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In Communes and Workers' Control in Venezuela: Building 21st Century Socialism from Below Dario Azzellini offers an account of the Bolivarian Revolution from below with extensive empirical examples and original voices from movements, communal councils, communes and workers.

Improve decision-making skills for community organizations and their leaders—from a participatory perspective! This book will show you how (and why) participatory communities come into being and what they can accomplish, regardless of the current political climate. It also examines leadership—and the skills community leaders need to develop to be most effective. You'll find ethnographic and psychosocial perspectives on the relationship between families and community organizations, leadership interventions designed to facilitate more effective decision-making, and more—all from organizations making a very real difference in a country that has had a strong community work tradition since the 1960s. This book presents an essential overview of the dynamics of urban low-income communities in Venezuela. With examples drawn from organizations designed to help a population that has been neglected by its government, Leadership and Organization for Community Prevention and Intervention in Venezuela is a unique source of inspiration and practical know-how. The intensive training workshops and restructuring projects documented in this book have proven to be positive and effective tools, strengthening Venezuelan communities despite the political unrest that has plagued the country. In Leadership and Organization for Community Prevention and Intervention in Venezuela, you'll learn how community organizations are: providing shelter for people displaced by natural disasters providing essential services when the government can't—or won't establishing community leadership roles—and helping community leaders to work more effectively transforming the perspectives of community leaders—from narcissistic to altruistic and much more! With this book, you'll examine the interaction between community organization and leadership—using the liberating, dialogic, reflective, and conscientization approach developed by Latin American community psychology. The book's approach is grounded and realistic. It highlights the outcomes of the authors' participatory research and action in urban Venezuelan communities, focusing on organization, participation, modes of leadership, decision-making and meta-decision-making, the moral development—and moral dilemmas—of community leaders, and the interrelationship between family systems and community in Venezuela. Community Organization and Leadership in Venezuela: A Prologue (Irma Serrano-García) Presentation (Maritza Montero) Organization and Leadership in the Participatory Community (Euclides Sánchez) Moral Dilemmas of Community Leaders and Sense of Community (Levy Farías and Gloria Perdomo) Community Leaders: Beyond Duty and Above Self-Contentedness (Maritza Montero) Metadecision: Training Community Leaders for Effective Decision-Making (Eneiza Hernández) Community and Families: Social Organization and Interaction Patterns (Maria Luisa Lodo-Platone) Index Reference Notes Included

Cholera, although it can kill an adult through dehydration in half a day, is easily treated. Yet in 1992-93, some five hundred people died from cholera in the Orinoco Delta of eastern Venezuela. In some communities, a third of the adults died in a single night, as anthropologist Charles Briggs and Clara Mantini-Briggs, a Venezuelan public health physician, reveal in their frontline report. Why, they ask in this moving and thought-provoking account, did so many die near the end of the twentieth century from a bacterial infection associated with the premodern past? It was evident that the number of deaths resulted not only from inadequacies in medical services but also from the failure of public health officials to inform residents that cholera was likely to arrive. Less evident were the ways that scientists, officials, and politicians connected representations of infectious diseases with images of social inequality. In Venezuela, cholera was racialized as officials used anthropological notions of \"culture\" in deflecting blame away from their institutions and onto the victims themselves. The disease, the space of the Orinoco Delta, and the \"indigenous ethnic group\" who suffered cholera all came to seem somehow synonymous. One of the major threats to people's health worldwide is this deadly cycle of passing the blame. Carefully documenting how stigma, stories, and statistics circulate across borders, this first-rate ethnography demonstrates that the process undermines all the efforts of physicians and public health officials and at the same time contributes catastrophically to epidemics not only of cholera but also of tuberculosis, malaria, AIDS, and other killers. The authors have harnessed their own outrage over what took place during the epidemic and its aftermath in order to make clear the political and human stakes involved in the circulation of narratives, resources, and germs.

A lack of funding and academic freedom amid a political crackdown leave scientists feeling hopeless and pondering an exodus from the country. A lack of funding and academic freedom amid a political crackdown leave scientists feeling hopeless and pondering an exodus from the country.

Migration presents challenges to receiving communities, as it tests their ability to respond to unexpected expenditures and social stresses. Evaluating the local impact of rapid and substantial migration flows is difficult due to the absence of a validated instrument for assessing community support for migration. Our study adapted and validated a Support for Migration Assessment survey (SMA) based on Social Exchange Theory (SET). The validation of the SMA contributes in two significant ways. First, it establishes an instrument that enables the assessment of support for migration (SFM) by considering community-level factors: trust in institutions (TII), overall community satisfaction (OCS), and perceived negative impact on infrastructure (INF). Second, the SMA extends SET to the context of migration to assess support by a receiving community. We recruited 333 survey participants between January and July 2022 using proportional stratified random sampling to measure locals’ perceptions toward the Venezuelan migrant population in Barranquilla, Colombia. The internal consistency of the factors was calculated with Cronbach’s alpha (α) and omega coefficient (ω), resulting in α = 0.88, ω = 0.89 for TII; α = 0.90, ω = 0.92 for OCS; α = 0.87, ω = 0.88 for INF; and α = 0.84, ω = 0.86 for SFM. After conducting exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, construct validity was confirmed based on the model’s goodness of fit (CFI = 0.939, TLI = 0.935, RMSEA = 0.062, SRMR = 0.076). The adapted survey demonstrates adequacy in assessing perceived community support for migration.

Background Onchocerciasis is a chronic parasitic infection originally endemic in 13 discrete regional foci distributed among six countries of Latin America (Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico and Venezuela). In Colombia, this disease was discovered in 1965 in the Pacific Coast of the country. The National Onchocerciasis Elimination Program was established in 1993 with the aim of eliminating disease morbidity and infection transmission. In 2013, the World Health Organization (WHO) verified Colombia as free of onchocerciasis, becoming the first country in the world to reach such a goal. This report provides the empirical evidence of the elimination of Onchocerca volvulus transmission by Simulium exiguum ( s.l. ) after 12 years of 6-monthly mass drug administration of Mectizan® (ivermectin) to all the eligible residents living in this endemic area. Methods From 1996 onwards, a biannual community-based mass ivermectin administration programme was implemented, complemented by health education and community participation. In-depth parasitological, serological and entomological surveys were conducted periodically between 1998 and 2007 to evaluate the impact of ivermectin treatment according to the 2001 WHO guidelines. When the interruption of parasite transmission was demonstrated, the drug distribution ceased and a three-year post-treatment surveillance (PTS) period (2008–2010) was initiated. Results After 23 rounds of treatment, parasitological and ophthalmological assessments showed absence of microfilariae in skin and anterior chamber of the eyes. Serological tests proved lack of antibodies against O. volvulus in children under 10 years-old. A total of 10,500 S. exiguum flies tested by PCR had no L3 infection (infectivity rate = 0.0095%; 95% CI: 0.0029–0.049) during 2004, indicating interruption of parasite transmission. However, biannual ivermectin treatments continued until 2007 followed by a 3-year PTS period at the end of which 13,481 flies were analyzed and no infective flies were found (infectivity rate = 0%; 95% CI: 0.0–0.014). Conclusions These results fulfilled the WHO criteria for onchocerciasis elimination. Consequently, in 2013 Colombia was verified as free of onchocerciasis, demonstrating that elimination of this neglected tropical disease is an achievable goal and paving the way for an elimination agenda to be followed by other endemic countries in Latin America and Africa.

Executive Summary Why some residents around the world facing chronic and acute stressors seek to exit their home communities while others do not, remains an unanswered question. People living in Venezuela face poverty, inflation, and food shortages and hold strong reasons to seek life elsewhere. Using a new survey of 100 residents in two communities in Venezuela — Santa Rita and Maracaibo — we qualitatively and quantitatively capture the intention to leave a failing state along a variety of potential explanatory characteristics at the individual and environmental levels. Testing the relationship with several sets of factors, including social capital, access to critical infrastructure, and anxiety about the political and economic environment, we find that optimism and access to electricity strongly correlate with intention to depart. Venezuelans who hold positive views of the future and have more regular access to electricity indicate less desire to emigrate, while individual and communal resources like social capital and individual resources like access to US dollars have no measurable impact. These findings bring with them important policy recommendations for NGOs and policymakers alike. Policies that promote optimism and psychological well-being within communities may indirectly contribute to reducing emigration intentions. Moreover, policymakers should be aware of the limits of bonding ties in helping communities experiencing multidimensional shocks. Our findings also point to the limited effectiveness of external resources in fostering a desire to stay and improve local conditions, and instead reinforce the importance of critical conditions at home.

Community media producers who are aligned with and supported by the Venezuelan state must reckon with the notion of \"press freedom.\" I argue that rather than embrace dominant liberal norms, which hold that a \"free press\" requires autonomy from the state, community media producers in Caracas approach the state as a potentially liberatory process of collective engagement. This approach demands that they reexamine liberal norms for freedom and autonomy. They do so in a context in which social actors inside and outside official state institutions struggle with the limits and future of liberalism in Venezuela. The dilemmas of community media producers in this context offer an opportunity to develop a critical anthropology of press freedom.

Behavior change campaigns are crucial in combatting illegal wildlife trade (IWT) by reducing demand, but assessing their impact requires robust strategies. The Behavior‐Centered Theory of Change (BC‐ToC) integrates Theory of Change frameworks with decision‐making models to design and evaluate interventions using behavioral and progress indicators. We used BC‐ToC to design two behavioral change interventions aimed at reducing demand for two threatened Venezuelan bird species: the Yellow‐shouldered Amazon (YSA) and the Red Siskin (RS). We developed workshops to engage community organizations and conservationists to identify audience groups, evaluate alternative behaviors considering impact and benefits, and define behavior‐based indicators for monitoring change. For YSA, two audience groups with similar demand motivations emerged: “common folks” (women, 20–70 yo, low education) and “young professionals” (20–30 yo, educated). Enjoying parrots through outdoor activities emerged as an alternative. For RS, the main audience segments were the breeder groups “South American node” (Venezuelan and Brazilian) and “Iberian node” (Spaniels and Portuguese). Iberian with wider age range (30–60 yo) and greater education than South American. Adopting responsible sourcing practices surfaced as the alternative behavior. We described behavioral levers, intermediary outputs, and indicators reflecting changes in knowledge, attitudes, norms, and control. We discussed challenges for adoption, emphasizing systemic barriers and the role of regulations, and provided ground‐tailored strategies for effective behavioral interventions. Our work integrates Theory of Change frameworks with behavioral models to create a Behavior‐Centered Theory of Change (BC‐ToC) that allows to design and evaluate behavioral interventions by describing both behavioral and progress indicators to evaluate the effectiveness of interventions in changing the target behavioral state. We applied BC‐ToC to design two behavior changes interventions aimed at reducing demand for two Venezuelan bird species threatened by illegal trafficking, the Yellow‐shouldered Amazon (Amazona barbadensis) and the Red Siskin (Spinus cucullatus).