Communist Party of Venezuela

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Communist Party of Venezuela Partido Comunista de Venezuela
Governors of States of Venezuela		0 / 23
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Website
www.pcv-venezuela.org
Politics of Venezuela Political parties Elections

The Communist Party of Venezuela (

The PCV was founded in 1931 as a clandestine organization during the military dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez. It was initially led by Juan Bautista Fuenmayor and Francisco José "Kotepa" Delgado [es]. The PCV became the Venezuelan affiliate of the Communist International. A forerunner of the PCV, the Venezuelan Revolutionary Party, had been founded in exile in Mexico in 1926 and attempted a rebellion in Venezuela in 1929.

The PCV remained an illegal organization until 1941, when it entered into an alliance with the progressive military regime of Isaías Medina Angarita, following orders from Comintern for communist parties throughout the world to support governments that aided the allied war effort. During this time it published the weekly newspaper ¡Aquí Está!. The PCV was outlawed during the conservative military dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez (1948–1958), when it played a key role in organizing the clandestine resistance to the regime, alongside activist from the (also banned) party Democratic Action.

In 1952, despite remaining an illegal organization, PCV provided key support to the non-communist leftist party URD in elections organized by the military regime to legitimize its rule. When URD's election victory became apparent, the military ordered the ballot counting process stopped and refused to accept its defeat at the hands of the communist-supported opposition. The episode shifted the balance of power in the military from relative moderates to the hard-line faction led by Marcos Pérez Jiménez, which substantially stepped up efforts to repress the clandestine opposition.

The PCV was not included in the power-sharing 1958 Puntofijo Pact that would underpin the country's transition to democracy. Appearing on a Venezuelan election ballot for the first time in the 1958 election, PCV backed the candidacy of URD's Wolfgang Larrazábal and received 3.2% of the vote (84,451 votes), contributing towards Larrazábal's total of 34.88%. The figure understates the party's influence in Venezuelan politics at the time, which stemmed less from its mass support than from its highly disciplined internal organization, including many full-time party organizers, and its ideological and financial ties to the Soviet Union.

In the early 1960s, inspired by the

During the Bolivarian era

In the presidential elections of 1998, the PCV backed Hugo Chávez adding 81,979 votes (1.25% of the national vote) to Chávez's total of 3,673,685 votes. In the 2006 presidential election, the PCV ticket received 2.9% of the National vote, contributing a haul of 342,227 to Chávez's total of 7,309,080 votes. These results make PCV the 4th largest party in the Chávez coalition. Following the December 2005 legislative election, eight PCV members were elected as deputies to the National Assembly: Roberto Hernández, Diluvina Cabello, Germán Ferrer, Oscar Figuera, Edgar Lucena, Chiche Manaure, Omar Marcano, and David Velásquez. The PCV has articulated its belief that the transition to socialism in Venezuela will be slow and evolutionary. The party was a small but vocal part of the Chávez governing coalition.

In the presidential elections of 2012, PCV again backed Chavez. Its ticket contributed 3.28% of the National vote, making PCV the second largest party in the Chavez coalition. The PCV won 1.6% in the

The PCV publishes Debate Abierto (Open Debate), edited by Carolus Wimmer, and Tribuna Popular (Popular Tribune). The youth wing of PCV is Juventud Comunista de Venezuela (Communist Youth of Venezuela).

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Communist Party of Venezuela.

• (in Spanish) Official website
• (in Spanish) Manifesto of PCV (1931)
• (in Spanish) Communiques concerning the coup of 1945