Key Venezuelan Socialist Leader Resigns

In an interview with Diario Panorama, the former vice president of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), Alberto Muller Rojas, announced he was resigning from politics.

Alberto Muller Rojas (archive).

Mérida, March 29th 2010 (Venezuelanalysis.com) – In an interview with Diario Panorama, the former vice president of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), Alberto Muller Rojas, announced he was resigning from politics.

Muller Rojas said that the revolutionary process over the last three months had been “wretched… everything that is going on isn’t healthy for the revolutionary process.”

He said there were “bourgeoisie” in the PSUV and that the government was turning away from internationalism, towards “petty bourgeois nationalism.”

Muller Rojas also said opposition political parties, which hold substantially less voter support than the PSUV according to opinion polls, had no chance of winning a majority in the National Assembly in the upcoming September elections.

Born in 1935, Muller Rojas is a retired general in the armed forces and has a long history of participating in left wing politics. In 1997 he joined the Homeland for All Party (PPT) and in 1998 headed up current president Hugo Chavez’s election campaign. In 1999 he was designated as Venezuelan ambassador to Chile, later returning to be part of the Chief Staff of the Armed Forces, and at the start of 2008 Chavez appointed him as first vice-president of the PSUV.

He is also well remembered for warning that Chavez was surrounded by a “nest of scorpions,” pointing out then Defence Minister Raul Baduel, who months later went over to side with the rightwing opposition. He has also clashed with Chavez over the issue of the politicisation of the military.

Muller Rojas, 75, has also been very sick lately, frequently relying on a wheelchair.