Deepening Democracy in Post-Neoliberal Bolivia and Venezuela

Advances and Setbacks

John Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000546156
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique mondiale

This book provides a timely and nuanced analysis of the successes and shortcoming of efforts to move beyond market democracy in Bolivia and Venezuela.

A twin crisis of democratic representation and socio-economic precarity created space for anti-system outsiders to emerge on the left flank of traditional party-systems in Bolivia and Venezuela, paving the way for a "post-neoliberal" democratization process. Over the course of the projects headed by Evo Morales in Bolivia and Hugo Chávez and his successor Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, however, power struggles emerged between a recalcitrant elite, the left-led government, and organized popular sectors. These tensions shaped the pathways that processes followed, with simultaneous democratization and de-democratization occurring whereby a partial deepening and extending of democratic quality for popular sectors was accompanied by the bending of liberal norms. Comparing the varying balance and forms of power between competing actors, this book offers a novel and rich explanation of the partial and stuttering efforts to advance a post-neoliberal democracy in Bolivia and Venezuela.

Bringing important insights on the reasons for the emergence of anti-system leaders and parties, the impact that they have on the quality of democracy, and how progressive governments interact with social movements, this book will be of interest to researchers studying Latin America, as well as those specializing in development and political science more broadly.

1 Re-conceptualizing democratization in progressive-outsider cases

DOI: 10.4324/9781003262466-2

Chapter overview

The elections of progressive outsiders Evo Morales in Bolivia and Hugo Chávez in Venezuela represented a point of inflection in both countries that opened post-neoliberal (de)democratization processes. Both were elected on mandates to challenge the confines of market democracy and foster a more inclusionary citizenship regime for long—excluded popular sectors in both political and socio-economic terms. The projects had mixed results in terms of their impacts on democratic quality with simultaneous democratization and de-democratization occurring. In Venezuela, the quality of popular sector political and socio-economic incorporation was initially radically boosted, a new left-wing party was forged, while at the same time the use of executive powers increased. Over time, tensions between the ruling left-party and critical sectors of the base emerged. However, such critique was generally side-lined. The process moved in an authoritarian direction as election results were ignored, state forces were used to repress both opposition supporters and former popular sector allies, while the ruling left-party entrenched itself in power with the backing of the military. However, despite such authoritarian behavior, the left-wing party formed during the process retains support from a significant sector of the popular base and has a strong organizational capacity relative to all other parties in the country. However, as the party leadership has also sanctioned repressive measures against contestatory sectors of the popular base, has been implicated in massive corruption scandals while the economy has collapsed, and has flagrantly broken with all liberal standards including respect for electoral outcomes, it remains to be seen to what extent the party’s organizational structure will survive if and when the party lose/are forced from office.

Like the Venezuelan case, in Bolivia, a new left-wing party was established and the quality of political and socio-economic incorporation for popular sectors was initially boosted. Presidential powers also expanded. Tensions between the left-party and sectors of the popular base emerged, while other sectors retained direct access to the executive and decision-making channels. There were top-down efforts to curb grassroots critique of the left party and the president, with schisms promoted in some popular organizations. Efforts to change the constitution to allow the president to run for office again triggered protests from both middle classes and some popular sector organizations. With the president forced from office, popular sectors demonstrated massive electoral support for the candidate of the left-wing party established at the outset of the process, indicating a progressive long-term, institutionalized shift in the party system.

To shed light on the paradoxical processes and to help us understand the similarities and divergences between the cases, this chapter develops a novel conceptualization and framework for evaluating progressive outsider-led democratization processes. As argued earlier, while some critics describe the projects as illiberal, authoritarian processes that simply damaged the quality of democracy, such accounts capture only part of the empirical realities. There is a failure to locate the processes in wider empirical contexts that account for popular conceptualizations of democracy and citizenship. As Foweraker¹ stresses, any comparisons or discussions of democratic performance can only be meaningful if they are placed in their proper political context. Variations in performance “necessarily flow from the constraints imposed on democratic government by oligarchic powers and prerogatives.”² Moreover, while oligarchic powers influence how left-governments govern, left-leaders have also been squeezed from below by popular forces demanding a move toward a post-neoliberal, participative-substantive model of democracy. As such, any effort to understand the pathways and outcomes of the left-led processes must eschew simple causal analysis and account for the ways that multiple actors with multiple sources of power seek to advance their prerogatives while hindering those of opponents.

In the following section, I discuss data collection techniques used to support the analysis of the two cases. Then, the outcomes of interest of this study—namely the impacts on democratic quality and the legacies of outsider-led processes—are conceptualized and instrumentalized. Next, a framework that calls for analysis of historical and emergent causes that shaped the direction and outcomes of the processes is developed. The final section of the chapter outlines research design.

Data collection: bringing popular voices back in

To support my case studies, I carried out research in the field in Venezuela in 2016 and in Bolivia in 2017. In 2019, 2020, and 2021, I carried out electronic interviews to support earlier data collection. I conducted over 80 in-depth interviews with members of urban popular organizations and union leaders. Interviews were semi-structured with open-ended questions allowing respondents freedom to detail their experiences. These interviews provide the basis for my analysis of popular sector interpretations of the successes and issues of the processes, whether bottom-up critique of processes was fostered or blocked, what happened if and when parties diverged from popular demands, how party-officials sought to meddle in popular organizations, why popular sector organizations engaged in defensive mobilization in support of the party or offensive contestatory mobilization against the party, and what the long-term impacts of the left-led processes on the quality of popular sector incorporation were. These interviews are supported by interviews with party members, journalists, and researchers to tease out why processes advanced as they did.

The reason for focusing data collection on popular sector organizations is simple; these organizations’ members were the most consistently excluded group—both politically and economically—under market democracy and as such it has been these groups who most actively called for a more inclusionary citizenship model. Such popular organization members are the key actors capable of stating whether or not democratic quality has been boosted and to what extent changes have become embedded. Moreover, these popular organizations have played, to varying degrees, central roles in shaping the directions of the processes. They are not simply passive recipients of government handouts, as some crude, ill-informed mainstream analyses suggest. Indeed, examining the varying capacity of popular organizations to influence parties and policymaking should be a core component of any analysis of the outsider-led processes. While historical analysis of the cases is developed by using secondary resources, it would not have been possible to gain nuanced answers to questions regarding the democratization processes without face-to-face interactions with popular actors. Respondents emphasized that they had very rarely been offered the opportunity to voice their opinions on the processes and resented the fact that their experiences were often written about by media and academic sources who had not actually sought the viewpoints of local popular actors.

In Venezuela, primary research focused on two core groups; urban popular organizations that came into existence after the election of Hugo Chávez, and organizations that pre-date Chavez’s election that had a history of organizing around ideas of inclusionary models of democracy. In Bolivia, primary research focused on urban popular groups with long histories of mobilization calling for radical substantive democratization. The analysis centered on groups who retained support for Evo Morales and on groups who initially backed the president but who withdrew support over the course of the process. All four groups, two in Venezuela and two in Bolivia, comprise popular actors who support the building of a post-neoliberal democracy. However, variances in organizational history as well as party-base relationships allow for both cross-case and internal comparisons.

In Venezuela, data collection focused on two sites in the capital city of Caracas, the José Felix Rivas barrio in Petare and the parish of El 23 de Enero. About 88 percent of Venezuelans live in urban environments³ so focusing on the city of Caracas is not unrepresentative of the country in general. José Felix Rivas is located in the popular parish of Petare, in the densely populated municipality of Sucre, eastern Caracas. Petare is a sprawling zone that, in general did not have a strong history of well organized, collective mobilization before the election of Hugo Chávez. However, numerous spaces of popular organization emerged following Chávez’ election. The site is representative of popular urban areas across the country due to its similar indicators for income, employment, education, and housing levels.⁴ The popular zone of 23 de Enero is located in the Libertador municipality in the Capital District of western Caracas. The name 23 de Enero (23 January) references the date in 1958 when the Venezuelan dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez was overthrown. The barrio is seen by residents as the heart of Chavismo. The Hugo Chávez-led coup attempt of 1992 was headquartered in the Cuartel de la Montaña building in 23 de Enero, while this same building now houses the mausoleum to Chávez; 23 de Enero has a long history of popular protest and left-wing guerrilla urban warfare demanding that the state deliver services to the urban poor.

In Bolivia, analysis centered on the popular indigenous city of El Alto. While Evo Morales and his Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) party emerged from a resistance movement of coca producers—the cocaleros—and relocated miners in the Chapare province, and actors and organizations based in this province make up the original core constituency of the MAS, primary data collection does not focus on such actors.⁵ Primary data collection instead focused on the experiences of urban popular organization members in El Alto for several reasons. This book seeks to offer a critical-progressive analysis. That is, rather than simply offering a fawning support of the processes that is blinkered to any shortcomings, while avoiding narrow-minded ideologically guided attacks on the processes that seek to delegitimize any attempt at building an alternative to market democracy, the approach taken here seeks to critically evaluate both the successes and shortcomings of efforts to construct a post-neoliberal democracy. Given the nature of the relationship between the MAS, Morales, and the organic base, it was less likely that primary data collection in the Chapare would have identified such critical evaluations of the post-neoliberal process or that such actors would mobilize against the president and the party. As such, analysis instead focused on the experiences of popular sectors in El Alto, the Ciudad Rebelde (Rebellious City).⁶ To support the interviews with Alteños’ (people from El Alto), I interviewed numerous popular organization members in the capital La Paz, as well as organizers of national-level bodies.

Popular organizations in El Alto were at the heart of anti-neoliberal protests that paved the way for the election of progressive outsider Evo Morales, and these organizations have a long history of calling for a radical deepening of democratic quality. Indeed, attitudes in El Alto are perceived to be a barometer of the sentiment in the country as a whole. By comparing and contrasting the experiences and opinions of Alteños who continued to support the MAS and Morales with those who desisted in doing so, a nuanced understanding of the strategies, successes, failures, and legacies of Bolivia’s post-neoliberal democratization process can be gleaned.

To support my analysis of the processes in both cases, official party documents, popular organization documents, and newspapers were collected and analyzed. I also attended numerous meetings of popular organizations and attended protests. Attending protests and organization meetings and being seen on a regular basis by local actors helped to establish my trustworthiness, while also giving me an opportunity to observe how actors speak to each other in a natural setting. Such occasions also allowed me to engage in more informal conversations helping me to gain a deeper comprehension of realities than would have been possible via formal interviews alone. In both countries, I was taken on tours of the locality, presenting me the opportunity to engage in informal discussions regarding the historical development of the sites. For example, in El Alto, I was brought to the outskirts of the city for lunch with one interviewee’s family before we walked around the neighborhood. This allowed me to witness first-hand the poverty levels in the city and the lack of development in terms of roadways and gas and water connections. While in El 23 de Enero in Venezuela, I met a woman selling cigarettes and newspapers from a kiosk. She brought me to a shrine she had set up for the deceased former president Hugo Chávez, stating that she goes there to thank Chávez every day for the gift of freedom he gave her. Such interactions help to comprehend just how Chávez was and is perceived as a savior and saint by some sectors, which then helps to contextualize responses by popular ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements and Dedications
• Introduction: the crisis of market democracy and the emergence of anti-system outsiders
• 1 Re-conceptualizing democratization in progressive-outsider cases
• 2 Crisis of market democracy and making space for outsider Hugo Chávez: Venezuela in historical context
• 3 Progressive and regressive centralization: the Hugo Chávez years, 1999–2013
• 4 From regressive to authoritarian centralization: Nicolás Maduro, 2013–21
• 5 Crisis of market democracy and making space for outsider Evo Morales: Bolivia in historical context
• 6 Progressive and regressive centralization: the Evo Morales’ years, 2006–14
• 7 Splits in the popular base, the return of the opposition, and the removal of Evo Morales, 2014–21
• 8 Venezuela and Bolivia in comparison: toward a typological theory of outsider-led, post-neoliberal democratization
• Conclusion: oligarchy, populisms, and pathways out of the crisis of democracy
• Index