Posted on 05/12/2002 3:09:41 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
CARACAS, Venezuela -- When President Hugo Chavez is to appear at a public event, Carmen Zambrano puts the word out in her shantytown neighborhood.
Within hours, people start knocking at her door with letters for her to deliver to the president or one of his aides.
"Last week, I took about 10 letters," the 45-year-old tax inspector says. "They mostly ask for medicine or surgeries. In two or three days, the president's people are calling."
It's all part of a day's work for Zambrano as leader of a Bolivarian Circle, part of a grass-roots network that spreads the populist Chavez gospel through community work.
That is what Chavez's supporters say. Political opponents tell a much different story.
"They are presidential gangs," charges Caracas Mayor Alfredo Peña, who has seen Bolivarian Circle members surround City Hall, yelling epithets and chanting slogans, on more than one occasion.
Circle members have staged raucous demonstrations in front of media offices, thrown eggs at opposition legislators and staged counterprotests at anti-Chavez events such as street marches. Police have put up ropes to separate the two sides.
Some allege that the Circles are really government-armed militias whose members have been trained and indoctrinated in Havana or serve as fronts for leftist guerrilla groups in neighboring Colombia.
"Weapons are being bought to arm members of the Bolivarian Circles and create a parallel armed force to defend the regimen," charges Francisco Arias Cardenas, a one-time presidential candidate. But like others who have made similar claims, Cardenas presents no evidence to back his allegation.
Chavez vehemently denies that the Circles have any sinister purpose and insists they are community Samaritans.
"The Bolivarian Circles are not armed groups," he recently said on his Sunday radio show. "Any member caught carrying weapons will be kicked out."
Nevertheless, officials admit that some members do carry guns, though not, they say, on government orders.
On April 11, the day Chavez was deposed in a coup before being restored to power 48 hours later, a TV camera captured a half-dozen members of Bolivarian Circles firing handguns from atop a downtown overpass onto opposition marchers demanding that the president resign.
One of the gunmen was a city councilman, Richard Peñalver, who belongs to Chavez's Fifth Republic Movement party.
During exchanges of gunfire that day, 17 people were killed and 200 wounded.
"I cannot deny that some people belonging to the Bolivarian Circles have deviated from the spirit of the Circles and carried arms," says Freddy Bernal, district mayor of Caracas' Libertador area and a principal Circle organizer who received training in community organizing in Havana last year.
Opponents insist that Chavez should disband the groups, which number about 70,000 across the country. Each is made up of seven to 15 members.
"We have to demand that Chavez dissolve these groups for the good of the country," says Felipe Mujica, an opposition leader. "No one can believe that these are civilians fighting against poverty. That's a camouflage for a paramilitary organization."
But dismantling of the groups, which have turned into a crucial source of support for Chavez, seems unlikely.
The Circles were named for Simon Bolivar, Venezuela's independence hero and the icon of Chavez's leftist, nationalistic platform that he has dubbed "Bolivarianism."
After the April 11 coup, thousands of enraged Circle members surrounded Miraflores presidential palace, calling for Chavez's reinstatement. Hundreds also assembled outside the Fort Tiuna army base, where Chavez was being held prisoner, and besieged the television stations that refused to broadcast the swelling tide of support for the overthrown leader.
"The Circles played a very important role in defending the president," says political scientist Angel Alvarez of the Central University of Venezuela. "They have an enormous capacity to mobilize in the street."
Some analysts attribute much of the controversy surrounding the Circles to hysteria.
"There are radical actors in the Bolivarian Circles who could be armed. But in Venezuela, a lot of people are armed," says Luis Vicente Leon, director of Datanalisis polling firm. "If you go to the opposition, you'll find armed people there, too."
Circles scoff at allegations that they are being armed by the government and see their role as helping Chavez aid the poor.
Duties of Zambrano's group range from helping people fill out credit applications at state-owned banks to steering the needy through queues for free medicine to contacting the mayor's office to get a staircase repaired.
"We're a group of women who do work for the community. We're not officials, but we facilitate the contact with the government agencies," says Zambrano, a single mother of four who formed her Circle four months ago. "We get a little better access."
But Circle members do not deny that they play a political role as well.
Whenever there is an event to support Chavez, "the regional coordinators call us and tell us to bring people," says Maritza Castro, a 44-year-old homemaker and neighbor of Zambrano's who leads her own Circle.
On April 11, shortly before the president was ousted from power, both Castro and Zambrano were at the Miraflores palace, wearing the red berets that show they are Chavez supporters, to "defend" the building from opposition marchers. On April 13, prior to Chavez's reinstatement, they and other group members demonstrated at three television stations that had imposed a news blackout.
"We love President Chavez," says Castro, who formed her group after receiving a furnished government house on the outskirts of Caracas that her son now uses. "No one has ever helped us poor people like Chavez. We're not going to let them take him away."
Such bedrock support is seen as vital for Chavez, whose political future remains precarious in a nation with a deeply polarized society.
"Armed or unarmed, the Circles are a type of life insurance for Chavez -- `If you topple me, I'll rock the country from coast to coast,' " says Leon.
Chavistas: Venezuelan street toughs: Helping "revolution" or crushing dissent?*** "Comandante" Lina Ron, who considers herself a modern version of "Tania," a woman who fought alongside Cuban revolutionary Ernesto Che Guevara, says she is a willing martyr for Chavez's cause. She was arrested after leading a violent pro-Chavez counter-protest against demonstrating university students….
Ron and her followers burned a U.S. flag in Caracas' central Plaza Bolivar just after the September terrorist attacks in the United States. The anti-Washington demonstration appalled many Venezuelans.
….Chavez has called Ron a political prisoner. "We salute Lina Ron, a female soldier who deserves the respect of all Venezuelans," he said recently. …Now Ron has become a focal point for debate about Chavez's "Bolivarian Circles," which the government calls self-help neighborhood groups. Chavez opponents call them a violent threat to democracy styled after Cuba's Revolutionary Block Committees. Created after Castro urged Venezuelans to "organize" to defend Chavez's revolution, the committees are forming street tribunals to demand Ron's release - and to symbolically prosecute government opponents as "traitors."***
Chavistas Attack Venezuela's Congress - Bolivarian neighborhood groups inciting wholesale violence
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