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.
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Venezuelan President
Hugo Chavez addresses a rally in Caracas, Venezuela. Photo courtesy of
Reuters |
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!
Both the shoe and garment factories were clean, spacious,
and airy, quite unlike the factories I'd visited outside Manila. Like most
shoe and garment factories, the majority of the workers were women. In the
garment factory the conventional gender division of labor prevailed; that
is, the cutters were men. What departed from convention was that the
cutters were not paid more than the sewers. But the most unusual sight for
me was that of women working together on a whole outfit, rather than each
sewer being confined to, say, sewing only a sleeve or a collar. One could
see how labor here was not alienated, the workers themselves deciding how
they would go about the production process. Our guide, a journalist, told
us that these women came from neighboring slums who were working for the
first time and, under no pressure by a supervisor, tended to work at a
leisurely pace.
Free food
Nearby was a government-subsidized food cooperative that
sold basic foodstuff for half the price. We walked through the aisles
poring over the food products and toiletries and making a few purchases.
We learned that almost half the population procures food at subsidized
prices, and one million get food for free. Add that to the fact that 17
million are for the first time receiving universal health care and free
medicine, and it is clear that this was a government determined to meet
the needs of the majority, not the privileged few.
We visited the new Bolivarian University that is located in
what were formerly the central offices of PdVSA, Venezuela's oil company.
Ironically, these offices constituted the nerve center of planning for the
aborted coup in April 2002 (engineered with thinly-veiled U.S. support)
and, in December of the same year, a work stoppage intended to cripple the
Chavez government. Now they had become the site for the construction of an
alternative worldview, a transformation that is necessary if the
Bolivarian ideals are to take hold. In line with the goals of the
Bolivarian Revolution, the new University has two priority areas of study:
medicine and education. According to the young Dean who addressed our
group, the goals are well-being and social justice, both of which are
possible only in opposition to neoliberalism and empire. In practical
terms this means educating doctors to work in poor communities rather than
in expensive private hospitals, and shaping people's thinking to uphold
humane values over purely material, acquisitive ones.
It was interesting to learn that as
the new Bolivarian University is being developed, the old one is allowed
to continue. The propertied send their children to the latter, while the
formerly excluded, who now enroll for free, are recruited to the new
University. The two institutions that we visited, the medical clinic and
the university, represent the manner in which the society is being
transformed. Parallel structures are set up alongside the old, rather than
the latter being torn down. It is perhaps because of this gradual,
peaceful process of change that everyone we met and talked to who openly
admitted that they had some criticisms and that they were not "Chavistas"
would nonetheless declare their support. "I'm with the process," is what
we resoundingly heard everywhere we went. Along with a few others in our
group, I wondered about the absence of a party formation and what its
ramifications might be for the endurance of this unprecedented
revolutionary movement. There are no easy answers in response to this
particular concern, of course. Needless to say, the total freedom with
which people we approached spoke up and the absence of a toe-the-line
mindset were quite appealing.
Government
Despite persistent negative publicity by the domestic media
(80 % of which is privately owned), Hugo Chavez can count on the majority
for support because of the tangible results his government delivers.
"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.
It is the misiones that are the embodiment of people's empowerment,
because it is through these "Bolivarian circles" that people are being
trained to administer projects on their own behalf. Through the literary
program, for example, well over one million people have learned to read
and write in just seven years.
These community-administered efforts brought to mind, in
stark relief, charitable undertakings such as that of Gawad Kalinga in
Payatas where inhabitants have purportedly become middle-class citizens,
thanks to the largesse of religious and business enterprises and
good-hearted philanthropists. A world of difference separates those who
have been turned into objects of charity (bestowed by now cleansed
consciences) and those in the communities we observed where individuals
appeared to be active participants in the re-making of their immediate
environment. Among the latest misiones is that of poor single mothers who
have organized to get loans from a special women's fund and who, under the
new constitution, are entitled to financial support as caregivers.
Principal among the constitutional changes were the radical
"49 laws" designed to regulate the production and taxation of oil, land
tenure, the fishing industry, and to prevent the privatization of social
security, to cite a few. Worthy of special mention is a constitutional
provision that protects the interests of indigenous peoples,
Afro-Venezuelans and those of mixed-race, a first in Venezuelan society.
We visited Barlovento, a region founded by freed slaves. There we met poor
Afro-Venezuelan students who were receiving free medical training as well
as adults enrolled in a literacy program. Our guide was a professor, a
specialist in the history of Afro descendants, who delivered a rousing
lecture on this history. He described to us how masses of people in
Barlovento went to Caracas to rally around Chavez during the attempted
coup. They rode buses, cars, whatever vehicle was available. Many walked
the 100 miles to Caracas, he told us, remarking that he himself could not
help but cry at this completely spontaneous and exceptionally moving
outpouring of support.
Oil resource, military
In addition to Hugo Chavez's own will to form a government
for the people, he clearly has advantages that few Third World heads of
state possess. Two that immediately stand out are Venezuela's oil resource
and the special character of Venezuela's military. Although Chavez has not
made a move to nationalize privately owned big industry - a hallmark of
what we know as "socialism"- he is using oil revenues to finance his
various projects. And he can bank on the military's allegiance because,
unlike other Latin American militaries (indeed, unlike the Philippine
military), Venezuela's military remains independent from U.S.' influence.
It has not, for example, sent soldiers for training to the infamous School
of the Americas, now renamed, for cosmetic purposes, the Western
Hemisphere Institute for Security. In their classes, moreover, soldiers
learn about their country's independence struggles. What Chavez has
striven to accomplish, then, is a salubrious civilian/military melding in
which soldiers work side by side with ordinary folks in their many
people's ventures. Such mutual trust is particularly necessary in light of
the very real danger posed by the small elite who, except for U.S.
superpower backing, would count for virtually nothing.
It must be remarked that Chavez's Bolivarian Revolution is
completely indigenous and follows no existing model. Its heroes are 19th
century Venezuelan figures: Simon Bolivar, independence fighter against
Spain whose goal was national independence and regional unity; Simon
Rodriguez, Bolivar's mentor whose injunction was for Venezuela to
construct for itself an original philosophical foundation for
independence; and Ezequiel Zamora, peasant leader who fought against the
landed oligarchy. Consequently, when those we talked to in Venezuela
expressed their concurrence with "the process," they could speak with
pride about their own history referring, furthermore, to a society in a
transformational state whose direction is guided by the democratic
participation of the people themselves. No other leader in world history,
after all, has Chavez's record of having won eight elections and
referendums in eight years, the number of votes each time exceeding the
ones before. Does this not reflect genuine people power?
The contempt with which Chavez is held by western media
generally and by the Bush administration specifically is therefore highly
suspect and questionable, if the concern were truly for democratic
principles. Chavez himself has stated more than once that his
assassination would be no surprise. The challenge seen in the Bolivarian
Revolution exists, without a doubt, in its innovation of an alternative
system that lies outside the purview of neoliberalism and the Washington
Consensus. The country's oil resources allow Chavez this independence.
Additionally, like the nineteenth century hero Bolivar, he has taken
measures to forge Latin American integration: barter of services with
Cuba, payment of Argentina's debt to international creditors, and
endorsement of Bolivia's Evo Morales, among others. Venezuela has recently
formally joined Mercosur, but Chavez has also set up ALBA, an alternative
economic alliance envisioned to counter U.S. free- trade policies and to
create a new development model. In the cultural realm there is Telesur, a
television channel established by Venezuela, Argentina, Cuba, and Uruguay
that hopes to replace currently U.S.-dominated programming with Latin
American production.
In Latin America and elsewhere, progressives are rallying
behind Venezuela's democratic and peaceful social transformation. Social
justice-minded Filipinos can do no less. While Venezuela's revolution
furnishes no template for other nations, we have a great deal to share
with the Venezuelan people. Our history, like theirs, is replete with
proud examples of resistance to colonial and neocolonial subjugation. We
need only to be mindful of this history - deliberately revised and
obscured as it has been in order to buttress a persistent colonial
mentality and preserve our neocolonial status - to understand our present
circumstances and to begin to take stock of ourselves as a people with an
enormous capacity to change things. As the Venezuelan example instructs
us, with an awakened and aroused collective consciousness, the
possibilities for systemic change are thrown wide, wide open. Bulatlat
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