Watchdog groups stay loyal to Chavez
Effort presses on amid turmoil
By Marion Lloyd, Globe Correspondent, 12/25/2002
CARACAS - Dressed in a yellow crocheted sweater and seated behind a cracked Formica table trimmed with Christmas tinsel, Maria Gisela Blanco looks more like a schoolteacher than a foot soldier in a political revolution.
But as the leader of a Bolivarian Circle, she has played a vital role in keeping President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela in power. The neighborhood-based circles form a national network of watchdog groups that has supported Chavez's government through months of turmoil.
Opponents of Chavez, mostly middle-class and upper-class Caracas residents, launched a general strike Dec. 2 in an attempt to force the leftist leader to resign or call new elections. The strike has hobbled the economy and cut off gas supplies from the world's largest oil exporter, while exacerbating class tensions in a country whose income disparities are among Latin America's widest.
''This is a social movement from the ground up. We've never seen anything like it,'' Blanco said of the mass mobilization of working-class Venezuelans on behalf of Chavez. The former army paratrooper, who won the presidency in the 1998 election, has won the hearts of many of Venezuela's 24 million people through his fiery speeches railing against the excesses of the country's elite.
In part to cement support among his working-class constituents, Chavez created the watchdog groups and named them after the country's most beloved native son, Latin American independence leader Simon Bolivar. The Bolivarian Circles are modeled after Cuba's Committee for the Defense of the Revolution and serve as liaisons between the neighborhoods and the government as well as fomenting key support for Chavez.
When a coalition of business leaders and dissident army generals organized an abortive coup against Chavez in April, Blanco, 40, described how the Bolivarian Circles sprang into action. Within minutes, members began banging out warnings on hollow electricity poles, she said, rallying supporters across the city's working-class neighborhoods in a modern-day version of Paul Revere's ride.
Chavez's opponents charge that the groups also function as armed gangs whose job is to intimidate opposition protesters. They blame the groups for the shooting deaths of 19 opposition supporters in April, during a protest rally on the eve of the failed coup. But Blanco denied the groups were responsible for that and subsequent violence, which has also claimed the lives of Chavez's supporters.
''You ask if we have guns? Of course, who in Caracas doesn't,'' she said of the city known as one of Latin America's most violent. ''But we are a peaceful organization.'' She said one of her favorite activities was painting murals of Bolivar on the walls of public schools and parks. ''It's very good for boosting morale,'' she said, gesturing to a portrait of Bolivar in a soldier's uniform that steers would-be group members to her modest office alongside a freeway.
There, Blanco, a seamstress with a sixth-grade education, hosts weekly discussion groups on political issues with residents. Typically, 30 people, mostly housewives, cram into the dim concrete room that Blanco's husband built alongside their house in the working-class First of May neighborhood. This week's discussion topic was articles 70 to 72 of the Venezuelan Constitution, which specify that elected officials must complete half their term before calling new elections.
''We discuss these points so that people understand why Chavez could not call for a vote even if he wanted to,'' she said. Chavez has resisted opposition demands for new elections, noting that without a constitutional amendment, he cannot call a vote before August, when he will have completed half of his six-year term.
Like many Chavez supporters, Blanco said her loyalty was to the president, not his Movement of the Fifth Republic party, which she called ''a bunch of useless opportunists.'' In contrast, she said the Bolivarian Circles were fomenting change through poverty reduction, such as coordinating microloans for women, rather than pushing party loyalties.
Blanco said she became involved in politics through her husband, a construction worker who was active in the urban guerrilla movement of the 1970s and 1980s. By the late 1980s, the couple was printing antigovernment propaganda against then-President Carlos Andres Perez on a secret printing press and distributing them under cover of night.
This story ran on page A14 of the Boston Globe on 12/25/2002. © Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.