For more than three decades, something more than data has been recorded in Venezuela’s barrios: emotions, connections, and ways of surviving amid precariousness. In that everyday terrain, the Center for Popular Research became a privileged observatory for understanding how people in the country’s poorest areas think and feel.
Since January 3, when the United States military bombed Caracas, forcibly removed Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores — who are now imprisoned in New York — and killed more than 120 people, Venezuela has been facing a situation that would have been hard to imagine just a few months ago. Laws, such as those governing hydrocarbons or mining, are being rapidly reformed to facilitate the inflow of foreign capital; anti-imperialist Chavismo maintains constant contact with Washington; an amnesty law has been passed, freeing thousands of prisoners — though some remain incarcerated or lack full political freedom — and Maduro’s name is beginning to fade amid more immediate crises. Jorge Rodríguez (Barquisimeto, age 60), president of Venezuela’s National Assembly and the country’s second-highest-ranking official after his sister, President Delcy Rodríguez, prefers the term she coined — “a new political moment” — to describe current events rather than speaking of a transition.
The Venezuelan parliament, controlled by the Chavista regime, on Thursday approved a new mining law that—just as with the hydrocarbons law—opens Venezuela’s mineral-rich subsoil to foreign capital. The approval of this 131-article law, which repeals the one enacted by former Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez in 2013, took several sessions and had been under debate for weeks. It finally passed unanimously on the same day that the new Attorney General and Ombudsman were elected.
© Ronald Peña R (EFE)
Login