Coche Parish is the gateway to Caracas from the west and south of the country. It has 59,000 inhabitants in 126 sectors, low middle class buildings in its main arteries, urban development created by the Gran Misión Vivienda Venezuela and hills where the most humble neighbourhoods are located.
In Coche is the military complex of Fuerte Tiuna, and the wholesale food market where more than 50,000 tons arrive monthly. It is a strategic point of the capital, which is the center of gravity of power in the country.
One of the sectors is El Kilombo rises from the lower part of Zea Street, from where you enter and climb the hill. Seen from the outside, it has the aesthetics of every Caracas neighbourhood: orange brick houses without frisar, constructions made with will, effort, spontaneous and organized self-management.
Narrow staircases, corridors, labyrinths, zinc roofs that blind when the midday sun falls vertically, children playing, conversations, workers, everyday life. Seen from its social dynamic, this neighbourhood, like all the other neighbourhoods in the country, is a target of the war that has been unleashed on Venezuela.
In El Kilombo live 271 families, and two brigades of the Movimiento Somos Venezuela, created in June 2017, epicenter of the previous attempt to seize political power, are deployed. Somos is an organization where different social movements and labour policies of the Bolivarian Revolution come to life.
Among these are the Frente Francisco de Miranda, UnaMujer, Jóvenes del Barrio, Movimiento de Recreadores, Por la Paz y la Vida, different Grandes Misiones, Misiones and Micro Misiones, as well as young people from the Patria Robert Serra. The deployment is national: 27,807 brigades made up of 361,501 citizens have already knocked on the doors of 6,300,000 homes.
In El Kilombo, the work to respond to immediate needs, build community organization, and face the impacts of economic warfare is daily and permanent.
Sputnik / Esther Yáñez Illescas
“It was created to be the articulating social arm of the direct response to the people, to become the subjects of attention to the protagonists of the transformation, to transform from the bases the realities that we are experiencing (…) It is integrated by those who, from the same reality, necessity, are in search of those who are more fragile than us”, explains Yinet Bernal, secretary of Somos in the Coche parish.
In the Kilombo brigades the majority are women from the same neighbourhood. Their work is daily and permanent, their objective is threefold: to respond to immediate needs, to build the organization of the community itself, and to confront the impacts of the hybrid war that impacts on the social body, seeks to fragment it, “operates on the whole of the spheres of social life and particularly on the domination of the bodies, hearts and minds of the population”.
A map of El Kilombo, in Coche, Caracas
Sputnik / Marco Teruggi
The fields of action are many: attention to the elderly with health difficulties, food production with projects such as raising laying hens, the operation of a feeding house where 200 people eat, working together with the Local Supply and Production Committees, and the twelve communal councils that make up the Comuna Armando Reverón, among other things. The brigades are in the territory, they know it, they are part of its daily life and organization.
The movement has a map and census where the needs, critical zones, populations, house by house, family by family appear. For example, of the 271 families in Kilombo, 184 receive the Hogares de la Patria voucher, 11 the Mujeres Embarazadas voucher, 102 the Adultos Mayores voucher (for those who did not contribute during their working years).
Somos Venezuela must have a precise assessment of all needs, priorities, and from there articulate the different existing policies and social platforms to provide responses.
“We are pressed, but we always move forward with God and the Revolution,” says Yelitza Medina, part of the brigade, born and raised in El Kilombo.
El Kilombo, like all the neighborhoods of the country, is a target of the war that has been unleashed on Venezuela.
Sputnik / Marco Teruggi
She proudly shows the laying hens, the health unit where vaccination is carried out, the single mothers who cook in the community food house, the bakery project, the cumulative invisible effort of those unfamiliar with it, such as, for example, that the houses were built by self-construction, volunteer work, recovery of spaces that used to be dumps, kennels, and truck cemeteries.
“The situation grips many people, the scarcity that exists, we in the community are helping ourselves with that, there are people who do not have and we are doing it for them, those of us who are working have children, grandchildren, and we are working for the children of the community, for everyone,” says Lesbia Galindo, who cooks in the feeding house, lives in a zinc house and works to be able to build her brick house.
There are several ways of measuring results: concrete material responses in each person/family/household, in the sector, the parish, at the national level, and as a collective form of resistance by the social body that is under siege on different fronts.
At stake are the values of solidarity, the logics of collective construction, the subjectivities that war seeks to destroy: the enemy strategy hat tdemands surrendered bodies, bent wills, individual resignations, depressed passions.
“We are attending four battle fronts, the first is the articulation with the whole system of Missions to give answers to our people, the second is the defense of the truth, here the Movimientos Somos Venezuela is telling the world that Venezuela is a people that is under attack by a war, they want to suffocate us, but we are in resistance, an organized people who do not only expect to be the subject of attention,” explains Yinet.
“We are being protagonists of the transformation of our reality, in the third front we are giving attention to the victims of this war, we are going to defend our people, and in the fourth front we are putting in place a system of production,” she adds.
You can see: “They want to throw Venezuela into a civil war and then plunder it”.
In the current context of Venezuela, community spaces play a strategic role.
The deployment of social policies according to the Chavista principle, namely the attempt to break the practice of vertical assistance, is a method of daily trenchwork in times of assault. The U.S., the local right, the economic powers, not only seek direct control of political power through the overthrow of President Nicolas Maduro.
Its strategic plan is to erase the network of organization, politicization, composition of a political subject in the popular neighbourhoods, be it Coche, any parish in Caracas or in the country. For this reason, the strategies include, among other things, economic and financial blockades, media campaigns in social networks, and disputes in the territories through armed groups and material wear and tear.
We are Venezuela, the experiences of communes, communal councils, collectives, Chavista grassroots organizations, the articulation between those experiences and the social policies of the State – with debates about forms and methods – are the story that the hybrid and prolonged war currently underway against the country has not been able to destroy.
The Coche parish is the gateway to Caracas from the west and south of the country.
Sputnik / Marco Teruggi
The community spaces fulfil a strategic function, they are territories for containing the social fabric in the face of material adversity, the rehearsal of participatory democracy, the reproduction of the Chavista project as an ethical, egalitarian, supportive expression of solidarity.
