Andean Group - March 2011 (ISSN 1741-4466)

It was probably no coincidence that President Hugo Chávez 's cautious stance on the popular uprisings in North Africa, and his initial silence on the crisis in Libya, only ended once the government had reached agreement with over 80 student hunger strikers camped outside the Caracas branch of the Organization of American States (OAS). Students have provided some of the most effective opposition to Chávez , handing him his only electoral defeat in November 2007 and more recently forcing him to backtrack on a controversial university reform. This has prompted comparisons with the youth-led popular revolts in Egypt and elsewhere. However, Venezuelan students are a minority, hail largely from the small middle class and are, as yet, unable to muster up the mass support seen in North Africa and the Middle East. And critically, neither do they have the support of the Venezuelan army.

'Operation Freedom'
Between 31 January and 22 February, 83 students camped outside the OAS HQ in Caracas staged a hunger strike in demand of the release of 27 alleged political prisoners, including three opposition deputies elected in the September 2010 legislative elections (who have been disqualified by a court from taking up their seats). They were also highlighting the case of a Caracas judge, Marí­a Lourdes Afiuni, detained and jailed in December in 2009 for ordering the conditional release of a local businessman held in pre-trial detention on corruption charges for three years (beyond the maximum allowable two years). (Afiuni is now under house arrest, after recent surgery). Most notably, the students were also demanding that the government authorise visits to the country by the OAS and the Inter American Commission of Human Rights (IAHCR) to assess the human rights situation. This has been a demand of the students and the main political opposition for several years now.

The strike was organised by 13 students from the group Juventud Activa Venezuela Unida (JAVU), and was led by one of JAVU's founders, Julio César Rivas (23), and its national coordinator Lorent Saleh (22), whose mother, Yamilah Saleh, joined the strike in solidarity with the students. Other students also set up solidarity camps outside other diplomatic buildings in Caracas, including the Brazilian, Chilean and Costa Rican embassies, and in ten states across the country. On 23 February, the justice and internal affairs minister, Tareck El Aissami, presented the students with a proposal to end the strike, which they accepted as “sufficient" to call off their protest. The deal includes the release of seven prisoners and the creation of working groups to discuss the cases of the rest, with a view to securing their conditional release. The students argued that they had won a significant victory. Earlier (December 2010) protests by students and their professors had also forced the president to backtrack on a planned reform of the 2009 Education Law ending the university sector's prized traditional independence.

Rivas, on his fourth hunger strike, is well known to the authorities. In September 2009, his colleagues staged a hunger strike to secure his release from the notorious Yare prison, where he endured a 22-day stint following his arrest (on 7 September 2009) on charges of rebellion, after participating in an opposition march against the government's polemical August 2009 Education Law. That law asserted stronger state control over the sector, which the opposition argued amounted to the 'Cubanization' of the Venezuelan education system.

Rivas defends his methods, arguing that his group has exerted sufficient pressure on the government to reduce the number of 'political' prisoners, and has successfully drawn the attention of the OAS secretary general José Miguel Insulza and other external actors, notably including the IAHCR and the US, to their cause.   Insulza on 23 February said he was pleased that “dialogue" had contributed to the end of the protest. A week earlier, he had stated that he would be prepared to go to Venezuela but noted that he could not go without government authorization. Insulza and the Canadian OAS delegation later brought the hunger strike up for debate at the OAS permanent council, a move Venezuela's OAS ambassador, Roy Chaderton, denounced as “a grave precedent". Venezuela and its allies in the Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América later issued a statement calling on Insulza, to “stop his attacks on the Venezuelan government and respect Venezuela's democratic institutions." It added that Insulza's actions could prompt “a dangerous return to the times when the OAS was an instrument of interventionism and colonialism" of the US. The Chávez government denied that Insulza had ever been refused permission to visit (though he insisted the contrary).

'Cairo on the Guaire'?
The government is publicly dismissive of the student movement and for several years has sought to polarise an already politicised student body by actively promoting pro-government student unions. It also regularly argues that students are “used" by opposition politicians and media to attack the government.

After a spokesman for the US State Department expressed concern about the “health and wellbeing of the (hunger striking) students who are risking their lives for their belief in democratic governance and individual liberties," Venezuela's foreign minister Nicolás Maduro accused the US of attempting to create “something like a virtual Egypt" in Venezuela. President Chávez dismissed the idea that the people's revolutions in the Arab world would be replicated in Caracas, noting that 'people's revolutions' had already taken place in Venezuela, Ecuador and Cuba.

The local pollster Luis Vicente León takes a similar view to Chávez , albeit for different reasons. While he acknowledges the resonance of the Venezuelan student movement, which first emerged at the forefront of the protests against the government's efforts to shut down RCTV in May 2007, and again in opposition to President Chávez 's constitutional reform referendum in November 2007, he makes the point that it's not immediately possible to conflate the student movement with the broader youth population. “While the majority of students are young people, unfortunately the majority of young people in Venezuela are not students. Students are 'the elite' of Venezuelan youth, independently of their socioeconomic bracket. They are active, motivated and articulate, but the base of young people is not".

León also points out that it is not possible to conflate the student movement with the opposition. The student movement, he argues, is working to a different dynamic. Students “don't give a toss" about opposition plans, he suggests, seeing the opposition as “irrelevant". “They [the students] are not against Chávez but in favour of a government that respects their rights and freedom".

Chávez has been in power 12 years (since 1998), meaning that a generation of young people born in the early 1990s has reached adulthood under him. Yet according to León, rather than the emergence of a 'Generation Ch', there is a stronger case to be made for a 'Generation anti-Ch',   representative of   a youth “that is not only not convinced by Chávez , but is much more irreverent towards and opposed to his revolutionary proposal than the national average". León argues that what the students and the broader youth population do share is their rejection of the Chávez government, which is 14 points higher than among the rest of the population. According to his calculations, of every 100 young people eligible to turn out to vote in the future (including in 2012), 60 would vote against Chávez . Yet the under 24s are “slow to register to vote and the majority declare themselves abstentionists". The difficulty then, for the student movement and the terminally chaotic opposition alike, is in mobilising these potential voters.

• 'Cairo-on-the-Guaire'
  Many Venezuela-watchers believe that the most likely threat to Chávez may come from his own disaffected supporters, setting off , in the words of one, a “defection cascade" ahead of (or after) the 2012 elections, which if significant enough might prompt the army to eventually withdraw its support for Chávez 's Socialist project. Bloggers have baptized this the 'Cairo-on-the-Guaire' scenario.
• 
  Opposition blasts Chávez over Libya
  On 6 March the opposition Primero Justicia lambasted President Chávez for his intervention in the Libyan crisis. The Venezuelan opposition will hope to use Chávez 's declared support for Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's regime to open up another front against him ahead of the 2012 presidential elections. Chávez and his allies Nicaragua and Cuba have been almost universally criticised for their support of the Libyan government. Whereas in the past Chávez 's megaphone diplomacy won him plaudits at home from the 50% of the electorate that previously backed him, his latest efforts are more likely to backfire domestically. Not only does it cement the opposition's view of him as an autocrat, but more importantly, the shrinking Chavista electorate may also baulk at Chávez 's support for a leader bombing his own people.