Bolivarian Revolution Research Articles

WITHIN THE SCOPE OF EXTERNAL INTERVENTION THE U.S.-VENEZUELA RELATIONS

Venezuela, 1998’de Hugo Chávez’in iktidara gelişi ile birlikte köklü bir dönüşüm geçirmeye başlamıştır. Chávez tarafından Bolivarcı Devrim olarak adlandırılan bu köklü dönüşüm ülkede siyasal, ekonomik ve sosyal açıdan pek çok değişimin yaşanmasına neden olmuştur. Bu durumun, Venezuela’nın dış politikasına da yansımaları olmuştur. Chávez döneminde uygulanmaya başlanan çok taraflı dış politika vizyonu, anti-emperyalist/anti ABD duruşu ve neoliberal politikalara karşı yapılan hamleler Maduro döneminde de uygulanmaya ve sürdürülmeye çalışılmaktadır. Bu gelişmeler sonrasında Venezuela’da yaşanan değişim sonucunda ortaya çıkan durum ABD’yi pek çok alanda olumsuz olarak etkilemektedir. Bu nedenle ABD, Venezuela’daki ekonomik çıkarlarını korumak, bölgede ABD karşıtı bir eğilimin yaygınlık kazanmasını önlemek ve Latin Amerika’daki hegemonyasını koruyabilmek için birtakım politikalar geliştirme ihtiyacı duymuş ve uygulamaya koymuştur. Böylece ABD ve Venezuela arasındaki ilişkiler zaman içerisinde oldukça gerginleşmiştir. Venezuela dış politikada müttefiklik ilişkileri, ülke içinde uygulanan siyasal, sosyal ve ekonomik program ve politikalarla ABD açısından olumsuz olarak değerlendirilecek eylem ve uygulamalar gerçekleştirmiştir. Buna karşın ABD ise çeşitli müdahale araçlarını kullanarak Venezuela’ya müdahale etmiş ve etmeye devam etmektedir. Bu açıdan müdahale ve dış müdahale olguları bu iki ülkenin ilişkileri açısından gündeme gelmeye başlamıştır. Bu nedenle Venezuela ve ABD arasında yaşanan gelişmeler çalışmada dış müdahale olgusu kapsamında değerlendirilmiştir.

Hugo Chávez dan Kebangkitan Populisme-Kiri Amerika Latin: Venezuela Era Hugo Chávez (1998-2006)

Hugo Chávez appeared and emerged in Venezuela under political-economic crisis. This article argues that his power struggle supported by the people because Chavez vision and mission are to favour the people inrerest, and he takes care about people. . Chave political project, as stated Ellner as non- revolutionary path of radical populism, expressed through various political program missions, namely to encourage social revolutionary program, but not in the political project of the revolution, at least during the Chávez powers throughout 1998-2006. However, Ellner mentioned that non- revolutionary path of radical populism can also lead to revolutionary-path, meaning that political poryek Chávez is still unfinished and still possible to reach a variety of changes, whether the "Bolivarian Revolution" will take the form of non-revolutionary transformation, or even revolutionary- path.

Populism and Performance in the Bolivarian Revolution of Venezuela by Angela Marino

Reviewed by: Populism and Performance in the Bolivarian Revolution of Venezuela by Angela Marino Javier Guerrero Marino, Angela. Populism and Performance in the Bolivarian Revolution of Venezuela. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2018. 225 pp. Angela Marino's clearly written Populism and Performance in the Bolivarian Revolution of Venezuela straddles political theory and performance studies to examine the complex relationship between populism and embodied actions in Venezuela. This intriguing study, which begins with the arrival of President Chávez to office in 1998, takes an interdisciplinary approach to "the political formations ... exercised by participants within and surrounding [End Page 149] these performances [...] as an organizational method of building popular power" (8). Highly relevant and ambitious, her original approach to the relationships between performance and politics serves as a correction to both the general misuse of the notion of populism to result from the recent rise in neoconservative nationalisms and the critical revision of populism in the face of Venezuela's unprecedented migration and humanitarian crisis. Marino proposes that populism can catalyze and reorganize power, giving rise to alternative political approaches like the oxymoronic "critical populism" (9). If populism is a dimension of the political, she argues, "then we need to account for how people know and reproduce populism through performance" (10). However, if "performance was a constitutive, mediating factor in the emergence of populism in Venezuela" (169), Marino fails to trace the profound relationship between participatory democracy, performance, and the body that has been central to the reconfiguration of contemporary local politics. Although the book seeks to reject the Manichean opposition "good versus evil" characteristic of theories of populism, the author replaces it with multiple binary oppositions that oversimplify the case and leave her thesis resting on a caricaturized struggle between candid politics—that draws on uneven ethnographic research—and an imperialist and racist thirst. According to Marino, the Bolivarian Revolution is an unprecedented radical shift, but her analysis is based on a movement of individuals only vaguely connected to a collective (166). While she understands the resulting fiesta politics (174) as "a moving target that is constantly negotiated and rearticulated through the performance and its production" (31), the complex interplay between Venezuelan populism and performance requires a more careful study. In five chapters, an introduction, and a conclusion, the book explores film, theater, and performance, as well as other intersectional bodily acts, and considers performance beyond its standard theorization as a cultural domain located outside of the law (168). Despite some misunderstandings and inaccuracies—for example, that Carlos Andrés Pérez's neoliberal reforms were announced "in a lavish banquet from the Teatro Teresa Carreño" (91)—Marino points out interesting connections. She fails, however, to explore the highly relevant Chávez-era transformation of the political regime from representative to participatory democracy. As Margarita López Maya has demonstrated, this regime's ideas were neither Marxist nor Chávez's own; rather, they were introduced in Venezuela through Catholic doctrine and reformulated by the political party Copei in the 1960's and 70's (López Maya 45). This understanding would change Marino's reading of Corpus [End Page 150] Christi devils, as well as her central argument. Also baffling is the failure to reference Rafael Sánchez's groundbreaking 2016 book, Dancing Jacobins: A Venezuelan Genealogy of Latin American Populism, which questions the relationship between populism and embodied manifestations throughout the nation's history. Sánchez even depicts Venezuela as a theater in which audience members leave their seats to join the crowds outside while the nation's representatives try desperately to regain their attention through increasingly manic dancing onstage. This welcome book considers a rarely analyzed topic in an understudied nation. Unfortunately, however, it fails to contribute in a rigorous way to an understanding of the extraordinary interplay between populism and performance in Venezuela. Javier Guerrero Princeton University Works Cited López Maya, Margarita. "Iglesia católica y democracia participativa en Venezuela." Latin American Research Review, no. 49, 2014, pp. 45-60. Google Scholar Sánchez, Rafael. Dancing Jacobins: A Venezuelan Genealogy of Latin American Populism, Fordham UP, 2016. Google Scholar Copyright © 2020 Center of Latin American Studies

The Commune Is the Plan

Recent years have witnessed a renaissance of radical planning in both theory and practice, but often with a persistent disconnect between the two. This article sets out from Harney and Moten’s concept of fugitive planning, adjusting it to speak to the still-colonial reality of the global South, before turning to overlooked experiments taking place in Venezuela’s communes. I argue that while grassroots planning in Venezuela mirrors all of the inherent and deepening contradictions of the Bolivarian Revolution, the self-managed socialism of the communes represents the only alternative to the perversions of oil development and the economic, social, and political crisis racking Venezuela today.

Narrativa De La Emigración Venezolana En El Siglo XXI: Emergencia E Invisibilización

This article analyzes four representative authors of the narrative of Venezuelan emigration in the twenty-first century: Miguel Gomes, Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez, Liliana Lara, and Juan Carlos Chirinos. These Venezuelan authors wrote their works during the years of the so-called Bolivarian Revolution, when the literature of the opposition was silenced or stigmatized as unpatriotic by the official discourse. Facing a violent and polarized context at home, they decided to write and publish from abroad. In their works, they delve into the roots and complexities of Venezuelan reality oversimplified by the discourse of the Chavez and Maduro regimes, and by international polarization as well. They narrate fictions of individuals or situations that stand out in the middle of an undemocratic regime in its efforts to silence individual dissidence. Therefore, traces of trauma and collective failure are common features in their works. Against the oversimplification of history, these authors create plots with varying levels of meanings, characters that live among different cultural identities or languages, texts that challenge translation, and understanding of the Venezuelan emigration phenomenon.

Escribir en un país en ruinas: un panorama de la literatura venezolana actual

El objetivo de este artículo es presentar un panorama de la literatura venezolana actual. Venezuela atraviesa una profunda crisis económica, social y política como consecuencia de la revolución bolivariana. Frente a esta, el campo literario se transforma e intenta mantener un espacio plural. Para analizar cómo las editoriales intentan sobrellevar el contexto nacional, estudiamos algunas publicaciones recientes y estrategias de publicación frente a la crisis, como, por ejemplo, el uso de las redes sociales y de las páginas web. Notamos, a pesar de importantes esfuerzos para mantener el mercado editorial, una dramática disminución en el número de publicaciones. Además, observamos que las editoriales en su esfuerzo de resistencia, terminan asumiendo múltiples roles como: promoción de lectura, labor de archivo, encuentros entre escritores de diferentes casas editoriales, organización de lecturas en público, alimentar sus redes sociales con contenido sobre historia de la literatura, hasta tirajes financiados exclusivamente con recursos personales. Sumado a esto, ocurre un importante éxodo de escritores, que, si bien permite a los autores hacer circular su obra a nivel internacional, no aumenta la oferta nacional. Todas estas adaptaciones del campo literario nos parecen insostenibles a largo plazo y lamentablemente no logran revertir la tendencia a un panorama literario precario y con muchas dificultades para la circulación de los textos

From community to communal media: Lessons for the sustainability of community media from the Bolivarian experience

Abstract This article seeks lessons for the sustainability of community media by looking at its role in Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution. It draws on recent theorization to define community media as an articulating mechanism of a maximally democratic civil society. It then situates this understanding in relation to the Gramscian notion of a ‘civil state’, which has increasingly informed Latin American socialism and in which the state’s role is to maximise participatory governance within civil society. The article then analyses the weaknesses of the Venezuelan community media sector under a liberal framework, and attempts to establish a new legal structure that would integrate participatory media with civil society and the Bolivarian ‘commune’ system. These efforts demonstrate that heterarchical institutional structures may best integrate community media with civil society in a manner that assures sustainability and autonomy.

Continuity and change in Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution

The aims and outcomes of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela are fiercely contested. A sympathetic view sees the possibility of Left revolutionary transformation as destabilised by aggressive US and domestic opposition actions. Detractors trace an authoritarian path from President Hugo Chávez’s election in 1998 to an inevitable socialist implosion under his successor Nicolás Maduro two decades later. This article emphasises continuities between the Bolivarian Fifth Republic and the Fourth Republic that the Revolution displaced. These account for the limitations of the transformative process. Historical institutionalism explains the reproduction of rentier practices and centralised state management and political organisation, culminating in cascading crisis across regime types.

Angela Marino. Populism and Performance in the Bolivarian Revolution of Venezuela.

Angela Marino’s Populism and Performance in the Bolivarian Revolution of Venezuela makes a seminal contribution to understanding the complex synergies between performance and populism as they intersect with discourses of power, race, religion, and class in the context of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution.

Statization and denationalization dynamics in Venezuela's artisanal and small scale-large-scale mining interface

Existing literature analyzing the spread of artisanal and small-scale mining highlights precarization and rising poverty in developing countries, generally as a consequence of neoliberal reforms,as the main drivers. Building on the case of Venezuela, this article draws upon this literature and traces a distinctive trajectory in mining evolution and policy-making from a liberal context to an increasingly statist one. The crumbling of a rentier state model, with increasing poverty and lack of social protection networks, represents a structural incentive for the expansion of artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) and the state promotion of large-scale mining. Furthermore, the intersections of irregular and illegal mining with armed groups are central to the mining sector in Venezuela. The article argues that the intersections of ASM and large-scale mining in Venezuela demonstrate a paradoxical process of statization and denationalization. The existence of increased statist economic policies such as expropriation of extractive industries did not necessarily translate to an increased state presence in mining communities in Venezuela during the Bolivarian Revolution. Rather, the overlapping of public, non-official and criminal groups' exercise of authority and control have proliferated in the face of a deep economic crisis of Venezuela's rentier state. The spread of criminal and irregular authorities complicates attempts to formalize ASM and incorporate large-scale investment.

Notes from the Editors, June 2019

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 The situation in Venezuela has become extremely dire due to Washington's heightened economic warfare, its continuing attempts to engineer a political coup, and its growing threats of massive military intervention—all aimed at bringing down the Bolivarian Republic. The recent seizure of Venezuelan oil assets in the United States and its gold reserves in British banks, as well as the sanctioning of Venezuelan oil sales, have come on top of a long series of economic sanctions—beginning with the Obama administration and now intensified under Trump's—that constitute nothing less than a modern form of siege warfare, extended to food supplies and medicine. But the Venezuelan Revolution has managed to resist in the face of the economic and political warfare of the most powerful imperialist nation in the world, and the reasons why are to be found in the nature of the Bolivarian Revolution and the Venezuelan people themselves.

La crisis de la universidad venezolana y el imaginario de la paz (2000-2016)

En este trabajo se presenta una mirada crítica de la crisis que vive la universidad venezolana y el estudio del imaginario social de la paz. Se trata de documentar y reflexionar desde una perspectiva filosófica, histórica y sociológica, respecto a la actuación, impacto y naturaleza con que encararon las universidades venezolanas el desafío coyuntural de las políticas de Estado en el período de la Revolución Bolivariana (2000-2016); no sólo para documentar el proceso sino para ofrecer las alternativas de cara a la construcción de una paz sostenible. Metodológicamente el estudio se fundamenta en la comprensión de la historia de las mentalidades de la Escuela de Annales y el Imaginario Social de Cornelius Castoriadis (1975).

On PetroCaribe: Petropolitics, energopower, and post-neoliberal development in the Caribbean energy region

This article examines PetroCaribe; a regional oil trading bloc spearheaded by Venezuela and Cuba. PetroCaribe has been an attempt at establishing an anti-imperial energy region in the Caribbean, enabling post-neoliberal development. We argue that two complementary modalities of power—petropolitics and energopower—have operated through PetroCaribe as a territorial-infrastructural energy region. Petropolitics frames PetroCaribe as a means for geopolitical manoeuvring around the supply of oil, enhancing the regional influence of Venezuela while empowering the Caribbean island-nations vis-à-vis oil exporting states. Energopower defines energy not as a geostrategic commodity but as a relation that binds places together, shaping political possibility, identity, and social relations. As an exercise of energopower, PetroCaribe has been motivated by visions of post-neoliberal development and anti-imperialism, seeking to reconfigure historically-entrenched power relations within the neoliberal petropolitical paradigm. In these terms, the article traces Venezuela's long and ambivalent relationship with oil, Cuba's efforts to secure oil for its socialist revolution, and the development of the Greater Caribbean as an energy region. It examines how PetroCaribe has been operationalized through oil and medical infrastructure. Even as PetroCaribe and Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution are in decline, the trade bloc prompts us to conceptualize energy and oil as generative of subjects and space.

4 Oil's Colonial Residues: Geopolitics, Identity, and Resistance in Venezuela

This article argues oil occupies a central role in the discursive universe of Venezuelan underdevelopment, producing anxieties of vulnerability and dependency. These anxieties are internalised and reproduced in what I describe as the coloniality of oil. Coloniality naturalises, hides, and rewrites maldevelopment – a process in which the developed world stymies growth elsewhere through the machinations of hard or soft power – as underdevelopment – a neutral category suggesting the developing world need only to catch up to the North Atlantic. Animated by the formation of new political subjectivities, the Bolivarian Revolution has attempted to break with this coloniality of oil.

5 Somatic Power in the Bolivarian Revolution: Biopolitics and Sacrifice in the Case of Franklin Brito

5 Somatic Power in the Bolivarian Revolution: Biopolitics and Sacrifice in the Case of Franklin Brito

1 Cultural Policies and the Bolivarian Revolution in the Socialist Venezuela of Hugo Chávez (1999–2013)

1 Cultural Policies and the Bolivarian Revolution in the Socialist Venezuela of Hugo Chávez (1999–2013)

Venezuela: An Unstable Equilibrium

Venezuela’s descent into the abyss deepened in 2018. Half of the country’s GDP has been lost in the last five years; poverty and income inequality have deepened, erasing the previous gains from the earlier years of the Bolivarian Revolution. Significant economic reforms failed to contain the hyperinflation, and emigration accelerated to reach three million people between 2014 and 2018, ten percent of the population. Politically, the government of Nicolas Maduro completed its authoritarian turn following the failed Santo Domingo dialogue in February, and called for an early election in May 2018. Maduro’s victory amidst a partial opposition boycott and international condemnation set the stage for a major constitutional clash in January 2019, when the world was divided between acknowledging Maduro’s second term or an opposition-declared interim president, Juan Guaido.

Polarization, Participatory Democracy, and Democratic Erosion in Venezuela’s Twenty-First Century Socialism

This article analyzes the emergence and consolidation of political polarization in Venezuela during the so-called Bolivarian Revolution, led by Hugo Chávez and his successor Nicolás Maduro from 1999 to 2018. We also examine the conditions under which polarization in Venezuela became pernicious, and contributed to erosion of democracy. Given the underlying class cleavages that were associated with pro- and anti- Chavista identities, we argue that the central dimension of polarization began with a political-ideological rift around competing concepts of democracy—participatory and representative, the rights that each vision privileged (individual civil and political rights vs. collective social and economic rights), and the interpretation of participatory democracy as a complement or substitute for representative democracy. As a result, the inclusion of representative and participatory models of democracy in the 1999 Bolivarian constitution failed to deepen democracy. Instead, they came to be seen as mutually exclusive or incompatible. The result was a polarized democracy that became increasingly authoritarian.

Conciencia política, la patria grande y la lucha de clases

Este artículo se dedica a discutir la inter-relación entre la conciencia política de los pueblos y la construcción de la Patria grande Latinoamericana y caribeña, lo cual se expresa a través de la lucha de clases, cuando hay conciencia, en los países del Nuevo Mundo y de allí a los pueblos hermanos suramericanos que sufren la arremetida del gran capital que en su etapa descendente busca aumentar sus ganancias apoderándose de los recursos más lucrativos del planeta: petróleo, gas, oro, coltán, litio, agua, entre otros. El artículo está dividido en tres secciones: I- Conciencia política: Logros de la Revolución Bolivariana, Conceptos de democracia y socialismo, Conceptos de capitalismo y Datos de Geopolítica, II- La Patria Grande Latinoamericana y caribeña y III- Conclusiones, Discusión y Propuestas.

Venezuela en la frontera de la desobediencia inconclusa

El objetivo de este artículo, es analizar la construcción epistémica, ontológica y axiológica del proceso político de la Revolución Bolivariana en Venezuela, como proceso de transformación social declarado en transición al socialismo, permeado por constructos del orden hegemónico global, que se debate entre la ruptura radical y el reformismo de supervivencia. Se utilizan como principales autores a Boaventura de Sousa yWalter Mignolo, en el marco conceptual de la Epistemología del Sur, la desobediencia epistémica y la descolonización del saber. Se utilizó una metodología analítica, documental, basada en el análisis comparativo de documentos bibliográficos,legales y electrónicos, el recurso de la hermeneusis permitió concluir que, en Venezuela la ruptura epistemológica en el hacer queda disminuida por la incorporación a la lógica discursiva del proceso sociopolítico, de conceptos propios de la hegemonía cultural de la modernidad occidental. La viabilidad de la Revolución Bolivariana enfrenta amenazas permanentes a su sostenibilidad, no se ha logrado identidad entre la enunciación discursiva y la realidad que se transforma.El debate entre la ruptura radical y el reformismo de supervivencia, sitúa a la Revolución Bolivariana en la frontera del reformismo, sin encontrar una definición sustantiva postcapitalista.