Anarchism in Venezuela
Anarchism in Venezuela has historically played a fringe role in the country's politics, being consistently smaller and less influential than equivalent movements in much of the rest of South America.
On the other hand, according to a series of surveys carried out by Latinobarómetro between 1998 and 2010, the population of Venezuela has maintained the most favorable view of a statist policy compared to that of other Latin American countries.
[1] In early 1810, during the debates within the Patriotic Society regarding the concept of federalism, Coto Paúl, himself influenced by the works of William Godwin,[2] proclaimed the following words against those who saw federalist ideas as anarchic:[3] Anarchy!
May anarchy guide us to Congress with that burning flame of the furies in our hands, and may its smoke intoxicate those partisans of order and lead them to follow it through the streets and plazas yelling “Liberty!”[4][5]Simón Rodríguez was also inspired by the ideas of utopian socialists, especially in their pedagogical approaches.
[9] Although the Venezuelan conservative Fermín Toro was one of the main promoters of the laissez faire philosophy in Venezuela, he later rejected these positions, approaching the socialist ideas of the time, including some of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.
[10] Ángel Capelletti and Carlos Manuel Rama argue in their book El anarquismo en América Latina ("Anarchism in Latin America") that Ezequiel Zamora, a liberal politician and prominent rebel leader during the Federal War, was influenced by Proudhonian ideas.
[10] While in Venezuela, the French anarchist and impressionist painter, Camille Pissarro, developed a political commitment by observing the social injustices in the country, which influenced his arrival to anarchism.
[14] After the fall of the Paris Commune in 1871, several exiles, among whom were Proudhonian libertarians, founded the Venezuelan section of the International Workingmen's Association, which existed at least until 1893 since that year a communiqué was sent to the Zurich Congress, signed by Bruno Rossner, H Wilhof and A Pisen.
[18] In 1909, Manuel Vicente Martínez published El socialismo y las clases jornaleras, a work "with a clear Proudhonian mutualist orientation", according to Rodolfo Montes de Oca.
Arrested in 1914 after returning to Venezuela, Panclasta spent seven years in prison, more due to his friendship with Castro (deposed in a coup d'état by Gómez) than for his ideology.
[22] He also became friends with George Bernard Shaw, Albert Einstein, Ernst Haeckel, Max Nordau, Gabriela Mistral, Alfred Russel Wallace and other thinkers of his time.
[23] Another promoter of Tolstoyan ideas was Julio César Salas from Mérida, who founded the newspaper Paz y Trabajo in 1904, later continuing on the magazine De Re Indica.
Alma Llanera, known today as the second national anthem of Venezuela, had a great impact that led the dictator Juan Vicente Gómez himself to grant Bolívar Coronado a scholarship to study in Spain.
[25] The Venezuelan artist, antimilitarist and anarchist Mattia Léoni (born in Puerto Cabello in 1897), together with his brother Léonidas, joined the libertarian movement of Tuscany, Italy, at a very young age, where he trained as a sculptor at the Carrara School of Fine Arts.
[26] On July 3, 1918, what Julio Godio called "the first industrial strike in Venezuela" occurred, which involved the workshops of Aroa as well as the transit personnel of The Bolivar Railway Company Limited, where the Italian anarchist Vincenzo Cusatti participated as its leader.
[29] After the end of the Gómez regime, and with the growth of new politicals movements in Venezuela, many libertarian-minded radicals were absorbed by or helped found non-anarchist organizations, as in the case of Pío Tamayo.
In addition to that, he supported a radical democracy and rejected state paternalism such as that represented by the minimum wage, which in his opinion impaired "the capacity for union bargaining and the workers' struggle.
That is when the instances of social change take place.” Faced with the failure of the armed struggle in Venezuela, important leaders of the Revolutionary Left Movement such as Domingo Alberto Rangel and Simón Sáez Mérida began a process of radicalization.
[34] On the other hand, some politicians with a libertarian orientation —especially of Hispanic anarcho-syndicalist inspiration— such as Francisco Olivo, Pedro Bernardo Pérez Salinas and Salom Mesa were members of the Democratic Action party, when it had a more popular inclination.
The CRA, which restyled itself the Collective Editorship in 2007, opposes the Chavismo and Bolivarian Revolution of former President Hugo Chávez, the Fifth Republic Movement, and its successor the United Socialist Party of Venezuela.
Unlike the CRA and El Libertario, the group took firmly pro-Boliviarian stances, stating that it supported the "Bolivarian process critically as radical militants of the Social revolution".
[37] In his later years, the long-standing Marxist Domingo Alberto Rangel collaborated with the anarchist newspaper El Libertario,[38] and in an interview in 2011 he stated that "the new paradigm is anarchism."
[40] In October 2013, Chávez's successor, President Nicolás Maduro, accused unionist workers of the SIDOR steel company of being behind regional unemployment, denouncing them as "anarcho-syndicalist populists".
