Venezuela's Unbreakable Commitment with the Palestinian

Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela

Ministry of People's Power for Foreign Affairs
Statement
May 31, 2010

The President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Commander Hugo
Chavez, emphatically condemns the brutal massacre perpetrated by the
State of Israel against the members of the Liberty Flotilla, as a
result of the war action started by the Israeli Army against
defenseless civilians, who tried to carry humanitarian aid supplies to
the Palestine people of the Gaza Strip, who are victim of the criminal
blockage imposed by the State of Israel.

President Hugo Chavez, on behalf of his government and the Venezuelan
people, expresses his deepest regret and sends his deepest condolences
to the families and relatives of the heroes who have been victim of
this state crime, and commit to honor their memory and to give the
necessary help so that the responsible of this murderers are severely
punished.

The revolutionary government of Venezuela will continue denouncing the
terrorist and criminal nature of Israel, and it reaffirms, today more
than ever, its unbreakable commitment with the fight of the
Palestinian people for freedom, the sovereignty and the dignity.

Caracas, May 31, 2010

Venezuela Coalition Defends Venezuela Against Ottawa's attempted Smear

Dear Friends,

In the past weeks, the House of Commons subcommittee on Human Rights initiated an investigation of the Bolivarian Government of Venezuela, whose apparent purpose was to smear the government of Hugo Chavez as "anti-democratic" and thus to draw attention away from the very real and gross violations of human rights in Colombia.

The Venezuela We Are With You Coalition (CVEC) as well as Hands Off Venezuela/Louis Riel Bolivian Circle joined in making two coordinated submissions to the parliamentary committee defending the Bolivarian Republic.

Below is the submission of the Venezuela We Are With You Coalition, prepared by Paul Kellogg.
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May 13, 2010

To: Julie Lalande Prud'homme
Greffière/ Clerk
Sous-comite des droits internationaux de la personne (SDIR) /
Subcommittee on International Human Rights (SDIR)
Direction des comites / Committees Directorate
Chambre des communes / House of Commons

131 rue Queen, pièce 6-10
Ottawa (ON) , K1A 0A6
Tel: 613-995-8983
Telec. : 613-947-9670
SDIR@parl.gc.ca www.parl.gc.ca

Brief to the subcommittee:

Thank you for the invitation to my organization (Coalition Venezuela We Are With You / Coalicion Venezuela Estamos Contigo) and to myself to present a brief to your committee. I will not be able to be present in person. I have been in touch with others from the solidarity movement in Toronto who will be making presentations, and am confident that they will make a very thorough presentation of the key issues. What follows are some brief written remarks as a modest supplement to your deliberations.

I am trained as a political scientist (Ph.D. Queen's University). For the last several years I have had a keen interest in events in Latin America and the Caribbean making it one of my research areas. For the last two years, I have been an assistant professor in the Department of International Development Studies at Trent University, in Peterborough, Ontario. So with that background, I have developed somewhat of an appreciation for the situation in Latin America and the Caribbean.

However, it does not take an extensive academic background to know that there are issues of human rights to be studied in Latin America and the Caribbean. Many of my first year students in the large introductory development studies class at Trent University -- who at the age of 18 do not, of course, have an extensive academic background -- are quite aware of human rights issues in Latin America and the Caribbean. What is surprising to me, and would be surprising to them, is your choice of country. Surely the issue in 2010 in terms of human rights in Latin America and the Caribbean is not the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, but rather its neighbour, Colombia.

I urge you to study the 2009 edition of the "Annual survey of violations of trade union rights." What you will read in the section on Colombia should give you chills. In 2008 alone, 49 trade unionists were assassinated "of whom 16 were trade union leaders, 45 were men and four were women. Attacks, disappearances and death threats continued."

Imagine the outcry in Canada if even one trade union leader had been assassinated in 2008. It would dominate the pages of the press. Were there to be 16 union leaders assassinated and 33 others, that outcry would be massive indeed. The truly horrifying aspect of this, however, is that this is by no means a one-year phenomenon. In 2007, there were 39 such assassinations so that "Colombia remained the most dangerous country in the world for trade unionists." In 2006 there were "78 trade unionists murdered during the year." This is in fact a very old story -- a long-standing, and quite well-documented story about a terrible situation confronting one of the most basic of all human rights -- the right of workers to freely associate and collectively organize.

There is another reason why, in 2010, it is surprising to focus a human rights lens on the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela rather than on Colombia. The Government of Canada is embarking on bilateral trade negotiations with a number of countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. There is no indication that the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela has been selected as one of these countries. However, as is also well known to my first year students at Trent University, Colombia is one such country. I read from a Government of Canada web site that on March 10, 2010, "the Government of Canada tabled legislation to implement the Canada-Colombia Free Trade Labour Cooperation and Environment Agreements." Surely the name itself -- given the facts outlined above -- should demand an urgent investigation into the human rights situation in Colombia. This is not just being called a trade agreement but a "Labour Cooperation" agreement. The Government of Canada is entering into a cooperative relationship with a country, on the issue of labour, when that country is widely seen as having the most anti-labour environment in the entire world.

In a certain sense, my brief to your committee should end here. My one point to you is that you have the wrong area of inquiry, that given Canada's policy orientation towards Colombia, the focus in terms of human rights needs to be Colombia and not the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, and that were you to spend any time engaging in such an inquiry, it would immediately call into question the ethical, moral, and political problems in intensifying collaboration with the Government of Colombia.

However, as a political scientist, it is incumbent on me to open up one more issue for you to consider. You will all be well aware that no political action takes place in a vacuum. Understanding the context is something that I urge all of my students to attempt, no matter what their choice of essay topic. A reasonable thesis for one such student essay might be to suggest that it is precisely the context outlined above -- the push for a bilateral trade, labour and environmental agreement with a government widely known for its terrible human rights record -- that might impel a Canadian government to focus on another country, any other country, in order to "change the channel." If we announce to the people of Canada that in 2010 human rights in Latin America and the Caribbean is to be our subject, and that in this year, the key country to study is the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, then it might have the political effect of focusing attention away from what is really going on -- an intensification of Canadian involvement with a very suspect regime in Colombia.

There might, however, be one benefit from such an exercise. An intensive focus on the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela is long overdue. The situation in that country, as in the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean, is exceedingly difficult. President Hugo Chavez Frias inherited an economy and society, severely damaged by long years of interference by International Financial Institutions (IFIs), institiutions in which Canada plays a leading role. Undoing the damage caused, in part, by the irresponsible Structural Adjustment Programmes of the IMF and the World Bank has been an enormous challenge, not just for President Chavez, but for political leaders all through Latin America and the Caribbean. The societal disruption caused by years of structural adjustment throughout Latin America, has contributed to an environment where human rights abuses do intensify. There is no more fertile ground for human rights abuses than the chaos created by economic decline and societal instability.

What needs to be soberly confronted by policy makers in Canada, is that the antidote to this economic decline and societal instability is -- not to give legitimacy to regressive regimes such as the one in Colombia -- but to do as has been done in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, in the little country of Bolivia, and elsewhere -- and resist the policy prescriptions of the IFIs, and to insist that the way forward in Latin America and the Caribbean is for sovereign development, controlled by the peoples of the region, not by distant institutions based in the Global North.

Your investigation of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela will surely lead you to encounter the interesting alternatives being developed to the Global North IFIs -- including but not restricted to the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA) and the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR). The establishment of these organizations has accelerated the assertion of sovereignty in the region as a whole -- an assertion of sovereignty which is the precondition for any and all improvement in the conditions of the people of the region, including an improvement in human rights.

Sincerely

Dr. Paul Kellogg
Dept. of International Development Studies
Trent University
Peterborough, ON K9J 7B8


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Footnotes:
International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), “2009 Annual Survey of violations of trade union rights: Colombia” – Accessed May 13, 2010.
2 ITUC, “2008 Annual Survey of violations of trade union rights: Colombia” > – Accessed May 13, 2010.
3 ITUC, “2007 Annual Survey of violations of trade union rights: Colombia” > – Accessed May 13, 2010.
4 Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada, “Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement” > – Accessed May 13, 2010.

Discussion on Venezuela's Economy

Venezuela is not Greece
by Mark Weisbrot
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 6 May 2010
http://tinyurl.com/2dj5duu

Given the Venezuelan government's low public and foreign debt, the idea the country is facing an 'economic crisis' is plain wrong. The country is not facing a crisis, but rather a policy choice.

With Venezuela's economy having contracted last year (as did the vast majority of economies in the Western Hemisphere), the economy suffering from electricity shortages, and the value of domestic currency having recently fallen sharply in the parallel market, stories of Venezuela's economic ruin are again making headlines.

The Washington Post, in a news article that reads more like an editorial, reports that Venezuela is "gripped by an economic crisis," and that "years of state interventions in the economy are taking a brutal toll on private business."

There is one important fact that is almost never mentioned in news articles about Venezuela, because it does not fit in with the narrative of a country that has spent wildly throughout the boom years, and will soon, like Greece, face its day of reckoning. That is the government's debt level: currently about 20% of GDP. In other words, even as it was tripling real social spending per person, increasing access to healthcare and education, and loaning or giving billions of dollars to other Latin American countries, Venezuela was reducing its debt burden during the oil price run-up. Venezuela's public debt fell from 47.5% of GDP in 2003 to 13.8% in 2008. In 2009, as the economy shrank, public debt picked up to 19.9% of GDP. Even if we include the debt of the state oil company, PDVSA, Venezuela's public debt is 26% of GDP. The foreign part of this debt is less than half of the total.

Compare this to Greece, where public debt is 115% of GDP and currently projected to rise to 149% in 2013. (The European Union average is about 79%.)

Given the Venezuelan government's very low public and foreign debt, the idea the country is facing an "economic crisis" is simply wrong. With oil at about $80 a barrel, Venezuela is running a sizeable current account surplus, and has a healthy level of reserves. Furthermore, the government can borrow internationally as necessary – last month China agreed to loan Venezuela $20bn in an advance payment for future oil deliveries.

Nonetheless, the country still faces significant economic challenges, some of which have been worsened by mistaken macroeconomic policy choices. The economy shrank by 3.3% last year. The international press has trouble understanding this, but the problem was that the government's fiscal policy was too conservative – cutting spending as the economy slipped into recession. This was a mistake, but hopefully the government will reverse this quickly with its planned expansion of public investment this year, including $6bn for electricity generation.

The government's biggest long-term economic mistake has been the maintenance of a fixed, overvalued exchange rate. Although the government devalued the currency in January, from 2.15 to 4.3 to the dollar for most official foreign exchange transactions, the currency is still overvalued. The parallel or black market rate is at more than seven to the dollar.

An overvalued currency – by making imports artificially cheap and the country's exports more expensive – hurts Venezuela's non-oil tradable goods' sectors and prevents the economy from diversifying away from oil. Worse still, the country's high inflation rate (28% over the last year, and averaging 21% annually over the last seven years) makes the currency more overvalued in real terms each year. (The press has misunderstood this problem, too – the inflation itself is too high, but the main damage it does to the economy is not from the price increases themselves but from causing an increasing overvaluation of the real exchange rate.)

But Venezuela is not in the situation of Greece – or even Portugal, Ireland, or Spain. Or Latvia or Estonia. The first four countries are stuck with an overvalued currency – for them, the euro – and implementing pro-cyclical fiscal policies (eg deficit reduction) that are deepening their recessions and/or slowing their recovery. They do not have any control over monetary policy, which rests with the European Central Bank. The latter two countries are in a similar situation for as long as they keep their currencies pegged to the euro, and have lost output six to eight times that of Venezuela over the last two years.

By contrast, Venezuela controls its own foreign exchange, monetary, and fiscal policies. It can use expansionary fiscal and monetary policy to stimulate the economy, and also exchange rate policy – by letting the currency float. A managed, or "dirty" float – in which the government does not set a target exchange rate but intervenes when necessary to preserve exchange rate stability – would suit the Venezuelan economy much better than the current fixed rate. The government could manage the exchange rate at a competitive level, and not have to waste so many dollars, as it does currently, trying to narrow the gap between the parallel and the official rate. Although there were (as usual, exaggerated) predictions that inflation would skyrocket with the most recent devaluation, it did not – possibly because most foreign exchange transactions take place through the parallel market anyway.

Venezuela is well situated to resolve its current macroeconomic problems and pursue a robust economic expansion, as it had from 2003-2008. The country is not facing a crisis, but rather a policy choice.
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