The Rise of Causa R: A Workers' Party Shakes Up the Old Politics
Maya, Margarita López
Causa R-with the R, for radical, always drawn in reverse was not long ago one of the tiny grupusculos on the Left. Today it is a major player in national politics. One of the stunning...
...He thought that the group should participate in the varied forms taken by the popular movement, with the understanding that the people themselves would sooner or later resolve the question of their own political direction...
...In 1990, Velasquez said that one of the fundamental ideas of Causa R was that "the workers can govern...
...5.Medina, "Causa Radical," p. 47...
...Nevertheless, he had played an important role in denouncing all kinds of corruption, especially in the unionism of Guayana...
...In a bipartisan political system long dominated by the social democratic party Accion Democratica (AD) and the social Christian party Copei, Causa Rtogether with the independent presidential candidacy of Rafael Calderahas changed the rules of the game...
...He served under Maneiro's command in the guerrilla struggle, and never separated from him, leaving first the Communist Party, and then MAS with his "comandante...
...In 1988, the party managed to elect three congressional deputies...
...At the same time, the group's conception of ideology as a process in perma- nent construction led it to reject ideologicalor politicalpigeonholes...
...What has changed is the political panorama...
...Just Causa R's Andres Velasquez, 1993 presidential candidate and governor of the state of Boilvar...
...On the one hand, in the late 1980s, the country's severe social and economic crisis led the Venezuelan population to increasingly reject the tradi- tional parties and the system they had constructed...
...That meant including groups less critical of the PCV, and seeking, for a time, conciliation between the new group and the old party...
...they solicited garbage com- pactors for the parish...
...The popular sectors spilled into the street to celebrate their victory...
...Isttiriz rejected the proposal, arguing that he had violated no rules and that "the only thing to respect was the vote of the people...
...Causa R had always been a political organization mid-way between a political party and a movement...
...The "sacudbn" or "caracazo" served to reveal the breach between state and society that had been developing over the past few years...
...1 5.Sesto, Tres entrevistas con Andres Velasquez, p. 122...
...In the first place, his government has been honest (something significant in the current Venezuelan context), and has stressed democracy, not only as a form of getting elected, but as a form of governing...
...Though it had carried 19 of the 20 states in the 1988 presidential and congressional elections, AD lost control of nine of those state governments in the counU try's first direct gubernatorial elections.12 The state of BolIvar, for example, where Causa R had concentrated its strength since the beginning of the decade, had always been an AD stronghold...
...Causa R also won in two municipalities: CaronI, in the state of Bolivar, and Miranda, in the central state of Carabobo...
...In reaction, and after a series of conflicts, the union was taken over in 1981 by FETRAMETAL, the AD-controlled labor federation with which SUTISS is affiliated...
...The success of Causa Rlike that of the Workers Party (PT) of Brazil, and perhaps the PRD in Mexi- coreveals the desire of the popular sectors, so badly beaten over the last few years in Latin America, to find new political space within which to make themselves heard...
...One of Pro Catia' s greatest achievements was the collection of 24,000 signatures in a petition calling for the reform of the law of municipal councils...
...At the moment of MAS's founding in January, 1971, one of the PCV dissidents, an ex-comandante of the armed struggle named Alfredo Maneiro, split off VOL XXVII, No 5 MARIAPRL 1994 29 Margarita Lopez Maya is on the political science faculty of the Center for the Study of Development (CENDES) at the Central University of Venezuela...
...Following the idea of seeking out the political center, a group led by filmmaker Thaelman Urguellcs in Pro Catia then proposed backing the candidacy of cx- president Rafael Caldera...
...This reform would give council representation to Catia' s communities, along with the right to revoke the mandate of representatives.5 Despite the fact that more than half a million people lived in Catia during the 1970sprobably over a million live there nowthe community never had a representative council...
...MAS would become Venezuela's most prominent and powerful group on the parliamentary Left for the next 20 years...
...On the other, a wide range of decentralizing political reforms [see "State Reforms that Opened the Door," p. 32] allowed the group to begin widening its base at the local and regional level...
...Traditional unionism had lost the battle...
...One more time, rumors of impending electoral fraud mobilized hun- dreds of people who began to gather opposite the Supreme Electoral Council (CSE) where they waited for official electoral bulletins...
...OlavarrIa, the publisher of the magazine Resumen, was from a wealthy background, and had a conservative point of view...
...I n January, 1972, Pablo Medina, one of the mem- bers of the group, went by himself to Ciudad Guayana with the task of creating a political vanguard at SIDOR...
...The Matancero activists fought for the democratic participation of workers in union decisions, and for the health and safety of the workers in the workplacethemes not dealt with by other unionists...
...He had spent 18 years as a PCV militant, and had become a member of the central committee...
...During 1971, Maneiro and his group evaluated which of the existing mass organizations could be mobilized in Venezuela...
...Being a rather small group...
...432 (February 14, 1982...
...Less than a year after the "caracazo," the first regional and municipal elections in December, 1989 reflected the degree of rejection of Perez' AD government...
...8 The second would move beyond the rentier economy...
...The party's origins date back to the break-up of the Venezuelan Communist Party (PCV) in the early 1970s, and the defeat of the country's revolutionary armed struggle...
...Unlike Venezuela's other parties, it rejected the formal trappings of a party such as statutes and bylaws, party hierarchies, and staff...
...11 .Sesto, interview, November 18, 1993...
...The government responded by imposing a state of siege, suspend- ing constitutional guarantees, and unleashing severe political and military repression that resulted in an official death toll in the hundreds...
...5 The "working class" had been converted to "the workers," a formulation which would now be used in all the organization's discourse...
...Second, given its limited resources, the state government has been able to provide with reasonable efficiency social services, especially health, education and personal security...
...Five years later, in 1977, Tello BenItez, another leader who had come up from the popular movement, gained a seat in the steelworkers' union, SUTISS...
...2.The group was then called "Venezuela 83," after the date when all foreign oil concessions were to revert to Venezuelan ownership...
...Pro Catia also started a campaign to acquire food storehouses for the area...
...17/lB (1991...
...150-153...
...They also began to develop a rep- utation for honesty, in stark contrast to the widespread corruption of the traditional union leaders...
...Since that date, the Causa R-affiliated new unionism has grouped together about 40 union and cooperative groups around the country.4 While the Causa R student movement at UCV would eventually founder over differences of conception and personality, the group at Catiacalled Pro Catiabegan developing community activities and political initiatives which, by the late 1970s, yielded a fair amount of success...
...Most of the dissidents who left the PCV, after having rejected armed struggle and unconditional loyalty to the Soviet Union and Cuba, went on to found another group, Movement Toward Socialism (MAS...
...Nevertheless, at the founding of MAS, the conception that prevailed was the creation of a mass movement that would gather into itself all the dissidents of the PCV and would rapidly look for ways to insert itself into the national political scene...
...6." Catia: Sucursal del infierno," Resumen (Caracas), No...
...8.Farruco Sesto, personal interview, November 18, 1993, Caracas...
...The party projected a campaign style that resembled the rough-hewn image most Venezuelans have of the country's founding party, AD, in the days of its revolutionary fervor in the 1940s and 1950s...
...Instead of focusing on megaprojects to extract and export primary goods (iron, aluminum and bauxite), Causa R advocates developing the Orinoco River region with medium-size industry and manufacturing that would process the primary material in the same state.16 In the 1993 electoral campaign, Causa R presented to the public a "base document" outlining its project for Venezuela...
...SIDOR was practically paralyzed...
...the fame and expansion of new unionism had begun...
...Causa R's ideas, how- ever, lack theoretical development, reflecting the pragmatic and shortrange vision of the orga- nization's policies...
...In the day's most dramatic and unexpected development, word began circulating around mid-day that Causa R's Aristobulo Isttiriz was ahead in the exit polls in the race for mayor of Caracas...
...The Rise of Causa R 1 .Alfredo Maneiro et al, Notas Negativas (Caracas: Ediciones Venezuela 83, 1971), p. 39...
...The newspaper was at first clandestine because of the authoritarian union leadership at SIDOR, which was controlled by a corrupt bureaucracy, mainly associated with AD.3 Towards 1973, an electrical worker named Andrds Velasquez began to collaborate with the group, by then composed of 10 workers...
...A "national committee" and a "national meeting" also exist, but in fact these structures were never well- known, and the criteria for representation have neverto this daybeen made explicit)' The group also developed a political strategy of distancing itself from the other groups that also had their origins in the armed struggle, such as MAS...
...Thousands of people filled the Plaza Caracas to defend Isttiriz' victory...
...and they sponsored games and sporting activities for children, and persuaded the government to build neighborhood parks.6 Despite the two successful Causa R-affiliated movements the alternative unionism at SIDOR and Pro CatiaCausa R was still a small group at the beginning of the l980s, located in only two points of the extensive geography of the country...
...In a country where arrogant attitudes and signs of sudden wealth are the traditional characteristics of politicians, Causa R candidates spoke, dressed and behaved like plain and honest workerswhich most of them actually were...
...4.Farruco Sesto, Tres entrevistas con Andres Velasquez: 19861990-1991 (Caracas: Ediciones del Agua Mansa, 1992), p. 43...
...In Ciudad BolIvar, the capital of the State, all activity stopped, and thousands of people demonstrated...
...It was likewise hesitantexcept for the brief flirtation with the centrist Jorge OlavarrIato enter into any electoral or parliamentary alliances...
...At the same time, the organization captured the mayoralties of the three largest cities of the state of BolIvar...
...VOL XXVfl, No 5 MARJAPRIL 1994 33 One of the enormous housing blocks in Cat/a, a fertile organizing ground for Causa R.REPORT ON VENEZUELA C ausa R's growing success over the past four years has brought small, but significant changes in its objectives and discourse...
...Voi XXVfl, No 5 MARJAPRIL 1994 31REPORT ON VENEZUELA before the deadline for the registration of presidential candidates, he placed a number of conditions for his candidacy before the organization, among them, that he he named Causa R's secretary...
...Sesto, Tres entrevistas con Andres Velasquez, pp...
...These triumphs were predictable, but the margins of victory were even wider than expected, and strikingly, Causa R did well outside of the state of BolIvar...
...Street assemblies," for example, are frequently called in public squares or city streets where people hear and debate state and local problems...
...Causa R, prepared from its SIDOR experience, began early in the after- noon of election day to accuse AD of fraud, while the population of Ciudad Guayana took to the streets to back Velasquez...
...106 (July 6, 1993...
...February 27, 1989 marked the first social explosion...
...The group that published the newspaper called itself Matancero as well...
...The group set itself the task of finding this leadership...
...Velasquez' record as governor of Bolivar can be considered, on a regional scale, an embryo of Causa R's sociopolitical project for Venezuela...
...The first part of Caracas one sees on the drive up from the international airport, Catia is made up of thousands of shackscalled "ranchos"which climb the mountains, in addition to the dozen or so "blocks," enormous complexes of buildings built by the state in the 1970s to house the poor...
...Velasquez, Tello BenItez and a few other workers were fired from their jobs...
...Velasquez became known as "the leader of El Porton...
...These characteristics put Causa R in a unique position to benefit from the historical convergence of two political processes external to the organization...
...J n November, 1982, just as the new alliance was getting off the ground, Maneiro died of a heart attack at the age of 45...
...Many feared that the party would now self-destruct.8 OlavarrIa, for his part, thought he could fill the vacuum left by Maneiro...
...Catia is a populous district in the western part of Caracas...
...Nonetheless, grave accusations of corruption and contentious regional leadership struggles had thrown AD into a serious crisis, and many of the party militants disobeyed the party line and voted for Causa R.'3 Velasquez won the governorship with 40.3% of the vote, while AD came in second with 36.69...
...As the campaign progressed, one question that surfaced was whether Causa R's Velasquez knew how to wear a tie...
...On December 6, 1992, just eight days after the year's second attempted coup d'etat, Velasquez was reelected governor of BolIvar with 63.36% of the vote...
...It has been working all along in unions and neighborhoods, without betraying its principles or succumbing to corruption...
...Two years later, in the elec- tions of 1979, the Matancero slate, headed by Velasquez, won control of the union at SIDOR...
...Maneiro thought that people had an astonishing capacity to spontaneously mobilize, and that it was the role of his group to give political content to that mobilization...
...a so-called "political committee" of a dozen or so leaders was delegated to make decisions...
...Maneiro went to MAS' founding convention full of reservations...
...Impoverished by years of economic crisis, and feeling betrayed by Carlos Andres Perez who announced in his first presidential message that the government had agreed to go along with the austerity conditions of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Venezuelans in cities throughout the country took to the streets to loot all kinds of commercial establishments...
...Maneiro said that popular leadership was produced constantly in all activities, even in a baseball game...
...From this small nucleus, comprised of middle- and base-level activists of the PCV, Causa R was born...
...Causa R, Proyecto politico para una nueva Venezuela (Caracas: La Causa R, 1993), p. 2. 18.Causa R, Proyecto politico, p.3...
...13.Guillermo Yepes Salas, La Causa R: Origenypoder (Caracas: Fondo Editorial Tropikos, 1993), p. 160...
...One of the stunning developments of Vene- zuela's 1993 presidential campaign was the rise to national prominence of the selfdescribed "workers' party," Causa R. Its presidential candidate, Andrds Velasquez, won a respectable 22% of the vote, and the party elected nine senators and 40 congressional deputies...
...Instead of beginning with a given political structure, he believed that one should have confidence in the popular movement's ability to produce a new political leadership.' In keeping with these ideas, Maneiro' s small group decided not to create a new organization with a constitutive act, a bureaucracy, and statutes, but rather to insist on the idea of a party in permanent formation.2 They thought the group should dedicate most of its efforts to constructing the constantly changing political vanguards that would emerge from the encounters between the group and the leadership of the spontaneous popular movements...
...Unlike Maneiro, Medina came from a large and poor familyhe had 10 or 12 brothers and sistersfrom the western city of Tocuyo, in the state of Lara...
...it would maintain the oil industry as the center of the economy not to produce rents, but to create linkages with other forms of production...
...252-257...
...As the campaign progressed, it became clear that the party was capturing the popular imaginationand the enmity of the country's traditional leadershipfor reasons having a lot to do with its style...
...Venezuelans, finding themselves poor, hungry, and orphaned by the state, reached out to the organization that most clearly had shown itself to be free of complicity with the old political system...
...They chose three within which to create a political vanguard: the student movement at the Central University of Venezuela (UCV) in Cara- cas, the independent workers' movement at the huge Steelworks of Orinoco (SIDOR) in Ciudad Guayana, and the popular movement in the Catia district of Caracas...
...Although these results seemed to come as a surprise to the rest of the country, Velasquez contends that the leadership of AD knew days in advance that they faced defeat, and were planning to fix the elections...
...From that point on, Matancero' s "new unionism" began to take hold...
...The organization began not with the idea that the party could spawn a revolutionary movement, but the reverse, that a party would be the result of a revolu- tionary movement at a certain level of its development...
...That afternoon, the president of the CSE called the two leading candidates together to sign a pact agreeing to respect the results, whatever they may be...
...9.Sesto, interview, November 18, 1993...
...3.Pablo Medina, "Causa Radical: Entrevista a Pablo Medina," Motivos (Mexico City), No...
...But given the Marxist matrix of Maneiro's thought, and given the initial proposi- tion that the group would construct itself within the popular movements, this narrowing is not at all contradictory to his plans...
...This mobilization had the desired effect: AD held a press conference soon thereafter to concede defeat...
...The labor tendency of the organization prevailed from this point on...
...He got a job as a worker on the night shift, settled in the working-class suburb of Matanzas, and began to put out a newspaper called El Matancero, named after the suburb where it was located...
...Finally, the state's plans for the develop- ment of the region of Guayana diverge somewhat from the traditional development plans of the federal government...
...It's been some time since organizations like AD and Mexico's PRIbureaucratized and corrupt by their long sojourns in powerhave been tuned in to the needs of the majority of the people...
...Maneiro decided to exclude himself, and took with him only 10 other people...
...This principal entrance and exitthe place Maneiro thought that people had an astonishing capacity to spontaneously mobilize, and that his group should have confidence in the popular movement's ability to produce a new political leadership...
...These reservations stemmed from Maneiro' s obsession with the problem of the "vanguard," and how to shape a skillfully led orga- nization of political militants...
...OlavarrIa had defended the position of the new unionism, and his articles had given some prominence to the Matancero movement and its leader, Andrds Velasquez...
...Manifestacihn popular proclamO ante eI Consejo Supremo Electoral triunfo de La Causa R," El Nacional (Caracas), December B, 1992...
...7.Alfredo Maneiro, Notas Politicas (Caracas: Ediciones del Agua Mansa, 1986), pp...
...As Velasquez returned to his post as governor of the state of Bolivar, the question remains unanswered...
...Previously confined to the narrow regional and sectoral base of trade unionism in the industrial state of BolIvar, Causa Rwith the R, for radical, always drawn in reversehas become a major player in national politics...
...The scarce attention the party pays to trying to incorpo- rate militant "intellectuals" or other educated sectors reinforces this weak- ness...
...While the group continued to encounter a militant and radical spirit within the popular movements, it became increasingly clear to the Causa R leadership that these movements were in no mood for revolutionary struggle, and that the path to expanded political work lay toward the political center.7 The group therefore began to approach certain centrist political figures...
...Arguing that the alliance with OlavarrIa should only be temporary, the founding directors of the organization, Pablo Medina and Lucas Matheus, objected to the conditions and prevailed.9 OlavarrIa dropped out of the presidential race, and ran instead for Congress as a member of a group called Opina...
...Claudio Fermmn of AD gladly accepted...
...The first would encourage the democratization of social life in all its instances: a profound educational reform, the constitution of a genuine state of law, urban reform, an anticorruption program, and the renewal of the idea of the common destiny of "the nation...
...During the debates in the inner circle of the PCV, it seems that Petkoff shared these ideas, and also agreed with Maneiro that it was time for a total break with the Communists...
...It was a hard blow for the organization, just at the moment it was beginning to achieve some visibility...
...arguing that Caldera and his party, Copei, represented the old politics, proposed instead the can- didacy of the president of their union, Andres Velasquez.'0 When Caldcra's candidacy was rejected, Urguelles, together with Pro Catia and the majority of intellectuals who remained in the organization, abandoned Causa R. The group's neighborhood arm and its remaining intellectuals were now lost, and Causa R was reduced to the founding members who had left the PCV in 1970, plus the leadership of the Matancero movement...
...17 To reach this new society, Causa R sees two great tasks before it: a radical cultural transformation, and a productive revolution...
...The party was not long ago one of the tiny grupasculos on the Left whose entire membershipin the words of one of its founders could fit inside a Volkswagen...
...In this context, Causa R reaped high dividends because it was so easy to differentiate the orga- nization from the dominant actors as well as the pacts they had entered into...
...4 IstUriz won 34.45% of the vote and Fermmn, 32.03...
...The traditional parties and unions seemed helpless to prevent the growing misery, or even to direct or control the unrest...
...With little formal education and training for public posts, union leaders may not necessarily make good mayors, town councilors or congressional repre- sentatives...
...Translated from the Spanish by NACLA.REPORT ON VENEZUELA with a tiny group of followers to found the organization that would become Causa R. A short, stocky man, with a flushed face and a somewhat disheveled demeanor, Maneiro was born into a middle-class family on the off-shore island of Margarita, and took pride in telling his companeros that he was descended from the Margariteno, Don Manuel Placido Maneiro, one of the heroes of Venezuelan independence...
...30 NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICASREPORT ON VENEZUELA where the plant workers waited for and were dropped off by Ciudad Guayana's buseswas an excellent site for public speaking, especially during shift changes...
...Causa R is not a new political organization...
...Among other things, he feared that MAS would include members of the PCV less willing than he, or MAS leader Teodoro Petkoff, to make a clean break with the old Communist orthodoxy...
...He thought that it was best to begin the process with a small number of dedicated activists...
...The introduction to the document says Venezuelan society urgently needs to become "just, balanced, tolerant, cohesive, efficient, productive and civilized...
...This centrality of "the workers" can be considered both a narrowing of Maneiro' s original conception of Causa R, and perhaps a narrow- ing of the group's ultimate chances for building a mass-based movement...
...In 1974, Velasquez gave his first public speech at the main gatecalled "El Porton" of SIDOR...
...But the steelworkers of Matancero...
...12.Margarita Lopez Maya, "Tensiones sociopollticas del proceso de decentralizaciOn en Venezuela," Cuadernos del CENDES (Caracas), No...
...Indeed given the hegemo- ny achieved within the party by the Matancero movement once the other movements had dissolved or left the party, such a focus makes historical sense...
...Supporters of Causa R were surprised by this alliance, but Olavarrfa did give the group access to one of the most widely read magazines in the country...
...Visible efforts have been made to restore public schools and hospitals to adequate working order after years of neglect by administra- tions more attuned to partisan interests than to regional concerns...
...After a number of tries, a centerLeft relationship developed in the 1983 presidential candidacyannounced in May, 1982of Jorge Olavarria...
...But in 1988, the federation let the union go, elections were held, and Matancero won again...
...10.Sesto, interview, November 18, 1993...
...Now that the electorate has given Causa R some power, the real challenges begin...
...BenItez negotiated at the bargaining tablewith the company and with the traditional union leadershipwhile Velasquez took charge of speaking to workers at the gate...
Vol. 27 • March 1994 • No. 5
