authoritarian socialisms and similar currents, but never camouflage themselves in a doctrine that loves freedom.