Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

The mood in Caracas (Venezuela) is sombre. It appears that the attempted coup against the government that began on 23 January is now substantially over (as the Venezuelan Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza tells me). The Lima Cartel is divided. The Europeans have cold feet. On the one-month anniversary of that attempt, a massive crowd of the poor gathered in the centre of Caracas to demonstrate their support for the Bolivarian Revolution. An elderly couple carried a sign which captured the mood – Somos los Invisibles. Somos los Invensibles. Venceremos (We are the Invisible. We are the Invincible. We will Overcome).

It is hard to gauge the numbers of people at that rally. A picture from a drone suggests a large crowd, but it misleads. Most crowd counting software assumes a certain body size and a certain amount of space between people in a crowd. Those assumptions do not apply in this case. The supporters of the government and of the Bolivarian Revolution bear the marks of their history on their bodies. They are small and thin, darker skinned and worn by decades of work that has earned them just about enough to survive. The reason why they adore Hugo Chavez – his image everywhere – and why they call themselves Chavistas is that it was the arrival of Chavez in the 1990s that gave them hope and that inspired their political activity. Not for them the accusations that this government – led by Nicolas Maduro – is responsible for their hunger. They know that their Bolivarian Revolution is a process and that they are active in that process.

There is fragility in Venezuela’s reliance upon oil and its lack of food sovereignty. There are some long-term fundamental problems of the Venezuelan economy that long predate the arrival of Chavez and that will continue for some time yet. These are problems common to most countries – such as Nigeria – that have large populations, that rely upon oil exports that finance the imports of just about everything. The vulnerabilities are many. Burkina Faso’s Thomas Sankara would say, ‘he who feeds you, controls you’. It is an important reminder. Talk of increasing food production in Venezuela is important – and urgent (take a quick journey with Ricardo Vaz to Mérida, where the native potato is being rescued). All this will require deeper land reform, but also changes in the culture of consumption that have been produced by the inflow of oil rent. Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonso – one of Venezuela’s great oil ministers – called oil the ‘devil’s excrement’. He remains correct.

The protest of the child care (anganwadi) workers brought to mind Wislawa Szymborska’s poem, The End and the Beginning (translated by Johanna Trzeciak):

After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble
to the side of the road,
so the corpse-filled wagons
can pass.

Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.

Someone has to drag in a girder
to prop up a wall.
Someone has to glaze a window,
rehang a door.

Photogenic it’s not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left
for another war.

We’ll need the bridges back,
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.

Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls the way it was.
Someone else listens
and nods with unsevered head.
But already there are those nearby
starting to mill about
who will find it dull.

From out of the bushes
sometimes someone still unearths
rusted-out arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew
what was going on here
must make way for
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass that has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out
blade of grass in his mouth
gazing at the clouds.

Warmly,
Vijay.