Chávez is a threat because he offers the alternative of a decent
society
Venezuela's president is using oil revenues to liberate the poor
- no wonder his enemies want to overthrow him
By John Pilger
05/13/06 "The
Guardian" -- -- I have spent the past three weeks
filming in the hillside barrios of Caracas, in streets and
breeze-block 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% literacy.
This achievement is due to a national programme, 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 Chávez, 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% in
1980 to 65% in 1995, three years before Chávez 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, Chávez used this
brilliantly to decentralise, to give the impoverished grassroots
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
post-war European social democracies.
Chávez, 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% 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 recognised the human
rights of mixed-race and black people, of whom Chávez 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 programme 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 Ł120 a month. It is not surprising that Chávez 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," Chávez 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."
The venomous attacks on Chávez, who arrives in London tomorrow,
have begun and resemble uncannily those of the privately owned
Venezuelan television and press, which called for the elected
government to be overthrown. Fact-deprived attacks on Chávez in
the Times and the Financial Times this week, each with that
peculiar malice reserved for true dissenters from Thatcher's and
Blair's one true way, follow a travesty of journalism on Channel
4 News last month, which effectively accused the Venezuelan
president of plotting to make nuclear weapons with Iran, an
absurd fantasy. The reporter sneered at policies to eradicate
poverty and presented Chávez as a sinister buffoon, while Donald
Rumsfeld was allowed to liken him to Hitler, unchallenged. In
contrast, Tony Blair, a patrician with no equivalent democratic
record, having been elected by a fifth of those eligible to vote
and having caused the violent death of tens of thousands of
Iraqis, is allowed to continue spinning his truly absurd
political survival tale.
Chávez is, of course, a threat, especially to the United States.
Like the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, who based their revolution on
the English co-operative 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 Chávez and the Bolivarian
revolution as the "largest threat since the Soviet Union and
Communism". When I said to Chávez 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."
John
Pilger's new book,
Freedom Next Time
, is published next month by Bantam Press
www.johnpilger.com
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
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