{"id":16864,"date":"2013-03-05T11:13:04","date_gmt":"2013-03-05T16:13:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theredphoenixapl.org\/?p=16864"},"modified":"2013-03-05T11:13:04","modified_gmt":"2013-03-05T16:13:04","slug":"editorial-hugo-chavez-kept-his-promise-to-the-people-of-venezuela","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/2013\/03\/editorial-hugo-chavez-kept-his-promise-to-the-people-of-venezuela\/","title":{"rendered":"Editorial: Hugo Ch\u00e1vez kept his promise to the people of Venezuela"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"hasta\"<\/a>By\u00a0OSCAR GUARDIOLA-RIVERA<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

He wrote, he read, and mostly he spoke.<\/span>\u00a0Hugo Ch\u00e1vez<\/span><\/a><\/span>, whose<\/span>\u00a0death has been announced<\/span><\/a>, was devoted to the word. He spoke publicly an average of 40 hours per week. As president, he didn’t hold regular cabinet meetings; he’d bring the many to a weekly meeting, broadcast live on radio and television.<\/span>\u00a0Al\u00f3, Presidente<\/span><\/a><\/span>, the programme in which policies were outlined and discussed, had no time limits, no script and no teleprompter. One session included an open discussion of healthcare in the slums of Caracas, rap, a self-critical examination of Venezuelans being accustomed to the politics of oil money and expecting the president to be a magician, a friendly exchange with a delegation from Nicaragua and a less friendly one with a foreign journalist.<\/span><\/p>\n

Nicaragua is one of Venezuela’s allies in<\/span>\u00a0Alba<\/span><\/a><\/span>, the organisation constituted at Ch\u00e1vez’s initiative to counter neoliberalism in the region, alongside Cuba, Ecuador and Bolivia. It has now acquired a life of its own having invited a number of Caribbean countries and Mexico to join, with Vietnam as an observer. It will be a most enduring legacy, a concrete embodiment of Ch\u00e1vez’s words and historical vision. The Bol\u00edvarian revolution has been crucial to the wider philosophy shared and applied by many Latin American governments. Its aim is to overcome global problems through local and regional interventions by engaging with democracy and the state in order to transform the relation between these and the people, rather than withdrawing from the state or trying to destroy it.<\/span><\/p>\n

Because of this shared view Brazilians, Uruguayans and Argentinians perceived Ch\u00e1vez as an ally, not an anomaly, and supported the inclusion of Venezuela in their<\/span>\u00a0Mercosur alliance<\/span><\/a><\/span>.\u00a0Ch\u00e1vez’s Social Missions<\/span><\/a><\/span>, providing healthcare and literacy to formerly excluded people while changing their life and political outlook, have proven the extent of such a transformative view. It could be compared to the levelling spirit of a kind of new<\/span>\u00a0New Deal<\/span><\/a><\/span>\u00a0combined with a model of social change based on popular and communal organisation.<\/span><\/p>\n

The facts speak for themselves: the percentage of households in poverty fell from 55% in 1995 to 26.4% in 2009. When Ch\u00e1vez was sworn into office unemployment was 15%, in June 2009 it was 7.8%. Compare that to current unemployment figures in Europe. In that period Ch\u00e1vez won 56% of the vote in 1998, 60% in 2000, survived a coup d’\u00e9tat in 2002, got over 7m votes in 2006 and secured 54.4% of the vote last October. He was a rare thing, almost incomprehensible to those in the US and Europe who continue to see the world through the Manichean prism of the cold war: an avowed Marxist who was also an avowed democrat. To those who think the expression of the masses should have limited or no place in the serious business of politics all the talking and goings on in Ch\u00e1vez’s meetings were anathema, proof that he was both fake and a populist. But to the people who tuned in and participated en masse, it was politics and true democracy not only for the sophisticated, the propertied or the lettered.<\/span><\/p>\n

All this talking and direct contact meant the constant reaffirmation of a promise between Ch\u00e1vez and the people of Venezuela. Ch\u00e1vez had discovered himself not by looking within,<\/span>\u00a0but by looking outside<\/span><\/a><\/span>\u00a0into the shameful conditions of Latin Americans and their past. He discovered himself in the promise of liberation made by Bol\u00edvar. “On August 1805,” wrote Ch\u00e1vez, Bol\u00edvar “climbed the Monte Sacro near Rome and made a solemn oath.” Like Bol\u00edvar, Ch\u00e1vez swore to break the chains binding Latin Americans to the will of the mighty. Within his lifetime, the ties of dependency and indirect empire have loosened. From the river Plate to the mouths of the Orinoco river, Latin America is no longer somebody else’s backyard. That project of liberation has involved thousands of men and women pitched into one dramatic battle after another, like the<\/span>\u00a0coup d’\u00e9tat in 2002<\/span><\/a><\/span>\u00a0or the confrontation with the US-proposed<\/span>\u00a0Free Trade Zone of the Americas<\/span><\/a><\/span>. These were won, others were lost.<\/span><\/p>\n

The project remains incomplete. It may be eternal and thus the struggle will continue after Ch\u00e1vez is gone. But<\/span>\u00a0whatever the future may hold<\/span><\/a><\/span>, the peoples of the Americas will fight to salvage the present in which they have regained a voice. In Venezuela, they put Ch\u00e1vez back into the presidency after the coup. This was the key event in Ch\u00e1vez’s political life, not the military rebellion or the first electoral victory. Something changed within him at that point: his discipline became ironclad, his patience invincible and his politics clearer. For all the attention paid to the relation between Ch\u00e1vez and Castro, the lesser known fact is that Ch\u00e1vez’s political education owes more to another Marxist president who was also an avowed democrat: Chile’s Salvador Allende. “Like Allende, we’re pacifists and democrats,” he once said. “Unlike Allende, we’re armed.”<\/span><\/p>\n

The lesson drawn by Ch\u00e1vez from the defeat of Allende in 1973 is crucial. Some, like the far right and the state-linked paramilitary of Colombia would love to see Chavismo implode, and wouldn’t hesitate to sow chaos across borders. The support of the army and the masses of Venezuela will decide the fate of the Bol\u00edvarian revolution, and the solidarity of powerful and sympathetic neighbours like Brazil. Nobody wants instability now that Latin America is finally standing up for itself. In his final days Ch\u00e1vez emphasised the need to build communal power and promoted some of his former critics associated with the journal Comuna. The revolution will not be rolled back. Unlike his admired Bol\u00edvar, Ch\u00e1vez did not<\/span>\u00a0plough the seas<\/span><\/a><\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Fuente<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0OSCAR GUARDIOLA-RIVERA He wrote, he read, and mostly he spoke.\u00a0Hugo Ch\u00e1vez, whose\u00a0death has been announced, was devoted to the word. He spoke publicly an average..<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":38152,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,166,18,21,43,97,106],"tags":[306,191,316,320,193,197,348,289,347],"class_list":["post-16864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-editorials","category-government","category-history","category-international","category-media-culture","category-us-news","category-women","tag-bolivia","tag-brazil","tag-chile","tag-cuba","tag-ecuador","tag-imperialism","tag-revolutionary-history","tag-venezuela","tag-workers-struggle"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/redphoenix.news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/hasta.jpg?fit=599%2C536&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16864"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16864\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}