Bolivar reborn
 
Date: Thu, 29 Nov 2007 10:04:32 -0600 (CST)

Bolivar reborn
Richard Gott

November 28, 2007 8:30 PM

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/richard_gott/2007/11/bolivar_reborn.html

In an unusually large open space, in a poor area of the city of Caracas
where ramshackle houses built from breeze blocks and concrete columns
occupy every available piece of ground, and where narrow streets wind up
the hillside filled perpetually by throngs of people, one of the many
thousands of cooperative enterprises created in the last few years has
been securely established.

Two large hangars house workshops, and close by is a large well-equipped
clinic and a government food store selling cheap food, known as a
Mercal. It sells a limited range of basic foodstuffs but would hardly
justify the title of supermarket. Today, as everywhere throughout
Caracas, powdered milk is in short supply, although no one knows for
certain if this is the result of opposition manoeuvre and malice, or of
government incompetence.

The clinic is clean and well organised, with modern equipment and a
stream of patients throughout the day. Unusually, it is manned by
Venezuelan doctors rather than by the Cubans who, in their thousands,
have run the medical outposts in the poorest parts of the country over
the past three years. One notable facility is a spacious room devoted to
trauma treatment for those suffering from gunshot wounds, knife
stabbings and other manifestations of the insecurity in the city.
Caracas has never been a "safe" city in recent decades, and some claim
that the situation has got worse during the nine years that President
Hugo Chavez has been in power.

Chavez believes that poverty is the root cause of crime, and that
tackling poverty will solve the problem. Yet, while poverty rates have
undoubtedly fallen, crime continues at a high level and some extra
action will eventually be needed.

One hangar used by the cooperative is devoted to making school uniforms
and printing T-shirts. The other makes boots and shoes. The atmosphere
is relaxed and informal. The workers, mostly women, chat among
themselves, sometimes sewing by hand, sometimes using machines, or
operating the simple presses. The cooperative was set up three years ago
and has become a model of its kind, much visited by revolutionary
tourists. Indeed the guide was herself part of another cooperative
dedicated specifically to looking after the streams of visitors.

The workplace was delightful, yet clearly not much work was being done.
These were not the regimented factories of the maquiladoras along the
Mexican border with the United States, let alone the sweatshops of Asia.
The guide explained that the 142 workers were mainly housewives involved
in a government job-training programme, Vuelvan Caras, that seeks to get
untrained people into socially useful work within the framework of a
cooperative. This is admirable, but here too much remains to be done.

Cooperatives are becoming the basic organising tool of Chavez's
Bolivarian Revolution, with thousands springing up all over the country.
I found a group of security guards, watching over a peasant collective,
who had formed themselves into a cooperative of their own, and a group
of cooks in a student kitchen had done the same, calling themselves the
Flavour and Revolution cooperative. In the revised constitution that
will be subjected to a referendum on December 2, the cooperatives will
receive constitutional approval. Article 112 declares that the state
will promote different kinds of economic enterprises, be they private,
mixed, or run by a local community, to create the best conditions "for
the collective and cooperative construction of a socialist economy."

Other articles in the revised constitution promise everyone a six-hour
day, and extend social security provision to all unorganised workers
(fulfilling the ambition of Simsn Bolmvar, the guiding genius of the
state, who invented the term in 1818). This is not so much populism as
sensible democratic politics. Chavez needs to win elections. Whereas
Fidel Castro has spent half a century explaining to Cuban people why
they can't have their cake today, Chavez needs to promise everyone the
moon in order to retain his popularity at the polls. Such is the
challenge of revolutionary politics in the democratic era.

Of the 69 articles in the constitution that have been revised, some seek
to reorder the existing structure of local government. State boundaries
will be altered and new regions created, some under the control of
central government. The purpose is to get more state money to neglected
and indigent areas as well as to avoid the corruption of local caciques.
The most significant new articles deal with the powers of a myriad
elected "people's councils", the basis of the country's future democracy
and give emphasis to the presence in society of its indigenous and
Afro-American components, in addition to those elements, hitherto
predominant, that originate from Europe.

The new constitution will be endorsed by popular vote in December, but
it has been hotly contested by a conservative and politically inept
opposition that remains small, weak and divided. Opposition politicians
have focussed their criticism on the centralisation of power, on the
possibility of the president being endlessly re-elected (as can
theoretically happen with the British prime minister and elected leaders
in much of Europe), and on the government's intention to regain control
of the independent central bank.

These of course are legitimate areas of debate, yet the opposition,
blinded by rage and frustration at its own incompetence and inadequacy,
tends to ignore the huge extension of democratic practice that the new
constitution will bring to long-disenfranchised sections of the population.

The unfavourable image of the Chavez government in the outside world has
been largely created by a tiny group of Caracas-based foreign
journalists who repeat the hostile propaganda produced by this
opposition, and fail to appreciate the quantitative and qualitative
improvements that have taken place in the country over the past few
years. It is easy to denounce the levels of crime and corruption, and
the incompetence of a government presiding over a revolutionary
upheaval, just as it is easy to suggest that catastrophe may lie ahead.
Yet it should not be possible to ignore the fact that the sheer volume
of the oil bonanza of recent years has given the country a feel-good
factor that is finally providing a sense of stability and optimism.

Quite apart from the extraordinary mobilisation of the people in the
poorest areas, benefiting from new schools and clinics, there has been a
huge expansion of public works all over the country, with new railway
lines and motorways and well-designed sports facilities in almost every
major city. Even the road from the airport has finally acquired a new
motorway bridge, and many shacks on the surrounding hillsides have been
freshly painted in gaudy colours, blue and orange, yellow and pink.
Doubtless these could be denounced as Potemkin villages, yet they
demonstrate an organising power on the part of the people that augurs
well for the future. The Chavez revolution remains the most original and
democratic experiment in Latin America, and is clearly here to stay.