With a majority of the opposition opting to boycott the December 6 National Assembly elections, the governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) won more than 67% of the vote. It now has a huge majority inside parliament which has expanded from 177 to 277 deputies.
Due to this expansion, a number of new deputies, many of them grassroots revolutionaries, will be entering parliament for the first time.
One of them is Melitza Orellana, who started her activism as a high school student in 1999, the year Hugo Chavez assumed the presidency for the first time. Since then, Orellana has worked closely with the country’s campesino movement and been heavily involved in promoting community councils and communes as expressions of radical local democracy.