Send page Print

Case studies / Comment

Venezuela: is Hugo Chávez in control?

17/09/2007 By Ivan Briscoe

The frenzied arguments over Chávez’s democratic credentials and his actions since winning reelection in December 2006 utterly fail to capture the contradictions of the Venezuelan street.

Just as the president’s socialism sits uneasily with the habits of an oil-rich state, the frequently voiced conviction that a new tyranny is settling into place ignores abundant evidence that the government’s greatest battle, which it may be losing, is to keep control of its own revolutionary ‘proceso’. Rampant crime and corruption are perhaps the most noticeable characteristics of this failure. 

Venezuela may now be more or less democratic than during its forty years of two-party oligarchy. But the truth is that without effective steerage, a revolution - democratic, populist or dictatorial - will not achieve the transformation it desires. It is in the effort to make ‘chavismo’ stick, and the resistance this produces, that the true identity of this regime will emerge.

Download the full version of this publication, available in English (56 kB)
Spanish (53 kB)

Keywords

Corruption Crime Latin America & Caribbean Natural resources Populism Revolution Venezuela

Bio author: Ivan Briscoe

Ivan Briscoe studied philosophy, politics and economics (PPE) at the University of Oxford, before receiving a Frank Knox Memorial Fellowship to continue his studies for a year at Harvard University. He has also completed a master's degree in Development at Madrid's Complutense University. From 2004 he has worked as the editor of the English edition of El País (Madrid). He writes often on Latin America and developing world issues for Open Democracy (www.opendemocracy.net) and The New Internationalist, and has taken part in numerous radio programmes on the BBC, Radio Nederland and Radio France International.