Derrotar una involución histórica / Pompeyo Márquez

To Defeat an Historic Involution

Throughout my life I have learned that each society establishes for itself the tasks that its development and progress demand. The current regime has become a shackle for that evolution. This is precisely where we find the truly revolutionary content. Humanity marches toward the liquidation of poverty, toward the equality of the sexes (it was marching with only one foot, the incorporation of women accelerates its social development); toward the defense of the environment, among other major goals for the millennium outlined by the United Nations.

Within that perspective of development, it’s an extremely grave error to want to build the future on a base of the destruction of everything now in existence. That constitutes a reversal. What experience teaches is to conserve those advances that have been made and to project them toward new stages of development. For instance, wanting to ignore that Venezuelan society was advancing and wanting to erase all of it is primitivism, it’s an involution.

Let’s check several facts: the progress in education, the productive apparatus that was being developed, the advances in farming, the leap away from centralization and caudillismo represented by the process of decentralization, the election of governors, mayors and neighborhood associations. There were new demands that went beyond the so-called partyocracy, corruption, bureaucracy, and matters relating to Judicial Power and jails. And so on, successively.

What was needed were new advances, the correction of vices and solutions for the new problems that the combination of misery and poverty presented. That’s what Chávez offered. But now we see the opposite: a militaristic autocracy, the desire to squash pluralism and decentralization. In the name of a “21st century socialism” that’s a near carbon copy reproduction of the monstrous mistakes of the cult of personality, of centralization and wanting to sweep away everything from the past. In sum, a copy of so-called “actually existing socialism,” whose remains are to be found in Cuba and North Korea.

None of what’s happening in India, in China, in Vietnam; none of what’s occurring in Latin America (Brazil, Mexico, Chile) is being acknowledged. They are read in a backwards manner. To say that advances happen without national and foreign investment, while simultaneously fighting savage capitalism, is to place oneself outside reality.

Alright, I’ll finish this commentary by pointing out with necessary emphasis that it’s indispensable we defeat this historic involution. And this must be done at the same time we prepare ourselves for the November elections, when we have to present the best candidates, ones who can create consensus and who have proposals that pay attention to the central necessities of regional and local communities.




{ Pompeyo Márquez, Tal Cual, 25 April 2008 }

Rómulo Betancourt / Pompeyo Márquez

Rómulo Betancourt

To Virginia Betancourt

February 22, 2008 marks the centenary of the birth of Rómulo Betancourt. I saw him for the first time in 1936, a few months after the dictator’s death, at a meeting that was held in the Circo Metropolitano of Plaza Miranda. Dozens of speakers participated that day. I joined the Student Federation. I was jailed several times. My life changed. A decree by Eleazar López Contreras expelled 47 activists. Rómulo was able to hide. Political parties were banned. I had the fortune of being a “connection” during the first Conference for the PDN [Partido Democrático Nacional]. I was able to live alongside all of its leaders for a week, in a large house in Catia that belonged to Antonio Bertorelli. I saw Rómulo engage in heated discussions with Jóvito Villalba, Inocente Palacios and Miguel Moreno. As the kids say nowadays, the “ultimate” was when I was in San Agustín del Sur, in the house of a comrade named Estrella that had a double exit and served as a “shell” for Betancourt.

I leave the PDN and join the PCV [Partido Comunista de Venezuela]. I was 17 years old.

It is a great truth that historical personalities and events must be examined in perspective, and at a distance from their actions. On more than one occasion I have recognized that character who came from the student struggles of 1928, who had elaborated, along with his fellow comrades, the Barranquilla Plan that completely transformed the struggle against Gómez by introducing ideas and proposals to pull the country out of the shadows under which it lived. That group, with Rómulo as its leader, was correct in confronting the Caribbean Bureau and the Communist International, in rejecting the Stalinist dictatorship and outlining a democratic path that kept Venezuelan reality in mind.

For reasons of space, I will mention he was also correct in fighting the insurrection of the 1960s. It’s true he exercised repression. In my case, I was detained during that time. I reject the repressive excesses. I honor those comrades who were assassinated, tortured, disappeared. That is part of the truth. The other is that during that period we chose a mistaken path that some who are with Chávez today refuse to acknowledge, or forget they once recognized it as a mistake. The assaults at Carúpano and Puerto Cabello, kidnappings of airplanes and boats and of members of the North American Military Mission, of Museum Cadres, of Alfredo Di Stéfano. Blowing up aqueducts. Guerrilla armies in various regions.

We couldn’t convince the country that Venezuelan democracy had failed in 1960 when it had been installed with our participation in 1958-59, after the defeat of Pérez Jiménez. Betancourt defeated us.

It would be foolish to deny he was an untiring fighter for democracy.




{ Pompeyo Márquez, Tal Cual, 29 February 2008 }

Pompeyo / Alexis Márquez Rodríguez

Pompeyo

The violent acts that occurred last week at the Instituto Pedagógico, in which Pompeyo Márquez and the student leader Yon Goicoechea were verbally assaulted – the latter also physically – are of a gravity that many people haven’t fully understood yet. Actually, it’s not just about a simple case of intolerance – which it is, of course –, but also an undeniable symptom of the moral and ideological prostration to which our country has been led by Mr. Hugo Chávez and by Chavismo. That man’s preaching of hate, practiced from the highest political perch, has continued to demolish the ethical values that had traditionally ruled in Venezuelan politics. Eight or ten years ago, not even the fiercest enemies of Pompeyo Márquez would have dared to insult him, to call him a fascist and traitor. Because even when disagreeing with his ideas and with his conduct as a citizen, at that time everyone recognized him as a paradigm of dignity, bravery, honesty, and his long and heroic fight against the dictatorship of Pérez Jiménez, from an absolute and often risky clandestinity, was celebrated.

And the lamentable event is aggravated – if that’s actually possible – by the behavior of Ms. Cilia Flores, who functions as the president of the National Assembly (Oh rivers of Ripley!), when she publicly supported and celebrated those acts of savage violence, in a blatant act of apology for these crimes.

Pompeyo himself remarked how in the middle of the tumult he noticed a sign asking: “Where is Santos Yorme?,” in allusion to the pseudonym he used in the fight against the dictatorship, to which he gave an answer that couldn’t have been more convincing. He said, give or take a few words, the following: “Santos Yorme spent ten years, between 1948 and 1958, fighting clandestine against a brutal military dictatorship. Today, the same Santos Yorme is engaged in the fight against Hugo Chávez’s military, totalitarian and autocratic regime.”

So, it is evident that the catastrophic political, economic and social crisis the Chavista government has continued to aggravate, is magnified by the serious moral crisis, which is so much more harmful and will take us many more years to overcome. It’s not that the political, economic and social crisis is easy to overcome, but with appropriate policies and sufficient economic resources it will be possible in a relatively short period. But the moral crisis, the return to the ethical values cultivated over many decades, and which have now been debased, this degradation will only be eliminated over several generations, and thus it will take many years.

It’s also alarming that the events I’ve commented on occurred at the Instituto Pedagógico, a center specifically designed for the formation of future educators. If those lunatics – fortunately only a few – that everyone saw on TV are going to be tomorrow’s educators, what awaits us in the future of the country’s education, which has already become quite deteriorated?




{ Alexis Márquez Rodríguez, Tal Cual, 2 November 2007 }

“La repetición de la historia” / Pompeyo Márquez

“The Repetition of History”

With this same title [Eleazar Díaz] Rangel published a commentary in Ultimas Noticias on 9/3/07. True. We’re in the presence of an historical involution. When we read Simón Alberto Consalvi’s biography Juan Vicente Gómez, just published recently, we retract to the end of the 19th century and the opening decades of the 20th (1899-1935: [Cipriano] Castro and Gómez).

To think that in this first decade of the 21st century, amidst the era of knowledge, the techno-scientific revolution, we have to hear about the “necessary” man, the one who is “indispensable,” about the “Single Chief,” the “Supreme Leader,” “Give Us the Order, Commander,” these all return us to that era. Truly this all means an involution the country will face and which the younger generations with more preparation than previous ones will have to defeat, because their future is at stake. Fortunately Venezuela has a democratic muscle formed throughout these last 70 years and everything in the world points toward the triumph of democracies with social justice.

We’re convinced that a portion of the country that today controls the levers of power through their “Single Chief” won’t be able to impose on the majority a change in its daily regimen and in the coexistence of citizens. We’re not in the midst of a simple debate regarding the modification of the Magna Carta. The matter is more vital: it is the desire to bury what liberties remain and, to gather Manuel Caballero’s phrase, it is literally the liquidation of the entire Constitution and placement of the life of the Republic, of the Venezuelan nation, in the hands of a caudillo, of an autocrat, in the name of the Liberator and by means of an absorbing cult of personality, centralization and presidentialism.

It seems pertinent for me to bring up this pearl, among many, from Consalvi’s life of Gómez, referring to the beginning of Castro’s mandate:

“In 1902, he assumed power as Constitutional President, with the Constitution he wanted: the term prolonged to 6 years (Chávez wants 7 years, my note). He never doubted in transforming Bolívar into a type of medium. One day while hallucinating he confided to the Parliament: “Something intangible but surely noble and wise like the numen that filled the soul of Bolívar, whispers in my ear that we have already crossed, perhaps for good, the odious promontory of domestic tempests,” and Consalvi adds: “The first of these tempests was called Cipriano Castro.”

These hallucinations are very relevant to our ears!

Millions and millions of Venezuelans have to stand up. I will repeat this until I drop: it’s not a problem for Chavistas and anti-Chavistas. It’s something that concerns the immense majority of the country. To lift our gaze: to trace a political stance that will go beyond December 9th. To affirm that we want to live in a democracy with social justice. That’s the challenge we’re facing. And we will achieve it. The question isn’t when but how. CONFIDENTIAL




{ Pompeyo Márquez, Tal Cual, 14 September 2007 }

¿Revolución en la revolución? y la crítica de derecha

In the summer of 1967, the Venezuelan communist party (PCV) leader Pompeyo Márquez published an essay entitled “Guerrillas y partidos comunistas” [Guerrilla Armies and Communist Parties]. This was the beginning of a debate that ensued between segments of the the PCV and Fidel Castro – a series of disagreements Márquez alludes to in a recent edition of his column for Tal Cual [see my translation here]. Márquez and PCV members such as Teodoro Petkoff were in the process of moving away from armed struggle toward a social democratic stance that would eventually lead to their founding of the party Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) in the early 70s. Márquez became a communist as a teenager in 1937, and he was a legendary clandestine combatant in the struggle against the dictatorship of General Marcos Pérez Jiménez in the 50s. Today he continues to be an active participant in Venezuelan politics, warning of the grave danger posed by the militaristic project being installed by Chavismo.

I discovered Márquez’s essay while researching the Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton, whose book ¿Revolución en la revolución? y la crítica de derecha (Casa de las Américas, 1970) is partly a response to the former. Dalton is mainly concerned with commenting on his friend Régis Debray’s essay ¿Revolución en la revolución? (Casa de las Américas, 1967) and the critiques the book sustained from sectors of the Latin American left. While elucidating Debray’s thesis that a small guerrilla army, and not the communist party, should be the vanguard of the fight against imperialism in Latin America, Dalton identifies several currents within Latin American communist thought, including a “right” within the left, which is where he situates Márquez. I haven’t been able to find a copy of Márquez’s essay but Dalton quotes from it extensively, enough to give an idea of its central argument. For Márquez, the party was to have precedence over the guerrilla army, which is always dependent on specific political and social contexts. He writes:


“Today’s task is to ideologically, politically and organically strengthen the communist parties, to place them at the height of the great tasks that remain to be accomplished and to equip them with an effective domain over all the forms of struggle, adequately managing their opportune and skillful combination, learning to engage, at every opportunity, in legal and illegal combat, peaceful and violent, according to the political juncture of each of our countries.”


I don’t have the time to discuss Dalton’s eloquent critique of Márquez’s position. But he sides with Fidel Castro against Márquez and Petkoff in the debate about the direction to be taken by the left in Latin America at that political juncture. Dalton’s ignominious death at the hands of his fellow guerrillas in San Salvador within years of writing ¿Revolución en la revolución? y la crítica de derecha, points to the mistake of his position. That same revolutionary vanguard he invokes in defense of Debray, with its Leninist conception of a small group imposing the will of the masses by violent means, eventually executed Dalton precisely for his stance as an intellectual first and soldier second. Joaquín Villalobos and the other members of the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (ERP) have in recent years admitted they were mistaken in accusing Dalton of being a spy, but in 1975 they were merely following the Leninist-Maoist line the poet had invoked in his essay. Dalton’s essential identity as an intellectual seemed suspicious to the ERP guerrillas who were barely out of their teens, and who believed that guns precede words in a revolutionary struggle.

One wonders whether Dalton’s thinking would have progressed beyond the desperate belief in the necessity of violence in a revolutionary project, as Márquez and Debray have ended up doing. In some ways, the rise of Chavismo is merely a continuation of a debate that’s been going on within the Latin American left for decades. In his Tal Cual column Márquez writes about his shift away from Marxism-Leninism toward democratic socialism, in an effort to think dialectically over time:


“In 1971 I helped found the MAS political party, with an accent on democracy within socialism. I had been educated in the “immediate collapse of capitalism” and what collapsed was the “socialist world.” From that point until today my thinking has continued to evolve until reaching the conclusion of social democracy, as a synthesis of the aspirations of the great popular masses to which I’ve dedicated my life from the time I was 14 years old until my 85 years today.”

El “socialismo” / Pompeyo Márquez

“Socialism”

You’ll have to forgive me for writing about this topic in the first person. I embraced the cause of socialism in 1937. I was an activist in a cell until I became its Secretary General in hiding, during Pérez Jiménez’s military dictatorship. When I traveled secretly to Moscow in 1956, I thought my aspirations had been attained. “The City of Man,” wrote one of my dearest teachers, Carlos Augusto León, in a poem. I attended the 20th Congress of the CPSU in February of that year. I encountered “Khrushchev’s Secret Speech,” which denounced the crimes of Stalin, the gulags – veritable concentration camps –, the number of people killed by firing squads, the number of people tortured. A complete horror that was confirmed by the collapse of the “socialist world” and Gorbachev’s affirmation that socialism never existed in the USSR, but rather a bureaucratic-military-police apparatus that ruled for 70 years in the name of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

I broke my relations with the PCV, with dogmatism, in December of 1970. The Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia had occurred and Teodoro [Petkoff] was courageous enough to propose “socialism as a problem.” When someone tells me that this is what I taught, I answer: “You’ve come up short. You haven’t read what I’ve been highlighting for 37 years: democracy, plurality, the role of minorities, of dissidence, the role and character of foreign investments (and there’s my book Por una Patria Libre), the polemic with Fidel, along with the mistake of the insurrectionist stance and the damage we caused to the democratic process inaugurated in 1958.” [José Vicente] Rangel called for us to rectify, and I mistakenly replied: “Rectify what?”

Today, drunk with power, this character wants to present himself as the great leader from the 60s. In 1971 I helped found the MAS political party, with an accent on democracy within socialism. I had been educated in the “immediate collapse of capitalism” and what collapsed was the “socialist world.” From that point until today my thinking has continued to evolve until reaching the conclusion of social democracy, as a synthesis of the aspirations of the great popular masses to which I’ve dedicated my life from the time I was 14 years old until my 85 years today.

I write this extremely tight synthesis in order to cite another one of my teachers and a close friend, Doctor Maza Zavala, who I met in 1942. In an interview with Tal Cual, he explained his vision of “21st Century Socialism”: “None, because I don’t know what it consists of… Socialism is not autocracy.” We are headed towards an autocracy, of course we are. The cult of personality, militarism, caudillismo, exacerbated centralization, single thought, etc. Just like the old USSR and in Cuba today, I affirm.




{ Pompeyo Márquez, Tal Cual, 17 August 2007 }

Pompeyo, 85 años / Fernando Rodríguez

Pompeyo, 85 Years

Watching the “Aló Ciudadano” episode that dedicated ample time to Pompeyo Márquez for him to recount episodes from his long and intense life, I was impressed, as always, by how his argumentative capacity works, by his brilliant political intelligence – a very peculiar form of intelligence –, his prodigious memory, but more than anything what comes from body and soul: his sanguine vitality, his Whitmanic wood chopper’s head, which looks like a Scandinavian fisherman’s, a boxer in the midst of give and take, a fighting bull and, at the same time, the archetypal grandfather, which is to say, a warehouse of kindness and generosity.

That he has spent seventy uninterrupted years, day by day, engaged in politics from sunrise to sunset is no mean feat. So much that quite often, a large portion of those long decades has been lived in jails and in the most Spartan clandestinity, or as a member of precarious minorities scaling impossible hills, like an untiring Sisyphus. And there he remains – moving his eyes and frowning, where his identity lies, according to Paolo Gasparini who photographed him once – watching and accusingly uncovering this latest military regime disguised as socialism. And those eyes and that life are a terrible mirror for so many opportunists, ignorant people, cynics and other specimens of the civic-military fauna that govern us today.

Not too long ago he told me he was going through many personal economic difficulties. And without insinuating shame or glory, he added: “It’s just that I was too naïve and I never took care of myself, like almost everyone else does.” Blessed naiveté amidst the multitude of millions in which so many danced yesterday and dance today, among his colleagues who take care of public causes. I think he truly never had much time to sit down and think about the healthy protection of his legitimate assets. There were too many tasks to accomplish. Publishing Tribuna Popular with Gustavo Machado, at one point practically the two of them by themselves, joining their two machines together for the wires that arrived from the USSR, which sang the praises of the achievements of Ukranian workers or Romanian farmers.

Or transforming himself into a ghost for a decade in order to lose the trail of Pedro Estrada’s hound dogs, who would have given everything to offer The Jackal [General Marcos Pérez Jiménez] the head of the damn Secretary General of the PCV [Partido Comunista Venezolano] political party. Or escaping with other leaders from the San Carlos prison, a masterpiece of engineering, sagacity, bravery and a capacity for Hollywood action films. Or being in limbo in 1956, while sitting at the twentieth congress of the CP of the USSR, and realizing that the Stalin he had trusted so much had an insatiable thirst for power and blood which led him to the worst political perversions. Or setting out to seek peace for a guerrilla movement that had lost all its senses and which led him into not a few ideological fist fights, even with Fidel Castro. And beginning the path of the MAS [Movimiento al Socialismo] political party and his profound democratic turn just when it seemed he was too old to jump towards the future so dangerously.

But also the left over time– above all in jails – he employed in a task that is no longer common currency: to study, being an illuminated autodidact which has led him to writing more than twenty books, nearly six thousand (sic) articles, and I don’t know how many party, parliamentary and ministerial interventions.

As he says in his autobiographical reflections, he not only aligned himself with books but also with anyone who had anything to teach. Today he continues writing several weekly articles, devouring all the important facts in all the press and the significant books, from a Chinese novel to our vernacular historians or economists. How is he not going to have a wrinkled brow when he hears all the nonsense circulating today among the heights of power!

But finally, carrying so much comes from a sense of duty related to his early, difficult political experiences, and above all from a noble and hyperbolic heart which makes him one of the Venezuelan politicians who has given and received the most affection during this stormy era that is the construction of our modernity. Congratulations, old man.




{ Fernando Rodríguez. TalCual, 30 April 2007 }