Rafael Uzcátegui is a Venezuelan anarchist and he has his own blog. He works in the human rights organization PROVEA. He is neither a supporter of Chavez, nor of the opposition. He is blacklisted by both camps. Dialogue with the opposition is difficult: for them he is a supporter of Chavez, a Chavista. The dialogue with the Bolivarian movement, however, is also very emotional. For them he is an imperialist and a supporter of the opposition. But he is simply an anarchist. He does not vote. He is critical and independent. No, there is no dictatorship here. But there is no revolution here either, he says. We should go to the interior, away from Caracas, because there the Simon Bolivar movement is much more authentic than in the capital. He talks with us for several hours and it is very interesting. At the end, he arranges for us to talk to other people from all camps, so that we can form our own opinion, he says.
Once again I get the impression that Venezuela is more multilayered, more diverse, more contradictory and more complex than the view from abroad shows.
On Tuesday, June 12, 2012, at 19.30h Rafael will give a lecture in Germany, in the Allerweltshaus (Körnerstr. 77) in Cologne about the increasing militarization of Venezuela. They present him like this:
Rafael Uzcátegui lives and works in Caracas. He coordinates the
research at Provea (www.derechos.org.ve), a Venezuelan human rights organization, and has been a member of the
editorial collective of the anarchist journal El Libertario (www.nodo50.org/ellibertario/), which is dedicated to the dissemination of the activities of the independent social movements of South America. He is the author of the books “Heart of Ink” and “Venezuela: The Revolution as a Spectacle. An Anarchist Critique of the Bolivarian Government.” Since 2009 he has been a member of the Council of War Resisters’ International, WRI.