In Venezuelas Difficult Times The Grassroots Are Stronger
In Venezuela’s Difficult Times The Grassroots Are Stronger
By Tamara Pearson, www.newint.org
December 25th, 2016
The time has come for rural communities, whom are organized and producing food for their own consumption, to play an important role in the country.
It’s been three years now of food shortages, inflation, and queues in Venezuela, and the millions of people involved in community and movement organizing have been the most affected. But they’ve also defied right-wing and general expectations, and even perhaps the expectations of the Maduro government, and have become stronger and better organized as a result of the hardships.
‘We can feel the difference between the quality of life we had four years ago – when things had improved so much. Everything is extremely expensive. You go out to buy a kilo of rice, and four days later the price has gone up, and it’s hard to deal with because our salaries don’t go up every four days,’ Jose Loaiza told me. A worker in charge of sustainable development for the mountain town of Los Nevados for Merida’s Teleferico (cable car) and a member of an urban agriculture organization, La Minga, Loaiza was one of four people I interviewed to get a sense of how the grassroots have been affected by these difficult times – times that have been utterly sensationalised and lied about by the mainstream media.
‘When Chavez came to power, 80 per cent of people were poor. We drank milk once a fortnight and ate meat once a week. Most people didn’t have access to proteins,’ Joel Linares, a Caracas based community organizer who also works with rural workers’ councils, explained.
He described the current crisis as a result of politics, and ‘consumerism that isn’t working’ in an oil based, urban-centric economy where people don’t produce what they consume. Vegetables and fish are available, but they are expensive, and the basic goods that people are used to like rice, beans, and milk can only be obtained on the black market, or by queueing outside a supermarket from 4 am. But businesses seem to have no problem getting hold of those products, and it’s easy to get a pizza, coffee, or bread if you can afford it.
‘It’s not that these things don’t exist, but the mechanism of distribution is still controlled by the private sector,’ Rachael Boothroyd Rojas, a Caracas community council representative and journalist with Venezuelanalysis.com said. And that is a private sector which has profited greatly from the crisis, and which has an interest is bringing down Chavismo.
More:
https://popularresistance.org/in-venezuelas-difficult-times-the-grassroots-are-stronger/