ShareThisBy ROBERT COLLIER
Friday, October 27, 2006
Hugo Chavez's revolution came to the hillside slum of San Juan one recent night in the glare of a solitary light bulb and with puddles from a recent thunderstorm still underfoot.
Two-dozen people clustered on a rooftop to debate the money and power that suddenly seemed within their grasp _ everything from home construction to bank loans, street repairs, and after-school and vacation recreation programs for children.
It was the first meeting of San Juan's communal council, an example of a new grass-roots governing structure that is spreading across Venezuela. Like thousands of other such newly elected councils, the San Juan group will soon be given previously unheard-of sums of money by the central government in what Chavez calls "a revolution within the revolution."
While the Venezuelan president has caused international controversy with his angry denunciations of the Bush administration, this is where the rubber meets the road for Chavez's radical rhetoric. He is spending billions of dollars on anti-poverty programs, in what experts say may amount to the largest such effort in a developing nation.
And in a gamble that turns part of his own government's power structure on its head, he is handing a large degree of authority over these spending programs to thousands of these elected local councils.
"The issues in these neighborhoods are very old fights _ water, land, decent housing," said Andres Antillano, a professor of social psychology and criminology at the Central University of Venezuela in Caracas who has been an adviser to many neighborhood groups.
"For many years, the only relationship with the state was the police. They came here and put everyone against the wall," Antillano said. "Chavez has chosen to gamble on legitimizing these issues. The communal councils are a very serious attempt at grass-roots organizing."
The policy appears especially popular in the hard-bitten slums of Caracas _ although as is true elsewhere around the country, the electorate seems divided between a strongly pro-Chavez minority and an apathetic majority. San Juan's new council was chosen with only 330 of the neighborhood's 916 eligible adult residents casting ballots.
"We like Chavez because he's giving us control," said Leomar Aquino, who had just been chosen head of the Education, Culture, Recreation and Sports Committee, one of a half-dozen such panels on the council.
On this night, nobody seemed to know exactly how much their neighborhood would receive. Nor, the next day, did anyone at the offices of the local district government or in the central government buildings downtown.
What is certain, however, is that Venezuela's petroleum-export earnings are rising rapidly, and the government is spending the money with abandon.
The government initially budgeted $857 million for social spending in 2006. But as oil money floods in, officials keep increasing the amount. It now stands at $7 billion, although many experts view that figure as a guesstimate of money being spent on the fly.
Public-works projects are everywhere, ranging from subway lines in Caracas and Valencia to bridges over the Orinoco River. New medical clinics _ mostly staffed by Cuban doctors provided under Chavez's oil aid program to Fidel Castro _ are within reach of almost everyone in this nation of 25 million people. And infant mortality has been cut from 21 deaths per 1,000 births to 16 per 1,000.
Another initiative that could change the lives of millions of poor Venezuelans is a new program aimed at increasing land ownership.
Venezuela is the most urbanized nation in Latin America, with about 86 percent of its people living in cities, but about one-third of those urban dwellers have no title to their land. In legal terms they are squatters, and thus cannot access many government programs.
Over the past year, 57 cooperatives of land surveyors have been formed to scour Caracas' hillside slums, measuring the sprawling neighborhoods that previously were merely blank spaces on official maps.
Ivan Martinez, director of the Urban Land Committee titling office for Caracas, said that more than 200,000 titles had been given out, involving about 1 million people.
"People now can get basic services," he said. "We can hook them up to water, electricity. We can help rebuild their houses. It's a huge change."
In San Juan, people are already hard at work.
Down the hillside from where the communal council was meeting, another council had already put its new powers to work. Using money and technical assistance from the state-owned oil company, PDVSA, and the water utility, Hidrocapital, it has hired local residents to install more than a mile of pipes in nearby streets.
But for many, progress is not happening fast enough _ and they blame the government.
"Chavez is working well," said Manuel Hernandez, a Caracas firefighter, who lives in San Juan. "My aunt was sent to Cuba to get her eyes operated on. But the people around Chavez are very bad. There is too much waste, too much corruption."
Chavez, who has been in power for seven years, often rails against the government bureaucracy as if he were an outsider. While Venezuela's government has long been known for its inefficiency, many people say the problem under Chavez has worsened.
At a ceremony April 9 to inaugurate the communal council program, Chavez acknowledged this perception.
"Many are saying that this is just Chavez's plan to corrupt the people, that now Chavez will spread money all around so people can go party and drink miche," he said, referring to a homemade liquor popular in the western mountains. "They say that everything will be wasted. But we're going to demonstrate what the Venezuelan people are capable of."
(E-mail Robert Collier at rcollier(at)sfchronicle.com.)
