Chavez Frias has won key battles, but he has yet to win the war
<a href=www.vheadline.com>Venezuela's Electronic News Posted: Sunday, May 18, 2003 By: Calvin Tucker
International commentarist Calvin Tucker writes: Over a hundred people packed into a room at Friends Meeting House in London Friday to hear a first hand report from members of an international women’s group that recently returned from Venezuela.
To loud applause from the audience, co-organizer Selma James described how the Bolivarian Revolution of Hugo Chavez Frias as empowering ordinary Venezuelan women to defend their rights at work and in the home. "Co-operatives are being set up. There is new women’s bank. People in Venezuela are transforming themselves. Look at their faces. That’s what the Revolution is all about."
A Bolivarian Circle UK representative told the meeting how important it is to get the real facts about the Revolution publicized and not to allow the hostile private media to distort and twist the truth. Another speaker spoke of the destabilization and coup attempts in Venezuela and their similarity with the US-orchestrated overthrow of the Allende government in Chile in 1973. The speaker finished by sounding a note of caution: "Chavez has won some key battles against the opposition, but he has yet to win the war"
The delegation, organized by Women’s Global Strike, spent two weeks touring the barrios with a video camera, filming ordinary citizens and asking what the Revolution meant to them. Women cleaners from one workplace in Caracas told of how, for years, they had been exploited by greedy employers and made to work for a pittance.
- The Chavez Frias government had helped them to set up a co-operative ... now they earn twice as much pay and work less hours.
In another sequence, hotel workers were shown describing how the CTV union leadership was failing to protect their interests and really represented the employers and the coup plotters. In protest, the workers had left the CTV and joined a pro-worker union.
Calvin Tucker writes on British and international issues for the British monthly "Straight Left". In November 2001 Tucker correctly predicted a coup attempt after becoming convinced that the United States of America was preparing for a coup against Venezuela's elected President Hugo Chavez Frias