A collection of interviews with activists and other contributors, this compelling oral history details Venezuela’s bloodless uprising and reorganization. For the last decade, Venezuela’s “Bolivarian Revolution” has captured international attention. Poverty, inequality, and unemployment have all dropped, while health, education, and living standards have seen a commensurate rise—and this chronicle is the real, bottom-up account. The stories shed light on the complex facets within the revolution, detailing the change in such realities as community media to land reform, cooperatives to communal councils, and the labor movement to the Afro-Venezuelan network. Offering a different perspective than that of the international mainstream media, which has focused predominantly on Venezuela’s controversial president, Hugo Chavez, these examples of democracy in action illustrate the vast cultural, economic, and racial differences within the country—all of which have impacted the current South American state.
A collection of interviews with activists and other contributors, this compelling oral history details Venezuela’s bloodless uprising and reorganization. For the last decade, Venezuela’s “Bolivarian Revolution” has captured international attention. Poverty, inequality, and unemployment have all dropped, while health, education, and living standards have seen a commensurate rise—and this chronicle is the real, bottom-up account. The stories shed light on the complex facets within the revolution, detailing the change in such realities as community media to land reform, cooperatives to communal councils, and the labor movement to the Afro-Venezuelan network. Offering a different perspective than that of the international mainstream media, which has focused predominantly on Venezuela’s controversial president, Hugo Chavez, these examples of democracy in action illustrate the vast cultural, economic, and racial differences within the country—all of which have impacted the current South American state.
Venezuela Speaks!: Voices from the Grassroots
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Overview
A collection of interviews with activists and other contributors, this compelling oral history details Venezuela’s bloodless uprising and reorganization. For the last decade, Venezuela’s “Bolivarian Revolution” has captured international attention. Poverty, inequality, and unemployment have all dropped, while health, education, and living standards have seen a commensurate rise—and this chronicle is the real, bottom-up account. The stories shed light on the complex facets within the revolution, detailing the change in such realities as community media to land reform, cooperatives to communal councils, and the labor movement to the Afro-Venezuelan network. Offering a different perspective than that of the international mainstream media, which has focused predominantly on Venezuela’s controversial president, Hugo Chavez, these examples of democracy in action illustrate the vast cultural, economic, and racial differences within the country—all of which have impacted the current South American state.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781604861082 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | PM Press |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2010 |
| Pages: | 343 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Carlos Martinez recently served in Venezuela as the program director for Global Exchange, where he coordinated dozens of delegations to Venezuela. His articles have been published in Common Dreams, Monthly Review Zine, and on www.venezuelanalysis.com. He lives in Berkeley, California.
Michael Fox is a journalist, a reporter, and a documentary filmmaker based in South America. He has covered Venezuela extensively as a writer for www.venezuelanalysis.com, and his articles have been published in Earth Island Journal, the Nation, NACLA, and Yes Magazine. He is the producer of the weekly radio headlines on www.venezuelanalysis.com, cofounder of the internet radio program Radio Venezuela en Vivo, and codirector of the documentary Beyond Elections: Redefining Democracy in the Americas.
JoJo Farrell worked in Venezuela as the program director for Global Exchange, an international human rights organization. A journalist and former reporter, he teaches and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Read an Excerpt
Venezuela Speaks!
Voices from the Grassroots
By Carlos Martinez, Michael Fox, Jojo Farrell, Silvia Leindecker, Lainie Cassel
PM Press
Copyright © 2010 the authorsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60486-294-2
CHAPTER 1
LAND & HOUSING REFORM
Iraida Morocoima,
5 de Julio Pioneer Camps, Urban Land
Committees
(5 de Julio barrio, Caracas)
The 5 de Julio barrio rests on the eastern end of Caracas. Makeshift orange block-homes cover the hillsides in a maze of tin roofs and winding streets typical of the poor communities that surround Venezuela's largest cities. 5 de Julio is one of the first barrios you come to as you enter in to the immense Petare Parish, which rivals Rio de Janeiro's Rocinha favela Las one of the largest poor neighborhoods in Latin America.
It was here that Iraida Morocoima was born, raised, and still lives. She points out her mother's house, just over the crest of the first hill, as she stares out at the mass of homes covering the countryside.
It's late afternoon on Sunday, and the streets and corridors of the tiny 5 de Julio barrio are busy. On the road into the community, the men lined up outside the corner store are finishing off a day's worth of beer in the afternoon Caracas sun. A few blocks away, the community has just held elections for a communal council. Iraida knows almost everyone. Like her, many of them are members of the 5 de Julio Pioneer Camp of the Comités de Tierra Urbana(CTU – Urban Land Committees), a social movement organized over the last seven years to resolve the lack of housing and right to land for Venezuela's poor.
The Urban Land Committees sprang to life around the February 4th, 2002 Presidential decree 1666, which opened the doors for Venezuelan citizens living in the barrios to acquire titles to their homes. The concept may sound simple. It's anything but. Venezuela is one of the most urbanized countries in Latin America. The process of urbanization in Venezuela surged in the middle half of the 20th century. Industrialization and a large oil boom drew people into the city with promises of jobs and improved quality of life. Meanwhile, in the countryside, rural land was consolidated in fewer hands, pushing campesinos off their traditional property and forcing them towards the largest cities in search of employment.
As in the rest of the Americas, the newly arrived campesinos set up camp along the periphery of the city, slowly consolidating their shacks into sturdier block structures. In Caracas, these communities sprouted up along the lush hillsides. Streets grew in and among the homes, which were built on top of each other, quickly outpacing the arrival of municipal water, telephone and electricity infrastructure. The barrios grew, and in the case of Caracas, expanded to millions of people. Meanwhile, since the original founders of the communities were essentially "illegally" squatting on the land, such areas had never been legally recognized. That is, not until the 2002 urban land decree.
Residents began to organize into Urban Land Committees in order to write their "community charters" and struggle for the official title to their homes, in which they had been living for decades. In many cases, the organization was successful. More than 300,000 families throughout the country have acquired the title to their homes. Iraida says that 70 percent of the residents of the 5 de Julio barrio now have the legal deed to their property. But some communities haven't received a single title, and the CTU say that close to three million families still live "in precarious settlements, threatened by mudslides and inadequate services."
Through this process of achieving legal recognition, many community members began to question how to struggle for the rights of those who didn't have a home, such as renters, or children of community residents who were now in the same position as their parents and grandparents before them — members of the community with little hope of ever achieving their own dignified home.
In 2004, the CTU Pioneer Camps (Campamentos de Pioneros) began to organize as an exciting new means for community members in need of urban housing to be able to acquire it through Movimento Sem Terra (MST – Landless Worker's Movement) style land occupations. But after only a few years, due to inaction and a lack of response from the municipal government, many of the original three-dozen "camps" had been demobilized.
5 de Julio was one of the emblematic few that not only remained active, but inspired fellow Pioneers to "continue in the struggle." In October 2007, they attempted their second land occupation in less than a year when a group of nearly a hundred activists occupied a stretch of unused land with the goal of resisting and constructing their own "dignified" housing and community. By the evening, they had been quickly removed by hundreds of members of the Metropolitan Police Force and the DISIP (Dirección de los Servicios de Inteligencia y Prevención), Venezuela's domestic secret service.
Two years later, after marching through difficult times, the Pioneer Camps are optimistic. Pioneer numbers are on the rise. In March 2009, in conjunction with the Mayor's office of the Libertador Municipality, the Pioneers occupied and held a sixty-hectare plot of land in El Junquito, on the outskirts of Caracas, which they are now developing with a group of 120 families. The Pioneers have been actively pushing for the National Assembly to finally pass an important Reform on the Regularization of the Land Law, which they helped to draft. On October 21, 2009, President Chávez signed into effect an Urban Land Law, which could quickly open the door to new occupations.
The Pioneers are confident that through their joint struggle and creative organization, they will continue to acquire more urban land and develop communities of their own.
Iraida Morocoima
he Barrio
5 de Julio was founded fifty-eight years ago. It has the same history of many of the barrios of Caracas, and Petare. The founders were people who came from the towns in the countryside, and who needed to live here. The people who arrived were very good workers, and those that set up at the lower end of the barrio were at greater risk from being evicted by the National Guard. They were the bravest. They had to join forces, and had to build their houses close together, so they could hear each other when the National Guard arrived.
After the fall of Marcos Pérez Jiménez, the local authorities let the residents stay, so community members began to construct the plazas and the common areas. My mom and dad are originally from small towns in eastern Venezuela. I'm number five of my mother's nine children, and I was born here in the barrio.
Roots of Activism
My father was always a member of the Communist Party. He came here because he was in the guerrilla movement many years ago, before I was born, and when things got difficult for the guerrillas in eastern Venezuela, a group of them came to organize in the cities. When I was about thirteen, I began to get involved in what was previously called a Venezuelan Communist Party (PCV) cell, to do community work. But, I was always very critical of these books that they passed out on Karl Marx and others because I always thought that they weren't practicing what they were reading.
I had a brother, who was also a PCV activist, but he was recruited into the military in 1989. Those were some of our most difficult years. Due to his military experience, he was asked to train people in weaponry to participate in the coup attempt on February 4, 1992, against Carlos Andrés Pérez. At that time, we didn't know who Chávez was, but it was a joint civilian-military effort. My brother invited me to join with Bandera Roja. I participated in the uprising and was fortunate to have been trained by my brother in this movement.
Afterwards, on November 27th, 1992 we carried out another attempt. We had really expected to succeed and that Andrés Pérez would leave power. Unfortunately this failed too, and the Metropolitan Police killed my brother in the barrio that day.
They ambushed him and they killed him. It was around noon and I was near the Channel 8 TV studio. When my father found out that we were involved, he had friends come look for me.
My father never believed in the people of Bandera Roja, because he was with the PCV, and my brother and I always had to hide our involvement at home. We had people in the barrio who supported us in this attempt, but always with a lot of caution. For our father, the idea that we both could have died for Bandera Roja was terrible.
I stayed connected to the people of Bandera, and I think it was at that point that I realized that I was really a part of this revolutionary process. My house was raided several times. There was a lot of police intimidation. There were raids, above all else, early in the morning. But the community made sure that the police didn't take you away. I think this strengthened the community's commitment to the barrio. A commitment which had already been there, but which increasingly saw that the struggle doesn't belong to one person, but everyone together, and which had continually supported us in these difficult times.
Despite of all this, I wasn't Chavista, because of the chameleon skin of the Copeyanos with whom we fought, saying that they were "Chavista." They were so quick to claim to be in favor of Chávez that it made us suspicious. But then I joined the CTU, and met these people — Andrés Antillano and others — whom we looked to for support and guidance in order to continue the fight that we had been carrying out. And so the CTU became a phase to continue these struggles to create the socialism that many of us had dreamt of.
The Pioneer Camps
From the CTU, the Pioneer Camps were born. Let me explain. The Pioneer Camp is like a barrio, giving birth to another barrio. We want to bring all the good things from the neighborhood, but with better planning, and we discuss this from the family perspective. One of the things that we say is that more than an individual; you are a representative of the family. You go to the assembly and then you must open up the debate within the family regarding the decisions made.
We got involved in the Pioneer Camps without a structure. We began to write the rules about how to work with this new community proposal and how to build from the neglected and the poor. A lot of people saw this as an alternative solution for their housing problem. Immediately, the people from the barrio began to get involved with assemblies in the communities.
The goal of the Pioneer Camp is to gain access to urban land, land that was never intended for the poor class, because this city was for the rich. So we say we want socialism, and to build a process of equality within the greater city. Well, this process comes with the urban land. We can live in the same areas that the rich live, but we don't want to be like them, because being the same as them means to enter to into this capitalist market, and that is a market of exclusion. We have the right to live in the area where they live.
The Macaracuay Land Occupation
Once we decided on our organizational statutes we began to look for land. Our technical support team showed us more or less how to do this, and when we finished our survey we had an idea of a few of the vacant properties within the municipality. That's how we ended up attempting our first occupation at Macaracuay, in Caracas. It was vacant land within the city that had been there for more than fifty years. And so we put it up for discussion. But we soon realized that while the authorities don't pay any attention when people move onto land in the hills, or in areas considered at-risk, when you start talking about land within the city, the authorities stop on a dime, because they could lose profits.
So, we were enormously surprised that the situation wasn't going to be that easy, confronted by people that believed that since they lived in a privileged neighborhood they have the right to offend others. We saw this when we carried out the symbolic land occupation in Macaracuay. They started to call us names, even racist slurs, and call us black. Not because we aren't, because we are, but they used it in a disrespectful way, as if we didn't have the same rights as them. We were afraid that this would lead many folks to distance themselves from the organization. What it did was unite us even more, deepening our understanding of the struggle before us.
We sat down with the local Mayor, José Vicente Rangel Ávalos, with the Vice-President's office acting as mediator, and at one point we were told there was some land in El Dorado. El Dorado is a middle to lower class area on Miranda Avenue. But when we went to see the lands, we realized that they were already being fought for by the communal council from the adjacent barrio. They wanted to put us in conflict with the communal council, and we said, "No, we aren't going to fall in to the trap of confrontation with the community."
The failure of negotiations with the Mayor led us to attempt our next land take. We found some land in the foothills of Mt. Avila and we began to plan using what we had learned at Macaracuay. Believing that since there was a neighboring community that was going to support us, which was more like us, it wasn't going to be that difficult.
We decided to do the occupation on Sunday, October 21, 2007. We arrived at 11am, put up signs, started to clean up the land, and waited for the community media to arrive to begin a discussion about the rights to the city. The police arrived around 1pm, threatening us, telling us we had to go. By 2pm the police blocked the media from arriving, claiming they didn't have permission to enter the area. Around 3 or 4pm, they began to tell us that we were going to leave, for better or for worse.
We were almost a hundred people. They began to bring in the police dogs as if it was a war. I didn't believe they would force us out until the final moments. There were elderly people among us. We never imagined the Mayor, the son of José Vicente Rangel, a great leftist Venezuelan journalist, could do this. We could not believe that this government, supported by the movement in the current revolutionary process, would actually come against us. But that's what they did and in the most brutal way, with dogs and tear gas.
At first, we could hold out. But when they launched more than eight tear gas canisters in a small area like this, it was difficult for us to continue. That's when we decided to leave the land. There was no other alternative. We left the land humiliated and really angry for being attacked in this way, and being made to feel less than Venezuelan. It reminded me of the repressive government of Carlos Andrés Pérez, which attacked the people.
At the first assembly after the occupation a few members said, "No, the people aren't going to continue." But it wasn't like that. We decided to continue and it was as if being pushed away, our resolve was even stronger. There was gossip spread within the movement trying to divide us. Fortunately, it didn't penetrate, because the people understand that the process is not of one person but of all of us. We will not stay quiet. They want to take our hope away. When you abandon the struggle, you are lost, and we will not abandon the struggle.
There are people who believe that if you still carry out a land occupation, you are against the Bolivarian process. That is what they are told. But I believe that we were supported in our occupation. They have called me from Coche, from Mérida, and Barquisimeto, and they say, "Look, we are going to organize. We have land." There are people in Petare that say, "We are waiting to clear the land to take it."
The El Junquito Land Occupation
Until El Junquito, that was the last major occupation. In the Municipality of Sucre, now there's an opposition mayor. If they attacked us last time when there was a pro-Chávez mayor in office, can you imagine what these right-wing opposition mayors would do? It hasn't been a lack of will on our part. I think it has been because of a lack of political will from the national government. Because there are also fights over state land and it is as difficult as if it were private land. It's complicated because there exists state capitalism. And it's as if our movement has just been getting started over these five years, compared with similar processes in Argentina and Uruguay that have been struggling for thirty to forty years.
There continue to be disorganized land occupations. Because of the lack of political understanding, the people think they don't have another option but to go occupy land individually, and build a shack on one of these hills. But we are spreading the word about the Pioneer policies, and we continue to work with the grassroots, and in six months, if the people are in the same situation, there won't be unconscious land occupations, but rather conscious land occupations. The other possibility is that the people begin to get somewhere with the government and we can begin to influence national state housing policy. It's been very concrete for us to have the land over in El Junquito, where we have seen the people maintaining the process for over six months, and you can see it develop.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Venezuela Speaks! by Carlos Martinez, Michael Fox, Jojo Farrell, Silvia Leindecker, Lainie Cassel. Copyright © 2010 the authors. Excerpted by permission of PM Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Map i
Acknowledgments ii
Prologue Greg Wilpert v
Introduction 1
Introductory History 11
Part 1 Land & Housing Reform
1 Iraida Morocoima, 5 de Julio Pioneer Camp, Urban Land Committees 29
2 Ramón Virigay & Adriana Ribas, Ezequiel Zamora National Campesino Front 45
Part II Women & Sexual Diversity Movements
3 Alba Carosio, Center of Women's Studies 65
4 Yanahir Reyes, Women's First Steps Civil Association 79
5 Marianela Tovar, Contranatura 91
Part III Workers & Labor
6 Felíx Martínez & Richard La Rosa, The New Generation of Workers Union, Mitsubishi Motor Corporation 109
7 Candido Barrios & Manuel Mendoza, Pedro Pérez Delgado Cooperative, Industrial Slaughterhouse of Ospino 125
8 Alfonso Olivo, Leufogrup Cooperative 137
Part IV Community Media, Arts & Culture
9 Negro Miguel, José Ñañez Ibarra, & Hector Rangel, Captain Manuel Ponte Rodríquez Foundation, Cuartel San Carlos 151
10 Wilfredo Vásquez, Catia TVe 163
11 Valentina Blanco, Raúl Blanco & Arturo Sosa, Radio Libertad 177
Part V Indigenous & Afro-Venezuelan Movements
12 Mecheduniya & Wadajaniyu, Indigenous University of Venezuela 193
13 Jorge Montiel, Maikivalasalii, Wayúu Community 205
14 Luis Perdomo & Freddy Blanco, The Network of Afro-Venezuelan Organizations 219
Part VI The Student Movement
15 Cesar Carrero, Socialist University Movement of Science Students 235
16 Gabriela Granados & Margarita Silva, Bolivarian University 251
Part VII Community Organizing
17 Golon & Coco, 23 de Enero Collectives 269
18 María Vicenta Dávila, Mixteque Communal Council 283
Endnotes 297
Additional Photographs 325
Organizations & Abbreviations|339
Spanish Translations 342
AuthorBiographies 345