Venezuela's Referendum and the Nation's Poor By Medea Benjamin

Venezuela's Referendum and the Nation's Poor
By Medea Benjamin

t r u t h o u t | Focus



Hugo Chavez could teach U.S. leaders a thing or two about winning votes

I knew that the administration of Hugo Chavez had won my heart when I met Olivia Delfino in one of the poor barrios in Caracas. As I was touring the neighborhood with an international delegation here to monitor this Sunday's referendum on Chavez, Olivia came out of her tiny house and grabbed my arm. "Tell the people of your country that we love Hugo Chavez," she insisted. She went on to tell me how her life had changed since he came to power. After living in the barrio for 40 years, she now had a formal title to her home. With that, she was able to get a bank loan to fix the roof so it wouldn't leak in the rain. Thanks to the Cuban dentists and a program called "Rescatando la sonrisa"-recovering the smile-for the first time in her life she was able to get her teeth fixed. And her daughter is in a job training program to become a nurse's assistant.

Getting more and more animated, Olivia dragged me over to a poster on the wall showing Hugo Chavez with a throng of followers and a list of Venezuela's new social programs that read: "The social programs are ours, let's defend them." Then slowly and laboriously, she began reading the list of social programs: literacy, health care, job training, land reform, subsidized food, small loans. I asked her if she was just learning to read and write as part of the literacy program. That's when she started to cry. "Can you imagine what it has meant to me, at 52 years old, to now have a chance to read?" she said. "It's transformed my life."

Walk through the poor neighborhoods in Venezuela and you'll hear the same stories over and over. The very poor now can go to a designated home in the neighborhood to pick up a hot meal every day. The elderly now have monthly pensions that allow them to live with dignity. Young people can take advantage of greatly expanded free college programs. And with 13,000 Cuban doctors spread throughout the country and reaching over half the population, the poor now have their own family doctors on call 24-hours a day-doctors who even make house calls. This heath care, including medicines, are all free.

The programs are being paid for with the income from Venezuela's oil, which is at an all-time high. Previously, the nation's oil wealth benefited only a small, well-connected elite who kept themselves in power for 40 years through a two-party duopoly. The elite, who controlled the media as well, kept the vast majority poor, disenfranchised, and disempowered. With the election of Hugo Chavez in 1998 on a platform of sharing the nation's oil wealth with the poorest, all that has changed. The poor are now not only recipients of these programs, they are engaged in running them. They're turning abandoned buildings into neighborhood centers, running community kitchens; volunteering to teach in the literacy programs, organizing neighborhood health brigades and registering millions of new voters.

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http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/081604Z.shtml

And, he likes Fidel, that great threat to our beloved Reich..er, Homeland..er, whatever we call it nowadays.

who Media voted for. With a name like that you have to wonder,what were they thinking.

http://www.globalexchange.org/getInvolved/speakers/12.html

Medea Benjamin

Iraq Occupation Watch

View current speaking engagements
Medea Benjamin is Founding Director of Global Exchange. For over twenty years, Medea has supported human rights and social justice struggles around the world.

Medea is a leading activist in the peace movement and helped bring together the groups forming the coalition United for Peace and Justice (see http://www.unitedforpeace.org/ ).

She is also the co-founder of Code Pink: Women for Peace, a women's group that has been organizing against the occupation of Iraq and pushing for a reorientation of budget priorities in the US to focus on heath care, education and housing, not war. Code Pink now has over 100 chapters throughout the United States (see http://www.codepink4peace.org/ ).

Medea has traveled several times to Iraq to establish the Occupation Watch International Center in Baghdad. The center monitors the military occupation forces and foreign corporations, hosts international delegations, and keeps the international community updated about the occupation forces' activities through a new website, http://www.occupationwatch.org . Medea most recently visited Iraq in early December accompanying the military families delegation (see http://www.globalexchange.org/countries/iraq/familiesreport.html ).

In September 2003, Medea was in Cancun, Mexico challenging the policies of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and in November in Miami protesting the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), and highlighting the coalescing of the global peace and economic justice movements.

In 2002, Medea accompanied four Americans who lost loved ones in the September 11th terrorist attacks on a trip to Afghanistan to meet people there who lost relatives during the US bombing of Afghanistan. Their extraordinary journey received such international attention that the US Government was pressured to discuss civilian casualties and to create a compensation fund for Afghan victims.

Medea's previous work has focused on improving the labor and environmental practices of US multinational corporations, and the policies of international institutions such as the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

For much of 2001, Medea focused on California's energy crisis, fighting the market manipulation by the big energy companies and rate hikes that cause hardship for low-income ratepayers and small businesses. She headed a powerful coalition of consumer, environmental, union and business leaders working for clean and affordable power under public control.

Medea was the Green Party candidate for US Senate from California in 2000. Her run for U.S. Senate succeeded in mobilizing thousands of Californians around platform issues such as living wage, schools-not-prisons, and universal healthcare.

During the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in December 1999, Medea's organization, Global Exchange, helped fix world attention on the need to place labor and environmental concerns over corporate profits.

While critical of unfair global trade policies, Medea has promoted "fair trade" alternatives that are beneficial to both producer and consumer. She helped form a national network of retailer and wholesalers in support of fair trade and was instrumental in pressuring coffee retailers such as Starbucks to start carrying fair trade coffee.

Medea is a key figure in the anti-sweatshop movement, having spearheaded campaigns against the giant sports shoe company Nike and clothing companies such as the GAP. In 1999 Medea helped expose the problem of indentured servitude among garment workers in the US territory of Saipan (the Marianas Islands), which led to a billion-dollar lawsuit against 17 US retailers.

After several fact-finding visits to China, Medea co-sponsored with the International Labor Rights Fund an initiative to improve the labor and environmental practices of US multinationals in China. The ensuring Human Rights Principles for US Businesses in China have been endorsed by major companies such as Cisco, Intel, Reebok, Levi Strauss and Mattel.

In 1999, San Francisco Magazine named Medea to their "Power List" as one of the "60 Players Who Rule the Bay Area." She serves on the board or advisory council of numerous organizations, including the United National Development Program, the Interhemispheric Resource Center, the National Student Campaign Against Hunger and Homelessness and Green Empowerment.

Medea helped build US support for the movement to oust General Suharto in Indonesia and for the right of self-determination for the people of East Timor. She supported the Peace Process between the Zapatista rebels and the Mexican government, fought to lift the embargoes against Cuba and Iraq, and was active in cutting US military aid to repressive regimes in Central America. She has been an election observer and led fact-finding delegations to dozens of countries.

She is author of eight books, including "Bridging the Global Gap, The Peace Corps and More," and the award-winning book "Don't Be Afraid, Gringo: A Honduran Woman Speaks from the Heart." She helped produce various TV documentaries such as the anti-sweatshop video Sweating for a T-Shirt.

Medea received a Masters degree in Public Health from Columbia University and a Masters degree in Economics from the New School for Social Research. She worked for ten years as an economist and nutritionist in Latin America and Africa for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Health Organization, the Swedish International Development Agency, and the Institute for Food and Development Policy.

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http://www.smartvoter.org/2000/11/07/ca/state/vote/benjamin_m/bio.html
Earlier Bio From the LEAGUE OF WOMEN VOTERS
November 7, 2000

They instead print stories to spread unease and fear about leftist leaders .....