Bolivarian missions

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The Bolivarian missions are a series of over thirty social programs implemented under the administration of former Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez and continued by Chávez's successor, Nicolás Maduro. The programs focus on social justice, social welfare, anti-poverty, educational, and military recruiting. They draw their name from the historical South American hero, Simón Bolívar.

Types

Education

• Mission Robinson uses volunteers to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic to Venezuelan adults.
• Mission Ribas provides remedial high school level classes to Venezuelan high school dropouts; named after independence hero José Félix Ribas. In 2004, about 600,000 students were enrolled in this night school programme, and paid a small stipend. They were taught grammar, geography and a second language.
• Mission Sucre provides free and ongoing higher education courses to adult Venezuelans.

Electoral

• Mission Florentino was organized by Hugo Chávez to promote the option "No" in the Venezuelan recall referendum of 2004. The organizational centers of the Mission were named "Comando Maisanta" and were the ideological central headquarters for those who wished to keep Chávez as the President of Venezuela for the remainder of his presidential period.

Environmental

• Mission Revolución Energética (Mission Energy Revolution) a campaign launched November 2006 to replace incandescent lightbulbs with more energy-efficient fluorescent bulbs.

Food and nutrition

• Mission Mercal seeks to provide access to high-quality produce, grains, dairy, and meat at discounted prices. Seeks to provide Venezuela's poor with increased access to nutritious, safe, and organic locally- and nationally grown foodstuffs. It also seeks to increase Venezuela's food sovereignty.

Healthcare

• Mission Barrio Adentro ("Mission Inside the Neighborhood") a series of initiatives (deployed in three distinct stages) to provide comprehensive and community health care (at both the primary (Consultorios y Clínicas Populares or popular clinics) and secondary (hospital) levels, in addition to preventive medical counsel to Venezuela's medically under-served and impoverished barrios.
• Mission Nevado Named after the dog of Simón Bolívar, this program provides free medical services to pets (such as dogs) and their owners and handlers, most especially animals that have been rescued from torture and suffering from mistreatment from owners.

Housing

• Mission Hábitat has as its goal the construction of new housing units for the poor. The program also seeks to develop agreeable and integrated housing zones that make available a full range of social services from education to healthcare which likens its vision to that of new urbanism.
• Great Housing Mission Venezuela is the latest expansion of the housing missions since 2011. The program has since resulted in the construction of 4.5 million dwellings as of 2022, with 5 million expected by 2025.
• Great Mission New Neighborhood, Tricolor Neighborhood conducts house rehabilitation projects since 2009.

Identification

• Mission Identidad provides Venezuelan national identity cards to facilitate access to the social services provided by other Missions.

Indigenous rights

• Mission Guaicaipuro carried out by the Venezuelan Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources, this program seeks to restore communal land titles and human rights to Venezuela's numerous indigenous communities, in addition to defending their rights against resource and financial speculation.

Land reform

• Mission Zamora an integrated land reform and land redistribution program in Venezuela. Several large landed estates and factories have been, or are in the process of being expropriated to stimulate the agricultural sector, create more economic activity and to redistribute wealth to the poor.

Rural development

• Mission Vuelta al Campo ("Return to the Countryside"; announced mid– 2005) seeks to encourage impoverished and unemployed urban Venezuelans to willingly return to the countryside.
• Mission Árbol (Mission Tree, announced June 2006) seeks to recover Venezuelan forests and to involve the rural population to stop harm to forests through from slash/burn practices by promoting more sustainable agriculture, such as growing coffee or cocoa. The projects aim to achieve this through self-organization of the local populations.

Science

• Mission Ciencia ("Mission Science" launched February 2006) includes a project to train 400,000 people in open source software, and scholarships for graduate studies and the creation of laboratories in different universities.

Socioeconomic transformation

• Mission Vuelvan Caras ("Mission Turn Faces") has as its objective the transformation of the present Venezuelan economy to one that is oriented towards socialism, rather than fiscal and remunerative, goals. It seeks to facilitate increased involvement of ordinary citizens in programs of endogenous and sustainable social development, emphasizing in particular the involvement of traditionally marginalized or excluded Venezuelan social and economic sectors, including those participating in Venezuela's significant "informal" economy. The mission's ultimate goal, according to Hugo Chávez, is to foster an economy that brings "a quality and dignified life for all". In January 2006, Chávez declared that, after fulfilling the first stage of the mission, the goal of the second stage will be to turn every "endogenous nuclei of development" into "military nuclei of resistance against American imperialism" as part of a continuous program to create "citizen militias".

Civilian militia

• Mission Miranda establishes a Venezuelan military reserve composed of civilians who could participate in the defense of the Venezuelan territory, in the legacy of the militias during the Spanish colonial period and the struggle for independence.

Culture

• Mission Música helps the development of music by encouraging young people to take up music-related careers as well as to revive traditional Venezuelan folk music.