Poor and Working Class Black Hurricane Survivors Visit
Venezuelan Communal Councils and Expose "Hatred" of
the Poor by Progressive and Government Forces in the U.S.
New Orleans, LA, March 1 - A
delegation of four members of the New Orleans Survivor Council
and two bottom-up organizers have just returned from a truly
inspiring and life-changing trip to meet the people of Venezuela. True to their commitment
to bottom-up leadership in New Orleans,
they went directly to the bottom: to the everyday, grassroots
folk of Venezuela. They
met with several of the Venezuelan Communal Councils (organized
groups of neighbors within Venezuela who run their communities,
and control the resources for their communities, much like what
the New Orleans Survivor Council is attempting to do within
their poor and working black New Orleans community), and told
their stories of survival and struggle to an undeniably attentive
audience. The Communal Councils were equally excited and inspired
by the meeting with the survivors, and leaped at the chance
to bring their needs and requests to the Venezuelan government.
This
was the first time a group of poor and working class black people
visited Venezuela representing
themselves and their own organizations and were not just a backdrop
or exhibit for other groups led by the privileged. The effort
of the New Orleans Survivor Council delegation to develop camaraderie
and a direct working relationship with Venezuelans who are also
struggling through class and racial oppression is unheard of
in the modern era. Most relationships between the masses of
the people throughout the world have not been developed by the
masses themselves but by people who claim to represent them,
or advocates for them, or those who have styled themselves as
their leaders.
For
almost all, except one Survivor Council member, it was their
first time outside of the U.S.
They had no passports before the trip and all of the delegation
were awestruck to meet people who had such solidarity in their
hearts for the poor and working black people in New
Orleans, the U.S. and throughout
the world. Everyone saw each other as part of the same
struggle and each person, those from the Survivor Council and
those from the Communal Councils had such similar experiences
in their own countries, lives, and organizations.
Because
of the revolutionary act of these New Orleans
residents and Katrina survivors, a delegation from Venezuela
will soon be coming to New
Orleans to follow up on the first visit
of the Survivor Council. They want to see the situation in New
Orleans with their own eyes, and to help
lay the basis for meeting the needs identified by the New Orleans
Survivor Council, as well as investigating setting up a sister-city
relationship between the Caracas Communal Councils and the New
Orleans Survivor Council. There is great hope among the poor
and working communities of both places that the roots of international
alliance that were planted in this visit, will grow into a tree
of established sisterhood, whose branches stretch from the barrios
of Caracas, to the hoods of New Orleans.
If
you would like to learn more about this story, please review
the included documents developed by the New Orleans Survivor
Council to share with the people of Venezuela
and the documents developed by the delegation during the visit.
Greetings
to the People of Venezuela
from the New Orleans
Survivor Council
To
the people of Venezuela
and to the Venezuelan Community Councils, we come to you as
people who have been deserted by the government in our own country.
We are survivors of Hurricane Katrina, members of the New Orleans
Survivor Council, poor and working black folk who have historically
been ignored in our country and feel we have been set up for
genocide. When Katrina hit, we were left in more than 20 feet
of floodwater for over 21 days in a city that sits over 13 feet
below sea level – left to die.
The
events of the past year have caused us to re-evaluate the direction
of the progressive and revolutionary movement. We noticed that
those left in New Orleans to drown were
the poorest and darkest-skinned people of the city. Looking
around the world, we see that the most oppressed and cast-aside
peoples are those with darker skin. We are looking deeply at
this intersection of skin color and poverty and asking everyone
to do the same. We are committed to building an egalitarian
society. We have concluded that the only way to accomplish this
is to look to those very people who have been relegated to the
bottom of society's heap for leadership. We call this bottom-up
leadership.
Our
people have also been deserted by most members of the progressive
community at home. We know that everyone comes to you for help;
the Harry Belafontes, the Danny Glovers, and the very organizations
that we helped to start and that later deserted us: they have
all come to you. Often, their talk is of oil money. Our appeal
to you is something quite different. We think the most exciting
thing happening in your country is the communal council movement,
and that is why we are here.
We
are looking for a relationship with you. Because we've been
deserted, we need to rebuild our own communities, schools, and
hospitals. We need to rebuild our levees so we won't be washed
away by the next storm. We need to build relationships with
people who care about us. From listening to your leadership,
it sounds like you care.
We are looking to forge sister-city relationships. These would
be sister-city relationships of a different type: not with the
official City Council of New Orleans, but with the New Orleans
Survivor Council, the organization of the most oppressed folk
in the city. Our council is the council of the people, the grassroots
people who were the most impacted by this disaster, the council
of the people who were left to die. And we have made great
sacrifice to come before you, personally, in order to represent
ourselves and put a stop to those who come over and claim to
represent us, building the power and prestige of themselves
and their organizations on the backs of our suffering.
In
your communal councils, we see organizations similar to ours.
Our goal is to empower the people at the bottom to begin to
self-govern. You have a government that declares support for
that process. We don't, and that is why we have come to you.
We
are interested in building our schools and communities, and
we desperately need to build our levees. We also have a dire
need for organizers to help us build Survivor Councils among
the 200,000 New Orleanians still scattered across six states,
in fifteen cities and numerous trailer park concentration camps.
We
therefore come to you with four requests:
We
thank you very much for enabling us to visit and learn from
your work, and we thank you in advance for the help we hope
you will extend to us.
An
Emergency Appeal to the People of Venezuela
from the New Orleans
Survivor Council
We
are a group of survivors and organizers working for the people
who were left to die when New
Orleans flooded after Hurricane Katrina.
We are visiting your country for the second time on an urgent
mission on February 18 to appeal to you as friends of the poor,
black, working class people of New
Orleans. We need your help and support,
as our government has attacked us and then turned its back on
our desperate needs.
When
Katrina threatened our city, local and national government united
to keep us in the city as the floodwaters rose. The poorest
and darkest skinned of working class people were left to die,
and more than 6,000 of us did. We were herded into shelters
with no food or water, and later dispersed all over the country
with no way to get back home. A quarter of a million Katrina
survivors are still scattered all over the country, and tens
of thousands of us are living in trailer camps that are like
concentration camps. Until now, the government has put every
possible obstacle in our way, has not rebuilt our neighborhoods
and has not even built levees around them that would keep out
the water in the next hurricane. They closed the public hospital
and most of the schools. Even the public housing units thousands
of us lived in are scheduled to be torn down, though the flood
did not damage them. Some residents moved back in anyway, and
this week heavily armed special police units have kicked in
the doors at 2 AM to throw people out and arrest them.
To
replace us in the jobs we once held, the government has brought
in so-called guest workers from Latin American countries, who
they tell a pile of lies to get them here. Then they house them
in trailer concentration camps, too, don't give them medical
care or safety protection, and pay them a fraction of what they
used to pay us for the same jobs. These workers cannot quit
their jobs without becoming illegal immigrants, so they are
forced to work under these conditions. This is modern day slavery
used to take the place of the descendants of their former slaves.
As
former slaves and modern slaves, we are building unity. We realize
that we must take our future into our own hands. The government
has proven that it won't help us. We are actively organizing
to bring the poor, black and working class communities back
to our city and to unite with oppressed working people of other
hues. We know that we all have the same oppressors, and in unity
there is strength. We are one people. This is why we are coming
to you to ask for your solidarity and support.
We
have been struggling for over a year now to rebuild our communities
and bring our families back home. However, it has become clear
to us that we are being cast aside by the government and much
of our society. Although everyday people have poured in to help
us rebuild, no one with any resources has helped us. No money
is coming to us from government or private sources, except the
small donations of poor people like ourselves. We have come
to see that the poorest black working class people in the United
States today are in the same position that
our ancestors were in on the Middle Passage from Africa, that
Jews, Gypsies and other oppressed peoples in Europe were in during the 1930's. Our young people are thrown
in jail by the thousands and shot down in the streets by the
police. Our access to health care is so poor that tens of thousands
of us die each day of preventable causes in the richest country
in the world. Our children cannot get a decent education and
look to a future without a decent job. We are being set up for
genocide, and few people see this, either in our country or
internationally.
What
is happening to us is important to every struggle in the world
today. We are the descendants of the African slaves who built
this country with their labor. We look around us in America
and all the world, and we see that the darker your skin, the
closer you are to the bottom of the heap. Like oppressed people
everywhere, poor black people in the United
States have always fought for
freedom. We have a culture of resisting exploitation. We refuse
to work hard for someone else's profit. We fought slavery; we
joined the army in large numbers to fight fascism in Europe
during World War Two, because we know racism when we see it;
we rose up against racism and burned cities forty years ago.
This is why the government is afraid of us and wants us out
of New Orleans.
What is happening to us is a prediction of what will happen
across our country and throughout the world as the U.S.
government sinks deeper into fascism and aggression. This is
not our struggle alone, it is the struggle of all laboring,
oppressed and shunned people of the world.
When
we first visited your country last year, we were excited by
promises of help. We need that help desperately. We have to
fight or die. We were very impressed by your young social workers.
We ask that you send twenty-five of them for two years to help
us organize the rebuilding of our communities. We also ask that
you provide financial support for twenty-five Katrina survivors
to be trained and supported as organizers.
Another
of our goals is for our people, by our own efforts, with our
own hands, to begin to rebuild the levee around our devastated
Ninth Ward neighborhoods to world-class standards. The US
government has left us vulnerable to being swept away by the
next flood. We appeal to you to help us fund a demonstration
project that will rebuild one block of levee. This will show
the government that the levee can be rebuilt, that the only
thing lacking is their political will to protect us. And it
will show the world that someone does care about the plight
of poor black people in the US.
The
rich want us to believe that as poor, working people, and dark-skinned
people, we are not smart or skilled enough to run our own lives.
On the contrary, we believe that it is the people on the bottom,
all over the world, who have the skills, intelligence and humanity
to run the world. Help us take a step toward international unity
of the oppressed of all hues, under the leadership of the most
oppressed, to stand up together. It is a necessity for the survival
of all of us.
Thank
you.
The New Orleans Survivor Council
The People's Organizing Committee
The New Orleans Workers' Center
A Timeline of Organizing
in New Orleans after Katrina
• August 29, 2005: Hurricane Katrina misses New Orleans and
people who were left in the city by the government heave a sigh
of relief.
•
August 30, 2005: waters rise, levees are destroyed, homes and
people are washed away by violently rushing water. Approximately
6,000 people die within a few days, 100,000 are trapped in shelters
or on roofs without food or water, shot at by police while trying
to flee the waters, then loaded on buses and planes and shipped
all over the country. These people were the poorest and darkest-skinned
people in New Orleans.
•
August 30, 2005: At a meeting of "The National Black Convergence"
leadership group organized by Harry Belefonte, going on during
the hurricane, Curtis Muhammad asked for an immediate and united
response. The suggestion was tabled for a later date, missing
the crucial opportunity to defend poor, black New Orleanians
and to open a new militant chapter in the US struggle for
justice.
•
September 8: a group of people from the Community Labor United
network met and concluded that the movement to respond to the
travesty should be led by the poor, working class black people
who were hit hardest by it. Two sectors of the movement, the
nationalists and the internationalists, began to develop a coalition
on a verbal agreement to follow the leadership of poor black
people. A name was chosen: People's Hurricane Relief Fund and
Oversight Coalition.
•
October through January: PHRF sent Curtis on a national speaking
tour, exposing the victimization of poor black New Orleanians
and announcing the campaign for the right of return led by the
survivors themselves. The money began pouring in: working
people, poor people, unions, progressive organizations, all
were deeply moved by the victimization of black people in New Orleans and responded generously. The coalition
planned its first big event for December 9 and 10: a Survivor's
Assembly and a March for the Right of Return.
•
The strategy for the Survivor's Assembly was that survivors
would be brought from all over the country to the Assembly,
and would take the reins of the organization from the Interim
Coordinating Committee (ICC) that had been set up temporarily
to facilitate the passage of resources raised on the backs of
the suffering of the poor. Allied groups in many cities began
finding and organizing Katrina evacuees.
•
Early December: it became obvious about a week before the assembly
that there was not agreement in this coalition. $200,000 was
spent to get survivors there, but the planning committee held
back the agenda until a week before the event. When they unveiled
it, it was clear that the only role for the survivors was to
sit and listen.
•
A struggle developed around the voice and leadership of the
survivors in their own struggle. In the end, survivors did not
take over the organization, and the rally the following day
was dominated by spokespeople for various left and nationalist
organizations. That weekend exposed the reality that the ICC
was not committed to follow the leadership of poor black folks.
•
January 2006: Curtis Muhammad, heading the organizing committee,
hired a staff of young, committed people, dedicated to following
the leadership of poor black people, and put volunteers on the
streets to find survivors and listen to their stories. This
grassroots organizing followed the traditions of Ella Baker
and Fannie Lou Hamer of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee and Paulo Friere's popular education and organizing
work (which has influenced Movimento Sin Terra). The New Orleans
Survivor Council (NOSC) was established out of this work.
•
January: a delegation from PHRF, including Curtis Muhammad,
went to the World Social Forum in Venezuela,
gave a workshop on the travesty in New Orleans,
and were very impressed with the young social workers and their
organizing in the housing developments in Caracas.
•
The NOSC set down principles for its work. In the midst of trauma,
people put aside selfish concerns to fight injustice. They said
that in order for people to come home, they would need four
things: a place to live, a place to send their children to school,
a place to go when they got sick, and a job. NOSC set up set
up an egalitarian system to prioritize requests: those in the
most need would get first priority in the rebuilding effort.
First help would go to elderly and disabled without resources,
then single parents without resources, then other homeowners
without insurance, and finally everyone else.
•
March: because at first most volunteers were middle class white
youth, an effort was made to recruit black students to come
for spring break. Well over a thousand responded during the
month of March, organized by a new network called Katrina on
the Ground. Residents took heart from this response of children
who looked like their own, and were inspired to take more initiative.
•
March-April: The ICC, serving as temporary coordinators of PHRF,
was moving PHRF in a different direction. They began maneuvering
to take over PHRF and the people's resources. Most people on
the ICC represented organizations that aspired to leadership
of the movement. They were impatient with the slow work of building
leadership among the people at the bottom and anxious to lead
a national campaign, affect local and national elections, and
get international attention. They became irritated at the young
organizers, out there talking to the Survivor Council members,
teaching them organizing skills, explaining the work to the
hundreds of youthful volunteers and putting them on the streets
in the service of the Survivor Council.
•
mid-April: the Survivor Council began to ask questions about
the money PHRF had raised in their names (mainly from Curtis
Muhammad's speaking tour, over one million US dollars), and
began to request oversight over that money. Overnight, the young
organizers were accused of insubordination and fired. PHRF's
ICC deserted the Survivor Council and left 60 high school volunteers
in the city without guidance, kept control of the remaining
$800,000 raised in the name of survivors, and began organizing
around its program of influencing the upcoming mayoral election
and preparing for an international tribunal.
•
mid-April: the day after being fired, the young organizers decided
to continue working without salaries. Curtis Muhammad threw
his lot in with them, and promised to raise money to help them
keep doing "bottom-up" organizing. The group re-named
itself the People's Organizing Committee (POC) and continued
its work with survivors and volunteers, asking the Survivor
Council to supervise them and act as their employer if money
could be raised to sustain them.
•
May – August: POC coordinated a large and complex summer volunteer
project. Hundreds of volunteers supported the work of the New
Orleans Survivor Council, gutting homes and doing door-to-door
organizing, and discussing what they were learning. The work
expanded to include organizing in the trailer parks where survivors
were still living, working with immigrant workers who had been
brought in to take jobs formerly held by Katrina evacuees, public
housing residents, parents trying to open a school, and allying
with a grassroots oriented legal group, and an environmental
committee.
•
August 29: on the anniversary of Katrina, NOSC and POC participated
in organizing and attending the march to commemorate the hurricane
and its victims. New
Orleans residents attempted to take empty
FEMA trailers from a lot; Curtis Muhammad was arrested for trespassing
(charges were later dropped when many residents attended court).
•
September: a new group of organizers replaced the original group,
who went back to work and school. All the areas of work continued,
though with far fewer volunteers because young people were back
in school.
•
October: Curtis Muhammad, on a visit to New
York to raise money, was told that a
move was afoot among foundations not to provide funding for
POC or Survivor Council initiatives.
•
September – December: Survivor Council of New Orleans consolidated
its own leadership group. Public housing residents formed an
organization within the Survivor Council and worked toward reopening
developments that the government had slated for demolition.
POC organizers and immigrant organizers formally joined forces
and resources.
•
January – February: Residents of Public Housing reoccupy units
in a public housing project. Survivor Council organizers join
forces with immigrant guest workers to attempt a citizen's arrest
of a slave trafficker. High school volunteers are threatened
with arrest for helping to clean up public housing apartments.
The Survivor Council sets as a priority developing plans and
resources to build a section of world-class levee around the
Lower Ninth Ward as a demonstration project.
•
February: members of the Survivor Council, POC and Residents
of Public Housing go to Venezuela
to appeal for support for building the levee, taking control
of public housing and maintaining and training organizers.
Letter to President Chavez
To:
The Honorable Hugo Chavez, President of the Bolivarian Republic
of Venezuela, The Honorable Jorge Rodriguez, Vice-President
of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela
From:
The New Orleans Survivor Council Delegation to Venezuela
Subject: A Report of our Visit to Venezuela
Date: February 22, 2007
Dear Honorable President Hugo Chavez and Vice-President Jorge
Rodriguez:
We thank you from the bottom of our heart for the warm, educative,
and passionate reception your people afforded our delegation
while in Caracas. We are the first delegation of poor, black,
working people from a grass roots organization from New Orleans,
the New Orleans Survivor Council, to come to Venezuela seeking
friendship, inspiration and support. We six survivors came to
you as people who have been deserted by the government in our
own country. We feel we have been set up for genocide. We deeply
believe in organizing the poor people most affected by oppressive
conditions and we look to them for leadership. We feel a strong
kinship with your government and people.
While
in Caracas, we met with a large number of your leaders and had
important conversations with them. We will summarize below so
that you can get a snapshot view of these interchanges.
•Gladys
Bolivar, activist from 23 de enero, along with Iraima Espinoza,
Yanilet Gonzalez and others in her neighborhood, met with us
to describe the Consejos Communales and our shared desire to
establish a sister city relationship between the Mayor of Caracas,
the Consejos Comunales and the New Orleans Survivor Council.
We acknowledged the similarity of our struggles and structures
and how we came to Venezuela because we sought a close relationship
with the Consejos Communales. Gladys and her fellow activists
said they would join us wherever possible in meetings in Caracas
and that they would like to come to New Orleans in a delegation
to see the situation for themselves. They said they would propose
to their people that the activists of the Consejos Communales
would welcome to Venezuela and train 25 organizers from New
Orleans and that they would help train and send 25 Venezuelans
who can speak some English to come to New Orleans to organize
with our people.
•Francisco
Torrealba, national assembly representative, President of the
Parliamentarian Group of Frienship to the US, along with Gladys
Bolivar and Tulio Virguez. We arrived at an agreement that he
should come to New Orleans to see our conditions first hand
and to seek the guidance and approval from the Venezuelan government
to support the training and work of 50 organizers, 25 from New
Orleans and 25 from Venezuela. He also heard our request for
Venezuela's support for a demonstration project of a world-class
levee to protect the poor communities of New Orleans that would
replace the inadequate levee that the US government has given
us. We discussed a series of economic development and technology
transfer ideas that we would explore during his visit to New
Orleans (see attached invitation letter to Mr. Torrealba). He
said he would speak with the ministers of Training and Social
Development as well as others in decision-making positions in
the government about our proposals. When hearing that previous
donations from Venezuela to New Orleans did not reach the poor
people who needed it most, he told us that he would make sure
that in the future donations would go to the poor. He showed
us great compassion for our people and our plight. The assemblyman
took us into the assembly hall where a committee meeting was
taking place; they stopped, acknowledge and cheered us. This
was refreshing and encouraging to us.
•Omar
Rangel of the Frente Francisco de Miranda, representing Erica
Farias and other social workers from the Frente met with us
and indicated his interest in training our organizers and helping
to recruit and train Venezuelan social workers to serve in New
Orleans as we re-build our families, communities and lives in
our city under the leadership of the New Orleans Survivor Council.
On Saturday we will go with him, Erica Farias, and other Frente
workers to visit the Consejo in Paroquia San Juan where the
work of the consejo is most developed and advanced.
•Tulio
Virguez arranged for us to do a media blitz throughout our week
in Venezuela that including the national TV station, Venezolana
de Television, radio station Radio Nacional de Venezuela, and
Vive TV. We had these interviews every day and have more to
come before we leave.
•Gladys
Bolivar and Tulio Virguez took us to the new Cotiza housing
development to see the way the Venezuelan government has dealt
with survivors of your floods. We were inspired by the beauty
of the construction, the hope of the people and the inspiration
from the government. We viewed the containers that some of these
people were forced to live in for over 20 years and they reminded
us of the horrible trailer park concentration camps the survivors
of the hurricane in New Orleans are forced to live in now. We
now have an image of what respectful housing for the poor can
look like. It gave us an idea to develop a brick factory in
New Orleans in the poor community to help build housing such
as this; we talked with engineers and construction workers on
the site to discuss the costs of such a development project
in New Orelans that would be modeled on the Venezuelan project.
•Rafael
Torrealba, President of the Teachers Union in Portuguesa state,
met with us at the National Assembly building and heard about
our hardships. We talked about the importance of homes, families,
jobs and communities to children's education and how the poor
children of New Orleans have suffered from the fact that there
are no schools in our poor communities, that the governments
on every level have used the hurricane and flood to execute
a plan to privatize the school system, clear the land where
our homes and public housing projects were and build middle
and upper class housing in its place. Rafael Torrealba indicated
his interest in coming to New Orleans for a fact-finding mission
and supporting our efforts to better educate our children. He
arranged for us to go to a teachers' council meeting and to
meet with the president of the Venezuelan Teachers' Union.
•Prof.
Eduardo Piñate, President of the Venezuelan Teachers Union,
met with us at the teachers' union meeting at Liceo Fermin Toro.
Rafael Torrealba brought us to him to see how we could work
together. He too was moved by our plight and asked us to write
a proposal specific to teachers that we would send to him and
the Ministerio de Educacion so that they would know exactly
how we can work together in the future. He was particularly
interested in our contacts and relationships with the Trinational
Commission (Canada, US, Mexico) in Defense of Public Education,
a section of the Initiativa Democratica de la Educacion en las
Americas, a Western Hemispheric organization of progressive
teacher unions struggling to keep education public, accessible,
and serving the people. They have indicated their great desire
to have the Venezuelan Teachers Union join their coalition.
Information on this was exchanged
•Maria
Eleonora Moreno took us to the Nucleo de Desarrollo Endogeno
Fabricio Ojeda. They showed us the factories and people there.
Maria will bring us to a meeting on Sunday with the Consejo
Comunales of Catia, Alta Vista in Caracas.
•General
Manager and Director of the Department of Foreign Affairs in
the Ministry of Culture. General Manager expressed support for
the exchange of organizers, important for V to invest in New
Orleans to further the revolution. She also asked that we continue
to communicate with her. She wanted to assist us in getting
our requests to the right
people in Venezuela.
•We
attended a meeting of representatives of 6 Consejos Comunales
de Parroquia San Juan, arranged by Omar Rangel of the Frente
Francisco de Miranda. We exchanged experiences of bottom-up
organizing of the poor and many of the activists expressed a
great desire to come to New Orleans to work with us.
•We
spoke with the mayor of municipal liberator Fredy Bernal. He
requested a brief list of major points about the situation in
New Orleans and our requests of the government which we prepared
and sent to him that night.
•As
of this writing, February 25th, we have several additional meetings
with media and government leaders.
Below
we list the proposals we have made to your government:
We
thank you and the Venezuelan people. We honor you and the people
of Venezuela. We support your revolutionary struggle and we
claim it as our own.
Hasta la Victoria,
Curtis Muhammad
Julie Andrews
Freddie Robinson
Robert Richardson
Ishmael Muhammad
Allen Harris
For the New Orleans Survivor Council
2226 Ursulines Avenue
New Orleans, LA 70119
504-872-9491 office
504-236-4703 cell
www.peoplesorganizing.org
[email protected]
President Chavez Press Release and Request
February 22, 2007
Dear Honorable President Hugo Chavez:
We thank you from the bottom of our heart for the warm, educative,
and passionate reception your people afforded our delegation
while in Caracas. We came to you as people who have been deserted
by the government in our own country. We are survivors of Hurricane
Katrina, members of the New Orleans Survivor Council, poor and
working black folk who have historically been ignored in our
country and feel we have been set up for genocide. We deeply
believe in organizing the poor people most affected by oppressive
conditions and we look to them for leadership. We feel a strong
kinship with your government and people.
While
in Caracas, we met with a large number of your leaders and had
important conversations with them. We will summarize below so
that you can get a snapshot view of these interchanges.
•Gladys
Bolivar, activist from 23 de enero, along with Iraima Espinoza,
Yanilet Gonzalez and others in her neighborhood, met with us
to describe the Consejos Communales and their desire to establish
a sister city relationship between the Consejos and the New
Orleans Survivor Council. We acknowledged the similarity of
our struggles and structures and how we came to Venezuela because
we sought a close relationship with the Consejos Communales.
Gladys and her fellow activists said they would join us wherever
possible in meetings in Caracas and that they would like to
come to New Orleans in a delegation to see the situation for
themselves. They said they would propose to their people that
the activists of the Consejos Communales would welcome to Venezuela
and train 25 organizers from the New Orleans and that they would
help train and send 25 Venezuelans who can speak some English
to come to New Orleans to organize with our people.
•Francisco
Torrealba, national assembly representative, President of the
Solidarity Group between Venezuela and the US, met with us,
along with Gladys Bolivar and Tulio Virguez. Mr. Torrealba's
compassion for our plight moved him to propose a trip to New
Orleans to see our conditions first hand and to seek approval
for the Venezuelan government to support the training and work
of 25 organizers from New Orleans and 25 organizers from Venezuela.
He also heard our request for Venezuela's support for a demonstration
project of a world-class levee to protect the poor communities
of New Orleans that would replace the inadequate levee that
the US government has given us. He said he would speak with
the minister of Training and Social Development as well as others
in decision-making positions in the government about our proposals.
•Omar
Rangel of the Frente Francisco de Miranda, representing Erica
Farias and other social workers from the Frente met with us
and indicated his interest in training our organizers and helping
to recruit and train Venezuelan social workers to serve in New
Orleans as we re-build our families, communities and lives in
our city under the leadership of our poor people.
•Jorge
Ariasa of the International Affairs TV show interviewed two
of our Survivors.
•Radio
shows
•Gladys
Bolivar took us to the new Cotiva housing development to see
the way the Venezuelan government has dealt with survivors of
your floods. We were inspired by the beauty of the construction,
the hope of the people and the inspiration from the government.
We viewed the containers that some of these people were forced
to live in for over 20 years and they reminded us of the horrible
trailer park concentration camps the survivors of the hurricane
in New Orleans are forced to live in now. We now have an image
of what respectful housing for the poor can look like.
The
events of the past year have caused us to re-evaluate the direction
of the progressive and revolutionary movement. Those left in
New Orleans to drown were the poorest and darkest-skinned people
of the city. Looking around the world, we see that the most
oppressed and cast-aside peoples are those with darker skin.
We are looking deeply at this intersection of skin color and
poverty and asking everyone to do the same. We are committed
to building an egalitarian society. We have concluded that the
only way to accomplish this is to look to those very people
who have been relegated to the bottom of society's heap for
leadership.
We
discussed how our people have also been deserted by most members
of the progressive community at home. We know that everyone
comes to you for help; and the very organizations that we helped
to start and that later deserted us: they have all come to you.
Often, their talk is of oil money. Our appeal to you is something
quite different. We think the most exciting thing happening
in your country is the communal council movement, and that is
why we are here.
We
shared our desire for a relationship with you, your government
and your people. We shared our desire to rebuild our own communities,
schools, and hospitals. In New Orleans we need to rebuild our
levees so we won't be washed away by the next storm. We need
to build relationships with people who care about us. From listening
to your leadership, it sounds like you care.
We
talked about our desire to forge sister-city relationships.
These would be sister-city relationships of a different type:
not with the official City Council of New Orleans, but with
the New Orleans Survivor Council, the organization of the most
oppressed folk in the city. Our council is the council of the
people, the grassroots people who were the most impacted by
this disaster, the council of the people who were left to die.
And we have made great sacrifice to come before you, personally,
in order to represent ourselves and put a stop to those who
come over and claim to represent us, building the power and
prestige of themselves and their organizations on the backs
of our suffering.
We
also discussed your communal councils and the fact that our
organizations are similar to each other. Our goal is to empower
the people at the bottom to begin to self-govern. You have a
government that declares support for that process. We don't
have such a government, and that is why we have come to you.
We
are interested in building our schools and communities, and
we desperately need to build our levees. We also have a dire
need for organizers to help us build Survivor Councils among
the 200,000 New Orleanians still scattered across six states,
in fifteen cities and numerous trailer park concentration camps.
We
discussed in detail the following:
We
are inviting you to New Orleans to see our conditions first
hand, to meet our people, visit our organization and help us
think thorough and formalize our relationship. We seek to create
a relationship with Venezuela and the poor from New Orleans.
We urgently request your presence.
Hasta
la Victoria,
Curtis Muhammad
Julie Andrews
Freddie Robinson
Robert Richardson
Ishmael Muhammad
Allen Harris
For the New Orleans Survivor Council
2226 Ursulines Avenue
New Orleans, LA 70119
504-872-9491 office
504-236-4703 cell
www.peoplesorganizing.org
[email protected]
Letter to the Vice-Minister
of Education
To: The Honorable William Mantilla, Vice-Minister of Education
of the Bolivarian
Republic of Venezuela
The Honorable Prof. Eduardo
Piñate, President of the
Venezuelan Teachers' Union
From: The New Orleans Survivor Council Delegation to Venezuela
Subject: A Proposal for Shared Work
Date: February 22, 2007
Dear Vice-Minister William Mantilla and Prof. Eduardo Piñate:
We are survivors of the hurricane in New Orleans and have come
to Venezuela seeking a relationship with your country. We are
the first delegation of poor, black, working people from a grass
roots organization from New Orleans, the New Orleans Survivor
Council, to come to Venezuela seeking friendship, inspiration
and support. We six survivors came to you as people who have
been deserted by the government in our own country. We feel
we have been set up for genocide. We deeply believe in organizing
the poor people most affected by oppressive conditions and we
look to them for leadership. We feel a strong kinship with your
government and people.
Public
education has been destroyed in New Orleans since the hurricane.
All the teachers were fired, the children could not go to school,
all schools that eventually were opened (none in the poor
communities) were privatized charter schools, the teachers union
was basically busted, and the children and families of New Orleans
were devastated. The situation of children and schools in New
Orleans was taken on by the Trinational Commission in Defense
of Public Education (Mexico, US, Canada) which is a section
of the Initiativa Democratica de Educacion en las Americas,
a Western Hemispheric organization of progressive teacher unions
and educational activists who want to defend public education
together through knowledge, solidarity, and action. They saw
the political dynamics in New Orleans as a laboratory for the
neoliberal agenda of destroying public education. The leaders
of Section 22 from the state of Oaxaca, those who led the struggle
in their city and state this year, were the first to recognize
the need for our people to unite together; we are expecting
a delegation of Mexican teachers to join us in New Orleans to
help us rebuild our schools, levee and infrastructure.
We
are particularly interested in having a relationship with teachers
in Venezuela because our children, families and teachers are
in such need. As educators, you know how important it
is to children's education that their families have homes, jobs,
and health care, and that good schools are available to them.
We have none of that in New Orleans. Our approach to the rebuilding
New Orleans is holistic: all parts of the city-- education,
housing, employment, health-- need to be developed together.
That's why our relationship with teachers and educators in Venezuela
is so important to us.
We
ask you to consider the following proposals for our shared work:
1)
That you or a representative come to New Orleans on a fact-finding
mission initiated by National Assemblyman Francisco Torrealba,
to see first hand the devastation 18 months after the hurricane
in New Orleans. We want you to be part of the Venezuelan team
that comes to New Orleans to participate with the poor black
community in assessing how to rebuild the infrastructure including
schools for our children and families. We are attempting to
bring back the 200,000 people who have been dispersed outside
of New Orleans, many of them in trailer park concentration camps
without any services including schools. We know you have
sent teachers to other nations in the past to teach literacy;
perhaps this is a model that you might apply to New Orleans.
2)
That you contact the leader of the IDEA network, Maria Elena
Arriaga, [email protected], and assess
your possible participation in their progressive grouping of
teacher unions and activists in the Western Hemisphere. They
would be honored and it would amplify solidarity and friendship
between teachers of our nations.
Please
know that we have made other requests of your government, for
organizers, for support for building part of a levee, to provide
alternative energy resources for our public housing residents,
and to develop mechanisms to share economic development and
technology transfer between the Venezuelan people and the poor
people of New Orleans through the New Orleans Survivor Council.
We
thank you and the Venezuelan people, the teachers, the children,
the families. We support your revolutionary struggle and we
claim it as our own.
Hasta la Victoria,
Curtis Muhammad
Julie Andrews
Freddie Robinson
Robert Richardson
Ishmael Muhammad
Allen Harris
For the New Orleans Survivor Council
2226 Ursulines Avenue
New Orleans, LA 70119
504-872-9491 office
504-236-4703 cell
www.peoplesorganizing.org
[email protected]
P.S. Our work would not be possible without the generous and
able support we received from Tulio Virquez and Edwin Herrera,
arranging our meetings, transportation and translation.
Letter to Our Friends in Venezuela
Camaradas:
The New Orleans Survivor Council activists who have been in
Caracas over the last few days have been received by all of
you with warmth, friendship, and support. We realize that while
we come from different nations, we share similar values and
solidarity.
While
in Venezuela, Francisco Torrealba proposed that he come to New
Orleans in the next two weeks on a fact-finding and solidarity
mission in order to assess how the Venezuelan people and government
can support the efforts of the black, poor, working people of
New Orleans in our struggle to regain our homes and our lives.
We
hope you will join Mr. Torrealba on this trip and see for yourself
what the situation is in New Orleans. If you cannot come yourself,
we hope you will send someone to represent you from your staff.
When in New Orleans, the Venezuelan delegation can discuss with
the New Orleans Survivor Council ways to work together to create
a just future for our people.
We
look forward to your response to this proposed trip and to our
future work together.
Hasta la Victoria,
People's
Organizing Committee