Hugo Chávez kept his promise to the people of Venezuela

The late Venezuelan president’s Bolívarian revolution has been crucial to a wider Latin American philosophy

Hugo Chávez. RIP.

The Commandante is dead but the Revolution continues. If there is an afterlife then Chavez is in Valhalla.

He wrote, he read, and mostly he spoke. Hugo Chávez, whose death has been announced, was devoted to the word. He spoke publicly an average of 40 hours per week. As president, he didn’t hold regular cabinet meetings; he’d bring the many to a weekly meeting, broadcast live on radio and television. Aló, Presidente, the programme in which policies were outlined and discussed, had no time limits, no script and no teleprompter. One session included an open discussion of healthcare in the slums of Caracas, rap, a self-critical examination of Venezuelans being accustomed to the politics of oil money and expecting the president to be a magician, a friendly exchange with a delegation from Nicaragua and a less friendly one with a foreign journalist.

Nicaragua is one of Venezuela’s allies in Alba, the organisation constituted at Chávez’s initiative to counter neoliberalism in the region, alongside Cuba, Ecuador and Bolivia. It has now acquired a life of its own having invited a number of Caribbean countries and Mexico to join, with Vietnam as an observer. It will be a most enduring legacy, a concrete embodiment of Chávez’s words and historical vision. The Bolívarian revolution has been crucial to the wider philosophy shared and applied by many Latin American governments. Its aim is to overcome global problems through local and regional interventions by engaging with democracy and the state in order to transform the relation between these and the people, rather than withdrawing from the state or trying to destroy it.

Because of this shared view Brazilians, Uruguayans and Argentinians perceived Chávez as an ally, not an anomaly, and supported the inclusion of Venezuela in their Mercosur alliance. Chávez’s Social Missions, providing healthcare and literacy to formerly excluded people while changing their life and political outlook, have proven the extent of such a transformative view. It could be compared to the levelling spirit of a kind of new New Deal combined with a model of social change based on popular and communal organisation.

The facts speak for themselves: the percentage of households in poverty fell from 55% in 1995 to 26.4% in 2009. When Chávez was sworn into office unemployment was 15%, in June 2009 it was 7.8%. Compare that to current unemployment figures in Europe. In that period Chávez won 56% of the vote in 1998, 60% in 2000, survived a coup d’état in 2002, got over 7m votes in 2006 and secured 54.4% of the vote last October. He was a rare thing, almost incomprehensible to those in the US and Europe who continue to see the world through the Manichean prism of the cold war: an avowed Marxist who was also an avowed democrat. To those who think the expression of the masses should have limited or no place in the serious business of politics all the talking and goings on in Chávez’s meetings were anathema, proof that he was both fake and a populist. But to the people who tuned in and participated en masse, it was politics and true democracy not only for the sophisticated, the propertied or the lettered.

All this talking and direct contact meant the constant reaffirmation of a promise between Chávez and the people of Venezuela. Chávez had discovered himself not by looking within, but by looking outside into the shameful conditions of Latin Americans and their past. He discovered himself in the promise of liberation made by Bolívar. “On August 1805,” wrote Chávez, Bolívar “climbed the Monte Sacro near Rome and made a solemn oath.” Like Bolívar, Chávez swore to break the chains binding Latin Americans to the will of the mighty. Within his lifetime, the ties of dependency and indirect empire have loosened. From the river Plate to the mouths of the Orinoco river, Latin America is no longer somebody else’s backyard. That project of liberation has involved thousands of men and women pitched into one dramatic battle after another, like the coup d’état in 2002 or the confrontation with the US-proposed Free Trade Zone of the Americas. These were won, others were lost.

The project remains incomplete. It may be eternal and thus the struggle will continue after Chávez is gone. But whatever the future may hold, the peoples of the Americas will fight to salvage the present in which they have regained a voice. In Venezuela, they put Chávez back into the presidency after the coup. This was the key event in Chávez’s political life, not the military rebellion or the first electoral victory. Something changed within him at that point: his discipline became ironclad, his patience invincible and his politics clearer. For all the attention paid to the relation between Chávez and Castro, the lesser known fact is that Chávez’s political education owes more to another Marxist president who was also an avowed democrat: Chile’s Salvador Allende. “Like Allende, we’re pacifists and democrats,” he once said. “Unlike Allende, we’re armed.”

The lesson drawn by Chávez from the defeat of Allende in 1973 is crucial. Some, like the far right and the state-linked paramilitary of Colombia would love to see Chavismo implode, and wouldn’t hesitate to sow chaos across borders. The support of the army and the masses of Venezuela will decide the fate of the Bolívarian revolution, and the solidarity of powerful and sympathetic neighbours like Brazil. Nobody wants instability now that Latin America is finally standing up for itself. In his final days Chávez emphasised the need to build communal power and promoted some of his former critics associated with the journal Comuna. The revolution will not be rolled back. Unlike his admired Bolívar, Chávez did not plough the seas.

Related Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/05/hug…ident

via Hugo Chávez kept his promise to the people of Venezuela – Indymedia Ireland.

via Hugo Chávez kept his promise to the people of Venezuela – Indymedia Ireland.

Standard Oil Co. (by Pablo Neruda, Canto General, 1940) |

When the drill bored down toward the stony fissures

and plunged its implacable intestine

into the subterranean estates,

and dead years, eyes of the ages,

imprisoned plants’ roots

and scaly systems

became strata of water,

fire shot up through the tubes

transformed into cold liquid,

in the customs house of the heights,

issuing from its world of sinister depth,

it encountered a pale engineer

and a title deed.

However entangled the petroleum’s arteries may be,

however the layers may change their silent site

and move their sovereignty amid the earth’s bowels,

when the fountain gushes its paraffin foliage,

Standard Oil arrived beforehand

with its checks and it guns,

with its governments and its prisoners.

Their obese emperors from New York

are suave smiling assassins

who buy silk, nylon, cigars

petty tyrants and dictators.

They buy countries, people, seas, police, county councils,

distant regions where the poor hoard their corn

like misers their gold:

Standard Oil awakens them,

clothes them in uniforms, designates

which brother is the enemy.

the Paraguayan fights its war,

and the Bolivian wastes away

in the jungle with its machine gun.

A President assassinated for a drop of petroleum,

a million-acre mortgage,

a swift execution on a morning mortal with light, petrified,

a new prison camp for subversives,

in Patagonia, a betrayal, scattered shots

beneath a petroliferous moon,

a subtle change of ministers

in the capital, a whisper

like an oil tide,

and zap, you’ll see

how Standard Oil’s letters shine above the clouds,

above the seas, in your home,

illuminating their dominions.

Translated by Jack Schmitt

via Standard Oil Co. (by Pablo Neruda, Canto General, 1940) | Frontlines of Revolutionary Struggle.

via Standard Oil Co. (by Pablo Neruda, Canto General, 1940) | Frontlines of Revolutionary Struggle.