Chávez releases gov’t funds for workers, not bankers

While the Bush gang in Washington and its counterparts in London, Paris, Berlin, Madrid and Tokyo were turning over the public treasury to financiers, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez was releasing government funds to a bank designated to make loans to popular projects in that country’s poorer communities.

On Oct. 17 Chávez inaugurated the program, which will help establish cooperative businesses and small construction projects connected with services for the people, before an audience of about 250 red-shirted supporters in a theater in downtown Caracas. In the crowd were 25 of the nearly 200 writers, economists, activists and organizers participating in the VIII meeting of the Network of Intellectuals in Defense of Humanity held jointly with the Forum of Alternatives.

The internationalists got cheers and applause as the president introduced them one by one. Colombian human rights activist, Senator Piedad Córdoba, received a standing ovation.

The meeting showed some of the strong points of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution: strong popular enthusiasm, topped by affection and admiration for Chávez himself. The president’s talk, rather than a lengthy monologue one might expect, was a give-and-take with the people, one with which both Chávez and the crowd seemed completely comfortable.

Even the youngest of the local organizers he questioned, a 24-year-old woman named Miledis Pineda, had a grip on every detail of the project she was responsible for in her community. Then to top off the dialog, Miledis demanded to come to the stage to give Chávez a hug. It was the president’s only moment of hesitation—but Miledis ran down the aisle, leapt onto the stage and stole the show.

Miledis Pineda WW photo: John Catalinotto

While Miledis’ intervention was the most dramatic, all those who were questioned by Chávez knew their business and had no fear of tripping up in public, or at least none that could be seen. Most of those responsible were women, reflecting another point of great progress for this revolution.

One conversation took place over closed-circuit television with a food-processing cooperative. The overall impression was of a population that had confidence in Chávez and in themselves.

While this meeting showed dramatically some of the progress made in Venezuela over the past 10 years, there are undoubtedly many challenges facing the revolution. The vast oil wealth has been nationalized, as was the steel industry and mining, but foreign imports and the media—TV, radio and newspaper—are still mostly in the hands of Venezuela’s wealthy class. These media are completely and often viciously anti-Chávez and anti-revolution.

Illiteracy is all but eliminated, and children of the poor now make up a majority of those in university, mostly in state-run schools, with thousands of new doctors being educated in Cuba. The “missiones” that bring subsidized food and medical care to and organize leisure activity in the communities are impressive. But like the one in metropolitan Caracas called Gramoven, they still only reach a minority of Venezuela’s vast poor population. Some 80 percent of food is imported, which has presented no immediate problem because Venezuela’s great oil wealth provides a trade surplus shared among the population.

The Bolivarian Revolution, as most here will tell you, is still a work in progress that must defend itself against powerful enemies, especially in Washington, who threaten with economic sanctions and the renovated Fourth Fleet. It is a revolution that international solidarity can help to succeed.

Catalinotto was one of two people from the U.S. at the VIII international meeting.