Search

The year 2022 represented a turning point for the regime of Nicolás Maduro, as the economic situation slightly improved domestically, while internationally, it managed to overcome the diplomatic blockade and relax the economic sanctions imposed by the United States. The article presents an analysis of what happened in Venezuela in 2022 through the lens of the regime’s political propaganda, which focused on selling a country that had been fixed when the reality of the Venezuelan population’s life was far from that. To analyze the paradoxes of the official campaign in contrast to the reality of what Venezuelans experienced, changes in quality of life, civil and political rights, migration, and changes in the international scenario were analyzed. It is concluded that the changes produced in the country benefited the regime and its image abroad, while keeping the population in a critical situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empirical evidence points to democratic erosion as dominant pattern in Post-Cold War cases. The debate about democratic erosion so far remains fragmented due to the proliferation of labels, and the lack of conceptualization and a shared definition. This paper presents a concept of democratic erosion as a route of "slow death" of democracy developing three definatory features: agency, opportunity and sequencing. Regarding the drivers of this change, the argument presented here is actor-centered, conceiving democratic erosion as a process shaped by the intentionality and systematic actions of an erosion agent. In view of the mechanism, the article introduces sequencing as specific logic of action that is able to explain the incremental dismantling. This logic of action is derived inductively from the Venezuelan case and illustrates the pattern of active and intentional change of rules realized in sequenced hollowing out of democratic structures, processes, norms, and principles. Five developed sequences serve as framework for the analysis of democratic erosion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The autocratic regime in Venezuela has survived despite a multitude of crises. It has done so by relying on classic autocratic tools, but also by deploying what I call "function fusion": granting existing institutions the ability to perform a variety of functions typically reserved for other institutions. The military is acquiring civilian and business functions; organized civilian groups have been given the function of conducting quasi-military operations; a constituent assembly has acquired the function of legislature and ruling party combined; and the state is sharing sovereignty with foreign armed forces and criminal gangs. The regime is adapting the concept of multitasking in the service of twenty-first–century authoritarianism. This is a risky strategy, but so far it has allowed the regime to maintain its repressive rule and keep its coalition intact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how seven leading western newspapers covered the topic of polarisation in Venezuelan society during the Chávez era. It found that the media largely ignored the debate as to whether Hugo Chávez was the catalyst or consequence of polarisation. It virtually unanimously presented him as a divisive, polarising character destroying democracy, contrary to the lived experiences of many Venezuelans, while ignoring other possible explanations for the polarisation. It also found that there was a strong similarity in how the liberal and conservative, British and American press covered the issue, with virtually no differences in explanations or outlook, thus manufacturing consent for the elite view of the issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Procesos Historicos is the property of Universidad de Los Andes (Venezuela) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In late December 2015, amidst plummeting oil prices, highly politicized food shortages, and an all-around tense political climate in Venezuela, an unexpected event took place in the country's National Assembly just days before a major shift in its political leadership. A new seed law was passed, with provisions including bans on genetically modified seeds and the patenting of life forms, recognition of both formal and informal seed systems, and protections for the seeds of the country's peasant, Indigenous, and Afro-descendant communities. The processes behind the Law's passage were long, messy, dynamic and contentious, with unanticipated twists and turns, betrayals and alliances. This article shares an 'intimate perspective' into these processes, as described by those directly involved in them, and as seen through the combined analytical lenses of a historical, relational and interactive approach to food sovereignty construction. This includes an exploration of the shifting of roles across state-society lines; the interaction of threats and opportunities as catalysts for collective action; and incremental shifts in power as social movements engage strategically in different types of spaces, including inside, outside, through and between formal structures of the state. Such an approach complicates simplified narratives around state co-optation of movements on the one hand or idealized depictions of state-society synergy on the other, revealing the many shades of grey involved. The aim is to contribute new insights into the complexities of state-society relations in the construction of food sovereignty, and into bottom-up policy-making processes more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the economic and social situation without comparison parameters in the contemporary history of Caribbean continent. It further discusses acceleration of the current Venezuelan political crisis; arrival of the Bolivarian Revolution to power in 1999; opposition bench of the National Assembly (former Congress of the Republic) ceased to be the minority in Venezuela; and origin of controversial maneuver by Venezuelan opposition against the regime of Nicolás Maduro.

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After opposition leader Juan Guaidó challenged Nicolás Maduro's leadership in January 2019, what has happened in Venezuela at the political, economic, and social levels? What has been the international response to the Venezuelan crisis? This paper aims to provide an overview of domestic processes that took place in Venezuela in 2019. It begins by highlighting the political challenge to the autocratic regime of Nicolás Maduro when the president of the National Assembly assumed the role of interim president of Venezuela. Then, it examines the main socioeconomic problems in Venezuela, and how the international community reacted to these challenges. The final section discusses the current situation of the regime and the opposition after a year of attempts at dialogue and negotiation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Venezuela has two types of prisons: a prison regime ruled by a hierarchical organisation of armed inmates and the securitised 'New Regime' system under the control of the Ministry of Penitentiary Services. This article uses a comparative approach to examine how legitimacy is constructed in these competing yet co-existing prison regime formations in Venezuela. Both the Venezuelan state and the prisons under 'carceral self-rule' legitimate their respective carceral orders through discourses of left-wing emancipation that correspond with different phases of the Bolivarian project. Yet contradictions emerge from these legitimising discourses and neither regime conforms to its respective discourse of participation or socialism. In the state-abandoned, violent and hierarchical prisons under carceral self-rule, prisoners are only partially empowered, while in the New Regime prison types predation at the hands of one's fellow inmates is replaced by the violence of the 'humanising' state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay exposes the existence of an alternative archive on the memory of the nineties. Through the analysis of the novels Pim Pam Pum (1998) by Alejandro Rebolledo, La última vez (2007) by Héctor Bujanda, Bajo tierra (2009) by Gustavo Valle (2009) and Valle zamuro (2011) by Camilo Pino, I establish a constitutive uprooting that escape from the nostalgic discourses of political polarization. The definition of the Black Friday Generation is proposed to talk about youth subjectivities that suggest a historical continuity between neoliberalism at the end of the 20th century and the Bolivarian Revolution at the beginning of the 21st century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In N.° 440 of the magazine El Cojo Ilustrado of April 15, 1910, it was carried out a major outreach work in full celebration of the Centennial of the Independence of Venezuela. This special issue became one of the main pieces to signal interconnection from other levels of the historical relevance of April 19, 1810, and origin myth of the independence revolution of the Venezuelan nation, its military heroes and the rest of the continent. This number weaves a wide and diverse network of connections whose ultimate goal would be to recognize a foundational moment in the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on Venezuela's self-proclaimed interim president Juan Guaidó has made a number of strategic errors that raise questions about the kind of regime his presidency seeks. It informs that Guaidistas argue that this is due to factors including fear of reprisals and loss of privilege, nefarious criminal interests, and intense surveillance.

This paper analyses the current political crisis in Venezuela after the proclamation of Juan Guaido as interim President in January 2019. The main argument here is that current crisis is the most recent chapter a long political crisis that began with rise to power of Hugo Chávez in 1999. A brief historical analysis of the previous chapters of the crisis is done as well an evaluation about the extent to which those previous events influence on current ones. The paper ends with an evalution of the possible scenarios of solution of the crisis and the role that Venezuelan domestic actors and international actors will play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the reasons why the most important anti-corruption campaign in twentieth-century Venezuela failed to win sustained support. Employing a constructivist approach to historical actors' understandings of corruption, it analyses the debates that erupted when the Acción Democrática (Democratic Action, AD) party prosecuted 167 former officials for illicit enrichment. The ensuing debate demonstrates that AD and its opponents disagreed over the proper boundaries between the public and private spheres in a modern state. AD sought to punish officials who used public office for private gain, but critiques of the trials effectively countered AD and contributed to its overthrow in 1948. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares the foreign policies developed by Hugo Chávez's (Venezuela) and Rafael Correa's (Ecuador) governments in order to determine how the kind of populism developed by both of them affected each government. It is concluded that in Hugo Chávez case, by using a traditional way of populism he adopted a confrontational foreign policy focused on promoting his image internationally. In Rafael Correa case, his government is techno-populist and most of the times he adopted a less confrontational foreign policy, but rather intended to obtain benefits in the short and medium term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Varia História is the property of Varia Historia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Nicolás Maduro was the winner of the presidential elections in May 2018 in Venezuela, an electoral process marked by a low level of participation and ignorance of the results by the opposition and a large part of the international community. Following the theoretical-methodological paradigm of the critical analysis of discourse, this article analyzes Nicolas Maduro's discourses during the electoral campaign, in order to identify their characteristics and the strategies of resistance to the dominant discourse that has been configured about Venezuela in the international scene. The results reveal a positive approach, focused on hope and the future rather than discrediting its political adversaries, but without disassociating itself from the chavista legacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this paper is to present the different approaches from the political theory on the implementation in Venezuela of a totalitarian regime. It is concluded that it began with a form of delegative democracy, from 2005, which degenerated into a competitive authoritarian system (2012 onwards), to finally become a totalitarian system, based on the conflict of powers between the Supreme Court of Justice and the National Assembly, with the weakening and annihilation of the rule of law. The actions of the illegitimate Supreme Court of Justice, not only inconstitutionally invaded exclusive powers of the National Assembly, blocking the proper functions of it, based principally of ideological characters more than in the law, which led the establishment of a purely electoral democracy, with totalitarian aspects, with the imposition and implementation of a Spurious Constituent Assembly, that continuously modifies the Constitutional text in order to benefit the will of the current ruler, in this case of study, Nicolás Maduro. In this way, citizens are violated their right to choose, undermining popular sovereignty, such as completely undermine the electoral mandate expressed on December 6, 2015 and the principles of integral democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pasar de ser la vitrina de Occidente en el Caribe durante la Guerra Fría a proclamar el socialismo en el siglo XXI hace de Venezuela uno de los casos más inusuales de la historia. Los hombres y las mujeres que impulsaron esa vuelta al socialismo fueron, paradójicamente, hijos de la Gran Venezuela. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a populist leader, Hugo Chavez famously used emotionally charged populist rhetoric to appeal to a broad base of poor and working-class Venezuelans. Was his choice of linguistic discourse a tool of popular control, response to public opinion, or both? Answering this question sheds light on the effectiveness of classical democratic conceptions of vertical accountability for populist leaders. Using a theoretical framework incorporating macro implications of Zaller's receive-accept-sample (RAS) model, the concept of Erikson, Mackuen, and Stimson's mood, and latent public opinion, we develop several competing expectations regarding rhetoric and presidential approval in Venezuela. Using computational sentiment analysis on a unique dataset of transcripts from Chavez's Aló Presidente broadcasts, we evaluate Chavez's quarterly public approval ratings with vector autoregression (VAR) and Koyck models. Results indicate presidential approval levels are causally linked to not only exogenous economic factors but also leader discourse. Results also indicate that leader language is not shaped by approval levels, illustrating the power of messaging and media control for populist leaders and the potential limits of democratic accountability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information about the political condition in Venezuela, featuring the late President Hugo Chávez, who has promised to bring about a peaceful revolution and to fashion himself as an anti-establishment political leader. Other information about Chá's political direction as well as evidence of mounting opposition to president's leadership is presented.

Abstract: The increasing instability of the Medina administration was reflected in its deteriorating relationship with the Venezuelan press, and ultimately the press played an active role in the administration's fall. Though Medina began his administration as a move toward democratization, elements of the press and other social and political groups came to believe that the pace of change and Medina's commitment to seeing it through were lacking. Elements of the press supported, then criticized, then openly opposed the government, demonstrating the important role a free press plays in the establishment and maintenance of a democratic society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]