Venezuela’s Popular Militias and the Revolution
Weekend Edition May 17-19, 2013
Inside La Piedrita
Venezuela’s Popular Militias and the Revolution
by GEORGE CICCARIELLO-MAHER
“Who are you? What are you doing here?”
When we got to La Piedrita, they already knew we were coming. If not for the phone call they received from a trusted comrade, then from the video cameras lining the perimeter of this revolutionary zone that jealously guards its autonomy from all governments, right or left. If not from the cameras, then from the network of eyes dispersed across the community, always alert to unknown or unrecognized individuals. And if not from all that, then certainly from the guard at the top of the rickety stairs that climb from the parking lot of the apartment blocks into the chaotic jumble of the barrio that lay behind it. He greeted us down the barrel of a chrome nine-millimeter pistol with stern questions:
“Who are you? What are you doing here?”
If we didn’t have good answers for these questions, there might have been a problem. But indeed, we had an excellent answer: two short words, “Valentín Santana.”
Meeting Valentín
Just minutes before, my photographer and I had been enjoying the warm June dusk a few blocks below, near a small park in the Monte Piedad neighborhood of 23 de Enero, a notoriously revolutionary area of western Caracas perched precariously above Miraflores Palace, the nominal seat of state power. We were chatting, laughing, drinking beer and miche—a surprisingly potent homemade firewater distilled from sugarcane—while others play dominos, when a new friend raised the inevitable question of why we were there.
We had come to understand the revolutionary collectives that constitute Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez’s most radical support base, to grasp their political vision and their often tense relationship with the process of political transformation known as the Bolivarian Revolution. Had we gone to La Piedrita? No, we hadn’t. Our only contact with the collective since had been gazing in awe at the nearby murals surrounding their zone of influence, the most spectacular of which is a massive image of Jesus holding a Kalashnikov, bearing the message, “Christ Supports the Armed Struggle.”
~snip~
This lesson notwithstanding, the power of guerrilla theater has not waned, with revolutionary movements—from the Sandinistas to the Zapatistas and beyond—increasingly fighting their battles in the media and the reactionary forces arrayed against them doing the same. But as I sit here witnessing a similar display, it dawns on me that there is little disconnect between image and actuality, that managing appearances is the performative equivalent to managing reality. La Piedrita’s show of force itself requires the same sort of autonomous local control that it seeks to perform: the image is the reality, and the reality is one of radical autonomy from the state. This autonomy is not limited to the revolutionary context of contemporary Venezuela; La Piedrita has been fighting for more than 25 years.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/05/17/venezuelas-popular-militias-and-the-revolution/