Misión Verdad
22-year old Orlando Figuera, a supermarket worker, being lynched and burnt alive by extreme-right guarimba thugs in Venezuela on May 20, 2017. He passed away few weeks later.
Fascism in Venezuela has several sources of origin. One of them was the activity of Nazi groups in Venezuela, sponsored by the German embassy in Venezuela in the first half of the 1940s.
Those groups promoted Nazi ideology in Venezuela, even in public events and activities; they tried to bring the Venezuelan political elites closer to the Nazi German ideology. For security reasons in the context of World War II and through US collaboration, Venezuela expelled Nazi officials in 1941.
Another component of Venezuelan-style fascism came from the regime of dictator Pérez Jiménez. Although Marcos Pérez Jiménez did not describe himself as a fascist, his government had conservative, totalitarian and corporatist practices. His pseudo-nationalist ideology was based on a narrative that served to justify the totalitarianism of his government.
The confluence of nationalist ideas and the characteristics of his “modernizing dictatorship”—this was how he labeled the developmentalist dictatorships in the region—laid the conceptual foundations for Venezuelan neo-fascism.
During the Fourth Republic (after Pérez Jiménez dictatorship ended), an openly fascist political party was founded in Venezuela. Nuevo Orden (NOR) was an avowedly fascist and anti-communist Venezuelan political party which originated from the Pérez Jiménez-sympathizer student movement Poder Nacionalista (PN) which was active in the Central University of Venezuela. It was founded as a national party in Caracas on January 12, 1974, but did not acquire relevance in the national political scene.
The NOR party even participated in three presidential elections, in 1983, 1988 and 1993, but fortunately it received no support from the population. It was finally banned by the National Electoral Council (CNE) in 2002.
In 1984 the government of Luis Herrera Campíns banned the Tradition, Family and Property (TFP) organization, a sect or group of lay Catholics linked to ultra-right conservative groups of the Catholic Church. That sect wanted to found a nation within Venezuela, located in the Amazon on the border with Brazil, which would be called Roraima, and even to assassinate Pope John Paul II.
In 1984 the TFP headquarters in the Country Club of Caracas was raided. It was discovered that most of the young men who were members of the organization came from the oligarchic families, had received anti-socialist and anti-communist education and also paramilitary training.
Thereafter TFP went underground, and some of the young people who were part of it went on to become the leaders of the current Venezuelan opposition, such as Henrique Capriles Radonski and Leopoldo López.
Fascism in Venezuela has its point of reference from the traditional political parties of the country, especially the most conservative wing of the COPEI party in the late 1990s, from where came groups of leaders that founded new right-wing parties, such as Primero Justicia (PJ), Voluntad Popular (VP), and Vente Venezuela (VV). All of them have a common factor: they have been led by people from the oligarchy, of high social class, trained in ultra-conservative ideals and in the same political-social niches of TFP.
Expressions of neo-fascism in Venezuela
Armed political violence (guarimbas)
The guarimbas of 2014 and 2017 were social revolts induced by Venezuelan extreme right-wing groups during which, in the style of Spanish dictator Franco’s Falangism, an attempt was made to create a state of siege and civil war through methods of social coercion and the use of extensive political violence in the society.
Although the guarimbas were failed regime change operations, they were also characterized as mechanisms of commotion directed against society itself in order to subdue the population and the State through force and intimidation, with discriminatory slogans and the promotion of an extreme right-wing ideology.
During these processes of political and armed destabilization, barricades were set up in middle and upper-class communities in the country, which turned them into identity bastions of a classist and discriminatory struggle. The selective pattern of these blockades, based on the persecution of chavistas, lower class people and the cooperatives—a mechanism to detect poorer people in public—implied targeted political persecution against individuals, which resulted in indiscriminate violence and hundreds of deaths during these years.
The guarimbas were similar to the upheavals created in Spain in the prelude to Francisco Franco’s coup and the subsequent civil war. They tried to divide Venezuelan society through discrimination based on race, social class and, especially, political ideology. They wanted the citizenry to confront each other through this type of segregation patterns and the exaltation of political intolerance.
The racist, classist, aporophobic and openly anti-socialist, anti-communist and anti-democratic nature of the guarimbas is an unfortunate milestone in the history of the Venezuelan extreme right, with its significance and repercussions.
Championing the US blockade
Another milestone of Venezuelan neo-fascism is requesting the United States for the economic blockade and illegal sanctions against the Venezuelan economy, and championing the blockade. Asking for these coercive measures has the implicit purpose of destroying the sources of income of the Venezuelan State, degrading the material base of the government and affecting public policies, including the social welfare missions.
Therefore, this pseudo-political praxis of sponsoring these unilateral coercive measures is deeply aporophobic. It is marked by ideologies and purposes favorable to the right wing; it aims at the poor people by trying to destroy their material and existential conditions of life. Of note is the profoundly classist component of promoting, through political methods, the destruction of the living conditions of the most vulnerable sector of the population.
According to Venezuela’s position at the United Nations, the acts of blockade committed by the United States and other allied countries against Venezuela are crimes against humanity. Thus, they fall into the categories of harm to eradicate or suppress the “other” by means of a wide scale of economic affectations.
The elite of the Venezuelan ultra-right, which is not affected by the illegal blockade but rather profits from it, practices fascism by promoting criminal actions against the population of the country in order to subjugate it.
Betraying the nation and not recognizing state institutions
Venezuelan ultra-right sectors have aligned themselves with foreign powers to orchestrate regime change operations against their own country, its government, and its institutions. Like many fascist regimes in the past, they would like to come to power by force and by attacking the integrity of their own country and its population in general.
These expressions are inherent to the militarism and imperialism of neo-fascists, as evident from their requests of foreign interventions and interference in Venezuela, under humanitarian pretexts. This describes neo-fascist behavior.
The new “libertarian” right
Venezuela is a political space where foreign and national right-wing political sectors want to fabricate the phenomenon of the new “libertarian” right in order to make viable the capture of political power.
Neo-fascist ideologies based on the political denominations of the “new right” must be vetoed in Venezuela, just as in post-war Germany any ideology of Nazi style or identity was vetoed.
The reason is obvious. In Venezuela there can be no place for totalitarian ideologies that imply the persecution or attempts of suppression, for ideological reasons, of large sectors of the society and political ideological groups of the nation, such as socialists, social democrats, communists, and traditional moderate right-wingers.
For this it is necessary to explain “the paradox of tolerance” according to Karl Popper, described by the Austrian philosopher in his 1945 book The Open Society and its Enemies. It is a paradox framed within decision theory, stating that if a society is unlimitedly tolerant, its capacity to be tolerant will be eventually reduced or destroyed by the intolerant. Popper concluded that, paradoxical as it may seem, in order to maintain a tolerant society, society has to be intolerant of intolerance and its concrete ideological expressions.
According to Popper’s dilemma, a politically healthy society, as the Venezuelan society should be, is one that gets rid of political organizations that accommodate ideological forms based on intolerance.
Translation by Orinoco Tribune
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