Economy & Trade, Headlines, Human Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean

VENEZUELA: Leading Human Rights Group Highlights Poverty

Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Dec 12 2003 (IPS) - As soon as the stoplight turns red, Angel Díaz moves quickly between the cars holding up a stained piece of burlap, offering a quick windshield wipe-down. Most of the drivers tell him no. But a few accept his offer before the light changes, and hand over a coin or two.

”I worked as a bricklayer, and as a plumber’s and carpenter’s assistant. Then I had a street stall where I sold sandals, but I ran out of money and couldn’t keep it up,” Díaz tells IPS on the street corner in the Venezuelan capital where he tries to rustle up enough money every afternoon to feed himself and his wife.

Matilde, his wife, was working as a domestic for a middle-class family, but ”the company where her boss worked downsized and laid him off, and then her employers fired her. It’s a good thing we don’t have kids,” he says.

”The worst thing that could happen to me would be to get sick or be run over by a car, and the best would be for the country to get it together again, for the politicians to stop fighting, and for there to be more work.”

But poverty affects 40 percent of Venezuela’s population of 25 million, according to the latest annual report (October 2002-September 2003) by the Venezuelan Programme of Education-Action in Human Rights (PROVEA), the country’s leading human rights organisation.

Along with the poverty, the steadily climbing unemployment, and the continuing decline of incomes, the human rights situation ”is aggravated by the state’s weakness in guaranteeing and protecting those rights, and the way Venezuelans are experiencing the political conflict,” Carlos Correa, the head of PROVEA, told IPS.

For the past two years, Venezuela has been in the grip of a heated stand-off between the supporters of President Hugo Chávez and the opposition movement that has been seeking his removal before the end of his term in 2006.

The left-leaning president has faced innumerable mass protest marches and survived a short-lived coup d’etat in April 2002 and a two-month general strike in December 2002 and January 2003.

”The most serious aspect is not the confrontation and polarisation, but the limitations of the political actors with respect to managing dissent within the framework of the existing institutions, and in terms of reducing the violence that has marked the conflict,” said Correa.

He pointed out that the way the political factions have dealt with their differences has made it impossible to build the agreements needed to deal with the country’s pressing social problems.

According to People’s Defender (ombudsman) Germán Mundaraín, ”the most serious violations of human rights in this country are the violations of the economic, social and cultural rights of Venezuelans.”

In Venezuela, one of the world’s top oil-exporting countries, the official unemployment rate stood at 17.8 percent in September 2003, 1.6 percent up from the year before.

But it climbed to 20.7 percent in February, after the two-month general strike declared by business associations, trade unions and employees of the state-run oil company in an attempt to press Chávez to resign. The shut-down drove a number of businesses under.

The minimum monthly salary equivalent to 156 dollars falls 21 percent short of covering the cost of necessary food items, according to government estimates, and 48 percent short according to the teachers’ union, which forms part of the broad anti-Chávez movement.

The proportion of malnourished children under 15 rose one percent in the period covered by the PROVEA report, to 12.4 percent of the population.

But Antonio González, PROVEA’s research coordinator, remarked to IPS that ”This is a crisis that has dragged on for a long time, and entrenched poverty is a central aspect of it. Venezuela’s crisis does not carry the name of any single person, nor can it be resolved merely by the removal, or continuation in office, of a president.”

On the health front, the PROVEA report praised the government’s ”Barrio Adentro” (”Into the Neighbourhood”) programme aimed at bringing free health care to more than one million poor Caracas residents who have been neglected for years.

Hundreds of Cuban doctors have been brought in, to visit slums in the capital and other large cities, through an agreement between the Cuban and Venezuelan governments.

But associations of Venezuelan doctors have complained about the programme, claiming Cuban doctors are stealing their jobs.

PROVEA said it hoped the conflict would be resolved, and that the initiative of bringing primary health care to the slums would be made permanent.

However, the rights group also regretted that the health budget, equivalent to 1.8 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), is far below the five percent recommended by the World Health Organisation (WHO).

In education, PROVEA pointed out that school enrolment registered a historic increase of 5.6 percent in the period covered by the report.

It also reported that as a result of the December-January general strike mounted by the opposition, children lost 38 days of school.

The Chávez administration launched a literacy drive in July targeting one million Venezuelans who cannot read or write.

The government has also opened state-run outlets where lower-income people can buy food at subsidised prices.

But the PROVEA report stated that such initiatives ”have been fragmented in their execution and weak in their impact.”

Rafael Alfonso, an anti-Chávez businessman who heads the Food Industry Chamber, said consumption of processed foods fell 15.4 percent in 2003 with respect to 2002.

PROVEA praised the government’s efforts in the area of land reform, a longstanding demand by small farmers and rural workers in this country where – as in most of Latin America – agricultural land ownership is heavily concentrated under the ”latifundia” (large landed estate) system.

Since Chávez first took office in 1998, 1.1 million hectares have been distributed to landless peasant farmers.

The human rights group also noted the difficulties facing agrarian reform, such as the resistance put up by private landowners. Four rural activists were murdered between January and September 2003.

In addition, the lack of a reliable land register has made it difficult to determine whether land is publicly or privately-owned.

The killings of rural activists were just one expression of the political violence that ”left 83 dead and over 200 injured” in the past two years. Most of the deaths were the result of unclarified shootings that occurred in street demonstrations before and during the two-day coup mounted by the opposition and a faction of the military in April 2002.

However, tempers have calmed somewhat since the two sides agreed in May to come up with an electoral solution to the crisis. The opposition has gathered signatures to hold a recall referendum, in yet another attempt to remove Chávez from office.

But Venezuelans have been hit much harder by violent crime than by political violence. In this country of 24 million, 9,617 homicides were reported in 2002, 21 percent more than in 2001, and that number looks set to rise again this year.

”Violence fuels marginalisation, which drives up poverty,” said PROVEA’s González.

A study by the Central University’s Peace Centre in Caracas showed that in 1975, when 25 percent of the population lived below the poverty line, the homicide rate stood at 12 per 100,000 population, and the robbery rate at 23 per 100,000.

By 2002, with 40 percent of the population living in poverty, the homicide rate had climbed to 42 per 100,000 and the robbery rate to 170 per 100,000. Venezuela’s crime rates are among the highest in Latin America.