Protests and Polarization in Venezuela After Chávez

Photo by Jorge Silva, Reuters.

February 2014—less than a year after the death of President Hugo Chávez—marked the beginning of a series of protests that raised important questions about the future of Venezuela. It is estimated that at least forty people died and more than eight hundred suffered injuries related to these protests. The essays in this Hot Spots series were written in the Spring of 2014, in the immediate aftermath of the protests. They attempt to make sense of these protests in Venezuela, which earned worldwide attention thanks to media images of violent clashes between white-clad protestors and police. According to conventional reporting, these were anti-government protests fueled by food shortages, inflation, violent crime, and frustration with the administration of Nicolas Maduro (who succeeded the late Hugo Chávez as president). However, these seemingly compelling explanations obscured a more complicated reality. For example, they failed to explain why people were protesting mostly in middle-class neighborhoods, and why popular sectors, who might also have had reason to protest, largely held back. In editing this series, our goal was to provide ethnographically grounded analyses that are rich in social and historical context in order to clarify the complexities of these protests, and to provide insight into Venezuelan politics and society more broadly. At the time of publication, the stakes are high: in December 2014, President Obama signed a bill to levy sanctions on Venezuela, which could inflame already heightened tensions and disproportionately impact already vulnerable populations. How these protests are framed and understood directly shapes decisions about things like sanctions.

The visceral polarization of Venezuelan society along class and political lines has long shaped both the scholarship and media coverage of Venezuela. It is a constant challenge to carve out analytical spaces that avoid contributing to this polarization, which is often glossed in terms of “chavistas,” or Chávez supporters, against “the opposition.” We sought to present essays that ground claims in systematic assessments of observable realities and in the lived experiences of Venezuelans affected by ongoing social, economic, and political contestations. The series editors first provide an editorial that considers the emergent political terrain after the shift in leadership from Chávez to Maduro. Next, David Smilde discusses the importance of empirically grounded research on protests and political action in Venezuela. The next four essays—by Miguel Tinker Salas, Julie Skurski, Mariya Ivancheva, and Richard McGrail—focus on the protests themselves, exploring the role of social class and fear, the polyvalent meaning of el pueblo or “the people,” students as protestors, and how mundane crises inform oppositional politics. Essays by Rebecca Hanson and Veronica Zubillaga complicate conventional thinking about police corruption and the experience of violence in Venezuela by offering correctives to depictions of crime and violence that dominate popular thinking on current protests. The following three essays—by Alejandro Velasco, Matt Wilde, and Angela Marino—offer perspectives from popular movements aligned with chavismo, examining alternative forms of activism, alternative imaginaries of sociality, and a history of barrio-based protests that force us to rethink assumptions about what democracy and democratic engagement with state institutions looks like. The final set of essays—by Luis Duno Gottberg, Naomi Schiller and Robert Samet, and Mark Weisbrot—expand the scope of analysis of recent protests by forcing us to rethink conventional assumptions about Venezuela’s economy, news media, and popular masses.

Posts in This Series

Life After Hugo Chávez

Life After Hugo Chávez

Whether cast as authoritarian strongman or brilliant revolutionary, Hugo Chávez and the movement he led undeniably transformed the socio-political terrain of Ve... More

Portraying the Venezuela Conflict: From Partial to Full Conflict Theory

Portraying the Venezuela Conflict: From Partial to Full Conflict Theory

Anyone who writes on Venezuela’s polarized politics knows there is no position above the fray. Pro-government commentators become targets for the clever insults... More

Venezuela: Class Narratives and the Politics of Fear

Venezuela: Class Narratives and the Politics of Fear

At the end of January 2014, Leopoldo López and Maria Corina Machado, leaders of the radical Venezuelan right wing organized under the banner of La Salida (the e... More

Battles to Claim the “Pueblo”

Battles to Claim the “Pueblo”

The protests that started in February 2014 in major Venezuelan cities have been unprecedented in their duration and social and geographic expanse. While they bu... More

A Multiplicity of Movements: A Brief History of Student Struggles in Venezuela

A Multiplicity of Movements: A Brief History of Student Struggles in Venezuela

Since the beginning of the violent protests in early 2014, many observers, activists, and journalists have referred to “the Venezuelan student movement” as if i... More

A Closer Look at Venezuela’s Anti-Government Protesters, a.k.a., The Opposition

A Closer Look at Venezuela’s Anti-Government Protesters, a.k.a., The Opposition

In Venezuela, a superficial gloss of the term The Opposition conjures images of right-wing elites who are pulling the strings behind the recent round of anti-go... More

The February Protests and the Unequal Experience of Violence

The February Protests and the Unequal Experience of Violence

During the days I am writing this paper, some middle-class neighborhoods in Caracas, like the one where I live, have been taken and blocked by vecinos (neighbor... More

Policing the Protests in Post-Chávez Venezuela: How Human Rights Legitimize Coercion

Policing the Protests in Post-Chávez Venezuela: How Human Rights Legitimize Coercion

Since protests erupted in Caracas on February 12, the media has been flooded with photographs of Venezuelan police cracking down on protestors. By March 2014, s... More

Where are the Barrios? Protest and History in Venezuela

Where are the Barrios? Protest and History in Venezuela

Venezuelans are no strangers to social conflict. In the fifteen years since Hugo Chávez first took office in 1999, coups, counter-coups, devastating strikes, me... More

Participation and Polarization After Chávez

Participation and Polarization After Chávez

Beneath the cacophony of political noise that dominates media coverage of the recent Venezuelan protests, there lies a host of ongoing social, political, and ec... More

On the Other Side of the Barricades: Venezuela’s Spring of the Arts

On the Other Side of the Barricades: Venezuela’s Spring of the Arts

Burning tires. Barricades. Nearly forty dead. While global media has been focused intently on the street violence isolated in wealthy neighborhoods on the east ... More

Dangerous People

Dangerous People

Over the past ten years, I’ve been conducting research on several Venezuelan social groups whose politics originate from a position of extreme marginality. Thes... More

Battles over Press Freedom in Venezuela

Battles over Press Freedom in Venezuela

For over a decade, we have witnessed a procession of well-publicized reports about the demise of press freedom in Venezuela. Most recently, accusations that the... More

Inflation, Shortages, and the Exchange Rate in Venezuela

Inflation, Shortages, and the Exchange Rate in Venezuela

Almost every news article about Venezuela in the past months claims that protesters are in the streets because they are fed up with high inflation, shortages of... More