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