* A member of the editorial collective of El Libertario (www.nodo50.org/ellibertario; in Spanish & English) prepared this article for the 6th edition of the Costa Rican (A) journal La Libertad [September 2007; http://revistalalibertad.blogspot.com] in response to an inconsistent effort to establish impossible affinities between Chavism and Anarchism.
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One of the successes of the inter-bourgeois confrontation that has been happening in Venezuela for almost a decade is the moving of the media polarization into an international space. This biased and infantilized point of view could well confuse some less awakened libertarian spirits. This indeed seems to be the case with the opinions voiced by companero Rogelio Cedeno in his text ‘Venezuela today: Realities and half truths’, published in # 5 of the Costa Rican journal La Libertad. Cedeno in a turnabout of intellectual prestidigitation asks for the social situation in Costa Rica precisely what he denies for that of Venezuela: a non-problematic and non-Manichean point of view. While, on the one hand, the Costa Rican movement opposed to the Free Trade Agreement is “…a wholly plural movement that breaks with the simplistic schema based upon the existence of a presumed polarization between left and right”, on the other hand, in Venezuela, the forces that are not aligned with the government represent, “…the brutal violence and cynicism of the forces of reaction”, that desperately yearn for a return to the days of the adeco-copeyan democracy. A strange business this…barely a paragraph earlier Cedeno had affirmed that, “visions in black and white are of little use to those of us who keep on thinking and struggling for a better world.” This very same horizon is shared by a constellation of revolutionary left-wing groups who, despite being made invisible by the propaganda of both the private sector and the state, reject the past as much as they do the present and continue, against the current, to struggle for a better future.