Published Date: 05 August 2009

By JAIRO LUGO IN CARACAS

THE tide is slowly turning against President Hugo Chavez. Venezuela's 21st-century socialist revolution is under threat, as many hospitals have effectively collapsed, crime is out of control and, for the first time in ten years, absolute poverty is making a comeback.

After a decade of broken promises, the unions are up in arms again. Last week, workers at a recently nationalised steel factory in the east region of Guayana went on strike for unpaid wages. On the other side of the country, in the state of Zulia, more than 20,000 former oil-services workers of the companies expropriated by the state this year are leading massive rallies and protests. They want their jobs back.

Even the doctors and nurses on the government's Barrio Adentro programme to provide medical aid to shanty towns are calling for better working conditions.

In Guarenas, 20 miles from Caracas, things are no different. It was here that the riots of 1989, which broke the backbone of the old regime, started. Streets are closed and piled with burning tyres. Gangs rob, shoot and kill.

"It is commonplace, I am afraid," says Mario Labarca, 46, a conductor. "We know when we are leaving the house in the morning, but frankly we don't know if we will return."

He shows me a revolver he has stowed under his car seat. "I've been robbed twice, but it won't happen a third time," he said. "This time it's me or them."

The number of murders in Venezuela has soared from fewer than 6,000 during Mr Chavez's first year in office to more than 13,000 last year, according to official figures.

Yet despite a steady decline in support, the outspoken anti-US president still has a strong support base among the poor. He is widely regarded as having improved the lives of the majority poor through oil-funded social programmes.

And his officials among the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) are adamant that the problems are under control, with false images being orchestrated by the mainstream media.

The national prosecutor, Luisa Ortega Diaz, has proposed a "Law of Media Crimes" to regulate all content of all media outlets. Journalists who give an opinion based on "wrong facts" – including crime reporting – will be deemed criminals and jailed for up to six years.

As the government controls more than 90 per cent of the parliament, it is almost certain this law will be passed.

The government, says Andres Cañizalez, a professor of media studies in Caracas, is imposing a wall to surround the independent media. It is reforming the broadcasting legislation and implementing a series of measures to limit freedom of expression. Prof Cañizalez believes that worse is yet to come.

However, for Gustavo Azócar, an old friend of mine from the University of Zulia, where we both studied journalism, things already are as bad as they can get. Last Tuesday he was sent to prison for the second time in less than four years.

Gustavo shares the fate of more than two dozen journalists who are in jail, have had to leave the country, or were made to resign from their jobs because of political pressure.

For Víctor Moreno, president of Fetrabolívar, one of the largest unions in the country, it is game over.

"We need to assume the fact that the revolutionary dream of ten years ago is now effectively dead," he said. "We in the workers' movement should take our tools and start rebuilding our political capital for what is coming in the future."

For the first time in many years, this seething unrest in Venezuela could hand the opposition a real chance to make inroads in the parliament.

If that happens, says Heinz Dieterich, the German-Mexican sociologist who is one of the most important international voices in favour of Hugo Chavez's regime, "that will be the end of the Bolivarian Revolution as we know it."

And this looming media blackout means the failure of Venezuela's revolution will not be televised, although everyone can see it.

• Dr Jairo Lugo is a former war correspondent, now lecturing in media studies at Stirling University.

CRACKDOWN ON BROADCASTERS

TENSIONS have been running high at Globovision, a TV channel that overtly criticises President Hugo Chavez. Government supporters, waving the flags of a radical pro-Chavez party, threw tear-gas canisters at the station on Monday.

Yesterday, Globovision director Alberto Federico Ravell condemned the violence and urged Mr Chavez to control his backers.

On Friday, Diosdado Cabello, the minister who heads Venezuela's telecoms agency, announced the decision to force 34 radio stations off the air. Denying the government was trying to silence its critics, he said the stations violated regulations by allowing their licenses to expire. Another 200 radio stations are at risk.

Mr Chavez has defended the decision as part of a "struggle against the media war, against the lies of the bourgeoisie and the oligarchy".