The Hindu : Opinion / News Analysis : Chavez works wonders

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Tuesday, May 31, 2005

Opinion

Opinion - News Analysis

Chavez works wonders

Richard Gott

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 in 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.

Two Cuban doctors are established in a temporary surgery 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 Chavez. They expect great things from the Government, and are mobilised to demand that official attention be focussed 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'etat of April 2002.

Hundreds of similar shantytowns surround Caracas, and many have already begun to turn the corner. In some places, 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. 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 Mr. Chavez, 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.

Most of the reports about this revolution over the past six years, at home and abroad, have been uniquely hostile, heavily influenced by politicians and journalists associated with the opposition. These criticisms have been echoed by senior U.S. figures, from the President downwards, creating a negative framework within which the revolution has inevitably been viewed.

The Chavez Government, for its part, has forged ahead with various spectacular social projects, assisted by the huge jump in oil prices, from $10 to $50 a barrel over the past six years. Instead of gushing into the coffers of the already wealthy, the oil pipelines have been picked up and directed into the shantytowns, funding health, education and cheap food. Leaders from Spain and Brazil, Chile and Cuba, have come on pilgrimage to Caracas to establish links with the man now perceived as the leader of new emerging forces in Latin America, with popularity ratings to match. This extensive external support has stymied the plans of the U.S. Government to rally the countries of Latin America against Venezuela. They are not listening, and Washington is left without a policy.

For the past six years, Mr. Chavez' Government has moved ahead at a glacial rate, balked at every turn by the opposition forces ranged against it. Now, as the revolution gathers speed, attention will be directed towards dissension and arguments within the government's ranks, and to the ever-present question of delivery.

In the absence of powerful state institutions, with the collapse of the old political parties and the survival of a weak, incompetent and unmotivated bureaucracy, Mr. Chavez has mobilised the military from which he springs to provide the backbone to his revolutionary reorganisation of the country. Its success in bringing adequate services to the shanty towns in town and country will depend upon the survival of his government. If it fails, the people will come out to block the motorway and demand something different, and yet more radical. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

(Richard Gott's book "Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution" will be published by Verso in June.)

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