Letter From Venezuela: The Land of Chavismo
By Chesa Boudin
Nov 17, 2006, 08:02
As Venezuelans prepare to go to the polls December 3, expectations are that President Hugo Chávez will easily win re-election, thanks to his wide base of support among the country’s poor and marginalized majority. In this election, however, people will be voting not just on hopes and expectations but rather on the proven track record of Chávez’s “Bolivarian Revolution” and its gains in alleviating poverty.
An innovative series of social programs known as misiones, or missions–set up to parallel ineffective and often exclusionary government agencies or services, and largely funded through oil sales, which account for 47 percent of government revenue and 80 percent of exports–has delivered concrete benefits to Venezuela’s poor. As one example, roughly 3 million Venezuelans have enrolled in one of the four free educational missions–basic adult literacy, primary school, high school equivalency and university–since the programs began in 2003. Recently, in one adult literacy class, the pride of the students was palpable as one after another went to the chalkboard to transcribe–albeit with a few errors–short sentences that their facilitator read aloud. One woman in her late 60s told me after class, “This is the first time in my life when Venezuela has had a government dedicated to inclusion, not exclusion.”
A mission that brings doctors to live in poor neighborhoods, towns and villages to provide free, easily accessible healthcare is so popular that in 2004 alone it logged more visits than the entire public and private healthcare systems combined over the previous five years. There is a job-training mission, and a mission that provides food subsidies and soup kitchens. These and the other missions offer much-needed services and dramatically increase the quality of life for millions of Venezuelans, often in ways that are not easily quantifiable in commonly reported poverty indicators.
Even in the statistics, however, changes are evident. According to Venezuela’s most recent census, the number of households living in poverty has dropped from 42.8 percent in 1999, when Chávez took office, to 33.9 percent in early 2006. Households living in extreme poverty dropped from 17.1 percent to 10.6 percent during the same period. The poorest quintile of the population has seen its consumption power more than double. Official unemployment has been cut by more than half, to around 10 percent, although most jobs are either in the public sector or in the “informal” sector.
Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in Washington, says that while poverty statistics tend to follow overall economic growth (and Venezuela’s economy has been growing at record rates as global energy prices have soared), the improvements are nonetheless remarkable. “The Chávez government has only had three years of stability and control over the oil industry,” he says. “In that time they have dramatically increased access to healthcare and education…. I don’t know of anywhere else in the hemisphere that has made these kinds of gains.”
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