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<h1 id="reader-title">Authoritarianism in Venezuela? A Reply to
Gabriel Hetland</h1>
<div id="reader-credits" class="credits">By Lucas Koerner – May
19th 2017</div>
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<p>Venezuela is once again dominating international
headlines as violent opposition protests bent on
toppling the elected Maduro government enter their
seventh week. The demonstrations have claimed to date at
least <a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/13081">54
lives</a> since April 4, surpassing the previous wave
of violent anti-government protests in 2014, known as
“the Exit”. However, this time around, the unrest
coincides with a severe economic downturn and a
transformed geopolitical landscape defined by the return
of the right in Brazil and Argentina as well as an even
more bellicose regime in Washington.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the international outcry at this latest
violent effort to oust the Chavista government has been
far more muffled than the last time.</p>
<p>With the notable exception of an <a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/13121">open
letter</a> by LASA members, a UNAC/BAP <a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/13127">joint
statement</a>, and other smaller protest actions, the
US left has been largely passive vis-a-vis both the
Trump administration’s escalating intervention against
Venezuela as well as the <a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/13070">systematic
media blackout</a>, preferring silence to active
solidarity with Chavismo.</p>
<p>In this environment, some leftist academics have
publicly broken with the Maduro administration over its
response to the country’s current political and economic
crisis.</p>
<p>In a recent <a
href="https://nacla.org/news/2017/05/03/why-venezuela-spiraling-out-control">piece</a> for
NACLA*, University of Albany Assistant Professor Gabriel
Hetland parts ways with the Bolivarian government,
citing concerns over Maduro’s “authoritarian” slide.</p>
<p>“Yet, while previous claims of Venezuela’s
authoritarianism have had little merit, this is no
longer the case,” he writes.</p>
<p>While we deeply respect Professor Hetland’s critical
contributions to the debate on Venezuela, we at <a
href="http://venezuelanalysis.com/">Venezuelanalysis</a>**
– a collective of journalists and activists who at one
point or another have lived, studied, and/or worked in
Venezuela – firmly reject this charge of
authoritarianism on both analytical and political
grounds.</p>
<p><strong>Setting the record straight</strong></p>
<p>Hetland cites a number of recent actions of the
Venezuelan government to bolster his claim, including
the Venezuelan Supreme Court’s (TSJ) alleged
“dissolving” of the opposition-held National Assembly
(AN), the “cancel[ation]” of the recall referendum, the
postponing of “municipal and regional elections that
should have occurred in 2016”, and the TSJ’s blocking of
the AN’s legislative activity in 2016.</p>
<p>There are of course a number of serious problems with
this account.</p>
<p>To begin, several elements of this narrative are
misleadingly presented, if not all-together factually
inaccurate.</p>
<p>First of all, as Venezuelanalysis <a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/13018">reported</a> at
the time, the TSJ’s March 29 decisions did not
“dissolve” the Venezuelan National Assembly as was
almost uniformly reported in the mainstream press.
Rather, the rulings sought to temporarily <a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/13013">authorize</a> the
judiciary to take on pertinent legislative functions,
which in this particular case meant approving a pressing
joint venture agreement between Venezuelan state oil
company PDVSA and its Russian counterpart, Rosneft,
which was critical for the former’s solvency. The ruling
– which was based on article 336.7 of the Venezuelan
constitution – provoked a <a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/13014">rift</a> within
Chavismo, with the current and former attorney generals
lining up on opposite sides of the constitutional
divide. One can certainly criticize the <a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/13019">since-reversed</a> decision
on constitutional and political grounds, but to present
it as a “dissolution” of the parliament is just
disingenuous.</p>
<p>This brings us to the question of the Supreme Court’s
blocking of the opposition-majority legislature in 2016.
It is undeniable that the TSJ did in fact strike down
three of the four laws the AN managed to approve last
year. However, it takes two to tango and Hetland
severely understates the opposition’s own role in this
protracted institutional standoff. It’s important to
note that the AN did not “act beyond its authority” only
“in some cases”, as Hetland describes.</p>
<p>From quite literally the moment that the new AN was
sworn-in in January 2016, the body explicitly declared
war on the Bolivarian institutional order crafted by
Chavismo, with AN head Henry Ramos Allup promising to
oust Maduro “<a
href="http://www.telesurtv.net/news/Ramos-Allup-asegura-que-sacara-a-Maduro-en-seis-meses-20160105-0039.html">within
six months</a>” – a blatantly unconstitutional threat
against a sitting president. A sampling of the
legislation pursued by the National Assembly in 2016
includes a law to <a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/11965">privatize
Venezuela’s public housing program</a>, a law to <a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/11870">return
expropriated lands and enterprises to their former
owners</a>, a law forcing the executive to <a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/12038">accept
humanitarian aid</a> into the country, the infamous <a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/11887">Amnesty
Law</a>, as well as a <a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/11948">constitutional
amendment</a> retroactively shortening the
presidential term by two years. We can add to this list
the opposition’s <a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/12737">attempted
parliamentary coup</a>, in which it declared that
Maduro had “abandoned his post” first in <a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/12744">October</a> and
again this past <a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/12912">January</a> – which
Hetland likewise neglects to acknowledge. Nor does he
mention the reason for the legislature’s current “null”
status, namely the opposition’s refusal to unseat three
of its lawmakers from Amazonas state currently under
investigation for alleged vote-buying in flagrant
violation of the high court. Again, one may still
criticize the TSJ’s blockage of the AN, but to
understate the parliament’s systematic efforts to
overthrow the Bolivarian government by any means
necessary is quite misleading.</p>
<p>Hetland similarly omits the opposition’s <a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/12875">own
role</a> in the suspension of the recall referendum
(RR) process. As we noted, the opposition-held
parliament came into office with the objective of
overthrowing Maduro “within six months” – a goal
evidently incompatible with the RR, which takes a
minimum of eight months. Indeed, the RR was just one of
the strategies in the opposition’s <a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/11880">four-pronged
plan</a> to oust Maduro unveiled in March 2016, which
also included the aforementioned constitutional
amendment, a constituent assembly to rewrite the
constitution (which the opposition <a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/13111">now
opposes</a>), and heating up the streets to force
Maduro’s resignation. As a result of the opposition’s
own internecine divisions, it <a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/11999">delayed</a> in
beginning the RR and made serious procedural errors,
such as collecting 53,658 fraudulent signatures, which
gave the government a pretext to indefinitely <a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/12736">stall</a> the
process in the courts. There is no doubt that the Maduro
administration dragged its feet on the RR process
knowing full well it would likely lose, but this was
hardly the one-sided drama presented by Hetland.</p>
<p>Lastly, the National Electoral Council (CNE) did in
fact <a href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/12727">postpone</a> the
regional elections scheduled for last year, citing
logistical conflicts with the RR process, a move which
is indefensible on constitutional and political grounds.
However, it’s worth noting that there is a precedent for
such a delay: the <a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/1278">local
elections</a> slated for December 2004 were similarly
postponed until August 2005 on account of the recall
referendum against then President Chávez the year
before. Hetland passes over this important detail in his
rush to indict Venezuela’s democratic credentials.</p>
<p>Moreover, while it’s perfectly legitimate to criticize
the Bolivarian government for delaying the governors’
races, municipal elections are a different story. Local
elections are scheduled for 2017, meaning that they can
be held any time before the close of the year. In
suggesting that the government has postponed local
elections, Hetland commits yet another factual error
that serves to inflate his largely ideological case for
the Maduro administration’s “creeping authoritarianism”,
as we shall see below.</p>
<p><strong>Fetishizing liberal democracy</strong></p>
<p>Beyond these factual errors and misrepresentations, the
main problem with Hetland’s piece is his implicit notion
of “authoritarianism”, which he at no point takes the
time to actually define.</p>
<p>Without going extensively into the genealogy of this
term, it’s key to remember that authoritarianism is
hardly a politically neutral concept.</p>
<p>As Hetland correctly observes, the charge of
authoritarianism was dubiously leveled against the
Chávez administration and other “pink tide” governments
who were excoriated by Western commentators and
political scientists for daring to challenge the
hegemony of (neo)liberal capitalist representative
democracy.</p>
<p>Indeed throughout the last decade, political scientists
led by former Mexican foreign minister <a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/6361?page=2&favtitle=The%2520Rightward%2520Drift%2520of%2520a%2520Latin%2520American%2520Social%2520Democrat">Jorge
Casteñeda</a> have distinguished between a “good”
reformist, liberal left epitomized by Brazil’s Lula Da
Silva that is willing to play ball with the Washington
and transnational capital and a “bad” radical, populist
left embodied by Hugo Chávez, which has opened up the
liberal representative floodgates to direct mass
participation in democratic governance.</p>
<p>As Sara Motta <a
href="https://www.academia.edu/31559252/Latin_America_as_political_sciences_other">underlines</a>,
this binary is deeply colonial in nature: the “mature”
and Westernized</p>
<p>“good-left” has learned from the alleged failures of
revolutionary Marxism and embraced incremental reform,
while the “bad-left” remains mired in the clientelism
and tribal authoritarianism of the “pre-modern” past,
rendering it hostile to liberal democracy.</p>
<p>This “good-left”/“bad-left” dichotomy is of course
nothing new, amounting to a minor aesthetic rehashing of
the “revolutionary”/“democratic” distinction applied to
the Latin American left in the wake of the Cuban
Revolution, which in turn is founded on the classic
“civilization” versus “barbarism” divide.</p>
<p>Hetland, in lieu of questioning the liberal ideological
criterion behind this colonial binary, preserves the
distinction, announcing that the Maduro government has
passed over into the dark realm of authoritarianism:</p>
<p>By cancelling the recall referendum, suspending
elections, and inhibiting opposition politicians from
standing for office, the Venezuelan government is
systematically blocking the ability of the Venezuelan
people to express themselves through electoral means. It
is hard to see what to call this other than creeping
authoritarianism.</p>
<p>In other words, “authoritarianism” for Hetland seems to
amount to the quashing of proceduralist liberal
democratic norms, including most notably separation of
powers, threatening the political rights of the
country’s right-wing opposition.</p>
<p>What we get from this formalist approach is a sort of <a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/12924">Freedom
House-style checklist</a> in which the pluses and
minuses of global South regimes (freedom of speech,
press, etc.) are statically weighed and definitive moral
judgement concerning “democratic quality” are handed
down. Venezuela is still not yet a “full-scale
authoritarian regime,” Hetland tells us, “given the
opposition’s significant access to traditional and
social media and substantial ability to engage in
anti-government protest.” In this point, Hetland’s
conclusion is virtually indistinguishable from that of
mainstream Latin American studies, which has long
invented convoluted monikers such as “<a
href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/23326927.pdf">participatory
competitive authoritarianism</a>” to characterize the
Bolivarian government.</p>
<p>The trouble with this perspective is that it ends up
reifying these so-called authoritarian practices,
casting them as the cause – together with the
opposition’s regime change efforts – of Venezuela’s
current crisis rather than a symptom of the underlying
correlation of forces.</p>
<p>The Maduro administration’s alleged steamrolling of
certain liberal democratic norms – particularly the
postponement of regional elections – is undoubtedly
quite concerning, precisely because it evidences the
catastrophic impasse in the Bolivarian revolutionary
process.</p>
<p>We at Venezuelanalysis have long been critical of the
Bolivarian government’s top-down institutional power
plays to contain the opposition’s efforts to oust
Maduro, which we view as a conservative attempt to
maintain the status quo in lieu of actually mobilizing
the masses of people from below to break the current
deadlock and resolve the crisis on revolutionary terms.</p>
<p>In this vein, we have critiqued those tendencies within
the Venezuelan state which we see as consolidating the
power of corrupt reformist “Boli-bourgeois” class <a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/12861">fractions
in the bureaucracy</a> and armed forces, including <a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/12080">direct
military control</a> over imports, the de-facto
liberalization of prices, reduced social spending
coupled with <a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/12120">draconian
debt servicing</a>, the <a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/12122">Orinoco
Mining Arc</a>, a dubious but <a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/13086">since-modified</a> party
registration <a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/12929">process</a>,
and a <a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/11489">conservative
turn</a> in anti-crime policy.</p>
<p>Yet Hetland is strangely silent regarding these
reformist retreats and regressions over the past four
years, which for all intents and purposes are far more
serious than many of the above “authoritarian” abuses he
describes.</p>
<p>It is precisely here that the charge of
“authoritarianism” betrays its liberal ideological bias:
by prioritizing the procedural violations affecting the
bourgeois right-wing opposition, Hetland renders
invisible the underlying dynamics of class warfare
brutally impacting the popular classes.</p>
<p>Therefore, contra Hetland, the problem is not that
liberal democratic norms have been undercut per se, but
rather that the revolutionary construction of
alternative institutions of radical grassroots democracy
– the “communal state” in Chávez’s terms – has come up
against decisive structural <a
href="http://www.alainet.org/es/articulo/184922">roadblocks</a>.</p>
<p>Here we must be unequivocal: liberal democracy is not
absolute nor universal, and its relation to
revolutionary processes is always mediated by context.
To impose these norms on the Cuban Revolution, for
instance, in its context of genocidal imperial siege is
the height of absurdity and political irresponsibility.
Given these circumstances, Cuba’s model of revolutionary
democracy – despite all its faults and limitations – is
no less legitimate than other democratic socialist
projects that have made strategic use of elements of
liberal democracy, such as Chile and Nicaragua in the
70s and 80s or Venezuela and Bolivia today.</p>
<p>The Bolivarian process is, however, fundamentally
different, as it is premised on an electoral road to
socialism in which the existing bourgeois democratic
order is approached as a strategic space of
counter-hegemonic struggle. In this context, the
suspension of certain liberal rights such as elections
or specific opposition freedoms would only be acceptable
under exceptional circumstances in which the Bolivarian
government were actually taking revolutionary measures
to resolve the current crisis and commanded unquestioned
legitimacy among its social bases.</p>
<p>Despite the undeniable spiral of political and economic
violence driven by the opposition, Venezuela is
unfortunately not going through an equivalent of a
“special period” insofar as the leadership of the party
and state has thus far failed to go on the offensive
against endemic corruption and take the fight to the
local and transnational capitalist enemy as was the case
during crucial revolutionary turning points in Russia,
China, and Cuba.</p>
<p>Given this reality, the message coming from some
sectors of Chavismo that there can be no elections under
conditions of warfare – a legitimate argument in other
contexts including Nazi-besieged Britain – is
questionable at best. Nonetheless, this counterfactual
is useful insofar as it demonstrates that liberal
democracy is a wholly inadequate yardstick for
evaluating revolutionary processes, confounding far more
than it clarifies, as in the case of Hetland’s critique
of “authoritarianism” in Venezuela.</p>
<p><strong>Throw them all out?</strong></p>
<p>In this diagnosis of causes of the current crisis, our
position coincides with that of the vast majority of
Venezuelan left-wing movements whose chief grievance is
hardly the litany of “authoritarian” practices against
the right-wing opposition enumerated by Hetland, but, on
the contrary, the reformist and at times outright
counter-revolutionary policies being pursued by the
Maduro government.</p>
<p>The same is true for Venezuela’s popular classes – the
social base of Chavismo – who don’t particularly care
that the Supreme Court has blocked the National Assembly
and the president has been ruling by emergency economic
decree since February 2016. According to independent
pollster Hinterlaces, around <a
href="http://www.eluniversal.com/noticias/politica/hinterlaces-poblacion-evalua-negativamente-gestion_646518">70
percent</a> of Venezuelans negatively evaluate the
opposition-controlled parliament, while <a
href="http://hinterlaces.com/61-no-confia-en-que-la-oposicion-resolveria-actuales-problemas-economicos/">61
percent</a> have little faith that a future opposition
government will address the country’s deep economic
problems. Rather, the majority of Venezuelans want the
Maduro administration to <a
href="http://hinterlaces.com/61-no-confia-en-que-la-oposicion-resolveria-actuales-problemas-economicos/">remain
in power and resolve the current economic crisis</a>.
Their discontent flows not from Maduro’s use of
emergency powers – contrary to the international media
narrative – but rather from his failure to use them to
take decisive actions to deepen the revolution in lieu
of granting further concessions to capital.</p>
<p>Despite the setbacks, retreats, and betrayals that have
characterized the past four years since the death of
Chávez, the mood among the Venezuelan masses is not a
uniform rejection of Venezuela’s entire political
establishment as Hetland suggests in a sweeping
generalization:</p>
<p>If any slogan captures the <a
href="http://venezuelablog.tumblr.com/post/160047747376/protests-and-lootings-in-venezuelas-popular">current
mood</a> of the popular classes living in Venezuela’s
barrios and villages it is likely this: Que se vayan
todos. Throw them all out.</p>
<p>While Chavismo has undoubtedly bled significant support
over the past five years and the ranks of independents,
or ni-nis, has swollen to <a
href="http://hinterlaces.com/monitor-pais-44-no-simpatiza-con-ningun-partido-politico/">over
40 percent of the population </a>, the PSUV remarkably
remains the country’s most popular party, actually <a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/12866">increasing</a> its
support from 27 to 35 percent since January. Similarly,
Maduro still has the approval of approximately <a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/13053">24
percent</a> of Venezuelans, making him more popular
than the presidents of Brazil, Mexico, and Chile – a
fact consistently suppressed by international corporate
media. These poll numbers are nothing short of
incredible in view of the severity of the current
economic crisis ravaging the country, speaking to the
partial efficacy of some of the government’s measures
such as the <a
href="http://hinterlaces.com/53-se-ha-beneficiado-con-los-clap-en-2017/">CLAPs</a> as
well as the opposition’s utter failure to present any
alternative program.</p>
<p>Likewise, despite growing disillusionment with the
government and <a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/13033">hints</a> at
a possible rupture, the fact is that the overwhelming
majority of Venezuela’s social movements and left-wing
political parties continue to back Maduro.</p>
<p>What’s more is that this left unity in support of the
Bolivarian government has only hardened in the face of
the ongoing opposition onslaught and in anticipation of
the National Constituent Assembly to be held in the
coming months.</p>
<p>However baffling on the surface, this staunch defense
of the Maduro administration actually makes perfect
sense for at least two reasons.</p>
<p>First, as any Chavista who has lived through the last
six weeks of right-wing terror can attest to, the choice
between the continuity of Chavismo in power and an
opposition regime is not a matter of mere ideological
preference – it’s a question of survival, as there is no
predicting the extent of the political and structural
violence the opposition would unleash if they manage to
take Miraflores. This is in no way to deny or downplay
the fallout of the current economic crisis, for which
the government bears a great deal of responsibility, but
there is no doubt that an opposition government would
take this economic war on the poor to new levels of
neoliberal savagery.</p>
<p>Second, the existence of the Bolivarian government
embodies the lingering possibility of transforming the
inherited bourgeois petro-state as part of the
transition to 21st Century socialism. While there is
cause for skepticism about the real possibilities of
pushing forward the democratization and decolonization
of the Venezuelan state in this conjuncture, there has
been an <a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/13123">outpouring</a> of
grassroots support for the National Constituent Assembly
which could serve as a vehicle to retake the
revolutionary offensive and institutionalize <a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/13125">radical
demands from below</a>.</p>
<p>This broad-based consensus of critical support for the
government on the part of Venezuela’s left stands
sharply at odds with Hetland’s “plague on both your
houses approach”, which, in Steve Ellner’s <a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/13126">terms</a>,
ends up “placing opposition and Chavista leaders in the
same sack” as equally undesirable alternatives.</p>
<p>While there is indeed tremendous anger and frustration
with the government – which may in fact translate to a
crushing electoral defeat for Chavismo in the next
elections – the prevailing sentiment among much of
Venezuela’s popular classes in the face of the
opposition’s present reign of terror remains “no
volverán” (they shall not return).</p>
<p><strong>The role of solidarity</strong></p>
<p>All of this brings us to the position of international
solidarity activists with respect to Venezuela.</p>
<p>We wholeheartedly agree with Hetland that it is the
duty of each and every self-respecting leftist and
progressive to “reject any and all calls for imperialist
interventions aimed at ‘saving’ Venezuela”.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, while anti-interventionism is urgently
necessary, this begs the question, with whom are we
supposed to be in solidarity?</p>
<p>Hetland calls on us to stand with “the majority of
Venezuelans who are suffering at the hands of a
vengeful, reckless opposition, and an incompetent,
unaccountable government.”</p>
<p>The end result of such a “plague on both your houses”
approach is a refusal to take a side in this struggle –
in a word, neutrality. This posture flows naturally from
Hetland’s liberal framework of authoritarianism, which
necessarily posits the Western intellectual as a
disembodied arbiter – occupying the Cartesian standpoint
of the “eye of God” in Enrique Dussel’s terms – uniquely
capable of objectively weighing the democratic virtues
and deficits of Third World regimes.</p>
<p>In contrast, we at Venezuelanalysis stand
unconditionally with Venezuela’s Bolivarian-socialist
movement, which at this conjuncture continues to
critically support the Maduro administration.</p>
<p>We take this stance not out of a willful blindness to
the Bolivarian government’s many faults and betrayals,
but because we (and particularly our writers on the
ground) know that for a great many Chavistas the choice
between radicalizing the revolution and right-wing
restoration is, quite literally, a matter of life and
death.</p>
<p>* <em>A version of this article was submitted to NACLA,
but no initial response was received. The editor
elected to go ahead and publish at <a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/venezuelanalysis.com">venezuelanalysis.com</a>
in the interest of a timely response. UPDATE: NACLA
did ultimately respond to our submission on the
afternoon of May 19, but by that time, the article was
already published. </em></p>
<p><em>** Written by Lucas Koerner on behalf of
Venezuelanalysis’ writing and multimedia staff as well
as VA founder Greg Wilpert.</em> </p>
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