On Tuesday, March 5, 2013 two events happened of diametrically opposed moral and historical significance—the end of the life of the great world leader Hugo Chavez and the death of the Los Angeles mayoral elections.
In between yawns and “oh, was there some kind of election in the news that I missed?” 8 candidates ran in the “fight for the soul-less city” mayor race. The results: City Controller Wendy Greuel and City Council member Eric Garcetti will run in another soul-less run-off on Tuesday May 21 to see who will carry out the bidding of Eli Broad, the downtown business elite, the transnational capitalists, and the LAPD for the next four years—the job officially called “Mayor of Los Angeles.” This election was met with such a yawn that even the “voting class” — the group of middle-class people with no power and the illusion that they have some, forgot to vote. (“Hey, did you know that my brother-in-law knows Wendy’s nanny who knows Eric Garcetti’s mechanic and they said…blah blah blah.”) L.A. like most urban center is a city of color—of the 4 million residents 12 percent are Black and 46 percent Latino. But you wouldn’t know it by listening to the candidates. Police brutality, low-wage and no wage jobs, choking air pollution, police and ICE suppression of immigrants, deteriorating social services, were not on the agenda—but all the candidates, including Jan Perry, a Black city councilperson, debated how many more police they wanted. These are the “free elections” that are so free that nobody gives a damn, only 16 percent of eligible voters showed up at the polls and the rest just stayed home and debated whether Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez, or Rihanna should be number one.
Meanwhile, on the same day, in Venezuela, a true champion of the people, the amazing Hugo Chavez, died– an event of enormous world consequence. Hugo Chavez, a man of African, Indigenous, and Spanish ancestry was elected president of Venezuela in 1998, re-elected in 2000, 2006, and again in 2012. During the election of 2006, Manuel Criollo and I, representing the Labor/Community Strategy Center, were so fortunate to have witnessed history. We went not as “impartial observers” but on the invitation of friends in Venezuela as partisan U.S. friends of the Venezuelan people. On Election Day, we were awakened by bells ringing at 6 A.M. These were not church bells but bells of liberation—urging working class voters to get up and get to the polls before they even opened. But that was really not necessary. Most of the voters were awake long before the bells rang. By the time we got to the streets at 9AM, the lines to vote went on as far as the eye could see–an entire city ready to vote. We saw hundreds of thousands of Indigenous working people with Chavista hats, banners, red-t shirts, chanting, talking, laughing. They were not “waiting” to vote but having a “vote-in” that was an all-day event. In one of the more affluent downtown districts, I asked a woman of European-descendant, obviously a very affluent voter, what she thought of the elections. She told me, “Well, Chavez will win because he is for the poor and there are so many of them, but he does not represent ‘us.'” I thought, well, she certainly knows her place in the class struggle, and fortunately, in Venezuela, so does the working class and the working people.
That night, the bells rang again, when Chavez won with 63% of the vote and a 74% voter turnout. Manuel and I stood in the rain in Caracas, along with what seemed like the entire city in the streets, crying with joy. It was impossible to explain to people in the U.S., the world’s policeman, what a free election feels like and looks like. Certainly no one in L.A. could comprehend if they judged by ours. And ironically, as soon as Chavez won in free elections again, the U.S. government kept referring to him as a “dictator” to justify its plans to overthrow him.