Touring Europe with Venezuelan o

Having worked with Juanita and Gastón and having met their network in Guaicaipuro, Miranda State, we knew the depth of their experience and the clarity with which they convey it. There was much to learn for anyone interested in what makes a revolution, so we determined to make it available.

The tour started with a reception at the Crossroads Women’s Centre in London from where the Strike is co-ordinated internationally. Next was a presentation and discussion on ‘Women and the Bolivarian revolution’ at Bolívar Hall, the embassy of the Bolívarian Republic of Venezuela.

Juanita Romero co-ordinates the Land Committee and the Madres del Barrio (Neigh-bourhood Mothers) mission in Guaicaipuro. She is called ‘Madre’, mother, by her network. Housing is an acute problem in Venezuela. The 70s oil boom led millions of people to abandon the countryside for the city, transforming a previously agricultural country into one that imports 65% of its basic food. Those drawn to the city were forced to build houses on squatted land on hills vulnerable to landslides.

The 1999 revolutionary constitution establishes everyone’s right to decent housing and aims to redistribute land to those willing to work it. Wherever she went Juanita explained how the community met and formed land committees to ensure that people got these rights. At the National University of Ireland in Galway, she described to a class of 40 archaeology students precisely what the land committees do.

She told how the community researches the area, its inhabitants and their origins; carries out a survey of existing housing, resources and facilities such as buildings, sewerage and water; and establishes the boundary of each property so that ownership deeds can be handed out. The land committee then presents its findings to the local council with proposals on who should be relocated, what facilities are needed and where they should be built. Once the works are agreed and the money is allocated, the land committee monitors the building contractors. It often asks for co-operatives of local people to carry out the work or for local people to be hired. Throughout this process the land committee works with professionals – lawyers, architects, eng-ineers…– and fights to keep them accountable to the wishes of the community.

The students were fascinated. They compared what they had heard with their own situation and the distance that exists between grassroots com-munities and town planners and other professionals. They were particularly interested in the community researching its own history, commenting that ‘history is not only alive in the stones but in the people.’ In the weeks after the class, several have begun using Venezuela in their projects as an example of how professionals can work accountably with communities. At most of the events Juanita spoke about the revolution changing people’s lives: how women had been transformed into committed activists working from early morning to late at night to defend their revolution. Women are 70% of those involved in the land committees as well as in all other community organising, including in the missions – government programmes to deal with health, education, training, employment.

She spoke about Article 88 of the constitution which recognises women´s unwaged work in the home as an economic activity that produces wealth and social welfare and entitles housewives to social security. It hasn’t been implemented yet, so President Chávez introduced an interim measure which pays the poorest women a wage of about $160 a month for the work of caring for other people. The Madres del Barrio mission was set up to ensure that the right women get this money. As with the land committee, the community meets, reviews people’s needs and prepares a priority list. Juanita said it was the most important mission yet for women.

Gastón Murat, Juanita’s husband and colleague, has been an activist all his life. Born and raised in 23 de Enero barrio, a working class area of Caracas famous for its combative resilience, he was a student organiser and a creator of community theatre. Both he and Juanita are members of the Socialist League.

At Bolívar Hall in London and the Houston Film School in Galway, Gastón described what it was like to grow up in a Caracas barrio before Hugo Chávez was elected president. Your life was always at risk as the police routinely cordoned off the area and shot people; even street theatre was considered subversive and those who performed it were persecuted. Most households in 23 de Enero are run by single mothers, and they fought tooth and nail to protect their children. During police raids ‘every woman was your mother’ – women would come out, tell the police you were their son and drag you into their home to prevent you from being arrested or shot. Many women sex workers also defended the community and helped with financial contributions.

Gastón said that people like himself who used to organise before the revolution had had to rethink everything once the revolution started. Some had narrow ideological ideas of what a revolution was. As huge numbers of people mobilised to claim what´s theirs and reshape the world, it became clear that the revolutionary reality did not match preconceived ideas.

When they started the land committee they had not intended to form a women’s organisation. But time after time, women were the ones who turned up for the meetings and took on the work. They were more determined, more flexible, more ready to be collective and more knowledgeable about the community they lived in. Now that people were getting their hands on the land, they wanted to take care of it, plan for green spaces and protect it from pollution.

When asked in London if women in Venezuela were prepared for an invasion by the United States, Gastón said that through history women have defended revolutions – ready or not. He pointed to the new Strike t-shirts on sale in the hall with a quote from President Chávez. ‘Capitalism is sexist, socialism cannot be sexist…Only women have the commitment, the passion and the love needed to make a revolution; to be motor, cutting edge and fire of the revolution.’ Juanita noted that women are 70% of the military reserve formed after the 2002 US-backed coup against President Chávez.

In Glasgow there was a lively discussion including with members of the Fire Brigades Union. Gastón is a founding member in Miranda State of the Fuerza Bolívariana de Trabajadores and of UNT (Unión Nacional de Trabajadores), formed to defeat the corrupt trade union leadership who were involved in the 2002 US-backed coup against President Chávez. As a trade unionist he had realised that trade unionists who were with the revolution had to stop thinking they are the vanguard and take leadership from the community, especially from women. If they didn´t join forces with other workers, waged or unwaged, they allowed themselves to be isolated, and ended up fighting among themselves and negotiating the exploitation of workers – a view echoed by many of those present.

In 2003, the Global Women’s Strike and others exposed the AFL-CIO Solidarity Centre for supporting the CTV – the union involved in the 2002 coup. The Solidarity Centre gets most of its funding from the US State Department and has been an arm of its foreign policy in Venezuela, Haiti and throughout the world. Such corruption had to be stamped out or workers, waged and unwaged, would continue to be undermined globally.

Juanita and Gastón were shocked to hear from a mother in a housing estate that poverty in some areas of Glasgow is so deep that many people live to an average age of 54 and many, especially young people, are driven to suicide.

People at Venice’s Book Fair for Peace were greatly moved by what they heard, especially an 80-year-old man who had fought the Nazis in the Italian resistance. The women present decided to form a committee to invite Juanita and Gastón back.

A question was asked wherever they went: can the revolution survive without Chávez? Juanita and Gastón had no hesitation. The grassroots were mobilised, aware of their rights and ready to fight to defend their gains. But it takes decades of struggle to produce a leader like Hugo Chávez: ‘He speaks with the voice of the grassroots, we speak through him.’ When he first appeared on the scene in 1992, the word spread through working class areas all over the country: ‘He is the man.’ The grassroots have no time for those who out of personal ambition advocate a `Chavismo without Chávez´. They want Hugo Chávez as their president and they will do everything in their power to protect him from assassination attempts.

All solidarity groups had been invited to speak in Bolívar Hall on ‘Women and the Bolívarian revolution’. Only Hands Off Venezuela sent speakers; the Venezuela Solidarity Campaign sent apologies.

On 12 October, the Day of Indigenous Resistance, Selma James, founder and co-ordinator of the Global Women’s Strike, spoke at Bolívar Hall on ‘Nyerere and Chávez: New passions and new forces’. The comparison between these two heads of state and their movements was most enlightening. The quotes she read from President Nyerere on how hard rural women work and the ujamaa village were startling.

´The truth is that in the villages the women work very hard. At times they work 12 or 14 hours a day. They even work Sundays and public holidays. Women who live in the villages work harder than anybody else in Tanzania. But the men who live in villages (and some of the women in towns) are on leave for half of their life.´

So was his description of the vested interests which had stood in the way of African unity.

´Prior to the independence of Tanganyika, I had been advocating that East African countries should federate and then achieve independence as a single unit. I had said publicly that I was willing to delay Tanganyika´s indep-endence in order to enable all the three mainland countries to achieve their independence together as a federated state. I made the suggestion because of my fear – proved correct by later events – that it would be very difficult to unite our countries if we let them achieve independence sep-arately. Once you multiply national anthems, national flags, and national passports, seats at the United Nations and individuals entitled to a 21-gun salute, not to speak of a host of ministers and envoys, you would have a whole army of powerful people with vested interests in keeping Africa balkanised.´

We all felt we had learnt a lot and that finally Julius Nyerere was getting credit for his extraordinary leadership. Some of those present had known his life-long assistant – they were delighted. Juanita and Gastón commented on the presentation. Juanita said that most people in Venezuela are proud of their African and Indigenous roots. She spoke about Guaicaipuro, the great leader her province is named after, who united the Indigenous nations against the Spanish invaders. When faced with defeat, he and his family killed themselves rather than be conquered.

Most of the meetings started with a preview showing of Journey with the Revolution, the new film produced by the Global Women’s Strike and directed by Finn Arden and Nina López, which shows the midwives, housewives, gay and disability activists, nurses, doctors, teachers and others running the health clinics, the soup kitchens, the land com-mittees, education pro-grammes, and Women’s Development Bank, which are transforming Venezuela. Juanita and Gastón’s network features prominently in the film. Audiences everywhere but particularly in London and Dublin greeted it with enthusiastic applause. They felt it showed what the revolution is like in practice. Many are waiting to buy copies so that the film can be shown widely.

The film was not shown in Barcelona as the Spanish version is not available yet. Instead we launched the book Creating a caring economy: Nora Castañeda and the Women´s Development Bank which we published in English and Spanish earlier in the year. Belen Rojas, Venezuela´s general consul in Barcelona, was particularly glad to meet Juanita and Gastón as she works with housing co-operatives which could benefit from their land committee expertise.

At the showing and reception hosted by David Morris, the Mayor of London’s Senior Policy Adviser on Disability Issues, Gastón spoke for many of us when he said that he didn’t think that people in the UK were apathetic, that there is a “silent war”. He said that many people are furious and have chosen to organise in small groups because they want to avoid being led by political parties.

Juanita and Gastón met with London Deputy Mayor Nicky Gavron and her assistant Miranda Grell who were particularly keen to hear about the Women´s Development Bank. We also met with MP John McDonnell who has been very active in support of the revolution and wanted to hear how communities organise, and with MP Adam Price who asked about women´s situation. MPs Angus McNeil and Jeremy Corbyn popped in to greet us. And there were interviews with Belfast Women’s News, Big Issue Scotland, Morning Star, Scottish Socialist Voice and Colourful Radio.

Finding out about our work at the Crossroads Women’s Centre in London, they were particularly interested in meeting women who are asylum seekers and attending meetings of the All African Women’s Group. They commented that it had made them realize what they had accomplished in Venezuela. Far from being witch-hunted, when Chávez won the election all illegal immigrants were given the right to stay. And during the Israeli bombing of Lebanon, everyone who had Palestinian or Lebanese relatives was allowed to bring them to Venezuela. They also met with Payday, the network of men which is part of the Global Women´s Strike.

Juanita was a Hare Krishna devotee for many years. She has outstanding talents and skills as a healer and a vegetarian cook. As her former teacher told her: ‘The community is your temple.’ Gastón also lived in a temple for some years, and they have brought their love and spirituality into their community organising.

After three weeks of living and organising with us Juanita and Gastón will be sorely missed. Those who met them feel encouraged and energised to continue to bring our revolution in Venezuela to all the other places we call home.

Touring Europe with Venezuelan organisers

Juanita Romero and Gastón Murat – what we learnt

By the Global Women’s Strike