by Mónica Baltodano
Editor’s note: While this is not our position, we present it as a discussion article since it comes from a revolutionary who draws from her direct experience of the betrayal of another Latin American revolution. Baltodano was a guerrilla commander in Nicaragua’s Sandinista Popular Revolution of 1979, is a social scientist and historian, and has participated in struggles against oppressive power, patriarchy and capital. This article is translated from the Spanish published in Desinformémonos.
Along with millions of left-wing activists around the world, the popular Bolivarian project, led by Hugo Chávez, filled us with hope. He came to power in the 1998 elections, cleanly, and once in power he had the audacity to push for a very advanced Constitution in which political, economic and social democracy was claimed, and wide spaces for citizen participation were established, including plebiscites for the revocation of mandates, to which he submitted several times, resulting in unquestionable support by the popular vote. Chávez can be criticized for the caudillo and personalist drift of his leadership and other errors in economic policy, but never for having stolen elections to stay in power.
Police violence in Venezuela against protesters of the electoral fraud. Photo: Confidencial, CC-BY-3.0
Chávez was part of the rise of progressive forces that democratically came to power, with a proposal for profound transformations in a Latin America full of scars and wounds that still bleed, the result of interventions—open or covert—on the part of the United States and right-wing dictatorships and military governments, which left thousands of people missing and murdered. It was a proposal for a continent that suffered from profound social inequalities, with majorities impoverished by corruption and the plundering of our resources, and also neoliberal policies (privatizations, labor deregulation, market dictatorship, abandonment of social policies), installed as recipes in all our countries.
It is clear that later the project was totally perverted. Suffice it to say that, if the main intention of the transformative projects was to improve the living conditions of the great majority and end inequalities, those purposes were abandoned by the new elites, reducing them to a purpose of power for power’s sake, for the benefit of the material interests of economic minorities, of the rulers or those associated with them. These failures explain the pain of the migration of millions of Venezuelans, the social difficulties experienced by large sectors within the country and the collapse of its economy.
In the end, the leadership of this announced revolution became bureaucratic, authoritarian and repressive. Unfortunately, we had already suffered these vices with right-wing dictatorships, but also with projects such as Real Socialism (exponentially elevated in Stalinism) and we lived through them in our own experience in Nicaragua, with the mutation of the aspirations of the Sandinista revolution to the pure and hard Ortega dictatorship. For us, Venezuela is nothing more than the case of another betrayed revolution.
Nicaraguans continue to endure a dictatorship that, with anti-imperialist and socialist rhetoric, has crushed democracy and the independence of powers, persecuted all dissenting opinions and established a totalitarian, absolutist, sultanical and mafia-like system, which, after murdering and imprisoning, has expelled not only the political opposition, but also social leaders, defenders of human rights, independent journalists, religious figures, feminists, former Sandinista leaders, denationalizing many, and maintaining a policy so violent and systematic that it has reached the level of crimes against humanity.
For all this, the opening of the possibilities of free elections in Venezuela and their results cannot be indifferent to us. We do not see it from the cold intellectual position of some who perhaps have not suffered directly from the suffering of dictatorships. Unfortunately, some of us are already fighting against two dictatorships. Before, with weapons in hand, living in hiding since adolescence, seeing our sisters victims of rape in prisons, and in both dictatorships suffering from so many people massacred, unjustly imprisoned, exiled and persecuted, enduring the suffering that always affects the most vulnerable: the poor.
True, as in the case of Nicaragua, in Venezuela, left-wing opposition alternatives are unthinkable, because the Ortega and Maduro regimes exacerbate their persecution against those who come from the original ranks of the revolution and because they expose the reactionary nature of these governments. But those of us on the left who see families torn apart, the country in debt, the State and institutions collapsed, and terror installed as the daily modus vivendi, have no doubt: the first step is to end the dictatorship at any price.
Democracy is like that. Latin American countries have transitioned from progressive governments to neo-conservative regimes, as occurred in Brazil with Bolsonaro and in Argentina with Milei, but as long as the rules of imperfect democracy are respected to a minimum, the challenge is to build alternative projects from below and submit them to the decision of the sovereign.