The view of Venezuela from two anarchists

Venezuela, El Libertario, Of Chavistas and Anarquistas: Brief Sketch

(November-December, 2004) By Michael Staudenmaier, with Anne Carlson
For almost a month, from mid-November until mid-December, 2004, we traveled in Venezuela, meeting an array of politically engaged activists from a variety of perspectives. Without a doubt, the foremost lesson we learned during our brief time there concerned the complexity of the social and political situation in the country, which has been consistently over-simplified in the United States. Where the mainstream media in this country portrays President Hugo Chavez as the next Fidel Castro, busily turning Venezuela into a Communist (or at least anti-US) dictatorship, the US left in general has welcomed Chavez uncritically as the new face of progressive struggle in Latin America. North American anarchists, meanwhile, struggle to understand the situation, and are too often torn between these two opposing but comparably one-sided perspectives.

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