VHeadline commentarist Carlos Herrera writes: My good friend from Axis of Logic, Les Blough, was present and active in the anti-war march in New York last weekend and he informed me that one of the anti war leaders, Larry Holmes, said in his speech that ”we also have out heroes” and held up a poster of President Chavez for all to see.
Larry Holmes is 100% right that Chavez is a hero for millions throughout the world ... but here in Venezuela itself, there are many unsung heroes working full time, with commitment and with the people to push the revolution forward.
One of these heroes is Captain Eliezer Otaiza Castillo who has held several key jobs in the Chavez administration and always seems to receive “missions” that can be classified at least as challenging, if not as extremely difficult. He is ex-head of the secret state police, the DISIP, ex-director of the National Training Institute (INCE), 
ex-head of the Presidential Commission to defeat illiteracy (Mision Robinson) and is currently director of the national Land Institute (INTI).
This vital task is to implement long overdue agrarian reforms in the context of the 2001 Land Law, with special emphasis on addressing the problem of idle crop lands throughout the national territory.
The long term aim is to ensure that Venezuela produces enough food to feed its population instead of importing almost 70% of what it consumes.
Montesinos’ capture in Caracas
As head of the DISIP, Otaiza was a key figure in the capture of Vladimiro Montesinos, Fujimori’s right hand man, arms & drugs dealer and now safely behind bars in Peru.
In fact, it was Otaiza’s intelligence work which led to the capture of Montesinos and his collaborators in La Yaguara (Caracas), on June 28, 2001, and probably saved Montesinos’ life, as he would probably have been eliminated since he had become such a hot potato.
- The blame would then have been pinned on the Chavez government ... bearing in mind the nascent media madness at that time.
Unfortunately for Otaiza, his luck ran out just after the coup d’etat in April 2002, when he was removed as head of the DISIP. The latter was out of control during the coup and Otaiza ended up being the scapegoat for the indiscipline and actions of the organization for which he was ultimately responsible. I remember his final press conference ... wearing dark glasses and answering coherently, he was nevertheless visibly upset at the decision which had been taken.
Mission Identity - promoting democracy
Otaiza’s next role was to clean up the INCE -- which was not functioning as it should have been for many years. It was soon after he arrived there that all courses were suspended, and the social missions ... starting with Mission Robinson and Mission Identity ... were welded on to the existing structure of INCE and its staff.
In his role as intelligence chief at the DISIP, Otaiza had had experience in cleaning up databases and this groundwork contributed decisively to the success of Mission Identity, when 2.5 million Venezuelans received identity cards for the first time. Many duplicated identity cards were cleaned out of the system and double-voting eliminated to a great extent.
Many new voters were thus entitled to participate in electoral processes, in line with the concept of the 1999 Bolivarian Constitution. Real participation in the democratic process was at last possible for the excluded in Venezuelan society, thus creating a new popular democratic class.
Mission Robinson - Otaiza comes of age
For anyone, Mission Robinson and its aim of eliminating illiteracy in Venezuela would have been a tall order. With 7% of the population not knowing how to read and write, there were more than 1.4 million individuals of all ages eligible to enter into Mission Robinson.
Otaiza’s task was to secure enough volunteers and facilitators to make the logistics of this Mission viable. He had to find enough teaching areas and ensure that the essential equipment, such as television sets and video players reached their destinations, some of which were in mountain chains, jungles and in the vast Venezuelan plains states. The vital tapes and note books had to be delivered safely to the “vencedores” ... the “victors” ... as the graduating students were called after successfully completing their seven week course, so as to see the light and come out of the shadow world of illiteracy.
The success of Mission Robinson was overwhelming and simply exposed the truth about how little had been done in the past during the IV Republic, when a maximum of 15,000 people a year learned to read and write in the Fe y Alegría catholic schools’ program. In the first six months of Mission Robinson, one million Venezuelans had learnt to read and write and were now ready to pass on to Mission Robinson II, to complete their primary education.
Eliezer Otaiza was instrumental in the success of this humanistic mission par excellence and is, in the author’s opinion, the world record holder for the numbers, speed and efficiency of this national literacy plan. He was in the front line, on the barricades, as any committed soldier, or in the case of Otaiza, revolutionary should be.
The next challenge for Otaiza
Captain Otaiza is now the head on the National Land Institute, INTI, and has another major challenge on his hands -- agrarian reform, the salt of any revolution, and the cause for which more human beings have died in the last 500 years in Latin America.
Otaiza has inherited the causes of the 18591863 Federal Wars, where thousands of Venezuelan landless peasants died in the struggle for the ownership of the land, as well as the phony land reform of 1961. In this case, nothing changed, and all the land was re-purchased by the oligarchy from the penniless peasant farmers living in atrocious conditions in the Venezuelan countryside. These peasants then moved to the cities, mainly Caracas in the hope of cashing in on the oil bonanza, to form the great belts of misery surrounding the capital city on the hill and mountainsides.
Despite the resistance of the landed oligarchy to the reforms, where idle and unproductive crop land will be declared illegal under the threat of eventual expropriation (compulsory purchase orders), Otaiza is slowly and firmly progressing with his task. President Chavez has declared “death to idle crop lands” and has demanded quick results from Otaiza, since without meaningful land distribution and justice in the countryside, there can be “no revolution”.
Control and management of the land question is being carried out within the framework of the Land Law of 2001, and this could be a painful process, since the results from Otaiza’s investigations so far have concluded that 90% of the land is underused and therefore classified as “idle” and can be subject to eventual judicial compulsory purchase orders.
Bearing in mind that the Land Law has been on the statute books since 2001, for four years, and there is idle crop land all over Venezuela in private hands, either occupied legally or illegally, it would appear that the landowners have not taken the new law seriously. Why is this so?
In the past, rich people in Venezuela could flout the laws and nothing would happen to them. Unfortunately for them, the situation has shifted by 180 degrees, and more so with a man of Otaiza’s revolutionary fiber at the helm. He will not desist until the job is done.
Recently, two large ranches have been expropriated due to Otaiza’s efforts, Hato Pineiro and El Charcote, which simply did not have legal or original ownership documents.
However, you can rest assured that state lands which have been fenced off ... and therefore appropriated illegally .... even back to the days of Simon Bolivar ... will be returned to the state by this determined soldier, Eliezer Otaiza.
It is not my place to predict how land reform will progress in Venezuela in the coming year, which could be crucial as Chavez demands the “great leap forward.” Rest assured, that the private mass media will be screaming as land reform starts to bite, so that peasant farmers can rightly work the land in the national interest, contributing to the food sovereignty of the nation as laid out in the 1999 Bolivarian Constitution and to have a decent standard of living for their historically impoverished families.
Readers should note, that if the is land is productive ... even if it is illegally occupied ... the presumed “owners” can stay and work the land, since they are contributing to the national food sovereignty plan. There are no arbitrary expropriations, as the mass media would have us all believe, and even less so with a certificate of a “productive farm” issued by the INTI.
In Venezuela, there are many heroes.
Historical ones -- such as Bolivar, Sucre, Zamora and Simon Rodriguez.
Contemporary ones -- such as Medina Angarita, Romulo Gallegos and Ali Primera.
Modern ones -- such as Hugo Chavez ... and the unsung heroes on the barricades with the “pueblo” such as Eliezer Otaiza.
Carlos Herrera
Carlos.Herrera@VHeadline.com