Coastal Post Online
MARIN COUNTY'S NEWS
MONTHLY - FREE PRESS
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(415)868-0502(fax) - P.O. Box 31, Bolinas, CA, 94924
September, 2004
Hugo Chavez Could Teach US Leaders
A Thing Or Two about Winning Votes
By Medea Benjamin
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I knew that the administration of Hugo Chavez had won my heart when I met
Olivia Delfino in one of the poor barrios in Caracas. As I was touring the
neighborhood with an international delegation here to monitor this Sunday's
referendum on Chavez, Olivia came out of her tiny house and grabbed my arm.
"Tell the people of your country that we love Hugo Chavez," she
insisted. She went on to tell me how her life had changed since he came to
power. After living in the barrio for 40 years, she now had a formal title to
her home. With that, she was able to get a bank loan to fix the roof so it
wouldn't leak in the rain. Thanks to the Cuban dentists and a program called "Rescatando
la sonrisa"-recovering the smile-for the first time in her life she was
able to get her teeth fixed. And her daughter is in a job-training program to
become a nurse's assistant.
Getting more and more animated, Olivia dragged me over to a
poster on the wall showing Hugo Chavez with a throng of followers and a list of
Venezuela's new social programs that read: "The social programs are
ours, let's defend them." Then slowly and laboriously, she began reading
the list of social programs: literacy, health care, job training, land reform,
subsidized food, small loans. I asked her if she was just learning to read and
write as part of the literacy program. That's when she started to cry.
"Can you imagine what it has meant to me, at 52 years old, to now have a
chance to read?" she said. "It's transformed my life."
Walk through the poor neighborhoods in Venezuela and you'll hear the same
stories over and over. The very poor now can go to a designated home in the
neighborhood to pick up a hot meal every day. The elderly now have monthly
pensions that allow them to live with dignity. Young people can take advantage
of greatly expanded free college programs. And with 13,000 Cuban doctors spread
throughout the country and reaching over half the population, the poor now have
their own family doctors on call 24 hours a day-doctors who even make house
calls. This heath care, including medicines, are all free.
The programs are being paid for with the income from Venezuela's oil, which is at an all-time high. Previously, the nation's oil wealth
benefited only a small, well-connected elite who kept themselves in power for
40 years through a two-party duopoly. The elite, who controlled the media as
well, kept the vast majority poor, disenfranchised, and disempowered. With the
election of Hugo Chavez in 1998 on a platform of sharing the nation's oil
wealth with the poorest, all that has changed. The poor are now not only
recipients of these programs, they are engaged in running them. They're turning
abandoned buildings into neighborhood centers, running community kitchens;
volunteering to teach in the literacy programs, organizing neighborhood health
brigades and registering millions of new voters.
Infuriated by their loss of power, the elite use their
control over the media to blast Chavez for destroying the economy, cozying up
to Fidel Castro, antagonizing the US government, expropriating private
property, and using dictatorial rule. They also accuse him of using the social
programs that have so improved the lives of the poor as a way to buy votes.
The opposition managed to collect enough signatures to trigger this
Sunday's referendum on the president's mandate. Chavez supporters, bolstered by
almost every poll, expect to win. "The opposition can lie all they want about
Chavez," said Olivia defiantly, "but the facts speak for themselves.
Before no one cared about us, the poor. Now they do." When I asked her
what was going to happen on Sunday, she grinned. "First we're going to
vote. And then we'll gather in front of the presidential palace for a huge
victory party."
The opposition is right: providing people with free health
care, education, small business loans and job training is certainly a good way
to win support. With the US elections coming up in November, George Bush-and
John Kerry for that matter-could learn a thing or two from Hugo Chavez about
winning the hearts and minds of the people.
Medea Benjamin is co-founder of the human rights group Global Exchange and the
women's peace group CodePink.