The protracted and turbulent Venezuelan crisis, which in fundamental ways still continues, could perhaps be better understood if we see it as the result of the unwillingness of a rentier society and its petro-state to undertake the reforms that might reverse its long and painful process of decay. The rentier nature of Venezuelan national life, characterized by the total undermining of the cultural relationship between hard work and well-being (Ball 1994, 31), as well as the key features of its petro-state —the “magical state” (Coronil 1997)—, have been discussed in detail elsewhere, and it does not seem necessary to repeat that analysis here (Karl 1994 and 1995). Suffice it to say that the Venezuelan democratic experiment between 1958 and 1998, gradually became especially vulnerable to the impact of three factors:

1) The ups and downs in the price of oil. When it went down, the petro-state, addicted as it is to an unceasing supply of money to spend, turned to foreign borrowing as an alternative source, soon aggravating its own fiscal condition. When the price went up, the country’s political leaders abandoned any intentions they might have had to introduce economic reforms, that are unacceptable to a population used to governmental paternalism as a way of life.

2) The essentially utilitarian nature of the political culture, the public’s weak normative commitment to democracy and the rule of law, and the resulting gap between the expectations inflated by an irresponsible political elite, and the actual performance of the petro-state (Romero 1997, 25-28).

3) The messianic-fundamentalist mentality (“Bolivarian Fundamentalism”) predominant within influential sectors of the Venezuelan military, an ideological-political factor that has played and still plays a crucial role in shaping the country’s recent political evolution.

The hour of reckoning for puntofijista democracy (thus called after the name of a place —Caldera’s own home in Caracas—, where one of its foundational pacts was signed in 1958) came in 1989, when the recently inaugurated government, amidst expectations of a speedy return to the bonanza of the early 1970s, finally had to face up to the fact that the banks were unwilling to go on footing the bill of the Venezuelan state’s wasteful ways and almost insane prodigality. It would be a mistake to think that the Pérez government, which tried to implement the economic “package” of pro-market reforms, did it because the President liked it, and had become a convert to neoliberalism. The reforms were undertaken because there appeared to be no more options, and the economy was in ruins. To undertake the reforms was an act of statesmanship, carried out by the wrong person and in highly unfavorable circumstances, considering the mood of the public at that time. Simply put, the people were not prepared to accept that the rentier “development model” had collapsed. They did not want to change then, and they do not want to change now. And why should they?, a large number of Venezuelans may reasonably ask, given that they believe there is nothing wrong with the rentier model itself, and once corruption is eliminated, petroleum wealth fairly distributed by the state will make us all prosperous again (International Republican Institute and Consultores-21 1996, 50).

Pérez’s catastrophic failure signaled the end not only of pro-market reforms, but also of any real possibilities that Venezuelan society could for an extended period of time be willing to realistically appraise the root causes of its impoverishment. The way was open for the scapegoats. First came Caldera and his anti-corruption crusade, in 1993 and 1994. It is well known that corruption plays an unusually large role in most Venezuelans’ minds, for we cannot find an alternative explanation to the fact that, according to the myth, the country is “rich” and yet the majority is poor. For almost three years, Caldera attempted to restore the old system and make it work again, an impossible task. He was forced, as Pérez before him, to the realization that no matter how hard he tried, there is no way the rentier, oil-based “development model” can make the country prosper again as it apparently did for some time. What it can now do is to deepen our dependency upon a single commodity and make us even poorer. Too late, the Caldera government introduced a half-hearted program of reforms, the Agenda Venezuela of 1996-1997 that was again received by the public as no more than another act of betrayal by a corrupt political elite. The door was open for the man who, this time, if not perhaps capable of making all of us thrive again quickly, at least would take revenge on those who brought us to the sorry situation we now find ourselves in: Lieutenant-Colonel Hugo Chávez.

2

It is easier to determine what has died in Venezuela over the past twelve months, than to ascertain what exactly is being born. Our forty-year old, oil-financed democracy of pacts between elites is dead, certainly, but there are plenty of contrasting views as to what is replacing it. I shall argue later that what we are witnessing is the transition from one type of flawed democracy to an even more perverted one, to an increasingly plebiscitary and militarized regime that in some relevant aspects is —and looks like— a degraded version of puntofijismo. But before considering the “Chavista revolution” in more detail, it could prove useful to place the Venezuelan situation within the wider Latin American context.

It has become customary, when discussing democracy in Latin America today, to refer to our political regimes as “hybrid”, “exclusionary”, “authoritarian”, “frozen”, “tutelary”, “crisis-prone”, and other such adjectives. Do these qualifications tell us anything that we did not already know about the realities of democracy in several of our countries? I do not think so. The fact is that not much is new as far as the quality of democratic existence in Latin America in general, and Venezuela in particular, is concerned. There is usually a lack of historical perspective in the prevailing emphasis on the “hybrid” nature of political regimes in the region, where a number of countries may be accurately characterized as semi-democratic, rather than fully democratic, “because of constraints on constitutionalism, contestation or inclusiveness, including outright electoral fraud and manipulation” (Hartlyn and Valenzuela 1994, 106). Some of our democracies are indeed flawed and perverted, and probably becoming more so under the pressures being experienced by most countries in the region —including Venezuela— to achieve more competitive involvement in the world economy (Romero 1996b, 84-86). As John Sheahan puts it, the citizens in the U.S. and other advanced Western democracies “can under normal conditions take for granted that their own structure of protection for personal freedoms is firmly established. That assumption is not valid in Latin America” (Sheahan 1986, 184). It is not valid now, it has not been valid in the past —with very few exceptions—, and it may be considered at least doubtful whether it will become valid in the near future.

I would not want to argue that there is nothing new in what has been happening, both politically and socioeconomically, in Latin America over the past fifteen years or so. Some of the changes, however, are not so much a question of substance as of degree. To begin with pro-market economic reforms, these have been well known in the region for decades. What is new is the intensity of the pressures on Latin American nations to open and modernize their economies and accept the realities of globalization. Until the early 1980s (in the Venezuelan case, until the end of the decade), a few Latin American countries were able to minimize the impact of painful reforms through borrowing. In the changed international environment, however, these countries have been forced to choose from only stabilization and structural adjustment, along the lines of the “Washington consensus” (Conway 1995, 156).

Will the economic reforms now underway in some Latin American countries lead to prosperity and freedom? Maybe. My view of the matter is that the need to undertake fundamental economic reforms, to modernize our economies and try to make them more productive and competitive is a fact of life for the region (that is, if we want to enjoy better standards of living in the future), and that we must be aware not only of the demands and costs, but also of the opportunities of globalization. There is, however, no escaping the reality that the democratic regimes charged with the task of reform keep finding significant obstacles along the way. The impact of market forces on traditionally closed societies can be highly destabilizing, creating competitive pressures on paternalistic states and protected economies. Venezuela, for instance, has lived for decades under the shadow of economic statism and political populism, and the country’s inhabitants have grown accustomed to the comfortable subsidy of an overvalued currency. But the current transformation of the world economy into a dynamically integrated system could bypass entire countries or large parts of their populations, shifting them “from a structural position of exploitation to a structural position of irrelevance” (Castells 1993, 37).

The incapacity of a number of countries to respond successfully to the challenges of globalization is leading to a plurality of collective reactions, with great disruptive potential. Castells mentions three: the first is to establish new linkages with the world economy via the criminal economy of drug production and trafficking, illegal arms deals, and even commerce in human beings. The second is the expression of utter desperation that has transformed entire regions —mainly in Africa— into self-destructive battlegrounds. A third reaction is the rise of ideological/religious fundamentalism, in opposition to a “development model” which threatens long-held cultural beliefs and identities (Castells 1983, 38-39).

There is a fourth reaction, however, that took form in Latin America in the late 1980s and during the 1990s, when economic setbacks and persistent social inequalities encouraged the demand for authoritarian leadership: el retorno del líder —the return of the leader (Zermeño 1989)—, of neo-caudillos such as Fujimori and Menem, who have played the part of Weberian plebiscitary figures, preserving a semblance of democracy and implementing hurtful but indispensable economic reforms, while at the same time strengthening their personal power.

Hugo Chávez belongs to this trend, but with a difference: rather than attempting to introduce market reforms, Chávez sees “neoliberalism” as an enemy. His “revolution” represents a more radical reaction to the impact of globalization, an attempt not only to exempt us from the demands of capitalist productivity and competitiveness, but also to lead us down the uncharted path of a new, original, “true democracy”. It is no wonder that this renewed experiment in populist utopia-building is taking place first in Venezuela, a country that has been able to postpone —thanks to oil— acknowledgement of the unraveling of the statist model, and where there is little awareness that we cannot continue living forever in an economy based purely on redistribution rather than wealth creation.

3

For a while, during the past decade, the very idea of military rule looked thoroughly discredited in Latin America. Also, after the terrible experiences of defeat and repression in the 1960s and 1970s, the coming apart of the Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions, and the collapse of the socialist utopia on a world scale, many thought that the Latin American Left had learned the correct lessons: “Democracy, despised and decried by the Left during the 1960s and 1970s as an empty procedure, a fallacious formality, was discovered anew in the prisons and torture chambers of diverse dictatorships…Procedural democracy —discovered through their painful learning process— was not the empty shell it had once seemed” (Gorriti 1994, 170). For some time, these developments lessened the threats to democracy from the military and the revolutionary Left. But popular disappointment with the slow march of economic reforms, the growth of poverty in the region, and a crisis of identity within the military, are slowly changing the situation.

The Left is now re-emerging, and in some cases —Venezuela and Ecuador, for example— it has forged links with radicalized sectors in the armed forces. This is, to be sure, a revamped Left, that no longer disdains “formal” democracy but embraces it as a kind of instrument to achieve a new utopia: democracy without capitalism. The main target of this newly-formed radical coalition of the old Left and military radicals is the market system, which it calls “neo-liberalism”, elevating nationalism to center stage. As Fidel Castro —much admired by Hugo Chávez— put it in his speech at the 4th Sao Saulo Forum in 1993: “Neoliberalism means the total plundering of our peoples”. What the new anti-market coalition proposes is “real democratization” as a way forward, a definition of democracy that goes beyond procedural terms and includes a “surplus of meaning” in terms of ideals of social justice and equality (Panizza 1993, 266). Chávez reflected this when he said —just to give one instance— that “(The poor in Venezuela) cannot buy meat; they cook the banana peel…to substitute for meat, to give to their children because they have none…Thus, there isn’t democracy here” (Quoted by Norden 1995, 20).

The rejection of markets, of capitalism and of globalization is giving rise to a confused but nevertheless significant grouping of military and civilian radicals that know very well what they are against (“empty” democracy, capitalism, neoliberalism, globalization), but do not really know where they are going. The bulk of commentators speak of a radical democracy that has yet to be conceptually fleshed-out (Rénique 1994, 65); others refer to a nebulous socialist democracy or a democratic collectivism inspired by the Indian communities of Latin America (Petras and Morley 1992, 1-3). The argument is that representative democracy, as it exists in the advanced West, though in some ways desirable, is not sufficient. One must go further, until reaching “authentic”, “participatory” or “true” democracy (Maingot 1994, 179). This is precisely what Hugo Chávez has been insisting upon ever since he first had the chance to address the Venezuelan people in 1994. But it remains impossible to find anything like a clear definition of what this “true” democracy would be like, or even what is meant by direct participative democracy, an obscure notion much talked about in Venezuela these days and which has found its way into the new Constitution (Art. 70). Nor is it at all clear how the new radicals propose to avoid the well-trodden path by which elimination of free markets leads to the elimination of democracy and individual liberties —that is, the road beginning in anti-capitalism and concluding in a dictatorship of a “popular democracy” type (Romero 1996a).

In the Venezuelan context, the bitterness of a people convinced that forty years of puntofijista democracy were no more than a continuous process of looting by corrupt politicians, has been compounded by the populist appeal of Bolivarian Fundamentalism, the official ideology of the “Chavista revolution”, an ideology which to a significant extent articulates the frustrations of the millions of marginalized and poorest Venezuelans. According to this vague view of things, just as Bolívar achieved independence from Spain, so today’s “true revolutionaries” must fight for independence from “neoliberalism”. This means above all the elimination of the “corrupt elites” that dominated Venezuela over the past four decades (a mission largely accomplished already), and the transformation of society according to Bolivar’s teachings. And what are these? Chávez’s own —highly distorted and simplistic interpretation of Bolivar’s doctrinal legacy, starts from a crudely conceived nationalism, which sees Venezuelans as the virtuous victims of corruption and foreign interests. The nation is perceived as embodied in the state, and the state is incarnated in the leader who, as the people’s protector, must develop a direct relationship with them, non-mediated by institutional constraints (Ceresole 1999). It corresponds to the state to control the “strategic sectors” of the economy, and direct its course.

On the international, foreign-policy front, the basic ingredients of Chávez’s vision are these: First, The United States is not an ally of Venezuela, but an adversary; it is enormously powerful but is also showing signs of “geo-strategic weakness”; the Venezuelan “revolution” must capitalize on that weakness, although for the time being Washington’s wishes must in some cases be accommodated. Second, the Cuban model is worth imitating; Cuba is a true ally of Venezuela, and —in Chávez’s own words— we are “walking together along the same road towards a better future”. Third, Venezuelan oil policy must try to revitalize the OPEC cartel, and fight for higher prices through strict adherence to quotas, rather than increasing volumes of production and searching for new markets.

This is not, on the face of it, a particularly well thought out, ideologically sophisticated political and economic program, and one is hard put to try and discover one such program behind the “Chavista revolution”. What we find, rather, is an emotional response to a situation of profound discontent on the part of a people, 87% of which think that the changes they would like to see do not depend on their own will and personal efforts, but must be implemented by a strong, benevolent and paternalistic government (El Nacional 19 October 1999, C/2), a people who believe the “Chavista revolution” will finally deliver the goods and fulfill their long-postponed expectations of material well-being. To them, to the great majority of Venezuelans, the “Chavista revolution” represents an additional attempt, perhaps the last one, to find the magic formula that will secure a fair and efficient distribution of the country’s “riches” among its inhabitants.

4

The reality of military nationalism joining leftist anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism is nothing terribly new in Latin America. What gives some originality to the Venezuelan situation is the highly charged political messianism of the Bolivarianos, the core-group of Chávez’s military followers, and of Chávez himself. Other aspects of their behavior belong to the well-known pattern of military interventionism in 20th century Latin America: “”Everywhere officers seek to prove the worth of the institution and expect civilians to prove their own worth” (Nunn 1995, 28). What else is new? Hugo Chávez is promising paradise around the corner to Venezuelans: this is what all puntofijista rulers did, ever since Pérez assumed power for the first time in 1973 and soon received a massive influx of petro-dollars, which he rapidly wasted. This time, however, there is a much wider gap between the people’s illusions and the realities of the “revolution”, between Chávez’s initial prospects and the actual circumstances of a changed international environment.

The original chavista project was conceived, in the early 1980s, for a world that no longer exists, a world in which the Berlin Wall was still standing, where political radicalism and revolution were still fashionable among intellectual elites in Latin America, the U.S., and Western Europe, and where the socialist utopia still held its spell. However, faced with a new, unfriendly environment, the “Chavista revolution” is fast developing into a confused, anachronistic response to the challenges of life in the 21st century. There is a vast, daily-growing abyss between rhetoric and fact in Chávez’s Venezuela, where the main characteristic yet distancing the new regime from puntofijismo —apart from the stronger military involvement in politics— is the defensive nature of chavista populism, in contrast to the assertive and ascendant populism of the past (Barrios-Ferrer 1999, 9). In other words, while under puntofijismo in its glory days there was a coalition of the middle and working classes, fighting together to create a system of redistribution and political participation, under chavismo we are contemplating the disappearance of what little was left of the middle and industrial working classes, and the attempt by the millions of marginalized poor to recover hope, by giving Chávez all the power he has asked for in the new Constitution, expecting that he will shore up the shattered ruins of the rentier model.

Chávez’s political base of support lies with those masses of poor Venezuelans, who also voted for Pérez in 1989 and Caldera in 1993, and with the same objective in mind: to insulate us from the demands of a world perceived as hostile, making our dream of oil-financed welfare for all come true. The military are also behind Chávez, at least for the moment. They are regaining political power and prestige, together with major institutional prerogatives, among them total autonomy from civilian control; but it is doubtful that a majority in the officer corps identify with the more radical aspects of Chávez’s rhetoric, his anti-Americanism, and sympathies with Castro and the Colombian guerrillas. Also, the military can accept Chávez’s policy of resentment only as long as it does not reach them too. Other components of Chávez’s platform: opposition to continued privatization, military-run social support for the poor, creation of reserved areas for indigenous peoples, are probably seen with a mixture of reservation and concern by many in the armed forces, who wonder where this is all going to lead us to in the end.

For all of his rhetoric, Hugo Chávez cannot flee from the world we live in. He remains as dependent on the international financial markets as his predecessors, and Venezuela needs to have access to the global capital markets if we want to grow economically in the coming months and years. Chávez has risen to power by promising Venezuelans to increase their standards of living, but “He cannot deliver the latter without either cutting dramatically into investment for development or by borrowing in the international markets. If he genuinely implements all of his policies, the foreign markets will close off to him. He will then be forced to turn oil revenues toward consumption, creating economic crises a few years down the road” (Global Intelligence Update, December 30, 1999). We might not even have to wait that long. Already the economic results of Chávez’s first year in power point toward what may be in store for us further down the road. The economy fell 7.2%, unemployment increased from 11.4% to 15.4% (although there are reasons to doubt the accuracy of this particular official figure, given the high number of daily bankruptcies in industry, commerce, and agricultural businesses); household consumption was down 4.8%, and gross capital formation 24.9%. Depressed demand helped to reduce inflation from 29% to 20%, but imports fell $ 3,065, or 20.7% (Veneconomy Weekly, January 12, 2000). The lack of international and domestic investors’ confidence in Venezuela can be illustrated by just one fact: for the first time in many years, possibly ever, the price of Venezuelan debt bonds has gone down, despite the fact that the price of oil has increased.

Politically, the “Chavista revolution” has produced a new Constitution, considered by many —rightly, in my view— as a disaster in its own right. Hastily drafted, after little meaningful debate, by an assembly 95% of which was composed of the President’s followers, the new document is even more statist and populist than the one it replaced. In sum, the new chavista constitutional precepts correspond perfectly to O’Donnell’s definition of a “delegative democracy”, one in which the president “governs as he sees fit, constrained only by the hard facts of existing power relations and by a constitutionally limited term of office” (O’Donnell 1994, 60). The fact, really, is that according to the new Constitution the president is for all practical purposes all-powerful, and checks and balances are weakened to a extreme.

Hugo Chávez has won all the elections and referenda he has called, and will surely win easily the “mega-election” scheduled for May of this year, when the President, National Assembly, state governors, city majors and other officials will be “legitimated”. Chávez has won, however, in the context of a persistent 55% of electoral abstention, and with the persevering opposition of at least 30% of the active electorate. The electoral system now being used has been designed to facilitate hegemonic supremacy by the President and his movement, with no respect for minorities or proportional representation. One wonders what they want this enormous power for, given the meager results the chavista revolution can show on the social and economic fields. This feverish process of concentration of power brings to mind the metaphor of the driver of a car heading out of control in an unknown direction, down a precipitate mountain road, and seeking desperately “to capture the wheel; for if he could but do this, his inevitable descent would represent order and not chaos” (Kissinger 1977, 205). Before becoming President, Hugo Chávez bitterly criticized the elitist and monopolistic political controls exercised by the old puntofijista parties; but his government has not improved on these. On the contrary, as his recent designations of the new Attorney and Comptroller Generals, “People’s Protector”, and members of the new Supreme Court show, he is replicating the manipulative and hegemonistic habits of his precursors, and beating them at their own game. It can cynically be asked: and why should he change those politically corrupt practices, considering that they had an almost flawless forty-year old record of successes? In its political dimension, too, the “Chavista revolution” is still very much attached to the unattractive legacy of four decades of mediocre “democratic” ways, predicated upon distrust of the people by their rulers, and the systematic predation of the petro-state.

5

In a book first published in 1938, Crane Brinton argued that revolutions have a three-stage process of development: moderate, extremist, and “thermidorian” (rule by one man: Napoleon, Stalin, Mao, Castro) (Brinton 1962). It would appear, according to the evidence now available, that the “Chavista revolution” has mixed up the three stages into one; it combines fiery rhetoric with practices that are rooted in the past, and already shows unequivocal signs of personalization and concentration of power at the presidential level. I do not think that what is happening in Venezuela can legitimately be branded a “revolution” in any rigorous sense of the term (Kaplan 1973). Nor does the chavista experiment represent “reequilibration” of democracy in Linz’s sense, that is, a political process that, “after a crisis that has seriously threatened the continuity and stability of the basic democratic political mechanisms, results in their continued existence at the same or higher levels of democratic legitimacy, efficacy, and effectiveness” (Linz 1978, 87). What we are seeing is neither renewal nor reequilibration of democracy; it is not a revolution either, but a process of uninterrupted and protracted political, socioeconomic, and cultural degradation of an entire rentier society, obsessively searching for the mirage of a vanished prosperity. Venezuelan society today is a bewildered and embittered one, which has deposited its illusions in the hands of a military caudillo, after having lost all faith in the traditional political class.

The paradoxical nature of the chavista political process lies in the fact that, in spite of its revolutionary mask, it represents another effort to restore the old statist-populist system, and try to make it function under different historical conditions —domestic and international. The new regime is in some crucial respects similar to the old one, although in the prevailing circumstances, with the traditional parties and institutions gone, we are witnessing a process of personalization and militarization of power relationships, that had been brought under some control under puntofijismo. The popularity of one man among the impoverished masses, and the institutional weight of the armed forces as a “last resort”, guaranteeing a precarious social truce and a minimum of order, are the two pillars of the chavista regime. Apart from these, there is little else. Given that Hugo Chávez is apparently convinced that he is on the right track, and consequently does not see the need to modify his policies, I think that what we can expect to happen in Venezuela in the coming months and years is the continuation of our political, socioeconomic and cultural degradation, a situation that will aggravate the resentments and frustrations simmering in our society.

In theory, Chávez has three options: first, to muddle through, much as his predecessors during the puntofijista period did, hoping to prolong the plebiscitary legitimacy of his rule; second, to radicalize his “revolution”, intensifying political repression and military control; and finally to go against the structural grain of rentier economics and the petro-state. The last option is the least probable, for it would require telling the truth to a people that are not yet ready to hear it, and particularly not from somebody like Chávez, who came to power to fulfill a dream. Muddling through will be tried, until the inevitable erosion of Chávez’s popularity and the enduring crisis open the way for more momentous decisions. For the moment, however —and as the former chavista “Comandante” and head of the political police, Lt. Cnel. Urdaneta, recently put it—, what we see in Venezuela is “more of the same, but worse” (“más de lo mismo, pero peor”) (El Nacional 11 February 2000, D/1).

In the meantime, it should not surprise anyone if the Chávez phenomenon is imitated elsewhere in Latin America, as seems to have been the case in Ecuador last January, for the “contagion effect” finds fertile ground in societies subjected to the tensions of global economic, technological, and cultural transformation, tensions and challenges that impose on us a difficult process of adaptation.

To sum up: I believe that Venezuelan society has experienced over the last few years what Karl Deutsch would call a process of “pathological” political learning. Let us understand here the term “political learning” as a process of cognitive change “through which people modify their political beliefs and tactics as a result of severe crises, frustrations, and dramatic changes in the environment” (Bermeo 1992, 274). This process of societal apprenticeship can assume several forms —creative, pathological, or merely viable. In the first case, the society’s learning process increases its ranges of possible intake of information from the outside world. If the learning process is pathological, it reduces the society’s subsequent capacity to learn, to adapt itself to new circumstances and overcome new challenges. Finally, if the learning process is merely viable it neither adds nor detracts from the society’s subsequent capacities for learning and self-steering (Deutsch 1963, 169). What Venezuelan society has done is to encapsulate itself in the old certainties, turning its back from a changing world.

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