Maria Pilar Garcia Guadilla is Professor and Researcher at the Simon Bolivar University, Caracas, Venezuela (see: http://www.anarkismo.net/article/16312 ).
Professor Maria Pilar Garcia Guadilla on the contradictions of asserted eco-socialism in oil-rich Venezuela (2010): “Some of the most significant socio-environmental conflicts of this decade in Venezuela have to do with the negative impacts of oil exploitation and mining, and the potential impacts associated with energy mega-projects, proposed both nationally and internationally, to supposedly reduce the U.S. dependence and achieving the integration of Latin America and the Caribbean by the now called Bolivarian Alliance for Our Americas People (ALBA). The Bolivarian Development Model has been defined discursively by Government spokesmen including President Chavez as "sustainable, endogenous, equitable and participatory" … The electoral tender made in 1998 by the then presidential candidate Hugo Chavez to support the struggles that environmentalists and indigenous were doing at the time around their conflicts, along with his environmental sustainability speech and criticism of the "neo-liberalism and wild capitalism ", created an expectation among the social movements that if he became president would set a vision more consonant with environmental sustainable development. However, these expectations were frustrated because according to the announcement made in 2005 by President Chavez, it is contemplated to double the oil production for 2012 through the exploitation of 500,000 km2 of marine platform and over 500,000 km2 in mainland, plus the construction of new refineries and a gas complex in the Gulf of Paria. Other activities included in those development plans are mining extractions in the Imataca Forest Reserve, the substantial increase in coal mining in the Sierra de Perija … Venezuela is a country of mining and extractive industry economy, whose model development has been based on the exploitation of oil and other non renewable natural resources that causes strong impacts on the environment...The construction of the XXI Century Eco-socialism in Venezuela passes, first, to overcome the deep gap between the rhetoric discourse and the reality of the development model; secondly, it requires that the desirable model of civilization is built collectively and not to be imposed from above as in the present and, finally, that his source of inspiration is the transition to a post-petroleum society, such as the one envisioned by Salvador De La Plaza, an eminent Venezuelan historian and politician, who warned about the harmful effects of oil and the need to control them to achieve national sovereignty. He implicitly noted that the oil industry to be sustainable requires that the environment benefits and costs arising from the exploitation of hydrocarbons needs to be listed in the "accounting" not only economically but also cultural and socio-environmental. This view is not very different from Kovel & Lowry (2002) who in their Eco-socialist Manifesto indicate that a society with a high degree of harmony with nature should lead to "the extinction of dependence of the fossil fuels”, which they considered attached to industrial capitalism. Get rid of this dependence "can provide material base for the liberation of the oppressed countries by oil imperialism "and reduce global warming and other problems arising from the ecological crisis.” [1].
[1]. English translation of article by Maria Pilar Garcia Guadilla “Venezuela: the myth of “Eco-socialism of the XX1 century”” in El Libertario # 58, March-April 2010, Anarkismo, 13 April 2010: http://www.anarkismo.net/article/16312 ; revised excerpt from a longer article appeared in Spanish in the Journal of Economics and Social Sciences (FACES-UCV) entitled "XXI Century Eco-socialism and Bolivarian Development Model: the myths of environmental sustainability and participatory democracy in Venezuela ", 2009, vol. 15, No. 1, pp.187-223 (see: http://www.scielo.org.ve/pdf/rvecs/v15n1/art10.pdf ).