Guardian: Chávez leads the way

[muriel_volestrangler]

In using oil wealth to help the poor, Venezuela's leader is an example to Latin America

A muddy path leads off the airport motorway into one of the small impoverished villages that perch on the hills above Caracas, a permanent reminder of the immense gulf between rich and poor that characterises oil-rich Venezuela. Only 20 minutes from the heart of the capital city a tiny community of 500 families lives in makeshift dwellings with tin roofs and rough breeze-block walls. They have water and electricity and television, but not much else. The old school buildings have collapsed into ruin, and no children have received lessons over the past two years.

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Two Cuban doctors are established in a temporary surgery here on the main track. They point out that preventative medicine is difficult to practise in a zone where the old clay sewer pipes are cracked and useless, leaving the effluent to flow unchecked down the hillside. The older inhabitants have been here for years; they first came from the country to take root on these steep hillsides in the 1960s. Many are morose and despairing, unable to imagine that their lives could ever change.

Others are more motivated and upbeat, and have enrolled in the ranks of the Bolivarian revolution of President Hugo Chávez. They expect great things from this government, and are mobilised to demand that official attention be focused on their village. If their petition to the mayor to repair their school and sewer pipes does not get answered soon, they will descend from their mountain eyrie to block the motorway, as they once did before during the attempted coup d'état of April 2002.

Hundreds of similar shanty towns surround Caracas, and many have already begun to turn the corner. In some places, the doctors brought in from Cuba are working in newly built premises, providing eye treatment and dentistry as well as medicines. Nearly 20,000 doctors are now spread around this country of 25 million people. New supermarkets have sprung up where food, much of it home-produced, is available at subsidised prices. Classrooms have been built where school dropouts are corralled back into study. Yet it is good to start with the difficulties faced by the motorway village, since its plight serves to emphasise how long and difficult is the road ahead. "Making poverty history" in Venezuela is not a simple matter of making money available; it involves a revolutionary process of destroying ancient institutions that stand in the way of progress, and creating new ones responsive to popular demands.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1495260,00.html

[Mich Otter]

1. It is not nice to take money from rich, international corporations...

Besides, taking money from them can get you killed if they cannot bribe you first.

[Selatius]

2. Hugo Chavez is a man I'd be willing to fight shoulder-to-shoulder with

If I woke up one morning and heard news Chavez was assassinated, it would be a tremendous blow to my morale. I hope he can make it, but it's not my call.

[sarcasmo]

5. I second that motion. Cuckoo-Bananas can't clean Hugos AK47.

[Judi Lynn]

3. What a jolt:an article NOT created somewhere within Bush's administration

and fed to us as news.

Stupendous!

Something amazing has been taking place in Latin America in recent years that deserves wider attention than the continent has been accustomed to attract. The chrysalis of the Venezuelan revolution led by Chávez, often attacked and derided as the incoherent vision of an authoritarian leader, has finally emerged as a resplendent butterfly whose image and example will radiate for decades to come.
....

Yet the wheel of history rolls on, and the atmosphere in Venezuela has changed dramatically since last year when Chávez won yet another overwhelming victory at the polls. The once triumphalist opposition has retired bruised to its tent, wounded perhaps mortally by the outcome of the referendum on Chávez's presidency that it called for and then resoundingly lost. The viciously hostile media has calmed down, and those who don't like Chávez have abandoned their hopes of his immediate overthrow. No one is any doubt that he will win next year's presidential election.

This is the first time I've seen this prediction written, ANYWHERE. It's a miracle! Bound to trigger even more American right-wing plots against his life.

It's wonderful learning that the actual results of the Bolivarian revolution are already transforming the lives of the multitudes of desperately poor in Venezuela, whom the former regimes had treated so contemptuously.

[deacon2]

4. Viva Chávez!

I have two words of warning for him: Salvador Allende