Monday, February 6, 2012
Venezuela Hails Progress on Anniversary of its Revolution
Embassy of Venezuela to the U.S.
Twenty years ago, a
civil-military rebellion took place in Venezuela under the leadership of current President Hugo Chávez and a group
of patriotic military officers. The events paved the way for creating alternatives to the oppressive and divisive neoliberal
system that previously reigned in Venezuela. By the late ‘80s, the country was wracked by popular dissatisfaction, repression,
and a political, economic and moral crisis.
"The Caracazo"
The precursor to the rebellion of February 4, 1992, was the "El Caracazo," a series
of popular revolts on February 27, 1989, that preceded the Bolivarian Revolution. "El Caracazo" has been remembered
as "by far the most massive and severely repressed riot in the history of Latin America" (see the book States
of Violence, edited by Fernando Coronil and Julie Skurski).
"El
Caracazo" mobilized an estimated one million people in Venezuela - particularly the urban poor - to revolt against the
established bipartisan regime and the neoliberal "shock" policies of the International Monetary Fund that were implemented
by the government of President Carlos Andres Pérez.
February
4, 1992: Hope Restored
In February of 2010, current President
Chávez described in detail what this revolution was about in one of his columns, "The Lines of Chavez":
"February 27th, 1989: the most transcendental political event of the 20th century in
Venezuela and the revival of the Bolivarian Revolution. The same year the Berlin wall fell, the Venezuelan people awoke and
rebelled against the International Monetary Fund and neoliberalism, categorically denying the fallacy of 'the end of the
world': a new history was beginning in Venezuela with the rebellion of the poor, with the consciousness of struggle and
battle personified in the victims of inequality and exclusion. A new history was written with the blood of the heroic people
of Venezuela."
(...)
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Press release, Feb. 3, 2012, Ministry of People's
Power for Foreign Affairs, Embassy of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Washington, D.C.
