MARGARITA ISLAND, Venezuela — For 20 years, Eustacio Aguilera's family owned the Hotel Residencia Guaiqueri in this tourist destination and free-trade zone.
He hired the cooks, the maintenance men and the cleaning women. But now when he asks them to prepare a meal or tidy a room, he is careful to treat them collegially. The staff may do menial work, but they are also co-owners.
"Before we had a boss. Now we are the bosses," said Hermogenes Garcia, a longtime maintenance man at the Guaiqueri.
The hotel is among 100,000 cooperatives formed in Venezuela in the last two years that are the centerpiece of President Hugo Chavez's new socialist model to create jobs and redistribute this oil-rich country's wealth. They now employ 7% of the country's workforce, a number that could grow to 30% in a few years, government officials say.
Chavez is spending hundreds of millions of dollars in oil and tax revenue on the cooperatives. Although there have been allegations of gross inefficiency and graft, cooperatives have become a powerful part of the economy and society.
More than 700,000 impoverished workers across the nation have suddenly become stakeholders, such as the 200 families in Bolivar state that were recently given the right to operate a toll road connecting state capital Ciudad Bolivar and Puerto Ordaz. Poor workers are now operating steel and textile factories, fisheries and dairy farms across Venezuela with the prospect of sharing in whatever profits the enterprises turn.
"Before this was just a job. Now you feel the hotel is yours," said Robert Carreno, head of housecleaning at the 40-room Hotel Kamarata, another hotel on Margarita Island that recently converted to a cooperative. "I have to give much more of myself now."
At Mango de Ocoita, some 80 miles east of Caracas on Venezuela's steamy Caribbean coast, Pedro Venegas gets emotional at the mention of Hugo Chavez. The cocoa farmer credits him for membership in a worker-owned farm cooperative and the use of a $7-million cocoa processing plant going up nearby.
Venegas hopes the cooperative and factory will revive his industry after years of stunted prices for cocoa beans. The plant will enable him and 3,000 other farmers in the cooperative to produce cocoa butter, powder and liquor that they can export directly to foreign customers, instead of selling raw beans into what for years has been a buyer's market.
