Analysis: Participation

Internal debate and criticism of the PSUV and its current state election campaign, as well as proper grassroots involvement, has been put off, and put off, because in this incredibly democratic country there is always some kind of election coming up. Yet for how long will such sacrifices be made in the name of defeating the capitalist opposition?

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Carlos Ciappina, secretary of the Journalism and Social Communication School of the National University of La Plata, Argentina, explains why the school decided to award Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez a prize for popular communication in 2011, and discusses democratisation of media in Latin American more generally.

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Venezuelan blogger and journalist Luigino Bracci analyzes the significance of electoral trends and why support for the opposition has grown faster than support for Chavez in recent years. He argues that if current trends continue, the opposition will win the presidency in 2018.

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The era that preceded Chávez’s 1998 election has echoes of the current predicament of U.S. politics—two major parties with fairly similar agendas took turns managing the country’s governmental institutions while elites controlled the country’s resources. Venezuela’s democracy, like much of Latin America’s, has meant a break with that past.

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The law for people with disabilities, passed in 2006, took further steps. As well as requiring public transport to include facilities to ensure access for disabled people, it also made it compulsory for all companies to have disabled people in five per cent of their positions. Coming from a country where disabled people are currently being penalised for supposedly avoiding work, the difference in approach is easy to notice.

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Pablo Gimenez is a Professor of political economy at the Bolivarian University of Venezuela (UBV) in Caracas. He spoke about the challenges posed by Venezuela’s oil-dependent economy and about the difficulties involved in trying to forge a new way of teaching political economy in the context of the Bolivarian Revolution.

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Nothing quite prepares you for a first visit to Venezuela ― especially when the country is polarised between two very different visions for the future. The atmosphere was like nothing I'd experienced in any election campaign in Australia.

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