The Marin Interfaith Task Force on the Americas delegation to Venezuela was co-sponsored by SOA Watch and the Venezuela Solidarity Network, but except when helping out delegation leader Lisa Sullivan when requested, it was my vacation and I enjoyed not having to be responsible for the 21 people on the tour.  The group was enriched by the participation of two young men from Portugal and an older couple who fled the repression in Argentina in 1975.

We spent little time in Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, having only four meetings. We met with the North American section of the Foreign Ministry where I was able to give them our VSN proposal for them to set up an office in Venezuela to coordinate international solidarity in order to greatly increase the number of people who can visit Venezuela and witness the incredible things that are going on there with their own eyes.  Curiously, the Portuguese guys three week visit was planned for them by the European section of the Foreign Ministry and they even picked them up at the airport.  So, it is something of a mystery that they don’t seem as interested in getting US citizens down there considering that the greatest threat to the Bolivarian process comes from the US government.  Lisa got a call from the Foreign Ministry a couple of days later and was told that they are taking our proposal seriously.

I was also able to give the proposal to Sr. Jenny, a nun who is highly respected by influential members of the government for her work in one of the poor barrios.  We participated in the Sunday service at her liberation theology church and met afterwards with a theologian who also works with the food and literacy programs.

I also gave a copy of the proposal to the head of the institute where future diplomats are trained.  I don’t know if that one will go anywhere, but figured it couldn’t hurt.  The final copy of the proposal I gave to one of the delegates who was going with the Portuguese to give to the European Section of the Foreign Ministry when they met with them after I left.  He was to ask for that section’s support for the proposal.

Lisa Sullivan, who is now full-time SOA Watch Latin America coordinator will continue to push the proposal.  She has led 20 delegations in the last two years and both understands the importance of people witnessing the reality and knows she can’t keep up the pace of delegations by herself.

What is the reality in Venezuela?  Well, there are lots of realities.  It’s still a very polarized country although I felt less tension than on previous trips, a feeling that Lisa confirmed.  That is especially significant given that governors and mayors are being elected in November, and since much of the opposition boycotted the last municipal elections there are inevitably going to be opposition gains in the upcoming elections.  As Eva Golinger told us in the fourth and last Caracas meeting, “South America is already a liberated zone, US hegemony is a thing of the past!” 

There is also the reality that so much money is pouring into the economy as a result of the oil boom that inflation and prices are staggering.  I paid $7.00 for an ice cream cone in the city of Valencia in a fancy shopping mall, but even elsewhere it was tough to eat lunch for under $10.  However, gas is the cheapest in the world ($0.30 a gallon, I think) so everyone is on the road every minute of the day and night which makes travel nightmarish.  It took us a 10 hour microbus ride to get from Sanare to the hotel near the airport on our final day.  The distance was 200-250 miles.

The fact that things are booming may be a partial explanation for the lower tensions as well.  An opposition leader we met with in Valencia said that businessmen are making so much money that they support the government although they’d never admit it!

Venezuela is a bigger country than I realized.  It is more than twice the size of California.  Most of the population of 28 million is concentrated in the North with the South mainly Amazon rainforest.  We traveled a small portion of that Northern area skirting Barlovento, the center of Afro-Venezuelan life and where the world’s best chocolate (cacao) is grown, Barquisimeto, the fourth largest city, a Caribbean beach town, a desert community, and went up into the foothills of the Andes.

In Chuao , an Afro-Venezuelan colonial town we visited a cacao cooperative.  Previously they had to export their cacao to Europe where it was turned into chocolate but now they are beginning to produce their own which is much more profitable.

The two big stories of the Bolivarian process are cooperatives, businesses that are owned and run by the workers who all receive the same compensation for their work, and communal councils which are supplanting traditional forms of representative government with participatory democracy.

Both are a mixed bag as one would expect in a country undergoing one huge and messy social experiment.  The government is promoting cooperatives big time.  Where people get good training in advance and understand what they are doing the cooperatives are a success and the people we met with were incredibly proud of what they have accomplished.  However, many cooperatives, as much as 50%, have failed or are inactive.  But, if I remember right, 50% of US businesses fail in their first three years as well, so the result is not unexpected nor an indication that the concept is wrong.

Besides the cacao cooperative we visited a bakery cooperative in Barquisimeto, a roofing tile cooperative in the small desert community of San Felix, two coffee cooperatives in Guapo, and a coffee cooperative of cooperatives which processes and markets the coffee, cutting out the middleman and increasing the profits for the producer coops.  The brand new beneficio ( processing plant) broke my heart because it was so much more advanced than anything I’ve seen in Nicaragua.  It recycles the water that is used to remove the pulp rather than dumping it and all the waste into the rivers and streams like happens in Nicaragua.  They then use the pulp to fertilize crops.  The inner husk they use as fuel for the machines which additionally saves on energy use.

We also visited Lisa’s home in Sanare in the foothills of the Andes which she’s been building for the last 15 years.  You feel like you can see all the way to Canada from her porch, one of the most incredible views I’ve ever seen.  I don’t know how she ever leaves the place.

The other part of the story of the Bolivarian process is the communal councils.  I’m leaving out the Missions from this account because by now everyone knows that illiteracy has been eradicated, health care is available free to all, special markets provide basic foods at prices even the poor can pay, etc. etc.

For me, I look for things in the Bolivarian process that are applicable in the United States.  It’s not that the US wouldn’t also benefit from universal health care, etc., but those are not going to bring fundamental change to the US as would cooperatives and participatory democracy.

Communal councils are voluntary bodies in communities, both urban and rural.  San Felix, the community we visited where they make the roofing tiles, has only 115 people, but their communal council has 15 committees ranging from health and education to sports, and uniquely for them, tile making.  The community councils prioritize among their needs and apply to the municipality for money.  This community is part of Carora where Mayor Julio Chavez (no relation to Hugo) has turned the entire municipal budget over to the communal councils.  Representatives from each meet and decide where the money goes with 35% of it allocated to the rural areas.  In San Felix, the church where we met, had a blackboard where the results of their communal council prioritization was recorded.  A majority prioritized building a fence around the school to keep the goats out – the other economic activity of the community.

I realized, during our meeting with Mayor Chavez, who by the way, was one of the panelists at our VSN symposium in April, that at some point participatory democracy becomes representative democracy no matter what you desire.  For issues larger than the community, someone has to represent the community because everyone in a municipality, much less a state or the entire nation, can’t all come together to make a decision.  The difference is that no one gets paid to be that representative so it is more a responsibility than an honor to be competed for.  However, it is easy to see that 20 years from now it could become ossified with the same people being chosen as representatives each time, especially if they move toward paying them.   If that happens, they’ll need another reform at that time.  In the meantime, every individual feels much more empowered and like they are an important part of the process than we feel in the United States.

Just a couple more observations before I close. 

When I returned to my office I found an email from someone who I’ve worked closely with in the VSN for the past three years.  He’s married to a Venezuelan and, though living now in the US, has lived and worked in Venezuela for many years.  They had just returned from a month in Venezuela and he was dispirited, feeling that the revolution is being betrayed by bureaucrats and opportunists and errors by the government.  Venezuela is a country that had a revolution through the ballot box rather than by force of arms.  Violent revolutions sweep out the old and transform everything overnight.  Venezuela has chosen an incremental path which will take constant vigilance by the people to preserve and advance.  One man at the top cannot transform a society; he can only open spaces for the people themselves to do that.  We’ll need 20 years to see if the Bolivarian process is a successful model for the rest of the world.

But, a couple of things give me hope.  In Barquisimeto, where Lisa lived for most of the 30 years she’s been in Venezuela, we visited the community center which she and the community built in a very poor barrio. This is a barrio where crime and hopelessness were endemic.  But the youth programs and other activities have transformed the community.  We were entertained by an incredible singing, drumming, quatro (small guitar), and dancing performance.  Kids from 12 to 20, who would otherwise have been doing who knows what, are actively involved in the center and each age group teaches those younger.  I was especially impressed with the comfortable and respectful interaction between the boys and the girls.  These kids are going to grow up to be good human beings – and we’re not just talking a handful here, there were at least 30-40 of them taking part.

And finally we met with a college age woman from the Bolivarian Youth in the small town of Monte Carmelo.  She told us that there are 56,000 like her in the Bolivarian Youth.  She reminded me very much of the Sandinista Youth of the 1980s who were on fire intellectually and emotionally.  She sees herself and her fellow Bolivarian Youth as the guarantors of the Bolivarian revolution and I believe her.  It will be important for the VSN to bring people like her to the United States to meet with their peers in US universities and working class communities.

I knew before I went on this third trip to Venezuela that everything I read about Venezuela is not just wrong but a deliberate lie aimed at restoring US hegemony to what the elites have considered since the time of James Monroe to be “our backyard.”  The Venezuela reality is so much different and provides so much hope to the world that we who have seen it and who understand the nature of our own government, are obligated morally to expose and oppose our government’s efforts to crush the Venezuelan experiment and to do everything we can to support it.

August 21, 2008

Petrocaribe Tackles Food Crisis

TEGUCIGALPA, July 30.— In an effort to guarantee regional food security,
representatives of the 18 Petrocaribe member countries are meeting in
Honduras as of Wednesday for a ministerial level summit on agriculture.
A newly created Petrocaribe Food Fund will begin with some US $500 million,
reported Prensa Latina.

The initiative came from Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to help reactivate
the agricultural sectors of the countries that benefit from the discount oil
sold to them by Venezuela and seeks to increase the supply of basic grains
and compensate for the high food prices.

The bulk of the start up funds will come from Venezuelan oil exports at a
rate of five cents for each barrel of crude oil sold.

The participants in the Petrocaribe agriculture summit will also create a
Council of Ministers of Agriculture to define procedures, statutes and
regulations. At the end of the meetings, an official statement is expected
to explain the accords reached.

The Agriculture ministers agreed that the food crisis, worsened by
skyrocketing oil prices, will not be resolved until the developed nations
change their current policies.

Atten ding the gathering are delegations from Petrocaribe member nations
Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Belize, Cuba, Dominica, Grenada, Guatemala,
Guyana, Haití, Honduras, Jamaica, Nicaragua, República Dominicana, San
Cristóbal y Nieves, Santa Lucía, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Surinam and
Venezuela. Attending as observers are representatives from Bolivia, Costa
Rica and Ecuador.

Petrocaribe en batalla contra carestía de alimentos

TEGUCIGALPA, 30 de julio.–– En un esfuerzo por garantizar la seguridad
alimentaria regional, representantes de las 18 naciones miembros de
Petrocaribe crearán hoy en esta capital un denominado Fondo Petroalimentos
cercano a los 500 millones de dólares, indicó (PL).

La iniciativa partió del presidente de Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, para
contribuir a que los países beneficiarios de Petrocaribe puedan reactivar
sus sectores agrícolas, sortear el desabastecimiento de granos básicos y
compensar la carestía de los alimentos.

El grueso de los aportes al Fondo procederá de las exportaciones petroleras
venezolanas, a razón de cinco centavos de dólar por barril de crudo.

Los asistentes a la Cumbre de Ministros de Agricultura de Petrocaribe
también crearán un Consejo Agrícola del grupo y definirán sus
procedimientos, estatutos y reglamentos. Al final de las sesiones, emitirán
una declaración oficial sobre los acuerdos que adopten.

Los ministros de Agricultura o equivalentes de varias naciones convinieron
en que el problema alimentario, agudizado por los altos precios del
petróleo, no tendrá solución hasta tanto las naciones desarrolladas no
renuncien a aquella política.

A la reunión asisten delegaciones de Antigua y Barbuda, Bahamas, Belice,
Cuba, Dominica, Granada, Guatemala, Guyana, Haití, Honduras, Jamaica,
Nicaragua, República Dominicana, San Cristóbal y Nieves, Santa Lucía, San
Vicente y las Granadinas, Surinam y Venezuela. Mientras, representantes de
Bolivia, Costa Rica y Ecuador lo hacen en calidad de observadores.

Exchange

P.O. Box 39188 Redford, MI 48239 Phone/Fax: (313) 587 9285 E-mail:  laborexchange@aol.com
 
Join the U.S./Cuba Labor Exchange to participate in a: Labor delegation to Venezuela and Colombia Saturday, October 18 to Thursday October 30, 2008, 2 weeks $1, 750 * This includes Venezuela and Colombia
(more…)

They launched 13 attacks and lies during Chavez’ tour of Russia, Belarus,
Portugal and Spain, said Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro during
an exchange with a group of journalists in La Moncloa, the Spanish
government’s headquarters, in Madrid.

They lie because the tour hurts someone, said the minister, before Chavez
and Spanish Head of State Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero announced important
agreements with this European country, especially in energy.

The MINCI (Venezuelan Information Ministry) had previously issued an
official communique to deny a wave of false press releases about Caracas
alleged buys of weapons for around $30 billion from Russia.

That plot was spread massively by international media and another false news
was spread later on the Internet, about Venezuela’s hypothetical willingness
to establish a Russian military base in its territory.

To the Venezuelan authorities, it was clear that des pite official denials
and clarifications, this large display of lies would be used to deceive
Venezuelans and as an extra tool for the constant imperialist campaign
developed against our motherland.

In the case of Spain, the last country in Chavez’ European tour, the largest
media have been leading a misinformation campaign since long time ago,
contrary to the nice atmosphere that marked his brief stay in Spanish land.

The Venezuelan President eased, in less than 10 hours, the tense atmosphere
that had been created about the state of relations with this European
country, regarding his peronal relations with King Juan Carlos and important
economic and political issues.

The visit was marked by an agreement for Venezuelan oil supply to Spain in
favorable conditions, interest in the presence of Spanish companies in the
Orinoco Strip, and a proposal for Latin America and Europe to begin talks
about the European Immigration Directive.

We have come to lend a hand, to work together with Spain to face up to the
problems and look for paths to progress and integration, President Chavez
told press in la Moncloa.

It was really an excellent visit, Information Minister Andres Izarra told
Prensa Latina.

(Prensa Latina)

A Letter from Sabine Kienzl, Political Economist at the Embassy of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela

Dear friends,

After the presentation of the Interpol report on May 15, 2008, several articles have been published with serious inconsistencies and misleading conclusions linking Venezuela to the FARC. Hence, some analysts seemed to have ignored key points in the report. Some of these points clearly state that “the accuracy and source of the user files contained in the eight seized FARC computer exhibits are and always have been outside the scope of INTERPOL’s computer forensic examination.” Moreover, the doubtful assertion that the computers were not tampered is taken for granted, even when the report reassures that more than FORTY THOUSAND files were manipulated between the 1st and the 3rd of March 2008. (more…)

Download the Emergency Response Network sign-up sheet here and start registering members of your community now!

Interpol’s Creativity

Since 2002, the Pentagon has been seeking evidence that intimately relates President Chávez and his government with the FARC. Top secret documents from the Department of Defense (that we have desclassifed under FOIA) evidence that the Pentagon has been unable to find proof of a clandestine, subversive relationship between the Venezuelan government and the FARC. The sources used in some Pentagon documents that attempt to show such a relationship are completely unreliable, since they are mass media outlets from Venezuela and Colombia, such as Globovisión, Caracol, El Universal and El Nacional – all of whom are aligned with the opposition to Chávez. (more…)

Read Palast’s article here:
http://www.gregpalast.com/300-million-from-chavez-to-farc-a-fake/