Visiting Venezuelans Call for Unity and Progress
By Victoria Cervantes and Kari Lydersen
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A Chavista in the 23 de enero neighborhood in Caracas, Venezuala, shows her support for the leftist president.
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After surviving the controversial re-call vote last summer with flying colors, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez’s administration is taking ambitious strides to launch the country in the international community and develop Latin American trade and social blocs as a counter to U.S. hegemony.
This was the message of several Venezuelan officials who visited Chicago this fall, talking about their hopes for the future and the country’s battle against the region’s endemic poverty.
According to Nelson Piñeda, a professor of history and Venezuela’s alternate ambassador to the Organization of American States (OAS), poverty is the greatest threat to democracy today. Piñeda was joined by Dr. Fermin Toro, Venezuela’s ambassador to the United Nations, and the Venezuelan Consul General at the University of Chicago on November 18, as part of international efforts to promote the proposed Social Charter of the Americas.
Piñeda cited figures showing that some 280 million people live in poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean. Martin Sanchez, the Venezuelan Consul General in Chicago, quoted a study that found that 72 percent of people in the region would accept a dictatorship if it could provide for their most basic needs.
The Social Charter is modeled on Venezuela’s Bolivarian programs, which actively involve underserved populations in healthcare, education and other fields rather than making them passive recipients of government aid. These include an adult literacy program which graduated more than 1.2 million people in its first year, and the Barrio Adentro Mission healthcare program, which brought 11,000 Cuban doctors into the poorest parts of Venezuela and aims to build neighborhood clinics across the country.
At the University of Chicago Ambassador Toro also spoke about human rights, saying there are two contradictory views of human rights on the world stage today. One concept is humanitarian and concern for the human rights of individuals, and the other concept uses the term “human rights” to justify intervention, war and political pressure. He said Venezuela subscribes to the first concept and is working to uphold human rights by transforming its judicial and political systems and by providing economic and social rights to its citizens.
The Social Charter is part of a larger strategy to increase trade and cooperation with other Latin American countries, as Venezuelan ambassador to the U.S. Bernardo Alvarez Herrera explained in a meeting at the Puerto Rican Cultural Center in Humboldt Park on Dec. 1.
“That’s the only real way to have a balanced relationship with the U.S.,” he said. “The way to be a player in the global world is to act as a region. A united Latin America is a more stable Latin America. The other governments aren’t going to let the U.S. treat us like pariahs.”
Their hope is the development of regional trade as an alternative to neoliberal globalization.
“If you are going into the neoliberal economy, all you need to be is efficient,” Alvarez said. “We need to stop privatization, guarantee rights to free education and free health care, and have a special program for indigenous people, the most excluded of the excluded.”
Venezuelan economics secretary Medea Aguilera del Blanco added that “the most important factor of the Venezuelan economy is education,” and said the goal is for people to “learn by doing” so the country isn’t just dependent on selling oil and importing other goods.