scholarly journals The Roadmap of Chavism to Power. Elections and Propaganda During the First Phase of the Bolivarian Revolution (1999–2006)

Author(s):  
José Alberto Olivar

<p>La investigación desarrollará un estudio sobre el proceso político ocurrido en Venezuela luego del triunfo electoral de Hugo Chávez Frías en 1998 y su segunda reelección llevada a cabo en 2006. La hipótesis de este trabajo considera que Venezuela transitó desde 1958 una fase acelerada de su transformación socioeconómica y política, que superó la capacidad de adecuación de la dirigencia de los partidos políticos para establecer nuevos escenarios de representatividad y participación del sistema democrático venezolano. Esta situación favoreció el tránsito hacia un régimen populista-autocrático instaurado a partir de 1999, bajo la denominación inicial de la Revolución Bolivariana. Uno de los aspectos resaltantes de la primera fase de la Revolución Bolivariana fue el auge del gasto público entre 2003 y 2005, orientado en su mayor parte a cubrir el costo de las misiones sociales, cuestión que desestimó la importancia de invertir en infraestructura y ampliar la capacidad de producción del país. Ello obligó al gobierno de Chávez a acelerar la construcción de obras de infraestructura pendientes desde hacía años, para disminuir las críticas de sus opositores políticos. La estrategia electoral en los últimos meses de la campaña electoral de 2006 se orientó a vincular la imagen de Chávez con obras públicas emblemáticas ya terminadas o medianamente concluidas. Los resultados de esta investigación arrojaron que la estrategia de vender la Revolución Bolivariana como un gobierno con hechos materiales permitió estimular en el imaginario colectivo la idea de la supuesta eficiencia de Chávez como gobernante y en consecuencia la conveniencia de apoyar su permanencia en el poder.</p>

2001 ◽  
Vol 100 (643) ◽  
pp. 80-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer McCoy ◽  
Laura Neuman

Hugo Chávez has taken on the mantle of the people's will. He has also taken on an ever-larger share of political power and shown an increasing interest in spreading his “Bolivarian revolution” to the downtrodden in nearby Colombia, Ecuador, and Bolivia.


2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (3/4) ◽  
pp. 590-595 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jose Ragas

In this essay, I examine the controversy around the “Carnet de la Patria,” a national identity card issued in Venezuela in December 2016. I argue that this ID card belongs to a larger project of surveillance and regulation of identity developed by the Bolivarian Revolution and implemented by the late Hugo Chavez and continued by current president Nicolas Maduro. Amid its worst economic crisis, the government claims that the new ID card will allow citizens a better access to goods from supermarkets, replacing the fingerprint system (“captahuella”) that provoked massive protests in 2014. Opponents to this document have highlighted the parallel with the cards that exist in Cuba (“ration books”), and the manipulation of the database system to benefit only those who support the government and are already registered in previous official databases. The Venezuelan case provides an intriguing scenario that defies the regional region addressed to provide personal cards to undocumented groups. It also provides valuable comparative lessons about the re-emergence of surveillance technology and identity cards in modern authoritarian regimes.


Author(s):  
Daniel Hutagalung

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.


2011 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 835-852 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANNE DAGUERRE

AbstractThis article analyses Venezuelan antipoverty programmes under the presidency of Hugo Chávez, the leader of the ‘Bolivarian Revolution’ (1998–present). Support for poor people has become the government's trademark since the creation in 2002–03 of a series of emergency social programmes, the Missions. These programmes attend to the basic needs of low-income individuals in terms of nutrition, health and education. The Missions are characterised by a pattern of institutional bypassing which makes their long-term institutionalisation difficult. Do the Missions really introduce a break with previous social policies? To answer this question, we first analyse the evolution of the Venezuelan social state. Second, we review the development of the Missions, especially the MissionVuelvan Caras, nowChe Guevara, an active labour market programme. Third, we provide an assessment of the Social Missions and identify ruptures and continuities with past social assistance policies. The main contention is that the Missions exhibit a strong pattern of path dependency, despite the ideological and discursive ruptures that have attended the presidency of Hugo Chávez.


Author(s):  
Antulio Rosales ◽  
Miriam Sánchez

Venezuela is essential for global energy politics because it has the largest oil reserves in the world. Historically the nation has been a significant producer, but from 2013 onward it became immersed in a deep crisis. This chapter discusses the transformation of Venezuela attributed to oil extraction, the complexities of the political configurations molded by rent distribution, and the changes in sociocultural features due to the permeation of oil rents. Venezuela’s dependence on oil has often been explained through the “resource curse thesis” due to its incapacity to assure the benefits of the commodity-led growth model and to invest in activities that foster long-term development. Political science scholarship, specifically, has been most concerned with the use of oil wealth to shape state and society and with the relationship between the state and the oil industry in Venezuela, especially its national oil company, PDVSA. These arguments account for a paradoxical mismatch between Venezuela’s promise as producer and its indebted and inefficient oil industry during Bolivarian Revolution, led first by Hugo Chávez and later by Nicolás Maduro.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-163
Author(s):  
Henry Moncrieff Zabaleta

On December 8, 2012, in the last speech of the late Comandante Hugo Chávez, the issue of Venezuelan sovereignty reached its climax with the succinct phrase – ‘Today we have Homeland! (Patria)’. Currently, Venezuela is going through a large-scale political conflict, trying to make sense of a pressing economic and humanitarian crisis. The so-called Bolivarian Revolution that began in 1999 as a project of revolutionary and anti-imperialist democracy, plays out today at an unprecedented geopolitical scale, increasingly appearing in international media, a media that distorts the many points of tension between the war and the resistance that Venezuelans experience in their daily lives. The slogan ‘We have Homeland! (Patria)’ has become the center of discord, splitting this nation: while some defend Venezuelan nationalist socialism, others oppose the system that has ‘ruined’ the country’s economy. This photographic essay, produced between 2012 and 2016, as a part of the author’s ethnographic work on geographies and socialist societies in Venezuela, shows the complex ways in which the discourse of national and territorial sovereignty materializes in the state, in the body, in the ways of life, in the city, in the neighborhoods and in the deserters of the Venezuelan socialist regime that faces neoliberal globalization.  Living between the borders of two economies articulated by the state, one socialist and the other capitalist, renders the Venezuelan spirit a subject that is both challenging and contradictory, something that manifests itself in Bolivarianism, the cult of Chávez, the attachment to consumer goods, the ‘escape’ from the system (even in the Caribbean Sea) and the anguish over the economic and political confinement of lives.


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