Tamara Pearson
April 11 will mark four years since the US-backed coup against Venezuela's democratically elected president Hugo Chavez. Within just 36 hours, the coup was defeated by a mass uprising of the poor, who, along with loyal sections of the military, mobilised to reinstate their president and constitution. As the Bush administration steps up its campaign of aggression against Venezuela's revolution by funding anti-democratic forces within Venezuela and trying to politically isolate the country internationally, progressive activists around the world will be organising a week of solidarity with Venezuela from April 10-16 to demand "US — hands off Venezuela!"
In Australia, the Australia-Venezuela Solidarity Network (AVSN), which Resistance is affiliated to, will be organising public forums, film screenings and protest actions outside US consulates on the anniversary of the short-lived coup.
The following is an abridged speech by Tamara Pearson to a 200-strong public meeting with visiting Venezuelan revolutionary Dr Carolus Wimmer in Sydney on February 28. Pearson is a member of the AVSN. To get in touch with the AVSN, which is organising solidarity brigades to Venezuela, and to help plan the week of solidarity in April, visit <http://www.venezuelasolidarity.org>.
Going to Venezuela last year was a life-changing experience. Our brigade visited different cooperatives and talked to people who were confident, warm and enthusiastic about the future. We talked to university students from nine in the morning until nine at night. They had so much to say, but they didn't paint a perfect picture.
They said that 10 years ago, Venezuela was just like Australia. They too didn't believe back then that anything would ever change, that anything could. They were open about the problems — the corruption and opportunism that still exists in Venezuela.
In Australia, we tend to age quickly. A lot of us spend 50 years doing meaningless work — in retail or advertising or in underfunded hospitals and schools. A few years ago I visited a man in the Villawood detention centre. He seemed very old. He couldn't laugh. He talked about killing himself. He talked like a 70-year-old, but he was only 15. He'd been in detention since he was 12.
In Venezuela it's the opposite. I met a man there who couldn't read 10 years ago, but who has now not only finished high school, thanks to the education mission, he has got a university degree. This man, about 75, had worked on a small street stall all his life. And this is a common story.
Venezuela is fighting for, and becoming, a society that values people as an end, not a means, where your life doesn't stop when you retire and you don't die alone in your flat. It is building an alternative to poverty, powerlessness, alienation and hopelessness. It is trying to bring an end to a life of all work and no dreams.
In Venezuela, I saw people in trucks full to the brim with history books that were being handed out free. That's the kind of world I want. Not like here, where you spend the first 10 years of your work life paying off your HECS debt.
Venezuela isn't keeping its revolution to itself. It's now giving cheap oil to low-income earners in seven states in the US. Some 20,000 low-income Ecuardorians will receive free eye surgery in Cuba and Venezuela this year. So far, 200,000 people from Latin America and the Carribean who were suffering from curable eye diseases but who couldn't afford treatment in their country have benefited.
Venezuela is relevant to all of us because it is standing up to the United States. The US has invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and it is pushing its free trade and privatisation agenda onto the rest of the world. But it has not managed to thwart the revolutionary process in Venezuela, which needs our solidarity to survive and deepen.
Few national leaders believe, or have the guts to say, as Chavez did at the World Social Forum: "The planet's most serious danger is the US government. The people of the US are being governed by a killer, a genocidal murderer and a madman."
Venezuela's fight for a better world is our fight too. Washington will not accept Chavez as president for another seven years. So we must organise to defend Venezuela's revolution, especially in the lead-up to the presidential election in December.
When we heard Chavez speak in Venezuela, he told us: "I want you to go home and take the message that imperialism is not invincible."
That's what I'm doing here today, and I hope you'll join me.
From Green Left Weekly, March 15, 2006.
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