From NACLA Report on the AmericasNovember/December 2011Faced with the world financial crisis, budget cuts, and tuition hikes, students across the hemisphere are increasingly standing up for their right to education. In Chile, students have been in the streets since May, calling for an end to Pinochet-era policies that prioritize private profit over education.The following interview with Jose Ancalao Gavilan, spokesperson for the Chilean Mapuche Federation of Students (FEMAE), and Giovanni Roberto, spokesperson for the UPR students National Negotiation Committee during the 2010 strikes, took place on November 3.Read the complete article. From NACLA Report on the AmericasSpring 2013The news poured down like a hard Venezuelan rainHugo Chavez had passed. After a two-year-long battle with cancer, we should have been prepared. But we werent. Like a surreal dream we read the reports from afar. We fielded media calls, listened to Ali Primera, and dialed distant friends, searching for familiar voices; grasping for something elusive that was slipping through our fingers. Comments, cries, gritos rolled in through social media, as we were gluedtransfixedto Facebook and Twitter.Photo Credit: Silvia LeindeckerFor Chavez supporters, unbelief and grief: In the center of Caracas, all is peace and quiet, but it breathes pain, wrote one friend shortly after the news was announced. I have no words, wrote another, just tears of anguish. Chavez lives on in each of us, wrote a solidarity activist from abroad.Across the ether friends posted their pictures of the Venezuelan president or tweeted #Chavez with comments and links to memorable moments, like Chavezs 2006 UN General Assembly speech when he called president George W. Bush the Devil. Meanwhile, the opposition celebrated and mainstream editorials continued their media spin, decrying Chavez as a despot who led the country to ruin amid marginal gains for the poor.Those gains, however, were substantial. Chavezs revolution offered universal access to free health care. It built schools, abolished illiteracy, and reduced poverty by half and extreme poverty by more than 70%.For members of Venezuelas grassroots movements, Chavez meant the hope of a better life and the means to organize to accomplish it. Chavez is like a guide. Chavez is a doorthe door for the struggles that we want to carry out, said Iraida Morocoima, of Venezuelas Urban Land Committees in 2009. But on the other side of that door are the people.Chavez attempted to empower communities and promote participatory democracy throughout his presidency. He called on workers to occupy their factories and supported the formation of tens of thousands of cooperatives. Chavezs government called for the community to organize locally outside of bureaucratic channels and gave the people the tools to do it. Over 30,000 communal councils were created by neighborhood residents to make decisions about their own communities. These new councils could (and still can) receive funds directly from the national government to carry out their projects.These moves were not flawless, but they empowered, inspired, and handed everyday folks the tools to dream for a better world together and make it happen. I think that the most beautiful thing is the collective workthat we respect each other and join together