http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=82190&d=14&m=5&y=2006&pix=opinion.jpg&category=Opinion
Sunday, 14, May, 2006 (16, Rabi` al-Thani, 1427)
Chavez's Threat: Alternative of a Decent Society
John Pilger, The Guardian
I have spent the past three weeks filming in the hillside barrios of
Caracas, in streets and breezeblock houses that defy gravity and torrential
rain and emerge at night like fireflies in the fog. Caracas is said to be one
of the world's toughest cities, yet I have known no fear; the poorest have
welcomed my colleagues and me with a warmth characteristic of ordinary
Venezuelans but also with the unmistakable confidence of a people who know that
change is possible and who, in their everyday lives, are reclaiming noble
concepts long emptied of their meaning in the West: "reform," "popular
democracy," "equity," "social justice" and, yes, "freedom."
The other night, in a room bare except for a single fluorescent tube, I
heard these words spoken by the likes of Ana Lucia Fernandez, aged 86,
Celedonia Oviedo, aged 74, and Mavis Mendez, aged 95. A mere 33-year-old, Sonia
Alvarez, had come with her two young children. Until about a year ago, none of
them could read and write; now they are studying mathematics. For the first
time in its modern era, Venezuela has almost 100 percent literacy.
This achievement is due to a national program, called Mision Robinson,
designed for adults and teenagers previously denied an education because of
poverty. Mision Ribas is giving everyone a secondary school education, called a
bachillerato. (The names Robinson and Ribas refer to Venezuelan independence
leaders from the 19th century.) Named, like much else here, after the great
liberator Simon Bolivar, "Bolivarian," or people's, universities have opened,
introducing, as one parent told me, "treasures of the mind, history and music
and art, we barely knew existed." Under Hugo Chavez, Venezuela is the first
major oil producer to use its oil revenue to liberate the poor.
Mavis Mendez has seen, in her 95 years, a parade of governments preside
over the theft of tens of billions of dollars in oil spoils, much of it flown
to Miami, together with the steepest descent into poverty ever known in Latin
America; from 18 percent in 1980 to 65 percent in 1995, three years before
Chavez was elected. "We didn't matter in a human sense," she said. "We lived
and died without real education and running water, and food we couldn't afford.
When we fell ill, the weakest died. In the east of the city, where the mansions
are, we were invisible, or we were feared. Now I can read and write my name,
and so much more; and whatever the rich and their media say, we have planted
the seeds of true democracy, and I am full of joy that I have lived to witness
it."
Latin American governments often give their regimes a new sense of
legitimacy by holding a constituent assembly that drafts a new constitution.
When he was elected in 1998, Chavez used this brilliantly to decentralize, to
give the impoverished grass roots power they had never known and to begin to
dismantle a corrupt political superstructure as a prerequisite to changing the
direction of the economy. His setting-up of misions as a means of bypassing
saboteurs in the old, corrupt bureaucracy was typical of the extraordinary
political and social imagination that is changing Venezuela peacefully. This is
his "Bolivarian revolution," which, at this stage, is not dissimilar to the
postwar European social democracies.
Chavez, a former army major, was anxious to prove he was not yet another
military "strongman." He promised that his every move would be subject to the
will of the people. In his first year as president in 1999, he held an
unprecedented number of votes: a referendum on whether or not people wanted a
new constituent assembly; elections for the assembly; a second referendum
ratifying the new constitution - 71 percent of the people approved each of the
396 articles that gave Mavis and Celedonia and Ana Lucia, and their children
and grandchildren, unheard-of freedoms, such as Article 123, which for the
first time recognized the human rights of mixed-race and black people, of whom
Chavez is one. "The indigenous peoples," it says, "have the right to maintain
their own economic practices, based on reciprocity, solidarity and exchange ...
and to define their priorities ... " The little red book of the Venezuelan
Constitution became a bestseller on the streets. Nora Hernandez, a community
worker in Petare barrio, took me to her local state-run supermarket, which is
funded entirely by oil revenue and where prices are up to half those in the
commercial chains. Proudly, she showed me articles of the constitution written
on the backs of soap-powder packets. "We can never go back," she said.
In La Vega barrio, I listened to a nurse, Mariella Machado, a big round
black woman of 45 with a wonderfully wicked laugh, stand and speak at an urban
land council on subjects ranging from homelessness to the Iraq war. That day,
they were launching Mision Madres de Barrio, a program aimed specifically at
poverty among single mothers. Under the constitution, women have the right to
be paid as carers, and can borrow from a special women's bank. From next month,
the poorest housewives will get about £120 a month. It is not surprising that
Chavez has now won eight elections and referendums in eight years, each time
increasing his majority, a world record. He is the most popular head of state
in the Western hemisphere, probably in the world. That is why he survived,
amazingly, a Washington-backed coup in 2002. Mariella and Celedonia and Nora
and hundreds of thousands of others came down from the barrios and demanded
that the army remain loyal. "The people rescued me," Chavez told me. "They did
it with all the media against me, preventing even the basic facts of what had
happened. For popular democracy in heroic action, I suggest you need look no
further."
Chavez is, of course, a threat, especially to the United States. Like the
Sandinistas in Nicaragua, who based their revolution on the English cooperative
moment, and the moderate Allende in Chile, he offers the threat of an
alternative way of developing a decent society: in other words, the threat of a
good example in a continent where the majority of humanity has long suffered a
Washington-designed peonage. In the US media in the 1980s, the "threat" of tiny
Nicaragua was seriously debated until it was crushed. Venezuela is clearly
being "softened up" for something similar. A US Army publication, Doctrine for
Asymmetric War against Venezuela, describes Chavez and the Bolivarian
revolution as the "largest threat since the Soviet Union and communism."
When I said to Chavez that the US historically had had its way in Latin
America, he replied: "Yes, and my assassination would come as no surprise. But
the empire is in trouble, and the people of Venezuela will resist an attack. We
ask only for the support of all true democrats."
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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