By Ian Sinclair
Peace News
April 2010
Venezuela Speaks!
attempts to counter the one-dimensional focus of the Western media on
president Hugo Chavez by highlighting the central role that grassroots
social movements have played in pushing the Bolivarian Revolution
forward.
As one activist explains: “With Chavez or without Chavez, it is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.”
Edited by three Venezuela specialists, Venezuela Speaks! is made up of
in-depth interviews with 29 radicals and activists – from women’s
groups, the indigenous movement, student groups, community media and
trade unions.
By working in communal councils and cooperatives,
building education centres, taking over factories and conducting land
occupations, these people have forced the profound changes that have
occurred on Chavez’s watch.
Their impressive gains include
cutting extreme poverty in half, reducing the infant mortality rate by
40%, recognising the economic value of housework, a literacy drive that
taught 1.5m people to read and write and the introduction of free
higher education.
The dominant thread running through all the
testimonies is the critical relationship between grassroots movements
and a sympathetic government.
Interviewees continuously refer
to the problem of what they call “the bureaucracy”, that is,
conservative forces still in the government who are either deliberately
or inadvertently slowing down the country’s transformation from a
representative democracy to something approaching a participatory
democracy.
Encyclopaedic in scope, with a superb introductory
history, extensive footnotes, a helpful list of abbreviations,
explanatory maps and photos, Venezuela Speaks! caters equally to
newcomers and those with a pre-existing knowledge of the subject.
Activists working for change in the developed world will no doubt be
inspired by the personal accounts of struggle. There is certainly much
to learn, especially the realisation that the social movements that
propelled Chavez into power were decades in the making.
However, the book also raises an uncomfortable question: if often poor
and uneducated activists in Venezuela can make such radical changes in
the face of such powerful and repressive forces, why can’t we do the
same in the relative freedom of Britain?
An astonishing achievement, Venezuela Speaks! deserves to become a landmark study of contemporary Venezuela.
