Dispatches, Venezuela

Venezuelan Funds Dry Up For Hugo Chávez Supporters In New York

July 18, 2011 By Juan Victor Fajardo

Luis Rojas reads a speech at a Petro Bronx meeting. Photo by Juan Fajardo.

OVER THE PAST FOUR years, the government of Venezuela has awarded more than $4 million to more than 30 non-profits in the South Bronx that range from local food cooperatives and interpretative dance studios, to small recycling centers and educational programs for immigrant families.

Other than the figure of Chávez himself, the big name behind it all is Citgo Petroleum Corporation, a U.S.-based subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company PDVSA. During the first three years of the grant operation, the recipients were selected by an organization called Petro Bronx, created for the sole purpose of managing the program. It operated as a community council of sorts, bringing together a rotating group, or “collective”, of five local non-profits.

But right from the start, those involved in Petro Bronx saw themselves not as an avenue for managing charitable donations but as a pioneering social movement in line with the precepts of Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution. They viewed Petro Bronx as the first North American chapter of Chávez’s international socialist project, known as the Bolivarian Alliance for the People of the Americas, or ALBA in Spanish.

“We accepted [the funds] as a form of solidarity from the people of Venezuela to the people of the Bronx, not as corporate charity,” said Petro Bronx founding member Luis Rojas addressing a gathering of members of the collective.

And those ideological subtleties were crucial.

“Comrades!” a red-bereted Rojas said in his speech. “This collective is and will be a part of the liberating currents of our peoples and it will be at the forefront of defending the principles of equality and justice that defined the great men of our America, starting with Simón Bolívar,” the hero of Venezuela’s war of independence.

And yet, despite their revolutionary fervor and language, the members of Petro Bronx say they turned a blind eye to political matters when selecting grant recipients each year.

“We said, ‘those who don’t want to deal with [revolutionary] politics, fine,” remembers Lucia Solano, a founding member of Petro Bronx, whose education center in the neighborhood is one of the organizations that has lost its Citgo funding. “That doesn’t mean they are not doing good work for the community.”

But people like Wanda Salaman and Joe Perez, members of the collective who also received funds, say that politics, and in particular the unbridled support of some members for the Chávez administration, became a reason for conflict within Petro Bronx.

“We didn’t [all] have the same ideology in a lot of ways,” said Salaman, director of a community center in the area. Some members “talked about Bolívar and all of these things,” she said, “they hijacked our meetings with their ideology. But I don’t care about [Chávez] and [former U.S. President George W.] Bush, what I care about is this community.”

Mejía says he “always knew [Petro Bronx] had to be careful in terms of identifying itself with certain political ideas.” But only because being prudent was necessary, he says, to fulfill the task Chávez assigned Petro Bronx in 2005 — that of spreading ALBA and Chávez’s revolution in the South Bronx – without falling foul of U.S. laws that forbid political partisanship in charitable organizations.

“The Bolivarian Revolution is not exclusively the patrimony of Venezuela,” Mejía said. “The revolution has taken steps to spread its roots, within the frame of social justice, beyond the geographic context of Venezuela,” he added, “and it has found a lot of support here in the United States.”

It is precisely that type of logic and language that put Petro Bronx at odds with Citgo. It motivated non-militant members of the collective to send letters and make phone calls to Citgo alleging that the political interests of some members were influencing the assignment of funds.

“Some of these groups just pop in and pop out,” Salaman said. “Are they really doing the work and will they continue doing the work even if they don’t get a penny from Citgo? I wanted to make sure that we were looking at groups and evaluating them and that we were not just giving them money because they were friends.”

When the third year of Citgo’s grant program came to a close in 2010, the company announced it would create the Simon Bolívar Foundation, a charitable extension of Citgo that would displace Petro Bronx entirely. Today, the Simon Bolívar Foundation manages the grant-giving process on its own from start to finish.

And when the list of awardees came out this year, the overtly political non-profits that had been running Petro Bronx since its creation were, to their surprise, simply not on it. Among the more than 30 recipients, however, were the old Petro Bronx members that had always opposed the overt politicization of the Citgo grants.

“It does not correspond with the message President Chávez gave at that meeting [in 2005],” said Mejía. The main issue, he insists, is not that there are anti-Chávez organizations among the awardees, but that most recipients have multi-million dollar budgets already. Citgo is not giving the money the non-profits “that actually need it,” said Mejía.

And maybe because they had much smaller budgets, most of the non-profits that were excluded from funding this year have now closed. Some of them had existed prior to the Citgo grant program, but had become financially dependent on Venezuelan funding.

“We are sad to say that all of these projects are paralyzed and/or closed today,” Luis Rojas told a crowd at the Petro Bronx gathering. They are closed, he added, “because, in an anti-popular and anti-Bolivarian way, some people entrenched [in Citgo] have irresponsibly and vulgarly ignored our collective.”

“I feel betrayed,” said Lucia Solano, who has taken the issue more personally. “We did not see it as asking for charity. It was about giving us support in solidarity, so we could do the work we do here.”

Although the Simon Bolívar Foundation chose not to comment on its relationship with Petro Bronx or on why some non-profits were denied funds this year, the company recently published a document that says it would not consider “political” or “sectarian” organizations for its grant program in the future.

What’s clear, however, is that no matter how betrayed some Petro Bronx members may feel, they still remain loyal to Chávez’s socialist revolution.

“As is natural, this has been problematic and traumatic for us,” Rojas said. “Because we have not been able to fulfill our promise to his Excellency the comrade, president, and comandante Hugo Rafael Chávez. Regardless, our commitment is invariable and it continues with the funds or without them.”

Closing his speech, Rojas looked to the crowd and proclaimed, “Long live the comandante Hugo Rafael Chavez Frias! Long live the people of Venezuela!”

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