George Ciccariello-Maher - Building the Commune: Radical Democracy in Venezuela

Nothing says enough like a bus on fire. On February 27, 1989, Venezuelans woke up to an economic reform package that saw gas prices double overnight, and with them bus fares. Workers and students on their Monday morning commute into the capital, Caracas, decided they had had enough. Instead of simply paying the new fare, they began to burn buses, occupy bus terminals, and block streets. While their anger was initially focused on the bus drivers, it wasnt long before they set their sights on the government. Burning buses soon gave way to marches and protests, broken glass, looted stores, and nearly a week of rioting across the entire country.

Grainy news footage from the rebellion shows the population looting unashamedly, some covering their faces but most not even bothering. After all, they were taking back things they deserved, but of which they had been deprived. Basic goods that had become too expensive or hard to find were soon discovered hoarded in warehouses and storerooms. These were now redistributed directly by the people themselves, who carried everything from imported whiskey to entire sides of beef on their shoulders up into the barrios (shantytowns) surrounding the city. In some instances, local policewho knew full well they couldnt stop the looting if they triedeven helped to make the process more orderly.

This was the Caracazothe explosion in Caracas, although the rebellion quickly went national, lasting almost a full week in some places. The Caracazo marked the first of a series of Latin American rebellions against the spread of neoliberal economic reforms that would see presidents deposed and political parties collapse across the continent. In theory, neoliberalism claims to minimize the role of the state in favor of the free market, but in practice the state has played a major role in enforcing neoliberal reform at gunpoint, in Latin America and elsewhere. When Augusto Pinochet overthrew Salvador Allende, the elected socialist president of Chile, in a 1973 coup backed by the CIA, he made the country a testing ground for radical experiments in market-based economics. And in the 1980s, a US interest-rate increase set off a debt crisis across Latin America as a whole that provided a pretext for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank to step in and impose neoliberal reforms more broadly.

Poor countries saddled with massive debts had no choice but to beg the IMF and World Bank for bailouts. The strings attached to these loans took the form of what has been called structural adjustment, but this polite term conceals a brutal reality. In practice, neoliberal reforms meant cutting wages, laying off teachers and other public-sector workers, cutting social-welfare spending, and privatizing public goods by selling off natural resources and services like water and gasnot to the highest bidder, but often to the highest briber. Under duress from international lenders, governments handed over their sovereignty by restructuring entire economies according to the dictates of the global market, giving foreign corporations free rein while they paid almost no taxes, and eliminating any and all price controls put in place to protect the poorest Latin Americans.

In Venezuela, gas prices and bus fares were simply the last straw. Following a decade of oil-fueled growth, the Venezuelan economy had been in crisis since at least 1983, when the price of oil tanked and the currency devalued sharply, instantly making peoples wages and the money in their pockets worth much less. One newspaper greeted the decision, whose date is still known as Black Friday, with a headline announcing: The Party Is Over. A series of neoliberal reform packages followed, with a single common denominator: eliminating all safeguards that existed to protect the Venezuelan population from the ravages of the global economy. This meant lifting price controls on the basic goods the population needed, freeing interest rates, reducing all sorts of subsidiesgas prices includedand increasing the cost of public utilities.

The result in Venezuela and elsewhere was not the growth that neoliberal economists and ideologues had promised, but instead the exact opposite: what is referred to in Latin America as the lost decade, in which the only things that really grew were unemployment and poverty. By the end of the 1980s, nearly half of all Latin Americans were living in poverty, with nearly 70 million falling into poverty in that decade alone. By 1989, the Venezuelan economy was shrinking, inflation was running at 85 percent, and the poor were bearing the brunt: more than 44 percent of families were living in poverty, and almost half of those in extreme poverty.

Against this backdrop, presidential candidate Carlos Andrs Prez played the role of charismatic savior. Having presided over an oil boom during his first term as president in the early 1970s, Prez was a reminder of the good old days, and he made big promises to match. His 1988 electoral campaign echoed popular frustrations with the emerging international financial system that was saddling poor countries with debts they couldnt pay. Prez denounced the IMF as a bomb that only kills people, accused the World Bank of genocide, and encouraged collective resistance among indebted nations worldwide. Once elected, however, Prez did a sharp about-face: in exchange for billions of dollars in IMF loans, he signed on to a structural adjustment plan even more radical than those of his predecessors.

When rebellion is in the air, however, broken promises can be fatal, and the widespread perception that Prez had betrayed his own campaign promises, in what many characterized as a bait and switch, had everything to do with the fury Venezuelans would unleash in the streets during the Caracazo. Prez repaid that fury in kind. Unable to quell the rioting by other means, he declared a state of emergency and sent the army and police into the barrios surrounding the capital to subdue the rebellious poor. Young army recruits sprayed entire apartment blocks with automatic gunfire, killing many who lived and looked just like themselves, leaving bullet holes that are still visible today. In a single incident, the army opened fire on a crowd gathered on the Mesuca stairway in the poor slum of Petare in eastern Caracas, killing more than twenty. When all was said and done, hundreds if not thousands had been slaughteredthe numbers have never been agreed upon because bodies were simply dumped into the mass graves that are still being unearthed today.