00:00To expand on the topic of the popular consultation in Venezuela, we are joined
00:04now by political scientist Eduardo Meneses. Eduardo, welcome to From the South.
00:10I'm really happy to be here giving you a thank you for the invitation.
00:15It's a pleasure to have you. Well Venezuela's national popular consultation
00:20allows residents to vote on projects designed to address the specific needs
00:25of their communities. Unlike a conventional national election, the process
00:30focuses on local priorities and the allocation of public resources. How does
00:34this model change their relationship between citizens and the institutions
00:38responsible for governing their communities? Well the first thing is that
00:44we need to acknowledge that traditional democracy, meaning representative
00:49democracy, is in a structural and extremely deep crisis all over the world.
00:54This idea that someone could represent us with a mandate that's going to last four
01:03or five years, depending on the country, without any other popular discussion or
01:09discussion with the people who this person is supposed to represent, has already been
01:14proven as a very limited dimension or a very limited conception of democracy. What is
01:20different with the democracy that we're seeing today in Venezuela and with this participatory democracy is that,
01:28first of all, it's acknowledging that democracy is not only a procedural perspective. It's not only
01:36having institutions and having people who have been elected. It's the question and the essential question of the material
01:48rights of people, meaning, for example, today people are going to be voting about
01:54basic services. I don't know, water, electricity, infrastructure, education. These kind of things are very
02:02material concerns that cannot only be discussed once every four years with a general mandate for someone. Having people be
02:12involved, not only in a moment of the
02:15of voting for these services, for example, but defining in previous discussions, in popular assemblies, what are the most
02:25important projects, what are the most priority, the most important priorities of investment in their territories and mainly invest in
02:36their territories in the discussion, not just a general question for the whole nation. It's something that really changes the
02:43framework of democracy and gives a
02:45a very important strength to what we see all over the world with centralization, austerity measures taken against people, which
03:04is not possible in this kind of perspective of a participatory democracy.
03:10Meneses, more than 37,000 projects have been submitted for this popular consultation, reflecting a process that begins with proposals
03:19from organized communities.
03:21To what extent those allowing residents to identify problems and design solutions themselves represent a shift from traditional models of
03:29public administration?
03:31That's very important in the sense of one of the main challenges that we have with centralized public administration is
03:40kind of the homogeneous perspective that needs to be developed when you have, for example, one administration that needs to
03:49represent thousands of different territories and they need to put in place one kind of projects that suits them all.
03:57So, this is a very different perspective. If we could just sum up the time, the thousands of hours of
04:06people discussing the relevance of projects in their territory, understanding that the people who can better understand and know their
04:17territory are the people who are living in this territory.
04:20And if we just made an analysis of the time that is being involved behind each one of these projects
04:27and the time that, I don't know, decentralized administration has to make the projects for a whole province, we will
04:37never be in the same kind of dimension of involvement, of thoughtfulness, of possibility of contrast, of specificities,
04:46understanding not only the statistics of a territory, but also the symbols of a territory, what's the history, what are,
04:54what is the symbolic dimensions that are in play in a territory.
04:59That is something that never just centralized administration will be able to do. If you just imagine how much would
05:10be the cost of public servants being doing this kind of immersion in a territory of collective thinking, that is
05:22not possible to imagine a traditional administration doing that.
05:27The big difference is that the big difference is thousands of hours of people who live in the territory, who
05:32have the whole life invested in that territory, being able to discuss all these projects.
05:37This is something that simply is not possible to compare with what, let's say, experts in a centralized administration could
05:46never do.
05:49Eduardo, one last question. Popular power has been a central concept in Venezuela's political project since Hugo Chavez came into
05:57power in 1999.
05:59Through communal councils and communes, the model seeks to give organized communities a direct role in decision making.
06:05How does the national popular constitution translate these political principles into a practical mechanism for governing at the local level?
06:15We need to understand that the reason why President Chavez took that decision in the first place was because of
06:25the deep and clear consciousness of the fact that the traditional administration heritage that they had from the traditional state
06:37that has been built
06:38under an oligarchy perspective was never going to be able to produce the deep transformation of society that was needed
06:48for a revolution to prevail and to last on the time.
06:52Let's say that we have seen, let's say that we have seen, I mean, that that's maybe the one of
06:57the biggest difference between the progressist and revolutionary perspective that was being founded in, that was founded in Venezuela, in
07:07contrast with all the other progressist perspectives that we had in the rest of Latin America.
07:12The traditional state with a very centralized power, which was centralized around the president was kind of the main perspective
07:25of how to held a transformation of society, while at the same time, Hugo Chavez was understanding that we could
07:34not make this deep transformation process with the same tool that was built for the
07:42and by the historical oligarchy of a country.
07:45So that's the first important thing to understand. And then I would say that once we have said that, it
07:54cannot only be something that is like, let's decentralize only discussion or directives.
08:02It needs to be something where we are not investing some intellectual moment or hours of the time of someone,
08:10but it's really been something that is
08:12connected to the everyday life of people connected to their history because we cannot understand the decision of someone if
08:20we do not understand from which territory they are coming.
08:24What is the history? A whole life put in service of a discussion of projects that are relevant to a
08:30territory, the prioritization of those projects.
08:33All of this is what makes the substance in which all the idea of a communal revolution, socialist communal revolution
08:42can be understood.
08:43And we have already been seeing that in the whole process of this communal state being developed because at the
08:52beginning were some, there were some communal, few communal circuits.
08:57Then the communities were starting to expand and then they go, they went from only deciding some projects and budgets
09:04to now and having some communities that are already developing communal economic alternatives for example.
09:11And all of this shows that maybe the road could be long on the transformation of the economy and the
09:19way political debate and political democracy can be thought, but definitely is the path to follow.
09:25And once we understand where the traditional state come from and where do we want to go.
09:31For some experience they may get into the perspective of what kind of Catholics have been pequeño, and so I
09:31think the person who they wanna make any cultural momentum will emerge,
09:31To me it's my theory it has been affected by praying fornic dimension.
09:31There are always been ailliity in the way that's the one next-bb and the other, fall of where try
09:31that could be okay.
09:32I think anyway that's what we say, so, what it could happen.
09:32This public belief is what, we want to understand the truth of the country is a wonderful mould of the
09:32city.
09:32We also find out those
