Johann Hari

As the arguments about the Iraqi constitution echo somewhere in the distance, it's frighteningly easy to be apocalyptic about Iraq. When 7/7 happens 24/7 and it's Bloody Sunday every bloody day, are legalistic arguments about constitutional clauses just a distraction from the meltdown of Mesopotamia?

Nobody who follows the situation in Iraq can have failed, by now, to have the darkest nightmare of all: of intractable civil war, with Baathists and Islamists determined to humiliate the Shia majority and the Americans by creating an abattoir on every street corner that achieves peace. And the disaster spirals: this would leave Iraq with an Anglo-American occupying force - equipped with its own centres of torture and mass imprisonment - unable to glue the country back together again, but also unable to withdraw and admit political humiliation for Bush and Blair. Cue Macbeth: "I am in blood / Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more / Returning were as tedious as go o'er."

But this vision is not inevitable. Another Iraq is possible, and, buried beneath the carnage and rubble, the Iraqi people fervently, desperately want to make it happen. The constitution published this weekend was drafted by Iraq's elected politicians. You remember them: the people whom eight million Iraqis risked their lives and dodged suicide-murderers to vote for back in the spring. After months of deliberation and negotiation, it turns out their proposed Iraq is "republican, democratic and pluralistic", with guaranteed regular elections, a free press, 25 per cent of parliament designated for women (far more than in the US Congress), and Kurdish - once an underground language punishable by torture - now one of Iraq's official languages.

Of course a constitution is only a piece of paper. Joseph Stalin wrote a constitution for the Soviet Union in 1936 that sounds mouth-wateringly free: total free speech, the right to demonstrate, even the right to not have to work overtime. No doubt these constitutional rights were a great comfort to the 10 million people worked to death in the gulags. So the Iraqi constitution, in itself, is a guarantee of nothing: only social movements, constantly pressuring a government over decades, can ensure that rights-on-paper become rights-in-real-life. But the constitution is significant none the less because it shows us what that other Iraq would look like, if only the clear majority of Iraqis could raise their voices above the gunfire and screaming.

Yet they remain trapped between two gun-toting forces, unable to assert their will. To one side there is the Anglo-American occupying army, whose leaders are primarily concerned with control of the oil supply in the Middle East and the establishment of long-term military bases. They have been flogging off Iraq's assets as if on eBay, imposing a form of neo-liberalism that has caused unemployment to hit 70 per cent. Worse still, they have been using Abu Ghraib-style torture on a wide scale and, according to Newsweek, are considering the "Salvador option" for Iraq - the deliberate targeting of Sunni civilians in order to terrorise them out of supporting the terrorists. (Yes, you spotted the flaw in their logic.)

To the other side is the "resistance", which is fissiparous and divided. There are still some remnants of the old Shia uprising, a mainly-justified movement that was angry at the delaying of elections and the arbitrary violence committed by many occupying troops. There was considerable popular sympathy for them, but mostly, these people have become part of the constitutional process and put their guns away (at least for now).

But the other shards of the resistance – now dominant – command very, very little sympathy among Iraqis. The Baathist wing seeks to regain power for the Sunni minority, and is butchering its way across Baghdad just as they did before 2003. The Islamist wing - calling itself al-Qa'ida in Iraq - wants to establish a Taliban state where, in their own words, "we will fight a bitter war against democracy and all those who seek to practice it".

Contrary to the conservative assumption that backward, tribal Arabs like tyranny, the great mass of Iraqis reject these visions as well. In every opinion poll and at their chance to vote, they showed they want all the boring, beautiful things of a stable life: democracy, federalism, power-sharing. And not the cosmetic-democracy of George Bush's propaganda either, but a real and deep democracy.

So how can those of us motivated by solidarity support the Iraqi majority against all comers? There are hundreds of independent groups we can support inside Iraq who are trying - in the most terrifying circumstances - to fight for a genuinely free Iraq. The Organisation for Women's Freedom in Iraq is campaigning against Islamist attempts to subject women to sharia law. (They have successfully kept it out of the constitution, although there are still worrying references to Islam as a "primary source of law" alongside promises to protect human rights). Oil workers across Iraq are fighting and striking to prevent the profits from Iraq's oil leaking out of the country and into the bank accounts of foreign corporations.

But what should we be trying to force our government to do? In the long term, we must work to change how our own societies work and build a world where the choices are far better than Bush vs Baathism. That would require us to build a very different foreign policy, independent of corporate interests and a thirst for oil. But Iraqis cannot afford to wait until then. What's the right cry right now for people who want to support Iraqis: troops out or troops remain?

The only principled answer is to take our lead from the Iraqi people. It is their country, and only they know what is best for it. Only Iraqis on the ground can tell which is the greater risk for them: a possible Islamist-Baathist takeover, or leaving the Anglo-American troops (with their torture and forced neo-liberalism) in place to fend them off.

There is a simple policy you can advocate that would place this decision directly into the hands of Iraqis. When the people of Iraq vote on the constitution on 15 October, they should also be asked a referendum question: do you want the coalition forces to remain for another year, or leave immediately?

Of course, the Bush administration would not want to hold such a referendum. They want to stay, build their bases, drill the oil and manipulate the elected Iraqi government for some time to come. But the Bushies did not want to hold an election last spring either. Their original plan was to appoint a pliant "constitutional convention" and only face the voters much later in 2006. Pressure within and outside Iraq forced them to change their minds; it could do so again.

Many people - settled into comfortable assumptions about what is happening in Iraq - would find the prospect of giving the Iraqis a say discomforting. To the "Troops Out Now" campaigners, it asks: would you really advocate a withdrawal against the wishes of most Iraqis? And to the stay-the-course-no-matter-what bombardiers, it asks: would you want to stay if you knew the Iraqis had voted to toss you out? What's your slogan - we'll liberate them whether they damn well like it or not? It's a simple chant, and the only moral one left: All Power to the Iraqis.

j.hari@independent.co.uk

There's an interesting and smart commentary on my piece about Shazia Mirza at

http://gutter.blogspot.com/2005/08/i-love-funny-muslim-girls.html

Check it out.

Also, for logistical reasons my days at the Indie have changed. (I'm about to start a small column on another paper that will appear on Fridays, hence the shift).

From now on, I'll be writing for Tuesday's and Thursday's Independent, rather than Wednesday's and Friday's. So a new piece will be appearing here later on today.

Venezuela is living in the shadow of the other September 11th. In 1973, on a day synonymous with death, Salvador Allende – the democratically elected left-wing President of Chile – was bombed and blasted from power. The CIA and the US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, had decided the “irresponsibility” of the Chilean people at the ballot box needed to be “rectified” – so they installed a fascist general, Augusto Pinochet. He ‘disappeared’ at least 3000 people and tortured 27,000 more as he clung to power right up to 1990. Since the Venezuelans elected Hugo Chavez, their own left-wing democrat, in a 1998 landslide, they have been waiting for their September 11th. That’s why it did not surprise anyone here this week when Pat Robertson - one of America’s leading evangelicals and a friend of George Bush - openly called for a US-backed murder of their President.

In the four corners of the Plaza Bolivar – Caracas’ Trafalgar Square – there are groups of citizens who work in shifts, waiting, permanently waiting, to mobilise for when an attack on Chavez happens. They are known as the ‘hot corners’, and everybody in the city knows to head there if there is an attack on Venezuela’s elected leader. Laydez Primera, 34, has been doing an eight-hour shift. He explains, “Los esqualidos [the squalid ones, as the opposition is often called] and Bush have tried everything to get rid of Chavez. They know we have elected him in totally open elections, but they don’t care. They have tried forcing a recall referendum in the middle of Chavez’s term, but the President won by 60 percent. They have tried saying the elections are rigged, but the opposition itself asked Jimmy Carter to come and watch the elections, and he said they were totally free. He didn’t say that about the election of Bush in Florida! And they even tried staging a coup. We will never, never forget that.”

The coup, the coup. Everybody here has their stories about the 2002 coup d’etat, and the strange 47-hour Presidency of Venezuela’s business leader Pedro Carmona Estanga. Robertson’s call caused a cascade of memories to burst across the streets of Caracas. That April, Chavez was kidnapped and removed from power in a decapitation of democracy orchestrated by the media, a few generals, and the wealthy elite. Carmona proceeded to dissolve the Supreme Court, the Constitution and the elected National Assembly and assume total control of the country. This was immediately welcomed by the Bush administration. They were eager to ensure the largest pot of oil outside the Middle East - providing fifteen percent of US domestic consumption – was placed back into the hand of US corporations, rather than a left-winger with his own ideas about oil revenue. It later emerged that they had been funding many of the coup leaders.

Only the story didn’t end there. Venezuela refused to be Chile. As Judith Patino, a 57-year old grandmother and street-seller who lives in one of the shanty-towns in the West of Caracas, explains: “We would not let our democracy be destroyed. We refused. Everybody from this barrio, everybody from all the barrios, went onto the streets of Carcas. Of course we were afraid, we thought there would be massacres, but we had chosen our President and we were governing our own country and we would not surrender.” Over a million people took to the streets, surrounding the Miraflores Palace – the Venezuelan Downing Street – and calling for Chavez to return. Los Esqualidos scurried away; Chavez returned to the Miraflores by helicopter, and Caracas erupted into what one young woman told me was “the biggest, maddest party Venezuela has ever seen.”

Yet, three years on, the country is still split. There is the rich twenty percent, who for over a century received all the oil profits - until Chavez came to power and began to distribute them more widely. They welcomed the coup and rejoiced at Robertson’s comments. And, glaring at them across a chasm of incomprehension, there is the poor eighty percent, who defended democracy and Chavez. A taxi-ride across Caracas shows how small the physical divide is between these Two Venezuelas, the conflicting mental universes that share a country. Santa Fe, in the East of the city, could be a slice of Beverley Hills. Palatial gated communities stretch along the hillsides, interrupted only by private golf courses and turrets for security guards to peer from. I am surprised to spot one of the battered, chugging public buses, which always seem to be held together by sellotape and goodwill. “For their servants,” the taxi-driver explains.

The bus carries them fifteen minutes away, to the barrio shanty-towns that could be a slice of Africa. Many are squatter barrios, thrown together in the rush-migration to the cities over the past fifty years. Houses made of tin and cardboard scar the hillsides, with life somehow flourishing in the crevices. Is this steel shack really a hairdressers? Is that tottering mass of concrete really a clothes shop?

It is easy to see why the people of the barrios support Chavez so passionately: I visited dozens of the ‘missions’ built by Chavez which provide health and education services for the poor, in some places for the first time in their lives. The Miracle Mission, for example, provides cataract operations, restoring the sight of poor people who have been blind for decades. They would have never seen again under the opposition vision of slashed public spending and oil revenues directed once again to the rich. If democracy was destroyed, these Missions - the lifelines for the barrios - would soon disappear.

It is harder to see why the opposition loathe Chavez with such snarling ferocity that they want a foreign power to intervene. Opposition spokespeople from Primera Justicia, one of the main anti-Chavez parties, offer me polite but frustratingly vague formulations – soft sentences that do not seem to explain the intensity of their hatred. I decide instead to meet ordinary anti-Chavistas, so I head for Las Mercedes where Caracas’ air-conditioned restaurants are located. I soon find myself chatting to a couple called Mario and Ellie Novo Chavez (Armani suit, Donna Karan dress). Surprised by his surname, I ask Mario if is related to the President. “Please! We are about to eat, don’t make us vomit!” Ellie laughs. She explains that Chavez is “a fucking communist”, a man who looks to “Fidel Castro, Muammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein” for inspiration. Mario is actually about to change his surname, because he thinks it is bad for his business as an IT technician to be associated even nominally with “that psycho.” He says, “There are really only two classes in this country – the educated, and the stupid. The poor are poor because they are incredibly ignorant. But Chavez tells them it is because we are taking the oil money. It’s ridiculous! He is giving the poor money for nothing.”

Yet there is an irony here: while lambasting the poor as ignorant, it turns out the couple are entirely ignorant of life in their own country. They have never been to a barrio, and they say I am “insane” to visit one. “They don’t have roads in the barrios! You won’t be able to get there,” Mario says, bizarrely. “You will be kidnapped and killed!” Ellie adds. I remembered what one maid in Barquisimeto, in the South of the country, told me: “We know how they live, because we are in their houses every day, cleaning their homes and raising their children. But the rich have no idea, no idea at all, how we live.” But Ellie interrupts my thought, declaring, “Please – let’s not talk about Chavez any more! He is in every conversation in Venezuela, and I am sick of it!”

How much of the division in Venezuela is based on race? Although there are exceptions, the wealthy elite tends to be white, and the skin tone gets darker the farther you go into the barrios. In the newspapers – which are all, without exception, vehemently anti-Chavez – the depictions of the President in cartoons look like Ku Klux Klan propaganda, wildly exaggerating the thick curliness of his hair and the indigenous slant to his features. “Oh, there was no problem with racism before Chavez,” Ellie tells me. “You know, it used to be a sign of affection to call somebody ‘el negro’. If you had a slow member of your family, that’s what you would say. But now, since Chavez, people have begun to think it is racist!”

Across the opposition heartlands, people talk like this – and worse. The wealthy elite seem to have whipped themselves into a hysteria, convinced that their maids, their police and their President are going to turn on them and lynch them in their homes. The media carefully reinforces this impression, creating a hermetically sealed fantasyland for the top twenty percent to scream in. Yet if you ask them for facts – actual examples of persecution or dictatorial behaviour – they either offer demonstrably false urban myths, or declare “It will happen soon!”

It is true that the medical Missions are staffed by Cuban doctors, who Chavez has exchanged with Castro in return for access to Venezuela’s immense oil supplies. The opposition has seized on this as ‘evidence’ that Chavez wants to make Venezuela into a Castroite dictatorship. But his supporters insist he is taking the good parts of the Cuban model – generous health and education services – while eschewing the pernicious parts, like the liquidation of free speech, elections and the freedom of the poor to make and sell goods.

But you would not know – from what the opposition says in every Venezuelan newspaper, or from the propaganda spouted by Pat Robertson – that Venezuelan elections are totally open and fair, that Chavez has been approved in elections or referenda no less than seven times, and there is more substantial free speech here than in Britain. In Venezuela, people can (and, every night, do) call on television for the President to be assassinated. Indeed, Chavez has been so reluctant to commit a crackdown that the leaders of the coup are still free and unpunished.

The people of Venezuela are still nervously waiting for them to return, in the form of another coup – or a CIA bullet. At two a.m. on one of Caracas’ wild, party-heavy mornings, I head again for the hot corners in the Plaza Bolivar, below the gnarled parrots that sit in the trees above Caracas. I ask Zaid Cortez, 27, what will happen if Chavez is assassinated. He draw on a cigarette – everybody in Caracas smokes – and says softly, “Venezuela will never go back to being governed by Los Esqualidos. We won’t go back to being a country where the petrol money is used for a minority and not for the barrios. So what will happen if Chavez is killed? Civil war.” He drags again. “We are ready.”

Thanks to Nicola Sanderson for pointing out this:

http://www.stormfront.org/forum/showthread.php?t=223141

When you are being attacked by these ignorant neo-Nazis bastards, you know you are doing something right. I'll be a "sexless pile of lard" (quite a vivid description, actually) against these Hitlerites any time...

[Please note: I'm travelling at the moment, so the next article will appear here tomorrow.]

Latinoamérica es un cementerio de falsos profetas. En cada esquina hay un recuerdo de los Mesías políticos que han fracasado. Bolívar, Che, Evita, Fidel, todos son recordados en estatuas y lienzos que miran hacia un continente casi tan pobre y esclavizado como África.
Pero algo está retumbando aquí en los barrios de Caracas, algo que está causando temblores en la Casa Blanca. Una revolución salsosa se está extendiendo desde las barriadas de Venezuela, y es la primera en Latino América que es totalmente democrática y gradualmente, asombrosamente efectiva.
Pero para comenzar esta historia, tengo que llevarlos a un tour por la antigua Venezuela. El barrio Nueva Tacagua es una barriada ubicada en uno de los cerros que rodean a Caracas, construida por el gobierno durante la prosperidad petrolera de los años 70. Cientos de casas fueron construidas con cartón comprimido y techos de zinc ya oxidados. Se conectan por medio de un sendero en el que se puede encontrar algún cubrecama abandonado.
El barrio está anidado en lo que parece un río de basura y mierda. Como no hay recolección de basura y como los colectores de cloacas no admiten desechos sólidos, todo es lanzado colina abajo con la esperanza de que se desintegraran algún día. Niños con caras de viejos juegan allí.
Gladis de Tarate vive en una abarrotada lata de sardina con sus cuatro hijos, su esposo y su mamá. Ella me dice: “Esta tierra no estaba en condiciones de ser habitada. Estamos sobre una falla de borde y siempre estamos esperando el próximo derrumbe, como los que ocurrieron en 1999 y dejaron miles de muertos.”
Pero hay preocupaciones más inmediatas: cuando llueve, el agua corre cerro abajo tan rápido que puede arrastar carros y casas consigo. El mes pasado se llevó a una pequeña niña.
A principios de los años ochenta, el gobierno envió como solución algunas casas remolque y se vanaglorió de eso por años – pero eran insoportables calurosas, “como estar dentro de un horno”, un hombre me explica, y tuvieron que ser abandonadas. Los servicios públicos eran prácticamente inexistentes: nadie aquí veía algún doctor excepto durante emergencias extremas, y la escuela tuvo que cerrar durante tres años porque el techo se cayó.
Esta es la vida que se le daba al 80 por ciento de los venezolanos, de color mestizo en su mayoría, dejados fuera de la oligarquía blanca que durante 40 años gobernó con una pseudo democracia corrupta.
Esa Venezuela está desmoronándose. No solo metafóricamente, sino literalmente. Los barrios se caen cerro abajo; las casas desaparecen bajo los derrumbes cada cierto tiempo. Y – como resultado de una lenta pero encendida revolución social que se está gestando acá – éstas comunidades están (al fin) siendo reubicadas o reconstruidas como parte de algo que todo el mundo aquí llama “El Proceso”.
Para comprender como El Proceso comenzó, tenemos que retrocedernos hacia 1991 – el año en que la vieja Venezuela alcanzó su nadir: El Fondo Monetario Internacional (FMI) exigió al recién electo gobierno de Carlos Andrés Pérez que cortase las pequeñas ayudas que se les daba a comunidades como las de Nueva Tacagua. Como siempre, impusieron sus propia ideología neoliberal – administración pública reducida, impuestos bajos, y privatización de servicios públicos – por encima de la democracia.
Aún cuando Pérez había basado su campaña precisamente en una plataforma opuesta, sucumbió ante esas demandas. El precio de los alimentos se cuadruplicaron, el desempleo se disparó y los exiguos servicios públicos al alcance de los más pobres fueron eliminados. Los barrios estallaron.
¿Cuál fue la respuesta del gobierno? Una masacre de más de 500 personas. Residentes de éste barrio recuerdan la llegada de los soldados armados con metralletas en el día del estallido social. Mataron a un hombre y lo lanzaron cerro abajo. La protesta acabó.
Pero de éste caos causado por el IMF, ellos explican, emergió una alternativa. Un general izquierdista, Hugo Chávez, comenzó a articular una alternativa para enfrentar al neoliberalismo que se había impuesto en Latinoamérica durante dos décadas – el neoliberalismo que ha creado el crecimiento económico más lento y la más alta desigualdad que se tenga memoria. En 1998 fue electo presidente. Desde entonces, él ha sido ratificado – en elecciones y referendos libres y abiertos – no menos de siete veces.
El Proceso Chavista se ha hecho carne en la persona de María González, con la cual me tropecé en uno de los barrios más peligrosos de Venezuela. Ella es una mujer de 60 años con un rostro de determinación y un dulce enjambre de nietos alrededor de ella. Ella estaba sentada en una clase de las miles de “misiones educacionales” establecidas por el gobierno de Chávez. Después del que el gobierno duplicó los gastos educativos, los barrios se están llenando de nuevas escuelas. Y no son sólo para los niños, sino para la mayoría de los adultos que fueron dejados fuera por el sistema educativo.
María explica que en la vieja Venezuela, la mayoría de la gente abandonaba la escuela a los doce años. Ni siquiera ella fue tan afortunada – ella nunca tuvo escolaridad. Como millones de venezolanos, en el medio de la riqueza proporcionada por los chorros de petróleo ella quedó totalmente analfabeta. Ella enseña un pedazo de tiza con una sonrisa y lentamente, cuidadosamente, escribe su nombre en una pizarra. Se voltea hacia mí y me indica asintiendo. “He trabajado toda mi vida como una mula. Pero ahora no moriré tan ignorante como una”, ella dice.
En cada barrio, encuentro una misión médica, otra de las joyas de esta nueva Venezuela. Son clínicas recién construidas – con la riqueza petrolera – donde los pobres ven doctores, muchas veces por primera vez en su vida. Miles de Marías enfermas van en busca de medicinas cada semana: muchas me dicen que podrían haber muerto sin estas misiones.
Muchas veces, algunos de nosotros que nos preocupamos por los derechos humanos pensamos solo en términos negativos – una masacre aquí, una prisión allá. Pero a lo largo y ancho de Venezuela yo me he encontrado todo lo diametralmente opuesto a las masacres en estas misiones: gente sana por medio de balas medicinales. Incluso, han aparecido en Nueva Tacagua mientras sus residentes esperan ser reubicados.
A pesar de todo esto, el proceso democrático en Venezuela ha sido sometido a una furiosa diabólización e incluso a un (efímeramente exitoso) golpe de estado. La razón principal de estos asaltos al gobierno electo de Venezuela es clara. La riqueza petrolera se supone que gotea directamente hacia arriba, hacia las trasnacionales, no hacia abajo, hacia los pobres.
El presidente sentado sobre las reservas petroleras más grandes fuera de las del Medio Oriente no debe oír a su gente y gastar los petrodólares en educación ni salud. No se supone que incremente los impuestos a compañías como la Halliburton de un insignificante 1% a un 17% para costear escuelas y hospitales para personas como Gladis y María.
Una sala de clases, un hospital, un barrio: éstos pueden ser sitios improbables para hacer una revolución social. En Europa asumimos que los gobiernos deben proveer de éstos servicios a los más pobres. Pero en un continente al que se le ha obligado antidemocráticamente a adoptar el neoliberalismo por décadas, le tomado a una revolución salsosa – una llamada bulliciosa y orgullosa desde los barrios de Venezuela – producir una democracia social.

j.hari@independent.co.uk

Traducido por Mercedes Gardner

Latin America is a graveyard of false prophets. On every corner there is a reminder of the political Messiahs who failed. Bolivar, Che, Evita, Fidel - all are remembered in statues and wall paintings that look out over a continent now almost as poor and unfree as Africa. But something is rumbling here in the barrios around Caracas, something that is causing tremors that are felt in the White House and every poor country in the world. A Salsa revolution is spreading out from the slums of Venezuela, and it is the first in Latin
America to be both totally democratic and slowly, startlingly effective.

But to begin this story, I have to take you on a tour of the Old Venezuela. Barrio Nueva Tacagua is a shanty-town in the high hills that sprawl around Caracas, built by the government at the height of the 1970s oil boom. The hundreds of homes here are made of pressed cardboard and rusting tin. They are connected by paths made of more of the same, with the odd old bedspread tossed in.

The barrio nestles in what looks like a river of trash and shit. Because there is no rubbish collection, because the sewers cannot cope with solids, everything is simply thrown further downhill, in the hope it will rot away. Children with old, lined faces play there. Gladys De Tarate lives in a swollen sardine tin with her four children, her husband, and her mother. She tells me, “This land was never meant to be built on. It is not safe. We are on a fault-line, and we feel like we are waiting for the next mudslide, like the ones in 1999 that killed tens of thousands of people.” But there are more immediate worries: when it rains, the water acquires crashes downhill so fast it can carry cars and homes with it. Last month, it took a small girl.

In the early eighties, the government sent some trailers here and boasted about it for years – but they were unbearably hot, “like ovens on the inside”, one man explains, and had to be trashed. The public sector was virtually non-existent: nobody here saw a doctor except in the most extreme emergencies, and the school closed for three years after the roof caved in.

This is the life that was given to the eighty percent of mostly brown-skinned Venezuelans, locked out of the country’s white oligarchy under forty years of corrupt psuedo-democracy.

This Venezuela is collapsing. Not just metaphorically but literally. The barrios are sagging down the hills; homes disappear in landslides every other month. And – as a result of the slow-burn social revolution here - these communities are (at last) being relocated or rebuilt as part of what everybody here calls “the process.”

To understand how The Process began, you have to go back to 1991 – the year the old Venezuela reached its nadir. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) demanded the elected government of Carlos Perez cut the tiny thread of government support provided to places like Barrio Nueva Tacagua. As ever, they put their own neoliberal ideology – small government, low taxes, make everyone pay for public services – above democracy. Even though Perez had campaigned on precisely the opposite platform, he gave in. The price of food quadrupled, unemployment soared, and the meager scraps of public services available to the poor were cut. The barrios erupted. The government’s response? A massacre of over 500 people. Residents of this barrio remember machine-gun toting soldiers arriving on the day of the uprising. They shot a man and tossed his body downhill. The protests ended.

But from this IMF-ed up chaos, they explain, an alternative emerged. A left-wing Venezuelan general, Hugo Chávez, began to articulate an alternative to the neoliberalism that had been imposed on Latin America for over two decades – the neoliberalism that has created the slowest economic growth and the highest inequality in living memory. In 1998 he was elected President. Since then, he has been approved – in free, open elections and referenda – no less than seven times.

The Chávez Process is made flesh in a woman called Maria González who I stumbled across in one of Venezuela’s roughest barrios. She is a 60 year old woman with a determined face and a sweet swarm of grandchildren buzzing around her. She was sitting in a class in one of the tens of thousands of educational ‘missions’ established by the Chávez government. After the government doubled education spending, the barrios are now filled with new schools. These aren’t just for children, but for the adult majority who were failed by the education system.

Maria explains that, in the old Venezuela, most people left school at the age of 12. She wasn’t even that lucky - she wasn’t educated at all. Like millions of Venezuelans, in the midst of spurting oil wealth she was left illiterate and innumerate. She brandishes a piece of chalk with a smile, and slowly, carefully, writes her name on a blackboard. She turns to me and offers a small nod. “I have worked all my life like a mule. But now I will not die as ignorant as a mule,” she says.

In every barrio, I seek out the medical missions, one of the other jewels of the new Venezuela. These are freshly minted clinics – acquired with the country’s oil wealth - where the poor are seeing doctors, often for the first time in their lives. Thousands of sickly Marias troop through for medicine every week: I met many who said they would be dead without the Missions. Often, those of us concerned about human rights think only in negative terms – a massacre here, a prison there. But all across Venezuela I keep finding the polar opposite of massacres in the missions: people mown back to health with medicine-bullets. They have even appeared in Barrio Nueva Tacagua while its residents wait for relocation.

Despite all this, the democratizing process in
Venezuela has been subject to torrential demonisation and even a (briefly successful) coup. I’ll be talking more about the opposition next week, but the core reason for these assaults on Venezuela’s elected government is stark. Oil wealth is supposed to trickle (no, cascade) upwards to multinational corporations, not downwards towards the poor. The President sitting on the largest pot of oil outside the Middle East is not supposed to listen to his people and spend his country’s petrodollars on education and health. He is not supposed to increase taxes on the likes of Haliburton from a negligible 1% to 30% in order to pay for schools and hospitals for people like Gladys and Maria.

A classroom, a hospital, a barrio: these might sound like unlikely locations for a social revolution. In Europe, we take it for granted that our governments should provide these services for the poor. But on a continent which has had neoliberalism undemocratically forced down its throat for decades, it has taken a Salsa revolution – the loud, proud call from the barrios of Venezuela - to produce social democracy.