Alerta que camina! Bolivarian dreamin in Venezuela
By Yasmin Khan, April 2006
Flying out of Caracas after the latest World Social Forum (WSF), exhausted and sunburnt, my brain tortured me for 3 hours on the plane with a 2 line chant. It was a chant drummed by students in the baking sun at the offical WSF opening parade, a chant shouted by indiginous communities protesting against policies of the Chavez government, a chant that reverberated through audotoriums packed with 1000+ people discussing 'what next after Evos victory in Bolivia', a chant sung by really bad reggae bands at the nightly street parties. It went something like this:
"Alerta! Alerta! Alerta que camina,
La espada de Bolivar por America Latina"
Which translates roughly as
"Alert! Alert! Alert at whats coming,
the sword of Bolivar through Latin America"
Bolivar is Venezuelan-born Simon Bolivar who through his armed struggles helped liberate Latin America from Spain over 200 years ago. Bolivar dreamed of a united Latin America, free from imperialist intervention and it is his ideology that is supposedly being put into practice by Hugo Chavez, the President of Venezuela and his movement the Movement for the 5th Republic (MVR). Chavez even renamed the country to the 'Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela after he was elected in 1998.
Chavez says that the imperialism imposed by the Spanish and Portuguese empires in Latin America 200 years ago has been replaced by an imperialism of neo-liberal globalisation operated through its apparatus of FTAA, the IMF and the World Bank. The WSF was an opportunity for me to see whether the countrys policies are bringing Bolivars dream any closer to reality.
The first thing I noticed about Venezuela is that, on first glance, it does not strike you as a hotbed of revolutionary socialism. In Caracas the Pepsi towers, giant Nescafe bilboards, super highways, massive shopping malls, carb free lunches and ipod nanos give you the impression of being in any North American city. [...] Venezuela under Chavez is still very much a capitalist economy. But look beyond the overt capitalism of downtown Caracas and you begin to see why the government calls its programme the Bolivarian revolution. New methods of participatory (as opposed to representative) democracy are being instituted, whilst the Chavistas have set about building an alternative economy alongside the existing one.
Instead of attempting to nationalise major industries, banks and public services, the classic demands of the far left, the Bolivarian government has left the capitalist economy within Venezuela alone, whilst providing the resources for an alternative economy to be built alongside it. This separate economy has at its heart notions of autonomy and sustainabity two words one would not normally associate with government programmes. It is a separate economy based on co-ops, community programmes, targeted welfare in the form of Missions to the barrios (slums) and supporting community self organisation. Bolivarian 'missions' are at the centre of the Venezuelan government's social programmes. There are different missions for different sections of public service, but they essentially come down to the government sending out people who are experienced in their field to help communities develop the skills to provide for themselves. Most famously, Cuban doctors are in Venezuela training local doctors and helping establish health centres in the barrios.
You dont have to wander far to see evidence of this dual economy in practice. A short walk around Caracas and you can see a regular supermarket where you could buy some expensive Nestlé coffee, or a government supermaket, a Mercal' that sells local coffee for about 1/3 of the price. When I wanted to email home I had the choice of the nearest internet café and Microsoft's propriatory software, or the free internet access at Info Shops built by the government where the computers are built with open source software.
Next door to the old University in Caracas there is now also a new Bolivarian university. The Bolivarian university is free, and on the day I visited there was a line of coaches outside that picked students up from the barrios and brought them to classes. In the Languages department I met some academics putting together the new english language textbooks. They explained that part of the challenge of the new university was determining what a Bolivarian textbook should look like, or how a Bolivarian university should operate - for example, how should students and teachers interact, what kind of language should be used (gender and race neutral for for example).
This is a refreshing aspect of Venezuela's revolution no-one is quite clear exactly what Bolivarian Socialism means yet. In foreign policy the rhetoric is clearly anti-imperialist, but the ins and outs of domestic social policy isn´t driven by a fixed ideological programme and instead is being shaped by actions on the ground. This was first played out during the writing of the new Venezuelan constitution, one of the first things Chavez called for when he came to power. Popular assemblies and local community meetings discussed, debated and proposed what eventually became the new national constitution.
My tour of the university was not without unexpected suprises. I turned one corner to see a classroom with a diagram on the whiteboard depicting the 'Intergration of the civilian and the military', complete with cut-out pictures of soldiers. The government may not know which way Bolivarian socialism will go, but the army as part of civil society seems likely to remain integral to it.
Embedded in the new Bolivarian constitution is the right of communities to be given funding to autonomously run projects. Leaving aside the contradictions of something being autonomous if it is funded by the government, these experiments in participative democracy seem to have been successful. Farming co-ops have sprung up around the country, which coupled with government policies on land reform (stating that any unused land will be heavily taxed , prompting landowners to ensure that their land is productive) has helped rural communities and landless groups. Local independent media in particularly is blooming - inspired no doubt by the way the way mainstream media acted during the US-sponsored coup attempt against Chavez in 2002. A self organised group can put forward a proposal for funding as long as its shown to be socially, economically or politically useful.
This aspect of the Bolivarian revolution is perhaps the most exciting. I cannot think of another government which has been so keen to devolve power and government strutures. Perhaps part of this comes down to trying to dismantle the control that the elite have had on the country for so long. As Chavez is well aware, attempted coups and general strikes have been used to try remove his democratically elected government. Therefore by ensuring that power is decentralised and given to communities, the revolution becomes more deeply embedded and is harder to remove.
Whilst these projects sound great in theory, in practice I heard a few stories, especially from outside Caracas, about local corruption in the handing out of these community grants. Most especially there was the assumption and tacit agreement that groups given funding would then do work to support the Movement for the 5th Republic. With a country that feels so under threat from its Northern neighbour, the US, it is perhaps not suprising to ask its citizens to take part in some civic duty to defend the revolution, but maybe this does not sit quite so comfortably with the idea of truly autonomous community funding.
Venezuela offers a unique glimpse of a type of society that is possible in just a few years with a radically reforming left government. Many of its social programmes are both innovative and inspirational. The fact that one of Evo Morales first acts as newly elected president of Bolivia has been to re-write the Bolivan consititution through local assemblies and use Venezuelan doctors to begin local missions shows the influence Chavez has had on Latin America. The land reforms Venezuela has enacted can highlight to other Latin America left leaders (most notably perhaps to Lula in Brazil) that radical land reform can take place at a fairly rapid pace. But there are also unique factors within Venezuela that make its radicalism possible. As the second biggest oil producer in the world, it has the money to fund its social programmes, something many of its Latin American lack.
However, the power of Latin America's social movements will also be an important factor in how radical governments outside Venezuela will get. Without their strength and their continual growth, Bolivars dream will not be achieved. Chavez has a keen interest in supporting radical social movements across Latin America, and it is perhaps in this way that he will be able to excert the most influence in freeing Latin America from the clutches of modern day imperialism.
Yasmin Khan is a London-based activist and a member of War on Want's Council of Management (though writes this in a personal capacity).