V for Venezuela

Green Venezuela

2007-04-08T21:38:00.000-04:00

Green Party Principal Speaker, Derek Wall, argues that capitalism is ecologically unsustainable and that Venezuela’s green policies should be applauded.

“One car each? Our planet won't stand that - that model of capitalism, extreme individualism and consumerist egotism. The destructive so-called developmentalism destroying the planet is, quite frankly, a thing of stupidity - una cosa de tontos.” -President Hugo Chavez

Classic Interview with Hugo Chavez

2006-07-01T21:45:00.000-04:00

By Greg Palast

The Progressive, July 2006

You’d think George Bush would get down on his knees and kiss Hugo Chávez’s behind. Not only has Chávez delivered cheap oil to the Bronx and other poor communities in the United States. And not only did he offer to bring aid to the victims of Katrina. In my interview with the president of Venezuela on March 28, he made Bush the following astonishing offer: Chávez would drop the price of oil to $50 a barrel, “not too high, a fair price,” he said—a third less than the $75 a barrel for oil recently posted on the spot market. That would bring down the price at the pump by about a buck, from $3 to $2 a gallon.

But our President has basically told Chávez to take his cheaper oil and stick it up his pipeline. Before I explain why Bush has done so, let me explain why Chávez has the power to pull it off—and the method in the seeming madness of his “take-my-oil-please!” deal. [more]

No more voom-voom!

2006-07-01T21:41:00.000-04:00

By Hugo Chavez
The Drawbridge, Issue 2, Summer 2006

During my recent visit to London, I discovered that Mayor Livingstone has put a tax, a charge, on motorists which, in my opinion, is a wise measure. Why?

Whenever I visit either a world capital or a major city, I make a survey; a survey of cars. You know, a president is like a prisoner: you get off the plane - welcome, welcome, welcome - shuffled into a car, voom, straight to the hotel, you get to see the streets, jump out, into a room, wait, you have ten more minutes, off you go, voom, you've arrived. From one place directly to the next, and then in the evening back to the hotel, and that's it. You end up like a prisoner being taken from place to place in voom-voom fashion.

So, what do I do? I look out and I count the other cars, across the world, in New York, in Washington, in Vienna. In every big city it seems that 96% of vehicles on the streets are standing in long lines like worms, going at the speed of a morrocoy, of a tortoise, burning who knows how many litres per kilometre because they're barely moving. They're stuck, and they can't turn the engine off because they'd only have to restart it yet again. And they're only trying to travel three or five kilometres within the same city. Again, in 96% of vehicles, vehicles for six people or the smallest ones for four, you see only one person travelling: the one behind the wheel. And this vehicle is three metres long by two wide, roughly speaking. This is the extreme of capitalist individualism. Everyone wants to have a car and drive around the streets like an idiot: alone in their car, burning litres and litres of fuel, contaminating the atmosphere.

Atenco Struggle Documentary

2006-06-13T13:18:00.000-04:00

Mourners carry body of young student Alexis Benhumea killed by the Mexican police. Photo: D.R. Erwin Slim

Synopsis (from the Canal 6 de Julio website):

This video analyzes the events in San Salvador Atenco, Mexico during the first days of May, 2006 and denounces the violation of the civilian population’s human rights by state and federal police forces. The documentary deconstructs the mass media’s operating methods, which were responsible for creating a climate of fear and an information blockade on the events in San Salvador Atenco, in the midst of an especially delicate situation: the 2006 presidential elections in Mexico.

NOTE: While an English-language version has not yet been released (but will be posted here as well as soon as it becomes available), the images in this 47-minute documentary speak for themselves. Much of the violence in Atenco was captured by television cameras, but few outside of Mexico have seen this footage. The filmmakers present not only the in-the-street shots of police savagely beating “anything that moved,” but also clips of the commercial news anchors flagrantly calling out for more repression of the popular movement from the state. Combined with Canal 6 de Julio and Promedios’ own work investigating the scene in Atenco and interviewing many of the townspeople, this is a powerful document of a turning point in Mexican history.

WARNING: Some segments of this film are exceedingly violent.

Download video here.

The Venezuelan Economy Takes Off

2006-06-06T22:32:00.000-04:00

In Venezuela, Oil Sows Emancipation
by Luciano Wexell Severo
Originally published in Rebelion on 12 March 2006

The data just released by the Banco Central de Venezuela (BCV) confirm that the Venezuelan economy grew at a cumulative 10.2 percent between the fourth quarter of 2004 and the fourth quarter of 2005. This is the ninth consecutive increase since the last quarter of 2003. Overall, in 2005, the gross domestic product (GDP) grew at 9.3 percent.

Just like in the previous eight quarters, the strong increase was fundamentally driven by activities not related to oil: civil construction (28.3 percent), domestic trade (19.9 percent), transportation (10.6 percent), and manufacturing (8.5 percent). The oil sector had an increase of only 2.7 percent. According to a report by the Instituto Nacional de Estadística (INE), the unemployment rate in December 2005 was 8.9 percent, two percentage points below the rate in the same period of 2004. In absolute terms, this means 266,000 additional jobs. Last year, the inflation rate reached 14.4 percent, but that was below the 19.2 percent rate in 2004. The nominal interest rate went down to 14.8 percent.

Chavez takes London

2006-05-21T22:48:00.000-04:00

A Discourse of Third World Hope: Chavez Takes London
By HUGH O'SHAUGHNESSY, counterpunch.org

Relentlessly Chávez continued, hour after hour on Sunday afternoon, May 14, in the drab auditorium of Camden Town Hall in London, the Spanish words tumbling out like some verbal tsunami or chaotic linguistic volcano. Socialism; Fidel; the Bolivarian Revolution; Evo Morales; democracy; more money spent on Venezuelan schools; don't dare invade Iran or you'll get the price of oil rising to $100 a barrel; human rights; Richard Gott; globalization; hope; capitalism; Jesus Christ; George Boosh; the ultimate selfishness of one person trying to drive a car in a traffic jam when he could get to his destination more quickly on foot.

On the platform a score of MPs and activists maneuvered their chairs so as to be seen to be close to the newly arrived star. After two hours of non-stop oratory the President of Venezuela, constitutionally elected, friend of the poor, still popular with his voters and the most powerful politician in South America, took breath. He paused and reminded Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London and chairman of the meeting, that Ken had promised him all the time he wanted. Said Ken genially, "I was thinking you were only half way through".

The Threat of a Decent Society

2006-05-13T23:22:00.000-04:00

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

John Pilger
Saturday May 13, 2006, 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 Op-Ed Assassination of Hugo Chávez

2006-02-13T20:12:00.000-05:00

By: Justin Delacour - FAIR

(The original version of this article appeared in the December 2005 issue of Extra!, the magazine of the U.S. media watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (http://www.fair.org/). The article has been slightly revised, however it stands as a powerful rebuke to the corporate North American media slant against Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution.)

After televangelist Pat Robertson first publicly called for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez Frias (700 Club, 8/22/05), the editors of several major U.S. newspapers were quick to denounce his outrageous incitement to violence. However, in criticizing the conservative televangelist, the U.S. prestige press overlooked its own highly antagonistic treatment of Venezuela's president, which has surely contributed to the heated political climate in which Robertson makes such threats.

Riding High with Hugo Chavez

2006-02-13T20:04:00.000-05:00

By MIKE WHITNEY, Counterpunch.org, February 13, 2006

Hugo Chavez’s meteoric rise on the world stage has as much to do with his defiance of Washington as it does with his leadership of a hemispheric revolution. At great personal risk, Chavez has consistently lashed out against his witless-nemesis, George Bush, and the coterie of sycophants who do his bidding.

The Sword of Bolivar

2006-01-22T22:17:00.000-05:00

Chavez handing over a replica of Bolivar's sword to Evo Morales upon his visit to Caracas.

Morales at the indigenous cleansing ceremony ahead of his inauguration on January 22, 2006.

Also check out the BBC slide show.

A Visit With the Bolivarian Revolution

2006-01-09T01:45:00.000-05:00

By: David Sugar

The third International Forum on Free Knowledge brought together many groups and individuals interested in the development of free software worldwide to the city of Maracaibo. One reason Venezuela choose to host this event is because starting in January, their new free software law, directive 3.390, comes into effect, which mandates all government agencies to migrate to free software over a two year period. I was invited to speak about Telephonia Libre; the use of free software in telecommunications.

Delegation of Prominent U.S. Progressive Leaders Visits Venezuela

2006-01-08T01:46:00.000-05:00

By: Gregory Wilpert – Venezuelanalysis.com

Caracas, Venezuela, January 7, 2006—The singer, actor, and civil rights activist Harry Belafonte visited Venezuela this week, leading a delegation of 13 other prominent activists from the U.S. During their visit, the delegation toured the complex of cooperatives, known as the Endogenous Development Nucleus Fabricio Ojeda, visited with ministers, Venezuelan community leaders, opposition leaders, and Venezuela's President Chavez.

Venezuela to Aid Bolivia’s New President Morales

2006-01-05T19:38:00.000-05:00

By: Gregory Wilpert – Venezuelanalysis.com

The rapport between Morales and Chavez was immediately visible, during the press conference, as each kept slapping the other on the shoulder and as Chavez promised to support Morales in all of his projects, most of which sounded very similar to Chavez’s own projects when he was first elected. Among the projects Chavez promised to support was a 30-month campaign to eradicate illiteracy in Bolivia, an effort to organize a constitutional assembly, the nationalization of Bolivia’s natural gas fields, and to engage in a land reform effort, among other things.

In addition to providing strategic advice and support on these projects, Chavez promised that Venezuela would supply Bolivia with the country’s entire diesel fuel needs, 150,000 barrels per month. In exchange, Venezuela would not ask for hard cash but for an in-kind payment of Bolivia’s agricultural products.

Also, Chavez said that Venezuela would provide Bolivia with a $30 million donation for social projects, to start off his presidency. Exactly what projects the new Morales government would use the money for was not explained.

There is an alternative: Bolivia, Venezuela, and the struggle against neo-liberalism

2005-12-27T19:40:00.000-05:00

Derrick O'Keefe

The reign of TINA, There Is No Alternative, is beginning to come to an end.

In Bolivia, Evo Morales has swept into the presidency after years of popular mobilization; the long-suffering indigenous and poor majority is demanding an alternative economic and social order.

In Venezuela, seven years after Hugo Chavez first won power, the Bolivarian Revolution is demonstrating an alternative path, powered by a people awakened to political action and in the process of transforming their society.

Part of the reason for the resurgent radicalism in Latin America is the fact that the United States government -- for all their efforts at sabotage and asphyxiation -- has never been able to fully eliminate the Cuban Revolution. Immediately following news of his massive election victory, Morales passed on this unsubtle message via Cuban television:

I want to tell the Cuban people, its government and its leaders: thank you, for showing how to govern, to Latin America and the rest of the world, and for defending its dignity and sovereignty. (‘Morales Praises Castro in Cuban TV Interview’, Agence France-Press, December 20, 2005)

I Believe Only In The Power Of The People

2005-12-24T13:55:00.000-05:00

by Evo Morales (address given at the "In Defense of Humanity" conference, held in Caracas last December)

What happened these past days in Bolivia was a great revolt by those who have been oppressed for more than 500 years. The will of the people was imposed this September and October, and has begun to overcome the empire's cannons. We have lived for so many years through the confrontation of two cultures: the culture of life represented by the indigenous people, and the culture of death represented by West. When we the indigenous people together with the workers and even the businessmen of our country fight for life and justice, the State responds with its "democratic rule of law."

What does the "rule of law" mean for indigenous people? For the poor, the marginalized, the excluded, the "rule of law" means the targeted assassinations and collective massacres that we have endured. Not just this September and October, but for many years, in which they have tried to impose policies of hunger and poverty on the Bolivian people. Above all, the "rule of law" means the accusations that we, the Quechuas, Aymaras and Guaranties of Bolivia keep hearing from our governments: that we are narcos, that we are anarchists. This uprising of the Bolivian people has been not only about gas and hydrocarbons, but an intersection of many issues: discrimination, marginalization , and most importantly, the failure of neoliberalism.

Bolivian-Bolivarian Revolution!

2005-12-22T14:05:00.000-05:00

It's official, Evo Morales will be the next president of Bolivia with the biggest majority since Bolivia's return to "democracy" in 1982. Check this article from Indian Country, the US's leading native newspaper.

Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales appearing together in Santa Cruz, Bolivia.

Venezuelan Warmth

2005-12-22T13:45:00.000-05:00

By Vijay Prasad
Frontline, Volume 22 - Issue 26, Dec. 17 - 30, 2005

Meanwhile, in Quincy, Massachusetts, Linda Kelly and her family of five are happy to get their Christmas present early from Santa Chavez. "He's doing the right thing," said Kelly to a journalist from Seattle Intelligencer. "The people of Venezuela are lucky to have him. That's the way government is supposed to be taking care of the little guy." Kelly's town has already lost two of its residents to the Iraq war. Last year, a suicide bomber killed Army Private Norman Darling, who joined the forces to give his four-year-old daughter Camryn a better life. In September 2003, a roadside bomb killed Sergeant Todd Caldwell. His mother, Gladys, called upon mothers like her "to get up in arms and call Senators and say, `We want these guys home because they're getting killed off.'" Caldwell was the 285th U.S. soldier killed in Iraq. As Venezuelan oil at discount prices entered his neighbourhood, the 2,000th soldier was killed. The Bush plan in Iraq requires the pacification of the resistance before any oil company will be comfortable enough to invest its windfall profits into the laden oilfields. This means that more of the U.S. poor from places like Quincy will be out there securing the Iraqi landscape for oil companies who do not benefit them. Chavez' action not only helps people like Linda Kelly but also shows up the inhumanity of the war-for-oil policy that absorbs the White House and the U.S.-led oil firms.

Venezuela and subversive democracy

2005-12-15T13:57:00.000-05:00

By Jesús Arboleya Cervera
Published by Progreso Weekly, 12/15/05

In the belief that they had seized power, the Venezuelan putschists in April 2002 proceeded at once to dismantle the democratic system of that country. They not only imprisoned President Hugo Chávez and persecuted his supporters but also dissolved Congress, abolished the Constitution and even reneged the Bolivarian nature of the republic. Evidently, that wasn't the kind of democracy they wanted.

Never mind that Chávez has won more elections than anyone else; the issue is not form but content. He is a "populist dictator" and the people have no right to impose a dictatorship on the oligarchy. Dictatorship is the patrimony of the oligarchy and, in the best of cases, democracy consists of packaging dictatorship in gift-wrapping paper.

Santa Claus, Make Way for Santa Chavez

2005-11-23T13:48:00.000-05:00

By Juan Gonzalez
The New York Daily News
November 23, 2005

Poor residents and nonprofit groups in the South Bronx are about to receive a huge Christmas gift from Venezuela's firebrand President Hugo Chavez: Eight-million gallons of heating oil at bargain-basement prices.

Two months ago, in an interview with the Daily News during his visit to the United Nations, Chavez first made the startling offer of cheap fuel for this winter from his oil-rich country to a handful of poor communities in the United States.

At the time, critics of the radical populist Chavez, the Bush administration's biggest nemesis in South America, scoffed at his proposal.

But the Venezuelan leader is about to deliver.

Culture and politics — a tale of two suburbs

2005-11-23T09:15:00.000-05:00

Margarita Windisch, Caracas, GreenLeft Weekly

Three months after the takeover of the local metropolitan police station by the poor community of 23 Enero, in the west of Caracas, the place is as busy as a beehive. The Coordinadora Simon Bolivar (CSB), a militant grassroots community organisation, has been instrumental in involving members of the barrio (neighbourhood) in transforming the derelict old police station into the pride and joy of the poor suburb.

The community is especially proud of the massive portraits painted by local artists of Latin American revolutionary heroes Che Guevara and Simon Bolivar crowning the entrance to the centre. Juan Contreras from the CSB explained: “Now our heroes greet us, not the stench of a rotten and violent system represented by the corrupt police force. Instead of having corrupt police guarding the front gate, grandmothers are doing their daily exercises under the supervision of Cuban health professionals. The centre now also provides education, dance lessons for children, and will be launching its very own radio station on November 25.”

Hugo Chavez vs. the King of Vacations

2005-11-21T09:09:00.000-05:00

By MIKE WHITNEY, Counterpunch

Hugo Chavez seems to take great pleasure in tweaking George Bush's nose. He's repeatedly called Bush a "terrorist" and disparaged the US as a "terrorist state". Just last week, Chavez fired off another broadside saying, "The planet's most serious danger is the government of the United States ... The people of the United States are being governed by a killer, a genocidal murderer, and a madman."

He got that right.

The rise of Bush’s new enemy

2005-11-14T09:07:00.000-05:00

John Pilger, New Statesman
14th November 2005

I was dropped at Paradiso, the last middle-class area before barrio La Vega, which spills into a ravine as if by the force of gravity. Storms were forecast, and people were anxious, remembering the mudslides that took 20,000 lives. “Why are you here?”, asked the man sitting opposite me in the packed jeep-bus that chugged up the hill. Like so many in Latin America, he appeared old, but wasn’t. Without waiting for my answer, he listed why he supported Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez: schools, clinics, affordable food, “our constitution, our democracy” and “for the first time, the oil money is going to us”. I asked him if he belonged to the MVR (Movement for a Fifth Republic), Chavez’s party. “No, I’ve never been in a political party; I can only tell you how my life has been changed, as I never dreamt.”

It is raw witness like this, which I have heard over and over again in Venezuela, that smashes the one-way mirror between the West and a continent that is rising. By rising, I mean the phenomenon of millions of people stirring once again, “like lions after slumber/In unvanquishable number”, wrote the poet Shelley in The Mask of Anarchy. This is not romantic; an epic is unfolding in Latin America that demands our attention beyond the stereotypes and cliches that diminish whole societies to their degree of exploitation and expendability.

Workers building a new Venezuela

2005-11-09T23:36:00.000-05:00

By Federico Fuentes, Green Left Weekly

Together, the government and workers have begun a process aimed at creating jobs at the same time as ensuring the production that is necessary to meet the needs of Venezuela’s people. Part of this is an experiment in cogestion or co-management, where workers are given a role in the running of their workplaces. The idea of co-management has been around for some time. In Germany, for example, co-management was used to co-opt the workers’ movement by giving workers shares and some nominal decision-making power, aimed at convincing them that their interests lay with increased production and profits for the bosses.

However in Venezuela, co-management is being posed as an alternative to the interests of the bosses, and more fundamentally, to those of capitalism. As Canadian academic Michael Lebowitz, now living in Venezuela, explained at a recent national gathering of workers for the recuperation of factories, “the point of co-management is to put an end to capitalist exploitation and to create the potential for building a truly human society. When workers are no longer driven by the logic of capital to produce profits for capitalists, the whole nature of work can change. Workers can cooperate with each other to do their jobs well; they can apply their knowledge about better ways to produce to improve production both immediately and in the future; and, they can end the division in the workplace between those who think and those who do — all because, in co-management, workers know that their activity is not for the enrichment of capitalists.

Venezuela's Path

2005-11-06T23:32:00.000-05:00

by Michael Albert, Z-Net

My first and arguably most personally surprising encounter with the Bolivarian Revolution was at the Ministry for Popular Participation, which was created in accord, I was told, with Chavez's desire "that the people should take power."

I asked the officials we interviewed, "What does that mean, that the people should take power?" After noting thousands of years of "empires obstructing people from participating in politics," all culminating in "the North American empire," the official said the "U.S. has had 200 years of representative government, but in your system people turn over control to others." Instead, in Venezuela, "we humbly are proposing a system where people hold power in a participatory and protagonist democracy. We want a new kind of democracy to attain a new kind of society."

On the wall was a diagram of their aims. It had lots of little circles, then other larger ones in another layer, and so on. The idea, they said, "was to establish numerous local grassroots assemblies or councils of citizens where people could directly express themselves." These local councils would be the foundational components of "a new system of participatory democracy."

Chávez and Maradona Lead Massive Rebuke of Bush

2005-11-05T23:34:00.000-05:00

By Jordana Timerman, the Nation

Some aspects of George Bush's travels have become commonplace, including massive protests, sporadic violence and tight security operations. All of these usual elements--notably the imperial-style arrival of the US president with an entourage of 2,000 people and four AWACS surveillance systems--were present at the Fourth Summit of the Americas in Mar del Plata, Argentina.

But the opposition to Bush and his proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), as well as neoconservative economic policies and capitalism in general, took on a creative twist this time, with a massive march that ended in a rally at a sports stadium involving a heterogeneous group of Latin American leaders: Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, Bolivian socialist leader Evo Morales, Argentine leaders of the unemployed, Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, singers from all over the continent, and, of course, Diego Maradona, legendary soccer hero.

Economic Growth is a Home Run in Venezuela

2005-11-02T23:38:00.000-05:00

By: Mark Weisbrot - Knight-Ridder News Service

CARACAS - "Viva Chavez," shouted Chicago White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen, as the team celebrated its World Series sweep last week. Guillen is Venezuelan, and a national hero in this country of 25 million people who seem to believe that they too, along with Chicagoans, have won the World Series.

His cheer for the country's leftist President Hugo Chavez might have caused some reaction just a year or two ago. But these days it went largely unnoticed, despite the continuing hostility between the Chavez government and the Bush administration. Relations between the two governments have been sour since the Bush administration supported a military coup against Chavez in April 2002, as well as a failed attempt to recall him last year.

But Chavez' popularity is now among the highest of any president in Latin America, with a 77 percent approval rating, according to the latest polling.

Building Socialism in Venezuela

2005-10-26T23:40:00.000-04:00

By: Federico Fuentes - Green Left Weekly

The last time I spoke with long-time influential writer on Latin American politics Marta Harnecker was at the 2003 World Social Forum, where we talked of the “most important anti-neoliberal struggle in the world” unfolding in Venezuela. It was two years later at this same event that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, for the first time in the international arena, proclaimed his support for socialism as the only alternative to capitalism.

Harnecker now lives in Venezuela, trying to support the government however she can, including working as an adviser to the new Minister of Participation and Social Development. Meeting her again, I asked her what she thought Chavez’s comments on socialism represented in relation to changes in Venezuela over that period.

MST Representative Visits Venezuela, Sees Country in Transformation

2005-10-20T23:42:00.000-04:00

By: Joao Pedro Stédile - MST

Dear Friends,

I am writing to you from the bolivarian planes in the state of Barinas, in the centre of Venezuela. I am here doing a "recorrido" [tour], as they say, to learn about the agrarian reform process in Venezuela. I am impressed. I am very impressed. After all, as the oriental proverb goes: "The eyes see more than the ears". Venezuela had a glorious past in the 19th century brought about by the heroic struggles for independence led by Simon Bolívar, Ezequiel Zamora with the aid of a brave Brazilian combatant who reached the rango [rank] of general: Abreu Lima, born in Pernambuco, whom Venezuelans are very proud of, even though we Brazilians regrettably do not even know his history.

Hugo Chávez and the Politics of Race

2005-10-14T12:43:00.000-04:00

The following article encapsulates the remarkable changes that have taken place under Chávez in regards to empowering the black and indigenous people of Venezuela and the rest of the Hemisphere.

By NIKOLAS KOZLOFF, Counterpunch

As the war of words heats up between the Bush White House and Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, the firebrand South American leader has boldly sought to forge ties with poor communities of color in the United States. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Chávez provided relief assistance to the poverty stricken and largely African American victims of the disaster.

World Social Forum, Venezuela: Another World Is Possible

2005-10-04T15:15:00.000-04:00

by Deborah James
January, 2005, Brazil

President Chávez addresses the teeming Gigantinho stadium in Porto Alegre, Brazil on the last day of the World Social Forum. The massive crowd cheers wildly; thunderous applause explodes each time he appeals for Latin American unity and denounces the Bush agenda.

I talk with him later that evening, wondering what it feels like to be the most popular politician in Latin America in decades. "The poor of Venezuela - and of the entire continent - are waking up. They are building the dream of Bolívar - to create a united Latin America free of interference from the United States."

Something remarkable is happening in Venezuela. For the first time, the President has challenged the business elite head-on, fighting - and winning - a David-and-Goliath struggle to recapture the national oil wealth from a tiny elite and put it to use to the benefit the poor majority.

Chavez staying true to pledge for U.S. poor

2005-09-23T16:51:00.000-04:00

By ESTANISLAO OZIEWICZ, Friday, September 23, 2005, Globe and Mail

When Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said on the weekend that he was going to open the taps on subsidized heating oil for poor folks in the United States, many assumed it was a drive-by comment aimed at raising the ire of his frequent critics in Washington.

But, as it turns out, Mr. Chavez is a man of his word.

Officials at Citgo Petroleum Corp. -- the Houston-based company that is wholly owned by Venezuela's state-owned energy company -- say they are scrambling to put the fine points on Mr. Chavez's promise to supply some of the poorest neighbourhoods in the United States with cheap heating oil this winter.

"The idea is to work with communities in need, with schools, and we'll have to work through not-for-profit organizations that will serve as intermediaries," public affairs manager Fernando Garay said.

...

Ms. Buxton said that Mr. Chavez's U.S. foray was borne of pragmatism and ideology.

"He's been deeply, deeply frustrated by coverage in the U.S. media and the attitude of the U.S. government, and he's trying to counter a very Republican-directed vendetta," she said, a vendetta that included a call by U.S. evangelist Pat Robertson for his assassination.

"He clearly needed to build constructive alliances with more liberal sections of American society and open a way to insulate himself against his Washington enemies."

On the World Stage

2005-09-22T11:47:00.000-04:00

By Robert Brubach, Z-Net

Hugo Chavez has moved onto the world stage as an advocate of profound change within his own country and abroad. At the gathering of world leaders at the United Nations this week he proclaimed: "The United Nations has exhausted its model...The twenty first century demands deep changes that will only be possible if a new organization is founded." He described the specter of a "frightening neo- liberal globalization" that has sapped the will of the United Nations. Alluding to the United States, he called for an end to the "shameless dictatorship" it exercises over the international organization and demanded that UN headquarters be moved from New York to an "international city" in a country in the South.

"Tremendous courage against the odds"

2005-09-21T11:31:00.000-04:00

Kiraz Janicke speaks to Gregory Wilpert for Green Left Weekly

...According to Wilpert, the Bolivarian revolution led by President Hugo Chavez is “really crucial and important as an experiment, as an example, as a place to learn and as an inspiration”.

Venezuela is “a place of world historical importance right now”, said Wilpert. “I think that’s why the word has to get out about it, because most people don’t really know what’s going on and the mainstream media aren’t really doing a good job of reporting on it.”

Wilpert claims that “Venezuela is the only country in the world, as far as I know, where the government is really trying to [work] its way towards something that is anti-capitalist, something non-capitalist. [Venezuelan President Hugo] Chavez talks about it being socialism of the 21st century. Even though it’s not defined exactly which way this process is heading, it’s really the only country in the world that is trying to do something different.”

Chavez in the USA

2005-09-18T21:40:00.000-04:00

Chavez made good use of his two days in NYC, visiting the Bronx (with Congressman Jose Serrano) and the Riverside Church (with Jesse Jackson) that hosted the historic meeting between Fidel Castro and Malcolm X 35 years ago. [Miami Herald | Globe and Mail| Journal News]

He also talked to Ted Koppel of ABC News in a wide-ranging and remarkably frank interview. He also talked to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!. Also read this commentary.

Chavez Speaks at the UN

2005-09-16T15:17:00.000-04:00

On the morning of September 16, 2005, Chavez brought the revolution into the halls of the UN, in a fiery speech recognizing the most precious issues facing the planet and putting Venezuela at the service of humanity and thus earning the loudest applause at the 60th anniversary summit.

See the complete video clip: English | Spanish

Read the full translated text and excerpts with commentary.

Does Hugo Chavez have a lesson for Canada?

2005-09-07T16:39:00.000-04:00

by Jerry West, rabble.ca, September 7, 2005

Imagine, using national resources to improve the national society and raise living standards for the poorest citizens. Imagine increasing access to education, health care and affordable food. It flies in the face of modern, corporate capitalism and the demand for ever lower costs for resources and labour.

And, as far as the U.S. and its corporate sponsors are concerned, it sets a bad example for the rest of Latin America. Imagine if Chavez's programs of redirecting wealth to the people of the countries where it is produced rather than letting it be sucked out by foreign investors should catch on. That is the other part of the problem.

Helping the Blind to See - Venezuela's People First Policies

2005-09-06T20:02:00.000-04:00

By Charley Allan, Morning Star, Tuesday, 06 September 2005

The contrast between the calls from a wealthy bible basher to assassinate Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez and the south American country's people-first policies in the region and beyond could not be larger.

So, US televangelist Pat Robertson has ordered his million-strong "brownshirt" army to assassinate Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

This powerful Bush ally, who sells "miracles" on live TV to people who really believe that he has a hot-line to God, may just be protecting his turf - after all, the Venezuelan president has just announced on his own television show that he, too, will be helping the blind see again, only for free.

Mission Miracle is a new social programme which sends poor Venezuelans to Cuba for sight-restoring eye operations.

It has been tremendously successful and Chavez recently announced that it will be extended to countries across the hemisphere, including the US.

While Bush prevaricates, Venezuela offers help to US poor

2005-09-02T23:54:00.000-04:00

By Jorge Martin

Venezuela was the first country to offer help to the United States in dealing with the effects of Hurricane Katrina. On Wednesday, August 31st, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez announced that Venezuelan state-owned CITGO Petroleum Corporation had already pledged US$1 million for hurricane aid. "It's a terrible tragedy that our North American brothers are living through," Chavez said. "We have a battalion from our Simon Bolivar humanitarian team ready in case they authorize it for us to go there, if they give us the green light." He offered humanitarian workers and fuel to help. "We are willing to donate fuel for hospitals, for public transport, everything we can do," Chavez said.

Venezuela Expropriates

2005-09-02T10:03:00.000-04:00

By Jorge Martin

Yesterday’s programme was broadcast from Cumana, where Chavez also participated in the inauguration of the Cacao Agro-industrial Cooperative Union, a Cacao processing plant that had been closed for nine years and has now been bought by the workers organised in a cooperative, with a low interest loan from the government. He explained that the type of cooperativism that is being promoted is one that “generates collective wealth through joint labour, going beyond the capitalist model which promotes individualism”.

A bid to empower poor barrios

2005-09-01T00:00:00.000-04:00

By Mike Ceaser | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

So, on a recent warm evening, some 20 men and one woman who make their livings roaring around Caracas on motorcycles carrying people and parcels, met in a small church to organize for mutual help and economic leverage. After an hour's enthusiastic discussion, the group founded the third workers' cooperative to be created in the Los Erasos barrio and one of the latest to be formed in Venezuela, where grass-roots organizing has boomed with the encouragement of President Hugo Chávez's "Bolivarian Revolution."

Chavez calls for global offensive for socialism

2005-08-31T15:29:00.000-04:00

Translated by Federico Fuentes

"I believe it is time that we take up with courage and clarity a political, social, collective and ideological offensive across the world — a real offensive that permits us to move progressively, over the next years, the next decades, leaving behind the perverse, destructive, destroyer, capitalist model and go forward in constructing the socialist model to avoid barbarism and beyond that the annihilation of life on this planet."

Quotes on Robertson

2005-08-30T10:33:00.000-04:00

"We could offer him free psychiatric treatment ... but he could be a lost case." -- Hugo Chavez on seeking Pat Robertson's extradition to Venezuela, CBS News, August 29, 2005

"Mr Robertson has been one of this president's staunchest allies. His statement demands the strongest condemnation by the White House." -- Venezuela's ambassador to the US, Bernardo Alvarez

"The ball is in the U.S. court, after this criminal statement by a citizen of that country. It's huge hypocrisy to maintain this discourse against terrorism and at the same time, in the heart of that country, there are entirely terrorist statements like those...
[Robertson's] comments reveal that religious fundamentalism is one of the greatest problems facing the world today." -- Vice-president Jose Vicente Rangel

Chavez with World Leaders

2005-08-29T17:45:00.000-04:00

The corporate media has developed a habit of showing pictures of Chavez with Castro to press home the point that Venezuela is "Cubanizing." Right-wing magazines have pursued this further, playing up the partnership between Venezuela and Cuba as a budding "axis of evil" in the US's very own backyard. Needless to say, the US administration has been behind this strategy of implanting the Chavez-Castro meme so as to isolate Venezuela as they have Cuba.

For much needed perspective, V for Venezuela has compiled the following pictures of Chavez meeting world leaders over the past five years. In each one, you can perceive Hugo's particularly bright smile and friendly embrace of one and all. This goes for allies and adversaries alike!

w/ former US President Bush Sr.

w/ Colombian President Uribe

w/ Uruguayan President Tabarez

w/ Jamaican Prime Minister Patterson

w/ Russian President Putin

w/ French President Chirac

w/ Nigerian President Obasanjo

w/ Indian Prime Minister Singh and President Kalam

w/ Chinese President Jintao

w/ Libyan Leader Khadafi

w/ former US President Clinton

w/ Mexican President Fox

w/ former Spanish President Aznar

w/ Spanish President Zapatero

w/ Soccer Legend Maradona, Spanish President Zapatero and Brazilian President Lula

w/ Kirchner of Argentina and Lula Da Silva of Brazil

w/ British Prime Minister Blair

w/ former Iranian President Khatami

w/ US President Bush

The loathsome and evil Pat Robertson

2005-08-29T16:33:00.000-04:00

Recently, Pat Robertson called for the assassination of Hugo Chavez. This resulted in a resounding condemnation from most corners, and even Rumsfeld had to issue a rebuke, despite the televangelist's deep links with the Republican Party's religious right base.

But even as they pummeled Robertson for his "fatwa", the corporate news media indulged in their own backhanded character assassination, leaving unchallenged Robertson's more serious allegations that the US government has been using to isolate Chavez. While Robertson's odious, bizarre and reactionary views on everything from gay rights to feminism, to the US constitution were duely noted, his views on Venezuela that happened to coincide with the Bush administration's views were treated uncritically.

Fortunately, most Latin American and Carribean governments have rallied to Venezuela's defense instead, seeing through the lies crafted in Washington.

However, what makes Pat Robertson especially dangerous is that he has had a strong influence in international affairs over the last two decades. The televangelist was a big supporter of General Rios Montt of Guatemala, the genocidal fascist maniac who launched a scorched earth policy against Mayan Indians, butchering thousands, and exterminating hundreds of villages when he was in power from 1982-1983.

Here's a direct Robertson quote:

He is putting down wrong-doers and punishing those who are evil doers... Let it be an example of what God can do when His people are in charge.

Indeed, but is that God or Satan he is talking about? Even Satan's not that bad!

He also supported the brutal thug Robert D'Aubuisson of El Salvador, one of the principal organizers of the death squads in the 1980s. Incidentally, both Montt and D'Aubuisson were evangelical fundamentalist Christians with ties to the religious right in the US.

More recently, Pat Robertson supported former president Charles Taylor of Liberia who was responsible for plunging much of Western Africa into horrific warfare in the 1990s. Ditto for Mobutu whose brutal kleptocracy set the stage for Africa's first continental war.

Like these dictators, he is delusional and paranoid. Here's another quote:

Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now doing to the evangelical Christians. It's no different. It is the same thing.

And one of the strangest (commenting on the X-Box):

Anything that begins with 'X' can't possibly be good for our children. First you have something like XXX, next thing you know you have X-Files, or even X-mas, putting the X where Christ should be!

While it's obvious that Robertson is a lunatic, he controls a powerful international broadcast system that can incite the actions he described widely. He also reflects the thinly veiled wishes of the Bush administration.

Fortunately, such talk only serves to clarify the opposing sides. At the same time Robertson was thinking outloud and preoccupied with murder, Chavez was tinkering with plans to sell cheap oil to poor communities in the US. A fitting reply indeed!

Chavez Quotes

2005-08-29T14:47:00.000-04:00

As the journalist Richard Gott recently said, "[Chavez] never stops talking and he never stops working." He is also eminently quotable as demonstrated by the passages below:

CULTURE:

It can be said to the first world, above all the so-called "developed" world, that the problem of poverty is not only that of Latin America, it is a problem of the whole planet, it is also a problem of the developed world. There are more dangerous poverties than the material type, there is moral poverty, spiritual poverty, the poverty of principles, we could say that material poverty is the consequence of moral poverty.

Without a cultural process, there cannot be a revolution. A revolution that is not accompanied by a cultural impulse designed to empower our roots, propels ideas, rescues costumes... a revolution that does not include that is not a revolution.

EDUCATION:

Some people say, hey Chavez, why are we spending so much on adult literacy and not on physical infrastructure. My answer is that before buildings and highways, we have to build a sovereign people who can live with dignity.

These plotters, these unpatriotic people, they don't want the people to be educated; they want the children and young people, especially those from the poorest sections of society and from the middle classes, to be ignorant, not to have access to education, so that they can dominate them for another 500 years. I promise you they won't succeed! I call on all the people of Venezuela to rise up united, to defend education, which is the lifeblood of the Republic!

Reading has always been a constant in my life. Through culture, study, we began to see the truth. Study and above all reading freed us from darkness. This is the thesis of Pablo Freire: "The importance of the act of reading", it is an act of self-improvement. Yes, you obtain the edge of the freeing sword through reading.

MEDIA:

In the South we are victims of the media monopoly of the North, which acts as a power system responsible for disseminating in our countries and planting in the minds of our citizens, information, values and consumption patterns that are basically alien to our realities and that have turned themselves into the most powerful and effective tool of domination. Never is domination more perfect than when the dominated people think like the dominators do.

SOCIALISM:

We must reclaim socialism as a thesis, a project and a path, but a new type of socialism, a humanist one, which puts humans and not machines or the state ahead of everything. That’s the debate we must promote around the world, and the WSF is a good place to do it.

SOCIALISM OR BARBARISM:

So, Karl Marx could reflect, think and write looking towards a distant future. The same could be said of Rosa Luxemburg, but for us it can't. The circumstances have changed terribly. We don't have centuries in front of us. It could be decades at most that are left for the peoples of this planet to make a decision. Either we really change the social and economic order, we say now we must have a new, renovated socialism of the 21st century, or we decide that life finishes on this planet.

This reflection is something I feel deep in my heart because of my profound conviction that the planet is being degraded more and more everyday, and that life on this planet is under threat. Because of this, today more that ever the dilemma has return with much more force, socialism or barbarism.

THE STRUGGLE:

I am at your service to help in whatever way I can in this direction. All of Venezuela is at your service to continue the process every day, without rest, this process of discussion, ideas, proposals, struggle and of battle, and so as to not only see each other at festivals every four years or every time there is a meeting of the G8 in some place where some groups go to protest. That is not enough! We need to be at it every day and every night. Either we save the world or we allow the world to be destroyed.

THE US:

The future of the world depends on the consciousness of the American people. When they unite, they can save the world from war and destruction.

I sincerely hope that some day the US public will develop some kind of mass critical consciousness, that they will remove the veil from their eyes and see the media powers for what they are. No part of the human community can live entirely on its own planet, with its own laws of motion and cut off from the rest of humanity. They must be critical, and make it their personal responsibility to humanity and morality to discover the truth.

Two fingers to America

2005-08-25T15:32:00.000-04:00

By Richard Gott, Published by the Guardian

Chávez is a genuinely revolutionary figure, one of those larger-than-life characters who surface regularly in the history of Latin America - and achieve power perhaps twice in a hundred years. He wants to change the history of the continent.

Revolutionaries and a country on the edge

2005-08-25T00:54:00.000-04:00

By Johann Hari, Published by The THE INDEPENDENT (London), August 25, 2005

Venezuela is living in the shadow of the other 11 September. In 1973, on a day synonymous with death, Salvador Allende - the democratically elected left-wing President of Chile - was bombed and blasted from power. The CIA and the US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, had decided the "irresponsibility" of the Chilean people at the ballot box needed to be "rectified" - so they installed a fascist general, Augusto Pinochet. He "disappeared" at least 3,000 people and tortured 27,000 more as he clung to power right up to 1990.

Hero of the Americas

2005-06-06T15:32:00.000-04:00

By Richard Gott, Published by the Guardian

Something amazing has been taking place in Latin America in recent years that deserves wider attention. The chrysalis of the Venezuelan revolution led by Chávez, often derided as the incoherent vision of an authoritarian leader, has finally emerged as a resplendent butterfly whose example will radiate for decades to come.

Hugo Chavez Frias and the Sense of History

2005-05-03T15:15:00.000-04:00

By Michael Keefer, Z-NET

The Venezuelan president harbours no illusions as to the kinds of tactics the U.S. empire is likely to deploy in response to a potentially-continent-wide reorganization of social and economic life in the service of human rather than corporatist interests. But neither is he content with the old definition of politics as "the art of the possible." For this slogan, which Chavez Frias says has at times "been no more than an excuse for cowards, or a by-word of traitors and conservatives," he substitutes what we might well term a Bolivarian Alternative: "Politics is the art of making possible tomorrow what seems impossible today."

In Defense of Humanity

2005-04-20T14:13:00.000-04:00

by Amiri Baraka, San Francisco Bay View

We are always Full of
Hope, Hopeful
We never believe what we believe
Is Impossible
& even if it was
it is necessary
& do/able

- 12/08/04 Venezuela to San Juan

My wife Amina and I were invited to an International Conference of Artists and Intellectuals. The invitation was sent from Caracas, Venezuela. The theme , “In Defense of Humanity”!

Do we know what that means? We haven’t got to that yet. Civilization is still a daring concept — humanity a vaguely romantic ideal!

And why, if we vouchsafe we know what “humanity” is … why does it need to be defended? And those who answer the call to defend it, who were they, where did they come from and what did they think about all of it. And what did the people of Venezuela think?

Education for social beings

2005-04-12T15:22:00.000-04:00

Interview with Education Minister Aristóbulo Isturiz
By Sarah Wagner and Gregory Wilpert

Co-responsibility means that the State is not a paternalistic state, but instead that the people have duties as well as rights. It is necessary to take on the big job of creating this consciousness in people of their duties, in order that together they can have the capacity to resolve, not only to complain that they have problems but also that they have to participate in the solution and the search for the solution of the problem. Due to this, the democracy that we are constructing is a participatory democracy.

Good Things Happening in Venezuela

2005-04-04T15:48:00.000-04:00

By Michael Parenti

Millions of his compatriots widely and correctly perceive him as being the only president who has ever paid attention to the nation's poorest areas. No wonder he is the target of calumny and coup from the upper echelons in his own country and from ruling circles up north.

Venezuela's Chávez as Everyman

2005-03-29T15:17:00.000-05:00

By Gary Payne

For Hugo Chavez is not merely the President of this poor majority, but the long-stifled expression of its collective historical frustration and the embodiment of its hopes. Hopes that would have seemed terribly naïve only a few years ago.

What is Happening in Venezuela?

2005-03-02T15:48:00.000-05:00

By M. Junaid Alam with Jonah Gindin

One could easily imagine the North American media playing a similar role to the Venezuelan media were leftist governments ever to be elected there. In early December the Venezuelan National Assembly passed a law on social responsibility in the media. Critics, predictably including the Inter-American Press Association (an owners' club masquerading unconvincingly as a journalists' rights association), have denounced the new law as an attack on free speech. What they of course mean is that it is an attack on their unfettered power to manipulate Venezuelan politics from the newsroom.

Revolution Extends Free Speech

2005-02-16T01:26:00.000-05:00

By Stuart Munckton - Green Left Weekly

For all the accusations that the Chavez government is curtailing freedom of speech, it has not shut down a single media outlet — or given itself the power to do so. By protecting the right to community media, it has actually extended free speech, giving media access to those who have never had it. This process, which is still developing, is aiming at democratising the media, thus making freedom of speech not simply a formality but a living reality.

The poor reclaim their land

2005-01-26T15:27:00.000-05:00

By Stuart Munckton

The land reform is also aimed at solving some of the problems in the cities. An explosion of rural poverty in the 1970s and 1980s led to mass migration into the cities (neoliberal policies in the region made this a continent-wide phenomena). Now, 90% of the population live in cities, many of them clustered in poor neighbourhoods on the outskirts. In order to both stimulate food production and solve the problems of the urban poor, the government has formulated a plan to encourage voluntary migration back to the countryside to form cooperatives to farm land redistributed by the government.

After the Referendum: Venezuela Faces New Challenges

2004-11-01T23:16:00.000-05:00

By Marta Harnecker

A new stage of the Bolivarian revolutionary process has begun. The opposition has been defeated in this battle, but the war has not yet been won. Before discussing this new stage and the challenges facing the revolution, it is important to put these in a historical context.

The Promise of Restitution of Indigenous Rights in Venezuela

2004-10-20T15:25:00.000-04:00

By Robin Nieto

The Chavez government changed the name of October 12 from "Day of the Discovery of America" to "Day of Indigenous Resistance," recognizing indigenous people and the effects of European colonialism on their societies. President Chavez regularly refers to his own indigenous and African roots conscious of promoting Venezuela’s non-European cultural heritage which many Venezuelans share.

After the Referendum: Venezuela Faces New Challenges

2004-09-26T12:01:00.000-04:00

by Marta Harnecker, Monthly Review

With President Hugo Chávez’s victory in the August 15 referendum, the Venezuelan opposition suffered the third great defeat in its struggle to end his government. The unprecedented recall referendum ratified Chávez’s presidency by a margin of two million votes and was declared valid unanimously by the hundreds of international observers who scrutinized it.

In a part of the world where democracy has been discredited by its failure to solve the problem of poverty, the result provided, in the words of one observer, Eduardo Galeano, “an injection of optimism.”

The victory belongs not to a man but to the project of creating a country guided by humanism and solidarity in its domestic and international spheres. It is also a victory for a development model embracing endogenous development and the social economy as alternatives to voracious, destructive neoliberalism.

The Meaning of Hugo Chavez

2004-08-24T14:18:00.000-04:00

By William Loren Katz, Black Star News

Like four-fifths of Venezuelans, Chavez was born of poor Black and Indian parents. Since the days of Columbus descendants of the Spanish conquistadores who supplied the governing classes of the Americas, have denied indigenous people a say in their future. Chavez represents a strong challenge.

Chavez is not only proud of his biracial legacy, but has begun to use oil revenues to help the poor of all colors improve their education and economic standing. He also flatly rejects Bush administration efforts to isolate Cuba, counts Castro a friend, and has repeatedly accused the US of meddling in his country and around the world...

Why Venezuela has Voted Again for Their 'Negro e Indio' President

2004-08-17T15:40:00.000-04:00

By Greg Palast

But Chavez won't forget, because the mirror reminds him. What the affable president sees in his reflection, beyond the ribbons of office, is a "negro e indio" -- a "Black and Indian" man, dark as a cola nut, same as the landless and, until now, the hopeless. For the first time in Venezuela's history, the 80% Black-Indian population elected a man with skin darker than the man in the Jaguar.

Hugo Chávez Triumphs

2004-08-17T01:36:00.000-04:00

By Sharmini Peries

Regardless of this pressure, Chavez remains the only elected leader of a nation that has relentless guts to give continuing volume to his peoples opposition to U.S-led neo-liberalism in the region and economic, political and military aggression the world over. If the social movements who captured the world's imagination with the slogan "another world is possible" could choose a political leader it should be President Hugo Chavez. Such resistance runs in the veins of Hugo Chavez's Bolivarian Revolution provoking left and middle ground political leaders.

The Importance of Hugo Chávez

2004-08-16T15:42:00.000-04:00

By Tariq Ali

Some foreign correspondents in Caracas have convinced themselves that Chavez is an oppressive caudillo and they are desperate to translate their own fantasies into reality.. They provide no evidence of political prisoners, leave alone Guantanamo-style detentions or the removal of TV executives and newspaper editors (which happened without too much of a fuss in Blair's Britain).

The Greening of Venezuela

2004-07-28T15:26:00.000-04:00

By David Raby

But the greening of Venezuela is not limited to the countryside: in the heart of Caracas, just behind the Hilton Hotel, an abandoned strip of land has been turned into an organopónico, an organic market garden for the intensive production of lettuces, tomatoes and an impressive variety of crops for the urban market. Unemployed people from nearby shanty-towns are given work here and trained as agricultural specialists.

Referendum and revolution in Venezuela

2004-07-05T01:06:00.000-04:00

Derrick O'Keefe interviews Michael Lebowitz, Seven Oaks Magazine, July 5, 2004

I think a lot of the criticisms by the ‘New Left’ and by the old, abstract Left, don’t amount to much. You have to concretely look at what is happening in Venezuela; it doesn’t fit any models that we’ve seen before. I think the best way to get a sense of what Venezuela’s about is to look at the constitution. It’s an incredible constitution. The first thing I said when I read it was: ‘who wrote this?’ It basically talks about the need for focus on human development, developing human potential. It’s basically a focus on a profound democracy and struggles and activity from below. And social movements were key in doing that, and I understand that especially the women’s movement and the indigenous movement were most active in sort of shaping the character of that constitution. You look at that constitution, and you say ‘that’s different from any model that I know.’

Venezuela: A New Revolution in Latin America

2004-07-01T12:10:00.000-04:00

By Ernesto Cardenal

The revolution is taking place in every area of social life. In neighborhoods, small villages and rural districts, they are creating community centers with free internet access for all, with libraries and areas for dance and theater. They are building stadiums and sports complexes, thousands of homes, and large blocks of low-rent apartments. They are issuing land titles, and supplying agricultural machinery, credit and technical support. Mission Barrio Adentro provides health services to people who didn’t have them before, including the indigenous tribes.

Venezuela and Indigenous Rights

2004-02-25T01:43:00.000-05:00

By: Global Exchange

The child of provincial school teachers, Venezuela's president Hugo Chávez is an outsider to the elite white world of Caracas. Unlike previous leaders in Venezuela and throughout Latin America who gravitate toward the outside European world, Chávez is proud of his Indigenous and African roots, claiming that one of his grandmothers was a Pumé Indian. During his 1998 presidential campaign, he signed a "historic commitment" to govern on behalf of the country's half-million Indigenous peoples were he to be elected. It is a promise he has kept, and this has earned him the undying support of that sector of the population. He is their champion. At the same time, these policies have gained him the animosity of the traditional elite who bristle at the thought of an Indian or African Venezuela.

Globalizing the Bolivarian Revolution

2003-04-24T09:17:00.000-04:00

By Alex Contreras Baspineiro, Special to The Narco News Bulletin

The president is an example for all of us,” he said. “He starts working at six in the morning and doesn’t quit until after three AM. He has extraordinary energy, and this gives us a lot of strength.” Although the military no longer has the privilege it did under previous administrations, soldiers are willing to give their lives for the “proceso,” or change process. That’s one thing that makes the Bolivarian Revolution different than many others – the revolution is supported by the masses, but also by the military.

Venezuela: the Chavista revolution advances

2003-03-28T23:18:00.000-05:00

By David Raby, Red Pepper

Three months ago the Chávez government in Venezuela was under siege by a jubilant opposition which thought it had the whip hand: with big business shut down by a bosses’ lockout, banks closed, massive anti-Chávez demonstrations and cacerolazos (pot-banging protests) every day, overwhelming media hostility and above all, the vital oil industry paralysed, it looked as if the government’s days were numbered. The opposition demanded a referendum to be held in early February to revoke the President’s mandate, and/or intervention under the OAS (Organisation of American States) Democratic Charter; and with support from the US, Spain, Colombia and other countries, they had reason to be optimistic - or so it seemed.

Today the situation has changed dramatically: the paro (business lockout) collapsed early in February, oil production is recovering, the Supreme Court has declared the referendum constitutionally invalid at this time, progressive Latin American governments have refused to go along with interventionist manoeuvres, and Chávez has taken decisive measures to restore his regime’s authority and support. And in the context of the Anglo-American war for oil and hegemony in Iraq, revolutionary Venezuela stands out as a bastion of resistance in Latin America.

VENEZUELA: Bolivarian circles organise the poor

2003-02-19T23:24:00.000-05:00

By Christiano Kerrilla

The circles' ideology is based explicitly on the revolutionary heritage of Venezuela, beginning with Bolivar's triumph in the war of independence against Spain, and include "as ideological patrimony the practical and theoretical experience of the freedom struggles of all the fraternal peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean".

Their tasks include "raising the consciousness of citizens developing all forms of participatory organisation in the community ... stimulating creativity and innovation in the life of the individual and the community ... [and] realising projects of community concern in the areas of health, education, culture, sport, public services, housing, and preservation of the environment, natural resources and our historical heritage."

The most important anti-neoliberal struggle in the world

2003-02-19T23:17:00.000-05:00

By Federico Fuentes

According to radical Latin American journalist MARTA HARNECKER, "the process of Venezuela's Bolivarian revolution" is little understood by much of the left. One of Harnecker's latest books is Hugo Chavez: One Man, One People, an interview with the radical pro-poor president of Venezuela. Green Left Weekly's FEDERICO FUENTES spoke to Harnecker at the World Social Forum held in Porto Alegre, Brazil, January 23-28.

African Venezuelans fear new U.S. coup

2002-12-26T01:31:00.000-05:00

By Professor Alejandro Correa of Barlovento

his month, for the first time in history, Venezuelan people of African descent have total control of their historic Black university, the Instituto Universitario Barlovento. They are already planning a university administered hotel and a restaurant for students, faculty and the community. This is an achievement of a lifetime, and the people of Barlovento gather around their seat of higher learning to reflect on their success.

Another topic on their minds and hearts is the fate of President Hugo Chavez. He is Venezuela's first multiracial president and is called "Negro" (nigger) by his detractors because of his African-Indigenous features. Behind the enemies of Venezuela and Hugo Chavez are very large sums of money being spent to destroy the dreams of the people who historically have been discriminated against because of race, economic ideas, etc.

Revolution and counter-revolution

2002-08-03T01:21:00.000-04:00

By Walden Bello, Frontline (India)

The revolution is real, so is the counter-revolution. The story of President Hugo Chavez' political evolution in Venezuela.

The death and resurrection of Hugo Chavez

2002-04-16T12:29:00.000-04:00

By Gabriel Ash, yellowtimes.org, April 16, 2002

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was ousted on Friday by a group of conspirators lead by an oilman and a general. The international press hastened to bury Chavez with summaries of his ill-fated career. But after spending only two days in military limbo, Chavez returned triumphantly to his palace on Sunday, carried by huge popular support. The events were stunning.

Chavez was democratically elected in 1998 in a landslide that signaled the bankruptcy of the old political order. He is a hard and polarizing figure, but those who call him a demagogue are wrong. Chavez is a real populist. Under his eye, Venezuela ratified one of the most progressive constitutions ever written. Using the new political procedures, Chavez dismantled the power of the old elite. Then, not only did he push policies of land redistribution and free education and health services for the poor, but in order to pay for these policies he found the courage, or the temerity, to take on U.S. corporate oil interests. Nobody can accuse Chavez of not taking his pledges to the voters seriously.

With Bolivar we go

2001-06-01T23:25:00.000-04:00

By Fabrice Losego, UNESCO Courier

Against this backdrop, Chavez abolished registration fees in public schools, sent the armed forces into local communities to repair and build schools and hospitals, and launched a pilot programme aimed at underprivileged children. According to conservative estimates, the initiatives have already allowed 350,000 children to enroll (roughly 4.2 million children make up the basic school population), a figure the president has vowed to boost by the end of the year. During a visit to Venezuela in January 2001, UNESCO’s Director-General Koichiro Matsuura commended Venezuela’ "serious efforts" to promote basic education, reflected in an increase in education spending to 6 percent of GDP, well above the 3.9 percent average in developing countries.

The Enigma of Chavez

2000-10-01T23:06:00.000-04:00

By Gabriel Garcia Marquez

His parents had a hardscrabble existence on a primary school teacher's salary. He had to help them since he was nine, selling sweets and fruits out of a wheelbarrow. At times he'd go on burro to visit his maternal grandmother in Los Rastrojos, a neighboring town which seemed a city because it had an electric plant with two hours of light at the beginning of the night and a midwife who had welcomed him and his four brothers into the world. His mother wanted him to be a priest, but he only got as far as altar boy. He rang the bells with such grace everyone recognized it by the pealing. "That's Hugo ringing them," they said. Providentially, among the books of his mother he encountered an encyclopedia. Its first chapter seduced him straight away: How to Triumph in Life.

Heroes & Heroines

2000-01-01T23:02:00.000-05:00

Here are some individuals that are inspiring the Bolivarian Revolution as well as the V for Venezuela web site. Names with asterisks * are those that have been mentioned by Hugo Chávez in his speeches and conversations.

Toussaint L'Ouverture *	Simon De Bolivar *	Abraham Lincoln *
Jose Felix Ribas *	Ezequiel Zamora *	Simon Rodriguez *
Guaicaipuro *	Manuela Saenz *	Antonio José de Sucre*
Jacobo Arbenz *	Che Guevara *	Salvador Allende *
Farabundo Marti *	Augusto Sandino *	Carlos Fonseca
Chico Mendes	Rigoberta Menchu	Subcommandante Marcos
Tupac Amaru *	Sitting Bull *	Crazy Horse
Tecumseh	Osceola	Emiliano Zapata *
Sojourner Truth	Harriet Tubman	Frederick Douglass
John Brown	Malcolm X	Huey Newton
James Connolly	Bhagat Singh	Patrice Lumumba
Petr Kropotkin	Elisee Reclus	Rosa Luxemburg *
Frida Kahlo *	Cesar Chavez *	Dolores Huerta
W.E.B. Dubois	C.L.R. James	Franz Fanon *
Walt Whitman *	Langston Hughes	Pablo Neruda *
Joe Hill	Woodie Guthrie	Paul Robeson *
Eugene Debs	Emma Goldman	Mother Jones
Dorothy Day	Oscar Romero *	Albert Schweitzer
Henry David Thoreau	Mahatma Gandhi *	Martin Luther King *
Paulo Freire *	Ernesto Cardenal *	Howard Zinn
Albert Einstein	Rachel Carson	Noam Chomsky *