when those we talked to in Venezuela expressed their concurrence with “the process,” they could speak with pride about their own history referring, furthermore, to a society in a transformational state whose direction is guided by the democratic participation of the people themselves. No other leader in world history, after all, has Chavez’s record of having won eight elections and referendums in eight years, the number of votes each time exceeding the ones before. Does this not reflect genuine people power?

The contempt with which Chavez is held by western media generally and by the Bush administration specifically is therefore highly suspect and questionable, if the concern were truly for democratic principles. Chavez himself has stated more than once that his assassination would be no surprise. The challenge seen in the Bolivarian Revolution exists, without a doubt, in its innovation of an alternative system that lies outside the purview of neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus. The country’s oil resources allow Chavez this independence. Additionally, like the nineteenth century hero Bolivar, he has taken measures to forge Latin American integration: barter of services with Cuba, payment of Argentina’s debt to international creditors, and endorsement of Bolivia’s Evo Morales, among others. Venezuela has recently formally joined Mercosur, but Chavez has also set up ALBA, an alternative economic alliance envisioned to counter U.S. free- trade policies and to create a new development model. In the cultural realm there is Telesur, a television channel established by Venezuela, Argentina, Cuba, and Uruguay that hopes to replace currently U.S.-dominated programming with Latin American production.

In Latin America and elsewhere, progressives are rallying behind Venezuela’s democratic and peaceful social transformation. Social justice-minded Filipinos can do no less. While Venezuela’s revolution furnishes no template for other nations, we have a great deal to share with the Venezuelan people. Our history, like theirs, is replete with proud examples of resistance to colonial and neocolonial subjugation. We need only to be mindful of this history – deliberately revised and obscured as it has been in order to buttress a persistent colonial mentality and preserve our neocolonial status – to understand our present circumstances and to begin to take stock of ourselves as a people with an enormous capacity to change things. As the Venezuelan example instructs us, with an awakened and aroused collective consciousness, the possibilities for systemic change are thrown wide, wide open. Bulatlat

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