Caracas, 4 December 2006

Compañeras and compañeros!

As you likely know by now, the election went easily and there was an overwhelming victory for President Hugo Chávez (who had 62.89% of the votes, while Manuel Rosales had a mere 36.85%).

Predictably, there were some small attempts to create disturbances by the opposition during the day (for example, an effort to spread concerns that the voting machines had admitted blank ballots sometimes when voters cast their electronic vote for Rosales — in fact they do this but only when a voter purposely casts a null vote and even Rosales took back the accusation shortly afterwards — together with a call for a cacerolazo disrespecting the results emitted by the Consejo Nacional Electoral, etc). Very early, however — around 11:30 pm last night — Rosales admitted defeat. In fact, with the victory so clear and with the majority of the international corporate media having already acknowledged Chávez as the favorite, he had little choice.

In the evening and through the early hours of the morning, there were joyous festivities in Caracas, but especially around Miraflores palace, where hundreds of thousands of people gathered (under the rain) to celebrate the victory of their president and to celebrate the victory of their own protagonic power as revolutionary citizens and voters.

Now will begin the work to make the revolution more profound, while consolidating its enormous successes and defending Bolivarian Venezuela from the ever-present menace of U.S. imperialism. Some of the key tasks that have been identified by revolutionary sectors are:

1. Building a cooperative, socialist, and participatory economy through the mechanism of cooperatives, worker-controlled factories, and the occupation of latifundios.

2. Socialization and democratization of the radioelectric spectrum, which is now mostly in the hands of the corporate media . Many of these enterprises have repeatedly broken Venezuelan law and blatantly lied to the Venezuelan people — to the extent of developing a completely illusory world that has nothing to do with the reality the majority of Venezuelans create through their work and inhabit in their communities. (This includes the de facto denial of the existence of huge sectors of the population and the works of the Venezuelan people and the Bolivarian government, such as the misiones, the schools, and the infrastructural projects including gasification, bridges, metros, railways, and highways). These commercial media enterprises are then guilty of human rights violations under any reasonable interpretation of the latter and should not continue in impunity.

3. Bringing financial operations that are now largely in the control of private banks, most of them Spanish, into the hands of the people and state. Currently private banks reap huge profits from the Venezuelan economy that are in no way returned to the people of Venezuela, making these banks neo-colonial parasites. (Interestingly, the heavy presence of peninsular banking in Venezuela was consolidated in the 1980s with Felipe González's government.)

4. Control of local governments passing into the hands of the communities through the mechanisms of the consejos comunales. The consejos will become a very powerful instrument to fight the bureaucratization that the Bolivarian government has inherited from the Fourth Republic (1958-1998). The people need to make the consejos own, and take control of their communities.

The elections on December 3, 2006 mark a clear victory by and for the Venezuelan people. Obviously, this is a victory they have achieved in the face of constant imperialist aggressions — including an overt mediatic war aiming to distort the Bolivarian process while denying its successes — and in the face of a global ideology which says there is no alternative to capitalism and therefore that the historical project of the working class is not possible.

For this reason — i.e. because the Venezuelan people have already achieved the "impossible" — there is much reason to be confident that the deepening and extension of the revolution in the above ways (and many others) are within reach. Of course this will be criticized by the economic elite of the world and their governments. But, as president reelect Hugo Chávez Frías has said: We are free and the rest doesn't matter! And Ernesto Che Guevara: When the extraordinary becomes quotidian, that is a revolution.

CONGRATULATIONS TO THE PEOPLE OF VENEZUELA!

CONGRATULATIONS TO CITIZEN AND PRESIDENT-RELECT HUGO RAFAEL CHAVEZ FRIAS!

¡HASTA LA VICTORIA SIEMPRE! ¡HASTA EL 2021… EL 2030!