Venezuela's Embattled Democracy

...Peons have already begun gravitating from the mountains to the suburbs of the large cities, adding to the misery of the shanty towns (or ranchhos, as they are called) and making them politically explosive...

...He is trying to raise output in such minerals as iron, manganese, nickel, and phosphate, to develop energy sources, and to create a metallurgical industry...

...The production of gas is completely dependent on it...

...Rondon Lovera, the Vice President of the House of Representatives, who explained at great length why he decided to leave Betancourt's Democratic Action party (AD...

...Since 1959, three forces had been allied with Democratic Action: COPEI, which oscillated between John XXIII and Franco...

...The financing of industrial expansion is geared almost exclusively to oil revenues...

...Our enemies pretend that we take money from Havana," he answered...

...Then came the riots in Caracas in September and October of 1960...

...The answer is Cuba...

...A commercial treaty with the U.S., for instance, is an obstacle to industrialization...

...The people who live in them are restless, tired of waiting, and unprepared for the prudent delays which solid reform often demands...

...The powerful Confederation of Venezuelan Workers has 1.2 million members...

...The unions and the parties exert far greater influence on the politically conscious population...

...Gonzalo Barrios, President of the AD, enlarged on this theme for me: "The revolution of October 1945 destroyed Venezuela's oligarchial power structure...

...And more than anything else its achievements during this period explain its triumphal return to power with the election of Romulo Betancourt on December 7, 1958...

...The extraordinary complexity of Venezuelan politics is the result of manifold personal relationships, which—despite assassinations, sabotage and uprisings—have woven an inextricable web of contacts between the Miraflores Palace (where the President and the top officials have their offices) and the legal opposition and the underground...

...In his large and beautiful library, I listened to Uslar Pietri, one of Venezuela's most brilliant polemicists, launch into a bitter attack on the government...

...liberals, Venezuela can achieve a peaceful and genuine revolution...

...Of those I spoke with, Domingo Alberto Rangel was the only one to insist that the oil industry must be nationalized within five years, but I did not get the impression that he was really pressing the point...

...the Peasants Federation has from 6-700,000...

...Finally, it utilized oil royalities for industrializing the country...

...While they expressly condemn the methods used in implementing agrarian reform, they are satisfied with only minor criticisms of the government's handling of oil...

...The greater part of our country's effective political parties came into existence, the Communist party was legalized, and we promulgated the most democratic constitution in Latin America...

...It is also estimated that 36,000 motor vehicles will be assembled in Venezuela before the year is out...

...If reforms do not soon bear fruit, if they do not make the peon a landowner or a qualified worker, there is trouble ahead...

...Has Betancourt betrayed his country's revolution...

...The total proven reserves are estimated at 16.75 billion barrels...

...and of these, 54 per cent are not more than 19 years old...

...The astonishing dignity of the uprisings and the heightened sense of life during the three revolutionary years from October 1945 to November 1948, forged an intimate bond among the battered partisans...

...Its candidate in the forthcoming election, Dr...

...For another, the most recent Democratic Action party program, published in 1962, is still largely based on a Marxist view of Venezuelan society...

...David Rousset, who is one of Europe's leading political commentators, is a regular correspondent for the Paris newspaper Le Figaro...

...But it also offers enormous prospects...

...For one thing, he has maintained the strong alliance between his party and the labor unions...

...Agricultural production, the subject of so much criticism, rose by 13 per cent in 1962, as against 2 per cent the preceding year...

...The party refused new concessions, limited the profits of foreign companies and ruled that their staffs must be 75 per cent Venezuelan...

...In condeming Havana, Betancourt chose to dissociate himself from Latin America's extreme Left, which believes that a national revolution cannot be successfully carried out until a violent break has been made with the United States...

...They, too, are learning...

...But even the survival of the Democratic Action party could mean defeat if it has to be paid for by abandoning reform and renouncing the program to emancipate the peasants...

...After the major political split of 1961, the extreme Left succeeded in organizing an overall Confederation of 200,000 members...

...That is the greatness of Venezuela: everything can be created there...

...Today there are many young officers—even Catholic officers—who are troubled, who have lost their illusions...

...Betancourt's action also caused the URD to break its united front with his party, thus destroying the coalition...

...What, then, is...

...and the General Staff, which is wholly occupied with the traditional kind of Army politics...

...Betancourt, on the other hand, has chosen cooperation with COPEI and the General Staff...

...In 1962, the govenrment collected 3.25 billion bolivars in oil revenue...

...At the time, the Venezuelan Communist party was faced with making the fateful decision of whether or not to support terrorist activity against President Romulo Betancourt's regime...

...There are, for example, 125,000 civil servants and 65,000 workers in the public administration out of a population of eight million...

...Betancourt and the leaders of the AD, who represent another—and no less authentic—segment of the Latin American Left, disagree...

...Initially an adherent of Lovera's dissident faction, Quijada is now supporting the candidacy of Dr...

...They spread to the countryside the following year...

...There is no question, however, that the rightists are unwilling to compromise themselves with the Democratic Action party...

...Raul Leoni...

...With the vehemence of gesture and mimicry of the authentic Mediterreanean, Dr...

...To emancipate the peasants, it adopted an agrarian law which enforced the redistribution of land...

...They feel that through a series of reforms and compromises, and with the help of the unions and U.S...

...Pietri, his chief grievance is against the Betancourt Administration's financial mistakes, its foolishly expensive loans, its waste and muddle in various agencies, and its excessive number of civil servants...

...And in domestic policy Betancourt has been hamstrung by the lack of a cooperative middle class...

...Betancourt's Administration, it should be noted, is not a one-party government...

...Meanwhile, the party faces other difficulties...

...For 1966 its production is estimated at 1.1 million tons a year...

...In those years Juan Perez Alfonso imposed the famous 50 per cent tax on the big oil companies and the Democratic Action party developed its transitional oil program to establish a national petroleum company, build a tanker fleet, and process the country's petroleum...

...Throughout these three prodigious years the AD was the party in power...

...The circles in Venezuela allied with Trujillo also organized an attempt on Betancourt's life, from which he barely escaped...

...The military has undergone certain experiences," he said...

...And it is precisely within this democratic framework that the present struggle between the terrorists and the police is taking place, like an attack of fever in a healthy body...

...One has to look elsewhere for the reason, and the most logical place to begin is with the AD'S economic policy...

...Pietri...

...This can be explained by the fact that the country's various political factions have a common past, and the glory of that past still dominates the imagination of all those who took part in it...

...Later, in his office in the Congress Building, I talked with Dr...

...Although many of the candidates in the December 1 presidential elections had taken to the hustings before I arrived in Caracas, a number of those I was able to talk to joined in excoriating the Betancourt Administration...

...Is there any truth in this...

...A consortium of American companies controls almost 75 per cent of the country's oil production...

...Many of the big landowners and some important financiers despise everything it represents...

...The appalling misery of the masses cannot be ignored...

...the Democratic Republican Union (URD), which provided trained cadres...

...As for Dr...

...In December 1962, oil production reached 3.35 million barrels a day...

...Recently, too, the peasant leader Ramon Quijada was able to launch a new union that controls between 150,000 and 300,000 small farmers...

...It is forecast that by 1975 the Guiana region will produce 2.1 million kilowatts of hydroelectric energy, 4.2 million tons of steel, 11 million tons of iron, and much more besides...

...It is we who by various strategems send goods and foreign currency to Cuba...

...Nor is there much time left...

...In those days the people became, for the first time, part of the national life...

...There can be no question that a legal victory at the polls by us would not be accepted...

...We are absolutely against the idea and prefer to work inside the Army...

...But the reserves discovered for that year were only 1.9 billion barrels, which is 74 million less than the year's production...

...A problem undoubtedly exists...

...If it accepted Peking's view and backed the terrorists, it would have to renounce the non-violent approach to power, which still offered many valuable advantages...

...American trusts also share two-thirds of the oil investments, and Shell and Royal Dutch divide the rest between them...

...Occupying 660 acres, crisscrossed by 12 miles of roads and 88 miles of railroad track, it is truly an impressive sight...

...A confidential talk I had with a top-ranking party leader, even though it took place before the government suspended the Communists and the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR) from participation in the country's political life, throws significant light on the decision...

...Obviously, the Democratic Action's so-called alliance with the Right does not seem sufficiently established to justify an armed struggle against Betancourt...

...All that the Left opposition, and especially the Communists, told me is that the foreign oil companies must be forced to respect the law, and that the stateowned oil company, the Venezuelan Oil Corporation, must be given more support...

...Betancourt's management of the economy, therefore, is hardly the cause of the rift among Venezuela's Leftist parties...

...Considerable problems remain to be solved, but the means to solve them exist...

...All of which tends to give today's thinly disguised civil war a certain fratricidal quality...

...Actually, the very opposite is true...

...Similarly, Venezuelan youth, which in four or five year's will be the country's decisive social force, is left to its own resources...

...indeed, the AD'S ideology has been molded by Marxism in a more fundamental way than has Fidel Castro's...

...I am told that, in effect, the National Liberation Front cooperates with officers who are said to be reactionaries...

...If more is not found to keep up with the current pace of production, these reserves will be exhausted in 14 years...

...Every year, Venezuela depends a little less on imports...

...Moreover, at present Venezuela's trade balance is far from being in the red...

...And in the same building I spent an hour hearing the harsh indictments of Domingo Alberto Rangel, the well-known MIR Deputy who has been in hiding since the Venezuelan Supreme Court suspended his party's immunity...

...To combat illiteracy, the Congress passed a "revolutionary" education law...

...His partisans here are convinced of the necessity of violence, but for rather well-known reasons he himself is closely allied with Moscow...

...It rules in coalition with the country's Christian Social party (COPEI), whose Left-wing is strongly influenced by the teaching of the late Pope John XXIII...

...As recently as 1958, in fact, the leaders of the various factions were united in the revolution that deposed the military dictatorship of Marcos Perez Jimenez, and many of them have been in exile or prison together...

...The major unions which are closely allied with the AD constitute the mainstay of the regime...

...Basically, Betancourt's economic policy is ruled by the desire to smash the oil monopoly...

...But close ties breed violent passions and now they find themselves reproaching each other for betraying the fruits of the common struggle...

...Thus it is apparent that Venezuela practices democracy as very few countries in Latin America do...

...Yet the target of all this criticism, the AD, is itself a party of the Left, both in its social composition and in its principles...

...But in the Army many of the young officers who first saw service under the dictatorship are beginning to turn toward the Left...

...The reaction to this move was the secession of the AD'S Left-wing, including many of its younger members who proceeded to found the MIR...

...Our program cannot be anything other than to overthrow the coalition and to ally ourselves closely with the young officers of leftist sympathies...

...The defeat of Betancourt and the Democratic Action party would truly be a disastrous blow to Latin America's democratic Left...

...For the first time since 1959, the balance of payments is fairly stabilized...

...They would like us to oppose the Army, to create a secret counter-army of our own...

...At various times they have tried to get rid of Betancourt by assassination...

...Oil represents 30 per cent of Venezuela's gross national product, 60 per cent of its revenue, and more than 90 per cent of its exports...

...If it sided with Moscow and against the terrorists, it faced certain isolation from its allies on the revolutionary Left and, perhaps more important, open hostility form the youth it was so zealously courting...

...Betancourt's prestige not only endured throughout the Jimenez dictatorship but still seems unimpaired by the passionate attacks of the militants who now accuse him of having betrayed the revolution...

...Semi-official meetings and negotiations never cease...

...It has a strong base of support among the rural population and the workers, is closely allied with the labor unions, and its program reflects a quasiMarxist analysis of Venezuelan society...

...The Army still carries some weight in domestic affairs, but it is not strong enough for its word to be decisive where policy is concerned...

...Nor was my informant alone in his criticism of the current government...

...I visited the huge iron metallurgical plant on the Orinoco...

...The industrial proletariat, too, occupies a more important place in the economy than it did in 1948...

...The answer is No...

...The turning point came in 1960 at the InterAmerican Conference in Costa Rica...

...Only we know the situation well enough...

...And small Army groups have attempted unsuccessful coups in San Cristobal, Barcelona, Carupano and Puerto Cabello...

...On my last trip to Moscow," he said, "I told the Russians that we, the Venezuelan Communists, were the only people qualified to determine the strategy for our country...

...Oil is the Gordian knot of the Venezuelan revolution...

...The Venezuelan middle class is more interested in speculation, in sending its capital abroad, than in investing it in local industries...

...The AD'S program requires a partnership with the middle class...

...In a few months everything was transformed, a new political order was created...

...In the end, of course, the Venezuelan Communists opted for Peking...

...When I asked the MIR'S Domingo Alberto Rangel how he accounted for the current bitterness in the light of this, he replied simply and concisely: "The government coalition broke up in 1961...

...Outside of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left, COPEI is the only party with any substantial influence in Caracas' Central University...

...Many of the party's leaders had expected that Caldera would be the joint candidate of the two parties, and were bitterly disappointed when the AD and the trade unions insisted on putting up their own candidate, Dr...

...The Cubans do not understand our attitude...

...At this point," I asked, "what in your view is Castro's position...

...In addition, it undertook negotiations toward establishing international control of production and prices in concert with the needs of the underdeveloped exporter nations...

...In construction, work stoppages have been reduced by half...

...We differ on many points with Havana, especially as regards the Venezuelan Army...

...His criticism is not always without point...

...Rafael Caldera, is basing his campaign on maintaining the coalition with Democratic Action...

...Our only alternative is a combination of legal action and armed struggle...

...The Venezuela created in 194548, interrupted in its growth only by the dictatorship of Perez Jimenez, is substantially the same country that exists today...

...And to finance industrial expansion, it founded the Venezuelan Development Corporation...

...Foreign observers deceive themselves about the real relationship of forces in Venezuela...

...Because of powerful North American interests in Venezuela, it is absolutely impossible to gain power by peaceful means alone...

...In 1959, for example, 83.5 per cent of the country's pharmaceutical products had to be imported...

...It would be interpreted by the university students and the unions as final proof that the road of peaceful reform and compromise in Latin America is a dead end...

...Barrios did not mention it, but he might have gone on to add that the Democratic Action party also introduced collective bargaining in Venezuelan industry, which helped bring about salary increases as great as 67 per cent...

...It is already deeply split and we believe we ought to take advantage of these divisions...

...An even brighter prospect is the immense region of Venezuelan Guiana, which is in the process of becoming the industrial base not only of Venezuela but of all Latin America...

...Yet in many respects the middle class has behaved like a social parasite...

...Dr...

...If Raul Leoni, the Democratic Action party's candidate in next month's elections, wins at the polls, he will face a task that presents enormous difficulties...

...What is more, all the movements of the Venezuelan Left, which now find themselves at each other's throats, are offshoots of Democratic Action...

...this year domestic production will fill 90 per cent of all needs in this area...

...At that meeting, Betancourt joined with the majority of Latin American nations and cast his vote to condemn Havana...

...Iron metallurgy and petrochemical development are the keystone of this program...

...But the real irony is that Betancourt and his adversaries continue to share a common intellectual tradition, an identical language, the same doctrinal references and the same criteria...

...I became dramatically aware of this several months ago while visiting Venezuela, where a look at the political chessboard clearly revealed that the struggle between the Soviet Union and China has passed from the realm of theoretical wrangling to a choice between armed conflict and peaceful maneuvering...

...The first armed opposition appeared in the suburbs of Caracas and in Valencia in 1961...

...Yet, significantly, in the course of my interviews nobody seriously brought up the point that the Communists and the revolutionary Left do not in principle oppose the AD'S oil policy...

...In this respect, the situation is in many ways similar to conditions in France during the OAS campaign...