We’re all familiar with the scene. Run-down shanty towns where the world’s poor try to get by amid violence, unsanitary conditions, political impotence, and bleak prospects for the future.
We assume it’s a festering mess. Precarious living at its worst.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. In hundreds of barrios around Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, qualified doctors are staffing freshly minted clinics, grocery store shelves are stocked with cheap, locally produced food, small-scale cooperative businesses are thriving, and educational opportunities are being expanded. These advances are not simply the by-product of a public treasury awash in oil revenues. More than that, they are tied explicitly to President Hugo Chavez’s revolutionary Bolivarian process – or simply el proceso – that is fundamentally altering Venezuela’s social fabric, forcing the nation’s institutions to respond to the people, rather than vice versa. And while the flamboyant Chavez deserves credit for this sea change, his supporters – known as Chavistas – are driving much of the revolution themselves. For though it was Chavez who initiated discussions to draft a new constitution in 1999, the document’s tenets of justice and equity were hammered out by ordinary citizens through nation-wide forums and meetings. The final document is wildly popular among Venezuela’s poor, and many of them always carry a small blue booklet version of it in their pocket.
