Features: Bolivarian Project

With the Venezuelan elections now looming, and with Chavez’s approval ratings stubbornly hovering around the 57% mark, it would seem that the international media has stepped up its “disinformation” campaign against the Bolivarian revolution with renewed urgency, producing the kind of biased, baseless and manipulative stories about the “persecution” of opposition presidential candidate, Capriles Radonski, that have been filling the corporate press’ Latin American correspondence pages for weeks.

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Reuters may have dismissed the CELAC as more “initials” but many Venezuelans, both in the government and in the organised grassroots, see it as an important step towards Latin American integration, and as an organisation that is profoundly different to the OAS, EU, APEC and other regional blocs. This Venezuelanalysis.com eyewitness report explores how and why.

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Through two very different interviews we get a glimpse of the bureaucracy, corruption, clientelism, achievements, inspiration, and political growth within Venezuela’s education system, all of which are representative of the broader demons and dreams faced in the Bolivarian Revolution and its aim to create the “new person”.

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The recent National Assembly election represents a new opportunity for the governing socialists to learn from past errors and to move forward in their program to construct 21^st century socialism. But it also represents a comeback for Venezuela's once moribund opposition.

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Twenty years ago, left forces in Latin America and in the world in general were going through a difficult period. The Berlin Wall had fallen; the Soviet Union hurtled into an abyss and disappeared completely by the end of 1991. Deprived of the rearguard it needed, the Sandinista Revolution was defeated at the polls in February 1990, and Central American guerrilla movements were forced to demobilize. The only country that kept the banners of revolution flying was Cuba, although all the omens said that its days were numbered. Given that situation, it was difficult to imagine that twenty years later, left-wing leaders would govern most of the Latin American countries.

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The ten percentage point victory (55-45%) that President Chávez and his movement achieved on Sunday represents a very important victory for the effort to create socialism in Venezuela. However, Chávez and his supporters ought to recognize that this victory comes with a certain degree of risk because it increases the Bolivarian movement's dependency on its charismatic leader.

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A collective discussion is occurring throughout the revolutionary movement led by President Hugo Chavez following the defeat of the proposed constitutional reform proposals — that were intended to deepen the revolution to help open the way towards socialism — in the December 2 referendum.

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