The Chávez government has been sustained neither by a significant political party nor by an important trade union. Indeed what remained of the country’s traditional parties and unions after 1998 have been prominent in their support for the right-wing opposition, the ‘yellow’ unions joining hands with the employers’ organisation to oppose the government.
Chávez has preferred it that way. So anxious was he to sweep away the ancien régime that had misgoverned the country for so long that he had no wish to re-establish the institutions that sustained it. His aim was to establish a revolutionary government in Latin America that would be genuinely ‘original’, as commanded by his nineteenth-century philosophical guru, Simón Rodríguez, to whom he owes more than to Marx or Castro. Rodríguez’s political advice to the newly independent countries of the 1820s was crystal clear:
Spanish America is an original construct. Its institutions and its government must be original as well, and so too must be the methods used to construct them both. Either we shall invent, or we shall wander around and make mistakes.
Chávez was determined ‘to invent’ from the start, and that meant dispensing with old political models. This neglect of institutions such as a political party or a trade union was a curious and unusual phenomenon to anyone on the left. Leftist rhetoric for more than a century had concentrated on ‘building the party’ and creating the institutions of the working class. Even in the Third World conditions of Latin America, where the organised working class has often been in a small minority, leftists have usually regarded a party and a trade union movement as an essential part of their political project. Castro’s Cuba, Allende’s Chile, and the Nicaragua of the Sandinistas all considered these institutions to be important. How should the people, newly emancipated, be organised if not through these traditional political organisations?
Chávez was recognisably a leftist in the Latin American tradition, with a strong anti-imperialist rhetoric and a genuine desire to secure benefits for the poorest sections of the population, and his ambitions were laid out in the constitution of 1999. A dozen articles in the constitution are directly concerned with labour and the rights of workers, and among these (articles 95 and 96) are solid confirmation of the right to form unions and the right to strike.
Yet Chávez did not put his shoulder behind moves made by others to create a new union movement. He started from the firm belief that parties and unions had been discredited in Venezuela by the actions of previous governments over half a century. When elected president in 1998, he arrived on the scene as someone wholly unconnected with what had gone before. His victory was achieved over the ashes of the previous system, which had effectively imploded. Why then would he want to re-create a political structure that had failed so dismally?
Support for Chávez had come precisely from that large (majority) section of society that was hitherto disorganised, effectively out of reach of traditional politics. He mobilised his supporters by appealing to them as the poor and the disenfranchised, and as peasants and shanty town inhabitants. He made no appeal to them in their condition as workers – and still less as the privileged workers that made up the bulk of the politicised unions of the previous era. When he sought to mobilise workers in the early years of his presidency, he turned first to the disorganised informal sector, hitherto untouched – indeed ignored and rejected – by formal unionism.
The traditional organisation of the country’s working class over several decades had been the Confederation of Venezuelan Workers (the CTV). This was a politically powerful and influential institution, founded in 1936, which had participated in all the progressive struggles of the past half century. Yet it had never embraced more than about 12 per cent of the workforce. Organically linked to Acción Democrática, the principal party of government since 1958, the CTV had begun to suffer from this connection in the 1990s, when neo-liberal governments introduced reforms that adversely affected workers’ interests. The CTV became widely discredited as a bosses’ union, with attendant thugs, and its decline was attended by the growth of several independent unions associated with La Causa R, notably in the industrial complex in Ciudad Guayana. These new movements paved the way for the defeat of the old political parties and their attendant unions, but did not lead to their own success. Chávez, rather than the politicians thrown up by the independent unions, took advantage of the new situation, and started his presidency with a tabula rasa.
After Chávez’s victory, the CTV was perceived as an important part of the discredited ancien régime. Losing members, and without the political funding that had formerly come its way, the CTV now embarked on an internal reform process to try to regain strength and credibility. With the financial support of its principal external ally, the American Center for International Labor Solidarity (ACILS), the international arm of the US AFL-CIO, it modernised its internal structure, ousted some of the old guard, and held elections for a new leadership. (The ACILS is funded by the US National Endowment for Democracy, an organ of the US Congress.)
Battle was soon drawn between the CTV, which wished to capitalise on its existing strength within organised labour, and the Chávez trade unionists who were more interested in mobilising the hitherto unorganised informal sector – where half the country’s workforce was to be found. The CTV successfully kept out the informal sector from membership of their union.
Leadership elections for the CTV were held in October 2001 in which the union organisations favourable to Chávez attempted to secure representation. But the Acción Democrática slate remained firmly in control. Their candidate, Carlos Ortega, won 57 per cent of the vote, while Aristóbulo Isturiz, the Chávez candidate (once a leader of La Causa R), secured only 16 per cent. The government quickly claimed the elections were fraudulent.
Chávez’s supporters went on to organise a rival trade union, the National Union of Workers (the UNT), which held its first congress in 2003. But without powerful support from Chávez himself, it was more of a radical talking-shop than a significant new institution capable of organising both the formal and the informal sectors. Chávez began to rely on ad hoc, semi-military mobilisations – ‘Bolivarian circles’, electoral ‘patrols’, educational ‘missions’ – to organise the hitherto disorganised sectors of society. Chávez was the master of ‘invention’, but in the struggle for ‘originality’ the role of organised labour had still to be mapped out.
The CTV leadership remained passionately hostile to Chávez since he threatened their powerful position built up over decades, and in the autumn of 2001 Carlos Ortega joined those who had begun plotting to overthrow the president. Yet although Ortega’s union had considerable industrial muscle, it lacked countrywide support. He was obliged to join with other disgruntled elements in society, notably the employers’ organisation, Fedecámeras, to try to bring down the government. The CTV was to participate in the preparations for the military coup of April 2002, and it helped in the work stoppage of December 2002 that briefly closed down the petroleum industry. It was an unusual kind of trade union that cooperated with the bosses to try to bring down an elected government.