Chavism
- Latam Sin Filtro
- Dec 6, 2024
- 4 min read
Updated: Mar 2
DefiniTION
The chavism is a political ideology in Venezuela that has a socialist and Bolivarian[1] orientation. The term refers to the former Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez (1999-2013). Today, chavism is represented by the current president Nicolas Maduro. Chavism is associated with many ideologies such as anti-Americanism, Bolivarianism, Latin American integration, anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, left-wing populism...
Chavism is born from the ideologies of the Venezuelan military and later president Hugo Chavez Frias. It is a militarist but also socialist ideology aiming at transforming society with the creation of a new, humanist and socialist citizen. Socialism as an alternative to the “destructive and savage system of capitalism” is at the core of chavism. Christianity also plays a central role.
The “Tree of Three Roots” is a key concept of chavism. Chavez considers that his ideology is based on 3 linchpins:
The Bolivarian root reflects Simón Bolívar's approach to equality and freedom and his geopolitical vision of the Latin American region.
The Ezequiel Zamora root, “the general of the sovereign people and of the civic-military unity”.
The Simón Rodríguez root, Simón Bolívar's own teacher, “the sage of education”
To these three central roots, Chavez added others for Francisco de Miranda and Antonio Jose de Sucre and later mentioned Jose Marti, Leon Trotski, Che Guevara and Fidel Castro.
During his presidency, Hugo Chavez nationalized the economy, implemented social programs, made oil the only source of wealth, militarized the public administration in an army-people relationship he calls “the civic-military union”.
Like most populisms, chavism is based on the idea that the people, oppressed by corrupt elites, play a fundamental role in the history of the country. Chavistas' interpretation of Venezuelan history became the bequest, the inheritance of the popular class. The chavism implies a popular politicization and a will to restore the Venezuelan national identity and protect it.
When it comes to foreign policy, chavism defends the construction of a united Latin America, inspired by Simon Bolivar's own project. Furthermore, chavism is an anti-imperialist current of thought, which defends the existence of a multipolar international order against U.S. hegemony.
Chavism has been contested several times. A study of protest actions in Venezuela carried out by the NGO Provea and Espacio civil registered more than 19,000 protests between October 1999 and September 2010 (street closures, rallies, marches, strikes, takeovers of establishments among others).
Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías and the rise of chavism
Since 1958, the parties Acción Democrática (social democrat) and Comité de Organización Político Electoral Independiente, known as Copei (social Christian) have been sharing the executive power through an alternation, causing a political misrepresentation.
Hugo Chávez appears in the political scene in the mid-1990s. His ideology was born from two very different environments: the army and the leftist intellectuals. On the one hand, at the age of 17, in 1971, he joined the Venezuelan Military Academy in Caracas and later occupied several positions in the National Armed Forces, and on the other hand, he spent time with leftist intellectuals and became interested in the workers and peasants’ movements.
In the 1980s, after years of dictatorship, democracies in Latin America are fragile and encounter serious economic obstacles: it is the lost decade. Many states implemented neoliberal policies imposed by multilateral organizations such as the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank, led by the United States and Western powers, in exchange for financing to face their colossal debts.
In 1989, the price of oil fell, impacting the financial resources of the Venezuelan State and inflation increased despite the devaluations of the bolivar. The State found itself in a serious situation of indebtedness. If President Carlos Andres Perez had denounced the practices of the IMF during his presidential campaign, he ended up asking for a loan from the organization, which implied radical adjustment policies known as the Economic Package or the Great Turnaround. That same year the Caracazo occurred, a series of violent protests that lasted 9 days in response to the increase in the price of gasoline and the cost of urban transportation.
Three years later, on the night of February 3 to 4, 1992, Chavez carried out a coup against the Perez government. It was a military failure but a true political success. Chavez appeared as the only alternative to the dominance of the two parties AD and Copei in the political scene. After the failure of the coup, Chávez spent 2 years in jail. There, he prepared his electoral campaign to be carried out from 1995 to 1997 and his ideology took another direction.
At the beginning, Chavez was very much inspired by Trotskyist[1] ideology, but after the coup attempt, he has been inspired by the theory of cultural hegemony[2]. He advocates an interpretation of Venezuelan history in which the prowess of Simon Bolivar and his project of Great Colombia were outraged by the Republic of Venezuela (1953-1999) which returned power to the corrupt Creoles.
With this, he won the 1998 presidential elections and decided to amend the Constitution to correct the “mistakes of the past”. On December 20, 1999, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela is proclaimed. In 2006, Chavez wins again the elections and works to establish the “New Socialism of the XXI Century”. Six years later, he is again elected President of Venezuela but dies the following year of cancer. Since then, Nicolas Maduro, his successor, has been leading the country through one of the worst social, political and economic crises in Venezuela's history.
[1] Bolivarianism is a current of thought that takes its name from Simón Bolívar, a Venezuelan military man who led independence movements in several Latin American nations. It is a form of Hispano-American patriotism and U.S. anti-imperialism.
[2] Trotskyism is a political current of Marxism developed by Leon Trotsky. Trotsky advocated measures such as the rotation of positions in the single communist party of the Soviet Union to end bureaucratism.
[3] Cultural hegemony is a concept developed by Antonio Gramsci. He believes that the current cultural norms of a society are imposed by the ruling class, the rules are the product of social construction with which to build a new workers' culture to carry out the workers' revolution of Marxist philosophy.
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