5/6/13 Venezuela and its democracy (before Chavez) It’s not easy to decide a date when democracy started in Venezuela, as it was the result of a process which somehow started with the independence from Spain, when, inspired by the French illustration, the founding fathers conceived a Republic where sovereignty resided in the people. However, the process was not linear and clear and many would agree that Venezuelan democracy was born in 1945-48 if by democracy we mean a political regime with division of powers, where people elect government and parliament via free secret and universal elections. Venezuela had free universal elections before the USA, among other countries. Befofe that date, there were many constitutional changes, civil wars and military coups. However, in 1945 there would be a different one, as it would call for free universal elections and as a result of it, in 1948 the novelist Rómulo Gallegos became the first elected president by the majority of the Venezuelans. He represented a multi-classist party of Marxist inspiration named Accion Democratica (AD), which later joined the International Socialist. Two strong actions of AD were a negotiation with oil companies where half of the benefits were for the Venezuelan state, and half for them (it is famously known as fifty fifty , in English). The second was a clear orientation towards social policies for all, and one of the main efforts was an educational reform which included secular education for all. However the first democratic experiment wouldn’t last long. Just after ten months of being elected, Rómulo Gallegos was overthrown by another military coup: this regime lasted ten years and its main leader was Marcos Perez Jimenez, an atrocious dictator, which epitomised the Latin American dictator, together with Baptista in Cuba and Trujillo in Dominican Republic. It is normally accepted that two forces conspired against him. Externally, the confrontation with the oil companies against which the government forced the 50% 50% policy, which meant that the companies should pay 50% of their benefits to the Venezuelan state. Internally, the resistance from the upper classes to an educational reform which would bring free public secular education for all. The army felt that the country was drawn to anarchy, for ferocious confrontations among the different political forces in the country. The combination of all steered the justification for the dictatorship. It is accepted that this dictatorship repressed the democratic forces with no mercy, especially AD, the communist party and the Unions. It invested heavily in infrastructure, had a more generous approach towards oil companies and had a very racist approach in relation to immigration. A fierce resistance was organised among the main parties (AD lead internally by Saez Merida, the communist party lead internally by Pompeyo Marquez and the Republican Party, lead by Jovito Villalba). An agreement was reached about the unity against dictatorship and about not repeating the same mistakes which destabilized the democracy. It is called the Pacto de Nueva York. In 1958 a democratic regime would reinitiate, but now the political parties that remerged publically in 1958 had the clear aim of avoiding another military coup. One of the analyses the leaders of the first democratic attempt made about the failure to hold power during the previous period was that the strong confrontations and extremisms between democratic parties led to a social and political climate that would be considered unstable by the military forces. Consequently the political parties agreed that they would avoid jeopardise the democracy again by severe confrontation and a system of negotiation was devised by the leaders of the democracy. From there the golden rule of the reborn Venezuelan democracy was the stability and the consolidation of the political system. In this way, actions were considered legitimate as long as gave guarantee of the democracy stability and consolidation of democracy. The golden rule of the Venezuelan democracy was expressed in the well-known “Pacto de Punto Fijo”, according to which the main political parties: URD, COPEI and AD, committed to back whoever won the elections and also they agreed to constitute a coalition government. The communist party was excluded from the pact to look friendlier to the US in these unstable years of the cold war. And there was another unwritten pact, maybe of more transcendence, called “pacto institucional”. -2- The institutional pact was an agreement about the mechanisms according to which the parliamentary forces would share the presidency of the Parliament (similar to the role of the speaker in the UK), Parliamentarian commissions as well as the members of the Supreme Court, Prosecution Service and the National Audit Office. As a result, it was established a negotiating style that always would guarantee that all different political forces had a political space to participate in decision making. For example, the opposition parties would hold the presidency of parliament and the National Audit Office. Democratic parties had a very clear approach towards development. In this period the country started an import substitution model which started few years earlier in other countries in the region. The original idea was to substitute imported products by local production in order to develop local industries. That was not feasible in one stage as there was not a strong industry at all so the strategy was to tax imports selectively or forbid them when there were national industries to produce them. Later this policy was coupled with the construction of complex basic industries by the state (steel, aluminium, power electric etc.). Socially speaking, the new born democracy endorsed an important historical aspiration: agrarian reform. The idea was to give land to those who worked on it. Even though its heated speeches, it was made trying to target the states’ lands and did not affect significantly the landowners who, when affected, always received juicy compensations. In the educational field, it was offered an expansion of the educational system which now was obligatory until year six and offered to all the possibility to continue education towards the university. Now, however, religious education was tolerated. It was also planned to build a social security system, both in health and housing. Even if there were some extraordinary achievements in health (for example Venezuela controlled malaria before the US), the democracy could not create medical attention of high standards so middle classes drove their expectations to private providers lowering the standards of the public sector. In relation to the housing policy, there was an extraordinary failure, as it could not cope with the extraordinary migration from the rural to the urban areas, creating huge slums around the cities. The key ideas of what would be the policy over the democratic period started germinating during Betancourt government (1958-63).
Posted on: Wed, 05 Jun 2013 20:46:56 +0000
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