Chavezs achievements
http://dawn.com/2006/05/15/op.htm#2
By John Pilger
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 worlds 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 per cent 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 peoples, 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 per cent in 1980 to 65 per cent in 1995, three years before
Chavez was elected. We didnt matter in a human sense, she said. We lived
and died without real education and running water, and food we couldnt 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 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.
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 per cent 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
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 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 womens bank. From next month, the poorest housewives
will get about 120 pounds 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.
The venomous attacks on Chavez, who is due in London, 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
Chavez in The Times and the Financial Times this week, each with that
peculiar malice reserved for true dissenters from Thatchers and Blairs 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 Chavez 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.
Chavez 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 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. Dawn/Guardian Service
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