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Chavistas Launch Campaign to Reclaim Revolution

Venezuela’s grassroots are rallying around a new self-managed campaign, which relies on graphic design and social media participation to highlight the enduring vitality of the Bolivarian process as a struggle to build power from below in the leadup to December parliamentary elections.
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Venezuela’s grassroots are rallying around a new self-managed campaign, which relies on graphic design and social media participation to highlight the enduring vitality of the Bolivarian process as a struggle to build power from below in the leadup to December parliamentary elections. 

Brought forth in September from a Creative Laboratory which included participants from Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, Peru and Colombia, the campaign flooded social media last week with evocative designs of anatomical hearts and veins intertwining across the continent, recalling Eduardo Galeano’s history, “The Open Veins of Latin America.”

Colorful portraits adorned with messages highlighting revolutionary goals such as Latin American integration and communal production are equally popular.

Rodrigo Acosta, a Chilean muralist now living in Merida and one of the campaign organizers told venezuelanaylsis.com that the autonomous and non-profit campaign represents “an urgent call” to “raise the flags that many of us have let fell, due to the campaign of demoralization from the right, and the economic crisis which affects us all.”

“First of all we have to overcome this feeling of orphanhood,” said Acosta, “and put into practice what Chavez taught us about participative democracy. […] We must assume our role and create revolution within the revolution.”

The campaign was launched on October 20th, on the three-year anniversary of the famous Strike at the Helm speech in which Chavez, in the late stages of his battle with cancer, urged Venezuela to work toward the socialist commune as the revolution’s ultimate goal.

The initiative is titled “Every Heartbeat Counts,” in recognition of each individual effort to “defend the spaces we’ve liberated,” explained Acosta, emphasizing “the small and otherwise invisible successes of the communes, those little fires that are kept alive in all of the country’s recesses.”

The images are marked with the hashtag #late, which is Spanish for the way a heart #beats.