Venuzuela On The Brink

Revolutionary warfare is usually a matter of R-15s and M-16s, AK-47s and RPG-7s – but the main weapon in Venezuela’s radical reform process is a small blue book that fits neatly inside your breast pocket. The book appears inoffensive at first glance, beginning with the usual preamble on the rights of the individual, but read the fine print and you’ll discover 350 articles alive with possibility, a cocktail of social and economic rights that would terrify Irish property developers and send Bertie Ahern running to Uncle Sam for immediate military intervention.

And the beauty of it all is that the little blue book was passed into law without a shot being fired. Our own Mary Robinson described it as “excellent” on a visit to Caracas in 2000, congratulating Venezuela for being the first country in the region to sign up to the International Court of Justice. However Ms Robinson also sounded a note of caution, reminding Venezuelan officials that the passions driving such a dynamic process can easily turn into authoritarian sleight of hand.
Revolutions are intense, emotional affairs, like falling in love, and hasty decisions are recalled at leisure with an embarrassed sigh. Like did I really give her my signed copy of the Waterboys’ first album? I thought it was only a loan.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, the man behind the radical experiment, wasn’t always a firm believer in the ballot box. As an army paratrooper he led a failed military uprising in February 1992 but Venezuela’s ruling class also plays fast and loose with the rules, resorting to electoral alchemy and state repression when the chips are down.
A two-party democratic system had been put in place in 1958 after squabbling factions united to overthrow an army dictator, Marcos Jimenez Perez. The social democrats (AD) and Christian democrats (COPEI), shared the spoils of office and systematically excluded the left from power, a position that found favour with the Catholic Church and successive US governments.
Venezuela is endowed with the greatest oil deposits outside the Middle East, a key factor in mitigating the type of social unrest that has turned its neighbour Colombia into a brutal war zone for the past fifty years. And, for a time, it wasn’t just the rich who got richer. Venezuela’s steady flow of black gold produced revenues that funded social projects, trickling benefits down to the poor.
The party ended in 1989 when excessive borrowing and a drop in oil prices forced President Carlos Andres Perez to adopt an austerity package dictated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The result was a spontaneous social uprising which lasted five days, an orgy of looting subdued by a punitive military expedition that left a thousand dead.
The Caracas riots preceded the Seattle street protests by a decade, the first major uprising against an international trade accord. The nation’s two-party system limped along for a few more years but it was only a matter of time before someone harnessed the anger of the poor to create a new political movement.

Waiting for the man
If The Clash had recruited a fifth band member in Venezuela, then the dapper Douglas Bravo would undoubtedly have got the job. At seventy years of age Bravo cuts a dashing figure as he roams the country, offering expert advice to communities in resistance despite the arrest warrant dangling permanently above his head.
As a teenager in the 1950s Bravo joined the Communist Party and dreamed up an ingenious way to overthrow the state; rather than form a rebel army and wage guerrilla war, a lengthy and bloody affair that would only have a remote hope of success, Bravo persuaded his comrades to infiltrate the armed forces and get them to do the job instead.
Venezuela’s army recruits, drawn disproportionately from the ranks of the poor, proved fertile agents for subversion and hundreds of cadets soon waited for the order to launch a military uprising. The moment never arrived, however, as the re-establishment of democracy in 1958, while limited, was greeted with relief after a decade of dictatorship.
Bravo, undeterred, fought on in the hills, was captured by security forces, escaped from prison and then resurfaced in Paris in the 1970s, once more preparing cadres to infiltrate the armed forces. This time Bravo’s manoeuvre coincided with a remarkable government plan whereby soldiers were encouraged to leave the barracks and mingle with civilians, studying sociology, engineering and medicine.
As a result, a new type of soldier returned to the barracks, with professional skills, civilian contacts and a fresh, social sensitivity, worlds apart from the neo-Nazis flexing their muscles in Argentina and Chile.
In 1980 Douglas Bravo hit pay dirt when he recruited a young soldier named Hugo Chavez Frias, a member of the first generation of soldiers to benefit from third level education. Chavez was an enthusiastic conspirator who lapped up Bravo’s wisdom then prepared his own Bolivarian rebel movement, in honour of independence hero Simon Bolivar.
Chavez made contact with left-wing organisations that were rapidly gaining ground in neighbourhood associations, student groups and independent trade unions, an emerging civil society that rejected the dominant political parties.
Having thus prepared the way, Chavez launched his rebellion in February 1992 but was quickly defeated.
However the authorities gave him one minute of television time to call on his comrades to surrender. Those sixty seconds transformed the unknown soldier into a household name, preparing the ground for his electoral assault on state power.
In December 1998 Chavez strolled into office, winning 56% of votes, pledging to implement a “peaceful, democratic revolution”. The new leader called a referendum to elect members of a constitutional conference, which turned the magna carta into a citizens’ charter, giving ordinary people a remarkable level of control over public affairs.
President Chavez outlawed large landowners and declared that people before profit would be the governments guiding principle.
A vote was held to ratify the new constitution. I watched as Chavez addressed a crowd of half a million people on the eve of the vote, in December 1999. “I will turn Venezuela into a first world nation within ten years,” promised Chavez before his people, young and old, barefoot and ragged, who danced and sang in the streets into the early hours.
Maria de Jimenez, a retired teacher, held her copy of the constitution aloft and told me, tears streaming down her face: “This is the best Christmas present we could have got…a new life for my ten grand-children.”
The nation’s power brokers, notably media, church and business leaders, cried foul and set about ousting the upstart “zambo”‚ a racial epithet used to insult people bearing Chavez’s mulatto features. The Clinton administration grew exasperated at Chavez’s dedication to popular consultation: “You don’t see a government in charge‚” said Peter Romero, the US State Department’s top official for Latin America, “only plebiscites, referendums, more elections, and they tell us ‘wait’‚ but we gringos are not known for our patience.”
In April 2002 patience ran out and the Bush administration gave the nod of approval to a coup manufactured by a business strike and media hype. There would be no repeat of the Bay of Pigs invasion fiasco in Cuba, this was to be a speedy, clean affair in which the murder of 18 civilians by unidentified snipers would be blamed on Chavez and prompt the army to disobey orders.
The operation ran smoothly as Chavez surrendered to rebel army officers, unwilling to risk a bloodbath. The head of the employer’s federation, Pedro Carmona was named interim president, the constitution was declared null and void and Chavez activists were hunted down and arrested.
Within hours Radio Bemba, Latin America’s most effective communication network – word of mouth – rallied Chavez supporters who took to the streets and with the help of loyal army units, reversed
the coup.
These remarkable events were documented from inside the presidential palace by two intrepid Irish film-makers, who produced Chavez: Inside The Coup, a stunning insight into media manipulation and political intrigue which received huge critcal acclaim when screened on RTE.
Six months later after the failed coup, the unrepentant media and business alliance, declared a business strike aimed at ousting Chavez. Once more the tactic failed but the Chavez administration was on the ropes, battered by economic losses and political unrest.

THE TOWN AND COUNTRY PLOT
When President Chavez had assumed office in December 1998 his cabinet was a mixture of army professionals and radical professors – once detained for the length of their hair and now in the driving seat of an oil-rich nation.
Ali Rodriguez, a guerrilla leader who fought alongside Douglas Bravo, was appointed the head of Latin America’s biggest company, Venezuela’s oil giant PdVsa. Jorge Giordani, a university professor once expelled for sedition, was named Planning Minister.
President Chavez had no master plan for governing the country and no experience, just a passionate vision of the need to secure a better deal for the poor. Once in office Chavez invited hundreds of activists to present projects that might help the process of ending poverty and easing overcrowding in the cities.
Planning Minister Jorge Giordani hired alternative architect Enrique Vila, a town planner with a keen eye for sustainable rural housing.
Vila worked on a national housing survey, evaluating the state of every home in rural Venezuela built in the previous two decades. He then wrote a 65-page dossier with a radical new plan for an integral rural development scheme.
Venezuela’s new president read the blueprint and gave it his enthusiastic backing.
The plan, if successful, will wean Venezuela from its dependency on oil and focus efforts on food security as an engine for national development. The project was named SARAO, meaning a self-catering rural association – in simple terms, a co-operative.
Vila advised me to visit the pilot SARAO community at el Chaguaramal, a place which appears on no map. I was told to look out for a man with a large paunch and a hairpin moustache at a sleazy truck stop along the Panamerican highway two hours east of Caracas.
Roberto welcomed me aboard his ancient Dodge pickup, driving several miles before turning onto a dirt rack that gave way to a colourful, circular housing project set amidst fields of crops.
The place looked like one of those secret US government projects where former CIA officers, sacked for cruelty to nuns in Paraguay, are sent to pasture on some unspeakable experiment with blue-eyed babies.
El Chaguaramal is located in the tropical lowlands where sunset is greeted by deep drumming from the descendants of former black slaves. SARAO members lined up to chat about their new lives, showing real excitement at the tasks ahead. In order to qualify for the project members must be unemployed or on a low salary, own no land and have at least one child. The theory is that in Venezuela, where relationships are as fickle as Liverpool’s Premier League form, a couple with a child stand a better chance of going the full distance.
Women are equal partners in the home and in the field, a tough pill to swallow in a machista society, while co-op members receive joint titles to the land, never owning their homes. “None of us are brothers here but as the project has been getting on its feet we have got to know each other and now we consider each other brothers,” said Joaquin Cabrera, a former employee on a nearby cocoa plantation.
The SARAO members are aware of the significance of this pilot scheme; “This is the first government that ever paid attention to the poor‚” said Douglas Petrizzo. “I want this to work and to multiply across the country.”

The urban farm
Back in Caracas I was curious to witness the parallel “ruralisation” of urban life. The pilot project is a vegetable patch down by the Hilton Hotel, on one side of a busy bridge linking a six-lane highway. Lettuces and tomatoes sprout incongruously in an abandoned park as vehicles whizz by and street traders sell their wares. A dozen workers wash and clean vegetables for sale while others water the plants or explain to curious passers by what’s going on.
“When we first started people stopped to laugh at us‚” explained Rafael, a former oil worker sacked for trying to start a union. “Now when they come by and see the lettuces and tomatoes for sale they ask us when they can have their own plot out in the suburbs.”
The city centre garden produces vegetables and medicinal plants sold at below average prices. The co-op members include an unemployed cobbler, chemist, accountant, plumber, teacher and tourist guide, with one thing in common; zero experience of agriculture. “We are all grandchildren of farmers who came to Caracas in search of jobs‚” said Rafael. “It didn’t take long to catch on.”
It’s a remarkable sight to behold a strategic plot of land in the heart of Caracas where property valued at $1,000 dollars per square metre is producing lettuces sold at 25 cents each. “This is a tool to help change the attitude of ordinary Venezuelans‚” explained a woman called Angelina, “you can’t put a monetary value on community. The garden plots bring people together, get neighbours talking to each other.”
The scale is impressive with an area of just 3,800 m capable of producing seven tonnes of vegetables a month. When classes restart in September, school groups will begin visits designed to inspire similar projects in schoolyards throughout the city. The government has already begun food plots in hospitals, army barracks and prisons, giving inmates a chance to improve their diet.
I wondered if government loyalty was a prerequisite for joining the co-op but Rafael balked at the notion. “I have my own way of thinking‚” he said, “no one ever asked me whether I voted for Chavez or not.” So much for the big vision but how is Chavez getting on with the nitty gritty tasks of running a country? In ideal conditions Chavez’s task would be overwhelming, a five-year deadline to deliver peace and prosperity to 24 million people, 80 per cent of them living in poverty.
However Chavez has faced severe blows to his plans: the floods in Vargas state which struck in December 1999, killing 30,000 people and costing billions of dollars in reconstruction funds were first.