Slavery, and human sacrifices, are the two great historic curses of our hemisphere that took vast amounts of blood and treasure and time to wipe out after great struggles.

But amid these eradications, which were thought to be for good, the seeds of these evils apparently still exist. That’s why we are seeing slavery recrudesce. Who should be the caudillo to first to re-introduce that to our hemisphere? Why, the leader most in touch with his inner barbarism – Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez.

Chavez is proposing to rope in every Venezuelan from ages 18 to 60 to “contribute” free labor to his favored shantytown projects. Whether he wants to or not. It’s not a voluntary program, but a forced one, under the socialist guise of ‘everyone pitch in together’ – something which works but only when it is voluntary, not compulsory. And it will be in the slums, at the direction of the nearest chavista commissar. Don’t like the area you are posted to? Too bad, the biggest dissidents will get the scariest slums, as an unofficial means of executing dissidents through the good offices of Venezuela’s abundant criminals.

Anyone without a bodyguard in those slums, (which Lonely Planet warns even backpackers never to set foot in), is likely to be robbed or killed as the thugs in these shantytowns see the easy pickings. Even the Cuban doctors have fled to the West due to the atrocious crime, and possibly because such a high number has defected, Chavez has decreed that all Venezuelans will donate free, unpaid labor to his pet projects like Mision Barrio Adentro, which is his Cuban doctor-cum-spy program, Mision Robinson, and other education and literacy programs, despite the fact that Venezuelans have paid taxes for years to educate illegal immigrants, who make up the vast majority of shantytown residents who are now Chavez’s favored voting bloc. Now not only must they pay taxes to Venezuela’s do-nothing union teachers, they also must do the teaching of the slum-dwellers themselves, despite the fact that the Chavistas have already declared they have ended all illiteracy. I guess this is as good an admission as any that they have not. Meanwhile, the shantytown dwellers will value this labor for exactly what they paid for it – which is nothing – and Venezuelans forced into these programs will put all the energy into it that unpaid forced chattel labor usually gets.

Meanwhile, don’t think the middle class Venezuelans forced into these “programs” by force will be able to teach the slum dwellers how to read most efficiently – they will be forced to use Marxist texts and Marxist indoctrination, and are likely to be set upon by Chavista repudiation mobs if they don’t – probably even if they do. The whole point of this forced labor is political revenge.

The Chavista move toward forced labor on the working level population is obviously a bid to get back at all his political opponents by enslaving them for a certain amount of time. It’s like being on a hacienda, and forced to pay tribute to the mint-julep-drinking planter in his wide Panama hat, as had happened in the past. Suddenly, everyone’s a peon now, except the wealthy Chavista elite, who claim credit for bettering the lives of the people. Trouble is, they are enslaving people and hypocritically calling it bettering their lives, as if some people are natural slaves, as Aristotle posited, or grosser still, being a slave is a condition a slave likes, as the Southern plantation owners used to claim.

It’s all the same slavery. Chavez has vowed to accelerate the Cubanization of his country with his ‘election,’ and this is a significant step toward it. Chavez calls it ‘revolutionary democracy and here’s who Chavez got the idea from: his own mentor, Fidel Castro, who regularly forces Cubans to donate one day a week in unpaid labor for the glorification of Castro’s island carcel. The place looks like hell, and is known as Cuba.

UPDATE: Bloomberg has even more disgusting detail here.

UPDATE: Miguel at Devil’s Excrement has the first on-the-ground report of this disgusting communist forced program, and its implications. Be sure to check out what he has to say about Viveza Criolla it will make you snicker in a black-humor kind of way, here.

UPDATE: Daniel at Venezuela News & Views has some excellent new material and a translation of a good Venezuelan article by a Venezuelan on this assault on human rights in this post here.