Venezuela Mayor Negotiates Replacement of Coca-Cola Plant with Commune

[magbana]

"Venezuelan Mayor Replaces Coca-Cola Plant with Socialist Commune

March 22nd 2009, by Tamara Pearson – Venezuelanalysis.com
The local mayor, Jorge Rodriguez, with the Coca-Cola representative (ABN).

Mérida, March 21st 2009 (Venezuelanalysis.com) -- On Wednesday, the mayor of the municipality of Libertador in Caracas, Jorge Rodriguez, from the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), signed an agreement with Coca-Cola to take over its land located in the lower-class suburb of Catia, and use it for public housing.

After ten days of negotiations with the mayoralty of Libertador, Coca-Cola agreed to relocate a distribution center which is next to the Nucleus of Endogenous Development Fabricio Ojeda (NUDEFO), one of many new types of "socialist" community development enterprises that the government in supporting.

Coca-Cola will hand over the 1 hectare piece of land to the mayoralty of Libertador, which will use the land to construct 450 housing units "in order to solve the housing problem and the high risk suffered by those living nearby," Rodriguez said, adding that other land further away had already been acquired to construct refuges for disaster victims.

The project is part of the "Socialist Caracas" plan which is being propelled by the local government in coordination with the national government and will benefit 40,000 local families. The plan includes the NUDEFO, an area of worker run collectives, a subsidized food market known as Mercal , an 85% subsidized medicine pharmacy, sports courts, communal councils, land and water committees, cultural workshops and social missions.

In the second stage of the plan, the government will construct a Bolivarian school, a childcare centre, an integral rehabilitation centre, a communal dining area, a gymnasium, a public library, a cooperative school, and an audiovisual production center.

Rodriguez said his administration is planning a profound change. "We hope that Catia becomes an example of the new socialist communities and the establishment of communes," he said.

"The city of Caracas deserves to be planned for the greatest enjoyment of the people who live here, it's a city that deserves urbanism in keeping with the times and above all in keeping with the principles that we have established in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, to reduce the huge gaps in the country, reduce social injustice, and plant, quickly, equality and happiness," said Rodriguez.

The mayor stressed that Caracas had been a victim of a lack of planning and of urban control that wasn't adjusted to the new times and highlighted the contradiction of so many people living in high risk areas while other land is basically unused, or functions as "bus and old car cemeteries and abandoned factories."

The Coca-Cola distribution centre, which supplies Western Caracas, has been running since 1992, and employs 300 workers. According to the agreement, it will have three, possibly extended to four, months to find land of the same size in order to continue operating. The mayoralty will assist with the necessary procedures for buying that land and constructing the storehouses.

On March 9, President Hugo Chavez announced that the company had two weeks to vacate the land during his weekly "Hello, President" television talk show. One caller to the show, from the NUDEFO, said all the participants in the nucleus had been developing activities to achieve Coca-cola's vacation of the land. Chavez stressed the importance of recovering such spaces and putting them at the service of the community.

Tags: coca-cola | Communes | missions | PSUV"
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news/4310

[EFerrari]

1. When I read about this negotiation, I was waiting for the thread that defended

Coca-Cola. Either it didn't happen or I was spared.

What a great outcome. :)

[Judi Lynn]

2. What a great way to address some part of the housing problem.

It's a wonderful plan, wonderful.

Anyone remember an earlier plan to use a huge Caracas country club golf course? Some of the members nearly had heart attacks, and after some discussion that mayor dropped the idea.

It will be amazing thinking of a future in which, with time, there won't be the constant threat of all those poor tin-roofed houses sitting precariously on the hills surrounding Caracas, many WITHOUT electricity, or water, or sewer facilities, being vulnerable to either fires, which would sweep the entire community in moments, with no ability to get fire trucks up there, or, in the rainy season, mudslides which would loosen their foundations and dump them all down the hill. Either way many lives have been lost, and those threats will exist until the time comes there are no longer any people stuck up there.

Thank God the new government finally came around, as the decades before have proven if left to their own devices the oligarchs had no intention of using ANY of the country's funds to bring desperately needed help to the suffering vast majority of poor Venezuelans.

Good, great news. Hope to see photos of this one day.

[Peace Patriot]

3. Yes, I remember the Golf Club controversy, and what was most interesting about it

was that it was the Chavez government that nixed that project, because it violated the Venezuelan Constitutional protection of private property!

The corpo/fascist 'news' monopolies here and in South America never mention items like this that indicate the Chavez government's scrupulous adherence to the law. They have never violated the Constitution. They have never broken the law. They have bent over backwards not to. And they furthermore are enforcing laws that were never enforced before, for instance, Venezuela was riddled with tax scofflaws, and the Chavez government has instituted fair, consistent tax collection.

Venezuela has many problems, but it has never before had a government that actually addresses its problems with intelligent, well thought out, "good government" proposals and activities. This is true as to the use of natural resources, and the contracts with multinationals for oil production (improving Venezuela's cut of the profits from 10/90, favoring the multinationals, to 60/40 favoring Venezuela's social programs), an intelligent land reform/food security program (which requires production of food and a 5 year waiting period before new farmers can receive title to the land, and provides technical support), educational policy (providing food, clothing, stipends and other supports for the very poor--both adults going back to school and children), medical policy (providing easy to access local community clinics for first-line diagnosis and treatment, and prevention), empowering local community councils to decide on local needs--where federal money will go, nationalization of critical industries where owners/investors are manipulating production to evade the law or to destabilize the country, and also utilizing Venezuela's oil resource to fill in the needs that Venezuela cannot yet supply--such as trading oil for doctors with Cuba, or oil for beef with Argentina.

Most of Venezuela's problems derive from a century of mismanagement and corruption by rightwing governments in cahoots with U.S. corporate interests. The problems of food security, lack of local manufacturing, dependence on imports, lack of education and bootstrapping help to the vast poor majority, lack of Venezuelan doctors and medical professionals, and neglect of local and regional infrastructure are long term and difficult to solve. You can't bring land back into food production, or train a doctor, overnight. The Chavez government has made a good start on all of them, and has remarkable achievements thus far on some--such as the elimination of illiteracy, universal medical care and a halving of extreme poverty.

That they have done this with no social disruption, no impact on the rich (other than denying them illegal or overly-greedy profit, and, of course, winning elections against them and keeping them out of the way of temptation), no unconstitutional or draconian measures of any kind, is amazing. Social revolutions such as Venezuela's have historically often been very violent and disruptive. Democracy and clean elections have solved that problem--the problem of the country becoming so unjust, with such brutal rightwing control, that it explodes in armed rebellion. We saw this time and again in the last century--in Latin America, in Africa, and of course in Russia and China. Our own country came close to violent revolution during the Great Depression. And it is truly a beautiful thing to see a social revolution happen peacefully through democratic means. It happened here, with the election of FDR and implementation of his New Deal program. Let us hope that it can happen here again--that our democracy has not been so damaged by the Bush Junta that it cannot recover the ability to change course. However, we now have the example of many South American countries that have succeeded in full course corrections, by their attention to democratic institutions. That's how it's done--basically by voting, and seeing that all the votes are counted.

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And check out this recent BoRev post, to illustrate my point. (Guess who Oxfam says has made the most progress in eliminating inequality?)

http://www.borev.net/2009/03/impress_your_friends_at_the_ho.html

[Peace Patriot]

4. Here's the Oxfam report...

"Want to reduce inequality? Look at Latin America!"

http://www.oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/?p=197

[Judi Lynn]

5. How the new government ever made this much progress in only 10 years

is something like a miracle, isn't it?

It should have been done so long ago, but the oligarchy had its death grip on the government which was relentless until one of their own went too far and killed far too many of the poor in "El Caracazo" massacre, and pushed the country past the point of no return in 1989. It took them 10 years from that mass sacrifice of 3,000 lives until they got the leader they wanted to start organizing a new government and a new way of doing things so El Caracazo and all the conditions leading up to it would never be possible again in Venezuela.

I think in one of the documentaries available on video, people in the street have basically said that the Bolivarian Revolution is here to stay, and if they lose Chavez, they are still going ahead with their revolution toward equality, justice.

I intend to share those stats from BoRev's link with my associates at the hobo camp! Thanks! Such great information.