When Chuck tossed his “fuck Chavez” out into the ether I knew only a few moments would pass before there'd be a vigorous response.
Once the replies poured in, things became captivatingly odd; Chuck (unsuccessfully, in my view) tried to explain his “fuck Chavez” as a critique – or at least, the beginnings of one – and his debating opponents directed their efforts towards debunking this assertion.
While that battle raged I wondered about how much we know – beyond a few positive vignettes gathered from news sources and left-leaning essayists such as the Guardian's John Pilger - about Chavez's program. I knew, for example, that Cuban doctors have been dispatched to provide care for the poorest Venezuelans but I don't know the specifics.
How many doctors? What about nurses and other medical professionals? What areas of the country? What are the results to-date?
I realized that my understanding of the day to day, Chavez era Venezuelan reality, a reality I was vigorously defending in debates with US media fed Chavez haters – men (it's almost always bloviating men), who read the NYT and proceed to pontificate - was embarrassingly slight.
Of course, I needed to speak with people 'on the ground' or people who'd recently been on the ground and experienced the situation's ups and downs. I also needed to read high quality books and essays.
As we geeks sometimes say when a person asks a question that's easily answered by on line research, GFE (Google Fucking Exists). I turned to the supercomputing platform/search tool as a start.
These days, Wikipedia (which has become a dominant platform in its own right) ranks high in a growing number of search results. The first two results were from that uneven source.
The Wikipedia entry on Chavez (which is tagged with the following warning : “The neutrality of this article is disputed”) begins this way:
Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías (born July 28, 1954) is the 53rd and current President of Venezuela. As the leader of what he calls the Bolivarian Revolution, Chávez is known for his socialist governance, his promotion of Latin American integration, and his criticism, which he terms anti-imperialism, of neoliberal globalization and United States foreign policy.
A career military officer, Chávez founded the leftist Fifth Republic Movement after he led a failed 1992 coup d'etat. Chávez was elected President in 1998 on promises of aiding Venezuela's poor majority, and reelected in 2000. Domestically, Chávez has launched Bolivarian Missions to combat disease, illiteracy, malnutrition, poverty, and other social ills. Abroad, Chávez has acted against the Washington Consensus by supporting alternative models of economic development, and has advocated cooperation among the world's poor nations, especially those in Latin America.
Chávez has been severely criticized, mostly by Venezuela's middle and upper classes. He has been accused of electoral fraud, severe human rights violations, assaulting democracy in favor of dictatorship, and political repression, and has survived both a brief 2002 coup and a failed 2004 recall referendum due to his enormous support amongst the poor that represent the vast majority of his constituents. Whether viewed as a liberator or authoritarian demagogue, Chávez remains one of the most complex, controversial, and high-profile figures in modern Latin American politics.
[...]
full at
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Ch%C3%A1vez>
It's an interesting article, obviously written to be as matter-of-factly accurate as possible (hence the “neutrality dispute” mentioned at the article's head – undoubtedly, it's not negative enough for some or positive enough for others). It appears to be a decent enough overview.
Others may – no, I'm sure will, disagree.
There's a good amount of information there but two sections of the entry held my attention the longest. The first was the brief discussion of Chavez's “Bolivarian Missions” - which is a large enough topic to merit a whole entry of its own -
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolivarian_Missions>
The “External Links” section of that entry (easily one of Wikipedia's most valuable features) pointed me to the Venezuelan Analysis website:
<http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/>
I have no idea how “objective” Venezuelan Analysis' articles are but it seems like a very good find.
Also from Wikipedia, there's the ALTERNATIVA BOLIVARIANA PARA LA AMERICA (ALBA)-
<http://www.alternativabolivariana.org/>
An interesting source if you read Spanish (if not, friends are good and failing that, machine based language translation such as Babel Fish - <http://babelfish.altavista.com/> ).
And finally, there's Richard Gott's work such as his book Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution (2005), Verso -
<http://www.versobooks.com/books/ghij/g-titles/gott_hugo_chavez.shtml>
Lots of reading to do.
.d.
--------- With any luck, Tom Cruise's ride on the crazy train will remove him from our screens in two, three years tops.
SMB