VENEZUELA: Reversing Decentralisation

• by Humberto Márquez (caracas)
• Monday, March 23, 2009
• Inter Press Service

'We have begun the process of reversing everything that signified the dismemberment of national unity, territory and sovereignty,' because under previous governments 'the country was fractured into pieces,' said Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.

This is the highest-profile move yet to claw back the powers and resources that, over the past two decades, were allocated to the 23 states and 330 municipalities into which the country is divided, and it is part of a re-centralisation process that started as soon as some opposition politicians won important posts in the regional elections held in November 2008.

The anti-Chávez governors who head five out of 23 states, including the three most populous, 'did not come to govern,' the president said on his Sunday television programme, Aló Presidente.

'What they want is Chávez's head, and they are already calling desperately on the military and on the OAS (Organisation of American States) to do something. Well, they will come face-to-face with us,' he said.

He added that 'the country cannot be sliced up into little pieces like a cake, it is one single country or it is nothing. There is only one president here, not three or four.'

He claimed that 'One hundred percent of the people and of the armed forces, and 85 percent of the regional powers' were on his side.

The states governed by the opposition are oil-rich Zulia in the northwest, the industrial north-central states of Carabobo and Miranda, Táchira in the southwest, bordering Colombia, and the northeastern island state of Nueva Esparta, as well as the administration of the Metropolitan Area of Caracas, which includes municipalities within Miranda state, belonging to the opposition, and the pro-government Capital District.

Control over the regional public television broadcasting station, management of schools, hospitals and civil registry offices, and responsibility for works of public infrastructure and roadworks, have all been wrested from the Metropolitan Area Mayor's Office. It only retains control of the fire brigade.

The Metropolitan Police had already reverted to the national executive before the November elections.

'This is a bizarre country,' Metropolitan Area Mayor Antonio Ledezma said in an interview with IPS.

'In other countries, presidents are eagerly delegating tasks to regional or municipal authorities. Here, even simple measures to alleviate the heavy traffic in Caracas are blocked and sabotaged,' he said.

The government banned Ledezma's plans for traffic regulations which would prohibit vehicles with certain number plates, in rotation, from driving on certain roads at peak hours. The city is located in a narrow valley surrounded by hills and has few main arteries, which are packed with two million vehicles a day that crawl along at an average speed of 10 kilometres an hour.

The government won the case in the Supreme Court, arguing that traffic control was the prerogative of national authorities, and the judges even forbade Ledezma from calling on car drivers to adopt voluntary traffic restrictions.

'The central powers are determined to block all initiatives that opposition governors or mayors could take to prove they can be efficient. It is as if the president were already campaigning for the 2012 presidential elections,' said Henrique Capriles, the governor of the state of Miranda.

When Capriles opened a contraflow lane for public transport at certain hours on the highway linking the centre of Caracas with the bedroom city of Guarenas, the National Guard intervened, but had to back down in the face of the fury of bus drivers and passengers who threatened to block the road.

'But sometimes heavy trucks, some of them actually belonging to pro-government mayors' offices, pretend to have breakdowns in those lanes to try to show that they are ineffective. It is hardly to be believed, we live in a bizarre world,' Ledezma complained.

In his view, 'what is happening is the concentration of power in one person’s hands. It's like going back to a time we thought was over, and the real losers are the people, who have the right to closer control over the resources that provide them with better schools, hospitals, roads or airports.'

According to the constitution, 'the following are the exclusive competence of the states: the construction, maintenance, management and use of national expressways and highways, as well as ports and airports in commercial use, in coordination with the central government.'

A week ago, at Chávez's request, parliament (156 out of whose 167 members are pro-government) changed the Decentralisation Law, drawn up by the Constituent Assembly that wrote the current constitution of 1999, to make it easier for the central government to claim back competences and powers presently exercised by the states.

Pro-Chávez governors supported this reform in a document that rejected 'the neoliberal ideology intended to impose dismemberment on national states by stripping them of their constitutional and legal powers and fragmenting their territories.'

'This translated into public policies, under the garb of neoliberal administrative decentralisation, which distorted the management of public service infrastructure such as expressways, highways, ports and airports,' said Tarek Saab, governor of the eastern state of Anzoátegui, speaking on behalf of the group.

While parliament was debating the proposed reform of the Decentralisation Law, Chávez ordered the armed forces to activate plans to occupy ports and airports in states headed by opposition governors.

'We are going to defend Puerto Cabello (the second largest port in the country, 150 kilometres northwest of Caracas) as a resource belonging to the people of Carabobo,' said Henrique Salas, the independent governor of Carabobo, who brought a lawsuit against the reform in the Supreme Court.

'He'd better find an army, because we are going to carry out Operation Fried Chick (Salas is nicknamed ‘El Pollo’, or Chick). Let them squeal as much as they like, or let them go to the OAS or to whomever they want, but those ports and airports will come under national control,' Chávez replied.

Trino Márquez, who served as minister for decentralisation in 1993, told IPS that 'Chávez's assault on decentralisation is part of the destruction of the democracy enshrined in the 1999 constitution, and the construction of 21st century communism in the manner described by Norberto Ceresole.'

Ceresole (1943-2003) was an Argentine sociologist, and a friend and mentor of Chávez's before the Venezuelan leader came to power in 1999.

His book dated that year, 'Caudillo, ejército, pueblo: la Venezuela del Comandante Chávez' (Strongman, Army, People: Commander Chávez's Venezuela) advocated the concentration and exercise of power in Venezuela where 'it arose from the operation of three, and only three, factors: the people who identify and ‘give orders to’ a strongman, and the armed forces that serve this order and take their place - most of them, and through personal conviction - as the protective shield of a new historical dynamic.'

As the ports and airports were being occupied, the Attorney General's Office asked a judge in Maracaibo, the capital of Zulia, the richest and most populous state in the country, to detain the mayor and former governor, Manuel Rosales, who the president easily defeated in the 2006 elections.

Rosales was accused of allegedly having ill-gotten properties in Miami, and of giving an old van belonging to the governor's office to a former police chief who was about to retire, without fulfilling all the legal requirements for the transfer.

'These accusations are false. I am going to challenge Chávez on every front, because he is a coward who takes shelter behind judges and the uniforms of the military. The people of Zulia are tired of so many lies, and they will rise up,' said Rosales at a rally of tens of thousands of his supporters in Maracaibo on Mar. 20.

At dawn the next day military units burst into the administrative building of the port of Maracaibo and Chávez announced that several national corporations would subsequently manage the country's ports and airports.

''We did not mobilise our people because we want to behave responsibly, but we won't take this violation of the constitution lying down,' said the president of the regional parliament, Eliseo Fermín, a follower of Rosales.

'It is completely abnormal for a president to order movements of warships, artillery units and helicopters to remove attributions and resources from the regions, and in this way debase democracy and the vote, because what is the point of people electing their authorities if, later on, the result is not respected?' Ledezma asked.

© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service