Venezuela’s Bolivarian Democracy: Participation, Politics, and Culture Under Chávez ed. by David Smilde, Daniel Hellinger (review)

The Latin Americanist, Septemeber 2013 government uses of human rights discourse and disengagement from how local human rights organizations have understood and mobilized human rights discourse. While Sheinin’s text should not be anyone’s first read on or introduction to the last military dictatorship in Argentina, the work certainly charts new academic territory that forces the reader to reconsider how we understand dictatorship, democracy and human rights. With this, Consent of the Damned leaves the reader unsettled by its provocative demonstration that human rights discourse can be mobilized by governments to sufficiently excuse, obfuscate, and consequently continue their perpetration of human rights abuses. Yet what Sheinin believes this means for the future potential of human rights discourse, whether it still holds any utility for political mobilizations against atrocities, remains a mystery. Katherine Jensen Sociology Department The University of Texas at Austin VENEZUELA’S BOLIVARIAN DEMOCRACY: PARTICIPATION, POLITICS, AND CULTURE UNDER CHÁVEZ. By David Smilde and Daniel Hellinger (eds.). Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011. 381 pp. Smilde and Hellinger’s anthology Venezuela’s Bolivarian Democracy is nearly as polarized as the country’s current political scene. The work is dedicated to “all Venezuelans working to create participatory democracy,” but if liberal democracy and participatory democracy are positioned opposite each other, the contributors gravitate toward both these poles. The editors and Julia Buxton’s foreword question liberal democracy and sympathize with the Bolivarian contribution to the current trend toward participatory or “protagonistic” democracy in Latin America. At the opposite pole, several authors rely on the values embodied in liberal democracy to assess the success of participatory democracy in Venezuela. Ranged between these two poles is a widely varying group of studies that attempt to measure the effectiveness and inclusivity of Bolivarian democracy and the level of participation that has been achieved so far. The collection succeeds in replacing exhausted debates on Chávez’s personal style, along with his supposed “authoritarian tendencies” and aspirations to follow Castro’s path, with empirical research on how the current political system is experienced by, or directed by, the people who are living through the “Chávez era.” This is especially true of Daniel Hellinger’s two chapters. “Defying the Iron Law of Oligarchy,” presents surprising findings that people in some of the most Chavista barrios still value aspects of representative democracy. The second makes a fascinating analysis of comments, many critical of the government, made on the (Chavista) web site Aporrea. Taken as a whole, these authors consult a 108 Book Reviews broad slice of Venezuelan society – in surveys, interviews and statistical measures – in regard to political participation and agency (protagonismo) in community media, popular organizing in the barrios prior to Chávez, the misiones, racial politics, women writers, and even the popular reception of a political telenovela. A striking omission is any study interrogating indigenous groups or the peasantry. In this work Venezuela is still Caracas . Another – more glaring? – omission is any study of the Bolivarian programs for women and how they are experienced by women of the barrios . The single chapter targeting women’s experience explicitly focuses on poets of the upper and upper-middle classes and their opposition to the current administration. No study employing gender as a category of analysis is included. Nor is there any discussion of the lives of gay men and lesbians, whether and how their lives might have changed. Smilde’s invaluable introduction promises that the unifying theme will be a focus on “phenomena outside of the central institutions of the state”(p.2), and this promise is fulfilled. The work maintains a clear focus on how the new system is being experienced by the Venezuelans themselves, “the achievements, dilemmas, opportunities, and conflicts of Venezuela’s Bolivarian democracy.” (p.26) In his brief outline of twentiethcentury Venezuelan political history, Smilde blames the earlier trumpeting of the democratic political stability of the Punto Fijo period (1958-’98) for obscuring the extent of the exclusion of the majority from the political process. Buxton refers to this period as an “illiberal” democracy. (xiii) The exclusion of the majority and their increasing awareness of and level of discontent with their place outside the halls of power is...