LONDON: Pilin Leon, a former Miss Venezuela, was busy judging the Miss World competition in London on Saturday when the oil tanker that bears her name, illegally at anchor in Lake Maracaibo, was being boarded by Venezuelan marines. The end of history was supposed to mean an end to class struggle, but the current political conflict in Venezuela suggests that it is alive and well.

When the captain of the Pilin Leon first dropped anchor, he was expressing his solidarity with the anti-government strike in Caracas. Enterprising reporters on the Maracaibo newspaper, Panorama, rang members of the tanker’s crew on their mobiles and found that they were not backing the strike and, indeed, were hostile to their captain’s piratical action. When the marines boarded the ship, only the captain needed to be replaced.

For the past year or more, Venezuela’s upper and middle classes, opposed to Hugo Chavez’s government, have protested in the wealthy new neighbourhoods of Caracas, while the poor (the vast majority of the city’s population) have come from their shantytowns and demonstrated to defend “their” president.

Chavez celebrated four years in power at the weekend, at the end of a week-long insurrectionary strike designed to force him to resign, and so far he has displayed a Houdini-like capacity to escape from tight situations. In April, a similar scenario led to a brief coup d’etat, from which he was rescued by an alliance between the poor and the armed forces, and this time, the president says, he will not allow himself to be surprised.

The opposition has been hoping to repeat in December what it failed to achieve in April, but the situation is no longer the same. The armed forces are now more solidly behind the president than before. The most conservative generals no longer hold important commands; those involved in the April coup attempt have all been sent into retirement.

The international situation is different, too. The US welcomed the April coup, but this time, with more important problems elsewhere, Washington is being more circumspect. It has publicly thrown its weight behind the negotiations being conducted by Cesar Gaviria, the Colombian ex-president who leads the Organization of American States.

Perhaps even more significant than the changing attitude of the military and of the US is the fact that the poor are more mobilized now, to such an extent that there is talk of a possible civil war. Until the April coup, the poor had voted for Chavez repeatedly, but his revolutionary programme was directed from above, without much popular participation.

The opposition’s protest marches have now conjured up a phenomenon that most of the middle and upper classes might have preferred to have left sleeping — the spectre of a class and race war.

The trump card of the opposition, in April as in December, has been the state-owned oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela, often described as the fifth largest oil exporter in the world, and an important supplier to the US. Nationalised over 25 years ago, it has been run over the years for the exclusive benefit of its employees and managers — its profits being invested everywhere except Venezuela. Before the arrival of Chavez, it was being prepared for privatization, to the satisfaction of the engineers and directors who would have benefited. But with a block placed on privatization by the new Venezuelan constitution, the company’s middle class and prosperous elite has been happy to be used as a shock weapon by the leaders of the Pinochet-style opposition, and they have tried to bring their entire industry to a halt.

The vital task for Chavez is to bring the oil company back under government control, replacing the conservative management with the radical executives who had been forced out in earlier internal struggles. If he is to support the crews loyal to the government on tankers such as the Pilin Leon, he may yet need to impose a state of emergency to regain the upper hand.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.