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A Call to Arms: Defend Venezuela Printer friendly page Print This
By Daniel Kovalik, Telesur
Telesur
Thursday, Aug 14, 2014

I am currently reading a biography about one of my heroes, Paul Robeson. Among the things that impress me is the story of Paul visiting Spain during the civil war to sing to the international brigades who travelled from all over the world, including from the U.S., to defend the Spanish Republic against the fascists.

​This has made me wonder where that type of spirit of internationalism is at the present. And, I would submit that if any country deserves such international help right now, it is Venezuela – a country that stands out as a beacon of social equality, democracy and internationalist self-sacrifice, though one would never know this from the mainstream press.

In terms of its own internationalism, I was greatly moved this week when I learned that Venezuela is sending 16 tons of humanitarian aid to Gaza. In addition, Venezuela has offered to take in Palestinian children displaced by the current conflict and have offered to train hundreds of Palestinian doctors. This should be enough to warm the cockles of anyone’s heart and to make Venezuela a country worthy of international solidarity and defense.

Venezuela has also been quite successful in advancing the cause of grassroots democracy since Hugo Chavez was elected President in 1998. Defending Venezuela’s democratic gains in a recent article, Chilean writer Pedro Santander put it well when he explained:
Regarding the supposed “democratic deficit of the Venezuelan regime,” the facts speak for themselves. Since 1998 there have been four national plebiscites, four presidential elections, and eleven parliamentary, regional, and municipal elections. Venezuela is the Latin American country with the highest number of elections and it also has an automatic electoral system (much more modern than Chile’s one), described by Jimmy Carter, who has observed 92 elections in all continents, as “the best system in the world.” 
As Santander further explains, the recent violent demonstrations by the opposition came on the heels of national municipal elections in which the Chavistas won 242 mayoralties out of 317.

In addition, Venezuela is a beacon in terms of its fight against poverty, slashing household income poverty from 42% in 1999 to 27.3% in 2013.  Meanwhile, through its various social programs which have brought free education, housing and health care to poorer Venezuelans, structural poverty  has been reduced from 29.3% in 1999 to 19.6% in 2013. 

Moreover, in regard to the once forgotten Afro-Venezuelan community, one Venezuelan commentator, Jesús Chucho García, recently explained:

In these 15 years of the Bolivarian process, afro-descendant Venezuelans have been dignified in an unprecedented way in Venezuelan history. Before, the land of afro communities was in the hands of latifundistas and agrarian bourgeoisie. One the worst cases of discrimination was reflected in the Farriar municipality, where Cuban supporters of Batista, with the help of the [pre-Chavez] government, dispossessed thousands of hectares of ancestral land, including Cañizos, Palo Quemao, Farriar, Palmarejo, and El Chino. Numerous witnesses tell of how the Batista supporters hired armed bands to assault community inhabitants at night, threatening them and burning their cane crops. This lead to persecutions, and a youth was murdered when people protested these events. When Chavez arrived, on an episode of "Alo, President" filmed in Palmarejo, he declared himself afro-descendant, and handed over 11 thousand hectares along with agriculture credits, and decreed the land communal property of the afro-descendants of Yaracuy.

Jesús Chucho García goes on to explain how Chavez returned thousands of hectares of land to Afro-Venezuelans in other regions, such as Barlovento.

What’s more, if we look at the UN’s most recent Human Development Index, which measures several key indicators of the health of a country’s citizenry (e.g., life expectancy, income, education, equality), we see that Venezuela has actually experienced a steady growth in such human development indicators since Chavez took office in 1999 with a total Human Development Index score of .662 in 2000 to .748 in 2012.   See, Table 2 at p. 149

Significantly, Venezuela had a huge relative increase in this index during that time, jumping nine (9) rankings in the HDI chart from 80 to number 71 in the world. If we compare this to Venezuela’s neighbor, and chief U.S. ally in this hemisphere, Colombia, that country has been stuck at position 91 in the world during that time same time period. Moreover, in terms of human rights, there is no comparison between these two countries which Colombia, one the largest recipients of U.S. military support in the world, having the dubious distinction of leading the world in forced disappearances at 50,000, and internally displaced peoples at over 5 million.

In the end, as Noam Chomsky opined last year, Chavez led “the historic liberation of Latin America” from the over 500 years of subjugation. This is no small feat. However, in order to continue this great progress, Venezuela needs and deserves international solidarity, especially in the U.S. where the government continues to bankroll the violent, right-wing opposition in Venezuela with millions of dollars in aid.

It is critical that people of good will step up to oppose such meddling in Venezuela’s internal affairs and defend the truth about Venezuela in the face of U.S. government and media manipulation.

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