In this house of 25mts2, 18 people lived in obvious overcrowded conditions.
Caracas Mayor’s Office came , Catia neighborhood, collecting information from technical stuff they do with the support of organized communities.
As there was a good popular organization and a suitable land for construction, the Mayor’s Office of Caracas contacted an architect who provided his services to the community and together they created the design of the new house .
Now, the 18 people live in that building. Not only participated in the design but also in the construction of their homes with technical and logistical support of the Mayor’s Office of Caracas, the architect Javier Caricato and building materials of the Ministry of Habitat and Housing of Venezuela.
These are information that no corporate media will recognize and is happening in Venezuela , despite economic and financial blockade imposed against the country by the government of EE.UU. I wonder if any country do this with the humblest.
The economic war is certainly effective in making life more difficult for ordinary Venezuelans. But instead of dejection and despair, we observed a surge of grass roots organizing.
This January I went to Venezuela with a group of North Americans to see for ourselves how economic “sanctions” are affecting people’s access to food. We wondered how the Venezuelan popular classes are responding to the massive attack on their economic well-being.
We saw a complicated scene, with virtually every kind of productive activity crippled in many ways, some not so obvious on the surface. Nevertheless, people have had time to adjust to the situation; they have been creative, energetic, and determined. Communes are growing, the government is surviving, and “It’s not as bad as it was in 2017” was a common refrain. These are some of the stories we heard as we met people working to achieve food sovereignty for their country.
The biggest problem, getting adequate food to the majority of people, is the same as it is all around the world: food production and distribution is still done mostly through a capitalist system. Venezuela is governed by a socialist party which has socialism as its goal. But the capitalist sector controls an estimated 80% of the economy; the government’s share is mostly in oil and some heavy industry. Stores and restaurants are well stocked with food, but the price is too high for most people to easily afford. Up to last year there was a system by which the government controlled the prices that merchants could charge, selling dollars at a discount to importers, in order to make low retail prices possible. Massive corruption on the part of the importers and others made that system unsustainable, and once the economic war ramped up it collapsed, since the government bank had no more dollars to sell. Read more
