I think your piece misrepresents some of the data. First, the fact that only 30 or so percent of entities in a business register are "active" is quite normal and does not represent a "failure" in any meaningful way.
Organizations are born and die, some never take off, but most developing countries have no means of keeping their business register up to date. To put this in a perspective - in the US, which has one of the best statistical systems in the world, only about 20-30% of the organizations on the Exempt Organizations Master File (a business register maintained by the IRS) is actually active. By that standard, Venezuelan cooperatives do quite well.
Furthermore, your unattributed quotation questioning the success of the Barrio Adentro program mentions the rise in the incidence of certain diseases, but fails to mention that Barrio Adentro also entailed a health census that for the first time produced truly national health data. This makes one wonder how much of this claimed "increase" was a result of better reporting rather than actual increase of incidence. Failure to mention that or, for that matter attribute this quotation to a source puts the credibility of your claim into question.
Finally your claim that Franco or Mussolini regimes supported cooperatives is demonstrably false. These regimes came to power in reaction to labor organizing and dismantled or gutted labor organizations, including cooperatives, and those that were allowed to operate were subjected them to centralized state control. So claiming that Franco supported cooperatives is like saying that Hitler supported France by creating the Vichy government.
Wojtek
On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 3:17 AM, Bhaskar Sunkara <bhaskar.sunkara at gmail.com>wrote:
> A short blog post on Venezuelan cooperatives...
> http://theactivist.org/blog/on-venezuelas-cooperative-revolution
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