A gathering in Washington DC examines Venezuela's practices of participatory democracy.

State-financed cooperatives are mushrooming in Venezuela, hand-in-hand with the boom in oil prices, and are supposed to be laying the foundations of a new socioeconomic model...

The Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA) is aimed at striking a major blow against US hegemony, the IMF, the World Bank, "free" trade, and neo-liberalism in general. By Shawn Hattingh.