Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Un'altro mondo E' possibile: Chavez e' pericoloso perche lo sta dimostrando

Chavez is a threat because he offers the alternative of a decent
country
13 May 2006
Venezuela's president is using oil revenues to liberate the poor - no
wonder his enemies want to overthrow him, writes John Pilger in the
Guardian.
I have spent the past three weeks filming in the hillside barrios of
Caracas, in streets and breeze-block houses that defy gravity and
torrential rain and emerge at night like fireflies in the fog.
Caracas is said to be one of the world's toughest cities, yet I have
known no fear; the poorest have welcomed my colleagues and me with a
warmth characteristic of ordinary Venezuelans but also with the
unmistakable confidence of a people who know that change is possible
and who, in their everyday lives, are reclaiming noble concepts long
emptied of their meaning in the west: "reform", "popular democracy",
"equity", "social justice" and, yes, "freedom".
The other night, in a room bare except for a single fluorescent tube, I
heard these words spoken by the likes of Ana Lucia Fernandez, aged 86,
Celedonia Oviedo, aged 74, and Mavis Mendez, aged 95. A mere
33-year-old, Sonia Alvarez, had come with her two young children. Until
about a year ago, none of them could read and write; now they are
studying mathematics. For the first time in its modern era, Venezuela
has almost 100% literacy.
This achievement is due to a national programme, called Mision
Robinson, designed for adults and teenagers previously denied an
education because of poverty. Mision Ribas is giving everyone a
secondary school education, called a bachillerato. (The names Robinson
and Ribas refer to Venezuelan independence leaders from the 19th
century.) Named, like much else here, after the great liberator Simon
Bolivar, "Bolivarian", or people's, universities have opened,
introducing, as one parent told me, "treasures of the mind, history and
music and art, we barely knew existed". Under Hugo Chávez, Venezuela
is the first major oil producer to use its oil revenue to liberate the
poor.
Mavis Mendez has seen, in her 95 years, a parade of governments preside
over the theft of tens of billions of dollars in oil spoils, much of it
flown to Miami, together with the steepest descent into poverty ever
known in Latin America; from 18% in 1980 to 65% in 1995, three years
before Chávez was elected. "We didn't matter in a human sense," she
said. "We lived and died without real education and running water, and
food we couldn't afford. When we fell ill, the weakest died. In the
east of the city, where the mansions are, we were invisible, or we were
feared. Now I can read and write my name, and so much more; and
whatever the rich and their media say, we have planted the seeds of
true democracy, and I am full of joy that I have lived to witness it."
Latin American governments often give their regimes a new sense of
legitimacy by holding a constituent assembly that drafts a new
constitution. When he was elected in 1998, Chávez used this
brilliantly to decentralise, to give the impoverished grassroots power
they had never known and to begin to dismantle a corrupt political
superstructure as a prerequisite to changing the direction of the
economy. His setting-up of misions as a means of bypassing saboteurs in
the old, corrupt bureaucracy was typical of the extraordinary political
and social imagination that is changing Venezuela peacefully. This is
his "Bolivarian revolution", which, at this stage, is not dissimilar to
the post-war European social democracies.
Chávez, a former army major, was anxious to prove he was not yet
another military "strongman". He promised that his every move would be
subject to the will of the people. In his first year as president in
1999, he held an unprecedented number of votes: a referendum on whether
or not people wanted a new constituent assembly; elections for the
assembly; a second referendum ratifying the new constitution - 71% of
the people approved each of the 396 articles that gave Mavis and
Celedonia and Ana Lucia, and their children and grandchildren,
unheard-of freedoms, such as Article 123, which for the first time
recognised the human rights of mixed-race and black people, of whom
Chávez is one. "The indigenous peoples," it says, "have the right to
maintain their own economic practices, based on reciprocity, solidarity
and exchange ... and to define their priorities ... " The little red
book of the Venezuelan constitution became a bestseller on the streets.
Nora Hernandez, a community worker in Petare barrio, took me to her
local state-run supermarket, which is funded entirely by oil revenue
and where prices are up to half those in the commercial chains.
Proudly, she showed me articles of the constitution written on the
backs of soap-powder packets. "We can never go back," she said.
In La Vega barrio, I listened to a nurse, Mariella Machado, a big round
black woman of 45 with a wonderfully wicked laugh, stand and speak at
an urban land council on subjects ranging from homelessness to the Iraq
war. That day, they were launching Mision Madres de Barrio, a programme
aimed specifically at poverty among single mothers. Under the
constitution, women have the right to be paid as carers, and can borrow
from a special women's bank. From next month, the poorest housewives
will get about £120 a month. It is not surprising that Chávez has now
won eight elections and referendums in eight years, each time
increasing his majority, a world record. He is the most popular head of
state in the western hemisphere, probably in the world. That is why he
survived, amazingly, a Washington-backed coup in 2002. Mariella and
Celedonia and Nora and hundreds of thousands of others came down from
the barrios and demanded that the army remain loyal. "The people
rescued me," Chávez told me. "They did it with all the media against
me, preventing even the basic facts of what had happened. For popular
democracy in heroic action, I suggest you need look no further."
The venomous attacks on Chávez, who arrives in London tomorrow, have
begun and resemble uncannily those of the privately owned Venezuelan
television and press, which called for the elected government to be
overthrown. Fact-deprived attacks on Chávez in the Times and the
Financial Times this week, each with that peculiar malice reserved for
true dissenters from Thatcher's and Blair's one true way, follow a
travesty of journalism on Channel 4 News last month, which effectively
accused the Venezuelan president of plotting to make nuclear weapons
with Iran, an absurd fantasy. The reporter sneered at policies to
eradicate poverty and presented Chávez as a sinister buffoon, while
Donald Rumsfeld was allowed to liken him to Hitler, unchallenged. In
contrast, Tony Blair, a patrician with no equivalent democratic record,
having been elected by a fifth of those eligible to vote and having
caused the violent death of tens of thousands of Iraqis, is allowed to
continue spinning his truly absurd political survival tale.
Chávez is, of course, a threat, especially to the United States. Like
the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, who based their revolution on the English
co-operative moment, and the moderate Allende in Chile, he offers the
threat of an alternative way of developing a decent society: in other
words, the threat of a good example in a continent where the majority
of humanity has long suffered a Washington-designed peonage. In the US
media in the 1980s, the "threat" of tiny Nicaragua was seriously
debated until it was crushed. Venezuela is clearly being "softened up"
for something similar. A US army publication, Doctrine for Asymmetric
War against Venezuela, describes Chávez and the Bolivarian revolution
as the "largest threat since the Soviet Union and Communism". When I
said to Chávez that the US historically had had its way in Latin
America, he replied: "Yes, and my assassination would come as no
surprise. But the empire is in trouble, and the people of Venezuela
will resist an attack. We ask only for the support of all true
democrats."
http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=269

country
*ROTFL*
Ma d'altronde chi se non Pilger poteva scrivere simili idiozie :)
-Stefano