A Blessing and a Curse: Oil, Politics, and Morality in Bolivarian Venezuela 9781503637085

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A Blessing and a Curse

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A Blessing and a Curse Oil, Politics, and Mor ality in Bolivarian Venezuela

Matt Wilde

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2023 by Matt Wilde. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-­f ree, archival-­quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Wilde, Matt (College teacher), author. Title: A blessing and a curse : oil, politics, and morality in Bolivarian Venezuela / Matt Wilde. Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023006790 (print) | LCCN 2023006791 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503636620 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503637078 (paperback) | ISBN 9781503637085 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Working class—Venezuela—Valencia (Carabobo) | Petroleum industry and trade—Government policy—Venezuela. | Petroleum industry and trade—Moral and ethical aspects—Venezuela. | Valencia (Carabobo, Venezuela)— Social conditions. | Valencia (Carabobo, Venezuela)—Politics and government. | Venezuela—Politics and government—1999- | Venezuela—Economic conditions. Classification: LCC HN370.V35 W553 2023 (print) | LCC HN370.V35 (ebook) | DDC 305.5/62098732—dc23/eng/20230614 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023006790 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023006791 Cover design: Susan Zucker Cover photograph: iStock / Marc Bruxelle Typeset by Elliott Beard in Adobe Jenson Pro 10.75/15

In memory of Karl Chidsey

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Contents

List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi 1 Sowing the Oil

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2 Portrait of a Political Family

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3 Aspirations and Disparities in

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the Bolivarian Barrio 4 Insecurity and the Search for Moral Order

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5 The Moral Life of Revolution

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6 Petro-­democracy and Its Ambiguities

103

7 The Weight of the Future

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8 The Unraveling

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9 Beyond the Magical State

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Notes 189 References 195 Index 217

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Illustrations

Portrait of Hugo Chávez, former president of Venezuela (Matt Wilde)

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Graffiti for and against Hugo Chávez’s proposed constitutional reforms in 2009 (Matt Wilde)

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The author’s room in Rafael and Yulmi’s annex (Matt Wilde)

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“Guns prohibited in public spaces,” at a local social mission (Matt Wilde)

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Moral y Luces (Morals and Enlightenment) at Mission Sucre (Matt Wilde)

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A children’s futbolíto tournament organized by the communal councils (Matt Wilde)

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New squatter settlements being established in Valencia, 2012 (Matt Wilde)

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FIGURE 1.1.

FIGURE 2.1.

FIGURE 3.1.

FIGURE 4.1.

FIGURE 5.1.

FIGURE 6.1.

FIGURE 7.1.

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Illustrations

A revolutionary mural painted by the Frente Francisco Miranda (Matt Wilde)

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“In this communal space, we don’t speak ill of Chávez” (Matt Wilde)

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Hugo Chávez and his daughters on the wall of Maria and Manuel’s house (Matt Wilde)

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FIGURE 7. 2.

FIGURE 8.1.

FIGURE 9.1.

Acknowledgments

This project began over a decade ago and has been shaped by so many

people down what has been a long and somewhat meandering road. Although she was never able to see this book completed, I am deeply indebted to Olivia Harris for igniting my interest in Latin America and anthropology, and for guiding me through the early stages of research. In Venezuela, I have received kindness and generosity ever since I first arrived in the country in 2008. Ceverina Marín and Felix Crudele welcomed me into their home and their family, introducing me to the joys of arepas and joropo and giving me the foundation for a life in Venezuela. I owe a huge debt to Lesbi López, who was a patient and inspiring Spanish teacher as well as a sympathetic and supportive friend. Bex Mair had a significant influence on my early forays in Venezuela, which were also shared with Adam Gill, Caribay Godoy, Andy Krieger, Vladimir Jolidon, Pablo Navarette, Hannes Senti, Hannah Strange, and Jesus Vincent. I am hugely grateful to Jim McIlroy and Coral Wynter for suggesting I visit Valencia, to Freddy Bello and Pedro Téllez for the long discussions of the city and its history, and to Angel Guevara and Yulmi Carrillo for their warmth and friendship. Karl Chidsey and Germania Marquina gave me a home away from home during difficult times, while Oscar Elieser has taught me so much about Venezuela and gone

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Acknowledgments

above and beyond on multiple occasions. I regret that I cannot name the most important people here. As a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics, I was surrounded by an eclectic array of fellow travelers who shared in the ebbs and flows of doctoral life. In particular, I owe thanks to Gustavo Barbosa, Michael Berthin, Gus Gatmaytan, Ana Gutierrez, Michael Hoffman, Daniela Kraemer, Giulia Liberatore, Dina Makram-Ebeid, Aude Michelet, Xandra Miguel Lorenzo, Zorana Milicevic, Amy Penfield, Sitna Quiroz Uria, and Martyn Wemyss for sharing the experience and providing thoughtful feedback in our writing-­up seminars. I am indebted also to Max Bolt, Ryan Davey, Deborah James, Insa Koch, and George St Clair for their friendship and guidance. My thanks extend to those who provided feedback on my work in various stages of development, particularly Laura Bear, Fenella Cannell, Kimberly Chong, Ben Coles, M ­ atthew Engelke, Stephan Feuchtwang, Tom Grisaffi, Angela Last, Mathijs P ­ elkmans, Miranda Sheild Johansson, Charles Stafford, Hans Steinmuller, Matt Tillotson, Chiara Tuckett, and Miranda Tuckett. As doctoral supervisors, Mukulika Banerjee and Sian Lazar offered meticulous attention to draft chapters, constructive and challenging feedback, and moral support both during and after my doctorate. David Graeber was a colleague, a comrade, and a friend whose presence I miss deeply in many ways. This book was influenced by many fruitful discussions of Venezuela and Latin America with colleagues such as Keymer Ávila, Stefano Boni, Aaron Kappeler, Martijn Koster, Mariya Ivancheva, Manuel Larrabure, Nadia Mosquera Muriel, Antulio Rosales, Naomi Schiller, Julie Skurski, and Iselin Strønen. A panel at the Latin American Studies Annual Congress in 2021 on “Ethnographic Encounters with Morality, Crisis, and Extractivism in Venezuela” was the perfect testing ground for the book’s main argument, and I am grateful to Eva van Roekel and Marjo Theije for arranging such a stimulating exchange. I also owe a huge debt to Amy Cooper and Robert Samet, whose support during the summer of 2021 gave me the confidence to finally finish. Amid the fog of COVID lockdowns, their encouragement was vital. Most recently, I thank my research team in Colombia—Laura García Juan, Polina Golovatina, Peter Kramer, and Alba Pereira—­for helping me under-

Acknowledgments xiii

stand the challenges facing Venezuelan migrants abroad, and for overcoming myriad difficulties amid the pandemic. Awards and grants were integral to the various periods of fieldwork that shaped this book. I would like to thank the Economic and Social Research Council for my 1+3 Studentship (Award ES/F022107/1), the Camel Trust, the Society for Latin American Studies, and the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF/29409). Material from some chapters appeared in different formats in Latin American Perspectives, Critique of Anthropology, and Bulletin of Latin American Research. I thank the editors and reviewers of these publications for their critical feedback. At Stanford, Dylan Kyung-lim White, Dawn Hall, Tiffany Mok, and Sarah Rodriguez have made the publication process a genuine pleasure. From the first conversations and proposal through to final submission, their feedback and guidance has been generous, prompt, and supportive. I am grateful for their patience and professionalism. Beyond the world of academia, I am blessed with a caring infrastructure that makes everything else possible. Alex Blackie, Ben Everitt, Corin Golding, Ewen Lappin-Cook, Brook Morgan, and David Soutar provide, quite simply, the best company I could ask for in a world of constant flux. My parents, Jan and Wilf, gave me the freedom to dream and wander. My sister, Rachel, has been a co-­conspirator since the beginning. I thank them all deeply. Most of all, I want to thank Anna: for her beautiful spirit, for being the center of my world, and for bringing out the best in me. I delight in the life we are building together. This book is dedicated to our sons, Gwyn and Dylan, whose smiles and laughter animate these pages, and whose irrepressible energy gives me hope for a better future.

FIGURE 1.1  

Portrait of Hugo Chávez, former president of Venezuela (Matt Wilde)

One Sowing the Oil

Toward the end of my first stay with Rafael and Yulmi, the couple mounted

the portrait of their president, Hugo Chávez, on the wall of their front room.1 They had asked a friend who specialized in family portraits to frame the image for the newly furnished space they had been gradually improving since my arrival as a doctoral researcher in early 2009. As they explained at the time, the portrait was an expression of loyalty and pride from a working-­ class family who had come to see their own fortunes as intimately tied to the figure whose protective gaze now looked down from the wall. “Before Chávez, most people thought that politics wasn’t important, or that it was dirty,” Rafael told me as we stood back to admire the picture one evening. “Our identity was really weak. We didn’t know about our own history, and politics wasn’t about social action. What Chávez gave us was a national identity that didn’t exist before.” In the decade that followed Chávez taking office in 1999, the lives of Rafael, Yulmi, and their family had changed significantly thanks to a series of government initiatives aimed at improving the lives of Venezuela’s poor majority. As state revenues accrued from oil exports were redistributed under Chávez’s leadership, new opportunities emerged in education, employment,

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Chapter One

and political participation for previously excluded sectors of the population. Rafael and Yulmi were in many ways typical of the local-­level pro-­government activists—­chavistas, as they called themselves—­who benefited from these reforms and became critical to Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution as it advanced through the first decade of the twenty-­first century. Rafael and Yulmi were both born and raised in El Camoruco, a low-­income urban community that is classified as a barrio—­a term that literally means “neighborhood” in Spanish, but which in Venezuela acts as a byword for the self-­built peripheries that characterize sizeable parts of the country’s urban landscape. Having cut their teeth as neighborhood organizers in their home city of Valencia, they were drawn into political activism shortly after Chávez’s election. Together with others in Rafael’s large extended family, they became key local activists during the launch of the government’s flagship pro-­poor projects such as the misiones sociales (social missions) and consejos comunales (communal councils). They also campaigned in support of Chávez during his numerous election victories throughout the early 2000s and by the time I arrived in El Camoruco had become prominent local members of the Partido Socialista de Venezuela (United Socialist Party of Venezuela, PSUV), the party the late president founded in 2007. By late 2010, as I finished the first stint of my doctoral fieldwork, Rafael and Yulmi had each taken on formal employment in the expanding Bolivarian state and were considered important figures in the local chavista milieu. The portrait that hung in their front room marked the significance of the material and symbolic changes the family had undergone over the course of a decade, its presence attesting to the totemic value that Chávez had come to play in their lives. In 2017, nearly a decade after I had begun research in Venezuela and five years since my last visit, I returned to Rafael and Yulmi’s home amid very different circumstances. Chávez had died from an aggressive form of cancer in 2013, and the country’s fortunes had deteriorated under the leadership of his chosen successor, Nicolás Maduro. The high global oil prices that had powered Chávez’s dream dropped dramatically in 2014, precipitating a wider economic and social crisis that has now gripped the country for almost a decade. An antigovernment protest movement that began in 2014 was reignited in 2017 amid spiraling hyperinflation, widespread shortages in food and medicine, and a growing discontent with the increasingly authoritarian

Sowing the Oil

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direction of Maduro’s government. As I returned to carry out further research in the midst of this crisis, my fieldwork was shaped by the new realities of everyday life in Venezuela: day-­long queues at cash machines, regular hikes in the prices of basic commodities, burning roadblocks erected by the antigovernment protestors, and increasing numbers of friends making plans to leave the country in search of employment and stability. The portrait of Chávez still hung in Rafael and Yulmi’s front room, but the inhabitants of this proud chavista household now found themselves struggling to make sense of the alarming downturn in the prospects of their country and their revolution. As they did so, our conversations frequently turned to the subject of oil and the ambivalent relationship that Venezuelans have with the substance that powers their economy and shapes their politics. “If we want to solve this crisis,” remarked Rafael one morning as we prepared arepas from a bag of state-­subsidized cornmeal, “we have to become self-­sufficient. We have to grow our own food, produce our own things. For too long we’ve been dependent on petroleum rents and that’s why we have this problem. You see, that’s the thing with our oil: it could be a blessing or it could be a curse.”

This book is an ethnographic study of the relationship between oil, politics, and morality as seen through the eyes of working-­class barrio residents in El Camoruco, a low-­income urban periphery located in the industrial city of Valencia. It draws on research conducted in three phases over the last decade—­2008–­10, 2012, and 2017—­and documents the everyday lives of El Camoruco’s residents during a period of rapid and conflictual social change. In what follows, I explore how Venezuela’s contradictory relationship with oil shaped both the conditions in which barrio residents made their lives and the terms in which they understood them over the last decade. I argue that everyday barrio life in this period was intimately shaped by the defining contradiction of the Bolivarian Revolution: that in its efforts to capture a larger portion of oil money and distribute it more widely among the population, this disjunctive political project pursued policies that ultimately entrenched Venezuela in the very position of dependency that Chávez sought to overcome. In the process, the revolution created a peculiar imaginative void between the future it envisioned through narratives and symbols and

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Chapter One

the reality it was able to deliver as a material experience. For barrio residents, this heightened long-­standing cultural anxieties about oil wealth that shaped everyday moral questions about how to be a good person and how to live a good life in turbulent and uncertain times. Under the late president’s leadership, state control over Venezuela’s oil sector enabled a left-­nationalist government to channel petroleum revenues into communities like El Camoruco through its social programs, and these endeavors had a real and visible impact on the quality of people’s lives while oil prices were high. For many barrio residents, Chávez’s reforms meant that they were able to access primary health care in their own communities for the first time. There were also new opportunities to study, find work, participate politically, and fashion new forms of personhood. In this sense, the first decade of Bolivarian rule was a period in which the ability to imagine and pursue better and more fulfilling lives, both individually and collectively, was significantly enhanced among the most marginalized sectors of the population. But at the same time, the reliance on oil money to deliver seismic social transformations reproduced the very development model that had left Venezuela so vulnerable to global economic downturns in the past. Economic policies designed to maximize the state’s spending power—­chiefly dollar controls and an overvalued currency—­increased Venezuela’s reliance on global commodity markets and ultimately undermined the drive to transition to a less volatile national economy. As a result, the Bolivarian era was characterized by deeply entrenched economic fragilities and political intransigencies that predated Chávez’s emergence and continued despite the revolution’s powerful narratives of rupture and renewal. Even before the present crisis began in 2014, new opportunities for barrio residents were often only momentarily realized or partially formed. They were distributed unevenly, experienced haphazardly, and inhibited by deep-­seated structural shortcomings that the revolution reproduced in spite of itself. In El Camoruco under Chávez’s rule, many of my interlocutors still struggled to find reliable and secure work, youth violence and street crime seemed to worsen by the year, and promised infrastructural improvements failed to materialize. And when the present crisis unfolded under Maduro’s leadership, chronic shortages in food and medicine, a climate of worsening political violence, and grotesque

Sowing the Oil

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levels of private and state corruption undid many of the revolution’s achievements. As old problems returned in new guises, the Bolivarian Revolution inhibited, weakened, and finally unmade the very progressive reforms and radical possibilities that it had opened up. In this book I argue that the promises and failures of the revolution brought to the fore long-­standing cultural anxieties about the influence of oil money on the moral constitution of the Venezuelan nation and its people. My reading of Venezuela’s relationship with oil is that it not only constitutes a structural backdrop to the everyday in political and economic terms but also operates as what Raymond Williams termed a “structure of feeling” (2001) that shapes ideas about morality in profound ways. In some instances, such as Rafael’s rumination about blessings and curses, these anxieties took the form of discussions about the political and economic imbalances associated with petro-­states at the national level. But in others, such concerns would emerge through doubts and suspicions about the circulation of petroleum revenues in local settings, and about the perceived connection between oil money and quotidian issues such as corruption, family values, individualism, and violence. As they appeared alongside the very visible public spending of the chavista state, these anxieties seemed to encapsulate a wider set of material and symbolic disjunctures that characterized the revolution as a whole. For barrio residents, new opportunities for self-­advancement were accompanied by new social tensions, producing a disorientating fusion of aspiration, hope, disillusionment, and fear in everyday life. This book explores the myriad political, moral, and practical challenges that working-­class Venezuelans encountered as they made their lives amid the openings and dead-­ ends that appeared in this tumultuous period. Oil, Politics, and Morality

When Hugo Chávez was elected in 1998, Venezuela was suddenly thrust into the global political spotlight. A radical army colonel who had been jailed for an attempted coup in 1992, Chávez gained notoriety for his colorful and fiery oratory performances and soon established himself as the de facto leader of an unprecedented regional political shift—­the so-­called Pink Tide—­ that saw a string of left-­leaning governments take power in Latin America

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Chapter One

during the first decade of the twenty-­first century. Naming his movement after Simón Bolívar, the Venezuelan general and statesman who liberated much of Latin America from Spanish rule in the nineteenth century, Chávez and his Bolivarian Revolution came to symbolize both the region’s rejection of the Washington Consensus and the alternatives it proposed to neoliberal models of governance and development (Barrett, Chavez, and Rodríguez Garavito 2008; Burbach, Fox, and Fuentes 2013).2 His forthright defiance of the United States garnered favor with many on the political left, while his policy of using oil money to finance new forms of social welfare, democratic participation, and regional integration was heralded as emblematic of a wider “post-­neoliberal turn” across Latin America (Goodale and Postero 2013; Petras and Veltmeyer 2016). But the late president’s attacks on the vested interests of domestic and foreign elites also won him many enemies, and chavismo was hampered from the start by significant opposition at home and abroad. Chávez survived a short-­lived coup in 2002, a shutdown of the country’s oil industry later that year, a recall referendum in 2004, and was opposed by a hostile private media throughout his presidency (Ellner 2008; Golinger 2005). By the time I arrived in the country in 2008, Venezuela’s political fault lines had largely polarized along lines of class (García-­Guadilla and Mallen 2019; Samet 2019), with the bulk of the revolution’s activists and supporters found among the country’s rural and urban poor. Scholarly interest in Venezuela mushroomed as the Bolivarian era unfolded. For much of Chávez’s time in power, debates centered on the roots of his popularity and the question of how to define his political movement (Castro 2007; Hawkins 2010). Some viewed chavismo as a product of the failure to adequately reform Venezuelan liberal democracy during the 1980s and 1990s and warned that Chávez’s government was eroding pluralism by concentrating power in the hands of the executive and promulgating a divisive brand of populism (Corrales and Penfold 2011; McCoy and Myers 2004). Others took a more sympathetic view, pointing to the role class conflict played in bringing Chávez to power, highlighting the widespread popular support for the Bolivarian Revolution, and defending its achievements in reducing poverty, improving public services, and enfranchising previously excluded sectors of the population (Ellner and Hellinger 2003; Ellner 2008;

Sowing the Oil

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Roberts 2006; Spanakos 2008; Wilpert 2007). A third strand of work located the origins of the Bolivarian movement in long-­standing traditions of militant organizing in Venezuela’s barrios (Ciccariello-­Maher 2013a; Fernandes 2010; Velasco 2015) and explored the complex dynamics that characterized themes such as neighborhood politics, democracy and the state, national and community media, and public health initiatives as el proceso (the revolutionary process) unfolded in local settings (Boni 2017; Cooper 2019; Samet 2019; Schiller 2018; Smilde and Hellinger 2011; Strønen 2017). My approach builds on these studies but aims to take our understanding of Bolivarian Venezuela forward by accounting for the oil dependency that both enabled and undermined the revolution’s drive for radical change. While the subject of oil is often mentioned in ethnographic accounts of the country, it is frequently presented as a contextual background to other thematic concerns rather than being a central focus in its own right. My contention is that the significance of Venezuela’s very particular relationship with oil deserves greater ethnographic attention, as well as a conceptual framework that connects the macrodynamics of oil—­that is, the question of how the globalized trade in petroleum shapes the fortunes of petro-­states—­to the microdynamics of everyday social life. Using what Iselin Strønen (2017, 6) terms a “lens of oil” to make this connection, this book provides a longitudinal perspective that spans both the revolution’s most prosperous period under Chávez and its descent into turmoil under Maduro. In so doing, it explains how an outwardly progressive political regime ultimately ended up sabotaging many of its own social achievements. Alongside this attention to debates about Bolivarian Venezuela, this book also makes a wider anthropological argument concerning the relationship between cultural understandings of oil and everyday political and moral life. Anthropologists have consistently highlighted oil’s often ambiguous social and cultural status, underlining its common association with greed, corruption, and crisis in a variety of settings (Behrends, Reyna, and Schlee 2011; Rogers 2015). Yet such work has tended to focus on either the extractive and commercial sites of oil complexes or on elite-­level governance within petro-­states, rather than on how political economies of petroleum might structure the quotidian moral frameworks of national communities.

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Chapter One

My interest is in oil—­and specifically oil wealth—­as a cultural phenomenon that shapes how citizens interpret their relationship with the state in moral terms and think of themselves as particular kinds of ethical actors as a result. Recent anthropological work at the intersection of morality and politics has demonstrated how political subjectivity can be central to wider forms of ethical self-­cultivation (Lazar 2013, 2017; Razsa 2013, 2015). This book extends such insights by examining the ways in which barrio residents experienced and understood the contradictions of the Bolivarian Revolution through their own struggles to create more hopeful, secure, and meaningful lives. Amid myriad conflicts and crises at the national level, barrio livelihood strategies in the Bolivarian period have been shaped by fleeting, contingent hopes and by persistent fears about the presence of nefarious social forces in everyday life. My principal lens on this phenomenon was drawn from my adoption into Rafael and Yulmi’s large extended family—­Los Hernández (The Hernándezes), as they were known locally—­which in many ways functioned as my ethnographic “village” over the last decade. As an adopted member of this large kinship network, I was granted a privileged view of Bolivarian Venezuela as seen by multiple generations within the same family. Through tumultuous national events, through personal triumphs and misfortunes, and through countless family gatherings marking births, deaths, graduations, and marriages, I witnessed the varied achievements, aspirations, doubts, and uncertainties that characterized barrio family life in this period. In the process, I saw how a historical moment that delivered hope and disappointment in equal measure was reflected in ruminations and misgivings about a whole swathe of issues—­consumption, crime, employment, masculinity, politics, popular culture, violence—­that connected the intimate domains of kinship to national and indeed global political and economic forces. Threaded throughout this book, the focus on Los Hernández reflects my own lived experience in El Camoruco, which was very much centered on the extended family as a social unit. But it is also grounded in a desire to give greater attention to one of the most important aspects of Venezuelan social life: kinship. All too often in the Bolivarian period, foreign researchers in particular have devoted their studies to Venezuelan politics and society in broad terms without taking into account what is probably the most significant social institution for Venezuelan people. In my view, to overlook

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the role kinship plays in everyday life is to miss the most critical means by which most Venezuelans structure their lives and make sense of themselves as social beings and moral actors. To this end, although my chief aim in this book is to show how the political economy of oil shapes political and moral experiences, a secondary aim is to present aspects of barrio life that have been largely overlooked by other scholars. Kinship is at the center of this analysis, which also covers themes such as everyday economic life, masculinity, and violence. Alongside its attention to kinship, this study also examines the everyday moral experiences of chavista activists in this period. In the first decade of Bolivarian governance, many of these actors were inspired by the possibilities the revolution seemed to open up, and by the opportunities it afforded them to craft new forms of political agency and moral personhood. Such individuals embraced Chávez’s call to fashion themselves as “New People” in the mold of Che Guevara’s (Guevara and Zimmermann 1969) revolutionary vanguard and threw themselves into efforts to establish new political institutions and new democratic practices. As they did so, these actors often described their political work in moral and religious terms, drawing on an array of spiritual metaphors as they sought to create “twenty-­first century socialism” through sheer force of will. During our first meeting in early 2009, Rafael described this perspective as follows: What I believe in when I think of socialism is the socialism of the barrio. Say I’m making breakfast in the barrio and I need sugar for more coffee but I don’t have it and the shop’s closed—­I go to my neighbor and knock on the door and borrow a little cup of sugar. Or if someone is being robbed in the street, all the other neighbors should come out and stop it. This is socialism. It’s about the small things, because before you can change the society, you have to change the person. This is fundamental.

Such statements reflected the belief that social change in collective terms rested on personal transformation on the part of individuals. In what follows, I explore how this enthusiasm for moral work on the self was often accompanied by expressions of anxiety about the corrupting influence of oil money on nascent political institutions and neophyte revolutionaries. As they sought to create themselves as new kinds of political and moral subjects, chavistas

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Chapter One

in El Camoruco found themselves struggling to reconcile these aspirations with the messy institutional and political entanglements they encountered in practice. This book shows how dilemmas about participatory politics and revolutionary strategy were often interpreted by chavista activists through questions about the moral virtues and ethical conduct of themselves, their comrades, and their neighbors. Sembrando el petróleo

Oil has a pervasive everyday presence in Venezuela. It is the subject of discussions on front porches and street corners, the focal point for political speeches and televised debates, and the fuel for a national obsession with cars and motorbikes. Across divides of class and race, all Venezuelans seem acutely aware that their country has the largest known reserves of oil on the planet (OPEC 2018). This is at once a source of national pride—­“We have enough for more than a hundred years,” many will boastfully tell foreign visitors—­and of rueful humor: “Here, it’s cheaper to fill your car than buy a bottle of water,” taxi drivers like to tell their gringo passengers. But as well as conjuring images of abundance and potency, oil is also a subject that evokes anger, disappointment, and even shame. Some Venezuelans feel that the wealth from their oil has produced a culture of greed and complacency, fostering a national character that is somehow predisposed to being indolent and unproductive. Others identify oil revenues as the source of a kind of collective moral decay, seeing it as the cause of everything from family breakdown to violent crime. Still others bemoan the waste of oil wealth by successive governments, condemning the corruption and incompetence that they regard as a by-­product of the long-­standing entanglement between petroleum and politics. As Santiago, my next-­door neighbor in El Camoruco, once put it: You, you’re from England, you have all those things already. But we should have big buildings, grand avenues, great shops, and beautiful cities. The people should be able to buy good clothes and drive nice cars and have a good house with plasma televisions and computers and all those things. Think of all the wealth we’ve got with our oil, but we don’t have what you have. Why? Because of the corruption here.

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Santiago’s assessment was shared by many of my interlocutors, who would often draw connections between the boom and bust of Venezuela’s oil economy and what they termed antivalores (literally “negative values”) such as corruption or individualism. In this sense, when Rafael expressed doubts about whether Venezuela’s oil should be regarded as a blessing or a curse, he was encapsulating an ambivalence toward el oro negro (the black gold) that has haunted the country for the best part of a century. In 1997, a year before Hugo Chávez was elected president, Fernando Coronil (1997) published a seminal work on the history of oil, modernity, and state formation in twentieth-­century Venezuela. Fittingly titled The Magical State, his groundbreaking study documented how the modern Venezuelan nation-­state had been founded on the back of the country’s oil industry as it emerged in the early part of the twentieth century. Coronil showed how the country’s transformation into a petro-­state had begun under the rule of the dictator Juan Vicente Gómez (1908–­1935), who began charging foreign oil companies for drilling access in the 1920s. In doing so, Gómez created a monopoly over the nation’s subsoils and began the process of Venezuela’s transition into what Bernard Mommer (1990) termed a “rent capitalist” economy, in which private enterprises pay for the right to develop a globally consumed natural resource, and the state seeks to maximize its income through regulation and taxation of these endeavors (Mommer 1990, 418).3 The influence of oil on the Venezuelan economy increased rapidly under Gómez’s rule, and by 1928 the country was the world’s second-­largest exporter of petroleum (Tinker Salas 2009, 74). This shift to oil exports as the predominant source of national income endowed the state with tremendous material wealth but also had a significant impact on how Venezuela’s political institutions developed. Coronil argued that political power increasingly “came to be based on the state’s control over the exploitation of the nation’s subsoil” (1997, 8), meaning that proximity to the state rather than control over labor became the predominant means through which wealth, power, and status were attained (Kingsbury 2016, 3). As a nascent state apparatus formed around petroleum rents, efforts to establish democracy and broaden the base of those who benefited from oil exports were contested and uneven during the first half of the twentieth century. A brief period of democratic rule emerged following Gómez’s death in

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Chapter One

1935, but Venezuela returned to dictatorship following a coup against the elected government of Rómulo Gallegos in 1948. Marcos Pérez Jiménez, another military officer, took control in 1952 and embarked on an ambitious modernization plan. Like Gómez, Pérez Jiménez saw himself as a nation-­ builder. He capitalized on improved oil agreements that had been brokered by Gallegos during the 1940s (Hellinger 2017, 57), which guaranteed a 50/50 split of profits between companies such as Standard Oil and the Venezuelan state. Between 1945 and 1957, government income from oil increased eleven times, and by 1957 it provided 70.7 percent of total state income (Aranda 1977, 141, cited in Coronil 1997, 201). Pérez Jiménez used this expanded income to invest in public housing, freeways, hydroelectricity, and the steel industry, but his drive to rapidly industrialize and urbanize Venezuela was accompanied by the brutal suppression of civil liberties. In 1958, after running up debts with private contractors and losing significant support among the military (Coronil 1997, 201–­2), the dictator was deposed through a combined military and civic uprising, giving birth to Venezuela’s Fourth Republic. Alongside his excavation of modern Venezuelan democracy, a critical component of Coronil’s contribution was that he showed how Venezuela’s transformation into a petro-­state tied its political economy to a particular form of “subaltern modernity” (Coronil 1997, 8) that was defined from the outset by several economic contradictions. Reliance on world commodity markets left the country acutely vulnerable to global cycles of boom and bust and undermined other domestic exports. Such weaknesses had been evident ever since Gómez’s decision to overvalue the Venezuelan currency at 64 percent of the US dollar in 1929. Venezuelan agriculture struggled to compete on the world market as a result of this policy (Hein 1980, 232), and by 1947 agriculture had slumped to just 4.2 percent of national GDP (Purcell 2013, 151). In several forensic case studies, Coronil showed how similar problems afflicted Venezuela’s efforts to develop an industrial strategy during the boom years of the 1970s, as the circulation of vast sums of petrodollars in the state machinery undermined efforts to stimulate domestic industries (Coronil 1997, 286–­320). This meant that a profound paradox came to shape Venezuelan democracy and society: while oil offered the promise of collective abundance, it also undermined that promise by building distortions into the

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13

national economy and organizing politics above all around the capture and distribution of petroleum rents. This paradox has long been a source of anxiety in Venezuela. As early as 1936, Arturo Uslar Pietri, a leading public intellectual of the time, warned that the country “would become an unproductive and idle nation, an immense petroleum parasite, swimming in a momentary and corrupting abundance and impelled toward an imminent and inevitable catastrophe” (Figueroa 1977, 163). To avoid this fate, Uslar Pietri famously urged the country’s political leaders to “sembrar el petróleo [sow the oil]” (Figueroa 1977, 165) by plowing investment into agriculture and industry and thereby using oil wealth to propel the country away from oil dependency. This principle of sowing the oil essentially became the guiding philosophy for a national development strategy that spanned several decades, as successive political leaders sought to portray themselves as “magnanimous sorcerers” (Coronil 1997, 5) who could harness petroleum for the common good. As Coronil’s analysis showed, however, this strategy was always entangled in deep-­seated structural barriers that were as evident in the boom years of the 1970s as they were in the crisis years of the 1980s. In 1976, shortly after the nationalization of Venezuela’s oil industry under President Carlos Andrés Pérez, a series of high-­profile corruption scandals and murder cases linked to oil money led the politician Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo to remark that “oil will bring us ruin: it is the Devil’s excrement” (Coronil 1997, 353). His words spoke to a moral disquiet around oil that has consistently characterized Venezuela’s development as a petro-­state, encapsulating the sense that a nation blessed with material abundance has somehow cursed itself through a Faustian pact with a social and moral pollutant. My argument might be thought of as a response to The Magical State, albeit one told from a different vantage point and in a different historical moment. Coronil’s key insight was to show how, as a postcolonial petro-­state, Venezuela’s dependent position in the global economy came to intimately shape its economy, its democracy, and its state institutions. Ultimately, as his analysis showed, the subordination of these critical spheres of Venezuelan society to globalized circuits of oil money, financial speculation, and debt produced a “truncated modernity” (Coronil 1997, 391) that undermined

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Chapter One

the country’s drive to free itself from dependency. Yet as invaluable as this framework remains today, Coronil stopped short of applying it to the social and cultural spheres of everyday life and never had a chance to analyze the Chávez and Maduro eras in sufficient depth. This book extends his analytical approach into previously unexplored areas—­primarily kinship, everyday economic life, grassroots politics, and morality—­and uses this approach to understand Bolivarian Venezuela in both macro-­and microterms, grounded in a longitudinal ethnographic perspective. In doing so, it traces the links between the current global political-­economic order, the challenges confronting progressive governments in the Global South, and the daily lives of the world’s urban poor. Change and Continuity in Bolivarian Venezuela

Hugo Chávez entered Venezuela’s political arena in a moment of national crisis. Though it had been celebrated as a model of Latin American democracy since the 1960s, by the 1990s Venezuela’s Fourth Republic was facing a severe crisis of political legitimacy. Designed to guard against a return to dictatorship following the overthrow of Pérez Jiménez, the Fourth Republic had constitutionally enshrined liberal democracy as Venezuela’s political system in 1961. But though the democratic pact that undergirded this move proved remarkably durable by Latin American standards, the Fourth Republic was also governed by a dense web of petro-­clientelism that marginalized leftist currents and ensured the loyalty of the Roman Catholic Church, the military, the business sector, and Venezuela’s major trade unions (Ciccariello-­ Mayer 2013b; Coronil 1997; Buxton 1999; Ellner and Hellinger 2003; McCoy and Myers 2004). Although the two parties that dominated this system—­ the center-­left Acción Democrática (Democratic Action, AD) and the Christian-­centrist COPEI (Comité de Organización Política Electoral Independiente, Independent Electoral Political Organization Committee)—­ were able to govern largely without electoral challenge until the 1990s, they suffered a dramatic fall from grace as economic crisis and a series of corruption scandals undermined the entire political and economic establishment. Chávez’s emergence marked a significant political shift for Venezuela, bringing leftist currents back to the electoral mainstream and advocating

Sowing the Oil

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for widespread social and economic reform. But in many senses, he was also the latest in a long line of Venezuelan leaders to be seduced by the seemingly transformative power of oil. After a period in which the state oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), had been undergoing what many regarded as privatization-­by-­stealth during the 1990s, Chávez ran his 1998 election campaign on a promise to reform the oil sector and restore a lost bond between petroleum and pueblo (Hellinger 2017, 64). In 2001, his government passed a new hydrocarbons law that restored central state control over PDVSA, raised the royalties and taxes for foreign companies, and decreed that the state must own 60 percent of any joint ventures with multinationals. Chávez also took a leading role in reinvigorating OPEC, a move that helped contribute to the rapid rise in global oil prices during the mid-­2000s (Hellinger 2017, 68–­74). In the process, the late president ended what had become known as the “concessionary era,” effectively renationalizing PDVSA in the process. The short-­lived military coup against him in 2002 and subsequent oil industry paro (work stoppage) in late 2002/early 2003 were responses to these reforms from disgruntled PDVSA executives and managers, but more specifically they represented a renewed clash between capital and the Venezuelan petro-­state (Hellinger 2017, 66). After several months of spiraling economic crisis, Chávez managed to restore oil production, firing 18,000 PDVSA employees who had participated in the stoppage. After emerging victorious from the paro, Chávez fixed the bolívar’s exchange rate at 1.6 to the dollar and restricted access to dollars by making individuals and companies apply to CADIVI (Commission for the Administration of Currency Exchange) for dollars at this preferential rate.4 These monetary policies were designed in part to prevent capital flight, which had been a major problem during the crisis brought on by the paro. But in an echo of policies pursued several times during the twentieth century, they were also a means of transferring purchasing power from the export sector to the import sector.5 A strong bolívar, priced above the market value it would attain as a floating currency, meant that a higher dollar price was received for oil exports and that foreign goods and raw materials were cheaper for Venezuelan importers (Dachevsky and Kornblihtt 2017, 85). Since Venezuela is a net importer of food, medicine, and consumer goods, this policy became critical to the “petro-­socialism” (Uzcátegui 2010, 76) of the Bolivarian Revo-

16

Chapter One

lution: the subsidized food distributed through social missions was enabled by overvaluation, allowing the government to import in bulk and keep prices in state-­managed grocery stores lower than private supermarkets. The same was true of the free antibiotics administered by Cuban doctors in new barrio clinics. As world oil prices rose steadily from 2004 onward, peaking at around $140 a barrel in 2008, Chávez’s government channeled hundreds of millions of petrodollars into social programs and local health-­care initiatives, expanded employment in the public sector, and stimulated consumer spending (Weisbrot and Sandoval 2007). Social expenditure is estimated to have increased fivefold per inhabitant in this period (Blank 2010; Seiffer, Kornblihtt, and De Luca 2012), with the number of Venezuelan households in poverty halving between 2003 and 2007, and extreme poverty falling from 25.1 percent to 7.6 percent in the same period (Weisbrot 2008, 1). Yet while overvaluation proved hugely successful at maintaining popular support for the revolution’s social programs, it also produced an array of long-­term problems: massive incentives for corruption through illicit currency trading and bogus importing (Sutherland 2013, 2016), domestic industries being undercut by cheaper foreign imports, and no apparent “plan b” should oil prices fall. As a result, even as the government was lauded for its social programs, people also frequently expressed misgivings about where it all might lead. Alongside this reassertion of oil nationalism in the economic domain, Chávez also sought to distance his movement from the political orthodoxy of previous eras. One of his first significant moves in office was to appoint a Constituent Assembly that was charged with drafting a new constitution. After a nationwide process of consultation, the Bolivarian Constitution was ratified by 72 percent of voters in 1999, moving Venezuela into what Chávez heralded as a new political epoch: the Fifth Republic. The Bolivarian Constitution marked an institutional and symbolic step change for Venezuelan democracy, moving from a bicameral system to a unicameral one (the single house now being called the National Assembly) and laying down the legal framework for what Chávez called a “participatory and protagonist democracy” (Alvarez 2003, 153). This signaled a move away from the top-­down, centralized, and heavily party-­centric model of the Fourth Republic and toward a much more decentralized system that sought to empower citizen

Sowing the Oil

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participation at local and regional levels of the state (Buxton 2020, 6). Citizens now had the constitutional right to revoke elected officials and judges in the second half of their terms, as well as to impose their will on local, regional, and national bodies through citizen assemblies. New political rights and protections for women, Afro-­Venezuelans, and indigenous peoples were also notable features of the new constitution, while land and tax reforms, nationalizations, and the promotion of a “social economy” all marked a significant move away from neoliberalism in the early years of Chávez’s presidency (Buxton 2020, 9; Ellner 2008). At the same time, however, as the first decade of Bolivarian rule progressed, it became clear that unshackling Venezuela from the political and economic tendencies of the Fourth Republic was easier said than done. The coup and the paro highlighted Chávez’s vulnerability to political and economic sabotage from the country’s elites, forcing him to make strategic compromises with segments of the business class (Ellner 2017). In order to guarantee supply chains in the wake of these crises, key private sector producers were given preferential access to contracts and cheap dollars, as a new stratum of elites—­the so-­called Boliburgesía—­emerged through their close connections to the chavista state (Buxton 2020, 11–­12). Politically, a return to top-­down party management was evident in Chávez’s decision to launch the PSUV in 2007 amid factional infighting within the multiparty coalition that brought him to power. Critics argued, meanwhile, that in spite of its promotion of radical democracy, the Bolivarian Constitution created a “hyperpresidential” (Corrales and Penfold 2011, 17) system that gave too much power to the executive. In the week that I began fieldwork in El Camoruco, Chávez successfully won a referendum that removed constitutional limits on presidential terms. Following this victory, his government was repeatedly accused of political improprieties, such as vote buying, job discrimination, manipulation of the national electoral monitor, and the abuse of state resources in election campaigns (Corrales and Penfold 2011, 17–­46). Such alleged practices were by no means new to Venezuela nor unique to chavismo, but they nonetheless highlighted Chávez’s struggle to undertake radical democratic reforms and hold onto power at the same time. For Julia Buxton (2020), the revolution’s eventual slide into “rent seeking, mismanagement, corruption, duplication and waste” (Buxton 2020, 11) was a product of US-­

18

Chapter One

backed domestic opposition to the Bolivarian project. Though Chávez’s national opponents were unable to unseat him from power, they were able to generate sufficient difficulties that his administration eventually replicated the political clientelism and economic boom and bust of previous eras as it fought battles on multiple fronts. The fieldwork context that I entered in the late 2000s was thus one shaped by a social and political revolution wrestling with its own contradictions. Although the drift toward centralism and petro-­cronyism had already begun, it was also a moment in which many of the revolution’s most radical political reforms were taking root at the local level. This produced a particularly strange phenomenon, whereby the revolution’s grassroots bases were attempting to democratize and radically rethink the state in community settings—­a phenomenon that Naomi Schiller (2013, 541) terms the “processual state”—­just as institutional chavismo was attempting to consolidate and centralize its power nationally. Such tensions are at the heart of the material that forms the second part of this book. The Moral Economy of a Hybrid Petro-­State

Ambivalent feelings toward petroleum are evident across anthropological work on oil. As Douglas Rogers (2015) observes, anthropologists working in various oil contexts have shown how it “shapes senses of cyclical boom and bust, of acceleration and deceleration, and of past, present, and future” (2015: 365). Oil wealth, as Gisa Weszkalnys (2011, 2016) argues, possesses an ambiguous potentiality, at once generative and destructive. It produces myriad expectations, hopes, and fears that in turn shape both state policies and local practices (Behrends 2008; Breglia 2013; Weszkalnys 2008). Given its association with both hoped-­for and unfulfilled development strategies in the majority world (Apter 2008; Davis 1987; Shever 2012), it is not surprising that oil is so often imbued with supernatural powers (Gamburd 2004; Gilberthorpe 2006). Indeed, even the so-­called resource curse theory attributes oil with the seemingly otherworldly power to destroy national economies and upend social worlds (Collier and Hoeffler 2005; Ross 2004; Rosser 2006).6 While it is true that petro-­states and other mono-­export economies in the Global South are frequently characterized by economic imbalances, political insta-

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bility, and social conflict (Behrends et al 2011, 6–­8), such tendencies invariably owe as much to the wider geopolitical and historical contexts in which they are situated as to the specific policies of national governments (Watts 2004, 2011). In Latin America, the challenge of employing resource nationalism for progressive ends has periodically brought both hope and disappointment, as reformist governments have wrestled with the complex pressures produced by the global demand for fossil fuels (Gustafson 2020; Riofrancos 2020; Rosales 2020). As such studies show, political power clusters around oil and other natural resources in regionally and locally specific ways (Appel 2012; Boyer 2014; Mitchell 2011), and entrenched geopolitical asymmetries mean that petro-­states in the Global South have a fundamentally different relationship with oil from their counterparts in the Global North (Strønen 2020, 6). Moreover, as Iselin Strønen (2020) notes, while perspectives that focus on the institutional capacity of nation-­states to manage oil wealth illuminate a good deal about the entanglement between state formation and natural resources (Karl 1997), they often overlook how “political, social, and economic processes and dynamics are saturated with cultural and symbolic meaning” (Strønen 2020, 5). Building on such observations, my approach brings anthropological perspectives on ethics and morality into dialogue with those that center on natural resources by exploring how a macrolevel political economy of oil interacts with microlevel political and moral subjectivities. Although the burgeoning anthropological subfield in ethics and morality has revitalized questions concerning human freedom, subjectivity, and “the good” (Faubion 2011; Heintz 2009; Laidlaw 2002; Lambek 2010; Rydstrøm 2003; Robbins 2004; Zigon 2008), it has had less to say about how these questions might relate to the underlying material forces that frame everyday moral experiences. As Hannah Appel (2019) notes, this can perhaps be explained by the fact that a central motivation of the “ethical turn” (Mattingly and Throop 2018) has been to foreground everyday moral experiences and ensure that they are “not effaced by always-­already constituted explanations via structures of power” (Appel 2019, 178). According to this view, it is precisely because so much anthropological work over the past few decades has focused on the impact of “such larger-­scale phenomena as historic, economic, and political conditions” (Zigon and Throop 2014, 3)—­“ dark anthropology,” as Sherry Ortner (2016)

20

Chapter One

terms it—­that efforts have been made to reclaim the immediate, the interior, and the not-­necessarily political.7 This presents a problem, however, for those of us who seek to work across spatial and temporal scales and understand how quotidian moral experiences do relate to wider social forces, even if they are not entirely determined by them. As Appel puts it, rather than setting everyday moral experiences against abstract or impersonal forces, anthropologists should instead aim to situate them within “the supra-­individual, supra-­present contexts in which we all craft quotidian ethics” (2019, 179). In line with Appel’s position, this book draws on the recent revival of anthropological interest in the moral economy concept (Alexander, Bruun, and Koch 2018; Carrier 2018; Gkintidis 2016; Hann 2010; Palomera and Vetta 2016; Narotzky and Besnier 2014; Sabaté 2016; Simoni 2016) to understand how barrio residents made sense of their place within the confusing and contradictory political economy that has characterized Bolivarian Venezuela. As a formulation, the moral economy is commonly traced to the work of the historian E. P. Thompson (1971), who set out to explain why the removal of price controls on grain in eighteenth-­century English marketplaces resulted in a series of violent uprisings among peasants. Thompson’s key contribution was to show how these uprisings were not simply a product of hunger but also “reflected a vision of a better world” (Carrier 2018, 22).8 English marketplaces, he claimed, were not circumscribed economic spheres governed by utilitarian models of supply and demand, but rather profoundly moral spaces shaped by long-­standing obligations between buyers and sellers (Edelman 2005, 2012; Thompson 1971, 98).9 Jaime Palomera and Theodora Vetta (2016) point out that subsequent anthropological use of the term has often departed from Thompson’s original emphasis on the moral character of certain kinds of economic practices and transactions. In many instances the concept has essentially been used as a metaphor for values or morality (Fassin 2012), while in others moral economies have been portrayed “as particular realms outside (or in the cracks of) the market and the state” (Palomera and Vetta 2016, 416). As Palomera and Vetta argue, the danger with detaching the moral from the economic is that it undermines the concept’s chief utility, which is to discern how class relations and modes of capital accumulation are understood and regulated through moral codes and practices, even amid

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exchanges in which the emic claim is that they are separate or opposed (see Simoni 2016). Here I build on this interpretation of moral economies as a means through which social actors attempt to understand, regulate, and potentially transform economic relationships through everyday moral practices, relationships, and expressions of value. Bolivarian Venezuela provides a compelling context to extend these insights because the state was engaged in the attempt to create a new kind of national moral economy using oil money. While this began as a political project that principally emphasized a rejection of neoliberalism through resource nationalism and social democratic reform, by the mid-­2000s it had become a much more explicit revolutionary and socialist endeavor, at least rhetorically. Chávez’s drive to sembrar el petróleo for Venezuela’s ennobled poor re-­positioned the “magical state” as the center of this new moral economy and demanded that supporters of the revolution created themselves as new kinds of moral subject in turn (a subject I examine in more detail in chapter 5). But he did so while presiding over an economy that was, at best, a hybrid formation (Fernandes 2010) that carved out experimental spaces of would-­be socialism while also being entirely reliant on its insertion within global circuits of petro-­capitalism. Indeed, Venezuelan capitalism actually functioned extremely well prior to the fall in world oil prices in 2014, with the private sector increasing its share of the economy from 65 to 71 percent between 1999 and 2011 (Villalona 2013). The tense and uneasy entanglement between these structurally symbiotic but discursively hostile political and moral economies was at the heart of the ways in which barrio residents wrestled with their aspirations, their responsibilities to others, and their relationship with the state. Over the past few years, what began as an economic crisis in Venezuela has spiraled into a political and humanitarian one that stretches across Latin America. According to the United Nations (2022), more than seven million Venezuelans have left the country since 2016, with many finding themselves in precarious situations elsewhere in the region. This has been compounded by the COVID-­19 pandemic, creating a multidimensional crisis both within and beyond Venezuela’s borders. By looking back at the last decade from the point of view of El Camoruco’s residents, this book explores how the roots of

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Chapter One

the crisis appeared in the myriad contradictions that characterized everyday life during the first two decades of Bolivarian Venezuela. In so doing, it seeks to understand how the turbulent vicissitudes of contemporary petro-­states shape the quotidian worlds of their inhabitants in deep and lasting ways. Book Overview

This book draws largely on material gathered in three periods of fieldwork—­ 2008–­10, 2012, and 2017—­with more recent research also featuring in the concluding chapter. In general, chapters 2–­7 focus on the first two periods of fieldwork, with chapters 8 and 9 drawing on research conducted from 2017 onward. Chapter 2 explores the relationship between kinship, morality, and political subjectivity. It introduces the large family network that sits at the heart of the book and traces the early history of the Bolivarian Revolution through the family’s recollections of Chávez’s rise to power. In chapter 3, I explore the impact of the government’s flagship social missions on El Camoruco’s residents, highlighting the moral ambiguities that characterized one of their unintended consequences: the deepening of localized forms of inequality in the barrio. Chapter 4 examines one of the great puzzles of the revolution’s boom period for chavismo, which was the continuing proliferation of violent crime. The chapter analyzes this theme from the point of view of young barrio men and shows how their struggles with violence embodied an uneasy search for moral order that haunted Bolivarian Venezuela even in its most optimistic period. Chapter 5 switches the book’s focus to grassroots politics during a period of radical reform and political possibility. The chapter concentrates on revolutionary self-­making among chavista activists in El Camoruco, who undertook an array of ethical practices as they sought to overcome doubts about the motivations of new activists, long-­term comrades, and even themselves. Such dilemmas, I suggest, reflected underlying anxieties about the role played by oil wealth in the revolution as a whole. The challenge of bringing new political forms into being is continued in chapter 6, which explores the launch of the communal councils in El Camoruco and highlights one of the perverse ironies of the drive to stimulate participatory democracy under Chávez: that the decentralization of resources inadvertently led to a decentralization of suspicion about the contaminating

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influence of oil money on neighborhood actors. Chapter 7 is based on a case study of commune construction that took place between El Camoruco and a number of nearby barrios between 2009 and 2012. Detailing the complex meanderings of this project, it argues that the attempt to incorporate grassroots community organizations into a state-­managed model of popular democracy produced a series of temporal disjunctures for the actors involved. I show how myriad everyday tensions within the project could be traced to the deeper contradictions that underlay petro-­socialism, and to the strange imaginative void between future visions and present realities that haunted the revolution. In chapter 8, the book returns to El Camoruco amid very different circumstances to those in which I first arrived: a serious economic and humanitarian crisis compounded by a backdrop of political violence and a slide toward authoritarianism under President Maduro. The chapter documents the everyday experience of economic crisis in El Camoruco and shows how many of the asymmetries and inequalities that were present under Chávez had significantly worsened under Maduro. These differing fortunes produced tensions within and between households, as old friendships and loyalties fractured amid Maduro’s authoritarian turn at the national level. The book’s final chapter reflects on how my interlocutors’ lives have changed over the course of the last decade. It returns to my core argument and considers the relationship between the global political economy of oil and the present conditions of El Camoruco’s residents, whose lives now stretch across Latin America in many cases. I conclude by exploring debates about how de-­carbonization might be structured to give resource-­dependent states in the Global South a genuine stake in democratic, equitable, and ecologically sustainable futures.

Two Portrait of a Political Family

It was September 2009 and Manuel’s birthday party was in full swing when

Antonio, Rafael’s older brother, grabbed the microphone from the DJ, turned the music down, and called for quiet. He then began a long speech dedicated to his father: When people talk about the revolution, a lot of them remember when Chávez was elected, or the attempted coup of ninety-­two, or el caracazo. But I’ll tell you something. There was someone a long time before Chávez: Manuel Hernández. What our parents have given us, and what they’ve given this community: that’s socialism. They taught us about values, they taught us about love, and they taught us about sharing with others. Look around you at all the people here, all the family and friends who come together so often. This is socialism, we’re living it in our family right now. And those values that they taught us, they’ll be passed down to our children. Maybe right now they look a bit bored because they don’t understand it yet, but they will. And it will continue to be passed down through the generations. That’s where socialism is, in what we teach ourselves and our children.

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The speech was a touching tribute to Manuel, who was better known by most of those present as simply abuelo (grandpa). It also exemplified a defining characteristic of this large chavista family, which was an enthusiasm for connecting their everyday lives to the grand narratives of national politics. In placing Grandpa Manuel on a par with Chávez, Antonio was drawing parallels between the late president’s self-­styled role as father of the nation and Manuel’s position as the family’s moral exemplar. By teaching his children a particular set of values, Antonio stressed, Manuel had laid the foundations for a kind of “home-­grown” socialism that underpinned the Bolivarian Revolution in local and vernacular terms. While this speech was particularly effusive in the connections it drew, Antonio’s words were by no means untypical. In the regular family parties that became a central feature of my fieldwork in El Camoruco, it was common for members of Los Hernández to celebrate the family as a social unit and emphasize its role in producing wider political and moral values. Such statements reflected the heightened sense of political significance that characterized everyday life in my first period of fieldwork but also demonstrated an often-­overlooked aspect of the revolution: its tendency to draw on idioms of kinship and love as a distinct expression of political and moral subjectivity. The chapter explores the relationship between kinship, politics, and morality by tracing the early history of the Bolivarian Revolution through the family’s recollections of Chávez’s rise to power. It shows how Los Hernández acted not only as a “survival network” as in the classic studies of kinship and urban poverty in Latin America (González de la Rocha 1994; Lloyd 1979; Lomnitz 1977; Perlman 1976), but also that the notion of “family” itself provided a moral ideal that significantly influenced the life trajectories of its members. I argue that this emic concept of family-­as-­ideal shaped the specific way in which a chavista identity was produced for my interlocutors in El Camoruco. For Los Hernández, an ongoing sense of being engaged in historic change emerged through a series of national political events that were shared and memorialized in intimate and everyday settings. In the process, kinship stitched together political and moral subjectivity and became central to the hopes, fears, and uncertainties that formed around the revolution.

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Chapter Two

Life and Research in El Camoruco

My first encounter with Rafael was at a small café in the center of Valencia in February 2009. A doctoral student at the time, I had been in Venezuela since October of the previous year and was looking for an urban field site outside of Caracas. After I described what I hoped to do with my research, Rafael invited me to visit El Camoruco, and we drove out from the city’s old colonial center, through the clogged traffic of its southern zones, and spent the rest of the day meeting friends, family members, and chavista comrades in his barrio. As I soon discovered, Rafael thought in grand terms and saw meaning in everything. This meant that he was open to possibilities of all kinds, and that each new development in his life was understood as part of the mission he had undertaken. He had already hosted a number of international solidarity visitors to El Camoruco by the time we met and viewed my arrival as part of a broader project of intercultural exchange and international education about the revolution. Undoubtedly, as an aspirational political leader who was establishing a profile beyond El Camoruco, Rafael also saw an opportunity in having a British researcher become part of his entourage. As we got to know each other better, however, he made his affection for me clear. In the long drinking sessions that would come to characterize many weekend evenings, he would philosophize about the meaning of our friendship, constantly reminding me that, “there’s a reason you arrived here and lived in this house.” I moved into Rafael and Yulmi’s house just a week after that first meeting, sharing a bunk bed with the couple’s fifteen-­year-­old son, Eduardo, before an annex became available on the second floor of the house about six weeks later. The annex gave me a little more independence, but most evenings I opted to eat downstairs with the family, before joining them in front of the house to enjoy the cool breeze that rolled in from the hills of San Esteban. This practice was central to life in El Camoruco: residents would sit outside their houses in small family groups watching the world go by and discussing the day’s events. Friends, family members, and local characters would pass by bringing gossip, news, and jokes, with the jovial greeting of epa! being shouted across the street. The discussions I shared with my host family in those evenings formed a constant backdrop to my research beyond the home,

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offering a means to become familiar with the “cultural intimacy” (Herzfeld 1996, 3) of my interlocutors. Usually, I would be jotting down notes from our evening conversations before I went to bed. Everyday family life turned out to be more central to my research than I had planned. Concerned about my safety, Rafael and Yulmi were careful to shield me during those early weeks of fieldwork, but I grew restless and started walking farther from their home on my own. Then, a few months into my stay, I was robbed as I returned from a nearby political meeting early one evening. Rafael and Yulmi became increasingly protective of me as a result, and for around a year I didn’t venture far beyond Sector 4 of El Camoruco (where the house was located) unless I was accompanied by a friend or traveling by car or motorbike. This was, in a sense, an exaggerated version of how many barrio residents themselves lived. While most people were comfortable walking around their own community in the evening, few would travel into neighboring barrios unless they were accompanied by a local or in a vehicle. As I explore further in chapter 4, territory played a major role in how people managed security concerns in everyday life. These limitations on my movements had a significant impact on my research. Instead of carrying out household surveys and tracing the relationship between political change and survival networks (my original plan), I found myself forced to focus much more closely on Rafael and Yulmi’s household and the wider kinship network it belonged to. Although I gradually developed sufficient contacts to attend political meetings and carry out interviews independently, much of my daytime research consisted of joining the family in their daily routines. I cooked arepas for breakfast each morning, walked to school with their son Eduardo, accompanied Rafael and Yulmi on shopping trips, and looked after Yuleidi, their youngest daughter, in the afternoons. On some days I would shadow Rafael in his work as a community organizer; on others I would help Yulmi with domestic chores. During the weekends, I would often join Eduardo and his friends in games of futbolíto (“little football”) in the street, and in the evenings there were usually family parties to attend. These were often raucous affairs centered on large quantities of Polar Ice (the local lager of choice) and dancing to salsa, merengue, and reggaetón. If the limitations on my movement were a source of frustration at first, I came to realize that my effective adoption by Los Hernández offered a priv-

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ileged view of barrio life that was distinct from other accounts of Bolivarian Venezuela. The steady stream of academics, journalists, and solidarity activists who wrote about Venezuela in the early years of the revolution often paid scant attention to the importance of kinship to people’s social worlds, taking much greater interest in the dramatic spectacle of politics at the national level. But my unique situation meant that I was able to understand how the specific form that politics took under Chávez owed much to how people viewed ideas like democracy, revolution, and solidarity through a lens of kinship. Kinship was both a collective resource that sustained people materially and a moral reference point that shaped how they understood their nation and its politics. A Regular Barrio, an Ordinary City

If incorporating kinship into my research proved to be something of a happy accident, the location of my fieldwork was rather more planned. Unlike the majority of foreign researchers in Venezuela, I wanted to work outside of Caracas in a barrio that wasn’t particularly noted for its politics. All too many scholars, I felt, based themselves in the most historically radical communities in the capital, meaning they ended up documenting relatively exceptional cases of political mobilization that weren’t necessarily representative of the country as a whole. By contrast, I was interested in how the revolution looked in a regular barrio and an “ordinary city” (Robinson 2005). Founded in 1555 in Carabobo State, Valencia is Venezuela’s third largest city and its industrial capital, generating around one quarter of the country’s manufacturing output. Located in an expansive valley between the Lago de Valencia, a large freshwater lake, and the Caribbean coast, the city was central to Venezuela’s colonial-­era trade in cacao, coffee, and sugar (Caballero 1970, 18) and remains at the heart of a contemporary agro-­industrial belt that also includes the city of Maracay. One of the first colonial towns in Spanish America to be built on the Hispanic grid system, Valencia has been Venezuela’s capital three times (1812, 1830, and 1858) and played a significant role in the nation’s political history. Just outside the city at the Battle of Carabobo in 1821, Simón Bolívar fought his final decisive battle to win independence from the Spanish. The city was embroiled in violence just five years after

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independence, when nationalists opposed to Bolívar’s Gran Colombia took up arms and called for Venezuelan sovereignty—­a struggle they eventually won in 1830. Despite this historical and political significance, Valencia remained a relatively small city until the mid-­twentieth century. Between 1873 and 1920, the population of Carabobo State only rose from 113,715 to 125,514 (Martinéz 2003, 124). Changes began to occur, however, with the discovery of oil. During the 1930s a group of wealthy businessmen introduced light industry to the city as Venezuela embarked on the beginnings of industrialization. This process was accelerated in the 1950s under the rule of Pérez Jiménez, as Valencia transformed itself into a major industrial center. Emboldened by the burgeoning oil economy, Pérez Jiménez courted foreign capital through low tax rates, free currency conversion, and profit remittances (Coronil 1997, 180) and encouraged immigration from Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Germany. Between 1951 and 1957, foreign investment in Venezuela more than tripled, with the majority of new companies arriving from the United States (Coronil 1997, 183). Many of these foreign enterprises chose to base themselves in Valencia, using a new 43-­hectare industrial zone established southeast of the city center. Between 1948 and 1958 the following companies mounted operations in the city: Cementos Carabobo, Sherwin Williams, Firestone, Coca-­ Cola, Goodyear, Owens Illinois, Celanese CA, Pepsi-­Cola, Inlaca, Dupont, Colgate-­Palmolive, and Container Coro of America (Bello and Sevilla 1980, 100). The emergence of new employment opportunities drew in large numbers of rural migrants from surrounding states such as Aragua, Cojedes, Falcon, Guárico, and Yaracuy, leading to a rapid rise in the city’s population. Numbering 91,678 in 1951, Valencia’s population rose to 373,922 by 1971, 903,621 by 1991, and 1,021,020 by 2001 (Martínez 2003, 135). This growth reflected a broader trend in the country at large, as Venezuela became an increasingly urbanized nation. In keeping with patterns across the country, the vast majority of those arriving in Valencia erected makeshift ranchos (shacks) in squatter settlements known as invasiones (land invasions). While these migrants settled largely in the south of the city and slowly turned their settlements into more established barrios, very different forms of urbanization occurred in the city’s north. From the 1950s onward, the outlying areas beyond Valen-

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cia’s colonial center were increasingly bought up by private contractors, who erected urbanizaciones (private urban developments) of high-­rise apartments for the middle classes and gated communities for the elite. During the oil boom of the 1970s, new affluent districts such as El Trigal, El Viñedo, and Prebo became some of the most sought after places to live outside of Caracas, as a burgeoning business and professional class established itself in the city. At the high end of this spectrum was the Country Club, a fortified compound replete with golf course, private gymnasiums, and even its own lake. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Valencia’s middle classes steadily abandoned the center of the city and moved out to these new private developments, while chronic traffic problems and underinvestment saw the colonial heart of the city largely fall into disrepair. By the time I arrived, Valencia had become a city whose stark social divides were manifest in its physical geography: a wealthy north of tree-­lined avenues and private shopping malls, a poor south largely made up of self-­built barrios and squatter settlements, and a crumbling colonial center functioning as a de facto border. El Camoruco has a population of approximately 4,000 people and is located in Miguel Peña, the largest urban parish in Valencia. Lying directly south of the city center and consisting predominantly of barrios, Miguel Peña’s population numbered some 500,205 people in 2010 and was projected to rise to over 640,000 by 2020 (IIES 2010). At the time of the last major census, the parish had an unemployment rate of 9.32 percent, with around 50 percent of the population employed in the informal sector (Censo 2011).1 Like much of Valencia’s south, El Camoruco is regarded as a “no-­go” area by many people who live in the north. Yet although the community did have its problems with street crime and gang violence, it was also one of the better-­served barrios in Miguel Peña, with two high schools, a number of social missions, relatively reliable amenities, and bus connections to the city center. The community was divided administratively between four sectors—­ Sectors 1–­4—­and the area surrounding the community was characterized by three different types of settlement. Together with other well-­established barrios like El Camoruco, there was also a large middle-­class urbanización called Los Mangos and a number of squatter settlements in an area of vacant wasteland just to the north of El Camoruco and its neighboring barrio, José

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Felix Ribas. The mixture of communities in the zone had significant political ramifications, as I discuss further in chapter 7. Charismatic Kinship

The importance of family as an ideal was conveyed to me in my first encounters with Rafael’s parents and his eight siblings (five brothers and three sisters). Shortly after we met, his mother María questioned me about my religious beliefs. Apparently unsatisfied with my declaration of agnosticism, she made her own position clear: “Catholicism is the best religion.” María had a quietly imposing presence and was, according to her children, very much the driving force behind the family. She and Manuel had been part of the original land invasion that formed the barrio in 1969 and were still respected members of the community. Drawn to Valencia from rural Yaracuy State by the promise of employment in its expanding industrial sector, they had come in search of a better life. Manuelito, Rafael’s younger brother, felt that the family’s political orientation could be traced principally to the values instilled by their parents. “I think originally it came from my mother,” he told me. “Firstly, she knows everyone! She’s loved by a lot of people, so there’s always been a connection with the community. Secondly, her religious beliefs gave us strong values and beliefs that have always stayed with us.” The centrality of mothers and grandmothers is a defining feature of what Samuel Hurtado (1995, 2000) and Alejandro Moreno (1995) term the Venezuelan “popular family.” Generally speaking, kinship structures in Venezuelan barrios are flexible and diverse, with female-­headed households, multiple partners, fostering, and half-­siblingship all common (Márquez 1999, 81–­90; Peattie 1968, 45–­47). In practice, there is no single “ideal” structure, and most families contain varied patterns of kinship that are often organized across a number of households. Since it is common for Venezuelan men to have children with more than one partner, fathers can be fleeting and transitory figures (Moreno 1989), with households being fundamentally anchored by mothers and grandmothers. This matrifocality is reflected by popular phrases such as madre no hay más que una; padre puede ser cualquiera (“there is only one mother; father can be whoever”) (Moreno 1989, 11). Since many

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barrio women now undertake paid work, it is often the abuela (grandmother) who looks after the youngest children. Abuelas function as the central pivot around which the rest of the family orbits, both in a literal sense in individual households and in a broader, moral sense for larger kinship networks that stretch over several households. As one local grandmother in El Camoruco put it to me, “Sometimes if the abuela isn’t there, the house dies. My sister, who lived across the road, was like that in her house. When she died, it was like the whole world had died.” Among Los Hernández, María’s role conformed to this pattern, but the wider family structure bore many elements of what Moreno terms the “Spanish tradition” (1995, 5), in that most of the brothers—­Rafael, Chico, Antonio, and José—­had left to form their own nuclear families. In keeping with the wishes of María, they had also married their partners, a practice that was by no means the norm among couples in El Camoruco. Alejandro and Morocho, the two brothers who were single, still lived with María and Manuel, together with Manuelito, his wife Licha, and their two small children. All three of Rafael’s sisters—­Mariana, Tania, and Isabel—­also lived with partners in nearby communities. Despite this wide dispersal of family members, the original family home, located eight blocks from Rafael and Yulmi in Sector 1, remained the central household in the family structure. During the day, it was a busy and crowded place, with María and Licha looking after the children of several households while their parents were out working. In the evenings, Alejandro would open up a hatch at the front of the house and sell hot dogs to passersby, while the other brothers would head off in their cars to collect wives, partners, children, and friends from work and school. Most family parties would be held at María and Manuel’s house on the weekends, when it was common for the children to still be up in the early hours, running around amid the dancing and laughter of their parents. When the entire extended family was together at such events, it numbered some ninety people. The strong sense of familial togetherness that such arrangements fostered was reinforced by terms of address. Often, rather than using their given names, members of Los Hernández would address each other with their familial terms: tío and tía (uncle and aunt), primo and prima (male and female cousins), and cuñado and cuñada (brother and sister-­in-­law), with cuñado and

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cuñada being applied to the partners of family members when it was clear that the couple was established. These naming practices worked to underline the strength of the family as a unit, together with collective attendance at important events such as birthdays and graduation ceremonies. As a large kinship support system, the Hernández family was thus a highly successful social unit, its solidity providing its members with a foundation from which individual life projects could be launched. Caroline Moser (2009) argues that a household’s ability to achieve social mobility can be measured in terms of its “asset accumulation” (2009, 18–­22) over time. By this she means the capacity to accumulate resources such as housing, access to education, and secure employment that can take a household on an upwardly mobile trajectory, or indeed accelerate an existing one. For Los Hernández, a new set of such “assets” emerged in the Bolivarian era, bringing opportunities for employment and political participation. As committed supporters of the government, several family members had taken on important roles in local chavista networks. José, one of the youngest brothers, described how Rafael had been central to this process, his infectious enthusiasm for community work beginning from a young age and rubbing off on his siblings as he became a prominent figure in the locality: After my mamá, I think it was Rafael. He started when he was fourteen and got me involved when I was only twelve or thirteen. He’s always done community work, and he’s always loved it. I was involved in the asociación de vecinos [neighbors’ association] when I was only eighteen, and that was because of Rafael.

Of the six Hernández brothers, five had become politically active in the Chávez era, with Manuelito and José running a transport union and bus cooperative respectively, Alejandro working for a PSUV councilor at the Alcaldía (municipality), and Antonio being involved in his local consejo comunal (communal council). Becoming self-­identified chavistas and socialists was, according to Rafael, a natural outcome of their upbringing. He admitted that the term “socialism” was not one he used before the arrival of the Chávez—­ “that language just didn’t exist back then,” he explained—­but argued that it fit perfectly with the values that stemmed from María and Manuel and ran right through the family.

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In this way, kinship for Los Hernández was a multifaceted “asset,” providing both material support and a strong sense of identity to its constituent members. But it also performed a more far-­reaching role, which was to offer a strong sense of moral duty that lent itself to community work and political activism. In her comparative work on socialist leadership, Lucia Michelutti (2013) shows how idioms of kinship can be a highly efficacious way of establishing affective bonds between leaders and followers. As she states in her comparison between Venezuela and India, this “charismatic kinship” shapes “not only the links between ‘the people’ and the leaders (between the represented and the representative), but also the construction of the people and their protagonist role in contemporary popular democracies” (2013, 20). The example of Los Hernández offers an added dimension to this formulation, showing how the power of such affective appeals owed much to an existing moral schema of family-­as-­ideal. The revolution appealed to Los Hernández because Chávez’s narrative resonated with figures such as María and Manuel and the values they were felt to embody. Kinship was thus a vehicle for collective support and an imaginative reservoir from which political and moral subjectivities and visions could emerge. I now trace how these subjectivities and visions evolved for Los Hernández as the Bolivarian era advanced. 1989–­2004: The Making of a Chavista Family

Rafael and Yulmi had lived in their house for almost twenty years when I arrived in 2009. Before the births of their three children—­twenty-­one-­year-­ old Cristina, fifteen-­year-­old Eduardo, and nine-­year-­old Yuleidi—­they had bought the plot of land on which it stood for a small sum of money and built the house from what Rafael described as “really ugly” foundations. “It was just four walls and a roof. We built everything else ourselves,” he explained. When Rafael was a child, Manuel had been in and out of work in the construction industry, and by the age of fifteen Rafael had started working independently as a buhonero (street vendor) selling newspapers and strawberries in the street. Yulmi’s family, much smaller than Rafael’s, had settled in a neighboring barrio, but her parents separated when she was a teenager. She maintained regular contact with her mother and sister, both of whom still lived locally, but spent more time with Rafael’s large extended family.

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A strong link between politics and religion played a significant role in Rafael and Yulmi’s lives from an early age. As teenagers, the couple met through the Juventud Obrera Católica (Young Catholic Workers), known locally as “La Joc,” who ran outreach programs for young people in many of the poorest parts of Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s. Seeking to offer alternatives to the growing problems with delinquency among young people, La Joc’s radical interpretation of Catholicism had a profound impact on Rafael and Yulmi. Drawing on core tenets of liberation theology, La Joc preached the Gospel as a call to end poverty, fight social injustice, and democratize religious leadership. They emphasized the importance of social action as a spiritual practice and replaced traditional Catholic notions of the meek and noble poor with more radical visions that saw them as the architects of alternative futures (see Gutiérrez 1974; Lancaster 1988; Levine 1992; Montoya 1995; Burdick 1993).2 Rafael described how La Joc’s local pastor had inspired him and Yulmi: He was very close to God and to us, the poor. He was religious, and it was like he transmitted a message from God, but it was a message for the people. He was different to other Fathers. He was warm, and all his work was about muchachos [young people]. He was like us—­he played football, he went to the cinema and he said rude things like coño e madre [a common Venezuelan curse]. He was involved in lots of things in the community like the asociación de vecinos [neighbours’ association] and el teatro del barrio [neighborhood theater]. He had a philosophy: it was a philosophy for life, a philosophy for the people.

La Joc’s efforts to develop class consciousness and empower young people resonated with Rafael and Yulmi. As Yulmi recalled, “What we learned in La Joc were certain values. It was about solidarity, about finding solutions to problems and working together.” The experience also exposed them to radical critiques of established political and economic orthodoxies, leaving an intellectual legacy that would later chime with Chávez’s radical discourse. Yulmi’s view on the Catholic Church, for example, stemmed from the discussions that had taken place with La Joc: “The Catholic Church has always been on the side of the right, of the fascists,” she explained. “For 500 years, there’s been a system of domination, and it was the Church that dominated our minds, dominated up here [gesturing to her head].”

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Having struck up a friendship through La Joc, Rafael and Yulmi began their relationship while they were still involved with the organization and went on to become youth workers themselves, continuing its work as they became young parents and established their home. Their early years as a young family were challenging, as the economic crisis of the 1980s hit barrio residents hard. Rafael remembered the difficulties of the time and recounted how some people were so poor “they were eating dogs—­literally, eating dogs from the street.” He worked on the assembly line at a local car factory for a period but was sacked after becoming a union organizer. Yulmi recalled the sexual harassment, which she described as routine, for young women looking for work without qualifications or training. “If as a young woman you wanted to find work it was like, ‘So what skills do you have? What qualifications do you have? Oh, nothing? Well then you’ll have to . . . [she makes a sexual intercourse gesture with her hands].’ That’s how it was, you basically had to prostitute yourself to get work.” The couple struggled along, selling homemade food and cheap clothing in the street, working in bakeries and, in Rafael’s case, finding seasonal work in construction. As a result of their time with La Joc, they identified with leftist politics and voted for La Causa R (The Radical Cause, LCR) during the party’s brief period of electoral success between 1988 and 1993 (see Buxton 1999). During this period, the sentiments of radical folk songs captured a growing sense of anger among working-­class Venezuelans. The lines of one song in particular, Rafael recalled, always stayed with him: Que la tortilla, se vuelva, Que los pobres coman pan, Y los ricos . . . Mierda, mierda

Let the tortilla, turn upside down, Let the poor eat bread, And the rich . . . Shit, shit

In February 1989, Venezuela’s urban poor took to the streets and the “tortilla” was turned upside down in dramatic fashion. The popular disturbances, known colloquially as el caracazo (literally “the Caracas explosion”), began on February 27 following an IMF-­backed austerity program put in place by the recently elected Carlos Andrés Pérez. Pérez had been president during the oil boom of the 1970s and ran on a nationalist, anti-­IMF platform that promised to restore the prosperity of the boom years. Directly contradicting

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his election promise, in the week following the introduction of the austerity program, petrol and food prices rose by 100 percent, as state subsidies were removed on staple goods and shops began to hoard foodstuffs. A series of protests against the rising bus fares escalated into widespread rioting and looting, spreading from Caracas to other major cities between February 27 and March 3 (Coronil and Skurski 1991; Maya 2003). The caracazo is remembered most keenly for the massacre of hundreds and perhaps thousands of people by the National Guard, who opened fire on looters and protestors in Caracas after martial law had been declared. Official records cite 277 deaths, but unofficial estimates—­and what is held in popular memory—­range into the thousands (Coronil and Skurski 1991, 311). The horror of those days can be understood as the moment that the illusion of a multiclass, color-­blind democracy finally died in Venezuela. When Rafael and Yulmi recalled the events, they stressed that it was not only in Caracas that people were killed, but in Valencia as well. In the city’s poor south, many claimed to have witnessed the National Guard carrying out shootings in the streets, but no formal records have ever been released. Rafael remembered the days leading up to the events, when rumors that something was about to happen had been circulating among local people in El Camoruco. We were waiting, and listening to the radio. We’d heard there were problems in Caracas. Then it [the looting] was totally spontaneous. In the barrio, there was this bodega [grocery store] nearby. My friend wanted to rob it but I told her not to because it was in our barrio. When I tried to stop her, she slashed me with a bottle . . . it was horrible . . . there were gunshots everywhere in the streets.

When Rafael told his story, he would show the scar on his arm that he sustained during the incident. In the south of Valencia, many looters targeted foreign-­owned stores as the National Guard pursued them through the streets. Close to El Camoruco, there were shoot-­outs between Chinese shop owners and looters. In the hours that followed, the military rounded up people in Miguel Peña’s Plaza de Toros. As Coronil and Skurski (1991) put it, the caracazo marked a “rupture of the moral bond between state and pueblo” (315) that would have far-­reaching polit-

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ical consequences. For Rafael, Yulmi, and their neighbors in El Camoruco, it was an experience that highlighted the political establishment’s willingness to use violence against its own citizens. Many remembered the events as part of a longer process of sociopolitical unraveling in which civil disobedience was met with arbitrary repression from the state. During one demonstration a few years after the disturbances, William, a longtime friend of the couple, was arrested and detained for twenty days without charge. “I was beaten by the guards and the other inmates,” he told me. “They put us in joint cells with all the other criminals without any reason.” This ongoing antagonism led to a steady buildup of resentment and political tension, generating a demand for change and a belief in the need for alternatives to establishment political parties. Chávez’s attempted coup in 1992 can be understand as an attempt to meet this demand and bring a new political identity into being. When his forces seized control of several large cities including Maracaibo, Valencia, and Maracay, Chávez is said to have looked out at the hillside barrios of Caracas with his binoculars as he waited for el pueblo to show its support. But a series of defections and errors led to his capture, and the popular uprising he hoped for never materialized. Although the coup attempt failed, it played a significant symbolic role for millions of Venezuelans. Yulmi recalled being pleased when news of the coup attempt broke: “I was happy. I thought, ‘At last a man who’s going to fight against this shit society.’ I’d never worked in anything electoral or political before, but when he arrived I went to help and I worked for free [without pay] in the streets.” As part of his agreement to surrender, Chávez requested the opportunity to make a televised address to the nation. In that address, he prophetically declared that his forces had failed to achieve their objectives por ahora (for now), before being taken away to prison. Chávez was released from prison in 1994 and elected in late 1998 after spending the intervening years building his political movement, the MVR (Movimiento V [Quinta] República, Fifth Republic Movement). But once elected, he faced a new set of challenges as political opponents attempted to remove him from office and chavistas mobilized in support. The first of these came in 2002, when a thirty-­six-­hour military coup forced Chávez from Miraflores before he was dramatically reinstalled after a popular uprising and military rebellion. In Valencia, as news of Chávez’s removal filtered

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through a media blackout, Rafael and Yulmi spent the day relaying the news around nearby communities and calling for people to join a protest outside the army barracks in Naguanagua, a few kilometers north of the city center. They spent most of the day and night there, chanting at the barracks and passing messages from friends in other areas. Yulmi remembered how close friendships had been formed during the experience, and how angry she was with people who refused to join them. We were trying to organize a group to go to the National Guard because we were saying, ‘Our state is being attacked by a military coup.’ But a lot of these people who wore the red hats and t-­shirts [chavistas], suddenly they had a headache or a stomach ache and couldn’t come. There were a lot of headaches and stomach aches that day, I remember it.

When Chávez dramatically returned to Caracas in a helicopter and was reinstated as president, many chavistas likened it to the Second Coming—­like Christ, he had returned after three days in exile. Rafael made this allusion himself during a night of heavy drinking, when he recounted his memories of the event. Taking my pen and notepad, he drew an image depicting man and heaven. Chávez sat between the two, with a line showing how he had come to link heaven and earth at the dawn of a new millennium: “Just as God had to send a man to sacrifice himself all the way over there,” he said, “so he also sent someone to us.” Shortly after the coup attempt, Rafael was arrested following an allegation that he had thrown a rock at rival demonstrators on an antigovernment march. The arrest took place during a gathering of family, friends, and comrades at Rafael and Yulmi’s house, when armed police stormed onto the front porch and dragged him away. His friends tried to prevent the arrest, holding him back as the police pulled at him, but the police pointed their guns at the head of his son, Eduardo, who at the time was only eight years old. In the end, a case never materialized because the mysterious witness behind the claims failed to come forward, and he was released after a day in the cells. But the event was a traumatic one for Rafael’s family and friends and served as a lesson, in their eyes, of the workings of what they called la derecha (“the right”) at the local level. Though Rafael, Yulmi, and their friends read the

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arrest as a warning from the local oligarchy in Valencia, the event helped to demarcate and solidify their identities as chavistas and revolutionaries. These identities were further strengthened during the oil paro (shutdown) that began in December 2002 and ran until February 2003. The shutdown, which was regarded by chavistas as political and economic sabotage, led to food and fuel shortages throughout the country and was only resolved when Chávez used the army, retired workers, and foreign contractors to regain control of the PDVSA’s operations (Wilpert 2007, 25). In El Camoruco, the paro was remembered by residents as la navidad que nunca era (“Christmas that never was”). With low quantities of food, families and friends shared the traditional hallacas with one another, and modest celebrations took place in the streets rather than in people’s houses. “In some ways, that was one of the best Christmases we’ve had because there was real unity between people,” Yulmi recalled. Far from destroying the Bolivarian movement, the events served to embolden a sense of solidarity among the president’s supporters and further entrenched political polarization at the national level. The recall election of 2004 was the final critical episode that my respondents identified as central to their self-­identification as chavistas. Using a constitutional clause that permitted a national referendum against the president if 20 percent of the population signed in favor, the opposition was confident of victory after 3.4 million people supported the proposal. But Chávez was able to mobilize 120,000 community-­level “electoral patrols” who went out to organize voters, distribute pro-­government propaganda, and count votes on the day of the election (Hawkins 2010, 1–­3, 23). Yulmi and her close friend, Rosa, were both members of these patrols and described how they had gone three nights without sleep as they campaigned by day and vote-­counted by night. Hostility between pro-­government and opposition supporters reached fever pitch in the days leading up to the vote. Yulmi witnessed a chavista activist being shot by an opposition supporter near a local polling station and then described her shock as the same individual calmly entered the building and began collecting votes. As she remembered it, the man had been threatening chavistas in the area for several days before the incident occurred. Terrified, she chose to confront him and show that she was not intimidated. “I said to him, ‘Seriously, I’m from here [El Camoruco] and you don’t want to threaten me because if you do you won’t make it to the end of the road, be-

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lieve me.’ Of course, I was bluffing but you have to make yourself look strong in these situations, otherwise they’ll take advantage of you.” By the end of 2004, Rafael, Yulmi, and Los Hernández understood their nation’s future as a battle between two mutually hostile political movements. On one side were the private media, the business community, the upper echelons of the Catholic Church, the majority of Venezuela’s middle classes and elites, and the United States. As Chávez radicalized his discourse with each victory, chavistas developed a series of names to refer to this opposition bloc: the oligarchy, the opposition, la derecha, and, most commonly among my interlocutors, los escuálidos (“the squalid ones”). Pitted against this bloc were the president and his pueblo: los pobres (the poor), the chavistas, the socialists, the revolutionaries. If this binary captured undeniable truths about Venezuela’s sociopolitical divisions, it also reflected a “strategic essentialism” (Spanakos 2008, 4) that helped to foster the sense of a Manichaean battle between good and evil (Hawkins 2010, 55). Indeed, as Robert Samet (2019, 6) argues, Bolivarian Venezuela has been characterized by two populist move-

FIGURE 2.1  

Graffiti for and against Hugo Chávez’s proposed constitutional reforms in 2009 (Matt Wilde)

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ments rather than one. Chavismo and the opposition both claimed to be the authentic voice of the Venezuelan people, each defining themselves as much by their opponents as by their political programs. By the time I arrived in El Camoruco, local pro-­government activists were concluding meetings and public events with the revolutionary slogan that Chávez adapted from Cuba: Patria, Socialismo o Muerte: ¡Venceremos! (“Homeland, Socialism, or Death: We Shall Overcome!”). The slogan’s emphasis on sacrifice and struggle was clear, my chavista hosts positioning themselves, fists clenched, as actors in a historic narrative of social transformation. In her seminal work on history and mythology, Olivia Harris (1995) identified the importance of periodization in the making of mythologies. She described how key “organizing moments” become critical to mytho-­historical imaginings, setting new temporal periods in motion. For Harris, an organizing moment is “a transcendental event upon whose axis history is created, a rupture from which fundamental categories of periodization and identity are derived” (1995, 20). The episodes described in this chapter show how a chavista identity emerged through a series of organizing moments that tied together family memories, local experiences, and national political events. With each of these moments, Los Hernández felt themselves being tied ever closer to Chávez and the revolution. The idioms of kinship and love that connected the family to a process of social and political transformation thus reflected its material experience as something intimate and local as well as something transcendent and national. Seen in these terms, both the connection that Antonio made between his father and Chávez and Rafael’s allusion about Chávez’s divinity expressed a kind of vernacular mythology of lucha (struggle). El proceso was understood not merely as a process of social and political change but also as one that encompassed a heightened sense of moral duty. In the remainder of this book, I explore how this expressed a deep longing for change and a lurking uncertainty about the terms in which that change unfolded.

Three Aspirations and Disparities in the Bolivarian Barrio

When you come back in a few years and see me, hopefully you’ll see a leader. But you’ll be able to say that you lived in my house, that you sat in the street drinking with me, that you mixed with the malandros. But not really malandros, Mateo, not really. I say us malandros because to talk about a malandro is not necessarily to talk about someone who goes around stealing, or high on marijuana, or whatever. It’s to talk about someone who wants to do things, for example someone who wants to do things with this revolution. This isn’t anything to do with drugs, with deaths or with narco-­traffickers. This is about people. It’s about the hope of doing things, of finding work, of jodiendo . . . of doing a million different things.

It was a late night in 2010 when Rafael made the comment above, which encapsulated the defiant sense of hope, aspiration, and pride that characterized his attitude to life. The term malandro has no direct English translation, but its closest equivalents would be expressions such as delinquent, thug, or gangster. Describing boys or young men who are cunning, dangerous, roguish, or criminal, the term malandro can mean be anything from a young boy on the corner to a heavily armed narco-­trafficker involved in seri-

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ous organized crime. In my experience, the most common usage described a young man involved in gang life who carries a gun and is likely to either consume or sell drugs, particularly marijuana and crack cocaine. Presumed to carry out street robberies and hold-­ups, malandros are likely to wear baseball caps, sports t-­shirts or vests and expensive branded trainers. They speak in the languid calé street slang and have a fondness for motorbikes, fiestas, and fast living. According to the mainstream Venezuelan national imaginary, the malandro is a “social, psychological and cultural mugshot of a stereotypical thug of the shantytowns” (Ferrándiz 2003, 116). In this instance, Rafael’s use of the term to describe himself and his community playfully subverted negative depictions of barrio life, instead emphasizing the creativity, determination, and resolve of barrio residents to overcome adversity. By stressing the ability to carve out spaces for hope and joy—­jodiendo in this context referred to a broad sense of pleasure-­seeking and mischief-­ making—­he was lauding the inventiveness of barrio residents. The sense of defiant optimism epitomized by such statements was a common feature of my first phase of fieldwork, when the benefits of the revolution’s social programs emboldened people’s sense that they could create better futures for themselves. Poco a poco (“little by little”), people would tell me, things were slowly getting better. This chapter focuses on the relationship between the revolution’s social programs and patterns of aspiration, social mobility, and inequality in El Camoruco. It shows how the government’s drive to redistribute oil wealth through Chávez’s flagship social missions provided an array of new benefits and opportunities to barrio residents during the first decade of Bolivarian rule. For some of the most vulnerable, this meant being able to access primary health care in their own communities for the first time, or being able to afford decent food for their families. For others, it meant learning basic literacy and numeracy or finishing the high school education they never completed as teenagers. And for others still it meant something more far-­reaching: the chance to study in higher education institutions, to undertake specialized training as community organizers, and to eventually build careers in the expanding Bolivarian state. Among those who fell into this final category, the revolution opened up possibilities for forms of self-­improvement that were simply never possible before.

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Yet as these emerging possibilities generated new aspirations, the limitations of employment within Bolivarian structures also became apparent. Although the circulation of oil money in the boom years of the revolution meant that ample work opportunities were available, many of these positions were relatively poorly paid and essentially confined to Bolivarian institutions. Mission employees were expected to buy into the social and moral objectives of the programs rather than focus on their own career trajectories, and this became a source of frustration for some, who found their personal aspirations at once opened and curtailed by participation in Bolivarian education and training programs. At the same time, these individuals nonetheless found themselves in a better material position than many others in their community, a fact marked by their ability to buy new commodities or improve their homes thanks to newfound disposable income. That those who were able to make the most of the Bolivarian system were also among the most politically connected within local chavista networks did not go unnoticed, and such individuals became the subject of gossip and jealousy as others observed the material benefits of their political connections. In the discussion that follows, I argue that these ambiguities and tensions were a product of a central contradiction underlying the revolution’s drive to sow the oil: that the moral demand to produce a socialist economy was dependent on the very model of petro-­capitalism that it sought to overcome. As they worked to make the most of new openings, El Camoruco’s residents crafted new aspirations in the gray zone between the revolution’s existing and desired political economies. Aspiration in the Bolivarian Barrio

After overcoming both the coup and the paro, in 2003 the Chávez government began creating its own social programs largely in parallel to the existing state bureaucracy, significant elements of which were regarded as hostile to the president’s reforms. Administratively, this took on a variety of different forms. In health, for example, the new missions were governed outside of the Ministry of Health, the idea being that oil money from PDVSA could be deployed more effectively by circumventing the Fourth Republic apparatus (Cooper 2019, 21). In education, meanwhile, the government backed away from reform-

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ing traditional universities, which had long been criticized for deepening class and regional divides by prioritizing students from private schools and failing to be proactive about funding shortfalls (Ivancheva 2017, 257). Instead, Chávez opted to create a whole new system of Bolivarian education that would function alongside the country’s existing primary, secondary, and tertiary institutions. The decision to create parallel structures reflected the government’s determination to address long-­standing structural inequalities in Venezuela but also underlined its relative weakness in relation to domestic opponents within the state bureaucracy: such adversaries would largely be circumvented rather than directly challenged. These new parallel structures meant that the missions were much more closely aligned with Chávez’s agenda, allowing him to aggressively pursue the drive to address the immediate needs of Venezuela’s poorest citizens and strengthen political support in the process. As Amy Cooper (2019) explains, the missions were presented as part of an obligation to repay a “social debt” incurred by the Venezuelan state after two decades of economic stagnation and the socially damaging neoliberal reforms of the 1990s. The term “mission” was itself significant, drawing on a history of both religious and revolutionary outreach work in Latin America that “imbued government welfare with moral connotations of compassion and social justice” (Cooper 2019, 19). By repositioning the petro-­state as a driver of social justice and encouraging the creation of new revolutionary subjectivities, the missions formed a central part of an emergent Bolivarian moral economy that sought to promote socialist and anti-­imperialist practices and values. As I will describe, however, their status as pockets of would-­be socialist morality nested within a wider system of petro-­capitalism produced a number of unforeseen challenges for those involved as workers or volunteers. The achievements of the missions in the years following their launch were unquestionably impressive. Perhaps the most well-­known initiative was Mission Barrio Adentro (Inside the Barrio), which saw the construction of tens of thousands of new local health clinics in predominantly low-­income areas. Most of these were staffed by Cuban doctors who arrived through an oil-­for-­doctors exchange program agreed with the Cuban government. By 2014, some 30,000 Cuban doctors are thought to have worked in Venezuela as part of Barrio Adentro (Cooper 2019, 20; Kirk 2015), most of them on two-­year placements. Such advancements were supplemented by hundreds

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of new diagnostic and rehabilitation centers built as part of Mission Barrio Adentro II (Ellner 2008, 134). In education, meanwhile, millions of Venezuelans enrolled in Mission Robinson, which offered teaching in basic literacy and numeracy. By 2005, Chávez proudly announced that the country was “free of illiteracy” (Hawkins 2010, 201) as a result of the program. A further 700,000 participants passed through Mission Ribas, the high school tier of the education program, with 27,000 of those going on to find work as teachers and facilitators within the mission system (Wilpert 2007, 127). Mission Sucre, a decentralized university-­level program that aimed for mass access to higher education, saw 500,000 new students enrolling in the new Bolivarian Universities in 2003 (Ivancheva 2017, 252) and 300,000 graduating by 2005 (Ellner 2008, 122). By creating new universities that were free and open to all Venezuelan citizens, the Chávez government oversaw a rapid rise in the number of students attending public universities. In 1998, some 377,107 graduated from public institutions; by 2007, this number had jumped to 1,567,314 (MPPEU 2009, cited in Ivancheva 2017, 259). Finally, seeking to address the high prices of largely imported food, the government launched Mission MERCAL (Mercados de Alimentos, Food Markets), a discounted food initiative that by 2006 had 15,000 outlets across the country, again mainly in poor areas. MERCAL built on the work of PDVAL, which Chávez had created in conjunction with PDVSA in 2003, and was supplemented by casas de alimentación (soup kitchens), which provided free staple food to 600,000 of Venezuela’s poorest households (Ellner 2008, 166–­67). In El Camoruco, the missions had become important social institutions by the time I arrived in early 2009. Mission Robinson and Mission Ribas were both operating out of the local high school in the evenings, while Barrio Adentro had installed clinics located in Sector 2 and Sector 4 of the barrio respectively. A new diagnostic health clinic was also a five-­minute drive away on the main road, while a PDVAL food outlet was located in Sector 2, together with a Mercalito (mini-­MERCAL) in Sector 4. In neighboring Jose Félix, a Casa de Los Abuelos (Grandparents’ House) had recently been constructed with money from PDVSA, providing food, social activities, and practical support to elderly residents in the surrounding communities. Esme, an elderly chavista activist who lived around the corner from Rafael and Yulmi, explained the impact of these missions on local people:

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The missions changed everything. With health, for example, if I have a little ache here or a pain there, I can go straight to the clinic and see my doctor, free. Before there was only the hospital. When Chavez arrived, everything changed. Right now, you won’t be able to find elderly people in their houses, because they’re out at the missions, or at the Casa de Los Abuelos. The quality of life has changed a lot for us.

For Los Hernández, one of the major advantages of the family’s large support network was that there were ample social resources that enabled individuals to spend their evenings in the classes. Children could be left with aunts, uncles, or grandparents while their parents studied, and these favors could then be reciprocated. All of Rafael’s brothers completed their high school baccalaureates through Mission Ribas in the years following the missions’ launch, and a great emphasis was placed on education for their children as well. Yulmi made particularly good use of the education missions during the time that I was conducting my doctoral fieldwork. Having successfully graduated from Mission Ribas, she was studying for a degree in social management through Mission Sucre, which meant taking classes in central Valencia several evenings a week. The course privileged Bolivarian values of social justice, equality, and national sovereignty and was designed to train the future managers of the revolution by fusing educational training with the radical pedagogy of Paulo Freire and the political and moral messages of twenty-­first-­century socialism (Hawkins 2010, 205; Ivancheva 2017, 260). This politicized pedagogy suited Yulmi, who was already a powerful orator and capable organizer as a result of her work with La Joc and the neighbors’ association. Drawing on her experience as a community leader, in 2009 she found work as a regional coordinator for MERCAL. Monday to Friday, and often on Saturdays too, she would rise at 5:30 a.m. to catch several camionetas (small buses) to the north of Valencia, where MERCAL’s regional center was located. Though this was a demanding routine, Yulmi reasoned that she had to make the most of these new opportunities. She compared them to her experiences as a young woman entering the job market in the 1980s: I was nineteen and I wanted to get out and work, but I had no qualifications and no training. Now it isn’t like that. We still have a big fight, but there are real opportunities now for women to educate themselves and

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get good jobs. With the missions and the new universities no one can say they don’t have the opportunities.

Yulmi’s words reflected a wider trend integral to the revolution’s appeal to working-­class women in the first decade of Bolivarian rule. Hailed as one of the most pro-­women in history, the Chávez government made significant strides in promoting gender equality in both the workplace and the home. This was symbolized by the Bolivarian Constitution, one of the first “non-­androcentric” constitutions, which required all job titles or positions to be listed in their feminine as well as masculine forms. Antidiscrimination articles within the constitution stated that all public policies should be reexamined for any unintentional discriminatory effects, such as the underrepresentation of women in higher education. The constitution also acknowledged the right of homemakers to receive social security payments for domestic labor (Wilpert 2007, 33). Yulmi felt that the prominent roles taken by women within Chávez’s government were equally as important. “There are still not enough women in important positions, but it’s a lot better than it was,” she told me. “And in el proceso a lot of the people driving the movement are women.” At the same time, however, it was also true that women within barrio households remained overwhelmingly responsible for childcare and domestic labor. In some cases, such as Yulmi’s sister-­in-­law Licha, women had given up employment because their husband or partner earned more and someone needed to look after their children until they started school. Licha, who had previously worked in administration for a juice company based in Valencia’s industrial zone, explained her situation as follows: The burden for women is tough. I want to go back to my job, but right now I can’t. Sometimes I get really bored here in the house, but then I get to see the kids growing up. And we didn’t want to have someone else looking after them when they’re so young, it’s not the same. You can’t give them your values and your way of life, and you can’t guarantee what they’ll get in those places [nurseries]. So I have to be at home here, even though sometimes it’s annoying and frustrating. And these two never shut up or stop moving!

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In Yulmi’s case, although she had taken on both postgraduate training and formal employment, she still did the majority of the family’s cooking, cleaning, and washing. In the mornings, she would prepare the family’s arepas before leaving the house. As well as preparing breakfast, when she was at home she would also cook a large lunch, usually of rice and chicken, which would be left in a pan on the stove and picked up by various members of the family as they returned from school or work in the afternoons. Rafael wasn’t averse to cooking, but his efforts would generally be confined to deep-­fried arepas in the evenings, which most family members would prepare for themselves if they came home late. Although both of the couple worked, it seemed to be assumed that the overarching domestic responsibilities still lay with Yulmi. While Cristina and Eduardo could more or less take care of themselves, it was Yulmi who would be cooking and cleaning on the weekends, and Yulmi who stayed in with Yuleidi when Rafael attended political meetings in the evenings. Carolyn Moser (2009) argues that poor Latin American women often act as social “shock absorbers” (68) by combining maintenance of the household with wage labor and often community work too, a “triple burden” that has been explored at length by feminist scholars (see González de la Rocha 1994, 2001; Chant 2003; Chant and McIlwaine 2016; Roy 2002). Yulmi was acutely aware of the struggles she faced in the home and would often complain about these multiple burdens. On one occasion, she snapped at Rafael after returning home late from work: “I’m shouting because I can’t stand up, my feet hurt so much, do you know what that feels like?” The frustrations that Yulmi expressed in such moments reflected some of the deep-­seated gender inequalities that continued in Venezuela’s Bolivarian era. Although the reforms made under Chávez were rightly lauded as signs of progress, critics have pointed out that Venezuela still lags significantly behind other Latin American countries when it comes to critical issues such the right to safe and legal abortions. Under Chávez, the revolution also tended to use maternalist language that naturalized women as caregivers and mothers, lacking an intersectional analysis that might have considered the interrelationship between hierarchies of class, gender, race, and sexuality (Schiller 2018, 165–­66). Yet the tensions around gender were by no means solely located in the policies or discourses that emanated from the government. In her discussion of barrio community media organizations in Caracas, Naomi

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Schiller (2018) illustrates how gendered inequalities were reproduced not by attitudes or relations that were imposed from above, but rather “through the radical interdependencies that emerged between and among community and official state institutions” (2018, 167). As Schiller sees it, the issues that barrio women faced in her field site—­which included the prioritization of male authority, sexual harassment, and derogatory homophobic and sexist language—­reflected regional and indeed global hierarchies that were reproduced through myriad everyday interactions. “Male supremacy,” she argues, “did not emanate from above—­from the masculinist vertical structures of the state—­but was instead created through practices and interactions between differentially situated actors involved in state making” (Schiller 2018, 189). This analysis highlights how gender inequalities in Venezuela reflected the slow and uneven nature of progressive social change as well as the complex ways in which social hierarchies can be reproduced in spite of progressive political reforms. In Yulmi’s case, it was not only these underlying inequalities in the home that she found frustrating. For a number of reasons, the job at MERCAL was also a source of exasperation. Although being the regional manager of a state company gave her a regular, secure income (1,500 bolivares [USD $350] per month, the standard minimum wage in 2009), she regarded the pay as incommensurate with the pressures of the role, which entailed significant responsibilities coordinating the distribution of MERCAL food across Carabobo State. She also complained about her interactions with the state bureaucracy and felt that staff were under pressure to work long hours at short notice out of loyalty to the revolution. As a result, she was already thinking about employment opportunities beyond her position with MERCAL: “I have to do this as part of my career development,” she explained. “But once I graduate I’m going to look for something better.” Her hopes beyond Sucre and MERCAL were to carry out postgraduate study and eventually find work at PDVSA. For a committed chavista and self-­defining revolutionary, PDVSA offered Yulmi the means to channel her aspirations in a way that remained morally compatible with the revolution. Arjun Appadurai (2004) has sought to pinpoint the attributes and resources that enable people to aspire, arguing that social betterment can be understood as a capacity to imagine particular possibilities, test them out,

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and thus garner insights into what opportunities might be available. As he writes: If the map of aspirations . . . is seen to consist of a dense combination of nodes and pathways, relative poverty means a smaller number of aspirational nodes and a thinner, weaker sense of the pathway from concrete wants to intermediate contexts to general norms and back again. Where these pathways do exist for the poor, they are likely to be more rigid, less supple, and less strategically valuable, not because of any cognitive deficit on the part of the poor but because the capacity to aspire, like any complex cultural capacity, thrives and survives on practice, repetition, exploration, conjecture, and refutation. Where the opportunities for such conjecture and regard to the future are limited (and this may well be one way to define poverty), it follows that the capacity itself remains relatively less developed. (2004, 69)

Appadurai’s formulation offers a useful way of understanding the new imaginative possibilities that had opened up for Yulmi as well as their potential limitations. On the one hand, for a barrio resident whose working background was entirely in the informal sector prior to the Chávez era, the very fact that she could envision working for PDVSA showed how her horizons had broadened. But on the other, the “nodes and pathways” Appadurai described were, for Yulmi, entirely situated within a Bolivarian system that relied on massive transfers of oil revenues from the petro-­state. In this sense, because they sought to craft new subjectivities out of a political economy that remained vulnerable to rapid downturns in global commodity markets, the new structures established by the revolution were at once inspirational and extremely fragile. The Limits to Aspiration

I met Edwin during my first week in El Camoruco. A friendly and talkative forty-­one-­year-­old at the time of our first meeting, he was popular in the barrio and always full of news. Edwin lived with his elderly mother in a one-­ floored, self-­built house a few roads south of the sports court. His father, a

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German immigrant to Venezuela, died a few years before my arrival, while his sister lived in a nearby urbanización with her husband and young son whom Edwin often looked after in the afternoons. Politically, Edwin voted for Chávez and considered himself chavista, but he was by no means a militant. He would rather watch television or visit friends than attend political meetings and described himself half-­jokingly as a chavista-­lite. He supported the government and its social programs but showed little interest in activism and voiced concerns about the single-­mindedness of some chavistas: “If you criticize the government, you get called an esquálido, and it shouldn’t be like that,” he once told me. As I soon discovered, an enthusiasm for education had been central to Edwin’s life for some time. A relative rarity for someone of his age from the south of the city, he graduated from the Universidad de Carabobo in 1991, in an era when the university was yet to run any direct buses from El Camoruco to the campus in the north of the city.1 Having worked a variety of jobs in private companies after graduating, Edwin decided to train as a teacher. When I first met him, he was teaching evening classes at El Camoruco’s Mission Ribas and studying for a master’s in education at UNEFA (Universidad Nacional Experimental Politécnica de las Fuerzas Armadas, National Experimental Polytechnic University of the Armed Forces) during the day. UNEFA had originally been solely for the use of the military, but, as part of the drive to expand access to higher education, Chávez had opened up the university to the general public through a presidential decree in 1999. Since his job at the mission was part-­time and poorly paid, Edwin hoped the master’s would enable him to find full-­time, secure employment in a state school. During the two years he spent studying for his master’s, he used the monthly 500 bolivares (USD $116) from the mission to help his mother run the house. Following his graduation from UNEFA in the summer of 2009, Edwin began looking for permanent work as a schoolteacher but struggled to find the secure position he was looking for. Instead, he found two part-­time jobs with no benefits: one at a local private school, the other as a supply teacher in a nearby state school. During the same period, he left Ribas and switched to teaching evening classes at Mission Sucre after a dispute with the director of Ribas. Edwin was a capable individual who had made shrewd use of new

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institutional openings in the missions and UNEFA. Proud of his achievements, like Esme and Yulmi he was clear on the difference the missions had made to barrio residents: Look, before there simply wasn’t the free education available. We had one college near El Periférico [in the south of the city, not too far from El Camoruco], but it only went up to high school level. The only other place for evening education was Pedro Gual on Avenida Bolívar [in the north of the city]. Think about it, after nine in the evening you can’t get a bus back here in the night, so you’d have to get a taxi—­or walk back through the city in the night, which is really dangerous. Now look at the difference: I walk one block and I’ve got Ribas and Sucre on my doorstep.

As he saw it, the geographical proximity of the missions meant that El Camoruco’s residents could no longer complain about a lack of educational opportunity: No one can say that there aren’t the opportunities now, the opportunities are there. He who wants to learn, learns. Right now, people who aren’t studying aren’t because they don’t want to, not because they can’t. Not everyone is born to be a professional, but people have other talents that they could realize. If you don’t want to go on to study at university, you could do a technical degree. The options are there.

But while the educational opportunities were there, in Edwin’s case they didn’t necessarily translate into secure employment, and in the months following his master’s graduation he was clearly frustrated at not finding a fixed teaching position. Before he found the private school job, he complained about visiting all the schools in the area without being able to find work. Teaching in state schools is often poorly paid in Venezuela, and as a result many teachers have two or even three jobs, teaching all day before doing evening classes as well. Consequently, openings in existing schools are difficult to find. Edwin wasn’t in financial trouble during this period because his mother’s pension of 900 bolivares a month (USD $210) and his own 500 bolivares from Mission Sucre were enough to cover their living costs (like most barrio residents who had built their own homes, they paid no rent or

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mortgage). Yet he admitted that things would have been much tougher if he had dependents. “It’s a lot harder for the families that have five, six, or seven children who are surviving on the same money,” he pointed out. One of Edwin’s major concerns was that his principal teaching experience was in the missions, which were not always respected by educational bodies outside the Bolivarian system. “Some people think the diplomas from the missions are chimbo [fake or worthless], or that they won’t be received in universities. This isn’t true, they’re totally valid, but that’s what some people have started to think,” he explained. In fact, such rumors about accreditation were in part correct. Although Bolivarian higher education institutions were supposed to adhere to the same national system as traditional institutions, in reality they often struggled to obtain the required accreditation for their degrees. This meant that graduates from Bolivarian institutions often had to retake their qualifications if they wanted to undertake graduate study in mainstream universities (Ivancheva 2017, 260). It was unclear whether Edwin struggled to find secure employment because of issues around accreditation or because there simply wasn’t enough work available. But between 2009 and 2012, he found himself continually caught between working in the missions for relatively low pay or balancing part-­time and supply work in mainstream schools, which offered no long-­term security. This predicament highlighted an underlying tension in the Bolivarian system: by opting to administer the missions from outside the mainstream sector, the government had inadvertently stigmatized its own social initiatives and, by extension, those who graduated from them. As Mariya Ivancheva (2017) notes, even though state enterprises were encouraged to recruit graduates from Bolivarian institutions, by 2009 many large employers such as PDVSA had reverted to prioritizing graduates from traditional universities (Ivancheva 2017, 261). As a graduate of UNEFA, Edwin thus found himself with a relatively low ceiling for career advancement in spite of his qualifications and experience. Whereas Yulmi was able to consider the possibility that there might be better prospects elsewhere, Edwin’s situation seemed more limited. The missions had unquestionably improved his prospects, but the parallel structures in which they were situated also placed significant limits on where he might go next.

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The Ambiguities of Social Mobility

While frustrations about bureaucracy, pay, working conditions, and career advancement were keenly felt, it was also true that those with secure employment in the expanding Bolivarian state found themselves in a novel position: they had become, relatively speaking, socially mobile. In Rafael and Yulmi’s case, striving for material betterment had always accompanied their involvement in community activism. As Yulmi put it, the couple regarded a major part of their socialist dream as “our struggle to improve the material quality of our lives.” Poco a poco, in twenty years they had transformed their home from a basic rancho into an impressive two-­floored house with sturdy security gates at the front, several televisions, washing machines, a modern gas cooker, and air-­conditioning units in each bedroom. Like many barrio households, Rafael and Yulmi had no property deeds for their home. They had paid a small sum to an informal property developer for the land, but never possessed a formal land title. While collective efforts were theoretically underway to apply for such titles in El Camoruco, the couple never seemed overly concerned by the slow progress of this process.2 Because they paid no rent or mortgage, any surplus income they earned could be reinvested in the home: the floor was tiled, a new television was purchased, or new furniture installed. The steady improvement in the material quality of their lives was also expressed in aesthetic touches such as the colored balustrades that lined the stairs and faced the street, or the bright paint and elaborate decorations that Yulmi added to the front of the house in time for Christmas 2009. Writing of similar instances of self-­built housing in São Paulo’s peripheries, James Holston (2008) describes the importance of customized homes: “Residents read this house architecture as indications not only of economic success but also of life cycles and personalities. In this sense, the neighborhoods constitute a stage on which houses perform by giving evidence of the social drama of each resident” (2008, 168). As well as being an expression of the family’s upward trajectory, Rafael and Yulmi’s home also functioned as a source of additional income. On the second floor Rafael had established three bedsit-­size rooms and a shared bathroom. Two of these rooms were being rented out to tenants during my stay: one to me, the other to a young couple named Pablo and Paula, who

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had a three-­year-­old son. The second floor, known as the anexo (annex) by the family, had a separate gate at street level that gave the tenants independent access. A second gate connected the stairs to the family house, so that Rafael or Yulmi could come upstairs when necessary. For my room, the smaller but better decorated of the two, the monthly rent was 250 bolivares (USD $58) per month, while Pablo and Paula paid 200 bolivares for theirs, giving Rafael and Yulmi a monthly income of 450 bolivares (USD $105) from the combined rents. Such arrangements typified the small-­scale entrepreneurial endeavors championed by Hernando de Soto (2000), who estimated the untapped value of informal urban dwellings in Latin America at close to one trillion dollars (2000, 36). Perhaps conscious of the transactional nature of their relationship with Pablo and Paula, Rafael argued that although they rented out the rooms in order to help themselves financially, they also wanted to provide affordable options for young people who needed somewhere to stay. He was certainly true to his word in my case, charging me the local rate even though I was a foreigner with access to US dollars and the lucrative parallel exchange rate. This capacity to use their home as a source of income was by no means unique in El Camoruco, where those with larger, more established houses often rented out rooms to young couples or individuals. But it did highlight the family’s relative material prosperity in relation to others in the community, many of whom remained extremely poor in spite of the government’s reforms. Because of Rafael’s standing in the community and my own role as a foreign researcher, local people rarely criticized the family directly to me, but I did hear gossip about the family’s affluence secondhand. There were also moments when underlying tensions sprang to the surface in my presence. One of these occurred during my first period of fieldwork, when I arrived home to find a blazing quarrel taking place between Eduardo, Rafael’s then fifteen-­year-­old son, and his good friend Fernando, who lived across the street. Eduardo had lent Fernando 100 bolivares (USD $23), and Fernando had failed to return the money within the agreed time. Furious as a result, Eduardo was effectively ending the friendship as I arrived: “You know what, people get to hear about these things and in the future when you need help, they aren’t going to darte la mano [give you a hand] because they know you’re a thief,” he shouted. Fernando responded by drawing attention to the dis-

FIGURE 3.1   The author’s room in Rafael and Yulmi’s annex (Matt Wilde)

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parities between his family, who were relatively poor, and Eduardo’s. “It isn’t easy for me like it is for you,” he shouted back. “I can’t just find a hundred bolo [bolívares] like that. Look at your house compared to mine. And you’ve got a car! My papá doesn’t even have a car.” Rafael attempted to mediate in the dispute, telling both boys they needed to take a step back and calm down. But neither was willing to do so, and the argument ended with Fernando storming off as Eduardo shouted insults after him. Eduardo said little about the incident afterward, simply stating that he wouldn’t be speaking to Fernando again unless the money was returned. But Guillermo, Cristina’s partner, provided some further context on the situation a few days later, when he explained that some young people in the community joked that the family were sifrinos del barrio. The term sifrino describes someone who is “stuck up” and is often used, particularly by barrio residents, to describe those from the middle classes or elite who refuse to venture into their neighborhoods out of fear or prejudice. By describing them as sifrinos del barrio, the playful suggestion was that Eduardo and Cristina acted as if they were above others in the community. Part of this, Guillermo explained, stemmed from the fact that Rafael and Yulmi opted to send their children to Santa María, a semiprivate Catholic school located in Sector 1, rather than Rómulo Gallegos, the local high school in Sector 4. Gallegos had a reputation for trouble with gangs, so much so that Guillermo recalled prominent gang members agreeing to leave their guns with the school principal during the height of a turf war between El Camoruco and José Felix. By contrast, Santa María had a good reputation, charging fees to those who could afford it and offering scholarships to children from low-­income families. As Moser points out, households can accumulate “intergenerational assets” by investing in education in the hope that a child’s success will be reinvested in the family (2009, 182–­205). For Rafael, Yulmi, and the rest of Los Hernández, sending their children to Santa María was a way of ensuring that they mixed with other upwardly mobile families and avoided the community’s more difficult individuals. But at the same time, their decision acted as a social marker for the visible unevenness of social mobility in the barrio. As they dedicated their lives to a revolution that was simultaneously alleviating poverty and producing new forms of localized stratification, this aspirational

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chavista family thus found themselves in an ambiguous and uncomfortable position in relation to comrades and neighbors who were faring less well. Viveza and the Moral Economy of Chavista Consumption

The tensions already described were undoubtedly felt keenly by Rafael and Yulmi, who made constant efforts to engender socialist morality in their family. The couple would regularly castigate their children for displays of egoismo (egotism/selfishness), reminding them forcefully of their responsibilities to others. They were suspicious of the reggaetón music that Cristina and Eduardo played loudly in the afternoons and evenings, with Rafael calling such music a “disease” that was “infecting” young Venezuelans with what he termed antivalores. For her part, Yulmi made a clear distinction between the material improvements the family had made to their home and what she termed the “individualist fantasies” promoted in the music videos of Daddy Yankee and other reggaetón artists. She was also forthright about her and Rafael’s achievements, as she explained when we stood back to admire the freshly painted house just before Christmas in 2009: There are people here who envy us and what we’ve got—­you know, the good house, the car, the better things. But we worked for all of this, we had nothing before and life was so hard. When other people have spent their money on partying, drinking every night, we’ve spent our money on things for the house so that, poco a poco, we’ve improved it. That was our decision.

While this pride was understandable, the comparison with less affluent households in the community also revealed a certain defensiveness. The claim that others had struggled because they were frivolous with money suggested a discomfort with localized forms of inequality and seemed to obliquely reference arguments such as the one between Eduardo and Fernando. Yulmi’s assertions about financial prudence almost evoked the valorization of toil and thrift that Max Weber (1976) associated with the “capitalist spirit” in his well-­known text. Yet such reflections about frugality and planning also had a wider context. As Yulmi explained, she began bulk buying food after the paro in 2003,

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when millions of Venezuelans faced severe shortages in basic commodities as the country’s economy shut down. Ever since then, Yulmi always made sure that the family had a surplus of dried staples in the kitchen. The subsidized food now available in MERCAL and PDVAL, coupled with the couple’s relatively stable incomes, meant that they could stock up on rice, pasta, cornmeal, dried milk, black beans, salt, sugar, and coffee for the month ahead. They would then supplement these essentials with fresh tomatoes, cheese, ham, margarine, and eggs from the local Mercalito in El Camoruco once a week. For special occasions, she might buy a chicken or a large cut of beef for a barbeque on the weekend, although competition for Mercalito’s discounted meats was fierce and people would often line up from early in the morning. Yulmi was intensely critical of what she regarded as complacent and irresponsible use of the food missions: “We’ve forgotten how it was to be poor and we want more and more. People want to buy five chickens instead of two. Well, if you’ve got the money to go and buy more in a private supermarket, good luck to you. Even the poor have forgotten poverty here.” Such statements underlined a set of doubts that characterized the expansion of consumer options for working-­class Venezuelans under Chávez’s presidency. Yulmi’s concern was that the food missions were encouraging recklessness and selfishness, with some taking more than they needed and others buying up vast quantities of low-­cost food in order to then sell it for a profit. These concerns tapped into a commonly held view among Venezuelans, which perceives the national character as being predisposed to a kind of reckless and roguish individualism. Iselin Strønen (2017, 290–­91), drawing on the work of the playwright José Ignacio Cabrujas (1996), uses the term viveza to define this imagined cultural trait. Drawn from the Spanish vivir (to live), she argues that Venezuelans often describe someone as viva or vivo if that individual is regarded as being notably “alive” to plots, possibilities, or schemes of some kind. For Strønen, viveza can be a positive trait, “symbolizing the ability to survive in a difficult environment” (2017, 292), as in Rafael’s characterization of himself as a malandro in the passage that opened this chapter. But the term is more commonly used negatively, as Strønen explains: In Venezuela, the concept encapsulates everything from corruption to shady or semi-­legal rebusques (inventive ways of making quick money or

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earning an extra income), jumping ahead in the bus line, pushing one’s way through by force in a traffic jam, refusing to offer prioritized seating for other to elderly and pregnant people on the metro, a general lack of respect for others and any kind of self-­seeking behavior. (2017, 292)

In my experience, viveza was often used to describe suspicious actions that related to consumption and money. When Yulmi made the comment above, we were discussing the food missions with another local man named Franklin, who had called past the house to discuss local political matters. Franklin, who lived in a wooden rancho not far from El Camoruco, had an even more damning take than Yulmi: “We’re thieves in this country! You could have someone living in a rancho who has a lovely fridge worth 3,000 bolívares [$700], but when you look inside it, what’s there? Just a bottle of water. That’s the mentality in this country.”3 These tropes about greed and short-­termism were common during my first period of fieldwork and seemed to reflect anxieties about the relative abundance of consumer options that were now available in Venezuela’s popular sectors. Such vernacular ruminations on the connections between consumption, oil money, and viveza date back to the 1940s and 1950s, when oil wealth created a new stratum of upwardly mobile Venezuelans who enthusiastically embraced North American models of consumerism (Tinker Salas 2009, 186–­89). In that period, imported cars, clothes, foods, and household items became markers of success for aspirational professionals connected to the oil industry, supplementing the existing popularity of Hollywood films and baseball (Ewell 1996, 187–­90). When PDVSA was nationalized in 1976 amid a global boom in oil prices, Venezuelans developed a global reputation for conspicuous consumption that was enabled by the country’s high exchange rate against the dollar. As well-­healed caraqueños and valencianos frequented the shopping malls of Miami flush with petro-­dollars, their reputation was epitomized by the phrase, está barato, dame dos (“that’s cheap, give me two”) (Strønen 2017, 233). According to the popular view, oil money had skewed Venezuelans’ sense of value and turned an uncontrolled desire for things into a shameful national characteristic. This cultural association between oil money, consumption, and morality became significant in new ways during Chávez’s presidency, as an oil boom

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characterized by many similar traits to the 1970s—­an overvalued currency, high rates of consumer spending, rapid economic growth—­was accompanied by something very different: the moral condemnation of consumerism and individualism by a socialist president. Chávez became notorious for long televised political sermons that stressed the need to remake Venezuela’s collective moral identity as part the country’s drive for national sovereignty. As the late president railed against neoliberalism and US imperialism, he also extolled the virtues of personal asceticism, claiming to have never owned a credit card and calling consumerism a “poison” of “capitalist propaganda” (Zúquete 2008, 99). Although he was often painted as a firebrand for expressing such views, in truth Chávez was invoking a long tradition of Venezuelan intellectual thought that has regarded oil money and consumer capitalism as moral pollutants within the national body politic. Figures such as the historian Germán Carrera Damas (1984) and the public intellectual Uslar Pietri (cited in Ewell 1984, 61) commented extensively on what they perceived to be a loss of autochthonous Venezuelan identity amid processes of cultural imperialism, and such positions resurfaced among left commentators in the Bolivarian period. Lina Ron, a prominent pro-­government revolutionary leader before her death in 2011, coined the phrase “Sambil Society” to describe Venezuelans who bought into the lifestyles sold in Sambil, the country’s most popular high-­end shopping mall. As Strønen writes, “Sambil Society became a term of disgust among revolutionaries, who regarded the mall as a symbol of imported consumerist fantasies that undermined the drive to politically and morally transform Venezuela” (Strønen 2017, 243). Placed within this cultural and political context, Yulmi’s concerns, which were emblematic of views I regularly heard expressed, can be understood as part of a nascent moral economy that sought to draw ethical boundaries around consumption amid entrenched anxieties about abundance, greed, and waste. Part of the fear she expressed centered on the fact that subsidized food and better employment opportunities gave barrio residents the means to act like the wealthy “dame dos” sifrinos of Miami or Sambil. But alongside the assertion that “even the poor have forgotten poverty here” was also the sense that Rafael and Yulmi were wrestling with the variegated effects of the revolution in personal terms as well. In this sense, their valorization of hard work, frugality, and self-­control signaled an effort to assert a moral econ-

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omy that seemed perpetually under threat from the wider social and cultural world in which it was nested. As Rafael had told me that night in 2010, being able to aspire, hope, and create in situations of adversity was a core part of what he regarded as a successful barrio habitus (Bourdieu 1990). The accounts presented in this chapter are a tiny sample of the diverse engagements that Venezuelan citizens undertook with the missions in the boom years of the revolution. But they nonetheless reflect the ways in which the Bolivarian period opened up a new set of opportunities for barrio residents who had learned to survive in the manner Rafael described. They also show that the diverse participants of the Bolivarian Revolution—­among them mission service users, community volunteers, state workers, and chavista activists—­often struggled with the gap between imagined possibility and lived reality. For a relatively passive government supporter like Edwin, the new opportunities for training and employment were real and significant, particularly in relation to the paucity of options that existed before Chávez. Yet they were also limited in their own ways and a source of frustration for someone who found his aspirations circumscribed within a stigmatized education system. For committed chavista leaders like Rafael and Yulmi, meanwhile, the relative prosperity that arrived with their burgeoning careers and secure incomes proved to be a source of both pride and discomfort, as they attempted to reconcile the egalitarian principles of the revolution with the palpable disparities in their immediate lives. To use Appadurai’s (2004) terminology, the revolution thus significantly increased the number of “aspirational nodes” available to barrio residents and strengthened the pathways from “concrete wants to intermediate contexts to general norms and back again” (2004, 69). But it did so unevenly, demarcating opportunities within a limited parallel system and offering more to those who were already key actors within chavista organizations. In his work on the new forms of entrepreneurialism that emerged in post-­Soviet Cuba, Sean Brotherton (2008) describes “a kind of hybridity, that is, fragmented subjectivities that bear traces of the competing political-­ economic realities that encompass people’s everyday lives” (2008, 268). This fragmentation, he argues, was a product of the overlapping and competing political-­economic forms that people wrestled with as the country began to open up its economy. The material presented in this chapter shows how we

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might understand precrisis Bolivarian Venezuela as undergoing a process that inverted the Cuban one: rather than a state socialist system fragmenting as market forces entered economic spheres, Venezuela under Chávez was defined by the drive to produce new political, economic, and moral relationships within an existing system of petro-­capitalism that it relied on materially but condemned rhetorically. As experimental sociopolitical spaces that sought to promote this desired transformation, the missions encapsulated the contradictory dynamic that characterized this process. They re-­centered the Venezuelan petro-­state as the poor’s chief benefactor and attempted to inculcate new loyalties and subjectivities based on this social contract. But they also left people juggling an array of competing moral and instrumental imperatives as they navigated their own routes through these new possibilities.

Four Insecurity and the Search for Moral Order

It was another Hernández family party and I was surrounded by a cluster of

young boys, fielding a barrage of questions about my home country. Having translated the body parts from Spanish into English and explained what I could about cold weather, the British monarchy, and Manchester United, I was caught off guard by the next question, put to me by a boy of no more than eight years old: “Do you have malandros in England? We have lots of malandros here.” The same theme was then picked up by the other boys, who each had something to say on the subject: “Do you know where the malandros are in El Camoruco?” asked one. “My papá knows the malandros. He’s even got a gun,” interjected another. “I saw a malandro on the corner yesterday,” commented a third. If the excitable chatter of children can tell us something about the issues that are prominent in a community’s collective imagination, the perspectives of my newfound friends seemed significant. As a figure who appeared to be both alluring and terrifying, the malandro was an organizing signifier that connected concerns about antivalores, street crime, and gang violence to everyday experiences of adolescence, masculinity, and morality. The reflections of my young interlocutors that evening underlined the per-

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vasiveness of a social and cultural archetype that, in one way or another, was likely to play a significant role in their lives in the years to come. During my first research period in Venezuela, a common refrain among taxi drivers was that the country had a worse murder rate than Iraq, as an obsession with the number of weekly violent deaths abounded in the national media.1 Newspapers such as Ultimas Notícias devoted special sections to “round-­ups” of the weekend killings each Monday morning, while television news channels ran regular accounts of the day’s most dramatic hold-­ups, police raids, and shoot-­outs. In Valencia, El Carabobeño published a weekly lista roja (red list) that detailed the names and ages of murdered individuals and the locations of their deaths. Such lists contributed to the popular identification of particular barrios and zones as candela (hot or on fire), reinforcing a well-­established stigma that associated the city’s popular sectors with crime, violence, and moral degeneracy. As well as having to live with the threat of street crime on a daily basis, barrio residents were routinely represented as the source of social anomie in the nation at large. In this chapter, I examine one of the great puzzles of the revolution’s boom period. Why, during a period of record high oil prices, economic growth, and public investment, did violent crime continue to rise in Venezuela? I explore this question from the point of view of those who were most likely to both perpetrate and fall victim to street violence: young barrio men. Tracing the story of Guillermo, a young man who became a key interlocutor, the chapter examines his struggle to avoid the dangers associated with local gangs and find a viable way of making a living in circumstances that repeatedly sabotaged him. It shows how young barrio men, who rarely participated politically and who saw relatively little improvement in their economic circumstances in spite of the revolution, often found themselves pulled into gangs due to economic necessity, loyalty to friends, and a particular expression of masculinity that many felt compelled to perform. Although high oil prices and extensive public spending helped to lift millions out of poverty during the 2000s, my experience was that the Bolivarian government’s achievements weren’t mirrored by significantly better employment opportunities for young, working-­class men. Because much of the Chávez-­era focus was on making improvements in education, health, and welfare rather than in directly providing new jobs, and because oil economies don’t necessarily gen-

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erate high levels of employment in nonpetroleum sectors, many young men in El Camoruco still wrestled with work opportunities that were largely ad hoc, insecure, and unreliable. In the eyes of such individuals, this situation was compounded by the visible presence of wealth elsewhere in their surroundings, which in Valencia took the form of expensive SUVs on the city’s roads, new luxury apartment blocks north of the old colonial center, and conspicuous consumption on display in shopping malls like Sambil. Such factors produced a strong sense that there was money “out there” if only one could find a way of accessing it. For young men with friends, neighbors, or family members already involved in gangs, the temptation to follow suit in exchange for what seemed like easy money was ever-­present. In what follows, I argue that as they struggled to make lives for themselves amid these everyday dangers, frustrations, and temptations, young barrio men articulated an uneasy search for moral order that haunted Bolivarian Venezuela even in its most optimistic period. While the challenges they faced are by means unique to Venezuela, there is a certain symmetry between the revolution’s aspirations for a better future in collective terms and individual efforts to carve out more secure and fulfilling lives in hostile material circumstances. In this sense, although the issues discussed in this chapter cannot be solely attributed to the reliance on oil wealth to deliver social change, they nonetheless encapsulate many tensions that ran through Chávez’s petro-­socialism and its struggle to reconcile the contradictory political and moral economies that underpinned the revolution. La inseguridad

Across Latin America, it is a common view that a close proximity to violence has become a defining and endemic characteristic of the contemporary urban experience, perhaps even “the principal problem in everyday life” (Koonings and Kruijt 2007, 4) for the urban poor. In places where gang activity and street crime are prevalent, violence has come to significantly shape how people imagine their cities and organize their lives, often in contexts where urban governance centered on security precipitates classed and racialized modes of segregation and exclusion (Caldeira 2000; Guano 2002; McIlwaine and Moser 2007; Rodgers 2007; Zeiderman 2016). Although Latin America’s urban poor are far more likely to be the victims of violent

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crime than other social classes, the peripheries of the region’s cities are routinely represented as places in which violence is predominantly cultivated and enacted. This means that as well as managing the daily risks associated with insecurity, the urban poor must also contend with social and territorial stigma that represents them as culturally predisposed to criminality and violence (see Slater and Anderson 2012; Wacquant 2008). In El Camoruco, such forms of stigmatization were reproduced and resisted by barrio residents in a variety of ways. Since the late 1980s, Venezuela’s cities have become synonymous with high levels of street crime and gang violence. According to police records, there were 4,550 homicides in 1998, which equaled approximately 20 violent deaths for every 100,000 people. By 2016, that figure had reached 21,000 per year, equivalent to 53 homicides per 100,000 (Ministerio Público 2016; Samet 2019, 34). Such statistics place Venezuela in the unenviable position of having some of the highest homicide rates in the world, comparable to countries such as El Salvador, Honduras, and Syria (Samet 2019, 35). To date, the bulk of scholarly work on this phenomenon has explained rising violence in socioeconomic and political-­legal terms. Many point out that the trajectory of the problem seems closely aligned with the consolidation of neoliberalism as a political and economic package from the mid-­1980s onward. In line with explanations elsewhere in the Americas (see Auyero 1999), scholars have highlighted the link between rising inequality and violent crime, citing the unavailability of secure employment, the erosion and fragmentation of public services, and an increased reliance on the informal economy as key factors that pushed people into criminal activities from the 1980s onward (Briceño-­León 2007; 2008). As in numerous settings, the proliferation of the drug trade played a key role in shaping patterns of criminality in Venezuela, transforming ad hoc street gangs into sophisticated criminal organizations that compete over territories, profits, and reputations (Bourgois 2003; Rodgers 2006). A number of commentators have argued that the sharp rise in violence in the early 1990s was also strongly linked to el caracazo, as a crisis of legitimacy for the Venezuelan state helped to produce a “culture of urgency” (Pedrazzini and Sánchez 1990) in the streets (Ugalde 1994; Smilde 2007, 62). During the 1990s, the state’s willingness to use violence against the urban poor was

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evident in the police “cleansing” operations known as limpiezas that targeted street children and young barrio men (Duque and Muñoz 1995; Márquez 1999). As Caldeira (2000) argues in the Brazilian context, violence directed by the state against its citizens concurrently works to legitimize it as an effective tool of domination and de-­legitimize official recourses to justice (see Caldeira 2000, 130–­210 and 339–­75; Rodgers 2006). When the state is experienced as a violent actor, urban residents are far more likely to take matters of justice into their own hands. Under Chávez, efforts were made to move away from repressive security operations, with national police reforms one of the government’s standout interventions. Chávez consistently maintained that the way to tackle violent crime was to reduce social and economic inequality and claimed that sensationalized media coverage of insecurity was designed to undermine the revolution (Samet 2019, 30–­31). Yet as Robert Samet (2019) argues, by the end of Chávez’s presidency, government policies on crime were “an incongruous mixture of progressive and heavy-­handed policies” (30) that reflected profound uncertainty about how to handle the issue. Susan Rotker and Katherine Goldman (2002) have stressed that rather than simply describing how people “live with fear,” more attention needs to be paid to the long-­term modifications that are made to lives when violence is an ever-­present danger. They suggest that life in violent contexts is characterized by the modification of habits and relationships—­“practices of insecurity” (2002, 12–­13)—­that permanently alter people’s everyday decision-­ making and sociality. In Venezuela, the interplay between fear and urban space is starkly manifested in the deserted evening centers of cities like Valencia, where residents avoid the streets after dark and only venture outside of their own neighborhoods in cars. A shopping mall culture that first emerged in the 1970s has now become the norm for middle classes and the wealthy, with traditional street markets such as Sabana Grande in Caracas and Avenida Lara in Valencia being abandoned in favor of heavily securitized shopping malls in wealthier parts of the city. This decline in shared public space—­what Roberto Briceño-­León terms the “loss of the city (2007, 96)—­is further evident in the huge growth of private security firms employed by the wealthy. According to Magalay Sanchez (2005), by 2001 Venezuela had as many as 200,000 operative private security guards (Sanchez 2005, 17–­18), a

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fact that reflected the predominance of la inseguridad (insecurity) in people’s everyday experience of the city. Fear became a central feature of my fieldwork after I was robbed several times in my first six months in Venezuela, including at gunpoint. After the last of these, which took place as I returned to El Camoruco early one evening, I suffered from anxiety on a daily basis, feeling I was too conspicuous and frantically profiling urban spaces and people as I moved through the city. I considered either abandoning or radically altering my fieldwork, and probably only pushed ahead thanks to the warmth of my friends in El Camoruco. But the experience meant that I began to carry out my own practices of insecurity with a more fervent discipline than before, as well as adding adaptations that were perhaps unique to a light-­skinned and fair-­haired foreigner (or catíre, as my friends in El Camoruco called me). These included: buying myself a baseball cap to help hide my appearance; never answering my mobile phone on public transport for fear that my accent would give me away; not traveling on camionetas after 6:00 p.m.; and never once walking unaccompa-

FIGURE 4.1   “Guns prohibited in public spaces,” at a local social mission (Matt Wilde)

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nied in barrios other than El Camoruco, even during the daytime. I suffered from panic attacks in parts of Valencia I felt could be unsafe and began using taxis more and more. On some weekend days when I wanted a break from research, I would travel all the way to the salubrious north of the city and spend hours walking around exclusive shopping malls like Sambil simply because I felt safe there. Although some of these practices were certainly specific to the fact that I was a white foreigner, the fears I experienced were not dissimilar to those of many Venezuelans, for whom accounts of robberies, kidnappings, and murders are a routine topic of conversation. As such, I came to see my own daily battle with fear as an important insight into how la inseguridad shaped the ways in which people made their lives practically and understood them morally. Practices of Insecurity in El Camoruco

In El Camoruco, it didn’t take me long to become acquainted with the talk of violence and its pervasive effects on everyday life. Shortly after arriving in the community, I met Guillermo, the boyfriend of Rafael and Yulmi’s eldest daughter Cristina, who told me about his friend who had been shot dead a month before. The killing had occurred after the young man was caught on the wrong side of the border between El Camoruco and its neighboring barrio, José Felix Ribas (usually called José Felix by locals). A war between the gangs in the two neighborhoods had waged sporadically for around a decade, and Guillermo’s friend had become involved in what is known as a culebra (“snake”) due to his association with members of José Felix’s gang. Culebras are essentially blood feuds in which retribution killings are carried out to avenge murder or another form of disrespect (Zubillaga 2008). Anyone connected to the killer can be murdered in response, which often leads to a “string of deaths and blood vengeance” (Ferrándiz 2009, 45) as extended personal networks seek revenge and draw even those not involved in gang life into cadenas (chains) that have no logical end and can claim numerous lives (Márquez 1999, 115; Ferrándiz 2004, 128). Concerned that I had arrived at a dangerous time, I asked Guillermo if the situation was at a particularly tense point. “No, things are more or less tranquilo [calm] right now. It’s just that some people still have peos [problems]

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with each other,” he replied.2 Guillermo explained that the war between the two gangs had been at its worst about a year before I arrived. Since then, things had calmed down significantly, with the murder of his friend the first in a while. Some people I spoke to felt that the arrival of social missions and improved education options had led to this relative cooling, suggesting hopefully that young men were perhaps finding alternative ways of making a living. Guillermo, however, rejected such optimism and put forward a grimmer explanation: “It’s because they all killed each other.” This recent history of gang violence had clearly left its mark on local people. Many described how El Camoruco had become notorious during the worst spell of the war, so much so that “the taxis wouldn’t come here,” as several put it. Others recounted specific memories of shootings that had taken place, describing in detail the gun battles they had witnessed firsthand, or listing those they had known who had been killed over the years. Aware of the ease with which peos and culebras could emerge, many young men like Guillermo who were not involved in gang life still chose to own guns (Guillermo kept his in the glove compartment of his car), believing it was better to have the option for self-­defense than to travel unarmed. The unfortunate by-­product of this was that arguments between actors who were not gang members could easily end in tragedy if someone chose to reach for their gun. After being woken up one night by gunshots coming from a nearby settlement of ranchos a ten-­minute walk away, I was informed in the morning that the shooting, which led to a fatality, had begun with a drunken argument at a party. Street crime, particularly in the form of armed holdups or carjackings, was also a major worry for El Camoruco’s residents. The camionetas that took people to and from work in the city center were often targeted for robberies in the evenings, and few people felt safe walking outside of their own barrio after dark. As a result, safety concerns pervaded the most mundane of everyday decisions: how to get home without a car from work or social engagements elsewhere in the city; whether or not a nearby party would be safe; when to travel on weekends; which group of youths were hanging around on the corner. For locals, such practices involved a routinization of suspicion that was exemplified in moments of mutual mistrust that occurred when unknown vehicles pulled up outside barrio homes. The residents of a

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given house would become tense if they didn’t recognize the vehicle: drive-­by shootings had been a common feature of the gang war, and since most car windows are tinted in Venezuela, there was no way of knowing who was inside. Equally, if those inside the vehicle were unsure if they had the right house, they would hesitate to lower their windows, fearful that they could be in danger without un conocido (a known person) to identify them. What could occur as a result was a mutually mistrustful stand-­off in which a car would pull up, keep its windows raised, and make those outside the house nervous. In turn, the residents would hesitate to approach the car and might even (as I witnessed on one occasion) go to fetch guns kept inside the house or call for help from nearby friends. Such nervous stand-­offs would only be resolved when someone from within the car eventually wound down the window and identified themselves and the person they were looking for. If they were recognized immediately or identified as a conocido, the tension would instantly lift and be replaced with warm handshakes, jokes, and the offer of beers and a seat. Encounters such as these demonstrated how fear of violence had heightened the importance of knowing and being known. The centrality of this feature to barrio social life was made clear to me during the first month of my stay in El Camoruco, when Rafael dedicated hours of his time introducing me to his friends and family to ensure that I was known by a sufficient number of people for it to be safe to walk around on my own. This practice was then repeated by numerous friends and acquaintances, who would present me to their friends and then emphasize to me sternly, with a forefinger pointed to their eye, that it was para conocer (to know and be known).3 Although my appearance made me particularly conspicuous, Venezuelans visiting unfamiliar barrios were also acutely aware of the dangers of being an outsider. On occasions when I accompanied my interlocutors to neighboring locales on foot, their friends or contacts would meet us at the border of their barrio and escort us to and from our destination. Safety was thus intimately linked to being with a known person from that community. Darwin, a local youth, explained the extent of this territorialism to me: “If you’re in a barrio and people don’t recognize you, word will get around. It’s not just the chamos [boys] though, even the viejas [old women] will say, ‘He’s not from here,’ and within minutes everyone will know [that an outsider is present].”

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Fear, Prejudice, and Local “Others”

The territorialism that came to accompany these practices of insecurity could also manifest itself in neighborhood rivalry and prejudice, as residents attempted to represent their barrio favorably by engaging in a kind of localized othering. Most people in El Camoruco were proud of their community, and while they would admit that there were social problems with drugs and gangs, they would also claim that in general terms it was clean or sano (healthy) in comparison with other barrios, which were labeled as dangerous or candela. Guillermo argued that Miguel Peña’s barrios became gradually worse the farther south one traveled. “Here the barrios are older so they’re not too bad,” he explained on one occasion. “There are families and people [who] know each other. But the new barrios farther to the south, the invasiones . . . coño [fuck]! Round there the kids walk around with their guns out openly. They’re crazy.” Michael Taussig (1986) observed that the construction of some kind of other is a way of fashioning reality through a projected fiction that justifies action in relation to that imagined other. This othering takes place in the opaque space between truth and fiction, in which the very act of unknowing enables the construction of a specific reality that permits or generates certain actions.4 Francisco Ferrándiz (2003, 117), meanwhile, argues that denigrating talk about other communities is evidence of how barrio residents wrestle with hegemonic stigmatization by shifting prejudices along to the nearest others, reproducing macabre hierarchies that rank communities according to how violent, dysfunctional, or marginal they are perceived to be. I was particularly struck by this tendency on one occasion, when a teenage boy cycled past Rafael and Yulmi’s house towing a trailer behind him. Inside the trailer was a portable stereo blaring out loud vallenato. Vallenato is a traditional form of Colombian music characterized by accordions and lyrics that lament the woes of life. In Venezuela, partly because Colombians are often perceived to be involved in narcotrafficking, the music has come to be culturally associated with gangs and violence, with many Venezuelans I spoke to claiming to hate the music because of what they felt it represented. “You don’t see that much in El Camoruco. The muchachos here are usually more sophisticated than that,” Yulmi commented as the boy trundled past. When I pushed her on this remark, she explained that this kind of (ap-

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parently) “unsophisticated” behavior was more common in squatter settlement than well-­established barrios like El Camoruco. “You know, there the communities aren’t as strong. There are newer people, lots of Colombians and marginales [marginals].” Her use of the term marginal, which is often employed by wealthy Venezuelans to describe barrio residents as a whole, seemed to tally with Ferrándiz’s claim that Venezuela’s urban poor unintentionally reproduce symbolic violence in an effort to differentiate themselves from communities that are deemed worse than their own. This point was underlined by another element that characterized these patterns of othering in El Camoruco: that it was present within barrios as well as between them. Although my respondents claimed to feel comfortable in El Camoruco, it was also known that particular areas were to be treated with caution. Archetypical of this was a large house not far from the sports court that was known to function as the local gang’s headquarters. Occupying an important place in the local imaginary, the house was said to be the principal place in which drugs and weapons were sold, as well as where prostitution took place. With small slats for windows that were covered with bars, it looked fairly dilapidated from the outside and often appeared to be uninhabited, except for the occasional sight of a young man poking his head out the front door. At night, there were often large groups seated outside and people would come and go from within. When local people spoke about the house, they often did so in hushed and implicit tones, gesturing by moving their heads in its general direction and saying opaquely, por alli abajo (“down around there”). Rumor had it that there were as many as twenty-­eight people living in the house, of various ages. Carla, Rafael and Yulmi’s neighbor, would whisper and check nervously that no one was listening before telling me about it: It’s horrible, Mateo. There are terrible things that go on there. There are little girls sleeping with little boys, drugs, prostitution, all kinds of bad things. It’s horrible. There are whole families who sell drugs and who are malandros, but you can never be sure who it is so you have to be careful. We don’t know who else is behind them. There may be others who aren’t in the house who we don’t know about.

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For an older member of the community like Carla, the house constituted a symbolic locus point for criminality and antivalores in the community, a specific place that connected El Camoruco to what she assumed to be a wider criminal underworld. Among younger residents, meanwhile, the house seemed to invite a kind of morbid fascination. Orlando and Jaime, two local teenagers who had identified the individual who robbed me near José Felix, discussed the house with adolescent relish: “El Camoruco is getting really candela again and that house is where they all meet and live. And they’re growing and growing every day,” said Orlando ominously. The presence of an active gang in El Camoruco was a constant source of anxiety for Rafael and Yulmi, who placed various restrictions on their teenage children’s movement in an effort to protect them. There were often tensions surrounding these restrictions, as the couple attempted to find a balance between sociality and safety. One such occasion was Eduardo’s sixteenth birthday, when Rafael and Yulmi organized a party at their house and invited a group of friends over. Eduardo had wanted to attend a party taking place not far from the sports court, where it was rumored that the local gang would be present. Rafael and Yulmi had forbidden Eduardo from going because they considered it dangerous, and instead organized the party at home where he would be allowed to drink in the company of close friends and family. As the evening wore on, it was clear that Eduardo was frustrated by the tameness of the event and embarrassed at being “supervised” by his parents. Perhaps also eager to impress his new girlfriend, he and his friends eventually snuck out while Rafael and Yulmi were talking politics in the backyard. Although tempted to join them, I chose not to go against Rafael and Yulmi’s wishes and stayed behind, a little frustrated by how limited my own life in El Camoruco was. A short while later, when Yulmi realized what had happened, I joined her as she reached for her mobile phone at the front gate. “I’ve told him before: never with the gangs,” she said as she tried unsuccessfully to reach Eduardo on his mobile. “You can’t get involved with them.” Terrifyingly, a few hours later several gunshots rang out and news filtered through that three young men had been killed at the party in question. Eduardo was still not answering his phone and Yulmi was frantic with worry. Finally, he returned home looking shaken and sheepish. He explained

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that a car had pulled up suddenly and opened fire on a number of youths from El Camoruco. Eduardo, Cristina, and his friends had run off as the shooting began and taken refuge at his girlfriend’s house. Clearly furious and terrified, Rafael gave Eduardo a long lecture on the dangers of attending parties of that kind, before joining me for a beer after Eduardo had gone to bed. “Maybe it’s a good thing they saw that. They’ve seen for themselves how dangerous it can be,” he remarked. A short while later, primarily in his capacity as a community leader but perhaps also to remind me of these dangers as well, Rafael asked me to accompany him to the scene of the shooting. As we pulled up outside the house, he wound down his windows to speak to the local youths gathered outside and pointed to the blood-­stained sheets covering three bodies in the road. The scene attested to the realness of Rafael’s fears for his children. Malandros, Families, and Moral Order

Given the relatively frequent occurrence of gang related violence in and around El Camoruco, it is perhaps easier to understand how the malandro became such a pervasive figure in the social imaginaries of young children. Scholarship on the subject has drawn attention to the relationship between violence and respect for young Venezuelan men, describing how the need to be respected in a socioeconomic environment that provides few means to achieve self-­worth has made gang life into a viable, if highly perilous, lifestyle choice (Duque and Muñoz 1995; Márquez 1999; Briceño-­León and Zubillaga 2007; Moreno 2008, 2009; Zubillaga 2007). Veronica Zubillaga and Roberto Briceño-­León (2001) argue that gangs express the attempted cultivation of two kinds of fragmented and at times contradictory masculine identities. One registers with the traditional Latino model of the man as the self-­sufficient breadwinner of the household, while the other fits with a more recent identity aligned with conspicuous consumption, individualism, and hedonism. This merging of “ultra-­traditional” and “hypermodern” (Zubillaga and Briceño-­León 2001 46) models of masculinity has, for them, produced a distorted version of the Latino patriarch, replacing a man’s ties to his family with loyalty to his gang.

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In Guillermo’s case, many of his closest friends from high school were described by local people as malandros, and most of those—­in fact, “all except for one,” as he put it—­were either dead or in prison. He described how close he had been to entering gang life, explaining that his friends would share their money from robberies or drug sales with him and others. “One friend of mine would go out robbing houses with a gun, and then he’d come back and share the money and we’d go to all the parties. He was a malandro but he was pana [a very close and trusted friend], and at the weekends we’d smoke and play Nintendo at his house.” Such stories are common to accounts of gang life in Venezuela, which document the codes of loyalty and protection that have traditionally existed between malandros and their communities. Such codes dictate that while malandros may rob or kill outside of their barrios, they are branded as chigüires—­cowards and traitors—­if they commit such crimes in their own communities (Duque and Muñoz 1995, 108).5 As Guillermo explained, the malandros he knew maintained strong relationships with their friends and family in the barrio, often sharing money, alcohol, and drugs and becoming indispensable to weekend parties as a result. Alejandro Moreno (2008) argues that this relationship, in which territorial loyalty is paramount, has meant that the malandro has become one of the known “characters” of the barrio, occupying a fixed place in community life: “In this way the malandro has his community . . . and the community has its malandros, just as it has its tin collectors, its drunks, its crazies in the streets, its portugués, its evangelical and its priest (2008, 277).6 Yet he also stresses that the nature of gang life can change if gangs become less morally regulated and more parasitic toward their local neighborhood. As far as Guillermo knew, the gangs in José Felix and El Camoruco retained a sense of loyalty to their barrios, with the fierce rivalry between the two communities reinforcing this territorialism even among nongang members. He explained that rises in robberies often coincided with a weak local gang: it was malandros, not the police, who protected residents from outside assailants. Indeed, Guillermo admitted that these strong ties had made it hard to avoid the culebras and drug-­taking when he was younger, describing how the parties, shoot-­outs, and encounters with the police fostered a strong sense of compañerismo (companionship) and a moral compulsion to defend his pana.

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My friends were all involved in the peo with José Felix, and when we’d go to parties they’d be shooting at each other or throwing bottles. I never wanted to get involved, but sometimes because I was with them I had to throw bottles too. Sometimes we’d get arrested by the police and taken to the modules. Back then it was really bad with the police. If you had a cap or Nike trainers or whatever, they’d take you away without asking anything and stick you in a little cell that stank of piss with twenty or thirty other guys.

Such statements underlined the multiple pressures that Guillermo faced as an adolescent, when showing loyalty to his friends often placed him in danger. Ferrándiz (2003) argues that it is precisely such imperatives that can trap young men in what he terms a “forced gender identity” in which the malandro “becomes the pre-­eminent form of masculinity available to male inhabitants of the barrios” (2003, 116). The very fact that Guillermo could be arrested because of how he looked and who he associated with highlighted the fragility of his life chances: even when he sought to morally circumscribe his actions, he could still be punished by the state for being a “de facto” malandro anyway. Such was the stigma attached to young men from Venezuela’s urban peripheries, they were almost forced into a particular social role by external forces as much as by internal ones. The question of why the malandro had become such a pervasive expression of masculine identity was one that concerned local people in El Camoruco, particularly mothers and grandmothers who worried about their sons and grandsons and complained about the indolence, promiscuity, and selfishness they perceived. Yulmi traced the problem to the relationship between machismo and the rise in poverty in the 1980s, arguing that the increased pressures on families had combined with the existing tendency for men to have children with more than one woman. She reasoned that the fragmentation of family life, coupled with poor employment options and a lack of positive role models, meant that too many young men were “growing up on the corner” and thus cultivating their identity out of el hampa (“the underworld”). As she explained: The problem here with our machismo is that a lot of men have children with two, three, or even more women, and that’s still totally acceptable.

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So for a lot of the children growing up, they don’t have a model of what a strong family looks like. The muchachos grow up thinking they can sleep with however many muchachas, have children who they don’t see, and take no responsibility, and the muchachas grow up thinking it’s fine to have a baby aged fifteen or sixteen and that’s what you do with your life. I’m not saying it’s bad to be a mother, but the problem here is that we’re creating weak families and that makes a society weak. All the delinquency we have now is because if there’s no dad in the house and mom has to go out working, who’s there to provide a base for the children? So instead they end up on the corner, they start smoking or robbing and that’s that. They grow up on the street, not in the home, and that’s why we’ve got so much delinquency.

Guillermo’s assessment of the problem was similar. When I asked why he had ultimately managed to avoid gang life, he put it down to the influence of firstly his father, who had given him a moral education at home, and secondly Cristina, who gave him a reason to pursue a life course different from his friends. His father, a Colombian shoemaker, had always emphasized the importance of working, and Guillermo claimed this had given him an alternative perspective to those of his friends. “From when I was very young I was taught to work. I was taught that you have to work so your kids can eat. It doesn’t matter if you’re not making much money, you still have to work. That’s the difference between me and them I guess. I had a strong family and strong values.” In his seminal work on masculinity in Latin America, Matthew Gutmann (1996) opposed what he termed the “fanciful and static” (16) portrayals of men and masculinity, suggesting that gender identity is better understood in line with the work of Stuart Hall’s (1990) formulation of identity as a practice that is “never quite complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation” (Hall 1990, 222, cited in Gutmann 1996, 17). In Guillermo’s case, the decision to style himself as the kind of man who works hard, looks after his family, and struggles with limited means showed that he had found a way to ser hombre (“to be a man”) by drawing on the ideal of a strong family. The valorization of work as a virtuous endeavor in itself was critical to the identity he crafted for himself, and his rejection of easy money made him the perfect prospective son-­in-­law for Rafael and Yulmi.

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It was thus, as Ferrándiz (2003, 126) and David Smilde (2007, 76) have suggested regarding religious conversion, having access to a different model of masculinity that enabled Guillermo to carve out a sense of self-­respect and direction. As Dennis Rodgers (2006, 287–­89) argues, gang life can be understood as an attempt to create social order out of situations of insecurity and precarity. Although in the long run gangs may contribute to further social disorder in their localities, for marginalized young men they offer collectivized organization, employment, solidarity, and expressions of identity that aren’t necessarily easy to find elsewhere. As such, for young barrio men to find other routes to material security and social stability, they must find alternative ways of cultivating themselves as particular kinds of moral actors. Yulmi was acutely aware of this and described her commitment to family as a moral project that responded to this problem: That’s why it’s always been so important to us to keep this family together. It’s to provide a model, not just for our children but for other children in the community. If people look at us and see that we’ve done well, that we’ve improved our lives and more or less have economic stability, that our children are studying and all that—­well they can see that as a model. If you can have, say, twenty families in the community that have both parents that then it’s a model for others to follow. Look at Rafael’s family, they’re a big family but all the brothers have followed the model of María and Manuel and have stayed with their wives. They’re raising their kids in stable households and that means that most of their children will go on to do the same. That’s how we need to build a new socialist society: from the families up.

The model that Yulmi articulated here was one that echoed her position on aspiration. The myriad intersecting socioeconomic, political, and moral issues that confronted barrio residents were understood as challenges to be met head on, almost as if families and households could be held together through willpower alone. If Yulmi’s determination was impressive, it also underlined the significant burdens that were placed on people’s intimate relationships by la inseguridad and its underlying causes. Kinship was not only understood as a means of providing care and solidarity, but was also

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imagined as a moral mission to counter the deep structural roots of crime, insecurity, and social anomie. The presence of violence in El Camoruco thus heightened the importance of family as an ideal and made masculinity a key site in the struggle to establish a sense of moral order. After over a decade of significant government spending on health, education, and welfare, the persistence of endemic violent crime in Venezuela presented a serious problem for supporters of the revolution who attributed the phenomenon principally to the structural causes of inequality and poverty. Although Chávez made significant strides away from neoliberal governance, the difficulties his administration faced in reforming the country’s police forces and criminal justice system meant that faith in state institutions and legal processes never emerged as a corollary during this period. Moreover, while public investment in treating the symptoms of poverty was substantial in the revolution’s first decade, the reliance on an overvalued currency to maximize petroleum revenues meant that producing a diversified economy that could provide more secure employment opportunities to the urban poor (one of Chávez’s stated goals) never ultimately materialized. To be sure, it was always highly unlikely that Venezuela’s problem with la inseguridad could be rectified within a decade. But the fact that it appeared to have worsened in spite of the revolution’s myriad achievements in other areas underlined the sense that, in relation to this particular issue, chavismo was as much about continuity as change. As the accounts in this chapter demonstrate, the paucity of secure, well-­paid employment options was a major problem for the young barrio men who were the most likely to both commit and fall victim to violence. The volatile cycles of abundance and scarcity that characterize dependence on oil revenues produced the ideal conditions for street crime, as the most marginalized sought out ways to siphon off ephemeral flows of money in material circumstances that remained stacked against them despite Chávez’s narratives of radical transformation. In their efforts to continue living while members of their families, their friends, or their neighbors either perpetrated or suffered everyday violence, barrio residents encountered the “end point” of structural violence as it filtered down into their communities and was enacted, all too often, by young men attempting to make a living and cultivate self-­respect with scarce means to do so. In facing this daily reality, they learned to structure

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their lives around violence in both practical and symbolic terms, guarding themselves and their loved ones as best they could and building social relationships characterized by the uneasy coexistence between mistrust and solidarity. Living with la inseguridad, then, was not simply a fear about the safety of oneself or one’s loved ones, but also a profound anxiety about antivalores that seemed to signal a wider moral crisis. Practices of insecurity were not only everyday modifications concerning security, but also moral markers that were set down in order to stake out the limits of where one could tread in both word and deed. In this way, the “othering” of individuals and communities expressed an attempt to construct symbolic boundaries between a world deemed violent and immoral and a world of family and community, sometimes by falling back on the very language that painted all barrio residents as backward, deviant, or violent. The pervasiveness of insecurity in barrios like El Camoruco provided a constant reminder to residents of the need for far-­reaching social change, of a moral disorder that must somehow be righted. Uncertainties about the revolution were reinforced with every robbery or murder, as residents repeatedly asked themselves why the violence persisted. As the Hernández family show, the understanding of insecurity as a crisis of values produced a particular discourse around ideas of moral decay and familial dysfunction. This in turn led to redoubled efforts to build and maintain families that could act as moral and political counterweights to social anomie. In their efforts to make sense of insecurity and protect themselves and their families from it, individuals like Rafael and Yulmi articulated a political and moral identity that reasserted the importance of family values and self-­sacrifice in opposition to individualism and selfishness. Their politics offered a means to transform concerns over insecurity and imbue everyday social reproduction with a redemptive quality. But just as such challenges could be understood as a justification for the revolution, they also highlighted its uphill struggle to establish a new moral order in such a short time frame. This proved to be a major source of doubt for revolutionaries.

Five The Moral Life of Revolution

Filling an empty bottle with water, Miguel lifted the vessel above his head

and addressed those assembled. “This is what you can have: your life full of goodness. And if you fill yourselves with goodness and love, what comes out? Goodness and love. And you give that to others.” He paused, emptied the bottle and held it, now empty, in front of him again. “Now, here’s the other bottle. If you leave yourself open to the world without the right formación, what will fill up inside of you? All of the vices, the badness, the negativity from the world outside. And what will come out, what will you give to others? That same badness, that dirty water.” In his voluntary work training new community activists, Miguel could often be found addressing groups of people with messages such as these, in which he would implore his listeners to consider their political participation as a commitment to remaking themselves in profound moral terms. Like many of my chavista interlocutors in El Camoruco and Miguel Peña, Miguel supported Chávez’s government and was keen to promote the revolution and its goals. But his predominant concern was with prefiguring that process by focusing on the ideological, moral, and spiritual formation of persons—­or what he and his comrades called formación.1 Chávez’s vision of a radically transformed Venezuela was one that

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Miguel and his fellow activists shared, but they believed this could only be realized if the revolution’s protagonists undertook this process of formación and filled themselves with the “goodness” he described. This chapter examines my respondents’ efforts to define and produce this moral substance, and to cultivate it in the people around them. In what follows, I explore how many chavistas understood their political participation in religious terms, drawing on their respective faiths as they worked to fashion themselves as new kinds of political and moral subjects. I examine the contrasting experiences of more recent “converts” to the revolution and of long-­standing community leaders, showing how tensions between these different segments of the chavista base reflected deeper uncertainties about the revolution’s progress as a whole. Chávez played a critical symbolic role for his supporters, acting as a moral exemplar and providing a constant stream of highly moralized pronouncements on everything from Christianity to consumerism. Yet as they sought to invoke the late president and live up to his vision, community leaders called into question the motivations of new activists, long-­term comrades, and even themselves. In the process, these barrio activists increasingly found the revolution’s lofty ambitions running into its material contradictions. As they wrestled with all these doubts, underlying cultural anxieties concerning the relationship between oil wealth and the nation’s collective moral psyche shaped people’s perceptions about their capacity to effect progressive social change. Activism as Redemption

Historically, barrio community organizations in Venezuela have displayed a great diversity of strategic and ideological positions, ranging from close clientelist ties with political parties in the early years of urban settlement (Karst 1973; Peattie 1968; Ray 1969) to radical mobilizations around amenities and public services during the 1970s and 1980s (Ciccariello-­Maher 2013a; Fernandes 2010; Velasco 2011). Yet unlike some of the larger and more established barrios of Caracas, El Camoruco’s political history was significantly less dramatic. Local people remembered how infrastructural improvements such as the community’s sports court and its first street lights had been arranged by a neighborhood committee in the 1970s, but elderly residents re-

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called no significant community mobilizations or confrontations with the state in this period.2 An asociación de vecinos (neighbors’ association, AV) was established following national-­level reforms in 1978, but it was only sporadically active and reportedly relied on close links with party officials from COPEI, who usually made investments in the community around the time of elections.3 A more combative community organization emerged in 1999 when, shortly after the election of Chávez nationally, Rafael was elected as president of the AV. Together with Yulmi, his good friend Rosa, and two of his brothers—­Alejandro and Manuelito—­he assembled a committed group of local activists and set about changing the way the AV worked. Drawing on their experiences with La Joc, the group used street delegates to gather information on pressing local issues and then began to make demands on the state without involving political parties. Between 1999 and 2003, El Camoruco’s AV saw a huge rise in local participation and was able to win a number of community improvements from the city’s Alcaldía (municipality), which until 2008 was in the hands of a conservative mayor, Francisco “Paco” Cabrera. New water pipes, telephone lines, freshly asphalted roads, and a pilot public health scheme all came as a result of the AV’s public mobilizations in this period. As the Bolivarian era progressed, the group that formed around Rafael broadened its participation to include new pro-­government organizations such as the Circulos Bolivarianos (Bolivarian Circles, CBs) and Unidades de Batalla Electoral (Electoral Battle Units, UBEs) as these were rolled out to support Chávez. Then, when a new communal council initiative was launched in 2006, the old AV was replaced with four new consejos comunales (communal councils, CCs). In these bodies, long-­standing activists were joined by newer recruits, many of whom were elected to committee positions. As a result, by 2009 El Camoruco’s chavista landscape was characterized by highly experienced community leaders who had been active for over a decade and by others who had only begun in the last few years. These dynamics came to play a significant role in the conflicts and disagreements that emerged as new political institutions were established in the barrio. Given the strong emphasis on moral transformation in Chávez’s discourse, it was significant that the vast majority of chavistas in El Camoruco

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regarded themselves as religious. Most adhered to a kind of popular Catholicism (see Salas 1987), with church attendance varying according to different individuals. Some were involved in cults of spirit possession alongside their Catholicism (Clarac de Briceño 1970; Ferrándiz 2003; Martín 1983; Taussig 1997), while others were converts to Evangelicalism or Pentecostalism, following a wider regional trend (Smilde 2007; Stoll 1990). Although these different strands of Christianity were effectively competing for people’s devotion in religious terms, most chavistas in El Camoruco seemed to regard a shared emphasis on cultivating oneself as a moral actor as more important than the differences in religious doctrine. Indeed, many talked proudly about their ability to incorporate people of different denominations within their political organizations. Often, the decision to take up activism had occurred at moments that were retrospectively regarded as personal ruptures. Ernesto, a contemporary of Rafael, described how he had identified with socialism since his teens, when he heard the music of the revolutionary folk singer Ali Primera for the first time. But he felt he had lost his way through the course of his working life, becoming greedy and selfish. He explained how he had owned a successful business before the emergence of Chávez: I used to have my own construction company. We were bought by an American company and I was earning a lot of money. I had three women, a great car, jewelry, all of it. Then it turned out that my administrators had been evading tax, and in one month it all collapsed. We lost everything. And after all that, because of all that, I opened my eyes.

In his study of the influence of liberation theology on Sandinismo in Nicaragua, Roger Lancaster (1988) describes how individualism was often equated with sin. By marrying ideas of Catholic redemption with a socialist form of altruism, liberation theology understood revolution as “the re-­establishment of the traditional image of social order—­real or mythical—­lost when sin divided the community and capitalism stratified the society” (Lancaster 1988, 85). Ernesto presented his commitment to the Bolivarian Revolution in similar terms, describing his past relationship with money and consumption as a kind of false consciousness. He was now concerned with cultivating a different set of values in the barrio’s young population, understanding his

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own experiences as a moral fable that he could impart to others. During community meetings, he would often stress the value of making sacrifices for the collective good. As he told one neighbor during an argument about people’s commitment, “This isn’t my job. My job is with a private company. I do this voluntarily.” Miguel, whose words opened this chapter, was an Evangelical who separated from his wife and returned to Valencia from the Andean city of Mérida around the time of Chávez’s election. He too had identified with socialism from a young age and found himself campaigning for the government as he attempted to rebuild his life in Valencia: When Chávez came to power, I was already a socialist. I became a socialist when I was twenty, twenty-­one years-­old. I was living with friends and at that time we shared everything: soap, toothpaste, talcum powder, sometimes clothes! So what I learned was the importance of sharing with others. Then, when I discovered Christianity, I learned to treat everyone as equals, that no one is better than anyone else. So when the revolution began, I was already ready for it.

Miguel suggested that he had been prepared for revolutionary activity thanks to his grounding in both socialism and Christianity. Importantly, he felt these were active processes of self-­making that he had already undertaken, giving him a firm belief in his capacity to be a good revolutionary. His emphasis on equality and sharing pointed to a socialism grounded in altruism and Christian decency, underlining the desire for a retrieval of what he perceived to be core values: kindness and self-­sacrifice. Another individual who began to consider herself a socialist after the arrival of Chávez was Rosa, who had worked as a manager in a private company for some twenty years before retiring to focus on community and political work a few years before I arrived in El Camoruco. She described how she had undergone a transformation when Chávez arrived, reevaluating her core values as she was gradually drawn to political work: Before, I was a capitalist, an individualist. I had the good job at the private company, the good car: all that. I was only interested in my make-­up and private schools for my girls. I had a nice car and was totally individ-

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ualistic. I wasn’t against [the left], but I didn’t involve myself. I’d always been involved in community things, but not in a political way.

Rather than a sudden moment of realization, she described her own political evolution in more gradual terms than Ernesto: My papá died of cancer the same year that Chávez was elected, and because we have a big space in our house I said that Rafael and Yulmi, who were working with the Bolivarian Circles, could use the space for meetings. I used to make coffee for everyone at the meetings, and they’d always ask me to join in, but I never did. One day there was a meeting in the house and everyone was saying, “Join in, join in,” so I did. After that it was a gradual process. It wasn’t like there was a single moment when I suddenly changed, it was a process. I suppose it’s still happening now. Even a few years ago I was still wearing the smart dresses and high heels to meetings, but now it’s just jeans and trainers.

Judith Butler (1995) argues that ideological formation is a process of “submission as mastery” (14), in which subjectivity is fashioned by submitting to a chosen doctrine and mastering its content through ritualized practice. For Rosa, the gradual shift in her attire seemed to reflect the evolution of her subjectivity, as she slowly cultivated a different public persona. Political conversion was thus an unceasing process (Badiou 2003, 63) that was enacted through the ritual of political meetings. In their different ways, these cases underline the ritual dimensions of grassroots activism and highlight the unpredictable ways in which religious faith and political identity can interlock. Diverse anthropological studies have shown that religious doctrines of various hues can oil the wheels of capitalist expansion (Freeman 2012; Kendall 1996; Muehlebach 2013) and also engender radical critique and resistance (Nash 1993; Ong 2010; Taussig 1980). As Sian Lazar (2008) notes in her study of indigenous trade unionists in Bolivia, while it is often assumed that the Evangelical focus on the soul means it necessarily promotes individualism, in practice the reality is far more complex. Although Evangelicals regard spiritual experience as a private affair, they also place great emphasis on the construction of community. As Lazar argues, “their concept of self is prior to the collectivity and shaped by

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it, rather than created in dialectical relation to other selves within that collectivity” (2008, 170). For chavistas in El Camoruco, the different approaches that Catholics and Evangelicals took to their religious beliefs didn’t preclude a shared understanding of revolution as a process of spiritual work on the self. Indeed, the accounts above show that activists who adhered to opposing Christian faiths reached very similar conclusions about the need to serve the community, sacrifice oneself, and forego individual desires. As a political vision that promised redemption, the revolution thus imbued activist experiences of political rebirth with a heightened moral significance grounded in a sense of duty toward the collective. Chávez as Moral Exemplar

It is impossible to understand how political and moral subjectivities were crafted by rank and file chavistas without considering the critical role Chávez played. Perhaps no national leader in the contemporary era has so aptly conformed to Weber’s (1947) definition of charismatic authority, which described the “certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities” (Weber 1947, 358). Chávez, famed for his powerful oratory performances and his warm, colloquial style of speech, had always pitched his political project as a process of moral and even spiritual renewal. In his election campaign of 1998, his slogan was a passage from the Bible that called for a spiritual awakening: “Let he who has eyes, see. Let he who has ears, hear” (Smilde 2004, 84). He repeatedly emphasized the linkages between political transformation and Christianity, likening the revolution to an eschatological shift occurring at the dawn of a new century. As Pedro Zúquete (2008) argues, this discourse went beyond secular populism and into the realms of a “political religion.” It offered “a comprehensive view of the world; it claims to have the answers for ultimate questions, such as the purpose of life; and it aims to shape and purify the collective consciousness, thus bringing about a new society and a new humanity here on earth (Zúquete 2008, 96). Chávez’s deployment of such language was clearly designed to strike a chord with a religious population (see Smilde 2004, 2007). But it also echoed Che Guevara’s (1969) contention that

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revolutionaries were duty bound to transform themselves morally in order to build a new socialist society. Explicitly drawing on Guevara, Chávez called for the creation of “a new man, a new society, a new ethics” (Zúquete 2008, 114) and implored his followers to become a model of duty and sacrifice. The devotion that Chávez commanded among my interlocutors owed much to his ability to weave himself into the quotidian rhythms of community and family life. In El Camoruco, Sunday was the day that his voice could be heard with the most regularity. Until he became unwell in 2011, Chávez would address the nation each weekend via his flagship television show, Aló Presidente. The show was perfectly timed to coincide with the warm, lazy afternoons when people were often nursing hangovers, doing washing and cleaning, or preparing sancochos (casserole-­like broths) for the visits of friends and family. Usually their one free day of the week, Rafael and Yulmi would often pass their Sunday afternoons in this way, with the president’s distinctive, booming voice competing with the eclectic mix of merengue, reggaéton, and salsa that could be heard from the road outside. Aló Presidente was presented as a weekly cabinet meeting in which the whole nation could participate. The show took place in a different part of the country each week, usually in places where Chávez was unveiling a new community project such as a clinic or school. One week he might have been overseeing a rural cooperative in Bolívar State, the next an agro-­industrial plant in Zulia. As new projects were unveiled, individuals from the host community would be invited to speak to Chávez and the nation, narrating what their community had achieved and invariably concluding with “Gracias mi comandante” (Thank you my commander). Usually seated behind a large wooden desk, Chávez would be surrounded by red-­clad devotees drawn from local political figures and members of the host community. He would speak informally, even coarsely at times, and address his live audience with affectionate colloquial terms commonly used by most Venezuelans: “Vente aquí negrita” (Come here little black), “Hablanos mi rey” (Talk to us my king).4 Much like an avuncular schoolteacher, he would explain how the new oil extraction machinery in the Orinoco Belt would work, or what a “multipolar world” would mean for the Caribbean Sea. Interspersed with these lessons were folk songs, recollections from his childhood, selections of important

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readings (among them Eduardo Galeano, Antonio Negri, Noam Chomsky, Jesus Christ, and, of course, Simón Bolívar), and celebrations of Venezuelan art, food, music, and poetry. The president could shift his tone, however, and become more aggressive and combative, even macho, when the moment arose. Heads of state, business leaders, and corrupt politicians alike were denounced in turn as frauds, liars, and murderers. On one occasion, which Chávez later admitted to regret, he fired a number of state workers on air by calling out their names one by one and blowing a whistle as each one was struck off (Chávez 2005, 152). As Zúquete (2008, 111) argues, Aló Presidente could be understood as a weekly national rite, even a “ritual of obedience” (Michelutti 2009, 20). The show’s regular visits to popular sectors all over the country helped to create the impression that Chávez was a kind of earthy superhuman, omnipresent and yet grounded, who was able to represent Venezuela’s interests among world leaders while still finding time to oversee the opening of a socialist cachapería in Cojedes.5 This appearance of omnipresence struck me on a typical afternoon in the house of Señora Carla, who was watching Chávez open a new Bolivarian school on television. Carla and I had been discussing some of the problems with the local communal council, and she was reflecting on this as Chávez appeared on screen. “He never rests,” she said casting her eyes to the TV. “I wonder if he knows about the problems we have with the communal councils here. I suppose he must do.” The idea that Chávez knew what was going on in El Camoruco typified the notion that the president himself was on hand to personally deal with the community’s problems. Oneidys, another local chavista activist, described what she called her “spiritual connection” with the president: I swear I have some kind of connection with Chávez. Sometimes we’ll be talking about something during the week and then come Aló Presidente on the weekend he’ll be talking about it himself. Like on Sunday he was talking about the importance of names and finding names that mean something, not just any old name. I was talking about the same thing last week at the meeting! It’s like there’s a spiritual connection with him, or maybe he’s recording everything we’re doing and knows about it! A lot of

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people interpret things Chávez says badly, and that’s when we have problems. He’s only a guide, he throws ideas out there and we have to grab hold of them and make them work for ourselves. He can’t do it all for us.

This sense of dialogue extended into the everyday discussions of activists, who used Chávez as a constant reference point during local meetings. Many would deploy the late president in support of an argument they were making. “It’s like Chávez said on Sunday,” Oneidys would say, or, “As our comandante said last night,” Rafael would begin. Sometimes these references would relate to specific questions of legislation or strategy, with Chávez cast as a source of knowledge that activists needed to keep up with. “When the president speaks about something, we need to know about it. We need to research it for ourselves so that we understand it and so that we’re enacting it ourselves,” said Rosa on one occasion. But equally common was the deployment of Chávez as a source of inspiration when individuals seemed to feel that morale was flagging. “I’m convinced,” Rafael stated firmly on one occasion as he pointed to a poster of the president on the wall, “that there’s no one more revolutionary than that coño e’ madre [motherfucker] over there. And we’ve got to echarle bola [work our balls off] to keep this revolution going with him.” Like Chávez, activists would implore one another with moral arguments, and like his performances on Aló Presidente, they would alter the transmission of their speech, shifting its delivery in moments of high emotion. Sometimes people would stand suddenly in mid-­speech, as if the importance of the statement itself had lifted them up. These actions seemed to be efforts to add weight to their utterances, imitations of Chávez’s style in the hope of summoning his charisma. Although the vast majority of my informants acknowledged that there were countless problems facing the revolution, it was virtually unheard of for any of these to be attributed to Chávez. Even when some of his closest confidants were found to be involved in corruption, the vices of those around him only seemed to magnify the president’s moral standing. It was common to hear statements such this one made by Miguel: “Chávez works so hard for us but it’s the people around him—­the ministers and the mayors and the governors—­they’re all corrupt and in it for themselves. Too many people think that all they need is a red t-­shirt to be socialist. They don’t un-

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FIGURE 5.1   Moral y Luces (Morals and Enlightenment) at Mission Sucre (Matt Wilde)

derstand that it’s about so much more than that.” This belief that Chávez was somehow removed from the dirty business of politics underlined the effectiveness of his charismatic performances, which for his supporters had transformed him into a “divinized man” (Michelutti 2013, 21) who became the “master-­signifier” (Žižek 1989, 93) of his own revolution.6 In 2012, one activist summed up this relationship to me, preempting the president’s death before it happened: “Look Mateo, Chávez isn’t Chávez anymore. He’s something else now. He sacrificed himself and turned himself into a symbol, into our symbol.” Doubt, Ethics, and Performance

In a certain sense, Chávez was immovable in the chavista cosmology because people acknowledged that his vision was incomplete, and that most activists fell short of the standards he embodied. A common trend among chavistas in El Camoruco was that activists who had been politically active for some time

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expressed doubts about the commitment or authenticity of newer comrades. The following exchange, which took place before a large public meeting, exemplified such uncertainties. Its chief protagonist was a young man named Jaime, who was a recent graduate of Valencia’s military academy: Jaime: You know what they [new chavistas] do? They get themselves the red t-­shirt and the red cap and then it’s like, “OK what do I need to say? OK, ‘Comrade’, that’s a good one. What else? ‘Compatriot,’ nice and easy. ‘Homeland, Socialism or Death.’ OK, great, thanks for teaching me, I’m ready to get out in the street and help the cause.” That’s what they’re like. But when you meet them—­when a real revolutionary meets them—­there’s a clash. Because you know. So you know what I say to these people? “I’m not chavista, I’m Bolivarian. And if you’re so revolutionary, tell me when Bolívar was born and when he died. Because if you don’t know these dates, you can’t tell me that you’re a revolutionary.” Second man: And Sucre [another independence hero]? Can you tell us the dates for Sucre? Jaime: [Looking embarrassed] Well, I don’t remember right now . . . Second man: I’ll tell you: Born February 3rd 1795, died June 4th 1830. Jaime: [Recovering his composure] Exactly! But the point is . . . In this instance, Jaime embarrassed himself by attempting to establish criteria for ascertaining who a “real” revolutionary was, only to fail his own credibility test. The second man, an older activist, was able to assert his own authority with a subtle put-­down that provided a quiet warning concerning denigrating talk about others. Yet beyond this verbal sparring, the exchange showed how demands to become particular kinds of revolutionary subjects produced an array of doubts and suspicions. Cultivating oneself as a revolutionary chavista was a complex and challenging process in which attempts to mimic the discursive style of “authentic” revolutionaries could leave one open to mockery or chastisement. In light of such doubts, long-­standing activists such as Rafael and Yulmi took on a steward-­like role within the local chavista milieu, assessing the relative merits of new activists according to their political and moral credentials. Much of Rafael and Rosa’s work as community facilitators involved

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supporting the formation of new neighborhood organizations, many of them in the new squatter settlements that had begun appearing throughout the south of Valencia in the Chávez era. A typical day would involve driving out in Rafael’s battered 4 x 4 to a new settlement on the fringes of Valencia’s urban sprawl. There, he, Rosa, and Oneidys would engage the community in a question and answer session concerning the importance of community organizations and the meaning of terms like popular power. Part of this would involve discussions of logistical practicalities, during which Rafael would outline how to organize a promotional team, how to arrange a public assembly, and how to elect street wardens. But much more of their focus was on providing ideological and moral guidance that, they believed, had to prefigure any attempt to become a community body. “What makes a community?” Rosa would ask those assembled, before delivering a well-­rehearsed speech: This is about building a new relationship with the state, and about you becoming the government in your locality. But before we talk about structures and funding, the most important thing is your formación as a community, your spiritual values. What you have here is the beginnings of a community, a chance to be unified and together in a union. You can be the founders of the history of your community.

Rafael would then follow Rosa’s introduction with a line that he would repeat over and over again: “The most important thing is the participation of the people.” For these experienced community leaders, the emphasis on these principles was not only an effort to create collectivities that could make successful demands on the state but also a desire to instill a political and moral consciousness that would preempt problems that might later emerge due to self-­interest or conflict over resources. As Oneidys put it, “To me, the la conciencia [consciousness] is the most important thing and it has to go hand in hand with infrastructural developments.” Yet while such efforts were made with those who were new to community organizing, there were also ongoing disagreements between long-­standing chavistas. Yulmi described her understanding of chavismo in El Camoruco as follows:

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In many ways, this is a beautiful community, but there are a lot of internal conflicts. It’s a problem with the “chavistas.” We have chavistas, low chavistas, medium chavistas, high chavistas, and light chavistas—­and us, the revolutionaries, of whom there are very few. The problem is that many of these chavistas don’t have the ideological orientation to help the revolution. There are too many people who enter without understanding things, who only want things for themselves. These people don’t have the formación.

Concerns such as these underlined a paradoxical problem for established community leaders. On the one hand, they were eager to politicize more people and strengthen their community’s ability to be a political force, which entailed bringing new individuals into the fold. But on the other, they worried about the capacity of new converts to achieve what they regarded as the necessary formación. Doubts about people’s intentions would often persist even if new activists regularly attended meetings and social events, particularly if access to money or state resources were suspected as being motivating factors. For Yulmi, the true test of a comrade’s character would come in moments of pressing need. As Joel Robbins (2007) argues, in processes of significant cultural or social change, people often develop a sharpened awareness of moral choices. Drawing on his exploration of Christian conversion among the Urapmin of Papua New Guinea, Robbins proposes the following: “Over time, new stable structures may arise, but during the course of the change conflict is likely to be the norm. This is why people’s sense of the moral weight of their actions is strong during times of change” (Robbins 2007, 302). Given that becoming a political activist can be regarded as analogous to religious conversion, we might therefore regard revolutionary subjectivity as similarly laden with what Robbins terms a “heightened moral consciousness” (305). Because long-­standing chavistas saw their role as inculcating a new moral subjectivity, they felt duty bound to monitor the ethical conduct of those who embraced their cause.7 As well as being suspicious of others, activists also expressed concerns about the extent to which they could to live up to the required moral standards themselves. “It’s really arrecho [tough],” Rafael told me on one occasion. “For years we were injected with all these antivalores [negative values]:

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selfishness, machismo, consumerism . . . and they don’t just go away because we want them to. We have to have real cultural change if we want to build a new civilization.” As a successful local leader who was gradually ascending the local PSUV hierarchy, Rafael increasingly found himself confronted with opportunities to take advantage of his status. But he used these opportunities as moments in which he could prove that it was possible to resist antivalores and enact the “cultural change” he felt was necessary. During one of our weekend drinking sessions in 2009, he recounted an incident that had occurred several months before. A representative of Edgardo Parra, the recently elected PSUV mayor of Valencia, had visited the house and offered Rafael a free Blackberry smartphone to help with local organizing. Rafael had been tempted by the offer but ultimately decided not to accept. He explained the exchange to me in some detail: I really didn’t know what to do. Do I take it or do I leave it? But I said, “I’m not sure if I can take it,” and she [the representative] started to get angry. “Why Rafael? What’s the problem?” So I said, “I don’t feel good with this. Firstly, because I know that if I accept this from you, I’m basically involving myself in an act of corruption. Look, we’re friends and if you need something from me I’ll help you out. But not like this, not like you give me something so that I’ll do something for you.”

In 2009, Blackberry smartphones had a particular cultural cache in Venezuela (Strønen 2017, 231), being highly valued imported commodities that were strongly associated with the kind of conspicuous consumption one would see in Sambil shopping malls. Mindful of these associations, Rafael felt uncomfortable with how the Blackberry would look to his friends and comrades: I’d be really embarrassed to walk around with a phone like that, really embarrassed. To walk around with a tremendous telephone like that with the people who are with me—­with where I’m from—­I couldn’t do it. To do that would be to show off, to show off your power. If they want to give me a phone with full credit, fine. But it has to be a normal, little phone. I can’t walk around with a phone like that. I share the things I have with my team—­the motorbike, the car—­Christ how many different people have crashed the car! I feel comfortable sharing things with

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my people. But to have something like that just for me, for me alone. I can’t. Morally I can’t.

Writing about the distinction between ethics and morality, Jarret Zigon (2009) identifies moments of “moral breakdown” that allow individuals to reflect on how they wish to act. In such moments, he writes, “a person becomes reflective and reflexive about her moral world and moral personhood and what she must do, say or think in order to appropriately return to her nonconscious moral mode of being” (Zigon 2009, 261). By rejecting the Blackberry, Rafael had taken an ethical decision to resist the kind of visible excess that transgressed the socialist moral economy he so fervently advocated. In doing so, he was able to propel himself away from what he regarded as antivalores and head off any accusation that he was engaging in the self-­interested viveza that chavistas criticized in “escuálidos.” As Mathijs Pelkmans (2013) argues, doubt is inherently intertwined with belief, often producing agency through a subject’s desire to erase or overcome uncertainty. Conviction can emerge from a perceived incompleteness within a given belief or ideology, or it can be dialogically produced through interactions with “non-­believers” (Pelkmans 2013, 29). For Rafael, a “mini-­Chávez” (Michelutti 2013, 24) whose political career relied on his working-­class authenticity, the Blackberry decision was a way of signaling that he remained connected to his barrio and his people as well as a means of ensuring that he felt comfortable with himself. This ability to turn doubts into productive moral agency and political narrative was critical to both his success as a community leader and his continued belief in the revolution as a whole.8 At the start of this chapter, I recounted how Miguel had used a bottle of water to encourage neophyte community activists to undertake a process of moral cleansing. Writing about Venezuela during the oil boom of the 1970s, Coronil (1997) described how metaphors that equated metabolic processes of pollution with the national body politic became a common trope in that period: The digestive metaphor thus came to express the relationship between society and nature as one between society and moral powers. The nation was feeding itself with an alien discharge; it had taken for good food what

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was actually harmful waste. Indigestion was thus a symptom of the moral disease of a society that had inverted the relationship between production and consumption, that could no longer distinguish food from waste, good from evil. Venezuela had lost control over itself: intoxicated by oil as waste, it had become transformed into waste. (Coronil 1997, 354)

The material presented in this chapter suggests that these entrenched cultural anxieties about oil money helped shape a highly moralized form of political subjectivity among my chavista interlocutors. As a project that stressed profound work on the self, revolutionary formación strove to counter the sense that Venezuela was not only a socially unjust and economically unequal society but also a profoundly immoral one. Chavistas’ understanding of revolution in such terms imbued political protagonism with a heightened sense of moral duty and allowed individuals to situate their activism within individual journeys of renewal or redemption. As the accounts illustrate, however, activists also found themselves wrestling with doubts about the gap between the visions they aspired to and the everyday difficulties they encountered in creating lasting change. Although revolutionary formación constituted an effective moral framework for producing new political subjects, it also created disappointment, disillusionment, and suspicion. Rosario Montoya (2007) argues that revolutionary socialist projects have a tendency to rely on discourses that demand “moral exemplarity” (Anagnost 1997, 115) in their desire for a radical break with the past. Revolutionaries undertake projects of self-­making because notions of change and renewal are attractive, offering the chance for personal salvation alongside more collective political demands. Yet the price for accepting this challenge is that individuals must contemplate their own perceived capacity to rid themselves of “the muck of the past” (Shah 2014, 340). Montoya observes that a multiplicity of macrostructural problems in such movements can be reduced to a “matter of consciousness” (2007, 80) for each individual to contend with. Instead of seeking out root causes, activists risk constructing an “ontological firewall” (Holbraad 2014, 370) that inadvertently shields the powerful by continually deflecting critiques back to the self. In contexts where the interests of the national government are ostensibly aligned with those of rank-­and-­file activists, this risk is particularly pronounced.

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Between 2009 and 2012, activists in El Camoruco faced an array of challenges that existed at multiple scales. Locally, these included ongoing problems with the barrio’s water supply, continuing insecurity and violent crime, a substandard public hospital, disputes over the direction of neighborhood political organizations, and widespread suspicion of corruption in the Alcaldía. Nationally, meanwhile, there was frequent electricity rationing (including regular blackouts), rising levels of inflation, ongoing political polarization, and a growing number of corruption scandals involving senior government figures.9 While all of these problems had their own specific dimensions, they also shared a common set of origins: decades of infrastructural neglect and underinvestment, vested interests within the state bureaucracy and political establishment, and the haphazard use of oil money to circumvent much-­needed structural reform. Yet very often, these entrenched macrolevel shortcomings were attributed to moral failings on the part of the Venezuelan people. As Rafael argued on one occasion: This is a problem we’ve got here, and it’s a problem connected to the huge oil wealth this country has. If you give all the money to institutions you make them too powerful. And then people expect them to do everything. You try and get people, for example, to clean their own streets and they say, “No, the Alcaldía should be doing that.” If you don’t pay people here, they won’t do anything.

While this statement was partly a critique of state institutions, it also contradicted the view that revolutionaries should strive to transform the state and veered into the kind of self-­denigrating discourse that viewed the Venezuelan populace as indolent, wasteful, and cursed by the immoral abundance of oil revenues. Such doubts underlined how the revolution’s myriad infrastructural and operational challenges were often interpreted through a lens of morality, as activists struggled to assert agency over problems that were beyond their orbits of influence. This problem of scale thus meant that chavistas were haunted by the very political and economic structures that underpinned the revolution, and by the oil money that simultaneously offered the promise of transformation and the threat of contamination.

6 Petro-­democracy and Its Ambiguities

“We really changed the conciencia [social conscience] of people,” Rosa

told me proudly. She and Rafael were reminiscing about their involvement in the asocación de vecinos (neighbors’ association, AV), and Rosa was reflecting on how the experience had shaped her attitudes toward community politics. “People put boxes of flowers in their front windows, and one December we had a competition for the best decorated street. All the streets were so pretty with the lights and the decorations. It was beautiful, Mateo, and that’s what the association achieved for El Camoruco.” As part of the team that Rafael assembled between 1999 and 2003, Rosa had been one of those who went out knocking on doors to engage people in discussions about the problems their community faced. She had seen firsthand how this focus on outreach and participation had given local people the confidence to organize collectively, and this became central to the principles that she regarded as essential for neighborhood organizations. Rafael shared her fond recollections of that period, describing how the community had been galvanized by the street delegate system they had adapted from the teachings of La Joc: I remember one time we had a meeting with someone from the Alcaldía about the water or the roads or something. He said, “I’ll get you the

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money if you can prove to me that this community is behind you and in need. I want to see two hundred people at the meeting on Thursday.” This was on the Tuesday, but I knew it would be easy. Back then we were so well organized I didn’t even need to go around the community myself. I just contacted the street delegates and they rounded up their streets. At the meeting we had like 400, 500 people and I remember seeing this guy’s face!

As Rafael and Rosa saw it, one of the real achievements of the AV had been that it reached out to households directly and involved them in collective decision-­making. This had helped to foster a strong community spirit that later translated into mobilizations that local authorities couldn’t ignore. Rafael and Rosa’s experience with the AV thus gave them a critical perspective on the array of new political bodies that emerged in the Bolivarian era, many of which they regarded as lacking the same energy as the AV. And while there was undoubtedly a sense of nostalgia in their comments, these were by no means the only critical views that were aired as new neighborhood organizations were rolled out by the Chávez government from 2006 onward. As the revolution entered a more radical phase, shifting constellations of neighborhood politics and state institutions created an array of new tensions at the local level. This chapter looks at the impact of the consejos comunales (communal councils, CCs) on El Camoruco’s political life following their local formation in 2007. The passing of the Communal Councils Law in 2006 was a significant moment in the government’s drive to advance a more transformative political agenda. Drawing on both existing practices of direct democracy among Venezuela’s urban social movements (Ciccariello-­Maher 2013a; Fernandes 2010; Motta 2011; Spronk et al. 2011) and reformist experiments in urban governance elsewhere in Latin America (Baiocchi 2005; Chavez and Goldfrank 2004; Coronil 2011; Grisaffi 2013; Lazar 2008), the CCs’ guiding philosophy was that local-­level citizen participation in the planning, implementation, and maintenance of community development projects would establish a platform on which a new “protagonist” democracy could be built (Alvarez 2003).1 Heralding them as cornerstones of the move toward twenty-­first-­century socialism, Chávez claimed that the CCs would begin

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the process of transferring political, economic, and administrative decision-­ making to the constituent power of a new “communal state” (Araujo 2010; Ciccariello-­Maher 2013a). Yet although the Bolivarian government positioned the CCs as central to its new model of participatory democracy, the reality I found on the ground was that participation itself was highly uneven and characterized by a myriad of different understandings about what these bodies should actually be. For some actors, particularly older women, the CCs offered new opportunities to develop themselves as political subjects and contribute to community life in genuinely fulfilling ways. For others, however, regular participation was deemed either undesirable or unfeasible, creating an ongoing disconnect between activists’ aspirations for the CCs and a series of daily frustrations with both unsupportive neighbors and the state bureaucracies that financed their projects. A defining feature of the CCs that distinguished them from previous neighborhood organizations was that they combined an experimental model of state-­led participatory democracy with the direct management of oil money that was channeled from central ministries. While the community benefited significantly from the injection of state resources for new initiatives managed by the CCs, clashes frequently occurred over money, with local residents expressing mistrust of elected spokespeople even as they deferred decision-­making to those same individuals. I argue that this localized form of what I term “petro-­democracy” produced a series of unintended consequences in El Camoruco, including conflicts over resources, suspicions about corruption and self-­interest, and divergent views about the CCs’ overall mission. These tensions not only transformed the role of the community’s principal political institutions but also created a series of moral ambiguities for its central actors, who found themselves performing a delicate balancing act between building new political institutions, responding to the community’s material needs, and administering redistributed oil money. In what follows, I show how the CCs became contested and morally hazardous spaces that were marked by local people’s cultural associations with oil revenues and political power. As they wrestled with a host of mundane challenges associated with bureaucratic administration, the CCs’ chief protagonists found themselves engaged in an embryonic democratic project that seemed caught between utopian and dystopian understandings of the state.

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From Neighbors’ Association to Communal Council

As numerous local people testified, a critical part of the AV’s success under Rafael’s leadership was its emphasis on deliberative discussions concerning the everyday problems that local people faced. For example, when a number of residents complained about neighbors throwing sewage into the street, it became clear that the AV needed to campaign for the community’s sewage and water system to be upgraded. But street delegates also approached the households involved and persuaded them not to throw dirty water or rubbish into the street in the meantime. The AV then drafted a set of community rules through a series of public meetings, establishing norms through conversations that took place on a street-­by-­street basis. As Rafael explained, “We had really high levels of participation because of the way we worked. We’d go out and talk to people and encourage them to engage.” It was this proactive and participatory model of community organizing that enabled the AV to make demands on the local state without the need for external brokers—­a significant shift from the previous era, when infrastructural improvements had often been contingent on electoral support for local AD or COPEI politicians.2 The water example also illustrated a distinctive organizational history in El Camoruco, where Chávez-­era mobilizations around infrastructure and public services had taken place through the AV rather than through Comités de Tierra Urbana (Urban Land Committees, CTUs) or Mesas Técnicas de Agua (Technical Water Committees, MTAs), which were often the precursors to the CCs in Caracas barrios (García-­Guadilla 2008; García-­Guadilla 2011; Lopez Maya 2008). As the Bolivarian era progressed, the AV became just one of many political organizations that were active in and around El Camoruco. Thanks to their accomplishments with the AV, Rafael and Rosa began extending their influence as they made connections with other community leaders and state actors. By then self-­defining as chavistas, in 2003 they began building a network of community leaders across Miguel Peña that eventually became known as the Asociación para la Promoción del Desarrollo Comunitario Endógeno (Association for the Promotion of Endogenous Community Development, ASOPRODENCO). ASOPRODENCO aimed to establish participatory AVs like El Camoruco’s in other communities and went on to

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become a central organizing unit for grassroots activists across the south of Valencia. In addition to this, having impressed with his capacity for community leadership and networking, Rafael was offered employment with the Alcaldía’s public services department, where he was asked to coordinate community outreach programs in other barrios with pressing material needs. With these multiplying commitments, he and Rosa eventually opted to stand down from the AV, handing over to Alejendro, Manuelito, and several others who had acted as street delegates. Between 2003 and 2006, the AV went through a less active period, due partly to the successful infrastructural improvements that decreased the need for large-­scale mobilizations, and partly to the intensely political period nationally. The coup attempt of 2002 had a significant impact on many barrio residents sympathetic to the government, with local concerns being put on hold as organizers sought to defend the president. As Yulmi recalled, “In that period we were fighting for our lives. We had to keep Chávez in power. If Chávez had gone, we would’ve had ten years of the ultra-­right, of a dictatorship, and then there would’ve been a civil war.” Amid the paro (2003), the launch of the social missions (2003), the recall referendum against Chávez (2004), and finally the build-­up to the 2006 presidential elections, many AV activists were pulled into more explicitly pro-­government groups such as the Bolivarian Circles and Electoral Battle Units, which tended to emerge during election periods and challenges against the government. In his historical work on Venezuela’s urban social movements, Alejandro Velasco (2011, 2015) describes how barrio organizations in Caracas oscillated between long-­term political struggles and more short-­term social demands for much of the 1960s and 1970s, before these currents converged in the 1980s when direct action was used to force municipal authorities into action over waste collection (Velasco 2011, 168–­74). Velasco argues that this ideological and tactical fusion between social and political struggles expressed both a radical critique of the state and a loyalty to the principles of liberal democracy. He calls this a “hybrid political consciousness” (179) that established participatory politics around a “contingent autonomy, neither fully independent nor fully beholden to the state” (181). Given this history, the launch of the CCs can be read as an effort by the Bolivarian government to incorporate existing neighborhood organizations

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within umbrella bodies that had much closer structural ties to the central state. This distinguished them from both previous currents within Venezuela’s urban social movements and other Latin American forms of direct democracy. As Baiocchi (2001, 2005) points out, the much-­vaunted participatory budgeting model in Porto Alegre, Brazil, was funded and organized by local municipalities that worked in conjunction with independent neighborhood organizations and local politicians (Baiocchi 2001, 65). By contrast, the CCs in Venezuela receive their funding directly from central ministries, a decision taken after problems emerged at the municipal level with the forerunners to the CCs, the Local Public Planning Councils (CLPPs). Although this was presented as an effort to circumvent political conservatism within municipalities, early critiques of the CC model warned that financial dependence on the petro-­state would endanger the capacity of neighborhood organizations to articulate independent political claims or avoid co-­option (García-­Guadilla 2011; Smilde 2009; Uzcátegui 2010). Others took a more optimistic view, acknowledging a number of “rough edges” associated with the CCs but pointing to the benefits of direct access to state resources for historically excluded communities (Ellner 2009). The most enthusiastic argued that the CCs offered Venezuela’s popular sectors the opportunity to build parallel structures of governance and gradually wean power away from the central state through a system of “dual power” (Azzellini 2010; 2013; Ciccariello-­Maher 2013b). New Patterns of Participation

In order to establish a CC, residents must undergo a lengthy registration process that requires a series of public assemblies, elections, and bureaucratic procedures before the body can be legally ratified. During a CC’s formation, elections are held for voceras or voceros (spokespeople), who then take responsibility for specified work committees in areas such as education, finance, food, health, land, and accountability. When these roles have been filled, the CC must put forward three projects that will contribute to endogenous development in the community. If they receive state approval, these projects are usually funded by central government bodies such as the Fundación para el Desarrollo y Promoción del Poder Comunitario (Foundation for the De-

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velopment and Promotion of Communal Power, FUNDACOMUNAL). In addition to long-­term projects, the CCs also administer funds for small-­scale microfinance initiatives called empresas sociales (social enterprises), which receive funding from the government’s Fondo de Desarrollo de Microfinanzas (Microfinance Development Fund, FONDEMI). By 2010, over 20,000 CCs had been formed in Venezuela (Ellner 2010, 67), with an estimated $1 billion being transferred directly to them in the first year of their launch (López-­ Maya and Lander 2011, 74). The formation of the CCs in El Camoruco marked a significant shift for locals, who had been accustomed to working with a single AV that represented the community’s entire population. Because the 2006 law stated that CCs must represent between 200 and 400 households, the original AV was forced to divide into four separate CCs (covering Sectors 1–­4), each with its own communal bank and separate set of spokespeople. Some local activists were unhappy with this division when the launch occurred, suggesting that the sizing rule should be a “guide” rather than a stringent law, and voicing concerns that it would lead to factionalism and conflict. On the other hand, sectorization did mean that a larger number of people had the opportunity to be elected as community spokespeople. My local CC in Sector 4 was formed in August 2007. After successfully holding its elections, the sector agreed to apply for money to establish a day center for elderly residents (La Casa de Los Abuelos), materials to repair some of the most rundown houses in the community, and a project to fill in the dirty and polluted canal that marked the border between El Camoruco and neighboring José Félix. Ten social enterprises were also established with microfinance loans from FONDEMI. Of these, seven were still functional in 2009, including a carpentry workshop, a confectioner, a small ceramic block producer, and a piñata workshop. One of the most notable features of Sector 4’s CC was that it was largely run by a small group of elderly women named Esme, Juliana, Carla, and Natalia. At the time of its launch, the community had elected twenty-­eight spokespeople. But since then, the number of public meetings had decreased significantly as the projects themselves became the CC’s main focus. In place of public assemblies, this group of dedicated women—­known locally as las señoras—­had assumed responsibility for the bulk of the unpaid labor required to run the CC. When they began their new roles, las señoras received

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official identity cards from FUNDACOMUNAL and attended a series of training workshops at institutions such as the Instituto Nacional de Capacitación y Educación Socialista (National Institute for Socialist Education and Training, INCES). The workshops detailed how to facilitate meetings, draft funding proposals, manage budgets, and organize community events. There were also optional courses in personal development, self-­esteem, and leadership. Juliana, who had never been involved in community work before the CCs were launched, had been inspired by the workshops and was now studying social management in Mission Sucre, a university-­level initiative also funded by the Chávez government. I’ve learnt so much so quickly, but it’s a lot of work. My family are always complaining because I’m always here in the house working on things for the consejo comunal! I’ve attended all the workshops, which are tiring because they often start at eight in the morning and end at three in the afternoon. I’m so busy with work for the CC and my course at the mission, there’s no time for anything else.

Together with the training schemes, regular contact with a myriad of state institutions was evident in the reams of political propaganda and official documentation that cluttered the houses of las señoras. These included copies of the 1999 constitution, booklets of recently passed laws, and manuals on everything from microfinance to socialist family values. Engaging with bureaucracy was also a key component of the spokespeople’s everyday practice and was particularly critical to the maintenance of the CC’s three long-­term projects. Frequent contact with the state funding providers and work contractors required constant letter-­writing, form-­ filling, photocopying, and telephone calls. Budgets, account statements, and work contracts also needed constant monitoring, and everything had to be countersigned by Esme, the social control spokesperson. Yet bureaucratic efficiency on the part of the spokespeople was no guarantee of a project going ahead smoothly. In the case of the canal project, for example, 7,000 Bs.F ($1,628) had been transferred to the CC and used to clean the canal in preparation for its concrete filling, but a second sum of money promised by FUNDACOMUNAL never arrived. Juliana wrote several letters to the organization but struggled to obtain a satisfactory response. She then tried

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directly contacting the engineer contracted to carry out the work but was told that he was waiting for the second payment from FUNDACOMUNAL. The canceled meetings and unanswered letters that accompanied Juliana’s efforts to complete the project clearly tested her patience. “I don’t know whether it’s a problem with FUNDACOMUNAL—­whether they’re not doing their job—­or if they’ve got so many projects [they lack the funding for ours],” she commented. As committed as Juliana was, it was obvious that she found it difficult to balance her role as a spokesperson with her family commitments. Both of her daughters worked during the days, and I would often find her simultaneously preparing the family’s food, fielding phone calls, and separating her bickering grandchildren. This merging of community work and domestic reproduction was in keeping with the observations of Elizabeth Friedman (2000), Sujatha Fernandes (2007), and Sara Motta (2013), who point out that though women have traditionally been excluded from formal political spheres in Venezuela—­including those of the political left—­there is a long history of their involvement in neighborhood organizing. Motta argues that gendered norms depicting women “through a desexualized and dependent articulation of mother, daughter, and wife” (2013, 41) persist, in spite of the fact that they have historically been at the center of collective struggles around health, water, and community improvements. Drawing on the insights of the Venezuelan feminist Alba Carosio (2007), Motta suggests that such struggles confronted and also reinforced exclusionary gendered norms. On the one hand, the caring maternal role was transgressed as it was politicized through community mobilizations. But on the other, “the politicization of their role as ensurers of the reproduction of the family and community, which came at great personal cost, also reproduced more traditional representations of the women as self-­sacrificing caregivers” (Motta 2013, 44; see also Rantala 2009 and Vargas Arenas 2007). The case of the señoras in El Camoruco indicates that these tensions were not only gendered but also generational. Well aware that they were taking on a heavy burden, the women nonetheless reasoned that those of a younger age were unable to do so because of their employment commitments. They also described how the introduction of a regular and secure state pension under the Chávez government had given them the financial security to dedicate

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themselves to such work. Esme explained, for example, that her commitment to community work was a product of her gratitude to Chávez and the revolution, which had prioritized elderly people through its welfare programs. “I have a lot of love for el pueblo, for this work, and I feel really appreciative toward the Chávez government,” she told me. Part of this gratitude stemmed from the fact that the CC also provided a number of personal opportunities to elected spokespeople. Although the role was a commitment that meant hours of unpaid labor, it was also a chance to develop new skills, cultivate self-­esteem, and, in many ways, become a semiprofessionalized community activist, even a quasi-­state functionary. As Esme’s statement highlights, becoming a CC spokesperson was an articulation of citizenship closely tied to ideals of altruism and solidarity. But the role also offered the opportunity for modest financial gains. Esme had established a piñata workshop with a microfinance loan from FONDEMI and could often be found at work with paint and papier-­mâché in the front room of her house. As a known person at the center of community life, her small business was the first point of call for anyone in need of a piñata. The CC thus facilitated the expansion of social networks and material opportunities, meaning that community leadership and social enterprise became mutually beneficial endeavors. Such were the demands that came with the spokesperson role, however, that few people seemed willing or able to take it on. Since there was now a clear set of institutional channels and ascribed funding providers, the need for collective mobilizations appeared less pronounced than in the pre-­Chávez era. Instead, spokespeople had to learn how to successfully plan, implement, and maintain projects, confirming Nancy Postero’s (2007) observation that project-­focused initiatives privilege particular actors who demonstrate the capacity to “montar proyectos” [launch projects] (Postero 2007, 77). As far as Sector 4 of El Camoruco was concerned, this capacity was both gendered and generational, an outcome of existing traditions of neighborhood organizing, recent improvements to social welfare, and the particular dynamic that existed between las señoras.

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FIGURE 6.1   A children’s futbolíto tournament organized by the communal councils (Matt Wilde)

Bureaucratic Activism

Although the well-­documented failings of the pre-­Chávez era resulted in the wholesale rejection of the political system associated with Venezuela’s Fourth Republic (Ellner and Hellinger 2003; McCoy and Myers 2004), Venezuelan citizens continue to value democracy as a principle and as a set of practices. Indeed, Daniel Hellinger (2011, 28–­29) argues that one of the enduring legacies of the Fourth Republic (1958–­98) is that many Venezuelans retain a belief in the importance of pluralist or representative democracy. For Chávez’s supporters, meanwhile, it was clear that a strong connection with the former president galvanized those who may have otherwise turned away from electoral politics. An enthusiasm for democracy was also evident in the elections for El Camoruco’s CCs, which directly replicated national elections in their form and process. On the day of CC elections, residents would find lists of prospective spokespeople on the walls of the local school when they arrived to

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cast their vote. These would be conducted via secret ballot in boxes identical to those used for political parties, and there were even officials from the Consejo Electoral Nacional (National Electoral Council, CNE) present to oversee proceedings. While this attention to the formalities of democratic practice worked to symbolically incorporate the CCs within the broader political system, it also contributed to the view that spokespeople were, much like professional politicians, in some way institutionally removed from the rest of the community. This was at odds with the rhetoric surrounding the role, which emphasized that spokespeople should merely act as delegates who carried out the community’s will. In practice, however, a slippage in this definition was often observable. Faced with the minutiae of practical challenges associated with the projects, on occasion spokespeople would take decisions independently. As a result, there were many local residents who viewed the CCs in the same vein as my neighbor, Graciela: “Ach, those people with their projects.” In Sector 4, such views were a by-­product of the patterns of participation already described. Although a wave of enthusiasm had accompanied the formation of the CCs in 2007, participation had fallen dramatically by 2009. My own estimate regarding the number of regular participants, gleaned principally from attending meetings and talking to local residents, was that El Camoruco’s four CCs usually had between five and ten core active spokespeople, with another twenty to forty people, depending on the sector, who would attend meetings and contribute to decision-­making. Occasionally, when the CCs organized events for public celebrations such as Children’s Day, a large proportion of the community would turn out and participate. But the reality was that for many people who worked, maintained families, or simply preferred to spend their free time doing other things, the demands of running a CC were too great to justify the kind of commitment made by las señoras. Santiago, a young man who had been involved in a number of chavista organizations, described how the succession of different community bodies in the Chávez era had left him and others cynical about the arrival of the CCs: The first thing we had here were the Bolivarian Circles. When they arrived, everyone was like, “Whoo, great, let’s get involved!” But in truth they didn’t really do anything. Then it was the cooperatives, but nothing

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seems to be happening with them now. Now we have the consejos comunales, but there are a lot of problems with them too, people aren’t doing what they should be.

As comments like this suggested, the continual exhortation to participate seemed to leave some fatigued, and as a result they deferred decision-­making to those who were willing to take on the burden. With their ID cards, official documents, and daily involvement in the state’s workings, spokespeople had accumulated trappings of state authority. But with these trappings came the more problematic perception that they were quasi-­professional politicians who operated in a representative capacity, rather than delegates of a body that was supposed to be participatory. Many active spokespeople viewed cynicism toward the CCs as a symptom of selfishness or disloyalty toward the revolution. Because of their close interaction with state bodies, spokespeople were exposed to current debates about the health of the revolution that circulated in the chavista party-­state milieu. A common opinion among PSUV and state officials was that the persistence of “capitalist” or “individualistic” attitudes in the general population was inhibiting the government’s push for twenty-­first-­century socialism. During a workshop I attended with spokespeople from across Miguel Peña at the Alcaldía, this was the main topic of discussion. Our trainer, a government official, described how cooperatives had struggled in Venezuela because people lacked a “socialist mentality.” “People still believe they can stop working when they go home at 3:00 p.m. in the afternoon,” he told us, mentioning Cuba as an example to be followed. “But you have to sacrifice yourself.” Many of the spokespeople nodded their agreement, and the bus journey home was spent discussing why participation seemed to be dwindling in the community. A few days later at a CC meeting in one of El Camoruco’s neighboring communities, a spokesperson named Marielvis, who had been at the workshop, began berating a number of locals who, in her eyes, were not pulling their weight. There are really only four or five of us working in this consejo comunal. We’ve all been at meetings with the Alcaldía for the last few days, but

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you know what they always ask us? “What projects have you got? What are you doing?” They won’t start sending us funds until we have projects ready. I’ve heard some people saying, “Oh I don’t want to work, oh I’m busy with my work and my kids,” but I’ll tell you this: you all have responsibilities.

This outburst revealed how an ideal of participatory democracy could be turned on its head. Rather than institutions of governance being opened up to the population at large, demands from above could be placed on local communities by using participation as a disciplining idiom. Marielvis’s words effectively transferred accountability from the state to local communities, using a discourse of revolutionary sacrifice to rebuke those who were perceived to be indolent or individualistic. The adoption of critical party-­state discourses by CC spokespeople thus enabled them to cultivate the “delegated authority” (Bourdieu 1991, 111) of institutions of power. As they became specialists in Bolivarian bureaucracy and discourse, spokespeople could subjectively remake themselves as local-­level guardians of the revolution. But in adopting this position, they also helped to blur the boundaries between community organizing and government diktat.

Oil Money and Discourses of Corruption

Local people, however, sought to hold their spokespeople to account in equal measure. While complaints about low levels of participation came from one direction, rumors about corruption within the CCs began to emerge from the other. Some residents suggested that funding for the microfinance initiatives was being misused and speculated that spokespeople were spending communal bank money without the community’s consent. A typical conversation of this nature took place at Edwin’s house when I visited for a barbecue one Sunday afternoon: Raúl: In Sector 2 they gave a family all this money to start a hierrería [smithy]. I don’t know what happened to the smithy but that family has a lovely new front to their house, and a new car.

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Ozleidy: I know, and there’s that muchacha who got money to open a cachapería—­I don’t know what she’s doing but she’s not making cachapas there, she was selling some other type of food. Edwin: [sarcastically] Oh no, it’s just a different type of cachapa that you’ve never seen before! Raúl: I don’t get involved in all these consejos comunales, I don’t think they’re a good idea. To me it just seems like another way for people to steal money. They’re not consejos “comunales,” they’re consejos “robonales.”3 The subtext running through such conversations was the belief that corruption was an inevitable companion to the handling of money, with many people arguing that the CCs were merely a new setting in which a presumed national proclivity for thievery and viveza would inevitably occur (see Coronil 1997, 321–­66). Because politics and politicians, Chávez excepted, were generally regarded as inherently contaminated, the CCs and their spokespeople were increasingly associated with what locals termed la misma vaina: the same old problem of corruption. In Sector 4, spokespeople responded to these rumors by arguing that people should participate if they wanted to stamp out corruption. By mid-­2010, Juliana was eager to call elections so that she could relinquish her role. She was tired of the constant criticisms and argued that people were merely making excuses for their own lack of involvement. I’ve left my studies, my husband, and my family for this job. And for what? To be accused of corruption when I’ve spent every day of the last two years working for this community. This is the problem here, there’s only a small group of us who actually commit to working, but then everyone else says that we’re not doing things properly or that we’re just working for ourselves. You can’t win.

These disagreements were further compounded by the fact that accusations also circulated between El Camoruco’s different CCs when projects were organized by the whole community. Because funding could only be paid into one CC’s bank, arguments would break out over who was controlling it. In

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one case, during the organization of a trip for the neighborhood’s elderly residents, Sector 3 refused to release their pot of money because they suspected that money had “disappeared” from the other three sectors. The issue was only resolved after a series of ferocious arguments. In March 2010, Sector 4 held their first elections since the formation of the CC. Many of the same spokespeople stood again, together with several new candidates. The most surprising of these was Edwin, who had made his cynicism toward the CCs clear to me on several occasions. Apparently, Esme had convinced him to stand as education and culture spokesperson on account of his experience as a schoolteacher. There were also a number of local opposition supporters seeking election, indicating a new strategy on their part: rather than rejecting the CCs because they were considered to be chavista institutions, they were now open to working within them. Local chavistas were concerned about their presence and were encouraging friends to stand for committee positions even if, as in Edwin’s case, they were considered to be “chavista-­lite” rather than revolutionaries. This strategy proved successful, with results showing that the majority of CC spokespeople remained chavista. Edwin, a popular figure locally, also won his position by a landslide. After the elections, Yulmi and I spoke to Edwin about his victory. She commented on the presence of opposition supporters in the local CC for the first time. “To be honest,” replied Edwin, “I’d prefer to work with esquálidos because with chavistas things always get personal.” I noticed Yulmi bite her tongue as he said this, and then listened as he described his main motivation for standing. Edwin’s plan was to obtain funding for the construction of a primary school in the vacant plot of land next to the sports court. The idea was to link the project to the missions based at the high school and provide a primary school for local children. As part of the proposal, Edwin planned to put himself forward to be the school’s permanent, salaried teacher. He had struggled to find secure work for some time and seemed to regard the CC as an opportunity to resolve this problem. He was frank about his motivations: “Let’s be clear about this: no one does things just out of their heart these days.” Yulmi looked distinctly unimpressed but again decided against saying anything in the moment. Back at the house, however, she was damning in her criticism.

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But Mateo that guy is dumb huh! I didn’t realize he was like that, but he only put himself forward because he’s got this personal project he wants to do. He doesn’t realize that if you’re a spokesperson you’ve got to work for the good of the community, from your heart. I can’t see him lasting because he only wants to do it to get himself a bit of money. . . . Why did he put himself forward? You know there are only two types here Mateo: the chavistas and the bolivarianos [she rubbed imaginary money between her fingers], and he’s a bolivariano—­only interested in the platíca [little bit of money] he can get for himself.4

As Akhil Gupta (1995) points out, discourses of corruption can be central to the way that citizens imaginatively construct relationships between themselves and the state. By leveling accusations at politicians or state officials, citizens hold more powerful actors to account by judging them against ideals of how they should conduct themselves. Though such ideals may be a long way from the real-­world encounters that marginalized populations have with the state, they nonetheless work to articulate the kinds of rights and responsibilities that people feel should exist. As he writes, “The discourse of corruption, by marking those actions that constitute an infringement of such rights, thus acts to represent those rights to citizens themselves” (Gupta 1995, 389). Similarly, Sian Lazar (2004) argues that in local democratic arenas, rumor and accusation work to form preemptive accountability, so that both existing and future leaders know what is expected of them. Even though suspicions and tensions may appear potentially destructive, “contestation is much of what actually makes the community” (Lazar 2004, 90). Seen in this light, the discourse of corruption that suffused everyday discussions of El Camoruco’s CCs can be understood as an attempt to hold spokespeople to account and establish a culture of accountability for these new political institutions. But it also reflected the increasingly blurred lines between community organizing and state bureaucracy: because CC spokespeople were seen to behave like state functionaries or professional politicians, they were subjected to the same accusations and suspicions that might be leveled at such actors. The irony here was that political reforms designed to champion grassroots participation were in fact associating voluntary neighborhood actors with the contaminating reputation of the petro-­ state. Because cultural idioms about the inherently corrupting nature of oil

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money are so pervasive in Venezuela, an unintended consequence of the CCs was that they decentralized not only decision-­making powers but also “the corroding force of accumulated toxins, waste, and excrement” (Coronil 1997, 353) that is seen to accompany governance and politics in the country. Divergent Currents

In many ways, the moral anxieties about the presence of oil money produced in El Camoruco reflected wider debates and fractures that characterized the revolution’s boom period as a whole (Ellner 2013). The radical Venezuelan intellectual Roland Denis (2011), for example, argued that chavismo in this period was divided between two broad currents: a “bureaucratic-­corporatist republic” and a “self-­governing socialist body” (cited in Spronk et al. 2011, 247–­48). Denis contended that while the Bolivarian government under Chávez ultimately sought to direct the popular movements that gave it legitimacy, the second current possessed “an entirely different logic, based in self-­government of land, social spaces, and spaces of production” (cited in Spronk et al. 2011, 248). In El Camoruco, although not all actors in the CCs expressed firm ideological positions, tensions between these two broad currents were evident in disputes between newly elected spokespeople and older community leaders such as Rafael and Rosa, where accusations of self-­ interest and viveza reflected wider uncertainties about the relationship between neighborhood interests, democracy, political power, and oil revenues. As Rafael and Rosa saw it, the clamor among many CC spokespeople to prioritize funding bids was often misdirecting the energies of activists away from a more important long-­term goal: the establishment of self-­governing institutions that could form the building blocks for a radical democratic socialism. As Rafael argued: It sounds like a contradiction, but all the money that the government sends to the consejos comunales can work against the revolution. You know, when we ran the asociación de vecinos in 1999, we achieved really high levels of participation because of the way we allowed people to incorporate themselves. Now, the vision is distinct, in the sense that what [the CCs] have achieved is only possible due to the funds. A lot of people

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[in the CCs] are really dedicated to organizing whatever scheme in order to get the funds, but they’re not worrying about the general participation of the people.

Fearing that the participatory culture they had established with the AV was being lost, Rafael and Rosa began to challenge local CC spokespeople by proposing that anyone should be able to organize projects, rather than this being the sole preserve of elected spokespeople. This proposal was put to the test when Valencia’s Alcaldía announced that it was canceling the contracts of the zone’s private waste collectors, who were consistently accused of corruption and criminality. Rafael and Rosa developed a plan to establish a community-­run waste collection cooperative through the local CCs. Local workers would be sourced from El Camoruco and its surrounding barrios and would be offered jobs as waste collectors. Their thinking was that the Alcaldía would finance this initially, but that funding applications could be made to FUNDACOMUNAL for trucks and equipment, enabling the cooperative to eventually become a self-­sufficient enterprise whose profits would be administered by the CCs. After positive discussions with IMA, the Alcaldía’s Municipal Environmental Institute, Rosa convened a meeting in El Camoruco and invited interested workers and spokespeople from the local CCs to attend. As people began to arrive on the day of the meeting, she noted down the names of the barrios and sectors that were present. “We have Barrio Macuto here, José Felix here, El Camoruco Sector 1? Yes. Sector 2 and Sector 4 too? Yes, good. And Sector 3? Well I’m from Sector 3, so that’s all four sectors from El Camoruco covered.” At that moment, Angel, a spokesperson from Sector 3’s CC who had been observing the meeting from across the street, shouted at her: “You’re not consejo comunal!” “How can I not be consejo comunal? I live in Sector 3, I’m part of this community,” she replied. “But you’re not a member of the council, you weren’t elected,” Angel spat back angrily. The argument was put on hold to conclude the meeting, but later on Rosa recounted how the two of them had continued when it finished. Angel had refused to concede that, as a nonspokesperson, Rosa had any right to organize meetings or speak for Sector 3. In turn, she regarded him as typical of many new spokespeople who had become in-

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toxicated by what she called their “pedacitos” (little pieces) of power. Rosa argued that spokespeople were supposed to be community delegates rather than elected decision-­makers and stressed that anyone from the community should be able to put forward proposals and participate in their CC’s running. “People think that only spokespeople, only people from the committees, are the consejos comunales. But the consejo comunal is the community, it’s the assembly of citizens. That’s the most important part,” she asserted. Disappointingly for Rafael and Rosa, the project had to be abandoned when the elected spokespeople refused to allow their communal banks to be used to deposit money, in what they regarded as an act of sabotage. Furious, Rosa repeated her claim that such attitudes were reproducing the rotten practices of the pre-­Chávez era. “These people are still thinking like, ‘This is my consejo comunal, I am the consejo comunal.’ They don’t understand how a consejo comunal is supposed to work.” The episode demonstrated how one understanding of participation—­the ideal that anyone could and should take an active role in running a CC—­collided with the assertion that only elected “members” could arrange meetings or launch projects. While personality clashes certainly played their part in the dispute, it also reflected a wider struggle to determine how participatory democracy and everyday decision-­making should work in the CCs. The main issue was not that Rafael and Rosa had attempted to organize the project without the CCs, but rather that they had done so without going through the spokespeople—­a sign, as Angel seemed to view it, of usurpation and disrespect. Rosa’s response was that people like Angel remained beholden to self-­interested bureaucratism and therefore needed challenging. Overall, the exchange showed that the raison d’être of the CCs remained contested and unresolved in El Camoruco. For some residents, participation in the CCs was a means of accessing state resources and taking advantage of new openings in order to benefit both themselves and the wider community. Spokespeople like Angel appeared to enjoy the small trappings of power that came with their roles and went to substantial efforts to protect the status they accrued as a result. For others like Rafael and Rosa, participation was interpreted through memories of their time with the AV, and through social imaginaries that understood neighborhood organizing as part of a wider revolutionary project. As they saw it, the motivations of community spokes-

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people were not only important in terms of how decision-­making operated locally but also in terms of defending the revolution from its own internal contradictions. In this sense, the conflicts within the CCs were viewed as part of a struggle between socialist and capitalist moralities, in which perceived individualism was seen as a threat to the moral legitimacy and functional efficacy of the revolution as a whole. The CCs were presented as the foundation for a new communal and participatory state, yet this chapter has shown that they were characterized by a more complex array of instrumental uses and ideological understandings as well as by myriad confusions and conflicts among grassroots actors. Insofar as El Camoruco can be taken as indicative of wider trends, there were unquestionably significant individual and collective benefits that arrived with the CCs, as those who took on responsibilities as spokespeople developed as political subjects and found rewarding ways of contributing to their community. But administering state-­funded projects also produced new burdens for such actors, who found themselves subject to resentment from neighbors and whose workloads reflected existing patterns of gendered inequality. Despite the repeated valorization of participatory democracy at the level of discourse, there was a notable gap between Chávez’s drive for participation and the real-­world capacity of locals to dedicate their time to the CCs. One problematic outcome of an emerging institutional distance between spokespeople and non-­(or infrequent) participants was that barrio residents could be admonished, often by their own neighbors, for failing to live up to chavista aspirations of participation. Such tendencies were compounded by accusations of corruption and self-­interest, which attempted to create a culture of accountability but also highlighted entrenched cultural anxieties about the contaminating effects of oil money on community life. Finally, many of these trends were at odds with more radical visions of self-­government and revolution, whose advocates struggled to articulate their positions amid a clamor for state revenues and power struggles with new community leaders. Activists who envisioned more radical neighborhood bodies were constrained in their ability to forge alternatives by the political-­legal framework of the CCs and their own loyalty to Chávez. The evident tensions between bureaucratism and self-­management, liberalism and socialism undoubtedly reflected contradictory tendencies that ran through the Bolivarian project as

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a whole (Hellinger 2011, 36). Yet the prospect of forming alternatives to the CCs, or of transforming them into more autonomous entities, was necessarily blocked by their subordinated insertion within the expanding petro-­state. As Stefano Boni (2020) puts it, “The organizational structure of the state was, through the communal councils, extended to the neighborhoods rather than replaced, contained, or weakened” (183). During the high period of the revolution, debates among activists and scholars centered on the extent to which Venezuela’s model of petroleum-­ funded participatory democracy would ultimately produce the seismic changes its adherents called for. From the vantage point of the present moment, it is perhaps easier to see that, prior to the crisis that began in 2014, the CCs constituted lived expressions of the revolution’s central contradiction: that the political-­economic model it relied on structurally undermined the very transformations it envisioned imaginatively. While almost everyone who wrote about el proceso under Chávez characterized it as one fraught with tensions, the assumption was often that these tensions were largely to be found in the contingent alliances made between grassroots organizations and the state (Azzellini 2010, 2013; Ciccariello-Maher 2013a). Few, however, considered the substantial internal divisions that existed among barrio actors themselves, who exhibited a huge diversity of political thought and action in relation to the CCs specifically and the revolution more generally. Rather than assuming a uniform understanding of grassroots radicalism among the chavista bases, my analysis here has emphasized how emic understandings of participatory democracy expressed the revolution’s chief contradictions as they appeared in people’s everyday lives. Alongside this observation, it is also important to acknowledge that many of the tensions described herein are common to progressive social movements and democratic experiments in a myriad of settings that differ markedly from Bolivarian Venezuela. Diverse understandings of democracy and conflicting ideological or strategic goals are common across progressive and radical milieus, while accusations of corruption occur in all manner of contexts where oil money is not a factor; indeed, political conflict and contestation often form the very substance of democratic debate and social change. Yet what perhaps sets the CCs and Bolivarian Venezuela apart is that the sudden presence of petroleum revenues in local political organizations cre-

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ated a particular temporal dynamic, as barrio residents found themselves burdened with a profound sense of urgency that emerged from the commingling between an oil boom, a national revolutionary project, and their community’s own material needs. Because it arrives in sudden bursts, oil money necessitates the desire to maximize its transformative potential (perceived or otherwise) before it disappears again. This imperative is arguably at odds with the slower and more deliberative work of building new participatory community institutions, a point that the factional tensions in El Camoruco seemed to reflect. Oil money, as Coronil (1997, 353–­60) observed in his analysis of Venezuelan politics in the 1970s, generates moral tensions from “its power to confer power” (360) and from suspicions that a public resource might be appropriated into private hands. In this sense, the aspirations and opportunities, the accusations and suspicions, the moral anxieties and doubts: all of these were vernacular expressions of petro-­democracy and its ambiguities in quotidian form.

Seven The Weight of the Future

In a new civic center a short drive from El Camoruco, I sat and took notes as

around thirty community leaders from across Miguel Peña discussed how to turn their proposal for a multibarrio commune into a working body of popular governance in the zone. The aim of the proposed commune was to extend the influence of CCs in the area and establish participatory structures of governance that could, in theory, eventually replace municipalities. After several hours of debate, the meeting ended on a high note, and the participants agreed to return to their respective communities and take the next step toward making the commune real. As each leader reaffirmed their commitment to the project, one woman, a new arrival to the group, enthusiastically concluded with the following words: “I promise to assume my responsibilities and I put all my faith in our líder máximo [maximum leader], Rafael Hernández, to lead us forward!” Immediately the entire group, including Rafael, shouted “No!” in unison. Rosa rose from her chair and delicately explained why her comrade’s words had struck the wrong note: Look, Rafael doesn’t have a communal council. Rafael doesn’t have a commune. Rafael is a community leader who took the initiative with a

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group of women and men to motivate these communities into forming a commune and that’s what we’ve been trying to achieve for two years now. This commune is being built with popular power, but it isn’t just our commune. It comes ultimately from Chávez and from Bolívar.

As Rosa attempted to make clear, the problem with referring to a local leader like Rafael as líder máximo was that it ran counter to the principles of popular power, which was the core doctrine these would-­be comuneros (commune members) used to define their political thought and action. By using a term of deference for Rafael, the woman had unwittingly undermined the ethic of self-­organization that these activists adhered to, instead emphasizing the centrality of a charismatic leader to the commune’s future success. Yet in Rosa’s challenge to the statement, she had referenced Chávez and Simón Bolívar. This had perhaps been an attempt to show that Venezuela’s then president and its founding father were the only líderes máximos that these activists needed. But, as I wrote in my field notes that day, if the commune was all about popular power and self-­organization, why did these figures need to be mentioned at all? The exchange highlighted a recurrent problem for the chavistas I worked with, who were often caught between contradictory imperatives that sat at the heart of their revolution. On the one hand, they were implored to create new structures of governance desde abajo (“from below”). Yet on the other, they were obliged to show obedience to their president and participate in institutional structures that were increasingly designed and managed in central state ministries. As this book has already shown, these twin pressures were compounded by the predominance of the petro-­state as a source of funding, which produced a clamor for state resources and moral anxieties about grassroots dependence on oil revenues. Here I build on the themes covered in chapters 5 and 6 by critically analyzing my interlocutors’ efforts to construct a commune in Miguel Peña between 2009 and 2012. Through this case study, I explore how the construction of new community organizations both encouraged self-­management and incentivized deferral to state institutions that monopolized resources. I argue that this contradictory model of state-­managed petro-­democracy simultaneously enabled and impeded egalitarian aspirations, producing a series of what I term “utopian disjunctures” for the actors involved. As local

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activists struggled to reconcile competing political currents within the same would-­be commune, they encountered a tension between radical aspirations for self-­governing democratic institutions and more pragmatic imperatives to obtain state resources and consolidate the PSUV electoral project. The chapter shows how the collision between two different political temporalities shaped a series of conflicts and dilemmas for community leaders, who wrestled with divergent visions of the future as they navigated a complex set of political and moral questions. Amid struggles between rival chavista factions, a strange imaginative void between hoped-­for visions and material realities haunted Miguel Peña’s comuneros, leaving the future weighing heavily on the present. Piloting the Commune

In January 2008, Rafael returned from a conference in Caracas with the exciting news that El Camoruco and its surrounding communities had been chosen as the location for a new urban commune. The move was born out of connections that ASOPRODENCO had established with FUNDACOMUNAL over several years, largely through the training workshops they offered to new CCs. These connections had eventually put Rafael in contact with officials from MPComunas, the government’s Ministry for Communes and Social Protection, which had been establishing communication with grassroots organizations and networks across the country since it was launched by Chávez. Having supported successful rural communes in places such as Lara State (see Ciccariello-­Maher 2016; Harnecker 2008), MPComunas identified Miguel Peña as an ideal zone in which to pilot one of the country’s first urban communes.1 As Rafael had explained to his comrades, the aim of the communes was to bring together groups of neighboring CCs to form broader networks of popular governance and eventually supplant existing municipalities. According to Chávez, as the communes were established, political and economic power would gradually be “transferred” to a series of interconnected communal territories. Since the CCs are limited to communities of no more than 400 households, the late president envisioned the communes as a more sustainable model, with the proposed development of Empresas de Producción

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Social (Socially Productive Enterprises, EPSs) offering communal territories the capacity to provide employment to local people and eventually generate economic resources from within their own communities (Añez and Melean 2011). Communes would also manage projects on a larger scale than the CCs, so while a CC might obtain funding for a new community center, a commune could potentially do so for a high school or even a hospital. Though Chávez stressed that the communes must be formed desde abajo, an Organic Law for the Communes was passed by the National Assembly in December 2010, and government-­sponsored billboards promoting the communes as integral to the La Patria Nueva (New Fatherland) were ubiquitous between 2008 and 2012. In Miguel Peña, ASOPRODENCO assumed stewardship of the proposed commune and began promoting the project among community leaders. In a series of public assemblies and organizing meetings in early 2008, Rafael, Rosa, and Oneidys formed a promotion committee and set about galvanizing local interest. On the back of the now established CCs, the early response was positive, with good attendance at the assemblies and a diverse representation of communities present in the planning stages. Numerous CCs and community groups expressed an interest in being involved and, mirroring the structural framework of the CCs, provisional committees were established in areas such as citizen security, health, housing, media and communication, political formation, services for the elderly, and social economy. Particularly encouraging for Rafael and Rosa was the involvement of spokespeople from CCs based in neighboring middle-­class urbanicaziones, many of whom had never been involved with barrio activists before. Their participation presented an opportunity to bridge some of the tensions that existed between urbanizaciones and barrios and move away from the stark social and political polarization that was so pervasive at that time. By early 2009, some twenty-­two CCs in the zone surrounding El Camoruco had provisionally signed up to the commune, with plans to incorporate a further eighteen communities also underway.2 In total, it was thought that the commune could eventually cover a population of up to 70,000 people. Yet as ASOPRODENCO set about what they believed to be the early stages of commune construction, another group of chavista actors appeared in the zone, based out of a small concrete office that had been hastily erected next to El Camoruco’s sports court. The office was one of many Salas de

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Batalla Social (Social Battle Centers) established as part of Mission 13 de Abril, another new initiative that was launched by Chávez to provide state support for new communes across the country (Delgado 2008).3 The Sala in El Camoruco was headed by Norma, an employee of a state-­funded organization called the Frente Francisco de Miranda (FFM), whose activists received specialist revolutionary training in Cuba before being assigned to strategic coordinating roles in different communities across Venezuela. Norma, an outsider to the community, was accompanied by several other paid FFM activists, including two young men from El Camoruco, Jhonny and Jesús, who had also undertaken the FFM’s training program in Cuba. Theoretically, the Sala and FFM were there in an advisory capacity, helping local community leaders and CC spokespeople coordinate with state funding bodies such as FUNDACOMUNAL and FONDEMI as the commune was established. But given that this was a similar role to the one that ASOPRODENCO was already performing, the arrival of the Sala (as the group became known locally) was a perplexing one for existing community leaders. ASOPRODENCO’s response to the arrival of the Sala and the FFM was lukewarm to say the least. No official communications from either Norma or MPComunas had been made when the Sala was first established, and there was confusion and resentment that local leaders with a long history of organizing in the area had effectively been overlooked by the new arrivals. As Rosa commented, “We need to define what the role of the Sala actually is here. That little office just appeared next to the sports court but no one has explained it or asked our opinion.” It eventually emerged that the arrival of the Sala represented the “official” state framework for commune construction, which ASOPRODENCO had unwittingly preempted thanks to Rafael’s connections in Caracas. In line with the model being rolled out by MPComunas, Norma had initially made contact with spokespeople from El Camoruco’s CCs rather than ASOPRODENCO, which proved a point of contention when the two groups eventually met in person. The presence of the two bodies meant that the would-­be commune effectively had two steering committees—­one led by ASOPRODENCO and the other by the Sala de Batalla and FFM—­whose leadership roles overlapped to a significant degree. While discussions about what all this meant circulated among local people, the recently arrived FFM activists began appearing at the meetings

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of local CCs and missions, usually armed with clipboards, piles of government documents, and a seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of the Bolivarian Constitution and the government’s most recent laws. As salaried activists, their official role was to provide administrative and logistical assistance to any Bolivarian project in the community, but they also seemed to be charged with maintaining motivation and participation among rank and file activists. On several occasions, Jhonny enthusiastically closed meetings by extolling the virtues of the revolution and informing those assembled of its forthcoming achievements: “This year we’re going to see so many advances for the Bolivarian Revolution,” he exclaimed after one CC meeting. “Advances with the communal councils, the communes, and popular power!” Despite the fact that the CCs were officially nonpartisan and open to all community members, he then encouraged the participants to swear allegiance to the revolution by loudly proclaiming the first line of Chávez’s slogan: “Patria, socialismo o muerte.” As everyone knew, it was implicitly mandatory to collectively conclude the refrain in customary fashion: “¡Venceremos!” Tensions between CC spokespeople and the new FFM activists soon emerged, particularly around the close attention to bureaucratic rules and regulations on the part of the new arrivals. On one occasion, Jose Ramón, a spokesperson from Sector 1, concluded a public meeting by telling the rest of the CC that they still had thirty days to register their community’s proposed projects with FUNDACOMUNAL. No sooner had he finishing speaking when a nonlocal FFM activist corrected him: “No, you’re wrong comrade. I have the laws here and that isn’t correct.” Jose Ramón tried to defend his position, saying he still thought they had thirty days to make their submission and intimating that it wasn’t that important anyway, since FUNDACOMUNAL were always behind schedule. But the FFM activist raised his voice, brandished his documents, and repeated his claim, this time slowly and deliberately for effect: “It says here, on this document, signed by President Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías [drawing out each word], that the way you’re doing it isn’t in accordance with the law. It’s people like you who are dividing the revolution here in El Camoruco. You need to learn the laws and act in line with them.” After the man left, Jose Ramón expressed his fury to those who had stayed behind:

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Who is that guy? I don’t even know who he is, but he’s not from El Camoruco, that’s for sure. He comes in here and tells me, someone who grew up here, that I’m dividing the revolution in this barrio! He was the one creating the argument and doing the dividing, not me. It’s always like this with the Frente, they think they’re more revolutionary than the rest of us, like they’re “professional revolutionaries” and we’re just amateurs. Someone’s got to do something about them, this keeps happening.4

Although such exchanges typified emerging tensions between established community leaders and FFM activists from outside El Camoruco, it was also true that there was substantial resentment toward ASOPRODENCO’s leadership from a significant number of CC spokespeople. As the disagreement in chapter 6 showed, some of those who had emerged as CC leaders in the barrio objected to Rafael’s continuing influence on neighborhood organizations. Since new CC spokespeople had effectively occupied the spaces left behind when Rafael and Rosa chose to focus their energies on

FIGURE 7.1  

New squatter settlements being established in Valencia, 2012 (Matt Wilde)

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ASOPRODENCO, spokespeople such as Angel and Ernesto disliked the fact that Rafael and Rosa retained the ability to act above their heads, especially since they had democratically earned their right to represent their sectors in local CC elections. As the local influence of Norma and the FFM grew, this group of CC spokespeople began to associate themselves with the Sala and develop their own plans for the commune that contradicted key elements within ASOPRODENCO’s proposal. Since neither project could move forward without agreement from all local CCs, the two factions found themselves engaged in a contest to win the support of local community leaders. As each group sought to defend its vision and win popular backing for a commune that didn’t yet exist, the tensions between these different chavista factions became increasingly entrenched. Conflicting Political Temporalities

By mid-­2010, Miguel Peña’s would-­be commune was a highly complicated picture. ASOPRODENCO, with their history of local organizing and their established networks beyond El Camoruco, felt they had legitimate claims on the stewardship of the initiative and encouraged disaffected CC spokespeople to work out their differences through discussion. In turn, the faction aligned with the Sala boasted the support of MPComunas (which entailed direct access to state funding), around thirty elected spokespeople from El Camoruco’s CCs, and a position that fit more cleanly within the government’s official commune framework. It was also the case that, although ASOPRODENCO was a well-­respected organization in the area, the Sala were able to capitalize on existing local rivalries and establish a network of spokespeople who were keen to challenge Rafael and Rosa in particular. Seemingly, different organs of the chavista state had conspired to create a power struggle by respectively backing different sets of prospective commune leaders. To complicate matters further, the factions were not split evenly between different CCs. Rather, there were divisions within individual CCs, with different spokespeople from the same communities pledging their allegiances to the rival commune proposals. This was a particularly fraught affair in El Camoruco, where Rafael and Rosa encountered comrades and neighbors who were openly aligning themselves with the Sala. The same was

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true for spokespeople like Angel and Ernesto, who were accused by local ASOPRODENCO activists of siding with an outsider—­Norma—­over one of their own. Although both groups expressed a firm loyalty to the revolution and to the principles of popular power, ASOPRODENCO’s commitment to consensus and the incorporation of a wide number of communities was one of the major sources of disagreement between the two factions. Because they reasoned that the size of the commune should be decided by the communities themselves, they refused to place limits on which CC spokespeople could attend meetings or be part of the project. In response, the Sala faction argued that because of the significant social and political differences between the middle-­class urbanizaciones and working-­class barrios, the commune should only be made up of low-­income communities. At a public assembly held to discuss their differences, Norma put forward the Sala’s view: “Those [middle-­class] communities don’t have the same material needs as these barrios. They have everything [material] resolved already, so what’s the point in having them in the commune? We need to focus on ourselves.” This was a huge point of contention for ASOPRODENCO, who were immensely proud of their work building a network of diverse communities and individuals. Rafael firmly defended their policy of inclusion. He reminded people that middle-­class residents from Los Mangos—­the urbanización that bordered El Camoruco—­used to be afraid to cross into the barrio, whereas now those same people were working as community leaders alongside activists from El Camoruco. In an impassioned response, he spoke of a broader vision of cross-­class unity and emphasized the need to tackle the endemic social and political polarization in Venezuelan society. “To me, the strongest element in our proposal is our integration of different communities,” he said. “This is about human sensitivity to others, no matter where you’re living. Chávez always says this. This commune is for everyone. It’s not about how much you have, but about your participation.” Yet this call for political and social inclusivity was firmly rejected by the Sala. Norma reminded those present of the material changes the Chávez government had delivered for barrio residents and warned that further prevarication over projects like the commune would endanger the revolution

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itself. “If we want this revolution to continue, we have to dar la respuesta [meet the needs] right now,” she said. This refusal to cede ground on the question of middle-­class inclusion seemed to be premised less on local issues and much more on the survival of the chavista electoral project at the national level. As Venezuela became steadily more polarized between supporters and opponents of the government throughout the 2000s, there were genuine fears among local chavistas that the opposition was gaining electoral ground on the government. By presenting their proposal as a cornerstone of the overarching chavista project, the Sala were portraying themselves as a means for residents to safeguard the material gains they had already won. In contrast to ASOPRODENCO’s more long-­term and open-­ended conception of the commune, theirs was a more instrumental proposal that ran alongside the PSUV’s electoral strategy of securing working-­class support by redistributing oil revenues through grassroots community organizations. In the view of ASOPRODENCO’s activists, however, the Sala’s search for state funding had blinded them to a more far-­reaching vision of self-­ government that focused on the making of new political and moral persons as its first principle. Time and time again, ASOPRODENCO activists would return to the question of consciousness and formación, arguing that the Sala’s refusal to cooperate with their proposal revealed the persistence of capitalist values in their opponents. Oneidys typified this view: I’m worried that [the Sala] are trying to keep the power for themselves, not necessarily because they’re corrupt but because they don’t understand popular power. . . . It isn’t us [the community leaders] who decide what happens, it’s the people. . . . I’ve never trusted the institutions because these things always come from above and it’s always about power.

In emphasizing these points, ASOPRODENCO sought to engender the kind of communitarian sociality and moral personhood that bore many similarities to the prefigurative politics that characterized much of the New Left during the 1970s. First coined by Wini Breines (1980), the concept rests on the idea that a new society can only be realized by creating noncapitalist and nonhierarchical relationships “prior to and in the process of revolution” (421). As David Graeber (2013) observed, the key to this approach is the belief

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that “the form of our action should itself offer a model, or at the very least a glimpse of how free people might organize themselves, and therefore what a free society might be like” (2013, 233; see also Maeckelbergh 2011). The problem for ASOPRODENCO was that this attention to consensus and formación lacked the access to state resources that the Sala had with their direct line to MPComunas and necessarily constituted a far lengthier process of deliberation. Although the network had a track record of successfully organizing communities and eventually winning infrastructural improvements, their ethos centered much more on building the capacity to act collectively in the first place; process was everything. Critics of consensus-­ based democracy contend that it is unsuitable for large groupings, often inefficient, and open to manipulation.5 In his analysis of Occupy London, for example, Jason Hickel (2012) argues that a dogmatic reliance on consensus rested on a problematic liberal ethic that, in its desire to promote inclusiveness, openness, and tolerance, undermined the dynamic of antagonism that is often central to the formulation of political claims (Hickel 2012, 6). This was precisely the criticism that ASOPRODENCO faced from the Sala, who regarded their open-­ended approach as time-­consuming, directionless, and politically naive. As the Sala activists pointed out, the historical moment was distinct from the periods in which Rafael had trained with La Joc or organized El Camoruco’s AV. Norma’s pitch to local people was therefore based on a sense of urgency: that oil revenues were available now, and that the commune was a means of accessing these before the opposition had the chance to roll back the revolution’s gains. This sense of urgency struck a chord with those who had been involved in the commune project since its inception. As one CC spokesperson remarked after another long meeting, “A lot of people are tired of all these meetings where nothing happens. Come on, let’s get moving and do something!” As such, divergent conceptions of the temporal frameworks in which community organizations should operate were central to the emergence of this intra-­chavista factionalism. While the Sala envisioned the commune as a conduit for the distribution of state resources—­implying a model of service delivery for the people—­ASOPRODENCO viewed it as a project that would work on the people in political and moral terms. The key distinction was between one political imaginary that viewed “the people” as an electoral

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base requiring maintenance and another that prioritized the subjective and relational transformation of that same “people” as a project in itself. Overall, since the conflicting political temporalities that underpinned these rival chavista factions were forced to inhabit the same space, the presence of each necessarily prevented the other from realizing its aims. Brokerage, Charisma, and Political Rivalry

It was not only divergent political temporalities that drove a wedge between ASOPRODENCO and the Sala. Alongside these morally charged debates about revolutionary strategy were significant differences around questions of leadership and democratic accountability. These particular issues were exemplified by a long-­running dispute between Rafael and Ernesto, the CC spokesperson from El Camoruco’s Sector 2 who had aligned himself with the Sala faction and become a central figure in the power struggle between the two groups. A few days after the public assembly, I spoke to Ernesto in the hope of finding out more about his opposition to Rafael and ASOPRODENCO. Although acknowledging his counterpart’s historic contribution to the community, Ernesto argued that Rafael had no legal right to coordinate the commune, whereas spokespeople from the CCs like himself had been elected to constitutionally sanctioned bodies. “A communal council is something concrete, something official with laws,” he told me. “What is their commune? How big should it be? We still don’t know.” Because he had been elected to a state-­sanctioned organ, Ernesto claimed that it was the legal conference of legitimacy the state had given to the CCs that gave spokespeople the right to manage any proposed commune. Yet while he invoked law and officialdom to advocate for the Sala’s claims on the commune, Ernesto also raised concerns about what he regarded as self-­interested careerism on Rafael’s part. Although Rafael’s contact with government officials had been the original starting point for the commune, Ernesto questioned his underlying intentions: You need to open your eyes. Rafael has been put forward to be a councilor, he’s got the connections in Caracas. He’s a politico [politician]. Now

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there’s nothing wrong with politicos, we need them to help our communities. But the danger with politicos is that they can become politiqueros [political schemers]. I mean, all he does is talk, talk, talk without doing anything.

As Sian Lazar (2008) notes, accusations of corruption or self-­interest can be used to “highlight the moral integrity of the accuser, as well as throw some mud (not always undeserved) at the accused” (76). The insinuation that ASOPRODENCO’s proposal was merely a vehicle for Rafael’s personal ambitions allowed Ernesto to present his own faction as a bastion of the authentic chavista bases and himself as a more trustworthy political leader. Selectively, Ernesto also presented two different faces of the state in this encounter: a legal-­bureaucratic state that assured accountability and gave him legitimacy, and a self-­interested and clientelistic state—­embodied in this instance by Rafael and his “connections”—­that threatened to undermine the democratic rights of elected community leaders. Thus, while the state could be invoked as a necessary source of accountability for community leaders and organizations on the one hand, it could also be portrayed as a source of corrupting or malevolent forces on the other. In many ways, Ernesto’s resentments reflected the ambiguous nature of Rafael’s role within the chavista party-­state nexus. As a charismatic and connected figure who divided his time between local organizing for ASOPRODENCO, political campaigning for PSUV, and paid work at Valencia’s Alcaldía, Rafael was an archetypal example of what Stefano Boni (2020) terms the “chavista broker.” Boni describes how such figures, most of whom are homegrown barrio leaders, help to reconcile divergent currents within the Bolivarian Revolution by mediating between the interests of grassroots community organizations and state institutions. The political careers of such individuals, he writes, lie “in the capacity to satisfy both sides” (Boni 2020, 171) by reconciling contradictory forces and countervailing imperatives. According to Boni, such figures connect levels, contexts, and interests; they are the grassroots protagonists of the personalized and manipulable distribution of state subsidies; they are indissolubly associated with a political party and its electoral

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success; and they conceal the asymmetry of the relationships they establish through rhetorical references to mutual help, interpersonal solidarity, and communitarian bonds. (172)

As Deborah James (2011) notes, moral ambiguity has been a distinguishing feature of anthropological studies of brokerage since the 1960s (Auyero 2000b; Bailey 1969; Blok 1974; Burgwal 1995; Gay 1998; Lazar 2004; Schmidt 1977). Brokers can be heroic figures who bring much-­needed resources to marginalized communities, but they can also be seen as “hustlers” who take advantage of structural exclusion to enrich or empower themselves. James argues that a broker is not only a figure who links popular sectors to centers of power, but also one “who activates the continuing interplay between apparently irreconcilable discourses and practices” (James 2011, 335). The observations of Boni and James are germane in Rafael’s case, since his political work involved a continual back-­and-­forth between different spheres of the chavista political world, and an ability to maintain his reputation as a servant of the community while doing so. Rafael was a gifted orator and a talented organizer whose capacity to problem-­solve owed much to his ability to put people at ease in a variety of different contexts. Indeed, it was precisely his deft movement between spaces of popular politics and institutionalized state power that made him such an effective broker. Among those who worked most closely with him, particularly the group of community leaders that formed the core of ASOPRODENCO, there was collective acknowledgment that Rafael’s charisma bound the group together. Though this didn’t reach the heights of “divine origin” (Weber 1947, 359) that a figure like Chávez possessed, it certainly constituted the “urban charisma” defined by Thomas Blom Hansen and Oscar Verkaaik (2009), who describe how particular individuals are able to cultivate status through their ability to navigate the complex spaces, networks, and power structures of the postcolonial city. As they write, it is the “specialist forms of knowledge, networks, connectedness, courage or daring that enable some individuals—­politicians, gangsters, business tycoons, and the everyday hustler—­to assume leadership, or to claim hidden and dangerous abilities and powers” (Hansen and Verkaaik 2009, 9). Yet the problem that seemed to be emerging through the commune dis-

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pute was that the very essence of Rafael’s charismatic authority—­his capacity to reconcile divergent tendencies, to mediate between different currents, and to deliver resources by drawing on unseen connections—­was now proving to be the source of resentment among his rivals. Because they possess the ability to both penetrate and transcend bureaucracies, charismatic brokers enact what Hansen and Verkaaik term a “rhizomatic logic” that “always reproduces fuzzy edges, loose ends [and] porous institutional practices” (2009, 20). Among aspiring leaders in the CCs, the “fuzziness” of Rafael’s charisma was a direct threat to their emergent power, a vestige of looser and more personalized relationships between local communities and the state. As the chavista state began to further embed itself in community organizations by institutionalizing the distribution of resources, Rafael’s fluid role presented a problem for those who stood to accrue power and influence through the bureaucratic tightening of community-­state linkages. For individuals like Ernesto who had long been in his shadow in the local chavista milieu, the Sala constituted an alternative source of authority that they could use to challenge Rafael’s position. This wrangling over leadership and accountability demonstrated that, far from creating a uniform model of popular democracy, the process of commune construction in Miguel Peña was multiplying and fragmenting the sources of authority that local leaders could call on to strengthen their positions, as new political institutions began to compete and overlap with older ones in a “duplication of bureaucracies” (Ellner 2008, 135). In their different ways, both Rafael’s long-­standing informal authority and the more formalized power of recently elected CC spokespeople like Ernesto had been won through popular mandates. But since one faction had to defeat the other in order for the commune to go ahead, these differing configurations of political power inevitably led to conflicts over who possessed the right to define nascent democratic institutions in the locality. They also gave aspiring political leaders new tools with which to chip away at the authority of their rivals.

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Fragmenting Loyalties

Eventually, the clamor for infrastructural investment took its toll on ASOPRODENCO’s faction. Their insistence on consensus and deliberation left the group open to charges of ideological indulgence, and the Sala exploited this cleavage effectively. As a case in point, the CC spokespeople from a squatter settlement close to El Camoruco announced that they would be aligning with the Sala after being promised funding from FONDEMI to turn their ranchos into houses. As Miriam, their lead spokesperson, explained to me, “We decided to link up with the Sala because it doesn’t seem like ASOPRODENCO’s proposal is going anywhere. We’re going to build our own houses now and that’s always been our dream.” Developments such as these seemed to be a tipping point for Rafael, and a few weeks later he announced that he had decided to step aside from the commune project. Some members of ASOPRODENCO left with him, choosing to refocus on issues in their own communities. Others, with some

FIGURE 7. 2   A revolutionary mural painted by the Frente Francisco de Miranda (Matt Wilde)

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consternation, agreed to link up with the Sala. As they had proposed, the commune would now consist of just ten communities, all of which would be barrios linked to the Sala in El Camoruco. The middle-­class urbanizaciones that had accompanied ASOPRODENCO for two years were jettisoned from the project, although they were encouraged to form their own commune that might one day form part of a larger “communal territory.” After a private meeting with the Sala in which Oneidys and Rosa agreed to dissolve ASOPRODENCO’s commune, Rafael sent a text message to both factions, in what was tantamount to a public resignation: Comrades, I’ve just been told that last night a huge step forward was made in the formation of the commune. I’m so happy for this community, which has waited so long for development. I continue to be at the service of the community in whatever way I can be to help establish the Communal State. Un abrazo [a hug].

After all the effort that had been put into the project, I was surprised by Rafael’s decision. But he had become increasingly busy with his new job at the Alcaldía and seemed to have concluded that he couldn’t win the commune dispute through persuasion. An even greater surprise, however, was the news that Oneidys was among those who had chosen to stay on and work with the Sala. She had always been one of their strongest critics within ASOPRODENCO, a passionate advocate of popular power who believed in the process of formación above all else. Most surprising of all was the explanation that she gave for her decision: “It’s to do with the lineamiento [guidelines],” she told me. “It’s the Salas de Batalla who are supposed to be managing the construction of the communes, and that comes directly from Chávez. That’s how the lines go.” Though she had always been suspicious of direct state involvement in local community organizations, Oneidys was now expressing the very arguments that ASOPRODENCO had opposed for so long. She even referred to governmental regulations—­lineamiento—­by way of justification. Perhaps most glaringly, the phrase, “That’s how the lines go,” referred to the hierarchical chain of command that came from Chávez and went down through MPComunas, the Sala, and the FFM. Having seen Rafael sidelined from of the project, it seemed that Oneidys had completely altered

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her view and abandoned the commitment to organizing outside of formal state institutions. While such a shift may seem contradictory, it is worth considering the insights of Miriam Shakow (2011), who observes that in practice political actors often combine actions and ideals that they declare to be distinct in theory (Shakow 2011, 316). Although those who self-­identify as revolutionaries seek a transcendent politics, they are invariably met with intransigence as they attempt to unshackle their projects from the historical and material exigencies in which they are situated. They are forced to make compromises that contradict their visions, and they shift their conceptual frameworks retrospectively as new imperatives channel their practice in particular directions. Oneidys strove for ideological purity and a far-­reaching vision of democratic socialism desde abajo, but in the end seemed willing to accept a more contingent reality. As I described previously, strategic concessions have been common throughout the history of barrio organizing in Venezuela, and Oneidys now appeared willing to work within a situation that fell some way short of her ideals. Shakow argues that the reemergence of revolutionary aspirations in Latin America didn’t erase more pragmatic calculations among political actors. Instead, these revolutionary visions “added to, rather than replaced” (Shakow 2011, 317) more instrumental approaches that accept contingent alliances when necessary. The importance of Oneidys’s acquiescence, therefore, revealed less about her personal morality and much more about the structural forces that were shaping her decisions. If allowing state ministries to determine the commune structure contradicted the approach ASOPRODENCO had always advocated, it nonetheless “came directly from Chávez” (as Oneidys herself put it) and was thus extremely difficult for chavistas to challenge. The powerful emotive tie between the late president and his supporters was integral to giving grassroots activists a sense of popular ownership over government initiatives and state institutions. But it also created a problem, since Chávez’s symbolic role as the unifying force between Venezuela’s “two bodies” (Coronil 1997, 116) provided substantial camouflage to an increase in state control over community organizations. Indeed, as Boni summarizes:

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In fact, the institutional framework in which direct democracy was designed and implemented was contradictory: popular power was both egalitarian (in the proclaimed centrality of residents’ assemblies) and hierarchical (in the recurrent emergence of authoritarian community leaders), inclusive (since the criterion for participation was residence) and partisan (since party affiliation played a crucial role), autonomous in the management of projects and dependent on state funding and recognition. (Boni 2020, 182–­83)

In the end, Oneidys’s eventual submission to the Sala’s proposal reflected the fact that participation in Bolivarian initiatives such as the commune was often highly disjunctive. While grassroots chavistas were encouraged to be the principal protagonists in the construction of new popular institutions, they were also under pressure—­sometimes tacitly, other times more explicitly—­to comply with government objectives in ways that consolidated the power of state institutions and PSUV’s electoral project. As a result, the actors involved found themselves in the disorientating position of having their utopian aspirations simultaneously nurtured and corralled by the same chavista state. In the final paper that he published, Fernando Coronil (2011a) considered a strange paradox that characterized the resurgent Latin American left of the 2000s. Although the Pink Tide produced, he wrote, “a proliferation of political activities inspired by socialist or communitarian ideals,” it also expressed a “pervasive uncertainty with respect to the specific form of the ideal future” (Coronil 2011a, 234). Political actors within the Latin American left, Coronil suggested, were thus caught between an “agitated present” and a “spectral future,” in which the future appears phantasmatic, as if it were a space inhabited by ghosts from the past and ideal dreams, and the present unfolds as a dense field of nervous agitation, constantly entangled in multiplying constraints, a conglomeration of contradictory tendencies and actions leading to no clear destination. (2011a, 247)

The ethnographic material presented in this chapter sheds further light on the predicament described by Coronil as it appeared in the Venezuelan context. In particular, it shows that this disjunctive relationship between the

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future and the present stemmed from the contradictory ways in which the chavista electoral project rhetorically promoted democratic experiments and institutionally reshaped them into formations that served its own ends. In the case of the would-­be commune, grassroots actors were subjected to imperatives that came from outside their communities and were encouraged to participate in institutional channels that weren’t of their making. Since some individuals were more willing than others to embrace the demands that came with the communal state model, conflicts inevitably emerged as activists attempted to reconcile distinct democratic ideals with their communities’ pressing material needs. As a result, they became caught between conflicting political temporalities and imaginative horizons that reflected some of the deeper moral dilemmas that ran through the revolution as a whole. That pressing material needs were found to be in conflict with efforts to transform social relationships in the long term, or that disagreements over who controlled political processes proved to be so fractious—­these were expressions of the revolution’s moral tensions as experienced in emic and everyday forms. Thus, while I share Schiller’s (2013, 2018) view that the Bolivarian era enabled historically marginalized sectors of the population to approach the state as an “unfolding project” (2013, 543), I also argue that the Venezuelan government’s new vehicles for political participation were highly constraining—­both imaginatively and structurally—­for grassroots community organizations. For the actors involved in projects such as the commune, the political imaginary produced by these contradictory forces was one characterized by disjuncture and frustration as much as by hope and aspiration. Even in its most successful period, the everyday experience of the Bolivarian Revolution was one intimately shaped by the tense coexistence between possibility and futility, motion and inertia. In 2012, two years after the commune dispute had been formally resolved, I returned to El Camoruco to follow up with my principal interlocutors. Although the terms of the commune had been agreed, the ten communities involved were still in the laborious process of legally ratifying the initiative with MPComunas. Miriam’s community had received some funding from FONDEMI, and around half the squatters were now living in houses. But there had also been delays with the payments, and they were still waiting for

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outstanding construction work to go ahead. The sense of uneasy waiting that Miriam described to me seemed to reflect a wider experience that chavistas across the country were sharing. After being diagnosed with an unnamed type of cancer in 2011, Chávez had been back and forth for treatment in Cuba for much of the year, leaving a void at the heart of the revolution. His public appearances had become far less frequent, and his supporters were left planning for presidential elections later that year with growing fears about the president’s long-­term health. Against a backdrop of rising inflation and the seemingly insoluble problem of insecurity, the triumphant confidence I saw among chavistas in my first research period had been replaced by a drawn-­out sense of ending. On the last night of my return visit, Rafael and his brother Alejandro had a furious argument about the local CCs. The rumors about corruption had worsened in the intervening years, and there were now accusations about threats of violence and the involvement of criminal gangs. Alejandro was describing how a group of motorizados (bikers) had intimidated local people by surrounding a meeting where residents were accusing one spokesperson of embezzling money. Alejandro was preparing to denounce the individual to state authorities, but Rafael was instead urging direct action. “We need to tell people what this coño de la madre [motherfucker] is doing,” said Alejandro. “But there needs to be an official process. We need to call in FUNDACOMUNAL and the Ministry. There needs to be a formal government investigation.” Rafael, however, was strident in his response: Do you know what will happen if you do that, Alejandro? People will just think it’s another stupid argument over money between three or four people. Some bureaucrat who’s probably more corrupt than anyone here will come in, and no one will want to be involved anymore. If you want to do something, I’ll tell you what you should do: organize a group of people, occupy the office, and demand to see the accounts. If they can’t prove where the money’s gone, they should be kicked out by the community. Do something that involves local people, otherwise it’s just la misma vaina [the same thing] again.

The argument exemplified the recurrent problems that local actors faced as they attempted to manage questions about the viability of community orga-

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nizations directly managing oil money, the conduct of their comrades and neighbors, and their relationships with state institutions. While political tensions between the grassroots bases of chavismo and the Bolivarian state were discussed extensively by scholars during the revolution’s boom period (see Denis 2011; Ellner 2013; Spronk et al. 2011), less attention was paid to the moral uncertainties that underpinned these tensions. As anthropologists have long pointed out, while the state seeks to symbolically maintain a “mystique of sovereignty” (Taussig 1997, 18), in everyday life it often appears in incoherent, mundane, or violent ways (Ferguson and Gupta 2002; Navaro-­Yashin 2002). In the Venezuelan case, while oil revenues appeared to imbue the Bolivarian state with a potent power “beyond the reach of human agency” (Schiller 2013, 543), the circulation of these revenues within community organizations also brought deep-­seated cultural anxieties to the fore of barrio social life. The attempt to symbolically collapse the distinction between state and society thus had the unintended consequence of entangling grassroots actors in the morally ambiguous workings of the petro-­state and its capillaries. Chávez was always central to the revolution’s ability to hold divergent political currents and conflicting material interests together. For his supporters, the late president’s appeal transcended secular politics and reached the realms of popular religion and national mythology. As Lucia Michelutti (2017) argues, Chávez’s charisma was so powerful because it drew on cultural and religious repertoires that set him apart from other political figures and positioned him as the embodiment of the Venezuelan people. When Chávez died in March 2013, the state funeral he received echoed the return of Simón Bolívar’s body to Venezuela in 1842 (see Taussig 1997, 101). Thousands lined the streets wearing caps and t-­shirts that bore the slogan Soy Chávez (I am Chávez). As Michelutti writes: By saying “I am Chávez,” people have come to embody parts of the proto–­ New Man through divine kinship. With his death Chávez achieved a complete fusion of himself with the people, “a mutuality of being” that requires no more democratic mediation to be legitimized. Those who supported him during his life and have been part of the process have been transformed into “extraordinary people” with “revolutionary” qual-

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ities. They feel like “the chosen ones,” the children of Chávez. They have become part of his sacred revolutionary genealogy. (2017, 245)

Yet if Chávez’s death meant that he was able to finally achieve a “complete fusion” between state and pueblo, it also meant that his real-­world political legacy would have to outlive him. As Coronil observed, a great irony of the late president’s commitment to narrativizing the revolution was that it rested on an “overproduction of words” (2011b, 8) that was enacted through the “monological voice of the state” (2011a, 254). While this enabled chavistas to see themselves as actors in a grand mythology of social transformation, it also monopolized the imaginative space from which other voices and other visions might have emerged. The alchemic fusion between Chávez’s charisma, the petro-­state’s revenues, and the collective efforts of millions was a unique conjuncture that generated hopes for a radically different society. But without its figurehead, and without its oil money, the delicate equilibrium between the revolution’s myriad contradictions struggled to hold.

Eight The Unraveling

“Do you see, Mateo? This is how it is all the time now,” said Cristina with an

exasperated sigh as I reached into my pocket and counted clumsily through a large wad of banknotes, before handing them to the teenage girl on the other side of the bodega’s metal bars. The previous evening, after what felt like an endless series of vueltas in and around El Camoruco, Cristina and I had been to the same bodega to buy a box of eggs, only to discover that we didn’t have the required 3,000 bolivares in cash. Returning the following morning with what we thought would be enough, we’d been given a new price: 4,500 bolivares. “This is the peo we have at the moment,” Cristina explained as I handed over the money and watched the girl flick adroitly through the notes. “Qué ladilla [how annoying]! It changes every day and it’s different everywhere.” For me, the hike on the eggs was the difference of less than a dollar, but for Cristina it constituted a significant chunk of her disposable income for that week. At that point, I was slowly becoming accustomed to what hyperinflation looks like in everyday life. But I was still shocked every time I encountered the daily price rises firsthand. The rapid and ongoing devaluation of Venezuela’s currency, coupled with shortages in an array of basic commodities, meant that finding sufficient food for a whole household had

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essentially become a full-­time job. This incident with the eggs was typical of how barrio residents like Cristina now spent much of their time: undertaking long circuits in search of scarce goods and affordable prices; spending hours playing dominoes in the queues for bread at the panadería or cash at the bank; and discussing, constantly, the fluctuating prices in food, toiletries, and medicines. Yet while complaints about prices had become a rudimentary feature of everyday life, many of these conversations were also characterized by rumors about who was hiking prices, who was hoarding goods, and who might be engaged in various forms of smuggling, theft, and speculation at the expense of others. This chapter focuses on everyday life in El Camoruco in the midst of a multidimensional crisis that began in 2014 with the collapse of global oil prices and rapidly spiraled into one characterized by hyperinflation, chronic commodity shortages, political violence, and mass outward migration. Based on fieldwork conducted on my return to Venezuela in 2017—­a year that proved to be a tipping point for the country in political and humanitarian terms—­it shows how a deep sense of mistrust had become a central feature of barrio life during the country’s long crisis. As El Camoruco’s residents wrestled with myriad challenges associated with endemic economic hardship, people stretched scarce resources among those they trusted, giving households and kinship networks a heightened role in daily survival strategies. But outside of these networks, many expressed suspicions about even the most mundane economic interactions and practices. New forms of microspeculation, known colloquially as bachaqueo, had become commonplace amid the shortages in food and other essential commodities.1 The practice, which involved so-­called bachaqueros buying up subsidized food in bulk and then selling it on for marked-­up prices in the street, produced substantial resentment among barrio residents, even though many acknowledged that it was often born of economic necessity (Smilde 2016). Thus, while anger was directed most spectacularly toward the government in the form of protests, fears and accusations were also present in the many everyday encounters that took place as ordinary Venezuelans bought and sold from one another in a context of hyperinflation and scarcity. In what follows, I show how Venezuela’s slide into crisis under the presidency of Nicolás Maduro deepened many of the local-­level social inequalities

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and tensions that had been present in the earlier phases of my research. But where such issues constituted something of a lurking and subterranean presence prior to the crisis, they had now become much more open and explicit, with local friendships and political loyalties fracturing against a backdrop of Maduro’s authoritarian turn at the national level. As localized patterns of stratification intensified, those who had advocated for a revolutionary moral economy found themselves increasingly contaminated by their close association with a political project that had lost substantial support among those it claimed to serve. Anatomy of a Crisis

How is it that a country that played such a central role in Latin America’s Pink Tide found itself so rapidly, and so dramatically, at the center of a humanitarian crisis that now stretches across the entire region? In many ways, the crisis that has now engulfed Venezuela for approaching a decade is emblematic of how political and economic volatility can feed off one another to devastating effect. As I described in the book’s introduction, Chávez’s 2003 decision to fix the bolívar at the overvalued rate of 1.6 to the dollar was pivotal in shaping the country’s economic model in the Bolivarian era. In an effort to prevent capital flight, the government limited access to dollars as part of these measures, meaning that individuals could only buy their $3,000 per year dollar entitlement by applying for a cupo (coupon) from CADIVI, the foreign exchange commission. These measures were followed in 2008 by a revaluation of the national currency at a ratio of 1:1000, giving birth to a new currency: the bolívar fuerte (strong bolívar). Fernando Dachevsky and Juan Kornblihtt (2017) argue that overvalued currencies create a “dual structure” for petro-­states, which is characterized by a domestic economy with low productivity that relies on transfers from the petroleum industry to stay afloat (Dachevsky and Kornblihtt 2017, 79). Although often presented as a “socialist” policy by Chávez’s opponents, overvaluation proved a major boon to both national and foreign corporations, who were able to access dollars at a preferential rate through CADIVI. As Dachevsky and Kornblihtt show, in 2013, 89 percent of importers’ purchasing power was derived from petroleum rents that were effectively handed over “free of charge” via over-

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valuation (2017, 87). Moreover, of the fifty companies that received the most foreign currency between 2004 and 2012, twenty-­seven were foreign-­owned (Dachevsky and Kornblihtt 2017, 87), meaning the Venezuelan oil sector was effectively subsidizing the purchasing power of multinational corporations operating within the country. While oil prices were high, overvaluation enabled Chávez to fund social programs and to retain some useful alliances within the private sector (Ellner 2016). But as the 2000s wore on, it became clear that the policy was also producing several problematic side effects. Firstly, it was inhibiting the productive capacity of nonoil sectors of the economy, who couldn’t compete with cheap imports in the domestic market and whose production costs made their exports too expensive for the global market (Dachevsky and Kornblihtt 2017, 88). According to Edgardo Lander (2014), the total share of oil’s export value to Venezuela’s economy rose from 68.7 percent in 1998 to 96 percent by 2014, highlighting how Chávez’s own policies on petroleum undermined his stated goal of diversifying the economy (Purcell 2013).2 Secondly, as a black market in dollars developed in response to currency restrictions, a gap between the overvalued bolívar and a second parallel bolívar—­el paralelo, as it became known colloquially—­began to generate worrying levels of inflation. A new form of microspeculation known as raspao (scraping) became common in this period, as people used CADIVI credit cards to withdraw dollars abroad and then sell them for a profit on the black market in Venezuela. Although the government largely turned a blind eye to such practices, both Chávez and Maduro made efforts to curb inflation by periodically devaluing the official bolívar and inserting various tiers of exchange for different imported goods. By 2014, the official bolívar used by the state to import food and medicine was valued at 6.3 to the dollar, while two additional exchange tiers—­SICAD 1 and SICAD 2—­were available at 12 and 50 respectively.3 Such measures were designed to reduce inflation by controlling the flow of dollars and offering commercial importers in key sectors cheaper access to dollars than via the paralelo. But the sharp drop in world oil prices in the same year significantly reduced the purchasing power of Venezuelan importers and increased the demand for dollars in spite of these reforms. In 2015, CADIVI became CENCOEX (Centro Nacional de Comercio Exterior, National Center for

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Foreign Commerce) and SICAD 1 and SICAD 2 were unified into SIMADI, valued at 174 against the dollar when it was first introduced. The parallel rate, however, still spiraled to over 880 in the same year (Dachevsky and Kornblihtt 2017, 87), and imports fell by 60 percent between 2012 and 2016 (Smilde 2016). Shortages in food and medicine started to emerge as a result, with the government accusing private importers of hoarding goods as part of an “economic war” against the revolution. By late 2017, with the official “first tier” bolívar still valued at 10 against the dollar, its parallel counterpart had reached an astonishing 40,000. This soaring inflation highlighted the gross distortions that underpinned the Venezuelan economy, but perhaps the most damaging side effect of overvaluation was that it was reproducing old inequalities associated with rent-­seeking, in which only those with access to cheap dollars—­chiefly state or military officials and private sector importers—­could participate in the appropriation of petroleum rents (Dachevsky and Kornblihtt 2017, 87). For these privileged few, the gap between the overvalued and parallel currencies created the perfect conditions for illicit currency trading, whereby dollars could be obtained from the Venezuelan Central Bank for nonexistent or overvalued imports and then either sold on for huge profits or smuggled out of the country. The economist Manuel Sutherland estimates that between 2003 and 2013, some $150 billion dollars were taken out of Venezuela through the purchase of foreign assets with dollars issued inside the country (Dachevsky and Kornblihtt 2017, 8; Sutherland 2016). For those with the right connections, then, currency controls actually enabled the very forms of capital flight they had been designed to prevent—­and all at the direct expense of the Venezuelan state. In 2014, after allegations made by former finance minister Jorge Giordani (2014), the government published the findings of an investigation into so-­called empresas de maletín (briefcase companies) that had been established solely for the purpose of fraudulently obtaining dollars. The investigation revealed that in 2012 some 212 phantom companies had defrauded the Venezuelan state of $20 billion dollars with the help of corrupt government officials and the use of phony receipts and false accounting (Ellner 2016, 113). While Giordani’s accusations centered on Chávez loyalists from the military who formed part of the Boliburgesía, subsequent studies showed that an even greater role in the scandal was played by members of

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Fedecámaras, Venezuela’s main business federation, and multinational corporations using front operations inside the country (CiudadCCS 2016; Gavazut 2014; Sutherland 2013). The collusion between state officials and domestic and foreign elites in this industrial-­scale transfer of wealth was particularly damaging for the government, but it is probable that the scandal itself was merely the tip of the iceberg. According to some estimates, of the $1 trillion dollars handed out by the Venezuelan Central Bank over the last decade, at least a third has not been accounted for (Chinea and Pons 2016). In an interview given in 2015, Roland Denis, a revolutionary activist and former vice minister to Chávez, claimed that over $300 billion dollars has been siphoned off into private pockets through fraudulent means over the last decade. Denis named large corporations such as General Motors, Polar, Colgate, Toyota, and various pharmaceutical and tire companies as being embroiled in embezzling money, as well as state-­owned enterprises such as Sidor (steel), Corpoelec (electricity), CANTV (public telephones), and various food and housing missions. He also suggested that hundreds of prominent chavista officials, including most state governors, were involved, calling them a “corrupt bureaucratic and military caste” who engage in “vomit inducing” transfers of wealth through their own networks of collaborators and frontmen (Denis 2015). Venezuela’s growing economic problems in this period were compounded by a series of political conflicts that began almost immediately after Chávez’s death. In April 2013, after being anointed as Chávez’s chosen successor, Maduro won an extremely narrow presidential victory (1.49 percent) over Henrique Capriles, the opposition’s MUD (Mesa de Unidad Democrática, Democratic Unity Roundtable) candidate. Capriles challenged the results and alleged electoral irregularities, but after months of intense wrangling—­including several brawls between rival politicians in the National Assembly—­the CNE announced that it had found no evidence of discrepancies. Tensions simmered in the months that followed, and then in 2014 a series of antigovernment protests broke out across the country. Led by Leopoldo López, a hardline opposition politician who played a significant role in the protests surrounding the 2002 coup (Peralta 2014), the protests drew on a large contingent of students from predominantly middle-­class and wealthy backgrounds. Using La Salida (“The Exit”) as their motto, the

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protestors called for a national uprising against the government and railed against everything from corruption and insecurity to inflation and food shortages. In the months that followed, violent clashes between opposition protestors, chavistas, and state security forces eventually claimed 43 lives (Faria 2015). Each side accused the other of inciting the violence, with the opposition pointing to the alleged involvement of pro-­government armed groups in some killings, and Maduro highlighting the well-­documented links between Venezuela’s right-­wing student movement and organizations funded by the US government, such as USAID (Gill 2018; Gill and Hanson 2019). López was arrested in February 2014 and charged with multiple serious felonies, and the protests abated several months later. In 2015, the MUD took advantage of the worsening economic situation and won a supermajority in the National Assembly elections, claiming 112 seats. Seeking to build on these gains, they attempted to activate the constitutional right to revoke the sitting president through a recall referendum but were blocked from doing so by the CNE, which had been weighted in favor of the government throughout the Bolivarian period (Corrales 2020). In 2017, amid another sustained wave of protests that resulted in even more deaths, Maduro unilaterally announced that a new National Constituent Assembly would supersede the National Assembly. Composed of representatives from key sectors selected by the government—­indigenous peoples, students, peasants, fishing communities, business leaders, people with disabilities, and spokespeople from the communal councils and communes—­the new assembly seemed designed to marginalize the MUD, who were given scant opportunity to organize their own candidates in these sectors (Corrales 2020, 55–­56). Alongside this seemingly perpetual state of political conflict was a visible shift in the behavior of state security forces under Maduro’s leadership. After the high-­profile murder of Mónica Spear, a Venezuelan actress and former beauty queen, Maduro launched a number of new security initiatives that explicitly targeted street criminals and gang members. Unlike Chávez, who had always argued that crime could only be solved by tackling its structural causes, Maduro embraced the language of the mano de hierro (“iron hand”) and oversaw violent police incursions into low-­income barrios, ostensibly in search of known criminals (Samet 2019). According to the Venezuelan human rights group PROVEA, Maduro’s new special police force, the

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FAES (Fuerzas de Acciones Especiales, Special Action Forces), has been responsible for hundreds of extrajudicial killings since its formation in 2016, as well as arbitrary detentions, forced evictions, the destruction of homes, and the deportation of Colombians living in Venezuela (HRW 2016; PROVEA 2018; Zubillaga, Llorens, and Souto 2019). The Venezuela I returned to in 2017 was thus a country in the midst of a multidimensional crisis that encompassed both national and international causes and effects. If the country’s immediate economic predicament could be traced to Bolivarian policies, it was also remarkably similar to the very issues that had led to Chávez’s election in the first place. This underlined the repeated difficulties that Venezuelan governments of various hues had encountered in moving away from the cycles of boom and bust that were shaped chiefly by global oil prices. In 2014, there was also an added factor that pre-­ Chávez administrations hadn’t faced: an overwhelmingly hostile geopolitical landscape that was purposefully worsening the crisis—­in spite of the cost endured by the Venezuelan people—­precisely to ensure that the revolution would fail. US-­led sanctions against the Maduro regime, which targeted the country’s financial and oil sectors, impeded the government’s ability to enact any stabilizing reforms and helped to accelerate a downward economic spiral (Bull and Rosales 2020a, 2020b; Rodríguez 2019). As Maduro doubled down on a polarizing rhetoric and blamed the crisis on the sanctions and domestic “traitors,” barrio residents encountered an increasing distance between their own everyday experiences and the messages emanating from Miraflores. A Commune at Home

On my return to Venezuela, I was struck by a number of significant differences in how the country felt. The presence of the military had become much more visible, from security checkpoints on the freeways to the National Guard searching people’s bags outside state-­run supermarkets (to prevent mass buying and speculation, I was told). The country’s roads felt more dangerous and edgy, with the ubiquity of broken-­down cars along the roadsides signaling how hard it had become to find the imported parts to repair damaged vehicles. This subtle but discernable shift in the feel of the country grew as I arrived in Valencia. The roads that wind through the popular sec-

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tors in the city’s south had always been somewhat chaotic, but now there was an added dimension: far more people out in the streets. In some cases, as my interlocutors explained, people were opting to walk because bus fares had become too expensive relative to what they were earning. But it was also clear that la calle had become the principal space for everyday survival for a growing number of people. There were more buhoneros weaving in and out of traffic selling mangos or cleaning car windscreens, more people haggling over prices at makeshift roadside stalls, and more of the most desperate sorting through piles of trash in search of food or items of potential value. The most striking change of all, however, came when I arrived in El Camoruco to find that almost all of my friends had lost weight, some of them to a worrying degree. La dieta de Maduro (“Maduro’s diet”), was the stoical refrain as people lifted up their up their t-­shirts to show their shrinking waistlines. My aim in returning to El Camoruco was to understand how the crisis had changed everyday life for my friends and interlocutors in the community. But I hadn’t entirely anticipated quite how difficult fieldwork would be as a result of the crisis. Between April and July of that year, Venezuela was engulfed by a wave of protests, many of which turned violent, that regularly brought Valencia and other major cities to a standstill. The burning roadblocks erected by the antigovernment protestors known as guarimbas made safe movement in the city particularly difficult, and many of my chavista friends from Valencia’s south were openly nervous about traveling to other zones even on quieter days. Given that numerous chavistas had already been killed in protests by the time I arrived, and that Barrio Adentro clinics were being attacked due to their association with chavismo, such fears were not unfounded (Cooper 2019, 149; Grandin 2017). But it was nonetheless an entirely new phenomenon for me, and one that reflected the abiding feeling I had during that return visit: a deep sense of mistrust now ran through every facet of social life in the country. This feeling was compounded by an array of more everyday challenges that significantly altered my original research plans. Friends I used to rely on for rides couldn’t drive anywhere because they couldn’t afford to repair their damaged vehicles. Neighborhood political meetings, once my touchstone for local news and gossip, were rarely taking place due to low participation and general disinterest. And former contacts I hoped to catch up with had left

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the country altogether in search of better opportunities in Colombia, Ecuador, or Peru. As a result, my research in 2017 was characterized by the strange juxtaposition between major political turmoil at the national level and a much more mundane set of challenges in El Camoruco itself, where boredom, frustration, and the daily navigation of a failing economy consumed people’s time and energy and tied them much closer to home. My fieldwork experience thus reflected the reality of barrio life as a whole, in which time was chiefly spent queueing, exchanging messages on phones, and passing time with friends and family. On my return to Rafael and Yulmi’s home, I was immediately informed of the changes inside the household. Having become a father at age seventeen, Eduardo had parted company with Natalia, the mother of his first child, and recently moved in with the mother of his second child. Having undertaken training with the Policía Nacional Bolivariana (PNB), the new national police force created by Chávez in 2009, he was now working for the local CICPC, the investigative arm of the police force. Like his parents, Eduardo had found secure and relatively well-­paid work inside the chavista state and spent our first few meetings regaling me with accounts of the shoot-­ outs he’d been involved in with local criminals—­or sucios (“dirty ones”), as he now called them. Although Eduardo had left the family home, Natalia was still living in my old annex with their young son, Estéban. Rafael and Yulmi’s youngest daughter, Yuleidi, now seventeen, had moved into the adjacent annex with her partner, Deivi, who had graduated from high school and was currently working as a shop assistant in the city center. Guillermo and Cristina continued to live in the annex downstairs with their young daughter, Rafaela, though the couple had made several visits to Guillermo’s family in Colombia and were busy saving for another trip. At first, these visits had been opportunities to earn money in Colombia and take advantage of the weak bolívar on their return to Venezuela; Cristina had even used money she earned in Colombia to buy a car in Venezuela after her first trip. But since then, the continuing downturn in the Venezuelan economy had made such short visits less tenable, and the couple speculated that their next journey abroad would be an indefinite one. Guillermo had been through various jobs since I last saw him. After leaving the café where he was working during my first fieldwork stint, he

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had worked for his father’s small shoe-­making company until it went out of business, and then worked for a time as a driver for a private company in the industrial zone, where he would drop off and collect workers each day. Prior to further restrictions being placed on access to dollars for foreign travel, Guillermo and several friends had used their CADIVI cupos to engage in a raspao trip to Peru. After traveling by bus and taking out hundreds of dollars using credit cards, they had returned to Venezuela and traded the dollars for bolivares at a higher price on the black market, making a handsome profit. This money had been a significant financial boost to the couple, supplementing the income Guillermo made as a taxista. He had earned just above the minimum wage doing this, but lost the position when his car was damaged in an accident. Now unable to repair the car, Guillermo cut a frustrated figure when we caught up one evening. “It’s hard here, Mateo, really hard,” he told me. “I haven’t worked for four months. My papa’s company can’t afford to import the materials they need to make shoes, and it’ll cost thousands to fix my car. Things just aren’t working right now.” This deep sense of frustration was shared by all younger members of the household. Natalia, who was working as a customer assistant at a bank in the city center, described how she had to rise at five each morning to prepare Estéban’s breakfast and ensure she had enough time to make it to work on the notoriously slow camionetas. Her pay was low and effectively diminishing by the day due to inflation, and she worried about the security of her job. But she nonetheless felt she needed to keep on working in the hope that things would eventually improve. “I rest at the weekends,” she joked as she explained her routine to me. Despite their struggles, these younger members of Los Hernández were aware that they had a degree of protection from the crisis thanks to the relative financial security that Rafael and Yulmi had established. Rafael had by then been elected as a local PSUV councilor, meaning he was paid a decent salary compared to most in the barrio. His job also yielded indirect benefits such as the use of a car, which enabled him to lend his own vehicle to a friend, who was using it to run a taxi service. In exchange for this, Rafael received a cut of his friend’s earnings. Such extra income was then invested in the home, which had seen further improvements since my last visit: the kitchen had been retiled and painted, a third floor was being constructed above the annexes, and a small piscina (swimming pool) had even been built

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in the backyard. These small but significant material improvements were clear signs of Rafael’s continuing efficacy as a “political entrepreneur” (Banerjee 2010, 30) who maximized his social and political connections. Given that no one else I visited in El Camoruco was making home improvements in this period, they also underlined the family’s relative affluence. Yulmi had never fulfilled her dream of working for PDVSA but continued in the same role at MERCAL. While her working conditions remained a source of frustration, in many senses MERCAL was one of the better employers in the crisis. One of the perks of Yulmi’s job was that she could obtain significant quantities of heavily subsidized food before it even found its way to local stores. A bag of pasta that would cost 8,000 bolivares from a bachaquero in the street was being issued to MERCAL employees for just fifteen bolivares. Unlike most households who spent a sizable portion of their day going from bodega to supermarket to bachaquero looking for the best price, Yulmi had a large supply of staple foods—­rice, pasta, bread flour, black beans, dried milk—­stored downstairs. Guillermo was clear about the difference this made to the household: Here it isn’t too bad, mainly because Señora Yulmi works so hard to make sure the family has food, and because they both have good salaries. But for other people, people who don’t have that, it’s arrecho Mateo. Sometimes you can’t find bread flour, sometimes butter or cheese. I’ve lost weight, look at me! It’s not like I’m starving, but sometimes I only eat twice a day, and I know for other people it’s worse.

Their ability to provide this foundation for their children and grandchildren remained a source of pride for Rafael, who remarked with a wry smile one evening that the house was turning into their very own commune. And in many ways, this commune at home provided a microcosm for the Venezuelan economy as a whole: while those who relied on a failing currency for their earnings struggled, they could find a degree of stability by orbiting those with state connections and mediated access to oil money.

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Crisis Talk (1): Of Money and Things

Since there was often little else to do, a significant part of my fieldwork in 2017 involved talking. In the summer of 2017, Cristina was unemployed and Yuleidy would usually return home from high school in the early afternoon, when there was ample time for gossiping, complaining, and staring at messages on phones. The two sisters would often look after Estéban while Natalia was at work, and then in the evenings the three young women liked to eat together downstairs in the main family home with Rafael and Yulmi. Deivi would usually join them later when he arrived home from work. The conversations during these afternoons and evenings would frequently turn to the latest price rises, and to the difficulties posed by blocked roads or power cuts. But my presence also prompted long and detailed interrogations into how much smartphones, laptops, televisions, clothing, rent, and cars cost in the UK. We had done this plenty during my previous fieldwork stints, but the five-­year gap since my last visit, coupled with Venezuela’s descent into economic crisis, now gave these conversations a different quality. As we worked through the price conversions from pounds to dollars to bolivares and calculated how much one would need in bolivares to afford an iPhone in London, these discussions would be punctuated with gasps of amazement and cries of naguara. During these conversations, I was struck by the strange power that exercises in conversion seemed to hold. Yulmi, in particular, seemed utterly obsessed by the cost of commodity items in the UK, so much so that Rafael rebuked her one evening after what felt like hours of price conversions on countless different commodities. “Fuck Yulmi! ‘How much is that Mateo’ all night! Leave him in peace! [“Coño Yulmi! ‘Cuanta cuesta eso Mateo’ toda la noche! Dejalo en paz!”] In my field notes that evening, I wrote that it was as if the collapse of the bolívar and the pervasiveness of scarcity in Venezuela had given stronger currencies like the pound and dollar an almost magical power. In part, this interest in conversion stemmed from the utter chaos that surrounded the bolívar and the dólar paralelo. The ongoing loss of value for Venezuela’s fiat currency, coupled with the continued presence of currency controls and the increasing use of dollars by those who had access to them, meant that the country was effectively living with a dual currency system,

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even though dollars remained formally restricted. This meant that calculating costs in dollars, even if one didn’t have access to them, was a way of managing the “socially constructed perplexity” (Salas 2021, 53) that characterized Venezuela’s monetary system. But I also had the sense that these exercises in would-­be commensuration performed a role that extended beyond quantitative conversion. Writing about Cuba’s dual currency system that began in the post-­Soviet period, Martin Holbraad (2017) describes how Cubans who had little chance of being able to afford anything in the new dollar stores (known as la chopin) would nonetheless spend hours inside them window shopping, only to leave without making a purchase. He attributes this phenomenon to the relationship Cubans have with consumption and money, which had been heavily regulated until the 1990s by a set of price and wage controls that meant people could only buy certain things with their pesos, according to a “pre-­ordained set of basic needs” (Holbraad 2017, 92). When dollars began entering Cuba in the 1980s—­first via a black market not dissimilar to Venezuela’s, then as regulated legal tender in the 1990s—­they occupied a completely different symbolic and moral position to pesos, because they were unbridled from the limits placed on pesos and theoretically convertible to anything. As a monopolizing state socialism gradually fell away, pesos took on a “token-­like quality” (Holbraad 2017, 92), leaving dollars to perform a very different imaginative role: Having been placed outside the remit of planning agencies, the dollar comes into its own as a transcendental scale of value that indexes its own potential to commensurate. . . . The compulsive window-­shopping that so many habaneros seem to engage in during this period could perhaps be interpreted as a quantity fetish. The fact that most window-­shoppers cannot afford the vast majority of what they see does not prevent them from partaking in the fantasy of commensuration that la chopin promote, if nothing else, by means of attractive rows of price tags. (Holbraad 2017, 92)

Seen in these terms, my interlocutors’ interrogations about the cost of consumer items in pounds and dollars might be understood as exercises in something similar to what Holbraad describes, as they found themselves occupying an “economic no-­man’s land between a half-­disintegrated socialist

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system of state provision and a world of capitalist plenty” (2017, 86). They were profoundly aware that they were subsisting on a currency that was essentially worthless outside of Venezuela, but at the same time felt compelled to explore what they would be able to buy if only they could access dollars. Of course, unlike Cuba’s decades-­old system of state socialism, Venezuelans were experiencing the disintegration of a relatively short-­lived experiment in redistributive petro-­capitalism that had always been somewhat contradictory and fragmented. In reality, both the runaway hyperinflation and the increasing role of the dollar were extensions of what had already been occurring prior to the crisis. As I have explained, a black market in dollars had been very much present under Chávez, and it had ultimately been the influx of dollars that powered the government’s social programs and drove economic growth during the revolution’s boom period. But in a sense, it was this very coexistence between the two currencies and the two worlds they represented—­ dependence, limitation, and “socialist” failure with bolivares; abundance, freedom, and “capitalist” possibility with dollars—­that provided the material for these imaginative meanderings. As I have argued throughout this book, an irony of the revolution’s most successful period was that although the government’s extensive social spending lifted millions out of poverty and gave historically excluded communities the sense that they were citizens for the first time, this didn’t necessarily produce the disciplined revolutionary subjects that Chávez desired. Instead, while many working-­class Venezuelans supported Bolivarian projects and initiatives, they also enjoyed having greater access to a world of consumer capitalism that accompanied the oil boom. When that world began to slip away, the things most closely associated with it—­dollars and branded commodities—­took on an even more powerful allure, as a fetishized imaginary of consumption came to symbolize the strange way in which scarcity and abundance coexisted in Maduro’s Venezuela. Crisis Talk (2): The Moral Economy of Los CLAP

In 2016, faced with widespread food shortages, the government took the step of issuing family-­sized bags of subsidized food through newly formed CLAPs (Comités Locales de Abastecimiento y Producción, Local Planning and Production Committee). According to the government, the bolsos of

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heavily subsidized food—­the cost in 2017 was just 4,100 bolivares, equivalent to around a dollar at the time using the parallel rate—­gave each household its staples for one month, the quantity being limited to prevent people selling things on at marked up prices through the bachaqueo. In the first phases of CLAP distributions, each household needed to provide a copy of their cédulas (national identity cards) to a local CLAP committee, which was usually organized through the CC for that community or sector. This committee was then authorized to carry out a local census to ensure that all households were registered. Local people told me how this had something of a galvanizing effect on El Camoruco’s CCs, leading to a renewed period of activity as the community mobilized spokespeople to carry out registrations. The entire process, however, was also fraught with mistrust and suspicion. As my research progressed, I heard numerous accounts—­told at varying degrees of separation—­of corruption taking place within the CLAP distribution process. Some recounted how state officials were refusing to issue new identity cards without bribes, while others reported that MERCAL employees and soldiers from the National Guard were siphoning off large quantities of CLAP food to then bachaquear elsewhere. There were rumors of organized crime being involved as well—­according to some, local gangs were now earning more money from the smuggling of food, gasoline, and medicine than selling narcotics—­and gossip about the fact that some in the community seemed to have more food than others. This crisis talk was often used by individuals to contextualize their own situations, and to show that they were surviving in an environment that was not only difficult in practical terms, but also demonstrably unjust. This was the case when I paid a visit to Edwin, who was still juggling various teaching and private tutoring jobs as he been when I last saw him in 2012. As we caught up in his front room one afternoon, Edwin described how he’d been informed by a CC spokesperson from Sector 4 that, as a single man without dependents, he wasn’t eligible for the CLAP. Edwin’s mother had died since I was last in the community, meaning he was the only permanent resident in the home. But he was unsure about the veracity of this information, and mistrusted the person it came from.4 He was also deeply frustrated by the situation he faced, which involved trying to balance his work commitments with the need to access affordable food: “Sometimes I have

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to buy from the bachaqueo because if I’m working then I don’t have time to stand in a line all morning [for affordable food from MERCAL]. When I get home there’s nothing left, so I have to buy from a bachaquero in the street. It’s arrecho, Mateo.” As Edwin pointed out, buying from bachaqueros virtually rendered his work pointless, since almost all his money would go to paying the inflated prices. His situation underlined the difficulties faced by those who lacked larger support networks, which enabled others to pool resources and divide their time more effectively. The CLAP distributions thus brought moral uncertainties about deservingness and motive to the fore. They also provided a locus point around which long-­standing political grievances took new forms. One afternoon I accompanied Rafael’s brother Morocho to a CLAP registration event that had been arranged in Sector 3. We arrived to find a makeshift marquee in the street, with state officials from SAIME (Servicio Administrativo de Identificación, Migración y Extranjería, Administrative Service for Identification, Migration, and Immigration) seated at laptops and around thirty people waiting to be issued their Carnet de la Patria (Homeland Card), a new digital card that used QR codes to administer the CLAP and other state provisions. The event had been co-­organized by the local CCs, and I was greeted warmly by Ernesto and several other spokespeople from the commune. Ernesto explained that the commune had been formally ratified in 2013 and had a number of projects planned, but that many of these had been paused due to the crisis. “Right now, we’re on all this,” he said, waving his hand at the registration tables. As he did so, I noticed the pictures of Chávez and Maduro that had been hung over the marquee’s entrance, and the handwritten sign that asserted: En este espacio comunal no se habla mál de Chávez (“In this communal space we don’t talk ill of Chávez”). The phrase had become a popular refrain among chavistas earlier in 2017, when Diosdado Cabello—­then the vice president of Venezuela and a senior figure in the military—­asserted in a televised address that state employees and recipients of state services should display the statement in public settings). Situated within the context of the protest movement, his proclamation was regarded by many as a threat to opposition supporters employed by the state and a sign of the government’s growing authoritarianism. The local significance of the statement became clearer a short while later, when Morocho and I said our goodbyes and set off home. We found our-

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FIGURE 8.1  

“In this communal space, we don’t speak ill of Chávez” (Matt Wilde)

selves walking in step with a young woman who lived close to his parents in Sector 1. Morocho grinned as he called over to her, using me as a conduit for the exchange: “Hey Mateo, don’t you think it’s funny when someone who talks badly about Chávez suddenly needs the missions for their food? These opositores [opposition supporters] say the revolution’s garbage, but now they’re all waiting in line so they can get their CLAP, right?” The girl half-­ smiled and sarcastically wished Morocho a good afternoon, before walking away. He then turned to me and explained why he was chiding her: “It used to be that opositores refused to eat food from MERCAL. ‘Ah no, that shit is only for dogs,’ they’d say. Now they’re desperate for the stuff!” Although Morocho knew that the CLAP distributions had become essential to the vast majority of his fellow barrio residents, he nonetheless seemed to regard the exchange as an opportunity to score points against a local opposition supporter. The logic in his argument—­that those who had always denigrated the revolution were now hypocrites for making use of the CLAP—­wasn’t a particularly strong one, since widespread dependence on subsidized food merely highlighted the government’s economic failings in the eyes of many. But that probably wasn’t the point. By highlighting the

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young woman’s history of opposition to the revolution, Morocho seemed to be marking out the boundaries of a specifically chavista moral economy that delineated between those who deserved the government’s support and those who didn’t. His words weren’t said in a vacuum. Throughout 2017 in particular, the speeches of Maduro and other high-­profile government figures were replete with references to treachery. Like many local chavistas, Morocho had often expressed dismay that friends or neighbors chose not to participate in the revolution. But where such frustrations had once reflected an earnest desire for people to show enthusiasm for el proceso, they now seemed to bear the added weight of defending a government that had mismanaged the economy and lost significant support among its traditional base. By invoking Diosdado Cabello’s words in this interaction, Morocho wasn’t only mocking a local political opponent; he was claiming victimhood on behalf of the government. Aquí no se habla mál de Chávez: the statement wasn’t simply about reasserting chavista identity, or even about making tacit threats to opposition supporters who accessed state programs. It was about attempting to control the narrative about what had gone wrong and who was to blame. Contamination and Viveza

If accusations of blame now characterized everyday interactions between chavistas and opositores in El Camoruco, they had also become increasingly common among chavistas as well. In the last few weeks of my research in 2017, a number of encounters involving Rafael and various erstwhile comrades highlighted the reputational damage that he was suffering due to his close association with the chavista state. On the face of things, Rafael was still doing what he had always done. Much of his time during my visit was spent working on the framework for a new initiative in the south of Valencia that was provisionally called the Escuela de Formación de la Producción Participativa (Participatory Production Training School). The project aimed to provide training and infrastructure to stimulate small-­scale urban agriculture in the city’s barrios and was envisioned as a direct response to the crisis in food security. Rafael had been working on the idea for around a year when I returned and described how there was already interest from around a thousand people, including long-­standing community leaders and

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others who were less experienced but eager to get involved. Having built a provisional framework for the project, Rafael was now trying to source political and financial backing for it, chiefly from the chavista block within the Alcaldía de Valencia and the Ministry for Communes in Caracas. His aim was to use state funding to pay specialist community organizers who could train local people in urban agricultural techniques, so that barrios could slowly become more sufficient in food production. The long-­term plan was to link community-­level food production to the CCs and communes, and then scale up to a city-­wide level. The project was typical Rafael, so much so that I felt strangely nostalgic as I accompanied him to meetings and promotional events and listened to motivational speeches that, in spite of the new subject matter, felt entirely familiar. Yet alongside this familiarity, I also felt uncomfortable. Perhaps because I was now more mature as a researcher, I challenged Rafael more than I had in the past, and we had more open disagreements as a result. We discussed the controversies around the recall referendum and the National Assembly shutdown and debated whether the new Constituent Assembly, which was announced via chavista WhatsApp groups while I was in the country, could be considered a democratic process. I found these conversations frustrating, with Rafael largely parroting the government’s lines and blaming everything on the opposition and Donald’s Trump’s economic blockade. I struggled most with the fact that Rafael remained very much an idealist when discussing grassroots politics but was far more reticent to talk critically about affairs at the national level. One evening, as we sat in front of the television eating deep-­friend arepas, he described the connection between his new project and the wider revolution: The problem with Chávez dying is that he didn’t get a chance to take the revolution into the next phase. He’d lifted people up, given them hope, but he couldn’t get the next phase started before he died. The big challenge we have now is: how do we change our consumerist system, our culture of consumerism? The formation of conscience could be something very small and local, like getting the señora on the corner who knows how to cook traditional dishes to show other people in the community how to do it, so that they understand the diversity of things you can do

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with food. It’s about getting away from our dependence on consumerism through these small experiences.

But how can they get away from the culture of consumerism, I asked, when the overvalued currency means that local producers can’t compete with international agribusiness? “If we lifted the currency controls,” replied Rafael, “all the esquálidos would just take their money out of the country.” I started to mention the empresas de maletín scandal as a counterpoint to this argument, but realized that Rafael’s attention had been drawn back to the television, where Maduro was finishing a speech and the music of Ali Primera was playing him out. Rafael sang along, then pointed his bottle of beer at the screen: “You see all those people around Maduro, Mateo?” I nodded, looking at Diosdado Cabello and other members of the president’s inner circle. “One day that’s going to be me.” It was difficult to know whether this was a serious declaration of ambition or not, but it was certainly a way of closing the discussion down. Aqui no se habla mál de Maduro, Rafael seemed to be saying. Although I was by now unsurprised at Rafael’s firm support for the government, such views were by no means the norm among local chavistas. Indeed, many people I spoke to were now highly critical of the government, which meant that Rafael was finding himself at odds with some of those who had been central to his political base in the past. This became clearer to me a few weeks later, when Rafael and Yulmi organized a party at their home. Such events had been regular occurrences during my previous fieldwork stints, and I was hopeful of catching up with old faces I’d been unable to visit. With a few exceptions, however, those old faces were notable by their absence. Rafael speculated that people were struggling with money and that it had been too short notice, and of course it was true that a number of key figures from the past were no longer in the country. But a few days later we ran into an activist called Luisa outside the local bodega. She greeted me warmly and apologized to Rafael for not making the party, but then switched immediately into a tirade of criticisms. She spoke about corruption and inflation, about children going to school hungry, and about young chamos going through the bins looking for their dinner. “This is not what the revolution is supposed to be,” she asserted. “This is not what we struggled for.” Rafael attempted to placate her but could only muster a lame politician’s response

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that did little to calm the situation. “We’re a family in this revolution. And like all families, we have our problems. But we need to stay united,” he said. Luisa rolled her eyes and promised to call by the house later to continue the discussion, but never did. In his original work on moral economies, E. P. Thompson (1971) described the acts of rhetorical and symbolic “levelling” (127) that peasants engaged in to defend the delicately balanced social solidarities that bound communities together. These acts were often directed at those who were deemed to have transgressed morally in one way or another. While Rafael clearly couldn’t be held personally responsible for the crisis, Luisa’s criticisms had a “levelling” quality to them, forcing him to defend the government in front of a queue of people struggling with the very issue that she was highlighting. Her anger was particularly striking to me since she had been one of Rafael’s strongest supporters during the dispute with the commune. A few days later I visited Edwin again and we discussed the changing views of many local chavistas toward the government. I asked him to explain a term that I’d been hearing frequently in everyday conversations: enchufado (literally to be “plugged in”). Well Mateo, someone who’s enchufado is someone who’s connected, someone who’s involved with the government in some way. It’s someone who can consigue [get hold of] things. Right now, there are lot of people who are conectados [connected], who you might call enchufados, and there’s a lot of opportunism, a lot of people taking advantage of the situation. Now, maybe there are also revolutionaries who are committed to el proceso, who echarle bola [work really hard] and still have hope—­ people who get things for the community. But there are others who don’t help at all. So, there are various types of enchufado!

Aware of local political sensitivities, I didn’t ask directly for Edwin’s views on Rafael. But we discussed neighborhood tensions in more general terms, before he said the following regarding Los Hernández: Your friend the concejal [councilor], Mateo, he’s not short of anything. If you go to his house, no joda, his house is well stocked and well maintained all over! But for the rest of us, chúpame la polla [suck my dick]!

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What I earn a week just isn’t enough. But if you ask them, “How’s everything going?” they’ll say, “No, we’re all fine,” because he’s the President of the Camara Concejal and he can find whatever he wants. Esa gente [those people] find what they want, chamo. And his wife with her job in MERCAL, you can see in their house bags and bags of food and no les dan a nadie [they don’t give it to anyone].

While Edwin stopped short of calling Rafael and Yulmi enchufados—­or at least, that sort of enchufado—­he was unambiguous about his resentments. The suggestion that the family might be hoarding food felt like an indirect way of insinuating viveza, which constituted acts of self-­interest to the exclusion of others. If the Bolivarian moral economy had been an attempt to establish a new set of rights and responsibilities between citizens and the state, it had also been about a sense of shared struggle among fellow chavistas engaged in that process. As Edwin seemed to be suggesting, Rafael and Yulmi were running the risk of becoming morally suspect because they didn’t appear to be suffering to the same degree as others. His use of the term esa gente (“those people”) was arresting in this regard: it alluded to those who were removed from the immediate community, those with connections beyond El Camoruco. As Strønen notes, viveza can become apparent not only through economic practices “but also social corruption in the sense of a lack of solidarity, decency, honesty and fair play” (2017, 293). For a leader like Rafael, whose reputation relied on being considered an authentic representative of the popular sectors, such insinuations were significant. To be seen as removed from the social, economic, and moral spheres of ordinary barrio residents was to find oneself at risk of contamination by an untrustworthy government and a corrupted revolution. In his work tracing the link between crime journalism and populism in Venezuela, Robert Samet (2019) argues that the common act of making public denouncements—­denuncia is usually translated as denunciation, accusation, or complaint—­is a means through which “some semblance of the popular will can crystallize” (Samet 2019, 13). Grievances, he asserts, are central to how a sense of being wronged coalesces into tangible political demands. The material presented here shows how grievances had become a regular and even mundane feature of everyday life during Venezuela’s crisis,

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but also that the perpetrators of these perceived wrongs were located in multiple sites, both immediate and removed. Almost everyone engaged in the governance and distribution of resources—­from the central government to the military, state administrators, mission workers, bachaqueros, and local community leaders—­was regarded as morally suspect, as people came to the depressing conclusion that almost no one could be trusted. While accusations of corruption and idioms about viveza had always been present, the crisis had brought such anxieties to the center of barrio social life, producing a political and moral subjectivity that coalesced, above all, around a deep sense of suspicion. As the material in this chapter has shown, by 2017 the dysfunctional and sclerotic nature of Venezuela’s national economy had produced a profound sense of mistrust that ran through myriad spheres of social life. While substantial anger was being directed at the government, accusations and suspicions were also being leveled at neighbors, erstwhile friends, and former comrades. If these varied accusations and complaints were a logical outcome of the country’s predicament, they also reflected a kind of reversion to the mean where vernacular understandings of morality were concerned. Writing about the many scandals involving oil money that followed PDVSA’s nationalization in the late 1970s, Coronil described how phrases such as somos una mierda (“we are a piece of shit”) became common refrains in everyday conversations, as Venezuelans tried to make sense of what was perceived to be a national proclivity for corruption. He attributed this self-­denigrating tendency to deep-­seated cultural anxieties about the relationship between petroleum and Venezuela’s collective moral psyche: “Corruption,” a word that condenses multiple meanings related to the self-­seeking violation of public norms—­from idleness on the job to clientelism and nepotism, from petty theft to blackmail and murder—­has become an endemic structural phenomenon widely accepted as an inevitable part of everyday normality. (Coronil 1997, 39)

As with the cases that Coronil explored, the social and economic problems that now confront Venezuela involve the circulation and evaporation of oil money in ways that often seem opaque, haphazard, and beyond the control of ordinary people. My interlocutors knew that hyperinflation was closely

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connected to the fall in oil prices and the persistence of currency controls. They understood, too, that the economic sanctions against Maduro’s government had significantly worsened the situation. But in everyday exchanges, these macroeconomic and geopolitical issues were often refracted through more localized concerns about how corruption and speculation, both corroborated and suspected, were shaping the quotidian transactions and relationships that people relied on to survive. It was, in the end, the immediate and the tangible that people focused on as they sought to bring the crisis within some kind of moral order. Nicolás Maduro’s government cannot be held responsible for the underlying historical and geopolitical forces that left Venezuela so vulnerable to global cycles of boom and bust. But it can be held responsible for persisting with currency controls long after they were useful, for eroding Venezuela’s democratic institutions, and for using violence against political opponents and the very urban poor it rhetorically valorizes. Maduro’s refusal to accept responsibility for the crisis fueled the circulation of mistrust by deflecting all grievances in the direction of caricatured enemies of the revolution. This left an explanatory vacuum in which deep-­seated cultural anxieties about Venezuela’s national moral character were given new life. Barrio residents were forced to make their lives, plan their futures, and “struggle along” (Desjarlais 1994) within the socially fractious and morally uncertain space that these deflections helped to produce. My final few days in Venezuela encapsulated this sense of struggling along amid circumstances that seemed profoundly out of control. At a family party attended by a large number of Los Hernández, there was an almost defiant sense of celebration. As we watched four generations eating, drinking, and dancing together, Rafael handed me a bottle of cocuy and remarked gleefully: “And this is called a crisis, they say!” But a few days later, as I made my preparations to leave the country, Guillermo called me up to the roof of the house where he liked to go for a quiet smoke in the evenings. After several weeks of stubborn refusals, he had finally agreed to accept some dollars from me. Instead of repairing his car, however, he was using them to buy a ticket to Colombia. We discussed the many struggles he had faced over the last year, and he conceded that he didn’t see any immediate future for himself in Venezuela. “You know, Mateo, Señor Rafael and Señora Yulmi, they’ll always

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support the government. But for me . . . well, one way or another, things have to change. And right now, there’s nothing for me here.” In a sense, the distinct experiences within this household were a good reflection of how barrio residents as a whole were experiencing the crisis. While Rafael and Yulmi were by no means wealthy, they were enchufado in their own way and therefore committed to the revolution come what may. As Guillermo pointed out, their loyalty was logical ideologically and materially, particularly because it was unclear what other options they had. But by the same token, it was equally logical that Guillermo—­and millions of young, working-­class Venezuelans like him—­might see both his future and his loyalties elsewhere. He had never been hugely political, but Guillermo had bought into the Venezuela envisioned by Chávez because it spoke to his own experiences and promised a society in which he might thrive. Yet now unable to make a living in the country, the revolution’s material appeal was essentially dead to him, whatever it may have once offered. Rafael and Yulmi’s home thus housed two divergent realities that coexisted uneasily, as everyday hardship convinced millions of Venezuelans that they would be better off trying their luck abroad.

Nine Beyond the Magical State

Since I was last in Venezuela, life has been hard for my friends and interloc-

utors. A few weeks after my departure in 2017, Guillermo, Cristina, and Rafaela left for Colombia. They settled in the city of Bucaramanga, 200 kilometers from the border, where Guillermo has family connections through his father. At first, the couple were hopeful they could make a good life there. Guillermo found work in a supermarket, Cristina in a café, and they managed to enroll Rafaela in a local school. They liked the city, which according to Guillermo felt safer and “more modern” than Valencia. He described the community they were living in as “like El Camoruco, but much bigger” and was pleased to find other Venezuelan migrants there. But after around a year, things started to become more difficult. Cristina and Rafaela were forced to return to Venezuela when Yulmi was diagnosed with a serious health problem. She thankfully recovered after an operation to remove her kidney, but Cristina and her daughter stayed behind to help Rafael care for her mother. In Bucaramanga, Guillermo struggled to pay the rent on their modest apartment without Cristina’s wages. To supplement his earnings from the supermarket, he decided to start a small business selling street food. He borrowed money from an informal lender to pay for a small mobile kitchen,

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and after finishing his shift each day would spend the evenings selling Venezuela-­style hamburguesas (hamburgers) in the local area. After several months, however, he hadn’t made enough money to pay back his creditors. In a series of desperate WhatsApp messages to me, Guillermo explained that his life was in danger if he didn’t make regular payments. For the next few months, I sent him what I could spare, and he eventually managed to resolve the problem by selling his motorcycle. Cristina and Rafaela returned to Colombia as Yulmi’s health gradually improved, but the couple continued to struggle with low wages and limited work opportunities and started to wonder whether there might be better options elsewhere. When COVID-­19 hit in 2020, the couple found themselves in a similar position to many Venezuelan migrants: unable to work due to lockdowns, and unable to return home due to travel restrictions (Roekel and Koopman 2020). In 2021, after encountering further difficulties, Cristina and Rafaela returned once again to Venezuela, while Guillermo began an eight-­day journey to Santiago in Chile. He paid border guards in Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia before paying a further hundred dollars to cross the Chilean border hidden in a bus. He told me that his journey across the continent had been relatively smooth, but that he’d seen “horrible things” happen to others along the way. When Guillermo finally arrived in Santiago, he found work washing cars in the city center. At the time of writing in early 2022, he is struggling in Chile, where he says life is expensive and anti-­Venezuelan xenophobia is worse than in Colombia. He now plans to try his luck in Spain, where he hopes to save enough money for Cristina and Rafaela to eventually join him. As hard as the migration experience has been for Cristina and Guillermo, they still see their futures outside Venezuela. Like the millions of Venezuelans who have left the country since 2014 (UNHCR 2021), the difficulties and risks abroad are regarded as preferable to the dire circumstances at home. In July 2019, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), headed by former Chile president Michelle Bachelet, published a damning report on human rights abuses and everyday living conditions in the country. As well as highlighting the alarming rise in political imprisonment and police violence since 2014, the report also found that some seven million Venezuelans were in urgent need of humanitarian aid, with substandard public hospitals and insufficient supplies leading to

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unnecessary deaths and the spread of previously controlled diseases such as diphtheria and measles (UNHCR 2021). This state of affairs left Venezuela acutely vulnerable to the impact of COVID-­19, and when the pandemic hit in 2020 one third of the country’s hospitals reported having no functioning water supply. Shortages of gloves, face masks, soap, and sanitizing gel were also cited as major problems by health-­care workers (Human Rights Watch 2020), some of whom took to collecting their own data on infection and mortality rates because they didn’t trust the figures being reported by government (Taylor 2021). While some critics pointed out that the UN report downplayed the impact of US sanctions on Venezuela’s troubles (Hetland 2019), few would now contest the view that Maduro’s economic decisions repeatedly failed to ameliorate the situation. As I have already argued, Bolivarian monetary policies were central to the country’s slide into economic crisis in 2014. There was undoubtedly a rationale for using currency controls and overvaluation in the aftermath of the paro, as a means of preventing capital flight and as a way of maximizing the petroleum revenues available to the state. But as numerous economic observers have argued—­including many on the left—­ these measures continued long after they were economically necessary, for reasons that have never been entirely clear (Weisbrot 2010, 2016). As Gabriel Hetland (2016) points out, one logical conclusion is that the measures were maintained because they offer huge financial benefits to the state and military figures who have enriched themselves by monopolizing the country’s import system—­figures on whom Maduro relies to retain power. Maduro introduced yet another redenomination of the national currency in 2018—­this time known as the bolívar soberano (sovereign bolívar)—­and a few months after the UN report, the president conceded that he was allowing a partial dollarization of the economy, with importers being afforded greater freedoms to access dollars and the right to use them as legal tender within Venezuela (Reuters 2019). Although this shift in policy has meant that commodities are circulating much more freely, most Venezuelans now face problems accessing dollars. Remittances from the country’s large diaspora have become increasingly important to the economy, making up as much as 6 percent of GDP according to recent estimates (Castillo 2022). But most people still experience an insurmountable gap between what they earn and the cost of daily living,

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with the unsubsidized sectors of the economy increasingly priced in dollars rather than soberanos. One recent study by the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello, for example, put the number of Venezuelans living in extreme poverty at 76.6 percent (Encovi 2021, 48). As one friend recently summarized to me, Venezuela is now a “double society” divided between the small number of people who can access dollars easily and the vast majority who cannot. Amid all these issues, Maduro has proved remarkably adept at retaining power in spite of widespread national opposition and substantial pressure from foreign powers. He was reelected in 2018 after winning the country’s presidential election on a record low turnout, but most opposition parties refused to stand candidates, and the election itself was marred by allegations of corruption, vote-­buying, and other irregularities (Charner, Newton, and Gallón 2018). In January 2019, the opposition-­majority National Assembly declared Maduro a “usurper” and announced that Juan Guaidó, leader of the Voluntad Popular party, would become acting president of the country under Article 233 of the Constitution. The declaration led to a lengthy political stand-­off between Maduro’s government and the opposition, with Guaidó apparently holding out hope that senior military figures would eventually break ranks with support from the United States. When this uprising failed to materialize, the two sides agreed to resume talks to resolve the stalemate (Lozano 2021). Regional elections in early 2022 offered some signs that the government was willing to loosen its hold on political institutions, but the extent to which this is a sign of genuine change remains unclear (ICG 2022). Back in El Camoruco, Rafael had stepped back from his political work to focus on caring for Yulmi while she recovered from her operation. Around the same time, he purchased a small plot of land on the outskirts of Valencia and turned his hand to growing food. It wasn’t quite the citywide revolution in urban agriculture that he’d hoped to lead, but in the context of Venezuela’s ongoing crisis, it was something. He contracted COVID-­19 in 2020, and we lost contact for a while when he changed his cellular number. Mutual friends who hadn’t seen him in the community speculated that he might have retired from politics altogether and moved to el campo (the countryside) permanently. Then in May 2021, Rafael reappeared in a WhatsApp message sent to all his contacts, announcing plans for a community-­led response to the pandemic. Accompanied by photos of a mask-­wearing Rafael speaking

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to a group of community leaders, the message detailed plans to build a network of “community prevention brigades” that would support people self-­ isolating and provide access to masks, tests, vaccines, and health services. It was classic Rafael, back to doing the grassroots organizing that he loved best. I was heartened by the message, which underlined his seemingly limitless enthusiasm for problem-­solving and network-­building. I was reminded, too, that whatever happens with Venezuela’s situation at the national level, it is there—­in the care, the resilience, and the collective strength of barrio residents—­that hope for the country’s future is ultimately to be found. A Blessing and a Curse

I have argued throughout this book that the central problem for the Bolivarian Revolution was that its reliance on petroleum exports ultimately entrenched Venezuela in the very position of dependency that its protagonists aimed to overcome. When the fall in oil prices pushed the country into crisis in 2014, Maduro’s government sought political solutions to economic problems, chiefly by trying to head off internal opposition and strengthen its control of the state apparatus. The resulting erosion of Venezuela’s democratic institutions significantly damaged the government’s claims to popular sovereignty, as the revolution’s myriad material and symbolic contradictions unraveled at an alarming pace. From the vantage point of the 2020s, it is perhaps easy to forget that, for all of its many faults in the precrisis period, the revolution inspired progressive movements across the Global South in the first decade of the twentieth century. It also provided a source of dignity and hope for millions of historically excluded Venezuelans who saw significant material improvements to their lives as well as a profound shift in how they were represented in the country’s national imaginary. As Iselin Strønen (2020, 2) argues, the crisis that has so dramatically affected the lives of all Venezuelans over the last few years underlines the profound difficultly in transforming a postcolonial petro-­state into an agent of radical social change. In spite of its early efforts, the revolution was unable to establish either a sustainable national development model or a secure position in the global economic order. But as Strønen also points out:

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The gap between ideological ambitions and actual political and economic unfoldings has to be understood in the context of the multiple conflictive demands and conditions facing the Bolivarian process: confronted with the colonial legacy of lacking social development, entrenched social inequalities, and diverging class interests, as well as economic and productive structures cemented over the best part of the last 100 years, how could the Venezuelan petro-­state overcome those obstacles, reduce its oil dependency, diversify the economy and achieve a more sovereign position within the global economy at the same time? (Strønen 2020, 4)

In the revolution’s most hopeful period, Chávez did take steps to begin extricating Venezuela from its heavy reliance on oil revenues. Strønen notes the major drive to reduce import dependency and work toward food sovereignty under the late president, which was anchored by a swathe of rural land reforms and massive subsidies for small-­scale agriculture cooperatives and social enterprises (Strønen 2020, 16). Yet these efforts were plagued by many familiar difficulties: an inability to compete with imports due to overvaluation, undeveloped internal markets, and widespread corruption and mismanagement at all levels of implementation (Kappeler 2019; Purcell 2013; Strønen 2020, 16–­ 17). A related problem was that the attempt to move away from oil dependency was only one of Chávez’s many projects. At the same time as trying to move toward a different model of political economy, the Bolivarian government was also either placating or fighting national elites, dealing with continued destabilization efforts by the United States, making historic investments in health, education, and welfare programs, and attempting to build new regional economic ties through initiatives such as the ALBA (Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América, Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America). These manifold challenges necessitated the capacity to channel significant sums of money to all manner of national and regional projects, often without sufficient operational expertise or adequate infrastructure to successfully manage them. The result was a bewildering array of new projects and initiatives, many of which were never completed. Asa Cusack (2019) summarizes the wastage that characterized ALBA, for example, as follows: It is not simply that currency appreciation hurt local production, for example, rather that the specific currency regime adopted, with bureau-

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cratically applied capital controls and an overvalued Bolivar—­designed to enforce labour law and protect local industry—­created a parallel foreign-­exchange market that ultimately enabled pilfering of state resources on an almost unimaginable scale. (Cusack 2019, 197)

The Bolivarian Revolution, and arguably the Pink Tide as a whole, was hamstrung by the multiple intersecting struggles it was embroiled in, which ultimately entrenched its reliance on the very development model it sought to overcome. Venezuela’s predicament, like that of most export-­dependent countries in the Global South, is that its national development strategies remain thoroughly entangled in its internal class divisions and in its dependent position in the global economy (Goodale and Postero 2013; Grinberg 2010). This means that its claims for self-­determination are, as Coronil (2011b) observed, caught in “the tension between national conditions of state legitimacy and the international conditions of capital accumulation” (2011b, 25). In this sense, the Venezuelan case offers a particularly bitter example of how emancipatory political projects continue to be obstructed by the legacy of colonial exploitation and the postcolonial structuring of the global political-­economic order. How to account, then, for the second strand to this book’s argument, which is that the revolution actually heightened the deep-­seated cultural anxiety that oil has morally contaminated Venezuela’s social body in profound and lasting ways? In my first two fieldwork stints, I was often baffled that so many Venezuelans, including those who were enthusiastic participants of the revolution, seemed to denigrate themselves, their neighbors, and their country even during a time that was broadly regarded as optimistic. Why, I wondered, did my friends and interlocutors repeatedly insist that corruption, greed, and selfishness had become so deeply embedded in everyday life that they had essentially become embodied national traits? A partial answer to this question can be found by returning to the words of Santiago, one of my neighbors in El Camoruco. In the book’s opening chapter, I recounted Santiago’s assertion that Venezuela’s oil wealth meant it should have “grand avenues, great shops, and beautiful cities,” but that corruption, above all else, had prevented his country from realizing its potential. Santiago’s declaration was typical of how many Venezuelans understand their

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country’s failings in relation to examples of development and modernity they perceive elsewhere in the world. According to this view, only some kind of national moral failing could have caused a country so rich in resources to fall so far short in delivering development to its people. To a degree, Santiago was right. If “corruption” can be taken to mean the illicit appropriation of public wealth into private hands, then this has indeed been a problem for many years in Venezuela (though it is, of course, by no means unique in this). But in wider terms, if the concept is extended to encompass rent-­seeking, then it is not merely illicit appropriation that constitutes the problem but rather the very structure of the Venezuelan economy as a whole. In The Magical State, Coronil (1997, 44–­56) argued that from the 1920s onward, the principal function of the petro-­state was to capture and distribute oil rents. This encouraged and privileged rent-­seeking as a central form of political and economic activity, as different actors competed to siphon off oil money, whether through direct state investment, the recycling of oil revenues through debt-­financing (Coronil 1997, 391), political clientelism, or other indirect means. In the Bolivarian era, rent-­seeking has in many ways become the predominant mode of economic life once again, whether through industrial-­scale acts of currency arbitrage at one end of the scale or the myriad acts of survivalist microspeculation at the other. Through its monetary policies, the revolution has thus incentivized rent-­seeking at all levels of Venezuelan society, in the process reproducing a particular kind of national imaginary about the relationship between money and morality. As Coronil argued about the oil boom of the 1970s: Paradoxically, oil money, the outcome of the activities of some of the most dynamic transnational corporations, reinforced in Venezuela economic perceptions and practices stemming from the Spanish discovery and colonization of the Americas which treated wealth less as the result of productive labor than as the reward for activities not directly connected with production, including conquest, plunder, or pure chance (Coronil 1997, 390).

In this sense, the pervasive popular discourse about corruption—­or corruption as an idiom for rent-­seeking—­can be understood as a vernacular critique of Venezuela’s political economy, expressed through a language of

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contamination. Oil money is regarded as a social pollutant because it is perceived to have produced a society based on the morally ambiguous practice of expropriating wealth through hidden and unproductive means. This, I suggest, explains one aspect of Santiago’s claim, but there is a second key element. He also compared Venezuela to England, making the point that “you have all those things already” and suggesting that this disparity reflected a cultural failing on the part of his fellow Venezuelans. Another significant dimension of Coronil’s work—­and one often overlooked by scholars—­was his desire to challenge the way that Euro-­America has historically presented itself as what he termed “the self-­made embodiment of modernity” (1997, 14). Calling this phenomenon “Occidentalism,” he argued that the self-­representation of the West (or the Global North) as both the origin and the apex of modernity had created flattened and ahistorical binaries that misrepresented the nature of the global economy. These binaries, he claimed, were not the inverse of Edward Said’s (1979) Orientalism, but rather “its condition of possibility” (Coronil 1997, 14). For Coronil, Occidentalism was a mode of representation that produces polarized and hierarchical conceptions of the West and its Others and makes these conceptions central figures in accounts of global and local histories by a series of operations: separating the world’s components into bounded units; disaggregating their relational histories; turning difference into hierarchy; naturalizing these representations; and therefore intervening, however unwittingly, in the reproduction of asymmetrical power relations. (1997, 15)

While his principal objective was to produce an account of Venezuelan state formation and political economy that was located within a global history of colonialism and postcolonialism—­to emphasize, that is, the relational nature of their constitution—­Coronil also offered a framework for understanding how Occidentalism had permeated the country’s self-­ representation in social and cultural terms as well. As Donald Kingsbury (2016) notes, Venezuela’s elites have long been haunted by anxieties about the country’s failure to transform itself into a replica of the Global North in spite of its oil wealth. Such anxieties, he argues, reflect a “coloniality of oil” that “naturalises, hides, and rewrites maldevelopment as underdevelopment.

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It obscures historically-­rooted processes through which the developed world of the North Atlantic has actively hindered economic growth and political independence in the South” (Kingsbury 2016, 423). My contention is that these insights can be taken a step further by understanding how a sense of moral unease about oil wealth has not only shaped elite discourses about development but also popular beliefs about everyday moral experiences and subjectivities. If the coloniality of oil constitutes a national internalization of Occidentalism, then the tendency to self-­denigrate and view Venezuela’s perceived failings through a lens that filters out geopolitics and history is a logical corollary. Here, the cause of Venezuela’s plight is not the globalized reproduction of exploitative social relations, but rather the morally faulty Venezuelan subject. Seen in these terms, the perception that the Venezuelan social body has cursed itself through a Faustian pact with petroleum expresses the internalization of Occidentalism in everyday terms. As people like Santiago grapple for ways to explain their country’s predicament, they inadvertently reach for representations that elide the asymmetrical global relationships through which oil is turned into money. Coronil stressed that a central part oil’s seemingly alchemic power is the erasure of land and nature from accounts of how it becomes a substance of value, enabling the state to fashion itself as a “magnanimous sorcerer” that summons wealth seemingly from thin air (Coronil 1997, 5; Strønen 2020, 19). In everyday social life, the uneven social relationships and global circuits of exchange that produce this value are obscured by the fantasy that oil can simply produce wealth on its own. As such, the pervasive anxiety about oil wealth as a curse that Venezuelans culturally embody can be understood as an attempt to bring an alienating and multiscalar political economy within some kind of tangible moral order. It expresses a vernacular critique of rent-­seeking as a moral-­economic practice and reflects an internationalization of Occidentalist representations of development and modernity. Just as the revolution tried to fill the gap between vision and reality with symbols and words, so the Venezuelan people use idioms of morality to articulate the ambiguous and ephemeral promise of oil money that seems to deliver blessings and curses in equal measure. To live in a postcolonial petro-­state is to be haunted by a myth of shared abundance that can never fulfill its promise in a world as uneven as ours.

Beyond the Magical State 185

The Future in Question

The collapse in oil and other global commodity prices was not only devastating for the progressive currents within the Bolivarian Revolution but also for much of Latin America’s Pink Tide as a whole. From 2015 onward, a “vengeful return to the right” (Escobar 2020, xi) was evident in the defeat of leftist governments in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, amid a wider wave of regressive revanchism that reached its apex in the coup against Bolivia’s Evo Morales in 2019. If this regional shift seemed to signal that the fates of progressive governments in Latin America would forever be determined by the vicissitudes of global commodity prices, it was also emblematic of another tide: that of an emboldened, authoritarian white supremacism. Yet though this trend has been both alarming and dispiriting to witness, it has not been the only significant political emergence in recent years. The breakthrough of climate politics to the political mainstream is an unquestionably momentous development, whatever the shortcomings of global action on climate change thus far. New progressive proposals that call for “doughnut economics” (Raworth 2017), Green New Deals (Aronoff et al. 2019), and radical de-­growth (Hickel 2019; 2021a) coalesce around a new and compelling set of demands: that the climate and biodiversity crises can only be addressed collectively; that the drive for social justice and collective well-­being must be encompassed within planetary boundaries; and that, with political will, states can be transformed into vehicles to meet these interdependent challenges. Such demands offer new political horizons for radical social movements and a new set of challenges for the politics of scale. In Latin America, the right resurgence may yet prove to have been an interruption rather than a wholesale volte-­face: electoral victories for the left in Argentina (2019), Bolivia (2020), Chile (2021), and Brazil (2022) signal yet another shift in a world still wrestling with the impact of the pandemic. What are the prospects for this latest string of progressive governments in the region? And what does the unavoidable need to de-­carbonize mean for states that remain reliant on the export of fossil fuels? Such questions are at the heart of the challenges facing contemporary progressive movements in the majority world, as Bret Gustafson (2020) notes:

186 Chapter Nine

So while divesting from fossil fuels and supporting a Green New Deal can mobilize the left in the US, it is hard to imagine broad-­based social and political support for keeping oil or gas in the ground in Bolivia, Brazil, or Venezuela. Herein lies the structural trap, in which left and right do the bidding of fossil capital. The challenge for revolutionary thinkers is immense: how to imagine a class-­based struggle against imperial capital in contexts of deep inequality and dependence that is also a struggle against the particularly toxic effect of fossil fuels. (2020, 244)

The tensions Gustafson describes here have been visible across Latin America, where the claims of indigenous peoples and environmentalist groups in countries such as Bolivia and Ecuador have clashed with the interests of progressive governments pursuing resource nationalism (Riofrancos 2020). Indeed, Venezuela has been something of an outlier in this regard, with dissenting voices to extractivist policies only really gaining prominence in response to Maduro’s decision to open up new operations in the Orinoco Mining Arc in 2016 (CSIS 2020; Uzcátegui and Balalba Barreto 2018).1 If the relative lack of historical opposition to resource exploitation in Venezuela reflects the country’s deep cultural and economic entanglement with oil, such present-­day controversies offer a grim vision of its immediate future: a deepening of human rights abuses and ecological destruction in the search for alternative streams of revenue. The country’s political situation clearly gives its present predicament a particular dynamic, but the underlying problem remains the same: to what extent can any resource-­dependent state in the Global South enact progressive social transformations that don’t depend so heavily on economically volatile and ecologically damaging exports? It is now clear that prioritizing collective well-­being and a regenerative, balanced relationship with the biosphere must become the foundations on which human political and economic systems are built. If such visions seem utopian, there are already numerous material proposals that set out viable routes toward them, from debt cancellation and the democratization of global economic institutions to the rethinking of finance as a tool for undertaking just transitions (Hickel 2018; 2021b; Lawrence and Laybourn-­Langton 2021). But such proposals can only be made realities by first breaking down the imaginative boundaries that Coronil identified—­between North and South,

Beyond the Magical State 187

between “civilized” and “barbarous,” between “modern” and “underdeveloped”—­so that populations in the Global North come to understand their own fates as entirely bound up with those in the Global South. As Coronil made clear, the denial of the interdependent and unequal ways the world is connected, coupled with the violent cheapening of the “web of life” (Patel and Moore 2017), is at the heart of the problems we now face. Rafael made a very similar point to me when we parted company for the last time in 2017: I think the most important thing for you to reflect on before you leave is that you’ve lived here in this part of the world with people who live in poverty but still have hope. You’re heading for where people live well, really well. But this is at the cost of what? It’s at the cost of other human beings, other human beings who have to work making these things. This is difficult to understand, difficult to see. What you need to do when you get back there, what you need to transmit to the First World, is that it’s one world, one planet.

This reflection brings to mind the “radical relationality” recently articulated by Arturo Escobar (2020), who advocates for the view “that all entities that make up the world are so deeply interrelated that they have no intrinsic, separate existence by themselves” (Escobar 2020, xiii). Whatever the Bolivarian Revolution eventually becomes, there is a deeper underlying politics here that transcends the specific agendas, fortunes, or failures of particular governments or movements. It stresses not only a shared common humanity but also a demand that the connections between that humanity—­that is, our global political and economic systems—­must become genuinely equitable and just. If populations in the Global North are to take such messages seriously, it means coming to terms with our own deep entanglement in the problems facing the majority world. Ultimately, the path beyond the magical state is not one that Venezuelans can walk alone.

FIGURE 9.1   Hugo Chávez and his daughters on the wall of Maria and Manuel’s house (Matt Wilde)

Notes

Chapter 1 1. With the exception of high-­profile political figures, all individual names in this book are pseudonyms. The same is true for the names of local neighborhoods. 2. The Washington Consensus is generally understood to be a set of restructuring principles that undergirded a shift toward deregulation, privatization, and trade liberalization across Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s. It is strongly associated with neoliberalism, which encompasses a similar set of policy objectives (see Goodale and Postero 2013; Hickel 2018). 3. In Marx’s analysis, ground rent is the surplus value accrued from natural resources—­defined as everything from rivers to mines—­that have been monopolized by a landlord. It is generated by differential rents, in which value is determined by the price of the commodity produced from the resource, and by absolute rents, in which surplus value is accrued from payments to the landlord regardless of the land’s fertility or the commodity’s profitability (Coronil 1997, 46–­48; Marx 1968). 4. At the time, this was actually 1,600 bolívares to the dollar, but in 2007 Chávez revalued the currency at a ratio of 1 to 1,000 to facilitate easier accounting transactions. The currency name was also changed to bolívar fuerte (strong bolívar). For the sake of clarity, I use the bolívar fuerte valuation throughout this book. 5. Overvaluation was first used in the 1930s and was adopted again during the 1970s, when a strong currency helped to finance Perez’s investment in infrastructure (Mommer 1988).

190 Notes to Chapters 1–3

6. According to Terry Karl in The Paradox of Plenty (1997), in comparison with economically advanced petro-­states such as Norway, postcolonial states such as Algeria and Venezuela have historically lacked the institutional capacity to effectively manage oil wealth. This has stifled long-­term planning, concentrated wealth in the hands of the few, encouraged corruption, and resulted in a constant oscillation between periods of boom and bust. 7. As Ortner (2016: 60) notes, recent anthropological approaches to ethics/morality have tended to position themselves against the “dark anthropology” of work that focuses on power, inequality, and violence. She argues, however, that some of the discipline’s most promising contemporary scholarship attempts to bring these approaches together. 8. In his definition of moral economies, James Carrier (2018) notes that such spheres can be either whole economies “or part of one in which moral economic activity predominates” (2018: 30). 9. Though Thompson is most commonly associated with the term’s genesis, it was popularized by James Scott (1976), who showed how the moral economies of risk-­averse peasants in Burma and Vietnam worked to informally regulate class relations and economic practices in order to guarantee livelihoods and maintain social harmony, if not outright equality. Chapter 2 1. Given that they were based on data taken before Venezuela’s economic crisis began in 2014, these figures are likely to be significantly different now. 2. The term escuálido means “squalid” but has a number of connotations. My respondents claimed that it referred to both the “squalidness” of the opposition’s campaigns against Chávez and to the physical appearance of those presumed to be his opponents—­thin and scrawny narcissists who aspired to North American ideals of physical beauty. It contrasted implicitly with the round and warm self-­ representation of working-­class chavistas. Chapter 3 1. The Universidad de Carabobo campus is located north of the city’s boundaries, near to the predominantly wealthy areas of Naguanagua, Prebo, El Trigal, and Mañongo. Students traveling from the south of Valencia, where the majority of the city’s barrios are located, face a trip two or three times longer than those who live in the leafy urbanizaciónes near to the campus. This improved with the arrival of direct university buses in the 1990s, but it remains a far longer and more inconvenient journey for those from the barrios in the south. 2. In February 2002, Chávez issued Presidential Decree 1,666, granting those in self-­built barrios the right to claim permanent rights to their homes. In response,

Notes to Chapters 3–5 191

barrios across the country began forming Comités de Tierra Urbana (Urban Land Committees, CTUs), which involved residents collectively submitting proposals to legalize their titles and guard against any future risk of eviction. Although hundreds of thousands of households were reported to have claimed land titles by 2007 (Wilpert 2007, 188), the CTUs in El Camoruco were still only notional entities by mid-­2010, meaning most residents still had no formal land rights. 3. As a result of Venezuela’s overvalued currency and restrictions on access to dollars, a gap between the overvalued bolívar and a second black market bolívar emerged in this period. For those with access to dollars, it was possible to live very cheaply in Venezuela by buying bolívars on the black market. This theme is discussed in more detail in chapter 8. Chapter 4 1. These refrains stem from reports in the national and international media that drew comparisons between Venezuela’s murder rate and the figures for violent deaths provided by Iraq Body Count (IBC). La Nacion, for example, compared Venezuela’s 16,000 reported violent deaths in 2009 to the IBC figure of 4,644 for the same year in Iraq (La Nacion 2010). 2. The term peo is slang that literally means “fart,” but is also used to mean arguments, admonishments, or resentments that exist or have existed between two or more actors. 3. Such warnings were often accompanied by the phrase ojo—­literally meaning “eye”—­which is often used as a synonym for “pay attention” or “stay alert.” 4. The central element in this dynamic, Taussig argued, “lies in the way it creates an uncertain reality out of fiction, giving shape and voice to the formless form of the reality in which an unstable interplay of truth and illusion become a phantasmic social force” (1986, 121). 5. The emergence of such patterns falls in line with the observations of Dennis Rodgers (2006), who shows how the institutionalization of the drug trade in the barrios of Managua transformed street gangs that had previously “defended” their barrios into “exclusive and predatory institutions that brutally imposed order through the creation of arbitrary regimes of terror to protect their drug dealing interests” (2006, 326). 6. Author’s translation. The term portugués refers to the owners of barrio grocery stores (bodegas), which are often owned by Portuguese families. Chapter 5 1. The literal translation of formación is “formation,” but this has various meanings. It can refer simply to “training” in a practical sense but was used by my interlocutors to connote a wide process of ideological, intellectual, moral, and social development of people as a result of studying.

192 Notes to Chapter 5

2. Neighborhood Juntas Pro-­Mejoras (Improvement Committees) were generally formed during or shortly after the land invasions that made up the process of rural to urban migration from the 1950s onward. As Talton Ray (1969) argued, many of these invasions were carried out within embedded clientelist networks controlled by AD and COPEI. Intermediaries with close links to party and/or municipal officials would target vacant land owned by the state or individuals with close links to the ruling party in a given municipality. The land invasions were then granted tacit approval, on the proviso that the party would receive electoral support from the settlers (Ray 1969, 37–­63; see also Karst 1973; Peattie 1968). According to Ray, after an initial flurry of activity during the settlement process, the achievements of the Juntas were often slow and ad hoc, with infrastructural improvements often corresponding to electoral cycles. As a result, they often failed to maintain widespread local participation and slipped into inactivity (1969, 43–­56). 3. The passing of the Organic Law of Municipal Regimes (LORM) in 1978 gave neighbors’ associations the right to exclusively represent their communities and encouraged municipalities to consult neighborhood groups about public works in their localities. 4. Terms such as negrita and blanquito (literally “little black/little white”) are common and generally affectionate terms of address in Venezuela’s popular sectors. They reference a person’s skin color but are not generally seen as discriminatory. 5. Cachaperías sell cachapas, which are sweet cornflower pancakes usually filled with ham, cheese, or pork. 6. Building on Laclau’s (2007) notion of the “empty signifier,” Žižek (1989) defines the master-­signifier as the nodal point that “quilts” the multitude of “floating signifiers” that exist in any ideological matrix. The master-­signifier fixes signs, ordering them within a structured network of meaning so they cease floating and acquire a coherent identity built around a central core (Žižek 1989, 87–­89). 7. Robbins (2007) argues that an anthropology of morality should make a distinction between “stable conflicts” that are inherent to cultural systems and those that involve some kind of competition between new and old value-­spheres. Because stable value hierarchies are upended in such periods, the morality of choice comes to the forefront of social life (2007, 311). 8. Rafael’s instinct about the Blackberry turned out to be correct. In 2013, Edgardo Parra was placed under house arrest after being charged with multiple counts of corruption. The charges concerned contracts that were awarded to various cooperatives and private companies between 2010 and 2013 (Meza 2013), and Parra was eventually jailed for over eight years (El Carabobeño 2017). The news was unsurprising to chavistas in El Camoruco, who always regarded the former mayor as something of an opportunist. 9. In November 2009, Jesse Chacón, a cabinet minister and longtime ally of

Notes to Chapters 5–7 193

Chávez, was forced to resign after his brother was found to be involved in a banking scandal that saw thousands of Venezuelans lose their savings (Grant 2009). Chapter 6 1. Popular barrio assemblies were widespread after the caracazo in the early 1990s, as working-­class Venezuelans searched for solutions outside of the political mainstream (Ciccariello-­Maher 2013a, 100). These assemblies were grounded in a commitment to horizontal modes of organizing (Ciccariello-­Maher 2013a, 18–­20) but also drew on a history of militancy around issues such as public services and state violence. When the MVR set about galvanizing support during the 1990s, it used neighborhood bodies known as Círculos Patrióticos (Patriotic Circles) that were in part modeled on the barrio assemblies. 2. According to Partha Chatterjee (2004), it is by demonstrating a collective identity and expressing the “moral attributes of a community” (2004, 57, emphasis in original) that the residents of urban peripheries can demand a duty of care from the state. 3. Robo is the Spanish word for robbery, theft. 4. Yulmi’s use of the term bolivariano was a play on words. The term was often used interchangeably with chavista, particularly by Chávez. The bolívar is also the name of Venezuela’s currency, so by rubbing imaginary money between her fingers as she spoke, Yulmi was insinuating that those who claim to be bolivariano were in fact only interested in money. Chapter 7 1. Marta Harnecker’s (2008) book Transfiriendo poder a la gente (Transferring Power to the People) documents the process of commune construction in a rural region of Lara State. It details how new popular structures and a localized constitution were built through self-­organization and the cooperation of an “enlightened” local mayor, Julio Chávez. 2. These communities were either those who had yet to sign up to the proposal or those who had yet to form CCs. 3. April 13 was the date that Chávez had returned to power following the coup in 2002. 4. During my first period of field research, the FFM activists I knew received a monthly “scholarship” payment of Bs.F 1,500 (USD $348.83). This was the national minimum wage at the time. 5. Schiller argues that grassroots participants in the Bolivarian Revolution understand the chavista state as “processual,” that is, “as a diffuse and unfolding ensemble of ideas, practices, individuals, and representations that has the potential to improve the lives of the poor and expand their access to meaningful participation in media production and broader politics” (2013, 541).

194 Notes to Chapters 8–9

Chapter 8 1. The term bachaquero comes from the bachaco, a large leaf-­cutting ant found in the Amazon region of Latin America. Bachacos are known for carrying large loads on their backs, a practice that bachaqueros also engaged in when carrying large quantities of subsidized food. 2. Lander’s figures are drawn from the Banco Central de Venezuela’s statistics on imports and exports: www.bcv.org.ve/c2/indicadores.asp (accessed October 29, 2017). 3. SICAD was the acronym for the Sistema de Administración Complementario de Divisas (Ancillary Foreign Currency Administration System). 4. Edwin later discovered, via Yulmi, that this information was indeed erroneous. Chapter 9 1. Covering some 12.2 percent of Venezuela’s total landmass, the AMO region is thought to contain some $2 trillion worth of bauxite, coltan, copper, iron, and gold in its subsoils (Ayala 2017), but the damaging impact of AMO operations has already been felt. Since 2018, there have been reports of elevated levels of mercury in local water systems and numerous human rights abuses involving miners, paramilitary organizations, and indigenous populations (CSIS 2020; Uzcátegui and Balalba Barreto 2018).

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Index

Acción Democrática (Democratic Action, AD), 14, 106, 192 ALBA (Alianza para Los Pueblos de Nuestra América, Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America), 180 Alcaldía de Valencia (Valencia Town Hall), 33, 87, 102–­103, 115, 121, 138, 142, 168 Aló Presidente, 91–­93 antigovernment protests, 2, 3, 39, 154–­ 155, 157, 165. See also guarimbas antivalores (“negative values”), 11, 60, 66, 76, 84, 100 Appadurai, Arjun, 51–­52, 64 Appel, Hannah, 19–­20 Argentina, 185 ASOPRODENCO (Asociación para la Promoción del Desarollo Endógeno Comunitario, Association for the Promotion of Endogenous Com-

munity Development), 106, 128, 129, 130–­142, 193 aspiration 5, 43–­45, 51–­55, 60, 64, 82, 125, 145, 159–­160; and socialism, 56–­65 asociación de vecinos (neighbors’ association), 33, 35, 48, 103–­104, 106–­107, 108, 120, 136 authoritarianism, 2, 23 144, 151, 165, 185 bachaqueo/bachaqueros, 150, 160, 164–­ 165, 172. See also Economic crisis Bachelet, Michelle, 176 barrios (neighborhoods), 2, 158, 178; inequality within, 57–­64, 151; land titles, 56; political organizations, 7, 86–­87; representations of, 30, 44, 59, 75–­78, 84 Barrio Adentro (“Inside the Barrio”), 46–­47 Blom Hansen, Thomas, 139–­140 Boliburgesía, 17, 153

218 Index

Bolívar, Simón, 6, 28, 93, 127, 147 Bolivarian Constitution, 16, 49, 178 Bolivarian economic policies: currency arbitrage/trading, 16, 151–­153, 182 (see also empresas de maletín); currency redenominations, 151, 177, 189; dollar black market, 152, 159, 162–­163; dollar controls, 4, 15, 153, 162, 169, 173, 177; dollarization, 177; dual/ overvalued/parallel currencies, 4, 15, 57, 151–­153, 161, 177, 180–­181, 189; foreign exchange tiers, 152–­153; land/ tax reforms and nationalizations, 17; social economy 17, 129 Bolivarian Revolution, 2, 3, 4, 6, 22, 124, 138, 163, 181, 185, 187; narratives of, 4, 85–­86, 131; police reforms, 70, 83; promises and failures, of 5, 17–­18, 21, 64–­65, 83–­84, 133, 145, 169–­172, 177, 179, 180–­181 (see also economic crisis); popular support, for 6, 163, 179; public investment, 15, 46–­49, 67, 83, 126–­148, 163, 180; social reforms, 4–­5 Bolivia, 176, 185–­186 Boni, Stefano, 7, 124, 138, 143–­144 Brazil, 185–­186 Briceño-­León, Roberto, 69–­70, 78 brokerage, 139–­140. See also clientelism Brotherton, Sean, 64 buhoneros (street vendors), 34, 157 Butler, Judith, 90 Cabello, Diosdado, 165, 167, 169 CADIVI (Comisión para la Administración del Cambio de Divisas, Commission for the Administration of Currency Exchange), 15, 151, 159 CENCOEX (Centro Nacional de Comercio Exterior, National Center for Foreign Commerce), 152

Capriles, Henrique, 154 Carrier, James 20, 190 charisma/charismatic authority, 31, 34, 91, 94, 95, 127, 137–­140 Chávez, Hugo, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 14, 16, 21, 24, 28, 35, 40, 44, 46, 62, 68, 83, 85, 88, 124, 142–­143, 146, 151, 163, 167, 174, 180, 189; accusations against, 17–­18; as a divine being, 38, 95, 139; as a moral exemplar, 24, 86, 90–­95, 112, 127, 131; death of, 2, 147–­148, 154, 168; recall referendum against, 6, 20, 107; speeches of, 63, 91–­93 chavismo, 6, 17–­18, 22, 42, 83, 97, 120, 147, 157, chavistas, 1–­3, 9, 22, 24–­25, 33, 38–­42, 45, 53, 64–­65, 85–­102, 106, 115, 118, 123, 133–­ 136, 138, 143–­144, 146, 148, 169–­172 Chile, 176, 185 CICPC (Cuerpo de Investigaciones Científicas, Penales y Criminalísticas, Scientific, Penal and Forensic Investigations Corps), 158 Ciccariello-­Maher, George, 7, 14, 86, 104, 105, 108, 124, 128, 193 Circulos Bolivarianos (Bolivarian Circles), 87, 90, 107, 114 CLAPs (Comités Locales de Abastecimiento y Producción, Local Planning and Production Committee), 163–­166 class, 1, 6, 10, 17, 20, 30, 35, 37, 41, 46, 50, 59, 61, 67, 68–­70, 100, 129, 134–­135, 142, 154, 180, 181, 186, 190 clientelism, 14, 18, 138–­139, 172, 182. See also brokerage Colombia, 29, 158, 163, 173, 175, 176 colonialism, 181–­183 Comités de Tierra Urbana (Urban Land Committees, CTUs), 106

Index 219

communes/communal state, 105, 126–­148 COPEI (Comité de Organización Política Electoral Independiente, Independent Electoral Political Organization Committee), 14, 87, 106, 192 consejos comunales (communal councils), 2, 22, 33, 87, 103–­125, 126, 129, 131, 137, 141, 146, 164, 165, 168 Cooper, Amy, 7, 46, 157 Consejo Electoral Nacional (National Electoral Council, CNE), 114, 154, 155 Coronil, Fernando, 11–­14, 100–­101, 117, 120, 143–­144, 148, 172, 181–­184, 186–­ 187, 189 corruption, 5, 10, 14, 16, 18, 93, 102, 116–­ 120, 124, 146, 150, 153–­154, 155, 164, 173, 178, 180–­183. See also economic crisis; moral economies; morality; oil Coups: against Chávez in 2002, 6, 15, 17, 38–­40, 45, 69, 107; against Carlos Andrés Pérez in 1992, 5, 24, 38; against Rómulo Gallegos in 1948, 12 COVID-­19, 21, 176–­179, 185 crime, 22, 30, 44, 66–­69, 70, 73, 83, 102, 155. See also insecurity Cuba, 42, 64, 115, 130, 146, 162–­163 Cusack, Asa, 180–­181 Dachevsky, Fernando, 15, 151–­153 de-­carbonization, 22, 185 democracy: liberal, 6, 14, 107, 113; participatory, 16, 104–­125 Denis, Roland, 120, 147 denuncias, 171 economic crisis, 2, 21, 124, 158, 159, 176–­ 178; food shortages, 2, 153, 155, 163–­

166; hyperinflation, 2, 149–­153, 173; poverty figures, 178; sanctions, 156, 173 (see also bachaqueo/bachaqueros; promises and failures of Bolivarian Revolution) Ecuador, 176, 186 El Camoruco, 2, 4, 22, 24–­25, 26, 30–­31, 47, 53, 68, 71, 73–­84, 85, 103, 108, 115, 118, 120, 130, 131, 145, 150, 157, 158, 164, 175, 178 el caracazo, 24, 36–­38, 69 el proceso (the revolutionary process), 7, 42, 49, 124, 167 Ellner, Steve, 6, 14, 17, 47, 108, 109, 113, 120, 140, 147, 152, 153 Empresas de Producción Social (Socially Production Enterprises, EPS), 128 empresas de maletín (“briefcase companies”), 153, 169 empresas sociales (social enterprises), 108 enchufados (“plugged in”), 170–­171, 174 Escobar, Arturo, 185, 187 escuálidos (“the squalid ones”), 41, 53, 118, 169, 190 see also Opositores FAES (Fuerzas de Acciones Especiales, Special Action Forces), 155–­156 formación, 85–­86, 97–­98, 101, 136. See also morality Ferrándiz, Francisco, 44, 72, 75, 80, 82, 88 Fedecámaras, 154 Fernandes, Sujatha, 7, 21, 86, 104, 111 Fifth Republic, The, 16. See also MVR FONDEMI (Fondo de Desarollo de Microfinanzas, Microfinance Development Fund) 108, 109, 112, 130, 145 Fourth Republic, The, 14 Freire, Paulo, 48

220 Index

Frente Francisco de Miranda (FFM), 130–­133, 142, 193 FUNDACOMUNAL (Fundación para el Desarollo del Poder Comunitario, Foundation for the Promotion of Community Power), 108, 110, 121, 128, 130, 131, 146 gangs/gang violence: see insecurity gender inequalities, 49–­51, 108–­112 Giordini, Jorge, 153 Gómez, Juan Vicente, 11 Graeber, David, 135–­136 Green New Deal, 185, 186 Guaidó, Juan, 178 guarimbas, 157 (see also antigovernment protests) Guevara, Che, 9, 91 Gupta, Akil, 119, 147 Gutmann, Matthew, 81 Gustafson, Brett, 19, 185–­186 Hall, Stuart, 81 Harnecker, Marta, 128, 190 Harris, Olivia, 42 healthcare, 4, 176–­177 Hellinger, Daniel, 6, 7, 12, 14, 15, 113, 124, 140 Hetland, Gabriel, 177 Hickel, Jason, 136, 186, 189 Holbraad, Martin, 162–­163 hope, 5, 43, 64, 145 Human Rights Watch, 156, 177 IMF (International Monetary Fund), 36 inequality, 22, 44, 57 insecurity, 4, 22, 27, 30, 44, 66–­84, 146, 155, 164; and police violence 70, 176 (see also crime)

Ivancheva, Mariya, 46–­48, 55–­56 invasiones (land invasions), 29, 141, 192 James, Deborah, 139 Kappeler, Aaron, 180 Karl, Terry, 19, 190 Kinship, 8–­9, 24–­25, 28, 31, 34, 42, 50, 82–­83, 150 Kingsbury, Donald, 183–­184 Kornblihtt, Juan, 15, 151–­153 La Causa R (Radical Cause, LCR), 36 Lancaster, Roger, 88 Lander, Egardo, 109, 152 La Joc (Juventud Obrera Católica, Young Catholic Workers), 35–­36, 48, 103, 136 La Salida (“The Exit”), 154 Lazar, Sian, 8, 90, 104, 119, 138–­139 liberation theology, 35, 88 López, Leopoldo, 154 López-­Maya, Margarita, 37, 106, 109 Los Hernández, 7, 24–­25, 28, 31–­34, 42, 48, 78–­84, 173 Maduro, Nicolás, 2, 7, 14, 23, 150, 152, 154, 155, 156, 157, 165, 167, 169, 177–­178 malandros, 43–­44, 66, 76, 78–­84. See also insecurity Marx, Karl, 189 Mesas Técnicas de Agua (Technical Water Committees, MTAs) 106 Michelutti, Lucia, 34, 95 Migration 21, 158, 175–­176 Miguel Peña 30, 37, 75, 85, 106, 128, 129, 140 Misión MERCAL (Mercados de Alimentos, Food Markets), 47–­48, 51, 61, 160, 166

Index 221

misiones sociales (social missions), 2, 15, 22, 44, 46–­49, 54–­55, 107, 131 modernity, 11, 12, 13, 182, 183, 184 Mommer, Bernard, 11, 189, 190 Montoya, Rosario, 101 Morales, Evo, 185 moral economies, 20–­21, 46, 60, 68, 100, 151, 163–­167, 170–­171, 190. See also corruption; viveza morality, 3–­5, 184; and masculinity, 66–­ 67, 78–­84; and political subjectivity, 3–­5, 8–­9, 10, 19, 21, 24–­25, 34, 42, 46, 64–­65, 85–­102, 115, 123, 128, 143, 163, 172, 184; and religious belief, 35, 63, 85–­90; and revolution, 85–­102, 144, 147; and socialism, 46, 62–­65, 82; and Venezuelan national character, 5, 63, 115, 172, 179–­184 (see also corruption, oil, viveza); anthropology of 19–­21, 98 Moser, Carolyn, 33, 50, 59 Motta, Sara, 104, 111 MPComunas (Ministerio del Poder Popular para las Comunas y los Protección Social, Ministry for Communes and Social Protection), 128, 130, 133, 136, 142, 145, 168 MUD (Mesa de Unidad Democrática, Democratic Unity Roundtable), 154, 155 neighborhoods: see barrios neoliberalism, 6, 17, 46 occidentalism, 183–­184 oil, 2–­3; and ALBA, 180–­181; and consumption, 8, 60, 62, 68, 78, 86, 88, 99, 136, 161–­163, 168–­169; anthropology of, 7–­8, 18–­21; as a blessing and a curse 3, 179–­184; coloniality of, 183–­184; cultural and moral

anxieties about, 3, 4–­5, 9–­10, 13, 22, 62–­64, 86, 100–­102, 105, 115, 116–­121, 124–­125, 127, 147, 172–­173, 179–­185 (see also corruption; moral economies; morality; viveza); dependency, 7, 156, 179, 186; economic distortions related to, 13, 83, 151–­153, 156, 180–­181; foreign oil companies, 11, 15; fossil capital, 186; global oil prices, 2, 15, 21; industry paro (work stoppage), 15, 17, 40, 45, 60, 107, 177; oil money/ revenues/wealth, 3–­4, 5–­6, 9–­10, 13, 21, 23, 45, 52, 62–­63, 83, 101–­102, 105, 116, 120, 123–­124, 136, 160, 180, 182; petro-­capitalism, 21, 45–­46, 65, 163; petro-­democracy, 105, 108, 125; petro-­socialism, 15, 23, 68; political economy of, 22, 68, 156, 183; rent-­seeking, 11, 17, 151–­152, 153, 182, 184, 189 (see also corruption); state revenues from, 12, 152 OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries), 10, 15 opositores (supporters of the opposition), 118, 136, 165–­166, 178 orientalism, 183 Ortner, Sherry, 19, 190 Palomera, Jaime, 20–­21 PDVSA (Petróleos de Venezuela), 15, 45, 47, 51–­52, 56, 160 Pelkmans, Mathijs, 100 personhood, 4, 9, 100, 135. See also morality Pérez, Carlos Andrés, 36, 189 Pérez Jiménez, Marcos, 12 Peru, 176 Pink Tide, 5, 144 151, 181, 185 PNB (Policía Nacional Bolivariana, National Bolivarian Police), 158

222 Index

populism, 6, 91, 171 Postero, Nancy, 112 post-­neoliberalism, 6 poverty reduction, 15 PROVEA (Programa Venezolano de Educación Acción en Derechos, Venezuela Program in Education and Action of Human Rights), 155–­156 PSUV (Partido Socialista de Venezuela, United Socialist Party of Venezuela), 2, 33, 99, 115, 128, 135, 144, 159 Ray, Talton, 86, 128, 192 resource nationalism, 19, 21, 186. See also oil Riofrancos, Thea, 19, 186 Robbins, Joel, 98 Rodgers, Dennis, 68, 69, 70, 82, 190 Rosales, Antulio, 19, 156 SAIME (Servicio Administrativo de Identificación, Migración y Extranjería, Identity Service for Identification, Migration and Immigration), 165 Sala de Batalla Social (Social Battle Center), 130–­142 Sambil, 63, 68, 72, 99 Samet, Robert, 7, 41, 69–­70, 155, 171 sembrando el petróleo (“sowing the oil”), 11–­13, 21 Shakow, Miriam, 143 Schiller, Naomi, 7, 18, 49–­51, 145, 147 Scott, James, 190 Smilde, David, 80, 88, 91, 108, 150, 153 social mobility, 44, 56–­65, 159–­160

socialism, 24–­25, 33, 45, 100, 163; of the twenty-­first century, 9, 104 Spear, Mónica, 155 Strønen, Iselin, 7, 61–­63, 99, 179–­180, 184 Sutherland, Manuel, 153, 154 Thompson, E.P., 20–­21, 170 Trump, Donald, 168 unemployment, 4, 30. See also economic crisis Unidades de Batalla Electoral (Electoral Battle Units), 87, 107 United Nations (UN), 21, 177 urbanizaciones (private urban developments), 30, 134, 142, 129, 190 USAID, 155 Valencia, 2–­3, 16, 26, 28–­30, 31, 37, 38, 40, 48, 67–­68, 70, 72, 89, 97, 99, 107, 132, 156, 157, 167, 175, 178, 190 Velasco, Alejandro, 7, 86, 107 Verkaaik, Oscar, 139–­140 Vetta, Theodora, 20–­21 viveza, 60–­62, 167–­172. See also corruption; moral economies; morality; oil Violence: see insecurity Washington Consensus, 6 Weber, Max, 60, 91, 139 xenophobia, 176. See also migration Zigon, Jarrett, 100 Zubillaga, Veronia, 72, 78, 156 Zúquete, Pedro, 91–­92, 93