Theory & Event

When Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez died in March 2013 after nearly a decade and a half in power, commentators on both the Left and Right began penning postmortems for the Bolivarian Revolution he was said to have lead. The slowing pace of revolutionary change, for many, seemed the most likely immediate consequence, a hope or fear that seemed justified with the Presidential elections of 14 April. Even though Chávez’s hand-picked successor won the vote, he did so by a margin that paled in comparison to the crushing electoral victories regularly won by el comandante. The new President, Nicolás Maduro, longtime Minister of Foreign Affairs and more recently Vice President, is seen by many as a compromise candidate between the Left and Right wings of chavismo. He lacks the charisma of Chávez and has little in terms of a domestic policy track record, but he has always been a dutiful and committed soldier of the Revolution. More to the point, however, the flagging electoral results for chavismo illustrate the longer-term period of internal debate and reconceptualization that intensified as the former President’s protracted struggle with cancer entered its final months. Put more directly and in the language of George Ciccariello-Maher’s excellent We Created Chávez: A People’s History of the Bolivarian Revolution, the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela is a phenomenon that exceeds elected officials or state institutions. It is, rather, a struggle spanning the last fifty years of Venezuelan history animated by the continual coming into being of new political and social subjects. Chávez did not ‘lead’ the Revolution, nor can Maduro hope to; it was the Revolution that made Chávez.

Immediately following Maduro’s election, the Washington-backed opposition immediately began a campaign of manipulation and disruption. The losing candidate and scion to the gargantuan Grupo Capriles media empire, Henrique Capriles Radonski, called for his followers to take the streets. At least eight supporters of the Revolution were killed in a night of attacks that singled out Cuban doctors in the government’s wildly popular Misión Barrio Adentro primary health care program. From Washington, US Secretary of State John Kerry and President Barack Obama publicly sided with the opposition and called for a recount. In the weeks and then months after the election Capriles and his proxies have initiated a tour of Latin America in a mostly failed attempt to drum up support for their case against the Bolivarian government.

The opposition’s tactics have been predictably and familiarly spectacular and dirty. Opposition-affiliated importers have been caught hoarding basic foodstuffs – and famously, toilet paper – in order to sow discontent with the Maduro government. Opposition legislators staged a brawl in the National Assembly – complete with motorcycle helmets, conveniently poised cameramen, and an agent provocateur posing as a chavista thug – to produce the image of political repression. More significantly, in an attempt to capitalize on long-standing divisions between the Right and Left wings of chavismo, the opposition manufactured and leaked documents and recordings they claim illustrate schisms, official corruption, and even murder plots among chief government officials and personalities – including President Maduro himself.

This is the image of post-Chávez Venezuela as presented by media outlets and policy makers in the North Atlantic: political strife and violence between Bolivarian and opposition elites triggered by a potentially explosive vacuum in power at the head of state. This is a rather partial and misleading picture. Of course, politics is always accompanied by the spectacle, and Venezuela has been no exception to this truism. If anything, the spectacular nature of the political has been even more apparent in Venezuela than elsewhere over the past twenty years. When Chávez was first elected, the traditional party system had imploded, leaving the private media to link up...