afternoon after nine hour flight from Madrid. Get free WSF bus to Caracas which takes 4 hours because of a landslide on the main road. Go through poverty-stricken shanty lowns perched on steep green hills. Feel like a LOULISL.
Dropped off at Plaza Venezuela where I ring a comrade and get vamous motel numbers which I ring from a table on a street Eventually one hotel has a room and after some difficulty I get there. It's in a rundown downtown area.
Four more French comrades (from Perpignan) are sent my way. Will share with them. Meanwhile go for dinner with Quebecois human rights lawyers who keep telling me I must lose the Castilian lisp. Hotel staff are very solicitous about our safety in this area. Jetlagged, I try to sleep. Volcanic snoring from comrades. Walk with French comrades can hardly keep up. At one point all I can see is hands walling to be filled with leaflets.
A student shows me round the Bolivarian University of Caracas, which has 3000 students and is situated in an old PDVSA (state oil company) building. Tuition is free.
March eventually moves off. As we walk along we give out mOIC leaflets Venezuelans lining the route who smile and say 'welcome and 'gracias'. A Peruvian comrade is puzzled as to why reformism dominates the European workers' movement. For a moment I am equally puzzled, then I slip into Trot mode. A marine biologist, a member of an indigenous people, the Wayu, explains to me the very different ways in which they are treated by the Venezuelan and Columbian governments.
Have changed to a single room and I try to get an early night but the noise of the street wakes me up at the crack of dawn. liberation theology who came over from Franco's Spain in the 1960s. They work in the barrios, fully support Chavez and talk of the successes of T CATPTOTO IITATITITTA AO tackling child malnutrition.
Less inspiringly, I talk to a comrade from the Partido Comunista do Brasil who thinks the Bolivians should wait for Brazil to become more economically powerful and not engage in ultra-left adventures like nationalising oil and gas.
Go to meeting chaired by Stuart Piper from Socialist Resistance, on workers' selfmanagement In Venezuelan factories and on participatory budgets in Brazil. The two experiences don't really get compared in any detail. Too many speakers on the platform.
More details of the new left PT administration Fortaleza supplied by ing on the Peruvian Marxist Mariategui organised by some very serious young Peruvians. The meeting is conducted in incredibly rapid Spanish - I catch about thirty per cent. They seem very enthusiastic about Humala, the 'Peruvian Chavez' now emerging.
On the school wall where the meeting is held there is a brilliant satirical painting showing scenes from Venezuelan history. The last scene, of Caracas, is relatively featureless and empty, showing that the future still has to be built.
At the campsite, I talk to Katherin, Venezuelan teacher of Spanish and English, and to Marcela who gramme which helps people to re-train and to set up cooperatives and to a British comrade from the de Menezes Family campaign. Traffic gets me up early again.