Medicine & Citizenship in Venezuela | Dissertation Reviews

For those of us deeply attached to Venezuela, this University of Chicago, 2012 dissertation by Amy Ellen Cooper is especially fascinating. But it will also be important for anyone seeking to change the world, on the relationship of social context and social conditions (including especially citizen participation) to physical health.

Medicine and Citizenship in Venezuela | Dissertation Reviews

From the review by Ana Servigna (Tulane):

Health practices are generally related to healing bodies, but Cooper explains that in Venezuela, those practices have become a “political experience of citizenship” (p. 73).…

Participation in the healthcare system is not limited to doctors and patients; it also includes an extraordinary number of community health volunteers. Complementing her previous chapters, Cooper analyzes the volunteers’ experiences of providing healthcare for others. One important feature that she highlights is that most volunteers are women, a phenomenon found in many other studies as well; however in her sample, these women are not only active participants but also local leaders engaged in the solution of local problems.

oooo

One of many popular images of the miraculous doctor.

And much more. I suspect that the desire for such participation was always, down deep, what the  cult of "el Doctor Milagroso", José Gregorio Hernández,  has always represented. He was a real Venezuelan physician, d. 1919, to whom many Venezuelans attribute magical curing powers and is now in the process of beatification. Statuettes and images of him are seen all over the country, and a postage stamp with his portrait was issued on the centenary of his birth in 1864. Now citizens have other ways to work to change conditions for better health, in addition to, or instead of, seeking magical aid from the dead doctor.

"Authoritarian leftism" support for despots

Remember Lenin's 1920 essay, Leftwing Communism: An Infantile Disorder? Nicholas Kozloff describes a similar disorder: What he calls the "authoritarian left" is so convinced that the enemy of my enemy is my friend — the "enemy" being western capitalism — that writers like Alex Cockburn and Robert Dreyfuss find nice things to say about Muammar Gadaffi and Bachar Al-Asad, and even Noam Chomsky refrains from critical analysis of the crazed Bolivarian Hugo Chávez. That means they're having trouble distinguishing "left" from "right."

The authoritarian left goes awry: From the Arab Spring to Latin America - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

Bolívar was no democrat

A critical analysis of Simón Bolívar's concepts of "liberty" and "people" demonstrates that he was no democrat in modern terms. Written for a contest on the 200th anniversary of his birth (1983), until now this essay has circulated only privately among Latin American historians.
Liberty&People

Bitter chocolate

In Venezuela, Plantations of Cacao Stir Bitterness - NYTimes.com

Slums

First, some good news:

Shakira Makes Education Her Mission - NYTimes.com

And be sure to check out "Hips Don't Lie" and then the more sober video on her "Barefoot Foundation" on Shakira's YouTube channel.

And now the down and dirty on the global horrors, too big for even Shakira's tremendous energy and good intentions:

Davis, Mike. Planet of slums. London; New York: Verso, 2006.

Davis has done us a great service by pulling together global data and case studies to portray a monster that threatens to be the real Terminator, bigger, more deadly and more immediate than the movie version.

Slums are as old as industrialization, which first created them by bringing (driving) people from the country to the cities for their labor, without bothering to provide housing, schooling, health care or even adequate space for them to live. Dickens and Engels, Jack London and George Orwell all wrote vividly about them. But since the 1950s, they have been growing exponentially and now have devoured whole cities -- like Kinshasa, which once was a smallish colonial capital with usable streets, breathable air and urban amenities, but now (according to Davis) is an immense extension of hovels with no overall order, no services or infrastructure, and barely enough food and water for its 6 million people. (The Wikipedia article paints a slightly more favorable picture but says 8 million; for confirmation of Davis's description, check out Kinshasa est devenu poubelle (a video about an attempted drive across town) or these BBC photos, Kinshasa 'The Dustbin'.)

Starting with millions of "displaced persons" following World War II, followed by other millions displaced from their small towns and villages by revolutions, civil wars, mammoth construction projects such as the Aswan dam, the partition of the Indian subcontinent, and the environmental degradation of the countryside by mining and other industries, "urban" populations have multiplied even in places without infrastructure or jobs or anything else to draw them. Or police adequate to control them. They overwhelm the urban institutions, "ruralizing" lands on the outskirts and in the interstices of the cities as they establish their own norms, systems of local exploitation, and their own improvised solutions getting food, shelter and safety to survive another day. The process is especially pronounced in Africa (Côte d'Ivoire, Tanzania, Congo-Kinshasa, Gabon, Angola), the Indian subcontinent, and everywhere in the global south, but it's happening in Los Angeles and other cities too. And in the huge colonias of Mexico City, villas miserias of Buenos Aires, and barrios of Caracas, among other places.

Davis is especially hard on the IMF and its "structural adjustment programs" (SAP's), which demanded that poor countries privatize all services in order to qualify for loans, the result being the disappearance of public services and controls. And he is scathingly critical of what he considers neoliberal pipe dreams, that (as the one-time anarchist architect John Turner put it), slums could be the solution, not the problem. That is, with proper guidance, the creative energies of the slum population (building their own housing, for example, and even micro-industries) would boost national development and economic growth, bettering lives for everybody. But no, says Davis, with example after example from case studies, slum populations are so exploited, first by richer forces outside the slum (such as all those Indians who have made themselves wealthy by charging exorbitant rents for wretched housing) and secondly by one another (early squatters charge high rents from later arrivals, for example) that they have no margin to save to improve their housing or much less to grow a stable business.

Another pipe dream that seemed to offer solution without cost has been Hernando De Soto's loudly proclaimed insistence that granting titles of ownership to squatters would release great sums of capital for entrepreneurship. Again using case studies, Davis lists what he calls the "epistemological fallacies" of such arguments. 1, "de Soto's heroic 'micro entrepreneurs' are usually displaced public-sector professionals or laid-off skilled workers," i.e., "entrepreneurs" by necessity, not choice. 2, very few of the working poor are truly self-employed, but renting space or tools -- the rickshaw that they pull, the wheelbarrow they haul, etc. -- from somebody just a little less poor, in a system of endlessly franchised petty exploitation. (Points 3, 4 & 5 are really elaborations of that same point 2.) Then 6, desperation over the real economy turns slum dwellers increasingly to seek semi-magical solutions, such as gambling and pyramid schemes, often with magical invocations to religious spirits. 7, financing by microcredits as in the Grameen Bank, important as it may be to the survival of a few, will never allow sufficient accumulation to help very many people; rather, they've become the "cargo cult" of NGO's, a seemingly low-cost solution that isn't. 8, "increasing competition with the informal sector depletes social capital and dissolves self-help networks and solidarities" -- the poor are fighting against the poor.

So what do we do? Well, according to Davis, we'll have to wait for his next book to find out. Or we can try to do something, like the Grameen Bank loans or Shakira's "Barefoot Foundation," to solve at least a small part of the problem. It may be that the efforts of people like Shakira and the Grameen Bank's Muhammad Yunus will make enough of a difference in enough people's lives in enough places in the world to change the whole slumming dynamic. But even if they don't have such a wide impact, efforts like those and the stairway a bunch of us built in a Caracas slum at least make lives easier for some people for some time. It's not enough, but it's something.

For another view of slums, check out this article on architect José Castillo by Carlos Brillembourg (BOMB 94/Winter 2006).

(Image of a Caracas stairway -- not the one I worked on, but similar -- from BBC Mundo: Venezuela -- la vida en un barrio. Good series of slides.)

Venezuela's disunited "opposition"

Recommended: The Venezuelan Opposition Musters Up a Lot of Nothing on "Jewbonics". This seems to me an exceptionally clear-headed analysis -- as far as I can tell from here ("here" being New York City this week). But then, the view of Venezuela's complex politics has to be clearer, if less detailed, from outside the country than within that overheated turmoil.

Anti-Semitism, left and right

Here's a good, sober analysis of an explosive subject: Anti-Semitism in Venezuela, A Taboo Subject for the Left? by Nikolas Kozloff. Those of us who are enraged by Israeli aggression in Gaza, the encroachment of settlements and carving up of Palestinian territories in the West Bank and other abuses have to be wary of alliances with racist kooks who blame Jews for everything. As though military aggression and territorial expansion were especially Jewish traits (hardly the image of Jews back when Marx wrote his famous essay, see below).

The president of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Spain, Jacobo Israel, made the point in a recent interview that Israel is held to much higher standards than aggressors in, for example, Sudan, who have caused ten times as many victims as the Israelis in Gaza. True, but the reason may have less to do with contempt for (or is it fear of?) Jews than with contempt for Africans, from whom we expect no better. For a similar reason, many activists are quicker to excuse Hamas rockets and Muslim suicide bombers than Israeli bombs and bulldozers. In current U.S. and European mythology, Israeli Jews are imagined as a civilizing force upon those more barbarous Semites, the Arabs.

And that is the problem: Anti-Arab anti-Semitism, that is, hostility to the Semitic Arabs, in some diplomatic and business circles is stronger than their anti-Jewish anti-Semitism. The people running the U.S. have tried to use Israel to police the region, and those running Israel have used that support to advance policies that benefit themselves and their friends, but not the region, or the U.S., or even the Israeli population as a whole.

Jews are no better than any other people, and no worse. No more deserving of security in their homes, and no less. We either hold all human beings to the same moral standards, or we don't really have standards. Qassam rockets hitting an Israeli home or school are as horrible as aerial bombardments on apartment buildings and other schools in Gaza or Lebanon. BUT those with greater power -- in this case, those with the bigger army -- have the greater responsibility, because they are better able to take the risks of peace.

Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question (1844)

Devil from codshit.com

Photo: Interior of vandalized synagogue in Caracas last month.

Clip: The animated documentary Waltz With Bashir is Israeli filmaker and Lebanon (1982) war veteran Ari Folman's way of coming to terms with that violence and responsibility.

Venezuelan politics seen from Venezuela

This piece by Max Ajl in the current NACLA gives another perspective on Hugo Chávez's latest electoral triumph: Venezuela: Local Reactions to the Re-Election Reform. Some interesting ideas here, though one of the oddest arguments in this collection of opinions has me perplexed:

And two, as Venezuela scholar Julia Buxton notes, there is something "fundamentally wrong in thinking that democracy is judged through reference to the procedural mechanics of liberal democracy," which is often understood as demanding pluralism, in which the opposition controls some political levers. Buxton argues that democracy simply is not measurable using the yardstick of mainstream U.S political science, and that it should be understood as popular control of decision-making and popular engagement within the society as a whole. On those scales, Venezuela is no lightweight.

If that's what she's saying, she's confusing democracy with plebiscite. Aside from the logical and political ethics problems (democracy without freedom to dissent? Come on!), there's the pragmatic problem of running a successful regime. If there are no constitutional checks, and no guarantees of pluralism, you lose the synergy that only a multiplicity of energies and ideas can create. Stupid ideas occur to everybody, even very smart people (remember Fidel Castro's "10 million tons" campaign? Or the coffee trees he ordered planted all around Havana? Or, to take a very different smart man's blunder, how about Winston Churchill's World War I strategy at Gallipoli?). If there's nobody around to talk back to the smart (or unsmart) strongman, disasters are more than likely.

Venezuela: preserving or imperiling reform?

I'm impressed by the argument of Venezuela Beyond the Referendum by Nikolas Kozloff. By identifying his "Bolivarian revolution" so strongly with himself, Hugo Chávez may be putting the whole operation -- the re-orientation of the country's wealth toward solving the problems of the poor -- in peril. He has also alienated a lot of people who had been, and wanted to be, allies, but who disagreed with him on some issue or strategy.

This happened in Cuba, too: people who considered themselves revolutionaries and strongly supported what we all understood were the basic principles of the revolution were driven into exile or even into armed resistance (the case of Gutiérrez Menoyo, the most famous example) because of some disagreement with Fidel Castro. Or, mainly, because they wanted different voices to be heard. Fidel survived all those mutinies; Hugo may not be so fortunate. How much better it would be if revolutionary socialists really practiced the democracy they preach. They might still make mistakes, but the mistakes would be shared. And talented, energetic people with independent minds could contribute to the common goal.

Colombia v. Venezuela: Reasons to be skeptical

Forrest Hylton makes some good points in this analysis of Colombian claims of what the FARC laptops show about the Venezuelan connection.

Hugo and the FARC

An old friend has called my attention to Interpol desacredita a Colombia en el caso del computador de Raúl Reyes (“INTERPOL discredits Colombia in the case of Raúl Reyes' computer”). I'd seen most of this (except the signatures on the letter). Yes, it seems that Uribe and his policemen are manipulating info to make the Chávez-Farc connection look worse than it probably is. Meanwhile, Chávez lets himself be photographed embracing Farc leaders and makes speeches calling for respect for the Farc as "interlocutores válidos". I don't know what truth there is in claims that the Venezuelan military gives sanctuary to Farc, but probably some truth -- if not from the top command, at more local levels. In isolated army or Guardia Nacional posts, there will be commanders either sympathetic to Farc or susceptible to bribes, or both, and it's pretty clear that Farc units move regularly across the borders into Venezuela and Ecuador. Some of the testimony in this report in Spain's El País from last December sounds more than plausible: El narcosantuario de las FARC.

I just learned (from a speech by Chávez) that there is a Venezuelan guerrilla group in the border area calling itself "Frente de Liberación Bolivariano" claiming to support Chávez -- he has disowned them.

Anyway, its a chaotic frontier, where bands of armed men and a few women make up their own rules while obeying no central authority. And some of those bands are no doubt in the pay of outside organizations who want to exploit the area's resources, including private, state and mixed enterprises looking for oil, pharmaceuticals, and other riches. Just like in José Eustasio Rivera's famous novel, La vorágine (1924, when the coveted resource was rubber).

Photo: Iván Márquez del Secretariado de las Farc y el presidente Hugo Chávez, durante la reunión que sostuvieron en Caracas como parte del proceso en búsqueda de un acuerdo humanitario con el grupo guerrillero. (November 2007. Source: La Tarde)

Venezuela again

An excellent review of the strengths and shortcomings of Hugo Chávez's charismatic leadership appears in the March 10 issue of The Nation: Chávez's Fix, by Daniel Wilkinson.

I'll have something to say about the intense and nasty electoral campaign in Spain shortly. I was in Madrid the past two weeks, where I didn't have easy (home) access to the Internet and also had a touch of fever, which seemed to me to be two good excuses to miss last week's blog deadline. Instead, I spent what writing energy I could summon on my personal priority, the novel on a great historical conflict that I'm anxious to complete.

Venezuela commentary in Spanish

Those of you who read Spanish may be interested in the commentary that my colleague, Baltasar Lotroyo, and I have been writing on another blog, Lecturas y lectores.

Protégete de los vacilantes (on the Dec. 2 referendum vote)

Otra visión de Caracas. Visit to the posh "Country Club" section and to the club itself, and to a very skillfully designed and popular shopping center, with the center's architect.

Política y espacio. A visit to Caracas' notorious "23 de Enero" housing project (mammoth superblocks, a violent political history) in August 2007. Photos.

"Socialismo del s. xxi": Hugo Chávez' big idea.

Hugo Chávez' military strength and problem

Last month's "No" vote in the referendum on changing the Venezuelan constitution, despite Hugo Chávez's energetic campaigning for "Sí", came as something of a surprise, given his continuing high approval ratings. It showed that not everybody who voted for him (over 60% in the last election) is willing to follow him anywhere he wants to lead, suggesting that the Venezuelan electorate is maturing and discriminating. The other surprise, to those who think of him as a dictator, was that Chávez accepted the result.

Jorge Castañeda, Mexican politólogo and former foreign minister (under President Vicente Fox), offered a cynical explanation of that second surprise: that army officers who knew that the vote was negative (hours before any public announcement) let him know that they would not tolerate fraud. (See Castañeda's article in El País, ¿Qué pasó en Venezuela?)

We can't know whether this is what really happened -- Castañeda's informed speculation is dubious, and his anti-Chávez bias is apparent. But Nikolas Kozloff's Hugo Chávez: Oil, Politics, and the Challenge to the United States (2006. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), originally published in 2006 and recently re-published as a paperback, includes two chapters suggesting that something like that is at least possible: "Chávez's Civil-Military Alliance" and "The Test of Chávez's Civil-Military Alliance" (pp. 71-104).

The "test" of his alliance with the military was the short-lived coup (Ap. 11-14, 2002), which Hugo survived by a hair, thanks to intervention of two generals (Carneiro & Baduel) and lower ranks, which changed the structure of the alliance in 2 ways: 1, allowing Chávez to identify and purge those most likely to betray his revolution, but 2, making very clear his dependence on those other officers who saved him but whose vision of the Bolivarian revolution does not depend entirely on his.

For more information and also some good laughs, see this video of Nikolas Kozloff on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Aug. 20, 2007.

Bolivarian Alternatives

A reader has asked about "Hugo Chávez' ALBA" which I mentioned as an example of inter-state associations that can limit multinational corporations' activity (see below, under headline "Globalization"). Here goes:

The Alternativa Bolivariana para los Pueblos de América is one of a half-dozen or more political-cum-trade associations among Latin American countries, in their attempts to establish policies and resources independent of the United States. In name and intention, "ALBA" is a direct response to "ALCA" (Área de Libre Comercio de las Américas ), Spanish acronym for the U.S.-sponsored Free Trade Area of the Americas.

ALCA/FTAA was founded at U.S. initiative in 1994 to reduce tariff barriers among 34 countries of the Western Hemisphere, that is, all of them except Cuba. Few, however, have actually joined, though the U.S. is still pushing the idea. Hugo Chávez has denounced it as another tool for imperialist exploitation by the U.S. The presidents of Brazil (Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva) and Argentina (Néstor Kirchner) have conditioned their participation on U.S. elimination of its agricultural subsidies (which appears unlikely), and there has also been loud objection to ALCA/FTAA's attempts to impose U.S. principles of "intellectual property" and patent protection, which the critics fear (with some historical basis) would be used to prohibit independent research and even exploitation of native plants which have been "patented" by a U.S. chemical company.

ALBA is the "alternative" proposed by Hugo Chávez. It does not exclude Cuba -- in fact, it was founded in Havana in 2004. (Just this week, Chávez surprised his Cuban hosts by proclaiming that "Cuba and Venezuela are really one government.") It does however exclude the U.S. It is "Bolivarian" both because Simón Bolívar (1783-1830) imagined a union of Spain's ex-colonies in America (he wanted to put its capital in Panama) and because it is Venezuela's treasury of bolívares (the national currency) that give it some plausibility. So far, besides Venezuela and Cuba, ALBA has negotiated agreements with Nicaragua, Bolivia, Haiti, and "bilateral agreements" (something less than full participation) with Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, etc.

Along the same lines, but with more radical implications, Venezuela and Cuba (with Venezuela's money) have created a new alternative to the International Monetary Fund, from which Cuba was excluded and which Venezuela recently abandoned. It was launched in Haiti with with $1 billion of Venezuelan money. Most of the countries of South America have already agreed to participate in what has now been redefined as a development bank which (at Brazilian insistence) will limit its lending to South America (thus leaving out Nicaragua and Haiti and other Caribbean countries -- Venezuela presumably will continue lending to them outside of the new bank).

Cities and Revolutions in Latin America

A call-for-proposals (CFP) with this title caught my attention, because it's something I've been pondering for practically all my adult life -- since my days in rebellious Caracas back in the 1960s. The session organizers, Federica Morelli and Jordana Dym, have also given it a lot of thought. But if their summary of current historiography is right, I have some doubts about the split between pre-modern (colonial and 19th century) and 20th-21st century views of city dynamics.

They write that scholars specializing in the colonial period "tend to emphasize cities as places of social revolution and economic dynamism. Scholars of independence and the nineteenth century see cities as places for popular mobilization (riots) and organized political opposition (juntas, coups) by elites. Scholars of the twentieth century and beyond tend to contrast Indian or peasant villages with the 'mega-cities' of Latin America where factories take in internal and external migrants, housewives demonstrate against dictators, gangs use urban institutions to organize, and politicians develop popular support that launches presidential careers."

The cut seems to be ca. 1920 or so. As described above, “colonialist” & 19th c. histories both see cities as “as places of social revolution and economic dynamism,” including riots & coups. That is, the rapid, innovative social dynamic of “cities,” built places with the greatest density of population – and an inertia of change – is clearly differentiated from the inertia of much slower change in their rural hinterlands, where Marx remarked on “the idiocy of rural life.” It is in the 20th century that ‘megacities’ incorporate the urban v. rural conflict within the urban density: that large numbers of rural people “invade” the cities, that is, are impelled to migrate there, but are not fully assimilated culturally.

Q1: Is this view of the premodern periods generally accurate? In Argentina and Venezuela (the 2 countries whose social history I know best), in the late colonial period and throughout the first century of independence, pressure for change came mostly from the rural areas: montoneras (rebellious bands of mounted men) in Argentina, in Venezuela the many rural revolts leading to changes in the central government in Caracas. The men who came to power, almost always by revolution (i.e., rural revolt), included Páez, a cattleman from the southern llanos, followed by the Monagas brothers (especially José Tadeo) from the rural east, others from rural Miranda or Falcón, and then a whole series of cattlemen and shepherds from the western Andes, especially the state of Táchira, where there was no city of important size.

The earlier independence wars were also largely rural affairs. The assemblies of dignitaries who declared independence met in cities (Tucumán, a quite small provincial capital in the remote north or Argentina, and the colonial capitals were usually centers of conspiracy, but the troops and very soon their officers came from smaller towns & villages). And even earlier, in Peru, Mexico and other places, the most serious threats to the colonial administration had come from small towns and villages.

Q2: In 20th & 21st centuries, why has the assimilation of rural migrants been such a difficult issue? Why have they formed villas miserias (Argentina), barrios (Venezuela), favelas (Brazil), campamentos (Chile), etc., that is, dense and precarious shantytowns surrounding and in interstices within the city, but seemingly antagonistic to its urban culture? Here are some likely explanations:

• Too many arriving too suddenly
• Rejection of the newcomers by the urbanites
• Preference of the newcomers for maintaining family ties & other traditions

The problem with the first hypothesis is that Buenos Aires, Caracas, Mexico City, Lima, Sao Paulo and other great cities have had much more difficulty assimilating their own rural compatriots than they have had with the large numbers of foreigners who began arriving around the beginning of the 20th century. I don't mean that all those Italians, Gallegos, Japanese, and Eastern European Jews were welcomed by the native urbanites, but that many of them found oportunities in their new environment to become effective urban actors, whether in politics, arts, business, or crime. The rural-urban migrants mostly did not.

I'm tempted to submit a proposal, even though I probably won't be able to get to Lyon (France) next August (I plan to be in the U.S. around that time). At the very least, I wanted to develop some ideas about it.

See the call for papers, IXth International Conference on Urban History, Lyon, France, 27th - 30th August 2008: Cities and Revolutions in Latin America

Chile & Venezuela: different Lefts, different paths

Someone just forwarded an anonymous attack --a string of insults, really -- on Ricardo Lagos, former president of Chile, because he dared to say in an interview that Hugo Chávez's kind of leftism was not replicable in other countries without Venezuela's fat "checkbook". An obvious enough point, one would think, but unacceptable to the anonymous author, who seems to think that boldness and clear revolutionary thinking are all that are needed to bring about revolutions everywhere.

We should be skeptical of all politicians, including Lagos & Chávez. Nevertheless, Lagos appears to me to be one of the most honest and effective of the bunch. He left office even more popular than when he entered, so clearly a lot of Chileans have a high opinion of him. He is of course pragmatic -- like all successful and long-lasting politicians, Left or Right. What the French call a possibiliste. And he is also cautious, as anybody governing Chile (with its terrible recent history) should be. So if his policies were "liberal" or "neoliberal", that was due less to his personal wishes than to his estimate (pretty astute, I think) of what his government could get away with.

Hugo Chávez is less obviously pragmatic, and far less cautious in what he says -- though I think he's very careful about maintaining good relations with his armed forces, which is a kind of pragmatism. He has also discovered that he can get away with, can dare to pursue, much bolder anti-U.S. policies than could Lagos. Not only that he can do it, but that he will be applauded for it. There are at least three immense differences between Venezuela and Chile that make Chávez's defiant rhetoric and aggressive reforms possible, all of them conjunctural (that is, produced by a convergence of historical processes that may not last long): (1) the high price of petroleum, and Venezuela's abundance of it; Chilean copper is selling well, too, but not like oil. So Chávez has the resources to spend on projects both useful and wasteful. (2) The weakening of the U.S. government's interest or capacity to slap down this opponent, because of its contradictory petroleum needs and the calamitous failure of its Iraq war (which was supposed to secure the needs of U.S. petroleum interests forever, but has ended up producing nothing but costs in all areas -- military depletion, diplomatic weakness, spiraling deficit). (3) The utterly different social-political history of the two countries. Just one aspect to note: Chile has a very large, established and monied conservative bloc, nearly as large as its very deeply established left. Votes, when free (before and after Pinochet) have always been close, with either Right or Left's hold on government precarious. Neither Lagos, nor Allende, nor anybody had the kind of support in the polls that Hugo Chávez musters. I think the main reason that the Right is so ineffective as a political force in Venezuela is that it never really had to bother about mobilizing voters, it was enough for them to make money while a whole series of corruptible governments of the white elite kept the darker masses at bay. The Venezuelan Left is also radically different from that in Chile, where both the Socialist and Communist parties became highly institutionalized, with large bases of trade union members, producing a more cautious political culture than in Venezuela where the ideologues of the Left parties, with much smaller and more marginalized rank-and-files, were responsible to no one but their own visions of the truth.

By the way, here's what Lagos really had to say about Chávez, in an interview in El País (26/03/2007). It sounds very sensible.

¿Considera válidos los análisis que dividen a América Latina entre los países en favor y en contra del presidente venezolano, Hugo Chávez?
Las políticas de Chávez se sustentan en la capacidad financiera que le da el petróleo y no son reproducibles en otros países que no tienen petróleo, donde no tienen esa solvencia. A lo mejor, a muchos jefes de Estado les gustaría tener la chequera abundante; otra cosa es saber darle el mejor uso a esa chequera. En condiciones mucho más modestas, Chile ha experimentado una holgura financiera producto del precio del cobre y ha hecho un uso cuidadoso de esos fondos, destinando parte de esos recursos al desarrollo en ciencia y tecnología y guardando otra parte... El tema de los pros y los anti Chávez es maniqueo.

Photo of Lagos from Chilean newspaper Clarín

Socialism today in South America

Like you, I've been wondering what "socialism for the 21st century" might look like. Here's a good overview of what it looks like so far in South America. It's especially interesting for its insight into what it might mean for the relations between Venezuela and its English-speaking, pro-"socialist" neighbor Guyana. The author is Odeen Ishmael, Guyanese ambassador in Caracas. Socialist Ideology Takes New Roots in South America

Also check out the other articles on this site.

Guest commentary: Venezuela

Douglas C. Smyth takes a sensible, balanced position on the momentous changes in Venezuela.

"If Chavez had done nothing else, he has at least galvanized the middle class to think of those less fortunate, instead of hiding behind the walls of their gated communities, even if they go only to counter him politically. ... But Chavez seems to be doing much more than that...," he writes.

Will Chavez Become a Dictator?

By Douglas C. Smyth

One of my Venezuelan cousins emailed me over Christmas, and mentioned Chavez putting into place more restrictive policies for the media, as well as new education laws, more taxes, and his consolidation of the political parties of the left. This is hardly surprising, given past history.

My cousin has become an activist for the opposition, a retired agronomist who will go into the barrios, probably for the first time in her life, to work for social change. If Chavez had done nothing else, he has at least galvanized the middle class to think of those less fortunate, instead of hiding behind the walls of their gated communities, even if they go only to counter him politically. I expect that my cousin will learn at least as much as she will teach. But Chavez seems to be doing much more than that: health care clinics, cooperatives, literacy programs, water and electricity to the barrios, vacant land occupations and much more, including cutting the poverty rate by 10%.

On the other hand, his political and security moves are worrisome. He has six more years, and he has consolidated all left-wing parties, and has begun a campaign against the private media, denying the renewal of a license for RCTV. The corporate media has been, admittedly, even more biased than Fox News, stridently anti-Chavez, but democrats everywhere get worried when freedom of the press is threatened. He has also beefed up his military, and armed a peoples militia.

Given history, though, you can hardly blame Chavez. The US did immediately support the coup d'etat that overthrew Chavez, the elected president, for two days in April, 2002, and there is conflicting evidence as to whether the US had a part in the coup itself. Further, it is incontestable that the US played a role in destabilizing Chile in the early 1970's and, at very least, supported Pinochet's overthrow of the Socialist government of Salvador Allende in September, 1973. I'm sure Chavez is very aware of the fate of Allende's peaceful revolution.

History has consequences. Chavez has clearly taken steps to prevent either destabilization (arguably attempted by the labor federation CTV in 2002), or a military coup, and his program to broaden Venezuela's market for oil beyond the US, and his regional trade pacts are, in part, understandable defensive measures, as well as a challenge to the Washington Consensus.

And why should he renew a TV license to a channel that used it to support a coup against the legitimate government? Broadcast TV should recognize that it has a public responsibility: it is granted a license to use the public's airwaves. If NBC supported a coup attempt against President Bush, would its license be automatically renewed?

While he has made mistakes, and while his programs have only begun to scratch the surface of his country's problems, Chavez offers something new, inspiring new leaders in Latin America to look for alternatives to the neo-liberal Washington Consensus dominated by the US.

We can just hope that the opposition will cohere enough that Chavez will be kept honest and democratic.

No leader, facing only token opposition, remains a democrat for long, ­as witness our own government under total Republican rule. Here’s hoping that the opposition in Venezuela will force at least the honesty that we are hoping for from the Democrats taking over Congress in this country.

Caracas, 1963-64: Buckets of cement

Someone signing as "Curious" has asked: "You say in your personal description that after college you "worked in the barrios of Caracas, Venezuela"-- that seems to have been a pivital experience for you, so we'd like to know--under whose auspicios was that experience (we may not have the right English word, we mean, which group provided that opportunity for you to do that)?"

The organization was called "ACCION en Venezuela" ("ACCION" was an acronym for a long name that we in the organization could never remember -- "Americans for Community Cooperation" in something or other). Created by an American (i.e., U.S. citizen), Joseph Blatchford, and some young associates around (I think) 1961, and funded by private corporations with investments in Venezuela, it recruited both young foreigners like me and Venezuelan nationals, mostly college students, to work in poor urban neighborhoods to foment community associations, or asociaciones de vecinos, for social improvements. I personally worked and lived in Barrio Sucre in Petare and later in Bo. Las Minas de Baruta, in close association with Venezuelan co-workers who, like me, were in their early 20s. Our projects included building cement stairways, digging ditches for sewer and waterline installation, and even building a small school, all in operaciones cayapas -- campaigns of collective volunteer labor by the men and women of the community. Our little organization used its contacts to acquire bags of cement and other materials needed, including usually the food that the women prepared for us laborers in every operación cayapa. Years later I went back to visit, and could see one of our stairways in constant use. It gave me a thrill. I even found one of the men I'd worked with on that occasion, shouldering buckets of cement mix to climb the hill and dump into the frame. Toribio Blanco, in Bo. Sucre, Petare -- if you see him, please give him my regards.

For an interesting discussion of the history of community development and asociaciones de vecinos in Venezuela, see DHV para nosotros. "ACCION en Venezuela" is one of the many programs mentioned there.