World Venezuela Newswire Archive

Despite all the expectations to deepen the Bolivarian process, the president Hugo Chavés Frias, made 2 partnership with the multinational companies Chevron-Texaco and Microsoft. Both agreements were signed before the referedum took place, but were as deliberately mugged by the progressive media and ignored by the conservative media.

One of them is a binacional gasoduto, sponsor by the Venezuela government and the Colombia government and coordinated by the American multinational Chevron-Texaco. Acording to Chavéz it´s a “direct way out of this giant asian market”. To construct the gasoduto, Venezuela volunteer to enter in the Plan Pueblo Panamá, a collection of infrastructure with the objective to respond to the American multinationals needs.

Parallel to that, the Venezuela´s government, via the education ministry, signed with Microsoft a contract to provide software to the schools across the country, contradicting the incentive policy of free software, which the government had adopted until Felipe Péres left the Planification and Development Ministry. According to Richard Stallman, the founder of the GNU movement (free software): “The Venezuela´s government just made a critical error, which consequences will give control of computing to a global corporation: make a contract with Microsoft to use the program in the schools.”

The silence and the non-resistence of the popular movements just amplified this situation, disarticulated by the expectations of the left government speech. In case Chavéz continue with immune posture before popular movements, we will see those movements fight against the local bourgeoisie just to let a free way to the global bourgeoisie, which has no problem to negotiate with the “bolivarian revolution”.

Links :
Indymedia Brazil [pt]
Rebeldia magazine [es]
Venezuela: gasoduto binacional e Chevron Texaco [pt]
Mais do que nenhum lugar, as escolas devem usar software livre [pt]

A spontaneous demonstration in solidarity with the people of Venezuela took place in Edinburgh, Sunday, 15th of august, co-inciding with the simultaneous referendum against Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, and initiator of massive social reforms benefiting the poor. The Edinburgh Fringe festival also co-incided with the demonstration, lending a high profile of publicity to the cause of the demonstration, particular when the demonstration with comedian Mark Thomas accidently met the Edinburgh Samba School, the party rocked.