And justice for all

Canadian journalist Jonah Gindin to speak on how Venezuela uses its oil money for good at this year's Parkland confer

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Most Albertans think of Venezuela as little more than a hot, impoverished South American country, but it’s also among the top five oil exporters in the world and is considered a bastion of progressive social policy. For the last year and a half, Canadian freelance journalist Jonah Gindin has lived in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas, where he chronicles the country’s social and political development for print and online publications including venezuelanalysis.com, Znet, and Monthly Review. This Sunday (November 20) Gindin visits Edmonton to give a talk entitled “Sowing the Oil: Venezuela’s Revolutionary Oil Policy is Building a More Comprehensive Democracy” at the Parkland Institute’s annual conference, in which he plans to outline some of the parallels between Venezuela and Alberta, two oil-producing regions with very different social and political agendas.

After years of funding cutbacks and privatization, Alberta continues to seek solutions to persistent social issues. Meanwhile, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez and his government have introduced public initiatives to provide better health, education, and employment programs to those who need it most—and they’re paying for it with oil. Chavez’s innovative measures, including an “oil for doctors” deal with Cuba, are successfully improving social services, but his radical social policies have also brought him into conflict with his own country’s elite and, significantly, with U.S. President George Bush and his administration.

Gindin, who studied history and international development at McGill, was intrigued by the “Chavismo” movement during his university years, and he was barely finished his studies when he headed for Costa Rica to learn Spanish, en route to Venezuela.

“I was supposed to study Spanish for a month in Costa Rica but while I was there I was reading the news about Venezuela,” he explains. “There were these big riots, what they call the ‘Guarimba,’ because people were anticipating that the National Electoral Council was going to refuse a referendum. So I was sitting in Costa Rica wondering ‘what the hell am I doing here while all this was happening?’ I immediately went to Venezuela. I didn’t have any contacts or anything; I had one email address for an editor of an online English language newspaper, Venezuelanalysis. The day after I got there, there was this giant march, so I went, wrote an article on it and sent it to the editor, and they published it.”

Encouraged by the experience, Gindin continued his investigations into the country’s extremely polarized political situation. “In a short period of time, with relatively constant attacks by opposition forces, it’s amazing what has been accomplished,” he marvels, citing Barrio Adentro, a new health program for the country’s poor, as an example. “Although Venezuela has a public healthcare system, the hospitals are so poorly funded and there’s so much corruption that the doctor will see you and say, ‘This is what’s wrong with you. In order to treat you I need to give you this medicine, so you need to go to the pharmacy and buy me rubber gloves, a syringe, this medicine, and cotton swabs.’

“The Chavez government is a very radical movement that gained power through a democratic election, so they had a radical mandate but the same institutions and bureaucracy as previous governments,” continues Gindin. “They tried using those traditional channels—built by the corrupt governments of the past 30 years—but things were being sabotaged from the beginning. They ended up having to create parallel structures outside of the existing institutions. Instead of trying to fix the situation in existing hospitals, they developed the Barrio Adentro, which means ‘inside the neighbourhood.’ Now, in every poor neighbourhood, there is a little primary care facility with two doctors and a few nurses, and you can go there and be treated. Sometimes that primary care means the difference between life and death.”

Venezuela also has subsidized food programs and a linked education and employment mission that provides universal access to everything from basic literacy training to university study. However, the strategies for providing these important programs—such as trading Venezuelan oil for Cuban doctors—are easy targets for Chavez detractors. “The opposition uses this to paint Chavez as a pro-Castro communist dictator, to discredit him with the U.S.,” Gindin points out. “The reason this is seen as a threat to global capitalism is because it’s exactly the opposite of what everyone else is doing. In every other country, including Canada, we’re moving away from public programs towards privatization. Since the fall of communism, the argument has been that there is no alternative; you may vary slightly, but you can’t go in the exact opposite direction. In Venezuela, they’ve now got universal, accessible healthcare and education. The fact that Chavismo is making advances in this way is a huge threat because it’s a lesson and a model for other countries.”

Gindin will make this point in greater detail at the conference this weekend, as he and other participants discuss the future in a province where the government has long championed privatization. While he is back and forth between Canada and Latin America right now, Gindin continues to be drawn to Venezuela. “Venezuela informs everything I do now,” he says. “It’s an incredibly pertinent point of reference for any investigation of democracy.” He plans to return to Venezuela to cover the presidential elections next May. V

Sowing the Oil: Venezuela’s Revolutionary Oil Policy is Building a More Comprehensive Democracy
Presented by Jonah Gindin • ETLC building, U of A • Sun, Nov 20 (9:45 am) • For more information, visit the Parkland Institute’s conference website at www.ualberta.ca/~parkland/conference/2005/cf05home.htm.

And justice for all

Canadian journalist Jonah Gindin to speak on how Venezuela uses its oil money for good at this year's Parkland confer

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