This interview took place on March 03, 2021 between Roberto Patiño and journalist Hugo Prieto, and was originally published in Prodavinci under the title, “Roberto Patiño: ‘El antídoto contra la represión es la organización popular’”
IQLatino has acquired the rights to translate and publish this interview in English.
After spending a month in hiding from the police siege set up by the government in December, Roberto Patiño* has returned to community work. The people showed that they were preoccupied with projects that have to do with the food security of children, the reduction of violence and the promotion of opportunities in productive work, without asking for political loyalty or that you wear a red, white or blue shirt in return.
The strengthening of popular organization and the creation of citizenship are the best antidotes to deactivate a political system that relies on repression and an insatiable appetite for power.
If we are really going to show that we are human beings, this is the moment when solidarity should move us. And the question is: is solidarity a spontaneous manifestation or the product of a discussion or debate within a community?
Solidarity, perhaps, is part of a very deep question. What is the meaning of life? And for me, the meaning of life is in the other. In bonding with the other. So solidarity has a spontaneous dimension. That we can help, for example, a person who in the middle of this conversation suffers a mishap. I think that our reaction would not be one of indolence or to pretend to be ignorant—that’s not my problem, I don’t know that person—which would be the opposite of solidarity, but rather we would look for a way to help. It would be a spontaneous gesture. It is there. Probably, in Venezuela these gestures are counted daily and by the thousands. Now, given the magnitude of the complex humanitarian emergency that is being experienced in Venezuela, of the prolonged crisis that we have lived through for so many years, I think that we must look for mechanisms, plan actions, so that solidarity is persistent and effective.
How do you come to that conclusion?
I can only speak from our experience. In 2016 we started with the issue of food security for children; we did it—on the weekends with some popular sancochos, associated with that spontaneity. Although it seemed like a good initiative, we soon realized that it was insufficient, with one soup a week you will not solve the problem of the malnutrition of a child. It was then about planning and executing projects that were consistent over time.
My impression is that the idea that “we are all illegitimate” has taken hold. Up to that point, let’s say, we escalated polarization in Venezuela. Everything is instrumentalized, everything is relativized, ideologization and political calculation mediate in any initiative. How do you involve people in solidarity purposes, whose objective is the most vulnerable?
My social work began in La Vega (2007) and the question I asked myself was how an authoritarian government, whose main interest was to accumulate power while curtailing freedom of expression, had so much support in the popular sectors? The first thing I did was meet people to try to understand them. To listen to them and put myself in their shoes. Otherwise, one acts based on prejudices looking only from a distance. I met Gabriela, who helped me understand the reality of what Chavismo has been and also the undercurrents that brought Chavismo. She had a sticker on her front door that read: “Who doesn’t love Chávez, doesn’t want his mother.” That shocked me. Because what is more sacred to you than your mother? What I think is that people felt that the Chavista project recognized them and put them at the center of political action. It’s what people felt, regardless of whether that was true or not.
The truth is that the social projects of Chavismo were loaded with ideology and oriented —as it was later demonstrated— to guarantee political loyalty. Is there a way not to fall into that trap?
The answer to that is that the changes have to come from the community itself. If you review what our action has been—in terms of reducing violence, accompanying the victims of extrajudicial executions and the food security of children—the common element, the driving force behind everything, is community empowerment. So these are cultural changes that we are targeting. The way you relate to the other and to the public.
People can be masters of their own destiny. That idea is very powerful. It is politicized, it is ideologized, as Mario Lobo Zagallo would say: “Russians also play.” I would say that there is a confrontation, a dispute, not between two political systems, but between two ways of understanding community work.
Totally. I believe that Chavismo has developed community control and blackmail mechanisms. And that is where we have insisted on making the contrast. We have never asked anyone, when defining one of our programs, if they are part of the opposition or if they are Chavistas; if the color of your shirt is red, white or blue. Never. That a child is well fed is something that interests all Venezuelans and especially the members of this community. In the same way, we are interested that young people can invest their time in a sports space or have access to programs for training at work. Or that a mother who lost a child, many times because of the State, can get support in a social fabric that supports her, but also get legal advice to file a complaint that is not forgotten. That interests us all. It does not matter if you are a Chavista or an opponent. There are projects that transcend polarization and it is in the facts where I have seen that this is possible.
How has power been taken? The slogan continues to be “commune or nothing” and any other form of organization represents (for the Chavista leadership) a threat or a danger.
I can tell you many anecdotes of political commissioners who come from power to try to sabotage an initiative of ours. That ranges from trying to prevent the operation of a dining room to issuing an arrest warrant to blocking bank accounts. But the community reaction is what has protected us. And I mean it in a broad sense, they are not the militants of a political party, but the people who know that the work that is being done there has not discriminated and seeks to strengthen that community fabric.
There is a social dislocation between the needs of the popular sectors and the urgencies of the middle class. How do Venezuelans of any social background—the population in general—convince ourselves that the work that seeks to build citizenship is necessary?
Two things around what you propose. One, what you call “the urgencies” in eastern Caracas—and their equivalents in the rest of the country–are totally legitimate. If you are over 60 years old and your concern is that you may be infected with coronavirus, why does that not count or is not valid? Is that less important? Is that ridiculous? That is very important to me. Now, I have not based my political and social action there. But I don’t detract from it. Nor did I discredit it. Two, just as Chavismo has a vision of control towards the neighborhoods, there is also a vision of indolence or criticism. Perhaps to radicalized sectors of the opposition, what we do seems like populism. And they do not understand, perhaps because they have not organized in their own communities, that the construction of citizenship is what produces the changes.
How could that be translated into concrete facts? Could you refer to some experiences?
I am going to mention an example. We recently organized a community assembly in Pinto Salinas—30 have been held (since the beginning of the year) following biosecurity protocols—among other things because I wanted to give meaning to what happened to us in December and thank the gestures of solidarity and those who have been with us. True, there are many reasons to be afraid—the fact that bank accounts have been blocked, arrest warrants have been issued—led me to wonder, while I was hiding from Sebin, how are people going to react? And any of them would have understood it, in the midst of hardships, suffering, that people go through. It is not about doing abstraction. Or to quote statistics. 45 percent of Venezuelans have no water. You have to understand how unworthy it is to be unable to flush the water from the toilet in three weeks or that your salary does not even suffice to buy a deodorant and that everything you earn you invest in food to be able to eat badly. Or the inability to get gas. You have to cook with firewood. Inhale smoke. Weaken the respiratory system amid the covid-19 pandemic. It is destroying the environment. In the midst of this situation, I could understand that people told me “I don’t need one more problem. I’m not going to bond with a guy who can get me in trouble.” Which, by the way, happens to me with familiar people, with childhood friends. “Watch out, Roberto is on the police radar. Don’t visit the house!” But in the neighborhood, in the community, the reaction has been the opposite and I needed to be grateful for that. The community wanted all of our allies to mobilize to say: respect our work.
You privilege political culture, the construction of citizenship, the ability you have to make your own decision, or you privilege political militancy and subscribe to a partisan vision.
It’s not even about those options. There is a more tragic vision. The perspective that a dictatorship manages, under which I am not a subject, I am not a citizen, I limit myself to waiting for what they decide, I limit myself to obeying. Others run the public and I’m just here, waiting. I do not believe in that. The real change in Venezuela is from the bottom up. It’s going to take time. The main obstacle is that there are people who took power for them. They expropriate political parties. They colonize the institutions. They run over communities and kill people to scare them. They persecute political dissent. That is a great obstacle that Venezuela has. But that does not mean that we sit idly by, that we do nothing right now. For us, getting out of the dictatorship means that we have to build what comes next. And that’s it. But I want to clarify something. Many people personalize the problem. Nicolás Maduro. The high hierarchs. And for me, that’s not the problem. The problem is a political system, a regime, where paranoia and the appetite for power justify all kinds of abuses.
We have reached the point where doing politics means taking risks, where joining a community can be classified as a crime. What meaning do you find in this approach?
For me, as for any human being, the most important thing is my family. That the Sebin entered my mother’s house with long guns. That is an outrage to the most sacred. Now, does that generate hatred against the people who are in power? No. I don’t feel hatred against them, I don’t feel hatred against anyone. I know that this is the product of a system and I am fighting against a system. I try to build, then, on things that deactivate that system.
You have been in community service for 13 years. And one can say that Roberto Patiño is not a deputy, he is not in the front row of a political party. I don’t know if he meets with the people who make the decisions. Does community work make you a political leader?
That question allows me to say something that is central to me. Community work is an end in itself. Regardless of whether or not I have a chance to influence politics. For me, both in community work and in human relations, it is the center of trust building. I don’t keep cards up my sleeve. I am very direct when I tell people what I believe and what I think. I also have a vocation of service in politics and that is why I have been in a political party for many years. Do you think I have wasted my time doing community work? No, we—in 13 years—have served more than 10 million plates of food to children in the midst of a complex humanitarian emergency. I question myself and I don’t know if I’m going to do something more important in my life. Does it have more value to do it without the political resources of the State? I do not know. What I’m doing is the most important thing for me, which is being linked to people. It’s what gives my life meaning. I know that my work—on a daily basis—has concrete results.
I don’t know if the historian Margarita López Maya acted as a prophet when she said that the government—once it had reduced or subdued the political parties—would target the civil society organizations. The truth is that this has been accomplished without delay. The attacks, the disqualifications, the follow-up, the threats are part of the day to day. How to deal with this system of control, repression and humiliation?
I think the only antidote we have against repression is more organization. That the initiatives, that the civil society projects, are decentralized and do not depend on individuals. And that, for me, is one of the great satisfactions within the bitterness that we lived in December. We never stopped even though I had to hide for a month. Despite the blocked accounts, the project kept going. I think you have to know how to read the internal dynamics within that political system to which I referred. I believe that there is a faction within the regime that became aware that the serious economic problems—which is what most mortifies them—do not have a solution if there is no reinsertion of the country into the orbit of the West. Let’s get concrete. The Chinese have not put a dollar in Venezuela for four years. Many of the projects have come to nothing. President Xi Jinping bases his legitimacy on the fight against corruption and from what we already know, there has been a lot of corruption in Venezuela. Russia is a military power, but it does not have the economic capacity to shoulder Venezuela. Iran can help solve the gasoline problem, but that’s about it. There is no possibility of normalization with the West if civil society is repressed, if the political siege they have is tightened. And there is an incentive.
It would be a point on the agenda of a faction of the regime. But does that faction have the capacity to impose such a decision? Deactivating the presence of Venezuelan oil in the world market is something that Chavismo should never have done. Yet they did. They were able to become aware of that mistake. But we don’t know, and this is a surprising paradox, if the opposition sees this as an opportunity.
We arrive at the hypothesis of change. I do not believe in violent solutions to the Venezuelan conflict. They are not—and in this I want to be very clear—sustainable solutions over time. What is the alternative? A negotiation, which involves discussing the possibility of reintegrating the country into the West, as long as clear rules are drawn up as part of a democratic transition and in Venezuela we can have mechanisms for political coexistence. That is the solution. Let’s see how it could be seen from the opposition. After 20 years, is there a possibility that what happened in Argentina will happen, where Kirchnerism returned to power? Yes. If the guys compete for power, they play by the rules and the majority of the country gives them confidence, yes. But they can’t do what they want. They cannot carry out operations like those of the FAES, which assassinate people with impunity. You cannot persecute opponents or co-opt institutions for yourself. You cannot break the Constitution and run over the private sector and civil society. That is what it is about, establishing rules. How could it be seen from the Chavismo perspective? After 20 years of revolution, are we going to accept that these guys can come to power? If not what? It is the Cubanization of this. And that is my great fear. Where we are headed to is a path in which we all lose.
I think that after 20 years we can become aware that tomorrow can be worse. It is something we must understand.
Undoubtedly. That is precisely the Cubanization. The funny thing is that Cuba wants to get out of it. The big question, the fright in the room, is the issue of impunity. What will happen to the crimes that were committed? With the suffering that has been inflicted? There we have to sit down and evaluate the mechanisms that have been implemented in other societies, the so-called transitional justice. How do we agree on a mechanism that makes the political solution viable but also addresses the suffering of the victims? Venezuelans sometimes feel that what has happened to us is exceptional; that what we have experienced has happened to no one. We are the navel of the world. What would South Africans say where 90 percent of the population was excluded from the political and economic life of their country because of the color of their skin? Can you imagine the level of crime that that means? And they found a solution. And didn’t that mean that 10 percent of the population had to leave the country or were thrown into the sea? We have the experience of our neighbor (Colombia), which after 50 years of internal war, implemented transitional justice mechanisms that, despite all the problems, all the challenges, have been strengthened and have yielded positive results.
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Roberto Patiño is a Production Engineer (Universidad Simón Bolívar) with a Master’s Degree in Public Policy (Harvard University). He is the Co-founder of the Caracas Mi Convive Movement and the Alimenta la Solidaridad program.
Photo: @alimentalasolidaridad