The Real Venezuela

Making Socialism in the 21st Century

Iain Bruce

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN:
  9780745327365
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781783715978
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Venezuela has become a huge source of hope and inspiration for the Left throughout the world. Some see it as a shining example of how to begin building a successful socialist state, but Western leaders see it as a dangerous enemy and accuse Chávez of being a dictator. This book reveals the truth by examining the country from the ground up. Iain Bruce explores the political changes underway in Venezuela at the level of the lives of ordinary people. Through grassroots investigations and extended interviews, he explores a series of key transformations in Venezuela: a new social economy around a network of co-operatives; workplace democracy; popular education; radical agrarian reform; participatory budgets and community planning. The result is a clear picture of everyday life in Venezuela. No other book on the country has this level of detail; it will be a key text for students of Latin American politics and social movements and of interest to anyone following the fortunes of the Bolivarian Revolution.

1 OIL FOR FOOD, HEALTH, EDUCATION …

In September 2004, Rodrigo Rato, the new head of the International Monetary Fund, advised oil-producing countries not to spend their rapidly rising revenue, but to save it. With the situation in Iraq going from bad to worse and China’s economic expansion seemingly insatiable, world oil prices had been climbing sharply throughout the year. From around US$20 a barrel in January, the world benchmark price soared to over US$45 a barrel in October. The average price of Venezuelan crude – heavier and more difficult to refine than most – was a little lower. But by September it was still about 60 per cent higher than the US$20 a barrel on which the country’s 2004 budget had been based.¹ The IMF’s argument was that saving such windfalls rather than spending them would avoid stoking inflationary pressures and prevent the international economy from overheating. Oil-producing countries like Venezuela would then be better placed to invest in long-term projects to expand their capacity.

A DIFFERENT LOGIC IN CARAPITA

To José Gregorio Falcon and Greydaris Motta, in the Caracas slum of Carapita, this argument made little sense. It was just past 6 o’clock in the evening, early in October, when I met them. Along with 40 or so of their neighbours, they were beginning class in the local schoolroom in the San José sector of Carapita. They’d enrolled in Mission Ribas, one of a series of adult education programmes paid for directly out of Venezuela’s oil income.²

At that time of day, with dusk falling fast, the view across the Caracas hillsides is spectacular. Tens of thousands of twinkling, low-wattage bulbs give it a Christmas tree appeal – concealing the reality of life for the million or more citizens who live in these precarious, gravity-defying shanty towns perched above the city centre. José Gregorio explained, ‘I never got further than sixth grade, so I never had much opportunity in life. My father was very poor and didn’t have any money for my schooling. But now it’s free, so we’re doing Years 1, 2 and 3 of Mission Ribas, which means we should be able to complete our bachillerato [high-school certificate] in two-and-a-half years. Then maybe I can go to university.’

Greydaris had her own story, similar but different. ‘I didn’t finish school because my parents didn’t have much money and then I got pregnant.’ Now Greydaris, with three boys, aged six, four and two, was hoping to become a lawyer. ‘I’m doing this for my children’s future,’ she told me. ‘If I study, maybe they’ll follow my example.’

Both said the Missions had transformed the atmosphere in the neighbourhood. ‘We’ve been encouraging more and more people to sign up. We try to persuade them. We lend them our books and materials. We help them with the exercises so they can catch up on anything they’ve missed. And the numbers are growing.’

Both agreed on something else too. ‘It’s thanks to President Chavez that we have these Missions.’ ‘This is being given to us by the president.’ ‘Our president is helping us students a lot with scholarships and so on.’ About 10 per cent of those enrolled in Mission Ribas received a grant of about a $100 a month. The point was to make sure students with particularly difficult circumstances could concentrate on studying, without being distracted by the need to scrape together enough for the daily survival of themselves and their families. But there was a danger, as Greydaris pointed out. ‘We are not studying because of these grants. We come to study because we want to be someone in life. But there are many who come just for the grant and nothing else. Then we say to them, don’t come. Either you attend class regularly or you’re out. If you want to come occasionally you can come as an observer, but without a grant. Because we’re not having anyone strolling about the streets or sitting at home watching telly on a grant, while we’re here working.’

José Gregorio pointed out proudly that he had never been paid a penny for his time over the last year as a member of the local health committee, helping the Cuban doctors of Barrio Adentro run the new local surgery. Barrio Adentro was perhaps the best known of all the social missions, through which more than 15,000 Cuban medical personnel had for the first time made primary health care easily and freely available in most of Venezuela’s poor communities.

A little further up one of Carapita’s steep, winding alleys, a dozen other local residents were crammed into Cecilia’s front room. All but one were women. Like Greydaris and the others in the schoolroom, they sat facing a large TV. This one was playing the course video for Mission Robinson II. ‘During the colonial period,’ the female narrator stated, ‘political and military power was exercised by the Captain General. … Religion played a very important role … and the main crop was cocoa.’³ Magdalia explained to me: ‘We’ve already learnt to read and write. Now we’re learning where we came from.’

By the beginning of October 2004, the Venezuelan government calculated that its adult literacy programme, known as Mission Robinson I, had taught 1,314,788 Venezuelans to read and write in less than a year and a half.⁴ A year later, on 28 October 2005, the government celebrated the certification of Venezuela by UNESCO as a ‘territory free from illiteracy’. Kofi Annan, then Secretary-General of the United Nations, praised Venezuela’s progress towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals. True, illiteracy levels had already been lower in Venezuela than in most of the region, at 7 per cent compared with an average of 11 per cent for the whole of Latin America and the Caribbean.⁵ All the same, this still might be the world’s most successful literacy programme ever. The Robinson II courses, like this one in Carapita, allowed the same students to go on and complete their primary education.

RETAKING VENEZUELA’S OIL

All this was possible precisely because the Bolivarian government had begun to re-assert control over Venezuela’s oil industry, the fifth largest exporter in the world, and the fourth biggest supplier to the United States.⁶ The industry had in fact been nationalised in 1976, with the creation of a new state oil company, PDVSA (Petroleos de Venezuela S.A.). But PDVSA increasingly came to be run as a giant bureaucratic empire in its own right – a state within the state – separate from any real government oversight, inhabited by the same managerial elite as before, and working in close symbiosis with the foreign oil majors which it had replaced, and with whom it now had a series of operating and exploration agreements – the terms of which were highly favourable to the international oil companies and often contravened the modest requirements of the existing legislation.

The first move by Chavez’ supporters was to write into the 1999 Constitution a bar on any privatisation of PDVSA – something PDVSA managers and the previous government had certainly been moving towards. At the same time Chavez began an international campaign within OPEC, the oil producers’ cartel, to raise world crude prices by ensuring production quotas were held to – something else that went in the opposite direction from previous PDVSA policy. He also began to curb the power of PDVSA managers by appointing a board made up of not PDVSA insiders but his own oil experts.

The last straw was the new Hydrocarbons Law introduced in 2001 which raised future royalty rates for foreign oil operators – to 30 per cent instead of the 16.66 per cent in the old law (or the 1 per cent many of them had actually been given exceptional licence to pay) – and stated that all state oil activities should be in the public interest and dedicated to ‘the organic, integrated, and sustainable development of the country’. The response of the old PDVSA elite was support for the coup in April 2002 and a leading role in the opposition-led lockout at the end of that year. It was only after these two attacks had been defeated that Chavez moved to sack 18,000 PDVSA managers and technicians, and relaunch PDVSA as a Bolivarian state enterprise, ‘belonging to everyone’. This, combined with the strengthening price of oil on the international market, is what freed up the resources to launch the Missions in 2003.

THE VISION OF AN ALTERNATIVE

The group gathered in Cecilia’s front room were taking an obvious delight in their learning. Magdalia, still in her twenties, turned to Maribel, in her thirties or forties. ‘Tell him how your life has changed!’ ‘Well, now that I can read and write, I can go out and I know where I’m going. I can see which bus to get on.’ ‘So you don’t get lost, right?’ And then she turned to Cecilia, who looked as if she might be past her sixties. ‘I’m really happy because I knew very little. What we were taught when I was young was almost nothing. I never reckoned I would learn any more. And now I’ve really got on. But then I never imagined we’d get a president who was so much better than all the previous ones.’

Time and again it came back to this praise of President Chavez. ‘If it wasn’t for him, we’d never be here learning what we never knew before.’ ‘Before nobody could care less about the poor. They just shoved a piece of paper in front of you and said, sign here.’ ‘This is the first time in the history of Venezuela, in the history of the world, that a president has sat down in the Miraflores Palace and really thought about the poor, about the people up here on the hillsides. So that’s why I ask the Lord and the Virgin to keep him in good health, so he can keep going.’

But this adulation went hand in hand with a vision of an alternative. ‘Before the rich wasted the money, sending their children to study abroad and things like that. Presidents got into Miraflores and just divided the money among themselves and their mates. But now the president is spending it on us, the Venezuelans. And we also have the right. We are the inhabitants of Venezuela, we love our country and we want to serve it.’ ‘So I don’t think the president’s ideas, what he’s doing, benefiting us the poor, can be bad for us or for the country.’ ‘He’s giving the youngsters the chance to study in the universities, which they could never afford before. And later they will help the country. They are its future.’

And this alternative, which these three generations of women in a Caracas slum had begun to imagine, included a recognition of the limitations of the current oil bonanza. ‘We cannot live only on oil. We need to learn more about other kinds of production, so that we can move the country forward. That’s also what we are studying for.’

Two things begin to stand out from the way the people of Carapita – and tens of thousands like them in other neighbourhoods – talk about their experience of the Missions and the other social benefits that they perceive the Bolivarian revolution has brought them. They are two of the most enduring characteristics, or sometimes contradictions, of the Bolivarian process, and we shall return to them repeatedly in the course of this book.

One is this sense of an alternative. It is an alternative that obeys a logic very different to that of Rodrigo Rato and the IMF, with their recommendations of fiscal restraint. Here the priorities are inverted, with the poor neighbourhoods now in pole position. The terms of debate are also reversed. Spending on the poor is no longer seen as an expense, but as a form of investment.

The second is this peculiar identification with the figure of Hugo Chavez himself – universally recognised as both leader and incarnation of the Bolivarian process. There is a strong element of veneration here. At first sight this does seem to lend weight to what many opponents, and some friends, have described critically as the ‘populism’ or even ‘personality cult’ at work in Venezuela. But there is more to it than that. Something else can be detected, even in the words people here choose to describe their experience.

They talk of course about ‘getting on’, ‘making progress’ and ‘improving themselves’. But one of the phrases you hear most often in these barrios is when people refer to themselves, and those around them who are taking part in the Missions and the other activities, as those who ‘want to emerge’ (que queremos surgir). And that is indeed what has happened. A whole section of Venezuelan society, the poor in general but in particular the urban poor of the Caracas hillsides, several millions of people who had been buried in silence, obscurity and neglect, have suddenly ‘emerged’ from the shadows and established themselves as actors, as protagonists both of their own individual stories and of the nation’s collective drama.

What we need to understand are the great variety of ways they have organised themselves in the process; and the kind of alternative that points towards.

THE RING OF FIRE AROUND CARACAS

It was of course these poor, shanty-town communities of Caracas – in tandem with middle-ranking army personnel – that saved President Chavez from the coup of April 2002. In fact there is a case for saying that they have been the central actor of Venezuela’s recent history, at least since the 1989 revolt known as the Caracazo.⁷ Either way it is the combination of the charismatic figure of Chavez and these labyrinthine urban slums that has set the tone of the Bolivarian revolution. So it is worth trying to understand a little better where these urban communities, and the people who live in them, come from.

Carapita

Carapita is both typical and specific.⁸

Like many of the hills around the historic city of Caracas, Carapita – and the Antimano parish of which it is part – was once Indian land. It was granted by the Spanish crown as a reserve for a branch of Los Teques, an indigenous people of the Carib ethnic group, because the Spaniards wanted to keep the indigenous people safely outside their colonial capital. Later many of these indigenous inhabitants were moved further afield: first to Macarao, where there were other communities of Los Teques; then much further into Bolivar state in the deep south of Venezuela, which helps to explain why indigenous groups far into Venezuela’s continental hinterland are descended from coastal Caribs. One community organiser in Carapita, Sofia Lashley, told me they had found indigenous artefacts at the top of the hill in the cemetery of the Heart of Jesus Church. By the beginning of the twentieth century there were almost no indigenous people left. A 1904 law called for these lands to be registered by the descendants of those indigenous communities, but in most cases no such register occurred. There was no one to do it. Much of the land became classified as ejidos – public land that belonged to the municipality and could not be sold.

But what followed in Antimano and some other of the most desirable areas was similar to what happened in much of the Venezuelan countryside through the first half of the twentieth century. Large landowners lodged a long and convoluted series of judicial claims, purchases and expansions – many of them almost certainly fraudulent – which were accepted by the courts. There was little or no oversight of the land registers. Most of Antimano parish became ostensibly private land.

When the first squatters began to build their homes in Carapita, in 1958, it was a hacienda or farm ‘belonging’ to the Baptista family. It grew potatoes, plantains and bananas. There were wild mangoes in abundance. In fact the first squatters were employees of the Baptistas. They’d been brought in to guard fences built at the bottom and the top of the farm, to keep other intruders out. But when they stopped being paid, the employees decided to leave the farm shacks they’d been housed in down by the road, and move up the hillside to build their own homes. Sofia Lashley is 37 years old, so she wasn’t around at the time. But from the tiny, two-room, breeze-block home she now inhabits with her partner and 16-year-old son, squeezed down a steep, narrow stone staircase from the Calle San José, she has learnt the history of her community in astonishing detail. ‘The houses were very spread out then. There were only two on this road. In La Chinita there was just one, and that disappeared in the 1970s.’

The real building boom in Carapita came in 1973. It was part of a process affecting all the hillsides along the southern flanks of the central Caracas valley – driven by a mass exodus from the Venezuelan countryside and the first international oil crisis. The sharp rise in Venezuela’s oil revenues deepened the economy’s ever more exclusive dependence on hydrocarbons – and fuelled a frenzy of prestige construction projects in the centre of the capital. Agriculture was abandoned even further. The governments of Rafael Caldera and then Carlos Andres Perez were dreaming of a ‘Venezuela Saudita’ that could slide seamlessly into the first world. But the other facet of that Caracas dream was the ring of ranchos or shanty-towns that sprang up to surround it, both physically and eventually politically.

‘What really triggered the growth of Carapita was that they’d begun quarrying rock here. They were dynamiting left, right and centre. In fact,’ Sophia points out, ‘that’s one of the reasons so much of this barrio is on unstable ground now....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Venezuela country facts
• Timeline
• Map of Venezuela
• Acronyms and other terms
• Introduction
• 1. Oil for food, health, education …
• 2. The people’s economy
• 3. War on the latifundios
• 4. Democracy at work
• 5. Who’s in charge here? From local democracy to communal power
• Conclusion: Making socialism in the twenty-first century
• Notes
• Index