In 1970, the Allende government found itself the coordinator of a messy jumble of factories, mines and other workplaces that had long been state-run, others that were freshly nationalised, some under worker occupation and others still under the control of their managers or owners. An efficient strategy of coordination was required. The 29-year-old head of the Chilean Production Development Corporation and later finance minister Fernando Flores – responsible for the management and coordination between nationalised companies and the state, and his advisor, Raul Espejo, had been impressed with Beer’s prolific writings on management cybernetics, and, like Allende, wanted to construct a socialist economy that was not centralised as the variations on the Soviet theme had been.

Allende, a doctor by training, was attracted to the idea of rationally directing industry, and upon Flores’ recommendation, Beer was hired to advise the government, and the scheme he plunged himself into was called Project Cybersyn, a ‘nervous system’ for the economy in which workers, community members and the government were to be connected together transmitting the resources they had on offer, their desires and needs via an interactive national communications network. The whole idea would seem, frankly, eccentrically ambitious, even potty, if today the internet were not such a quotidian experience.

Although never completed, by the time of the coup, the advanced prototype of the system, which had been built in four months, involved a series of 500 telex machines distributed to firms connected to two government-operated mainframe computers and stretched the length of the narrow country and covered roughly between a quarter and half of the nationalised economy. Factory output, raw material shipments and transport, high levels of absenteeism and other core economic data pinged about the country and to the capital, Santiago – a daily exchange of information between workers and their government, easily beating the six months on average for economic data to be processed in this way in most advanced countries.

Paul Cockshott, a University of Glasgow computer scientist who has written about the possibility of post-capitalist planning aided by computing, is a big admirer of Cybersyn as a practical example of the general type of regulation mechanism he advocates: ‘The big advance with Stafford Beer’s experiments with Cybersyn was that it was designed to be a real-time system rather than a system which, as the Soviets had tried, was essentially a batch system in which you made decisions every five years.’
Staff tallied the data and seven government surveyors (seven being the largest number of people who can comfortably participate in a discussion) viewed real-time economic processes for immediate decisions from a space-age, Star-Trek-like operations room, complete with Tulip swivel chairs with built-in buttons, but the aim was to maintain decentralised worker and lower-management autonomy rather than to impose a top-down system of control. The intention was to provide an Opsroom overseeing each industry and within each plant. At the factory level, it was planned that workers’ committees would run the Opsroom. Figures were avoided in favour of graphics displays under the belief that people should be able to engage in economic self-government without formal mathematical or financial training. Vast, economy-wide co-ordination is not the same as centralisation.

When the government faced a CIA-backed strike from conservative small businessmen and a boycott by private lorry companies in 1972, food and fuel supplies ran dangerously low. The government faced its gravest existential threat ahead of the coup. It was then that Cybersyn came into its own, when Allende’s government realised that the experimental system could be used to circumvent the opposition’s efforts. The network allowed its operators to secure immediate information on where scarcities were at their most extreme and where drivers not participating in the boycott were located and to mobilise or redirect its own transport assets in order to keep goods moving and take the edge of the worst of the shortages. As a result, the truck-owners’ boycott was defeated.

After that other September 11 almost forty years ago, when the bombs fell on La Moneda, the presidential palace where Allende took his own life rather than surrender to Pinochet’s fascists, the fires that destroyed democracy in Chile also took the world’s first non-Stalinist experiment in economy-wide planning with them, replaced by another economic experiment of an altogether opposite character: the monetarist structural adjustment of Milton Friedman, infamously replicated by Margaret Thatcher and her dozens of imitators.

Today, 40 years later, systemic change is on the table again. After decades of defeats, there is a burgeoning – if still fragile – sense that far-reaching transformation going beyond a tinkering with the system might be necessary and, crucially, achievable.

So you would think that the period would be ripe for discussion of a post-capitalist economics, for a blossoming of competing concrete proposals of what a thoroughly different economic system might look like. Yet very few have engaged in the hard thinking about what could happen ‘the morning after’ a presumed victory. We are undergoing the biggest economic disaster since the 1930s, an unprecedented global slump that may turn out to be worse than the Great Depression, and no one wants to theorise about the day after tomorrow, fearful that we may be ‘building castles in the air’.

This is the utility of Allende’s Cybersyn for us in 2013. Cybersyn is not some quirky historical curiosity. Nor was it a utopian dream. Rather, Allende’s experiment was a real-world example of post-capitalist planning that needs to be scrutinised in great depth and then appraised to see what bits of it, if any, can be redeployed were ordinary people once again to win power.

The mood in the country in March 1972 was still quite euphoric, following substantial and hugely popular achievements such as the nationalisation of Chile’s copper mines and the pursuit of a more radical land reform. People still felt that now, at last, they had a government which belonged to them and would bring real and irreversible improvements for the poor and the dispossessed. In the words of the Inti-Illimani song: ‘Porque esta vez no se trata de cambiar un presidente, será el pueblo quien construya un Chile bien diferente’ —This time it’s not just a change of President. This time it will be the people who will build a really different Chile.

Radicalised culture

Chile was an intensely exciting place to be. Everyone was ‘comprometido’ —committed, involved. There was no room for being in the words of the Victor Jara song, ‘ni chicha, ni limonada’ —a fence-sitter, neither beer nor lemonade. Political debate was constant and ubiquitous among all ages and classes of people of the left, centre and right. Newspapers (most of the principal ones still controlled by the right), magazines, radio and TV discussed every action of the government, every promise made by Allende and his ministers and every move of the opposition with a depth, sophistication and venom almost unimaginable in Britain today.

The changes were not only political, they were profound changes in the national culture. Most of the popular singers, many actors, artists, poets and authors identified closely with Popular Unity and considered themselves engaged in a battle against the imported, implanted values of Hollywood, Disney, Braniff Airlines, the ‘cold-blooded dealers in dreams, magazine magnates grown fat at the expense of youth’ in the excoriating words of Victor Jara’s song ¿Quien mató a Carmencita? There was a vogue for playing chess and in cafés and squares you would see people earnestly bent over chess-boards while conducting vehement political debates.

The national publisher Quimantu (the old ZigZag company, bought by the government in 1971) was printing a vast range of books, produced and sold at low prices, to enable all but the poorest to own books, enjoy reading and have access to literature. In the two years of its existence it produced almost 12 million books, distributing them not only in bookshops, but street news-kiosks, buses, through the trade unions and in some factories.

Dark clouds

But dark clouds were beginning to gather. The CIA had already attempted a coup in 1970, with a botched kidnap attempt ending in the murder of General Schneider, commander-in-chief of the Chilean army. ITT and other US corporations were busily urging more decisive intervention on the State Department. There was a vast increase in funding to opposition groups in Chile and the price of copper, Chile’s crucial export, was being manipulated on the world market. The economy was beginning to falter, and inflation to climb.

In October 1972 the owners of road transport staged a massive lockout (still, mistakenly, called ‘the lorry-drivers strike’), paralysing road transport, attacking or sabotaging the vehicles of any who continued to work and paying a daily wage well in excess of normal earnings to owner-drivers who brought their lorries to the road-side encampments of the strike. The atmosphere of these was similar to those of the refinery blockades in Britain in 2000, but far more serious and violent. Food, oil, petrol and other necessities ran short.

I spent some of my free hours unloading trains in Santiago’s Estación Yungay, alongside teams of volunteers organised by the Chilean Young Communists and other groups.

The lockout subsided, and all attention was turned for the next few months on the mid-term congressional elections due in March 1973. Despite a concerted opposition media campaign to denounce growing food shortages and economic difficulties which were affecting the living standards of many workers, Popular Unity increased its share of the vote to 43.2 per cent.

By now, however, the Christian Democrat party had turned decisively to the right and began to identify more and more closely with the parties of the traditional right. Virulently anti-communist and sometimes anti-semitic messages became more frequent in their newspaper, La Prensa. Together, this right-dominated block held the majority in both Senate and Chamber of Deputies and could block any legislation. Their messages were that Popular Unity meant ‘the way to communism via your stomach’, in other words by hunger; and that socialism meant promoting envy and hatred (of the rich).

Violence of the wealthy

The now united opposition decided that if democratic votes would not provide the results it required, it would resort to violence and call on the military to intervene. Government buildings and institutions were targeted by arsonists, and sabotage of the electricity network brought frequent black-outs. I watched gangs of young middle-class men in Providencia, one of the wealthier avenues of Santiago, halting trolley-buses and setting fire to them.

On June 29 the No.2 Tank Regiment headed by Colonel Souper and backed by the leadership of the fascist group Patria y Libertad, staged an attempted coup. Tanks surrounded La Moneda, the presidential palace in the centre of Santiago. But the rest of the armed forces failed to move in support and the coup failed. I spent that day with my friend Wolfgang, a film-maker at the State Technical University, peering round street corners and trying to film the action as it developed.

We could not tell at the time if this was a dress rehearsal or a false start by a group of hot-heads. Our relief at its failure was short-lived: it was immediately clear that worse lay ahead. At my work-place, the Forestry Institute, we began to take turns to mount guard at night to protect the buildings against sabotage. The institute’s distinctive Aro jeeps had been ambushed on roads in the conservative south of Chile and the drivers beaten up.

In the poor neighbourhood where I lived, close to the centre of Santiago, we had set up a JAP, a food supply committee, which aimed to suppress the black market, discourage hoarding and ensure that basic necessities such as rice, sugar, cooking oil and some meat, were distributed to local residents at official prices. We had enrolled 1,200 families in an 8-block area, and the weekly general meetings were attended by 400 or more. We worked with the owners of the small corner grocery stores common in that area. But they had no love for us.

Military rebellion

The country was slipping into a de facto state of civil war. Allende attempted to stabilise the situation by including military officers in his cabinet, but his loyal army chief, General Prats, was forced to resign when a group of wives of other senior generals staged a demonstration outside his house, accusing him of cowardice. His replacement was General Augusto Pinochet, at that time still believed to be loyal to the constitution.

By early September 1973, we fully expected a crescendo of right-wing violence, a military rebellion, further coup attempts. Popular Unity supporters marched in a vast demonstration on 4 September, taking hours to pass in front of the Moneda Palace, where a desperately tired and grim-faced Allende stood to salute his supporters.

But nothing had prepared us for the swiftness, the precision and the totality of the coup that began in Valparaiso on the night of 10 September and had gained complete control of the government, all major cities, airports, radio stations, phones, transmitters and communications by 3pm on the 11 September.

In the Instituto Forestal, we met in the canteen. Most people left to go home, collect children from school, ensure the safety of their families. Some perhaps had orders from their parties to go to particular points of the city, to defend, to await orders, possibly to take up arms. A group of us stayed on to guard the buildings until the military curfew made it impossible for us to leave. The radio broadcast only military music and bandos, military communiqués, read in a clipped, cruel, mechanical voice, declaring an indefinite 24-hour curfew, reading a list of names of those who must hand themselves in immediately to the Ministry of Defence, and justifying the ‘military pronouncement’.

Torture and killings

At first we believed that there would be resistance, that the armed forces would divide, even that General Prats was marching from the south at the head of regiments loyal to the constitution. But none of this occurred. Pockets of resistance in industrial areas of the cities were swiftly and brutally eliminated. Some military officers were arrested, others fled the country, but there was no significant rebellion. The parties of Popular Unity and the MIR hunkered down for underground resistance but, having worked publicly and openly for so long, most of their existing leaders were instantly identifiable and were soon arrested or killed.

Together with other non-Chileans, I hid that night in the outhouse of a colleague who lived near the Instituto. Returning next morning we found the institute empty, with signs of doors having been forced and some bullet marks. A military patrol had come during the night and arrested the director and those who had remained on guard. We went through the buildings, office by office, removing all lists of names, trade union membership, party posters and badges, everything that we supposed might incriminate our colleagues. It was hard: everything that had been normal, routine, legal, was now illegal, dangerous, potentially lethal.

Later, some of the cleaners arrived and warned us to leave immediately: it was likely that the military would return and arrest us. They took us across the fields to the shanty-town where they lived and, at considerable risk to themselves and their families, hid and fed us in their houses until the curfew ended.

The next days were spent living in limbo, moving from one friend’s house to another. Of my two Chilean flatmates, one had been arrested on the 12 September in the State Technical University, along with hundreds of students and academics and taken to the Chile Stadium, where Victor Jara was tortured and shot. Wolfgang managed to escape and later would come as a refugee to Britain. The other, Juan, had sought asylum in the Swedish Embassy.

Complete purge

The scale and totality of the coup is hard to grasp. From the first, the military sought to replace every single public official from ministers, through provincial governors, university rectors, right down to small town mayors and secondary school heads. The new appointees were mostly serving or retired military officers or those in their direct confidence.

University departments (especially sociology, politics, journalism) were purged or closed and whole degree courses abolished. Libraries and bookshops were ransacked and books burned. Blocks of flats in central Santiago were searched and all suspect books (including mine) thrown by soldiers from the windows and burned in the street below. All political parties were declared ‘in recess’ and all those of Popular Unity and the left were banned, with their offices and property seized. The entire national electoral register was destroyed.

Our flat had already been raided twice by police, after right-wing neighbours claimed we had an arsenal of weapons stored there. Unwisely I returned, ten days after the coup, to collect clothes and was just leaving when the police blocked off the street and an armed patrol arrested me.

At the comisaría, the local police station, there was an atmosphere of hysteria. The carabineros there had divided and fought a battle on the day of the coup, between those loyal to the constitution and supporters of the coup. The survivors had been on duty almost continuously and been fed with rumours that ‘foreigners had come to Chile to murder their families’. Improbably, they accused me, despite my fair hair and blue eyes, of being a Cuban extremist. A pile of books, perhaps including mine, was burning in the courtyard and the smoke blew in through the bars of the cell where I was held.

In the National Stadium

Later that day they took me to the National Stadium, the vast national football and sports arena. The entrance was thronged with groups of prisoners being brought in from the four points of the capital. There was a large group in white coats, doctors and nurses from one of the main hospitals, arrested because they had refused to join right-wing colleagues the previous month in a strike against the government.

We were herded into changing rooms and offices. Soldiers manned machine-gun positions along the corridor which ran the full circuit of the stadium below the stands. We were 130 in our camarín, a team changing room, only able to lie down to sleep at night by lining up in rows and dovetailing heads and feet. Next to us was a cell with women prisoners, some of whom had been horribly abused and tortured, but whose morale and singing would sustain us in the coming days.

Photographs of the period tend to show prisoners sitting in the stands. But these were only a fraction of the total number, while many more remained in the cells below and those selected for interrogation, torture and elimination were taken to the adjacent velodrome.

I was lucky. My family and friends had informed the British Embassy that I was missing, and on my seventh day in the Stadium the British Consul arrived to obtain my release. I hoped to stay in Chile but with no documents and no job (all foreigners at the Institute had been indefinitely suspended by the new military-appointed director) I had little choice but to leave. Most others were much less fortunate. The Brazilian engineer next to me in the camarín was taken out for interrogation, hooded, beaten around the ears with a wooden bat until he could scarcely hear and questioned by both Chilean and Brazilian intelligence. I told Amnesty International about him, but we could never discover what became of him.

Neoliberalism starts here

Returning to Britain, I became involved with the Chile Solidarity Campaign, just being formed with backing from Liberation, the main trade unions, the Labour and Communist Parties, IMG, IS and many others from the churches, academics, artists, musicians and theatre people. At the time, we believed that the dictatorship would be brief, and I personally hoped and expected to return to Chile and resume my life there.

What none of us sufficiently understood was that the Pinochet regime was much more than the sum of its troops, its armaments and repression. It was an entire economic project, perhaps the first full-on attempt to implement a neoliberal revolution by means of the extreme shock of military coup and dictatorship. But the power that underpinned it lay not in Santiago’s Ministry of Defence, but in Washington and Chicago, in corporate headquarters, banks and think-tanks, in the City of London, Delaware and the budding off-shore empires. As so brilliantly documented by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine, these would come to dominate not just Chile, but the states and economies of most of the developed world, and the recent recession notwithstanding, they dominate them still.

The fight against this globalised economic dictatorship has barely begun. Even in Chile, more than 20 years after the end of the Pinochet regime, the thousands of students who have taken to the streets in the past few years are clear in their demands: for an end to the neoliberal model in education and other public services and for the resumption of universal provision as a human right.

Mike Gatehouse is a campaigner and journalist. He lived in Chile in 1972-3 and after he left worked for the Chile Solidarity Campaign and the El Salvador Committee for Human Rights. He is now a member of the editorial team of Latin America Bureau.

Hugo Chávez has entered the Latin American iconography beside Simón Bolivar and Che Guevara, two of his favourite historical figures. In the coming days, his mausoleum will become a place of pilgrimage for fans among the poor majority of Venezuela and left-wing activists from around the world. Like Spain’s El Cid, even in death Chávez will continue to ride his horse and win the forthcoming Venezuelan elections. The future of the Bolivarian revolution cannot be taken for granted, however.

This week we will read multiple editorial pages where serious analysts from very different ideological perspectives will unpack the many reasons for why millions of Venezuelans so blindly trusted a charismatic and previously unknown military commander to lead them to a better future – and why many more millions across Latin America — and the South, more generally — mourn his passing as the loss of a very close friend.

How poverty fell

The truth is that millions of Venezuelans live better today than before Chávez took office in 1999. It is true that the domestic economy is shaky and that inflation is high, that the crime rate is horrendous, that access to sugar and other basic goods has not always been guaranteed, and that power outages have been unbearable in the recent past. But it is also true that in Venezuela poverty in all its variations and manifestations has fallen steadily and visibly in the past two decades – from 71 per cent of the population in 1996 to just 21 per cent in 2010 (and from 40 per cent to 7.3 per cent as far as extreme poverty is concerned). It is also indisputable that the real income of workers has risen, that social sectors previously excluded from the market have had access to subsidised products for family consumption, and that national wealth has been distributed in a more egalitarian manner than in most other countries of the region.

The United Nations’ Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) recognises that the Bolivarian social programmes, known as misiones, have boosted the literacy rate up to 98.5 per cent and that the enrolment rate for students has increased to 92.7% for primary school and 72.8% for high schools. Venezuela’s position in the Human Development Index has remarkable improved in the past decade, from a HDI value of 0.656 in the year 2000 to 0.735 in the year 2011. Between 2000 and 2011, life expectancy at birth increased by four years, mean years of schooling increased by almost two years and expected years of schooling increased by more than three years.

While some may say that this derived from Venezuela’s oil affluence, it is indisputable that the same opulence only served to enrich a parasitic kleptocracy before Chávez took office. As UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon confirmed following Chávez’s death: “President Chávez spoke to the challenges and aspirations of the most vulnerable Venezuelans”. The most vulnerable indeed have much reason to mourn Chávez’s passing. Under his leadership, a wide range of social projects integrated within the misiones were deployed throughout the country. While the ad hoc planning and management features of these initiatives have been criticised, the misiones have expanded access to health care and education to every corner of the country.

It may be true that the new doctors and nurses are Cubans, that the quality of the diplomas and degrees issued by the new Bolivarian schools and universities could have striven to attain a higher standard, that massive slums remain despite the Bolivarian housing programmes and that the popular local markets opened by the government were not a real solution to the scarcity of essential goods. It may also be true that Venezuela’s chronic dependence on oil production and the primarisation of the economy deepened, and that Venezuela has been unable to break free from the ‘Dutch Disease’ and the ‘resource curse’. No doubt there is much more to criticise about how social and economic policies were designed and implemented under Chávez’s leadership. But what Chávez and his Bolivarian Revolution managed to achieve – in the face of hostile opposition from powerful elites both within Venezuela and from the day he was first elected to the day he died – has to be admired.

Objectivity needed

So many journalists and academic researchers who have published appraisals of Chávez as the leader of the Bolivarian revolution have not been concerned to be objective or even factual in assessing what has really been achieved from the perspective of the previously excluded majority of poor. A constant during the past years has been a malicious fixation with Chávez as an individual, depicting him as a one-man show, as an evil dictator, as an irresponsible and not-so-smart clown, or as the messiah of a global socialist revolution to come. Little serious attention has been paid to the complex and internally contradictory set of socio-economic relations that shape contemporary Venezuela.

The destructive fixation with Chávez is nowhere more perceptible than in the European press. Being a daily reader of El País, I do not recall any positive coverage in any article or opinion piece published by the leading Spanish newspaper — which portrays itself as a source of top-quality journalism and open to ‘progressive’ perspectives — during the years that Chávez was in government. I certainly recall plenty of adverse reporting, much of it editorial comment disguised as unbiased news.

Following the clean election reports issued by the Carter Foundation and other independent electoral observers, the mainstream media focus on the ‘dictatorial’ characteristics of Chávez’s government no longer flies. Attention has since turned to the economy. It was reported that Venezuela, under Chávez, was heading towards economic meltdown, arguing that there is a convergence of an ill-performing oil industry in state hands, a huge public deficit, a never-ending expansion of a swollen public sector, mammoth national debt and an inefficient banking system.

In response to such gloomy perspectives, some more balanced analysts — such as Mark Weisbrot, in recent pieces published by The New York Times and the Guardian — have denounced the obvious hyperboles, misrepresentations and biased interpretation of data. A more detailed and objective analysis of the recent evolution of the Venezuelan economy published by none other than the International Monetary Fund (IMF) shows that the public deficit represents just 7.4 per cent of GDP, well below the two-digit figures exposed by Chávez’s right-wing critics. The available data also demonstrate that the debt remains just above 50% of GDP, a much healthier ratio than the average in the European Union (82.5 per cent) and well below the target set by Brussels (60 per cent).

Moreover, while some journalists and opinion-builders claim that Venezuela has become a failed socialist state characterized by an artificially bloated public sector, the data analysed by Weisbrot indicates that the Venezuelan state employs approximately 18 per cent of the working population, which is lower than in France and in the Scandinavian countries. And while high inflation — a widespread problem across Latin America — remains a source of distress, the fact that the government has invested heavily in social policies to the benefit of the poorer sectors of the population should also be taken into account.

Where now?

Following their president’s death, Venezuela must hold new elections in the coming weeks. Hugo Chávez and the various incarnations of his party, most recently the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), have won 13 of the 14 democratic elections since 1999. There is every chance that the Bolivarian side will win this next election too.

Chávez was a leader who enthusiastically embraced the opening of new opportunities for citizens’ participation beyond the limits of traditional representative democracy. In the context of TNI research work in Venezuela since 2006, I have been direct witness of the constraints and shortcomings of innovative spaces such as the consejos comunales (community councils) and the mesas técnicas (community-based councils for the management of water and other public services), but also of the empowering dimension of participatory democracy for individuals and groups previously excluded from politics. The legacy of this should not be under-estimated.

At the same time, there is no doubt that the demonisation of the Bolivarian process will continue, despite or more likely because of the absence of Chávez. Venezuela has massive oil reserves which will be of great interest to big powers that have shown little hesitation in intervening in the national politics of the Middle East and North Africa to ensure their continuous control over energy resources. One can expect that they will be more than inclined to support regime change in Caracas too, especially since the demise of their most fervent opponent – nationally and internationally.

A region turned left

Any evaluation of Chávez’s legacy should also pay attention to the broader region. From the late 1960s to the early 1990s, most Latin American governments were under the control of military dictators or corrupt and corporate friendly politicians. The ascension of Chávez to national office in Venezuela marked a rupture with a decades-long trend, opening the way for the expansion and ongoing popularity of left or centre-left governments throughout the region. In 2004 an international conference on the Latin American Left (the Madison Dialogue) was co-organised by the Transnational Institute and the University of Wisconsin’s Havens Centre. The regional picture was totally different then from that we observe today. But when Chávez had won his first election a few years before, the differences were even starker.

Then, the prevailing economic dogma was neoliberalism and a left-turn in the region was unforeseen even by the most canny political scientists of that time. It took some years after Chávez’s first election for other progressive presidents to take office – in Argentina (2003), Brazil (2003), Uruguay (2005), Bolivia (2006), Ecuador (2007). Chávez pioneered constitutional reform to give legal recognition to new and expanded rights, and Bolivia and Ecuador later followed suit. Chávez was also the first to renationalise public enterprises. He changed the path of regional integration by creating the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of the Americas (ALBA), killing the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) proposed by George Bush at the hemispheric summit of Mar del Plata, and more recently requesting Venezuela’s entry to Mercosur based on a different understanding of integration – one that goes beyond just business and profits. While Hugo Chávez cannot be credited solely for all the achievements and failures of the left in Latin America, he should certainly be recognised as the pioneer in a number of areas that have influenced the direction of the region as a whole and which now serves as a beacon of hope for progressives everywhere.

As Uruguay’s President Jose Mujica, a former Tupamaro guerrilla commander, declared: ‘You are always saddened by a death, but when you are talking about someone who has fought on the front line, and about someone who I once called “the most generous leader I have met”, the pain takes on a whole new dimension.’

Daniel Chavez is a Uruguayan anthropologist specialising in Latin American politics and urban social and political movements. He co-ordinates the Transnational Institute’s New Politics Programme.

While Chávez’s political opponents were never able to remove him from the presidency democratically, it would appear that in the end it was nature that defeated a man whose anti-imperialism and principled siding with the poor and marginalised in his country and elsewhere, inspired precisely this constituency to defend his government with such passion. “Queremos ver a Chávez!” (We want to see Chávez!) shouted the millions of pro-Chávez supporters that took to the streets in Venezuela in 2002 to demand that he be reinstated as president after a US sponsored coup briefly ousted him. This people power played an instrumental role in his return to the presidency less than 48 hours after he had been kidnapped and taken to an island off Venezuela’s mainland. Theirs was truly a love affair with “their” president, whose support base was to be found in the low-income neighbourhoods known as barrios that encircle Caracas and other Venezuelan cities. It was these people who had, more than any other group, experienced a dramatic improvement in their material conditions. They experienced at first-hand what can happen when a government is prepared to stand up for the poor and marginalised.

In contrast to his popularity at home, Western elites viewed Chávez with a cynical disdain. These sentiments spread to large sectors of the general population, through an anti-Chávez mass media campaign that systematically distorted events in Venezuela. Rather than try to explain Chávez’s appeal to large sectors of the Venezuelan population or understand the process of radical change underway in the country, the West’s media class preferred to focus almost entirely on the figure of Chávez. It was precisely this narrative that was so effective in discrediting the Venezuelan process through concealing the role of collective agency, silencing the people from below, rendering them insignificant.

Nevertheless, Chávez still held a wide appeal beyond Venezuela’s borders, especially in the countries of the global South, who understood all too well what imperialism meant in practice. In Chávez, many saw a genuine leftwing icon, someone with the courage to lead the fight against US imperialism, not only in Latin America but across the world. However, there were those on the left, especially in the West, that displayed an increasing antipathy to Chávez, perhaps the result of the distorted picture of Venezuela generated by the media. Others remained suspicious that a man coming from the military could offer a progressive politics, especially in a continent where the military’s record is steeped in blood. A deeper understanding of the specificities of the Venezuelan case is a prerequisite for purging prejudice.

My own decision to spend a year and half in Venezuela between 2005-2007 was the result of my desire to see for myself what kind of process was unfolding under the Chávez government. What exactly was going on that so provoked the ire of the US government and the Western political and media classes?

I found a country in the midst of intense and profound changes, with a new constitution heralded for its progressive content such as the rights it accorded to traditionally ignored groups such as Venezuela’s indigenous peoples. There were government supported community radio and television stations being run by young people; neighbourhood assemblies that discussed how to “transfer power to the people”; government-subsidised supermarkets in the poorest neighbourhoods (where articles of the constitution were explained in cartoon form on the packaging); a plethora of free cultural festivals and debates about socialism on the streets of Caracas and across the country. All this felt like being transported to another planet, one where social justice and human dignity were a priority. In the midst of all of this was the commanding figure of Chávez, whose leadership qualities and charisma were so evident that no credible domestic opponent could deny them. Such opponents included the (generally white skinned) elite that had traditionally ruled Venezuela, whose fury at their loss of political power was only exacerbated by the gradual erosion of their economic domination of the country. Again the private media was harnessed to fuel the fires of hatred towards Chávez and his government.

Of course Chávez’s charisma was a double-edged sword. It served both to placate divisions between various factions of his movement and energise his followers into action (especially at election time); but it also fed into what was arguably one of the major weaknesses of the Venezuelan process: the over-reliance on Chávez. This, in turn, disincentivised the search for a new or collective leadership. Nevertheless, with Chávez around, the movement for radical change in Venezuela felt, for the most part, irrepressible.

Despite this and other weaknesses, I returned from Venezuela convinced that the country’s ‘Bolivarian’ process was a noble experiment; that at its core it was seeking to create a society where human needs are prioritised over corporate needs. In most of the world this is clearly not the case. For me, Venezuela’s “threat of a good example” is a subversive alternative that is not only challenging neoliberalism and capitalism but is laying the foundations for a 21st Century socialism.

I had the privilege of observing Chávez at close quarters when, as part of the team filming with John Pilger for his documentary ‘The War on Democracy’, we were invited to travel with Chávez for two days. After arriving in Barquisimeto on the presidential plane, we drove through the city in a presidential convoy, where thousands of Venezuelans lined the streets and waved the convoy on. This was a genuine expression of affection for someone they considered one of their own. At the first event, in a massive stadium, I was struck by the patient manner in which Chávez explained what his government was doing. At a further three events that day Chávez explained his government’s vision, using metaphors and a language that resonated with ordinary Venezuelans.

It was these Venezuelans, people like Joel Linares, a community activist and friend, who every day invested their time, energy and passion into building the fairer Venezuela Chávez so often spoke about. “Chávez has given the people back their spirit of struggle. Because the ideas of struggle don’t die” was what Mariela Machado, a nurse and community activist in the La Vega barrio, told me when I asked her what she felt was the biggest change she had experienced under the Chávez goverment.

So as the forces of reaction in Venezuela and abroad get ready to step up their offensive against the Venezuelan process while trying their best to conceal their delight at Chávez’s death, we should remember his true legacy.

Hugo Chávez galvanised the Venezuelan people into taking centre stage in the country’s political process. He was a leader and a teacher but above all someone that demonstrated an unwavering faith in the principle that the people are the best architects of their freedom. In doing so he inspired not only millions of Venezuelans, but millions more around the world who believe in the urgency of building an alternative.

Viva Chávez!

This article was first published by Alborada.

Cherán is a remote village: 2,400 metres above sea level, with 16,000 inhabitants and located in the Mexican state of Michoacán. This is one of a band of municipios or villages where the majority are indigenous Purépecha people with a history and language stretching back to before the Spanish conquest. The mountainous hills are covered by forest which they have farmed sustainably as a communal resource for centuries.

Nevertheless the indigenous people and their way of life have little importance for the ruling elites. Nearly 10 per cent of the adult population must migrate each spring for low paid work in the United States. Meanwhile the profits from illegal logging provide no benefits to the local economy in Cherán. Their struggle demonstrates what a community can achieve by uniting to defend and build its own future in the face of murder and destruction by private companies in connivance with drug gangs which the state has done little to prevent.

Participatory planning

The immediate problems in Cherán were the killings and destruction of the forest. It was not hard to meet villagers who had lost family and friends trying to prevent illegal logging. Despite security being a central concern the villages were simultaneously building their local democracy and moving on to build their own vision for the future. For example, central planners were content to relegate Cherán’s position in the state development plan to timber extraction for processing elsewhere and to tourism. However the villagers wanted to make their own economic future. With the help of volunteers from the local university they set up a participative planning event which took place over several months from the spring of 2012 which was open to all villagers.

When the villagers established their autonomy, they banned the main political parties who were widely seen as a corrupt part of the municipal, state and federal government. Instead, the communities elected, by Purépecha customs, 12 representatives from the four barrios, or districts. This structure, or keris, has now been recognised by the electoral commission as the legitimate authority which runs the village’s affairs. The local democracy is sometimes referred to as ‘uses and customs’. This is not without dangers. Women have ended up disenfranchised by such practices in other places but women are currently represented on the keris in Cherán.

This establishment of their own keris was achieved by using legal frameworks which indigenous people have fought for since the Mexican Revolution. The second article of the constitution recognises the state as ‘pluricultural’ with indigenous people having rights to self-determination. Mexico signed the International Labour Organisation’s Convention 169, passed in 1989, which requires governments to pursue indigenous policies centred on non-discrimination, cultural recognition and participatory democracy.

In 2001, the COCOPA federal law was passed – a watered down compromise in response to Zapatista demands – which did propose some autonomy at a local level for indigenous people over land, natural resources, the judiciary and governance. Cherán took advantage of these structures to gain recognition for its own keris. Decision making takes place in open meetings of the local assembly. The 12 representatives who act on behalf of the people of Cherán are instantly recallable delegates. The assembly is also struggling internally to avoid discrimination against women, young people or other ethnic groups.

The participatory plan which the villagers and keris adopted seeks to improve employment, health and education and to make a better life for women, young people and children. At its heart is a principle to see their customs, values and traditions respected and strengthened.

It is important to understand events in Cherán alongside other notable uprisings in Mexico over the last 20 years. There is the ongoing Zapatista (EZLN) uprising in Chiapas starting with an armed uprising in 1994 demanding justice for indigenous people.

Then in 2006 the Asemblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca (APPO), a largely urban movement in Oaxaca grew from a struggle by the local teachers union. It developed forms of direct democracy in the barricaded town centre similar to the Paris Commune. It was suppressed in November 2006. However, across Mexico blockades of streets in town centres on particular issues ranging from changes to the education curriculum, ‘reform’ of the employment laws or local demands such as for a health facility are regular occurances.

Lessons for Europe

What are the important characteristics of the struggle in Cherán? First, it was very clear from the participatory work I witnessed in Cherán that this is a movement not merely focussed on the immediate security needs and environmental threats. It is looking beyond this to create a future social and economic model which is sustainable and which respects their language, customs and culture. Second, they hold a handed-down historical memory of droughts, privations and struggles which go back over a hundred years. They are connected to traditions which go back even further. This forms a strong basis for unity.

Third, they have knowledge and connection to networks of indigenous people facing similar conflicts across Mexico and other parts of Latin America – and they see the international dimension to their own struggle. Fourth, they are aware of the poverty and corruption of existing institutions and political parties and for this reason have set up their own local democracy.

What’s interesting is that despite the differences, the struggle in Cherán will be familiar to indignados and a growing culture of protests in European settings. The lessons can be summarised as, first, focus on the immediate issue but plan for a much broader future. Second, remember and learn the history of your struggle and build upon it. Third, see the links between your local struggle and understand the international forces operating on your situation – build alliances if possible. Fourth, build your own local democratic structures in inclusive ways.

Villagers in Cherán face the a triple threat from the forces of large scale private enterprise, organised crime and drug gangs, and a government at federal and state level which has not been able to protect the citizens. In response to war-like conditions the villagers have established their own governance, defence and local development. They are aiming to reinforce their own civil society based on ideas and values that pre-date the concept itself. They deserve our solidarity, respect and support.