MILLIONS of Venezuelans voted in yesterday’s presidential elections, yet the Western media denounce Venezuela as a dictatorship. Is there political democracy in your country?

When I first visited the UK, the leader of our revolution was still Hugo Chavez. At that time, we had held nine successful elections. The presidential election yesterday was number 32. That’s almost two elections per year! 

In August, there will be a consultation process to ask the local communal organisations in the barrios about their needs and plans in every municipality.

You have witnessed the opposition rally and seen their mobilisation for this election. This is something we celebrate. This is democracy.  Everyone here can participate and disagree, but the majority vote must be respected.

Venezuela has managed to bring about stability and guarantee workers’ rights. Decades of struggle have been transformed into constitutional rights for our people: health, education, housing, food and much more. Few other countries in the world guarantee these rights.

What role does the trade union movement play in mobilising the pro-government vote?

At the last election we managed to mobilise 1.5 million workers. Our aim in this this time round was to mobilise over two million workers, and we are co-ordinating our efforts with each of our individual trade union affiliates in the various sectors.

You can see the people’s passion in Chavista demonstrations. We are seeking to maximise the vote for Nicolas Maduro because we expect the extreme right to cry fraud and threaten violence if they lose. Nicolas is the only candidate that can guarantee peace.

How do you defend the interests of workers when the state you support is also a major employer?

The biggest employer is the state but there is also a strong private sector. We have a fluid relationship with the Venezuelan state, and this has enabled us to defend our interests and foster engage in dialogue to address the problems caused by the US economic blockade of our country.

To give you an idea of what this blockade means, in the last 10 years Venezuela has lost over $642 billion. To surmount that, it’s been necessary to become almost self-sufficient in agricultural and industrial production and goods. We have been able to diversify our economy, so we aren’t solely dependent on revenue from the oil industry. There is also a lot of entrepreneurship.

There has been a catastrophic collapse of wages in recent years. What has caused that and why should workers vote for President Maduro?

The main cause has been the criminal economic blockade which led to the precarisation of labour and a drastic fall of workers’ income. Maduro has been the only one who has guaranteed the purchasing power of workers, which he has done through bonuses and all sorts of other financial mechanisms. He has pegged wages to the US dollar, which has now reached $130.

The government has also distributed what we call the CLAP food box to over seven million families. This has helped families survive the blockade, and now with the economy recovering, the situation is finally getting better for workers.

With inflation now falling to low levels, workers’ purchasing power is increasing. That’s why I have no doubt that us workers will have voted in massive numbers for Nicolas Maduro.

What are the main demands and priorities for your members?

The most important problem is the blockade and the 930 sanctions against our country which has drastically reduced the workers’ incomes. We have endeavoured to increase workers’ purchasing power and guarantee their jobs and stability. We are doing all of this in the context of a crisis deliberately engineered by the United States. 

I think the first thing is prevent any kind of privatisation and stop any attempt to dismantle the state bequeathed us by Hugo Chavez.

Our priority is to defend what we have won. The programme of the opposition is more privatisation and more precarisation, and we will never accept that.

That’s why we have turned out en masse to vote for Nicolas Maduro, a former bus driver and the first ever working-class president.