Muhammad Idrees Ahmad

‘The Chávez revolution remains the most original and democratic experiment in Latin America, and is clearly here to stay’, argues Richard Gott.

In an unusually large open space, in a poor area of the city of Caracas where ramshackle houses built from breeze blocks and concrete columns occupy every available piece of ground, and where narrow streets wind up the hillside filled perpetually by throngs of people, one of the many thousands of cooperative enterprises created in the last few years has been securely established.

Two large hangars house workshops, and close by is a large well-equipped clinic and a government food store selling cheap food, known as a Mercal. It sells a limited range of basic foodstuffs but would hardly justify the title of supermarket. Today, as everywhere throughout Caracas, powdered milk is in short supply, although no one knows for certain if this is the result of opposition manoeuvre and malice, or of government incompetence.

The clinic is clean and well organised, with modern equipment and a stream of patients throughout the day. Unusually, it is manned by Venezuelan doctors rather than by the Cubans who, in their thousands, have run the medical outposts in the poorest parts of the country over the past three years. One notable facility is a spacious room devoted to trauma treatment for those suffering from gunshot wounds, knife stabbings and other manifestations of the insecurity in the city. Caracas has never been a “safe” city in recent decades, and some claim that the situation has got worse during the nine years that President Hugo Chávez has been in power.

Chávez believes that poverty is the root cause of crime, and that tackling poverty will solve the problem. Yet, while poverty rates have undoubtedly fallen, crime continues at a high level and some extra action will eventually be needed.

One hangar used by the cooperative is devoted to making school uniforms and printing T-shirts. The other makes boots and shoes. The atmosphere is relaxed and informal. The workers, mostly women, chat among themselves, sometimes sewing by hand, sometimes using machines, or operating the simple presses. The cooperative was set up three years ago and has become a model of its kind, much visited by revolutionary tourists. Indeed the guide was herself part of another cooperative dedicated specifically to looking after the streams of visitors.

The workplace was delightful, yet clearly not much work was being done. These were not the regimented factories of the maquiladoras along the Mexican border with the United States, let alone the sweatshops of Asia. The guide explained that the 142 workers were mainly housewives involved in a government job-training programme, Vuelvan Caras, that seeks to get untrained people into socially useful work within the framework of a cooperative. This is admirable, but here too much remains to be done.

Cooperatives are becoming the basic organising tool of Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution, with thousands springing up all over the country. I found a group of security guards, watching over a peasant collective, who had formed themselves into a cooperative of their own, and a group of cooks in a student kitchen had done the same, calling themselves the Flavour and Revolution cooperative. In the revised constitution that will be subjected to a referendum on December 2, the cooperatives will receive constitutional approval. Article 112 declares that the state will promote different kinds of economic enterprises, be they private, mixed, or run by a local community, to create the best conditions “for the collective and cooperative construction of a socialist economy.”

Other articles in the revised constitution promise everyone a six-hour day, and extend social security provision to all unorganised workers (fulfilling the ambition of Simón Bolívar, the guiding genius of the state, who invented the term in 1818). This is not so much populism as sensible democratic politics. Chávez needs to win elections. Whereas Fidel Castro has spent half a century explaining to Cuban people why they can’t have their cake today, Chávez needs to promise everyone the moon in order to retain his popularity at the polls. Such is the challenge of revolutionary politics in the democratic era.

Of the 69 articles in the constitution that have been revised, some seek to reorder the existing structure of local government. State boundaries will be altered and new regions created, some under the control of central government. The purpose is to get more state money to neglected and indigent areas as well as to avoid the corruption of local caciques. The most significant new articles deal with the powers of a myriad elected “people’s councils”, the basis of the country’s future democracy and give emphasis to the presence in society of its indigenous and Afro-American components, in addition to those elements, hitherto predominant, that originate from Europe.

The new constitution will be endorsed by popular vote in December, but it has been hotly contested by a conservative and politically inept opposition that remains small, weak and divided. Opposition politicians have focussed their criticism on the centralisation of power, on the possibility of the president being endlessly re-elected (as can theoretically happen with the British prime minister and elected leaders in much of Europe), and on the government’s intention to regain control of the independent central bank.

These of course are legitimate areas of debate, yet the opposition, blinded by rage and frustration at its own incompetence and inadequacy, tends to ignore the huge extension of democratic practice that the new constitution will bring to long-disenfranchised sections of the population.

The unfavourable image of the Chávez government in the outside world has been largely created by a tiny group of Caracas-based foreign journalists who repeat the hostile propaganda produced by this opposition, and fail to appreciate the quantitative and qualitative improvements that have taken place in the country over the past few years. It is easy to denounce the levels of crime and corruption, and the incompetence of a government presiding over a revolutionary upheaval, just as it is easy to suggest that catastrophe may lie ahead. Yet it should not be possible to ignore the fact that the sheer volume of the oil bonanza of recent years has given the country a feel-good factor that is finally providing a sense of stability and optimism.

Quite apart from the extraordinary mobilisation of the people in the poorest areas, benefiting from new schools and clinics, there has been a huge expansion of public works all over the country, with new railway lines and motorways and well-designed sports facilities in almost every major city. Even the road from the airport has finally acquired a new motorway bridge, and many shacks on the surrounding hillsides have been freshly painted in gaudy colours, blue and orange, yellow and pink. Doubtless these could be denounced as Potemkin villages, yet they demonstrate an organising power on the part of the people that augurs well for the future. The Chávez revolution remains the most original and democratic experiment in Latin America, and is clearly here to stay.