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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.
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Keywords
Corruption Crime Latin America & Caribbean Natural resources Populism Revolution VenezuelaBio author: Ivan Briscoe
Former senior researcher in Peace, Security and Human Rights at FRIDE.
