Populism and Authoritarian Politics in Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution

Posted on Aug 17, 2024 in History

The Liberal Tyranny of Juan Vicente Gómez (1908-1935)

• Juan Vicente Gómez and Rafael Reyes shared the same interest in promoting a flow of investments into Venezuela by nullifying Cipriano Castro’s nationalistic policies.
• Gómez favored oil companies. The market was owned by Dutch Shell, Gulf, and Standard Oil. Venezuela had a demand for abundant, cheap labor, which discouraged European immigrants.
• The Gómez regime celebrated race-mixing.
• In the 1920s, nationalist resentment of foreign economic domination and hostility toward Gómez pervaded the middle class. The economic climate was dominated by monopoly, nepotism, and corruption.
• Gómez died in 1935, and his minister of war, Eleazar López, rose to power. Many exiles returned after this and organized trade unions, political parties, and professional organizations. López was under siege from the entire political spectrum.
• López’s successor, General Isaías Medina, supported policies like Venezuela’s first social security, income-tax legislation, and the formation of trade unions. He tackled the agrarian problem.
• Marcos Pérez Jiménez and Rómulo Betancourt overthrew the Medina administration. They sought to end dependency on oil by diversifying the economy through industrialization, to expand the internal market by improving living standards, and to initiate land reform that would increase the productivity of agriculture.
• Jiménez and Betancourt created the AD (Acción Democrática) to achieve Venezuela’s bourgeois democratic revolution.
• Class issues and gender inequality persisted.

A Strange Alliance: Betancourt, Military Populism, and Dictatorship (1945-1958)

• Betancourt’s government, composed almost entirely of white elites, had continued to discriminate against nonwhite immigrants and appeared insensitive to the historical links among race, class, and political order that bound together Venezuela’s café con leche society.
• Betancourt’s government (AD) represented the first serious effort to transform the country’s archaic economic and social structures.
• The AD drafted a new constitution that guaranteed many civil and social rights and universal secret voting. In 1946, they created a tax that increased income by 230%.
• On November 24, Colonel Marcos Jiménez staged a coup, and the minister of defense, Carlos Delgado, took power.
• This new government dissolved Congress, annulled the 1947 constitution, voided the petroleum law, and abandoned other progressive programs like agrarian reform and school construction.
• After Delgado’s assassination, the regime became more repressive, and Marcos Jiménez declared himself provisional president (dictatorship) for the next five years (1953-1958).
• The Jiménez administration focused on grand works of infrastructure—highways, urban freeways, and port improvements—and urban constructions, some of little or no social utility.
• By mid-1957, the Junta Patriótica gained strength and support. On January 21, 1958, they proclaimed a general strike, which was very effective. The next day, Jiménez fled for the Dominican Republic.

Limited Democracy and Populist Resurgence (1958-1969)

• In 1958, Betancourt returned to create a democratic Venezuela. He was very cautious in choosing moderates as his political allies, as well as in his decision to join the nation’s other centrist parties to endorse the “Pact of Punto Fijo.”
• The “Pact of Punto Fijo” had three main effects. First, it created a unique model of representative democracy. The government was specifically tailored to isolate the Marxist left, making it virtually impossible for Marxists to wield power. Second, the system evolved into two parties that controlled political life: the AD and the Social Christian COPEI. Third, it assigned a major role to the state as a regulator and arbiter between the classes and interest groups.
• Over the next three decades, Venezuela made large advances in health and literacy, but petroleum goals weren’t reached, and poverty increased. Income distribution remained inequitable, and Venezuela still had an unpayable foreign debt.

Populist Problems in a Petroleum Republic (1969-1988)

• Rafael Caldera of the Social Christian Party won the presidency on a campaign to nationalize all existing oil concessions. There were also bills that nationalized the foreign-owned natural gas industry and gave the government power to control oil production. Caldera issued a decree that forbade foreign interest in radio and television stations and electric companies.
• Venezuela still remained heavily dependent on oil income; its industrialization was largely based on foreign capital, inputs, and technology. Agriculture remained the most backward branch of the national economy (it imported 46% of basic foodstuffs).
• After 15 years of democratic rule, it was doubtful if the quality of life for the majority of Venezuelans had improved at all. The UN said income distribution was the most unequal in the world.
• Carlos Andrés Pérez took power and proved to be an ineffective leader who raised the food import dependency by 70%, created unheard-of levels of corruption, and sank the country into even more debt (the national debt had increased by $10 billion by the end of his term).
• Pérez’s successor, Jaime Lusinchi, chose to pay the national debt with foreign banks before 1983.

Neoliberalism and the Dilemmas of a Petroleum Republic (1988-2003)

• The 1988 election saw the return of Carlos Andrés Pérez. Once in office, he inaugurated a neoliberal economic austerity program, which included massive currency devaluation; the lifting of controls and subsidies on a wide range of products and services, such as gasoline, bread, and electricity; and a rise in interest rates.
• Tens of thousands of people took to the streets in February 1989 because of the increase in bus fare and the measures of the neoliberal economic program.
• The neoliberal program deepened the recession. Prices for many basic foods and household items, transport, and electricity rose between 50 and 100 percent. Real wages fell between 20 and 50 percent.
• Pérez’s privatization program caused a significant loss of jobs in a country already burdened with high unemployment. The gap between rich and poor kept growing.
• In 1992, a coup led by Colonel Hugo Chávez Frías came perilously close to overthrowing the regime. His plan involved putting all those engaged in corruption on trial; a reversal of Pérez’s neoliberal policies; an emergency program to combat misery and poverty; and a dissolution of government and election of a constitutional assembly.
• In 1993, Rafael Caldera was elected president. Caldera called for a new labor law, a monthly minimum wage increase, repeal of IMF value-added taxes, new taxes on luxury items, and reform of the income tax system. Caldera deviated from what he promised.
• He wanted to privatize the oil industry and the aluminum, steel, and electrical companies.
• Around the 1990s, under Caldera, poverty had nearly doubled, inflation and unemployment had risen, the murder rate grew by 73%, and robbery by 23%.

Popular Democracy, the Military, and the Bolivarian Revolution

• Colonel Hugo Chávez won the presidential election in 1998, promising to combat poverty and misery.
• Chávez started a revolution called “Bolivarian Democracy.”
• A new constitution adopted in 1999 swept away the elitist and corrupt political system.
• He sought reforms designed to make the government more functional and socially responsible to correct the enormous imbalance in access to goods and culture.
• Chávez provided a sense of dignity to the popular masses.
• Agrarian reform: Chávez passed a law that limited farm size to 250 acres. The agrarian reform proposed to give parcels of land to as many peasants as possible.
• Improved access to education for poor children. Education reform eliminated the fees students formerly had to pay (more than 1.5 million children were added to public school rolls).
• A massive vaccination program was implemented in poverty-ridden areas.
• A special bank was created to provide microcredit to women who wished to start their own enterprises.
• In cooperation with other members of OPEC and independent producers, he sought to keep oil prices at satisfactory levels by reducing production quotas when necessary.
• On April 11, 2002, Chávez was removed from power by rioters, and a “Pinochetazo” seemed to be in the making, but the presidential guard and the loyalist military crushed the revolt.
• He then returned to power and faced several attempts to remove him, but they all failed. He was reelected in 2007, and with his democratic mandate, he reversed the denationalization of the Venezuelan economy.
• Venezuela remained divided into two nations: the majority struggling to emerge from poverty and backwardness, and a minority determined to hold on to its power and privileges.