Caracas, December 1 (teleSUR-RHC)-- With houses slanting down the hill and peeling paint exposing concrete, the neighborhood of La Vega might look haphazard, but its residents are highly organized.

One of 22 parishes in the city of Caracas, La Vega is home to around 150,000 people. Among them are hundreds of community councils.
  
In 2006 Hugo Chavez passed a law to empower local citizens to form neighborhood-based elected councils, which make the decisions to help people go about their day to day lives. Local, popular organizations such as these form one of the cornerstones of Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution, entrusting people to run their own communities and catering decisions to their own needs.

Jose Acosta, who allocates funds for each of the projects, told teleSUR that the councils were vital for the functioning of the community.

“If there is no organization, we don’t have anything. Our fundamental basis is organization. Through the census, conducted house by house, we know how many families live in a community, which people, and what their needs are, helping us to provide a state institutional response,” he said.

Decisions are democratic, and must be approved by assemblies of citizens, which meet each week.  “(All decisions are made) in the assembly of citizens. Everything passes through the popular power, if not you can’t start the projects. Our whole base is popular power,” Jose said.

In La Vega, community councils recently completed paving a road, which before was just rubble.
    
“Now cars and buses can pass along here calmly,” Aribis Yanes, a member of the council told teleSUR English.

Another project underway is the construction of stairs. The residents at the top of the neighborhood do not have access to water, and up until now have been using a dirt path. The 140-meter structure will allow them to go up and down the hillside safely to collect it. 

As well as infrastructure, the councils deal with other social initiatives. Aribis headed up a program to get a mobile Mercal - the market where food is sold at low prices set by the state - to visit the neighborhood.

Because communal councils are partly funded by the state, they could lose out if the government does not achieve a majority in forthcoming parliamentary elections.