Ángel Prado, minister for the Communes and Social Movements of Venezuela. File photo.
Venezuela’s minister of Communes, Ángel Prado, says that he was a bit scared when President Nicolás Maduro proposed that he become the new minister for the Communes. He was offered the role on June 6, when the president visited the El Maizal Commune, located in the municipality of Simón Planas (Sarare), Lara state, where Prado had been elected mayor for the 2021-25 term. He was born in those mountains and valleys; he learned with his mother to raise sheep, make conuco and sell preserves, with which he bought one of those first Nokia phones, through which an uncle called him to tell him that Father Rojas was organizing a trip to Cuba to participate in political training seminars.
“That day the president accompanied us to start the corn planting cycle,” recalled Prado. At the barbed wire fence bordering the commune’s fields, Maduro met him and told Prado that “It is time for you to leave the commune and assume other tasks.” National Assembly Deputy Jorge Rodríguez, who at that time was the head of the president’s electoral campaign command, was also present at that meeting.
A few minutes later, the president got into a Tiuna vehicle and started an improvised peasant march on the rural road that crosses El Maizal from where, megaphone in hand, he announced Prado’s entry to the cabinet. “There were more women than men,” recalled the minister of Communes during the interview at the headquarters of Últimas Noticias.
What are the characteristics of a commune?
It is a people’s territorial organization with a structure of self-government. It is created by the people of the community to work for the political, social, economic and cultural transformation of a territory that has common interests, common problems, a culture, and a form of community life. The commune is a dynamic form of people’s government. That is to say, the community itself dictates the functions and structure of the commune. There are guidelines, we have a commune law, we have very precise guidelines from Commander Hugo Chávez, but also an alert from the commander and a mandate to create the commune according to the interests of the community. It has a government structure, it has its communal bank, and the citizens’ assembly functions as the highest decision making instance. The commune has its communal councils, with a demarcated area, with its name and a legal status. In addition, it has its comptroller and planning and production system.
How many communes are there in Venezuela?
So far there are a little over 3,000 communes. We are making a registry because we have been tasked with creating a system to administer very precise data of the communal councils and communes. There are more advanced communes, others that are reorganizing their scope, others that have started in a very incipient way but due to some problems of motivation or internal conflicts, they are in the process of reaching an agreement, but they are already established communes that have been working for some time. There are some new ones, but others like El Maizal, El Panal 2021, 5 de Marzo in the Caracas Valley; Cinco Fortalezas in the east; Altos de Lídice in La Pastora; Che Guevara Commune in Mérida; Patria Nueva and Maisanta in Barinas are old communes. There are many of them and we have identified 4,505 territories that we call communal circuits and where the popular consultation will take place.
This Sunday the second popular consultation will be held, what are its main proposals?
This consultation will be quite successful, it will achieve a high participation of our people. The first consultation could have been an expectation or something hopeful. There was a campaign of the Venezuelan right wing claiming that in order to improve public services, no one should be consulted. I live in a commune and millions of people who work in the communal councils and in the communes repudiate when an institution executes a project that has not even been discussed with the communes. We welcome it and we consider it positively, we like it when the institutions go to consult with the community and ask us what our priorities are. In this case it is not an institution that is asking, in this case it is the people who are prioritizing. It is a proposal launched by the president of the Republic, Nicolás Maduro, and we accept it at the base.
What is the election process?
The people make a previous discussion about issues in their communities, how they should be attended, in what order of priority, and they postulate seven projects to be voted on Sunday, August 25. The one with the most votes will be the project that will receive the funding for being executed in the short term in 4,505 communal circuits.
What is a communal circuit?
It is an aggregation of communal councils in an area. They are not recognized as a commune, but they have common issues, a common life, they just need to take the step to become a commune and in this phase they have been asked by the communal circuit to get together to attend, to make proposals and to attend to issues, to receive financing that can help to solve internal problems in this area of several communal councils and to give shape to a territorial organization in a geographical area.
Who identifies or convenes a communal circuit?
They are convened by the Ministry of Communes. In reality they are communities that know each other, that recognize each other, but that have not taken the step to work under a single organization. When the communal councils get together we are stronger, the planning is better, the policy is consolidated, the cultural and educational issues are worked on.
Is this a parallel government to the mayor’s office?
The commune is a self-government in a specific community. A mayor’s office can coexist with a commune, a mayor can work with the communal leadership. Now, if the mayor gets afraid that the commune is going to dispute the power and confronts the commune, then unfortunately the commune in the territory has control of the vote, it has political control, electoral control. For example, we had an experience in a municipality where the national government transferred a significant amount of resources for projects in the commune and the mayor made available machinery, technicians, engineers, and even provided a financial contribution to complement the projects and that commune loves that mayor, loves him, supports him, and will reelect him. I have also seen, for example, in the municipality of Baralt in the state of Zulia, where the mayor has forbidden the commune to invest the resources provided by the national government in the school that is deteriorated and has put up obstacles because it is a regional school.
In April you carried out the first consultation. What progress have you made on these approved projects?
I can guarantee that almost 60% of the projects have already been completed. We can go to the interiors of Venezuela to see the happy faces of the people who have been able to have access to public services that they did not have for years, especially in this difficult economic situation of the country, after we stopped receiving massive transfer of resources in the communal councils. Now we have been able to solve specific problems of water, health, agricultural roads, etc. There have been visits by officials from the Federal Council of Government, the Ministry of Communes, mayors’ offices and governors’ offices to advise and accompany the communes, and we see how a project was well executed and a closing process is carried out. This project received a second financing, that is, it received double the financing promised for the first consultation, which was about 400,000 bolivars.
Venezuela Prepares for Second National Popular Consultation to Select State-Funded Projects
Will these election processes continue to be repeated in the communes?
This Sunday, August 25, we are going to vote to choose the second project in each commune to be financed by the national government and at once the processes will be accelerated to complete the projects, seeking support by all means because the president has already announced at the end of November or in early December there will be a third consultation. From next year there will be four annual consultations. We are going to be in a mode of constant execution of projects, especially in the area of public services to solve specific problems. The president has also said that he is going to launch a popular consultation to prioritize production projects in the 4,505 circuits that we have and it is estimated that between 2025 and 2026 we will have consolidated 6,000 communal territories. It is there and with the people there that the nation’s budget will be executed.
On June 6, President Maduro, at the El Maizal Commune, gave the go-ahead to a reform of the Organic Law of the People’s Power.
Yes, some laws of the People’s Power are being discussed in the National Assembly, such as the Law of the Communes. There are other laws on which we are going to start a national discussion after August 25 because we want, as the president said, to shield the People’s Power, to protect the People’s Power, the commune, from the bureaucracy, from the amount of formalities that sometimes exist and that hinder progress, hinder the faster work of a commune, especially on the subject of competencies, of the administration of economic programs, and what we want is to facilitate the mechanisms because in the communes we have to go through so many bureaucratic steps to be able to develop our projects. We do not want this path to be so traumatic, where sometimes the very superstructure of the State prevents us from advancing with greater speed, especially in the resolution of social problems, because in the end what the community wants is to see its neighborhood, its community become better.
During the electoral campaign, President Maduro assigned you a task on the housing issue. What has been done so far?
The president gave the leadership to the Ministry of Communes of three million houses that we are going to build in the next six years. We have already called the housing committees of each communal council to get together in the circuit. A communal circuit can have 10, 15, 17 or 20 councils, and we will form the great communal housing circuit in each of the 4,500 existing circuits. There we start working on the basis of priorities, which families receive housing urgently, which are the houses that were left unfinished and that we should finish them, which are the houses that should have benefits to improve roofs, windows, floors, or some other housing services. We are doing a census study, the number of families, how many people live in a house, how many are overcrowded. All these tasks would be completed in the next few days and we would have information in order to present concrete proposals to the president of the Republic. I take this opportunity to make a call to the Venezuelan people, to the commune leaders and the people who need, who dream, who hope to have their own housing through the communal council, to continue organizing, to continue debating and to talk, analyze, think and write about how this methodology should be to build millions of houses.
How are these tasks of a housing plan going to be shared by the ministries?
We are a single government and there must be a centrality in the cabinet of President Maduro, and although the Ministry of Housing may have the resources, materials, methods of construction, there has already been a clear instruction from the president that each circuit, each commune should organize its housing plan and that the Ministry of Communes should discuss with the people organized with the housing committees and design the policy or complement it. We should design the policy or complement it and establish the new methodology, and it is through the People’s Power that we are going to develop the big projects, not only of urban housing but also of rural housing, peasant housing, housing in the neighborhood, located where each person has his or her land and is waiting for a little house.
What message do you send to the country’s commune members?
I ask the Venezuelan people to be very attentive to the defense of the homeland. We must read again, we must look again for all the messages of our Commander Hugo Chávez, especially when he talked about the transfer of power to our people, when he called us to build people’s organizations, that we should be protagonists of the great transformations in the Venezuelan communities and that we should keep in mind that the revolution has enemies, that the Venezuelan homeland has enemies because it has great oil reserves, great reserves of many minerals, which today imperialism, the big transnationals and the bourgeoisie need in order to sustain their way of life. Venezuela has to take care of its territory, it depends on the patriots and, although it may seem unimportant for some politicians of the right or the left, we endorse and support President Nicolás Maduro’s decision to work with the organized people. A housing committee, a health committee, an agricultural committee, an economy committee, a communal council may be something that has little relevance for some people, but for us it is the organizational cell that, if it multiplies, if it becomes millions of organizational experiences in the country, we will be the solid base of the Bolivarian Revolution because we do not have another homeland, because we will not have another opportunity to be government as the common people, who live up there in the highest parts of the neighborhood or who live in the most sheltered countryside where perhaps almost nobody can reach, where not even the media can reach. Today we are the government, we have the opportunity to decide on the resources and how to solve our issues, because we are not going to have that in another system of government but only in our revolution.
(Últimas Noticias) by Eligio Rojas and Karla Ron
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/SC/DZ
