On Sunday, they zeroed in on the municipality of Sucre, where the mayor of José Vicente Rangel Avalos, son of the former vice president José Vicente Rangel, remains an influential figure among the president's supporters.
Sucre, in particular Petare and the notorious barrios of Unión and Félix Ribas, has an unenviable reputation for violence.
Rival gangs frequently resort to gunfights either between themselves or with the police – or, sometimes, even both. Whether there's a connection or not, garbage collection and other public services are deemed inadequate.
- Both points were picked up by Carlos Ocariz of Primero Justicia, who's put himself forward as a nominee as the opposition candidate to take on Rangel Avalos, as he went on a walkabout in Caucaguita, a humble parish in the east of the capital. "This is a community with 35 years of being forgotten, which doesn't deserve to be in the condition that it is," he said.
Ocariz focused on the present. "It cannot be that with a barrel of oil at more than $100 and here they don't have drains and go on living in tin shacks," he declared.
"Here, there's only thuggery and hunger. Until when are we going to live with this?" Primero Justicia, he claimed, was going to turn Sucre into a model municipality.
Copei Secretary-General Oscar Pérez, who'd also like a crack at the Sucre mayoralty, overlooked Ocariz' implicit swipe and joined in.
Sucre, he claimed, was "the most violent and most dirty" municipality in Venezuela. Garbage wasn't collected, it was simply put somewhere else, he added.
These sleazy opportunists can only get a toehold in the barrios (c/o CIA analysis, money and leadership) because Hugo Chávez and his bolivarians have set off on the wrong foot right from the beginning. They have chosen the path of reforming capitalism into socialism -- and have now come up against the wall for not instituting a radical socialist plan to organize the barrios on a socialist basis from the get-go. Today they're continuing trying to implement socialism on-the-cheap -- but it's still too little and almost too late, as the capitalist problems inherited from the ancien régime have continued to mount.
ReplyDeleteThere is no substitute for socialism and socialist democracy. Capitalist methods just don't cut it, even if they promise you the world, up front...