Workers Lead the Way in Venezuela

In the latest sign of the increasing radicalism of the Bolivarian Revolution, Venezuela’s National Union of Workers [UNETE] has published a series of policy proposals calling for more workers’ control of industry.

 Among the proposals are:

• Full nationalisation of the banking and finance sectors
• Nationalisation of foreign commerce related to essential foods
• Readjustment of wages and prices to account for the cost of living and production
• Creation of a ministry for workers’ control and social production, directed by workers’ councils
• Introduction of a national maximum wage
• Introduction of an industrial transformation law that will see idle companies and land transferred to workers’ or peasants’ councils
• Demarcation of indigenous lands over the interests of transnational mining companies

UNETE is Venezuela’s primary union federation, having been formed in 2003 after the traditional federation CTV supported coup attempts against socialist president Hugo Chávez. Around 80 per cent of the country’s trade unions are affiliated to UNETE.

Early this month, president Chávez celebrated the first anniversary of the nationalisation of the Bank of Venezuela, which was bought over last year by the state and retained its entire workforce. It has also experienced tremendous growth since then.

Chávez said: “I don’t know if there has been any experience like it before in Venezuela of such growth. That means a lot of things. This throws out all of that information that is emitted from the laboratories of psychological warfare that global capitalism has set up in Venezuela… that manipulate and put fear in the minds of Venezuelans.”

The revolutionary government has also moved in recent months to challenge price speculation that has seen food costs skyrocket. Several supermarket chains have been nationalised and the government has opened its own restaurants.

At the opening of one such restaurant last week, commerce minister Richard Canan said: “The creation of these socialist arepa restaurants allows us to demonstrate to capitalist businesses that it is possible to have a venue where food can be sold at a fair price and not as a commodity, as it is under capitalist concepts.”

The UNETE federation’s national co-ordinators recognise the work that has been done by the Venezuelan government to improve the lives and conditions of the country’s workers and peasants, but argue that this work has been hampered by “bureaucratism, indolence, and corruption of functionaries who act like a fifth column... in the entire structure of a bourgeois state that refuses to die”.

The document produced by UNETE goes to the heart of a struggle that exists within Chávez’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela [PSUV] and within the Bolivarian Revolution itself. It is a struggle between a rank and file who are anxious to see the socialist transformation of Venezuela and a bureaucracy who seem determined to prevent that from happening.

Government leaders are not blind to the problems facing their project and measures have been introduced to remove power from such bureaucrats and place it in the hands of the workers. In May, Chávez swore in the new directors for the 15 industrial companies that make up Venezuelan Corporation of Guayana [CVG], the directors having been elected by the workers before being ratified by the president.

The CVG forms an important part of Plan Socialista Guayana. This plan came into being following the nationalisation of the giant steel plant SIDOR in April 2008. The workers there began to discuss what a socialist company would look like and how it could be run democratically. They set up their own Bolivarian Workers’ University, in which 1,300 of them registered, where weekly classes are given in important technical skills as well as political theory.

Guayana is the largest of Venezuela’s eight administrative regions and is an important industrial centre. Around 80,000 people work in steel, aluminium, iron ore and mining companies, which have all been nationalised. In conjunction with the Ministry of Labour, workers from the CVG came up with Plan Socialista Guayana last year.

Plan Socialista Guayana is a 10-year programme to turn the CVG companies into worker-managed, socialist operations. Under this plan, the companies will greatly reduce the amount of raw materials being exported and workers will focus on supplying local and national projects for the benefit of the people. The introduction of the plan was hindered by management and local government figures until Chávez himself stepped in. That directors for these worker-run companies have now been appointed shows that the Plan is now well under way.

Other avenues have also opened in the attempt to combat the problems of bureaucracy. A prominent example is the community council. These councils were introduced with the intention of promoting the participatory democracy that is central to the Bolivarian Revolution, by having communities come together to address local problems and develop local projects. Over 30,000 community councils have been created all over Venezuela since their introduction in 2006.

This explosion has not been without problems, especially in terms of finance. The Venezuelan government passed an amendment to the community council law in May to clarify and strengthen the role of the councils in society. Councils are elected by assemblies that represent between 150 and 400 families in a particular area, and assemblies need 30 per cent attendance to form a quorum, ensuring a minimum level of community involvement in the affairs of the council.

In both urban and rural areas, numbers of community councils are coming together to form socialist communes. There are currently around 200 socialist communes being built at present, which are effectively creating a parallel, horizontal alternative to existing municipal authorities.

There are many people in Venezuela who are frustrated at the limited progress made over the past decade by their government, which continues to struggle against a hostile native bourgeoisie as well as a dangerous imperialist power to the north and its satellite state in Latin America, Colombia.

However, as long as the workers and peasants of Venezuela keep pushing towards the socialist transformation of society, the dream of the Bolivarian Revolution and of 21st century socialism will remain alive and well.

European Union support for Colombia and Israel ignored by politicians

Over recent weeks we have all seen what has passed for debate in the European election campaign. However, completely absent from this debate has been the role of the European Union (EU) in bankrolling terror states involved in gross human rights abuses, political repression, torture, murder and other breaches of International law.

Particularly reprehensible has been the EU’s decision to maintain and upgrade, favoured trading status with both Colombia and Israel, regimes that violate International law on a daily basis.

In Colombia, trade unionists, political opponents and human rights activists all face intimidation, arbitary detention, kidnapping, torture and murder at the hands of the Colombian regime or their right wing death squad allies. Last year, over 40 Trade Union activists were murdered. Already this year, 19 more Union activists have been slaughtered.

Israel continues its illegal occupation of Palestinian lands and the building of its illegal annexation wall. The inhumane siege of Gaza continues as the civilian population increasingly struggle to get food and essential medicines to survive. The Israeli military continue bombing the area, obliterating the remnants of an already destroyed economy and infrastructure. During their recent invasion of Gaza, Israel committed countless war crimes, deliberately bombing civilian targets, killing more than a thousand Palestinian civilians, including hundreds of young children.

Rather than cutting all ties with Israel, imposing sanctions on them and seeking to bring those responsible for the war crimes committed against the Palestinian people to justice, Israel has been allowed to retain favoured trading status with the EU.

By doing so, the EU are bankrolling the Colombian and Israeli terror regimes and éirígí believe they are complicit in the human rights abuses and war crimes committed by these states. That this scandalous situation is deemed unworthy of being debated by the candidates exposes the shallowness of the claims of a commitment to human rights which occasionally emenate from the EU and its politicians. Their silence shames them all.

Bankrolling Murder in Colombia

Francisco Santos CalderónThe Colombian vice-president, Francisco Santos Calderón, was in Belfast this week.

Calderón was here to address a PSNI-run drugs conference on the issue of the cocaine trade and how to combat it. Unfortunately, the senior Colombian politico was not expected to address the involvement of the right-wing death squads in the trade and their dubious relationship with his government.

According to the European Union, Colombia is designated as a developing country.

Over the years, as a result of this classification, under a scheme entitled the General System of Preferences (GSP), Colombia has received preferential trading status with the EU. This scheme and the special benefits that apply and which Colombia is in receipt of are intended solely for countries that respect certain basic human rights and the rights of workers.

Back in 2005 the scheme was altered to a new system entitled GSP Plus, which delivers extra benefits for qualifying countries. However, the new system significantly required those qualifying countries to not just ratify a number of core international conventions on labour rights and human rights, but, more importantly, to also “effectively implement” these international conventions. Among the rights enshrined in these conventions are the right to protection to organise and collective bargaining, as well as the right to freedom of association.

So, while the Colombian regime has indeed ratified the necessary conventions, they have failed to implement them effectively and, in fact, they consistently and regularly breach these and other International Labour Organisation (ILO) conventions as a matter of course. Indeed, all the evidence clearly shows that they actively engage in measures, both directly and indirectly through their allies in the right-wing death squads, to hamper the work of trade union activists and to intimidate, disappear, torture and murder those engaged in trade union activity as well as other human rights activists and political opponents. Trade union membership numbers have plummeted in recent decades to just 850,000, just 5 per cent of the total workforce and just half of what union membership figures were 20-years-ago.

For trade unionists, Colombia remains the most dangerous place in the world. An Amnesty International report issued in July of last year highlighted the fact that, during the past two decades, over 2,000 trade union activists have been killed (the figure stands at 2,683 in the last 22 years), while 138 have been the victims of enforced disappearance in Colombia. In more than 90 per cent of these cases, the people responsible for these atrocities have yet to be brought to justice.

In stark contrast to the image presented to the world by the Colombian regime and its US and British allies, the situation has not improved and violence in Colombia has increased dramatically throughout 2008. From January 1 this year up until the end of August, 40 trade unionists were murdered, a figure already higher than the numbers for the entire year of 2007. Among those activists murdered were 15 trade union leaders. Over the past decade, the number of trade unionists killed in Colombia has been consistently greater than those killed in all other countries worldwide combined.

Added to that is the extremely worrying fact that 125 death threats were issued against trade unionists trying to carry out their activity in the workplace throughout Colombia this year alone. Considering the propensity of those issuing the death threats to murder or disappear those that they threaten, those figures are a real source of concern for Colombian trade unionists and should be of major concern for the EU and those who decide what countries are to awarded GSP Plus status.

And it is not just trade unionists that bear the brunt of the Colombian regime’s murderous campaign. The reality of life in Colombia is that those that dare speak out against the regime, those that dare stand up to the repression and murder inflicted by the regime and their allies, those that dare to speak out for human rights and against the appalling human rights record of Colombia all face intimidation, arbitrary arrest, kidnapping, torture and murder for their beliefs and activities, whether political, human rights or trade union orientated.

No more state crimes!Human rights groups have shown that, during the current president’s six-year period in office, the Colombian military has been responsible for the extrajudicial executions of around 1,200 civilians, a figure that is almost twice the number killed in the period between 1996 and 2002.

Amnesty International’s latest report, entitled Leave Us in Peace! - Targeting Civilians in Colombia’s Internal Armed Conflict, again documents an increase in the numbers of civilians killed by the Colombian military and calls for an end to all military aid to the regime. Among the many Colombian military units for which there is clear evidence of involvement in torture, murder and other human rights abuses are units who receive British government and British military assistance, the notorious High Mountain Battalions of the Colombian Army. The report also documents a significant upward surge in attacks against human rights and trade union activists and increases in the forced disappearances and forced displacement of civilians by the regime.

That such a regime, with such an appalling human rights record, should be rewarded with special status by the EU is appalling and should not be allowed to continue.

The position of countries that have GSP status is currently under review and a decision will be announced by the EU Commission on December 15. It is imperative that the EU does not renew Colombia’s special trade status. Instead, they should, as has been called for by the CUT trade union federation, the largest union organisation in Colombia, initiate a high-level and thorough investigation into the murder campaign and human rights abuses carried out by the regime and its allies against trade unionists, human rights activists and political opponents.