“Government” here also means ordinary people, not an impersonal bureaucratic state, for indeed Chavez has many times called upon the historically-disenfranchised majority to take power into their own hands.
By Delia D. Aguilar
Bulatlat.com
CARACAS, Venezuela – The trip to Venezuela marked the culmination of a college seminar in which I registered along with 16 others here in Connecticut. The course objectives were to comprehend President Hugo Chavez’ “Bolivarian Revolution” and to get a glimpse of the “misiones” that are its backbone. Because mainstream media has nothing but condemnation for Chavez and his projects, we were very interested in finding out what activities the Venezuelan people are engaged in that pose such a huge threat to the West, in particular to the United States.
Landing in Caracas felt much like landing in Manila. The climate is very similar (though perhaps not as humid), as were the buildings and commercial logos. Familiar billboards of Nescafe, Pepsi, etc. were visible from our hotel, serving as landmarks on the occasions that we ventured out on our own. But inhabited by a mere 5 million – Venezuela’s total population is 25 million – Caracas isn’t as crowded as Metro Manila. The affluent in Caracas who comprise a tiny minority are surrounded by the poor who are concentrated in slums along the hillsides. We were taken to one such slum by a former Maryknoll priest from the U.S. who had lived in that neighborhood for many years. That, too, felt like being in Tondo. The priest reminded me of Father Gigi, an Italian priest whom we met in New York not long after he was booted out of Tondo in an army jeep and shoved into a Rome-bound plane by the Marcos dictatorship in the late 1970s
But what was very different from the Philippines are Venezuela’s remarkable misiones and cooperatives. We visited a cooperative that included a garment factory, a shoe factory, and a medical clinic. The latter, especially, impressed all of us, even those in our group whose only point of comparison was the U.S. Furnished with the latest equipment and staffed with doctors trained by Cubans (up to 20,000 Cuban doctors are in Venezuela for this purpose), the clinic had its waiting room filled with patients of all ages, poor patients who were getting medical care at zero cost. Medicine was also dispensed entirely for free. Although not large, the clinic offered dental, pediatric, obstetrical/gynecological, and other specializations; it had X-ray machines and equipment to conduct simple lab tests, and could handle common ailments. What a contrast to our own situation in the Philippines!
