Back to Venezuela index   Venezuela's slum army takes over In the crowded barrios, the poor who helped Chávez back to power are seizing control of their own lives   by Reed Lindsay in Caracas The Observer, Sunday August 10, 2003 The economy is in a shambles, the country is torn by social strife. The government is paralysed by factional conflicts, and the virulent media denounce a new public scandal nearly every day. But in the sprawling hillside slums of Caracas, there is optimism. A startling buzz of activity from the very bottom of society's ladder is beginning to affect an embattled Venezuela. Since weathering a coup in April 2002 and a debilitating strike early this year, President Hugo Chávez has pushed through measures aimed at promoting civic participation among the poor. And the result may well prove to be the turning point of Venezuela's fortunes. In the teeming barrios of the capital, a quiet revolution is under way. Meeting in dilapidated school houses and potholed alleyways, Venezuelans have formed neighbourhood groups to fix deficient water supply systems, to organise volunteer efforts at local schools and to launch recycling campaigns. Committees are conducting censuses and writing neighbourhood histories as part of a government plan to grant land titles to hundreds of thousands of slum-dwelling families who squatted decades ago but were long ignored by the authorities. Others are attending self-convoked 'citizen assemblies' to talk about everything from neighbourhood problems to national politics, and to create local planning councils where municipal authorities will be required to share decision-making with community representatives. Community radio and television stations, banned by previous governments, are thriving. 'What is new is not so much what the government is doing, but what is happening outside it,' said Arlene Espinal, 49, a social worker and resident of the 23 de Enero barrio, which looms above downtown Caracas. 'There's been a powerful awakening in the barrios.' For Elka Oropeza, everything changed with last year's coup. A 30-year-old single mother and lifelong resident of 23 de Enero, Oropeza was one of tens of thousands who descended from Caracas's poor neighbourhoods in protest after Chávez was forced from office and a fleeting dictatorship was installed under business leader Pedro Carmona. The largely spontaneous demonstrations were a crucial factor in Chávez's unexpected return to power in less than 48 hours. Oropeza had not voted for Chávez, and before the coup merely observed the nation's political turmoil. Since then, she has become an assiduous community leader and a fierce defender of the government. 'Before Chávez, the only thing I had ever done was vote,' said Oropeza, who attends weekly 'citizen assemblies' in her barrio and is helping with a government-sponsored literacy campaign. 'Now, we feel that he's giving us the power to choose what we want in our communities.' The grassroots initiatives provide the first examples of Chávez's pledge to promote sweeping social change through the active participation of the citizenry. The new community activism, however, has gone largely unnoticed in middle and upper-class neighbourhoods of Caracas, where Chávez is hugely unpopular. Media coverage, meanwhile, has been largely limited to the controversies surrounding the so-called Bolívarian Circles, government-promoted neighbour hood organisations that mainly serve as political action groups in support of the President, and a government programme that has brought several hundred Cuban doctors to provide free healthcare in the barrios. But analysts say that the local initiatives, and especially the efforts to grant land titles to long-time squatters, could reap untold political dividends in the barrios, traditionally a bastion of support for Chávez. 'Chávez is consolidating his strength among the poor,' said Eleazar Díaz Rangel, director and columnist of Ultimas Noticias, the only major newspaper in Caracas that is not stridently anti-Chávez. Many barrio residents are taking action with little heed for official directives or government sanctions. When teachers at the Juan Bautista Alberdi elementary school in the suburb of Manicomio walked out on classes during the opposition-led strike in January, the students, along with their parents, took the school back by force. They have since changed the locks, painted the walls and started classes under the tutelage of six strike-breaking teachers and 14 volunteers, including some parents. 'We don't want a government, we want to govern,' said Carlos Carles, co-founder of Radio Perola, a community station that has become an axis of local activism in the barrio of Caricuao. 'We want to decide what is done, when it's done and how it's done in our communities.'