Venezuela's colectivos: vigilantes or alternative organs of class power?

[Die Neue Zeit]

Below are excerpts from a couple of articles on Venezuela's colectivos:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/13/us-venezuela-protests-colectivos-idUSBREA1C1YW20140213


This week's explosion of violence in Venezuela has again put a spotlight on militant grassroots groups called "colectivos", which view themselves as the defenders of revolutionary socialism but are denounced by opponents as thugs.

[...]

From running security in their communities to drumming up support for government anti-poverty efforts, they function as an informal extension of the Socialist Party, frequently blurring the lines between partisan activism and community service.

They are a key part of government's electoral "machinery", and they can move voters at the last minute to help sway close races and are sometimes tarred by critics as poll station thugs who intimidate opponents.

The colectivos point to their bookshops, study groups, summer camps for children, and coffee mornings for pensioners as genuine services to their communities. They frequent government marches and rallies to keep opposition meddlers away.

[...]

"The colectivos are paramilitary groups armed by the government and protected by officials in uniform," Lopez, the opposition leader, told Reuters after Wednesday's violence.

[...]

Colectivos such as the Coordinadora Simon Bolivar group, named after South America's 19th century independence hero, are staunchly ideological, but deny having weapons.

The group runs a radio station, left-wing bookshop, an Internet cafe, and even a veterinary clinic from a former police base, now covered with paintings of Bolivar, a masked Palestinian fighter, and Argentine guerrilla Ernesto "Che" Guevara.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/14/venezuela-violent-clashes-chavistas-opposition


The colectivos, whose main turf is the 23 de Enero neighbourhood in western Caracas, were formed during the Chávez years to enforce the leftist ruler's government programmes. They double as neighbourhood organisations that run community improvement projects but can also act as vigilante groups that intimidate political opponents.

Mainstream opposition would judge the colectivos as "gangs" and "thugs" just because they do perform paramilitary or paramilitia (http://www.revleft.com/vb/all-power-workers-t173926/index.html) functions, all the while ignoring their own hypocrisy when it comes to police brutality.

However, with a little more professional training in public safety, public order, and detective work, could the popular paramilitia character of the colectivos be an effective alternative to the bourgeois state's police apparatus?

[Tenka]

They are daemonised by western bougie media which repeats claims of them being dedicated to "social cleansing" based entirely on what some quasi-think-tank shit SAID ABOUT THEM (wasn't even an attributed quote).

I have seen a video of one of their actual atrocities. On a motorcycle one member intimidated someone whilst that person's friend, filming and sounding drunk, screamed "BANDIIIIDOS" repeatedly, and to "let him go" (in Spanish). Social cleansing? Never seen that done to drunk white people before. An interesting development.

But more seriously, I don't think their apparent composition would allow them to be bourgeois cops (apart from individuals selected from among them). They are a militant wing of Chavismo and all that entails.

edit: As for your actual question, I haven't a clue.

[Die Neue Zeit]

It's unfortunate that this week's edition of the Weekly Worker repeated the mainstream line by calling them only "armed groups typically riding on motorcycles who harass and assault opposition protestors (http://www.cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/1001/dont-trust-maduro)."

[Rafiq]

What is important to recognize is that, as in Allende's Chile, the result of the left-populist government has brought about a wider spectrum of radical politics within the masses which at this point exceeds beyond Chavez and the PSUV. If there is any victory from Chavez, it is the mass-politicization of the populace.

[Bala Perdida]

I don't support their violence against the protesters, and and being the paramilitary wing of the PSUV isn't good for anyone. However, I do see potential in them and admire their actions as a community group. If they where to tone down the violence, act alone, and maybe reform the organizations they could gain more popular support.
I can't say I support Maduro either, but if this was happening anywhere else the government reaction would be the same. I also like his speeches, although the bits of his CNN interview I saw on Univision made him look like an ass.
Ultimately the colectivos have the potential to make or break the movement for socialism. Also, as much as anyone may not like them, the class struggle is basically being carried by the PSUV so I say they are the best option. If I was in Venezuela I might hate them more, but over here advocating against both sides does nothing to spread revolutionary change.

[bropasaran]

I remember learning how Hezbollah has basically a social system of it's own, like it had internet, tv, radio and printed media and operates hospitals, schools, solidarity and investment funds for help to the poor and unemployed, and such things, I was really bumbed and thinking- where the hell are libertarian socialist groups doing that, if were doing that, only of course doing it in a libertarian manner, with LibSoc ideas being spread, that would probably bring people to support LibSoc more then anything else, seeing directly that it's principles are feasable, and we'd be like literally building a new society within the shell of the old.

I also think I read that in Spain in decades before the revolution working people had such organizations like unions connected with educational programs, credit unions, benefit societies, friendly societies, etc.

If this is going in that direction, I think that's great.

[Die Neue Zeit]

http://www.cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/1002/letters



Bolibourgeoisie

In response to Daniel Harvey’s two recent articles on Venezuela, there are a couple of issues I would like to point out.

First, the majority of Venezuela’s adult population doesn’t have a working class background. It is imperative that the Bolibourgeoisie be ousted and liquidated as a class, but also necessary to recognise the revolutionary pragmatism of seeing through via communitarian populist fronts the political ascension of national or socioeconomic ‘patriotic’ elements of the petty bourgeoisie - a sort of petit-Bolibourgeoisie - for the urban and rural petty bourgeoisie do form the majority of the country’s adult population.

Turning to the violence, mainstream opposition has judged the colectivos to be “gangs” and “thugs”, just because they do perform paramilitary or paramilitia functions, all the while ignoring their own hypocrisy when it comes to police brutality. However, they “[blur] the lines between partisan activism and community service”, organise “bookshops, study groups, summer camps for children and coffee mornings for pensioners as genuine services to their communities” and run the odd “radio station, leftwing bookshop [...], internet cafe [or] veterinary clinic” (Reuters) in “[doubling] as neighbourhood organisations that run community improvement projects [and] as vigilante groups that intimidate political opponents” (The Guardian).

With a little more professional training in public safety, public order, and detective work, could the popular paramilitia character of the colectivos be an effective alternative to the bourgeois state’s police apparatus?

[Die Neue Zeit]

In Caracas slum, ‘colectivos’ keep protests away (http://buenosairesherald.com/article/153780/in-caracas-slum-‘colectivos’-keep-protests-away)

By Laurent Thomet, AFP



Community organizer groups seen as essential by Maduro, sinister by the opposition

CARACAS — The voice of Hugo Chávez thundered from speakers in a western Caracas slum, a daily reminder that this remains the late leader’s turf, immune to protests from the wealthier east.

The comandante’s shouts of “Viva la revolución!” echoed down the hillside January 23 barrio that is known as a stronghold of “colectivos,” or collectives — community organizer groups that are deeply loyal to the Socialist government.

The students and opposition activists who have demonstrated for the past month against Chávez's handpicked successor, President Nicolás Maduro, have not dared to protest here.

The “colectivos” say their role is to provide security in their streets and fulfill Chávez’s mission by cleaning up their neighbourhoods, organizing sporting events for children and promoting health and education programmes.

But protesters see something more sinister behind these groups, accusing them of sending motorcycle gunmen to wreak havoc at demonstrations that have posed the biggest challenge to Maduro’s nearly year-old presidency.

“They are demonizing the colectivos because they want to get rid of the colectivos that are driving the (revolutionary) process,” said Mauricio Urbina, a burly 49-year-old municipal worker who is the coordinator of Colectivo La Libertad (Freedom).

At least 20 people have died in violent protests that began last month, including a 51-year-old member of a colectivo who was shot dead on February 12.

“If they (the government) want peace, why are they sending colectivos,” said Miguel Rodríguez, a 21-year-old law student who is part of hardcore protesters who have clashed almost daily with riot police in the well-off Chacao district.

‘Poor celebrate, rich protest’

In the capital, the ideological divide is also split geographically between east and west — the defiant middle-class on one side, a Socialist slum on the other.

While radical protesters clashed with the national guard on the anniversary of Chávez’s death on Wednesday, the January 23 residents launched fireworks and flew kites in honour of their “eternal comandante.”

“The poor are celebrating and the rich are protesting,” said Urbina, wearing a black cap with a red star.

But colectivo leaders acknowledge that their omnipresence in the slums keeps any government opponents from venturing out to demonstrate.

“These are sectors whose majority support the revolutionary government,” Urbina said. “We say our piece and, well, people will say, ‘We are the minority, I won't go out.’”

Opposition leader Henrique Capriles, who lost last year’s presidential election by a whisker, says the protest movement will not force any political change as long as the country’s poor stay home.

‘We want peace’

The colectivos were born years before Chávez was first elected in 1998, rebelling against right-wing governments in the 1970s and 1980s.

They now oversee their own slices of turf, assisting the government's oil-funded social programmes, from free healthcare centres manned by Cuban doctors to education projects and sports activities.

Municipal police rarely venture into the slum. The colectivos are in charge of security here, though they insist that they stopped using guns long ago to protect their community.

“The only weapon we have is the Constitution,” said Keyvins Tablante, 27, an organizer of the Colectivo Salvador Allende, making kites next to two baseball fields being renovated with artificial turf.

“We work for peace, for the community, to take back public spaces. The colectivos have proven that we are not violent,” he said across from the Mountain Barracks where Chávez's remains lie inside a marble tomb.

But one group called La Piedrita (Little Stone) has been known to carry firearms. La Piedrita’s members declined to be interviewed.

La Libertad’s territory is right under La Piedrita.

Urbina’s group oversees an apartment building featuring huge murals of Chávez and Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara, with closed-circuit cameras peaking from the roof.

Next to a court where children were playing football, Urbina opened the door to a room with a flat-screen TV and computer showing live images of streets and sidewalks.

When they see trouble, they say they intervene by trying to “mediate” between the assailant and the victim, or hand over a suspect to the national guard.

“They take care of the area, walk around policing, ensuring no drugs are sold,” said Irma Reyes, a 49-year-old mother of four who walked by the neighbourhood’s Plaza Bolivar.

“We are organized,” she said. “We want peace, we want harmony.”

[Die Neue Zeit]

“Colectivos are Synonymous with Organization, Not Violence” (http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/10499)



Clodovaldo Hérnandez, Venezuelan writer and politician, talks about the criminalization of grassroots organizing, the right-wing strategy behind it, and goes on to explain why “the fate of the revolution rests in the communal councils” in an interview with newspaper Ciudad CCS, from March 10th, 2014.

Ciudad CCS: Recently there has been a criminalization of popular organizing. Just like in 2002 with the Bolivarian Circles, today there’s an effort to attribute recent violence to the “colectivos,” referring to them as armed paramilitary groups. Will this become part of public opinion, as it did back then?

Clodovaldo Hérnandez: It has already become widespread. We are seeing it in the isolated but intense demonstrations of hate that have sprung up in certain municipalities of the country. This is part of a political culture belonging to a sector of the Venezuelan opposition. I maintain the belief, perhaps out of innocence, that it represents a minority. I know many people who are not chavistas and still they do not think this way, but there is a nucleus within the opposition that is truly and literally fascist.

But, will this label of violence affect the revolution’s supporters?

In some cases the social base of chavismo has been vulnerable to that rhetoric. In fact, I’m convinced that in April of 2002 the mass opposition marches that we saw were possible because the fear factor was manipulated very skillfully. The idea was planted in many that you must fear chavismo, for it is fundamentally violent and criminal. That psychological threat has followed us, and we haven’t been able to defeat it entirely. I believe we’ll have to contend with it until the people’s will for peace prevails.

Does the campaign satanizing collectives in some way wear down the people who make them up?

Absolutely not. The same thing happens within the collectives as within chavismo in general. Whenever these fascist assaults present themselves; People draw together and unite. The recent antichavista activities, the most virulent to date, have only inspired us to deepen our efforts to reclaim the work of our collectives and communities. The collectives play a role in their barrios that no one else can, encouraging political education, cultural expression and sports. Many of the Bolivarian government’s policies, for example the missions, can only be carried out thanks to the existence of these collectives.

What is the true relationship between collectives and firearms?

The reality of it is that there is no identification between the collectives and firearms. I believe that both the commander Chavez, and president Nicolas Maduro each made their position unequivocally clear; any person who raises weapons in alleged defense of the Bolivarian Revolution is out of line, and outside the limits of the law. The monopoly of legitimate violence is exercised by the state alone, as a democratic obligation. We have to make an effort not to allow these false judgments to take root, because collectives are not synonymous with weapons and violence, but with organization and grassroots movement, culture, and of working alongside the Bolivarian government to resolve concrete problems in the communities.

Is the association of collectives with violence part of a right-wing political strategy against grassroots organizing?

Undoubtedly, a very clear-cut strategy. In that sense, the opposition has been totally coherent. They know that it is necessary to their political objectives to criminalize any method of grassroots organizing, because any manifestation of such is a direct threat to their strategy. They know that as long as people organize, the possibilities of collapsing the revolution grow weaker. But on top of that there is a clear interest in demoralizing the revolutionary ranks. That is what Capriles Radonski did, very skillfully, in his 2012 campaign, when he talked about the “enchufados.” [People said to have more access and benefits for being “plugged in” to the government network.] There was a moment we thought that was directed towards high-up government workers, but the truth is that it was an attempt to bring down the communal councils and their mouthpieces. It was based on situations found in a small number of communal councils, whose participants had been criticized within their community for practicing corruption. The campaign sought to exaggerate these events and make them appear to represent universal reality, as if it was happening everywhere, with the ultimate goal of destroying that form of popular organizing. The right knows that within the communal councils are people who never had a voice in politics, who never administered public resources, are finally participating. And for that reason it is a fundamental space in the Bolivarian Revolution. The strategy is that the people will stop believing in their own potential, that they begin to see their local organizations and representatives as if they were a problem, when in reality they are part of the solution. Finally, the right, especially the extreme fascist wing, has multiple reasons to criminalize collectives, because by condemning them as the culprits of their own violent actions, they’ve created a scapegoat to say that the violence is coming from elsewhere.

A Deep Cultural Change

Aside from these campaigns, grassroots organizing confronts other challenges. For example, the predominant capitalist values such as individualism and greed in popular sectors. What is your perspective, as someone who at first theorized on these topics and ultimately has experienced them firsthand?

I believe the survival of this political process depends on our capacity to permanently reinvent our approach to organizing and participation. From the beginning, president Chavez wished to improve the structure of a representative democracy, starting with the traditional spaces for participation. There is also a systematic effort to reinvent the military and police. I admit that at one time I thought it was necessary to revise and reinvent the communal councils.

Notwithstanding, throughout my experience as a minister, especially when we launched the Gobierno de Calle (street government), I understood better what Chavez meant to create through the communal councils. That was when I realized, humbly, the importance of the communal councils for our revolution.

There is no place in the world where popular organizing does not exist. In every corner of this earth you can find people who know how to identify their community’s problems. The truth is that we haven’t been capable of telling the story of the profound transformation our political culture has undergone in Venezuela. As a rule, people who are leading voices in those organizations attend to collective problems much more than their individual or family’s needs. Of course there have been some cases when individualism has prevailed, and many cases, on the other hand, where the community doesn’t address the problems and leaves all work to community members who, out of necessity, become representatives of those people who are not participating. Also we’ve seen problems with the State’s response, the response of the institutions, because we have some spokesmen there who serve as mediator, but when the State does not respond, it reflects badly upon them and the spokesperson alike. In any case, this generation of men and women, especially women, has assumed that responsibility, that lead role, deserve recognition beyond formality. At some moment we will have to stop and value the enormous work that has been accomplished in these spaces. By that same coin, I think we are obligated to be categorically firm in the cases that have betrayed the trust of the citizen assemblies. Whoever uses their condition as spokesperson to accumulate wealth or act on their own individual interests or those of select groups, should be sanctioned. They are obstacles that appear along the road to revolution, and should be viewed as they are; isolated cases that do not speak to the general reality.

Has the so-called social accounting (contraloría social) advanced parallel to these changes in political culture?

In terms of resource management there have been many prejudices. It is said that we are giving public funds to people who do not know how to administrate them. Well, precisely, it’s about taking a new path. We’re talking about a people who never were called to participate in how their funds were managed. It’s obvious that at the beginning there will be problems. That does not mean we are complicit in letting mistakes happen, our role is to make a clear path for social accounting, providing more efficiency. This implies, for example, that the State must offer on its behalf simplification, de-bureaucratization, of its proceedings in order to be more efficient in its support for the communities benefitting from their communal councils.

Diffusion: Our Pending Labor

It’s clear that the private media is an enemy of popular organizing. But what happens with public, community and alternative media? Have they counterbalanced the private media’s attempt to pervert public opinion?

I believe they have advanced, but slowly. That’s why the president has insisted on projects like VTV Communes, which we’ll be seeing soon. We have reflected at great length and I can say, as a form of self-criticism, we still have much work before us if we wish to disseminate the work of Poder Popular (people’s power). In order to do so we must tell many stories, and each story is happening right now, simultaneously, all over the place. There are thousands and thousands of people who have something to say. We need to improve on their outreach.

There is an sector inside the revolution, important to ideological discussion, which argues that people’s organizing in communal councils and communes is not leading us towards socialism because it generates a kind of exaggerated individualism of small sectors that only act upon their specific interests. What is your response to this?

I do not agree at all. I reiterate my belief that the revolution depends upon its ability to reinvent means of participation. In October of 2012, when Chavez gave the Golpe de Timon (“Turning the Wheel Around”) speech, he spoke of a massive network that existed all over the nation. That logic implied in a lattice-like structure is different than traditional forms of participation. I am a strict defender of the party because it is necessary to complete certain tasks, but every revolution should experiment constantly in the area of organization outside the party lines. I’m not saying the communal councils are the ultimate and definitive form of participation, but it seems to me that in these moments within the communal councils rest the fate of the Bolivarian revolution. If they did not exist, the revolution would never have been sustained. If this will be transformed into something better in the future, we shall see. In any case, nobody attempting to make a political analysis out there will be able to decide, it’s up to the Venezuelan people and the leaders among them. I believe that sometimes we lack enthusiasm when putting our trust in the people and in the political direction of the revolution. In the past few months, president Maduro has shown that he is not only the constitutionally legitimate president but also that he’s progressively amounting to the political leader of the revolution. I know how hard it is for us to think of a leader who isn’t Chavez, but I believe that president Maduro is on the path to becoming one. This is a reflection that we, the Bolivarians who come from the old left vanguard, must make; if we had just a little more faith in the people, maybe they would achieve what Chavez achieved in 1998.