Blogs

Every street corner in the historic center of Caracas has a name.  Hence if you ask someone for directions, you will often be given the names of two corners instead of the name of a street or of a street number.

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Librarians have a key role to play in their communities. This is one of the main ideas I got out of the closing forum of the book festival, and something I have to admit I haven’t thought about much, despite my passion for literature.

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With the national youth conference, a planned coup revealed, students going back to uni yesterday, and the campaign to discuss the laws as well as for the elections heating up, it has been quite a week. 

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In order to build the youth team meeting in our community, we (myself and a representative from my branch) went through the list of 102 young people registered for the PSUV, and visited each house, systematically going up and down the avenues. The first house we visited was really fancy- the kind with furniture

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Wow, talking about a field trip just get a form, to elect the spokesperson for my youth team (that corresponds to my branch of the PSUV). I had to go to the ‘sala situacional’ – kinda like a logistics centre, which has lists of all the branches, spokespeople, circumscriptions (group of 10 branches) etc. That was a bus trip away and I couldn’t work out which bus to get.

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On Saturday, through another friend/comrade, I met C- and over yoghurt and fruit, we discussed starting the youth team of our PSUV branch. He is a student who moved here from Falcon state, where his family is. He’s one of five siblings and he told me how his dad had 2 siblings to a previous girlfriend, left his mother when he was 10 and has another 5 kids by a new wife, but does nothing to support the other kids.

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“In order that December 2 never happens again” Chavez argued on Saturday that it was necessary to go on the offensive with the “United Socialist Party of Venezuela as the spearhead and vanguard” of the revolution. “Enough with betraying the people. We have arrived here to make a real revolution or die trying”.

Chavez uttered these words as he opened the founding congress of the provisionally named United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV). This speech was the latest in a series of reflections, following the defeat of his proposed constitutional reform last December 2.

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During last year’s "state of the nation" address, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez outlined his plan to speed up the revolution over 2007. Central to this was the "5 motors" that were to drive the revolution forward, along with reiterating his call to form a united socialist party of the revolution.

With the defeat of the referendum on constitutional reform - one of the motors - the false start of the motor on new geometry of power which was tied to the reform, a poor showing on the other 3, and the new party still non-existent, Chavez end 2007 in a difficult position.

Since then much has been made about the direction the revolution will take partly Chavez's talk of "putting the brakes" on the revolution and his cabinet reshuffle. An article in the New Statesman even went as far as to say that Chavez was doing a U-turn on his socialist project.

However his speech for the "state of the nation" address today to the National Assembly gave a bit of an insight into what we can expect this year.

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Not long after hearing a loud bang, we were told at work that our building was being evacuated. "There's been an explosion and everyone has to get out of the building" I was calmly told by a fellow workmate. As we approached the stairway (we are on the 20th floor so it would have been a hell off a walk down!) we could see residents from the apartment below climbing up with their faces covered. It turned out that a tear gas grenade had been set off on the 14^th floor.

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