<nettime> Venezuela: Political Oucasts in Power

["Ricardo Bello" <aracal@well.com>]

I may agree with the sentence: "Poverty is the genocide of the
poor", but its meaning awakens something weird in the Venezuelan
context, and even the best intel analysis, Stratfor for example,
donīt get it. The worst type of marginalization is not suffered
by the economic outcast, but by the political one. Those extremely
poor women who live in slums with no health care whatsoever,
no food and no job, never were citizens in the first place. They
never were taking into account and with Chavez, for the first
time in their lives or ancestorīs memories, they feel (they do
not think, the relationship with populist political power is
not a rational one) for the first time in 200 years, as citizens,
true members of a society or community. They can conspire now,
and this is one of the best definition of community I have heard:
two or more people willing and able to conspire), they act on
history. They are poor but they are real.

This is the big issue and most anti-chavistas do not see the
picture. Chavistas, on the other hand, do not recognize middle
class values nor their increasing and fierce political consciousness.
Many people, everything points that way, are going to get killed
this year. We have been so far a more or less pacific country,
an exception in Latin America: Guatemala, Colombia and El Salvador
were distant scenarios. War was unknown to us. Tonight, both
sides of the conflict do not want to see the face of the opponent,
the political alter-ego; they do not want to see that face, itīs
too troublesome. Politics of recognition is an absent area in
our symbolic interchange. We are the invisible people, the non-existent
one, the forever outcast enemy.

Economic welfare goes second place, it isnīt even an issue in
the political agenda.

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