Having escaped the harsh experience of military rule during the 1970s and 1980s, Venezuela did not undergo the political demobilization and abandonment of social democratic policies that occurred in most of Latin America over the same period. As a consequence, Venezuela appeared in many ways to be unprepared for the neoliberal policies promoted by the United States as part of the “Washington Consensus.” Authoritarian regimes throughout the continent sought to restructure the principal dimensions of social life and adapt them to the new exigencies of the global economy. Policies of deregulation, liberalization, privatization, reduction of the state’s social activity and the limitation of social rights, which could only be partially implemented in the U.S. and Europe, were imposed with few constraints in Latin America, in some cases after all resistance had been crushed through repression. Chile represents the most extensive and painfully “successful” experiment of this type. The Popular Unity government was overthrown, the multifarious popular movement was routed, power relations among diverse social groups were radically altered, and a fundamental change occurred in the political culture. More than one decade after democracy was restored in 1989, the political system still functions within the limits of the Constitution imposed by the dictatorship. The democratic transitions and processes of state reform and decentralization carried out in most Latin American countries were implemented only after military regimes had modified the economic model of state intervention, which had existed previously. The new civilian governments did not alter basic policies that had excluded vast sectors of the population and promoted concentration of power and wealth. It is thus hardly surprising that to this day democracy generates little enthusiasm throughout most of the continent, that political parties are in crisis, and that the population in general expects little from elections. Throughout Latin America, more vitality can be found in movements such as the Zapatistas in Mexico, and “Sin Tierra” in Brazil, and novel forms of struggle, such as the cortes de ruta (interrupting traffic routes) in Argentina and the indigenous/popular mobilizations that paralyzed Ecuador in 2000 and Bolivia in 2000 and 2002 (CLACSO, 2000). Before the 2002 elections in Brazil, Bolivia and Ecuador, only in Venezuela under the government of Hugo Chávez that came to power in 1998 had electoral politics played an important role in resisting neoliberalism. After the transitions to democracy throughout Latin America in the 1980s, Venezuela’s political institutions no longer seemed unusual, only their longevity. Nevertheless, the Venezuelan political process was still did not appear in sync with the rest of the continent. The Venezuelan armed forces became restive just as the military returned to the barracks elsewhere in the continent. Already in 1982 (when Hugo Chávez began organizing within the armed forces) the military unrest that would shake the Punto Fijo democracy was taking form. The election of Chávez in December 1998 brought to power a leader determined to oppose neoliberalism at home and global concentration of power abroad. Unlike the case of the Southern Cone and most other parts of Latin America, Venezuelan electoral politics had not been tamed by terror and transition. Even though two attempted coup d’etats, popular explosions, and declarations of radical populist content initiated Chavismo, from 1998 onward the movement remained within democratic institutional limits, with seven national elections carried out over the course of two years (Parker, 2001). Chávez aroused suspicion among most other leaders, but he also produced hope among popular movements in the hemisphere. With Cuba excluded from participation in hemispheric and multilateral meetings, and given the fact that he came to power through competitive elections, Hugo Chávez has arguably been the most effective national leader espousing resistance to the Washington Consensus. This paper explores three main issues. In the first place, it presents several general hypotheses on the global geopolitical and economic context within which the Venezuelan political system has operated over the last decades. The second refers to some of the particular conditions, which help explain the relative stability and success of the first decades of Venezuelan democracy after 1958 and which gave rise to notions of “Venezuelan exceptionalism.” The third refers to the conditions leading to the breakdown of this experience and basis of the extraordinary popular resistance that has confronted the attempts to impose neoliberal adjustment policies in the country over last two decades, leading to the election of Hugo Chávez as President in 1998. The Global Context During the postwar period, especially in the 1960s, significant changes in the global arena fostered a relative redistribution of power in favor of underprivileged sectors. The bipolar nature of the Cold War permitted a degree of freedom favorable to national liberation movements, which triumphed in many parts of the world. With regard to the distribution of power, the world became somewhat more democratic. In Western Europe, the social welfare state became firmly established and was accompanied by democratization throughout the continent. In Latin America, the “oligarchic” regimes entered into crisis, and popular struggles -frequently through some form of populism- achieved levels of participation and social incorporation greater than previously known, with the exception of the Mexican Revolution. Reductions in the enormous gaps in the distribution of wealth and income accompanied this political change (Cornia, 1999). In Western Europe, inequality declined during the 1950s, 1960s, and throughout most of the 1970s. Low levels of unemployment and the accelerated expansion of social security helped reduce inequality. In the United States, the concentration of wealth, measured in terms of the proportion of wealth in the hands of the richest one percent of the population, reached its postwar peek of 37 percent in 1965, but after that began to decline, with the wealthiest one percent accounting for 22 percent of assets in 1976 (Wolff, 1995). In Latin America income distribution improved in the 1960s and 1970s, until the 1982 foreign debt crisis. Between 1970 and 1982, the ratio of the average income of the wealthiest 20 percent to the poorest 20 percent of the population decreased from 23 to one in 1970, to 18 to one in 1982 (UNDP, 1999: 39). Although no major change in income distribution occurred in Venezuela during this period, the material conditions of the majority of the population steadily improved, largely as a consequence of oil rent. Increased oil revenue reflected the increased power of Third World oil-exporting nations vis-à-vis the companies and consuming countries after the founding of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in 1960. At the beginning of the 1970s the rate of profit for large corporations fell, much as Marx would have predicted, as a consequence of their more limited access to resources, workers, and markets in many parts of the world. The nationalist policies of the Third World, in the context of a bipolar world, the strengthening of organized labor, increased taxes and state regulation, put the brakes on the private sector’s expansive capacity. Global corporate executives felt threatened not only by communism and reduced profits, but by democracy itself, which seemed to pose risks to liberal, industrialized societies. The Trilateral Commission diagnosed this crisis as one of “governability”, i.e., an excess of democracy that needed to be contained (Crozier et al, 1973). Conservatives advocated an extraordinary offensive at all levels: military, political, technological, and economic. The governments of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher spearheaded this global counterrevolution (Quijano, 1996), initiating aggressive military policies against “rebel” governments and popular movements throughout the world. The foreign debt, as manipulated by Washington, has been a central political weapon in this global strategy. The Bretton Woods multilateral financial institutions broadened their functions at the same time that they imposed severe controls on countries that proved incapable of paying their debt and appeared to be in serious financial straits. The concentration of power and decision-making capacity by transnational corporations and their governments negatively affected the majority of the world population. This consolidation reflected itself in further steps in the establishment of a global liberal legal order and in new, extremely powerful super-national institutions, such as the World Trade Organization (Wallach and Sforza, 1999). Of particular consequence for Venezuela has been the International Energy Association (IEA), founded in response to OPEC’s success in raising oil prices. The IEA eulogized the oil policies designed by Margaret Thatcher for the North Sea that eliminated oil royalties and established a sliding scale for taxes, two key elements later embodied in Venezuela’s “Oil Opening” (Mommer, 2003). Multinational companies sought to restore the rate of profit through corporate mergers and through technological and organizational transformations designed to diminish labor costs and strengthen management’s capacity to impose its will on workers. To meet these objectives corporations accelerated automation, introduced new communication technologies, implemented labor “flexibility,” fractionalized and relocated different phases of the productive process, and increased capital mobility -- all aspects of globalization. Both the processes of state deregulation and changes in labor legislation throughout the world increased the power of the owners of capital and limited that of the workers (MacEwan, 1999: 59). This successful corporate strategy for the recuperation of earnings rates required the establishment of firm barriers to protect capitalist enterprises from alleged “excesses” of democratic politics- i.e. regulation, taxes and other public policies that would restrict the economic liberty defended by neoliberal ideology. All available statistics indicate that a notable decrease in equality, both among and within most countries, has accompanied this concentration of power and capital over the past two or three decades (Cornia, 1999, 2000). The relationship between the average income of the fifth of the world population living in the wealthiest countries and the fifth of the population living in the poorest countries went from 30 to one in 1960, to 74 to one in 1997 (UNDP, 1999). According to a study of 124 countries representing 94 percent of the world population, the income share of the wealthiest 20 percent of countries increased from 69 percent in 1965 to 83 percent in 1990 (UNCTAD, 1997). In Venezuela these patterns became evident after the collapse of oil prices and devaluation of currency in 1983. The ratio of income (from salary) of the top tenth percentile to that of the lowest tenth percentile went from 12.5 to one in 1984 to 23.9 to one in 1991 (Lander, 1996b:65). In keeping with world trends, the rate of impoverishment in Venezuela persisted throughout the 1990s, along with the outbreak of popular protests. Since 1990, fifty-five countries, the majority of sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe, and the Community of Independent States, have experienced declining per capita incomes (UNDP, 1999). The increase in inequality of the “transitional” countries of Eastern Europe and the Confederation of Independent States (CIS) has been the greatest ever known historically (UNDP, 1999). Inequality grew significantly in China, Indonesia, Thailand, and other countries of South East Asia that in past decades had achieved rapid growth and at the same time improved income distribution and reduced poverty (UNDP, 1999). Average family consumption in Africa at the end of the 1990s was 20 percent less than 25 years earlier (UNDP, 1999). In addition, in most OECD countries income inequality increased after 1980, most notoriously in the United Kingdom, the United States and Sweden (UNDP, 1999). Throughout Latin America, structural adjustment policies implemented by authoritarian and non-authoritarian regimes alike exacerbated inequalities (Berry, 1997). The foreign debt gave creditors and multilateral financial organizations immense power over the governments of debtor countries. Democratic political processes became progressively emptier; the “recommendations” of the multilateral organizations came to be more important than the will of the voters, public opinion, or parliamentary decisions. In these conditions, the states of the periphery and semi-periphery countries came to operate more like “a kind of subcontractor or franchise holder” (Sousa Santos, 1999: 33) and less like democratic representatives of national sovereignty. According to neoliberal discourse, the restoration of democracy combined with economic growth would improve the living conditions of the millions of excluded people of the continent. Given the unchanged relations of power in the continent, this is not a realistic expectation. Even where there has been sustained growth and where poverty-reducing policies have had some success as in the case of Chile, the distribution of income has not been altered. Economic growth is now less progressively distributed than it was in the past (Morley, 2000; Janvry and Sadoulet, 1995: 15). At the end of the 1990s, only Uruguay showed an improvement in poverty levels as well as in equity in comparison to the situation at the beginning of the 1980s. In democratic Argentina, the income difference between the wealthiest 10 percent and the poorest 10 percent of the population increased from a factor of 15 to 24 between the years 1991 and 1997 (Gambina, 1999). In all Latin America, unemployment at the end of the 1990s was higher than during the crisis of the 1980s (Weller, 2000: 48), and there appeared a general tendency toward more precarious and heterogeneous jobs. Labor law “reforms” diminished job protection and workers’ negotiating power. The ILO has calculated that for each ten new jobs created in the 1990s, eight are low quality positions in the informal sector (Ocampo, 1998). Job security has been reduced, and there has been an increase in temporary jobs not protected by collective bargaining agreements (CEPAL, 2000, 98-99). At the same time, fewer workers are covered by some system of social security or employment insurance (CEPAL, 2000: 101). Venezuela has not escaped these tendencies, specifically the loss of traditional legal benefits (Ellner, 2003). Faced with these results, it is hardly surprising that electoral democracy had until recently inspired little interest in most of the region. Electoral promises have rarely coincided with public policy; resistance has largely taken extra-parliamentary form. The Decomposition of the Punto Fijo Regime in Venezuela Despite significant inequality, during the first years of the democratic regime installed in 1958, and especially during the period of greatest expansion of petroleum rent (1973-1978), the standard of living in Venezuela improved. Social indicators reflecting education levels, health standards, life expectancy, access to housing and public services, infant mortality, and employment (including levels of informal employment) all registered significant improvement. Public sector employment and an important expansion of access to education at all levels, particularly university education, led to substantial social mobility. During part of this period, there was some improvement in income distribution (Rodríguez, n/d). After the defeat of the armed insurgency in the 1960s, Venezuela assumed the role of a showcase democracy, an experience widely considered to be successful, institutionalized, stable, and legitimate. Historical patterns of growth and increase in oil prices were projected into the long-term future. The upper and middle classes, did not see their ever increasing levels of consumption and cosmopolitan cultural orientations as threatened by popular demands since state income continued to rise. Expanded education, health and public works expenditure did not depend on taxing private wealth. Popular sectors of Venezuelan society, especially the new urban majority of the population, expected continued patterns of upward social mobility. A “modern” integrated society appeared possible in a not too distant future. A political culture of “national harmony” and its corresponding multi-class political party organizations achieved hegemony. A self-image of an inclusive, equalitarian and racially democratic society became dominant. Optimism prevailed. The thesis of Venezuelan exceptionalism took firm hold. Toward the end of the 1970s these tendencies began to rapidly reverse themselves. A significant decline in per capita oil income and per capita income (Rodríguez, n/d) anticipated the foreign debt crisis and devaluation in 1983. The financial crisis occurred later than those in most Latin American countries, but the political impact proved more profound since expectations of sustained growth and improved living conditions had sunk deep roots in the Venezuelan mode of thinking. In addition, the economic crisis became more prolonged, with deterioration in the living conditions of a majority of the population lasting more than two decades. Per capita income in 1997 was 8 percent less than in 1970; workers’ income during this period was reduced approximately in half. Furthermore, there occurred a marked deterioration in income distribution. Capital’s share of income derived from production increased by approximately 15 percentage points, implying a substantial increase in its power relative to labor (Rodríguez, n/d). According to one estimate, total poverty in the country nearly doubled between 1984 and 1991, from 36 percent of the population to 68 percent (Martel, 1993). The impact of these changing conditions on Venezuelan political culture became profound. A Divided Society An increasingly divided society took shape in Venezuela. Historical and more recent forms of social divisions and exclusions, which had been forgotten in dominant political discourse and political culture, became increasingly difficult to ignore. As elsewhere in Latin America, social segregation was most visible in urban areas. A sensation of insecurity became generalized throughout the population, constituting “an emerging culture of violence… very distinct from the culture of tolerance and peace that dominated Venezuelan society in the past” (Briceño León, et. al, 1997: 213). Along with unemployment, personal safety topped the problems perceived as most serious by the population. Between 1986 and 1996 the number of homicides per 10,000 inhabitants jumped from 13.4 to 56, an increase of 418 percent, with most of the victims being young males (San Juan, 1997: 232-233). A countless number of streets in the middle and upper class neighborhoods were closed and privatized; increasingly, bars and electric fences surrounded houses and buildings in these areas. The threat represented by the “dangerous class” came to occupy a central place in the media -frequently with racist overtones- with demands that drastic measures be taken, including the death penalty or direct execution by the police force. These processes of exclusion, segregation and fragmentation led to socioeconomic decay -especially in the cities- and to the decomposition of the traditional mechanisms and forms of socialization and social integration, particularly the family, school and work. At the same time new models of alternative socialization emerged to address the challenge of surviving extremely adverse conditions (Pedrazzini and Sánchez, 1994). The benefits of economic growth in the country (health, education, housing, well-compensated employment, social mobility) once assumed by the popular sectors to be a real possibility for a better future, now appeared inaccessible. Poverty and exclusion ceased to be seen as temporary phenomena in a “developing” or “modernizing” society, or as conditions that could possibly be overcome through individual effort. These crises-like conditions increasingly became permanent features of society. We are dealing here not with the exclusion of a minority categorized as “marginal” in relation to society as a whole, but with the living conditions and cultural reproduction of the great majority of the population. The result was the development of what Ivez Pedrazzini and Magaly Sánchez (1994) have called the “culture of urgency.” They describe a practical culture of action, in which the informal economy, illegality, illegitimacy, violence and mistrust toward the official society are common. Alejandro Moreno (1995) characterizes this other cultural universe as the popular life world that is other, different from western modernity, organized on a matriarchal family structure, with other conceptions of time, work and community, and a relational (community oriented) rationality distinct from the abstract rationality of the dominant society. This cultural context is scarcely compatible with the model of citizenship associated with liberal democracies of the West. The declining legitimacy of the political system, evident since the early 1980s, prompted the elite to reform a presidential and centralized state that was increasingly ineffective, corrupt and incapable of responding to the demands of a more diverse and complex society. Politicians from across the political spectrum embraced the goals of modernization and democratization (with the latter understood principally as decentralization). The Presidential Commission for the Reform of the State (COPRE) prioritized this goal after its founding in 1984. Thus, while society became increasingly fragmented, the idea of carrying out institutional changes to make the Venezuelan political system more decentralized, more democratic, and more participatory dominated political debate. In a society increasingly characterized by social apartheid in the form of severe economic exclusion, cultural breeches, and differentiated individual and collective identities, institutional political reforms could only make a partial and limited contribution to the achievement of a nationally integrated political system. From a juridical and institutional point of view, new mechanisms of incorporation and participation proved necessary. These reforms included steps to decentralize the state as well as direct elections of mayors and governors. These modifications promoted the emergence of diverse regional and local leaderships and brought fresh air to the political system (López Maya and Lander, 1996: 174). However, the economic and cultural processes of exclusion proved much more potent than the democratizing impact of these political reforms. Thus we encounter the apparent paradox of an increasingly divided society with an elite political debate centered on institutional democratization. However, since this elite debate did not appear willing to deal with the structural and cultural determinants of exclusion and political illegitimacy, what had seemed as deeply rooted ideas about democracy and society had to be questioned. Social-democratic and Christian democratic ideals, which for decades were located at different points on the political spectrum, by the 1990s became infused with new meanings derived from neoliberal and neo-conservative ideological frameworks. An anti-political and anti-party discourse was reflected in the media, establishing a Manichean opposition between the state (characterized as corrupt, inefficient, and clientelist) and a mythical civil society (which includes the media), understood as a synthesis of all virtue: creativity, initiative, efficacy, honesty and participation. The paradigmatic new subject of this “democracy of citizens” that would replace the “democracy of parties” was the neighbor-citizen, conceived on the basis of the experience of middle and upper-class urban neighborhood organizations (Lander, 1996a: 55-56). The central concern of these organizations has been defense of property and protection from threats by the excluded sectors of the population. The normative horizon for this conservative idea of democracy is an apolitical society, free of ideological debates, where the principal concerns of government have to do with the effectiveness and honesty of the administration, one in which participation and democratic decision-making about the collective good is tightly restricted to local arenas. The economy must be vigorously protected from “demagogic and irresponsible” demands formulated in the name of democracy. All social and redistributive policies by the state fall under suspicion as populist. The social and political organizations (parties and unions) that in previous decades served as the principal channels of expression for popular demands not only were in crisis, but tended to be treated in the new political discourse as illegitimate. For this model of citizenship the paradigmatic image is the middle and upper-middle class neighborhood, with its professional expertise, access to the media, personal political relations, and use of the Internet as an organizational instrument. With growing de-legitimization of all redistributive public policies and most social policy, the country’s underprivileged sectors had little space for the articulation and expression of their interests. This political model could be called, paraphrasing Bonfil Batalla (1989), Venezuela imaginaria, which was disconnected from the Venezuela profounda -- that is the everyday life of the majority of the population. This deep fissure in Venezuelan society was most sharply expressed in the social explosion of February 1989 known as El Caracazo. In the principal cities of the country, massive looting occurred on a scale previously unknown in Venezuelan history. Large-scale military repression produced a toll of hundreds of deaths, perhaps more. The rioting constituted a symbolic breaking point in the legitimacy of the democratic regime associated with the Pact of Punto Fijo initiated in 1958. (López Maya and Gómez Calcaño, 1989). The absence of popular opposition to the coup attempts of February 1992 and November 1992 confirmed the decomposition and growing illegitimacy of a political system long considered a showcase for Latin America. The Caracazo coincided with the imposition of strict conditions by the multilateral lending organizations, similar to those forced upon most other countries of the continent. Faced with a severe crisis of international reserves, fiscal as well as trade and balance of payment deficits, and an external debt that under these conditions could not be paid, the government of Carlos Andrés Pérez (1989-1993) signed a Letter of Intention with the International Monetary Fund. Pérez made a commitment to carry out an orthodox policy of structural adjustment, despite having appealed for votes in his campaign by presenting images of abundance from his first government. These agreements were not submitted to parliamentary consultation and were made public only after being signed (Lander 1996b: 52-53). The significance of these structural adjustment policies cannot be understood apart from global trends in capitalism. Concurrent with a massive transfer of resources toward financial capital, and measures involving a commercial opening, privatization, and deregulation, the range of national decisions that could be taken through democratic procedures was severely limited (Lander, 1996b: 66-68). During the three years of the implementation of the structural adjustment policies, regressive distribution of wealth and income, and the levels of poverty all took a qualitative leap (Lander, 1996b: 63-66; Valecillos, 1992: 205). Without a doubt, the transformations in the petroleum arena are the most significant. As a result of the nation’s growing crisis after 1983, the state gradually lost control over the petroleum sector (Mommer, 2003). The state company, Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), began to impose its own agenda, departing from its role as a public enterprise and increasingly becoming a transnational corporation adhering to the liberalizing agenda of multilateral economic institutions, including the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. PDVSA succeeded in reorienting public policies with respect to this activity in the following ways: (a) opening the petroleum sector to direct foreign investment, severely limiting possibilities for the participation of national private capital; (b) substituting the policy of defending prices for one oriented toward capturing markets by offering increasing quantities of crude oil at lower prices; (c) disregarding Venezuela’s OPEC commitment on production quotas, and making a sustained effort to have the country withdraw from this organization or make it irrelevant; (d) introducing, despite its evident unconstitutionality, provisions for international arbitration in the contracts signed with foreign investors; (e) substituting the system of special compensations required from private enterprises for the exploitation of non-renewable resources for a liberal regime with tax rates similar to those of any other economic activity (Mommer 1999: 70-98). All this translated into a significant reduction in the state’s capacity to regulate petroleum activity and reduction in its share of petroleum earnings. These polices of structural adjustment demonstrates that Venezuela’s political system like its counterparts elsewhere in the continent, found the range of possible autonomous decisions subject to limits imposed by international economic and political forces. This predicament has endowed Chávez’s slogan of popular and national autonomy with special significance. Perhaps here lies the explanation for his immense popular support and for the strong resistance that he and his government have generated from elite sectors. Reclaiming Sovereignty: The People and the Nation President Chávez’s discourse links the concepts of people (“pueblo”) and nation. The principal leitmotiv of his political project has been the “pueblo,” characterized at different moments as young, vigorous, hard-working, noble, creative, conscientious, worthy, revolutionary, Bolivarian and sovereign. According to Chávez, the leaders of the elites and the oligarchy have betrayed the people over the last 40 years. For this reason the “Bolivarian revolution,” a “peaceful and democratic” revolution through which the people will recover their dignity and become cognizant of their power, is declared to be necessary. Only in this way will a highly disintegrated nation be able to reunite:

Mere representative democracy in Latin America has failed. If dictatorships do not work for us … neither do representative democracies that end up converting themselves into dictatorships based not on a tyrant, but on a cabal that governs in a dictatorial manner in the name of democracy. In order to overcome this, it is necessary to promote -- and in Venezuela we are doing just this -- a democracy that ceases being representative, although it preserves levels of representation, but is one that promotes participation, and that moves toward [popular] decision-making. This process will take years, but we have already begun it. A democracy with a popular essence (Chávez, 2000e).

In his speeches and televised talks, Chávez has characterized the contemporary world as unjustly “unipolar” and inequitable (2000a). He has also vehemently condemned neoliberalism.

“I believe that in this part of the world, neo-liberalism is the path to hell. I do not believe in the thesis of the “invisible hand” of the market that fixes everything. I prefer to call it the hairy hand of the market that messes things up” (Chávez, 2000e).

On another occasion he asserted,

“Savage capitalism wants us [the state] to disappear from the scene. No. We have the right to exist. We have the right to establish our own mechanisms of regulation and to encourage, above all, Venezuelan production” (Chávez, 2000b).

In broad terms, his discourse on foreign policy has pointed to a search for an “autonomous” and “independent” insertion into world politics, one that would permit the defense of “national interests.” Chávez has pursued “Venezuela’s self-determination and development of national sovereignty in diverse arenas: territorial, economic, cultural, military, nutritional, and energy-related” (Movimiento V República, 2000). He repeatedly calls for a “multipolar,” more just and more egalitarian world. He assumes that the country cannot achieve any of these objectives in isolation, but only through a process of alliances with other nations which share these goals. In particular, he has privileged policies designed to enhance national autonomy and the negotiating capacity of the South: Latin-American integration, closer cooperation with OPEC partners, and economic and political relations with countries such as Russia, India and China. For the medium-term future, Chávez has stressed the need to strengthen the Andean Community of Nations. Even more important has been his insistence on establishing strong links with MERCOSUR, which led to the acceptance of Venezuela as an associated member of the trade block in July 2004. Nevertheless, for Chávez “although economic integration is a necessary component, it will never be sufficient.” Latin American political and military integration is also seen as necessary for the creation of a geopolitical bloc to underpin sovereignty for the people of the entire continent (Chávez, 2000e). This discourse on national sovereignty and the rejection of the global neoliberal order of capitalism does not, however, imply breaking off relations either with the United States, transnational capital or multilateral economic institutions. Time and again, Chávez asserts the importance of cordial relations with the United States and guarantees that Venezuela will continue to be a reliable supplier of oil for that country. Despite categorizing the foreign debt as a “criminal matter” (Chávez, 1999a) and demanding its renegotiation, his government has affirmed its intention of paying the entirety of its inherited commitments. One of the principal goals of President Chávez’s foreign trips has been to engage with members of the international business community and invite them to invest in the country and to pledge respect for international accords and legal guarantees for investments. Among the multiple issues that have created tensions between the Venezuelan and the US government (Plan Colombia, OPEC, diplomatic and economic relations with “axis of evil” countries, role of the US government in the April 2001 coup, etc.) the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) is likely to become one of the issues leading to acute confrontations with the United States government. As negotiations have advanced, and popular opposition throughout the continent has increased, the Venezuelan position has become more and more critical of the treaty. In the Third Summit of the Americas held in Quebec in April 2001, for the first time the final statement was not approved unanimously among the heads of state of the 34 represented countries. Venezuela reserved its position both in relation to the FTAA negotiating schedule and in the definition of democracy exclusively as “representative democracy.” Further criticisms of the FTAA negotiating process were formulated in the Quito Ministerial Meeting of November 2002, which demanded transparency in the thus far secretive character of the negotiations, and pointed out that the Venezuelan Constitution (Article 73) requires the holding of a national referendum before such an important policy decision can be assumed by the country (Rosales Linares, 2002). A global critique of FTAA was presented at the FTAA Trade Negotiations Committee meeting held in Puebla in April 2003. Whether these developments will stimulate alliances with potential critics of the FTAA in CARICOM and the governments of Brazil and Argentina remains to be seen. Final Commentaries The political phenomenon represented by Chávez cannot be understood apart from the basic split -both material and cultural- between elites and popular sectors within Venezuelan society, a distance that widened during recent governments. The neoliberal policies of the 1990s accentuated exclusion and inequality in the nation. The expectations generated during the first years of the democratic regime initiated in 1958 were increasingly frustrated, and initial advances toward a more democratic society suffered severe reverses. The key word in Chávez’s speeches, to which he returns again and again in the most diverse contexts, is pueblo (people), which is a synthesizing term taking in the popular and the national. He often uses the concept “el soberano” (sovereign) synonymously with “el pueblo.” This reiterated appeal to the popular and the national (in which he defends sovereignty by invoking the founding myths of the nation) generates contrasting interpretations and reactions among different sectors of Venezuelan society. For the upper-middle and upper classes and a large proportion of the country’s intellectuals, the recurrent appeal to sovereignty is a source of division and social animosities, instigating a separation between rich and poor that threatens democratic stability as well as their own personal security and property. Their consumption patterns, value orientations, and enjoyment of the “modern” and global good life resemble more closely those prevailing in the core countries. Not surprisingly, they agree with Washington’s characterization of Chávez’s nationalism as an anachronism in a globalizing world, a return to unfeasible and historically obsolete Third-World postures. The popular sectors to a large degree interpret this discourse in opposite terms. In this second, popular reading, the divisions within Venezuelan society, and with it the exclusion of the majority, are not simply a product of Chavista discourse. On the contrary, Chavismo’s recognition of the wide breach between rich and poor and its appeals to the majority (el pueblo, el soberano), has a powerful integrating effect. Even though the material conditions of the majority of the population have not improved as a result of the Chávez government, and in some cases have even deteriorated, Chávez continues to be popular among non-privileged sectors because his symbolically integrative discourse cultivates an extraordinary sense of belonging. The appeal to the national (and to the founding leaders of the nation), far from being perceived as anachronistic, contribute to a powerful sense of identity. There has been however much more that what has been disqualified as a “merely” symbolic integrating effect. For a large number of the underprivileged, new historical levels of participation and organization have been achieved. And, perhaps more significant is the diffuse process of cultural decolonization that appears to be taking place in this part of the population. The extensive mobilizing and organizing experiences, as well as the significant cultural and political transformations involving the excluded majority of the population, are by far the most significant changes in Venezuelan society over the last four years. It is beyond the goals of this text to analyze the degree of consistency of Chávez’s discourse, the relationship between his discourse and the principal forces favoring political change and government policy, or the viability of his proposals given the global geopolitical context within which Venezuela finds itself. However, some ideas can be advanced. For many reasons, after four years most of the popular material expectations in relation to Chavez´s government have not been fulfilled. Only since mid 2003 with the massive social programs know as the misiones (literacy, expanded educational access at all levels, land reform, substantial social and community health programs, employment and the promotion of cooperatives) has this begun to change. On the government’s side, its major failures can be attributed to the lack of an organized political party as well as that of a coherent, practical and viable political and economic project for the country. Equally lacking has been a sustained political effort of coalition building directed at expanding the government’s base of support toward the middle class and some sectors of the business community. This has gone hand in hand with an inexperienced -and sometimes corrupt- handling of a weak and severely inefficient state apparatus. In many areas of government, improvisation has prevailed. The downturn in the world economy has not helped. Chavez’s radical, confrontational discourse, while effective in terms of rallying popular support, has contributed to the creation of a profound distrust in the business community and upper and middle classes. Since the end of 2001, this rhetoric has been systematically characterized by the Venezuelan media and wide sectors of the opposition as an authoritarian Castro-communist threat to both liberty and property. Even though the new constitution defines an ample role for private enterprise and guarantees private property, and the word “socialism” is totally absent from Chavez’s discourse, significant proportions of these sectors have taken the threats seriously. As a consequence there has also been an extraordinary level of organization and mass mobilization in the upper and middle classes. A very intensive media and internet crusade has contributed to the creation of high levels of anxiety and even paranoia about the eminent threats posed by Chavista mobs (turbas, hordas) that are allegedly poised to assault their neighborhoods and ransack their houses. The long-held dream of a society in which the upper and middle classes could continue their journey towards global citizenship and First-World abundance, while preserving the allegiance of the excluded as a guarantee of the legitimacy and stability of their rule, has come to an end. The myth of true social integration and genuine citizenship without significant alterations in the societal distribution of power has become untenable, and thus the bases of the so-called Venezuelan exceptionalism have been terminally eroded. The country’s celebrated racial and social democracy, as expressed in the informal and familiar social intercourse among different sectors of society turned out to be a very superficial veneer. Social exclusion and derogatory expressions based on class and race, which seldom appeared beyond private conversations and jokes, have now achieved the status of a legitimate public, political discourse, as the excluded sectors mobilize and refuse to assume their place in the social hierarchy. Another myth, that of a country with a left-of-center and center political culture without significant conservative or right wing political tendencies is also rapidly vanishing. It is in the context of this extreme political polarization and mutual distrust that ample sectors of the opposition have attempted to overthrow the government by any means at their disposal. Thus many of the so-called democratic sectors of the opposition have repeatedly made public statements demanding that the armed forces step in to oust Chávez. They were not successful in overthrowing the government, but violence, political polarization and instability has increased. To conclude, two things are worth emphasizing about the current Venezuelan political process. One is that Chávez and his government have given renewed urgency to certain essential matters that cannot be avoided in any strategy for change or in debates over the challenges of constructing more democratic societies in the continent. Issues such as national sovereignty, autonomous development, equality, social integration, as well and the need for modes of participatory democracy in order to transcend the limitations of representative democracy have been highlighted. In the process, Chávez has earned the mistrust of influential groups throughout the continent. Perhaps what most concerns the United States government, in particular, is that Chávez has awakened interest among popular sectors in Latin America and shown that elections can, under the right circumstances, be used to challenge the Washington Consensus. 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