Venezuela of Yesteryear

On Friday August 22, my last day in Mérida, my friend and I went to Venezuela de Antier, one of three theme parks outside of the city. Rain or no rain, it’s high season due to school holidays, and the place was packed. As far as I can tell, we were the only non-Venezuelans there.

There are no rides at Venezuela de Antier. It’s all edutainment, as one passes from pavilion to pavilion, each representing a different Venezuelan state. We took the trolley-bus into the park, which is far away from the parking lot, and upon arrival were ordered off by machete-wielding “policemen” (the park is set in the 1920s, time of Venezuelan dictator Vicente Gómez).

There were demonstrations, performances, audience-participation shtick, a bullring (no bulls, though, just some guy who plays a mean trumpet), and a giant replica of a dancing devil, from the Corpus Christi festival in the town of San Antonio de Yare. You can see the bullring and the devil in the photograph. Just like at any theme park, there were many many opportunities to spend money on food, T-shirts, and knick-knacks (not to mention the steep entrance fee).

We enjoyed a good meal at one of the restaurants, had fun watching Venezuelans dress up at the olde tyme photo portrait studio, and had a blast at the cabaret. The bar was really well stocked (I had a Cynar), and the bands were fantastic. One was a Cuban-style Latin jazz combo, and the other played Mexican music with great big sombreros and whole get-up. The audience was super-enthusiastic, with people whooping it up, and getting up to dance. People were there with their kids—no taboo against kids in bars here, so long as they’re drinking soft drinks. I reflected on the many opportunities for working musicians in the various pavilions of the park.

Back in the city, we watched President Chávez speaking at length on TV. He does that regularly, extemporaneously or in response to questions. He is always lucid, persuasive, and coherent, although perhaps a bit repetitive. (Can you imagine Bush speaking at length without notes? It would be incomprehensible, and he’d probably say something that would cause an international crisis.) At one point, Chávez was talking about the Chief of the Venezuelan Opposition attending the opening ceremony of the Olympics. He was referring to Bush, of course.

On Saturday August 23 we said goodbye to Mérida with a prop-plane flight of about an hour and a quarter to Caracas. Here’s a photo of a valley to the east of the city, seen the base of Mérida’s (no longer operational) cable car. I also said goodbye to the lovely people at the inn I had lived at for three weeks--it's a cooperative enterprise, something the Chávez government encourages and provides technical assistance for.





Back in Caracas

On Saturday and Sunday August 23rd and 24th, and my friend and I had some time to explore Caracas. We stayed at in a fancy hotel suite in a fancy (and safe) neighborhood. Here’s the view from our room—Dorothy, I don’t think we’re in Mucuchíes anymore. And here’s a photo of part of one of Caracas’s extensive slums, this one right next one to a major downtown area. Caracas, like Rio de Janeiro, Quito, Lima, Lagos, Karachi, and any number of other cities around the globe, has huge populations of penniless people flocking to the urban centers, with the crime attendant with large wealth discrepancies. The poor, of course, are the first victims of the crime rate, since they cannot afford the private security that the middle class and rich resort to. See "The Free World of Slums by the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek at http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/1090/ .

In our meanderings around town, and in and out of some of Caracas’s art museums, we enjoyed the architecture of the city, some from the early days of independence in the beginning of the 19th century, a lot of it poured concrete stuff from the late 20th and early 21st century. One the way out of town, we passed some of the houses that the Chávez government is building in slums—sturdy little boxy things built right on the site where a ramshackle hovel had stood.

I’m back home in New York now, eager to maintain and improve my strengthened Spanish skills, to teach a little Spanish to my first-grade students, and to share my observations about revolutionary Venezuela with people in the United States. To keep up with the situation in the Bolivarian Republic, check out venezuelanalysis.com . And please be prepared to stand up against the U.S. government if it decides to invade Venezuela, as some ominous signs point to. Thanks for reading. Peace.

hiking in the Andes

If you are receiving this post by email, think about heading over to steveinvenezuela.blogspot.com so you can read comments and post your own. I was really pleased to get a comment on my media blog from Global Exchange's Venezuelan translator for the Mérida program.

On Sunday the 17th my friend and I took the bus an hour and a half north (and uphill) from Mérida to stay overnight in the lovely mountain town of Mucuchíes. We stayed in an international tourist-class hotel with a medieval castle theme. Here’s the view from my window…people here still plow with oxen because the hills are too steep for tractors. Over the next couple of days, as we hiked, we saw that potato fields were sown right up to the border of the national park, and were it not for the park, the land would probably be cultivated even higher.

Mucuchíes is as rich with political graffiti as anywhere else in Venezuela. “There is no 11 without 13” refers to the April 11 2002 against Chávez, and his April 13 rescue and restoration to power. Notice that the 13 is painted with the Venezuelan flag…and the 11 with the U.S. flag. In Mérida, I picked up a book in Spanish by a Venezuelan university professor about the history of the CIA in Venezuela. His reason for writing the book, he says, was that we all know the CIA was behind the 2002 coup, but rather than wait thirty years for the documents to be declassified, as was the case with Allende in Chile, let’s look now at the entire breadth of the CIA’s malign history in this country.

The other mural—“No to the closure”—refers to the government’s decision to refuse the renewal of RCTV’s broadcasting license, which I discussed in the post entitled “Media.”

We visited a small art exhibit in the Mucuchíes cultural center—all the art, some figurative and some abstract, in a variety of media, was about the importance of the potato for Andean culture. There were only about fifteen works in the exhibit, but some of them were really high quality, and all, as far as we could tell, were by local artists.

On Monday the 18th we proceeded further uphill to the hamlet of Mitibibó, where we stayed in the mucuposada there. Mucu is a local indigenous word meaning “place of,” and posada is Spanish for inn. Mucuposadas are local Andean homes refitted for guests, and strategically located in places where hikers need to spend the night. The network of mucuposadas and guided hikes is a program of a non-profit called Andes Tropicales, which receives funding from the EU, the Belgian government, the Venezuelan Ministry of Tourism (I think), and other sources. The mucuposada in Mitibibó was the first, in operation since 1999, and Irene, the proprietor, talked with us about the gain, not just to her, but to the community. She has guests all year long, high season and low, and has prepared meals for as many as thirty people at a time. The local producers from whom she buys provisions, as well as the women she hires to help her cook when there’s a big group, all benefit from the eco-friendly, culturally sensitive tourism that Andes Tropicales brings. The visitors come from all over the world, as well as from within Venezuela; Europeans predominate. The food is delicious, simple, local fare; we watched our hosts bake arepas from scratch each morning.

Andean homes consist of rooms that open onto an open courtyard, and indoor heating is not part of the local culture. If it’s in the 40s outside, it’s in the 40s inside. No problem when you’re sleeping under multiple heavy wool blankets, but it can be really tough to get out of that warm bed. The mucuposadas have electricity and hot water…but getting out of the shower, wet, on a cold morning can be…bracing. It’s especially cold when it rains (a couple of hours every day this time of year…there’s also bright sunshine every day, and you warm right up when you start hiking uphill!). Unlike Mérida or Caracas, one can drink water right out of the tap up in the mountains without boiling or filtering, because it’s pure mountain water. We also filled a water bottle from a high-altitude running stream during one of our hikes.

On the first day, we passed a gate to a paddock with a red United Socialist Party of Venezuela flag on it. I asked out guide, Lolo, who’s from Mitibibó, and he told me that the upmountain farms are like the rest of Venezuela: a majority of people are Chavistas, and some support the opposition.

We hiked for two days, staying in an Andes Tropicales rustic shelter the second night and a mucuposada called El Nido del Gavilán (The Hawk’s Nest) in Misintá, a little farming community right next to Mucuchíes. On the second day, the hike was strenuous, and my friend and I spent more than half of the day on horseback. Our guide, Daniel, is from La Toma Alta (where the Andes Tropicales shelter is), and is sixty-one years old. He took the entire trail on foot, while managing two horses and a mule loaded down with our stuff. After he dropped us off in Misintá, he walked the animals by road three hours back to La Toma Alta…and did it all over again the next day with other tourists!

He told us that Andes Tropicales had lent them the money to buy the animals used on these hikes. For the entire six hours of walking/riding, we saw no other human being than the four of us—three tourists and the guide. When we broke for lunch, we were at nearly 14,000 feet. It was breathtaking. Well, except for the brief hailstorm.

media

On Wednesday afternoon, we headed back to the University of the Andes for the third time, this time for a talk about the media with Dr. Robert Kirby, political scientist and naturalized Venezuelan citizen of British origin. Dr. Kirby spoke a lot about who owns our media outlets, and what other businesses they own (and what governments they’re involved with, etc.).

Los Angeles, a city of four million people, has two daily newspapers. Same with Miami. Caracas has something like thirteen, with many more in other cities and regions of Venezuela. Even after the Chávez government’s efforts to expand government broadcasting, 75% of Venezuelan TV and radio stations remain in private hands (and the government channels have a very small audience). The private print, broadcast, and cable media are overwhelmingly aligned with the opposition and against the government. So much for censorship in the Chávez “dictatorship.”

One medium that has expanded considerably in the revolution is community TV and radio (though they’re still dwarfed by the private media). I think it’s fair to assume that many community broadcasters are supportive of the revolution, although their content is entirely in their hands.

Readers may remember in 2007 when the broadcasting license for Venezuela’s wildly popular RCTV came up for the renewal, and the government refused to renew. Note that RCTV is still on cable here, just not on VHF. RCTV was openly involved in the military coup that briefly overthrew Chávez and suspended the constitution in 2002; had CBS participated in a failed military coup against the president of the United States, the network would have been shut down and it’s owners and broadcasters jailed or executed for treason. Twenty-one nations, among them the U.S, the U.K., Canada, and France, have reported 236 closures of broadcasting outlets; for instance, Prime Minister Thatcher refused to renew Thames TV’s license after they broadcast a documentary about IRA assassinations she had asked them to keep off the air for national security reasons. That being said, while the revolutionary government’s decision not to renew RCTV’s license was entirely lawful, Dr. Kirby pointed out that it was a political mistake; it really put wind in the sails of an opposition that had been floundering.

Dr. Kirby spoke with us a bit about the political situation here, apart from strictly media matters. He counts himself a Chavista (at a university that is now and historically has been solidly Christian Democrat), but he says that recently he has become disillusioned with “the process.” He feels that the president is trying to do too much too fast, and doesn’t always have good people around him. Missteps have ensued.

In contrast to an assertion in a previous post of mine, Dr. Kirby affirmed what the Movimiento 13 coordinator told us on Monday: abstention has been rising throughout the Chávez years in this country of historically high voting rates, and abstention is expected to be 60-70% (!) in November’s gubernatorial and municipal elections. Which brings up the question of Venezuela’s “neither/nor” majority (neither Chávez nor the opposition)—what do they want? There’s no question that the opposition is less popular than the government here, but Dr. Kirby is not alone in his disillusionment. The Venezuelan murder rate has tripled during the Chávez years, and is now second highest in the world after El Salvador, at 48 per 100,000 of population. Colombia, with its narcotraffic and civil war, is at 40/100,000. Dr. Kirby attributed the rise in crime to two factors: 1) you don’t get caught, the system doesn’t work, and 2) Venezuela has become a channel for drugs produced in Colombia and bound for the U.S. and European market, leading to gang violence. (El Salvador’s murder rate is due to gang membership of Salvadorans deported from Los Angeles.)

Venezuelans’ main concerns are crime, unemployment, and inflation. Last year, Venezuela’s 40% inflation rate was second in the world only to Zimbabwe. Meat just went up 50%, and bread 33%. I see the food inflation as a part of the world food crisis, which we’ve been struggling with in the U.S. as well, but it can’t be good for any Venezuelan government.

Gasoline, by the way, is subsidized and costs 18¢ per gallon. An IMF-imposed price “liberalization” in 1989 led to a rise in gas prices, which led to a rise in the price of public transportation and food, with led to the Caracazo upsrising. That 1989 popular rebellion against the effects of globalization in 1989 led to Chávez’s attempted 1992 coup, his eventual pardon under intense public pressure, and his election in 1998, and re-elections in 2000 and 2006. (One of the things Chávez has done is to pay off Venezuela’s debts and withdraw from the IMF. He has proposed ALBA—the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas and the Caribbean—as a substitute for NAFTA, CAFTA, FTAA, and all the other World Bank skullduggery afoot.)

Corruption, Dr. Kirby says, is way down on Venezuelans’ list of priorities.

One of the last things he addressed was the recent spate of disqualifications of political candidates due to corruption. Apparently, the disqualifications are an administrative procedure (upheld in a recent court decision, but the courts are no more politically independent here than is our own Supreme Court), and he feels that the accused candidates ought to have been entitled to due process. 42% of the disqualifications are of Chavistas, and many of the candidates are, undoubtedly, indeed guilty of corruption, but he believes that at least some of the disqualifications are political revenge by Chávez…another political mistake.

That same evening, we were guests on the radio program “Revolution and Salsa” on the community station Radio Zamorana. A propos of the name of the show, I quoted Emma Goldman: If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution. I also thanked the Venezuelan people and government, as a Palestine activist, for their unwavering support of Palestinian freedom. I really liked the radio host; the show reminded a lot of “Al Lewis Lives,” one of my favorite show on WBAI in New York.

On Thursday afternoon, we watched the excellent 2004 film “Venezuela Bolivariana.” The idea of the documentary is that the Fourth World War was the Cold War, and that we are now in the midst of World War V—the international popular rebellion against the post-USSR phenomenon of neoliberal globalization. The Caracas collective who made the film identified the Caracazo as the first strike against neoliberalism that continued with the Battle for Seattle, the uprisings in Prague and Genoa, the World Social Forum…and, of course, the Venezuelan revolution. After the film was over, I commented that now, six years after a popular uprising defeated the 2002 coup, I don’t feel the people’s empowerment that was so evident between 1992 and 2002 in the movie. The Global Exchange folks who live here, North American and Venezuelan alike, agreed. People are tired of the sniping between the government and the opposition, people are exhausted from all the struggles, and people don’t feel the threat that was so present earlier in this decade.

The question remains: how much is this revolution really a revolution? As our Mérida translator pointed out to me on Friday night, Fair Trade is capitalist just as much as Free Trade is, and no one in Venezuela is talking about interfering with the basic structure of private property and commerce. (We were sipping fruity drinks at a busy downtown bar as we spoke.) The current government has a lot in common with Venezuela’s Social Democrat government of the 1970s, the last time there was a boom in oil prices—lots of social programs were instituted then, too. For me, as an anti-imperialist from the U.S., the most exciting thing about this government is its international stance against the pillaging that the G7 governments have seen as a corporate right since the Soviets gave up the ghost, and its work in building a new world order based on mutual help and cooperation.

On a much lighter note, on Saturday afternoon I visited Mérida’s ice cream parlor that holds the world record for the most ice cream flavors. Zoom in on the picture below and note the signs for smoked trout ice cream, mushroom and wine, and cream of crab. Mm-mm! We were less ambitious; my friend ordered avcado, and something called jojote, and I tasted both. They were delicious.

zoo, opposition, Misión Che Guevara

I thought of another FDR-Chávez parallel: the opposition. Ask someone whose grandparents were straight-ticket Republicans during the Depression, and they’ll tell you that Roosevelt was reviled. Venezuela is a politically polarized country, and the 35% of Venezuelans who oppose the revolution abhor Chávez. Their vehemence is amplified by the fact that most of the newspapers and TV stations are in their hands, and they have the full cooperation of the international media. Back 1933, business leaders in the United States are believed to have approached World War One veteran General Smedley Darlington Butler to plan a fascist overthrow of the Roosevelt presidency, something that thankfully did not come to pass. See http://coat.ncf.ca/our_magazine/links/53/generalsources.html for a list of sources about that plot (note that the Wikipedia article on this plot, entitled Business Coup, has been flagged as a possible hoax). In 2002, a Venezuelan coup did in fact overthrow Chávez and install businessman Pedro Carmona in his place, but, thankfully, the elected president was quickly restored due to an outpouring of popular support, and troops that who were loyal not to their officers, but to their president.

The parallels have their limits, of course. Roosevelt´s presidencies were never subject to the destabilizing interference of a foreign superpower, but the machinations of the United States are a constant and continuing threat to Venezuela´s democracy. (See for instance http://www.chavezcode.com/2008/03/chronology-of-4th-generation-war.html) And Chávez has never taken an action as dastardly as Roosevelt´s internment of 110,000 Japanese nationals and Japanese-Americans, and it is hard to imagine his ever doing so. Their careers leading to the presidency were very different as well; FDR ascended to the presidency from the governership of New York, while Chávez spent much of the 1990s in prison for his failed 1992 coup, although he was eventually pardoned due to popular pressure…he became a popular hero after the coup failed and he took full responsibility.

I spent Sunday afternoon at the zoo in Mérida. It’s an interesting place; they have a collection of native Venezuelan wildlife—Andean condors, tapirs, coatamundi, spectacled bears, jaguars, capuchin monkeys—including some species I haven’t seen before. (I was disappointed that there wasn’t an anaconda.) Conditions for the animals were variable. The tapirs had an large wooded enclosure with a big pond to paddle around in, and were active and looked happy. The big cats and the monkeys were in bare concrete cages, and seemed pretty stressed out.

The zoo was crowded with locals and with Venezuelan tourists enjoying a Sunday afternoon in high season. There’s nothing much else to do here on a Sunday; almost everything’s closed except the churches. Socialism or no, Venezuelans remain a religious lot, and images of the Holy Family and of saints abound.

On Monday afternoon we went back to the university to meet with the coordinator of the March 13 Movement, Mérida’s largest and most important student group. Movimiento 13 long predates the Chávez presidency, and initially supported Chávez, but turned against him early in his first term. The University of the Andes here in Mérida has many faculty, students, and administrators who oppose the government; it’s a little disorienting for us North Americans to be in a place where the government is on the left and the students are on the right!

The main thrust of his talk was that, while the programs of the revolutionary government are well-intentioned, they are poorly administered, leading to graft and corruption and a squandering of national resources. I think his argument is disingenuous; the opposition in Venezuela has made it clear that they are opposed to the government’s redistributive project itself, and are committed to protecting the privileges of the economic class that controlled the country’s economy and politics prior to 1999. This coordinator’s motivation is not as clear to me; he does not come from that privileged class, but from a barrio…i.e. Chávez’s base.

Several people here in Mérida have spoken to me with bitterness of the violence and destruction of the student protests here, and the restraint of the police in the face of provocation and injury. The Movimiento 13 coordinator told a different story, complaining of police attacks against students, and lifting his shirt to show us his many battle scars.

He spoke as if a majority of Venezuelans share his views; when we asked him about Chávez’s re-election in 2006, he claimed a level of abstention that simply wasn’t true. 2006 saw a huge voter turnout in Venezuela, much higher than we ever see in the U.S., and the president won handily. That he then lost the 2007 referendum on constitutional reform speaks to the fact, I think, that while Venezuelans support their president, they’re not afraid to disagree with him.

As for corruption, people here tell me that yes, absolutely, there is corruption, and not all of the resources that the government has dedicated to people’s needs get where they’re supposed to go. One Venezuelan spoke of the “Bolibourgeoisie,” bureaucrats who have enriched themselves off of the Bolivarian revolution. All have emphasized, however, that this is not a problem unique to the Chávez government, but one that plagued the liberal and conservative governments that preceded it. In my opinion, the worst thing that can be said about the revolution in this regard is that it has not yet succeeded in addressing the problem of corruption that it inherited. Now, if we could just begin to tackle the issue of corruption in the U.S. (did somebody say ¨Halliburton¨?)

On Tuesday afternoon we went to the outskirts of Mérida to visit a Socialist Training Center (Centro de Formación Socialista) of Misión Che Guevara, the government job training and economic development program. We sat in on a small class of men, ranging from teenagers to middle-aged, who were learning basic electronics, digital electronics, and specialization in TV repair or other areas, working on equipment donated by the EU. The teacher emphasized that he is a facilitator, not the professor, and that they engage in constructivist education at the center. The students spoke with us about the equality and solidarity amongst them, regardless of previous academic achievement (or lack thereof). They had a lot of questions for us about education in the U.S. At the end of their 4½ month program, they’re prepared to take a job in the national telephone company, start a business together, or take a number of other career paths. We asked if women participate in electronics training, and were told that only a handful do.

The director of the center then taught a short lesson on political education for us and for the electronics students; the lesson was unabashedly partisan, despite the director’s assertion that he was not “ideologizing.”

We proceeded down the road to a spot where people from the community were queued up for heavily subsidized groceries. Many of the products have an article of the Venezuelan constitution printed on the label; zoom in on the bag of rice at the right and you can read Article 326 (“The security of the Nation is based on the joint responsibility of the government and civil society…”)

Trout farming

On Friday afternoon we contracted with a transportation cooperative here in Mérida to take us up to Mucuchíes. The operative word is up. Mérida is at about the same altitude as Denver. Mucuchíes, an hour and a half away on winding mountain roads through jaw-droppingly beautiful tropical Andean scenery, is at about the same altitude as the north rim of the Grand Canyon. And darn cold, especially at night. We stayed at El Convite, an agricultural, financial, and educational non-profit rural center that has been operating in this mountain town for 24 years.

On Saturday we went still higher, to San Rafael, about 15 minutes from Mucuchíes. There we visited an agricultural/ecological/tourism cooperative called Sendero de Mirmicá (http://www.mirmica.org.ve/). After an overview of their various projects in the areas of production and education, we rode horses up the mountain to their trout farming operation (see photo, left). Rainbow trout were introduced to the Venezuelan Andes from Norway in the 19th century, and thrive in the cold glacial waters here. Mirmicá’s trout operation has been going for 3 years now, and has so far been successful. Presumably, the policies of Venezuela’s current government concerning expanded access to credit, training, and other resources for Venezuelan peasants and urban poor alike have helped make projects like this one possible.

Mirmicá is also involved in the struggle against the petrochemical contamination of the Andes, with the concomitant health problems one would anticipate. The trout are raised with water that comes directly from a mountain lake above them, and flows back into the watershed. The fish are fed food they produce themselves, and are marketing to other trout farms in the area as an alternative to costly corporate-produced trout food. No chemicals are used, and dogs are employed to keep away the birds of prey who would otherwise treat the trout ponds as a well-stocked buffet. They are also raising worms, and selling the organic effluence from the vermiculture as an alternative to petrochemical fertilizers. In addition, they raise and market organic seeds (chard, cilantro, parsley and fava beans among others), and have constructed their organic greenhouse from damaged pipes that couldn’t be used for the trout farm.

After leaving the Mirmicá cooperative, we traveled high up to the top of the Trans-Andean highway. It was a rainy day, and we were entirely inside of the clouds. I’ve included a photo, at the right, of the only plant that thrives this high up. It’s called the frailejón, and it grows 1 cm each year. The highway was a party scene, as hundreds of Venezuelan vacationers and day trippers stopped to pick up some snow—a very rare occurrence in these parts—and mold it into snow bunnies that sat on the windshields of their cars. (Oy, you should have seen the traffic jam getting back in to Mérida!)

Back here in town, I’ve been watching Channel 10, the Venezuelan government TV station. It is unabashedly partisan (“dairy farmers, sowing the seeds of a socialist homeland”), and devotes some attention to criticism and analysis of the hysterical anti-Chávez media campaign in the Venezuelan and international private media. I enjoyed a segment called “The Most Criminal Lies of the United States”; the episode I saw was about the North American military overthrow of the Grenadan revolution in 1983. Sunday is the day for Aló Presidente, in which Chávez speaks to the nation much as FDR did in his Fireside Chats. While Chávez says he’s a revolutionary, and Roosevelt’s New Deal was arguably intended to forestall revolution, I can’t help but notice parallels between the two. Both are charismatic leaders who have pushed through social reforms that have transformed the nation. Neither were shy about attempting to amass whatever power is necessary to make their programs a reality—witness FDR’s attempt to pack the Supreme Court, and Chávez’s use (twice, more than any other Venezuela president) of the decree power granted him by the legislature. Roosevelt broke George Washington’s unspoken two-term limit, and did in fact enjoy a lifetime elected presidency, leading Congress and the states to enact a constitutional amendment to prevent any future president from serving a 3rd or 4th consecutive term. Chávez proposed a change to the 1999 constitution that would have extended the presidential term here from 6 to 7 years and lifted the two-term limit; that change, along with an extensive package of other constitutional reforms, was rejected by Venezuelan voters in 2007. (One difference is that, unlike in the U.S., where impeachment and conviction is the only way to remove a president, the Venezuelan president can be recalled by popular vote at any time during her or his term…the Venezuelan opposition tried a recall plebiscite after the unsuccessful 2002 coup, but the voters supported the president. On Sunday, Bolivians are voting in their own presidential recall, one that is expected to reaffirm indigenous Bolivian president Evo Morales’s popular mandate. There was a large demonstration in Caracas on Saturday by Chávez’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela in support of the Bolivian president.)

For more information on Venezuela, check out venezuelanalysis.org . Their Links section includes every pro-Chavez, anti-Chavez and neutral site in English and Spanish that you could imagine. They also have the 1999 Consitution, in English.

Feminism in Venezuela

It rained really hard on Wednesday. The result was snow all of the peaks around Mérida, a very unusual occurrence in these parts.

On Thursday afternoon, we had the pleasure of meeting with a professor at the Unversity of the Andes, whose expertise is in the women’s movement in Venezuelan academia, government, and civil society, and the ongoing struggle for feminist legal reform here. She took us through the history of women’s organizing during the Punto Fijo period of Venezuelan history (1958-1998), and the changes that have—and haven’t—occurred under the 1999 Bolivarian constitution.

One interesting point is that, at the insistence of feminists, the constitution uses both the masculine and feminine forms for every noun and adjective (e.g. la cuidadana/el ciudadano—the citizen), making it absolutely clear that the Bolivarian revolution is for every Venezuelan, regardless of gender.

Some of the biggest gains of the past nine years have been less on the legislative front than in the provision of material resources; the government missions to women in the barrios, Banmujer (a government bank dedicated to making credit and microcredit available to women’s enterprises), and the creation of a network of tens of thousands of meeting points for women throughout the country have brought a level of empowerment and material security unknown under previous governments, however, these tend to be top-down initiatives of the governments institute for women, INAMUJER, rather than coming from the grass roots. In the legislative arena, the struggle for abortion rights and non-discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender presentation continues, so far unsuccessful in the face of opposition from the Catholic and Evangelical churches, and conservative sectors of civil society.

Venezuela has recently instituted a very progressive law on the right of women to live free of violence, and law that provides for the first time for training of law enforcement personnel in how to protect women from domestic violence, among other things. However, the gap between legislation and enforcement is wide, and violence against women continues here at a very high level.

The United Socialist Party of Venezuela (the party of President Chávez) is running lists of candidates in the upcoming state and local elections that alternate one male candidate with one female candidate, and so on.

Cuban doctors

We’ve begun our daily Spanish classes. I have the pleasure of working one on one with a teacher. Mostly, we converse, and I work on my vocabulary, grammar, and fluency through the conversation. The conversation has been interesting; we talk about daily life in Venezuela, politics, travel, education, and child rearing. She’s a devoted mother, and likes to brag about her children. She was a paramedic during the horrible floods of 1999 in Vargas (between Caracas and the Caracas airport.) Her brother was Chávez´s chef for a time.

In Monday afternoon, we met in Poets’ Park for a talk with one of the writers for venezuelanalysis.com. He went over some of the common myths about Venezuela in the international press (Chávez is a dictator, he is concentrating power in himself, Venezuela is socialist, private property in Venezuela is under attack…), and went over the evidence that contradicts each of these myths. We had a really interesting conversation about the proposed constitutional reform that was rejected by the voters late last year, and what that reform would have added to the 1999 constitution (protection from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, institution of forms of property—collective, social, state—that would exist alongside private property, lifting of term limits on the presidency, and many other provisions). The reform did not include the right to abortion, which is illegal in Venezuela, because the government understood that opposition from the Catholic Church would have been impossible to overcome. The defeat of the reform was a political defeat for the Chavistas; this fall’s municipal and state elections will be crucial to see if the opposition has gained strength.

The National Assembly is dominated by the Chavistas, because the opposition, knowing they would be defeated, boycotted the last national election as a political strategy. In Caracas, the revolution has been an urban phenomenon, strong in the barrios (slums). Here in Mérida, it’s more of a rural phenomenon. In the last elections, the Chavistas won 21 out of Mérida state’s 22 municipalities, losing only in Mérida city itself. The community councils and citizen assemblies are much better attended and more active in the state’s rural areas than in the prosperous state capital. (The Chavista movement is trying to build a participatory democracy, to replace the forms of representative democracy that historically excluded Venezuela’s poor, who are the majority of the country.)

Chávez’s eighteen months of decree power have just ended. The power was conferred on him by the National Assembly, as is their right under the 1999 constitution (and under previous constitutions as well). He’s just signed the 26 laws he intended to promulgate with his power of decree, and the text of those laws will be published shortly. This is his second decree period; he was granted one by the legislature in his first term as well.

The writer for venezuelanalysis.com spoke about the student movement, of particular interest since Mérida is a university town. He has been an eyewitness to demonstrations by right-wing students, and said that they were violent (Molotov cocktails and so on), and that the police did not respond in kind, but simply set up barricades to contain the disturbances. The images of police in scary-looking riot gear have been used to smear the government, claiming of repression of student activism that isn’t in fact occurring. We spoke afterward with out tour leader, who is a student here and describes himself as a moderate Chavista. He confirmed that the students have been violent, and that, prior to Chávez’s election, it was the left-wing students who led violent demonstrations. Now, the left-wing students are more involved in the projects of the revolution—community radio in the barrios, health clinics, and so on.

On Tuesday after classes, we visited a clinic of Barrio Adentro. Barrio Adentro, which means Inside the Barrios (slums, shantytowns), is a project of the Chávez government in which health clinics have been built all over Venezuela, in the communities traditionally not served by the health system, and supplied with Cuban doctors, Cuban medicines, and Cuban medical equipment. We toured the immaculate and well-stocked clinic, and then met with the doctors. They emphasized that the services are provided entirely free of charge, and went through the long list of procedures available at this site.

They spoke of the brigade of 1000 Cuban doctors that was organized after Hurricane Katrina, and the U.S. government’s refusal to allow them in. They went instead to Guatemala and Pakistan, to assist in the medical crises that arose after natural disasters in those two countries.

They urged us to visit Cuba. I spoke one on one with one of them, and he spoke glowingly of the changes in Havana since I was there ten years ago—improvements in transportation and food, as Cuba’s “special economic period” that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union ended. They asked us a lot of questions about the upcoming U.S. election, and the implications of an American president of African descent.