I have spent the past three weeks filming in the hillside barrios of
Caracas, in streets and breeze-block houses that defy gravity and
torrential rain and emerge at night like fireflies in the fog.
Caracas
is said to be one of the world’s toughest cities, yet I have known no
fear; the poorest have welcomed my colleagues and me with a warmth
characteristic of ordinary Venezuelans but also with the unmistakable
confidence of a people who know that change is possible and who, in
their everyday lives, are reclaiming noble concepts long emptied of
their meaning in the west: “reform”, “popular democracy”, “equity”,
“social justice” and, yes, “freedom”.
The other night, in a room
bare except for a single fluorescent tube, I heard these words spoken by
the likes of Ana Lucia Fernandez, aged 86, Celedonia Oviedo, aged 74,
and Mavis Mendez, aged 95. A mere 33-year-old, Sonia Alvarez, had come
with her two young children. Until about a year ago, none of them could
read and write; now they are studying mathematics. For the first time in
its modern era, Venezuela has almost 100% literacy.
This
achievement is due to a national programme, called Mision Robinson,
designed for adults and teenagers previously denied an education because
of poverty. Mision Ribas is giving everyone a secondary school
education, called a bachillerato. (The names Robinson and Ribas refer to
Venezuelan independence leaders from the 19th century.) Named, like
much else here, after the great liberator Simon Bolivar, “Bolivarian”,
or people’s, universities have opened, introducing, as one parent told
me, “treasures of the mind, history and music and art, we barely knew
existed”. Under Hugo Chávez, Venezuela is the first major oil producer
to use its oil revenue to liberate the poor.
Mavis Mendez has
seen, in her 95 years, a parade of governments preside over the theft of
tens of billions of dollars in oil spoils, much of it flown to Miami,
together with the steepest descent into poverty ever known in Latin
America; from 18% in 1980 to 65% in 1995, three years before Chávez was
elected. “We didn’t matter in a human sense,” she said. “We lived and
died without real education and running water, and food we couldn’t
afford. When we fell ill, the weakest died. In the east of the city,
where the mansions are, we were invisible, or we were feared. Now I can
read and write my name, and so much more; and whatever the rich and
their media say, we have planted the seeds of true democracy, and I am
full of joy that I have lived to witness it.”
Latin American
governments often give their regimes a new sense of legitimacy by
holding a constituent assembly that drafts a new constitution. When he
was elected in 1998, Chávez used this brilliantly to decentralise, to
give the impoverished grassroots power they had never known and to begin
to dismantle a corrupt political superstructure as a prerequisite to
changing the direction of the economy. His setting-up of misions as a
means of bypassing saboteurs in the old, corrupt bureaucracy was typical
of the extraordinary political and social imagination that is changing
Venezuela peacefully. This is his “Bolivarian revolution”, which, at
this stage, is not dissimilar to the post-war European social
democracies.
Chávez, a former army major, was anxious to prove he
was not yet another military “strongman”. He promised that his every
move would be subject to the will of the people. In his first year as
president in 1999, he held an unprecedented number of votes: a
referendum on whether or not people wanted a new constituent assembly;
elections for the assembly; a second referendum ratifying the new
constitution – 71% of the people approved each of the 396 articles that
gave Mavis and Celedonia and Ana Lucia, and their children and
grandchildren, unheard-of freedoms, such as Article 123, which for the
first time recognised the human rights of mixed-race and black people,
of whom Chávez is one. “The indigenous peoples,” it says, “have the
right to maintain their own economic practices, based on reciprocity,
solidarity and exchange … and to define their priorities … ” The
little red book of the Venezuelan constitution became a bestseller on
the streets. Nora Hernandez, a community worker in Petare barrio, took
me to her local state-run supermarket, which is funded entirely by oil
revenue and where prices are up to half those in the commercial chains.
Proudly, she showed me articles of the constitution written on the backs
of soap-powder packets. “We can never go back,” she said.
In La
Vega barrio, I listened to a nurse, Mariella Machado, a big round black
woman of 45 with a wonderfully wicked laugh, stand and speak at an urban
land council on subjects ranging from homelessness to the Iraq war.
That day, they were launching Mision Madres de Barrio, a programme aimed
specifically at poverty among single mothers. Under the constitution,
women have the right to be paid as carers, and can borrow from a special
women’s bank. From next month, the poorest housewives will get about
£120 a month. It is not surprising that Chávez has now won eight
elections and referendums in eight years, each time increasing his
majority, a world record. He is the most popular head of state in the
western hemisphere, probably in the world. That is why he survived,
amazingly, a Washington-backed coup in 2002. Mariella and Celedonia and
Nora and hundreds of thousands of others came down from the barrios and
demanded that the army remain loyal. “The people rescued me,” Chávez
told me. “They did it with all the media against me, preventing even the
basic facts of what had happened. For popular democracy in heroic
action, I suggest you need look no further.”
The venomous attacks
on Chávez, who arrives in London tomorrow, have begun and resemble
uncannily those of the privately owned Venezuelan television and press,
which called for the elected government to be overthrown. Fact-deprived
attacks on Chávez in the Times and the Financial Times this week, each
with that peculiar malice reserved for true dissenters from Thatcher’s
and Blair’s one true way, follow a travesty of journalism on Channel 4
News last month, which effectively accused the Venezuelan president of
plotting to make nuclear weapons with Iran, an absurd fantasy. The
reporter sneered at policies to eradicate poverty and presented Chávez
as a sinister buffoon, while Donald Rumsfeld was allowed to liken him to
Hitler, unchallenged. In contrast, Tony Blair, a patrician with no
equivalent democratic record, having been elected by a fifth of those
eligible to vote and having caused the violent death of tens of
thousands of Iraqis, is allowed to continue spinning his truly absurd
political survival tale.
Chávez is, of course, a threat,
especially to the United States. Like the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, who
based their revolution on the English co-operative moment, and the
moderate Allende in Chile, he offers the threat of an alternative way of
developing a decent society: in other words, the threat of a good
example in a continent where the majority of humanity has long suffered a
Washington-designed peonage. In the US media in the 1980s, the “threat”
of tiny Nicaragua was seriously debated until it was crushed. Venezuela
is clearly being “softened up” for something similar. A US army
publication, Doctrine for Asymmetric War against Venezuela, describes
Chávez and the Bolivarian revolution as the “largest threat since the
Soviet Union and Communism”. When I said to Chávez that the US
historically had had its way in Latin America, he replied: “Yes, and my
assassination would come as no surprise. But the empire is in trouble,
and the people of Venezuela will resist an attack. We ask only for the
support of all true democrats.”
