UNESCO. General Conference; 30th; Records ... - unesdoc - Unesco

since it comes from below, as the Chairperson of the Executive Board also said. It is originating from the grass
roots, not from the elite, in a process of reconstituting the Republic and the State, a constituent process. In less than
eight months, Venezuela crossed a formidable barrier, the Venezuelan people resorted to a referendum, utilizing an
option afforded by the Constitution, to elect a great constituent assembly, which is supra-constitutional and enjoys
extraordinary powers, against the opinion of the leading lights who had been delaying changes for over two
decades. And in less than three months of the Assembly being established, we have a new Constitution in
Venezuela which will be submitted to a referendum in a few weeks’ time.
(21.14) My wife, Marisabel, who is an elected member of the Assembly and chairs its Human Rights and Social
Rights Committee, was reminding me that progressive provisions have been approved to guarantee fundamental
human rights, children’s rights, minority rights, women’s rights, the rights of indigenous peoples. I want to tell you
that in Venezuela, for the first time in our history, the indigenous peoples came down from the mountains and went
to the cities to establish assemblies by themselves, and without electoral laws being involved. After all, what
electoral law can we impose on the indigenous Guarao or Yaruro or Cuiba, with their own criteria and their own
idiosyncrasy? And they elected three representatives to the Constituent Assembly. And they are now there,
ensuring direct, and not indirect, representation. In this way, a new Republic is being born, a new political system
is being born, and a new State which we have named a State based on the rule of justice more than the rule of law,
because the law is oftentimes cold and dogmatic. Beyond law lies its goal, which is justice.
(21.15) In Venezuela we are also taking up challenges for ourselves in the economic sphere, and constructing a
new economic model. I believe that we have to strive hard in the world to break out of the neo-liberal trend which
is taking us straight to hell. Globalization is fine. Modernity, science, technology and competitiveness are also just
the thing. All these terms are welcome, but they do not have to lead us to hell. We have to invent, to quote another
Venezuelan sage, Don Simón Rodríguez, the Socrates of Caracas as he was called by Bolívar, one of his favourite
pupils. He said that we in South America could not continue to copy models; we must either invent or err. We are
obliged to invent our own models, an economic model, and learn to be daring, daring to take up challenges.
Sometimes with a little boldness, which I believe is always lacking, we are designing and building on the humanist
road, an economic self-management, endogenous, competitive and humanist model, since it gives their rightful
place to human beings, which is as it should be. Economic models must work for the benefit of the human being,
not for that of the macro-economy. The integration which takes place between us has to be profoundly humane, and
we cannot leave it to technicians or just to econometricians. It has to be all-embracing.
(21.16) In Venezuela we are also making every effort to give people back their fundamental rights: education,
culture, science, technology, the right to life and right to participate, and their political rights. We are, of course,
encountering a mountain of problems. To give you a simple example and without going into too much detail, we
have a group of Venezuelan government ministers, including the Minister of Education, Dr Navarro. We have
undertaken an educational revolution and one of the objectives we have achieved in a short time is an increase in
the number of children attending school: in just a few months we increased the number by 2%. Six hundred
thousand children who were not at school six months ago are now enrolled. But to do this we have had to be very
firm in holding in check the neo-liberal tendency to privatize everything. Had it been up to the neo-liberals, the
very air we breathe would have been privatized.
(21.17) Education cannot be privatized, for heaven’s sake! Health cannot be privatized! Maybe in hell, but not
here. The devil will quite likely charge a flash of fire for anyone wanting to study or for anyone needing to be seen
to in hell. But here on earth this cannot be. Education has been undergoing privatization in Venezuela for years and
fees have been charged even in State schools. Furthermore, if the children did not arrive neatly dressed in their
uniforms and well-shod, they were refused admission. And they had to come well-fed, because there was no food
for them there. Look, Madam, they said to the mothers, here is the book list. If he doesn’t bring all the books,
properly covered, your child cannot come in. Even going as far as to threaten educational officials throughout the
country with dismissal, we told the whole country that people must refuse to pay for schooling. It was an
instruction I gave the people: that no one must pay for schooling. Of course this presented problems. Some teachers
ended up hiding on the roof of the school because parents came looking for them to ask for their money back. One
head teacher fainted when a presidential commission arrived to ask why she was charging fees. She had said that
the president was the boss in the Palace, but that she was the boss in her school. I sent a commission to speak to her
and the lady fainted on its arrival.
(21.18) The result of this initiative is that 600,000 children are now in school, a school run on Bolivarian lines
where everything is included - breakfast, lunch and dinner, a full day of class, medical attention, cultural and
sporting activities in the afternoon, because sport is part of health as culture is part of education. We have
restructured the Ministry of Education, as culture had been separate, marginalized. Certainly, we do have José
Antonio Abreu, that eminent man of culture of Venezuela and the world, to whom I pay tribute, and Carmen Ramia
too, a great Venezuelan fighter in the cause of culture, and Jesús Soto and Carlos Cruz Diez, two eminent
Venezuelan men of culture, representatives of the spirit of creativity.
(21.19) The armed forces are thus proposing a complete social project. I am a military man; I wanted to be a
painter when I was small; later I wanted to be a major-league baseball player. If you will allow me to break with
protocol, the thing is that my good friend, the President of Cuba, is getting together a baseball team, and has
promised to give us a thrashing in Havana. In conjunction with the Havana Summit, Venezuela and Cuba are to
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