Stoking Separatism In Venezuela

By José Steinsleger
April 13, 2007
La Jornada
ZMAG

After failing in the different options of delegitimising the government of President Hugo Chavez (coup d’état, media war, petroleum sabotage, assassination, disregarding electoral results), some sectors of Venezuela’s “democratic” opposition have started to unfurl the cause of Zulia (Venezuelan province with most of the oil deposits).

Before a widespread sentiment of “Zulia-ness” has taken root, it is being nourished by Rumbio Propio (Own Course), a movement of super-democratic folk who are trying, as they say, to make the petroleum-rich state of (with Maracaibo, the second city of the country, as the capital) into “the Hong Kong of Latin America”.

Rumbo is hardly “original”: it believes in “true, classical liberalism”, understands the Right as the “political side that defends and listens to human rights and liberties, individual and economic” and is (it goes without saying) “… against totalitarianism of any sort and side”.

In the presidential elections last November, Rumbo supported the state governor, Manuel Rosales, who in April 2002 openly supported the coup by the businessman, Pedro Carmona.

In his campaign team, Rosales counted on the help of two figures: Commissioner Henry López Sisco (CIA agent responsible for various massacres during the government of Jaime Lusinchi 1984-88) and the pathetic Teodoro Petkoff, former guerrilla who claims to be misunderstood by “leftists and rightists”.

The separatist climate of Rumbo and the “Zulia patriots” is expressed in billboards, tee shirts showing maps of the “independent republic”, Press articles, web pages and confused declarations of academics selected to manipulate the history of the region.

The writer Luis Britto García remembers that during the coup of April 2002, the commentator, Victor Manuel García (a firm supporter of “globalisation”) shouted on television: “Why not? Bolívar, independent! Cojedes (Venezuelan region), Independent! Zulia, Independent!”

On October 26, 2003, the anti-Chavez newspaper, La Verdad (The Truth), interviewed Julio Portillo, head of the School of Political Science at the private Rafael Urdaneta University.

In the text, the professor supported the idea of a “region autonomous before independence”; later he contradicted it and underscored the “resemblance” of Zulia with Quebec and Panama. Finally, Portillo proposed a consultative referendum on independence with the “argument” that Zulia would be a nation “… because of its riches”.

In 2005, the head of Political Science at Zulia University, Lucrecia Morales, urged the delinking of the state from “this government (of Chavez) and to do it through the route of “definitive emancipation”.

And the geniuses of Washington keep on hoping, thinking that “Zulia-ness” could drive to an independence of the type in Panama (1903) without having learnt anything, it seems, from the defeat at Bay of the Pigs (Cuba, 1961).

Exploiting the mean spirit of the nationalists, Washington’s Ambassador in Caracas, William Bromfield, embarked on a series of visits to governor Rosales.

In Maraicabo, he said: "Twenty-five years ago I lived for two years in the ‘independent western republic of Zulia’ and know perfectly what it means to be in a heated climate”.

A little before the elections, Bromfield spoke of opening a consulate and of the possible signing by Zulia of a bilateral (sic) agreement with the United States. The declaration of someone who is seen as the head of the “democratic opposition” in Venezuela led to widespread denunciation among the Deputies and politicians.

The newspaper VEA of Caracas hinted at a possible plan “… to create artificial frontiers that would lead to a State without a country between Venezuela and Colombia, whose mission is to take hostage Zulia and bestow on it a euphemistic independence by the agents of the White House…”

Bromfield, in any case, was not wrongfooting it: lapped by the waters of the Maracaibo lake, three rich Venezuelan states (Zulia, Mérida and Trujillo) border three strategic departments of neighbouring Colombia: Guajira, César and North Santander, points in Pentagon’s counterinsurgency warfare.

Separatism in Zulia should be taken seriously. There are precedent: in 1928, the American financier William Buckley promoted a conspiracy by oil producers to separate Zulia; in 1916, the governor Venancio Pérez Soto defeated an attempted secessionism promoted by the United States petroleum companies; in 1869, governor Venancio Pulgar derecognised the President, José Ruperto Monagas, was defeated and ended up taking refuge in a British warship that was “by chance” observing the insurrection.

Separatism in Zulia is a real story of pirates entrusted with liquidating the Bolivarian project of Chavez. The possible political independence of Zulia would lead to a crisis of unpredictable levels, civil war included.

How many Latin American governments would be disposed to support this separatist adventure?

Well, none to start with…

Translated from Spanish by Supriyo Chatterjee

This article was published in La Jornada, Mexico, on April 11, 2007.