Merida

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has inaugurated new government-run hypermarkets (large supermarkets), which replace of the recently nationalised Exito hypermarket chain.

The seventh summit of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA), a nine-nation anti-imperialist trading bloc established in 2004 by Cuba and Venezuela, was held in Cochabamba, Bolivia over October 16-17.

Thousands of peasant rights’ activists marched in Guarico, Venezuela on Thursday to demand an end to impunity for the killings of 220 farmer organizers since the 2001 Land Reform Law was passed. The march was sparked by two recent attacks presumed to have been planned and paid for by large estate owners against well-known land reform activists.

The president of Venezuela’s National Statistics Institute (INE), Elias Eljuri, said on August 7 that since Hugo Chavez took office in 1999, “Poverty has been dropping ... from 49% in 1998 to 26.4% in 2009”.

In a summit in Venezuela on June 24, the Caribbean and South American integration organisation ALBA was strengthened by the addition of Ecuador, St Vincent and the Grenadines, and Antigua and Barbuda as its newest member countries.

Following a week of inspections of privately owned rice processing facilities aimed at assuring the supply of essential foods at regulated prices, the Venezuelan government announced plans to expropriate a plant owned by the multinational food company Cargill, which was found to be modifying all its rice in order to evade price controls on basic food items.

After it was officially announced that the “yes” vote had won the February 15 referendum on a constitutional amendment that would remove limits on the number of times any elected official could stand in elections for public office with 54.4% of the vote, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez delivered a speech from the balcony of the Miraflores Presidential Palace, his two daughters beside him. The victory removes the current two-term limit will allow Chavez to stand in the presidential election when his current term finishes at the end of 2012.

Over August 9-11, almost all of the candidates of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) registered for the upcoming November 23 state and regional elections in the National Electoral Council (CNE) office, many accompanied by large marches of their supporters.

Unemployment in Venezuela dropped from 8.8% in July 2007 to 7.2% in July 2008, the National Statistics Institute (INE) announced on August 14.

Cooperativist ecological farmers supported by the Venezuelan government’s land reform programs were attacked on August 7 by armed and masked men who, the farmers say, were hired by large estate owners in the area to cut short the changes heralded by the Bolivarian revolution in their rural Andean mountain valley of El Vallecito.

Venezuela has won Miss Universe again. Meanwhile, my friend in Bolivia wrote on her blog that day, “I don’t know if anyone as big as me deserves to be alive”.

“Once they got their wages, [the workers] occupied the installations and demanded that the company go, then they occupied the offices and demanded that the administration of Sincreba [Merida Waste Incineration and Recycling System] retire”, Simon Rodriguez told Green Left Weekly on the peaceful take-over by its workers of the Solid Waste Processing Plant in Merida in September last year.