by Wikipedia
Reflecting on
Chavez's recent death eight months after visiting Venezuela, in the time spent
back in the UK my sympathies and opinion of the country, its people and their comandante
have felt the nostalgic breath of time, my experiences sweetened through
distance and fuzzy memories. Travelling in another country as a young white
European, wanting to delve into the actions and thoughts of Venezuelanos, I encountered
difficulties in bridging the gap between the people and places being visited as
an interested outsider and the mundane and harsh realities of everyday life
that you find so intriguing and foreign compared to your own.
The majority of
encounters and acquaintances made in Venezuela were dictated by the places I
stayed and visited. This is a rather unsurprising observation but revisiting
the people I met and under what circumstances forces a self-reflection on the
attitudes to Chavez I had before visiting Venezuela, whilst in Venezuela and
returning home coinciding with the deterioration of his life. It is very
difficult to visit a new country with a fresh state of mind, to rid away with
all pre-conceptions, attempting not to fall into comparisons with other
countries, cultures and things you may have read. This does not entail a
misconception or misunderstanding of socio-historical processes but to experience
as freshly and open-mindedly as possible the undercurrents that weave through
society that are so often hidden behind the invisible wall between tourist and
native, outsider and insider.
During the month I
spent in Venezuela, traveling East from Caracas to Venezuela's "long finger'
that almost touches Trinidad, the most common form of accommodation were
hostels, known as posadas. For the
persons who owned these businesses, as proprietors and the bourgeoisie, Chavez
was, to put mildly, not to their taste. One European lady, owner of a large 10
bed hostel with short silver hair, a small black wristwatch and glasses that
perched resolutely on the end of her nose, was at first dismayed at the milk
situation in Venezuela, leading on to lamenting the lack of options beyond two
types of cheese; with her partner presenting Venezuela as "el Cuba segundo',
the second Cuba. Another posada owner,
who had dropped in to collect the weekly earnings, offered me a lift to the
nearby town to catch the bus further East. The air conditioned 4x4 formed a
cloud of dust as it swerved up the mountainside to an apartment block where we
picked up his young son who had been to private Maths lessons, somewhat
questioning my desires to visit Venezuela. "You are young! Why come here?' Having
moved to Venezuela from Chile with his energy-business minded father, the
country seemed to be no more than a limp body from which they could leech, with
disregard for the common man and their barbarity. Another lamented Chavez's
buying of votes during the election. Another criticised him of killing the
cows, almost personally.
Spending time in
these environments with these people whose lives have not improved under Chavez
in the last 14 years and are visibly upset is challenging in not wanting to question
their experiences, finding fault in their arguments and asking them what about
other people's lives and futures in the last 14 years? Your life may not have
developed or change as you had once hoped, but for millions of others the
opportunity and recognition that Chavez has inputted not only in the constitution
and in the concrete structures of cities and villages but in the hearts and
souls of a religious and devout nation. Even sowing a seed of hope in the
consciousness of the majority of Venezuelan's has been a historic achievement,
liberating from the cultural, economic and political dominance of imperialism,
building a future Venezuela that contains the aspirations and dreams of the
people, where communities represent themselves, not worlds and environments
that are constructed without consent, without negotiation and without basic
respect and dignity of life and pride.
The majority of media
coverage of Chavez in the West is well known to be inaccurate, misleading and
at times entirely daydreamed. Some media sites have picked up on a piece on the
reaction of the oil market to Chavez's death by Association Press business
commentator Pamela Sampson who argued:
"Chavez invested
Venezuela's oil wealth into social programs including state-run food markets,
cash benefits for poor families, free health clinics and education programs.
But those gains were meagre compared with the spectacular construction projects
that oil riches spurred in glittering Middle Eastern cities, including the
world's tallest building in Dubai and plans for branches of the Louvre and Guggenheim
museums in Abu Dhabi."
How dare he build
schools, hospitals and food markets, taking away our power to construct our
dreams in phallic shapes protruding towards the sky to offer unsurpassed views
over our dominion. Whilst Ms Sampson's criticism of Chavez's policies is one of
the more frank approvals of wealth inequality and elite sycophancy, more subtle
media references have marked Chavez out as a threat to freedom and prosperity,
labelled a dictator, authoritarian and despot, strangling the rights of the
people. In fact, as we have seen over the last few days in Caracas and
Venezuela, there exists a participatory and engaging citizenry that Chavez has
energised to realise their potential and time is now; putting shame to civic
engagement and political attitudes floundering in a country over the Gulf that
is the main labeller of "Chavez the dictator', the United States.
In the conversations
with the taxi drivers, the people selling peanuts and popcorn on the street,
the kids playing baseball with a stick and a stone in the streets, the children
who now have the opportunity to go to school for free, for the normal guys and
the normal girls, for the outsiders and the down-and-outs and the excluded
ones, there was only one man who had even attempted to stand up and fight for a
nation and state that was run of the people, by the people and for the people, instigating a social
introspection that upholds the Bolivarian tradition of the America's new birth
after European colonialism that had been soured through United States backed
imperialism. For them there was only Chavez. "Mi Corazon!', my heart!
We are often made
aware of Chavez's polarising nature and raises questions on unequivocally praising
and reinforcing the positive aspects of changes in Venezuela under the crushing
weight of Western media bias. Observing and understanding the things that have
gone wrong and there is much to do with many problems endemic and rooted in
society, but we need to move on from defending to finding solutions to the
problems that have not been soothed or healed; mass poverty still exists in
Venezuela, the revolution is yet to touch to most excluded, balance racial
inequality and reduce oil-reliance to name just a few. Chavez's vision was of sovereignty
and independence but with solidaristic ties stretching the Pan-American
highway, across the seas to Africa, Europe and through the Panama-canal to
Asia; offering out the mulatto, black and white hand of Venezuela. To
paraphrase Martin Luther King, the arc of Venezuela's history is long but bends
toward solidarity, peace, equality and compassion that before Chavez had been
missing for too long.
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