³Now the community is the basic structural unit of
government of the new state, legally defined as 200-400
families in urban areas, around 20 in the countryside and
from 10 up for the indigenous population. The Spanish
political analyst Juan Carlos Monedero observed that the
main reason 20th-century socialism failed was a lack of
participation by the people. Communal councils may be
instrumental in the construction of Venezuela¹s 21st-century
socialism.²
--------------------------------------------------------
Original source URL:
http://mondediplo.com/2006/09/13venezuela
Popular revolution, culture of impunity
Venezuela¹s promising future
Local councils Units of Popular Power are being set up in the hope that
their members, and the small groups they represent, will take responsibility for
changing their lives.
By Renaud Lambert
JUAN Guerra, a lorry driver from Zulia state, knew that he looked out of place
in an office in his dirty jeans and three-day beard. But he had spent a week
crossing Venezuela and he would not be intimidated by a civil servant from the
national assembly. He slammed his fist on the table and said: ³No, we are not
asking, we are demanding that the comrade deputy transmit our complaint to the
citizen president.²
Juan and his colleague Jhonny Plogar represent 700 lorry drivers. In 2000 they
filed a complaint against their employers, the coal haulage companies
Cootransmapa, Coozugavol and Coomaxdi. According to the plaintiffs, the
companies ³misused their cooperative status to benefit from tax exemptions and
state contracts². Over the past five years the two men have been shunted from
office to office and Jhonny has a bulging file of copies of letters written to
ministries, town halls, the state government and the president.
When Venezuela¹s National Superintendence of Cooperatives (Sunacoop) finally
withdrew the companies¹ cooperative status, the national coal mining company
continued to use their services. The Zulia state governor and presidential
candidate, Manuel Rosales, who signed a decree dismantling all bodies set up
during the 2002 coup, is in no hurry to put Sunacoop¹s decision into effect. The
bosses are using the time to get organised. Hired killers known as sicarios will
soon be threatening people.
This is a common situation in Venezuela. When the two men reached the national
assembly to present their case, they found a crowd of other plaintiffs with
similar cases. All support Hugo Chávez, the citizen president, and all demand an
end to bureaucracy and corruption. They are hostile towards a government that
they consider inefficient at best, reactionary at worst. Chávez himself has
said: ³Our internal enemies, the most dangerous enemies of the revolution, are
bureaucracy and corruption² (1).
This language has been used before to blame incompetent activists for not
applying presidential policies correctly. But the ³Bolivarian process² stresses
popular participation as a means of transforming the state apparatus. In
Venezuela it is called ³the revolution in the revolution².
Before Chávez was elected in 1998, two parties shared power for 40 years: the
Venezuelan Christian Democratic party (Copei), and the social democratic party,
Democratic Action (AD). They were adept at using petrodollars to deal with
problems. They handed out government posts to calm social unrest but had to
comply with the neoliberal ideology of the North and the need to limit public
policies. The only way to offset the bloated state apparatus was to organise its
inefficiency. With Venezuela¹s social divisions, skilled civil servants often
come from backgrounds resistant to social change, sometimes because of ignorance
of the conditions in which most Venezuelans live. Gilberto Gimenez, director of
the foreign minister¹s private office, has said his solution was: ³Diplomats
will be promoted only if they spend two weeks in the barrios (working class
districts).² He was smiling when he said it.
Few political leaders are able to take an active role in transforming the state
from within. Before the foreign minister, Ali Rodriguez (2), got the job, six
others had tried their hand since 1998.
Not a political party
The Fifth Republic Movement that brought Chávez to power is not a political
party. After 1994 (3) it grew out of a coalition of leftwing parties and former
guerrilla movements disgruntled with their leaders, who some thought settled too
comfortably into the society they had struggled against. Young activists trained
by AD and Copei quickly realised that the Chávez candidature would open up new
ways to reach power and many joined his ranks.
In November 2001, when Chávez tried to pass 49 decrees to start social reform,
Luis Miquilena, who had been responsible for bringing the Venezuelan left and
Chávez together, decided the decrees were too radical. He resigned as interior
minister (4) and his followers in the National Assembly followed. ³We lost a
legislature,² explained sociologist Edgar Figuera, ³They were passing those laws
on the cheap. Venezuela is still stuck in the legal framework of the Fourth
Republic² (5). Until the country could train its activists, a revolutionary
project was being built with tools inherited from a state devoted to
perpetuating the neoliberal model.
At the December 2005 parliamentary elections pro-government parties won all 167
seats in the national assembly and no longer had any excuse to delay legislative
reforms. The 75% abstention rate in the elections may have been the result of a
boycott by the opposition, realising that it would be beaten and preferring to
abstain. Even so, it revealed dissatisfaction with a common failing in the
revolutionary process, one with which Venezuela must deal: the replacement of a
bourgeois elite by a political elite that has the same shortcomings and
distances itself from the daily realities of the people.
Without a real party, a solid state, enough revolutionary activists or, for the
moment, a coherent social movement, the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela is no
different from any other experiment in Latin America. Chávez said in 2004: ³The
people must be organised and take part in a new participative, social state so
that the old rigid, bureaucratic, inefficient state is overthrown.² He was
referring to ³missions², programmes managed by the community, that bypassed the
old state to deal with social emergencies. The creation of communal councils
this April is an important step towards building the new state and the type of
local government on which it will be based.
A small house shelters the Unit of Popular Power (UPP) at Vela de Coro from the
sun that scorches the Paraguana peninsula. A small poster explains that communal
councils ³are a push for participative democracy, for assisting social movements
in their quest for solutions to collective problems and paying back the nation¹s
social debt². Here, the town hall took the initiative to help set up these
organisations. Xiomara Pirela, UPP coordinator, said: ³We just supply the tools
or help in the event of conflict. Only a citizen¹s assembly can make decisions.²
The councils at work
The councils¹ task is to coordinate and integrate activities of local missions,
urban land and cultural committees. Pedro Morales, director for the Caracas
region of Fundacomun, the organisation that finances the councils, said they do
not ³represent, but speak for the citizens¹ assembly, which is the ultimate
decision-making body².
Xiomara Pirela showed us a pile of maps, some drawn in felt-tipped pen. ³People
start by making a social sketch of their community: houses, inhabitants, their
income, infrastructure, social problems.² This work contributes to the
³participative diagnosis² and highlights priorities: water supplies, drainage, a
health centre. On that basis the communal council suggests projects to citizens¹
assemblies, passes them to relevant authorities and manages resources allocated
through a communal, cooperative bank. Each project can get up to $15,300;
applications for more expensive projects can be made to public planning councils
or town halls for the following year.
In Barinas, Mérida, Táchira and Trujillo, the four most advanced states of the
Occidente region, more than $44.6m has already been paid for some 3,000
projects. After 2007 half the money allocated to the Intergovernmental
Decentralisation Fund and the Special Economic Assignments Law for mines and
hydrocarbons, nearly $1.2bn, will be earmarked to finance the councils. Town
halls and states that used to benefit from these funds will have to make do with
what is left over.
Some mayors are tempted to push their sympathisers for election to the councils,
although it is illegal. According to Pedro Morales: ³The councils are not only a
response to the problems of bureaucracy and corruption; they also increase the
accountability of people who were used to letting the state decide for them and
then complain about the result.² The population is more than ready to take on
the responsibilities.
On 16 July Block 45, a huge apartment building in the 23 de Enero barrio of
western Caracas, leapt a political hurdle. After half a dozen preparatory
assemblies, they elected a council. A resident pointed to the garbage piled
carelessly around the block. ³This building is known as one of the filthiest in
all of South America,² she said, then added proudly, ³but now people will get a
grip on the situation.²
ŒNo vote, no meals!¹
Something similar happened further up the hill in the El Observatorio district.
A plastic sheet pinned in a corner served as a voting booth, a poster reminded
voters ³balloting must be direct and secret² and a queue formed in front of the
cardboard urns, shown to be empty before voting began. As is so often true, the
local women had taken matters in hand. The stakes were considerable and the law
clear. Notices said: ³If less than 20% of the community takes part (6) the
election will be invalid and no complaints will be accepted afterwards. The
women were confident: ³The men will come,² one said. ³I¹ve told my husband: no
vote, then no meals, no laundry, nothing!²
In a few months thousands of councils have been or are being set up. Those that
existed before the law was passed are gradually being legalised. There are
already more than 500 in Caracas and 50,000 are expected overall. Upper-class
districts are also taking part ‹ ³that is, when people agree to provide
information on salaries², said a resident of Prado del Este. Xiomara Paraguán,
an El Observatorio council member, said: ³At least they¹re taking part. Who
would have thought that possible a few years ago?²
Why did the government wait seven years to set up the councils? Engels Riveira
of the Camunare Rojo council said: ³If the mayors and governors had done their
jobs properly, we wouldn¹t have needed the councils. In a way it¹s thanks to
them.²
The rush to set up the councils shows that they cater to a need for democratic
process. Participation had already been encouraged in the workplace, as
co-management, self-management or cooperatives (the number of these shot up from
under 1,000 in 1999 to more than 100,000). There were local cultural committees.
But political arrangements were still needed.
Now the community is the basic structural unit of government of the new state,
legally defined as 200-400 families in urban areas, around 20 in the countryside
and from 10 up for the indigenous population. The Spanish political analyst Juan
Carlos Monedero observed that the main reason 20th-century socialism failed was
a lack of participation by the people. Communal councils may be instrumental in
the construction of Venezuela¹s 21st-century socialism. ³If we get the money,²
said Xiomara Paraguán. Another El Observatorio council member countered, ³If the
money doesn¹t come, we¹ll go and get it.²
Since the elections things are moving in El Observatorio. Paraguán attended a
workshop on social projects and showed off her diploma. All council members will
have similar training.
Faced with the inertia of some bureaucrats and politicians, people have to rely
on the vigour of Contraloría (social control), a citizens¹ watch that defends
the process. Councils may be more finely tuned version of the principle and help
Venezuelans get the means to exercise co-responsibility with the state.
Juan Guerra is a grassroots expression of Contraloría. After he finally got to
meet a deputy, he said: ³Revolution is like an iron fence protecting the
bourgeoisie. If we, the people, allow the rust to accumulate, the fence will
fall.²
--
--------------------------------------------------------
Escaping the Matrix website http://escapingthematrix.org/
cyberjournal website http://cyberjournal.org
subscribe cyberjournal list mailto:•••@••.•••
Posting archives http://cyberjournal.org/show_archives/
Blogs:
cyberjournal forum http://cyberjournal-rkm.blogspot.com/
Achieving real democracy http://harmonization.blogspot.com/
for readers of ETM http://matrixreaders.blogspot.com/
Community Empowerment http://empowermentinitiatives.blogspot.com/
Blogger made easy http://quaylargo.com/help/ezblogger.html
