Community Organizing in Caracas

23 de enero is a barrio of Caracas famous for its levels of community organization and revolutionary tendencies. Cira Pascual-Marquina recently met with Juan Contreras, director of the Coordinadora Simon Bolivar, located in an occupied police station at the heart of 23 de enero, and asked him about his work as organizer and his advice to organizers abroad.

CP: The conditions in the U.S. now are much closer to those of the Venezuelan IV Republic(1958-1998) than they are to today’s. Do youhave any advice or thoughts to share forpeople organizing in the U.S. today?
JC: My advice would be to be perseverant andconstant: one has to maintain the political principles that informed one as an organizer – theyears of struggles and fights are important. Onemust always maintain his or her objectives and aims in view.
Here in Venezuela, today, we are building a new society using the World Social Forum slogan“another world is possible.” We are involved in the construction of another world, a society with social justice and with quality of life for all people. This translates into promoting education, health, housing, dignified work, and recreation; the latter needed by any human being in order to live well, whether in Africa, Asia,Oceania, Europe, or in the Americas.
For 40 years, during the IV Republic, our government never cared about the whole of society,the collective, but, on the contrary, excluded the weakest and the poorest. This led to a society full of inequalities and imbalances. Today, with
the Bolivarian process, we aim to erase those differences and to build a more balanced society.
We believe that to construct the world we want from below, from the community, we must be creative, resolute, and daring.
The Organizer in the V Republic As a collective, we have been committed to social consciousness raising and community work since before Chavez’s election in 1998. The only thing that has changed is that now we have much more work than before. In a community like this - one that has been totally ignored by the social policy of the state and one with many deficiencies (access to water, transportation,etc.) - we have built a resistance that surfaces from the darkness of our problems and which kindles our willingness to fight.
We are now in a time of a revolutionary process as there we have a government that cares for the people, and we have a social politics that seeks to lower levels of violence. In these first few years the Coordinadora is focused on improvements in education and health. We aim to educate and to inform our people and our community such that the whole collective will benefit from the process. In other words, we wish to live well, but not merely as individuals – the whole collective of society needs to live well.
Architectural Context
It is interesting to see that there is so much social and political consciousness, indeed a quite militant and self-organized community, inhabiting these 1950s blocks that follow the architectural model of Le Courbusier. These models were designed in France to fragment and to depoliticize poor folks. Yet, here, in Caracas, and in Colombia too, the opposite happened.
This should encourage people to realize that cultural activism and convivial cooperation can alter the way we inhabit our urban spaces.
These buildings were built between 1955 and 1957, in the middle of the military dictatorship here in Venezuela. Marco Perez Gimenez was in power and this complex was built under the premise of the new nationalist ideals that sought to foster urbanization by eliminating the “rancho”, depicted as a unhealthy shed, in favor of the apartment. It was believed that in transforming the environment the quality of life would improve. 56 high-rise buildings of 15 flights and 42 small ones of 4 flights were built in under three years for a population of 60,000 people.
The color of the buildings -- red, blue, white, green -- aims to give an airy feeling and was copied from the French model. Although we live in dense buildings where each person has his or her apartment we feel that we are quite connected; in the East of Caracas, where rich folks live, it is common that no one knows who is his or her neighbor. Here, Families raise their kids together and everyone in the neighborhood knows everyone else – in fact we have a refrain that says ‘in a little village there is a big hell’ because everyone knows everyone else’s business.
People come together because they care about what happens in their neighborhood, in the geographic space they inhabit. If there is a need for services, if there is a young boy in the community who is sick, folks collaborate.

In part this community fabric has much to do with the people who emigrated here. During urbanization people from the countryside,campesinos, came to the city to look for a better quality of life: health, education, housing, recreation,and work. So I would say that the social fabric here has something to do with that and with architecture that, for us, enabled neighbors to live side by side in such a way that helps to foster solidarity. We have a neighborhood that has been contestable and irreverent from its very beginning.Interestingly, in Colombia, where block 8 of 23 de enero was built, we find much contestation as well. This is a story that very few people know: here the blocks go from 1 to 7 and from 9 to 56.
The 8th block, called “El Venezolano,” is in the city of Cali, in Colombia. This is where the ELN (Ejercito de Liberacion Nacional) has emerged.
So we believe that there is something in the architectural structures of these buildings that allows for a communal, convivial living when taken to a Latin American context; through the years these buildings have become referents in fights and struggles.
CP: For us, the work of the Black Panther Party in the U.S. is an important referent. For the Party, an important part of their political consciousness raising work was their cultural work: recovering cultural roots, taking pride in cultural traditions. It seems that here too that – in revolutionary Venezuela but especially at the Coordinadora – there is a program of recovering traditions. So the question is how is the political work connected with the cultural?

JC: In our case we have used culture to establish a bridge within our community that connects our beliefs to articulation and to action. These cultural elements provide a basis for the common political work of pursuing shared visions for our country, for correcting the aspects of our country that we feel have been left in a bad shape by previous governments.
Culture and politics go hand in hand here. Who does not like to dance, to draw, to be involved in cultural events? When you come here to the 23, you see a huge number of murals everywhere. It’s a cultural manifestation, but also through the mural you are manifesting an idea and you are identifying yourself with an ideology.
The fact that we have maintained our cultural roots and that we are engaged culturally has rooted us in a way of thinking about life – about what we want and about what we are searching for. This is the crux of who we are. And I think the same happened with the Black Panthers. A people that have been excluded because of a race and class struggle – this makes them irreverent, creates a culture of resistance, and elevates their own cultural roots and their desire to make their voices be heard. For the last 40 years we have resisted –with culture as a form of resistance- the government’s indifference. If people are having problems – if they are not receiving water – we will begin to mobilize politically. We locate the institutions that are responsible as well as those who can be our allies, and then we organize in order to denounce and then to resolve the situation.
International Solidarity
We have seen the need to have solidarity with other peoples. Many folks from the 23 went to fight in Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador. Venezuelans fought for the independence of Cuba and in the Civil War in Chile. We want justice around the world, not just at home. Right now, I think that many Latin Americans, Venezuelans, and folks from the 23, would go to fight alongside Palestinians and the Lebanese if we had a chance. Because what is going on there is not a war, it’s genocide. Many would give their blood for the survival of the Palestinian people, of the Lebanese. This is an important part of justice in our political and ideological framework. We believe in the solidarity of all peoples with all peoples. There is a saying - solidarity is the tenderness of the peoples.
This characterizes our fights. And solidarity not only in our militancy, in our going to fight for just causes internationally, but also humanitarian missions. We have helped expatriates from Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay and Argentina. We received Argentinians as brothers and sisters while 30,000 Argentinians disappeared during the junta.
We are dreaming an internationalist world. We dream for Latin America and for the rest of the world, for a world without aggression  or constant bellicose threats.