 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we have with us Professor Sonia Gupta, who is the director at the Center for European and Latin American Studies at Jamia Milla University. Welcome Professor. Professor, talking about Venezuela, the Constituent Assembly election were held on 30 July 2017. What has progressed after that? Yes, I think the July 30th elections to the National Constituent Assembly or the ANC as it is popularly known, I think really a watershed. Because just before that we had seen four months, 120 days of violence with these armed groups called guarimbas, you know, the street violence that Venezuela had witnessed and which was accompanied by a huge propaganda campaign against the Maduro government and against the Bolivarian process itself. The entire violence has just stopped after the National Constituent Assembly. So that goes on to show that the kind of attack that Venezuela is facing is actually a hybrid attack. It is not the, it is a non-conventional war. So you have this entire media, the foreign media was there and you know at appropriate times taking, clicking the pictures of the violence and you know the entire world thinking that Venezuela was on the brink of a crisis, that there was chaos. And it is so interesting to see that just after July 30th, the violence has stopped. So why has that happened? One is the ANC itself was thought of as a democratic exit out of the impasse in which the, you know, there was a kind of a constitutional impasse because there was a National Assembly which had been elected in December 2015 with a majority going to the opposition. But there were some legal issues because of which the Supreme Court of Venezuela had objected to, you know, some of the parliamentarians who had been found to use fraudulent methods and therefore they were debarred from the assembly. The opposition had basically made this an issue that, you know, we are not being allowed to run the National Assembly. But the main aim of the opposition was to ask the ouster of Nicolás Madur and their main aim is to finish away with Chavís more. Now the Constituent Assembly itself, if you see it has been done in accordance with the 1999 constitution which was, you know, kind of done under the visionary leadership of Hugo Chávez just after he took office and it talks about the Constituent Assembly as an integral part of popular power. So the referendums that often held the changes in constitution through Constituent Assemblies as a very much a part of the Bolivarian Constitution. And this particular Constituent Assembly, as you know, has about 540 odd members and it is not the usual election. It is through sectoral representation. So they are from the youth, from women's organizations, from trade unions, from fishermen's organizations and so on so forth. Once this assembly was sworn in and this happened on 1st August, the important thing was that the July 30th election saw a massive turnout of the Venezuelan people. Some 41% of the eligible electorate participated in the election to the Constituent Assembly. Now that really was something which the opposition had never thought would happen, you know, and so we saw a resurgent Chavís more kind of asserting itself and people actually came out to vote. So the Constituent Assembly kind of established in a certain way the legitimacy of Chavís more in the eyes of international observers as well as within the country. So after that, what has happened is that there have been offers of a dialogue with the opposition. So the Constituent Assembly has been given the charge of drafting out a new constitution plus, you know, modifying the education plan and so on so forth and they have been working at the grass root level with people and, you know, talking to the communes and to the communal councils and so on so forth. At the governmental level, there has been an attempt to restart the dialogue. Now the Maduro government has always been keen on holding a dialogue with the opposition and it is the opposition which has been shying away from all dialogue because their entire emphasis has been on the ouster of Maduro and that has been their only demand that Nicolás Maduro has to go. Now Nicolás Maduro has his presidential term up till 2018. There is a presidential election coming up. In fact, there is an entire chronogram of elections in Venezuela now October 15th. We have the regional elections that is election to the governors of the 23 provinces which are scheduled and then of course and again in December and then 2018. After the death of Hugo Chavez and as soon as Nicolás Maduro took over the presidency in April 2014, there has been an increased violence on the streets, you know. So it was, you've seen just after his election about 43 people died and it was much more this time and it was of course localised. For example in the eastern side of Caracas and a few other provinces. The international media of course played it up. It was not only there in the big media but also you know in the social media and Facebook and particularly WhatsApp messages. Suddenly my students were talking about ma'am you are talking about the Bolivarian Revolution and its you know achievements and here we have you are saying it's a democracy and there is so much violence going on and so on so forth. So it was an absolutely state of art technology being used all you know with full support of globalised communications. So when I say that there was a hybrid war against Venezuela and the ANC election has been a kind of a breather because that kind of attempt to discredit the Maduro government and of course this absolute huge propaganda war through transnational media houses and through social media etc. seems to have suddenly stopped. A different narrative has started you know of human rights and so on so forth but the ANC has given a big breather to the Venezuelan government and certainly to the people. With the Hugo Chavez the world had hoped for a government for the people. It has really hoped for a government which is with the people. Do you think Venezuela paves the way for a new model of democracy? That's exactly what it is you know and that is why it is so dangerous that is why the Venezuelan model is a threat because if you look at President Chavez his own emergence as a leader was not just that there was a leader and then he took the masses with him. In fact there Venezuela had a very strong you know currents of various social movements different the 23rd January and in fact this wonderful book by George Chica Alomair where he talks about where the title of the book is We Made Chavez. So so really in Venezuela as well as I think even in Bolivia and Ecuador and many other parts of Latin America including Brazil I think we have to talk about a democracy from below because it was the entire it was through the hemispheric alliances which had been established during the world social forum. Do you know during those 90s starting with the rebellion the Chiapas rebellion in Mexico the entire current of social movements and indigenous assertion that swept across Latin America. Now that was the basis of Latin American integration and the pink tide the so-called pink tide. So it is not so these ushering in all these leaders and particularly of Hugo Chavez in the you know the way he was has to do with the strong social movements in many of these Latin American countries. So why was there a need for new constitutions in many of these countries. Ecuador had a referendum and you know public participation and a new constituent assembly. Bolivia had the similar thing and Venezuela the very first thing that President Chavez did was what I have already referred to the 1999 constitution which why was it needed because here was a new model of democracy being being constructed where the backbone of the Venezuelan democracy is the communes the communal councils. So it's a highly decentralized system where the communal councils have at least were very strong over the last one year one has seen a kind of an erosion of the kind of empowerment one saw through the communal councils but the fact is that Hugo Chavez had this vision to see that a participatory democracy is actually you know going to be possible only if you think of the people's power as supreme. So that went into the constitution that has the constitutional level and at the theoretical level I would like to cite Alvaro Garcia-Lenera the vice president of Bolivia who you know talking about democracy in talking about democracies in revolution you know that Latin American democracies in revolution said that democracy is a site it is the locus of building socialism the more radical your democracy the better you are on the road to building socialism. So this kind of gradualism that is being seen in these new experiments with building socialism which are not through like 1960s the Cuban revolution which was through the you know capture of state power through an armed uprising. Here in whether it is an Ecuador or Bolivia particularly in Venezuela it is through elections and if it is going to be through elections it has a different essence altogether. So democracy is not something to be impatient with you know that soon this transitional phase will be over and we will build socialism I think democracy is being looked at at the very site as the space as the locus of building socialism. You said about people's power as supreme normally when we talk about military and politics in the context of Latin America or many other countries we see military dictatorship but Venezuelan army is a different case there are quite interesting facts so how it is related to people and how the close relation between people and army. Yeah actually this is a singular feature of the Bolivarian revolution what they call the Unión Cívico Militar that is the civil military union partly one has to see that the entire discourse of the Bolivarian process is rooted in you know in Boliva's dream of one of Latin American integration and also his the anti-imperialism you know as much against Spanish imperialism as against the nascent United States imperialism. So the Bolivarian army draws its legacy from the figure of Simone Boliva and from that tradition of that anti-imperialist tradition you'll be surprised that this time when I went to Caracas I participated in with the army the entire army it's known as the Fuerza Nacional Bolivariana so which means Bolivarian national armed forces so they are they talk about and they were they were celebrating the second anti-imperialist forum so it's an army which is very different from the usual conception of the army have particularly when we think of Latin America as you rightly said you think of Latin America and you think of the military and you think of dictatorships but here is an army which traditionally I mean after all Hugo Chavez himself was from the armed forces the Bolivarian armed forces in fact I must correct myself it's not the Bolivarian armed forces because Hugo Chavez insisted that it's the armed force one united armed force and I must also tell you that I was talking about the civil military union somewhere and I said that the Bolivarian armies with the government and the ambassador of Venezuela immediately corrected me and he said no it is not with the government it is with the people and I think this was something which was slightly difficult for me to understand till I went recently to the military university it's a university where the armed forces people study along with the civilian populations like any other university more importantly the the conception of defense of the country that the task of the defense of the country is not just of the army but of the people as such that it's the entire people so there isn't much differentiation in terms of you know the role of the army as protecting the borders etc only the army is integrally linked to the people's processes and takes part in it like any other civilian population would recently the US president Donald Trump he threatened Venezuela with military action these are the times when do you think that a global solidarity is required to stand with Venezuela absolutely Venezuela represents the hope for humanity at the moment I would say because the Venezuelan experiment with building socialism within the democracy is of unique importance to all of us who live in democracies around in the world and who believe in in peace and democracy the military option that President Trump talked about was only recent but they have been at war with Venezuela they have tried diplomatic isolation they have tried through the organization of American states as you know President Hugo Chavez had visualized this attack you know and therefore he had emphasized on Latin American integration the economic sabotage and I have already talked about the media war so unlike the military coups that were attempted earlier what are being attempted now are soft coups and the whole idea is to destabilize the government discredit the government and as in Trump's own words suffocate the Venezuelan economy and make the people so distraught that they would just out of sheer just give up on the Chavez more and you know just want to get out of this situation so this and and all of this coupled with this discourse of humanitarian crisis in Venezuela so in face of all this Venezuela today has been able to not only survive but survive well because of international solidarity and this international solidarity has come apart from people solidarity also for example in the United Nations the recent General Assembly the entire NAMM block 120 member states voted for a resolution against coercive measures they did not name Venezuela but it was very clear that 120 member NAMM had voted against coercive measures and interference in the sovereign countries Cuba in the UN Human Rights Commission moved a resolution on Venezuela human rights and it was supported by 63 countries including India but I think more important than these are is the solidarity of of the people's movements the solidarity of of people who believe that that that there is hope in this new model of democracy which Venezuelan people are trying to build and that they should be given a chance without this kind of a foreign you know intervention and attempts at suffocating the experiment we just participated in the solidarity conference there was an international solidarity summit in Caracas in between September 16th and 19th and there were about 200 participants from more than 60 countries from all the five continents and these were peace activists grassroot trade unionist grassroot leaders and even religious leaders coming from churches because one of the interesting features of the Bolivarian process has been that the hierarchy the church hierarchy has been siding with the opposition but the people are very religious and the entire discourse of Hugo Chavez was about a Christian socialism and so several religious leaders were present in this international summit for solidarity which was called Todos Somos Venezuela which means all of us are Venezuela a dialogue for peace democracy and Bolivarian revolution and Bolivarian democracy all Latin American countries by the way have pronounced themselves against the use of military in Venezuela even the allies of US so I think that is what the international solidarity has been able to achieve and we have to continue with it. Thank you Professor Sonia Gupta for speaking to New Slick.