Good Things Happening in Venezuela

by Michael Parenti

Even before I arrived in Venezuela for a recent
visit, I encountered the great class divide that
besets that country. On my connecting flight from
Miami to Caracas, I found myself seated next to an
attractive, exquisitely dressed Venezuelan woman.
Judging from her prosperous aspect, I anticipated
that she would take the first opportunity to hold
forth against President Hugo Chavez.

Unfortunately, I was right.

Our conversation moved along famously until we got to the political
struggle going on in Venezuela. “Chavez,” she hissed, “is terrible, terrible.”He is “a liar”; he “fools the people” and is “ruining the country.”

She herself owns an upscale women’s fashion company with links to
prominent firms in the United States. When I asked how Chavez has hurt
her business, she said, “Not at all.” But many other businesses, she quickly
added, have been irreparably damaged as has the whole economy. She
went on denouncing Chavez in sweeping terms, warning me of the
national disaster to come if this demon continued to have his way.

Other critics I encountered in Venezuela shared this same mode of attack:
weak on specifics but strong in venom, voiced with all the ferocity of those
who fear that their birthright (that is, their class advantage) was under
siege because others below them on the social ladder were now getting a
slightly larger slice of the pie.

In Venezuela over 80 percent of the population lives below the poverty
level. Before Chavez, most of the poor had never seen a doctor or dentist.
The neoliberal market “adjustments” of the 1980s and 1990s only made
things worse, cutting social spending and eliminating subsidies in
consumer goods.

Successive administrations did nothing about the
rampant corruption and nothing about the growing gap between rich and
poor, the worsening malnutrition and desperation.
Far from ruining the country, here are some of the good things the Chavez
government has accomplished:

● A land reform program designed to assist small farmers and the
landless poor has been instituted. In March 2005 a large landed estate
owned by a British beef company was occupied by agrarian workers for
farming purposes.

● Even before Chavez there was public education in Venezuela, from
grade level to university, yet many children from poor families never
attended school, for they could not afford the annual fees. Education is
now completely free (right through to university level), causing a dramatic
increase in school enrollment.

● The government has set up a marine conservation program, and is
taking steps to protect the land and fishing rights of indigenous peoples.

● Special banks now assist small enterprises, worker cooperatives,
and farmers.

● Attempts to further privatize the state-run oil industry---80
percent of which is still publicly owned---have been halted, and limits
have been placed on foreign capital penetration.

● Chavez kicked out the U.S. military advisors and prohibited
overflights by U.S. military aircraft engaged in counterinsurgency in
Colombia.

● “Bolivarian Circles” have been organized throughout the nation,
neighborhood committees designed to activate citizens at the community
level to assist in literacy, education, vaccination campaigns, and other
public services.

● The government hires unemployed men, on a temporary basis, to
repair streets and neglected drainage and water systems in poor
neighborhoods.

Then there is the health program. I visited a dental clinic in Chavez’s home
state of Barinas. The staff consisted of four dentists, two of whom were
young Venezuelan women. The other two were Cuban men who were there
on a one-year program. The Venezuelan dentists noted that in earlier
times dentists did not have enough work. There were millions of people
who needed treatment, but care was severely rationed by the private
market, that is, by one’s ability to pay. Dental care was distributed like any
other commodity, not to everyone who needed it but only to those who
could afford it.

When the free clinic in Barinas first opened it was flooded with people
seeking dental care. No one was turned away. Even opponents of the
Chavez government availed themselves of the free service, temporarily
putting aside their political aversions.

Many of the doctors and dentists who work in the barrio clinics (along
with some of the clinical supplies and pharmaceuticals) come from Cuba.
Chavez has also put Venezuelan military doctors and dentists to work in
the free clinics. Meanwhile, much of the Venezuelan medical
establishment is vehemently opposed to the free-clinic program, seeing it
as a Cuban communist campaign to undermine medical standards and
physicians’ earnings.

That low-income people are receiving
medical and dental care for the first
time in their lives does not seem to be
a consideration that carries much
weight among the more
“professionally minded”
practitioners.

I visited one of the government-supported community food stores that are
located around the country, mostly in low income areas. These modest
establishments sell canned goods, pasta, beans, rice, and some produce
and fruits at well below the market price, a blessing in a society with
widespread malnutrition.

Popular food markets have eliminated the layers of middlemen and made
staples more affordable for residents. Most of these markets are run by
women. The government also created a state-financed bank whose
function is to provide low-income women with funds to start cooperatives
in their communities.

There is a growing number of worker cooperatives. One in Caracas was
started by turning a waste dump into a shoe factory and a T-shirt factory.
Financed with money from the Petroleum Ministry, the coop has put
about a thousand people to work. The workers seem enthusiastic and
hopeful.

Surprisingly, many Venezuelans know relatively little about the worker
cooperatives. Or perhaps it’s not surprising, given the near monopoly that
private capital has over the print and broadcast media. The wealthy media
moguls, all vehemently anti-Chavez, own four of the five television
stations and all the major newspapers.

The man most responsible for Venezuela’s revolutionary developments,
Hugo Chavez, has been accorded the usual ad hominem treatment in the
U.S. news media. An article in the San Francisco Chronicle described him
as “Venezuela’s pugnacious president.” [1] An earlier Chronicle report
quotes a political opponent who calls Chavez “a psychopath, a terribly
aggressive guy.” [2] The London Financial Times sees him as “increasingly
autocratic” and presiding over what the Times called a “rogue
democracy.” [3]

In the Nation, Marc Cooper---one of those Cold War liberals who
nowadays regularly defends the U.S. empire---writes that the
democratically-elected Chavez speaks “often as a thug,” who “flirts with
megalomania.” Chavez’s behavior, Cooper rattles on, “borders on the
paranoiac,” is “ham-fisted demagogy” acted out with an “increasingly
autocratic style.” Like so many critics, Cooper downplays Chavez’s
accomplishments, and uses name-calling in place of informed analysis. [4]

Other media mouthpieces have labeled Chavez “mercurial,” “besieged,”
“heavy-handed,” “incompetent,” and “dictatorial,” a “barracks populist,” a
“strongman,” a “firebrand,” and, above all, a “leftist.” It is never explained
what “leftist” means. A leftist is someone who advocates a more equitable
distribution of social resources and human services, and who supports the
kinds of programs that the Chavez government is putting in place.

(Likewise a rightist is someone who opposes such programs and seeks to
advance the insatiable privileges of private capital and the wealthy few.)
The term “leftist” is frequently bandied about in the U.S. media but
seldom defined. The power of the label is in its remaining undefined,
allowing it to have an abstracted built-in demonizing impact which
precludes rational examination of its political content.

Meanwhile Chavez’s opponents, who staged an illegal and
unconstitutional coup in April 2002 against Venezuela’s democratically
elected government are depicted in the U.S. media as champions of “prodemocratic”
and “pro-West” governance. We are talking about the freemarket
plutocrats and corporate-military leaders of the privileged social
order who killed more people in the 48 hours they held power in 2002
than were ever harmed by Chavez in his years of rule. [5]

When one of these perpetrators, General Carlos Alfonzo, was hit with
charges for the role he had played, the New York Times chose to call him
a “dissident” whose rights were being suppressed by the Chavez
government. [6] Four other top military officers charged with leading the
2002 coup were also likely to face legal action. No doubt, they too will be
described not as plotters or traitors who tried to destroy a democratic
government, but as “dissidents,” simple decent individuals who are being
denied their right to disagree with the government.

President Hugo Chavez whose public talks I attended on three occasions
proved to be an educated, articulate, remarkably well-informed and wellread
individual. Of big heart, deep human feeling, and keen intellect, he
manifests a sincere dedication to effecting some salutary changes for the
great mass of his people, a man who in every aspect seems worthy of the
decent and peaceful democratic revolution he is leading.

Millions of his compatriots correctly perceive him as being the only
president who has ever paid attention to the nation’s poorest areas. No
wonder he is the target of calumny and coup from the upper echelons in
his own country and from ruling circles up north.
Chavez charges that the United States government is plotting to
assassinate him. I can believe it.

Michael Parenti’s recent books include Superpatriotism (City Lights) and The Assassination of Julius Caesar (New Press) which won Book of the Year Award, 2004 (nonfiction) from Online Review of Books.

His latest work, The Culture Struggle , will be published by Seven Stories Press in the fall of 2005.

For more information visit his website: www.michaelparenti.org