Venezuelas Polarized Politics: The Paradox of Direct Democracy Under Chavez 9781626377165

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VENEZUELA’S POLARIZED POLITICS

VENEZUELA’S POLARIZED POLITICS The Paradox of Direct Democracy Under Chávez Ana L. Mallen María Pilar García-Guadilla

Published in the United States of America in 2017 by FirstForumPress A division of Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.rienner.com

and in the United Kingdom by FirstForumPress A division of Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 8LU

© 2017 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mallen, Ana L., author. | García-Guadilla, María Pilar, author. Title: Venezuela’s polarized politics : the paradox of direct democracy under Chávez / by Ana L. Mallen and María Pilar García-Guadilla. Description: Boulder, Colorado : FirstForumPress, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017008367 | ISBN 9781626375895 (hc : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Political participation—Venezuela. | Direct democracy—Venezuela. | Polarization (Social sciences)—Venezuela. | Chávez Frías, Hugo. | Venezuela—Politics and government—1999– Classification: LCC JL3881 .M35 2017 | DDC 987.06/42—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017008367

British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book was produced from digital files prepared by the author using the FirstForumComposer.

Printed and bound in the United States of America

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992.

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Contents

Preface

vii

1

Polarization and Democracy in Venezuela

2

Participatory Democracy and the Public Sphere

25

3

Political Ghettos in Caracas

53

4

Media Wars

71

5

The Fragmentation of the Public Sphere

97

6

The New Student Movement: Dreams of Unity

119

7

Unabated Polarization in Venezuela

137

Bibliography Index About the Book

1

151 163 171

v

Preface

This is not the book we intended to write. Our collaboration began in 2000 at Simón Bolívar University, when María Pilar received funding from the Venezuelan National Fund for Science and Technology (FONACIT) to coordinate an interdisciplinary research project on the emergence and consolidation of new forms of political action, political projects, and conflicts resulting from the 1999 Venezuelan Constitutional Process. Ana, who participated in that research, later developed the framework for analyzing polarization in the Bolivarian Republic. In 2000, we set out to understand the sociopolitical project underpinning the Bolivarian Constitution and the increased organization and mobilization of both Chavistas and their Opposition, as they sought to prevent or facilitate Chávez’s policies. Drawing from social movement theory, we thought to analyze the ideological, organizational, and strategic models used in the constitution-making process to expand citizen rights. We were curious how the new rights enshrined in the constitution, and the new participatory-protagonist model developed in it, would transform the relationship between state and society. By 2002, we understood that something more profound was taking place. Anecdotally, we began to see ruptures in social relationships. Within Simón Bolívar University, we witnessed professors on different sides of the conflict, no longer willing or able to engage in dialogue, harassing each other for supporting or decrying the regime of Hugo Chávez. When we defined the April 11, 2002, incident that deposed Chávez for forty-eight hours as a coup d’état, we were reproached. We found ourselves dumbstruck when liberal-progressive academics outed our assistant, who sympathized with Chávez, when she decided to wear a “red blouse”—the color that came to be identified with the Chavistas. We witnessed values compromised for the “greater good” and watched scholars justify undemocratic practices in order to protect or denounce the Bolivarian Revolution. We realized that everyday encounters required careful handling. We had to preface our statements with disclaimers, listen carefully, and use increasingly technical language to engage in debate, so as not to offend

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those who might disagree with our analyses. Public engagement and debate became increasingly difficult as we had to carefully code our points of view. We found that to transit between the two groups, we had to approach everyday interaction as an ethnographic study. As the polarization took hold, we watched it infiltrate the social relationships that underlie public and private dialogue. It created coalitions among political parties, civil society groups and grassroots movements, public and private institutions, and citizens themselves, positioning them into two camps that increasingly made it socially unacceptable to engage with and relate to the Other. We found polarization to be such a pervasive and perverse phenomenon that it divided cities into Chavista and Opposition enclaves. Politicians and political parties coalesced into different camps, as did media and journalists, universities and students, unions and workers. We saw the conflict engulf social movements and compromise their values and platforms for change, as they too morphed into pro- and anti-Chávez camps. In this increasingly conflict-filled environment of polarization, we found ourselves outliers. The FONACIT project had successfully integrated an interdisciplinary and ideologically diverse group of scholars interested in social and political change, who, as the conflict unfolded, would eventually work to either further the Bolivarian Revolution or actively oppose it. The diversity of their networks provided us entry to the cosmology of Venezuelan political actors, Chavista and Opposition. It was this unrestricted access, and the trust that we invested in each other, that allowed us to reflect on the causes and consequences of polarization in Venezuela, its ties to direct democracy, and what has now been called Twenty-FirstCentury Socialism. Based on the research we had conducted, and with the help of our FONACIT colleagues, we had a vantage point from which to explore the acute polarization that Venezuelans experience in their daily lives. What we found was that the increased polarization endured by Venezuelans after the 1999 Bolivarian Constitution was crucial to understanding the conflicts between Chavismo and the Opposition, and was the key to the massive mobilizations in favor of and against the regime. We attempt in this book to reconstruct the polarization process in Venezuela through a critical reading of its causes and consequences in the Chávez era, focusing on the first decade of the Bolivarian Republic. We wrote the book to shed light on the complex set of circumstances that gave rise to the ongoing conflict. However, in true constructivist fashion, we do not claim that our work on Venezuela or the theoretical framework we constructed to analyze this historical period constitutes a definitive account of how polarization emerges. We do not claim polari-

Preface

ix

zation in other circumstances will take a similar form. Nor do we provide evidence that polarization will have similar impacts on political systems when it emerges in different historical contexts. Instead, we hope the patterns identified in this work will inform scholarship on the subject for others to explore, and provide political and social activists a better understanding of polarization processes in the hope that what transpired in Venezuela can be avoided elsewhere. We would like to thank our colleagues and friends who participated in the FONACIT project for their generosity and dedication to social justice: Maryluz Guillén, Melissa Abache, Claudia Rodríguez Guilly, Ana Ligia Duarte, Ana Maldonado, Carolina Salazar, Rosangel Alvarez, and the late Alexandra Morris, who contributed both theoretically and methodologically to our work. We would also like to thank Marly Briceño, Débora Calderón, Yolanda D’Elia, Elba Julieta García, Carlos Enrique Lagorio, María Alexandra López, Susana Morris, Yunitza Dávila, and María Gabriela Pinzón, who opened doors to different networks and made valuable contributions to the project. This book would not be possible without the work of students from the Universidad Simón Bolívar, who gathered and systematized information. Among them: Yulibeth Alvarez, Verónica Contreras, Marco Ferrara, Marian Fleitas, Jessica García, Elena García Terrero, Carolina García, Melissa Figueroa, Albanys López, Sofia Marichales, Karina Montes, María Gabriela Finch, Angélica Schaper, July Tovar, Alba Tovar, and María Eugenia Vásquez. Finally, we would like to recognize the valuable supportive secretarial work of Dolores Misel. We would like to thank our colleagues Jeffrey Goldfarb, Carlos Forment, and Naomi Schiller for enlightening our assumptions on polarization in Venezuela, and Daniel Hellinger and Eduardo Silva for their critical reading and helpful comments. We dedicate this book to our colleagues and to the people of Venezuela, who continue to work to fulfill the dream of a more just, egalitarian, and plural democracy.

1 Polarization and Democracy in Venezuela

Ask Venezuelans to explain the violence among ordinary citizens that took place in 2002 and 2003 and you will get multiple answers. Many speak of the conflict between supporters and detractors of Hugo Chávez as the result of a class struggle between the haves and have-nots. Others define it as an ideological struggle. Depending on their political persuasion, Venezuelans might characterize the conflict as a struggle between the people and their democratically elected government, or an oligarchy reacting to the loss of its power. Or they might explain the violence as a democratic society defending itself against an authoritarian regime. Frequently, the conflict is explained as the inevitable result of an elected demagogue who exacerbates class differences, stirs up historical resentments, and shapes reality to justify his lust for power. In the years we have spent studying the causes and effects of polarization during the Venezuelan Bolivarian Revolution, we have found (and promoted) three recurrent explanations that account for the intense animosity that characterized relationships between ordinary citizens. The first and most popular explanation, advanced by academics aligned with the Opposition,1 alleges that the antagonism between citizens is directly related to Hugo Chávez’s divisive rhetoric (Molero de Cabeza 2002, Madriz 2000, Tarre 2005, Bolivar 2008, Castañeda and Morales 2008). On this account, Chávez is understood to have discursively manipulated divisions along class (and racial) lines in an attempt to amass greater power—by appealing to the poor, and explaining their extreme poverty as the result of the greed and avarice of the elite and the middle-class. According to critics, evidence of this strategy can be found in the “aggressive and oftentimes violence [sic] of his texts, as well as the constant appeal to irony and [the] disqualification of his adversaries” (Chumaceiro Arreaza 2003, 25). In

1

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Venezuela’s Polarized Politics

essence, this view posits that President Chávez’s rhetoric incited class warfare, leading critics to assert, “it seems a commonsense truth that President Chávez leads a movement founded on class hatred…to the point that the country seems submerged in a state of confrontations between unknown civilians in the twenty-first century” (Madriz 2000, 70).2 A second explanation, more popular among supporters of the regime, posits that Chávez’s rhetoric and public policies, focused on the historical exclusion of Venezuela’s underclass, simply shed light on the country’s inequalities. In this version, the divisions between the rich and the poor in Venezuela predate the conflict. In his exposition of his motives for aligning with the Bolivarian government, Venezuelan architect and poet Farruco Sesto articulates this position. There was an important sector of Venezuelan society, a great part of the middle class…that lived in Venezuela as if in a private club. Sheltered in their particular habitat by impassable walls, even if they were imaginary, with all luxuries at their disposal. They refused to admit the reality that wreaked havoc outside those walls…Misery, ignorance, desperation, [and] abandonment, spread out beyond the limits of the club. But within [the walls] that sector of the middle-class, [either] blinded or pretending not to know, enjoyed a foolish private paradise. Sheer stupidity! For one sphere and another, both parts of a single social system, were not disconnected but were strongly related. The easy riches on one side had to do with the poverty on the other. The supposed civility of those that wielded power, information and resources had to do with the calamity of the majority. Two countries coincided in time and space, but one did not want to know about the other, it did not need it emotionally and pretended it didn’t exist (Sesto 2006, 9– 10).

Chávez himself has claimed that “the polarization between the rich and the poor was created by capitalism and neoliberalism, not by Chávez” (cited in Oppenheimer 2005, 262).3 Polarization, once a latent feature of Venezuelan life, manifested itself in the conflict. A third explanation points to the exacerbation of class cleavages suffered by the Venezuelan republic in the 1980s as the source of the conflict (García-Guadilla 2003 and 2007, Ellner 2003). Generally linking Chávez’s Bolivarian regime to Latin American populism, the argument recognizes the socio-economic conditions underlying the election of Hugo Chávez in 1998. This explanation understands the election of Chávez as the culmination of a series of political events catalyzed by the decline in oil revenue in the 1980s, which resulted in violent riots in 1989.4 Political instability followed the economic

Polarization and Democracy in Venezuela

3

downturn: the legitimacy deficit suffered by Venezuela’s democratic regime resulted in two coups d’état (Vilas 2001, Weyland 2002, Roberts 2003 and 2006, Ellner 2004, Arenas and Calcaño 2006, Hawkins 2010). While correct in their assertions, the arguments above cannot fully explain the thoroughgoing polarization of Venezuelan society under Hugo Chávez. There is no denying that in Venezuela, as in most of Latin America, there are metaphorical and literal walls that divide the rich and the poor, distorting each group’s perception of the collective wellbeing. Increased socio-economic inequalities in Venezuela resulted in the election of a new political figure whose charisma and discourse was reminiscent of twentieth century Latin American populist regimes. We cannot deny that the president’s confrontational discourse, the enduring social inequalities, and the economic crisis of the 1980s contributed to polarization in the Bolivarian Republic of Hugo Chávez, but they do not explain how everyday Venezuelans were transformed into objects of polarization. To delve further into our subject matter it is necessary to understand what is meant by polarization and an object of polarization. In this work, we define a public sphere5 as polarized when all forms of public social interaction are interpreted through antagonistic political narratives.6 The term objects of polarization refers to individuals or collectives who act in the public sphere in accordance with these antagonistic narratives. The three explanations proffered above cannot fully account for a polarization so severe that the discourse and actions of individual citizens, and of organized communities, are reduced to their perceived political affiliation. A political discourse—even when disseminated through propaganda—cannot prevail as the dominant discourse in the public sphere if it does not gain currency among the general public. In addition, socio-economic inequality is not unique to Venezuela. In fact, vitriolic political discourse and pervasive socio-economic differences are found in much of Latin America and the developing world. While the increase in socio-economic inequality experienced by Venezuelans in the 1980s and 1990s certainly laid the foundation for the conflict, it would be erroneous to conclude that the polarization of Venezuelan society resulted solely from the exacerbation of class cleavages. As will be demonstrated, the antagonistic stance of pro- and anti-Chavistas did not result solely from socio-economic inequality. The gap between the rich and the poor cannot fully explain how the differences between these two groups became irreconcilable, or why each faction interpreted life under Chávez in such disparate ways. Divisions along class, gender, and race, discursive antagonism, and social segregation can be found in virtually all societies. And barriers to

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Venezuela’s Polarized Politics

equality and justice can be found at equally alarming levels in other Latin American countries. If we equated polarization with inequality, we would find similar antagonistic forms of social interaction throughout the region and in different historical periods. Polarization in Venezuela describes a state of heightened tension between citizens, whose very subjectivity is subsumed under their perceived political affiliation. How then are we to understand the transformation of subjects into objects of polarization in Venezuela? It is difficult to grasp the magnitude of social forces at play in a polarization process, for they must occlude the diversity of subjects in a public sphere and transform multiple narratives and actors into simple polarities. After all, the public is the sphere of the commons, of the collective good. It is a point of intersection where individuals share both unique and common experiences (Arendt [1958] 1973). It is the space where we reveal ourselves to others as social beings (Goffman [1956] 1959). Societies are constituted by a plurality of actors that interact in different social milieu, undergo diverse experiences, and react to them in different ways. Sociologically speaking, polarization does not do away with the diversity inherent in a society, but it colors the way a society interprets social interactions, giving way to the transformation of subjects into polarized objects. To explain the polarization of the public, it is important to understand the role of communication and how multiple publics unfix discourse to allow diverse interpretations of a message. Within political discourse, individuals speak with the direct intent to inform and persuade others. Political discourse attempts to provide a specific interpretation of events. However, despite the intent of the speaker to deliver a specific account of events, receptors of political discourse can and do interpret their message in multiple ways. As Habermas (2000) reminds us in his Theory of Communicative Action, interpretation is colored by individual experience. The plurality of experience within the human condition gives way to different narratives within the public sphere. Using these narratives, receivers decide on the validity of claims and structure their interpretations. Narratives, as Ricoeur (1986) reminds us, are specific interpretations of a discourse or event that exclude all other possible interpretations, thereby providing cogency to the complexity of social reality. While narratives may exclude alternate versions of social reality, they themselves are fixed neither in content nor in time. The result is a vibrant public sphere wherein diverse publics compete to disseminate and make hegemonic (however temporarily) their specific narrative of social reality.

Polarization and Democracy in Venezuela

5

Within a polarized public sphere, two antagonistic groups or publics compete to make their narrative of social reality hegemonic. While a multiplicity of narratives may coexist alongside the two dominant publics, the latter limit the possibility that any alternate narrative can prevail, or even appear, within the public sphere. As we will discuss in this work, in the case of Venezuela, the inability of any alternate public to compete with and prevail over each dominant antagonistic public of supporters and detractors of the Bolivarian Revolution transformed individuals into objects of polarization. Regardless of the plurality at the level of subjective experience, within the Venezuelan social imaginary, social actors and their public discourse were evaluated based on the narratives of each dominant public. This resulted in the understanding of individual traits as objects of polarization, that would be associated with a specific political affiliation and/or constituency. Can the polarization process explain the violent confrontations between ordinary citizens in Venezuela? In her speech for the Center of Latin American Studies in 2002, at the height of the political conflict in Venezuela, prominent Venezuelan social psychologist Mireya Lozada explained that at the center of the polarization process was the understanding that the Other was in fact the enemy. In her speech, Lozada listed a number of characteristics of Venezuela’s polarization that included: the prevalence of stereotyped perceptions; a strong emotional charge; a personal investment in the conflict; a breakdown in common sense; the forceful affiliation of diverse groups within a political faction; exclusion, intolerance and confrontation within groups or institutions; increased solidarity within groups as a result of confrontation with others; mutual negative perceptions; hostile or nonexistent interactions; and latent or manifest conflict (Lozada 2002). In other words, the process of polarization requires that societies replace pragmatic politics, calculated risks, rational behavior, tolerance and plurality with a Schmittian-styled existential struggle where “the specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.”7 Within this conception of politics, the antithesis between friend and enemy can take multiple forms. An enemy may be perceived as “morally evil, aesthetically ugly or economically damaging”—but in each case the actions of “the enemy” must be judged to determine whether “he intends to negate his opponent’s way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one’s own existence” (Schmitt [1927] 1996, 26–27). We will argue that the election of Hugo Chávez ushered in a new understanding of politics in Venezuela, wherein the citizenry viewed the

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Venezuela’s Polarized Politics

survival of democracy, of their future, and of their way of life to be at stake in political victory or defeat. Polarization in the Time of Hugo Chávez

When Hugo Chávez entered the public sphere as a presidential candidate in 1998, he promised to institutionalize a political demand for regime change that had emerged in the 1970s, and which called for increased citizen participation in the political decision-making process. Once elected, Chávez set out to transform Venezuela’s representative democracy into a “participatory-protagonist democracy.”8 In 1999, he convened a National Constitutional Assembly to enshrine the rights of citizens to participate in politics without the mediation of their elected representatives. The Bolivarian Constitution of 1999 enacted a series of plebiscitary measures aimed at exerting citizen control over different branches of government, including the executive.9 The changes in the institutional structures informally but effectively created a “popular” branch able to hold governments accountable to the will of the people.10 The transformation from a representative to a participatory democracy based on direct forms of citizen participation in the political sphere was the culmination of the decades-long effort by Venezuelan civil society to reform the country’s democratic regime. This ended decades of political stability. Venezuela’s pre-Bolivarian democracy had been established after a civil-military coup ousted Dictator Marcos Pérez Jimenez from power in 1958. The foundation of that fledgling democracy was the Pact of Punto Fijo, a political agreement that safeguarded the interests of political parties, the economic elite, the military, and the church.11 From this pact, meant to ensure peaceful coexistence, Venezuela’s founding fathers established a constitutional government that implemented a democratic system based on the ideals of representative democracy, the separation of powers, and checks and balances. Financed through the royalties the state received from petroleum, and intended to maintain political stability between powerful economic interests in the country, the resulting democracy was characterized by a loyal opposition, and a corporatist system of economic redistribution (Neuhouser 1992, Romero 1997). This carefully crafted pact between Venezuela’s political elites eventually entered a state of crisis. By the mid-1970s, the Puntofijista regime suffered a breakdown as the price of oil worldwide decreased, hampering the ability of the Venezuelan state to continue its informal redistributive practices, and prompting organized citizens to demand the decentralization of state power. By the 1980s, the economic crisis, and

Polarization and Democracy in Venezuela

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the political leadership’s inability to understand civil society’s demand for greater political power, further fueled the demand for reforms. In the 1980s and throughout the 1990s, local neighborhood organizations were joined by feminist organizations, human rights NGOs, business associations, popular organizations, and networks of liberal democratic groups seeking to democratize Venezuelan democracy (Gomez Calcaño 1987, García-Guadilla and Roa 1997, García-Guadilla and Silva 1999, García-Guadilla 2005). While the demand for political reform, aimed at increasing government accountability and giving the citizenry a larger role in municipal decision-making, began primarily as a middle-class demand, the economic downturn pushed political reform to the forefront of the national agenda. The economic downturn in the 1980s began with the dramatic devaluation of Venezuela’s currency on Black Friday (February 18, 1983), and reached a low point in 1989 when president Carlos Andrés Pérez, under the tutelage of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, announced he would implement a series of neoliberal economic reforms aimed at limiting state control over the economy. Riots resulted provoking a decade of political turmoil that culminated with the election of Hugo Chávez in 1998. On December 6, 1998, Hugo Chávez Frías was elected president of Venezuela with 56 percent of the popular vote. Capitalizing on his popularity, Chávez embarked on the task of transforming Venezuela’s democracy. Consonant with the demands of civil society, he promoted citizen participation in the government’s decision-making process. By employing concepts such as “co-responsibility” and “co-governance,” Chávez preached plebiscitary measures as a way of complementing political representation. From 1998–1999 Chávez’s confrontational style and his radical policies generated high levels of popularity and support among the citizenry.12 What Chávez offered was exactly what the previous regime had denied Venezuela’s population. This attested to his willingness to support the demands for regime change and participatory democracy that Venezuela’s civil society and citizenry had pursued. With high approval ratings, despite institutional constraints, and a strong political opposition able to contravene his decisions, in the eyes of many, “Chávez displayed greater respect for democracy than many other leaders who have cultivated a charismatic relationship with the disenfranchised” (Ellner and Hellinger 2004, 218). Critics of his government (rightly) argued that the president’s Bolivarian Revolution established a more conflict-ridden and divisive

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form of doing politics, and derided his government for refusing to compromise on its political-ideological program.13 The tendency to embrace or co-opt dissenting opinions that prevailed under the Puntofijista regime gave way to Chávez’s readiness to delegitimize and/or eliminate all objections to his program by isolating reformminded Opposition leaders and classifying them as hardliners. As Chávez struggled to construct his new democratic regime, he upset the balance of power among different political and economic interests and did little to assuage the tensions that arose from his actions. Forging ahead with his Bolivarian Revolution, he remained faithful to his ideological program, refusing to compromise in exchange for political stability. Leaders of the old regime went on the offensive, attempting to regain control of the country. In December of 1999, Venezuela’s participatory democracy, enshrined in the Bolivarian Constitution, was ratified through a popular referendum. “Participatory-protagonist” democracy officially replaced Puntofijismo´s representative democracy. Having won the presidency through a landslide victory, Chávez was symbolically mandated by the electorate, but the road to Venezuela’s new democratic regime was fraught with controversy. Chávez’s controversial style led to a string of political conflicts that began as soon as he took office. In January 1999, during his inauguration, Chávez swore on the 1961 Puntofijista Constitution to enact “necessary democratic transformations,” and announced he would sign a decree for a referendum to seat a Constitutional Assembly. Chávez capitalized on his electoral victory and utilized his presidential prerogatives to ensure his coalition, the Patriotic Front, obtained a considerable majority within the new Constitutional Assembly (Maingón et al. 2000, García-Guadilla and Hurtado 2000).14 Ratified on December 15, 1999, the Bolivarian Constitution was approved with 71 percent of the votes cast (and a 54 percent abstention rate). The president parlayed his popularity into another resounding victory during the 2000 “mega-elections.” After the ratification of the 1999 Bolivarian Constitution, on July 30, 2000, a new general election of all constituted powers was held to re-elect authorities at the national, regional, and local levels. Only two years after being elected, in 2000, Chávez won his first re-election with 56 percent of votes cast, and his coalition the Patriotic Front (Polo Patriótico) won close to 70 percent of the seats in the National Assembly (Consejo Nacional Electoral 2000, 2000a). The president´s coalition won seventeen of twenty-three governorships as well as the mayoralty of the city of Caracas (Consejo Nacional Electoral 2000b, 2000c).

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With considerable control over different levels of government, Chávez embarked upon the task of drafting laws to institutionalize the Bolivarian Constitution. A string of controversies ensued as politicians and civil society Opposition leaders began to contest his interpretation of the charter. First, a debate emerged over the ratification of appointed high-level government officials. In November 2000, the National Assembly proposed that an oversight committee to ratify non-elected authorities be comprised of 15 National Assembly representatives and 6 civil society representatives. Leaders of Venezuela’s civil society alleged the proposed composition violated the spirit of plural representation outlined in the constitution and asked the Supreme Court to impugn this proposition (Tribunal Supremo de Justicia 2000). In early 2001, a second controversy emerged as a Chávez-dominated National Assembly introduced several bills to reform Venezuela’s education laws to include a definition of education that extended beyond traditional instruction in math and science to include “a humanistic and cooperative perspective” to promote “citizen participation and social solidarity and foment intercultural dialogue and ethnic diversity” (Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deportes 1999, 39). Liberal groups within civil society interpreted the move as an attempt to imbue the education law with a specific leftist ideology, and incited middle-class protests against the government numbering in the tens of thousands (Mallen 2003). That struggle set the precedent for the conflict that would follow. The Movimiento 2001 (2001 Movement) to “defend” Venezuela’s educational system strengthened coalitions between political and civil society Opposition leaders, and gave the latter a leading role in the public sphere; it positioned the conflict as an ideological struggle; and it generated the belief that the national government was willing to interfere in the private sphere of citizens. In sum, the movement acted as the backdrop against which the narrative of the Opposition was constructed.15 The Opposition protests gained momentum after the National Assembly passed the Ley Habilitante (Enabling Law) in November of 2000. The measure granted Chávez the power to decree a series of laws that would regulate economic and institutional affairs (Gaceta Oficial de la República Bolivariana de Venezuela 2000). The decree resulted in 49 laws that implemented a new legal order in line with Chávez’s Bolivarian program. Two new laws garnered the most attention: the Ley Orgánica de Hidrocarburos (Law of Hydrocarbons) and the Ley de Tierras y Desarrollo Agrario (Land and Agrarian Development Law). Both of these measures affected important economic interests within

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Venezuela’s Polarized Politics

Venezuela, stirring them against Chávez.16 The Enabling Law resulted in the first Opposition-organized national strike against the government on December 10, 2001. The hostilities between the Opposition and groups sympathetic to Chávez’s government (or Chavistas) escalated, resulting in the April 2002 coup d’état and the 2002–2003 national strike, which revealed the degree of polarization within Venezuela. How Direct Citizen Participation Resulted in Polarization Within the Bolivarian Regime

In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas (2000) reminds us that the shape of the public sphere in nineteenth century European countries stemmed in part from political, economic and social transformations as well as innovations in communication that accompanied the transition from monarchical to democratic governments. We argue that the 1999 Bolivarian Constitution-making process had a similar effect on the Venezuelan public sphere. Throughout the formal transition from a representative to a participatory government, and in the subsequent process of consolidating and institutionalizing the new regime, political actors competed to prove that they alone enjoyed legitimacy.17 As will be discussed in Chapter 2, the constitution-making process not only redefined the rules of the game but, through its emphasis on citizen participation, it provided political actors and citizenry alike the opportunity to claim that their faction and public sector most faithfully represented the will of the people. The Constitution of 1999 effectively buttressed two visions of democracy: the representative and the participatory-protagonist (GarcíaGuadilla 2003a, García-Guadilla and Mallen 2013). This was made possible through the support that both Opposition and Bolivarian political actors lent to the notion of increased citizen participation in the decision-making process. Though Opposition political actors and public prioritized liberal democratic values such as freedom of expression and private property, among others, the Bolivarian government and its public prioritized the values of social democracy, social and economic equality However, both publics sometimes espoused similar principles. For example, both agreed, believed in, and disseminated the notion that increased citizen participation was a legitimate means of resolving conflict, and that the legitimacy of governmental authorities and programs hinged on political participation. An unintended result of the model of participatory democracy was the emergence of a dynamic of symbolic action where each public mobilized massively to demonstrate its power and socio-political

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legitimacy, and express its degree of satisfaction or discontent towards government. In the Venezuelan context, citizen participation was not limited to formal processes but depended on public performances within public spaces. Both government sympathizers and detractors took to the streets between 2000 and 2003 and staged marches and countermarches in an attempt to persuade the other of their strength and numeric superiority.18 The legitimacy assigned to citizen participation by the 1999 Bolivarian Constitution, in combination with traditional political parties being weakened by the legitimacy crisis of the Puntofijista regime, prompted alternative socio-political actors to take up the banner of political Opposition and challenge the executive’s assertion that Chavismo represented the will of the people. Consequently, in the Bolivarian Republic, the primary challenges to the legitimacy of Chávez’s government stemmed not only from political parties but also civil society organizations that embraced the Opposition narrative19— including trade unions, business organizations, and NGOs.20 Their strategies for ousting Chávez from power did not follow the rules of the game laid forth in the constitutional doctrine. As the conflict evolved, both factions interpreted the struggle through narratives of radical transformation as opposed to a matter of choice or change. A loss implied more than a mere deficit of power, a change of party, a redistribution of resources, or even a change in political systems of organization; for Venezuelan citizens it signaled the end of a way of life or the possibility of an alternate future. Throughout the conflict, the narratives utilized to interpret this existential struggle assumed diverse form: people vs. oligarchy, proletariat vs. bourgeoisie, and later socialism vs. capitalism. While the discourse changed, the narrative of a zero-sum struggle remained. In the case of Venezuela’s existential struggle, the political conflict acted as a centrifuge that bound citizens into two antagonistic publics that stifled expression within their own groups, and the pluralism of Venezuelan society at large.21 Rival publics were characterized as enemies and each faction demanded absolute loyalty and disdain for the Other. The will of the people came to be understood as the will of those in the group. In a conflict where publics were perceived as bent on destroying the Other, the struggle for self-preservation replaced the defense of plurality as the guiding principle of democratic life. Any lingering doubts as to the nature of the conflict were dissipated in April 2002 when a civil-military coalition deposed President Hugo Chávez for forty-eight hours. The events leading to the coup originated in February 2002 when Chávez appointed a new president and

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Venezuela’s Polarized Politics

governing board to the state oil company Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA). On February 25, senior executives within the company released a statement titled “Let’s Save PDVSA,” wherein they alleged the political appointments violated the liberal-meritocratic principles of the company. On April 7, 2002, Chávez responded by firing seven executives on the air during his weekly television show, Aló Presidente (Chávez 2002). A coalition between the national worker union, the national chamber of commerce, rival political parties, and nongovernmental organizations called a national strike on April 9, 2002. A series of failed negotiations ensued. Venezuela’s military-civil coalition staged a coup d’état after Opposition protesters and Chavistas died in violent confrontations during a protest march. In many ways, the April 11, 2002 coup d’état consolidated and gave credence to the representation of the conflict as an existential struggle. Both supporters and detractors of Chávez understood the preservation of democratic rule to depend on their ability to demonstrate their numeric majority over their opponent, and both occupied the streets claiming to represent the sovereign. In what became a common feature of political strife, sympathizers and detractors of the regime convened marches and countermarches to demonstrate the numeric superiority of each group.22 Popular protests turned violent as the social polarization intensified, and the political Opposition promoted non-legal or democratic solutions. The heightened need to defend the political, economic and social existence of each faction repressed the expression of plurality in Venezuelan society. As Venezuelan citizens of various political persuasions began to align (or as Lozada (2002) argues were forced to align) themselves to the image presented by their respective faction, the plurality of Venezuelan society, once understood as essential to a functioning democracy, was condemned as contradictory to it. Individuals participating in the public sphere embraced (or were forced to embrace) the rhetoric, policies and agenda of their political faction while fully denouncing the discourse of their opponent. When the polarization process was well underway, those who publicly or privately strayed from their faction’s platform were publicly chastised. The conflict between sympathizers of Hugo Chávez and supporters of his Opposition was exacerbated to the point of influencing the everyday interaction of Venezuelan citizens. In all societies, individual actions convey a social or political meaning that can be analyzed or interpreted, but in polarized societies, the multiple possible interpretations of a single act are subsumed by the political context in which they develop. As the conflict extended beyond the political sphere, everyday social interaction between citizens in

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Venezuela produced cultural objects, symbols and meanings that demonstrated the saliency of polarization in Venezuelan society. The decision, for example, to wear a red t-shirt no longer represented a simple color preference, but indicated unequivocal support for President Chávez. The color red acquired such significance that an active participant and ardent follower of the Bolivarian Revolution came to be referred to as a rojo-rojito (a red-red or very red). To wear a red t-shirt in polarized Venezuela was to demonstrate unequivocal support for the Bolivarian Revolution. Moreover, in Venezuela’s polarized society, culture acquired a deeply political meaning. Unlike simple everyday choices, one’s use or consumption of culture—books, movies, gallery exhibitions, even food—encodes or expresses more information about one’s social subjectivity. But just as with rote everyday acts, those cultural choices can be interpreted in various ways. In non-polarized societies, the information provided by an individual’s use of cultural symbols may be limited, but all possible interpretations are not necessarily funneled into a single explanation. In Venezuela’s polarized society, cultural objects became directly correlated with a particular political affiliation. The political meaning assigned to cultural expressions molded citizens’ social interactions. In the days leading to the attempted coup d’état against Hugo Chávez in April 2002, a Venezuelan citizen writing in a pro-Chávez internet site, described his experience as he confronted both an Opposition and a pro-government march. I head towards Altamira [an upper-middle-class residential neighborhood] to rent a movie. And I see the Chavista caravan, the problem is that I am out of luck today, I look like a madman, but not like a Chavista madman. They scream, “Repent! Repent!” at me and at Altamira. Of course, anyone who has the Danish Dogme [film] “Mifune” in his hand is discarded as a squalid-adeco[traditional political party]-petite-bourgeoisie-at-the-service-of-the-contras. “Repent! Repent!”...A few hours later we head towards Los Chaguaramos… head[ing] west past the [Opposition] concentration in favor of the chicpdvsa [PDVSA state oil company]-meritocracy. “[Chávez] will leave. He’ll leave” [shouts the Opposition]. I stop at the light. I stop in front of well-dressed girls and men in ties. And what is worse, I am in my distressed 1970 VW Bug…and I look like a madman, of course…They eye me intensely, and they do not ask, no, they scream: “Die Chávez! And who are you with! Define Yourself! Define Yourself! A bug has to be defined; a distressed bug is suspicious, especially in Altamira (Antiescualidos.com 2002).

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Venezuela’s Polarized Politics

Political affiliations were also easily deduced from the terms citizens used to describe the events of April 11, 2002—either as a “political coup” or as a “civic action resulting from a power vacuum.” Likewise, one’s ideological affiliation could be identified depending on whether one referred to the general strike staged by the Opposition from December 2002 to January 2003 as a “national civic strike” or as an “insurrectional strike,” or whether one described the closing of private, commercial television station RCTV as an “arbitrary shut-down” or as a “government media concession that was not renovated.” The more polarized a society, the more likely these cultural and linguistic clues will be lumped together with other characteristics to construct a social imaginary of the Other. What results are fixed narratives that gain currency in everyday discourse. In the above example, the anonymous author described how supporters of Hugo Chávez described Opposition members as “squalid-Adeco-petitebourgeoisie-at-the-service-of-the-contras.” Chavistas’ construction of the social imaginary of the Other were based on what they perceived were the relationships between Opposition members and their consumption of elite culture, their support for pro-American forces in Latin America, and their corrupt political parties (Adeco).23 These perceived ideological tendencies, relationships with centers of power, and cultural preferences were reinforced by the social representation of their way of life. In contrast, Chavistas demonstrated their loyalty to the leader and his populist project by approving the precepts and implementation of state-run programs. Chavistas aligned themselves with community and state media, the sovereign poor, and the Third World. To be a Chavista was to exercise citizenship through popular movements. And finally, to be a Chavista was to dispute the Opposition. Though everyday acts and cultural consumption can often be politicized in exceptional political moments—such as a presidential election, a referendum on a controversial issue, or a political scandal— Venezuela’s polarization reached a pathological degree when the individual’s political affiliation subsumed all other attributes and became the primary variable in the establishment of social relationships. From 2002 to 2003, sustaining relationships with people outside of one’s own political affiliation became increasingly problematic in Venezuelan society. The centrifugal force of Venezuela’s polarized society created unspoken social norms condemning fraternization between political factions. In 2006, a journalist for the Opposition media outlet Globovisión, Andrés Fernando Schmucke, wrote a book entitled, Me

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Enamoré de una Chavista (I fell in love with a Chavista). The title is a confession of sorts. It suggests that to fall in love with someone of a different political affiliation violates the norms of Venezuelan society. The title highlights the obstacles of consorting with someone outside of one’s own political position and the effect that the polarization process had on individuals’ lives. The polarization of Venezuelan society impacted the allocation of “space”—both geographical and metaphorical.24 In Venezuela, like in most of Latin America, resources, and access to basic services, are unequally distributed between the haves and have-nots. Metropolises like the city of Caracas have exponentially increased the number of interactions between fellow citizens, but the inequalities between Venezuela’s citizens manifest themselves in the distribution of urban space. While the rich on the east side of Caracas live in plush neighborhoods or urbanizaciones, the poor live on the west side in shantytowns disparagingly called cerros (García-Guadilla 2013). Undoubtedly, the unequal distribution of wealth between Venezuela’s social classes structures the interaction between them, resulting in what García-Canclini (2007) has aptly described as “different, unequal and disconnected” citizens. The national strike of 2002–2003 is best understood against this backdrop. After the April 11, 2002 coup d’état, a coalition of organizations united to form the Coordinadora Democrática (CD), a political hodgepodge that lumped together radical and moderate leftist parties and organizations, business and labor interests, and liberal nongovernmental organizations. Under the leadership of the president of the national chamber of commerce (FEDECAMARAS) and the president of the national labor union CTV, the CD called for a national strike against the government of Hugo Chávez. The objective of the strike was to force Chávez out of office. Initially the strike had limited impact. While the affluent east side shut down, in the center and west of the city, Venezuelans went about their business. The strike gained strength when oil tankers successfully blocked a crucial navigation channel in Lake Maracaibo and joined PDVSA management in a work stoppage that successfully paralyzed oil production. The resulting decrease in oil production led to a decline in oil supply. As Venezuela struggled to meet its international oil supply obligations, drivers queued up at gas stations, flights were cancelled, banks operated half days, private (and some public) schools cancelled classes, and shops closed their doors at the peak of the Christmas shopping season (López Maya 2004). If the 2002 coup provided proof that each public interpreted the conflict as an existential struggle, the 2002–2003 national strike

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Venezuela’s Polarized Politics

demonstrated that the division of space, when subject to a process of polarization, generated antagonistic interpretations of the same lived experience. With quotidian life at a standstill, networks dedicated 24hour programming to coverage of the strike. Rumors circulated among Venezuela’s middle-class that Chavista hordes would descend on their homes and attack their properties. High rises in middle-class neighborhoods barricaded their doors and windows and prepared themselves for violent confrontation. Meanwhile, in poor neighborhoods, workers enjoyed paid “vacations.” Chavistas and rival groups both partook in protests, marches and events staged by the national government and the Opposition. The increased mobilization of each Chavista and Opposition public occasionally resulted in violence between sympathizers, leaders and even media (PROVEA 2003). For nearly two months, the country awaited the outcome of the showdown between supporters of Chavismo and the Opposition. The 2002–2003 national strike ultimately favored the government, for it created the pretext for a purging of Opposition sympathizers from public spaces vital to the regime. The strike, led primarily by professionals in the national oil industry, generated the perception within Chavista publics that the revolutionary project would be held hostage by the Opposition until government supporters took over executive positions in national industries (Trómpiz 2007). The 2002– 2003 general strike resulted in the expulsion of more than 30,000 professionals in the oil industry, leaving a vacuum to be filled by national government supporters. Additionally, after the failed 2004 recall referendum against Hugo Chávez, the Lista de Tascón (Tascón list) published the names of every citizen who had signed on in favor of the recall, eventually resulting in a purge of state employees who purportedly supported the Opposition (Guardia and Prieto Rodríguez 2007, Hsieh et al. 2009). After the events of 2002–2003, the national government embarked on the task of building institutions that could help it consolidate its claim to represent the Venezuelan sovereign or the majority will. Instead of negotiating or reaching agreements with existing institutions and their rival political and civil leaders, the government of Hugo Chávez created parallel institutions to carry out the reforms demanded by the Bolivarian Republic. Chávez set out to organize his own civil society, one capable of promoting and defending the revolutionary project. Bolivarian unions arose to challenge official unions, and students sympathetic to the government organized alternative student associations for supporters of the revolutionary project. Eventually the government would build the

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Bolivarian University. Numerous broadcasting licenses were granted to alternative and community media. Television and radio stations popped up in state hospitals and in Venezuelan barrios (Forero 2004). Websites appeared with the aim of defending the Bolivarian Revolution (Gonzalo 2004). Local community and alternative media challenged the dominant private-commercial media, whose editorial lines sided with the Opposition. In the end, the creation of alternative institutions became the hallmark of progress and change in the Bolivarian Republic. In their zeal to carry out the sovereign people’s will, the Bolivarian government and the Opposition each attempted to bring solutions to common problems through distinct organizations and institutions. As a result, a divisive matrix was institutionalized in spaces occupied by the citizenry. Not only did politicians belong to different parties, citizens worked in parallel organizations with parallel functions. Supporters of the ruling party enrolled in Círculos Bolivarianos (Bolivarian Circles), Comités de Tierra Urbana (Urban Land Committees), Consejos Comunales (Communal Councils), Mesas Técnicas del Agua (Technical Water Committees) and Misiones (Misions), and others organizations established by the government as venues for citizen participation which either had direct links to the government apparatus (Círculos Bolivarianos), satisfied basic necessities, such as education, health care and affordable food (Misiones), or operated as governmental decisionmaking bodies at the community and local level (García-Guadilla 2008 and 2011, Goldfrank 2011). In contrast, the Opposition sought participation in pre-existing civil society organizations (Asamblea de Educación, neighborhood associations) or in organizations formed during the political conflict (Asamblea de Ciudadanos, Mujeres por la Libertad, Gente de Petróleo) (García-Guadilla 2005b). This division of space intensified the polarizing dynamic by legitimizing the existence of spaces solely occupied by one political faction or another.25 The most visible division of space took place within the media. At the height of the conflict, private-commercial media outlets transformed into political actors and ceded their screens, broadcasts and pages to the Opposition. They dedicated 24-hour news coverage to the strike. Private-commercial newspapers published headlines claiming Venezuela was on the brink of a civil war (Blanco Muñoz 2004) and from 2002 to 2004 the discourse of both Chavismo and the Opposition became increasingly belligerent. The government accused the private-commercial media of conspiring with the leaders of the 2002 coup, imposing a media blackout

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to impede Chávez’s return to power, participating in the Opposition’s calls for a national strike, helping coordinate the actions of rival political organizations, and engaging in biased reporting. Among Chavistas, private-commercial media was seen as having distorted facts to alarm the population. By disseminating rumors, manipulating facts, and making insinuations, these media created an alternative reality for sectors of the middle class, generating “fear, agitating, manipulating, terrorizing and inciting them [the middle class] to commit acts of violence” (Rodríguez Miérez 2005, 26). The government responded to what it considered media bias in the same way it responded to Opposition-dominated institutions: it created parallel ones. A national policy aimed at creating new media outlets for Chavista publics resulted in an explosion of alternative and community media funded by the national government. The “media war” resulted as the Opposition and Chavista public struggled to dominate local and national media. The polarization of Venezuelan society under the leadership of Hugo Chávez was consolidated in three ways: the transformation of a representative democracy into a participatory-protagonist democracy resulted in the need for political actors to establish their legitimacy through competing citizen mobilizations. The media became politicized by taking on the role of purveying the legitimacy of either supporters or detractors of the regime. And the division of public space resulted in violent confrontations between supporters and detractors of the Bolivarian regime. Entrenched in the everyday interactions of Venezuelan citizens, the polarization of Venezuelan society during the Bolivarian regime promoted by Hugo Chávez effectively stifled plurality within the country, including among both supporters and detractors of the regime. Chapter Descriptions

As we embarked on the task of understanding the dynamics of polarization in the case of Venezuela under Chávez, we quickly surmised an interdisciplinary approach would be required to paint a more complete picture of its most relevant aspects. Only through this approach could we possibly begin to better understand the connections between its diverse dimensions and the manner in which it insidiously permeated everyday life. We drew from sociology, media studies, psychology, political science, cultural anthropolgy, human geography and ecology in an attempt to reveal how the promise of a more inclusive democratic system evolved into a social order that pitted citizens against

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one another, unleashing a series of violent incidents reminiscent of a war zone. In Chapter 2, we explain how the 1999 Bolivarian Constitution laid the foundation for a new regime whose discourse, values, structures, and processes differed radically from those of the previous Puntofijista democratic system. But the 1999 constituent process, shrouded in the language of citizen participation, “protagonist democracy” and human rights, deterred discussions surrounding the interpretation and social impact of the principles of the new regime. The lack of clearly articulated and consensually agreed upon foundational principles led to a series of confrontations between political parties and civil society that erupted as Chávez’s government began to define, implement, and institutionalize the tenets of the 1999 Constitution. Chapter 3 discusses the exclusionary territorial expression of participatory democracy resulting from increasing social and political polarization. It analyzes the imagery of the Other when understood as the enemy, and the citizenry of fear that led to a segregated and highly conflictual spatial pattern in the besieged capital city of Caracas, contributing to the emergence of ghettos, or highly segregated/exclusionary spaces. In Chapter 4, we argue that the definitions of participatory democracy and of the sovereign that resulted from the deliberations of the Constitutional National Assembly (Asamblea Nacional Constituyente) exacerbated the role of the media as a political actor in the conflict. The need to visually demonstrate public support for each political faction to substantiate their claim of representing the sovereign, combined with the importance each public attributed to media as transmitters of information, resulted in a “war of numbers” between the national government and private-commercial media. As will be demonstrated, the “media war” radically altered the media landscape, increasing citizen participation in the production of media while curtailing the legal rights of the Venezuelan press. This process set the stage for the construction of two public spheres of comparable resources and power that sought to influence the country’s future. In Chapter 5, we describe the construction of two antagonistic public spheres, and how the media—private-commercial, public, alternative, and community—exacerbated their mutual exclusion and division until it became increasingly difficult to create networks of communication. As a result, national, private, alternative media, and mediums (internet, television, newspapers) disseminated information, which the two antagonistic social groups selectively absorbed,

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Venezuela’s Polarized Politics

interpreted, and evaluated. Two public discourses emerged that framed the conflict as an existential struggle. In Venezuela, the impossibility of competing with or prevailing over the two dominant antagonistic publics (supporters and detractors of the Bolivarian Revolution) resulted in the understanding of individuals as objects of polarization. As the experience of Students for Freedom shows in Chapter 6, regardless of the diversity of subjective experience, within the Venezuelan social imaginary, social actors and their public discourse were entirely evaluated on the basis of the narratives of the dominant antagonism. We conclude our work by summarizing our findings, in the hope that other scholars will draw from the Venezuelan experience to further develop our understanding of polarization and its impacts on pluralist democracies. We end with a brief overview of polarization in Venezuela after the death of Hugo Chávez. Notes 1 In this work, we will use the terms Chavista and Chavismo to refer to the publics that supported the narrative of the conflict articulated by the national government and actively participated in the construction of the narrative whether through militancy in the government’s party, protesting in marches, leaving comments on websites, or participating in government programs. The term Opposition (with a capital O) will be used to refer to the public that supported the narrative of diverse groups that made up the opposition to the national government. The Opposition, like Chavistas, encompasses a broad swath of actors from politicians, to opinion makers, and everyday citizens who participated in marches or publicly propagated the narrative through public performances. 2 The use of discourse to explain the polarization of Venezuelan society is similar in scope to Arendt’s (1951) description of the sway of the leader over the masses in The Origins of Totalitarianism. Like Arendt’s description, the arguments are premised on the notion of masses vulnerable to propaganda. 3 The full quote reads as follows: “The polarization between the rich and the poor was created by capitalism and neoliberalism, not by Chávez… It was created by a system of enslavement that has lasted more than five centuries. Five centuries of exploitation, especially in the twentieth century when the capitalist system was imposed, and at the end of the century, when the neoliberal era was imposed, which is the most unvarnished stage of savage capitalism. This system created difficult conditions that led to a social explosion. In 1989, I was an officer in the army and I saw the country had erupted like a volcano. Then there were two military maneuvers. I participated in one of them alongside thousands of military comrades and civilians” (cited in Oppenheimer 2005, 262).

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4 In recent Venezuelan history, the 1989 riots represent the breakdown of the democratic system established in 1959. Known as the Caracazo the 1989 riots resulted from an announcement by then President Carlos Andrés Pérez, he would implement a series of austerity measures in line with International Monetary Fund and World Bank guidelines. Citizens rioted and the military was called in to quell the violence. The government officially reported 276 dead, though others have estimated a toll of up to 400. The military repression and human right abuses perpetrated by the military shattered the illusion of stability that had characterized Venezuela’s democratic system, and unleashed a period of political upheaval that would result in the election of Hugo Chávez in 1998. For more on the Caracazo see, Coronil and Skurski’s (1991) “Dismembering and Remembering the Nation,” and López Maya’s (2003) “The Venezuelan Caracazo of 1989.” 5 For critics of modernity, the public sphere is a space corrupted by the interests of a few who wield hegemonic control over the means of communication, their message, and their discursive styles (Horkheimer and Adorno [1944] 2002, Habermas, 2000). In this work we adopt the definition of other authors who describe the public as a sphere fractioned by multiple actors and actions (Anderson 1983, Fraser 1992, Warner 2005). We adopt Warner’s poignant observation that though an interpretation may prevail in the public, we should not infer this signifies the hegemony of one particular public over another. 6 In this work, we define discourse as the text emitted by a messenger and interpreted by multiple receivers. Unlike discourse, the narrative contains references that structure understanding in an act and therefore require receivers exclude other possible interpretations in order to create a totality through which the receiver can logically eradicate contradictions within a social reality (Ricouer 1986). 7 Theoretically, a Schmittian existential struggle is at odds with traits commonly attributed to modern democracies such as pluralism and tolerance. At the heart of Schmitt’s argument lays the assumption that a pluralism of interests if allowed to prevail in the political sphere jeopardizes citizens’ political unity. Schmitt proposed political conflict should act as a binding agent, where citizens could find common ground on similar political positions and actions. 8 The Bolivarian Revolution aimed of transform the country’s two-party representative democracy into a more participatory model that placed individual participation at the center of the political decision-making process. Participatory-protagonist democracy was the term given to this model. 9 Among the plebiscitary measures established by the 1999 Bolivarian Constitution to increase citizen checks on the exercise of power is Article 72 that allows 20 percent of the electorate to convene a recall referendum for any publicly elected official. Plebiscitary power over international treaties is provided the electorate through Article 73 of the constitution. Laws passed by the legislature or decreed by the executive can also be submitted to popular referendums if so deemed by the electorate. In addition, Article 204.7 allows 0.1 percent of the electorate to initiate laws. Article 184 of the constitution requires municipalities collaborate with communities and neighborhood groups, and allow them to participate in drafting budgets, and in the establishment of economic enterprises such as cooperatives, among other rights listed. Article

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Venezuela’s Polarized Politics

296 allows civil society to elect three of the five members of the National Electoral Council. 10 As will be further explained in Chapter 2, although new institutional measures gave citizens a greater voice in governmental affairs, the 1999 Bolivarian Constitution diminished the citizen’s power through representation in the legislative branch by creating a unicameral legislature based on proportional representation. The 1999 Bolivarian Constitution stripped the government apparatus of basic mechanisms that guaranteed the rights of political minorities through representation, even as it explicitly recognized the civil rights of historically excluded groups, such as Venezuela’s indigenous population. Although the 1999 Bolivarian Constitution created greater venues for citizen participation, the changes in the state’s institutional structure weakened the representation of political minorities in the legislature while leaving the office of the presidency intact. The arrangement resulted in the exacerbation of presidential powers as the office of the presidency directly elected by the people could claim to embody the indivisible will of the people. 11 For an excellent review of the compromises and concessions made by different political parties to diverse interests in Venezuelan society through the Pact of Punto Fijo, see López et al. (1989) De Punto Fijo al Pacto Social. 12 In a nationwide survey conducted by the Venezuelan-polling agency, Instituto Venezolano de Análisis de Datos (IVAD) in 1999, 78.6 percent of respondents held a negative view of the situation of the country, but 66 percent believed the country was poised to get better. 13 Arguing the Bolivarian government was attempting to ingrain its political-ideological platform in the new constitution, as early as May 1999, a debate ensued as to the nature and extent of the content of the Bolivarian Constitution. Rival political candidates to the National Constitutional Assembly (ANC) accused the government of introducing specific political content that conditioned the sphere of action of future governments. In response to reports ANC government candidates wanted to constitutionally apportion GNP to productive sectors, Opposition business leader Aurelio Concheso (1999) quipped, “Can you imagine what would have happened if Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin had insisted on including in the US constitution the patterns of economic activity at the end of this century?” Along the same lines sociologist Trino Márquez (1999) opined, “Chavismo has been responsible for hiding very well [the fact] a constitution must only force the existence of certain conditions so a society can be more productive and efficient but should never become a program for government action.” 14 ANC representatives were chosen individually not through party affiliation. However, candidates aligned with the president’s party were identified through a list commonly referred to as Chávez’s lottery. The long list of candidates disseminated votes for those aligned with the Opposition while Chávez’s lottery allowed Chavismo to obtain enough votes to beat Opposition and independents; in fact, “the opposition obtained 34.5 percent of the votes but only 4.7 percent of the positions in the ANC. Conversely, the Patriotic Front (Polo Patriótico) obtained 62.1 percent of the votes but 94.5 percent of the seats” (García-Guadilla and Hurtado 2000, 21–22). 15 During the 2001 protests middle-class residents offered the following as explanations for their participation in the protest: “we do not want them to impose education, we want it free of ideologies”…“[government appointed

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educational] supervisors is a direct intervention in the decisions of parent associations”...“they want to impose Cuban educators that will give us guidelines”...“I don’t want my grandchildren to speak like Cuban children” and “this is the government’s way of locking us up” (cited in Mallen 2003, 25). 16 The agricultural statute outlined the executive’s plans for broad land reform. It limited the number of idle acres an individual or the state could possess and it set the procedures for distributing ejidos (properties given to farmers by the state that cannot be sold but can be inherited) to the country’s rural population. The Law of Hydrocarbons expanded the executive’s control over the country’s national oil industry while simultaneously limiting the privatization of the nation’s oil company. 17 We use Kis’ definition of social legitimacy described as “the existence of a de facto authority…marked by the fact that at least a significant part of the political community believes that people ought to obey official rules because this is their duty vis-a-vis the State. It follows that we can say that de facto legitimacy is shaken when some of the following (not easily measureable but quite salient) symptoms are present: pervasiveness of blatant, defiant disobedience on the part of the subjects; a sharpening of controversies concerning legitimation between elites; and, in extreme cases, the formation of new centers of power claiming legitimacy for themselves and challenging the legitimacy of old authorities” (Kis 1995, 405–406). 18 Between 1989 and 1999, Venezuela averaged 736 protests annually. This number doubled after Hugo Chávez came to power. Between 1999 and 2007, the country averaged 1,395 protests a year (Acosta 2007). According to the 2008–2009 Annual Report of the human rights organization PROVEA, the number of protests that year increased from 1,763 to 2,893 (PROVEA 2009). 19 The term civil society normally understood to describe organizations that claim and defend the rights of the citizenry, was narrowly defined in the Bolivarian Republic. Following the logic of polarization, the term civil society was utilized to describe upper middle-class organizations that sided with the Opposition. In contrast terms such as “communities,” would be utilized by Chavistas to describe organized citizenries. 20 In October 2002, the Coordinadora Democrática (Democratic Coordinator or CD) was created by the Opposition as a means of counterbalancing the claim of the government to represent the sovereign. The CD included a variety of heterogeneous political and social actors: rival political parties, the Venezuelan workers union, the chamber of Commerce federation, private-commercial media, the Institutional Military Front (an organization of dissident military officers), and numerous non-governmental organizations of liberal persuasion. 21 The stifling of plurality within the different publics was especially acute in the Opposition that grouped organizations with divergent interests such as the Venezuelan workers union, and the national chamber of commerce (FEDECAMARAS). Right of center parties such as COPEI and Primero Justicia coalesced with left of center Acción Democrática, Movimiento hacia el Socialismo (MAS) and Bandera Roja (BR) within the Coordinadora Democrática. Aligned with the socio-political organization were public opinion makers and media owners such as Teodoro Petkoff—a former guerrilla and editor of the national daily Tal Cual and Alberto Federico Ravell—owner of the

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24-hour news channel Globovisión and former communications strategist for politicians of Acción Democrática. 22 In their work, “Venezuela: Protesta Popular y Lucha Hegemónica Reciente,” Venezuelan scholars Edgardo Lander and Margarita López Maya (2008) have described this process as a form of street politics that results from a Gramscian struggle between social classes to impose a hegemonic worldview. While similar in scope with the approach taken in this work, the description of the conflict as a Gramscian struggle focuses on class as the determinant variable for the establishment of political-cultural affinities in the conflict. As López Maya (2008) herself and Noam Lupu (2010) demonstrate within different periods of the Venezuelan conflict class cannot explain the at times contradictory results of electoral contests. 23 Adeco is the term given to sympathizers of the political party Acción Democrática (AD). 24 In this work, “space” is broadly defined to include geographical locations, as well as institutions, and individual bodies. 25 The segmentation of space and the characterization of organizations as pro- or anti-Chavista, undermined the ability of domestic groups to negotiate solutions. By 2004, when pro- and anti-Chávez forces decided to find a democratic solution to the crisis by going forth with a presidential recall referendum, the Carter Center had to intervene to assure its transparency (Dietz and McCoy 2012, Martínez Meucci 2012). In the process, international figures themselves came under attack. Prior to the recall referendum, Chávez’s supporters claimed Jennifer McCoy, a senior election observer for the Carter Center, was partial towards the Opposition because she had publicly criticized Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution (Delacour and Barahona 2004). When Chávez was declared the victor, Chavistas quickly changed their tune, praising both McCoy and the Carter Center for their efforts and performance. Having previously considered them impartial to their cause, McCoy and the Carter Center subsequently became targets of the Opposition (O’Grady 2004, Tantillo and Myers 2004). With Chávez’s presidency acting as the centrifugal force within society, the threat of violence increasingly overshadowed attempts to assuage the differences between the two factions. In line with a Schmittianinspired existential struggle, wherein war is neither the aim nor the purpose of the struggle but lingers throughout, the threat of violence became a persistent characteristic of the relationship between the two publics.

2 Participatory Democracy and the Public Sphere

Following Chávez’s presidential election, Venezuelan society sought to redefine its vision of democratic rule. With Hugo Chávez’s election, Venezuela’s Puntofijista regime—institutionalized in the 1961 Constitution and consolidated through forty years of representative democratic rule—came to an end. Its representative democracy was to be transformed into Venezuela’s Bolivarian participatory-protagonist regime. The transition from one regime to another redefined Venezuela’s public sphere. Whereas there had previously been a distinction between the public sphere (the civilian space of debate and social and economic activity) and the sphere of public (i.e. governmental) authority, the new constitution blurred the boundaries between the two.1 Within this shifting milieu, the conflict between supporters and detractors of Hugo Chávez would center on the role to be played in the new democratic regime by public authorities and by the citizenry. For those who supported Hugo Chávez, the 1998 presidential election commenced the next phase in Venezuela’s democracy, one characterized by increased citizen participation in the state’s decision-making process, which had promised prosperity for all in a more egalitarian society. In an opinion piece written for the national daily El Universal in 1999, the architect of Venezuela’s participatory-protagonist democracy, Ricardo Combellas, attributed the need for a new constitutional assembly to citizen demands that emerged after the Caracazo, which had resulted from the 1961 Puntofijista constitution’s failure to develop a robust participatory democracy, due to its embrace of a “two-party democracy [partidocracia, and its] tutelage deviation, closed to participation.” Detractors of the new presidential agenda characterized the post-1998 period as a movement away from democratic practices and a shift

25

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toward insidious forms of Latin American authoritarianism (Falcoff 1998). Once elected, Hugo Chávez embarked on the task of creating a constitution that would provide the legal framework for a Bolivarian participatory-protagonist democratic regime. On February 2, 1999, as he was being sworn in as president of Venezuela, Chávez broke protocol and, laying his hand over the 1961 Venezuelan Constitution, declared, “I swear before God, I swear before the country, I swear before my people that over this moribund constitution I will drive the democratic transformations necessary so the new republic has an adequate Magna Carta for the new times. I swear” (Chávez 1999). A stage of “higher lawmaking”2 was initiated to redefine the relationship between Venezuela’s political institutions, its leaders and its citizenry. Upon taking power, Chávez and his political coalition, the Movimiento Quinta República (Fifth Republic Movement) called on the citizenry to vote through a popular referendum, for a constitution that would extend their right to participate in government beyond the ballot box. The 1999 Bolivarian Constitution, ratified on December 15, 1999, guaranteed rights, cleared institutional obstacles, and created new institutional venues which promised to transform the people or sovereign of Venezuela into an active citizenry. The institutional transformation shifted the locus of political legitimacy in Venezuela. If political legitimacy derives from the citizenry’s support, based on their evaluation of a government’s performance, then the embrace of a specific political system depends, in part, on its efficiency and stability. As described in Chapter 1, Venezuela’s Puntofijista democracy was destabilized when oil fluctuations interrupted the government’s redistributive measures. This instability put into question the effectiveness of the distributive policies of Puntofijismo. The failure of the economic and political policies of Puntofijismo resulted in a call for institutional renewal, which prompted the shift from representative democracy to citizen participation in the sphere of public authority. Within the Bolivarian Republic, the system of representation no longer reaped political legitimacy. Instead, political, community, and civil society leaders claimed legitimacy by demonstrating that they spoke as proxies for the people. This shift greatly expanded the role of the public sphere as the realm of the political. In essence, public opinion became the gauge of political legitimacy. Individual leaders and organizations that were perceived to articulate the “will of the sovereign” (people) enjoyed popular support. Symbolically, authority shifted from politicians in public office to the people. The term was often defined by media as the citizenry, the

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Opposition, civil society, organized communities, or Chavistas. The approval or rejection of professional politicians, government policies, political parties, and institutions depended on how the public within Venezuela assessed their adherence to the mandate of the sovereign, as defined by each constituency’s narrative. The process of “visibilizing legitimacy” began as early as 1999. As the nation began discussions on the constituent process the differences between the Opposition and Chavismo assumed greater importance. The shift in the source of legitimacy put into process the period of constitutional lawmaking that emerged from crises and the states’ inability to provide adequate solutions. They may be brought on by natural disasters, crises of political legitimacy, or economic downturns, but they have in common the belief amongst leaders and citizens that the existing political system and its policies have failed to resolve pressing issues. National constitutional assemblies, strong executives and legislatures, and active judiciaries are deemed necessary to transform the political system (Ackerman 1998). With socio-political actors assuming the future of the country was at stake, the political realm in Venezuela took on increased relevance as Chavistas and the Opposition interpreted the conflict as a transcendental period that would radically alter the status quo. Both supporters and detractors of the regime interpreted the institutional changes enacted by Chávez’s government as a shift that would dramatically impact their livelihood and wellbeing. The 1999 National Constitutional Assembly (ANC) formally inaugurated a period of extraordinary politics where political debates and policies assumed a fundamental importance. Politics-as-usual, where citizen participation is limited to voting at the polls and keeping abreast of political developments, turned into a public deliberation over the foundational principles of the Venezuelan Republic (García-Guadilla and Mallen 2012). The period of higher lawmaking helped transform ordinarily passive citizens into an active political cadre. As citizen interest in the political process increased, so did mobilization and engagement. In essence, convening the ANC would not only transform the legal structure of the state, it would also set into motion a citizenintensive form of politics that would alter the boundaries of Venezuela’s public sphere. The Fourth Republic and the Pact of Punto Fijo

Long acclaimed as “Latin America’s exceptional democracy,” Venezuela was a paradox of development.3 Rich in oil and natural

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resources, in 1960 Time Magazine lauded the nation’s potential for democracy a year after President Rómulo Betancourt, the father of Venezuela’s democracy was elected, and described him as one of the “hemisphere’s real builders.” Venezuela was poised to become the prototype of Latin American economic development under democratic rule. The dream was short-lived. Thirty years later, the magazine reported on Venezuela’s infamous so-called Caracazo revealing the extent to which the promise of democracy and development had failed. Hoping to escape the power struggles that doomed Venezuela’s first attempt at democratic governance from 1945–1948,4 Venezuelan democracy was built on an effort to assuage the fears of the country’s elite and dispel any concerns the new democratic government might try to undermine their interests. Consequently, between 1958 and 1964, the country’s political parties, in piecemeal fashion, negotiated a series of assurances with powerful interest groups, generally referred to as the Pact of Punto Fijo. Workers were assured of their right to organize while the economic elite was guaranteed the right to private industry and investment. The military was to be modernized, and granted a seat at the executive branch. The Church would no longer be subject to government intervention. This pact rested on three pre-defined characteristics of Venezuelan democracy. The first was the understanding that Puntofijista democracy would be constitutionally ratified, based on the ideals of a representative democracy, separation of powers, and checks and balances. Article 3 of Title I of the 1961 Venezuelan Constitution specifically stipulated that the government of Venezuela was to be “democratic, representative, responsible and [practice the] alternation [of power]” while Article 4 confined the expression of popular sovereignty to suffrage. According to López Maya et al. (1989), the classification fused the concept of representative democracy with liberalism. This conception of democracy characterized by freely elected representative governments, universal suffrage, and political and civil rights, developed to promote citizen participation in decision-making processes organized around the invisible hand of the market forcing organized groups to defend and expand their political and civil rights.5 Built on the presumption of oil wealth, a second characteristic of Puntofijista democracy was that of a state-centered capitalist economy that carefully outlined the rights and responsibilities of the state and of private capitalism. As some authors have pointed out, for Venezuela’s dominant political parties, the role of private enterprise was deemed necessary only as a means of contributing to the collective good as determined by the state, and private enterprise only dominated in a few

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and marginal economic sectors such as construction, and commerce. In contrast, the Venezuelan state was in charge of developing the country’s infrastructure by managing transportation, and power. It was also in command of the country’s main source of revenue—the petroleum industry—and operated other enterprises, such oil refineries, fisheries, and other resource extraction. This economic organization produced socio-economic arrangements that were subject to the volatility of the price of oil in the international market making them unsustainable in the long term. A third function of the Pact of Punto Fijo was to establish a way of doing politics that relied on the alternation of political power. The move toward a competitive but non-antagonistic political sphere resulted from the ideological similarities between the traditional parties of Accion Democrática (AD) and Comité de Organización Política Electoral Independiente (COPEI). The success of AD and COPEI can in part be attributed to their ability to transform into catch-all parties and construct an ideological platform capable of uniting diverse interests. To become a major contender against AD, for example, COPEI reached beyond its regional Andean base, and beyond its professional and pro-clerical coalition, and reconciled its Christian Democratic ideology with its upper-middle class constituency.6 In contrast to COPEI, AD’s progression to the center-left involved distancing the party’s most radical revolutionary members. This fissure allowed the reformist elements of the party’s platform to prevail over the radical policies advocated by its Marxist-inspired left wing.7 The culture of competitive rivalry was furthered by a patronage system where leadership positions in influential professional organizations were distributed between AD and COPEI supporters (Martz and Myers 1977, Martz 1992, Myers 1998). Through their commanding presence in Venezuela’s largest labor movements, the parties secured a large electoral base and consolidated their power by distributing leadership positions in labor unions, peasant organizations, the bar association, and the chamber of commerce, among their base (McCoy and Smith 1995, Crisp 1997, Coppedge 1994). Breaking with the Past

At the time of Hugo Chávez’s rise to power, the incipient civil society of the 1970s had mushroomed into a political force that grew with the legitimacy crisis of the Puntofijista regime and effectively laid the philosophical foundations for the implementation of a participatoryprotagonist regime. As early as the 1970s, middle-class neighborhood

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organizations began calling for decentralization measures aimed at making politically appointed local public officials accountable to the populations they served (Ramos-Rollón 1995). Though these organizations succeeded in pushing through minor reforms, the movement did not appeal to other social and political groups until the financial crises of the 1980s and the political turmoil of the 1990s. In the 1980s and 1990s, middle-class neighborhood organizations spearheaded efforts to democratize Venezuela’s democracy alongside larger sectors of civil society.8 Feminist organizations, human rights NGOs, and business associations seeking to democratize Venezuelan democracy joined those neighborhood organizations. These various organizations emphasized the need for civil society to participate in matters of the state, and promoted values such as responsibility, individual liberty, competition, efficiency, and leadership (GarcíaGuadilla and Roa 1997, García-Guadilla and Silva 1999). Alongside these social movements, popular base organizations emerged with the goal of preserving, defending, and managing their interests. Cooperatives, neighborhood groups, alternative media, ecological defense groups, informal education groups, groups united for the defense of health, cultural associations, and class-based labor unions attempted to defend the legitimate interests of society, rather than those of the bureaucratic or economic elites (Britto 1989). These new organizations substituted the initial thrust for decentralization in local government, with the demand for constitutional reform. In essence, they called for “new rules of the game” that would allow greater accountability and citizen participation in the government’s decision-making process (Crisp and Levine 1998, GarcíaGuadilla 2003a and 2005, Gómez Calcaño and López Maya 1990). Against this background, the February 27, 1989, Caracazo represented more than a popular outburst. The days of rioting and looting in Caracas and sixteen other cities in Venezuela shattered the myth of the longevity and strength of Venezuela’s democratic system. The Caracazo revealed the legitimacy deficit of the country’s leaders, political parties, and institutions. It ignited the call for political reform. With the decrease of oil prices threatening the conciliation of classinterests, decentralization and greater citizen participation emerged as possible solutions to the country’s pressing problems. No one expressed this better than Venezuela’s consummate writer, Manuel Caballero: The lesson of 27-2 is not the [social] explosion or violence, but the will to participate…the memory of the violence on those days may prompt those who thought all would be resolved through a theoretical

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match between the ‘omnipotent state’ and a saving ‘free enterprise’ to reflect [upon those assumptions]. 27-2 reminded us there is a third person in the ring. And his role is not precisely to referee…like a peasant, the poor, with shouts, sticks and stones, civil society revealed its presence (cited in Britto 1989, 304).

The search for a political solution to the economic crisis resulted in the call for the general overhaul of Venezuela’s democratic system. Three different attempts were made to reform the 1961 Constitution after 1989. Following the Caracazo, the Special Bicameral Commission for the Revision of the Constitution, composed of representatives from the different parties, set out to amend the constitution, but lacked a specific agenda, and resulted in a proposal that required a general reform of the charter. A second attempt took place in March 1992, when the Bicameral Commission released the Project for the General Reform of the Constitution of 1961. It consisted of 70 articles that called for the need to revamp the Venezuelan judicial branch, to establish the referendum as a means of consulting the electorate, to regulate the internal processes of political parties, and their actions within unions and professional associations. It also considered whether to terminate constituted powers and hold new elections. The transformative nature of some of these proposals generated powerful inter- and intra-party factions in Congress. In August 1992, Congress agreed to suspend the debate over constitutional reform (Kornblith 1998). Two coups followed in 1992, solidifying the search for political alternatives to the two-party representative democracy model. By 1993, Rafael Caldera, a founder of Venezuela’s traditional party COPEI, broke ranks with his party and was elected president as a candidate for the party Convergencia (Convergence). It was the first time since 1958 that neither of the two major political parties won the presidency. President Rafael Caldera reintroduced the notion that constitutional reform could restore legitimacy to Venezuela’s democratic system. Promising to reestablish the bases of the political system, Caldera pledged to work towards the establishment of a participatory democracy by reforming the branches of government and promoting increased decentralization. The proposal was dead on arrival as it encountered opposition from AD and COPEI, and excluded civil society as a primary player in the process (Kornblith 1998). The Caracazo may have revealed the structural weakness of Venezuela’s democracy but it was Hugo Chávez’s election in 1998 that would radically redefine Venezuela’s political system. The ushering in of new democratic practices dismantled the assumptions on which

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Venezuela’s previous democratic regime had been founded. Professional politicians, community leaders, and newcomers alike agreed the Venezuelan nation-state was due for a radical transformation. Greater transparency in political processes, increased accountability to the electorate, and greater citizen participation had been demands articulated since the 1970s.9 By 1992 a national poll revealed 55 percent of citizens believed the country’s problems could best be solved without the interference of the country’s dominant political parties (Njaim, Combellas and Álvarez 1998). This stage was the precursor of the Bolivarian government’s participatory-protagonist democracy. Chávez did not introduce, nor did he have to sell, the concept of participatory democracy to Venezuelan citizens. By the time he assumed power in 1998 the country was ready for a radical transformation. Venezuela’s Participatory-Protagonist Democracy

After a decade of failed efforts at constitutional reform, in 1998 presidential candidate Hugo Chávez rallied for the cause. Initially averse to participating in the political process, Chávez warmed up to politics when he transformed his disdain for Puntofijista democracy into a political project that called for a new constitutional order (Gott 2011). A political outsider who had championed the cause of the poor, denounced corruption, and promised to sow the wealth of the nation, Chávez—the Lieutenant Colonel who once sought to overthrow Venezuela’s democratic government—now positioned himself as the leader who would remake it. Remarkably in tune to the country’s political culture, Chávez correctly surmised his military background would garner him votes, for it symbolically distanced him from the country’s political elite and built on the country’s tradition “to make the army the arbiter of their political conflicts” (founder of Venezuela’s Puntofijista democracy, and former president Rafael Caldera quoted in Gott 2000, 77).10 The combination of a strong military presence, a political outsider image, an anti-status quo rhetoric, and a political project that promised to build a new democratic participatory government landed Chávez his first electoral victory. In 1998, with a strong coalition behind him, Chávez and his newly formed party, the Movimiento Quinta República (Fifth Republic Movement), won the presidency with 56 percent of the popular vote. Chávez did not squander his symbolic or political capital. The transition from a representative to a participatory-protagonist democracy began with the derogation of the 1961 Constitution and the election of a new constitutional assembly that would revamp

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Venezuela’s ailing political system. Muscling his way through the Opposition-led legislative branch and a largely discredited judiciary, Chávez and his coalition, with the support of organized citizen groups, wrote a constitution that gave the Venezuelan population rights they had heretofore been denied. The 1999 Bolivarian Constitution provided mechanisms through which the citizenry could institutionally impose demands on its elected officials. The constitution recognized the right of citizens to self-government and co-government; it articulated and designed the political processes and institutions necessary to guarantee citizen participation. The model of participatory democracy enshrined in the constitution enables direct community participation in the state, and transforms citizens into active subjects (Fundación Centro Gumilla 1999). Among the unique plebiscitary measures of the 1999 Bolivarian Constitution are the articles found in Chapter IV, which outline the political rights of the population and the extensive use and power of direct participation through popular referenda. The constitution protects the right of the citizenry to elect officials to public office, express their opinion on public policy through popular referendums and plebiscites, and recall public officials. Beyond ballot box measures, it endows citizens with the right to propose ordinary legislation, and to initiate and participate in constitutional assemblies. It recognizes citizen assemblies, giving them legal character, and declares their decisions binding. Unlike Venezuela’s Puntofijista regime, the 1999 Constitution extends a citizen’s right to formally participate in the sphere of public authority. Article 70 grants community enterprises, such as cooperatives, savings organizations, and other forms of associations “guided by the principles of mutual cooperation and solidarity” the possibility of exercising political power (Constitución de la República Bolivariana de Venezuela 1999). In essence, Article 70 of the Bolivarian Constitution explicitly makes the private sphere of commodity trading a publicly relevant political actor when managed by a collective. Article 70 allows collective economic endeavors to exercise political power and form part of the sphere of public authority. Citizen checks over constituted powers turn citizen participation into a de facto branch of government.11 In addition to their participation as voters and members of community organizations, individual citizens are granted the right to launch political initiatives and decide matters of national importance. The Bolivarian Constitution allows citizens as well as different branches of government to call for a plebiscite (Article 71), and allows registered voters to subject international treaties to referendum when they “compromise national sovereignty or transfer

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national power to supranational organizations” (Article 73). The founding charter extends the right of the citizenry to abrogate legislative initiatives and presidential decrees, effectively giving registered voters (and consequently organized society) oversight of the legislative and executive branches. In sum, the 1999 Bolivarian Constitution allows organized citizens in pursuit of both public and private endeavors to take part in the sphere of public authority. This blurs the boundaries between civil society and the state, but more importantly, it challenges and effectively weakens the legitimacy of the state’s elected representatives. Power to the People

In Venezuela’s transition from a representative to a participatoryprotagonist democracy, the privileging of the “will of the people” weakened the power of Venezuela’s political parties. From the onset, the Bolivarian government emphasized the importance of the results of popular referenda, and redefined political participation to include not just political parties or government institutions, but civil society, blurring the line between public officials, organized NGOs, and individuals that help define modern notions of state and politics. In stark contrast to the party democracy enshrined in the 1961 Constitution, the Venezuelan Bolivarian charter does not mention political parties. Instead, Article 67 differentiates between citizen associations and “citizen organizations with political ends,” and calls for the regulation of the latter, stipulating “citizen organizations with political ends” must select candidates through internal elections and cannot be financed through public funds. This particularity results from the Bolivarian project’s emphasis on participatory-protagonist democracy as a privileged form of government. In his inaugural speech before the National Constitutional Assembly (ANC) in 1999, Chávez urged delegates to break with the classic structure of representative democracy based on a tripartite division of powers, advocating instead for the construction of a participatory democratic model where participation “[was] not an end to itself” but a means to transform the citizenry into protagonists with the power to make binding decisions. We have to give the people diverse mechanisms such as plebiscites, referenda, popular assemblies, the power to initiate laws, all these instruments must remain inserted, in my opinion delegates, in the new fundamental charter, so that participation may be binding, so that it is

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not simply participation for participation’s sake, but an instrument to construct, of protagonism and a true democracy, of effective participation, vital to construct a new country, a direction, a project (Asamblea Nacional Constituyente República de Venezuela, August 5, 1999, Section 5).

The Bolivarian model of citizen participation explicitly sought to endow the citizenry with decision-making powers. As explained by Chávez, though not a direct democracy, participatory-protagonist democracy was to come as close to it as possible. While the new constitution endowed the citizenry with decisionmaking rights within the sphere of public authority, it simultaneously weakened the powers of elected officials, but it did not do so uniformly (Álvarez 2003). Participatory provisions such as the right to recall public officials placed regional and local representatives and national legislators in greater jeopardy of recall than the national executive. According to Article 72 of the Bolivarian Constitution, public officials can be recalled by 25 percent or more of the electorate when the total number of votes cast are equal to or greater than the votes cast to elect the official. Given historically low voter turnout in regional and local elections, and smaller net votes allotted to legislators, these offices run a greater risk of being recalled than the office of the presidency (Molina and Pérez 1999). It may take hundreds of thousands of votes to recall a local official but it takes a national crisis to collect the millions of votes necessary to recall the executive (Álvarez 2003). Other participatory measures granted to the citizenry, such as the right to propose constitutional reforms and the right to demand constitutional assemblies, are shared with other branches of power, but the bar is set much higher for the legislature. While the executive needs only to meet with his cabinet to decree constitutional reforms and call for a constitutional assembly, the legislature must obtain a simple majority in the case of reforms and a two-thirds majority in the case of a national constitutional assembly (Álvarez 2003, 8–10). The legal-institutional changes outlined by the 1999 Bolivarian Constitution were premised on the decline of representation as a legitimate and effective means of participation in the political apparatus. The prevalence of this assumption remained throughout the entire process that led to the formation of the National Constitutional Assembly (ANC). In 1999, based on its ideologically-driven emphasis on participation over representation, the Bolivarian government actively excluded popularly elected Opposition legislators from the process leading to the ratification of the ANC.12

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The exclusion broke with the modus operandi of the Fourth Republic. Instead of distributing power among the country’s political and economic stakeholders, the president’s coalition, the Polo Patriótico (Patriotic Front), set out to prove support for its proposal by convening the ANC through Presidential Decree No. 3. The decree consisted of two questions. The first defined the nature of the ANC. It asked the electorate to convene a “national constitutional assembly with the purpose of transforming the state and creating a new legal order that [would] allow for an effective social and participatory democracy.” Question No. 1 ensured the Opposition would not limit the scope of the ANC to reforms based on the Constitution of 1961. Question No. 2 asked voters to “convene a national constitutional assembly and authorized the president to call for elections… according to the mechanisms set forth by the Presidential Constitutional Commission.” Opposition parties challenged the executive over the right to articulate the guidelines and procedures for the ANC. By including the Presidential Bases for a National Constitutional Assembly in Presidential Decree No. 3, the executive branch controlled the guiding principles of the ANC. The Presidential Bases included the procedures and mechanisms necessary to choose ANC members. Drafted by advisors of the executive branch, the Presidential Bases for a National Constitutional Assembly stipulated that a simple electoral majority could convene a national constitutional assembly. It established the ANC’s unicameral structure, its 6-month duration, the requirements of aspiring candidates, and it determined that the number of representatives to the assembly would reflect 1.5 percent of the population. It also reserved seats for representatives of indigenous populations and asserted their right to special electoral procedures conducted in accordance with their ancestral customs. The document established that political parties, organizations and groups within civil society could sponsor candidates to the assembly, but they were to be directly chosen by the electorate and would not be subject to specific mandates or instructions. Elected ANC members had the duty to represent the whole of the nation and not particular constituencies (Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela 1999, 1999a). Most importantly, it freed the ANC from oversight from (already) constituted powers, and allowed it to self-determine the breadth of its powers. In essence, once constituted the ANC could wield power over the executive, judicial, and legislative powers. It was not the executive decree that led to political conflict. In Venezuela, popular politicians had frequently utilized executive decrees to govern and circumvent dissenting interests within their own parties (Coppedge 1994, Crisp 1997). Nor did the executive’s call for a national

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referendum surprise the Opposition; by 1998, some members of Venezuela’s political Opposition had joined the chorus of politicians calling for a popular referendum to legitimize a national constitutional assembly. However, in the months following Chávez’s election, AD and COPEI leaders interpreted the decision to convene the ANC as a political maneuver to expressly exclude Venezuela’s traditional parties from the task of re-founding the country’s democratic system.13 Three different points of view emerged on how to convene the ANC. Chávez and his coalition argued the ANC had to be convened through a popular referendum and should be given ample power to establish a new democratic government. AD and COPEI hardliners argued Congress should convene the ANC as stipulated by the 1961 Constitution. They maintained the ANC should limit itself to amending specific articles within the existing document. Reformers in the Opposition proposed Congress pass a constitutional amendment allowing the ANC to be convened through a popular referendum and agreed with Chávez that the ANC had to have the power to re-found the nation. In the end, Chávez convened the ANC through a referendum based on Article 4 of the 1961 Constitution which stipulates that sovereignty resides in the people and Article 180 of the Law of Suffrage and Political Participation which gives the president and the legislature the power to convene a referendum when issues of national transcendence dominate the public agenda.14 The Opposition interpreted the scope of the prerogatives granted to the executive through the national referendum as an aggressive concentration of power. Indeed, Chávez’s decision to circumvent the legislature was both strategic and symbolic. The president did not have a qualified majority in the legislature. The use of an executive decree to convene the ANC neutralized the political options of the Opposition in the legislature where they could influence the process. Hoping to wrestle control from Chávez, the Opposition pushed for the modification of Presidential Decree No. 3. On March 18, 1999, the Supreme Court of Justice declared the executive could not unilaterally dictate the guidelines to convene a national constitutional assembly. In essence, the ruling forced the executive branch to come under the review of the National Electoral Council. The National Electoral Council left the document intact, reproducing verbatim many of the president’s proposals. At the heart of the debate was Clause 8 of the Presidential Bases for a National Constitutional Assembly, which read,

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Once the ANC is installed, as an originating power that represents popular sovereignty, it must dictate its own procedural norms, establishing as its limits the values and principles of our republican history. [It must] comply with international treaties, accords and compromises validly subscribed to by the republic. [Additionally, it will maintain] the progressive character of the fundamental rights of man and democratic guarantees demonstrating the utmost respect for the compromises undertaken (Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela 1999, 1999a).

On April 13, 1999, the Political-Administrative Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice declared the national constitutional assembly did not possess originating powers and ordered the National Electoral Council to eliminate all indications of the “original character” of the ANC from the Presidential Bases for a National Constitutional Assembly. The Political-Administrative Chamber deemed that the ANC could only be endowed with originating powers if a legal rupture had occurred as in the case of coup d’état or a civil war. According to the tribunal, the de jure transition from one form of government to another did not give the ANC originating powers. The court further declared that the constitutional assembly was subject to existing laws, institutions, and the legal order until the people of Venezuela ratified a new constitution via referendum. The court ruling in favor of the Opposition ordered the National Electoral Council to change Question No. 2 and modify Clause 8 of the presidential guidelines. Complying with the orders of the Political-Administrative Chamber of the Supreme Court, the National Electoral Council eliminated the phrase “an originating power that represents popular sovereignty” from Clause 8 of the presidential guidelines and changed Question No. 2 of the referendum to read: “Do you agree with the bases proposed by the National Executive to convene the ANC, examined and partially modified by the National Electoral Council on March 24, 1999, and as published in its entirety in the Gaceta Oficial de la República de Venezuela, number 36.669 on March 25, 1999?” In April of 1999, in lieu of the Political-Administrative Court’s interpretation, Chávez sent a letter to the chamber stating that he ran a campaign based on the promise of an originating constitution to reconstruct and transform the democratic system. He vowed to utilize his presidential prerogatives to conduct matters of state. The Supreme Court of Justice responded that he cease his hostility towards the court. The issue of the originating power of the constitutional assembly was more than a fight over choice of words. Of primary importance to both Chávez and the Opposition, the nature of the ANC would

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determine the extent of its powers. Chávez and his coalition, the Patriotic Front, contended that if the ANC was an originating power it should be able to direct and control the functions of other branches of government. The Opposition disagreed. According to legislative representatives, Chávez and the Patriotic Front concocted the idea of an originating power to establish a de facto dictatorship that would maintain the guise of legality by operating through an omnipotent political body (El Universal 1999). Within this context, the extent of the president’s power over the ANC depended on his ability to ensure his party obtained majority within the assembly. The bases for the selection process of ANC representatives established the direct nomination of candidates. Chávez and the Patriotic Front could not resort to closed or open party slates to push their candidates to victory. According to the bases to convene the ANC, voters had the opportunity to choose their representatives from different parties and socio-political organizations. The emphasis placed on the popular and egalitarian character of the ANC meant that citizens that met the minimum requirements and obtained 20,000 signatures supporting their candidacy would be placed on the ballot. As a result, voters chose among 1,170 candidates to fill 131 positions. The Patriotic Front devised what the media derogatively referred to as “Chávez’s lottery”—a list of all the candidates that belonged to its coalition. This strategy was important given that of the 131 candidates, 24 were national representatives, 3 representatives were to be selected by the indigenous population through separate processes, and the remaining 104 were selected through regional elections. Chávez’s supporters had a stronghold on the key national positions. A survey conducted in June 1999, revealed that most eligible voters preferred candidates that did not belong to a political party, belonged to a new party, or Chávez’s coalition (El Universal 1999a). The fight for regional representatives, however, would prove more difficult to overcome. As the November 1998 congressional elections had demonstrated, the Patriotic Front’s regional support was not as prominent as the support it had at the national level. By drafting and distributing “Chávez’s lottery,” the coalition quickly solved the problem. Patriotic Front militants, sympathizers and independents, utilized the list of coalition candidates to elect 121 of the party’s members to the ANC. On July 25, 1999, the Patriotic Front obtained 65 percent of the votes and their candidates filled 96 percent of the national constitutional assembly’s seats (Maingón et al. 2000). The setbacks suffered by Venezuela’s traditional parties during Chávez’s first year in office resulted from a deficit of legitimacy, but it

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was furthered by the differences between the Bolivarian regime’s definition of participatory democracy and traditional parties’ understanding of citizen participation. While the push for reform between 1989 and 1992 centered on decentralized power and popular referenda, it did not emphasize direct citizen participation. The reforms under Puntofijismo attempted to fine-tune the institutions of Venezuela’s democracy but largely remained confined to the representative ideal of a civil society participating in public debate, and influencing lawmaking through the ballot box, all the while remaining separate from the institutional processes in the hands of elected and appointed public officials. Lodged in a battle to retain their quota of political power, Venezuela’s traditional parties underestimated the symbolic importance of the referendum. The guidelines for the ANC presaged a different understanding of democracy and the role the public sphere now played both as part and parcel of the sphere of public authority, and as the source of political legitimacy. From his first legislative initiative, President Chávez redefined the rules of the game. Question No. 2 of the presidential decree to establish the ANC replaced the negotiated patronage system of Puntofijismo that distributed power between political parties with first-past-the-post electoral contests. More importantly, the Bolivarian government’s first national referendum set the precedent for a new understanding of government representation. While the Puntofijista regime had been founded on a platform that respected and defended the specific interests of each political party’s constituency, the new government demanded representatives put aside the interests of their constituency and represent the collective good on behalf of the sovereign. As a result, in the Fifth Republic, political legitimacy would derive from the claim of public officials, citizen associations, and political parties to represent the people. The actions taken by Chávez’s government to convene the 1999 referendum calling for a new constitutional assembly was the first act symbolically shifting the source of government legitimacy. If Puntofijista democracy had triumphed due to its conciliatory gestures and its reliance on representation as the guarantor of political power, the 1999 national constitutional referendum gave birth to the Bolivarian Republic by sidelining traditional parties and crowning the people themselves as the source of political capital. The shift did not eradicate representation as a source of legitimacy, but given the dire state of Puntofijista democracy, leaders and policies that came to be perceived as faithfully representing the people would enjoy greater degrees of legitimacy.15 As the ANC process evolved, government legitimacy expanded to derive from both the office of elected leaders and their role

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as proxies of the people. The transition to a direct form of democratic government, the increasingly indistinct boundaries of the public sphere, and the transformation of socio-political actors into spokespersons for the sovereign, set the stage for the subsequent polarization process suffered by the Bolivarian regime. Who Constitutes the People?

Following the dictates of his popular mandate, President Hugo Chávez and his coalition boldly institutionalized citizen participation to make the government more beholden to the people. A noble sentiment in theory, the task of defining how to best interpret the will of the people had to be given shape in ANC deliberations. Shortly after the ANC was convened, President Chávez and delegates assumed the task of defining the sovereign. In his discourse before the assembly on August 5, 1999, Chávez described a new federation, “a co-sovereignty,” “subsidiary sovereignties,” and sovereignty seen as a “popular expression” limited only by the rights and responsibilities of the people and the nation (Asamblea Nacional Constituyente República de Venezuela, August 5, 1999, Section 5). Chávez had defined his mandate as returning to the citizenry their right to participate in government, and the need to reconstruct Venezuelan democracy. Adhering to the notion of a sovereign with formal authority, Chávez warned the new Bolivarian Republic based on the “principle of co-sovereignty or subsidiary sovereignty,” should not be held hostage by the “sum of small regional constitutional assemblies” (Section 5). Chávez defined sovereignty as a “popular expression” that demanded direct participation in government but his definition described the popular will as a unitary, indivisible mandate. In essence, Chávez and his coalition defined the sovereign as an ideal will that would take shape as individuals suspended their own interests and defined, together with others, the will of the community. In a direct allusion to Rousseau’s concept of the general will, Francisco Visconti, ANC member and part of Chávez’s coalition, reiterated, We [members of the ANC] are depositories of the general will of the Venezuelan collective. The sovereign…is not simply a popular will or the sum of individual wills. It is the disposition, the compromise and the desire that the Venezuelan collective has to establish a new relationship among members of society, to redefine a new society, to re-found a new republic…(Asamblea Nacional Constituyente República de Venezuela 1999, August 8, 1999, Section 2).

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In practice, the task of reconstructing a new democratic system required the government tangibly define the sovereign (García-Guadilla and Mallen 2012). Chávez would do just that. In his August 5, 1999 discourse, the president argued, “What would be the necessary condition, for a human group to be considered a people? … [that it] share the glories of its past by having knowledge of them, being conscious from where they originate ... and…in the present having a common will that binds them” (Asamblea Nacional Constituyente República de Venezuela, August 5, 1999, Section 5). The sovereign included the segment of the population that shared a specific interpretation of Venezuela’s national history and identified with the project of the new Bolivarian political class that sought to design a new participatory-protagonist democracy. In her interpretation of the American and the French Revolutions, Hannah Arendt (1965) argues that the historical context from whence national constitutional assemblies emerge is as important in shaping them as the actions of delegates to them. Chávez and his governing coalition understood the popular mandate as emanating from an unprecedented historical moment characterized by a peaceful and democratic revolution charged with the task of beginning Venezuelan democracy anew. Delegates argued the popular mandate required the ANC wipe the slate clean, and four days into official deliberations, members of Chávez’s coalition began to articulate guidelines for the constitutional charter by dialectically positioning their arguments in opposition to the Puntofijista regime.16 When confronted with objections from Opposition delegates, ANC member Hermann Escarrá defended the government’s position by arguing that “the force of history” had led them to “break with the axiomatic neutralism” and forced them to understand that “constitutional law…[was] not administrative law. Not legality.” “Constitutional law,” he asserted, “is history. It is a telluric force, it is a social reality, it is an economic reality. It is a political reality” (Asamblea Nacional Constituyente República de Venezuela, August 8, 1999, Section 2). Describing the trajectory resulting in a historic revolution, Luis Miquilena, president of the ANC and a former Chávez advisor, stated the ANC was “the emblematic directive of this [Bolivarian] project. But our enemies remain blind.” (Asamblea Nacional Constituyente República de Venezuela August 3, 1999, Section 6). ANC delegates simply had to “see” the sovereign and act in accordance with its will. According to Chavista ANC delegates, the popular expression of the sovereign did not need to be speculated upon, it had been chiseled by the

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political crises of Puntofijismo, the election of Hugo Chávez, and the historic national referendum that convened the ANC. In his speech before the ANC, Chávez called on delegates to create a new vision of the nation based on the principle of “Robinsonian inventiveness” (invencionismo Robinsoniano). Utilizing the image of Simón Rodríguez, teacher and mentor to the liberator Simón Bolívar, Chávez urged delegates to creatively spearhead an economic and political revolution.17 Without specifying concrete solutions, he pleaded for delegates to reject “neoliberal dogma,” and “free-market fundamentalism.” Alluding to the ills of Puntofijismo, he urged delegates to refrain from constructing a representative democracy with a “bureaucratic machinery… [that] denied fundamental human rights” (Asamblea Nacional Constituyente República de Venezuela August 5, 1999, Section 5). He advocated the new constitution promote an active citizenry by giving legal and binding character to plebiscites, referenda, popular assemblies, and popular consultations, and allowing citizens to initiate laws. The Limits of Popular Participation in the ANC

The executive’s initiative in promoting and setting into motion the 1999 constitution-making process contributed to the success of the assembly, but as previously detailed, the popularity of this demand derived from years of support for constitutional reform that would end the political crisis by replacing Venezuela’s partidocracia (party democracy) with a participatory democracy. Chávez and his governing coalition advocated ANC members extensively interact with different organizations of Venezuelan civil society. Meanwhile, human rights organizations, women’s, neighborhood, environmental, and educational groups organized citizen assemblies and drafted proposals to present to the 1999 National Constitutional Assembly. Their efforts resulted in the submission of 624 proposals to the ANC; of these, 321 were partially or completely adopted by the assembly (García-Guadilla 2000, 24). The majority of the successful proposals came from human rights organizations; the ANC accepted 65 percent of their proposals. Proposals from other groups such as environmental NGOs, women’s and business associations, and networks of organizations with liberal interests and values seeking the decentralization of the state obtained an average acceptance rate of 33 percent. According to García-Guadilla (2000, 25), the differences in the approval ratings of human rights organizations’ proposals and those of other groups within civil society can be attributed

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to the focus on participatory democracy on the part of the former. Successful proposals criticized representative government. Recommendations that focused on citizen checks over constituted powers through popular forms of organization were most likely to be incorporated into the final text. Ironically, by relying on a notion of popular sovereignty and the general will, Chávez and his coalition undercut citizen participation in the ANC process in two important ways. First, they eliminated proposals from political leaders, citizens and organized groups not aligned with the government, and whose ideological platform differed from the people’s mandate as defined by the presidency. This excluded sectors of society that had benefited from the spoils of Puntofijismo. Secondly, the notion of the will of the people as a coherent ideological project given voice by the presidency allowed delegates to the ANC to limit the participation of individual citizens who supported the Bolivarian government, by arguing the president already represented their point of view. The definition of the sovereign articulated by Chávez was thus used to exclude some of the very citizen organizations that had attempted to reform the Venezuelan political system. The reason for this was expressed when delegate Eliézer Otaiza, affiliated with the president’s coalition, objected to the use of the term civil society. Fellow delegate Ydelfonso Finol, explained. These little words (palabritas) 'civil society'… in [the state of] Zulia… have an elitist connotation for the people: [and make reference to the organizations] Queremos Elegir, FEDECAMARAS, two or three organizations that have been prominent in this country’s civil society, while the term 'communities' has much more to do with workers, with people from grassroots communities, etcetera, that also have a need to be expressed (Asamblea Nacional Constituyente República de Venezuela August 7, 1999, Chapter X).

While the exclusion of the term civil society aimed at including more diverse types of social organizations, the distinction between an elitist civil society and a grassroots community resulted in different levels of citizen participation in the ANC debate. Grassroots organizations that drafted proposals and directly presented them to ANC committees enjoyed a greater rate of inclusion. Organizations identified as part of civil society that either submitted their proposals to the general assembly, or specific delegates with whom they shared personal or professional ties were also more likely to be included (García-Guadilla 2000 and 2002, Carvajal 2002, Guillén and García-Guadilla 2006).

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In the cosmology of the Bolivarian Republic, the sovereign was defined as the disenfranchised masses that had no political voice under the 1961 regime. This interpretation of participatory democracy contrasted sharply with the inclusion advocated by groups within civil society that continued to preach the virtues of a consensual government but demanded it be exercised through organized society. Civil society organizations that participated in the drafting of the Bolivarian Constitution came to recognize their conception of participatory democracy did not coincide with that espoused by the government. This was especially true of organizations with a liberal ideology whose interpretation of participatory democracy maintained the separation between civil society and the state. In the process of issuing recommendations to the ANC, some of these organizations were denied direct access to representatives of the assembly. The inability of some of these groups to present their proposals personally to the ANC became a point of contention with Chávez’s government. For these groups, their inability to participate in ANC discussions overshadowed the success they achieved when their proposals were incorporated into the constitution. Organizations disparaged as civil society slowly concluded that without direct links to the government’s network, they would be excluded from participating in Venezuela’s new participatory democracy (Mallen 2003). Though Chávez and his coalition limited the participation of the political Opposition in the ANC, the actions of the government did not mobilize the citizenry against it. As Opposition leader Leonardo Carvajal (2002) pointed out, the protests that Opposition nongovernmental and citizen organizations staged in 1999 did not incite general protests. In fact, weeks before voting to ratify the 1999 Bolivarian Constitution, polls indicated the new constitution had a 67 percent rate of approval. Polls further concluded that respondents’ identification with and sympathies towards Chávez influenced their positive view of the Bolivarian Constitution (El Universal 1999a).18 Limiting Participation Within the Chavista Base

The lack of proper ideological affinity created an obstacle for citizen participation in the ANC, but the interpretation of the sovereign as indivisible created roadblocks as well. When regional delegates demanded they be periodically allowed to return to their constituencies to report on their progress and gather ideas and proposals, Chávez warned them to avoid any “federalism” that would result in “anarchy” and undermine national unity (Asamblea Nacional Constituyente

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República de Venezuela, August 5, 1999, Section 5). Regional delegates argued that as representatives of the provinces they best understood the regional electorate and could better articulate issues of relevance to distinct populations. They petitioned for permission to travel to the provinces to inform their constituencies of ANC developments and solicit their opinions and petitions. Chavista Delegate Saúl Ortega opined the following. What is happening is that in this process, we offered to consult with the people, and that is what we, the provinces, are demanding. There is a world out there that is waiting for us, individuals, organized groups, communities who need to be heard and some who cannot come to Caracas. For that reason, [I propose] … we include consultations as a form of convening this assembly. That we are given the liberty to go and work in our regions and acts as proxies of the people that elected us and put us here (Asamblea Nacional Constituyente República de Venezuela August 8, 1999, Section 6).

Among the Chavista majority, hardliners toeing the official line argued regional constituents did not need to consult their constituencies. We are national delegates. Some of us were elected as national candidates and many more were elected as regional candidates, but when the ANC was instated and convened, we are all now national delegates. I understand the need to continue to correspond with the regions, but … I cannot be with one sector right now, we should not limit ourselves to a geographical perimeter, I believe the importance now, above all else, is Venezuela in its totality (Marisabel de Chávez cited in Asamblea Nacional Constituyente República de Venezuela August 8, 1999, Section 2).

The objections of the regional delegates were ignored. Leaders of the Chavista coalition maintained their position, arguing that what mattered was the bond delegates had with the community and not with a specific group. This allowed delegates to draft a constitutional charter in six months as requested by President Chávez but hindered the ability of regional delegates to communicate with their provinces, privileging the participation of national citizen organizations (García-Guadilla and Hurtado 2000). Far from helping to mitigate the exclusionary policies that resulted from these interpretations of the sovereign, the plebiscitary instruments utilized to convene the ANC stripped its deliberations of substantive debate. Hoping to sidestep political Opposition and expedite the completion of the new constitutional charter, the ANC redefined the

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manner in which decisions were to be approved. While in principle the constitutional delegates agreed to approve the statutes and decisions of the ANC through a qualified majority consisting of 2/3 of delegates, they subsequently voted to decide by simple majority. The resolution in favor of a simple majority meant ANC decisions could be made with a quorum of 67 delegates and a simple majority of a mere 34 representatives among the 131 delegates that were elected by voters. In response to allegations that this procedural change would undermine the legitimacy of ANC decisions, the Chavista majority argued that ratification of the Bolivarian Constitution through a popular referendum would prove the legitimacy of the new constitution. Moreover, according to delegates in Chávez’s coalition, their overwhelming majority in the ANC gave them binding power over ANC decisions. The majority held by the Patriotic Front [Chávez’s coalition]…is a majority [given] so we will not be run over. We are not violating…it is precisely that we understand there might be a perfect diversity of criteria. Imagine, if in the discussion over the procedural norms that are to structure discussions, the manner through which we will try to establish a hierarchy of subjects, we have had differences, how will it be when we have to discuss substantive material and it is very probable that due to an imposed qualified vote we will not be able to approve a right that might benefit the workers, a minority sector of the population…in my opinion…democracy is majority and minority and it is not always a qualified majority. In reality, the fact we have a majority, that it was rightfully won, through a very high popular vote in the last elections, does not mean the Opposition will now tell us: ‘well now you must approve everything by an overwhelming majority, through a qualified vote, with two-thirds of delegate approval’…we will incarcerate ourselves, because the people elected us to exercise our democratic rights and we will exercise them in this National Constitutional Assembly and the absolute majority is one of the democratic rights and because we have a wide decisive majority we will not renounce these rights. (Vladimir Villegas cited in Asamblea Nacional Constituyente República de Venezuela August 8, 1999, Chapter XI).

The decision to vote on resolutions through a simple majority accelerated the decision-making process, but it limited discussion and undermined broad consensus. Non-Chavista minorities were unable to leverage the need for a qualified majority over Chavista delegates, and their influence was diminished.

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Elite Polarization Despite Popular Support

Though the Bolivarian project emerged from attempts to address a genuine crisis of legitimacy, the demotion of representative democracy, the politicized definition of the sovereign, and the exclusion of elected officials from the process of convening the ANC resulted in contention among the political elite. The inability or unwillingness of the government and Opposition parties to work in a bipartisan manner exacerbated their differences and contributed to an increasingly hostile political discourse that pit Opposition politicians and Opposition-run government institutions against their Chavista counterparts. In March 1999, amidst rumors the ANC would wield power over the legislative branch, Opposition national assembly representatives met with the president and advocated a limited role for the constitutional assembly. According to press reports, the meeting, though courteous, resulted in allegations of irreconcilable differences and the accusation that the government was trying to create an “omnipotent” assembly. In statements to national media, Opposition leaders accused the government of trying to concoct an originating power to establish a de facto dictatorship (Baptista 1999, Morrillo Ramos 1999). President Chávez and his coalition responded that the Opposition’s reaction was due to the loss of their stronghold on political power (El Universal 1999b). This discursive tit-for-tat foreshadowed the course Venezuela’s politics would take. Chavista political leaders distanced themselves from the Opposition by categorizing their differences as irreconcilable and attributing Opposition arguments to political maneuvering as opposed to ideological positions. The new ruling coalition held a considerable advantage over the Opposition. Emboldened by Chávez’s electoral victory and seizing on the association of Opposition majorities in the legislative and judicial branches with Puntofijismo, the ANC decreed a national emergency that required all constituted powers submit their authority to the ANC for ratification. The executive was quickly ratified. With very little political capital, the judicial branch fell under ANC review. The National Assembly opposed the measure and refused to submit to the scrutiny of the ANC. The conflict resulted in physical confrontation, presaging the escalation of conflict that would ensue. On August 27, 1999, national guards blocked the entrance of the National Assembly as elected legislators attempted to fulfill their legislative duties, until the new constitution was ratified through a popular referendum. The standoff

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was eventually resolved through the mediation of the Catholic Church and the creation of a smaller delegate assembly authorized to continue to legislate until the ratification of the new constitution.19 In the end, the conflict over the National Constitutional Assembly set rhetorical and tactical precedents. Between the Bolivarian government and its Opposition, political discourse became increasingly bellicose and pit political leaders, ideologies, visions of democracy, and party sympathizers against each other. Unilateral political actions and an increasing division of the public sphere would follow. Conclusion

Upon taking office, Chávez made good on his promise to convene a national constitutional assembly to transform Venezuela’s representative democratic system into a participatory-protagonist one. This change in the political structure of the state increased the institutional powers of the citizenry by allowing them to use plebiscitary measures to revoke political mandates, as well as initiate and derogate laws. The new plebiscitary measures introduced by the 1999 Bolivarian Constitution and the institutions that derived from popular power broke the monopoly that elected and appointed government officials had enjoyed. Venezuela’s legislative bodies and party caucuses, once the bearers of popular sovereignty, found themselves forced to share their authority with citizens, community organizations, and popular assemblies. The new forms of citizen participation outlined in the Bolivarian Constitution resulted in a greater emphasis on the moral authority of the will of the people, with competing political actors claiming not just to represent their constituencies, but to speak on behalf of the people at large. This would culminate in a struggle to claim the sole representation of the public will. Claims by leaders and politicians to represent the sovereign accentuated the differences between Hugo Chávez and his Opposition, and led to the inability of socio-political actors to recognize the legitimate claims of their opponents. The new political arrangement left little room for divided sovereignties. The new form of representation, based on popular sovereignty, in conjunction with the new institutional venues for direct citizen participation required new forms of political action. What resulted was a heightened need for the visual elements of political representation capable of unequivocally providing visual testament of the representation of the sovereign. Popular referenda capable of quantifying the will of the population served to legitimize the political

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project of the Bolivarian Revolution. And in the years following the ratification of the 1999 Bolivarian Constitution, this need to legitimize claims of representation of the sovereign resulted in citizen mobilizations through protests and marches, and citizen participation in government programs. In its most extreme form the sovereign would be reflected in the bodies of the citizenry as they donned the emblems, colors, and other cultural markers of their political affiliation. Notes 1 In this work we have adapted the term “public authority” utilized by Habermas (2000) in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere to describe the different spaces of citizen action in sixteenth century Europe, to differentiate between the public sphere as opposed to the private, but also distinct from the realm of government and public institutions. 2 In We the People, Volume 2: Transformations, Ackerman (1998) states that in moments of “higher lawmaking,” political actors stretch the limits of constitutional law to redefine the nation-state. Drawing his case analyses from history, Ackerman determines from outcomes whether a specific period can be considered a milestone in higher law. We are not so ambitious. Whether or not we can conclusively and by way of historical evidence call a political moment a period of “higher lawmaking” that presaged a revolutionary shift in the philosophical tenets of Venezuela’s democratic regime, we contend here that the perception among citizens that they were witnessing a radical political transformation set to substantially alter the foundational principles of the nationstate and directly impact their way of life, changed their understanding of politics-as-usual. 3 See Ellner and Tinker-Salas 2007. 4 In 1948, Venezuela’s first democratically-elected President Romulo Gallegos was toppled by the military with the consent of the socio-economic elite after only three years of government. A center-left government, the threeyear regime was considered too radical by the country’s powerful interest groups. 5 In essence, the Pact of Punto Fijo hampered efforts at inclusion by denying the possibility of transforming Venezuela’s democratic government into a socialist or communist regime by defining its limits a priori. The question of a possible communist government was swiftly decided when, in the aftermath of their 1958 civic-military coup, AD and COPEI excluded the Venezuelan Communist Party from the subsequent state formation process, arguing they disagreed with the Communist Party’s call for a revolution (López Maya et al. De Punto Fijo al Pacto Social, 69). 6 For an insightful look at the development of COPEI and its subsequent rise to power, see Herman (1980) Christian Democracy in Venezuela. 7 The split between AD members resulted in the emergence of guerrilla groups in the 1960s that claimed AD had betrayed the revolution. This opening allowed leftist political parties such as MAS and La Causa R to emerge. Although the electoral success of these parties has been marginal, they have

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played an important role in Venezuela’s political system and its subsequent democratization processes. For a historical account of the 1960s guerrilla movements, see Levine 1974 and Carvallo 1995. 8 It was estimated that by 1996 there were 1,016 civil society organizations operating in the country. For a detailed analysis of the boom of civil society see Gruson, Parra, and Regnault 1997. 9 Framing the expanses of wealth created by state-sponsored capitalism was a political system based on the alternation of power between Venezuela’s dominant parties, the left of center, Acción Democrática (AD) and the right of center, COPEI. Under the Puntofijista regime, the state’s actionable power was concentrated in the caucus of these two political parties, who partitioned political positions to allies through closed slate ballots and designated nonelected political offices which allotted appointees a great deal of discretionary powers. Party candidates to legislative bodies such as the Chamber of Deputies, the Senate, state legislative assemblies and, until 1979, city councils, were elected through closed party lists. The tarjetón, as the ballot form was called, presented voters with the contending parties’ names, symbols and colors. Which candidate took office depended on how many votes the party obtained and how high a specific candidate ranked on the official party list. As a result, elected officials owed their loyalty not to the constituencies that elected them but to the political party and the specific faction, which had lobbied on their behalf (Coppedge 1994, 327; Morgan 2011). 10 If the Puntofijista regime had fomented the belief among Venezuelan citizens that democracy was the best form of government, it had not erased the vestiges of the perceived need for military intervention in regime change. In a 1993 survey, after two failed coup attempts, 80 percent of Venezuelan respondents expressed a favorable view of the military, though they rejected military rule (McCoy and Smith 1995, 135). 11 Title IV, Chapter I of the Bolivarian Constitution of 1999 lists five public branches of government: the legislative, the executive, the judicial, the citizen and the electoral branch. The power given to the electorate is not considered part of the citizen branch of government. This public power is composed of the Defender of the People, the office of the Attorney General, and the General Comptroller (Constitución de la República Bolivariana de Venezuela 1999). 12 The exclusionary measures also resulted from historical and political considerations. Within the context of regime change, the exclusion or limited participation of the country’s discredited political elite responded in part to the need to break with the leadership of the Fourth Republic and recreate Venezuela’s democracy with new political ideals, institutions and actors. 13 The political Opposition would introduce 14 appeals against Presidential Decree No. 3; the Supreme Court of Justice declared them all inadmissible (Maingón, Baralt and Sonntag 2000, 98). 14 The debate over how to convene a national constitutional assembly was decided by the Supreme Court of Justice. In January 1999 the Supreme Court ruled that while the “people” delegated authority to public officials they did not abdicate their sovereignty and could therefore exercise it directly via referendum. The court declared that a constitutional assembly was not the only means of convening the ANC. 15 For a critical view of the constituent process see, Brewer Carias 2010.

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16 In debates such as whether to consider the ANC an originating or a de jure assembly, whether to establish prosecutorial immunity for delegates, and determining their compensation, members of the president’s coalition justified their positions by reverting to examples of corruption, impropriety and persecution under Puntofijismo (Asamblea Nacional Constituyente República de Venezuela, August 7–8, 1999). 17 The Bolivarian Republic used historical figures and events as a means to define the “sovereign.” This resulted in the appropriation by Chávez’s government of historical figures such as Simón Bolivar, Ezequiel Zamora, and Simón Rodríguez, whom Chávez regularly exalted as fathers of the Bolivarian Revolution. For an analysis of this appropriation of history, see Juan Eduardo Romero 2005. 18 Though the Opposition would vigorously object to Chávez’s interpretation of the sovereign, at the time of his discourse in 1999, Chávez’s definition did not provoke protests among Venezuela’s population. In fact, during Chávez’s first year in office, the ANC enjoyed ample public support. Days before the selection of ANC candidates, polls indicated 46 percent of Venezuelan citizens agreed with the ANC’s mission to create a new constitution, transform the state, and create a new judicial order (IVAD 1999). 19 According to surveys taken in 1999, there was a general apathy toward the process and a limited understanding of the implications of an ANC as well as unreasonable expectations. Only 44 percent of the population polled knew the exact date of the election of ANC candidates. Polls further demonstrated the prevalent notion the ANC was going to “change the constitution” was favored by the higher socio-economic strata while the hypothesis the ANC was going to eliminate congress was expressed by 87 percent of the lowest socioeconomic strata versus the 13 percent of the highest strata (IVAC 1999).

3 Political Ghettos in Caracas

While the Bolivarian Constitution institutionalized participatory democracy and favored the inclusion of civilian organizations in government decision-making processes, the Opposition and its constituencies increasingly expressed their discontent with the new arrangement, alleging they were being left out of the political process. During the 2001–2003 period, Chávez’s government implemented the tenets of the 1999 Bolivarian Revolution through presidential decrees, bypassing potential detractors in the legislative branch. This led the Opposition to express their discontent in the public arena. Antigovernment groups increasingly protested in the streets, avenues, plazas, highways and other public areas of the city of Caracas.1 As the conflict gained visibility in the post-1999 period, it encouraged the rise of territorial and spatial divisions that would eventually reconfigure the city. The increased political tension partitioned the population along social and ideological lines. The use of public space to manifest political positions resulted in a segregated urban environment, which accentuated the conflict unfolding between ordinary citizens. Moreover, this process transformed previously existing class differences into outright class conflicts that sought to appropriate public spaces, revealing a less democratic face of civil society (García-Guadilla 2003 and 2007, García-Guadilla and Mallen 2013)2—Venezuelan sociologist Tulio Hernández called it the “grammar of war” applied to public space. (García-Guadilla 2006, 48). Thus, previously shared spaces were “ghettoized” as political constituencies claimed them as their own, exacerbating the existing socio-spatial segregated and undemocratic urban landscape. This partitioning—attributable to both pro-government and antigovernment groups—created or revealed a deficient political culture, grounded in the exclusion of the Other. In the case of the Opposition, civil society leaders justified the exclusion of Chavistas as a means of

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defending the liberal democratic constitutional rights they considered threatened, such as private property or freedom of speech. In the view of Chavismo, exclusion was merited as a means to stop the Opposition from obstructing the government’s implementation of new constitutional socio-economic rights. The Grammar of War: April 11, 2002

The radical exclusion of the Other as part of normal political expression evolved gradually. First, politicians, social organizations, media outlets, and eventually the citizenry itself were partitioned as either Chavismo and Opposition. Then, the process of polarization, became increasingly bellicose in nature. The April 11, 2002 coup d’état against Hugo Chávez by the Opposition would provide the justification for the polarization process. April 11 was the defining moment in the conflict that would ensue, and exposed different facets of Venezuelan polarization. It revealed the partitioning of territory and the claims on public space by each group, as well as the repercussions for transgressing those boundaries. It underscored the use of visibility as a political tool to ascertain the legitimacy of each constituency. It presaged the importance of the media in promoting divergent interpretations of reality. And it provided the stage for the emergence of the diverse narratives that would frame the conflict as an existential struggle. A series of skirmishes preceded the violence unleashed on April 11. During the first three months of 2002, newspaper and television outlets were sieged by Chavistas. According to the daily El Universal, these attacks were coordinated by the popular leader Lina Ron3 and the Bolivarian Circle she led (Álvarez 2002). Marches staged by the Opposition were confronted with countermarches by Chavistas. Eventually, simultaneous but separate marches took place in symbolic spaces such as the National Assembly, separated by a thin line of security forces. These mobilizations turned violent as pro-Chávez and anti-Chávez sympathizers, students, and workers confronted each other. The April 11 coup was primarily fueled by a conflict between the president and organizations that housed diverse groups and interests, including the chamber of commerce Federación de Cámaras de Comercio y la Producción (FEDECAMARAS), the national labor union Confederación de Trabajadores de Venezuela (CTV), political parties including AD, COPEI, Bandera Roja and Primero Justicia, as well as civil society organizations. By 2000, the Opposition publicly decried the first Enabling law, granted by a Chavista majority in the legislature, that

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allowed Chávez to pass a set of 49 laws through presidential decrees.4 This coalition, led by FEDECAMARAS’ leader, Pedro Carmona Estanga, called for a 12-hour strike on December 10, 2001. Organizations disenchanted with President Hugo Chávez rallied to the cause and converged to form the national platform that would eventually become the Opposition. Although groups opposed to Chávez had already publicly spoken out and even staged marches against what they deemed to be undemocratic and exclusionary practices on the part of the executive, the December 2001 strike was more successful in that it provided the Opposition with the opportunity to counter Chavismo’s dominance of public protest, which had been legitimizing its claim to authority. Much emphasis has rightly been placed on the divergent economic interests that gave rise to the conflict. The December 2001 strike was led by economic groups disenchanted with what seemed to be a reversal of the opening, in the 1990s, of the national oil industry to international investment. The president’s use of the Enabling Law in 2000 to push through reforms in key sectors such as energy, land, and agriculture incentivized resistance among certain economic groups. Indeed, among the 49 laws passed through presidential decree the Ley Orgánica de Hidrocarburos (Law of Hydrocarbons) and the Ley de Tierras y Desarrollo Agrario (Land and Agrarian Development Law), effectively threatened the interests of economic elites. The Law of Hydrocarbons increased taxes paid by transnationals working in the extractive industry. It also required a minimum of 51 percent of state participation in joint ventures. Changes to the Land and Agrarian Law allowed large-estates to be expropriated for the public utility. It would be a mistake, however, to understand the Opposition that surged against Chávez in the post-1999 period as driven solely by economic interests. The emergence of an Opposition capable of staging countermarches that would rival the mobilization of Chavismo was initially driven by the government’s mishandling of the National Constitutional Assembly, the labor union referendum, and the conflict over the law of education. The exclusion of political leaders from the process of drafting the Bolivarian Constitution whom the president considered linked to the corruption of previous regimes generated the perception that the Bolivarian government would purposefully exclude constituencies that did not support Chávez. But if the experience of the National Constitutional Assembly generated this perception among former political leaders, the union, and educational conflicts transmitted the message to the bases of each constituency. In 2000, as part of the dismantling of the institutions of Puntofijismo Chávez proposed that a

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referendum be held to replace leaders of the Confederación de Trabajadores de Venezuela (CTV). The decision was put to the sovereign through a referendum as opposed to union members. With regard to the Educational Law of 2001, inclusions agreed upon by both pro-Chávez and Opposition groups were not honored by Chávez in the law’s final version (Mallen 2003, López Maya 2005). Public opinion among the Venezuelan middle and upper class held that the Bolivarian project harbored leftist tendencies with which they disagreed, and their inability to influence the educational law added to their perception of being subject to a political project that would not only affect their interests but Venezuela itself. After these missteps on the part of Bolivarian government, the conflict intensified, as both the government and the Opposition dug in their heels. The Opposition demanded Chávez undo the 49 laws decreed through the Enabling Law, and public opinion makers began to demand the president’s resignation. The government not only refused to review the 49 laws, it threatened to pass a new media law, and in February of 2002, Chávez appointed new leaders to the state oil company Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA). The latter move reignited the struggle between the (other) leaders of PDVSA and the federal government over control of the country’s oil industry. On April 7, 2002, Chávez fired PDVSA Opposition executives on live television, arguing they were not appointed through merits but through political connections, and accusing them of corruption. PDVSA is the heart of the Venezuelan economy and an elite has taken over PDVSA…What is the average salary of the PDVSA elite?…the PDVSA elite some of them earn up to 300 million Bolívares a year. Some earn 15 million Bolívares a month. Do you know what that salary is compared to the salary of the workers?…Simón Bolívar used to say, ‘talent without virtue is a curse.’ It is not enough, you cannot speak of having a PhD from who knows where and what more, and you are well, the first technocrat of the world, but besides that where is your ethic? All of this must be taken into consideration (Chávez 2002).

PDVSA executives may have held the right credentials, but according to Chávez they lacked the desirable moral attributes. After the incident, the Opposition was indignant at the insult they had suffered at the hands of Hugo Chávez. The president had symbolically challenged their claim that power should be based on merit, by questioning whether this qualified them to lead the nation. On April 9, FEDECAMARAS once again convened a strike. On April 10, CTV union leader Carlos Ortega called on workers to join.

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Coming after months of marches and countermarches, the Opposition urged Venezuelan citizens to publicly manifest and massively protest their discontent with the government of Hugo Chávez. Privatecommercial media advertised the event.5 The protest was to begin on April 11 in the middle-class eastern quarter of the city at Parque del Este and finalize at PDVSA headquarters in Chuao, also located in the east.6 However, once at PDVSA headquarters, leaders called on their constituencies to march to the presidential palace instead, located in the western quarter of the city, in an attempt to sacar a Chávez (oust Chávez). Chavista leaders, such as Caracas mayor Freddy Bernal, urged the Opposition to desist from marching towards the Miraflores Palace where thousands of government sympathizers had congregated days before to show their support for the Bolivarian government. Chavista officials warned that a confrontation would result in violence. Under the slogan ni un paso atrás (not one step back), Venezuela's middle-class and political and economic elites marched on to Miraflores to demand Chávez's resignation. Private-commercial media televising the event helped convene protesters, and the march grew in size as it made its way to the presidential palace in the center of Caracas. The transmissions also drew Chávez’s supporters directly to the Miraflores Palace. The live transmissions also prompted supporters of the government to congregate, as did internet listserves, webpages, and text messaging. At around 2:00 pm, Chavistas and Opposition members faced off, separated by the National Guard, as Chavistas chanted No Pasarán! (they will not pass). Violence erupted as unidentified snipers killed protesters on both sides. During the event, commercial television cameras captured shots being fired from the Puente Llaguno bridge and showed images of scores of injured Opposition protesters running for shelter.7 This footage was followed by scenes of armed Chávez supporters on the bridge seemingly firing upon protesters. These images captured by the commercial television station Venevisión would be rebroadcast internationally to prove Chavistas were responsible for firing at the Opposition march and killing innocent protesters. Subsequent contradictory footage of Puente Llaguno would show Chavistas and Opposition led municipal police firing at each other on a relatively empty street. Opposition and Chavistas would both claim to have been attacked by the snipers, and blame each other for perpetrating the massacre. In its report on the events of April 11, the National Assembly (Asamblea Nacional 2004) concluded the Opposition march never reached Puente Llaguno. Nonetheless, in the polarized milieu that

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would ensue, the events of Puente Llaguno would become yet another example of the divergent interpretations of the conflict held by Chavismo and the Opposition. At 3:45 pm, President Chávez decided to address the nation, calling for dialogue and reproaching Opposition leaders. Private-commercial media split their screens to televise both the national address and the carnage of the massacre as it unfolded. The alleged shooting of Opposition protesters by Chavista snipers sufficed to prompt a demand for the resignation of Hugo Chávez.8 Early the next morning, with the government's legitimacy in question, the military high command alleged Chávez had resigned. Chavistas claimed Chávez was forcefully removed from Miraflores and held incommunicado. The country's political and economic elite convened an interim government. The Opposition dissolved all constituted powers and named Pedro Carmona Estanga, leader of FEDECAMARAS, interim president. Forty-eight hours later Chávez would return to power, but during his absence private-commercial media would reveal its power. Opposition leaders graced television screens explaining how they had worked handin-hand with commercial media outlets to force Chávez from power. On April 12, television station Venevisión broadcast interviews on the news program 24 Horas (24 Hours) with Opposition leaders, who explained how they had planned to obtain massive support from civil society and then activate the armed forces. Capitalizing on its lion’s share of ratings to influence the outcome of the coup, commercial media failed to broadcast the reaction of Chávez’s supporters. The public television station Venezolana de Televisión (VTV) and the government-run radio station Radio Nacional Venezuela were shut down. Word that Chávez was being held incommunicado, and had not resigned as was reported by private media, was spread via text messaging among government supporters (Peñalver 2007), and through community radio stations Fe y Alegría, Radio Libre Negro Primero and Radio Perola, and the community television station Catia TV. Mass email listings and websites such as antiescualidos.com acted as centers of information for the ousted president’s supporters, and urged them to march and demand Chávez be released and reinstated (McCaughan 2005, Lopez Vigil 2006, Holland 2008). Former Venevisión employee-turned-Minister of Communication under Hugo Chávez, Andrés Izarra, claimed private-commercial television stations censored reporting on Chavista protests. As rumors of Chávez's forced removal spread, his supporters took to the streets to demand the military

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reinstate the popular leader. Riots broke out in Caracas. Repression by police followed, and the number of dead increased. Venezuela’s armed forces were faced with a decision: repress Chávez's sympathizers or restore Chávez to power. Members of the military were divided. A pro-Chávez faction, the Palace Guard, ousted the new interim government and took control of the presidential palace. Chávez’s cabinet contacted international media to report what had taken place, as national private-commercial media failed to report that Chavistas had recaptured the presidential palace. After restoring VTV, they broadcast that they had taken control of Miraflores and that Chávez had not resigned but was being held incommunicado. When public and international media reported that Chávez had not resigned, protests surged and government supporters congregated at Miraflores. Having failed to procure the support of the Palace Guard, and in the face of violent street protests, the military high command reinstated Chávez as Venezuela's constitutional president.9 On April 13, 2002, Chávez returned to power and, addressing the nation, asked for forgiveness, and promised reconciliation. Reconciliation would prove impossible to implement. April 11 proved perceived legitimacy could derive from mass mobilizations. The violence unleashed had the long-term effect of cementing the physical boundaries of political action for each faction. Henceforth, as we will see, the city of Caracas would be partitioned between Opposition and Chavismo. April 11 also outed private-commercial media as engaged in political activism as opposed to objective journalism. Most importantly, April 11 consolidated the perception of the conflict as a struggle between two divergent visions of democracy of Venezuela’s future. If the Caracazo of 1989 had demonstrated the impact class has on the interpretation of political events, the April 11, 2002 coup showed the widening gap between the interpretations of reality held by supporters and detractors of the Bolivarian Revolution. Within the public sphere, the April 11 coup provided the opportunity for political actors to articulate a narrative of conflict that would outlive President Hugo Chávez. Chavistas described the coup as “the appropriation of the hopes of the lower classes” (Antiescualidos.com 2002). Upon Chávez’s return to power, a sympathizer exclaimed “we will not allow them to rob us of our hopes, our dreams and our future” (ibid). Online, Chavistas produced the motto: Prohibido No Soñar (ibid). In turn, the Opposition claimed that Chávez had “fabricated hopes” (Rios 2002). Having been manipulated, the masses “had to learn how they had been lied to, betrayed, how wrong they had been” (Pérez Oramas 2002). Chávez had “confused

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those who unfortunately had no education or had particular interests” (Olivo Urrutia 2002). A Class-Based Citizenry of Fear

Many of the anti-democratic practices of intolerance and exclusion carried out by both pro-government and Opposition actors were based on perceptions that were reinforced by socio-economic differences. Within the Venezuelan public sphere, the Other—according to private media and the middle and upper classes—was, in general terms, the poor, or disorganized mobs. The interpretation these classes had of the poor was forged during the Caracazo, when acording to Coronil and Skurski (1991), looters from the barrios began carrying away “consumer commodities [clothes, appliances, furniture, hardware] other than food [violating] elite and middle-class notions of what should rightfully be accessible to poor people. Among the elite and the middle class, the fear that the disturbances were a threat to all private property and social order took hold. Some of the very wealthy left the country in their private jets. The middle class sought to band together to protect their property, often organizing armed defense groups among neighbors (319–320).” Building on this social imaginary of the poor, by 2001, middle and upper class Venezuelans considered the Bolivarian Circles created by President Chávez to be violent and terrorist. Bolivarian Circles were political and social organizations of Chávez sympathizers originally established by President Hugo Chávez in 2001 to organize the poor. Among Opposition sympathizers, Bolivarian Circles were described as militias akin to Cuba’s Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (Hawkins 2010). In turn, the poor also perceived the middle and upper classes as “delinquent, corrupt and exploitative”; in their own words, the middle and upper classes were “squalid oligarchs,” and after the coup d´état of 2002, they borrowed the term golpistas or putschists from the government to refer to them.10 The journalist Andy Webb-Vidal (2002) quotes a person who operated a pro-Chavista radio station: “Those from Altamira describe us as aggressive and dangerous, but they don’t wish to listen to us. They see us as a threat, but the Opposition is the actual threat.” Webb-Vidal also points out that, according to the results of surveys carried out in 2002 by the media, some areas within the city were perceived as impenetrable by the other political constituency. This resulted in a fragmented and polarized socio-geography. He cites as an example an incident in which a well-dressed young woman, a graduate of a national university, sitting on a bench in Plaza Altamira (the

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symbolic center of the Opposition), stated she wouldn’t dare register her diploma at the Ministry of Education located in downtown Caracas, considered Chávez’s territory, for fear of being recognized as a traitor, golpista, and oligarch. She added, “one feels the need to disguise oneself in tattered clothes” to enter such places (1–9). Like public spaces, private spaces also became symbols of a specific political or class-based constituency. Chávez supporters seized buildings associated with the Opposition such as private-commercial media, and the administrative offices of FEDECAMARAS, the national labor union CTV, and PDVSA’s private oil subsidiaries. The support or rejection of President Chávez and his Bolivarian project, coupled with the perceived interrelation of political affinities and social class, had territorial implications. These resulted in fierce clashes between political constituencies, and accentuated the public perception that the poor supported Chávez, his political platform and the values associated with it, while the middle- and upper-classes sided with the Opposition and its more liberal principles. The identification of class with political position was reinforced by President Chávez, who equated political ideologies with social classes, defined the People (el Pueblo) to exclusively refer to the poor, and stereotyped the middle class as “oligarchs and golpistas.” Meanwhile, the political polarization justified exclusion and violence towards others. Consequently, violence, whether real or perceived, produced crises or ruptures in personal, familial, and social relationships, which tended to limit the dialogue necessary to confront it and heal. Ghettos in Caracas

The polarization of the capital city of Caracas expressed itself geographically, in both private and public spaces. As political conflicts sought to conquer territory, the claims of the two opposing constituencies led to highly segregated spaces and to the construction of urban ghettos in the city (García-Guadilla 2003). Citizens traversed the city at the risk of being identified as an Other. Public services and quality of life deteriorated as fear and violence invaded space. In short, the territorial division of Caracas resulted in a loss of rights for its citizens, due to their exclusion and disenfranchisement based on their perceived ideological or political persuasion. This new spatial arrangement contrasted sharply with the years prior to the Bolivarian Revolution, when Caracas was hailed for “the coexistence of popular sectors with the modern neighborhoods of the

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middle class,” and as “a society of classes without class struggles” (Naím and Piñango 1984). This romanticized view of the city changed drastically after the urban unrest of the Caracazo of 1989. The violence and fear of the Other that emerged during the rioting gave way to the notion that Venezuelan society experienced political events differently according to social class. Like most metropolises, Caracas is divided by social classes, with the middle and upper classes generally concentrated in the eastern quarter of the city, while the poor generally reside in the west. During the Chávez era, Chavistas claimed boroughs in the poorer sectors of the two most populous areas of Caracas: Libertador (in the west) and part of Sucre (in the east). The Opposition appropriated spaces in boroughs populated by residents with higher incomes, such as Chacao, Baruta, El Hatillo and part of Sucre, all located in the eastern quarter of the city. An urban area characterized by high levels of inequality, Caracas has been historically restricted by invisible yet effective social and economic barriers that deter the marginalized and the poor from participating in public spaces as citizens. Even before Hugo Chávez’s rise to power, the city’s landscape was divided by fences and gates, electrified wiring, and security booths, which functioned as physical and symbolic deterrents to the free movement of the city’s residents (GarcíaGuadilla 1998). In the 2002–2003 period, private security checkpoints were strengthened with barricades to protect the private property of the middle and upper classes, and restrict access to homes, buildings, streets and neighborhoods. Public spaces once characterized by free movement increasingly turned into ghettos that provided a safe-haven for residents that were deemed to belong, but threatened violence towards those who were deemed not to. These social geographies in Caracas became closely associated with the purported lifestyles of each social class such that, in order to avoid urban violence, it became necessary to know the ideological and social terrain one was in, to avoid transgressing those limits. The Opposition occupied the middle of the Caracas valley; Chavista territory was demarcated by the margins of the city (GarcíaGuadilla 2006, 47), which became strategic during conflicts. This strategic position resulted from the location of poor sectors of Caracas at the outskirts of the city, where the primary vehicular entrances are located, and include Avenida Sucre-Catia, and the highways GuarenasGuatire, Valle Coche, and Caracas-La Guaira among others. In reporting on the “March for Peace” by a group of motorcyclists belonging to the Opposition, in the working-class neighborhood of Catia in Caracas, the newspaper El Nacional on February 23, 2003 (García-

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Guadilla 2006, 48), noted that they “… defied the whimsical class and political zoning of Caracas [which] violation could be punishable by a beating or a shower of stones.” One of the members of the Coordinadora de Catia (the sponsor of the event) stressed that “They [the Chavistas] consider this territory their cradle and for this reason they defend it.” The caravan returned to its base without injuries even though they “challenged the unwritten rule where someone with a red beret is in danger in Altamira (an upper class neighborhood) and another with a “scrawny look” must walk quietly in Casalta (a popular neighborhood).” During this time period, transgressing the space of the Other could result not only in injuries but in death. This was precisely the catalyst for violence on April 11 when, as explained, the Opposition decided to lead their protest to Miraflores Palace. Other examples of violent episodes due to territorial transgressions include the Paseo de los Próceres Opposition march of La Gran Batalla (the Great Battle) on January 3, 2003, which entered the spatial domain of Chavismo, resulting in two Chavistas losing their lives and more than eighty being injured on both sides (OSAL/CLACSO 2003).11 On February 23, 2003, a metropolitan policeman died after crossing a line of Chavista followers located in front of the PDVSA building in the La Campiña development. Within this polarized territorialization, during times of heightened political confrontation, even sticking to one’s own space did not necessarily guarantee one’s physical security. Territorial Polarization and the Loss of Public Space

Opposition and pro-government mobilizations, marches, rallies, demonstrations, guarimbas and trancazos (blockades)12 disrupted urban activities and thus the right to the city (García-Guadilla 2005a). In its zeal to demonstrate its capacity to convene the citizenry, the government installed popular markets on main public roads such as José María Vargas Boulevard in the very heart of Caracas, and organized musical gaitazos (parties) in boulevards or public plazas in order to amass popular support. Streets, plazas and highways that were transformed into spaces for political expression in favor of or against President Chávez lost their publicness. As pointed out by Tulio Hernández (2003) in his Sunday column of El Nacional. That Bolívar Plaza, that symbol of urban centrality, inherited from the original scheme of the Spanish Colonial city, has been converted into the operational headquarters of a violent group, applauded by the

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[Chavista] Mayor of the Libertador municipality himself, an area closed to opponents, is at the very least a sad and backward aberration. The same applies to the territory taken in La Campiña. There, on the pretext of having installed a security zone (once again reinforcing the grammar of war) to defend PDVSA from its squalid enemies, a noisy Chavista shrine operates day and night, with an additional tent converted into a brothel at regulated prices, which has become a source of deep indignation and annoyance to neighbors in the area.” A similar dynamic can be found in the [Opposition’s] Altamira Plaza, which has been…hijacked for the political activities of only one group of citizens and has become forbidden not only for [pro-]government political activists but for citizens wanting to enjoy the area, children wanting to play or senior citizens wanting to converse, as they did before (cited in García-Guadilla 2006, 47).

Polarized territorialization translated into streets that did not facilitate pedestrian flow en route to their daily activities, highways that did not serve vehicular traffic, and plazas that were no longer useful for rest and recreation. Instead these public spaces were transformed into political headquarters littered with tents and camping equipment, to be used for demonstrations and vigils, or to shelter the thousands of people mobilized to support or reject the regime. These actions blurred the original urban function of these public spaces. Another consequence of this socio-political polarization was the emergence of a new middle-class subculture that involved specific clothing (for marching in the colors of the national flag), as well as national folklore music and nationalist symbols and banners. Marches increased face-to-face social relations and a spirit of solidarity among these “social equals.” The patriotic and nationalistic subculture of the lower classes differed from the middle class Opposition in its appropriation of national culture and urban landmarks. Traditional patriotic symbols like the Plaza Bolívar, the National Pantheon (which houses the remains of Simón Bolívar), the Miraflores Palace, the National Assembly, and the Paseo Los Próceres, among others, were appropriated by government supporters because, according to Chavistas, they contained superior patriotic value. At the heart of this appropriation lay the notion that the Chavistas were the rightful owners of the country’s history. In contrast, the spaces of protest for the middle and upper classes were modern landmarks such as the Plaza Altamira, the Francisco Fajardo and Prados del Este highways, and the public spaces adjacent to buildings like PDVSA headquarters—the symbols of modern petroleum culture.

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The Community Active Defense Plans of January 23, 2003

Perhaps one of the most salient examples of spatial disenfranchisement was the implementation, by the Opposition, of the Contingency Plans of January 23, 2003, in the main cities of Venezuela and particularly in the capital of Caracas. These plans, promoted by a coalition of retired military officials, the political Opposition, civil society organizations, and local neighborhood associations, urged the upper and middle classes to defend themselves against the “Chavista hordes” that would “violently attack the sacred private-property precincts of the middle class.” This generalized perception among Opposition constituencies was primarily fueled by constant rumors and reports disseminated by commercial media. During the Opposition strike of 2002–2003, retired military personnel, attempting to gain influence within the leadership of the political Opposition and middle-class neighborhood associations, spread rumors of an impending attack on upper- and middle-class neighborhoods by “Chavista hordes and Bolivarian Circles.” As a consequence of these rumors, “Contingency War Plans” (Planes de Contingencia) were designed at the neighborhood level, and Community Active Defense Plans (Planes Comunitarios de Defensa Activa) at the residence level, temporarily transforming condominiums and neighborhoods into pseudo-militarized communities that were willing to go as far as using weapons in order to protect themselves from outsiders. These plans prophesied that an attack would take place by Chávez sympathizers on January 23, 2003—the date that commemorates the fall of dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez in 1958. According to information presented by some Opposition retired military personnel, on January 23, 2003, Bolivarian Circles would perpetrate “terrible violent acts” that could only be countered through war tactics. These military personnel, many of whom had working relationships with private security firms, allied themselves with middle-class neighborhood associations to put into motion community defense plans. Guidelines were distributed through private email lists such as [email protected] ([email protected]). The introduction of a section of the document titled “Terrorism Version” (2003) states the following: This is material developed by a group of neighbors with the consensus and participation of friendly communities and specialists in the area of community security, with the objective of establishing operational guidelines that allow us to increase the effectiveness of our response to emergency situations that might arise in our homes, schools or jobs ([email protected] 2003, 3).

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As word of these contingency plans spread, Opposition constituencies armed themselves, fearing and blaming the Other. In the narrative of the Opposition, the use of weapons was justified since “the middle class has armed itself to defend the sacred rights of property, family, and liberty while Chavistas do so to attack such rights”. In the words of Chávez followers, they “were not armed” but they also would “defend their rights” with arms if necessary. The defense plans were more suited to fortified cities and were at times downright medieval in outlook. They advocated the use of weapons, protecting doors and gates of buildings with internal locks, spilling barrels of hot oil and water on aggressors, constructing barricades, and making Molotov cocktails, among other tactics. The Community Active Defense Plan makes the following recommendations: [I]t is acceptable [to employ] the use of oil, gasoline, chains, nails …or barriers with automobiles, trucks or buses, barrels, flowerpots, garbage, broken bottles; uncover drains and sewer lids to prevent or delay access to the area ([email protected] 2003, 18)

It also advocates nighttime vigilance, in shifts, by residents themselves, who were not to rely on domestic help or even the private sentries who normally guard the entrances to buildings—they were not to be trusted as they belonged to the working-class. In this respect, the Community Active Defense Plan stated: Don’t get too comfortable with your domestic help, specifically those who work only during the day. Remember that many of these people have been manipulated and some are beginning to see us as the enemy. This is a delicate situation and there is no reason to generalize… but you should be alert to any evidence (20).

The plan recommended residents “be prepared for any contingency that may occur” (1). It called for activating an alarm system that sent classified threat levels from green to red, and advocated the use of a highly sophisticated system to communicate with the local police, private media and neighbors. The majority of buildings within middleclass neighborhoods increased their number of guards (paradoxically, from the poor class), constructed barricades, and maintained an alert status at night. In the end, nothing happened. But the event consolidated the notion among housewives, children, and the middle class in general that the poor were indeed the enemy.

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Although these contingency plans were promoted through a group of retired military, they were fully supported by the Civic Alliance of Civil Society (Alianza Cívica de la Sociedad Civil), made up of the liberal citizen organizations Queremos Elegir, Nulidad 1011, and Ciudadanía Activa. These organizations, aligned with the political Opposition, released a document with recommendations for basic supplies for each home in case of an emergency, including food, water, electricity, health, important documents, and money in the event of a “natural or social disturbance.” These events were ranked according to their severity: social turmoil, military intervention, military intervention with restricted constitutional rights, “extreme circumstances,” which meant massive social turmoil, and general emergency situations. This last category included “armed mobilization and confrontation” ([email protected] 2003, 2). “Being prepared for the worst” (4) meant stocking basic provisions in each home to “have food reserves and necessities for the long term” including electricity, kitchen and food supplies, and health and first aid kits. With regard to the use of “weapons for defense.” the following was recommended. You never know when some type of weapon can serve to defend the home. Bats, pieces of rebar, large machetes or knives and even firearms may be useful, as long as one knows how to use them … does not hesitate at the key moment, and is aware of the legal ramifications of their use (6).

As the perceived threat of the enemy or the Other gained currency among Venezuela’s middle-class, their social organizations prioritized class interests in response to the political crisis. Paradoxically, they relied on the pre-existing citizen organizations, like condominium and neighborhood associations, that were first institutionalized through the Law of the Municipal Regime of 1989 and subsequently through the Constitution of 1999, and which struggled in the 1980s to deepen democracy and pursued increased citizen participation in local issues. These bellicose, anti-democratic plans were advocated by the same actors who in past decades, under the liberal Constitution of 1961, mobilized democratically to demand political aperture and the institutionalization of increased citizen participation in the democratic process.

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A Not-So-Civil Society

At the height of the conflict between the government and the Opposition (2002–2003), anti-government citizen and business groups and workers’ unions allied with Opposition political parties and even “usurped” their role (García-Guadilla 2007, 151). This was the case when neighborhood associations and other middle-class citizen organizations, as well as FEDECAMARAS and the CTV, accompanied Opposition parties in a two-month political strike and led the coup d’état against president Chávez. As a result of the politicization of civil society organizations, Venezuela’s public sphere experienced a deficit of autonomous social actors necessary to confront the increasing polarization and the sociopolitical crisis. The transformation of civil society organizations into political actors, and the perceived need to put aside their interests to form a single alliance, left the core interests and identities of these organizations vulnerable to the needs of the political crisis. Moreover, many of the Opposition coalition’s decisions—including the strike in December 2002, announced through the media by CTV union leader Carlos Ortega—were made without the endorsement of the social organizations that participated in that alliance. Thus they were undemocratically carried out in the name of the conglomerate that was the Opposition. At the same time, Opposition political parties disguised themselves as social organizations, creating a vacuum within the political sphere, and thereby unwittingly legitimizing the incorporation of military forces that opposed the government of Hugo Chávez into the coalition. This legitimation of military involvement in politics encouraged civil-military alliances with undemocratic undertones, such as those described in connection with the defense plans of January 23, 2003. Much has been written in political science about the democratic role of civic social organizations, but very little about their potential for antidemocratic practices based on the exclusion and negation of the Other. The Venezuelan experience shows that the underlying assumption about the democratizing potential of social organizations does not always hold under conditions of acute polarization (García-Guadilla 2004). Social organizations were willing to deploy undemocratic strategies to assert their class interests and prioritize their own values and lifestyles. Consequently, during the 2002–2003 period, middle-class citizen organizations aligned themselves with the business sector, trade unions, political parties, and military groups in opposition to Chávez, and designed violent defense strategies. They also organized into militias and advocated violent plans to defend their particular class interests,

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claiming the right to “civil disobedience” under Article 350 of the National Constitution and, above all, claiming to defend democracy. This undemocratic behavior raises the question whether, in the absence of a democratic civic culture, and in the presence of jarring social inequalities and political polarization, it is possible to construct participatory democracies capable of including all citizens, disregarding cleavages of social class and ideology. Notes 1

They protested through marches, sit-ins, caravans, honking horns and flickering lights; they even protested from their homes through cacerolazos (cacerolazos derives from the term cacerola or pan and refers to a particularly prevalent form of protest in Venezuela that consists of residents simultaneously banging pots and pans). Other means of protest included the use of flags displayed on vehicles, on balconies, and carried during the innumerable marches that the Opposition and Chavistas organized in public spaces. 2 As described in Chapter 1, throughout the 1990s, the mobilizations and struggles of social movements and organizations to “democratize” Venezuela’s political regime fought to include longstanding human rights in a founding charter that would increase citizen participation in the governing process. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, with the exception of the Caracazo, civil society’s call to democratize Venezuela was generally characterized by democratic processes and peaceful demonstrations. 3 Lina Ron was a leading figure in the Bolivarian Revolution. She was the founder and president of the political party Unidad Popular Venezolana (Venezuelan Popular Unity), which supported Hugo Chávez. Ron would play numerous roles within the Bolivarian Revolution, but was primarily known for utilizing intimidation and coercion to defend the cause. She was deemed “uncontrollable” by Hugo Chávez—an adjective that would become the title of her bibliography. She died in 2011 of natural causes. 4 Chávez was granted the first Enabling Law in November 2000 by the Chavista majority within the National Assembly 5 The private television station RCTV repeatedly broadcast the following advertisement: “Venezuelans, today, Thursday 11, at 10 am everyone to the street. We will march united for Venezuela from Parque del Este to PDVSA, bring your flag, for liberty and democracy. Venezuela does not give up. No one will defeat us” (Asamblea Nacional de la República Bolivariana de Venezuela, 2002). 6 During the conflict the organization Gente de Petroleo (People of Petroleum) composed of high ranking professionals working in PDVSA, organized and led multiple marches to and from the PDVSA building in Chuao in the Opposition-friendly eastern quarter of the city (García-Guadilla 2000– 2010). 7 According to a 2002 report from the human rights organization PROVEA, twenty were reported dead and more than one hundred injured.

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8 In his statement on April 12, 2002, General Lucas Rincón Romero declared, “The members of the Military High Command of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela deplore the lamentable events that took place yesterday in the capital city. In the face of this information, we requested the President of the Republic resign from his position, which he accepted. The members of the High Military Command place our positions at the service of the officers that will be appointed by the new authorities” (Asamblea Nacional 2004). 9 According to Amnesty International (Venezuela: Resolve the crisis by respecting human rights and the constitution), the events that took place between April 11 and April 14, 1999, left 46 people dead and over 100 injured. 10 During the conflict, Chávez and Chavistas frequently referred to the Opposition constituency as “squalid oligarchs.” See PROVEA 2003. 11 A chronology of social conflicts in Venezuela from January to April 2003 elaborated by the Observatorio Social de América Latina OSALCLACSO stated that at the height of the conflict, on January 3, 2003, “thousands of government opponents mobilized from different points in Caracas in the Marcha de la Gran Batalla to the emblematic Paseo Los Proceres …asking for the release of the General of the Division of the National Guard (GN), Carlos Alfonso Martinez, one of the rebel leaders of Altamira Plaza. At the end of this march, there were clashes with pro-government groups and security forces, leaving two government supporters dead and more than eighty injured on both sides. 12 Guarimbas and trancazos were protests led primarily by Opposition groups that cut off vehicular transit within the city through the burning of tires and other waste.

4 Media Wars

“We had a deadly weapon: the media. And now that I have the opportunity, let me congratulate you.” —April 11, 2002, coup participant Vice-Admiral Victor Ramírez Pérez congratulating journalist Ibéyise Pacheco for her help during the coup, transmitted live on the commercial television channel Venevisión. “Communication media are the enemies of the revolution.” —Hugo Chávez

The 1999 deliberations of the National Constitutional Assembly (ANC) amplified the role of Venezuelan media. As political actors vied for the right to define the “will of the people,” they increasingly relied on “publicness” to support their claims—public presence, public relevance, and perceived public authority. The media became crucial, offering the possibility of disseminating political messages, offering favorable coverage of proposals, and using the camera to demonstrate popular support. In the battle over the hearts and minds of the citizenry, the media could also filter information through their editorial lens, and shape public opinion. As we saw in the previous chapters, to demonstrate their strength and political legitimacy, government and Opposition leaders and supporters expressed the “will of the sovereign” through massive mobilizations. Government sympathizers and detractors would take to the streets throughout the conflict, from 2000–2007, and stage marches and countermarches in an attempt to persuade the other side of their strength and numeric superiority. Pro-government and anti-government marches and countermarches became the most salient feature of political life within the Bolivarian Republic. But public opinion was also “visibilized” through print and visual media. This was accomplished through newsreels, comments on internet

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sites, op-ed pages in national dailies, radio and television morning shows, and webzines. Political actors utilized the media to disseminate consistent, if not dogmatic, narratives. Consequently, media patronage became increasingly important for both the government and the Opposition. They battled for control over the media landscape. While publicly owned media became venues for favorable government broadcasts, private media were generally identified with the Opposition. As a result, media outlets were derided by Chavistas and Opposition alike for inaccurate reporting, especially during moments of increased political strife. As we will argue, the accusations were not necessarily unfounded. In the polarized political climate, Venezuelan media outlets slid down a slippery slope, turning reporting into activist journalism and ultimately taking center stage as political actors in their own right. Media Rights and the Bolivarian Revolution

Upon assuming power, the government of Hugo Chávez immediately focused on its relationship to national and international media. It first began defining its relationship to media outlets during the 1999 National Constitutional Assembly (ANC) deliberations. The assembly focused not only on the freedom of expression, but also on the democratization of information production, and the right to accurate information. Though the discussions that ensued within the ANC on the role of media in a participatory-protagonist democracy were frequently justified on the basis of the democratization of information, the relationship that would develop between different media and the state responded to the very real political consideration of the strained relationship between the government of Hugo Chávez and private media. Though the strained relationship first became evident in 2001, and continued to deteriorate in subsequent years, from its onset the Bolivarian government was sensitive toward media critique. As early as August 1999, the National Constitutional Assembly debated whether ANC delegates should write a letter to the international press corps demanding it treat the ANC fairly, in response to what they described as a smear campaign orchestrated between the international press and local private media (Asamblea Nacional Constituyente República de Venezuela 1999, August 31, 1998). In the debate, ANC members complained of editorials written by prominent Latin American pundits and disseminated in international and national press. ANC delegate Guillermo García Ponce argued the international press could carry out its smear tactics because “Venezuela

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does not occupy a space in the web of information...There is no way of accessing an internet page to obtain information on Venezuela.1 It is incredible this should occur as Venezuela is the object of aggression on an international scale” (Asamblea Nacional Constituyente República de Venezuela 1999, August 31, 1998, Section 5). García Ponce urged the ANC to “exhort the executive branch to better their communication policies, especially at the international level, where there are deficiencies [vacíos] that hurt us terribly” (ibid). The result was an emphasis on media reform that would eventually transform into an aggressive government communication strategy. The Bolivarian regime focused its reforms on a tri-partite conception of the role of the media in modern democratic societies, attributing to it both a positive and a negative impact on governance. Adhering to the notion of the media as an elite monopoly, Chavistas essentially equated existing Venezuelan commercial media outlets with the Puntofijista elite, and therefore named them automatic foes of the revolution. Of 81 references to private media in the official transcripts of the ANC debate, 42 percent describe existing media as holding a monopoly on the circulation of information (Asamblea Nacional Constituyente República de Venezuela 1999). The debate involved two complementary arguments. The first focused on the influence the political and economic interests of “elite” media producers had on the selection and interpretation of information transmitted to the public. According to this narrative, privatecommercial media utilize their power to defend their interests through self-censorship that diminishes the quality of public debate. In his remarks to the ANC assembly, constitutional assemblyman Elías Jaua Díaz also aligned with the Bolivarian government expressed the following. Those of us that know thoroughly [en profundidad] how communication media carry themselves [se desenvuelven], will not be blackmailed by the guardians of liberty. It is not true all media are absolutely objective. It is not true media are objective, they cannot be, for they represent legitimate interests—as I said before— economic…They have interests to defend. To media owners, defend them; we too have the right to defend this peaceful process (Asamblea Nacional Constituyente República de Venezuela, August 31, 1999, Section 5).

To counteract the power of existing commercial media, and what ANC representatives affiliated with the Chávez government believed was a concerted media attack on the Bolivarian Revolution, ANC representatives called on the assembly to promote the “democratization”

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of media production and grant the citizenry the right to “truthful, opportune, and objective” information. This second argument would eventually be consecrated in the 1999 Bolivarian Revolution as an individual right. According to the architect of participatory-protagonist democracy in Venezuela, assembly representative Ricardo Combellas, the individual right to produce and disseminate information had to be safeguarded from a notion of freedom of expression that confined the exercise of that right to the realm of journalism. While the democratization of media production did not raise objections within the ANC, the move to canonize “truthful, opportune and impartial” information as a constitutional right led to intense debates over freedom of expression. For the Opposition, the right was a ruse for media censorship. The government countered that the media had a responsibility to inform the public and essentially contribute to the education of the citizenry. The role of educating the citizenry was framed in terms of cultural, historical, health, and even environmental issues, and Opposition leaders quickly deduced this could potentially evolve into a policy that required media to “educate” the citizenry on matters of policy, turning communication media into political tools. They argued that consecrating that responsibility within the constitution would lead to increased government intervention in private-commercial media. As a result of these debates, the National Constitutional Assembly defined freedom of expression by dividing it into three distinct, though interrelated, areas, according to three different constituencies. In two articles, the 1999 Bolivarian Constitution describes the freedom of expression as it applies to media producers, audiences, and organized citizens. Article 57: Everyone has the right to freely express his or her thoughts, ideas or opinions orally, in writing, or by any other form of expression, and to use for such purpose any means of communication and diffusion, and no censorship shall be established. Anyone making use of this right assumes full responsibility for everything expressed. Anonymity, war propaganda, discriminatory messages or those promoting religious intolerance are not permitted. Censorship restricting the ability of public officials to report on matters for which they are responsible is prohibited. Article 58: Communications are free and plural, and involve the duties and responsibilities indicated by law. Everyone has the right to timely,

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truthful and impartial information, without censorship, in accordance with the principles of this Constitution, as well as the right to responses and corrections when they are directly affected by inaccurate or offensive information. Children and adolescents have the right to receive adequate information for purposes of their overall development.

The articles defend the right of media producers to report information without constraints, protect audiences by stipulating the Bolivarian Republic is responsible for ensuring they receive information from multiple sources and points of view, and—in line with the government’s definition of a participatory-protagonist democracy— grant organized citizens the right to participate in the process of producing and disseminating information, and the right to challenge information disseminated by private and public producers. Thus freedom of expression is not only guaranteed to media outlets, journalists, and editors, but exists only when all citizens have the opportunity to disseminate their thoughts and opinions. The problem with the bifurcation of the freedom of expression into these three spheres, is that it allows each group to prioritize one facet of freedom of expression over the others. While the government upheld the rights of citizens to have impartial and truthful information, and participate in the production of information, the Opposition championed the right to produce information without government restraint. The schema the government and the Opposition each used to define the freedom of expression evidenced the ideological differences between them. In a skewed interpretation of the Frankfurt School’s critique of the culture industry, the government viewed private media as run by an elite who maintains the status quo. It sought to redress this imbalance by providing citizens with the legal and institutional means to produce and disseminate their own information. But in its zeal to protect audiences, the government enacted legislation with the potential to restrict the freedom of expression of media producers, regardless of ideological persuasion or political affiliation. Though the Bolivarian Constitution provided ordinary citizens with access to media outlets, it also created the conditions for coercion and self-censorship. Article 58 stipulates that citizens are to have access to “free and varied,” “timely, truthful, and impartial” information. According to the Venezuelan Press and Society Institute (IPYS 2007), these adjectives restrict the type of information that can be disseminated by journalists and media outlets. They generate apprehension among journalists, editors, and owners, who must weigh the importance of

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information against the possibility it will be negatively judged by varying socio-political actors with wide-ranging standards. April 11, 2002: Catalyst of the Government Media Empire

In March 2008, BBC correspondent Carlos Chirinos (2008) reported on a gathering of media personalities in Caracas to discuss the state of the press in Venezuela. He likened the event to a boxing ring. “In one corner,” on the east side of Caracas, the biannual meeting of the InterAmerican Press Association (SIP) convened media owners, journalists and intellectuals in support of private-commercial media outlets against what the organization described as the growing suppression of press freedoms under Hugo Chávez. A mere block away, the Latin American Forum Against Media Terrorism denounced the allegedly irresponsible practices of private media outlets, claiming they used the fourth estate as a political weapon against regimes whose ideology they opposed. Media producers in Venezuela undeniably took sides in the political conflict. Private outlets generally supported the Opposition. Public and community/alternative stations sided with the Bolivarian regime. As might be expected from openly partisan media, throughout the political conflict, from their corners of the boxing ring, media producers selectively covered news and events, chose friendly over critical sources, blurred the lines between information and editorial, transformed activist journalism into propaganda, acted as proxies for political parties and movements, and coordinated and promoted events meant to make visible citizen support or opposition to the Bolivarian Revolution. The phrase “media war” was coined to refer to the antagonistic role private-commercial media outlets adopted towards Hugo Chávez. However, the relationship between the president and private media was not always one of hostility. In 1998, the newly elected president enjoyed favorable media coverage,2 and though the media were critical of the impasses between existing political elites and the new ruling coalition when it came to the ANC and other political reforms, private media outlets remained on the sidelines as mere commentators on the ongoing conflict. The relationship between Hugo Chávez and private media soured in 2001. As noted in Chapter 2, Hugo Chávez’s government, Opposition politicians, and civil society failed to agree on the laws required to fulfill the mandate set forth in the 1999 Bolivarian Constitution. Exercising his executive privilege, Hugo Chávez decreed 49 Organic Laws. According to Reporters Without Borders, the executive decree was the tipping point for private media outlets. The presidential power grab

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affected the interests of private media moguls whose wealth made them part of Venezuela’s traditional elite. The increased government intervention in economic affairs and the perceived attack on the right to private property seemed to solidify the widely circulated claim that the Bolivarian Revolution was being modeled after the Cuban Revolution.3 The media transition from observers and commentators to protagonists of the conflict was completed in 2002 when private media outlets supported the April 11 coup, and rallied protesters for the Oppositionled national strike. As the political conflict escalated, Chávez responded by dramatically increasing the number of cadenas—televised presidential addresses which media outlets are legally required to broadcast—during prime time programming. Media specialists estimate that between 1999 and March of 2004, the Bolivarian government required television stations dedicate a total of 584 hours of programming to government broadcasting—a cost calculated to total 364 million USD. In addition, radio and television stations were required to transmit the president’s weekly show, Aló Presidente (Hello President). Typically lasting 4 hours, the show increased the estimated total of obligatory government broadcasting by 740 hours and increased the cost of programming by an estimated cost of 20 million USD between 1999 and March 2004 (Boyd 2004). The fight over media intensified in the days before the April 11 coup. In their role as political actors, private Opposition media promoted the strike through political propaganda, and Opposition print media adhered to the strike, suspending the publication of their dailies on the first day of the work stoppage. Asserting their role as purveyors of information, private television stations broadcast the killings taking place in the streets of Caracas. Days later, they opted to broadcast Hollywood movies and cartoons instead of airing footage of the violent confrontations between police and Chavista protesters. This selfimposed blackout lasted until Sunday, April 14, 2002, when Hugo Chávez returned to power.4 The events of April 11, 2002 fomented the belief that the government needed to create a media empire able to counteract the misinformation of private Opposition media. According to Carlos Lugo, director of Radio Libre Negro Primero, the role community media played during the private media blackout also demonstrated the power and the need for alternative media. Blanca Eekhout, founder of the community television station CatiaTV tells a similar story. After the 2002 coup, the president allegedly pressured the media regulating agency CONATEL (Comisión Nacional de Telecomunicaciones) to

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speed up the licensing of CatiaTV. The station was licensed in May 2002 (Hawkins 2006). Efforts to develop and license alternative and community media were prioritized after the events of April 2002. Violence Against the Media

By 2002, having taken sides in the conflict, media outlets quickly became a target of political ire. Violent protests against privatecommercial and alternative-community media, and violent attacks on media outlets and journalists, became commonplace. During 2002 and 2003, government officials, political leaders, and supporters, from both the government and Opposition, perpetrated such attacks. According to Reporters Without Borders, the first such altercation took place on May 1, 2000, when ordinary citizens beat journalists covering the May 1 workers’ parade with rolled-up newspapers (Bourgeat 2003, Salazar 2004). The number of incidents then quickly escalated. Threats against reporters, assaults on camera operators, and protests and detonations of low-intensity explosives outside media outlets all became commonplace. In 2002 alone, seven low-intensity explosives were detonated in buildings belonging to private media outlets (IPYS 2003a). On December 9 and 10, 2002, nineteen media outlets were simultaneously targeted by protests, in Caracas and other provinces.5 Protesters demanded an end to “media terrorism.” Minister of the Interior and of Justice (Ministerio de Interior y Justicia) Diosdado Cabello defended these acts as a defense of the people’s values and the Bolivarian Revolution. Public media also experienced protests, although in lesser numbers. On December 9, 2002, a demonstration was staged outside of the offices of the government television channel Venezolana de Televisión, with shots fired at the façade of the building. On January 4, 2002, an unknown individual fired at a group of people gathered outside the public national radio station Radio Nacional de Venezuela (RNV). According to Reporters Without Borders (Bourgeat 2003), at least seven journalists from community and public media outlets were injured between December 2, 2002 and February 2, 2003. Among them was Narka Moreno of Catia TVe, who on February 2, 2003, was attacked by Opposition supporters when they attempted to cover a rally staged by the Opposition. In a 2003 Human Rights Watch report, Moreno explained why she believed she had been subject to violence: “it’s an ideological question…it is clear that in Venezuela the private media distort reality. The community media like us have to come to represent

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the other side. I think they knew that I had recorded things they didn’t want the public to know that’s why they beat me and stole my camera” (Human Rights Watch 2003, Attacks on Public and Community Broadcasters). In general, by 2003, polarization was so extensive that pro-government community media reporting on the Opposition was enough to incite violence. In 2002, the Institute for Press and Society (IPYS 2003a), a Latin American watchdog group that monitors the state of freedom of expression in the region, drafted a report on Venezuela. The institute recorded a total of 142 reported incidents against the media, constituting some 167 human rights violations of the right to freedom of expression.6 Roughly 40.1 percent of the violations involved physical violence (aggression and attacks). Other incidents report intimidation, and verbal harassment. Violations committed by government officials usually resulted from attempts at censorship or intimidation, while acts of physical aggression were usually committed by individual citizens. According to IPYS, the president’s antagonistic discourse was at least partly responsible for citizen attacks on the media, as the majority of those attacks were committed by self-identified government sympathizers.7 The total number of incidents reported by IPYS decreased from 142 in 2002 to 110 in 2003. However, the total number of violations increased, from 167 in 2002 to 186 in 2003. Reports of physical violence decreased from to 40.1 to 32.25 percent, while incidents of intimidation increased. As in 2002, more than half of all violations against journalists perpetrated by civilians involved acts of physical violence. Claims of intimidation and censorship were made against government authorities and institutions (IPYS 2004). Unlike in 2002, when civilian attacks on media occurred spontaneously as journalists covered unfolding events, in 2003 most attacks against media outlets were collectively and purposefully perpetrated. This demonstrated the extent of the polarization between supporters and detractors of the national government, as well as the citizenry’s perception of media outlets as political actors. The association of media outlets with particular political positions was so intense that journalists reported having to take measures akin to reporters in war zones. Between 2002 and 2004, journalists working for private-commercial media outlets described using gas masks and bulletproof vests as part of their attire for live coverage of events. In some instances, the common threat of violence prompted journalists of different media outlets to look after each other. In 2004, journalist Zaida Pereira, from the public national television station VTV,

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described how fellow journalists from private media instructed her and her crew to stay nearby as they covered an Opposition march to celebrate Labor Day, in an effort to ensure their safety. She continued, “at other opportunities in the past, we have told them [private media journalists] ‘stay there so nothing happens to you,’ and we try and convince the people that those journalists are doing their job, independently of the outlet they work for” (Pereira 2004, 17). In 2002, journalists and their crews began camouflaging their affiliation with specific media outlets. Private outlets allowed journalists and their crews to remove identification tags from their vehicles and some reporters admitted to donning military berets in the likeness of Chávez to facilitate their ability to cover a story. Another journalist confessed to owning a fake press pass to avoid being recognized as a journalist for a private media outlet (Bourgeat 2003, 12). By literally changing the cultural markers that identified them with a political faction, journalists secured their physical integrity as they covered events. The need for journalists to camouflage their affiliation to a specific media outlet resulted not just from the identification of media with one of Venezuela’s political factions, but also from the need to report from locations or events that “belonged” to a specific faction. In their 2003 report on the state of freedom of expression in Venezuela, Reporters Without Borders described the inability of reporters to enter public spaces considered hostile to the ideology of their media outlets. A commonplace practice in Venezuela by 2003, the report quoted the popular community leader Lina Ron as saying, “I cannot let anyone come into the center [of Caracas]. The counter-revolutionaries are only allowed to march in the east of the city and nowhere else. This place is our territory” (Arraiga 2004, 49). Journalists identified with either political faction reported being subjected to cacerolazos, being told to leave the area, or threatened with violence for covering events organized by the opposite faction. From 2002 through 2004, private-commercial media refused to report from the barrios for fear of being attacked. Media director María Isabel Arraiga explained that the privatecommercial television outlet RCTV had to create reversible jackets for its employees to hide the RCTV logo, in order to ensure their safety as they returned home to the barrios of Caracas (ibid). Perhaps one of the most revealing incidents of the period was the aggression perpetrated against Berenice Gómez Velásquez. At the time, Gómez Velásquez was a journalist for the national daily Últimas Noticias. Unlike other private media outlets in 2002 and 2003, the print daily was fairly objective in its coverage of the conflict, and was

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therefore identified as pro-Chávez by Opposition supporters and proOpposition among Chavistas. According to Gómez Velásquez, in 2004 she and her motorcycle driver were approached by a “horde” of approximately one hundred armed Chávez sympathizers on motorcycles while on their way to meet the popular Chavista leader Lina Ron. Confusing her driver with a policeman, the group proceeded to beat him, rob him of his wallet, bulletproof vest, gas masks, radios and motorcycle. Hoping to stop the beating, Gómez Velásquez showed them her press identification card. A sympathizer threatened the owner of the daily. Gómez Velásquez reports that while some onlookers helped them, another (apparently unsympathetic to Chavismo) commented, “This is how Chávez repays those of you who work in a Chavista newspaper, because Últimas Noticias is Chavista” (Gómez Velásquez 2004, 116). Afterwards, Gómez Velásquez was informed by a fellow journalist, that her Chavista aggressors had threatened her life. “Next time they [will] kill me, because I am a counterrevolutionary” (117). This incident reveals the extent to which individual journalists were objectified by the citizenry and seen as a tool of their media outlet, regardless of their ideological point of view, their personal political persuasion, or the material they published as news. Beyond the objectification of journalists, the political partitioning of space and the appropriation of public events by a particular faction undermined the ability of journalists to cover their stories. María Isabel Arriaga, a seasoned Venezuelan journalist of more than 20 years, described the relationship between the citizenry and the media before the political conflict of 2002 as an alliance. Citizens complained by denouncing inefficiency in government, and media reported in the hope of a quick government response. The political conflict unleashed in 2002 broke that alliance. Media outlets were transformed into “aggressors” that obstructed the ability of the citizenry to progress in their pursuit of the greater good (whether capitalism or socialism, representative or participatory democracy, the Left or the Right). Journalists themselves succumbed to the polarization process. Though journalists reported instances of collaboration, and attempts were made by different organizations to overcome the polarization of media professionals,8 they frequently attributed the same political bias to colleagues working for opposing media outlets as did the citizenry at large. Perhaps one of Venezuela’s most controversial journalists during the 2002–2003 period was Patricia Poleo, who was accused by the government of using her status as a journalist to help plot the coup

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against Chávez. In a 2004 interview, Poleo described what she perceived as the current state of freedom of expression in Venezuela. Media are taking risks [jugándose] for their survival, and we journalists are taking risks for the survival of the profession over time. The media know they are waging this fight the way they have to, or they will disappear at the hands of the regime. I think after this is over and the country returns to normalcy and we have democracy again, media will have to return to be what they are supposed to be (Poleo 2004, 34).

Poleo apparently believed that media outlets were justified in going beyond their original function, and transforming into political actors, in the name of the greater good. Pereira (2004), an admittedly pro-Chávez journalist, revealed that colleagues questioned her willingness to engage with people from Opposition (golpista) channels. Her counterpart at the privatecommercial opposition daily El Nacional, Laura Castellanos, and the national television station RCTV, reported a physical confrontation with a community media producer who accused her of “not telling the truth” (Castellanos 2004, 55). Interestingly, Castellanos, whose brother was a journalist at the national public television station Venezolana de Televisión VTV, recalled an incident when her crew was approached by an Opposition sympathizer who asked, “Are you from Radio Caracas Televisión?” When they nodded, the woman inquired, “Laura Castellanos works there, right?” They nodded again. She then proceeded to ask them to relay to the president of the network that Laura “is an infiltrator because she has brothers in Venezolana de Televisión,” and stated, “you’ve got to fire that woman” (53). The incidents described above clearly demonstrate the toll that the polarization process took on the ability of media outlets to be perceived as objective purveyors of information. Interestingly, as the case of Últimas Noticias illustrates, even when media attempted to retain a semblance of objectivity, antagonistic narratives colored each constituency’s evaluation of the truthfulness of reporting. This also led to questioning the professionalism of journalists, as even personal associations, such as those of Laura Castellanos, were taken as proof of a journalist’s inability to report in a proper and truthful manner.

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The Bolivarian Republic and Its Emphasis on Media

The acts of private-commercial media during the coup d’état of April 11, 2002, and the 2002–2003 national strike, left a lasting impression on the national government. If the democratization of media emerged as a right in the 1999 Bolivarian Constitution, it acquired a sense of urgency after the coup and national strike, when the Bolivarian Revolution’s communication machinery began in earnest. Premised on the belief that the concentration of media outlets in the hands of a few, representing the country’s socio-economic elites, inevitably led to the dissemination of biased and manipulated information, the government sought to circulate its own media propaganda, through its own media outlets, and sanction journalists and outlets that violated the citizenry’s right to “impartial and truthful” information. The national government’s investment in public, alternative, and community media transformed the landscape of Venezuelan media. As described above, the need to invest in public, alternative and community media resulted from Articles 57 and 58 of the 1999 Bolivarian Constitution, which enshrined the right of citizens to produce information. Following the dictates of Venezuela’s participatoryprotagonist democracy, Chávez’s government sought to democratize the means of production of information. In 2000 Chávez modified the Law of Telecommunications (Ley Orgánica de Telecomunicaciones) to allow the government to invest in the establishment of new media outlets.9 In 2002, Venezuela had 50 television stations. Most of these were regional and community short-range stations. Three private-commercial television stations broadcast nationally through an open frequency: Radio Caracas Televisión, Televén, and Venevisión. Other important stations, based on audience, included the state television station Venezolana de Televisión, Globovisión and the Catholic station Vale TV. In 2002, Venezuelans listened to 423 radio stations, most of which were private. After April 11, 2002, these numbers shifted dramatically in favor of the government. In 2004, the government provided an infusion of capital to community media, and in 2005 it distributed new equipment to 65 community radio and television stations. In addition to its investment in community media, the government created additional public television stations. The government’s efforts to outnumber private media outlets intensified in 2007, when president Chávez refused to renew the open broadband license of Venezuela’s oldest Opposition television station Radio Caracas de Televisión (RCTV). RCTV’s broadband was given to

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Tves, a public television station created by the government, giving the government ownership of a total of 7 national television networks. Efforts to counteract dissenting points of view were not limited to national audiences. The government of Venezuela aggressively sought to offset the influence of the United States media internationally. Emulating US propaganda strategies abroad, the national government created the Venezuela Information Office in 2004, “dedicated to informing the American public about contemporary Venezuela.” The Venezuelan Information Office acted as a lobbying firm from 2004 to 2007 and produced press releases touting the milestones of national government programs, responded to press articles and negative international reports on Venezuela, produced a blog, and actively sought support from sympathizers in the United States, urging them to call, write or email elected representatives and denounce biased information in the US media, block legislative efforts to sanction Venezuelan actions, or promote legislation favorable to the regime. In conjunction with other regional leaders, the Bolivarian government sponsored the creation of Telesur, a multinational news network dedicated to regional coverage of Latin America, to counterbalance the power of CNN en Español, Univision, and Telemundo (all three of these outlets are U.S.-based Spanish-speaking networks for Latin America, available region-wide through cable). According to Venezuela’s Information Office, Telesur presses “the need to see Latin America through Latin American eyes.”10 The initiative launched a counteroffensive by the US government when Florida state representative Connie Mack introduced an amendment to the Foreign Relations Authorization Act to beam US-produced anti-Chávez programming to Venezuela, and solicited funds to finance a Radio Free Venezuela radio station to broadcast to Venezuela and deflect any media attacks on the United States by Telesur (El Universal 2005). Mack’s amendment passed in 2005. Additionally, the Venezuelan government created an international press agency called Agencia Bolivariana de Noticias (ABN)11 to produce government information to be read, presented and republished by other media outlets and international and regional press organizations such as Reuters, EFE and Notimex. By 2007, the effects of the national government’s media building efforts shifted the numerical balance between private-commercial and community and alternative stations. The national government had granted 36 new licenses for community radio stations and 227 licenses for community television stations (Urribarri 2009, 168). The government also supported seven national television stations, including

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Telesur, and 35 community television stations. It backed two national radio stations (Radio Nacional de Venezuela and YVKE) as well as 231 FM community radio stations. Supporting this budding empire were an international press agency and 73 local dailies (Hernández Díaz 2009, 92). While increasing the number of public, alternative and community media outlets helped the national government increase the number of sources willing to disseminate its interpretation of political events, this did not mitigate the attacks of private media, whose long-standing popularity and diverse entertainment programming commanded the lion’s share of Venezuela’s television ratings.12 “Truthful, Opportune, and Impartial” Information: Regulating Media

The national government’s efforts to counterbalance the information disseminated by private media in the aftermath of the 2002 coup d’état consisted in bolstering the number of media outlets that might offer more pro-government interpretations of the conflict, but also in legislating the production and dissemination of information. In December 2004, the government passed the Law of Social Responsibility in Radio and Television (Ley de Responsabilidad Social en Radio y Televisión)—intended, according to the government, to bolster independent media and protect children (by barring depictions of sex and violence during daytime hours). The Law of Social Responsibility in Radio and Television had the following purpose. To establish, in the diffusion and reception of messages, the social responsibility of radio and television service providers, advertisers, national independent producers, and users…in order to promote social justice and contribute to the formation of the citizenry, democracy, peace, human rights, culture, education, health, and the social and economic development of the Nation, in conformity with the norms and constitutional principles of the legislation for the integral protection of boys, girls and adolescents, culture, education, social protection, free competition and the Organic Law of Telecomunications (Article 1).

The law stipulated that 60 percent of TV programming had to be made by independent producers, which according to the government was meant to break the monopoly of Venezuela’s media conglomerates (Márquez 2004). It also gave the government the right to utilize (or appropriate, according to the Opposition) up to 70 minutes of weekly

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airtime for its own programming. Moreover, it penalized stations for airing information “contrary to the security of the nation” and created new provisions allowing citizens and public figures to sue for defamation, slander, and liable. The law also meant to foster a “broadcasting industry that [was] in line with the model of socioeconomic change that the country [was] experiencing” (ibid). Composed of 35 articles, the law contemplates 78 infractions and sanctions for violations by media outlets to be administered by the National Commission of Telecommunications, CONATEL. The Opposition denounced the law as an attempt to institute government censorship. For detractors, CONATEL’s power to impart sanctions effectively granted the presidency power over media outlets.13 Articles 29 and 33 of the law required radio and television outlets to abstain from broadcasting messages that “promote, justify or incite war, promote, justify or incite public disorder; promote, justify or incite crime; are discriminatory; promote religious intolerance; are contrary to national security; are anonymous.” The measure allowed CONATEL to revoke a broadcasting license for up to five years if a media outlet received more than one sanction. International organizations such as Human Rights Watch and the Organization of American States called on the Venezuelan government to clarify the law. The Inter-American Press Society (ISP) believed its provisions violated the rights of the Venezuelan press by giving the government the right to suspend any radio and television programming for 70 hours if CONATEL considered the programming an affront to national security (El Universal 2005a). For the Press and Society Institute (IPYS), the law was a measure designed to allow censorship a priori (Torrealba 2010). Days after the law was signed, national dailies printed blank picture boxes, alleging they had self-censored to avoid the legal ramifications of reporting violent acts. The controversy over the 2004 law stemmed largely from the backdrop of the conflict. The national government adhered to its claim the law simply modernized the existing code, and claimed the measures included in the law were no more onerous than those established by regulating agencies in other countries. The Venezuelan Information Office argued the law did not dramatically differ from Federal Communication Commission (FCC) regulations in the United States that prompted the government agency to fine CBS for Janet Jackson’s 2004 Superbowl “wardrobe malfunction” or the pressure exerted by the FCC on Clear Channel Communications that resulted in the company’s decision to drop the Howard Stern Show from its programming.

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It is difficult to impugn a government’s right to regulate what is broadcast on television screens and radios within a country, but the 2004 Law of Social Responsibility in Radio and Television had more to do with the political conflict in Venezuela. The split screen during Chávez’s 2002 national address to the country showing images of Opposition protesters being shot on the streets of Caracas,14 which in the narrative of the Opposition prompted the armed forces to stage a coup d’état, caused the government to take a narrow view of freedom of the press. The government framed its oversight as a ban on sex and violence during primetime programming meant to protect children and adolescents, but media producers accused the government of coercion, noting their operating licenses could be suspended “pending investigation” if they showed news footage of violent confrontations between law enforcement and citizens. While the national government argued CONATEL could impartially review sanctions against media outlets, the polarization of Venezuelan society led critics to question the autonomy of the institution and the directorate. In 2009, the National Assembly proposed legislative bills that critics denounced as further constraining freedom of expression. On July 30, 2009, Venezuela’s Attorney General submitted the Special Law against Media Crimes (Ley Especial Contra los Delitos Mediáticos). The law proposed criminal measures against media owners and producers if they were found guilty of disturbing public order, causing the citizenry mental distress due to the content of their broadcasts, or undermining the credibility of state institutions. According to the law, media owners, media executives, journalists, hosts, speakers, artists and “any other person who expresses themselves through a communication medium, be it print, television, radio or of any other nature” to divulge false news or manipulated news, who refused to reveal an anonymous source, or who instigated violence, could be jailed for a period of two months to four years. The Special Law against Media Crimes was dead on arrival at the National Assembly; representatives of the government’s own party rejected the measure, calling it “unnecessary” (Peñaloza 2009, Peñaloza 2009a).15 Outright Censorship and Hostile Takeovers

Venezuelan political actors’ need to sway citizens to their cause through media outlets prompted both the national government and the Opposition to try to limit the sphere of influence of media producers not aligned with their own political affiliations. As the conflict intensified, both Opposition and Chavista government officials flexed their political

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muscle and resorted to legal measures by which to outright censor media outlets. In 2003, Caracas’ Opposition mayor Alfredo Peña ordered the community television station of one of the city’s largest shantytowns, CatiaTV, to be closed down. In October 2003, the National Telecommunication Agency (CONATEL) initiated administrative proceedings against the private television station Globovisión. The government alleged the television station was using open frequencies without a government license and seized equipment. After appealing to the Interamerican Commission of Human Rights, Globovisión resumed its broadcast. Outright censorship of private media, however, remained a threat. Debates in the Bolivarian-led National Constitutional Assembly revealed a deep-seated disdain for private media in Venezuela, and a series of confrontations ensued between the national government, media owners and journalists. In his analysis of President Chávez’s declarations on media outlets, Bisbal (2009) reveals a steady progression towards censorship on the part of President Chávez. In 2001, Chávez described the relationship between himself and the media as “part of a historical clash of forces.” In 2002, during the events leading up to the April 11 coup, Chávez asserted, “the media are destabilizing the country.” In 2003, the president explained, “I don’t want to shut down channels, but if they do not reconsider we’ll have to close them down.” By December 2006, he warned, “there will be no new license for the putsch channel called Radio Caracas Televisión. The license is over…We will not tolerate any communication media at the service of the putsch [golpismo], against the people, against the nation, against the dignity of the Republic” (Bisbal 2009, 36–39). On May 27, 2007 at 23:59 p.m., Chávez carried out his threat. Private-commercial television Channel 2, whose screens has been transmitting images of the channel’s directors and employees singing the Venezuelan national anthem, went dark. For 53 years, Channel 2 had been licensed to Radio Caracas Televisión (RCTV). On May 27 it was relinquished to the government channel Televisora Venezolana Social (TVes).16 Though substantiated on legal grounds, the refusal to renew the RCTV’s license would curtail the ability of private media to disseminate their message. In 2009, the federal government would again threaten to sanction a privately owned commercial television station broadcasting on an open frequency: Globovisión. Globovisión is a 24-hour news television station, whose news segments are reproduced by regional and local media outlets. It was investigated by CONATEL in May 2009. President Chávez ordered the investigation in response to the actions of station

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owner Federico Ravell, who went on live television after a 5.4 earthquake struck Venezuela. Ravell criticized the government’s sluggish response. At the time of his announcement, the national government had yet to report the earthquake. Globovisión was accused of violating the 2004 Law of Social Responsibility in Radio and Television for broadcasting messages “provoking, supporting or inciting disturbances of public order” (Toothaker 2009). In 2009, the government threatened to rescind the concessions of up to 240 private open frequency radio stations and 45 television stations, alleging their failure to comply with their legal status. The announcement made by the Ministry of Public Works and Housing unleashed panic among media producers who were in the process of renewing their status and had yet to receive formal notice of their compliance or non-compliance. In the end, 32 radio stations and 2 television stations had their licenses revoked and their transmissions immediately shut down due to their lack of compliance with the Law of Telecomunications. Summing Up the Numbers

The debate over freedom of expression in Venezuela must be contextualized within the political conflict. If the 2001 coup d’état against Chávez awakened the government’s need to counterbalance the power of private media, the transgressions against the freedom of expression that followed were fueled by the private media’s overwhelming support for the Opposition during the 2002–2003 national strike. With the notable exception of two national dailies of wide circulation, Últimas Noticias and Panorama, all dailies suspended their publication on December 2, 2002, the first day of the strike. In February 2003, the Venezuelan Press Block, a professional organization composed of directors of 38 dailies, urged citizens to adhere to the strike and defend their liberties. Private television channels demonstrated their support for the strike by suspending their daily programming and dedicating their entire television cycle to coverage of the strike.17 The coverage not only included on-site reporting and interviews with Opposition leaders, it also replaced advertising spots with political propaganda. No fewer than four television stations (not to speak of radio and written press) concatenated during 24 hours in December 2002 and January 2003. During that time, they transmitted 17,600 [propaganda]

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spots against the government, dedicating all their programming, without a second of reprieve, to denigrating the government through sensationalist-journalism, to cause all kinds of alarm, to propagate any rumor that spread fear. It was an unprecedented behavior, unseen anywhere else in the world, as far as I know (Hernández Montoya cited in Britto García 2006, 146).

On December 6, 2002, the hostility between supporters and detractors of Hugo Chávez seemed to reach its climax when a Portuguese immigrant opened fire on Opposition protesters camped at the Plaza Altamira, a public plaza taken over by a group of dissenting military officers calling for the resignation of Hugo Chávez, where continuous Opposition protests took place. Three people were murdered and 19 injured by the shooter, whom the Opposition claimed was a Chavista supporter and who the government claimed had been hired by the Opposition to destabilize his government as they had done during the April 2002 coup. In essence, private media outlets failed to fulfill their objective journalistic role in the events that unfolded between 2002 and 2003. As explained by Andrés Cañizales (2004), former director of IPYSVenezuela, during the national strike private media disseminated propaganda and ceded their microphones to Opposition leaders. In what subsequently became the modus operandi of Venezuelan media, interviews with public figures unraveled into diatribes, with journalists allowing political figures with whom they shared common opinions to speak uninterrupted, and without seriously questioning their actions or views. By openly taking sides in the conflict, private media led Venezuelan audiences to question the latter’s independence and objectivity. Cañizales not only correctly asserts that the actions of media producers during 2002–2003 helped discredit private media, but he also correctly notes that the slippery slope that journalists in Venezuela went down resulted from historical deficiencies within the profession. In 2007, the IPYS surveyed local reporters, owners, and editors to understand what measures they utilized to self-regulate their reports and to adhere to ethical standards of journalism. Seventy-five percent of respondents declared their media outlets did not have an individual or department to fact-check their stories. They relied solely on the work of their reporters and editors. Additionally, 72 percent indicated their media outlets did not contact their sources or individuals featured in their stories to inquire how they felt they had been treated in those stories. The survey found that 83 percent of those surveyed indicated

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their media organization did not have ombudsmen—independent offices or individuals who channel audience grievances, complaints and recommendations. Moreover, only 11 percent of those interviewed stated their media outlets received some form of feedback from media observatories or independent groups (IPYS 2007, 114–115). During the 2002–2003 period there were plenty of examples of Opposition media criticism of the government lacking professional standards. Newscasts consistently described Chávez as “crazy, dictator, tyrant, putsch leader.”18 The president was compared to Hitler (Xalma Mellado 2004) and national media characterized his government as “communist,” “totalitarian” and “fascist.”19 Some media outlets went as far as falsifying information. In 2004, for example, a reporter for the national daily El Nacional published in her weekly column a report linking Venezuela with the 2004 bombing in Madrid. According to Salazar, a Spanish official cited in the article stated that the titadine used in the bombing came from Venezuela and the military production site CAVIM. Though the author asserts her information was culled from a NY Times article, the NY Times authors do not mention Venezuela in their report.20 The national government responded to these attacks by private media not only with vitriolic counterattacks, but also by passing legislation that resulted in the restriction of the freedom of expression of Venezuelan media outlets. The results of the legislation can be glimpsed in the following data. While acts of physical aggression against journalists peaked in 2003 and then steadily declined, 2005 marked the beginning of a new form of governmental control over media. After the ratification of the Law of Social Responsibility for in Radio and Television in December 2004, censorship steadily became the most commonly cited violation to the liberty of the press. The law allegedly prompted the national private television station Televén to drop a staunch Opposition morning news show, Marta Colomina’s En Entrevista.21 Colomina alleged the show was cancelled “after government officials, including the vice-president himself, began threatening and even fining Televén executives in an effort to pressure them to stop employing her.” The more lasting effects of the law are not as obvious. To fully comply with the law, journalists, editors, and media owners were required to weigh the veracity and impartiality of news reports before they could be published. This effectively imposed a degree of selfcensorship on private media, who may have been inclined to avoid reports on subjects that might lead to confrontations with the national government. According to an IPYS poll of both private and public

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reporters in 2007, 44 percent of journalists surveyed declared the media outlets they worked for had given them explicit instructions to avoid certain subjects. 56 percent of those who had experienced direct censorship failed to report it for fear of stirring conflict with government authorities, and 22 percent declared they failed to report stories to avoid contradicting the interests of their (private and public) sponsors (IPYS 2007, 57–58). Other forms of censorship included denying journalists access to information and sources. By 2010, the most common complaint reported by journalists reporting for Opposition media was the denial of information through informal mechanisms. Journalists were barred from physically entering government institutions. Invitations to government and Opposition press conferences changed venues or times without forewarning. Authorities refused to speak or respond to questions from Opposition media outlets. According to IPYS, the practice was so commonplace that Venezuelan journalists, especially in the provinces, assumed self-censorship as part and parcel of their function. To not selfcensor could result in a lack of access to information or withdrawal of advertising revenues. In the 2007 IPYS survey, 61 percent of journalists, media owners, and editors surveyed attributed their self-censoring to the possibility they might lose access to their official government sources, or to fear they might be subject to physical aggression on the street, or threatened by the government. Journalists changed their views of themselves and their profession as reporting became increasing difficult. In 2009 for example, the National Legislative Assembly radically altered journalists’ access. They replaced the press box with a press room where journalists could cover legislative debates through the assembly’s television channel. The rules of the National Assembly were changed to deny journalists access to bills presented by the assembly. According to IPYS, in 2009, after journalists were banned from the adjourning sessions of the assembly, a journalist obtained a photocopy of a bill and was threatened with physical violence by an assembly representative (Torrealba 2010). The incident underscored the new rules of the game for press in Venezuela, where the ability of a journalist to obtain a copy of a proposed bill was interpreted as a heroic act by the Opposition and a delinquent act by government officials. Premised on a view of audiences as passive receptors of information, both government and Opposition leaders staged a communication “war” that radically altered the media landscape in Venezuela. Indeed, if the April 2002 coup unleashed a “media war” after President Hugo Chávez set out to construct a media empire strong and

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numerous enough to counteract the media power of the Opposition, and empower, as will be demonstrated in our next chapter, ordinary citizens at the local level, it also restricted the freedom of expression of media producers through increased government regulation of an industry that had long forgotten its journalism standards. Notes 1 By 1999 there were websites that reported on Venezuela. The accusation made reference to a lack of internet media that reported favorably on Chávez and the Bolivarian government. 2 In 1998, President Hugo Chávez was elected with the support of the national daily El Nacional and to a lesser degree the support of the television station Venevisión. The 2003 Reporters without Borders Report argued that the media ties between El Nacional and the presidential candidate resulted in the designation of Alfredo Peña, ex-director of the daily, as Minister of the Secretariat of the Presidency (Bourgeat 2003). 3 Comparisons between Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution and Castro’s Cuban Revolution emerged early on in the conflict and continued to be a point of contention between supporters and detractors of the government. In 2000, when Chávez formed the Bolivarian Circles, government detractors claimed these organizations were modeled after Cuban community militias. The claim gained currency in 2001, when the government and civil society failed to draft the Law of Education. As Opposition groups formed to defend their proposed educational policy, their supporters argued the government’s proposal was inspired by the Cuban revolution (See Mallen 2003, Buxton 2005). 4 When media stations were subsequently asked to explain the media blackout, they alleged they feared for the safety of their reporters. It was not a far-fetched explanation, as the number of attacks on journalists increased dramatically in 2002. However, international television channels such as CNN reported the rioting, providing national channels the possibility of borrowing their coverage. As pointed out by Correa and Cañizales (IPSYS 2003), the will to cover the news weakened as the balance of power shifted from the Opposition back to the government. 5 The concerted protests took place in front of the affiliates of Globovisión, Radio Caracas Televisión, Venevisión, Canal TVS (Aragua), Promar TV (Lara) and in the offices of the dailies 2001 and Abril. 6 IPYS reports define specific attacks against journalists as incidents. However, each incident can contain numerous violations depending on the type and number of violent acts reported. 7 Though government supporters employed these tactics more often than their Opposition, the Opposition was not exempt from using violence against reporters and media outlets they considered unsympathetic to their cause. Reflecting on the stifling of views that characterized the conflict, in a 2004 interview journalist Mayela León described how both government and Opposition publics oftentimes harassed private media reporters when they “did not like what we wrote” (León 2004, 41).

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8 Hoping to mitigate the effects of Venezuela’s polarizing dynamics on the profession, a group of journalists attempted to create a space for dialogue between opinion makers and journalists. During the conflict, the Carter Center attempted to buttress efforts toward dialogue, but did so with marginal success (Vanolli 2009, Dietz and McCoy 2012, Martínez Meucci 2012). 9 The second objective of the 2000 Law of Telecommunications advocates the development of community media in order to promote “not for profit,” “free and plural communication.” 10 Originally published as part of the Venezuela Information Office Listserve under the subject: Telesur, Terrorism Updates, Venezuela Delegation. [email protected]. May 26, 2005. 11 The Agencia Bolivariana de Noticias is now called the Agencia Venezolana de Noticias (AVN). 12 In 2007, the private-commercial television stations RCTV and Venevisión had a combined share of 70 percent of television ratings. Globovisión and Televén scored a 3 percent and 10 percent share of the ratings respectively, while the national public television stations Venezolana de Televisión captured 10 percent of television audiences (Bisbal 2009, 56). 13 Though sanctions were technically to be imposed by the Directorate of Social Responsibility, composed of eleven members including the CONATEL’s general director, representatives of select government ministries, a church representative, a professor of social communication at a public university, and two media “users,” the overwhelming representation of government ministries led critics to question the Directorate’s impartiality. Also, although CONATEL was declared an autonomous institution by the 2000 Law of Telecommunications, and purported technical, financial, organizational and administrative autonomy, in 2005 CONATEL fell under the administrative tutelage of the Ministry of Infrastructure. Currently, CONATEL is part of the Ministerio del Poder Popular para la Comunicación e Información (Ministry of Popular Power for Communication and Information). 14 It is important to note that government sympathizers were also attacked but private commercial media did not report these attacks. 15 Another controversial law that touched on the freedom of expression was the Law of Education, approved by the National Assembly in August 2009, which reiterated the tenets of articles 29 and 33 of the 2004 Law of Social Responsibility in telecommunications and “prohibits the publication and dissemination of print or other forms of social communication that produce terror in children, incite hate, aggression, lack of discipline, deform the language or are prejudicial to the good values of the Venezuelan people, [their] morals and good customs, the mental and physical health of the population.” The law calls for the sanctioning of media outlets that violate the law. 16 For Venezuela’s Opposition the “shut down” of RCTV was considered an “arbitrary affront against the freedom of expression.” The government’s unwillingness to renew the channel’s operating license was applauded by government sympathizers who believed the media outlet had “manipulated information” during the failed coup d’état against Hugo Chávez in April 2002. 17 Private television channels slowly began to reincorporate entertainment shows after December 15, 2002, but would frequently interrupt programming to report on-up-to-the-moment news on the national strike.

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18 The international press has also contributed to the name-calling. In 2004, for example, the Chicago Tribune referred to President Chávez as a “big-mouth with a strong authoritarian streak” (Chicago Tribune 2004). 19 In some cases, groups within civil society have followed suit. In an obituary published in the national Opposition daily El Nacional on November 5, 2004, a group calling themselves the “free men of Venezuela” honored the death of Claus Shenk Von Sauffenberg who failed in his attempt to assassinate Hitler. According to the obituary, the free-men of Venezuela honor his memory and “salute his gesture of legitimate social defense, which arises from its historical context as a valid model in the fight against tyrannies of whatever ideological type.” The obituary is signed “NGO Long Live Free Venezuela.” (The Devils Excrement 2004). Posted online in the Opposition blog The Devil’s Excrement, the blogger wonders if the obituary is a “warning” for Bolivarian government leaders. 20 Cited in Weisbrot 2004. The original New York Times article can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/12/world/bombings-madrid-suspects -carnage-yields-conflicting-clues-officials-search-for.html?pagewanted=1. 21 Colomina, a regular op-ed contributor to the Venezuelan daily El Universal, reported and conducted political interviews through the Opposition friendly radio network Unión Radio. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights granted provisional cautionary measures to Colomina. Her protection was provided by a local Opposition mayor in the city of Caracas (Human Rights Foundation, Caracas Nine).

5 The Fragmentation of the Public Sphere

“Well yes, this is a country at war. Here there is a war of the means of communication, a political war, here there is an economic war, a moral war.” —Hugo Chávez Frías, January 20, 2003

The December 2, 2002, national strike against President Hugo Chávez was designed to force a recall referendum. What ensued were some of the most dramatic moments of the Venezuelan conflict. The two-month national strike shut down retail stores, closed schools, disrupted national oil production, and interrupted everyday life in the city of Caracas. With nothing else to do, Venezuelan citizens observed or actively participated in the nonstop marches or countermarches that took place. But regardless of their degree of involvement in the struggle, from the privacy of their homes, all watched, heard, and read as events unfolded. For two months, television screens, radio stations, and newspapers dedicated their coverage to the strike. Life in Caracas revolved around 24-hour coverage of the political conflict. The standstill of everyday life bolstered the power of the media, as the Opposition and the government both took to news coverage to advance their position. Like other institutions, Venezuela’s national media succumbed to polarization and media outlets quickly transformed into protagonists in the ongoing saga. Private-commercial media articulated the editorial line of the Opposition and promoted its events. Public government-run media disseminated the government’s narrative and broadcast official propaganda. Not surprisingly, the conflict quickly developed into a “media war” between two antagonistic publics.1 And as the hostility between Chávez and private media intensified, both parties escalated their attacks. In his

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infamous January 10, 2003, speech, Chávez referred to the country’s four privately run national television stations as the “four horsemen of the Apocalypse” and accused private-commercial media of placing themselves at the service of lies. In his speech, Chávez charged, “the four horsemen of the Apocalypse have unloaded their hate. They have unloaded the historical hate of the Venezuelan oligarchs against the Venezuelan people” (Chávez 2003, 49). In response, Venezuela’s Radio and Television Industry issued a statement declaring their “categorical rejection to this repetitive attitude of the citizen Hugo Chávez Frías.” They demanded that “He stop his conduct of instigating the hate that has sown so much harm, death and pain in Venezuela” (El Nacional 2003, A3). Chávez’s speech, and the statement issued by Venezuela’s Radio and Television Industry, highlight the positions of Opposition and Chavista publics. Staunch supporters of the Opposition attributed the violent nature of the conflict to the president’s turgid language, and his speeches laced with demeaning characterizations, denunciations, and threats. Government sympathizers attributed the polarization of Venezuelan society to the underhanded reporting of private-commercial media and their lies. Both groups correctly emphasized how media outlets and discourse had contributed to differences in interpretation of events, but this alone does not explain why Venezuelan citizens held such disparate views of the conflict. To understand how media or public discourse affect our interpretation of social reality, we must first understand the relationship between information and action. There is undoubtedly some correlation between what we see, read, and hear, and what we do. But can we say that the ideological biases articulated in editorial lines are automatically transmitted and accepted by their audiences? Do audiences passively receive information or do they challenge the interpretive threads of producers of information? In the 1980s, Walter Cronkite’s sign-off, “And that’s the way it is,” at the end of every CBS news broadcast was considered true, as Meyrowitz (1985) argues, for media producers selected the information that would circulate within the US market. The power of mass media like CBS to choose what information is transmitted makes their interpretation of events into a kind of social reality. Except the ability to selectively circulate information does not determine how different publics will interpret the news. As Thompson argues in his work Media and Modernity, “whereas production fixes symbolic content in a material substratum, reception ‘unfixes’ it” (1995, 39). While media outlets can control the information that is disseminated in society, they

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cannot control the interpretation of information, for, as we will argue, an audience’s understanding of facts and events is developed through their relationships with different publics. Media undoubtedly plays a role in understanding social reality, but the description of social reality authored by media groups is aided and abetted, questioned and rejected, by citizens with a plurality of views. The persuasiveness of media outlets’ interpretation of social reality is linked to the structure of the public sphere, a variable more complex than who controls the means of media production. There is no denying we must understand the role media outlets play in society, how they exercise their power, and whether they remain commentators or assume the role of actors in a political conflict. But, as will be demonstrated, the effectiveness of media outlets is closely related to the organization of the public sphere and the power and influence distinct publics exert in a historically determined period. We must tease out the relationships between media producers and other centers of power, understand how information is disseminated, and why it is framed by media outlets in the interests of some sectors of society, but also who accesses this information and how information is interpreted by them. In the case of the Venezuelan conflict, the effectiveness of an editorial line depended on how it was classified by the country’s bifurcated public sphere. As in non-polarized societies, Venezuela’s public sphere consisted of multiple publics with distinct and diverse opinions that competed among each other to temporarily impose their intersubjective interpretation of social reality (Warner 2005). In the case of the Venezuelan Bolivarian Republic, the public sphere fractured into two antagonistic publics, neither of which could hegemonically impose their interpretation of the ongoing conflict.2 Forced through the centrifuge of polarization, the plurality of Venezuela’s public sphere was reduced to the antithetical Chavista and Opposition publics. The fractioning of the Venezuelan public sphere resulted from the understanding of the conflict as an existential struggle. Built on the work of Schmitt, the concept can be understood as a battle for power that divides the citizenry into “friends” and “foes,” the existential struggle treats the Other as “existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible” (Schmitt [1927] 1996, 27).3 Within this framework, discussions over public policies, presidential decrees, or constitutional laws became a matter of threatening or preserving a way of life. Initially, Venezuela’s antagonistic publics accommodated a broad range of opinions on the government and the Bolivarian Revolution. The Chavista public, for example, integrated government militants known as

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“Rojo-Rojitos,” as well as “Chavistas-light,” who supported, but were critical of, the Bolivarian Revolution and Chávez’s leadership; “Chavistas sin Chávez” who believed in the revolutionary process but did not consider Chávez’s leadership essential to its success; and “Hojilleros,” pro-government militants whose verbal attacks on the Opposition mimicked the aggressive discourse of a popular television program, La Hojilla (The Razor Blade), broadcast on the public television station Venezolana de Televisión. The range of opinions subsumed under the Opposition public were even more disparate. United primarily in their disagreement with Chávez’s government, within the Opposition there coexisted ideological tendencies from Chicago School capitalists to state-centered social democrats. However, the existential struggle came to limit the expression of this plurality by generating associative interpretations, where support or criticism of a government policy, a specific media outlet, or public figure automatically confined a speaker to one of the two antagonistic publics. The result was a public sphere with limited space for points of view that did not resemble the existing antagonism. Lamenting the negative consequences of this polarization, a letter to the editor during the 2002–2003 national strike, dated January 7, 2003, explained: “those of us who are in neither extreme [Opposition or Chavismo] and are able to sometimes say Chávez is right and at other times criticize the inflexible positions of the government, are branded ‘Chavistas’ or we are branded ‘Opposition,’ depending on the analysis of each of the two extremes” (Giraud 2003). Although the Venezuelan political crisis predated the Bolivarian Revolution, the existential struggle that ensued exacerbated the conflict, by limiting the expression of the country’s plurality. The existential struggle now determined the interpretive thread of each public. Interpretations of facts and events were inserted into this framework, reducing the possibility of multiple narratives. More importantly, the understanding of the conflict as an existential struggle prompted each public to stifle the expression of its own alternative or dissenting points of view. As will be demonstrated, within the existential struggle, diversity of opinion was construed as dissent that strategically jeopardized that public’s position. The claim that the ability of media outlets to persuade depends on the shape of the public sphere does not minimize the role of media in the construction of social reality. In Venezuela, media outlets played a role in the conflict insofar as they accepted, adopted, and contributed to antagonistic narratives. As argued in the previous chapter, media assumed protagonist roles in a political conflict, employing their power

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to persuade the citizenry. But as will be demonstrated, the success of their persuasion was determined by the structure of the public sphere and not by their ability to massively disseminate information. The Fourth Power Flexes Its Muscle

Supporters of Hugo Chávez charged private media with “media terrorism” and demanded private mass media outlets “tell the truth!” Within the polarized milieu of Venezuelan politics, the “media war” involved not just propaganda battles, but as discussed in Chapter 4, very real acts of aggression directed at private-commercial, publicgovernmental, community, and alternative media outlets and journalists. But in the public sphere the “media war” revolved around the increased role of direct citizen participation in the government’s decision-making. In a regime where government legitimacy rested on the perceived support of the greater part of the citizenry, media mobilization became increasingly important for both the government and the Opposition. The “media war” thus became about making communities visible or public. In her analysis of community media, Schiller (2011) describes how community-based reporters got involved in media production upon realizing private-commercial media disseminated negative information about their community but failed to report on the achievements of community organizers. Her interviewee explains. Commercial television spread information about our community when someone killed someone, and of course pornography, sexuality, violence. But it never spread information that our community was organizing itself, that it was transforming itself to change things. No one was seeing that. So we started analyzing and thinking. All the things we had accomplished and no one knew about them (11).

The explosion of community media not only accomplished the task of providing a “public” supporting Chávez, it also transformed communities from passive receptors of information into participants in the creation of media narratives.4 As Schiller points out, community media did not consider their audience passive vessels for the reception of information. The same attitude was embraced by public media outlets. In an interview in 2007, National Radio of Venezuela (RNV) director Hindú Anderi explained why the media outlet discouraged the use of the term “radioesucha” (radio listener). She stated, “they [the audience] are not only radio-

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listeners...they use this medium and demand better service, quality service…the user has the right to complain…and this gives them more rights and allows for more participation than those we used to call radiolisteners or television audiences” (Anderi 2007). Putting this new philosophy into action, the on-air booth of the RNV reminded hosts to refrain from using the term “audience,” and to instead address callers as “usuarios” (users). While the Chavista public saw itself as a participant in the reporting and broadcasting of information, it did not hold the same benevolent view of the Opposition. The emphasis on the need to broadcast information about community participation in the Bolivarian project was closely related to the belief that the Opposition was a passive receptor of information and required media proof of Chavista version of events. In contrast, the Opposition saw itself as an enlightened public, capable of critically discerning between biased and objective information. While the Opposition considered itself part of an organized civil society, it viewed the Chavista public as a mass, easily duped by government propaganda.5 In an interview for the television program 24 Horas (24 Hours) aired on the opposition channel Venevisión, historian and Opposition leader Jorge Olavarría argued that Chávez had two bases of support: the armed forces, and the “a very numerous mass that still sees him as their hope, that feels represented by him” (24 Horas 2001a).6 To paraphrase Thompson’s analysis, in Venezuela’s polarized society, whereas the Other’s public passively received fixed information, One’s own public “unfixed” it and freed it up to multiple interpretations. As private media outlets assumed a political role,7 the attacks on Chávez increased in virulence, especially in opinion columns and television shows. The animosity and the speculative nature of private media coverage was easily discernible in the headlines of the national dailies. To cite a random example, on November 12, 2001, the daily El Diario 2001 printed the following headline, “Democracy is in trouble, warn ex-constitutional assembly members,” and “Anarchy reigns in the country in the face of a political and moral crisis worse than 98.” The national daily El Universal headlined with “Venezuela on its way towards catastrophe.” Simultaneously, El Nacional, featured a story on an opinion poll and declared, “70 percent believe Chávez is responsible for the country’s problems.” Structuring the Public Sphere

Building on Schmitt we argue that in order for an existential struggle to occur, political actors must have roughly equal strength. Chávez’s

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investment in public, alternative, and community media aimed to mitigate the influence of private and commercial media in Venezuela and thereby level the political playing field. Diversifying media ownership further segmented Venezuela’s public sphere and transformed the landscape of the media industry. As described in the previous chapter, the need to invest in public, alternative, and community media resulted from Articles 57 and 58 of the 1999 Bolivarian Constitution, which enshrined the right of citizens to produce information. Following the dictates of Venezuela’s participatory-protagonist democracy, Chávez’s government sought to democratize the means of the production of information. This changed the landscape of the media industry. It created a more even balance of power between private-commercial outlets sympathetic to the Opposition and public-community media likely to uphold the government’s point of view. It did not, however, fulfill the mandate of the 1999 Bolivarian Constitution. While there was undoubtedly greater citizen participation in the production of information, through community outlets and alternative media, the existential struggle limited the ability of the citizenry to express a plurality of views. Because of Venezuelan polarization, it is difficult to claim that increased citizen participation in media production resulted in the expression of a diversity of opinions in the public sphere. While this diversity existed in each of the antagonistic publics, it was more likely to be expressed within the boundaries of each than in the discursive arena of public debate. Dissenting points of view failed to reach the opposing side. Circumscribed to their neighborhoods, community media enjoyed limited coverage outside their geographic location. Within the city of Caracas, their reach further fractured by the mountainous terrain of the city. Alternative media, especially in the form of internet news sites and blogs, frequently hosted a range of discussions that highlighted the distinct plurality of opinions that existed within each antagonistic public, but required a citizenry with access to the technology, and the knowledge to utilize and produce the information found in the medium. Moreover, the medium itself, which organized information in the form of networks, further reinforced the dynamics of Venezuela’s existential struggle by echoing similar points of view within those networks and allowing users to spotlight and disseminate the most radical discourses within them.8 The limitations of non-traditional media sources were compounded by the characteristics of national television and print media. Community and alternative media, public and private-commercial television and

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radio stations enjoyed national reach, either through open broadcasting channels, national cable television, or though broadcasts embedded in regional outlets. Public and private-commercial media outlets tended to reproduce the government’s and Opposition’s official interpretation of events. In Venezuela’s polarized society, the inability of community and alternative media outlets supportive of the Bolivarian Revolution to reach beyond their geographical boundaries further aggravated the Opposition’s perception of a homogenized Chavista discourse, and an easily manipulated Chavista public. While the Opposition was composed of heterogeneous organizations spanning the ideological spectrum, this plurality was constrained by private-commercial media who, during the conflict, broadcast information derived from a single media source. Coverage of events by a single media outlet would be reproduced and rerun by other private outlets. This “media cartel” of information, as it was described by the government, presented a coherent and homogenous interpretation of events. In addition, the backstage wrangling of political and civil leaders within the Opposition was hidden from the public, ensuring the presentation of a single view. Critical interpretations that questioned the strategies or the effectiveness of Opposition proposals were treated as a violation and its perpetrators were frequently derided as traitors. Such was the case, for example, with Claudio Fermín, an Opposition leader who in 2004 wrote an editorial criticizing the Opposition strategy of attempting to remove Hugo Chávez from power through a recall referendum. His editorial implied the Opposition had lost due to fraud allegedly committed by Hugo Chávez but also due to the failures of its own campaign. This interpretation of the failure of the recall referendum contradicted the official declarations of the Opposition that focused solely on electoral fraud. Within the zero-sum framework of the existential struggle, Fermin’s declarations were seen as strengthening the government and undermining the Opposition.9 In summary, the existence of numerous media outlets with diverse ownership, sources of information, and technology did not directly translate into an open, pluralistic public sphere. This was limited by restricted access to diverse media, and the strategic logic of the existential struggle, which narrowed the discourse each side was willing to endorse. While the increased numbers in media outlets sympathetic to the government’s position augmented the diffusion of its position, this failed to neutralize the power of private-commercial media and their influence on citizens critical of government. The failure within each side’s media to ultimately accommodate alternative points of view resulted from the polarized nature of the conflict.

The Fragmentation of the Public Sphere

Dime con quién andas y te diré quién eres: Venezuela’s Antagonistic Publics

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Modern societies are composed of multiple publics with distinct discourses. The plurality of existing publics within society derives from the free expression of different points of view. When certain forms of subjective experience are not represented in existing public discourse, other publics form to challenge, modify, or complement those existing points of view. These new publics are discernible in the words utilized to describe social reality. They are evident in divisions made between an imaginary “us” and “them,” where a loyal audience is identified, a counterpart is singled out, and persuadable addressees are sought out. They are perceptible in competing interpretations of a common past and differing projects for the future. The uniqueness of a public does not just pertain to the use of certain words to describe social reality, but to an entire narrative wherein past, present, and future have been assigned specific meanings. The differences between publics are not merely a matter of discourse, but of narrative. Discourse is speech emitted by a messenger and interpretable by receivers in a multiplicity of ways. Narratives, however, are matrices that etch out a distinct picture of reality. Narratives provide a frame of reference that structures understanding and narrows the limitless possible interpretation of speech and action. They organize information and create a coherent whole capable of smoothing over the contradictions and nuances of social reality.11 The dichotomous narratives of the Bolivarian Republic developed along the course of an existential struggle. In the months leading up to the 2002–2003 strike, the Opposition and the Venezuelan government were involved in a series of negotiations arbitrated by the Organization of American States aimed at ending the conflict. In these negotiations, the Opposition, acting on the claim their supporters made up the numeric majority, proposed that the government convene a non-binding referendum, asking the population whether Chávez should remain in power. After all, the 1999 Bolivarian Constitution permitted the citizenry to demand a binding recall referendum by the midway point of a presidential term. In interviews, Opposition leaders frequently justified the national strike they later convened as a measure designed to create pressure for a democratic electoral solution to the crisis. The slogan “Elecciones ya!” (Elections now!) reflected the urgency behind their demand, based on the existential threat they believed the Chávez government posed to their way of life.

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The conflict in Venezuela has often been neatly summarized in terms of class: supporters of Chávez are poor, the Opposition is rich. This is confirmed by statistical data;12 however, the existential struggle was about far more than the distribution of wealth. It derived from each group’s repudiation of the Other’s cultural expressions. To be a member of the Chavista or Opposition public required a certain performance. As Goffman ([1956] 1959) explains, participation in a public involves an audience whom we persuade that we are who we claim to be. This is an especially important task in a polarized society, where one’s inability to convince a public of one’s rightful place could result in being categorized as part of the opposing constituency. Like all publics, Chavismo and the Opposition required participants exhibit and utilize a series of markers to identify themselves as part of that group. In the Venezuelan existential struggle, the differences in the narratives of the Chavismo and the Opposition can be divided along three axes: their association with symbolic centers of power, their relationship to the state, and their definition of “legitimate language and performance.” In the Chavista narrative, the public identified with the people, the downtrodden, the poor and the marginalized. Discursively, to be a Chavista meant to sympathize with the government and show one’s support for the revolutionary project. It meant to associate with local communities, and to work on projects aimed at alleviating poverty, and developing the material and institutional conditions for self-sufficient communities. To be a Chavista was to recognize, value and respect the contributions of Latin America and the Third World. The Opposition narrative opposed and criticized the government and the revolutionary project. It did not identify with the rich, but it believed in meritocracy as a means of alleviating poverty and acquiring status, power and wealth. It identified with individual efforts over governmentsubsidized and -managed initiatives. To be in the Opposition meant to recognize and applaud the achievements of the first world and utilize its example as a guide for development.13 In the narratives of the two publics, the nature of the country’s government and its relationship to the citizenry were radically different. To be a part of the Chavista public was to defend the government’s participatory and protagonist democracy and understand the people and the state as “co-participants.” The role of citizens in a participatory democracy was greatly esteemed. Chavismo understood liberty as a republican ideal, and demanded the citizenry be able to exercise a role in the act of governance. To be Chavista meant to be part of an active citizenry that demanded real institutional power. It meant to understand

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the role of the citizenry as a partner, not a rival, of the state. This unique relationship did not imply a lack of autonomy from the state but it also did not imply a break from the state or the government. Chavismo did not assume, for example, that private enterprises were better off without government intervention, regulation, or management. Like its Chavista counterpart, the Opposition defended the ideal of more inclusive democracy, but it saw its role in the state-building process as separate and distinct from that of the government. For the Opposition, the role of the citizenry was to constitute a civil society, 14 where autonomous citizen organizations exercise their role as watchdogs of government policy, but are not part of the ruling apparatus. In their liberal conception of civil society, the role of organized citizenry was limited to influencing public policy and decision-making.15 The role of governing fell to constituted powers and democratically elected representatives. Moreover, while liberty was positively defined within Chavismo (the freedom to participate in deliberation, etc.), the Opposition emphasized negative freedom (freedom from government intervention). The incursion of government into what was considered part of the “private” sphere, such as the economy or education, was deemed suspect and unacceptable. A third point of contention stemmed from the “linguistic revolution” of the Bolivarian Republic (Bourdieu [1991] 1997). The previous regime had used neutral words in its attempt at “establishing a practical consensus between agents or groups of agents having partially or totally different interests” (40). This use of “neutral words” was fitting for a negotiated democracy needing to maintain stability and therefore unwilling to interfere with class interests. But these communications standards were deliberately violated by the Bolivarian president and the Chavista public, including an increase in the use of pejoratives, in order to reflect the new values promoted by the new government. Chávez’s participatory-protagonist democracy shifted the emphasis from the need to appease conflicting interests to the popular will, challenging the linguistic standard of neutrality. The abandonment of neutral words, specially to describe the conflict that ensued, resulted in a dynamic where the political affiliation of the citizenry could easily be deduced from the words they used to describe the actions of the government and the Opposition. To situate an individual within a public it was not necessary for him or her to profess his or her preference for the government or for the Opposition. The simple choice of words to describe the landmarks or events of the conflict indicated one’s political perspective. After the events of April

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11, 2002, for example, Chavistas described the actions of the military as a “coup d’état,” while the Opposition justified the military intervention on the basis of the “power vacuum” caused by Chávez’s alleged resignation. The same tendency emerged during the 2002–2003 general strike. Emphasizing the Opposition’s democratic right to protest, its public referred to the work stoppage as a “national civic strike.” The government focused on the insubordinate features of the walkout and labeled it an “insurrectional strike.” In 2007, when the government refused to renew the operating license of Opposition television station RCTV, the Opposition condemned the action as an “arbitrary shut down,” while the Chavistas defended the measure, highlighting the government’s right to deny public broadcasting concessions to private media outlets. For the Chavista public, the government simply “did not renew an operating license.” The differences between the Chavista and the Opposition publics’ understanding of the political conflict was not limited to their use of words. Cleavages also emerged in their disparate understanding of common values. While Chavistas emphasized social values and equality, the Opposition maintained its emphasis on negative freedom and individualism. The differences in perception were easily discernible in the interpretations each public made of its antagonist’s democratic model. While both publics upheld democratic principles, supporters of the Bolivarian Revolution privileged a participatory form of government based on direct citizen participation, with an emphasis on the will of the majority. Opposition sympathizers also stressed citizen participation, but did not share the government’s view of citizen participation as part of the governing apparatus; instead, they upheld representative democracy, its checks and balances, and its protection of electoral minorities. Because each public privileged a specific model of democratic practice, they readily employed anti-democratic adjectives to describe their opposition. Both government and Opposition leaders were labeled terrorists, totalitarians, murderers, and fascists. The use of these terms was not limited to anonymous or private citizen exchanges, but frequently extended to public utterances by each group’s political leaders. In his December 5, 2002, Cadena (national address), for example, President Chávez compared the private media to the propaganda of Nazi Germany and recalled Goebbles’ maxim that a lie repeated a thousand times became a truth (Radio Caracas de Televisión, 2002). In response, the dissident merchant marine Captain José Luis Blandín responded.

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We are convinced the president has very clear ideals, which are to submit the majority of this nation to a regime we do not want. Be certain, Mr. President, that just as you and your minority have the conviction to impose a communist regime in this country, be assured the pulse of the merchant marines will not tremble to preserve the regime of liberties. And I tell you, just as Nazi Germany was destroyed, if this country (the economy of this country) has to be broken into two, and then remade from its ashes so as not to lose our liberty and democracy, we will do it (ibid).

Pejoratives were not only used to describe the “enemy’s” ideology, but the totality of the group. In his description of political struggle, Schmitt notes that it does not require the totality of the enemy to be vilified, for the “enemy” may possess moral, aesthetic, or economic virtues. In the Venezuelan struggle, however, such compartmentalization was sorely lacking as the “defects” of each group were transformed into identifiers that homogenized the public and its actors. Throughout the conflict, the pejoratives in use regularly followed the discourse of the haves and have nots found in traditional Latin American populist regimes. While the Opposition was described as “oligarchs,” “elites” and escuálidos (squalid ones), government sympathizers were referred to as desdentados (toothless) and resentidos sociales (socially resentful). Chávez coined the term escuálido in a speech in 2002 to describe the weakness of the Opposition, both in terms of their perceived lack of popular support and their lack of ideology. From this, the term escuálido transformed into an all-encompassing pejorative to describe a segment of the population that Chavistas considered to be a violent, immoral, and cowardly minority. In a similar manner, the term resentidos sociales, utilized by the Opposition to negatively describe Chavistas, referred specifically to the movement’s broad base and support among the popular classes in Venezuela, but was also utilized to describe the culture of the lower classes, deemed uncouth, aggressive, and violent.16 For members of the Opposition public such as Paulina Gamus, the discursive performances of the president embraced this culture of “vulgarity, crassness, humiliation, insolence, double-meaning, and the worst of blunt straightforward meanings, insults and injury to those who are incapable of defending themselves” (Gamus 2009). These two terms, escuálido and resentidos sociales, came to encapsulate the entire ideology, morality, and culture of the antagonistic public. As the conflict intensified, the narratives of each public perpetuated the existential struggle, insofar as they defined the Other as an actor whose nature was “different and alien.” This, and the cultural and

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political differences between the two groups, perpetuated the evolution of different discursive styles. The performances of individual actors from each public followed the guidelines or standards set forth by that public, guaranteeing the actor’s credibility within their own public but also guaranteeing rejection from the antagonistic audience. In essence, the existential struggle accentuated differences in interpretation, contributing to the polarization of the shared public sphere. In contrast to the normative ideal of the public sphere, where discourse is judged on its merits, in Venezuela discourse was inevitably assessed based on the affiliation of the speaker. The class differences that underlay the political conflict were accentuated by disparities in culture and discourse as the conflict took on linguistic and performative dimensions. Within the Chavista public, the authenticity of a performance depended on the ability of the speaker to exemplify a certain discursive style, which included persuasive arguments, but also personal stories, and appropriate emotions. In Goffman’s terms, the discursive performances of the Chavista public blurred the lines between “front stage” and “backstage.” Chavismo defied the standard political script, which values rationality, pragmatism, and diplomacy. In the Chavista public, what has normally been considered backstage demeanor operated front stage. No one exemplified this discursive performance better than Chávez himself, whose televised performances repudiated the succinctness, pragmatism, and solemnity of traditional government addresses. From the set of his weekly television show, Aló Presidente (Hello President), Chávez frequently sang, told childhood stories, made jokes, articulated threats, and narrated stories from Venezuelan history. In contrast to Opposition performances, which expected “appropriate” behavior from political actors, President Chávez combined different venues – formal and informal – into one. Songs and jokes, which typically belong in social gatherings, turned up on occasions traditionally characterized by solemnity and formality. In his televised appearances, Chávez frequently shifted tone and presented audiences with different forms of public and private discourse. This broke with the standards of political discourse. And the medium, as McLuhan reminds us, “is the message.” The challenge to staid government addresses reflected the threat the Bolivarian Revolution posed to Puntofijismo’s social arrangements. The constant peppering of anecdotes in Chávez’s official addresses also prolonged his televised performances, which frequently lasted for hours. The length of the segments decreased the profit margins of private commercial media, as televised appearances monopolized airtime. Symbolically, the use of

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national airwaves to transmit government addresses demonstrated the government’s partiality towards the “people” at the expense of the country’s economic elite. This breaking of the boundaries between front- and backstage performance not only defied existing forms of political discourse but also redefined what could be considered appropriate content. In the Chavista public, there was an increased emphasis on affect. On numerous occasions, when Chávez’s policies received ample support from the population, Chávez described the relationship between the executive office and the people with the motto, el amor con amor se paga (love is rewarded with love). Moreover, as the Opposition pointed out, government officials and government sympathizers passionately (as opposed to rationally) defended their political project.17 For the Opposition public, the government’s discursive performances violated the standards of the presidential office.18 As explained by Napoleón Bravo, host of the television show 24 Horas (2001) on the private television station Venevisión, these types of performances “had never been seen in the history of Venezuela. Presidents did not know how to sing or dance when they were presidents, they always (sang, danced) when they were looking for votes.” In the discussion that ensued over the president’s television show, an Opposition leader anthropologist and psychiatrist explained the president’s discursive style was meant to entertain the audience. For the Opposition, the performances were warranted, given the masses to which they were addressed: masses need to be entertained. Defending the Chavistas, Juan Barreto, a representative in the National Assembly from the president’s party, responded. I think what happens is that some social sectors…feel a certain disdain for the way the president communicates, perhaps because they feel he doesn’t speak to them and he does not identify with…their social group…the perception of Chávez in some social groups has important racial and class biases and this has characterized the prejudicial perceptions that condemn the president (ibid).

The difference in perception between the Opposition and Chavistas was based on the different cultural expressions of each public. According to Barreto, the Opposition condemned the discursive performances of the Chavistas not only because they violated the standards of the ruling class, but precisely because they reflected the cultural expressions of the poor.

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While Chavismo demanded these mixed (front- and backstage) performances, the Opposition required formality. Their demand was not generalized to all members of the Opposition in all circumstances, but it was held up as a standard of communication for government officials and other public figures. The Opposition found the performances of Chavista government officials “embarrassing,” “needing moderation,” or “excessive.” Take, for example, Chávez’s performance at the United Nations. Standing before foreign dignitaries and delegates, he assumed the role of teacher and salesman to promote Chomsky’s book Hegemony or Survival: The Imperialist Strategy of the United States. As if engaged in casual conversation, he stated, “it reads easily, it is a very good book, I'm sure Madame (President) you are familiar with it. It appears in English, in Russian, in Arabic, in German.” After his friendly recommendation, Chávez then proceeded to personally attack President George W. Bush, referring to him as “the devil.” In the Opposition narrative, Chávez’s speech demonstrated the substandard performance typical of Chavista government officials, prompting the Opposition to question the government’s competency and legitimacy. In his opinion piece published after Chávez’s performance at the UN, renowned Venezuelan historian Manuel Caballero (2006) recalled another of the president’s speeches, in 1999. Arguing it was a sign of things to come, he noted. He [Chávez] said that if he were an unemployed father of four, he would also rob at gunpoint. That is not significant: it is said in all seedy shops after the fourth beer. The problem is this was not a drunk saying this…but someone who had just draped the presidential sash over his chest.

Caballero’s objections demonstrate how class-based cultural differences and performance standards intersected in the judgments of each public. Among the Opposition, the inability or unwillingness to act appropriately in public spaces demonstrated the government’s mediocrity, a bias which resulted from Opposition members’ own class culture. For the Opposition, Chávez’s cultural presentation lacked any merit, while for the Chavista public, his bluntness demonstrated his good character. With each public adhering to a different set of performance standards, the values each upheld could only be bestowed upon actors who acted in accordance with their criteria. Praise was not awarded when individuals or the government achieved goals, but when their efforts were presented in socially prescribed ways.

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Even as the Opposition public favored more formal performances that upheld the divide between front- and backstage behavior, that limited government addresses to official state matters, and that were devoid of unruly passions, their own public behavior frequently violated these standards. During tense moments, Opposition leaders frequently resorted to verbal aggressions and anti-democratic discourse. In his speech to the National Assembly, Congressman Henry Ramos Allup referred to General Luis Felipe Acosta Carles as a “hominid”—a frequently used caricature of both Chávez and his supporters (Herrera 2005). Writing in the daily El Nacional, Jorge Olavarría, a leader of the Opposition, goads the military, “Do you want to be an army that acts as a force for coercion, confrontation and occupation at the service of Chávez? Then continue doing what you are doing. But, if you don’t want to do that, then you must do what is asked of you.” He continues, “I do not reproach the armed forces for not having staged a coup against Chávez. I reproach the armed forces for staging coups in favor of Chávez by letting him do what he cannot and should not do. I reproach them for not defending us from our external enemies, nor from the internal enemies that threaten and attack us” (Olavarría 2003, A5). In his editorial, Olavarría alluded to an internal war and stopped short of asking the Venezuelan military to intervene in the conflict. Embellishing Olavarría’s words, in a letter to the editor, an Opposition sympathizer plainly stated, “If the high military command does not take the murderous psychopaths of the ‘un-government’ by the horns, it is because they don’t have horns but feathers” (Álamo Bartolomé 2003). Media, Polarization, and the Public Sphere

In the conflict between Chávez’s government and its Opposition, two culprits were blamed for having divided Venezuelan society. The Opposition blamed Chávez’s own hateful rhetoric, arguing that it had ignited animosity between his supporters and his detractors (Chumaceiro 2003, Madriz 2000). Chávez indeed gave the Opposition plenty of material to support this claim: in his speeches, news conferences and weekly television show, he pitted a loyal, patriotic, humble, and hardworking “pueblo” against an immoral, treacherous, self-serving, and “less than human” pithy elite. On the other hand, those who were sympathetic to the government blamed the private-commercial media, for having taken on the role of political actors to promote the Opposition, using scaremongering tactics (Kaiser 2003).

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Venezuelan society was polarized neither by Chávez’s discourse nor by private-commercial media. Words seldom suffice as an explanation for our understanding of social reality. Rarely are they catalysts for social action. While it is safe to assume a polarized society will speak a polarized discourse, polarized discourse does not by itself create a polarized society. Nor do polarized discourses inevitably prevail within a political conflict. To understand the antagonism between supporters and detractors of Hugo Chávez, it is necessary to peer into Venezuela’s public realm. Media did play a role in the polarization of Venezuelan society, but only insofar as they constituted an element of the public sphere. Privatecommercial, public (government-run) media, and community and alternative media all produced and disseminated information. Media networks, the sources they cited, and the information they chose to cover all contributed to the divergent interpretations citizens formed of the conflict. Many private media outlets assumed the role of political actors and worked to the advantage of the Opposition. This led the government to strengthen public, community, and alternative media, in an effort to counterbalance the Opposition narrative, while also using legislation to weaken the viewership of private-commercial outlets, effectively limiting the number of stations and dailies that disseminated the Opposition public’s point of view. Whether the government’s strategy was considered an attack on freedom of expression or an attempt to democratize the production of information, the strategy bifurcated the public sphere. The primary factor in the polarized interpretation of events during the Venezuelan conflict was the bifurcated structure of the public sphere. In non-polarized societies, various publics compete to turn their subjective interpretation of a claim into a hegemonic “truth.” Under conditions of polarization, Venezuela’s fluid, ever-changing, mobile public became narrowed and fixed; from a multiplicity of publics, two dominant publics emerged. In the Bolivarian Republic, political and social polarization limited expression, pigeonholing distinct narratives and discourses into one of two antagonistic camps, Opposition or Chavista. The perceived irreconcilable rift between supporters and detractors of the Bolivarian Revolution intensified as each public constructed homogenized social representations of the Other, and embraced distinct discursive styles and standards for public presentation, which further accentuated their differences. Besides their class-based cultural differences, the two publics had distinct cultural forms, associated with different centers of power, had a different understanding of their

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relationship to the state, and used different modes of expression. All of this contributed to an existential struggle between two antagonistic publics unable to accept each other’s interpretation of events. As a result, the two publics transcended the discursive arena and manifested itself in everyday actions aggravating the tension between an already divided citizenry. Notes 1 Warner (2005) and Fraser (1992) explain the relationships between publics, subpublics, and counterpublics as between non-equals. In Venezuela, the conflict between the antagonistic publics was aggravated due to the power both possessed to circulate their interpretation of social reality in the mass media. 2 There are competing views of the public sphere incorporated in this analysis. While we normatively adhere to the viewpoint that a public sphere should operate as a discursive space where publics compete to temporarily impose their understanding of social reality as the dominant interpretation (Warner 2005, Fraser 1992, Benhabib 1992), we also draw from Critical Theory and beyond (Adorno and Horkheimer [1994] 2002, Debord 2004, Chomsky and Herman 1988) to describe the media industry as a hegemonic power. We contend the structure of the public sphere is historically determined and can oscillate between a pluralistic, inclusive discursive arena and an allencompassing Orwellian tool. 3 In The Concept of the Political, Schmitt ([1927] 1996) argues that the definition of the enemy does not imply that the Other must be negatively described in its totality. The enemy may be a good economic partner, be esthetically beautiful and moral. We find this logic flawed. As will be demonstrated in this chapter, the existential struggle in the Venezuelan crisis produces negative descriptions of the enemy that are not limited to their ideology or class. The fragmentation of the positive and negative attributes of the “enemy” described by Schmitt, while possible, seems to negate the intense animosity and the totalizing social representations necessary to convert the Other into an “enemy.” 4 It is interesting to note that while the Chavista public saw itself as an independent public in charge of the production of its own information, the government did not always share this point of view. In a 2005 government act, the Minister of Communication and Information, Yuri Pimentel, stated that equipment given to community media were “weapons to educate the conscience of our people and defend ourselves from [private] media attack. If we have the truth, we have the strength. We should build a new communication system” (Venezolana de Televisión 2005). Unlike the discourse of community activists sympathetic to the Bolivarian Revolution, the description of the Chavista public in governmental discourse oscillated between a critical public and a public that needed to be educated. 5 It is important to remember that this characterization of the Chavista public as a mass can be attributed to the associations the Opposition made

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between the Bolivarian regime and both populist and totalitarian governments. Though there are multiple differences between both types of regimes, both depend on the ability of a leader to sway the masses. 6 On the program, Olavarría explained, “a never-before-seen phenomenon is taking place in Venezuela, a profound division, a serious, sharp and violent confrontation, between the leading group of the country, which increasingly censors, with greater acrimony and greater exasperation, the conduct and words of the chief of state, and a numerous mass of ignorant people that occupy subaltern positions in society… I don’t want to fall into class resolutions…but the truth is that in Venezuela there is a great confrontation. The president has two bases of support: the support of the numerous mass of people who today see him as their hope, who identify with him, who feel represented by him, and the armed forces” (Olavarria cited in Bravo 2001). 7 It is important to recall that the active political role assumed by privatemedia resulted in part from the lack of social legitimacy of Venezuela’s traditional political parties, AD and COPEI. As the Opposition struggled to regroup itself, the political vacuum it left in its wake, and the newly instituted emphasis on participatory democracy, allowed other social actors to actively participate in the political conflict that unfolded. 8 For a detailed analysis of the plurality of the Chavista public, see Schiller’s (2011) work on community media and Hellinger’s (2009) analysis of the internet site aporrea.org. 9 It is important to note that the boundaries of publics are not static. In Venezuela, they did change. In the case of the Opposition public, the restriction of different points of view slowly eroded to allow alternative interpretations of events. In 2007, the Opposition positively embraced the discourse of the student movement, who initially refused to be identified as part of the Opposition, utilized the 1999 Bolivarian Constitution to press their claims, and publicly acknowledged the legality of Chávez’s government (see Chapter 6). While the Opposition expanded to include more diverse expressions, the Chavista public contracted. Critical points of view expressed on public television and radio and in the widely circulated government-friendly daily Últimas Noticias were rebuked by the president and his party. In July 2009, President Chávez and other government officials accused a group of pro-government scholars of being infiltrated by the CIA, for having publicly criticized the Bolivarian Revolution’s dependence on Chávez as its leader. 10 There is a Spanish proverb familiar to English speakers: “a man is known by the company he keeps.” 11 For a rigorous definition of narrative, see Ricouer (1986). 12 The conflict between Chavistas and the Opposition can be succinctly described as a class struggle. Data reveal the support base of Chavismo predominantly belongs to the poorer strata of Venezuelan society, while support for the Opposition derives primarily from the elite and the upper-middle class. Beyond economic data, there are plenty of other markers placing the dividing line between Chavistas and the Opposition along class borders. The division of urban space that characterized the conflict confines the Opposition to residential areas in the eastern side of Caracas, while Chavismo thrives in the west. But class conflict cannot be reduced to its economic dimension. The hostility and repudiation that characterize the relationship between Chavismo and the

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Opposition is not solely based on the struggle for the redistribution of resources. It also derives from the cultural expressions of class. 13 Common sense might dictate the differences in the narratives correspond to the ideological values between a conservative right and a progressive left. The assumption is not necessarily false, but neither is it necessarily true. We find the differences in the values between Venezuela’s antagonistic publics result from a romanticized Latin American concept of the “people”·versus an unapologetic approach toward development. Within the Chavista public, there are different attitudes as to the role of the state. While some favor a paternalistic state (represented by Chávez in this case), others see it as incompatible with a participatory democracy where the government is subject to the will of the people. The range of diversity in the Opposition public is even greater. The Opposition public encompasses views that range from a neoliberal view of the state, to a participatory democracy, to state-centered capitalism. 14 The term “civil society” came into vogue in Venezuela during the boom of nongovernmental organizations in the 1980s and 1990s. In the pre-Bolivarian period, the term described multiple organizations, from human rights and environmental groups to liberal-democratic associations and popular movements (García-Guadilla 2003a, 2005). When Hugo Chávez assumed power in 1998, the term came to refer exclusively to organizations aligned with the Opposition. In fact, the 1999 Bolivarian Constitution rarely utilizes the term and describes civil society as “social organizations, associations, society, organized society and organized communities,” among others. As the conflict intensified, Opposition organizations held steadfast to the description as proof of their democratic spirit, while organizations that supported Hugo Chávez rejected the term and opted to describe themselves as popular movements (García-Guadilla and Mallen 2013). 15 The 1999 Bolivarian Constitution, with its emphasis on citizen participation, not only provides for plebiscitary measures, it also stimulates direct citizen participation in institutional organizations. These changes in the law have resulted in numerous institutions that participate in local government, such as Communal Councils (Consejos Comunales), Urban Land Committees (Comités de Tierra Urbana), and Technical Water Boards (Mesas Técnicas de Aguas); (García-Guadilla 2008 and 2011, Smilde and Hellinger 2011). 16 The use of “resentment” as a means of understanding the animosity of the Chavista public towards the Opposition was canonized in 2008 by political scientist Ruth Capriles (2008) in her book entitled El Libro Rojo del Resentimiento (The Red Book of Resentment), wherein she argues that Chávez utilizes resentment to incentivize his base and foster conflict with his political Opposition. 17 Although presidential broadcasts resembled casual conversations around a kitchen table, they followed a carefully crafted script. As explained by Juan Barreto, the president’s performances in Aló Presidente were purposefully interspersed with official announcements, anecdotes, stories, and songs (24 Horas 2001). 18 In her 2004 work chronicling the events that took place between 1998 and 2004, Venezuelan philosopher Colette Capriles describes a comment overheard on the street in 2002: “there should be two presidents. One for the people, like this, singing rancheras [folk songs], and rude; and another, a real one, for the rest of us” (Capriles 2004, 140).

6 The New Student Movement: Dreams of Unity

Though the narratives of the antagonistic publics, Chavista and Opposition, permeated everyday discourse, they did so with the awareness of the acute process of polarization underway. Venezuelans recognized and understood the polarization taking place, called it out by name, and at times devised strategies to decelerate or dismantle it. Several attempts were made, by different organizations, to bridge differences.1 None were as visible, conciliatory, or inclusive in their approach as that of Estudiantes por la Libertad (Students for Freedom). At 23:59 on Sunday May 27, 2007, Channel 2 television station RCTV transmitted images of the station’s directors and workers singing the Venezuelan national anthem, before screens dramatically went blank. The television station, which had been broadcasting for 53 years, then became the property of the government, giving birth to the new public television station Venezuelan Social Television (TVes). This government decision led to the emergence of a new sociopolitical actor that opposed the measure. Within the polarized Venezuelan public sphere, the closure of a private-commercial media outlet understandably resulted in protest on the part of the Opposition. (The Chavista public, on the other hand, applauded the non-renewal, arguing that RCTV “had manipulated information” during the attempted coup that took place in April 2002.) But the Students for Freedom were unique in that, while they disagreed with the closure, they rejected the Opposition label. Instead, they stated that their protests sought to speak on behalf of all citizens, regardless of their political affiliation.2 This was the first movement that attempted to bridge the bifurcation of the public sphere by accepting the legitimacy of the government of Hugo Chávez while challenging it publicly.3

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The emergence of Students for Freedom in the public sphere initially appeared to follow the dynamics of polarization. They described the closing of RCTV as “arbitrary, and a violation of the right to freedom of expression,” and saw the government’s decision as evidence of the tendency of Chavismo to silence Opposition media.4 But in contrast to the Opposition, the students who participated in these protests (and who subsequently rejected a constitutional reform proposed by Chávez that attempted to reform the 1999 Bolivarian Constitution) publicly and explicitly accepted the legality and legitimacy of the government. This new approach kindled the possibility of a national reconciliation, and addressed publics that did not fit squarely within the Opposition. In keeping with the need to manifest one’s political position publicly in a participatory democracy (see Chapter Three), the Students for Freedom movement took to the streets to protest the closure of RCTV. They demanded the government restore RCTV’s license, respect plurality of thought, and guarantee their own right to protest by “releasing [the] approximately 200 students [who] had been imprisoned for participating in a street demonstration” (Martínez 2007). But they broke with the prevailing polarization when on June 1, 2007, they requested the National Assembly grant them the right to reply, as set out in the constitutional charter. The request was bold, in that it defied two taboos of the conflict. First, it challenged the balkanization of space: the National Assembly, considered a bastion of Chavismo, was symbolically off limits to the Opposition. Secondly, the students demanded participation in the political arena on the basis on the rights enshrined in the Bolivarian charter—not as a means of removing the president. The students’ right to reply was granted on June 7, 2017. Broadcast by both private-commercial and public media, the students demonstrated the willingness of both the government and a nongovernmental constituency to hold public debate in the seat of national power. Unfortunately, Students for Freedom’s proposals were bogged down by the polarized narratives of the existential struggle (see Chapter 5). The students’ vision of democracy and their embrace of allegedly liberal values that seemed closer to those of the middle class (and the Opposition), than to those of President Chávez and his Bolivarian project, made their performance suspect in the eyes of Chavistas. In the dynamic of public performance that prevailed in the Bolivarian Republic, with its marches and counter-marches, the student movement required a counterforce. A Bolivarian Students group, sponsored by the president himself, emerged in the public sphere to

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counteract Students for Freedom by introducing views, values, and a vision of democracy more consistent with the Bolivarian project. This led to a politicized conflict among students in Venezuela, polarizing yet another constituency within Venezuelan society. As Students for Freedom entered the National Assembly on June 7, 2017, they were greeted by Bolivarian Students. Despite their discourse of national reconciliation, and the movement’s potential to transcend political boundaries, Students for Freedom failed to halt the dynamics of polarization between government sympathizers and the Opposition, including in the conflict over the closure/non-renewal of RCTV. The division in Venezuelan society that had begun in 2001, which hindered the expression of plurality, reduced social interaction and exchange, created silos of experience within different social groups, and prevented the construction of an alternative to the Chavismo/Opposition dichotomy. The Rise of a New Actor

While the Opposition established itself with the coup d’état of April 2002 and the national strike5 from December 2002 to February 2003, Students for Freedom first appeared in the public sphere in 2007, as a “loyal opposition”6 who accepted the legitimacy of the government of Hugo Chávez, while defending freedom of expression and the right to political participation. The movement’s novel approach to the political landscape introduced the possibility of transcending the division between Chavistas and Opposition. In a “Manifesto for Reconciliation,” student leader Manuela Bolívar7 proposed creating public spaces that could permit dialogue between citizens of different political and ideological stripes. Students for Freedom did refresh the discourse of the Opposition (Bermúdez et al 2009, Casanova 2009, Tovar Arroyo 2007), but from its inception, the new student movement attempted to create alternative groups where government supporters and Opposition could coexist and exchange views. Today we have decided to build a testimony of reconciliation, not only from the streets, but also from the closeness and warmth of home. I ask you, gentlemen, at how many birthdays, christenings, barbecues and Venezuelan family get-togethers have we had to forgo talking of the country for fear of ruining the party due to [our] political differences? How many friends and family have stopped communicating for years simply because they have different opinions?

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My own story...has taught me that it is valid to think differently; two persons with different ideas can share the same table, the same future, the same surname...Just like me, many of you here can tell your own stories. All testify to a generation that believes it is impossible to have freedom and equality without fraternity (Bolívar in Tovar Arroyo 2007, 183–184).

With these words, Manuela Bolívar encouraged the Venezuelan citizenry to dare to build alternative publics to counter those prevailing in Venezuela, not only in the most traditional public space—“the street” —but also in the most intimate spaces of the private sphere,8 “the dining room and the living room,” all in the name of achieving national reconciliation. In some sectors of the Opposition, and for the students themselves, this manifesto generated hope for new dialogue between supporters and opponents of the government.9 Perhaps no one expressed this feeling better than Olga de Aguirrebeitia, columnist of the online magazine Gusano de la Luz (Worm of Light), who noted. [Students] grow with the...overwhelming [cry of], Chávez [yes, but] not like this...that elevates them, universalizes them, and most importantly, attracts more and more adherents. Adhesions that occur without trauma even among supporters of the President and by adhering they do not feel they betray the leader but rather this reminds them why and for what purpose they gave him power. They [the students] have broken the division between Venezuelans redirecting them to the national reconciliation that is so much needed (De Aguirrebeitia 2007).

This text, distributed by Opposition groups through the social network Red de Veedores (Overseer Network), attempted to strengthen the call by students to promote dialogue and national reconciliation. In the words of one student, leader of the Opposition party Un Nuevo Tiempo (A New Time), “the students have become the hope of a nation immersed in hatred, intolerance and the use of weapons, to discuss and defend political views [rationally]” (Karam 2007). This hopefulness would be quickly counteracted by the logic of the polarization within Venezuela. In the course of the controversy over RCTV, the Bolivarian Students movement coalesced to support the government’s position. Consistent with the prevailing dynamics of having two antagonistic publics, Bolivarian Students branded the Students for Freedom part of the political Opposition and referred to them as “coup mongers.”

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In late 2007, after failing in their attempt to prevent the closure of RCTV, Students for Freedom directed their attention toward a constitutional reform bill proposed by President Chávez. The bill, which involved sixty-nine articles, included such controversial proposals as removing term limits on the office of the presidency, redefining private property, gerrymandering, and replacing some mechanisms of representative democracy with direct democracy. Students for Freedom objected to Chávez’s proposed referendum on constitutional reform. Although the mechanism of a referendum was established in the 1999 Constitution, the student group argued that the content of the reform bill had been decided “behind closed doors” and “without popular participation.” Moreover, they alleged, citizens had not been properly informed about the proposals and the complexities contained therein. Unlike the political Opposition, which had decided to boycott the referendum altogether, students mobilized to demand the right to participate democratically in building the kinds of reforms addressed by the bill. Given the imminence of the referendum and the refusal of authorities to postpone its date, Students for Freedom decided to stake their claims on a “no” vote. They campaigned publicly, and encouraged Opposition groups to head to the polls as well. The referendum, held on December 2, 2007, defeated the bill. Marcel Granier, president of RCTV, declared that the closure of RCTV had now “defeated Chávez [himself],” since he had “miscalculated the effect that his abuse would have among students and popular sectors, which are deeply committed to democracy and pluralism” (Giusti 2008). The subsequent success of Chavista candidates in state and local elections, in November 2008, led to Chávez’s virtual disregard of the results of the 2007 constitutional reform referendum, and prompted him to propose a new constitutional amendment limited to one of the rejected articles: the indefinite re-election of the Executive Power or Office of the Presidency. This proposal was later amended to include indefinite reelection for all public authorities, given the need for consensus among the parties that supported Chávez. Once more, Students for Freedom, as well as the Opposition, campaigned against the amendment. The second time around, the proposal was approved, in a referendum in February 2009. Students for Freedom: Views and Discourse

The Students for Freedom movement was novel because of their willingness to go beyond the mere defense of liberal values, to try to bring new political discourse to the public sphere, and promote such

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values as reconciliation, peace, and tolerance. They also defended the right to information and, ultimately, the right to build a new social model for all. In short, the movement used creative and innovative strategies to promote a new understanding of the conflict in Venezuela. Before the National Assembly, on June 7, 2007, students proposed a dialogue for national reconciliation. Douglas Barrios, a leader in the group, requested that both Chavistas and the Opposition refrain from politicizing his words, asking them to cease sowing divisions and stop stereotyping students’ actions and views. He asked for respect for the plurality of opinion, and to put an end to “discrimination,” arguing that students: are not part of a unique single ideological system, and do not have a homogeneous single line of thought...we are not socialist students, we are social beings. We are not neoliberal; we are free human beings. We, the students, do not oppose, we propose. All Venezuelans should be treated equally, without discrimination and without value judgments relating to the good and bad...We believe that once and for all, divisions, double standards, and discrimination must end. We say: stop discrimination, we demand and promote national reconciliation.10

Barrios’ speech did not repudiate the government, but repudiated stereotyping and discrimination resulting from the dynamics of polarization (they alleged the government had taken to distributing scholarships and public sector jobs solely to its sympathizers). Barrios sought to end discrimination and to ensure all citizens could exercise their rights equally.11 He finished his speech by calling for social reconciliation and clarifying that the student movement “shall permanently abide by the Constitution” and that these students are “a generation without a dark past, a generation without hatred or revenge.” In essence, his discourse attempted to distance students from both the Puntofijista regime and the political conflict between the Bolivarian government and Opposition political parties and leaders. Despite this speech denouncing discrimination and polarization, the Students for Freedom present at the National Assembly were unable to transcend the logic of antagonism. As Barrios finished his speech, he and the other Students for Freedom took off the red t-shirts they had been wearing and declared that they dreamed with “a country where we can be taken into account without having to be in uniform” (ibid.). The red t-shirts, which had seemed to be a conciliatory gesture toward the government, since the color red symbolizes support for the Chávez regime, turned out to be part of a ruse. In the narrative of the Opposition, red also symbolized the uniformity of thought that characterized

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supporters of President Chávez. Students implicitly endorsed this view when they removed the shirts. The act demonstrated that while discourse can shift and change, it is difficult to transcend the narrative of the Other that dominates a public sphere—a condition necessary for reconciliation. Interviews conducted between 2007 and 2009 with members of Students for Freedom revealed the difficulty of building alternative publics, due to the polarized perceptions that one group of students had toward the other. When asked about his view of Bolivarian Students, one of the respondents expressed: “students who supported the government lacked critical thinking and their participation in the conflict was not for the defense of values but to support the president” (Interview No. 20, GAUS-USB 2007–2009). Some of the students surveyed, including several that were not active in the Students for Freedom movement, believed that the Bolivarian Students were not defending values. They were often accused of having “sold their soul” or, in the best-case scenario, they were considered to be defending the “viewpoint or vision of Chávez” (Interview No. 52, GAUS-USB 2007– 2009). An engineering student at Simón Bolívar University summarized the perception Students for Freedom had of the Bolivarian Students as follows. The Opposition movement is plural and polarized; we are opponents of Chávez but we invite Chavistas to join us, it is not a fight against each other; we are not the countries’ political Opposition. Obviously we agree with the Opposition regarding their decisions and positions, but we are not the same even though we are always portrayed in this manner...and given the circumstances, we worked with them on many occasions. Normally, we would not appreciate being labeled as part of a group or another, and we may easily disagree with a point of view expressed by the Opposition. Chavista students are the spitting image of Chávez, and the Chavistas follow his steps and are devoid of their own ideas or initiative…perhaps sometimes they do have their own, but I have yet to see or hear it...Chávez decides when there will be student demonstrations…(Interview No. 27, GAUS-USB 2007–2009).

While the Students for Freedom tried to distance themselves from Opposition groups, their ideals regarding democracy, freedom of expression, or private property were influenced by the discourse of the Opposition; likewise, the Opposition embraced the students’ discourse as it upheld their own values. Opposition publics praised student actions. In the daily El Universal, opinion leaders described students as: “Youth Fighting for their Freedom” (Valeri, 2007); “The Rebellion of the Future” (Uzcátegui, 2007); “Fighting Youth Reappeared” (Salgueiro,

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2007); “Students who Regained the Streets” (Méndez and Díaz, 2007), and warned the government to “Beware of Youth” (Echeverría, 2007), as the student movement were the “Youth of my country!” (Jaimes Branger, 2007). As a result, the movement did not achieve its goal of becoming an alternative Opposition public; moreover, pro-Chávez groups insisted on associating them with the “disloyal, coup[-]monger[ing] and destabilizing” Opposition, labeling them conflictive, and rebuking them for their association with Opposition leaders. In a similar vein, Chavista public opinion viewed the students as “antidemocratic, destabilizing, reactionary, violent, and manipulated by the Opposition and the CIA.” Pro-government media published the following headlines from May 27 to 30, 2007, when the RCTV conflict reached its peak: “Opposition and Reactionary Factors of ULA [University of Los Andes] Activate Antidemocratic Mechanisms” (Aporrea.com 2007); “William Ojeda and the Mayor of Chacao Manipulate University Demonstrations” (Agencia Bolivariana de Noticias 2007); and “Aprendices de Guarimberos (Barricade Learners)” (Quintero 2007).12 According to messages at Aporrea.com, members of the Students for Freedom movement were “spoiled children” of irresponsible parents. The Chávez government’s attempt to discredit the students were based on a social imaginary that saw protesters as part of the middleand upper social classes and, therefore, part of the “squalid oligarchs” of past conflicts. Bolivarian Students: Views and Discourse

In 2000, the government of Hugo Chávez began creating associations to organize a student movement in support of the revolution. Among these were the Juventud V República (Youth Fifth Republic), which acted as the student wing of the party, the Instituto de la Juventud (Youth Institute), and the Federación Bolivariana de Estudiantes (Bolivarian Student Federation). These organizations were supported by various government agencies whose goal was to create a student movement to defend the ideals, policies, and in general, the project of President Chávez’s government. According to Bolivarian Student Larissa Slibe (2007), these organizations responded mainly to the government’s interest in creating a sympathetic student bureaucracy, but promoted minimal student participation. The Bolivarian Students movement gained momentum, first, after the 2002 coup d’état and 2002–2003 oil strike, carried out by the Opposition, and secondly, after the creation of the government’s

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Educational Missions and the Bolivarian University in 2003. The expulsion of more than 30,000 professionals from the oil industry as a result of the coup and oil strike created a shortage of professionals in state-run companies, which was filled with young leaders who sympathized with Chávez’s revolutionary project. This was largely a response to the belief among Chávez's supporters that the revolutionary project would be hindered by the Opposition unless supporters of the Bolivarian Revolution directed and took control of state-run companies and initiatives. Thus, Bolivarian student leaders were appointed to coordinate media jobs and social assistance programs known as social missions (Misiones Sociales); they were also elected to posts in municipalities under the control of the government.13 The Educational Missions and Bolivarian University were created for the purpose of eradicating illiteracy and promoting the education of the poorest social classes, helping them complete their elementary, middle, high school and university studies. Nationwide educational missions such as Robinson, Ribas, and Sucre provided education, trained new students of the Bolivarian movement, and served to focus the efforts of various student organizations. Organizations formed under governmental control, such as the Bolivarian Students Federation and the Youth Institute, attempted to impose their agenda on the new Bolivarian Students movement, while the Missions laid the groundwork for the formation of young people whose class interests and ideology were in favor of the Bolivarian project, but were not directly part of its political agenda. Chávez’s inauguration of the Bolivarian University in 2003 created a unique opportunity to cement the discourse and action of the Bolivarian Students. President Chávez asked students to elect leaders to represent them before the National Assembly, to engage with the Students for Freedom. It was at Bolivarian University that students gathered to elect their spokespersons. After group discussion, the following criteria were agreed upon: gender representation; representation of social, political, and communication networks; communication; leadership; and student work in the Missions. Thus, the leadership of the Bolivarian Students was not the result of a traditional election of representatives. Leaders were not formally accountable, nor could they be recalled. Instead, their representation emerged mainly from the social networks to which they belonged (social programs called Missions, government institutions and political activism networks). The Bolivarian leaders did not have to go through a process of legitimation as they were already leaders within their networks.

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The manner in which the Bolivarian Students leadership was selected differed from the manner in which the Students for Freedom selected their representatives. Representatives of the Students for Freedom movement were directly elected by the students from different schools, faculties and universities, and therefore, were legitimized by the mechanisms of representative democracy, but decided their actions and strategies during the RCTV and constitutional reform conflicts through participatory democracy at student meetings. In contrast, the Bolivarian Students defined their legitimacy as spokespeople for the movement in terms of their integration into the communities they worked with as part of the Missions. This work, they claimed, was part of a vision of the future of Venezuela they would turn into reality. Bolivarian Students leader César Trómpiz explained during an interview (2007) that students saw the relationship between the people, the student movement, and the state as a hierarchical pyramid in which the State responded to the student movement while it in turn responded to the people. The Bolivarian Students organization narrowed the gap between students of different ideological tendencies by creating alternate public spaces within which to engage in dialogue in addition to those created by public and private universities. Ironically, Bolivarian Students were delegitimized in the Opposition’s discourse precisely due to the work they carried out within government institutions, which in the view of the Opposition evidenced their close relationship with the government. The association of the Bolivarian Students with government institutions violated the Opposition’s standard of a civil society independent of the state. In the discourse of the Opposition, the leaders of the Bolivarian Students movement were not part of “civil society,” but were government servants paid to defend the Bolivarian project. While Students for Freedom proudly proclaimed their autonomy from the political Opposition, Bolivarian Students touted their work in government missions and ministries as proof of their commitment to the people. Students for Freedom and Bolivarian Students Dialogue

After their participation in the National Assembly on June 7, 2007, Students for Freedom set out to create an alternative public space in which antagonistic groups could communicate with one another. This proposal materialized three days later when Students for Freedom representative Yon Goicoechea, and Héctor Rodríguez of the Bolivarian Students, sat down to exchange points of view on the program Entre Noticias, broadcast by the private-commercial television station

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Globovisión. For the first time, student leaders explained their use of terms such as “private property,” “freedom of expression,” and “socialism,” and agreed on the need to democratize freedom of expression and to establish policies to alleviate poverty. They agreed it was necessary to accept, within the democratic system, a political opposition that both supporters and detractors of the government could consider “loyal,” and to stop ideological bias in media reporting. This exchange focused on the possibility of a dialogue in which each leader could explain their group’s position, while avoiding the misrepresentations that occur when their discourse is refracted through the polarized public sphere. Focusing on the issue of socialism and private property, Goicoechea defended the right to private property, while Rodríguez defended socialism. Both participants defended their proposals and visions for a future Venezuela by taking into account, and attempting to dismantle, the narratives that they assumed others had of their worldview. In response to a question on private property, for example, Rodríguez explained that the socialist system that he defended had the objective of democratizing production by putting companies in the hands of the people. I think you have to respect private property… we have been deceived that under socialism, your house will be taken from you, your toothbrushes will be taken. No, that is not the problem socialism is addressing. The problem socialism is addressing is: who controls the means of production. The one who controls the means of production will control the whole society. I believe that the means of production that are essential to society must be controlled by the collectivity, by society in general.14

With this statement, Rodríguez denied the Opposition narrative according to which the government and its supporters wanted to abolish private property through the “Cubanization” of Venezuela. Rodríguez ended the discussion by stating that as government supporters “we want a nation of homeowners. A country where every citizen owns his/her own home, owns his/her own vehicle, owns his/her own means of life...no one is against the...great owner.” Similarly, Goicoechea stated his belief that the majority of Venezuelans support private ownership, but said: “What does that mean? that we agree to estate land ownership [latifundismo]? No. I am, obviously, like most Venezuelans, against the fact that a person may have thirty thousand hectares of land and I think that's another point in common.” He agreed with Rodríguez in stating that private property “has limitations...has restrictions, [and] one needs to see what should be

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done to distribute it equally among Venezuelans.” He reiterated his support for cooperative enterprises. However, when Goicoechea articulated the need for “a nation of property owners” he revealed the very representation that Rodríguez had tried to dispel—namely, that socialism would do away with private property. The commonality of views expressed by Goicoechea and Rodríguez elicited such surprise that during the exchange Héctor Rodríguez said, “I believe Yon is already becoming a socialist” and Yon Goicoechea declared, “I am a leftist” (ibid.). This dialogue, which worked so hard to find a common ground, and succeeded in doing so, would not be repeated.15 The impossibility of escaping the polarizing dynamics of the country resulted in violence between the two groups of students. Two incidents are worth mentioning in particular: the attack on the progovernment student Robert Serra at the private Andrés Bello Catholic University (UCAB), and the attack on Yon Goicoechea at the public Caracas Pedagogical Institute (IPC).16 On June 11, 2007, after having represented the Bolivarian movement on the podium of the National Assembly, Serra was assaulted by his colleagues at the UCAB, where he studied, requiring the intervention of university authorities. The brawl took place three days after the host of the Aló Ciudadano (Hello Citizen) program, Leopoldo Castillo, “outed” Bolivarian students who participated in the National Assembly on the private-commercial Globovisión television station and informed his public these students had been or were employed by different government agencies. Serra arrived at the UCAB campus dressed as a “Bolivarian.” He wore a tricolor hat adorned with the stars of the Venezuelan flag, an emblem of the Bolivarian flag and a jacket or sweater colored rojo-rojito (red-redder). This self-identification with the government, within a university public space where a substantial majority of the student population was anti-government, created a volatile situation, and as the student leader tried to take the floor to defend his position, he was surrounded by fellow students shouting loudly “out, out, out!” “shut up!” and “get out!” Following the logic of polarized public space (see Chapter 3), the UCAB students demanded their colleague abandon this space to which he did not belong. Another student shouted “Go to the Bolivarian [University]!” suggesting that any students who supported Hugo Chávez belonged there instead.17 A second act of violence occurred on October 25, 2007. On that occasion, the leader of Students for Freedom, Yon Goicoechea, was invited to a forum of the Caracas Pedagogical Institute to speak against the president’s proposed constitutional reform due to its potential impact on freedom of expression. When he expressed his disagreement with the

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reform proposed by President Chávez’s government, supporters felt that his speech was biased and demanded the opportunity to be included in the debate, generating a violent confrontation in which government supporters shouted slogans such as “Coup mongers leave the university!” “No right wing!” and other commonly used slogans like “Uh, ah, Chávez will not go!” Initially, Goicoechea continued his speech: “This country has been unable to advance against exclusion, against poverty and against corruption and inefficiency. This country urgently needs a reconciliatory change; in this country a peaceful change is urgently needed. I hope there will be a day when you will not hate us for thinking differently.”18 Goicoechea rejected polarizing dynamics by adopting and using the language and culture of government supporters, calling them “comrades,” a term of fellowship used by government supporters to greet each other: “I do not hate you, comrades, for thinking differently. I do not hate you for thinking differently, brother...My deep respect for supporters of the President of the Republic who are in this audience” (ibid.). Despite these words, the pro-government students continued questioning Goicoechea and asked him about his T-shirt. Goicoechea had donned a shirt with the logo of the Opposition television station Globovisión. Focusing on the symbols of polarization, pro-government students demanded to know the meaning of the T-shirt. Within the context of the existential struggle, the relationship of the Opposition to private companies was interpreted by the Chavista narrative as unconditional support for Venezuelan elites. Consequently, government supporters accused Goicoechea of defending the elites, or in this case, the private commercial television station Globovisión, to the detriment of the people. As a result of these questions, the student leader put aside his conciliatory speech and engaged in the antagonistic discourse of the Opposition, according to which President Chávez wished to increase his power at the expense of people, who are manipulated by his government. The irony of the meaning of this T-shirt is being experienced today by the Venezuelan people. The irony of saying that you are with the people and the government [is] increasingly becoming rich and [there are] more and more poor people, [that] is worse than the irony of this T-shirt...The irony of the great popular sectors making social demands while here they are thinking about indefinite reelection, that irony is worse than this T-shirt...the irony of speaking on behalf of the people and taking away the power from the people, that irony is worse than this T-shirt.

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Goicoechea concluded his speech by declaring his respect for students who sympathized with the government and talking about national reconciliation. However, he had failed to break with antagonistic discourse. The final questions that he posed suggested Bolivarian Students were incapable of overcoming their representation of the Opposition as a group unable to feel solidarity with the people. Why is it so difficult to accept that we are not here to defend any company, brother? Why can’t you believe that there are Venezuelans who want the best for our country? Why can’t you believe, gentlemen, there are also other Venezuelans touched by poverty, touched by street children? Why do you think you are the only ones touched by it? Venezuela’s youth is deeply touched by the state of misery of our nation. (ibid.)

After his passionate speech, a device exploded and filled the IPC conference room with smoke. Goicoechea attempted to leave the room while students who supported the government jumped on him and beat him.19 Hitting the Wall of the Existential Struggle

The emergence of Students for Freedom in the public sphere opened the door to national reconciliation in Venezuela. This new political actor both recognized the legality of the government and defended the values of liberal democracy. While the students managed to expand the boundaries of Opposition discourse, and promoted a new interpretation of the conflict, they failed to break the polarizing dynamics between Chavistas and Opposition. Because Students for Freedom developed their own proposal using the discourse of the Opposition, they could not transcend existing polarization, as they had originally intended. Moreover, in the context of an existential struggle between two competing groups, the general public’s association of Students for Freedom with the Opposition was interpreted by Chavismo as evidence of a real relationship between the two. As a result, their proposals were rejected by Chavista constituencies. In sum, student mobilization in Venezuela developed in the context of an existential struggle where each of the two actors tried to impose their view on how to resolve the conflict, and what values needed to prevail within the country. Although representative-liberal and participatory-protagonist-social democratic regimes are not mutually

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incompatible, and both are enshrined in the Bolivarian Constitution of 1999, socio-political actors in the Venezuelan conflict viewed them as inconsistent. Even though there were some common beliefs in both discursive models, as was demonstrated by the exchange between students Yon Goicoechea and Héctor Rodríguez, these did not transcend the antagonistic narratives to influence either side, as both were afraid to yield space lest their own vision for the country be threatened. The polarized dynamics forced students, like all socio-political actors, to mobilize within a balkanized public space, vying for hegemony. While President Chávez influenced the confrontation by asking Bolivarian Students to debate Students for Freedom at the National Assembly, the media also created a visible space of confrontation. Students were unable to transcend these contentious dynamics, and often failed to even create dialogue between government supporters and detractors within universities and student organizations. Students for Freedom was unable to transcend the conflict or create reconciliation. Their experience shows that national reconciliation in Venezuela cannot result from a mere proposal, but from the ability of socio-political actors to create alternative interpretations of the country and its prospects, which must necessarily be built through social interaction between members of the two publics, and a vision for the future constructed jointly by them. Notes 1 One such organization was Los del Medio, a group created by journalists working for government and private-commercial media outlets. Composed of journalists from written, radio and television media, the group’s purpose was to create a space of self-awareness to reflect, in times of crisis, on the role played by media in the polarization process. 2 We refer to students who opposed the action against RCTV as Students for Freedom and those who supported it as Bolivarian Students as this is how they self-identified during the conflict. 3 These students identified themselves as part of the public sphere. Student leader Stalin González, during a radio interview with journalist Cesar M. Rondón, said: “We are a generation interested in Public and Political issues” (Stalin González in GAUS-USB 2007–2009). 4 The Opposition used the term “closing” while Chavistas used the term “non-renewal” to explain the government’s actions. 5 As previously explained, the language used by political opponents to refer to this conflict was the “national strike,” “general strike” and “civic strike,” while the government used the terms “sabotage,” “oil coup” and “uprising.” 6 We do not intend to classify the Venezuelan political Opposition of 2007 as “loyal, semi-loyal or disloyal,” as its request for a presidential recall

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referendum in 2004 implies an agreement to settle its conflicts with Chávez through constitutional and legal mechanisms. However, some sectors close to Hugo Chávez would label the political Opposition as disloyal due to its involvement in the April 11, 2002, coup d’état. Nonetheless, and according to Linz (1978), the Venezuelan student movement can be classified as a “loyal opposition,” as it explicitly advocated resolution of disputes through legal and democratic means, rejecting violence. Furthermore, unlike most of the Opposition, whose purpose was to “remove the President by constitutional mechanisms,” the Students for Freedom did not seek his “departure or resignation.” 7 Manuela Bolívar, went on the participate in La Salida (an Opposition movement of 2014), see Chapter 7. In 2015 she was elected to the National Assembly representing the Opposition political party Voluntad Popular (Popular Will) alongside several leaders of the Students for Freedom. 8 In his work, The Politics of Small Things, Goldfarb (2006) analyzes how public discourse and deliberation that takes place within the private sphere can promote political change. 9 The reaction of the Opposition to the protests of Students for Freedom varied considerably: while most of the Opposition applauded and supported the call of the student movement for reconciliation and national dialogue, some Opposition leaders continued focusing on criticizing the administration of President Chávez. The expectations in some cases were very high as Opposition voices came to consider students as “a historical force for liberation” (Giusti 2007). However, there were also political Opposition spokespersons who felt that the task of national reconciliation was not for students, and even some academics and researchers cautioned that this hope was “an illusion” (Lozada in Elvia Gómez 2007). 10 Access to this televised event was obtained through the Instituto de Formación Cinematográfica COTRAIN in Caracas, Venezuela, which kept daily recordings of the programming of media outlets in Venezuela. However, the students’ presentation before the National Asssembly was posted on YouTube. See “Cadena completa: estudiantes revolucionarios y opositores en la Asamblea Nacional, 2007,” YouTube video, from televised event June 07, 2007, posted by Luigino Bracci Roa, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aEY4q7_Cbs. 11 Generally the speech refers to discrimination instead of polarization; however, such discrimination results from polarization. Since the discrimination to which the students referred is based primarily on the dynamics of existing polarization in the country, belonging to or simply being stereotyped as one of the two antagonistic groups was frequently linked to the possibility of being included or excluded from social programs and benefits. An example is the “Tascón list,” which included persons who in 2002 signed the petition to carry out a presidential recall referendum, and was subsequently used by the government to discriminate when scholarships, jobs in the public sector, or other benefits were sought. 12 The term aprendices de guarimberos (barricade apprentices) alludes to the 2002–2003 conflicts such as the national strike, when Opposition citizens set up barricades by burning tires to prevent access to highways and other public roads. It also references the barricades set up in condominiums and neighborhoods to defend the urban middle-class from the “Chavista hordes” they believed were to descend on their property (García-Guadilla 2003, 2005a) .

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13 Like the Students for Freedom, the Bolivarian Students who led the 2007 movement would later on assume political office as part of the Bolivarian government. 14 Access to this televised event was obtained through the Instituto de Formación Cinematográfica COTRAIN in Caracas. However, the students’ debate was posted on YouTube. See, “Debate entre Jon Goicoechea y Hector Rodríguez,” YouTube video, from televised event June 10, 2007, posted by queacidos, June 10, 2007, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qllXgasa95I. 15 Subsequently, other debates took place between students, for example, on the Venevisión television program Al Descubierto of June 11, 2007. On this program, three Bolivarian students decided to confront their ideas with three Students for Freedom in a 45-minute segment. Unlike the performance of Goicoechea and Rodríguez the day before on Globovisión, these six students did not elaborate on the topics of debate. Their discussions were fueled by the views and discourse of antagonistic groups demonstrating on television the hostility generated by the discourse of the existential struggle in Bolivarian Venezuela. 16 In 2016 Yon Goicoechea was temporarily imprisoned allegedly for transporting detonation cord. In 2009 Robert Serra was elected representative to the National Assembly. He was murdered in 2014. President Nicolás Maduro blamed the murder on Colombian President Alvaro Uribe. The murder is unresolved. 17 Access to this televised event was obtained through the Instituto de Formación Cinematográfica COTRAIN in Caracas. However, the incident at the UCAB was posted on YouTube. See “Agreden en la UCAB a Estudiante Bolivariano,” YouTube video, from televised event June 11, 2007, posted by online by user Carlchucho Ríos, June 11, 2007, https://www.youtube.com/watch ?v=tY-PDh184oA. 18 Access to this televised event was obtained through the Instituto de Formación Cinematográfica COTRAIN in Caracas. However, the incident at the IPC was posted on YouTube. See “Chavistas sabotean foro en el Pedagógico de Caracas,” YouTube video, from televised event October 25, 2007, posted by online user josefco277, October 25, 2007, https://www.youtube.com/watch ?v=RSe9zN0kAp4. 19 In a subsequent interview with William Ojeda, a member of the party Un Nuevo Tiempo, for the newspaper El Universal (UNT exige al Gobierno que condene hechos de violencia en el Pedagógico 2007) the distinction between good and bad is explained once again. Ojeda states, “attacks on citizens and students who have expressed their position with respect to the so-called reform seem to us an act of fascism, where beating is used due to lack of arguments, acts of spiritual degradation and absolutely immoral. Such actions are an expression of a hate factory.” It should be noted that in this case the accusation of violence, immorality and lack of democratic spirit is not limited to those causing it, but encompasses all pro-government groups.

7 Unabated Polarization in Venezuela

There can be no doubt that Venezuela underwent a radical transformation under Hugo Chávez. Beginning in 1998, the Bolivarian Revolution instituted profound changes that altered the democratic structure, the public sphere, and the narratives, discourses, and public performances of both leaders and ordinary citizens. Every facet of Venezuelan public life was transformed by the conflict that evolved between Chavismo and the Opposition. Ordinary citizens were not exempt from the influence of the conflict, and through their increased participation in both the public and political realms, they redefined their relationship to government, as well as the role and function of both national and local government. By 2001, a cursory glance at Venezuelan politics would have sufficed to see that the nation was divided into two hostile publics that pivoted around their view of the Bolivarian Republic. For the Chavista public, the Bolivarian Republic represented a new way of life, one that would result in a badly needed more equitable distribution of resources. It signified increased political power for them, through their active participation in the political sphere, with a voice, a vote, and the power to sway public institutions. For Chavismo, the Bolivarian Republic embodied the hope for greater democratic participation, the redistribution of resources, and the fulfillment of social rights. For the Opposition public, Chávez’s continued tenure of power and the establishment of the Bolivarian Republic represented a threat to their civil and political rights. Basic freedoms were in jeopardy: their freedom to participate, the sanctity of private property, and the freedom of the press. The Bolivarian Republic represented greater state intervention in the free market and the private sphere. It marked the end of individual freedoms and presaged the imposition of a state-mandated ideology.

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The interpretation each faction had of the Bolivarian Republic raised the stakes of political struggle. The conflict was not defined in terms of a particular opinion prevailing over another, but in terms of a radical transformation of Venezuelan politics and society. Venezuela’s conflict assumed the shape of an existential struggle that manifested itself in the public sphere, where two antagonistic publics reduced the plurality of Venezuelan society to either pro- or antiBolivarian forces. In the span of two years, from 1999 to 2001, the dominant social cleavage in the country ceased to be nationality, religion, cultural identity, or even social class, but the relationship an individual or group had to the presidency of Hugo Chávez. Contrary to many analysts, the polarization that overtook Venezuela cannot be explained in terms of class alone. Though the conflict certainly had roots in the ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor, socio-economic differences and competing class interests cannot alone explain how an existential struggle fully partitioned the public sphere and transformed ordinary Venezuelans into polarized subjects. The polarization of Venezuela’s public sphere resulted from forms of social interaction based on patterns of exclusion and inclusion. The spatial balkanization of Venezuelan society, which predated the Bolivarian regime and reflected market forces, contributed to polarization by physically relegating actors to specific geographic spaces: the well-to-do mostly in the east and the poor in the west. As polarization increased it accentuated economic, social, and cultural disparities, weakening existing connections between different groups in Venezuelan society. In a country already informally balkanized, the polarization process provided a justification for the forceful exclusion of the Other, denying them the possibility of participating in public gatherings and appearing in urban spaces. The exclusion of the Other was accentuated after the 2002–2003 period, with the construction of parallel institutions. Community doctors and clinics funded by the national government, to provide services to the poor in the barrios and working-class areas, operated alongside public hospitals. Professors and students sympathetic to the Bolivarian Revolution conducted research, studied and graduated from the Bolivarian University created by Chávez. Bolivarian workers joined Bolivarian unions, while Opposition workers remained in the national Confederacy of Venezuelan Workers. Poor communities and Bolivarian sympathizers shopped in governmentsubsidized markets. And Bolivarian publics communicated to audiences through government-promoted public, community, and alternative

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media. Under these conditions, the polarization that had begun in political circles quickly permeated the fabric of Venezuelan society. The Underside of Citizen Participation

The demand for greater citizen participation in the political process that emerged among the middle-class in the 1970s evolved into an existential struggle between two antagonistic publics resulting in violent confrontations between ordinary citizens. We should remember, preChávez Venezuela was not devoid of socio-political organization and individuals were not “atomized.” Throughout the 1970s, increased citizen participation in the political process was heralded as the solution to the legitimacy crisis of the Puntofijista regime, and community organizations played an active role in achieving multiple reforms. Middle-class organizations and popular organizations alike mobilized to demand an end to centralized forms of government. The Bolivarian Republic and indeed Hugo Chávez himself held steadfastly to the belief that increased citizen participation in the form of a participatory democracy could finally undo the structures that perpetuated the enduring socio-economic inequalities, the corruption, and the inefficiency of Puntofijismo. The 1999 Bolivarian Constitution institutionalized citizen participation. It expanded civil and political rights, formalizing the right of citizens to participate in political spheres to which they had previously been denied access. According to the Bolivarian Constitution, citizens could remove elected representatives through popular referenda; form cooperatives and new citizen associations; produce their own media; and decide how best to invest in community projects that bettered their way of life. How did increased citizen participation, promoted, institutionalized, and funded by the national government, contribute to social polarization and an existential political struggle? The Venezuelan case demonstrates that the institutionalization of participatory democracy does not in and of itself result in a better or more efficient democratic regime. In the 1980s and 1990s, before Chávez’s ascent to power, social organizations of varied interests and constituencies united as a common front to pressure the state to reform the constitution and decentralize political processes, to improve democracy. When Chávez assumed power, he appropriated the goals of these organizations, and his political agenda promoted co-responsibility, co-government, and participatory democratic processes. By adopting the discourse and banner of Venezuela’s social movements and organizations, the state set in motion a process of differentiation, forcing

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each social movement and organization to renegotiate its relationship with each other and the state. The differences that social movements had previously set aside in hopes of achieving common goals became points of contention between organizations within civil society. The 1999 Bolivarian Constitution that birthed Venezuela’s participatory-protagonist democracy also set the precedent for the hostilities that would be unleashed during its institutionalization and consolidation. Within the chambers of the National Constitutional Assembly (ANC), delegates interpreted themselves as representing the “will of the sovereign” as opposed to the will of different class, social, economic, and political interests. This choice took form in the unicameral legislature that was to represent the “collective” instead of a plurality of interests within a federal state. The ANC’s emphasis on popular sovereignty within a representative democratic system that incorporated plebiscitary measures as checks on government resulted in a massive citizen mobilization. Pro-government and anti-government groups convened marches and countermarches, as they attempted to represent the sovereign, creating a dynamic of political mobilization that became the most salient feature of the political conflict within the Bolivarian Republic. The emphasis on demonstrating the numeric majority of one group over another responded primarily to the new forms of political legitimacy established by the Bolivarian Constitution. The reshaping of Venezuela’s democracy generated new political practices that accentuated the differences between Chavismo and the Opposition, led to the inability of socio-political actors to recognize the claims of their opponents, and transformed media outlets into political actors. These transformative changes in Venezuela’s political system redefined what socio-political actors were willing to accept, to refuse, and to change. Perhaps the most important alteration to the political landscape was the new perceived need to become the sole representative of the popular will, because there was no room for a divided sovereign. Or more precisely, if the new source of political legitimacy rested in the claim of representing the sovereign as a whole, the representation of only particular interests implied a lack of legitimacy. Media and “Publicness” in Bolivarian Venezuela

This new form of government based on popular sovereignty, in conjunction with the new institutional venues for direct citizen participation, required new forms of political action. Popular referenda, quantifying the will of the population, served to legitimize the political

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project of the Bolivarian Revolution. More significantly, both the government and the Opposition resorted to invoking the “will of the sovereign” to resolve disputes, which created the need to invoke a visual representation of the sovereign. This resulted in citizen mobilizations through protests and marches, citizen participation in government programs, and the use of coded cultural symbols to display the citizenry’s political affiliation. In this milieu, where commonplace political disputes necessitated visual proof of the support of the totality of the sovereign, media transformed into key players. The ability to selectively circulate information, to choose which events to cover, to prefer certain sources over others, to select favorable camera angles, and to interpret facts based on their editorial line gave media in Venezuela the opportunity to act as brokers of political legitimacy. It effectively gave media outlets the opportunity to act as political actors. Opposition private-commercial media seized the opportunity. Effectively transforming into political agents, they developed common themes around which to interpret the national government's actions. The Bolivarian government was portrayed as inefficient, violent, and authoritarian. The national government responded to the bias of private media by laying the foundation for its own media empire, premised on the right of the citizenry to produce and disseminate information. Under Hugo Chávez, community and alternative media burgeoned from within the shantytowns of Caracas and effectively gave voice to the barrios. The push to break the private media’s stronghold on airwaves, television screens, and electronic pages resulted in the stifling of media freedoms. Shrouded in the right of the citizenry to “truthful, opportune and impartial information,” laws were enacted that circumscribed the freedom of the press. The threat of administrative proceedings against media resulted in the self-censorship of journalists, editors, and media owners. With social networks and media outlets filtering information and communication, each public was only exposed to their own faction’s narrative. This impacted who Venezuelans’ trusted, empathized with, included, and excluded. Public Performance

Social action in Venezuela came to be framed in the context of the conflict between supporters and detractors of Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution. What must be answered is how the political realm penetrated the day-to-day lives of Venezuelan citizens, and how citizens

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came to interpret the Venezuelan political conflict as an existential struggle. In the highly polarized milieu of the Venezuelan conflict, the claim to represent the sovereign resulted in the inability to accept any other point of view. The acceptance of the Other’s truths or the acceptance of a multiplicity of contradictory truths implied that one no longer had the sovereign on one’s side. The political polarization not only determined who was included/excluded but it legitimized the exclusion. The change from the Puntofijista regime to the participatoryprotagonist Bolivarian regime also reflected a change in values. There was a marked re-evaluation of the “popular,” understood not as “community” but as the barrio, pitting this social stratum against the bourgeois or “oligarchic” values traditionally associated with the modern liberal state. Rights were enshrined in the community, not the individual. Power was to be accessed through direct citizen participation, not representation. Popular forms of community organization (Bolivarian Circles, Urban Land Commitees, Communal Councils, etcetera), coexisted alongside institutional structures (political parties). Popular or experiential knowledge was prioritized over formal education as qualifications in the meritocratic system, and popular micro-economic systems were promoted alongside formal economies generating competition for resources and power between these parallel structures. Within this framework, the public sphere came to be constituted, not by individual free speech, but by the use of media to advance one or another interpretive thread. The massive mobilizations of Chavistas and anti-Chavistas, mediated through the use of radio, television, internet, and the written press, was an attempt by each faction to challenge the other’s propaganda and hegemony. Narratives evolve, but the form they assume depends on the individuals who contribute to them—their social status, material needs, and lived experience. The polarization process in Venezuela divided citizens geographically, and chastised social interaction with the opposite public, making it difficult if not impossible to engage in faceto-face interaction. This social division meant that each side’s narrative of the conflict only drew upon that public. This created two different publics, two different belief systems, and two worldviews. In the case of the Venezuelan conflict, interpretive threads had to connect with Chavismo’s or the Opposition’s political aims and their narrative of progress in order to acquire legitimacy. Moreover, information and points of view would only be accepted from sources deemed trustworthy. Which sources Venezuelans deemed reliable

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depended on which side of the conflict they stood on. This dynamic simultaneously discredited the other’s media outlets as biased and their sources as unreliable, shielded individuals from information disseminated by the other side, limited the knowledge or perspective that groups and individuals acquired of the Other, and promoted indifference to opposing views and arguments. This process gave way to pre-formed judgments and limited communication. Once the scripts were written, it increasingly became more difficult to change the lines. Can Polarization Be Overcome?

The polarization that took place in Venezuela did not simply result from Chávez’s or the Opposition’s political strategy, or from their constituencies’ defense of their political and economic interests. Nor was it simply the result of two very different discourses describing opposing points of view and experiences. Rather, it forced limits on discourse describing the political conflict, molding multiple explanations to fit the framework of the existential struggle. And as the political conflict intensified, even everyday acts, cultural styles, and social interactions came to be interpreted politically, undermining the ability of Venezuelan citizens to accept the plurality inherent in their society. The dynamics of Venezuela’s polarized society demand a better understanding of the public sphere, as a place where symbolic alliances and solidarities can be created, to forge bonds among citizens that underlie political action. To understand the public sphere as a space of contention requires that we expand the boundaries of what we consider “the public” to incorporate, for example, the body. For, as revealed in the violence against media producers or in the case of Students for Freedom, in Venezuela’s polarized society, the particularities of the speaker influenced how audiences determined the authenticity of discourse. Given the dynamics presented here, it is difficult to foresee an end to the polarization Venezuela has suffered. If we accept that the polarization of Venezuelan politics was mutually constructed and solidified by both Chavismo and the Opposition, then the reaction of these constituencies to future challenges will determine whether these dynamics can be dismantled. The question then is what type of common interests and challenges can undermine the existing antagonism. It is also clear that in order to begin to chip away at polarization, it is necessary for these publics to give voice to their inherent pluralities.

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However, as demonstrated in this book, pluralism cannot itself guarantee the end of polarization. The construction of a vibrant and diverse public sphere would require the centers of power within Venezuela (government institutions, media conglomerates, unions, professional associations, civil society, etcetera) to be willing to yield their influence to construct inclusive solutions, even when these solutions are implemented to the detriment of their own quotient of power. This seems unlikely given the shaping of the conflict as an existential struggle, the tendency of the government to opt for the establishment of parallel institutions to address common needs, and the willingness of some actors to legitimize undemocratic practices as a means to seize control of government. Within this complex milieu it is important to underscore that while direct participation may make regimes more democratic, in the case of Venezuela, increased citizen participation played a part in legitimizing some of the most undemocratic episodes of the time period in question. Episodes such as the coup d’état, the general strike of 2002–2003, and the violence against the media and against the student movement all served to undermine the other side’s legitimacy or claims. This leads to the question whether participatory democracy can thrive when plurality of expression within a society is stifled. The Death of Chávez

This book was primarily written before the death of Hugo Chávez. It analyzes a time period mostly characterized by an economic boom, derived from high oil prices, which financially buttressed the government’s so-called Socialismo del Siglo 21 (Twenty-First-Century Socialism)—a program that relied heavily on oil-financed social inclusion programs. From his inauguration until his death, Chávez maintained control of all the branches of government and embarked on the task of establishing institutions for participatory democracy, such as urban land committees and communal councils. The latter became the cornerstones of Twenty-First-Century Socialism, through which Chávez envisioned what he called the “Communal State.” The project aimed to institutionalize direct democracy at the national level through a set of Popular Power Laws. Much has changed since Hugo Chávez assumed power in Venezuela. The leader of the Bolivarian Revolution died in March 2013. An economic crisis crippled Venezuela’s economy and jeopardized the government’s model of wealth distribution from oil. In 2015, the Opposition won a majority of seats in the National Assembly—a feat

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they had not achieved since 1999. These changes have transformed the institutions of Chavismo, requiring that we revisit the dynamic of polarization and the role of participatory democracy. Twenty-First-Century Socialism, built primarily on the image of Hugo Chávez and dependent on his charisma, left an ideological and leadership vacuum upon his death. His appointed successor, Nicolás Maduro, attempted to elevate the image of Chávez to that of a cult hero, trying unsuccessfully to capitalize on the former president’s charismatic identity. In April 2013, Maduro won the presidential election against Opposition candidate Henrique Capriles Radonski, by a razor thin margin of less than 1 percent, reflecting the acute polarization of the electorate. The narrow victory rekindled claims of electoral fraud on the part of some Opposition political leaders, such as María Corina Machado (then representative in the National Assembly), Leopoldo López (leader of the political party Voluntad Popular or Popular Will), and Antonio Ledezma (Caracas Metropolitan Mayor). Subsequently, sporadic protests erupted among Opposition groups that did not accept the 2013 electoral results. Organized protests followed from February 2014 through May 2014. These were dubbed La Salida (The Exit). The main political actors in 2014 were students aligned with Voluntad Popular. They parted ways discursively and strategically from the Students for Freedom movement of 2007. Recalling the violent strategies used by the Opposition in 2002, the students’ visibility was largely due to their use of Guarimbas. The economic crisis, foreshadowed in 2012 by the dramatic drop in oil prices, aggravated the political, social, and territorial polarization, which then reached its peak with the arrival of Maduro. The bottoming out of oil prices significantly affected Venezuela’s Twenty-FirstCentury Socialism project, financed on “red oil,” as it was called by the government. The lack of public funding for government initiatives required social programs to be substantially reduced and redesigned. The need to prioritize the distribution of wealth led the government to double-down on the use of political-partisan criteria as the primary qualifier for benefits. As a result, meeting needs linked to the economic crisis, such as distributing food and medicines, increasingly followed a partisan logic, favoring groups aligned with the Bolivarian regime. In the midst of this economic crisis, the political Opposition won a significant majority in the National Assembly, breaking with Chavismo’s stronghold on government. This change in the balance of power elevated the expectations of the Opposition, who began to advocate political change through the Recall Referendum against President Maduro.

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Maduro’s government reacted swiftly to the Opposition’s majority in the National Assembly. Nine days after the election, the President of the House of Representatives, Diosdado Cabello, convened the National Communal Parliament. Based on Article 2 of the Law of the Communes of Venezuela, the Communal Parliament is a mechanism for direct democracy designed “to strengthen the People’s Power.” Cabello, while still president of the National Assembly, offered its legislative chambers for deliberations. In the first session of the National Communal Parliament, Cabello (La Patilla 2015) pointed out, “we will now have a parliament [National Assembly] in the service of the bourgeoisie. On the part of the right, we will not hear anything that will favor the people.” He emphasized, “we are going to push from below” making reference to Chávez’s last dying request that Maduro implement the system of the communes. During his radio and television program, En Contacto con Maduro (In contact with Maduro), the president stated, “today the National Communal Parliament was ordained at the seat of the National Assembly, I will give all the power to the Communal Parliament, and that Parliament will be a legislative institution for the people from the popular sectors” (Noticiero Digital 2015). However, he failed to explain how this legislative body, which effectively undermined the power of the newly elected representatives of the National Assembly, and brought together almost 600 communal parliamentarians, would operate. In response, the president of the Opposition coalition Mesa de Unidad Democrática (MUD), Jesús Torrealba, stated: “The only Parliament mentioned and recognized in our Constitution is the National Assembly and that same constitution establishes that the voice of the sovereign people, expressed at the polls last December 6, is a mandate that must be obeyed by all” (Unidad Venezuela 2015). Although the Communal State of Twenty-First-Century Socialism does not figure in the Constitution of 1999, and was defeated in a referendum for Constitutional Reform in 2007, the outbound pro-Chávez National Assembly attempted to legitimize the Communal Parliament by approving the People’s Power Laws of 2010 and emphasizing that its decisions were to be considered binding. In the act of installing the Communal Parliament, Diosdado Cabello recalled that communal parliaments were created “five years ago as a strategy of Chavismo in case they lost the 2010 legislative elections,” to “counterbalance” an Opposition majority within the National Assembly (La Patilla 2015). Opposition representative Juan Andrés Mejía of the Popular Will party Tweeted “The Communal Parliament is part of a para-state that only supports those aligned with the government (enchufados).” Lawyer Juan Manuel Raffalli noted on the internet, “No Communal Parliament can

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assume the functions of the National Assembly, that would be impossible practically and constitutionally.” The National Communal Parliament would in effect create a directly democratic legislative body parallel to the National Assembly and have the potential to eventually substitute it. Despite not having a constitutional basis, the National Communal Parliament was formally summoned by President Maduro to legislate on matters before the National Assembly. Aiming to bypass the National Assembly, Maduro urged the Communal Parliament to approve plans and policies that normally required the approval of the Assembly. The measure lost steam due to the inability to define the Parliament’s spokespersons, and to internal divisions within the body’s leadership and agenda. Sworn in on January 5, 2016, the Opposition-controlled National Assembly responded by proposing two controversial measures: the Amnesty Law (to release Opposition leaders held as political prisoners), and the above mentioned recall referendum against Nicolás Maduro. A staple of their electoral promises, these initiatives led to increased polarization and irreconcilable positions on the part of Chavismo and the Opposition. The Amnesty Law, which would have covered, according to the Foro Penal Venezolano (Venezuelan Penal Forum), about 80 “political prisoners,” resulted in confrontations not only within the Assembly but also with President Maduro. On January 9, Maduro expressed his position on the matter in unequivocal terms, stating “the murderers of a people will not be released ... I will not accept any amnesty law” (Ruíz 2015). The law was also rejected by progovernment representatives, other government officials, the Family Victims of Puntofijismo, and the Guarimbas Victims Committee. The recall referendum against President Maduro was presented by the Opposition as “a way of escaping the economic and political crisis.” The proposal to remove Maduro was declared “non-negotiable” by most of the political forces of the Venezuelan Opposition. The conflict over the referendum escalated when on October 20, 2016, the Consejo Nacional Electoral (National Electoral Council) accepted the verdicts of five regional courts alleging fraud in the first stage of the collection of signatures for the preliminary referendum. For the Opposition, the decision of the National Electoral Council responded to political pressure from the government. Nonetheless, the council suspended the referendum initiative until further notice. With this decision, the constitutional-electoral “exit” proposed by the Opposition was blocked, resulting in the Opposition-controlled National Assembly demanding an “Agreement for the Restitution of the Constitutional Order in

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Venezuela” that sought to “restore democracy” by declaring a “rupture within the constitutional order” and alleging the existence of a constitutional coup. The National Assembly declared itself “in rebellion,” emphasizing that “they would support a political trial” against President Maduro. Some of the more radical political actors within the Opposition movement called for “civil disobedience,” alleging these actions were sanctioned by Article 350 of the 1999 Constitution. On October 26, 2016, the Opposition coalition called on citizens to march for La Toma de Venezuela (The Taking of Venezuela), reigniting the polarizing and exclusionary dynamics underway in Venezuela that had begun with the coup against President Chávez in 2002. The conflict was aggravated by the economic crisis, and shortages in basic goods, including food and medicine. While the government and the Opposition jointly identified the downturn in oil prices as the root cause of the shortages, the Opposition blamed what they defined as a humanitarian crisis on the implementation of the government’s socialist program or Plan de la Patria, and on the inefficiency of government economic policies. The government insisted that the economic crisis was furthered by the economic war unleashed by the Opposition and multinational corporations. This resulted in a divergence of strategies, plans, and policies to address the crisis. The Opposition proposed the country declare a humanitarian crisis and request assistance from international organizations. Instead, President Maduro requested the National Assembly issue a Decree of Economic Emergency Status (Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela 2016). When that was rejected, President Maduro opted to use the extraordinary powers granted to him by the previous pro-Chavista National Assembly and rule by decree. Under the pretext of facing an economic war, a second Decree of State of Emergency and Economic Emergency gave extraordinary powers to newly formed Comités Locales de Abastecimiento y Producción—Local Committees for Provisions and Production or CLAPs. These committees were formed from ideologically pro-Chávez organizations such as the Bolívar-Chávez Battle Units (Unidades de Batalla Bolívar-Chávez), the Francisco Miranda Ideological Front (Frente Ideológico Francisco de Miranda), the National Union of Women (Unión Nacional de Mujeres), and representatives of communal councils, among others. The food distribution system is subject to military supervision and control. Documentary and newspaper archives indicate that CLAP programs exclude a high percentage of the population. This is due to two main reasons. First, the supply of basic foodstuffs cannot provide assistance to

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100 percent of the Venezuelan population. In October 2016, estimates indicated CLAPs provided assistance to less than 20 percent of the population and only satisfied 15 percent of a family’s monthly needs (GAUS-USB 2016). This has generated discontent and protests in impoverished sectors, leading critics to assert that CLAP is a mechanism for “distributing hunger,” since the underlying problem is a lack of incentives for production rather than problems with distribution. Secondly, food distribution is prioritized based on political (Opposition versus Chavista) and territorial criteria (poor versus middle-class neighborhoods). First in line in the CLAP distribution list are poor Chavista sectors that are organized for political mobilization in favor of President Maduro (members of the government’s party, collectives, or communes). These are followed by less organized sectors (e.g., ideologically diverse communal councils). In some cases, CLAP food bags may reach poor areas where there may be support for Opposition groups, in an attempt to diminish support for the presidential recall referendum. Nonetheless, these resources do not reach middle class sectors, as these constituencies refuse to register with the president’s political party. The only middle-class citizens who benefit from the distribution are those who are allied with poor sectors, live territorially nearby them, or who work in public agencies. These decrees, which attempt to legitimize new social organizations and programs (misiones), represent the replacement of the participatory organizational structures originally promoted by President Chávez through urban land committees and communal councils, with highly politicized and militarized structures such as the CLAP, which are controlled by the government’s party (Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela), and in the case of the CLAPs are supervised by the Minister of Defense, General-in-Chief Vladimir Padrino López. As a result, these new organizations have a high potential for co-optation and corruption. They respond neither to direct nor participatory democratic initiatives, as they have been imposed through presidential decrees, and within them the role of communal councils is minimized to the point of being all but displaced. As a result, the implementation of participatory democracy at the local level has been crippled. The media landscape in Venezuela has also changed dramatically as the government has furthered its dominance in print media, television and radio. Additionally, the scarcity of supplies required for print has prompted commercial media to opt for publications in digital formats and to produce digital networks. This has resulted in a diversity of social media and internet sites such as efectococuyo.com, prodavinci.com, caraotadigital.net, aporrea.org, elpitazo.com, and contrapunto.com.

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Though Chavistas and Opposition make ample use of social media such as Twitter and Facebook to disseminate information, the digital sphere has created spaces for the critical exchange of information and has resulted in spaces where less radical positions among Chavistas and Opposition can coexist. Internet sites have become the most utilized mediums to express pluralism in Chavista and Opposition publics. Despite the flourishing of alternate points of view within these publics, the government’s response to the economic crisis leads us to believe that Venezuelan society has yet to develop the mechanisms necessary to overcome the polarization generated after Hugo Chávez’s election. While it is possible the shortages of foodstuffs will chip away at the antagonism, it seems unlikely the centers of power established under these polarizing dynamics will give way to construct the inclusive, participatory democracy that Venezuelan civil society demanded in the 1990s and that Chávez promised in 1998. Such a strategy would have to reconcile the opposing visions of democracy embraced by Chavismo and the Opposition, while tackling the inequality and poverty that underpin the antagonism between those two constituencies. Until then, the dream of an inclusive, pluralistic, participatory democracy will be difficult to realize.

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Index Caldera, Rafael, 31 Capitalism, 2, 11, 20(n3), 28, 51(n9), 81, 117(n13) Capriles Radonski, Henrique, 145 Caracas: Caracas divided by social classes, 15, 53, 62, 138; Caracas valley and Opposition, 62; cerros, 15; Chacao, 62; Chavista territory, 62; east side of Caracas, 15, 62; El Hatillo, 62; Francisco Fajardo highway, 64; ghettos in, 19, 53, 61–63; Guarenas-Guatire highway, 62; José María Vargas Boulevard, 63; killings taking place in the streets of Caracas, 59; Miraflores Palace, 57–59, 64; modern landmarks, 64; National Assembly, 64; National Pantheon, 64; neighborhood associations, 65; Parque del Este, 57; Paseo Los Próceres, 63; Plaza Altamira, 60, 64; Plaza Bolívar, 64; poor sectors, 62; Prados del Este highway, 64; protests, 53; Puente Llaguno bridge, 57; social geographies in Caracas, 53, 60, 64; territorial division of Caracas, 17, 53, 62. See also ghettos; protests Caracazo, 1989 riots, 21(n4), 25, 28, 30, 59, 62 Carmona Estanga, Pedro, 58 Carvajal, Leonardo, 45 Catholic Church, 28, 49, Censoring, 58, 86–88, 92. See also media, self-censoring Chamber of commerce, Federación de Cámaras de Comercio y la Producción (FEDECAMARAS), 54, 56, 61, 68 Chávez, Hugo: background, 32; coup d’état against, 11, 13, 54–59; divisive rhetoric of, 1, 2, 32, 97– 98, 113; death of, 144; election

Active Defense Community Plans. See Community Active Defense Plans Agencia Bolivariana de Noticias, 84, 94(n11) Agreement for the Restitution of the Constitutional Order in Venezuela, 147–148 Alianza Cívica de la Sociedad Civil (Civic Alliance of Civil Society), 67 Asamblea de Ciudadanos, 17 Asamblea de Educación, 17 Asamblea Nacional. See National Assembly Asamblea Nacional Constituyente. See Constitutional National Assembly Austerity measures, 21(n4) authoritarian regime, 1, 141 Bernal, Freddy, 57 Betancourt, Rómulo, president, 28 Bolívar, Simón, 43, 52(n17) Bolivarian Circles, 17, 54, 60, 142 Bolivarian Constitution (Constitución de la República Bolivariana de Venezuela, 1999). See Constitution, Bolivarian (1999) Bolivarian Revolution, 1, 5, 8; aim of, 21(n8); divisiveness, 7, 17 Bolivarian Students, 120–122, 126– 132; leadership, 128; Trómpiz, César, 128; view of Students for Freedom, 122, 126. See also under Students Bolivarian University, 17, 127 branches of government, 22(n10), 51(n11), 140; legislature, 53. See also citizens, as branch of government, Cabello, Diosdado, 146 cadenas, radio and television, 77

163

164

Index

(1998), 2, 5, 7, 25, 31; polarization of Venezuelan society under, 6, 12, 13; reelection (2000), 8; relationship with private media, 72–77, 88, 91, 114; demands for resignation, 58, 70(n8); return to power after April 2002 coup, 58, 59, 77; speech to ANC, 43; sworn in as president, 26. See also Chavistas; polarization Chavistas, 10, 27; aligned with poor and class struggle, 14, 63–64, 69(n1), 116(n12); coup of 2002, 57–59, 108; defined, 20(n1), 100, 111–112; media, 73, 81, 142, 150; narrative of, 106–110 citizen participation in ANC process, 44, 49 citizens, as branch of government, 51(n51), 101, 103, 106–107 civil society, 7, 16, 29, 31, 34, 51(n8); Ciudadanía Activa, 67; civil society Opposition leaders, 9; defined, 23(n19), 117(n14); democratic role, 6, 7, 30; elitist connotation, 44; as political actors, 68, 139–140; proposals to the ANC, 43, 44, 45. See also community organizations civil-military coup (1958), 6, 50(n5) class struggle, 1, 2; cleavages, 3, 60. See also polarization; under social class Combellas, Ricardo, 25, 74 Comités de Tierra Urbana (Urban Land Committees), 17, 117(n15) Comités Locales de Abastecimiento y Producción CLAP (Local Committees for Provisions and Production), 148–149 Communal Councils (Consejos Comunales), 17, 117(n15), 142, 144, 148–149 Communal State, 144 Community Active Defense Plans (Planes Comunitarios de Defensa Activa), 65–67

community media, 83, 101, 116(n8), 141. See also individual media stations community organizations, 23(n19), 44, 49 Confederación de Trabajadores de Venezuela. See Labor union, Confederacy of Venezuelan Workers (CTV) Consejo Nacional Electoral. See National Electoral Council Constitution, Bolivarian (1999): 10, 19; amendment to the constitution (indefinite re-election for public authorities), 123; Article 1 (Organic Law of Telecommunications), 85; Article 57, 75, 103; Article 58, 74–75, 103; Article 67, 34; Article 70, 33; Article 71, 33; Article 72 (right to recall public officials), 21(n9), 35; Article 73, 21(n9), 33–34; Article 180 of the Law of Suffrage and Political Participation, 37; Article 184, 21(n9); Article 204.7, 21(n9); Article 296, 22(n9); Article 350, 69, 148; citizen control, 6, 33; ratified (1999), 8, 26; framework for participatory-protagonist democracy, 26, 139; ratification through popular referendum, 48; right to propose constitutional reform, 35; unicameral legislature, 22(n10), 140 Constitution (1961), 25, 67; Article 3 of Title I, 28; Article 4, 28, 37; and party democracy, 34; reform attempts, 31 Constitutional National Assembly (Asamblea Nacional Constituyente, ANC), 6, 8, 19, 22(n13), 27, 32, 34, 35, 41–47; defining the sovereign, 41–42, 45, 140; limits of participation, 43–47, 48; originating power, 38; procedures for choosing members, 36–37, 39; ratification of Bolivarian Constitution, 47;

Index 165

regional delegates, 45–46; support for, 52(n19); constitutional coup (2016), 148 Contingency War Plans (Planes de Contingencia), 65 coup of April 11, 2002, 10–15, 17, 54–60, 77; establishes Opposition, 121; privatecommercial media acts, 81, 83, 85, 87, 92 Cuba, Cuban Revolution, 93(n3); cubanization of Venezuela, 93(n3); Cuba’s Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, 60 Decentralization, 30, 31 democracy, from representative to participatory, 6, 10, 48, 49, 108; antidemocratic practices, 68–69; pre-Bolivarian, 6, 32, 139; value of social democracy, 10. See also participatory-protagonist democracy; representative democracy discourse, defined, 21(n6), 105; vs. narrative, 105 discrimination, 1, 134(n11). See also social class economic crisis, 5, 144–145, 148, 150; Black Friday (1983), 7; of 1980s, 3, 6, 31 economic redistribution, 6, 11, 26, 137. See also right to private property Elections, Chávez’s lottery, 22(n14); election of ANC candidates, 32, 39, 52(n18); election of Hugo Chávez, 2, 5, 7, 25, 31; election of Maduro, 145; indefinite reelections, 123; legislative elections, 8, 39; local elections, 35, 123; mega-elections (2000), 8 elites, 6, 28, 30, greed and avarice, 1. See also polarization; social class existential struggle, 99–101, 120, 132, 138, 142. See also polarization Fermín, Claudio, 104

Fourth Republic, 27–32, 36, 51(n12). See also Pact of Punto Ghettos, 19; political, 53, 61–69 Gómez Velásquez, Berenice, 80–81 human rights organizations, 7, 19, 43, 117(n14); Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, 88, 95(n21). See also rights, human rights Inequality. See polarization International Monetary Fund, 7 Izarra, Andrés, Minister of Communication, 58 Journalists, censorship of, 92; taking sides, 90–91; under attack, 79– 82, 92, 93(nn 4, 7). See also media Labor union, Confederacy of Venezuelan Workers (CTV), 54, 55, 61, 68 Land reform, 23(n16) Laws. See under Venezuelan laws Legislature. See branches of government Ley Habilitante (Enabling Law) See under Venezuelan Laws , 9, 54, 56 “linguistic revolution” of the Bolivarian Republic, 107 Maduro, Nicolás, 145–147 Manifesto for Reconciliation, 121 Media, bias of private-commercial media to Opposition, 18, 58–59, 72–73, 75, 83, 90, 114; Chávez government support of national public media, 84–85, 91; fragmenting the public sphere, 98–101, 114; as political actor, 19, 54, 71–72, 76–77, 79, 80–82, 98, 102, 116(n7), 140–142; print media, 71; private-commercial media, 17, 57, 58, 91; reform, 73; responsibility to educate citizens, 74; role of the media, 71, 101–

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102, 141; self-censoring, 75, 77, 86, 91–92, 141; US media, 84; violence against the media, 78– 82, 91. See also individual stations under Venezuelan media; Rights, freedom of the press “Media war,” 18, 19, 76, 92, 97, 101 Me Enamoré de una Chavista (Schmucke), 14–15 military, 51(n10), 59, 113; involvement in politics, 68. See also Contingency War Plans Miquilena, Luis, 42 Movimiento 2001, 9 National Assembly, 8, 9; and Communal Parliament, 146–147; restricted access for journalists, 92; Students for Freedom right to reply, 120 National Chamber of Commerce (FEDECAMARAS), 15, 68 National Communal Parliament, 146–147 National Constitutional Assembly. See Constitutional National Assembly National Electoral Council, 37, 38, 147 national strike (2002–2003, oil coup), 10, 12, 14–16, 55, 89, 97, 121, 126, 133(n5), 144; “insurrectional srike,” 108; “national civic strike,” 108 neoliberalism, 7, 20(n3), 117(n13) oil/petroleum industry, 6, 23(n16), 27–30, 145; Gente del Petróleo (People of Petroleum), 69(n6); national oil industry, 23(n16); government’s model of wealth distribution from oil, 6, 26; oilfinanced social inclusion, 144; and national strike, 15–16, 55, 97, 126–127. See also Petróleos de Venezuela Opposition, 1, 6, 55, 60, 61, 104; conflict with Chavistas (2002– 2003), 12, 68, 105; contesting

Chavistas’ intepretation, 9, 11, 102, 116(n12); defined, 20(n1); excluded from process of ANC, 35, 36, 43–45; leaders called hardliners, 8; narrative, 9, 11, 66, 87, 105–109, 114, 119; national strike, 10, 12, 14, 15, 68; polarization, 48, 53, 54–59, 100, 113, 137–139; and privatecommercial media, 17, 18, 72, 75, 76, 78, 86, 92–93, 94(n16), 97, 104, 141; protests, 9, 23(n18), 63, 70(n12), 90; shifting power under Bolivarian Constitution, 49, 55; strike, 10, 14, 15, 68, 77, 89; and student movement, 119–129; violence, 93(n7) Ortega, Carlos, 68 Ortega, Saúl, 46 Other (the Other): disdain for the Other, 11, 53, 106, 138; as enemy, 5, 68, 110, 115(n3); fear of, 62, 66; transgressing the space of, 63. See also polarization Pact of Punto Fijo, 22(n11), 25–29, 50(n5); as a political agreement, 28; dismantling of the institutions of Puntofijismo, 6, 55; distributive policies of Puntofijismo, 26; elections during, 51(n9); Fourth Republic, 27–29; patronage system of Puntofijismo, 29, 51(n9), 139; political crises of Puntofijismo, 11, 43; Puntofijismo’s representative democracy, 6, 19, 25, 28, 40, 48, 51(n10) Palace Guard, 59 Padrino López, Vladimir, 149 parallel institutions, 138, 142, 145– 146 participatory-protagonist democracy, 6, 10, 21(n8), 25, 43; Bolivarian model of citizen participation, 26, 34–35, 140, 139; defining the sovereign, 42, 141; direct community participation, 107, 139; and media, 72, 74–75, 103; replacing representative

Index 167

democracy, 8, 18, 29, 32, 34, 49, 142. See also democracy Pérez Jiménez, Marcos, president, ousted by civil-military coup, 6, 65 Pérez, Carlos Andrés, president, and neoliberal reform, 7, 21(n4) Petkoff, Teodoro, 23(n21) Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), 12, 15, 61; leaders, 56 Petroleum industry. See oil/petroleum industry Polarization, in the Bolivarian Republic of Hugo Chávez, 3, 98– 101, 109–110, 116(n6), 137–139, 142–144; coup as justification for, 54, 59; definition of, 4; in national strike, 97; objects of, 3, 4; pejoratives to describe “enemy’s” ideology, 109; political polarization, 12, 14, 41, 54, 81, 114; preventing multiplicy of views, 113; social polarization, 2, 13, 15, 60, 64, 114, 119; student movement, 119; and violence, 18, 57–59, 70(nn 9, 11), 78, 81. See also media political discourse, 4, 112; Chávez’s break with standards of, 110, 111 Political parties: Acción Democrática (AD), 29, 31, 37, 50(nn5, 7), 54, 116(n7); Bandera Roja (BR), 23(n21), 54; Comité de Organización Política Electoral Independiente (COPEI), 29, 31, 37, 50(nn5, 6), 54, 116(n7); Communist Party, 50(n5); Coordinadora Democrática (Democratic Coordinator or CD), 15, 23(nn 20,21); Mesa de Unidad Democrática (MUD), 146; Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS), 50(n7); Movimiento Quinta República (Fifth Republic Movement), 26, 32; Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela, 149; Polo Patriótico (Patriotic Front), 8, 22(n14), 36, 39, 47; Primero Justicia, 23(n21), 54; Un Nuevo Tiempo (A New Time),

122, 136(n19); Unidad Venezuela, 69(n3); Voluntad Popular (Popular Will), 145; weakened under participatoryprotagonist democracy, 34, 39, 43. See also Chavistas; Opposition political stability, end of, 6 Presidential Decree No. 3, 36, 76; appeals against 51(n13) protests, 23(n18), 53, 57, 63–64, 69(n1); citizen mobilization, 22(n15), 23(n18), 50; countermarches, 54, 55, 71; of education laws, 9, 22(n15); flags display, 69(n1); guarimbas, 63, 70(n12), 145, 147; La Gran Batalla (the Great Battle), 63, 70(n11); La Salida (The Exit), 145; La Toma de Venezuela (The Taking of Venezuela), 148; March for Peace, 62; marches, 11, 15, 57, 69(nn 1, 6), 140, 148; media as targets, 78, 93(n5); Students for Freedom, 119–133, 145 Public space: allocation of space, 53, 54, 63–64; alternative public space, 128; defined, 24(n24); polarized public space, 63, 80, 130 Public sphere, 4, 116(n9); definition, 21(n5), 25; polarized, 3, 5, 19, 59, 61, 98–101, 143; realm of the political, 26, 42, 103, 115(n2); and social media and digital, 149–150 Puntofijista regime. See under Pact of Punto Fijo Queremos Elegir, 67 Ramos Allup, Henry, 113 Ravell, Alberto Federico, 23(n21) reconciliation, national: 121, 122, 124, 147–148 redistribution of resources. See economic redistribution referendums, 21(n9), 54(n14), 56, 123; for Constitutional Assembly, 8, 37–38, 40, 43; plebiscitary

168

Index

power, 33; popular referendum to ratify constitution of 1999, 8, 26, 47; presidential recall referendum against Chávez, 16, 24(n25), 97, 104, 134; recall referendum against President Nicolás Maduro, 145– regime change, 6, 7, 51(n10) representative democracy, 6, 18, 21(n8), 25–26, 28, 34, 43; proportional representation, 108; regional representation, 35, 39, 45–46; representation of political minorities, 22(n10); representation of the sovereign, 48. See also participatoryprotagonist democracy revolution, Chávez’s Bolivarian, 21(n8), 52(n17), 69(n3), 93(n3); and Cuban revolution, 93(n3) rights, civil rights, 28, 22(n10); constitutional rights, 33; freedom of expression, 33, 74, 75, 89, 91, 120, 121, 125, 129, 143–144; freedom of speech, 54; freedom of the press, 19, 79, 86, 93, 114, 120, 141; human rights, 19, 69(n2), 79, 85; to private property, 10, 54, 60–62, 77, 66, 125, 129, 137; rights of citizens to participate in political spheres, 6, 26, 33, 41, 69(n2), 120, 121, 139–142; socioeconomic rights, 54; Students for Freedom, 20, 119 Riots, 2, 7, 30, 62; in 1989, 21(n4); in April 2002, 59, 93(n4). See also protests Rodríguez, Simón, 43, 52(n17) Ron, Lina, 54, 69(n3), 80 Sesto, Farruco, 2 shortages in basic goods, 148, 150 Social class: class conflict (rich vs. poor), 1–4, 15, 60–62, 67, 106, 112, 113, 115, 116(n12), 138, 139, 149, 150; middle-class, 1, 9, 16, 57, 60–61, 65–67, 68, 126, 139; underclass, 2, 61, 64, 66; upper class, 1, 15, 23(n19), 57,

60–61, 116(n12). See also polarization social media, 149, 150 social programs: CLAP programs, 148; Educational Missions, 127– 128; Missions (Misiones), 17; Misiones sociales (social missions), 127 socialism, 11, 129; Socialismo del Siglo XXI (Twenty-First Century Socialism), 144–146 Special Bicameral Commission for the Revision of the Constitution, 31 strike, December 2001. See national strike students: alternative student associations, 16; Andrés Bello Catholic University (UCAB) students, 130, 135(n17); Barrios, Douglas, 124; Bolívar, Manuela, 121, 122, 134(n7); Bolivarian Students, 120–122, 126–132; Caracas Pedagogical Institute (IPC), 130–132, 135(n18); Federación Bolivariana de Estudiantes (Bolivarian Students Federation), 120, 126; Goicoechea, Yon, 128–132, 133, 135(nn 15, 16); González, Stalin, 133(n3); Juventud V República (Youth Fifth Republic), 126; Mejía, Juan Andrés, 146; Rodríguez, Héctor, 128–130, 133; Serra, Robert, 130; student movement, 116(n9), 119; student protests, 145; Voluntad Popular (Popular Will), 145. See also Students for Freedom Students for Freedom (movement) (Estudiantes por la Libertad), 20, 119–133, 143; accept but challenge Chávez government, 119, 121, 129, 134(n6); national reconciliation, 132, 134(n9); protest closure of RCTV, 120, 123, 133(n4); protest proposed constitutional reform referendum (2007), 123; leaders of, 128; and rights, 128–129; view of

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Bolivarian Students, 125. See also students symbols: 64, 124, 130; cultural markers used by journalists, 80; patriotic symbols, 64, 141; rojorojito, 13, 130; T-shirts, 124, 131 Telemundo, 84 television, Radio Caracas Televisión (RCTV), 14, 83, 88, 108, 119– 121, 123; role in protests, 69(n5). See also under Venezuelan media Theory of Communicative Action (Habermas), 4 Torrealba, Jesús, 146 Venezuelan Information Office, 84 Venezuelan laws, Amnesty Law, 147; Decree of Economic Emergency Status, 148; Decree of State of Emergency and Economic Emergency, 148; Law of Education, 55, 56, 93(n3), 94(n15); Law of the Communes of Venezuela, 146; Law of the Municipal Regime, 67; Ley de Amnistía (Amnesty Law), 147; Ley de Tierras y Desarrollo Agrario (Land and Agrarian Development Law), 9, 55; Ley Especial Contra los Delitos Mediáticos (Special Law against Media Crimes), 87; Ley Habilitante (Enabling Law), 9, 54, 55, 56, 69(n4); Ley Orgánica de Hidrocarburos (Law of Hydrocarbons), 9, 23(n16), 55; Ley Orgánica de Responsabilidad Social en Radio y Televisión (Law of Social Responsibility in Radio and Television), 85, 87, 89, 91, 94(n15); Ley Orgánica de Telecomunicaciones (Law of Telecommunications), 83, 89, 94(n9); organic laws, 76; People’s Power Laws of 2010, 146 Venezuelan media: Agencia Bolivariana de Noticias (ABN),

84, 94(n11); Agencia Venezolana de Noticias, 94(n11); Aló, Presidente, 12, 77, 110, 117(n17); alternative/community media, 17, 19, 30, 77, 101, 103– 104, 114, 138, 141; Antiescualidos.com, 58; Aporrea.com, 126; Aporrea.org, 116(n8); cadena (televised presidential address), 77; Canal TVS (Aragua), 93(n5); caraotadigital.net, 149; Catia TV, 77, 78, 88; Comisión Nacional de Telecomunicaciones (National Telecommunication Agency, CONATEL), 77, 86, 88, 94(n13); community radio, 58, 83–85; contrapunto.com, 149; efectococuyo.com, 149; El Nacional, 62, 82, 93(n2); El Universal, 95(n21), 102, 125; elpitazo.com, 149; En Contacto con Maduro (In contact with Maduro), 146; Fe y Alegría community radio station, 58; Globovisión, 14, 83, 88, 89, 93(n5), 94(n12), 130, 131, 135(n15); Gusano de la Luz (magazine Worm of Light), 122; Instituto de Formación Cinematográfica (COTRAIN), 134(n10), 135(nn 14, 17, 18); Instituto Prensa y Sociedad (Venezuelan Press and Society Institute), 79, 86; Los del Medio, 133(n1); Panorama, 89; prodavinci.com, 149; Promar TV (Lara), 93(n5); Radio Caracas Televisión (RCTV), 82, 83, 88, 93(n5), 94(n12), 108, 119, 120, 123, 133(n4); Radio Libre Negro Primero, 58, 77; Radio Nacional de Venezuela (RNV), 58, 78, 85, 101; Radio Perola, 58; Telesur, 84; Televén, 83, 91, 94(n12); Televisora Venezolana Sociales (Venezuelan Social Television, TVes), 88, 119; Últimas Noticias, 80–82, 89; Unión Radio, 95(n21); Vale TV, 83; Venevisión, 57, 58,

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83, 93(n2), 93(n5), 94(n12), 102, 111; Venezolana de Televisión, 58, 78, 82, 83, 94(n12) Violence, 57–59, 135(n19); against media, 78–82, 93(nn 4, 6); defense against authoritarian

regime, 1; during national strike (2002), 90; threat of, 24(n25) World Bank, 7 Zamora, Ezequiel, 52(n17)

About the Book

During Hugo Chávez's presidency, Venezuelan society underwent a sudden—and vicious—split between the Chavistas and the Opposition. What accounts for the extreme intensity of the split? How did differences so quickly become irreconcilable? What role did the media play? Answering these and related questions, Ana Mallen and María Pilar García-Guadilla explore how participatory democracy led to profound social polarization in Venezuela. Ana L. Mallen has researched Venezuelan politics for fifteen years. She has worked with communities in Mexico, the United States, and Venezuela. María Pilar García-Guadilla is professor of political and urban sociology at the Universidad Simón Bolívar in Venezuela.

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