by SUSAN SPRONK and JEFFERY R. WEBER
Rosangela Orozco, who is affectionately known as “La Chiqui,” is a young militant from the Caracas barrio 23 de enero and a leading organizer with the Gran Polo Patriótico (Great Patriotic Pole, GPP). The GPP was created in preparation for the October 2012 elections and to deepen the Bolivarian process. The GPP builds on the legacy of the Polo Patriótico, a coalition of left political parties and social organizations that supported Chávez in electoral campaigns and referenda, which was replaced by the Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (United Socialist Party of Venezuela, PSUV) founded in 2007. Today, the GPP is conceived as an organization that aims to bring together diverse social movement militants and political party activists who support the revolutionary process but are not necessarily comfortable with the rigid organization of the PSUV. We caught up with Rosangela at a meeting of the Gran Polo Patriótico in Caracas.
Susan Spronk and Jeffery R. Webber: What is your political history?
Rosangela Orozco: I am a militant of a popular grassroots, communal movement that was named after a fallen compañero of the Coordinadora Simón Bolivar from a very popular neighbourhood [where I live] in Caracas, the 23 de enero. This Coordinadora brought together many youth and militants of different left tendencies in the parish of 23 de enero in the 1990s. On April 11, 2002, Alexis Gonzalo was killed during the coup d’état [that tried to oust Chávez].
The coup d’état was primarily a “media” coup, particularly given the lies that the privately owned media and the foreign media tells about Venezuela, about how Chávez is a dictator, and how everything going on inside the country is bad, etc. etc. They kidnapped Chávez with the idea that they would assassinate him, and replace him with someone who would respond to the entire capitalist system, someone with one of the last names of the big families that monopolize everything in this country, including the media that sells information like a commodity. But of course, this coup did not last very long because the people took to the streets.
This compañero Alexis lost his life during this period and we took his name as our motto, because he was an example to us all. He was an internationalist, and an example of a young revolutionary. He participated in the literacy campaigns in Nicaragua. We wanted to preserve his name, but more importantly, to remind ourselves that we need to dedicate our lives and everything we do to revolution, up to and including this interview.
I started as an activist in 1998 when Chávez came to power. I started with the social missions, working at the grassroots on communal issues. We would participate in meetings where we would talk about politics, Marxism, feminism, Guevarism, social change, because this is the reality of what we are living in Venezuela; we have to wake up. But back then, Chávez was not yet talking about socialism; we in the barrios were more politically advanced than Chávez. We were talking about revolution while he was talking about a “government that includes everybody,” the Third Way, etc.
But the representative democracy that Chávez stood for in the early years is an alternative to what we were living in the Fourth Republic [the pejorative phrase denominating the pacted two-party democracy that existed in Venezuela from 1958 until Chávez’s election], and the political repression. We in the 23 de enero, for example, experienced violent state repression on February 27, 1989 [the Caracazo, the day when riots against IMF-imposed austerity were brutally suppressed by the military]. I was only nine-years-old then, but even then I could see how awful it was that arms were being used directly against our community. We didn’t know why or what was happening. The reason that we were attacked is simply because in our neighbourhood there were popular organizations confronting the state in this fight. But we were not the only ones. The same thing happened in La Vega, Petare, in different parishes of Caracas, anywhere that people went to the streets to protest against the brutal neoliberal policies of the government.
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