Roberto Jorquera, Caracas
Three thousand people, including leftists from the US, Canada, Australia and most of Latin America, attended the third Global Encounter in Solidarity with the Bolivarian Revolution, held on April 13-16.
The event began with a two-and-a-half hour address by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, in which he declared: "In all that I have read and experienced, I am convinced that socialism is the answer to the worlds problems ... Capitalism does not care about the human being; it is prepared to sell its parents for the gain of profit, while socialism, on the other hand, puts the human being and human rights first and demands social justice and human rights." Concluding the address, Chavez said: Let's progress towards socialism of the 21st century."
After the opening ceremony the next day, the encounter participants joined hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans, wearing red shirts, outside the presidential palace to celebrate the defeat of the April 11-13, 2002, military coup. At the festive gathering, participants in the rally stood for hours listening to the Vice-President Jose Vicente Rangel and then Chavez denounce the continued threats against Venezuela by the US and explain the need to elaborate a "new socialism" for the 21st century.
At an April 12 press conference, Chilean Marxist Marta Harnecker, who was one of the encounter's coordinators, said: "This is an event that is trying to gather people who think outside the framework of a capitalist world. We don't have many answers yet, but we have a great will and the world has many expectations of us... This is not an event for those who make alliances with the United States instead of with Venezuela or for those who think first of profits, no. But this is not just an event for Chavistas either. This is for anyone who believes in popular power."
Themes covered during the encounter, which involved panel discussions held in eight different cities, included the agrarian reform process; housing and the environment; the role of women in the revolutionary process; the involvement of indigenous communities and Afro-Venezuelans; education, human rights and youth; and "experiences of citizens' participation in the local sphere".
A highlight of the encounter was a visit to local organised communities, including projects organised through the Women s Bank, peasant communities that had taken over land and Alcasa, a state-owned aluminum processing plant in the south-eastern state of Bolivar. During the visit to Alcasa, workers at the plant explained the process by which the company was taken over by the workers after the bosses' lockout in late 2002 and how they are discussing everything from how to elect their managers to production quotas and how to produce better goods and also to look at what they should be producing and for whom. Discussions within the plant also include what role the company should play in the development of the Venezuelan national economy and the local economy.
One of the workers, Jose Lima, said: "This is our constitutional right to elect all officials ... In the process of workers taking over the management board we need to accept different views ... What we are seeing is revolutionary change in production and in people."
From Green Left Weekly, April 27, 2005.
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