Causa R-with the R, for radical, always drawn in reverse was not long ago one of the tiny grupusculos on the Left. Today it is a major player in national politics. One of the stunning developments of Vene- zuela's 1993 presidential campaign was the rise to national prominence of the self- described "workers' party," Causa R. Its presidential candidate, Andrds Velasquez, won a respectable 22% of the vote, and the party elected nine senators and 40 congressional deputies. The party was not long ago one of the tiny grupasculos on the Left whose entire membershipin the words of one of its founders could fit inside a Volkswagen. Previously confined to the narrow regional and sectoral base of trade union- ism in the industrial state of BolIvar, Causa Rwith the R, for radical, always drawn in reversehas become a major player in national politics. In a bipar- tisan political system long dominated by the social democratic party Accion Democratica (AD) and the social Christian party Copei, Causa Rtogether with the independent presidential candidacy of Rafael Calderahas changed the rules of the game. As the campaign progressed, it became clear that the party was capturing the popular imaginationand the enmity of the country's traditional leadershipfor reasons having a lot to do with its style. In a country where arrogant attitudes and signs of sudden wealth are the traditional characteristics of politicians, Causa R candidates spoke, dressed and behaved like plain and honest workerswhich most of them actually were. The party projected a campaign style that resem- bled the rough-hewn image most Venezuelans have of the country's founding party, AD, in the days of its revolutionary fervor in the 1940s and 1950s. As the campaign progressed, one question that surfaced was whether Causa R's Velasquez knew how to wear a tie. (As Velasquez returned to his post as governor of the state of Bolivar, the question remains unanswered.) The party's origins date back to the break-up of the Venezuelan Communist Party (PCV) in the early 1970s, and the defeat of the country's revolutionary armed struggle. Most of the dissidents who left the PCV, after having rejected armed struggle and uncon- ditional loyalty to the Soviet Union and Cuba, went on to found another group, Movement Toward Socialism (MAS). MAS would become Venezuela's most promi- nent and powerful group on the parliamentary Left for the next 20 years. At the moment of MAS's founding in January, 1971, one of the PCV dissidents, an ex-comandante of the armed struggle named Alfredo Maneiro, split off VOL XXVII, No 5 MARIAPRL 1994 29 Margarita Lopez Maya is on the political science faculty of the Center for the Study of Development (CENDES) at the Central University of Venezuela. Translated from the Spanish by NACLA.REPORT ON VENEZUELA with a tiny group of followers to found the organiza- tion that would become Causa R. A short, stocky man, with a flushed face and a somewhat disheveled demeanor, Maneiro was born into a middle-class fam- ily on the off-shore island of Margarita, and took pride in telling his companeros that he was descended from the Margariteno, Don Manuel Pla- cido Maneiro, one of the heroes of Venezuelan independence. He had spent 18 years as a PCV militant, and had become a member of the central committee. Maneiro went to MAS' founding convention full of reservations. Among other things, he feared that MAS would include members of the PCV less willing than he, or MAS leader Teodoro Petkoff, to make a clean break with the old Communist orthodoxy. These reservations stemmed from Maneiro' s obsession with the problem of the "vanguard," and how to shape a skillfully led orga- nization of political militants. He thought that it was best to begin the process with a small number of dedicated activists. During the debates in the inner circle of the PCV, it seems that Petkoff shared these ideas, and also agreed with Maneiro that it was time for a total break with the Communists. Nevertheless, at the founding of MAS, the conception that prevailed was the creation of a mass movement that would gather into itself all the dissidents of the PCV and would rapidly look for ways to insert itself into the national political scene. That meant including groups less critical of the PCV, and seeking, for a time, conciliation between the new group and the old party. Maneiro decided to exclude himself, and took with him only 10 other people. From this small nucleus, comprised of middle- and base-level activists of the PCV, Causa R was born. The organization began not with the idea that the party could spawn a revolutionary movement, but the reverse, that a party would be the result of a revolu- tionary movement at a certain level of its develop- ment. Maneiro thought that people had an astonishing capacity to spontaneously mobilize, and that it was the role of his group to give political content to that mobi- lization. He thought that the group should participate in the varied forms taken by the popular movement, with the understanding that the people themselves would sooner or later resolve the question of their own political direction. Instead of beginning with a given political structure, he believed that one should have confidence in the popular movement's ability to pro- duce a new political leadership.' In keeping with these ideas, Maneiro' s small group decided not to create a new organization with a consti- tutive act, a bureaucracy, and statutes, but rather to insist on the idea of a party in permanent formation.2 They thought the group should dedicate most of its efforts to con- structing the constantly changing political vanguards that would emerge from the encounters between the group and the leader- ship of the spontaneous popular movements. Maneiro said that popular leadership was produced constantly in all activities, even in a baseball game. The group set itself the task of finding this lead- ership. During 1971, Maneiro and his group evaluated which of the existing mass organizations could be mobilized in Venezuela. They chose three within which to create a political vanguard: the student movement at the Central Universi- ty of Venezuela (UCV) in Cara- cas, the independent workers' movement at the huge Steelworks of Orinoco (SIDOR) in Ciudad Guayana, and the pop- ular movement in the Catia district of Caracas. I n January, 1972, Pablo Medina, one of the mem- bers of the group, went by himself to Ciudad Guayana with the task of creating a political van- guard at SIDOR. Unlike Maneiro, Medina came from a large and poor familyhe had 10 or 12 brothers and sistersfrom the western city of Tocuyo, in the state of Lara. He served under Maneiro's command in the guerrilla struggle, and never separated from him, leav- ing first the Communist Party, and then MAS with his "comandante." He got a job as a worker on the night shift, settled in the working-class suburb of Matanzas, and began to put out a newspaper called El Matancero, named after the suburb where it was locat- ed. The group that published the newspaper called itself Matancero as well. The newspaper was at first clandestine because of the authoritarian union leader- ship at SIDOR, which was controlled by a corrupt bureaucracy, mainly associated with AD.3 Towards 1973, an electrical worker named Andrds Velasquez began to collaborate with the group, by then com- posed of 10 workers. In 1974, Velasquez gave his first public speech at the main gatecalled "El Porton" of SIDOR. This principal entrance and exitthe place Maneiro thought that people had an astonishing capacity to spontaneously mobilize, and that his group should have confidence in the popular move- ment's ability to produce a new political leadership. 30 NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICASREPORT ON VENEZUELA where the plant workers waited for and were dropped off by Ciudad Guayana's buseswas an excellent site for public speaking, especially during shift changes. Velasquez became known as "the leader of El Porton." Five years later, in 1977, Tello BenItez, another leader who had come up from the popular movement, gained a seat in the steelworkers' union, SUTISS. From that point on, Matancero' s "new unionism" began to take hold. The Matancero activists fought for the democratic participation of work- ers in union decisions, and for the health and safety of the workers in the workplacethemes not dealt with by other unionists. They also began to develop a rep- utation for honesty, in stark con- trast to the widespread corruption of the traditional union leaders. BenItez negotiated at the bargain- ing tablewith the company and with the traditional union leader- shipwhile Velasquez took charge of speaking to workers at the gate. Two years later, in the elec- tions of 1979, the Matancero slate, headed by Velasquez, won control of the union at SIDOR. In reaction, and after a series of conflicts, the union was taken over in 1981 by FETRAMETAL, the AD-controlled labor federa- tion with which SUTISS is affiliated. Velasquez, Tello BenItez and a few other workers were fired from their jobs. But in 1988, the federation let the union go, elec- tions were held, and Matancero won again. Traditional unionism had lost the battle; the fame and expansion of new unionism had begun. Since that date, the Causa R-affiliated new unionism has grouped together about 40 union and cooperative groups around the country.4 While the Causa R student movement at UCV would eventually founder over differences of concep- tion and personality, the group at Catiacalled Pro Catiabegan developing community activities and political initiatives which, by the late 1970s, yielded a fair amount of success. Catia is a populous district in the western part of Caracas. The first part of Caracas one sees on the drive up from the international airport, Catia is made up of thousands of shackscalled "ran- chos"which climb the mountains, in addition to the dozen or so "blocks," enormous complexes of build- ings built by the state in the 1970s to house the poor. One of Pro Catia' s greatest achievements was the col- lection of 24,000 signatures in a petition calling for the reform of the law of municipal councils. This reform would give council representation to Catia' s communities, along with the right to revoke the man- date of representatives.5 Despite the fact that more than half a million people lived in Catia during the 1970sprobably over a million live there nowthe community never had a representative council. Pro Catia also started a campaign to acquire food storehouses for the area; they solicited garbage com- pactors for the parish; and they sponsored games and sporting activities for children, and per- suaded the government to build neighborhood parks.6 Despite the two successful Causa R-affiliated movements the alternative unionism at SIDOR and Pro CatiaCausa R was still a small group at the beginning of the l980s, located in only two points of the extensive geography of the country. While the group continued to encounter a militant and radical spirit within the popular movements, it became increasingly clear to the Causa R leadership that these movements were in no mood for revolution- ary struggle, and that the path to expanded political work lay toward the political cen- ter.7 The group therefore began to approach certain cen- trist political figures. After a number of tries, a center- Left relationship developed in the 1983 presidential candidacyannounced in May, 1982of Jorge Olavarria. OlavarrIa, the publisher of the magazine Resumen, was from a wealthy background, and had a conservative point of view. Nevertheless, he had played an important role in denouncing all kinds of corruption, especially in the unionism of Guayana. OlavarrIa had defended the position of the new union- ism, and his articles had given some prominence to the Matancero movement and its leader, Andrds Velasquez. Supporters of Causa R were surprised by this alliance, but Olavarrfa did give the group access to one of the most widely read magazines in the coun- try. J n November, 1982, just as the new alliance was getting off the ground, Maneiro died of a heart attack at the age of 45. It was a hard blow for the organization, just at the moment it was beginning to achieve some visibility. Many feared that the party would now self-destruct.8 OlavarrIa, for his part, thought he could fill the vacuum left by Maneiro. Just Causa R's Andres Velasquez, 1993 presidential candidate and governor of the state of Boilvar. Voi XXVfl, No 5 MARJAPRIL 1994 31REPORT ON VENEZUELA before the deadline for the registration of presidential candidates, he placed a number of conditions for his candidacy before the organization, among them, that he he named Causa R's secretary. Arguing that the alliance with OlavarrIa should only be temporary, the founding directors of the organization, Pablo Medina and Lucas Matheus, objected to the conditions and prevailed.9 OlavarrIa dropped out of the presidential race, and ran instead for Congress as a member of a group called Opina. Following the idea of seeking out the political cen- ter, a group led by filmmaker Thaelman Urguellcs in Pro Catia then proposed backing the candidacy of cx- president Rafael Caldera. But the steelworkers of Matancero. arguing that Caldera and his party, Copei, represented the old politics, proposed instead the can- didacy of the president of their union, Andres Velasquez.'0 When Caldcra's candidacy was rejected, Urguelles, together with Pro Catia and the majority of intellectuals who remained in the organization, aban- doned Causa R. The group's neighborhood arm and its remaining intellectuals were now lost, and Causa R was reduced to the founding members who had left the PCV in 1970, plus the leadership of the Matancero movement. The labor tendency of the organization prevailed from this point on. Causa R had always been a political organization mid-way between a political party and a movement. Unlike Venezuela's other parties, it rejected the for- mal trappings of a party such as statutes and bylaws, party hierarchies, and staff. Being a rather small group. a so-called "political committee" of a dozen or so leaders was delegated to make decisions. A "national committee" and a "national meeting" also exist, but in fact these structures were never well- known, and the criteria for representation have neverto this daybeen made explicit)' The group also developed a political strategy of dis- tancing itself from the other groups that also had their origins in the armed struggle, such as MAS. It was likewise hesitantexcept for the brief flirtation with the centrist Jorge OlavarrIato enter into any elec- toral or parliamentary alliances. At the same time, the group's conception of ideology as a process in perma- nent construction led it to reject ideologicalor politi- calpigeonholes. These characteristics put Causa R in a unique posi- tion to benefit from the historical convergence of two political processes external to the organization. On the one hand, in the late 1980s, the country's severe social and economic crisis led the Venezuelan population to increasingly reject the tradi- tional parties and the system they had constructed. On the other, a wide range of decen- tralizing political reforms [see "State Reforms that Opened the Door," p. 32] allowed the group to begin widening its base at the local and regional level. In this context, Causa R reaped high dividends because it was so easy to differentiate the orga- nization from the dominant actors as well as the pacts they had entered into. In 1988, the party managed to elect three congressional deputies. February 27, 1989 marked the first social explosion. Impoverished by years of economic crisis, and feeling betrayed by Carlos Andres Perez who announced in his first presidential message that the government had agreed to go along with the austerity conditions of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Venezuelans in cities throughout the country took to the streets to loot all kinds of commercial establishments. The govern- ment responded by imposing a state of siege, suspend- ing constitutional guarantees, and unleashing severe political and military repression that resulted in an official death toll in the hundreds. The "sacudbn" or "caracazo" served to reveal the breach between state and society that had been developing over the past few years. The traditional parties and unions seemed help- less to prevent the growing misery, or even to direct or control the unrest. Less than a year after the "caracazo," the first regional and municipal elections in December, 1989 reflected the degree of rejection of Perez' AD govern- ment. Though it had carried 19 of the 20 states in the 1988 presidential and congressional elections, AD lost control of nine of those state governments in the coun- U try's first direct gubernatorial elections.12 The state of BolIvar, for example, where Causa R had concentrated its strength since the beginning of the decade, had always been an AD stronghold. Nonetheless, grave accusations of corruption and contentious regional leadership struggles had thrown AD into a serious cri- sis, and many of the party militants disobeyed the party line and voted for Causa R.'3 Velasquez won the governorship with 40.3% of the vote, while AD came in second with 36.69%. Causa R also won in two municipalities: CaronI, in the state of Bolivar, and Miranda, in the cen- tral state of Carabobo. Although these results seemed to come as a surprise to the rest of the country, Velasquez contends that the leadership of AD knew days in advance that they faced defeat, and were planning to fix the elections. Causa R, prepared from its SIDOR experience, began early in the after- noon of election day to accuse AD of fraud, while the population of Ciudad Guayana took to the streets to back Velasquez. SIDOR was practically paralyzed. In Ciudad BolIvar, the capital of the State, all activity stopped, and thousands of people demonstrated. This mobi- lization had the desired effect: AD held a press conference soon there- after to concede defeat. On December 6, 1992, just eight days after the year's second attempted coup d'etat, Velasquez was reelected governor of BolIvar with 63.36% of the vote. At the same time, the organization captured the mayoralties of the three largest cities of the state of BolIvar. These triumphs were predictable, but the mar- gins of victory were even wider than expected, and strikingly, Causa R did well outside of the state of BolIvar. In the day's most dramatic and unexpected develop- ment, word began circulating around mid-day that Causa R's Aristobulo Isttiriz was ahead in the exit polls in the race for mayor of Caracas. One more time, rumors of impending electoral fraud mobilized hun- dreds of people who began to gather opposite the Supreme Electoral Council (CSE) where they waited for official electoral bulletins. Thousands of people filled the Plaza Caracas to defend Isttiriz' victory. That afternoon, the president of the CSE called the two leading candidates together to sign a pact agreeing to respect the results, whatever they may be. Claudio Fermmn of AD gladly accepted. Isttiriz rejected the proposal, arguing that he had violated no rules and that "the only thing to respect was the vote of the peo- ple."4 IstUriz won 34.45% of the vote and Fermmn, 32.03%. The popular sectors spilled into the street to celebrate their victory. VOL XXVfl, No 5 MARJAPRIL 1994 33 One of the enormous housing blocks in Cat/a, a fertile organizing ground for Causa R.REPORT ON VENEZUELA C ausa R's growing success over the past four years has brought small, but significant changes in its objectives and discourse. In 1990, Velasquez said that one of the fundamental ideas of Causa R was that "the workers can govern."5 The "working class" had been converted to "the workers," a formulation which would now be used in all the organization's discourse. This centrality of "the work- ers" can be considered both a narrowing of Maneiro' s original conception of Causa R, and perhaps a narrow- ing of the group's ultimate chances for building a mass-based movement. But given the Marxist matrix of Maneiro's thought, and given the initial proposi- tion that the group would construct itself within the popular movements, this narrowing is not at all contradictory to his plans. Indeed given the hegemo- ny achieved within the party by the Matancero movement once the other movements had dissolved or left the party, such a focus makes historical sense. Velasquez' record as governor of Bolivar can be considered, on a regional scale, an embryo of Causa R's sociopolitical project for Venezuela. In the first place, his government has been honest (some- thing significant in the current Venezuelan context), and has stressed democracy, not only as a form of get- ting elected, but as a form of governing. "Street assem- blies," for example, are frequently called in public squares or city streets where people hear and debate state and local problems. Second, given its limited resources, the state gov- ernment has been able to provide with reasonable effi- ciency social services, especially health, education and personal security. Visible efforts have been made to restore public schools and hospitals to adequate working order after years of neglect by administra- tions more attuned to partisan interests than to region- al concerns. Finally, the state's plans for the develop- ment of the region of Guayana diverge somewhat from the traditional development plans of the federal government. Instead of focusing on megaprojects to extract and export primary goods (iron, aluminum and bauxite), Causa R advocates developing the Orinoco River region with medium-size industry and manufac- turing that would process the primary material in the same state.16 In the 1993 electoral campaign, Causa R presented to the public a "base document" outlining its project for Venezuela. The introduction to the document says Venezuelan society urgently needs to become "just, balanced, tolerant, cohesive, efficient, productive and civilized."17 To reach this new society, Causa R sees two great tasks before it: a radical cultural transforma- tion, and a productive revolution. The first would encourage the democratization of social life in all its instances: a profound educational reform, the constitu- tion of a genuine state of law, urban reform, an anti- corruption program, and the renewal of the idea of the common destiny of "the nation."8 The second would move beyond the rentier economy; it would maintain the oil industry as the center of the econ- omy not to produce rents, but to create linkages with other forms of pro- duction. Causa R's ideas, how- ever, lack theoretical development, reflecting the pragmatic and short- range vision of the orga- nization's policies. The scarce attention the party pays to trying to incorpo- rate militant "intellectu- als" or other educated sectors reinforces this weak- ness. With little formal education and training for public posts, union leaders may not necessarily make good mayors, town councilors or congressional repre- sentatives. The success of Causa Rlike that of the Workers Party (PT) of Brazil, and perhaps the PRD in Mexi- coreveals the desire of the popular sectors, so badly beaten over the last few years in Latin Ameri- ca, to find new political space within which to make themselves heard. It's been some time since organiza- tions like AD and Mexico's PRIbureaucratized and corrupt by their long sojourns in powerhave been tuned in to the needs of the majority of the people. Causa R is not a new political organization. It has been working all along in unions and neighborhoods, without betraying its principles or succumbing to cor- ruption. What has changed is the political panorama. Venezuelans, finding themselves poor, hungry, and orphaned by the state, reached out to the organization that most clearly had shown itself to be free of com- plicity with the old political system. Now that the electorate has given Causa R some power, the real challenges begin. The Rise of Causa R 1 .Alfredo Maneiro et al, Notas Negativas (Caracas: Ediciones Venezuela 83, 1971), p. 39. 2.The group was then called "Venezuela 83," after the date when all foreign oil concessions were to revert to Venezuelan ownership. 3.Pablo Medina, "Causa Radical: Entrevista a Pablo Medina," Motivos (Mexico City), No. 106 (July 6, 1993). 4.Farruco Sesto, Tres entrevistas con Andres Velasquez: 1986- 1990-1991 (Caracas: Ediciones del Agua Mansa, 1992), p. 43. 5.Medina, "Causa Radical," p. 47. 6." Catia: Sucursal del infierno," Resumen (Caracas), No. 432 (February 14, 1982). 7.Alfredo Maneiro, Notas Politicas (Caracas: Ediciones del Agua Mansa, 1986), pp. 252-257. 8.Farruco Sesto, personal interview, November 18, 1993, Caracas. 9.Sesto, interview, November 18, 1993. 10.Sesto, interview, November 18, 1993. 11 .Sesto, interview, November 18, 1993. 12.Margarita Lopez Maya, "Tensiones sociopollticas del proceso de decentralizaciOn en Venezuela," Cuadernos del CENDES (Cara- cas), No. 17/lB (1991). 13.Guillermo Yepes Salas, La Causa R: Origenypoder (Caracas: Fondo Editorial Tropikos, 1993), p. 160. 14. "Manifestacihn popular proclamO ante eI Consejo Supremo Elec- toral triunfo de La Causa R," El Nacional (Caracas), December B, 1992. 1 5.Sesto, Tres entrevistas con Andres Velasquez, p. 122. 16. Sesto, Tres entrevistas con Andres Velasquez, pp. 150-153. 17. Causa R, Proyecto politico para una nueva Venezuela (Caracas: La Causa R, 1993), p. 2. 18.Causa R, Proyecto politico, p.3.
