Co-ops transform Venezuela

For over a decade, an abandoned refilling station owned by Venezuelan oil company PDVSA in western Caracas was a place of death. Community residents said it was a place where women were raped, murdered bodies dumped and drugs used and dealt.

This multi-acre space embodied the fear and hopelessness gripping the surrounding communities during the early and mid-1990s — a time when so-called Venezuelan leaders conspired with the “Washington Consensus” to push neoliberal policies to maintain the continued prosperity of the few at the expense of the masses of Venezuela’s poor.

Since 2004, this space has been transformed from a hopeless wasteland to a place of production, art, sustenance and health. It now represents the hope of a community that has been reborn."