| know buddee 2004-08-25, 12:38 pm |
| Why Hugo Chavez Won a Landslide Victory
By Medea Benjamin, AlterNet. Posted August 18, 2004.
Go to the barrios of Caracas, and it becomes obvious why the recall
effort against Hugo Chavez failed: providing people with free health
care, education, small business loans and job training is a good way
to win the hearts and minds of the people.
When the rule of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was reaffirmed in a
landslide 58-42 percent victory on Sunday, the opposition who put the
recall vote on the ballot was stunned. They obviously don't spend much
time in the nation's poor neighborhoods.
I knew Chavez would win the referendum when I met Olivia Delfino in a
poor Caracas barrio that our international election delegation
visited. Olivia came running 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 and a bank loan to fix the roof so it
wouldn't leak. 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 crying. "Can you imagine what's 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 poor barrios in Venezuela and you'll hear the same
stories over and over. The very poor can now go to a designated home
in the neighborhood to pick up a hot meal every day. The elderly 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 an electoral duopoly. The vast majority in
this oil-rich nation remained 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 actively
engaged in running them. They're turning abandoned buildings into
neighborhood centers, running community kitchens, volunteering to
teach in the literacy programs and organizing neighborhood health
brigades.
Infuriated by their loss of power, the elite have used 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 governing through dictatorial rule.
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, expected 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."
The opposition accuse Chavez of using the social programs that have so
improved the lives of the poor as a way to gain voters. In this, the
opposition is right: providing people with free health care,
education, small business loans and job training is certainly a good
way to win the hearts and minds of the people.
Sunday's overwhelming victory for Chavez has given him an even
stronger mandate for his "revolution for the poor." It should also
give George Bush and John Kerry reason to rethink their attitude
towards Hugo Chavez. Rather than demonizing him as a new Fidel Castro
and stoking the opposition, US leaders should embrace Venezuela's
social transformation and the way it is empowering people like Olivia
Delfino.
Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the human rights group Global Exchange
and the women's peace group CodePink, is an election observer in
Venezuela.
Copied from: http://www.alternet.org/story/19585/
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There will be many more righteous powerful political leaders like
Chavez in the world as time goes on - who will be deserving of the
people's love and admiration. The time is coming when politicians who
are little more than puppets for the rich (along with news media
groups who are also pawns of the rich)- will be sad aspects of the
dark past. The future is much brighter than most of us can imagine.
These are the last days of a very dark era in man's history.
KB
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"Man must change or die. There is no other course."
The World Teacher
http://www.share-international.org
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