We Created Chvez

A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE VENEZUELAN REVOLUTION

GEORGE CICCARIELLO-MAHER
Photographs by Jeff St. Andrews

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Durham and London 2013

 2013 Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper . Cover
design by Jennifer Hill; text design by Courtney Leigh Baker.
Typeset in Galliard by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ciccariello-Maher, George.
We created Chvez : a people's history of the Venezuelan Revolution /
George Ciccariello-Maher ; photographs by Jeff St. Andrews.
Pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8223-5439-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8223-5452-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Social movementsVenezuelaHistory. 2. VenezuelaHistoryRevolution, 1958. 3. VenezuelaPolitics and
government. 4. Chvez Fras, Hugo. I. St. Andrews, Jeff. II. Title.
N363.5.C53 2013
303.4840987dc23
2012048666
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7893-8 (electronic)

FOR ABBEY AND OAKLEY FRANCISCO

In memory of Joel Olson

Contents

Acknowledgments
Map of Venezuela
Introduction. What People? Whose History?
One. A Guerrilla History
Two. Reconnecting with the Masses
Three. Birth of the Tupamaros
First Interlude. The Caracazo
History Splits in Two
Four. Sergio's Blood
Student Struggles from the University to the Streets
Five. Manuelita's Boots
Women between Two Movements
Six. Jos Leonardo's Body and the Collapse of Mestizaje
Second Interlude. Every Eleventh Has Its Thirteenth
Seven. Venezuelan Workers
Aristocracy or Revolutionary Class?
Eight. Oligarchs Tremble!
Peasant Struggles at the Margins of the State
Nine. A New Proletariat?
Informal Labor and the Revolutionary Streets
Conclusion. Dual Power against the Magical State
Notes
Index

Acknowledgments

This book, like the revolutionary process it documents, would not be possible without the blind
faith and irrational support of many. My dissertation committeeWendy Brown, Mark Bevir,
Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Kiren Chaudhry, and Pheng Cheahlet me make what must have
seemed like two terrible decisions: to move to Venezuela for no apparent reason and to write a
book while also writing a dissertation. I am grateful for their patience and unflagging support.
Similarly, my editor at Duke University Press, Valerie Millholland, responded to my proposal
with encouragement from day one, despite the fact that it had sprung, only recently and
partially formed at best, onto a restaurant napkin. Gisela Fosado has helped to carry the project
forth as it ascended from the abstract to the concrete. My thanks go out as well to two
anonymous reviewers for Duke University Press, who truly surprised me with their generosity
and helped to improve the manuscript through several drafts.
Many friends and comrades read the manuscript and offered suggestions that proved
decisive for the revised version, including Dan Berger, Lainie Cassel, Fred Fuentes, Kiraz
Janicke, Elliott Liu, Naomi Schiller, and of course Jeff St. Andrews, whose incredible images
grace these pages and who tempted fate with me on many an occasion to take them. Steve
Ellner, Michael Lebowitz, and Gregory Wilpert have proven supportive through the years both
as incisive commentators and as the source of a collective wealth of detailed knowledge of the
Venezuelan process. I also owe thanks to the editors of Counterpunch, Jeffrey St. Clair and the
late Alexander Cock-burn, in whose digital pages many of these ideas and arguments were first
tested. Dante Canoura of Euroamericana de Ediciones was kind enough to allow me to reprint
epigraphs from the lyrics of Al Primera.
My deepest debt of gratitude goes to the subject of this book, the bravo pueblo venezolano,
whose inspirational actions occasionally confound analysis and whose singular multiplicity
makes the task of this bookand especially that of acknowledgmentimpossible to the point
of absurdity. I therefore will simply say thank you to x, to y, and to z for the example that you
provide and the path that you light. Those whom I came to know concretely and often
accidentally taught me the importance of this open-ended acknowledgment, since they were
but few among many millions. Thanks to the fiercely affectionate community of 23 de Enero,
to those I interviewed and those I spoke with less formally, and especially to my students from
the Venezuelan School of Planning. Both in Venezuela and closer to home, I am indebted to
the many inspiring comrades who continue to bring the ruckus and build the new world in our
hearts: you are the air I breathe, and this work would have been impossible without you.
Thank you Abbey and Oakley Francisco for making writing difficult, for promising joy and
love as the perennial temptation that awaits where work ends. This opposition is only apparent,
however, as they infuse these pages. Loving thanks, too, to Oakley's incredible birth parents,
Matt and Missa, who gave us more gift than one, inviting us into their families as they joined
our expanding circle of Abu and Aba, Nonno and Sasa. This circle would not be complete
without our dearest Jeff and Alicia, Oak's guard dogs, whose love we can feel even from a

vast distance and whose new addition we breathlessly await. For their indescribable
contributions to the rebellious joy of my past, present, and future, I dedicate this book to
Abbey and Oakley. I also dedicate it to the memory of Joel Olson, who read and discussed the
manuscript with me but whose presence in this work far exceeds the comments he gave. I may
have changed your mind about Venezuela, but you changed my mind.

Introduction. What People? Whose History?

The people is a poet singing to its own prayer,
although a rosary of sorrow hangs on its chest.
We need to sharpen our aim, our target practice
and although it says ugly words, the people has the right
and it doesn't make me angry, but it's the pure truth:
there is no uglier word than this society.
Al Primera

Who are you? What are you doing here?

When we got to La Piedrita, they already knew we were coming. If not for the phone call they
received from a trusted comrade, then from the video cameras lining the perimeter of this
revolutionary zone that jealously guards its autonomy from all governments, right or left. If
not from the cameras, then from the network of eyes dispersed across the community, always
alert to unknown or unrecognized individuals. And if not from all that, then certainly from the
guard at the top of the rickety stairs that climb from the parking lot of the apartment blocks
into the chaotic jumble of the barrio that lay behind it. He greeted us down the barrel of a
chrome nine-millimeter pistol with stern questions: Who are you? What are you doing here?
If we didn't have good answers for these questions, there might have been a problem. But
indeed, we had an excellent answer: two short words, Valentn Santana.
Just minutes before, my photographer and I had been enjoying the warm June dusk a few
blocks below, near a small park in the Monte Piedad neighborhood of 23 de Enero, a
notoriously revolutionary area of western Caracas perched precariously above Miraflores
Palace, the nominal seat of state power. We were chatting, laughing, drinking beer and
michea surprisingly potent homemade firewater distilled from sugarcanewhile others play
dominos, when a new friend raised the inevitable question of why we were there. We had come
to understand the revolutionary collectives that constitute Venezuelan President Hugo Chvez's
most radical support base, to grasp their political vision and their often tense relationship with
the process of political transformation known as the Bolivarian Revolution. Had we gone to La
Piedrita? No, we hadn't. Our only contact with the collective had been gazing in awe at the
nearby murals surrounding their zone of influence, the most spectacular of which is a massive
image of Jesus holding a Kalashnikov, bearing the message, Christ Supports the Armed
Struggle.
Well then, you must meet Valentn, this new friend insists, and I know immediately just
who it is that he means. Valentn Santana is the historic leader, the iconic figurehead, and the
most publicly recognized member of La Piedrita. After a few frenetic phone calls in which our
proposed visit is repeatedly rebuffed, our persistence pays off and we are cleared to head up to
La Piedrita. We begin the climb upward, past Blocks 5, 6, and 7 of 23 de Enero, after which the
multicolored superblock towers for which the area is famous give way to shorter blocks that
are grouped tightly to form large, enclosed squares that are, from a military perspective, easier

to defend.1
They knew we were coming, and yet they performed surprise, hostility, and militant
discipline. Here, gun pointed at my chest, I can't help but feel like a young Herbert Matthews
in the Cuban Sierra Maestra (in fact, La Piedrita adjoins the Sierra Maestra sector of 23 de
Enero). Matthews, so the story mistakenly goes, was duped by Cuban guerrilla commander
Fidel Castro, who in 1957 allegedly marched a small number of troops in circles past the New
York Times journalist to exaggerate the strength of his forces. Although this description of
events has since been discredited, Matthews name became synonymous with journalistic
navet.2 This lesson notwithstanding, the power of guerrilla theater has not waned, with
revolutionary movementsfrom the Sandinistas to the Zapatistas and beyondincreasingly
fighting their battles in the media and the reactionary forces arrayed against them doing the
same. But as I sit here witnessing a similar display, it dawns on me that there is little
disconnect between image and actuality, that managing appearances is the performative
equivalent to managing reality. La Piedrita's show of force itself requires the same sort of
autonomous local control that it seeks to perform: the image is the reality, and the reality is
one of radical autonomy from the state. This autonomy is not limited to the revolutionary
context of contemporary Venezuela; La Piedrita has been fighting for more than 25 years.
Like many of the collectives dotting the revolutionary landscape of western Caracas, La
Piedrita emerged as a spontaneous community response to the scourge of narcotrafficking, as
young revolutionariesimbued with the history and ideology of struggles pastconfronted
both the drug trade and the violently corrupt state that facilitated it (see chapter 3). The
collective's beginnings were modest, with a single member (Santana himself) devoted to what
he calls trabajo de hormiga, ant work: publishing a small community newsletter that
interwove references to Che Guevara with recipes and birthday wishes.3 This same spirit of
humility was reflected in their chosen name, which refers to a pebble, little more than a mild
nuisance. But La Piedrita would soon be something more than a nuisance to malandros
(delinquents) and police alike, stamping out the drug trade entirely and effectively forcing the
police out of their community. Today, La Piedrita's autonomous status is best expressed by the
large, hand-painted sign that greets all visitors: Here La Piedrita gives the orders and the
government obeys. This is no exaggeration: the Chvez government once sent a captain of the
military reserves into the zone, who was immediately taken into custody by the collective.
When the official protested, explaining that he was merely there to scope out a possible escape
route for the president in the event of a repeat of the 2002 coup, the response from La Piedrita
was unambiguous: the government does not tell us anything, it must ask.
As I await Santana's arrival for my interview, the air in this corner of 23 de Enero is thick
with tension. After a pipe bomb exploded prematurely while being placed outside the offices of
the radically anti-Chavista chamber of commerce, Fedecmaras, on February 24, 2008,
government forces determined that a militant who was accidentally killed called this area
home.4 Although Fedecmaras is widely loathed among Chavistas for participating in the
short-lived 2002 coup in which Chvez was briefly replaced with the organization's then-head
Pedro Carmona Estanga (see Second Interlude), planting pipe bombs was beyond the pale. For
the first time in years, ever since these local militias had reached a sort of dtente with the
central state, police entered the area, searching homes for suspects associated with the selfstyled Venceremos Guerrilla Front, whose name appeared on flyers found at the scene. For

many, including Valentn Santana and La Piedrita, this unwelcome incursion was an open
attack on their tradition of local autonomy, and they responded by making that autonomy
perfectly clear: on April 3, a multitude of local collectives including La Piedrita engaged in an
armed blockade of 23 de Enero, appearing publicly in ski masks and armed to the teeth to
shut down the community with burning tires and barricades as a sharp warning to the
government. Chvez issued a stern rebuke on his television program Al Presidente, insisting
that these people don't look like revolutionaries to me, they look like terrorists; he even
suggested that they had become infiltrated tools of the CIA.5
I am struck by the soft-spokenness of this militant organizer, who, with his light skin and
army-green cap, looks more like an Irish Republican Army member than the bearded guerrillas
more commonly associated with Latin America. Now, sitting on a crumbling wall across from
us, Santana scoffs at the suggestion that La Piedrita might be even inadvertently serving the
interests of the imperial enemy. Instead he catalogs the collective's achievements: after the
drug trade and the violence associated with it were stamped out, they turned to eliminating
even private drug abuse and alcoholism and now were poised to confront domestic violence.
Alongside the elimination of such scourges, the collective had long promoted alternatives,
including cultural and sporting activities aimed at reinvigorating a sense of revolutionary
community among local youth. In this struggle on two frontsagainst threats to the
community and toward the regeneration of its cultural fabricSantana has given more than
most. In 2006, his own young son Diego was killed alongside Warner Lpez, another young
member of La Piedrita (according to Santana, they were killed by members of another radical
armed organization, Jos Pinto's Tupamaro party).
Later that same month, we were invited to ride along with these revolutionary collectives as
the extreme left of the Chavista bloc made its displeasure clear in a caravan throughout the
entire barrio of Catia, within which 23 de Enero is but a small part, insisting that we are not
terrorists. Nevertheless, despite such militant pleas, tensions would only increase. In the year
that followed, members of La Piedrita declared several opposition leaders military targets,
they attacked the opposition's television station Globovisin and other such targets with tear
gas as punishment for crimes past and present, and Santana even publicly threatened the life
of Marcel Granier, the head of the other major opposition television network, RCTV.6 In
response, Chvez again declared them terrorists and issued an arrest warrant for Santana
himself. Noting the difficulty of arresting members of such militant organizations (one
previous effort to arrest Santana had failed), Chvez even insisted that he would go get him
myself and made clear what was at stake, adding, with a feigned ignorance of the group's
history, that, We can't allow La Piedrita such-and-such to become a state of its own. 7 As a
result of such conflicts, it might not be surprising to find critiques of Chvez on the far left:
after all, these revolutionary militants now confront a Venezuelan state that, with its bloated
bureaucracy, sordid corruption, violent police, and chaotic prisons, looks much like the state
that had been killing and torturing them for decades.
In preparation for the caravan of militias, a young woman wandered through the crowd,
offering to paint revolutionary slogans on car windshields. When one angry militant insisted,
only half-seriously, that she adorn his windshield with the phrase Death to Chvez! she
gasped audibly. To fully grasp the relationship between these most revolutionary organizations
and Chvez's government, we must understand not only her astounded gasp but also the angry

outburst that elicited it. In other words, we must attempt to grapple with the fact that the vast
majority of such militantsthose who deeply despise corruption, bureaucracy, and even the
state itself and are more likely to associate that state with torture, murder, and
disappearanceare still Chavistas, at least for the time being.
I probe this peculiar tension during my discussion with Valentn Santana, attempting to wrap
my head around a central element of the political process underway in Venezuela as a whole,
namely, the relationship between the radical autonomy from the state that such collectives
maintain and the unification of revolutionary forces to take and exercise state power under
Chvez's leadership. But such a fundamental tension, which in many ways constitutes the
central theoretical problematic underlying this book as a whole, cannot be explained away
easily. I ask Santana, this figure deemed a terrorist by the president and who that same
president would soon seek to have arrested, what he thinks of Chvez. It is dark and so I cannot
be certain, but his face seems to wear a smirk that suggests he foresees my confusion at the
counterintuitive position he is about to assume: Chvez is our maximum leader, he insists.

The Paradoxes of Power

And so I begin from a seeming paradox: despite La Piedrita's militant autonomy and rejection
of the Venezuelan state, its members nevertheless pledge their loyalty, however temporarily
and contingently, to the man currently sitting atop that state. As should be abundantly clear by
this point, what matters more than anything else for this revolutionary collective and groups
like it is not what happens in the gilded halls of official power. More important than el
presidente is el proceso, the deepening, radicalization, and autonomy of the revolutionary
movements that constitute the base of the Bolivarian Revolution.8 But this is not to say that
all that rests atop this base is mere superstructure, that the realm of official politics is
completely inconsequential, that the state itself does not enjoy a degree of autonomy. Rather,
as La Piedrita's seemingly paradoxical fidelity to Chvez illustrates, there instead exists a
complex and dynamic interplay and mutual determination between the two: movements and
state, the people and Chvez.
By beginning with a paradox, we enter into an interstitial space, one suffering the painful inbetweenness that is to be against (para) the grain of the present (doxa): between the great
leader and no leader at all, between the state and its absence, between paranoid errors of right
and left, with the paradox of paradoxes best expressed in graffiti daubed near El Valle in
southern Caracas reading, Long Live Chvez, Not the Government.9 Paradoxes, however, are
generally intellectual creations, with the definition of doxa reserved for the privileged few.
Like so many apparent paradoxes, therefore, this one too unravels and is to some degree
resolved, in practice, by the work of 27 million tugging hands that strip away its congealed
synchrony, its frozen timelessness. My starting point in this book is, therefore, not the one we
most commonly associate with contemporary Venezuela. It is not the story of an evil and allpowerful, would-be dictator centralizing all power in his own hands, nor is it the tragic account
of a well-meaning populist led astray by the inherent corruption of power. On the contrary, it is
not the story of a Great Leader blazing a shining path and dragging the people, nave and
pliant, in His turbulent wake. It is not, in other words, any of the many stories we hear about
Hugo Chvez Fras, but that is simply because it is not a story about Chvez at all.

Far too often, discussions of contemporary Venezuela revolve around the figure of the
Venezuelan president. Whether from opponents on the conservative right or the anarchist left
or supporters in between, the myopia is the same.10 This is not without reason: since Chvez's
election in 1998 after his imprisonment for a failed 1992 coup attempt, Venezuela has become
a radically different place, and the Bolivarian Revolution that he inaugurated (in name, at
least) has seen power wrested from old elites and unprecedented social improvements and is
poised to transform even the state itself. But although Chvez is indeed importantand I hope
eventually to recover the complexity of his current relationship to revolutionary movements
and collectivesmy point of departure must be a different one. Because often it is only
through the simplicity of inversion that we can arrive at a higher level of subtlety, of
complexity, and of nuance, the practical resolution of this paradox comes in the insistence
from the outset that the Bolivarian Revolution is not about Hugo Chvez. He is not the center,
not the driving force, not the individual revolutionary genius on whom the process as a whole
relies or in whom it finds a quasi-divine inspiration. To paraphrase the great Trinidadian
theorist and historian C. L. R. James: Chvez, like the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint
L'Ouverture, did not make the revolution. It was the revolution that made Chvez.11 Or, as a
Venezuelan organizer told me, Chvez didn't create the movements, we created him.12 By
refusing to center our analysis on the Venezuelan president from the get-go, by resisting the
constant historiographic temptation that James scornfully dismissed as the personification of
social forces, by averting our eyes from the dazzling brilliance of the commanding heights of
political powerwhose light is blinding in more ways than onea whole new world comes
into view.
But in a way, this simple displacement of Chvez's centrality tells us little in and of itself; as
James rightly warned, even that is not the whole truth. Specifically, simply taking the focus
off Chvez does not tell us where that focus should then fall, where our gaze must instead be
directed. If we created him, who is this we? Is it the working class? The peasantry? The
informalized urban lumpenproletariat? If Chvez does not drive the Revolution, if we deny
him that coveted throne, then which historical subject assumes it? Or, is the very concept of a
historical subjecta single bearer of future history, be it an individual or a classfar too
unitary and homogenizing to accurately explain contemporary Venezuelan political dynamics?
More importantly, however, simply refusing to focus on Chvez the man tells us little about
the complexities of the relationship that exists between this as-yet unidentified revolutionary
subject, the transformative process as a whole known as the Bolivarian Revolution, and Chvez
himself (and, more generally, the state apparatus that he inhabits).

What People?
In pressing toward an answer, we could do no better than to follow the lead of a revolutionary
organizer from the barrios of Petare in eastern Caracas, when she asks insistently, Why is
everyone so worried about Chvez? What about the people? Worry about the people. 13 But if
this is a people's history, the term people complicates before it clarifies, raising more
questions than it answers, and I must ask: What people? and, Whose history? Some radical
theorists in the United States and Europe have recently rejected the people as a useful
category for revolutionary change, arguing insteadbased largely on the experience of the

French Revolutionthat the people carries within it conservative, unitary, and

homogenizing tendencies.14 But one need go no further than a dictionary to see that such an
understanding has little relevance to the Spanish-speaking world: the Royal Spanish Academy
offers a series of five definitions of the people, or the pueblo, four of which refer
straightforwardly to the inhabitants of a particular space or territory, but the last of which is
subtly subversive, denoting instead the common and poor members of a populationthe
oppressed.15 The history of Latin American revolutionary and social movements show us this
distinction in practice: more often than not, the people has been taken up as a banner by
precisely those same common and poor while simultaneously being deployed by
governments, populist and nonpopulist alike, in an effort to maintain the status quo.
Thus, this idea of the people in Latin America is an instance of struggle, and although the
phrase people's history was pioneered and popularized in the U.S. context by Howard Zinn, the
contours of such a history in the Latin American and Venezuelan context refers to a far more
specific content. Argentine-Mexican philosopher of liberation Enrique Dussel elaborates upon
this radical potential embedded within the concept of the people, drawing inspiration from
Fidel Castro's 1953 speech History Will Absolve Me, in which Castro adds to the concept of
the people the peculiar modifier si de lucha se trata, if it is a question of struggle. Dussel
insists that the pueblo is not a concept of unity, but one that instead establishes an internal
frontier or fracture within the political community, and stands, as he puts it, in opposition to
the elites, to the oligarchs, to the ruling classes of a political order. 16 For Dussel, the Latin
American pueblo is instead a category of both rupture and struggle, a moment of combat in
which those oppressed within the prevailing political order and those excluded from it
intervene to transform the system, in which a victimized part of the community speaks for and
attempts to radically change the whole. And the external division that the pueblo marks
through its struggle is, according to Dussel, reflected in its internal multiplicity, in which
dialogue and translation between its component movements serve to provide a common
identity in the course of struggle.17
The history corresponding to this people would, therefore, be of a specific kind: rather
than the traditional history that focuses on a progression of political leaders, the sort of
history from above that leads to the exaggeration of Chvez's role, and beyond even a history
of those poor and oppressed constituents of the people, this would instead be a history from
below, one driven by the struggles and the self-activity of the people themselves, a struggle by
the people over what it means to be the people to begin with. To do so, we must think in
specifically (albeit not exclusively) Venezuelan terms, and in Venezuela past and present, the
central reference point of struggles over what the people means has been the country's
national anthem, Gloria al Bravo Pueblo, or Glory to the Brave People. In fact, the anthem
has often constituted the very terrain of those struggles, embodying and crystallizing this
division between those wielding power and its victims: Invoked in official contexts, such as
the state ceremonial occasion and the school salute to the flag, the hymn embalmed the bravo
pueblo in the distant past; to sing it spontaneously in a popular assault on the street was to
resuscitate it as a living critique, not a ratification of authority. 18 Whereas those in power
have used the anthem to signal national unity, those they oppress draw upon its more radical
elementsphrases such as Death to oppression! and Down with chains!to mobilize the
energies necessary for the radical transformation of the political system.19

But our history does not begin as far back as 1810, the year in which Vicente Salias penned
Gloria al Bravo Pueblo. If what interests us is a people's history of the process currently
underway in Venezuela, we must inevitably seek a more concentrated focus on recent history,
grasping those foundational moments that provide the parameters for today's struggles. In what
follows, I begin this history in 1958, the year of the overthrow of Venezuela's last unelected
dictator, Marcos Prez Jimnez, and the year that nominally marks the establishment of
Venezuelan democracy. If it seems strange to begin a history of popular struggle with the
establishment of a representative democratic system, it is because my approach is also a
conscious inversion of traditional fables in which formal democracy is seen as the resultas
the ultimate outcome of those struggles and their unquestioned telos, the final objective of
struggle, and therefore also the moment at which that struggle ceases. Instead, the
establishment of formal democracy in Venezuela marked the beginning of another struggle, a
struggle for both democracy and equality as substantive and not merely formal parameters of
social life.20 It is this longer struggle that continues today; the formal democratic regime that
was established in 1958 and later consolidated in the two-party, power-sharing pact signed at
Punto Fijo (and therefore colloquially known as puntofijismo) was in many ways established as
an attack on the people, as a subversion of the popular will that had ousted the dictator, and as
an effort to prevent the incursion of the people into the halls of official power. This was the
essence of the pacted democracy, and even undemocratic democracy, of which many
critics spoke throughout the years and in which the very force that made the democratic
transition possible needed immediately to be tamed, its energies stifled and channeled.21
For this, Venezuela's ostensible founding father Rmulo Betancourt was both more
responsible and less apologetic than most, and he would take aim directly at the idea of the
people itself. According to Betancourt, the communist-turned-rabid-anticommunist who took
power in 1959 in the first free elections to follow the dictatorship, the people in the abstract
does not exist, and the concept instead represented a weapon, an entelechy which
professional demagogues use in seeking to upset the social order. Instead of the people,
Betancourt could see only a multiplicity of associationsthe political parties, the unions, the
organized economic sectors, professional societies, university groupsthrough which
demands must be channeled.22 Any attempt to unify these demands was seen by Betancourt and
others as inherently dangerous to established power and potentially anarchic: frantically
fearing the forest, he could only tolerate the trees. The irony is that in his open hostility to the
concept of the people, Betancourt was in agreement with his archrival, Fidel Castro: the
radically subversive potential of the pueblo was a mortal danger to men like Betancourt who
sought only to control and channel its energies.
Thus, while Betancourt rode to power on the radical energies unleashed among the popular
masses, he was nevertheless deeply suspicious of those who demanded radical rather than
gradual change, those who sought socialism over capitalism, and above all those who
understood democracy as something more direct, more unfettered, and more participatory than
the limited democracy that Betancourt would favor. As a result, and against this radical
alternative, Betancourt and others sought to construct a democratic system that was protected
from the people, in which all demands were to be diverted though institutional channels and
specifically the two predominant political parties. This was a system of democracy as
institutionalized antidemocracy, in which the people could only appear as a fragmentary and

segmented nonpeople. And so we find at the very heart of Venezuela's so-called democracy a
veritable conspiracy against the pueblo as a radical moment of rebellious energy. What is
peculiar here is that, even as Betancourt denied the existence of the people, its spectral
presencethe fear it inspired in elitesconditioned the creation of a system that sought to
prevent the people from coming together as a force. The antipopular political system,
therefore, was an expression, however negative, of the power of the people, and the history that
this book tells is one that draws upon the same source, albeit from the opposite direction.
In constructing such a system, Betancourt's weapon of choice was domestication: the slow
and systematic effort to build institutions capable of co-opting popular discontent and
channeling it down official pathways. As though responding to his own experience of the
Betancourt years, Venezuelan folk singer Al Primerawhose verses grace each of my
chapterswould later write that the docile [manso] people are always corralled, but this
doesn't happen if they are fierce [montaraz]. While Betancourt sought to create a pueblo
manso, however, he could not tolerate the montaraz, and therefore turned to a dual strategy:
domesticating those who would submit to the hegemony of his Accin Democrtica Party (the
workers' and campesino movements) while excluding and attacking those (particularly students
and communists) who would not.23 This people's history, this history from below, begins
with the immediate rebellions that greeted Betancourt's election; if he was suspicious of the
radical movements, then this suspicion was mutual. As though knowing what would be in
store, the poor barrios around Caracas rioted upon receiving word of their first truly
democratic president, and Betancourt never forgave the capital city for its betrayal. After his
inauguration, mass mobilizations continued, since even this limited democratic opening
when combined with the exhilarating experience of having overthrown a dictatoronly served
to stoke the flames of rebellion. Students occupied their campuses, peasants their land, and the
unemployed marched in the capital demanding work. Picture this: less than one year after this
father of Venezuelan democracy was elected, his government was shooting people dead in
the streets, and the majority of his first years in office was spent under the iron heel of a state
of emergency.24
Thus unable to successfully incorporate and accommodate this insurgent energy from below
into a system capable of defusing it from above, Betancourt turned to exclusion, on the heels of
which repression closely followed. His government gradually pushed radical sectors outside of
the democratic institutions, thereby converting what might have been a loyal opposition into a
disloyal one. This outside crystallized as the guerrilla war that began not long after
Betancourt came to power; hundreds of young Venezuelans, inspired by the recent success of a
small band of Cubans, sought to overthrow Venezuelan democracy. According to any of the
standard criteriabe they military or politicalthe Venezuelan guerrilla struggle was a
resounding and abject failure; the guerrillas grew increasingly alienated from their base, and
this base largely opted for the apparent contradiction of electoral participation.25 But what is
key is to recognize that those radical energies from below that had generated the guerrilla
struggle to begin with, those demands of the popular masses that the new democratic regime
was either unwilling or unable to meet, did not simply disappear into thin air. Instead, the
ostensible failure of the guerrilla struggle gave way to a dispersed multiplicity of revolutionary
social movements, and former guerrillas themselves courted legality in a variety of ways,
with both sectors twirling helically around one another in a constant struggle to both

revolutionize the state and avoid its tentacles.

Whose History?
This is, therefore, not a history of the exceptional Venezuela, seemingly the only Venezuela
visible to many social scientists in the United States and some in Venezuela. For decades,
Venezuela had appeared to many as an island of stability amid the economic chaos, military
rule, and civil war that had swept the region during the 1960s and 1970s. Some, like the
political scientist Daniel Levine, even claimed that this stability derived from the ability, first
of Betancourt and then of the two-party system, to incorporate conflict and change successfully
into the sphere of official politics by organiz[ing] social life from top to bottom, thereby
undercutting more radical threats.26 This view neglects the degree to which incorporation
operated alongside exclusion, and the fact that Venezuelan society clearly was not organized
from top to bottom, as the bottom would soon make abundantly clear.27 And as this power
from below was gradually excluded, power from above became increasingly alienated,
delusional, and, above all, rigid, with this rigidity coming as a direct counterpart to the
ostensible stability of the system. As Mirabeau said of the colonists in Haiti, those elites who
had considered themselves exceptional for so many years slept on the edge of Vesuvius
without even knowing it.28 So too the academics like Levine, who would make a
prognosticative error of epic proportions with the claim that In Venezuela, the future lies with
cautious men.29 Such claimsand the exceptionalism thesis that undergirded themwould
soon be left buried like Pompeii under so much molten ash.
As Venezuela's system of representative democracy grew increasingly rigid and
exclusionary, corrupt and violent, the warning that the Theban chorus offered Antigone, Bend
or break, bend or break, became ever more pertinent.30 For every demand that went
unfulfilled, pressure only increased. It was during this time that Al Primerawho was not
coincidentally known as the people's singerwould turn the national anthem into a veritable
battle hymn. Shortly before his suspicious death in 1985, Primera prefaced his rendition of
Gloria Al Bravo Pueblo to an audience in Barquisimeto with the following words: To purify
it, to purify it among ourselves, to purify it in our hands, in our hearts, in our eyes, in our soul.
To purify it for the times they have stained it. Our people's highest song, the song forged in the
paths and the battles that gave us the name of Venezuelans, of the homeland. The song of
always, the song of the birds, of the children, the song of Venezuelan unity, the song of future
combat. As time passed, as the economy worsened, as neoliberal reforms pushed millions
more into extreme poverty amid a collapsing currency and skyrocketing prices, and as
rebellion became an everyday occurrence, this was a system that was unbending and could only
break.
And break it did on February 27, 1989, on the very day that president Carlos Andrs Prez's
neoliberal reform package entered into force; the camel's back broke, and the barrios exploded
in a week-long riot, known as the Caracazo, that approached the level of mass insurrection (see
the First Interlude). During the Caracazo, bravo assumed more and more the radical content of
the pueblo itself, si de lucha se trata, resignified in the streets according to its colloquial
double meaning: pissed off or fed up with a state of affairs. Noun and adjective inverted,
the people are fed up [bravo] stood as a straightforward indictment of the political system as

a whole. During the insurrectionas the bravura of anger was matched only by a bravery
against the most uneven of oddsthe national anthem again proved prophetic, as Venezuelans
and the world would follow the example given by Caracas in its moment of fury and the
political process that the Caracazo inaugurated. Those fed-up people would not find much
relief in the short term: somewhere between three hundred and three thousand were
slaughtered to restore the faade of democratic stability, and a dying system limped on despite
having already received the blow that would eventually kill it.
The subject of my history is this bravo pueblo that made its most resounding appearance in
1989, which simply by appearing exploded the prevailing myth of harmony that was
premised on its invisibility. 31 What had masqueraded as singular harmony was now revealed
as two, with the previously hidden side of the equation gathering under the mantle of the
people (not, however, without maintaining its hard-won internal differentiation). 32 This is a
history written from that hidden nonplace that would only appear as fully visible in 1989, what
Al Primera calls the other Venezuela, one possessing even its own truth:
I come from where you've never gone
the other Venezuela, the Venezuela of the poor,
the Venezuela with no reason, no reason to exist
The truth of Venezuela isn't found in the Country Club,
the truth is found in the hills [los cerros, the barrios]
with the people and their discontent.

This is a history of exclusion and frustration, torture and massacre, wealth and thievery, the
wink of the politician and the nod of the bureaucrat. But it is also far more than that because
limiting our history to the crimes of the powerful would be to remain mesmerized by their own
governing myths, myths that imply that they actually are in power rather than merely
occupying ultimately fragile positions within the political institutionalism of the state. If the
moral bankruptcy of Venezuelan elites was revealed for all the world to see in the 1989
Caracazo, their political fragility appeared most clearly in a pair of failed coups in 1992, the
first of whichon February 4was led by Chvez himself.
We Created Chvez tells the story of what happened between 1958 and 1989, the story that
binds the 1989 Caracazo to Chvez's failed 1992 coup and eventual election in 1998, and
ultimately the story of the relationship between this bravo pueblo and the political process
currently underway. Thus, although this is a people's history, as my subtitle suggests it is
also a history of the Bolivarian Revolution, and while narrowing the scope of the former it
seeks to expand our understanding of the latter: this revolution has been a far longer process
than many recognize. Most historic accounts of the Bolivarian Revolution begin in 1998, the
year Chvez was elected, as an expression of the precipitous collapse of Venezuela's two-party
system.33 While this moment was undeniably important for what has come since, I call it an
expression consciously: Chvez's election, much like the disgust felt toward those he
replaced, was the result of previous struggles, and so we must turn our gazes back still further.
Some existing histories do so, looking for the origins of Chvez's electoral success in his
notable lack of success in 1992 and his live television appearance that marked that failure.
Taking full responsibility for his failings on that daya rare occurrence for political figures in
VenezuelaChvez spoke two fateful words that would become a slogan overnight and

cement his political future: the rebels, according to this young lieutenant colonel, had failed
por ahora, for now.
This, too, was a crucial moment, but again, merely tying 1998 to 1992, rooting Chvez's
successful seizure of power through the ballot in his unsuccessful effort to do so by the bullet,
is not enough. A history of the trajectory stretching from 1992 to 1998 is still firmly a history
from above, a history of state power, first of failure and then of success in seizing the
state, rather than being a history from below, a history of popular power. To rewrite this
history from below, it is necessary to look back even further, narrowing even more the list of
existing historical accounts to those that locate the fundamental impetus for both 1992 and
1998 in an earlier date: 1989, the Caracazo. Here the shift is a fundamental one: if 1992 and
1998 center on Chvez the individual and the state as his object, 1989 reveals that this
individual project rests on a mass base more bent on destroying than seizing the state. Whereas
1992 and 1998 center on questions of constituted power, of the institutionalized power of the
state, 1989 was instead an explosion of constituent power, that radically unmediated force
aimed against those institutions and which itself resists institutionalization.34 Yet even many of
those histories that recognize the fundamental importance of 1989 do not follow this
importance to its ultimate conclusion, choosing instead to center contemporary history on
Chvez himself, thereby contributing, however inadvertently, to what Velasco deems a
historical genealogy that rests on the rise of Hugo Chvez as the redeemer of long-suffering
popular sectors, whose political awakening can be traced, at best, to the mid and late 1980s.35
I hope to go further. After all, where did 1989 come from? Here our regression is not infinite,
and the clash between the from below and the from above that occurred on the streets in
February 1989 finds both sides constituted in the years after 1958: in the guerrilla struggle and
its collapse and the period of autonomous movement-building that followed in its wake.

Changing the World?

If, in what follows, I largely privilege such radically constituent moments as foundational to
understanding what is going on in Venezuela today, the point is not to neglect the constituted
power of the state or the moments of constitution in which the two enter into a
transformative relationship.36 Thus, in destabilizing this seeming paradox between the
autonomy of radical Chavistas from the state and their support for Chvez, we also destabilize
the ostensible opposition underlying its appearance as a paradox by reformulating the classic
question of revolutionary politics and the state: Do we change the world without taking
power, as the title of John Holloway's book would have it? 37 Or is it only by seizing such
power that transformation becomes possible to begin with, as goes the retort of Holloway's
detractors?38 Once again, the opposition is merely apparent, and we begin to overcome it by
subjecting its opposing terms to the creative dynamics of popular practice. The story that
follows, the story of recent Venezuelan history, is, therefore, not the story of one side or the
other, of how to seize the state as is or to avoid its sinister tentacles entirely. It is instead one
that rejects the very terms of this opposition in the manner of Enrique Dussel, who insists that
to speak precisely, power is never taken.39 The Bastille can be taken, the Winter Palace can
be taken by a small number of disciplined Bolsheviks, but power is something that is held by
the people, and the problems emerge with the institutionalization of that power, which Dussel

deems both necessary and profoundly dangerous.

Put differently, my goal here is to avoid the twin dangers that plague contemporary
discussions of revolutionary change in Latin America in particular: the tendency to fetishize
the state, official power, and its institutions and the opposing tendency to fetishize antipower.
Thus, alongside the general fetishism of the state that manifests in the Venezuelan context as a
fetishization of Chvez the man, there stands as well an equal and opposite fetish of what has
been called horizontalism, the fetish of refusing or ignoring the state a priori as in
Holloway's insistence that the world cannot be changed through the state.40 To fetishize
means to worship something human as though it were divine, and I hope that the literal
fetishism of both positions is clear: the first refuses to see the state (and Chvez) as produced
by human hands and therefore subject to radical transformation; the secondin its denial of
human organizational capacities, of organic leadership generated through struggle, and of the
delegation of powersees such transformation as utterly impossible and futile.41 For both, in
other words, the state is a superhuman entity to be either worshipped or feared but never
transformed.
Although the practical dangers of fetishizing the state are more acute and more obvious in
discussions around Venezuela, we cannot afford to neglect the dangers that come with
fetishizing horizontalism, especially because these have methodological implications for how
to write a history like this one. If a focus from above creates an evident blindness toward
movements from below, the fetish of the horizontal creates a more specific blind spot in
which movements and organizations that are not sufficiently horizontal either are
misrepresented as being more egalitarian, directly democratic, or antistate than they are or are
rendered illegible and invisible.42 Here, organizations such as La Piedrita stand as a sort of
double warning of the difficulties of an abstractly horizontal approach. Despite the collective's
organic relationship with the local community, to study it horizontally would be to ask the
impossible; even insisting on speaking to nonleaders would mean asking members of a tightly
disciplined organization to break that discipline. Blinkered horizontalism, in other words,
would render the internal functioning of collectives like La Piedrita even more opaque than
they already seem, as when one uses the wrong lens to view an object, but as I will show, their
importance to the process is undeniable.
In the history that follows, the difficulty of the seemingly vertical relationship between
mass and vanguard (like the paradox of movement and state, autonomy and unity) is held at
bay on the practical plane, as different stages of struggle against this corrupt and violent
democracy instituted in 1958 have manifested in different forms of struggle, different tools,
and different weapons. For example, the early guerrilla struggle to which we turn first was an
unapologetically vertical enterprise, and indeed, much of the debate shaping that struggle
revolved around what, if any, political control would be exercised on the military structures of
the guerrilla fronts. While this verticalism resulted largely from its military character, we
should not let this obscure the very real elements of racial and gender privilege operating
within the struggle. While my account has been enriched by discussions with rank-and-file
participants of the guerrilla struggle (including women and Afro-Indigenous fighters), these
can in no way serve as a substitute for discussions with those actually charged with making and
executing the broader strategies and tactics that determined the course of the armed struggle.
For better or for worse, the most radical demands of the people were represented most often

through vanguardist structures during this period. This does not excuse errors, of which there
were many, frequently tied to but not reducible to verticalist elements such as vanguardist
foquismo. Nor should it obscure that at certain points the guerrillas were more alienated from
their nominal support base than at others; more than anything else, this fact doomed the armed
struggle and determined the strategic transformations that would emerge in its wake.
Nevertheless, these guerrillas remained, to some degree, the most revolutionary and
intransigent representatives of the pueblo as a radical critique of oppression and inequality,
and it is in this sense that the history of the guerrilla struggle remains, however imperfectly, a
people's history.
In the same way that fetishizing the horizontal might lead to a neglect of leadership, so too
could such an approach exclude a priori those who have opted strategically to work either
within or in a close relationship with government institutions on the national, state, or local
levels. Indeed, to exclude those who see in such institutions an unavoidable instance of
struggle would be to neglect the vast bulk of revolutionaries on the ground driving the
Bolivarian process forward. Thus, that many high-ranking government officials have been
drawn from the ranks, not only of the guerrilla struggle but also from other sectors of the
revolutionary movement, does not exclude them from this history; rather, it poses again and in
a slightly different way the seeming paradox from which I began: those who have suffered
most from the violence of the state in the past have nonetheless come to occupy positions in
that state. While such figures must be balanced with those who voice very real and credible
concerns about movement autonomy and radicalism, be it from the sphere of semiofficial
movements or those who reject any and all association with the state (but without ceasing, for
the most part, to support the president and the process), this does not undermine their
relevance.
Just as these twin fetishes fail by establishing too firm a distinction between what they
support and what they oppose, and just as my objective is to reestablish the linkages they cut,
so too must we speak of reestablishing a relationship between the horizontal and the vertical
more generally. In this, we can do no better than to turn to the Venezuelan revolutionary,
former guerrilla, and inspiration for much of what has been called Bolivarianism: Klber
Ramrez Rojas. In a 1994 essay about the movements that had sprung up in the barrios in the
aftermath of the 1989 Caracazo rebellions, Ramrezwho only recently had lent his pen to the
forces behind Chvez's failed 1992 coup to draft a litany of documents outlining the structure
for a revolutionary governmentreflected on both the successes and failures of the
horizontalism of these popular movements. While admitting that the radical insistence on
horizontal modes of organization emerged as a justified form of self-defense from the old and
corrupt political parties, and that the very real autonomy this horizontalism afforded the
movements constituted a well-deserved political and social victory, Ramrez nevertheless
argued that through the fetishization of dispersed popular assemblies, this triumph has been
converted into its own defeat. From a strategic perspective, he continued, horizontality
will be necessary for the development of the commoner [comunero] state; but tactically, at this
moment it becomes a serious error because it foments the isolationism of the popular bases
from national struggles.43 It is in an effort to avoid these twin fetishes that, when it comes
time to conclude, I will speak neither of power from above nor entirely from below, but instead
of a dual power that exists in ongoing, tense, and antagonistic opposition to the state,

straining insistently upward from the bases to generate a dialectical motion allowing the
revolutionary transformation of the state and its institutions, with the ultimate goal of
deconstructing, decentralizing, and rendering it a nonstate. For Klber Ramrez, this dialectic
of dual power means the liquidation of the currentstate and its replacement with what
some might, again, deem a paradox: a government of popular insurgency.44
One final warning before I begin, and it is related to what I have just said, because there is
something else worth noting in this exaggerated emphasis on horizontalism, this abstract
imperative to change the world without taking power. Too often, discussions of how to
change the world degenerate into model-building exercises, and too often the raw material for
such exercises is provided by Third World revolutionaries and the model constructed by First
World philosophers. If the impetus to change the world by taking power derives in many
ways from the Russian Revolution, the model for how to do so in the Latin America of the
1960s was in many ways provided by the Cuban Revolution as filtered through the writings of
the radical French intellectual Rgis Debray. In 1963, Debray made a pilgrimage to the Sierra
of Falcn to speak with the Venezuelan guerrillas. More than four decades later, I have had the
opportunity to speak with many of those same people, as well as a multitude of younger
organizers from various sectors of the struggle. While it may therefore seem that I would want
to liken my task to Debray's, nothing could be further from the truth. This is not merely
because Debray's foquista modelin which the guerrilla struggle is led by a small elite of
mobile focos detached from any social basewas a caricature of the Cuban Revolution, but
also because its application in Venezuela and elsewhere was nothing short of catastrophic.
Debray's name, therefore, stands not as an inspiration but as a warning about the danger of
models for how to change the world. Has horizontalism become a model in its own right, one
revitalized by the momentous nature of the Zapatista insurgency and amplified by theorists
like Holloway under the banner of antipower? If so, does the imperative to refuse power
accurately reflect the Zapatista experience, or is it as much a caricature of that experience as
was Debray's theory of guerrilla warfare? Do the Zapatistas refuse all power or do they seek to
regenerate a new form of power from below? Do they refuse all institutions or do they merely
subject those institutions to the constant pressure of popular intervention (in, for example,
revocable mandates and popular assemblies), what Dussel calls obediential power, building
on the Zapatista imperative without creating a model?45 And even if such theories actively
reflect Zapatista practice, is it possible to generalize and export the particular and local
experience of the Zapatistas across the continent and the world without contributing to what I
have called elsewhere anarchist imperialism?46
This book consists of three sections of three chapters divided by two explosive historical
interludes, two constituent moments of rupture that represent qualitative leaps in the history
of the Venezuelan people. The first section tracks the guerrilla struggle, its failure, and the tide
of urban militancy that arose in its wake; the very same vanguardism that doomed the
guerrillas was disproven in practice by the rebellious masses. This is a history of failure, of
defeat, but one in which those very defeats provide fodder for subsequent victories. In the first
section, chapters move chronologically (approximately by decade: the 1960s, 1970s, and
1980s); the second section rotates our axis in an effort to think sectorally according to some of

the more important social movements that emerged in the wake of, and indeed often from
within, the guerrilla struggle in a flourishing of student, women's, and Afro-Indigenous
organizing that centers on the 1970s and 1980s but that also extends into the present. The final
section then rotates our axis once again, speaking broadly according to economic class but
always casting a critical eye toward traditional understandings of who it is that constitutes the
political subject of revolutions. When the subjects of these final chaptersthe working class,
the peasantry, and the so-called lumpenproletariat, or informal urban poorare combined with
those of the previous section with which they overlap, we have the broad strokes of what is
understood in Venezuela and much of Latin America as the people.
It would be all of these separate and cross-cutting slices that, seen more broadly, emerged
from the guerrilla struggle, underwent a period of autonomous development, and then began to
slowly reagglomerate with (para)-military elements in the run-up to the 1992 coup and the
1998 election, propelling Chvez to the seat of constituted power. But these two dates1992
and 1998do not provide the content of our explosive interludes, regardless of their
importance; in fact, I speak of these moments of constituted power only in passing. Instead,
our interludes describe those radically creative and generative momentsthe 1989 Caracazo
and the 2002 rebellion that overthrew the coup-installed government and returned Chvez to
powermoments in which the Venezuelan people appeared in struggle as a constituent force,
revealing itself as both the source of power and the feet of clay that prop up many of those who
wrongly claim that power as their own. Once we set our sights on the people, on the expression
of power from below rather than from above, traditional milestoneswhether it be 1958,
1992, or 1998are both subordinated to a different set of moments (1989, 2002) and imbued
with an entirely new meaning.
To return, finally, to the question of people's history, to see that the inversion from which we
set outthe refusal to remain mesmerized by the figure of Chvez or by the statehas
allowed for an infinite enrichment of our account, generating an alternative series of watershed
moments and historical ruptures. To conclude where we begannot full circle but full spiral
we turn again to C. L. R. James, who insists that phases of a revolution are not decided in
parliaments, they are only registered there.47 Hugo Chavez is not a cause but an effect., not
Creator but creation; in this sense, the history that follows is literally a defetishization, a
demystification. His election and even his failed coup did not mark the beginning of the
Bolivarian Revolution, but were instead the result and reflection of its long and largely
subterraneous history, a history that has only recently emerged into the light of day, and to
which this project hopes modestly to contribute. We have reached that higher plane of
complexity of which I wrote at the outset, from the perspective of which we can now attempt
to grapple with the undeniable importance of Chvez to the contemporary moment and his
relationship with the revolutionary social movements that created him. But even in this we
must not focus too much on Chvez; to paraphrase what many a revolutionary organizer in
Venezuela has told me: we created himbut we will also go beyond him if necessary.

One. A Guerrilla History

I'm not staying at home, because I'm going into combat
I'm going to defend La Puerta in the Valley of Momboy
Let's go to Bocon! Let's go up into the mountains!
To kiss the garden which remained forever in Bolvar's eyes
Al Primera

June 30, 1962

Nationally recognized Venezuelan journalist and former head of the Patriotic Junta that
overthrew the dictator Marcos Prez Jimnez, Fabricio Ojeda rose and walked calmly to the
podium. This towering figure of resistance solemnly recounted having stood above a grave in
the Cemetery of the Southlater to become a symbol of extrajudicial killings during the 1989
Caracazoand taking a solemn oath that the sacrifice of our martyrs would not be in vain.
But this speech was unlike any Ojeda had ever given before. Elected to Congress by the will
of the glorious people of Caracas, which now find themselves oppressed and humiliated,
Ojeda was announcing his decision to abandon the halls of official power. Four short years
after playing a central role in Venezuela's democratic transition, Ojeda was now joining the
guerrilla struggle seeking to topple that regime. As he neared the end of this fateful speech,
Ojeda reached a fever pitch, evoking a ferocity that far exceeded his diminutive physical
stature, his voice rising to a shout as he sought inspiration in the national anthem:
And so, Mr. President, call my substitute because I have gone to fulfill the oath that I took before you all to defend
the Constitution and the laws of this country. If I die, it matters not, others will come behind me to take up our rifle
and our flag to continue with dignity what is an ideal and an obligation for all of our people.
Down with chains!
Death to oppression!
For homeland and people!
Viva la Revolucin!1

When Al Primera speaks of heading up into the mountains in the epigraph with which we
began, I see him as symbolically tracing Ojeda's path: back to his birthplaceBocon,
Trujillo, which Bolvar himself declared the garden of Venezuelaand on to La Puerta, both
an actual town and a metaphorical gate to the guerrilla struggle.
Why begin the story of the contemporary Venezuelan revolution in 1962? And why with
Fabricio Ojeda? If only to mark the origins of the guerrilla struggle, this moment would prove
imperfect: Ojeda was a latecomer in this strict sense. If only because of his celebrity, however
symbolically important, then the decision would not be an admirable one but one that leads
toward an answer. Why had a leader of the resistance to the dictatorship, who himself
participated in Venezuela's nascent democracy, turned so rapidly against this new government?
To answer this question is to discover the open secret of fifty years of Venezuelan history, the

truth concealed under the thin veneer of Venezuelan exceptionalism. At an astonishingly

early stage, Fabricio Ojeda was eloquently expressing the shortcomings of formal liberation
and the formal democracy that had come to preside over this liberated state. The
Venezuelan people, he insisted, are already tired of promises that cannot be fulfilled and
disappointed with a democracy that never arrives.
If Ojeda's critique of representative democracy was heretical to many, he approached the
level of blasphemy toward that foundational moment in 1958 in which he himself played a
fundamental role, when Prez Jimnez was overthrown by a unified civilian-military rebellion
of the type so often recurrent in Venezuelan history. On January 23this I confess as creative
self-criticismnothing happened in Venezuelaonly names were changed.2 Young idealists,
with Ojeda at their head, had believed in good faith that by merely removing the tyrant, they
would be able to overcome the glaring contradictions that had plagued Venezuelan society. But
Rmulo Betancourt was elected, taking power in 1960, and within less than a year the country
had returned to emergency measures, searches, imprisonment, torture, and abuses of executive
power, all in the name of that same democracy that, for Ojeda and others, was their
antithesis. This is our decision, this is our path. We go to arms with faith, with joy; however,
despite this joy, Ojeda insistedlong before Mexico's Zapatistasthat arms were a last resort:
We take up arms against violence, against repression, against torture, against corruption. We
take up arms against depravity and treason. so that the dawn of liberty and justice might
glimmer on the horizon of the Nation.3
Fabricio Ojeda was not the first to head for the Venezuelan hills, nor would he be the last.
More farsighted radicals knew Venezuelan democracy would be in trouble as soon as Rmulo
Betancourt took the reins, but few could have foreseen the precipitousness of its decline. The
collapse of the dictatorship was greeted with mass euphoria and, as one might expect,
optimism toward this newborn democracy. But even before January 23, 1958, the nominally
unified movement that overthrew Prez Jimnez was racked with cleavages. Betancourt,
himself a former Communist, had been languishing in exile and attempting to prove his
anticommunist credentials to the United States while maintaining an anti-imperialist faade at
home, despite the fact that the Venezuelan Communist Party ( PCV) played a central role in the
united front against the dictatorship. Paralleling this political division was an equally profound
generational divide that cut across party lines. The old guard of Betancourt's Democratic
Action (AD), Christian Democratic (COPEI), and Democratic Republican Unity (URD) parties
were largely in exile while those younger party cadres still in Venezuela were battling the
dictatorship on the ground and making corresponding strategic decisions. Ojeda, a youthful
member of the URD, embodied this more radical young guard in many ways. As we will see,
this generational divide would be exacerbated by a rural/urban divide that plagued Betancourt's
presidency from the outset, although ironically it did not figure into initial guerrilla strategy.
But while the young radicals had successfully crafted the political unity needed to overthrow
Prez Jimnez, the old guard was busy consolidating unity of a different type. First in the Pact
of New York, and later in the more infamous Pact of Punto Fijo, representatives of AD, COPEI,
and URD sought to pour the foundation for a limited, multiparty democracy that excluded both
the far right of the ancien rgime and the Communist far left.4 The result was a rigid political
system, a partyocracy known as puntofijismo, a straitjacketed and heavily mediated
democracy that was celebrated for its exceptional stability by some but increasingly

alienated from the vast majority. It was this system that would finally collapse more than three
decades later, and while the deafening snap would only occur in 1989, some load-bearing
beams began to give way from the outset in a succession of splits that drew the young radicals
away from their own parties and into the armed struggle.

Meeting Douglas
As I write, guerrilla commander-turned-Chvez critic Douglas Bravo is 78 years old, but you
would not know it. A short man with dark hair, an angular face, and broad shoulders
accentuated by a blazer with padded shoulders reminiscent of Miami Vice, it is less than a
month since this epic guerrilla leader underwent open-heart surgery to replace his aortic valve.
Sitting in a small caf in Parque Central, he unhesitatingly pulls open his shirt to show the
scar. He is as strong as a horse, evidently, and despite more than two decades of
rehabilitationa friendly government euphemism used to denote the pacification of former
guerrillashe is still a guerrilla at heart. As we speak, his eyes dart sharply and nervously
about, over my shoulder, to the elevator, to the entrancehabits learned during decades of
covert existence that are, no doubt, hard to shake. His nose does not work properly, he
explains, since breaking it in three places in a fall in the mountains during the 1960s. Soon, he
confides, he will have surgery to repair it. How, I ask, can a well-known guerrilla fighter,
rehabilitated or not, trust that he will receive good medical care when the industry is largely
dominated by the right? He confides with a wink: My doctor is a good friend who helped us
during the guerrilla struggle.5 After a brief discussion in which my political sympathies are
probed, Bravo abruptly announces: I can work with you. Meet me tomorrow.
The next day, we meet nearby in Bravo's unadorned apartment to discuss the early stages of
the guerrilla struggle. Bravo himself joined the Communist Party in 1946 at the age of 13.
Even before the fall of the dictatorship, the guerrilla struggle had found its first organizational
form in the shock troops that the PCV entrusted to Bravo, Teodoro Petkoff, and Eloy Torres
as early as October 1957 as the spirit of the new began to push through the shell of the old.6 To
the obvious question of why these shock troops were turned so quickly against a nominal
democracy, and a newly minted one at that, his answer is simple: they were forced to. This was
because right out of the gate, Betancourt was taking no prisoners, especially not in Caracas, a
city that he felt had betrayed him in the 1958 election and in which former head of the
governing junta, Rear Admiral Wolfgang Larrazbal (supported by the PCV and URD), defeated
Betancourt by a five-to-one margin.7 To add insult to injury, on December 8 and 9, supporters
of Larrazbal rioted in an effort to reverse the result of the election, and, as if things could not
get worse for the president-elect, Fidel Castro visited the country in late January.8
Castro, nominally a Betancourt ally at that point, recalled the moment when, during his
speech in Plaza El Silencio, he mentioned the new Venezuelan president's name: there was a
storm of booing from the vast crowd.9 While Betancourt's anti-Communism certainly
predated that fateful and humiliating day, it is equally clear that he would find a new object of
hostility in the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution and what he would soon decry as CastroCommunism. The old social democrats like Betancourt and Peru's American Popular
Revolutionary Alliance had in a flash been superseded by a new and more direct mode of Latin
American resistance that would soon train its sights on them. Not even the Communists

escaped the Cuban example, but while the PCV would eventually chart a leftward course to
outflank the newer revolutionary currents by supporting the guerrilla struggle, Betancourt took
a very different tack, turning to the barracks instead of to the people and quickly making his
the bloodiest government in Venezuelan history.10
Reflecting on the series of events that brought the young democracy to the brink of
revolution within less than two years of Betancourt's inauguration, Bravo emphasizes three in
particular. First, Betancourt took power in a global context of crashing oil prices in the
aftermath of the Suez Crisis alongside a domestic social context in which the population
demanded the continuation of Larrazbal's hugely popular Emergency Works Plan. The
resulting fiscal pressure created a pincer-like institutional crisis that sparked the wave of
militant demonstrations voicing radical demands. Betancourt drew his first blood against those
very sectors left unprotected by the elimination of the Emergency Works Plan: in August 1959,
mere months after Betancourt had taken the reins of the state, government troops fired on a
demonstration of fifty thousand unemployed workers in Plaza la Concordia, killing three.
Nearly simultaneous demonstrations by students and land occupations by peasants in Aragua
State were similarly repressed.11 Speaking with an elderly resident of western Caracas who
moved to the capital in 1956, I am told that the Betancourt years were the worst! It was lead,
lead, and more lead! His policy was to shoot first and ask questions later.12
Second, it was this repression carried out in their own names that led the younger and more
radical sector of Betancourt's AD to break decisively with the reactionary old guard. Perhaps
surprisingly and certainly ironically, given Betancourt's hysterical hostility to CastroCommunism, this new party, the Revolutionary Left Movement ( MIR), twisted the knife in the
wound of their separation by explicitly avowing the Cuban example. These were the same
young AD membersmost notably Domingo Alberto Rangel, Amrico Martn, Moiss
Moleiro, and former AD General Secretary Simn Sez Mridawho had been responsible for
creating the alliance with the Communists that had overthrown Prez Jimnez successfully,
partly against the wishes of the party's exiled leadership. Aside from taking an estimated 80
percent of the AD youth contingent, the MIR also took with it a charismatic and influential set of
leaders and fourteen congressional deputies, thereby foreshadowing a second split a year later
in which the group headed by Ral Ramos Jimnez departed with an additional twenty-six
deputies, depriving Betancourt of even a congressional majority. 13 Predictably, Betancourt and
what remained of AD reacted harshly against this new body that had been torn from its flesh,
and repression against the newborn MIR was immediate and severe, arguably more so as a result
of its insolent betrayal.14 Less than six months after the party's founding, six of its members
were arrested for subverting the regime, sparking an escalating cycle of student demonstrations
and further repression.
Finally, the simmering tension surrounding Cuba came to a head in San Jos, Costa Rica, in
August 1960 at a meeting of the Organization of American States. As a part of the Punto Fijo
Pact, Betancourt had invited ample cabinet representation from both COPEI and URD, but when
the United States attempted to pass a motion condemning the Cubans, URD foreign minister Dr.
Ignacio Lus Arcaya first attempted to change the proposal before finally refusing to sign it.
For this, Betancourt sacked him, prompting pro-Castro rallies in Caracas.15 While the URD
remained in the cabinet for the moment, the repression of the young MIRistas and the resulting
galvanization of student rebellion led the government to close all institutions of higher

education and send troops into the rebellious Central University (UCV) in October 1960 (see
also chapter 4).16 This was more than the remaining URDistas in the cabinet could take, and they
resigned.
Despite a climate of mutually heightening tension, however, Bravo insists that up to this
point both the MIR and the PCV had remained within the realm of legality and peaceful struggle.
This is echoed by MIR founder Moiss Moleiro, who, despite facing early charges of
subversion, insists that the party's turn toward the armed struggle came only in response to
ferocious repression at the hands of the young elite democracy. 17 Indeed, the MIR and the PCV
found themselves increasingly in the same position. In September 1960, a PCV-led oil union
was attacked at Lagunillas, leaving one dead and twenty injured, and amid occupations at the
UCV and in 23 de Enero, the parties found even their press freedoms assailed: in October their
printing press was closed and in November their official publications were shut down
directly.18 When a militant telephone strike broke out in November, the MIR preemptively
called for an insurrection, thereby leaping from loyal to disloyal opposition.19
Nevertheless, despite facing a similar level of repression, the process whereby the PCV came
to a similar conclusion was an excruciatingly slow and hesitant one. Although the existing
history reflects the revolutionary situation that existed during October and November 1960,
few recognize just how close the country was to overthrowing Betancourt. Whether through an
exaggeration of objective barriers to revolution, Stalinist ambiguity toward the national
bourgeoisie, or cautious patience with the new democracy, revolutionary movements surged
forward but the Party failed to react. Or, better put, certain sectors of the Party failed to react.
To the seething dismay of Bravo and other young radicals, the Communist Party failed to act
when it mattered most: at one point in late 1960, several military commanders essentially
offered to hand over power, but the Communist Party began to debate whether it was right to
overthrow a democratically elected government. The debate continued for more than twentyfour hours, by which time the deadline had passed and the insurrection had been duly
exhausted and repressed.20 The workers and students in the streets and even the radicalized
liberals of the MIR already were clear on the repressive nature of the Betancourt government,
and yet the Communist Party, nominal bastion of the popular revolution, was offered power
and failed to make up its mind. Do you understand what this means? Bravo rhetorically
demands of me, with an insistence that has not faded in fifty years. Our tragedy! The
incapacity of the Communist Party to understand this historical moment. How truly sad that
was! That was the first big battle, chico, and we lost. In the words of a PCV guerrilla, the party
killed the tiger but was afraid of the hide.21
To add to the tragedy, this same situation would repeat a year later in late 1961 and early
1962, with similar results, as the Party continued to vacillate amid a strike of transport
workers. Despite refusing to support the rebellions prompted by the strikewhich led to
nineteen deaths in Januarythe PCV and MIR were blamed, their headquarters searched, and
more than one thousand arrests made.22 If the MIR's calls for insurrection a year earlier had been
premature, the upsurge of November 1961 was, according to Bravo, the time for decisive
action: It was at that instant that there should have been some kind of military action. But it
was not until six months later that the PCV finally cut the Gordian Knot of its irrational
patience with a representative democracy that bludgeoned it daily, activating its clandestine
cadres within the Armed Forces in military-civilian uprisings in Carpano (known as the

Carpanazo) and Puerto Cabello (the Porteazo) in May and June 1962, by which point it was
too late for anything but a spectacular and bloody failure.23 As Bravo explains, the
revolutionary momentum of previous months had been squandered: the masses were on the
withdrawal, on the defensive, the student movement was on the defensive, the workers were on
the defensive, and the government was on the offensive. When I ask if it was the officers who
failed to rise up in late 1961, I am immediately corrected: No, no, that's not what I'm saying.
We, the political directorate [of the PCV] committed the error of launching the military
movements not at the moment of revolutionary upsurge, but rather at the [later] defensive
moment. This sentiment was recognized by Betancourt at the time, who reputedly quipped:
Those idiot revolutionaries didn't know what to do.24 Immediately after the May rebellion at
Carpano, both the MIR and the PCV, harassed and repressed since 1960 and operating largely
underground and without press freedoms, now found themselves officially banned by
presidential decree (the PCV for the first time since the dictatorship that it had helped to
overthrow).25 For many, the only path left open was the armed struggle.
Not all members of the PCV shared this decision, however. While younger members of the
Politburo were chafing at the bit, many more experienced militants were hesitant. On the fortysixth anniversary of the Porteazo, I sit down with several aging members of the Pez Front in
the state of Portuguesa, a Communist fortress if ever there was one. At first, these aging
former fighters, some in their 70s, are hesitant to meet me. They send emissaries to feel me
out, a process that takes place in the back of a pickup truck on the way to an unknown location.
I am asked for revolutionary references: who can vouch for me? Security is tight, or rather
surprisingly tight given the relatively open atmosphere that has prevailed in Venezuela in
recent years. None would deny that things have gotten better under Chvez and that these
modest septuagenarians are not living in fear, but the danger of reprisal from right-wing
elements and the possibility of an eventual change of government are at the foremost of wary
minds.
It seems as though I have been sufficiently convincing, and a meeting after lunch is
arranged, at which point I realize that the emissaries were none other than the guerrillas
themselves. Even after we begin the interview, signs of reticence remain: barely perceptible
hand gestures and laden looks are exchanged, as if remembering for an instant that some things
are best left unsaid, some subjects best avoided, and some statements best made off the record.
Afterward, I discover that this is the first that some of these men have spoken openly of their
experiences, even among themselves. But as relaxation sets in and a sort of purgative catharsis
emerges through releasing what has gone unspoken for so many years, they slowly lower their
guard by way of humorous comments: If they're from the CIA, we're already fucked, one
jokes, with another adding, I've only got a few years left anyway.
Two of these guerrillasJess and Carlos Jimnezare the sons of former Communist
Party founder and Central Committee member Demetrio Jimnez. Jess recalls his father
bringing him, as a child, to a political meeting in Puerto Cabello, where he had been a union
organizer in the 1930s before being recruited by the PCV and where he played a key role in
organizing the Porteazo. A neighbor recalls the suffering that their family experienced during
the guerrilla struggle, explaining that This family felt the weight of government repression on
their own flesh. This is no mere metaphor: torture was frequent in both physical and
psychological forms, and Jess recalls his familychildren includedbeing subjected on

several occasions to mock firing squads in full view of their neighbors.26 Perhaps unsurprising
given their family heritage and local tradition, these former guerrillas are staunch Communists
and have nothing but the deepest respect for the Party's role in the armed struggle. As Jess
puts it, there was no social insurgency where the PCV wasn't presentVenezuelans are
rebellious by nature, but it is the PCV that agitates this. Visibly moved, tears in his eyes, he
continues: we [Communists] have always been faithful, incorruptible, decent, and firmI
want you to emphasize in your book the work of the Communist Party. But the Party, he
insists, certainly is capable of committing its share of errors, and the decision to throw its
weight behind the armed struggle was one such error. Their father had opposed the decision
and voted against it, and the motion was carried by only a small majority. With not a small
amount of bitterness, Jess reflects on the lives lost and the fact that many of the younger
militants who carried the motionlike Bravo and the tremendous traitor Teodoro Petkoff
would break with the PCV not long afterward (as both would later break with Chvez). But
initial opposition notwithstanding, the respect these guerrillas had for party discipline was
such that they unreservedly joined the armed struggle that they had opposed as individuals.
These aging guerrillas in a secluded corner of Portuguesa are not the only ones who opposed
the decision to enter the armed struggle. Their hesitance was echoed by the recently deceased
retired general Alberto Mller Rojas, who I met in Caracas only a few days later in the Red
House, the headquarters of the newly formed United Socialist Party of Venezuela ( PSUV), of
which Mller was at the time the first vice president.27 Amid the dense smoke of a dozen
cigarettes smoked in rapid succession, Mller explains that he had joined the Communist
Youth in 1946 before leaving voluntarily, which was party policy for those joining the
military. He too was opposed to the idea of the armed struggle, but as a nominally apolitical
member of the military, he was not bound to the same party discipline as the guerrillas in
Portuguesa. When, as an officer, he was approached by old friend Teodoro Petkoff to join the
armed struggle, he refused immediately. Why? I ask. Porque no soy bolsa! (Because I'm
not an idiot). This simplicity, however, masks a more complex strategic military analysis:
according to Mller, representative democracy had not yet run its course and still enjoyed
mass support.28 But Mller's response does not address the fundamental reason that most
participants give for turning to the bullet: that the repressive young democracy had left them
no alternatives. As one early combatant in the armed struggle told me: Many thought it was
suicide, but not going was also suicide.29 After all, if the Cuban experience had taught
anything, it was that the objective barriers to revolution could be transformed by subjective
action of the will. Unfortunately for the young militants who carried the banner of the armed
struggle into the Venezuelan hills, their subsequent experience would do little to prove the
Cuban thesis.

From Foquismo to Prolonged Guerrilla War

Much like the MIR's premature call for urban insurrection in November 1960, the initial stages
of the guerrilla struggle were marked by the youthful exuberance of its participants and the
intoxicating optimism provided by the Cuban example; many young MIR militants were
motivated by romanticism, and the PCV's indecision left the guerrillas without a developed
apparatus for the struggle.30 According to Luben Petkoff, who, along with brother Teodoro was

one of the earliest leaders of the communist guerrillas, When we took to the mountains for the
first time we were more than a little taken with the idea that our war was going to be a Cubanstyle war, or very similar to the Cuban guerrilla war. We thought that the solution to our
problems was no more than two or three years away, and that the guerrillas were going to solve
the problems of the Venezuelan revolution in the short term. 31 During 1961, Douglas Bravo
and others had begun to establish small, rural guerrilla units known as focos, first along the
mountainous eastern coast near Turimiquire Peak and the sweltering western state of Lara, but
by the time of the military rebellions in Puerto Cabello and Carpano, the government
suddenly realized that it faced a rapidly expanding threat in the countryside.32 Within a few
short months, clashes had occurred all over the country: in Sucre in the coastal east and then
Turimiquire, then in Bravo's home state of Falcn in the west, then in La Azulita in the Andean
state of Mrida (under guerrilla commander and later founder of La Causa R, Alfredo
Maneiro), then in Portuguesa where I spoke with the Pez Front, and further south in Trujillo. 33
In a major clash in Yaracuy, more than a dozen newly minted guerrillas were arrested
(including Luben Petkoff) and several were killed.34
Despite their exuberance, the learning curve for Venezuelan guerrillas was predictably
steep: most of the initial fronts were liquidated almost immediately, and survivors made their
waylessons learned the hard wayto reinforce the more established fronts.35 Central among
these was the Jos Leonardo Chirino Front, headed up by Douglas Bravo in his home state of
Falcn in northwestern Venezuela and named for an Afro-Indigenous leader who sparked an
eighteenth-century slave rebellion in the very same sierra that would later provide refuge for
the guerrillas (see chapter 6).36 Second, and arguably more important for the unprecedented
mass support it enjoyed, was the Bolvar (or Liberator) Front in Lara State, which was
consolidated under the leadership of Argimiro Gabaldn. Son of General Jos Rafael
Gabaldn, a former governor of Lara who had rebelled against the dictator Juan Vicente
Gmez in 1929 and set about building an army of indigenous peasants, Gabaldn the younger
built his front on the warm ashes of a 1960 communist-influenced indigenous rebellion.37
Tucked between the mountainous zones of Trujillo and Portuguesa and home to the heavily
communist towns of Humocaro Alto and Humocaro Bajo, this front would see the area's first
serious combat in April 1962.38
While Luben Petkoff would later characterize the early optimism of the guerrillas as
adventurist, it was not adventurism per se that doomed the rebels, but the particular form that
this adventurism generally took: vanguardist foquismo, the belief that small, mobile, and
isolated focos could quickly create the necessary conditions for a revolution. In mid-1962,
after the first wave of defeats and desertions, the dwindling Chirino Front held its First
Guerrilla Conference. The initial euphoria had worn off, and amid the difficult terrain of the
Sierrathe geography as inhospitable as the peasantry was stubbornthe Cuban example
could only seem distant, and the guerrillas began to take stock of their errors. Bravo describes
the somber realism of the conference in the following terms: What was fundamental was to
leave immediatism aside, to carry out profound mass work, and to avoid unnecessary combat.
But for others, from a distance and still enamored of the vision of rapid victory, this looked
like withdrawal: In Caracas, revolutionary circles made fun of us. Since we weren't fighting,
they made jokes saying that we were boy scouts.39

A Tale of Two Armed Forces

If unchecked optimism led these young guerrilla units to quick defeats, relations with the
military proved to be yet another stumbling block. But in neither case would imported theories
from Cuba or elsewhereprove helpful. Such theories, after all, tended to pose an
opposition between the archetypal Latin American military gorilla and the revolutionary
insurgent: the first clean-cut, rigidly disciplined, and reactionary, and the latter unshorn
(exemplified in the Cuban barbudos), freethinking, and rebellious. This caricature has never
suited the Venezuelan context, and given the important and complex role of the military in the
Bolivarian Revolution, it is essential to grapple with this issue. Many root the particularity of
the Venezuelan Armed Forces in the composition of state power (where, unlike in Colombia,
the power of the landed oligarchy was more limited), the composition of the military (which,
unlike in the Southern Cone, was not strictly elite and unlike the case in countries like Bolivia
was not strictly racialized), or the experience of the Liberation and Federal Wars. For Douglas
Bravo, however, there is a more proximate historical reference point, what he deems
Trejismo. Named for Hugo Trejo, the progressive lieutenant colonel who led an aborted
rebellion against Marcos Prez Jimnez on January 1, 1958, Trejismo refers to a democratic
and progressive current within the Venezuelan Armed Forces, a sizeable segment of which
would turn against Betancourt within a few short years of his election.40 For Bravo, failing to
grasp the importance of this current within the military was one of the guerrillas most serious
errors because it threatened to leave the military in the hands of traditional conservative
sectors.41
Recognition of this potential discontent within the military heavily influenced the
establishment in 1963 of the Armed Forces of National Liberation ( FALN) as a broad structure
to unify the disparate guerrilla fronts. In the aftermath of the failed rebellions in Carpano and
Puerto Cabello and the subsequent forcible exodus of leftist officers from the Armed Forces
into the guerrilla ranks, no number of prejudices about military gorillas could prevent the
revolutionaries from recognizing their potential radicalism, and the nominal head of the FALN
was none other than Captain Manuel Ponte Rodrguez, one of the leaders of the rebellion at
Puerto Cabello. The FALN's founding document even included a direct appeal to rescue the
Armed Forces, and it was not merely the structure of the FALN, but also its operating
procedures, that were shaped by the peculiar nature of the Venezuelan military: it was FALN
policy not to engage the Armed Forces in battle if possible, and the FALN's honor code pledged
to respect the lives of soldiers.42 There were strategic reasons for this, and the FALN's political
counterpart, the National Liberation Front (FLN), actively sought to facilitate the conversion
of allies and new combatants from the enemy front, allowing every honest, patriotic,
nationalist, democratic or revolutionary officer to redeem themselves before the eyes of
history.43
One noteworthy example was Captain Elas Manuitt, a young army officer stationed in
Tchira, near the Colombian border, at the time of the Carupanazo. Upon hearing of the
uprising, Manuitt promptly deserted his post, showing up at Communist Party headquarters
carrying two machine guns and demanding to be incorporated into the guerrilla forces.44 This
fidelity to the ideals of the traditional Armed Forces was seconded by Tulio Martnez, a former
army lieutenant who also left his post after the 1962 rebellions, to later become Bravo's

lieutenant in Falcn, insisting that I haven't deserted, I haven't betrayed anything. I remain,
and intend to remain, an officer. I have only left an army which goes on parade for an army
which fights.45 It was precisely this peculiarity of the Venezuelan guerrilla army that would
be violated in one of the most serious early errors of the armed struggle. On September 29,
1963, a mere two months before the presidential election, in operations named for the
communist leaders Olga Luzardo and Italo Sardi, an attack was initiated on a commuter train
traveling from Los Teques to El Encanto, south of Caracas. When the smoke had cleared, four
National Guardsmen were dead, and the Betancourt government would take full advantage of
the attack to undermine the moral claims of the guerrilla struggle. To this day, Teodoro Petkoff
(now of the anti-Chvez opposition) is considered by many as the responsible commander,
although he denies this.46
For Douglas Bravo, this position vis--vis the military is one of the peculiarities of the
Venezuelan revolution, one that explains the tendency toward joint civilian-military action of
the sort later undertaken (with Bravo's own blessing) by Chvez and others.47 But it is not
without its own contradictions, which would play out in different ways through the decades.
Most fundamentally, this peculiarity draws out a tension within the armed struggle between
guerrillas and what could be deemed putsch-ists, namely, those who saw the struggle as
leading up to action within the military, a coup d'tat, rather than with the complete
transformation and replacement of the Armed Forces from below. 48 While this debate would
resurface in the run-up to Chvez's 1992 coup, in the short term it contributed to the PCV's
oscillation between two forms of vanguardism, seeking revolutionary change from either the
focos or the barracks, but never truly from the popular masses.

The FALN'S Swan Song

Although widespread doubt existed regarding the potential effectiveness of guerrilla action in
the cities, urban guerrilla units enjoyed early successes where their rural counterparts were all
but exterminated. The urban equivalent of the guerrilla foco was the Tactical Combat Unit
(UTC), small platoons of five to six fighters. The UTCS had been active before 1959some even
fanning the flames of urban discontent at Betancourt's electionbut their strategic relationship
to the rural guerrilla army was never concretized.49 Their tactics were nothing if not
innovative; between 1961 and 1963, soccer stars were kidnapped, French impressionist
paintings stolen, airplanes hijacked to drop propaganda, and the U.S. military mission
occupied. These commando-type operations were combined with mass tactics in the barrios,
such as the provocation of street battles with police.50 Some, later criticized as politically
counterproductive, included the kill a cop a day policy, which allegedly was maintained for
500 days.51
But the importance and success of the urban struggle notwithstanding, it would be in the
cities, Caracas in particular, that the key battle of the Venezuelan guerrilla struggle would soon
be lost. On December 1, 1963, a mere two months after the public outrage that greeted the El
Encanto attack, presidential elections were held. Foolishly, the guerrilla forces called a general
strike a mere ten days before the election, a strike that, despite its tactical success, set the stage
for a strategic defeat that Teodoro Petkoff called the swan song of the FALN.52 We
announced a strike to block the general elections, and we were able to paralyze the city. We

paralyzed the city in an absurd way, with bullets. That day nobody moved in CaracasOne
leftist politician said that the elections were ruined, but what was actually ruined was the FALN.
We had no munitions left for Election Day, so our promise to stop the elections could not be
fulfilled.53
Despite this guerrilla policy of militant abstention, the crucial electionsto choose
Betancourt's successor and consolidate the system of representative democracywent forward
as planned. The result could not have been worse for the armed struggle: not only did 90
percent of the electorate go to the polls, but Ral Leoni, an old-school adeco of Betancourt's
own stripe, won. A revolutionary situation had been squandered once again, and the urban
guerrillas, alongside their rural counterparts, spent the years 1964 through 1967 searching for a
new path.54
This path was far from tranquil, as Leoni sought to pacify the guerrilla struggle with both
the carrot and the stick. According to Bravo, Leoni's preference for the former constituted a
minority position within AD and the Armed Forces, and as evidence he cites the violence of the
simultaneous government offensive, which represented practically a state of exception and
involved a significant number of summary executions.55 Despite Leoni's soft-spoken faade, a
stark contrast to Betancourt's forceful demeanor, many agree that the later years of the armed
struggle were even more violently repressive than those of Betancourt himself.56 New theaters
of operation (TOS) were established and included what many now term concentration camps,
and the colonial prison-turned-barracks at San Carlos was reopened to house political
prisoners. One such TO was established at El Tocuyo in Lara State in 1964, and it was there that
nearly every guerrilla from the Pez Front with whom I spoke had been imprisoned and
tortured under the direction of an unknown American who barked out orders in English.57 Some
were burned with a hot iron, some with raw garlic, others were covered in feces, whereas most
were simply executed or thrown from helicopters to their death.

Guerrillas Without Communists

The lessons of these early guerrilla failures remained unclear and contested, and the schism
that would eventually divide the Party from the FALN was widening. Tensions boiled over into
an openly factional battle at the Party's Seventh Plenum in April 1964, where, despite
significant support for the armed struggle, some like Guillermo Garca Ponce and Teodoro
Petkoff were increasingly suspicious of the FALN leadership.58 For Petkoff, the FALN had taken
over at the expense of the PCV: A revolutionary cause after all cannot be run like an army. The
militarization of the revolutionary organization generated a contempt for political
considerations.59 But the PCV hardly was in touch with the masses in a way that would grant it
a monopoly over the political, and even less so as the party leadership was gradually rounded
up and imprisoned. As early as 1964, the MIR's Domingo Alberto Rangel had begun to voice
opposition to the armed struggle, in part on the basis of the country's increasing urbanization
and the need for a mass base, for which he was pilloried as a traitor by the PCV and the duros,
or hardliners, of his own party.60 Two years later, however, Petkoff and other key leaders of the
PCV languishing in San Carlos grew increasingly skeptical of the future of the armed struggle,
only disagreeing on how the strategy of withdrawal should be carried out. The response from
the mountains was clear: the PCV leadership was utterly out of touch with the daily struggles of

the guerrilla combatants, and both sides were increasingly out of touch with the masses.
With withdrawal decided, the dissenting Douglas Bravo could no longer be tolerated. He was
disciplined first for publicly contradicting the party line and siding with Castro by supporting
the continuation of the struggle, and while his expulsion from the Party was only formalized in
1966, they would have thrown me out earlier if they could, he tells me with a chuckle.61 In a
meeting with many of those commanders who shared his views, Bravo took the decisive step of
founding the Party of the Venezuelan Revolution ( PRV) on April 23, 1966. In attendance were
Ojeda, Manuitt, and Francisco El Flaco Prada, among others.62 They abandoned us, one
early member of the PRV told me of the PCV, emphasizing the fact that while the clear majority
o f FALN fighters favored a continuation of the armed struggle, the Party's withdrawal
immediately left them without resources.63 Bravo's forces took with them the entire Chirino
Front in Falcn as well as a number of individual fighters nationwide and the entirety of the
PCV's urban guerrilla apparatus, but the birth of the PRV was marked by loss almost
immediately: less than a month later, Ojeda was captured by the Intelligence Services ( SIFA),
tortured, and killed in a mock suicide by hanging. This was a serious blow to the new
movement, which was itself not yet consolidated: Fabricio was the principal political figure
of the guerrilla movement, Bravo recalls, and the most widely known leader in terms of
public opinion. His death created a profound deterioration for us. The desertions began.64
And not only desertions occurred. The PRV suffered immediate divisions among cadres sent
to Cuba for training, with one sector forming the Movement for National Salvation (MOSAN)
and another, younger contingent that had become frustrated with the slow pace of the struggle
forming Punto Cero (Point Zero), named for their Cuban training camp.65 Despite some
symbolic successes, including the December 1966 landing of a group of international fighters
under the leadership of Luben Petkoff, the armed struggle in Venezuela found itself in
irreversible decline. In such desperate times, previous lessons were forgotten, and Bravo
admits that the PRV fell once again into the isolated and vanguardist foquismo its members had
ostensibly abandoned years earlier. 66 The MIR continued activity in the eastern part of the
country, shifting its cadres from the Ezequiel Zamora Front in the central region of El
Bachiller (reconstituted by Amrico Martn in late 1966) toward the Sucre Front further east
around 1968.67 But most of the remaining guerrilla leaders would gradually assent to the
pacification schemes, taking with them the last hopes of a sustained armed struggle.

We Too Risked Our Lives

Like many other young women of her era, Nora Castaeda would have been considered
precocious by any standards. As a fourteen-year-old high school student amid rising opposition
to the increasingly repressive Betancourt regime, she signed up for the newly formed MIR when
it split from AD in 1960. Even by the standards of this youth-driven party, Castaeda was
young, but in the context of the revolutionary 23 de Enero neighborhood, radicalism was
something of a genetic inheritance, and within two short years she became an active participant
in the party's clandestine activities. That things have changed is clear from the location of our
meeting: I meet Castaeda in her office in Banmujer, the Women's Development Bank, a
government-sponsored institution over which she currently presides as its president. She
recounts her role in the armed struggle primarily as follows:

The women from our organization organized the National Commission of MIR Women [CONAMIR], and our role
was a fundamental one: firstly, to attend to imprisoned comrades, not only materially but also politicallyand we
also had to attend to their families, above all economically, and to support the compaeros headed to the rural
guerrilla who needed solidarity and support. As you can see, women's rights were completely absent, and we weren't
fighting for the human rights of women, but instead as a support for all the movements fighting for the transformation
of society, which at that moment passed through the urban and rural guerrilla struggle.68

Thus, while many women participated directly in guerrilla warfare, Nora's role within the MIR
was instead one of support. She recognizes the tension that this entailed, but does not mean it
as an unqualified critique: in the era of guerrilla warfare, she and a number of other
revolutionary women consciously chose to put broader societal transformation first.
Ldice Navas, who also now works at Banmujer, embodies the direct participation by women
in the guerrilla struggle in a poignant way, and she has given more to that struggle than most.
Navas began as a young MIR militant in 1966, following her brothers into the armed struggle,
and she kept up the fight longer than most: joining the nascent Bandera Roja (BR) when the MIR
divided in 1969 and remaining in the armed struggle well into the 1980s.69 In the context of
massive government repression, Navas husband Julio Cesar Guzmn, whom she had met in
the trenches of 1966, fled into exile, only to give his life to the struggle in El Salvador. Navas
recalls, My husband fell in combat in San Vicente, in the ranks of the FMLN, on December 29,
1981. Navas herself only left Venezuela in 1986, after which point she would be out of the
country for nearly a decade, working in Cuba, Nicaragua, and El Salvador toward the ideal of
proletarian internationalism and the struggle against neoliberalism.
But it was not only her husband who was lost to the struggle for international solidarity; as
Navas recalls: Later, my two children began to learn, to develop their human sensibility, their
solidarity with the poor. This led one of my children, Julio Cesar Guzmn [Navas], to also
decide to join the struggle of the Salvadorean people, and at one point when he came down
[from the mountains] to the city he was detained by the army in Santa Clara and executed on
October 30, 1991. I returned after the Peace Accords to see where he had been killed. 70
Guzmn Navas was a mere twenty years old. Having seen the participation of thousands of
women in the Salvadorean struggle, Navas insists that women participated fully and even
showed a greater capacity for resistance than did men. She recounts incidents in which women
were forced to watch in silence from underground hiding places as their children were
executed. That's a limit situation, Navas insists, having to cover your mouth to not be
discovered, that's an extremely painful experience for any mother. That women and men had
exactly the same responsibilities doesn't mean that there was no machismoI repeat that in
terms of participation in the struggle, women were equally valued as men, and it was in the
process of the struggle itself, by the heat of its crucible, that gender relations became
malleable and saw their most radical transformations.71
While Castaeda and the CONAMIR worked more directly on women's issues and in a support
capacity, Navas insists that theirs was but a single struggle; after all, in this context one could
be detained, tortured, and killed just as easily for providing support as for picking up the gun. I
found this sentiment to be echoed by the group of (all male) guerrillas I interviewed from the
Pez Front, who, without prompting, inserted enthusiastic praise of women who participated
both directly and indirectly, emphasizing the spontaneous wall of silence that many would turn

toward the forces of order to protect loved ones. Such quiet displays of force led many to
realize that here was a people with the madera, the strong wood necessary to support a
revolution.72 To neglect the participation of women in the guerrilla struggle is to neglect the
very real claims of solidarity and ideals that would lead women like Ldice Navas to risk their
own lives and sacrifice their families on the altar of proletarian internationalism, but this
chapter of women's history in Venezuela is inexplicably absent from most predominant
accounts of both the guerrilla struggle and the mainstream women's movement.73

Revolutionaries Without Masses

It was amid the guerrillas turn toward prolonged warfare in late 1963 that the French
intellectual Rgis Debray penetrated the military encirclement to visit the Chirino Front.
While Revolution in the Revolution would not appear for another four years, Bravo recalls that,
during discussions with the writer, the guerrillas were introduced to the arguments that would
later compose the book: Debray's exaggerated emphasis on mobility, the privileging of the
military over the political, and the rejection of urban combat.74 In other words, Debray's Cubainspired doctrine would emphasize those very elements that the Venezuelan guerrillas had
already been forced to abandon in practice, but despite this, the remaining traces of
vanguardism and foquismo would come to be the Achilles heel of the later armed struggle as
well. Partly in recognition of these errors, Bravo now insists that foquismo is a deviation that
divorces vanguard action from the bulk of the popular masses, and to his credit he founded
the PRV in an effort to transition from a vanguard struggle to a people's war. 75 Furthermore,
Debray had not even faithfully represented his object of inspiration: The Cuban revolutionary
epic appeared as a caricature because the popular masses were actively involved and the
urban fronts played a key role.76 What Bravo fails to mention, perhaps, is that this was a
deviation to which many Venezuelan guerrillas had all-too-readily succumbed, first through
the euphoria of emerging struggle (in 1962) and later in a desperate effort to grapple with
defeat (after 1966).77 Much as imported whisky warms the belly, the intoxicating optimism of
a self-identified vanguard was often the best way of resisting the cold reality of objective
defeat.
Although Bravo insists that we never shared Debray's point of view, his own description
of their early errors suggests differently. 78 The most serious of these, a general error, was the
decision to send isolated focos to the mountains rather than connecting guerrilla units to
existing campesino struggles, such as the more than three hundred sixty Fronts for the Right
to Bread formed by 1960, which had seized local haciendas and occupied the lands with
machete and rifle in hand. But blinded by vanguardism and foquismo, the young guerrillas
neglected existing struggles, choosing instead to create their own out of thin air. The second
and related error, for Bravo, was of politically induced overreach: You can't start out with ten
fronts if you haven't even consolidated one, he tells me.79 The original PCV strategydeemed
the beehive theorywould have seen a single front in Lara State, which would then radiate
struggles outward. However, because of political territorialism, each person wanted to create
their own structure in their own way, and the result was a proliferation of ill-prepared fronts
led by headstrong comandantes, sowing the seeds for later divisions that would plague the
guerrilla struggle to the very end. Another abandoned policy that would have counteracted both

errors was called the 500, which advocated training 500 young party militants in agrarian
production, management, and political-syndical organization, who would then be distributed
alongside the rural guerrilla fronts to reinforce the ties between the focos and the rural masses.
Again, this plan was abandoned with only a few dozen of the 500 trained.
This is not to suggest, however, that the Venezuelan guerrilla struggle was entirely lacking
in mass support. During the early years, the Bolvar Front under Argimiro Gabaldn enjoyed
significant support from local campesinosin part inherited from Gabaldn seniorbut
Argimiro's accidental death in 1963 in many ways doomed the front.80 Further east, guerrillas
unde r MIR leadership engaged in innovative experiments that broke severely with the
vanguardist tradition and in many ways ploughed the soil for contemporary movements. Carlos
Betancourt was to the guerrilla struggle in eastern Venezuela what Douglas Bravo was to the
west: under the alias Jernimo, Betancourt was a comandante of unquestioned authority. But
today I meet him in a small office in the basement of the newly founded Bolivarian University,
where he has been contracted to teach workshops about ideological education. For a man who
once commanded hundreds of hardened fighters, he is humble in both appearance and manner,
especially in contrast to Bravo, and as we enter he bustles around the office preparing coffee
for me.81 Despite his political roots in the MIR, of which Betancourt was a founding member, he
served several years under Gabaldn in the west before establishing the Sucre Front in four
eastern states. These MIRistas in the east were immediately critical of foquista orthodoxy and
began experimenting instead with mass-based approaches to guerrilla warfare.82
Rejecting columns for smaller and more mobile detachments, Betancourt pioneered a
combined form of struggle. This aging comandante grabs a scrap of paper to sketch out the
structure of the Sucre Front: the main detachmentnamed for recently deceased Fabricio
Ojedawas a mobile and offensive unit much like those operating in the west, but one that
worked in close conjunction with the Juan Chacn Lanza (Juancho) and Gatico Ahmadaray
detachments, which were more geographically fixed. It was these latter two detachments that
constituted the Sucre Front's most serious break with foquismo, serving not only as rearguard
bases, but more importantly as spaces for serious mass work, including cultural schools,
literacy programs, local economic development including support for campesinos, and the
formation of local militias. According to Betancourt, these spaces allowed the guerrillas to
capitalize politically on military offensives. Moreover, while the leadership of the Ojeda
detachment was fixed, the local base areas allowed fighters to elect their own leadership, who
then were held accountable in popular assemblies (this applied even to Betancourt himself),
and even sought to fight gender discrimination within the armed units (Ldice Navas was a key
participant in this struggle). This experimentation in mass-based struggle and prefigurative
popular democracy would prove important as the years and decades wore on, but even with the
support that the guerrillas enjoyed in the east, the struggle was unsustainable in the face of
mass disenchantment and the carrot and stick of legalization and government repression, and
the MIR would undergo a series of splits in the early 1970s (see chapter 2).
What, then, were the lessons of the failure of the Venezuelan guerrilla struggle? There seem to
be as many explanations as there were guerrillas, and each of these seems partial. It was not
simply the romanticism or adventurism of the guerrillas, who had soon given up on their early

expectations of rapid victory and set about building an apparatus for sustained struggle. Nor
was it simply their petit-bourgeois or student makeup, which some blamed for that
romanticism.83 While this might have been an accurate description of many MIR militants, it
does not hold for the many working-class revolutionaries who threw their weight behind the
cause, like the PCV guerrillas I spoke with in Portuguesa. Gonzalito, for example, had been a
shoe-shiner, a drunk, and a street vendor, only later to become a Communist without reading
Capital and insisting that the streets are the best book. But even they could not deny the
impact of the influx of students, and they joke with me about having to tell aspiring
combatants from the UCV that this bus to the mountains is full, wait for the next one.84
It was not simply a misjudgment with regard to either the popularity of democracy or the
role of the traditional military. It was not simply a misplaced emphasis on a depopulated
countryside.85 It was not simply the importation of foreign models for revolution, which does
not explain the similar fate of imported opposites: first an ostensibly Cuban foquismo and later
Chinese-inspired prolonged warfare.86 And it was not simply, as Bravo put it, the PCV's policy
of giving up; by that point, the struggle had long been lost. It was not simply any of these
elements that doomed the struggle, and yet it was all of them, or rather that element that drew
them all together: vanguardism, the assumption that an enlightened leadership had but to show
the way and the people would follow, and that if the masses did not support the struggle, so
much the worse for the masses. It was vanguardism that led romantic young students from the
MIR to believe that they could lead a revolution and that the masses would flock to support
them. It was vanguardism that bridged such disparate extremes as the PCV's oscillation from
supporting small rural focos to military putschism and its internal debate over military versus
political leadership, seemingly opposed extremes that shared a neglect for mass work. Above
all, it was a vanguardist temper that dictated that certain foreign theories could simply be
chosen and applied regardless of context, geographical or human. Even foquismo was but an
extreme variant of this same vanguardism, one that shunned the people on purpose and
according to which the absence of mass support for the Venezuelan guerrilla struggle was
alchemically transformed into a virtue.87
Almost any former guerrilla fighter will tell you that the defeat was not military: it was
political. Ironically, although many young romantics would be the first to renounce the armed
struggle, those cadres who opposed the decision to take up arms tend to celebrate it. Back with
the Pez Front, I am told that the armed struggle was a beautiful and heroic experience, which
touched the heart despite its ineffectiveness at taking power. As we discuss, a younger PCV
militant interjects to praise his revolutionary elders, insisting that ustedes abrieron una
brecha, their efforts had opened a breach that, despite their failure, proved crucial as time
wore on. It is this idea of finding victory in failure that best describes the legacy of the
guerrilla struggle because it expresses the unbounded optimism of those who embody that
legacy. The armed struggle was like a school of militancy in which young fighters could cut
their teeth, preparing for the more protracted struggle that history had in store. But each new
lesson was like Minerva's Owl, arriving too late to be of any use. To paraphrase Hegel, this
gloomy picture was increasingly clear to the struggling guerrillas, but its lessons arrived too
late to rejuvenate a form of struggle grown old. And so, at the end of the long decade of the
1960s, the guerrilla movement was utterly divided, isolated from any serious mass support,
and confronted a repressive state that enjoyed ever-increasing levels of legitimacy. While the

strategies for confronting this situation would vary in the decade to come, all would seek to
correct what was perceived as the original sin of the Venezuelan guerrillas: the lack of mass
support, itself an outgrowth of vanguardism. As we will see, not only was recognition of these
errors too late in coming, but some errors would persist and be repeated in the decades to
come.

Two. Reconnecting with the Masses

The people are wise and patient,
say the elders who know how to keep time
when singing to the guacharaca.
They say to cheer up because the time is coming,
Bolvar left yesterday, but today he is returning.
Let's go, let's go to meet him!
Al Primera

The Venezuelan guerrilla struggle was dashed to pieces on the surprisingly treacherous rocks
of the masses. After initially riding the tiger of massive anti-Betancourt sentiment, the
guerrillas, for a number of reasons not entirely within their control, saw their support dissipate
rapidly in the late 1960s. Leoni's government, recognizing that it was largely Rmulo
Betancourt himself who sparked the armed struggle, implemented a successful policy of
pacifying former fighters, which within a short period had divided the PCV, divided the MIR,
and divided even the FALN, thereby allowing repression to continue unchecked. In the reputed
words of their archnemesis Betancourt, the remaining guerrillas were little more than chicken
and rice without the chicken, Marxists without workers, socialists without campesinos.1 This
fact slowly dawned on those who remained in the armed struggle, generating a slow and
painful process of self-examination in an attempt to figure out what had gone so terribly wrong
and why the people had failed to respond to their clarion call to topple the young democracy.
All the while, the Venezuelan people continued to struggle: 1967 saw the beginning of an
upsurge of popular grassroots resistance, starting with public workers in Maracaibo but quickly
spreading nationwide, a wave of struggle that coincided paradoxically with the failure of
those seeking to control and lead such a movement.2 Paradoxical, to be sure, for those still
harboring lingering vanguardist pretensions, who could not grasp the potential for autonomous
action from below. But who were the Venezuelan masses toward which these guerrillas
yearned, who were now beginning to act on their own, thereby disproving in practice the
elitism of reactionaries and revolutionaries alike? They were, as some dissident guerrillas had
already begun to note, largely urban. Decades of government neglect and half-measures such
as the 1961 Land Reformitself a response to campesino rebelliousnessconspired with the
deformation inherent to the oil economy to produce a mass exodus from the countryside (see
chapter 8). Venezuela was already more than 60 percent urbanized at the onset of the guerrilla
struggle, and by the period of reflection that followed its failure, more than 70 percent were
living in the cities (this trend has continued to this day, with a current urbanization rate of
more than 90 percent).3
Here again Rgis Debray's impact is central because his defense of the guerrilla foco is
closely intertwined with his defense of the rural as that foco's proper sphere of operation. He
mounts this defense through a peculiar phenomenology that distinguishes the countryside
categorically from the city. While recognizing the importance of urbanization in Venezuela
and the explosive social contradictions created by the rural exodus, Debray nevertheless

cites as irrefutable Che Guevara's critique of the urban guerrilla.4 In a tone that echoes
Frantz Fanon's analysis of the colonial world as a Manichean realm of absolute oppositions
(without, it would seem, integrating Fanon's insights into the political implications of
urbanization), for Debray the rural comes to reflect almost mystically the alchemical processes
of armed struggle: struggling in the countryside breeds proletarians, the city petit-bourgeoisie;
the countryside is the weakest link, the city the strongest; in the country the guerrilla enjoys
unlimited mobility and can decide how and when to attack, in the city the pace is set by the
enemy amid inhospitable terrain.5 It is worth asking, however, to what degree this qualitative
opposition between urban and rural actually holds up in practice, and we can do this by first
wondering which urban Debray is speaking of. Doing so, it becomes clear that Debray never
distinguishes the urban proper from the semiurban barrios into which this mass urbanization
has been funneled, thereby neglecting the fundamental continuities that exist between the rural
campesino and the uprooted ex-campesino of the barrios (see chapter 9).
Teodoro Petkoff, who at the time was one of the main proponents of the centrality of urban
warfare, argued that, contrary to Debray's strategic rejection of urban guerrilla warfare, a city
like Caracas has an excellent topography for urban combat. After all, as the 1960s came to a
close, the Venezuelan capital was far more than the wide avenues, open plazas, and right
angles that one might find elsewhere. The poor and densely packed barrios with their
cardboard-and-tin ranchos often had far more in common with the mountainous guerrilla zones
from which their inhabitants had recently migrated: copious amounts of cover, tiny
passageways requiring detailed informal knowledge, and a population density capable of
harboring armed combatants.
In this way a single man who fired his weapon, then moved swiftly and fired from another point could paralyze an
entire barrio. The idea was not for him to win battles with the police, but to form part of the insurrectional complex of
the city. In this the participation of the masses was absolutely essential, and it came in this way: when our combatants
were withdrawing from the police, they found all doors open. A housewife would appear at her door and say, Take
a glass of water. Or I'll keep your weapons. Or Hide in here. Or You can escape that way.6

While the urban guerrillas of a previous decade had squandered this spontaneous support, the
strategic importance of mass work in the barrios would only increase in the decades that
followed. Nevertheless, this slow and partial process of rediscovering the popular masses did
not only take the form of abandoning the armed struggle; several strategies were attempted,
each a complex combination of success and failure, of lessons learned and errors repeated.
During the 1970s, parties were formed for electoral participation, open fronts were formed for
mass work, and even those who continued the clandestine struggle were breaking with old
schemas and attempting to reformulate the guerrilla experience in a new context and with an
eye to the failures of the past.

The PRV: Bolivarianism and Dissolution

The first serious experimentation would begin within the heart of the PRV itself, as a direct
result of its formation. Despite splitting from the PCV over the question of the armed struggle,
the PRV immediately attracted a variety of dissident sectors into its ranks, including prominent
founding members of the PCV who later had been expelled, such as Salvador de la Plaza,

expelled for attacking the Communist Party USA policy of peaceful coexistence and ngel J.
Mrquez (aka The Anarchist). The PRV further included a current influenced by Juan Bautista
Fuenmayor, the first general secretary of the PCV, who was expelled for opposing the failed
alliance with Betancourt and AD7. Alongside these historic currents, several intellectual and
artistic groups also joined the PRV (including the avant-garde group El Techo de la Ballena and
the revolutionary artist Chino Valera Mora), as did many of the PCV's military cadres, the nonMarxist but antidogmatic current led by Fabricio Ojeda, and a large contingent from the
Communist Youth (JCV).8
Amid such a varied group, polemics were inevitable, we couldn't avoid it, Bravo tells me.
But it was precisely this climate of tense intellectual ferment that began to generate one of the
PRV's most powerful legacies: It was there that we began to discuss, with the comrades from
Falcn, the question of Bolivarianism. But in the late 1960s as today, Bolivarianism had more
to do with a generalized process of rediscovering and reclaiming a national revolutionary
tradition than with Bolvar himself. According to Bravo, colonization destroyed the spiritual
and religious matrix of the indigenous and enslaved African population, and this cultural
genocidealong with the 80 million deaths it provokedrepresented the biggest crime that
capitalism has committed in the whole world. In the absence of these precolonial belief
structures, what remained were the legacies of the liberation leaders who had fought against
Spain, who themselves came to be religious figures. Bolvar and other liberation leaders,
according to Bravo, therefore represent both an authentic truth and an authentic lie,
embodying both the concrete anti-imperialist struggle and a fetish into which the people
deposit their own revolutionary aspirations. While Bravo insists that a similar process is
underway today with the adoration of Chvez, he seems unwilling to admit the positive and
necessary aspects of this process as he does for Bolvar.
By 1970, the PRV had defined itself as a Marxist-Leninist-Bolivarian party, and one of the
first trailblazers of Bolivarianism was PRV cadre Cornelio Alvaradosubsequently
disappeared by the statewho published a newspaper under the title El Bolivariano. This
rediscovery of a domestic revolutionary tradition coincided with and was nourished by the
study of subjugated Marxisms elsewhere, as Rafael El Negro Uzctegui, currently of the
Patria Para Todos ( PPT), or Homeland for All Party, explains to me. 9 A gregarious but softspoken man whose striking visage is a contrast of dark skin and a white beard, Uzctegui was
among those who made the transition from the PCV to the PRV alongside Bravo. After joining
the JCV in 1959 and being legal for a very short period, he began fighting in the politicalmilitary teams of the Communist Youth in Caracas before heading east in 1964 to fight in the
Manuel Ponte Rodrguez Front in Monagas, then under the leadership of Alfredo Maneiro.
According to Uzctegui, the PRV's separation from the PCV was a liberation of sorts because it
allowed us to get to know the various socialisms that existed in the world, socialisms that
were at the time multiplying as a result of the growing Sino-Soviet split.10 This all allowed us
to break with preconceived structures and was one of the elements that led the PRV to be one of
the parties with the greatest theoretical structure. We made an effort to learn Venezuelan
history, the history of our past, and this influenced both the PRV's understanding of the
potential of the traditional Armed Forces and of Chvez's 1992 coup: When I listen to Chvez
now, his speeches, his anguish, his way of expressing things, I see a portrait of my young
militancy during those times, jumping from a quote by Mao Tse-Tung to a quote by Gramsci,

to a quote by Toni Negri, to a quote by Rosa Luxemburg, to a thought of Che Guevara, or that
of a Latin American patriot. Indeed, the three roots that Chvez and others would later
claim as the historical and ideological foundation of the Bolivarian Revolutioncomprising
Bolvar alongside his mentor Simn Rodrguez and the peasant agitator Ezequiel Zamora
derived directly from their links with the PRV (Adn Chvez, Hugo's elder brother, was a PRV
cadre, and many vestiges of the PRV, including those like Uzctegui in the PPT and Klber
Ramrez Rojas, would support the coup).
For Isidro Ramrez, who joined the PRV-FALN later at age 16 under the nom de guerre
Armando, only to find himself promoted to the party leadership after many in his home state
of Carabobo were arrested, this debate and this vision also had a religious component that was
rooted in liberation theology and linked to the reconsideration and valorization of the different
cultural histories that influenced the Venezuelan context. 11 We had to accept that part of our
reality and part of our cosmovision, besides the Catholic and Christian, also includes the
African and indigenous contributions, a plurality of spiritualities. Ramrez even recalls a time
when Francisco El Flaco Prada, second commander of the PRV, asked him to organize a visit
to the shrine of Mara Lionza at Mount Sorte in Yaracuy State. Similar in some ways to
Santera, the worship of Mara Lionza blends Catholicism with local, pre-Columbian, and Afro
beliefs. Prada was very open to such ideas, and so they traveled to the shrine in 1981, with
the objective of digging through these roots of the spirituality of our people. This all took
place with a bit of a Mariteguista vision, a rediscoverya recuperation of collective cultural
memory so long forgotten and erased by Eurocentrism.
As this mention of Peruvian communist Jos Carlos Maritegui might suggest, such
questions of cosmological memory are not limited to the religious sphere but speak to a
spiritualization of Marxism itself. When asked about the current relevance of the PRV-Ruptura
experience, Ramrez responds: If there's one thing I know about the PRV, it was its ethic, its
devotion, something which has to do with ideals more than the material realm. Whether it be
the individual materialism of corruption or the collective materialism that centers brute
productive capacity, such a spiritualization is fundamental for the Bolivarian process of the
present. Yes, we need to work toward the prosperity of the people, and socialism needs to be
materially prosperousbut socialism can't cease to be spiritual, precisely because it needs that
wisdom to know how to manage the material, because if not it will devour you. This critique
of the purely material and openness to the ecological aspects of socialism would lead as well to
t h e PRV's most significant theoretical contribution: a three-volume critical study of the
Venezuelan oil economy published in the late 1970s, which remains a seminal reference point
for the present.12
If one area of theoretical innovation was most fateful for the PRV, it was the party's study of
nonparty organizations and its eventual rejection of the Leninist party form as the most useful
tool for revolutionary change. We even saw the party as part of this old, capitalist tradition,
Ramrez argues, and the PRV itself officially dissolved in the early 1980s.13 Uzctegui, on the
other hand, attributes the division and dispersal of the PRV more to Douglas Bravo's own
theoretical development: through his unbridled heterodoxy and increasingly ecological focus,
he liquidated the party without meaning to do soand the revolutionary process lost an
important organizationwith a great spirit. Many who were hesitant to abandon the partyform passed into similar, smaller organizations such as Patriotic Hope (including Dimas Petit

and Rafael Ramrez), other leftist groups such as the Socialist League, Bravo's later Tercer
Camino (Third Path), Maneiro's Radical Cause (including Uzctegui), New Autonomous
Movements, Gente 80, and the Revolutionary Tendency (which briefly included Al Rodrguez
Araque, who later went on to join the Radical Cause and PPT before joining the Chvez
government).
In the PRV, many theoretical experiments were set into motion, but the dissolution of the
party intervened before they could be completed. From recovering the three roots to thinking
about spirituality and materialism, to emphasizing the cultural and interrogating the party
form, to questions of ecology and the oil economy, in these years the PRV was, above all, an
unprecedented crucible of theoretical experimentation. Although somenotably, PRV dissident
Carlos Lanzquestion the true depth of this process of reflection, there remains little doubt
that it was the PRV that set the process into motion and that the momentum gained in this
process of experimentation contributed to bringing Chvez to power. As former PRV member
Hctor Vivas (a self-professed architect of the 1975 escape from San Carlos) would later put it:
The Venezuelan revolutionary process did not begin with Hugo Chvez. The revolution that
the comandante is leading is a continuation of what was embarked upon by Simn Bolvar.
And besides, he comes out of the PRV.14

MAS and La Causa : The Rebirth of the Electoral Left

Cuartel San Carlos, an eighteenth-century colonial fortress tucked amid modern architecture
not far from the old city center of Caracas, is not what it used to be. Or, rather, it has been
many things: military barracks, the bloody site of an attempted coup in 1945, and, most
notoriously, a prison and torture chamber reserved for the political opponents of Venezuela's
repressive democracy. But now it is something quite different. As I enter, a massive FALN flag
drifts lazily overhead. This former prison has been taken over by ex-PRV guerrillas and now
serves to educate the public on the horrors of the old regime.15 To call it a museum does not
do it justice; run by those who themselves have been political prisoners, the San Carlos of
today is a monument to the memory of their suffering and their struggle. As I walk through the
old cells, many still etched with makeshift graffiti scratched into the plaster and concrete
walls, I am told how, upon its liberation, the basement of the prison still contained the remains
of the colonial torture chambersknown by prisoners as tigritos, or little tigersthat had
been again put to use under the Leoni government.
San Carlos represents not only the mute suffering of a people, however; it also stands for the
dignity, and indeed, cunning, of resistance. It was from here that, in 1967 and again in 1975,
spectacular escapes were orchestrated. This is the basis of its new significance, and today its
walls are emblazoned with the faces of heroic escapees, some of whom are well-known
members of the government (and opposition). In February 1967, it was here that the leading
lights of the PCVPompeyo Mrquez, Teodoro Petkoff, the Machado brothers, Freddy Muoz,
and Guillermo Garca Poncefound themselves. This was not the first time Petkoff had seen
the inside of San Carlos, and it would not be his first escape. In 1964, he had escaped from the
nearby Military Hospital after drinking a liter of blood, which he then regurgitated to fake a
gastric hemorrhage; but, after making his way to the western front, Petkoff was recaptured,
arriving once again at San Carlos later that same year. 16 A new escape plan was in the works

almost immediately: codenamed the book, the plan included a young Syrian known as
Simn the Arab, who assisted in digging the more than 200-foot tunnel from a kiosk across
the street over a period of nearly three years, guided only by the faint tapping of a typewriter
from within the cell.17 In what L'Humanit deemed the escape of the century, Petkoff,
Mrquez, and Garca Ponce escaped through the tunnel on February 5, 1967.18
But the divisions that emerged within San Carlos ran deep once on the outside. While the
imprisoned leadership agreed on the decision to withdraw from the armed struggle, arguments
about how this was to be done were soon conflated with a new challenge: how to react to the
Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Petkoff clashed with the established leadership of the PCV,
arguing that the Czech experience had been an attempt to develop a new form of socialism, and
that rather than merely resisting imperialism through popular frontism, the PCV should attempt
to construct socialism in the present. Against the stageist logic of Democracy Today,
Socialism Tomorrow (the same logic that had led to the PCV's fatal hesitation toward the
armed struggle) young party cadres, echoing their MIR counterparts a decade prior, were clear:
Socialism Now!19 The same Teodoro Petkoff who only a few years earlier had condemned
Douglas Bravo for violating the sacred principles of organization and encouraging
factionalism was now himself beginning to question those same principles openly, and in
December 1970 the young radicals left the PCV to form the Movement toward Socialism
(MAS).20 Shortly after the split, Petkoff described the aspiration of those comprising the young
party to create a revolutionary organization that would be sufficiently open so as not to
attempt to impose a rigid model on the society in which it lives. In this open organization,
there would be no firm division between hardcore militant and sympathizer, no insistence that
we are men of a special temper, that we communists are made of a special kind of steel. The
MAS sought to infuse socialism with the spirit of the New Left, with its internal democracy and
rejection of vanguardism and two-stage theories of revolution, seeking to construct a very
horizontal organization in which the distance between the leadership and its base is very
small.21
But words are one thing and actions another. Ellner notes that the new MAS was born of
old-style opportunism and Machiavellian maneuvering: Petkoff and others initially had
framed themselves as proponents of PCV unity in a cynical attempt to do as much damage to
the party as possible before leaving.22 The strategy paid dividends immediately: the young
dissidents were surprised when PCV elder Pompeyo Mrquez opted to leave with them. As
would become clear over the years, this sort of Machiavellian opportunism has made it
difficult, if not impossible, to know if Petkoff meant what he said, and this characteristic
infused the wildly inconsistent policies of the MAS. The stroke of strategic genius that brought
Pompeyo and others into the nascent MAS, moreover, entailed its own dangers, which former
guerrilla commander Alfredo Maneiro recognized earlier than most. According to Ellner, The
MAS was born with two defined ideological currents, the left of Petkoff and the center of
Mrquez, and from the beginning Maneiro argued that the presence of the centrists in the
new party would slow the process of revising the doctrine and practice of orthodox
communism.23 Thus it was that Maneiro, considered by many a natural member of the MAS
leadership, walked out of the MAS founding conference.24 Meanwhile, his concerns would be
substantiated inside, and the centrists were recompensed royally for their willingness to
abandon the old party, traditional positions on the working class and factionalism were

inserted into party statutes, Mrquez himself was named general secretary, and the new party
even endorsed the slogan, We are, more than ever, communists.25
The MAS was born as a heterodox alternative to PCV orthodoxy, but it soon became clear that
such heterodoxy did not necessarily position it to the left of its predecessor. First, the MAS
sought to rethink the concept of working-class centrality in a country like Venezuela, where
the workers proper constituted a small and relatively privileged class (see chapter 7).
However, Petkoff, who saw this as extending the lessons of the guerrilla struggle and therefore
advocated updating of the concept of the proletariat to encompass as well the marginal
informal class (see chapter 9), oscillated between this position and an open celebration of the
middle class.26 Regardless of this variation in position, the party itself remained
demographically middle class, drawing its membership largely from students and
professionals. But given that the Venezuelan middle classes were relatively privileged at the
time of the 1970s oil bonanza, the political implications of this class makeup were decisive:
The MAS, as would have been the case with any other left-wing party emerging from
privileged sectors and accepting this social base, was destined to move to the right as time
passed.27 This rightward shift was exacerbated by the party's a priori electoralism and the
opportunism that this would engender, with heterodoxy here becoming a new orthodoxy: The
MASistas have almost always seen electoral results as the best way to determine the correctness
of their positions.28 If the task was to reconnect to the masses, the MAS could only see those
masses through an electoral lens.
The MAS's rightward shift was as swift as it was forewarned. Shortly after its founding in
1971, the party abandoned the immediatism of its demand for Socialism Now! and opted
instead for a language of partial reforms; in its zeal to please voters, the word socialism was
nearly absent from the 1978 presidential campaign.29 As the poet and critic Luis Britto Garca
told me, he was with the MAS until they became social-democrats, and this certainly did not
take long at all.30 But what was most ironicand most revealingabout the MAS's obsessively
electoral strategy was its impressive failure. Despite nominating the charismatic and widely
respected journalist Jos Vicente Rangel, who was best known for revealing extrajudicial
killings by the government and later serving as vice president under Chvez, the MAS garnered
a paltry number of votes, and even this number declined when the party turned inward,
nominating Petkoff himself in 1983. Where much of the Venezuelan population sought honesty
and responsibility in a time of corruption, the MAS appeared in a 1983 opinion survey as the
most dishonest party on the Venezuelan political horizon, truly an accomplishment given the
stiff competition.31 But as economic crisis set in, even this party seemed an attractive
alternative to the prevailing two-party system, and the MAS saw significant success during the
1989 municipal elections. But where many sought an outlet for their total opposition to the
corrupt and elite two-party democracy, the MAS appeared as an apologist for and even
functional reinforcement of that system, celebrating the contributions of the AD and COPEI to
the nation's democratic heritage. When the Venezuelan party system found itself in free fall
after the 1992 Chvez coup, MAS threw its lot in with the candidacy of COPEI founder Rafael
Caldera, a dinosaur from the old system whose political extinction was delayed only by his
opportunistic recognition of the true significance of the 1992 coups (see the Second Interlude).
But the modest successes of the MAS would soon be eclipsed even on the electoral plane by a
very different sort of party, one that better represented the MAS's own nominal critique of the

party-form and one whose devotion to bottom-up organizing was more sustained: La Causa ,
or The Radical Cause (LCR). When Alfredo Maneiro walked out of the founding conference
of the MAS in January 1971, it was not to form a new party, and while the newborn MAS was
approving statutes critical of the Party as an end-in-itself, Maneiro was putting this
skepticism into practice by not initially forming a party or even a movement but rather a loose
grouping known as Venezuela 83. 32 This antiparty attitude combined a persistent hostility
toward corrupt representative democracy with a firm recognition of the vanguardist errors of
the guerrilla struggle, and in so doing was more in line with the later political mood of the
country than the MAS.33 This remainder left by the PCV-MAS split would be as frustrated with
the old as with the new, and whereas the MAS made every effort to incorporate itself to the
existing rules of the representative democratic system, the LCR broke more decisively with
those rules, choosing, at least initially, to rewrite the script in favor of a bottom-up, more
directly democratic organization that would work within and alongside social movements.34
Closer in some ways to the PRV than the MAS, Maneiro and others extended the lessons of the
guerrilla failure, insisting that the mass movement can take into its own hands the task of
producinga new leadership.35 Despite the recognition of leadership that this view entailed,
it was nevertheless a serious rupture with the vanguardism of the past and, equally, with the
contemporary vanguardism of the MASistas [who] maintained an almost mystical faith in their
own capacity to direct the struggle.36
Toward this end, Venezuela 83 identified three key areas of existing struggles on which to
focus their energies: the student movement at the Central University in Caracas, where
Maneiro had begun to study philosophy, the sprawling Sidor steelworks in the steamy
Venezuelan East, and the historically combative barrio of Catia in western Caracas. The
groups operating in these areas under the Venezuela 83 umbrella dedicated themselves
primarily to establishing newspapers: PRAG at the Central University, Catia 83 in Catia, and El
Matancero at Sidor (named for the industrial area of Matanzas). Of these, only the last would
have a significant and lasting impact, and Venezuela 83's antivanguardist refusal to fix
ideological positions would be the cause of most of its later problems, making its fate
ironically similar to that of MAS. The PRAG grouping was expelled in 1976 after demanding
greater ideological clarity; a similar fate befell its 1980s successor, an intellectual grouping
known as The House of Calm Waters. 37 More dangerous still was the later political
transformation that this hostility to ideology would make possible. When Maneiro died
suddenly and unexpectedly in 1982, he was in the process of steering the organization that had
been renamed LCR in 1979 toward the center, and the ensuing struggle for leadership led to the
departure of the Catia group.38 The result was twofold: the party that had recognized the
importance of the barrios so early on had lost its urban wing, and this, combined with the prior
alienation of intellectuals, facilitated a workerist turn.39 Maneiro, who had once attacked MAS
for evacuating socialism of its content and described them as sheep in wolves clothing, tired
sheep for attempting to conquer the center rather than uniting the left, would himself come to
a similar conclusion from the opposite direction: moving toward socialismas worker control
and local participationwithout ever using the word.40 While LCR's experiments in local
governments and in the workers' movement were significant (see chapter 7) and contributed to
the Bolivarian Revolution's emphasis on participatory democracy, they too would soon be
overtaken by events.

While the MAS always remained a marginal force and threw in its lot with Caldera in the
1993 election, the LCR experienced a sudden explosion in that election due to the intransigence
of its critiques of the old system and attempts to replace it in practice.41 But this was not all it
showed; although many assume that the LCR laid the groundwork for Chvez's eventual victory,
a much more subtle dialectic was at work, one driven from below and that involved divisions
within the party itself. When LCR head Andrs Velsquez was first elected governor of Bolvar
State in 1989, he needed to invoke the specter of mass popular violence and the Caracazo to
force the reigning two-party elites to even recognize the election, and when he was
reconfirmed in 1992, it was in the wake of the February and November coups, which
themselves were the result of the Caracazo.42 The LCR's biggest upset in 1992, however, was the
unexpected victory of Aristbulo Istriz as mayor of Caracas. This victory did not come out of
nowhere: Istriz was one of two members of Congress who, after Chvez's February coup
attempt, refused to condemn the coup and instead critiqued the political system and neoliberal
policies that had generated it (the other was Caldera himself). This reveals not only a
fundamental difference between the LCR and MAS (Petkoff sharply condemned the coup), but
also a deep-seated division within the latter: a considerable segment of the LCR had maintained
contact with both the armed underground and dissident currents within the military such as
Chvez's MBR-200. Although the LCR would publicly split over the question of supporting a
Chvez candidacywith the majority forming the PPTthe real split already had occurred
around the 1992 coup attempts.43

The Death Throes of Vanguardism

If the editors of L'Humanit once called the first escape from San Carlos in 1967 the escape of
the century, they would need to eat their words less than a decade later. As the violent process
cynically termed pacification took root, those formations choosing to maintain the armed
struggle suffered severe losses, and as happened a decade earlier, the majority of those
captured alive wound up in San Carlos. Juvenal was not one of them: he has never been
captured, despite the central role he played in the 1975 escape from San Carlos and in the
waning stages of the armed revolutionary struggle. I first meet Juvenal in the stifling heat of
Maracaibo in oil-rich western Venezuela. Ducking into an air-conditioned caf to escape the
105-degree noontime sun, we begin to discuss his history and reflections on the guerrilla
struggle. From a long line of communists, Juvenal joined the MIR in 1964 at age 11, rising to
the youth leadership by 14. Despite his youth, he recounts that his education was completed
by revolutionary practice, as the party trained him in political subjects and combat
preparedness. We young people were linked to the struggle at that time for romantic
reasonsbut in life and in the unfolding of your militancy you make certain decisions under
pressurerepression reinforces rage, and that rage is converted bit by bit into
consciousness.44
As an urban tactical combat unit fighter in Caracas, Juvenal always harbored a slight
resentment that the urban struggle was treated as secondary, as a rearguard providing supplies
and fighters for the countryside. When the PCV withdrew from the struggle in 1966, the MIR
continued on, but not without strain on the organization and simmering tension between the
MIR and Bravo's nascent PRV-FALN. In late 1968, MIR founder Domingo Alberto Rangel left the

party to seek legalization, and a year later those who remained active divided into three
groups: Amrico Martn led the Authentic group toward pacification (later joining the MAS in
1988), while the remaining armed elements divided essentially along generational lines. More
experienced cadres from the eastern fronts created Bandera Roja (BR; Red Flag) under Amrico
Silva, Carlos Betancourt, and Gabriel Puerta Aponte, whereas the younger members of largely
urban detachments, such as Jorge Rodrguez, Fernando Soto Rojas, and Julio Escalona, formed
the Organization of Revolutionaries (OR).45
Political divisions in Venezuela, according to Juvenal, who himself identified with the OR,
are very emotional events, and the division of the MIR transformed their initial comradely love
for one another into an enduring and visceral hatred between revolutionaries that has lasted
even until today. Although there was an effort afterward to create a unified structure
comprising the guerrillas from the PRV, BR, and OR, this never crystallized, and throughout
the 1970s guerrilla actions continued without even a minimal degree of coordination between
fronts. Juvenal grasps for an explanation, struggling palpably: Compaero, cnchale!We
Latinos are stupid about these things, I don't know if it's the indigenous blood, the Spanish
blood, the Caribe in us, no s qu vaina es Within the OR, as had been the case in the PRV
before it, vanguardism and foquismo had been rejected on paper but persisted in practice, as
they kept seeing the same repetition of the guerrilla struggle according to the same
framework, with no link to the masses. Above all, it was this repetition of old errors that led
Juvenal to part ways with the group around 1973, heading to Caracas in search of kindred
revolutionary spirits.
It was there, in the cool breeze and political heat of the capital, that Juvenal encountered one
of the more controversial figures of recent Venezuelan history: Carlos Lanz Rodrguez.
Alongside Lanz, a longtime guerrilla who at that point was still affiliated with the PRV, Juvenal
turned his attention to the Cuartel San Carlos. At the time, the notorious prison was swelling to
capacity with political prisoners, holding the majority of the leadership of both BR and the PRV,
as well as members of the OR and the early PRV offshoot Punto Cero.46 Arguably the most
active group at the time with the highest degree of tactical capacity, BR began to organize the
digging of a tunnel from within the prison, inviting the participation of the imprisoned PRV
cadres, including El Flaco Prada. The mission was dubbed Operation Jess Alberto Mrquez
Finol after a Bandera militant, alias El Motiln, who had, like Petkoff, staged a spectacular
escape from the Military Hospital only to die in a hail of bullets in an ambush in 1973.47
Juvenal and Carlos Lanz provided the muscle on the outside, with the not insignificant aid of
an entire detachment of BR guerrillas, approximately sixty fighters. Six of these commandos
seized a building across the street to provide armed cover for the escape, and after waving a
white towel from the balcony, a second unit began to move. Armed with a stethoscope, a power
drill, and a sledgehammernot to mention automatic weaponstheir task was to connect to
the tunnel from a neighboring house above it: We sent the signal and awaited a response from
our comrades who were, at that moment, some three meters below the foundation of the house
and more than fifty meters from their cellswe heard three distant strikes, timid, cautious,
beneath the floor; I repeated the code and the response became more audible; there was no
doubt: we were above our objective.48 Under the cover of a neighbor's blaring television and
the excited distraction of a showdown between perennial baseball rivals the Caracas Leones
and Magallanes, the guerrillas labored for two hours to drill through the cement floor. Furious

digging gave way to the gentle collapsing of backlit earth and the face of a long-imprisoned
comrade, and just before midnight on January 18, 1975, an astounding twenty-three political
prisoners from the various besieged guerrilla organizations escaped through the narrow tunnel
(including Rafael Uzctegui of the PRV and Carlos Betancourt of BR).49
But the exhilaration of such a momentous victory could not conceal underlying divisions,
tensions, and disagreements. Shortly afterward, Juvenal and Lanz approached El Flaco Prada
to discuss the possibility of shifting PRV strategy and tactics, especially toward the still-elusive
task of direct mass work. These discussions broke down, however: we discussed and
discussed, and said, coo, we're in the same situation, the compaeros don't want to understand
us, this forced us to create una vaina nueva, something entirely new, or supposedly new, and to
walk according to what we believe, and so we regrouped. It is ironic that, despite their
recognition of the errors of the pastof vanguardist arrogance and self-isolating foquismo
Juvenal and Lanz would largely repeat those errors. Juvenal tells me with a sort of exasperated
humor, we were talking, saying we're going to change things, and we fell into the same
vaina as before because we came together precisely for the purpose of a military operation, the
Niehous operation. On February 27, 1976, the first night of carnival and exactly thirteen years
before the Caracazo, Lanz, Juvenal, and several unnamed others appeared at the door of
American businessman William Niehous. When a maid opened the door, Niehous, already
suspicious, quickly shouted for her to close it, but it was too late. An assailant blocked the door
with his foot and the other members of this still unnamed formation that would later be known
as the Revolutionary Commando Groups (GCR) entered, taking Niehous hostage.
In a text published under the obvious pseudonym Gaspar Castro Rojas (i.e., GCR) and titled
How We Kidnapped Niehous , the operation is described in detail.50 Asking that I leave out
details such as their exact numbers and the operational codenames, Juvenal explains to me the
genesis of the operation. They had been inspired by the successful 1969 kidnapping of a U.S.
ambassador by the Brazilian Revolutionary October 8th Movement (of which current Brazilian
president Dilma Rousseff was once a member). In an effort to overcome their own dogmatic
sectarianism, Juvenal and Lanz sought support from the OR and BR, the latter of which was in
the process of dividing yet again. The operation was named for none other than Argimiro
Gabaldn, the legendary leader of the early guerrilla struggle in the Venezuelan Midwest who
had enjoyed an unprecedented degree of mass support, but this was a severe misnomer: despite
Juvenal's and Lanz's recognition that the absence of mass support had been the Achilles' heel
of the armed struggle, their new operation would not correct this error.
The urban commandos had previously infiltrated Niehous' corporation, Owens-Illinois,
discovering a veritable treasure trove of documents testifying to corruption at the highest level
of the Venezuelan government as well as the efforts of multinationals to interfere in domestic
politics. Adding to these the documents seized from Niehous' home, the guerrillas issued a
public denunciation of both multinationals and the government of Carlos Andrs Prez. In the
predictably hysterical terms of the U.S. press: The terrorists identified themselves as part of a
little-known leftist movement named the Argimiro Gabaldon Revolutionary Command. Instead
of asking for a cash ransom, they demanded that Owens-Illinois 1) pay each of its 1,600
Venezuelan employees $116 as compensation for its exploitation 2) distribute 18,000
packages of food to needy families; and 3) buy space in Venezuelan and foreign newspapers
for a lengthy manifesto, written by the extremists, denouncing the company and the Caracas

government. Otherwise, they implied, Niehous would be killed.51

For a time, the commando strategy proved successful, effectively driving a wedge between
the corrupt Venezuelan state and Owens-Illinois and setting into motion a strange dynamic: in
an effort to free Niehous, Owens-Illinois fulfilled these three demands, but in fulfilling the
third it provoked the anger of the Prez government. According to a government statement,
Owens-Illinois had offended the dignity of the country and promoted the subversion of our
constitutional order by printing the kidnappers' statement, and was promptly nationalized.52
But while a pristine operation in military terms, as the longest political kidnapping in
Venezuelan history wore on, it soon became politically unstable and eventually disastrous. In
July 1976, several Liga Socialista members were detained, and its most important leader, Jorge
Rodrguez (father of a recent vice president of the same name) was tortured to death by the
government's intelligence force (DISIP).53 Now flailing wildly, the DISIP began to arrest anyone
in sight, even members of congress who had been attempting to negotiate Niehous' release. As
the one-year anniversary of the kidnapping approached, Lanz himself was detained at a police
checkpoint in eastern Bolvar State, not far from where Niehous would be discovered alive
more than two years later. 54 Lanz was returned to Cuartel San Carlos, of all places, to serve
more than eight years in a prison from which he had helped twenty-three revolutionaries
escape only two years earlier. But if the Niehous kidnapping was a tactical success of some
sort, and even a political success in some aspects, few would argue that it was worth the
backlash it provoked: some four hundred revolutionary leaders were arrested and many killed
as a direct result.55
Lanz's account of the infamous Niehous operation and its aftermathpublished from his
cell at San Carlosis a sharply polemical but theoretically convincing and original analysis of
the phenomenon of corruption from within a strict Marxist framework of the expropriation of
labor and commodity fetishism.56 According to Lanz, corruption tends to be treated as a
problem of morality, of virtue, but this explanation conceals the economic and social
conditions that make the phenomenon of corruption possible, providing it with a cover, a moral
alibi.57 In his trial defense, Lanz echoes Fidel Castro's epic History Will Absolve Me, denying
participation in the kidnapping but seizing the opportunity to denounce the corruption that the
operation had revealed. I take pride in becoming the accuser of the regime of Carlos Andrs
Prez, because anyone who reviews my life will find nothing but revolutionary consistency and
sacrifice. I fully assume the consequences of having behaved and continuing to behave like a
revolutionary communist, [and] if this Tribunal considers such conduct to be worthy of a
conviction, I can say that I will endure it with firmness because I have faith that the future is
ours, hasta la victoria siempre.58
The context in which I meet Carlos Lanz is a testament to the incredible truth of his faith
in the future. In a skyscraper towering over the Metro station at La Hoyada in central Caracas,
an impatient Lanz whisks me through security and up the elevator to the Ministry of Higher
Education, where he has recently been named vice minister. As someone familiar by this point
with Venezuelan government ministries, I nevertheless am taken aback by the luxury of the
Ministry of Higher Education, which boasts smooth hardwood floors and minimalistic, modern
furnishings. Stunned by the surreal situationmeeting a convicted terrorist amid such
decadence, sponsored moreover by a revolutionary governmentI nevertheless muster a
clumsy joke: Well, I say nervously, it's better than San Carlos. Lanz is prodigiously

effective; I do not even need to ask the questions, he simply offers forth information faster
than I can process it, information about his past, his influences, his intellectual and political
trajectory, his views on workers' autonomy, his time as head of the state aluminum company
Alcasa, and his role in formulating the Bolivarian Revolution's educational reforms. You can
get this in the documents, he insists, but I lived it in my practical experience.59
Lanz first entered the armed struggle by way of the Communist Youth in 1961, finding
himself in the Sierra de Falcn by 1965 alongside Douglas Bravo, with whom he would go on
to found the PRV-FALN a year later. For Lanz, those involved in the armed struggle reflected an
eclectic multiplicity of viewpointsfrom a Debray-style foquismo to a rural Maoism, from a
military-oriented putschism to his own Red Brigades-inspired approach, which he defined
according to a strict class content. But all of these ostensible alternatives shared one key
element: their vanguardism. For all its efforts, Lanz feels that the PRV's theoretical
experimentation was, in reality, quite limited: the various prevailing Marxist dogmasfrom
Stalin to Mao, Vietnam to North Koreamerely sat uncomfortably alongside one another,
with little space for a diminutive and lame Maritegui. Lanz describes this approach as
Vatican because in all their disputes and divisions, the guerrillas merely left one church to
set up another, left one paradigm to establish another. There was no real search for our own
way of thinking.60 More damningly, Lanz insists that there was never a true strategy of
guerrilla warfare in Venezuela, understood as an accumulation of forces geared toward the
eventual annihilation of the enemy. The armed struggle had served merely as a political
fulcrum to foment a coup or, worse, as a political bargaining chip for those seeking
pacification. This was, in part, because it was strangely parliamentary in its ideological and
demographic makeup: polyclassist, nationalist, and populist, with a petty bourgeois
consciousness that was the legacy of Stalinist popular frontism.
Beginning around 1974, Lanz and others within the PRV had begun to delve deeply into
ultraleft Marxism and specifically into Italian autonomism. Inspired by the radical classcentrism of authors like Antonio Negriof contemporary Empire and Multitude fameLanz,
like the Italian government, mistakenly associated autonomist theory with the radical practice
of popular justice instituted by Italy's Red Brigades. It was this theoretical advance that led
Lanz, Juvenal, and others to the Niehous operation.61 Along with such sources, however,
Juvenal adds that those involved in the GCR sought to deepen and extend the PRV's exploration
of indigenous radicalism in search of our own roots; they studied the three roots of
Bolivarianism long before Chvez, sought out indigenous inspiration from Tupak Amaru and
the rebellious Jirajaras, and delved into liberation theology, all on a solid foundation of
Maritegui. If anything, Juvenal argues that they tended to bend the stick too far toward
heterodoxyLike good Latinos and Caribes, we abandoned Marxism entirely!resulting
instead in a mezcolanza, a hodgepodge even more chaotic than that of the PRV.
In the aftermath of the Niehous operation and the repression it brought upon the broader
movement, a multiplicity of armed groups stumbled on, with Juvenal heading up the
nationwide urban guerrilla organization known as Venceremos, which perfected hit-and-run
tactics and bank expropriations without ever truly connecting with the masses: and there we
committed the same error, he adds with a desperate chuckle, we continued with the
foquismo. As Juvenal put it: We began to speak of the fact [that] the struggle needed to be
fundamentally political, and that it needed a deeper rapprochement with the masses, or we

would disappear, and in fact, we almost disappeared. Toward the end of the 1970s, the
Venezuelan guerrilla movement faced a situation of long, drawn-out defeat, a slow death.
Repression had forced them into clandestinity, thereby contributing to their isolation from the
masses, and these dwindling urban guerrilla organizations found themselves as isolated from
the masses as their rural counterparts had been a decade earlier.

Mass Fronts and the Politics of Legality

While the central object of Lanz's critique was state corruption, he nevertheless issued a
stinging critique to those representatives of the opportunist left, who profoundly
overestimated bourgeois legality in search of mass support and who therefore failed to foresee
such a vicious backlash.62 Most armed organizations of the mid-1970s sought to reconnect with
the masses by carefully treading a fine line between clandestinity and openness through the
establishment of semilegal mass front organizations. The hope was that these mass fronts
would be capable of doing what focos had not: organizing the urban masses in a broad and
dispersed war of position while avoiding, for the time being, a war of maneuver, or direct
confrontation with a zealously repressive state apparatus. In the mid-1970s, this vast space
between clandestinity and electoralism was populated rapidly by groups such as the Liga
Socialista, a legal front for the OR formed by Jorge Rodrguez in 1973 shortly before his death;
Ruptura, a legal front for the PRV; and the Committees for Popular Struggles, Committees for
Workers' Struggles, and Committees for Revolutionary Student Struggles, all legal fronts for
BR. As founding documents of the Liga Socialista make clear, these mass fronts grew out of a
double critique of the errors and deviations of [both] foquismo and reformism, and their goal
was to use legality strategically without falling into electoralism, as did the PCV and MAS.63
Each mass front centered around its own newspaper: the Liga's Bassiruque, BR's Quehacer, and
Ruptura itself.
In the words of two young militants of the period, this was a time in which hundreds of
militants opted to turn their gaze once again toward the struggles of the vast majority. 64 For a
moment, it seemed as if these young heirs of the armed struggle were finally, at long last and
after many frustrated efforts, reconnecting with the masses, but when they began to do so
effectively, Lanz's warning increasingly rang true. These mass fronts, according to Juvenal,
had in their hands the possibility of channeling a mass movement linked with the guerrilla
movementThat was a magical political moment in 7374: all universities and student
centers in the hands of the left, in the hands of the armed revolutionary movementworkers'
strikes directed clandestinely by the guerrilla movement. But this magical moment was lost,
like so many before it, and though Juvenal cites internecine bickering nourished by vanguardist
arrogance as the central causes, the decline of these mass fronts coincided directly with the
post-Niehous backlash. In the chronology that accompanies Lanz's text, the death of Jorge
Rodrguez stands as proof of the limitations of this strategy: It became clear that bourgeois
democracy on the one hand allows the legality of struggles, and on the other represses with all
available force any mass action that threatens security.65
But perhaps it was Lanz and Juvenal themselves who were guilty of overestimating
bourgeois legality by failing to foresee the severity of the consequences that their actions
would bring down upon the mass fronts. They had certainly not solved the central enigma of

such legality: how to build a mass movement without it? Bourgeois legality was a doubleedged sword: much like the state itself, it could be neither wholeheartedly embraced nor
entirely neglected, and indeed, few embraced legality navely. Isidro Ramrez explains to me
the complex relationship that existed between the clandestine PRV and its nominally legal mass
front, Ruptura: when an above-ground member of Ruptura came under suspicion of the police,
they would pass into clandestine work in another region, and, conversely, if a clandestine
member of the PRV was detained and released for lack of evidence, that member could then
pass back into the legal structure that was Ruptura. The latter occurred with Ramrez in 1977
when, after being caught in Maracay hanging a PRV flag, he was tortured for several days with
electric shocks before being released. Everyone knew that PRV and Ruptura were linked, and
this everyone included first and foremost the repressive apparatus.
The Venezuelan armed struggle was in many ways a richly fertile experience that generated
much of what has come since, but because this generativity came as much from its failures as
from its successes, it required profound self-criticism. While Juvenal insists on the historical
debt that the Bolivarian Revolution and contemporary organizers of all stripes owe to those
who gave their lives in the guerrilla struggle, he nevertheless recognizes that we haven't
reflected individually or collectively on the defeat of the armed struggle of that period. In
particular, there are many who insisted on and continue to emphasize the military aspect of
that defeat, whereas Juvenal insists that it was almost entirely political, since the proposals
and the form the struggle took, instead of bringing us closer to the masses pushed us further
away from the masses. Even on a military level, he now wonders, What better than the
masses to protect a movement? What we didn't understand at the time was that the masses
were our best protection? And this criticism is also a profound self-criticism as well, coming
as it does from someone who remained an urban commando well into the 1990s. This turn
toward the people helped to consolidate a developing if inconsistent critique of vanguardist
conceptions in which the revolutionary leadership always possesses the truth which it seeks to
teach to the inexperienced masses.66 The lessons of the 1970s would sink in slowly for some,
generating a qualitative leap in the 1980s, but even today Juvenal insists on the danger of
overlooking the mass element of the Bolivarian Revolution: The struggle is in the street, and
even today we don't recognize that if we're not in the streets, the government will become
bureaucratic and move to the right.
Much like the guerrilla struggle itself, these strategies for reconnecting with the masses were,
on the surface of things, at least, resounding failures. The PRV had dissolved into a loose milieu
without ever solidifying what was meant by its Bolivarianism, the electoral left remained
marginal (barely exceeding a combined 5 percent during this period), and both the remaining
armed focos and their mass legal fronts remained on the defensive in the face of a rising tide of
state repression. Guerrillas would continue to reach out toward the realm of legality, occupying
a sort of gray area between clandestinity and openness in an effort to rediscover the people in
whose name they often claimed to speak. If many attempted to heed Lanz's warning,
strategically taking advantage of legal openings while not fooling themselves about the
inevitable backlash, they also found the very category of legality to be a profoundly political
one in constant dialectical motion, around the edges of which they would be forced to dance.

But the floodgates of repression were blown open by the Niehous operation, and the more
successful later organizations were in establishing linkages with the urban masses, the more
they came under the bloody scrutiny of representative democracy in decline.

Three. Birth of the Tupamaros

The verses of the people
can be flowers or bullets,
the bullet that defends them,
or the bullet that kills them.
Ali Primera

From angaras to Tupamaros

They were called angaras. As the Metropolitan Police flooded up the Avenida Sucre and
surrounded the first blocks of the Monte Piedad neighborhood of 23 de Enero, which perch
strategically on a bluff overlooking the ostensible seat of Venezuelan political power, the
young residents of Block 5 were prepared. They crept swiftly up the dark and narrow stairway,
grimy from decades of disrepair, and onto the roof of the hulking, thirteen-story structure. As a
police helicopter shuddered toward the building, the young Rodrguez brothers produced a
makeshift rocket launcher, which they quickly attempted to stabilize, aimed, and fired. These
three brothersRicardo, Carlos, and Sergio, the last of whom would be martyred but a few
short years laterwere known affectionately in the neighborhood as los cepillini because their
short, flat-top haircuts resembled nothing so much as the bristles of a broom. The projectile
flew wide, missing the helicopter, but this was not all that had gone wrong: in the commotion,
Ricardo had lost half of his thumb. It was painful, certainly, but more dangerous than the blood
spurting from his damaged artery was the unmistakable evidence of a political crime. Ricardo
rushed down to his apartment, where he quickly attempted to bandage the wound, but within a
few short minutes, having received word of the botched attack by the angaras of Block 5,
police stormed the building. Given their history of militancy, the Rodrguez brothers were
automatically the prime suspects and so the first to receive a visit. Ricardo had no other option
than to lie because the truth would see him in the gulag of Venezuelan democracy at best, and
in the torture chamber of the nearby Metropolitan Police outpost at worst.1 He had been
feeding his newborn, he explained, with his bandaged thumb concealed behind the frightened
creature and pain concealed behind his calm faade.
Even many years later, relief is still visible on his face as he recounts this close brush with
the forces of neoliberal order: if they had found me, I might have been disappeared for good!
Ricardo holds the remains of his mangled thumb close to my face, as if to emphasize the
severity of the injury as well as the exceptionality of his fate: all were not so lucky, although
under such conditions luck is, at best, a relative measure. Many were permanently disappeared,
and many, like Ricardo's brother Sergio, were shot down in plain view (see chapter 4).
Members of the Block 5 Collective tell me of people being shot execution style and thrown off
the roof of the building as a warning to others, reminiscent of the Southern Cone's Operation
Condor but a forceful reminder that such atrocities were not limited to formal dictatorships.
Many more suffered an intermediate fate. As Ricardo tells me his story, an older AfroVenezuelan man looks on quietly before volunteering the information that he had been

disappeared for two months at one point, and that this had not been his only brush with the
violence of the state; he spontaneously lifts his shirt to show bullet wounds in his side to match
those on his chin and arm. His name? He'd rather not say. Can we take a picture? If you want
my picture, ask the DISIP, the notorious state intelligence service. Did they consider
themselves Tupamaros? My question evokes a contemporary term of both celebration and
condemnation, one that reveals as it shrouds, and for which I am given only partial (and
inevitably multiple) explanations. One onlooker, scarred physically by state repression and
emotionally by the period of addiction that followed in its wake, puts it bluntly: We're the
real Tupamaros. Look, I don't have a belt! My apartment is full of cockroaches! This is the life
of a revolutionary!

Fuego en el 23
Hay fuego en el 23,
en el 23

When legendary Puerto Rican salsa combo Sonora Poncea recorded their epic 1969 hit
Fuego en el 23, they would have had little idea what revolutionary aims their words would
eventually come to serve in distant Venezuela, despite the fact that the late leader of the
Machetero independence movement Filiberto Ojeda Ros was himself a member of the famed
combo. But words are infinitely malleable, open to appropriation by others, and numbers even
more so. Today, Fuego en el 23 has become something of an informal anthem for one of the
most revolutionary spaces in all Venezuela, the parroqua of 23 de Enero (January 23),
situated in the sprawling barrio of Catia in western Caracas. Here fire serves as a two-sided
metaphor for the role the zone has played: simultaneously as a staging zone for resistance and
a recipient of repression, Al Primera's two bullets from which this chapter began. Perched in
the hills just above Miraflores Palace in western Caracas, 23 de Enero has never been a
trustworthy ally for those inhabiting the constituted power that the Palace represents, and its
name on the lips bespeaks a different sort of power altogether. As Al Primera puts it
elsewhere, the docile [manso] people are always corralled, but this doesn't happen if they are
fierce [montaraz]. This is a lesson that the inhabitants of 23 de Enero seem to have taken to
heart, and this fiercely independent spirit is visible even in its self-chosen name.
Originally known as 2 de Diciembre (December 2), named in a self-aggrandizing gesture for
the date on which Marcos Prez Jimnez came to power in a 1952 coup, these towering
apartment blocks were intended as the ultimate gift of a monarch, a veritable Let them eat
cake moment. In the recent words of poet Luis Britto Garca, writing in honor of the fiftieth
anniversary of the dictator's fall, Prez Jimnez used architecture as the symbolic expression
of all unresolved problems; hence the much trumpeted construction of 2 de Diciembre with
its decadent expanse and wide open green spaces. This luxurious display case awaited the
poor, who would cease to be poor by the very fact of inhabiting it. 2 Much like Marie
Antoinette, however, Prez Jimnez would not see this symbolic gift through to its conclusion.
The still uninhabited superblocks of 2 de Diciembre were occupied forcibly during the
rebellion that toppled his regime, the date of whichto add insult to injuryprovided an
occasion for a rechristening: the area became known as 23 de Enero for the date in 1958 when

Prez Jimnez fled the country. That this group of buildings had already worn the rise and fall
of a dictator on its very nameplate foreshadows the central role it would later play in
Venezuelan political life. For 23 de Enero is indeed montaraz, in Primera's words, a fiercely
free beast with no compunction about snapping off the hand that feeds it. This threat of
betrayal is one to which Hugo Chvez is not immune, and any Venezuela leader not wishing to
meet Prez Jimenez's fate or worse must take this lesson to heart.
Originally intended to accommodate sixty thousand residents in some nine thousand
apartments, Prez Jimnez's delusion of tranquil modernity has since been replaced with the
reality of urbanization: the wide open spaces between apartment blocks have been packed
tightly with standard Venezuelan shantytown housing, humble brick-and-tin ranchos squeezed
between and stacked one on top of the other. Some now estimate the population of 23 de Enero
at around five hundred thousand, a choppy and turbulent sea of ranchitos, the undulating
surface of which is broken only by the surreal jutting cliffs of the bulky, multicolored
superblocks which twice gave the area its name. This is the 23 de Enero of today, looming
large in the Venezuelan psyche, foreboding for the few but inspiring for the many. Many an
unashamed anti-Chavista contributes to the myth of 23 de Enero by investing it with his
symbolic fears. One, who admittedly had never set foot in the place, nevertheless explained to
me, with a self-seriousness that is not to be exaggerated, that there you need to walk with
bullets across your chest and a knife in your teeth. But the reality is far different. Although 23
de Enero is nestled within Catia, a sprawling barrio where some of the worst violence of the
capital is concentrated, the prevalence of revolutionary popular militias in the area often
means that it is far safer than the surrounding zone, safer even than many wealthier areas. This
disconnect from opposition mythology does not mean, however, that the area does not also
carry a symbolic weight for those who live there. Speaking anonymously near Block 5, a
former member of Douglas Bravo's PRV tells me that at work, people think that I'm an
extremist simply because I live in 23 de Enero, adding with a wink: as a matter of fact I am,
but they would think so even if I weren't.
For Juan Contreras, founder of the Simn Bolivar Coordinator, a broad front of militant
groupings, this hostility to the state and scorn for its petty gifts is but one ingredient in the
cauldron of resistance that is today's 23 de Enero.3 He credits this historically revolutionary
posture to a number of elements, the first being that when Prez Jimnez was toppled on
January 23, 1958, many of these government-sponsored housing structures were occupied by
poor residents from surrounding areas who had opposed the dictatorship. Second, even those
granted housing in the area by the dictator replied to this faux generosity with open resistance,
burning tires in the street, chasing out the police, and eventually advancing down the hills onto
the seat of government during Prez Jimnez's final moments. The third element, itself deeply
intertwined with the first two, is that the guerrillas were here in 23 de Enero, and this
presence played a major role in making 23 de Enero the barrio of resistance, barrio of
struggle that it remains to this day. The FALN, and later the PRV, BR , and OR, all played a role
here, as did many members of Punto Cero, most notably their leader Rubn lvarez,
affectionately referred to as El Cabezn, who was executed here by the DISIP in 1972 after
being captured by Cuban-Venezuelan exile and terrorist Luis Posada Carrilles. This guerrilla
presence in 23 de Enero was both cause and effect: after first seeking the shelter and support of
this historically militant zone, their presence served to further radicalize the population

through ideological education and practical example.

Here, the transition from resisting the dictatorship to resisting the new democratic regime
was surprisingly seamless. Betancourt was trounced electorally in the capital and humiliated
by its residents at his inauguration, and for this he never forgave the radical caraqueos
concentrated in 23 de Enero. Teodoro Petkoff recalls the spontaneous hatred that many
residents of the barrios of western Caracas exhibited toward the nascent elite democracy:
at times some fifty or sixty persons would stand in line on the roof of the 23 de Enero housing
project, waiting their turn to fire a rifle [one shot each] at the army barracks that stood across
the road. The army would respond by spraying these apartment blocks with machine gun fire,
so for safety people slept on the floor of their apartments. You can still see the bullet marks in
the apartment buildings.4 As we will see in the First Interlude, the phrase you can still see
the bullet marks is one that resonates to this very day in a 23 de Enero that still bears the
visible scars of the Caracazo.
Other times, urban guerrillas deliberately provoked confrontations with police, in which
local residents gladly participated, sometimes battling for days on end. Nevertheless, despite
mass enthusiasm for such actions, Petkoff recalls a growing hesitance and even hostility to
these vanguardist focos: by 1964 and 1965 we began to find that our urban combat groups
were provoking rejection instead of solidarity from the population. While before many would
stand in line to fire a rifle, now they were hostile to these urban combats because of the police
reaction they generated. After the guerrilla combatants fled the barrio, the police would come
and crack down on everyone. Thus, while avoiding capture was essential to the urban
guerrilla's tactics, this strategic necessity soon came into conflict with another essential
element that had proven similarly essential in the countryside: relations with the community.
Residents of the poor and combative barrios soon began to feel that they were bearing the
brunt of the repression brought about by the hit-and-run tactics of the guerrillas.5
Although this would lead some community members to sit out the street battles of the late
1960s, thereby dooming Venezuela's experiment in urban guerrilla warfare, the specter of
barrio conflict inevitably reared its head again with the rise of a double violence, the structural
violence of economic scarcity and the socially repressive violence of the neoliberal state.
When it did, this spontaneous hatred of the police and the state would give birth to an
organizational form very distinct from the foquismo of the urban guerrilla struggle. Now it
would not be small units of well-heeled former university students or intellectuals or even
members of the traditional working class, but rather local residents themselves who would
engage in mass street skirmishes in defense of their own neighborhoods. This qualitative
development did not emerge only from pragmatic resistance to the very real risks that the
guerrilla struggle presented for the community, however, but equally from a confrontation of
strategic viewpoints and a deepening of the critique of vanguardism and foquismo, the material
embodiment of which was that shadowy, mythical force with a name as foreign as its causes
are indigenous: the Tupamaros.

The Socialization of Repression

this guy sure can walk,
he leaves a corpse on every corner6

The movement that came to be known cryptically as the Tupamaros emerged from the
radically transformed political, social, and economic context of the 1980s and the incessant
dialectic of resistance and repression in which the state and revolutionary movements
struggled for control of the new conjuncture. This struggle would, as struggles do, lead to a
drastic reorientation of strategies on both sides. Whereas the Venezuelan state previously had
engaged in isolated skirmishes with an equally isolated guerrilla force, we have seen how some
revolutionary organizations found success by reaching out to the population through legal front
organizations. It was these efforts in conjunction with the onset of precipitous economic crisis
that generated the emergence in the 1980s of mass resistance movements among the poorest
sectors of Venezuelan society, against which there emerged a qualitatively new strategy of
repression.
It was in the heart of the period of profound disillusionment and debate among former
guerrillas that economic crisis hit: beginning with the 1983 devaluation of the bolvar known
as Black Friday, part of the Venezuelan government's first heterodox effort at neoliberal
reform, the economy went into a tailspin.7 Structural adjustment efforts meant that the popular
masses would bear the brunt of these macroeconomic pains: as median incomes crashed and
unemployment increased, everyday costs skyrocketed and, unsurprisingly, levels of social
violence followed.8 Before the socialization of repression, then, there was the socialization
of a violence of a much more banal sort: the socialization of scarcity, the socialization of
hunger, and the socialization of a newly flourishing drug trade in the barrios (as will become
clear, however, this social violence was not clearly distinguishable from state violence). As the
macroeconomic crisis deepened, the Venezuelan government would respond in the
increasingly strict neoliberal terms of the International Monetary Fund, and with both its
capacity and willingness to provide for the population in free fall, the country became a
veritable tinderbox of resistance.
Unable and unwilling to govern through popular consent, a succession of presidents turned
instead to force, unleashing onto the popular classesby now the vast majority of the
populationa sort of repressive violence previously reserved for the small focos of armed
insurgents. Whereas the guerrillas had been met with the occasional targeted massacre,
longtime revolutionary organizer Roland Denis insists that this new period saw the state shift
not only the object of its repression but also its scale: the state socialized repression,
distributing it across society as a whole.9 As popular rebellion spread horizontally throughout
society, so too did repression cast a wide net, giving birth to what Denis terms the socially
repressive state , which instead of fighting the guerrillas themselves began to fight the people
whose demands it could not meet. Confronted with the specter of an unprecedented popular
rebelliousness, the government sought desperately to prevent any cooperation or collaboration
between revolutionaries and the masses. At first, it was precisely those who had best absorbed
the lessons of the guerrilla struggle who would bear the brunt of this broadening state violence.
In this context of socialized violence and groping toward a resolution of the central
contradiction of the guerrilla struggle, many revolutionaries skeptical of electoral centrism
turned to what was dubbed the Social-Historic Current (CHS). This current, according to Denis,
who was a key participant at the time, brought together various sectors, from nonorthodox
Marxists to radical Christians to Afro and Indigenous movements, all united broadly under a
renascent Bolivarianism, and many drawnnot coincidentallyfrom the ranks of the now-

defunct PRV.10 Walking the fine line between openness and clandestinity, this was a movement
that sought to resurface as a public current, a groundbreaking effort at constructing a locally
rooted, bottom-up method of organizing the masses. In its socially repressive phase, the
Venezuelan state could not allow mass organizing among these newly rebellious sectors, and
therefore it trained its sights directly on the CHS. First, however, there was Cantaura. On
October 4, 1982, fifteen hundred army regulars encircled forty-one alleged members of the
Amrico Silva guerrilla front in the eastern Venezuelan state of Anzotegui while four aircraft
dropped a total of seventeen 250-pound bombs on the location. Twenty-three guerrillas, mostly
from Bandera Roja, were killed while participating in an unarmed meeting between guerrilla
and student leaders. While it was true that the victims were members of a revolutionary group
that showed no mercy, former MIR guerrilla Domingo Alberto Rangel emphasizes that not
even they were armed.11 Foreshadowing later tactics, the meeting had been infiltrated by
government intelligence agents, and in a perverse precedent to Colombia's false positives of
today, the victims were dressed in military garb to simulate armed combat.
After Cantaura came Yumare, an event that would indelibly scar the youthful optimism of
the CHS both physically and metaphorically. As with Cantaura, infiltration was the method,
and, as with Cantaura, the objective was extermination rather than arrest. In fact, it was the
DISIP infiltrators themselves who proposed the meeting, the stated objective of which was
nothing more subversive than to discuss the future of the CHS, and who selected a secluded
location for the fateful event. On May 8, 1986, the organizers arrived at the chosen location,
driven by the infiltrators themselves, and were promptly captured by the DISIP, tortured, and
executed. There is evidence that DISIP planning for the massacre began in March 1986, a full
two months earlier, and autopsies showed that the victims were shot through the head and chest
with military weaponry, some execution-style at pointblank range. At some point, other
members of the CHS who were captured and tortured elsewhere also were brought to the site
and executed. After the fact, a guerrilla ambush was simulated, and the corpses again were
dressed in military fatigues and paraded before an uncritical press, which duly repeated the
official line regarding the massacre.12
The total death toll was nine, but the fact that quantitatively fewer died at Yumare than at
Cantaura should not blind us to the fact that the later massacre suggested a pattern of
broadening repression. It was, after all, the CHS that was targeted rather than Bandera Roja, its
novel hope, its breadth and aspirations, its creativity and antidogmatic open-mindedness that
was embodied in the mutilated victims of Yumare. 13 In other words, while the 1982 Cantaura
massacre targeted some actual combatants (who were unarmed and meeting with legal
organizers), the events at Yumare in 1986 represented, in contrast, an attack on above-ground
social and cultural leaders whose activities had been forced into clandestinity by an
increasingly unstable state. Moreover, this noticeable shift between 1982 and 1986 marks a
turning point within a longer trajectory, one that begins with many individual victims, such as
Alberto Lovera and Fabricio Ojeda in the 1960s and Jorge Rodrguez in the 1970s, and that
leads up to and through the bloody aftermath of the Caracazo. While this may seem to be a
transformation in degree and not in kind, there is a point at which quantitative shifts in the
numbers of cadavers embody and reflect a radical qualitative transformation. This is why
Denis, who lost some close friends at Yumare, deems Cantaura the end of the guerrilla
struggle. Those gathered at Yumare were not guerrillas, but Yumare itself was the result of a

dialectical process whereby the most inspired elements of the armed struggle sought out a new
form within which it could develop.
But there was nothing progressive or inevitable about this dialectic, and state violence would
fold this process onto itself, forcing the struggle into newer and untested waters. Just as the
struggle pushed ever forward, so too did the state unleash a furious wave of repression that
before long burst its banks and destroyed itself in the process. If violence was becoming
socialized, it had yet to reach the limits of this socialization, and Yumare, with its unashamed
killing of noncombatants, prefigured the Amparo massacre two years later in 1988, in which
fifteen fishermen were slaughtered in Apure under the bogus claim that they were preparing a
guerrilla attack.14 Both of these bloodbaths, moreover, represented a perverse prelude to the
1989 Caracazo riots, the bloody if inspired cataclysm in which government troops would be
sent to the poor barrios to slaughter thousands.
Here, then, are the rough contours of this dialectic: after the defeat and dispersal of the
guerrilla struggle, armed organizations sought to reestablish a connection with the poor masses
through legal fronts operating largely in the barrios (the 1970s). The threat that this connection
posed to the state apparatus, the specter of large-scale armed struggle that it represented, led to
the gradual deployment of the socially repressive state, and the targets of repression were no
longer isolated armed focos but rather the rebellious masses as a class who rose up in the
Caracazo (the 1980s). But the crashing crescendo of 1989 was far from the end of this dialectic
of repression and resistance; this broad offensive against the masses pushed barrio residents
toward new organizational forms oriented around self-government, the elimination of the drug
trade, and armed self-defense (the 1990s), which remain central to the Bolivarian Revolution.

From Urban Guerrillas to Tupamaros

This qualitative shift assumed a particularly acute form in the cauldron of resistance that is
23 de Enero, and the effort to overcome the strategic errors of the guerrilla struggle set the
parameters for an entire generation's political coming-of-age in the rebellious parroqua. This
generation included Juan Contreras, who describes his youth as a veritable crucible in which an
almost literal heat nourished revolutionary ferment. My generationand I have been here
since the day I was bornwe grew up in the heat of the struggles that took place here, in the
heat of the police raids, in the heat of the repression, in the heat of the tear gas, in the heat of
the gunshots. Then, a decade later, we repeated almost as if a carbon copy everything we
experienced as children here in 23 de Enero, and we made it our own struggle. We joined the
political-military organizations and nuclei that remained here in the mid-1970s.
For these young guerrillas, however, it was not the crisp mountain air and the solitude of the
isolated rural foco that marked their entrance into the world of political struggle. Rather, as we
saw vividly with the Rodrguez brothers, the rooftops were our trenches.15 According to
Contreras, his generation confronted the same double-sided violence identified by Denis: on
the one hand, the lack of necessary services, and on the other, the open repression that was
meted out to those demanding such services. Citing the right to life that Venezuelan
democracy enshrined in words but trampled in practice, Contreras echoes guerrillas of prior
generations: We had to rise up in arms even to defend our own physical integrity, and this is
why we don't regret anything that we have done. It was this very material starting point that

distinguished the class composition of these organizations from some of the past: these were
not petty bourgeois students headed to the hills, half-inspired by a sense of romantic adventure,
but rather a revolutionized poor fighting for their lives.
Beginning in the mid-1970s, these young ongaras of 23 de Enero, like the armed
organizations they had joined, operated on two levels simultaneously, combining open
sociocultural work with bank expropriationsContreras insists that to call them robberies is
a vulgar misrepresentationand other offensive measures. But as repression pushed the
urban guerrilla organizations, one after the other, toward either extinction or irrelevance, and
as the contradictions of vanguardist foquismo became more apparent, this younger generation
began to think on its own. Contreras refers to this literal re-generation as the moment in which
Papa and Mama disappeared, by which he means the verticalist political organizations of the
past that told you what to do and even how to do it, passing on to you the entire political line
and you just obeyed. But beginning in the 80s, we started to be critical, we began to construct
our own organization and our own future, and we became the parents of this child, this open
social movement which sought contact with our community. It was in seeking contact with
the community that these young ongaras drifted away from the strictly political-military
objectives of the urban guerrilla struggle toward tasks that were more properly social and that
responded to the everyday concerns that had driven them to act in the first place.
Central among these tasks was confronting the drug trade, and if there is one single struggle
that marks the birth of the Venezuelan popular militia movement, it is the battle against drug
trafficking. But what might initially seem to be a battle on two frontsagainst a repressive
neoliberal state and against the infiltration of drug traffickerswas in practice but a single
struggle. In a striking parallel to the fate of the Black Panthers in the United States, Contreras
documents the role of the state in making drugs available and the political objectives of so
doing: It was the DISIP who brought the drugs into 23 de Enero in the early 80s. We must put it
this way: it was part of a state policy and it was a dirty war, a low-intensity war seeking to
destroy the resistance which had developed in 23 de Enero.16 Even those who doubt that the
drug trade was part of a high-level strategy of the state could not deny its operation on the
micro-level; underpaid police seized the opportunity afforded by their petty sovereignty to line
their own pockets by providing drugs and looking the other way. In practical terms, the effect
was the same: police and drug traffickers became but two faces of a single target that these
nascent groups sought to exterminate.17
Neither entirely clandestine nor fully open, small groups began to spring up to defend local
barrios from this double menace. This began informally, with semipublic appearances by
armed and black-masked encapuchados who would publicly out those selling drugs and present
them with a clear-cut ultimatum: either you stop selling drugs or you will be killed.18 This was
and remains more a dispersed culture of self-defense than any kind of centralized
organizational strategy; a member of the loose Block 5 Collective explains to me how they
stamped out the local drug trade in their area without the need for a name or a flag: If we
catch someone dealing drugs in our neighborhood, he tells me, first they get a warning. If
they show up again, they get a beating. And if they show up a third time. He trails off,
indicating with a hand gesture that the outcome will not be pleasant. He also recounts a recent
situation in which members of the community caught a local malandro, or delinquent, robbing
the Cuban doctor in the local Barrio Adentro health module: an unarmed crowd of neighbors

seized the man, beat him, stripped him naked, and sent him on his way.19
While actively confronting the drug trade in semiclandestinity, local organizations such as
La Piedrita, with which we began, and Contreras' own Simn Bolvar Coordinator
simultaneously began to engage in above-ground cultural work aimed at preemptively
undercutting the basis for social violence: they painted murals, rehabilitated sports fields, and
reclaimed music and culture, all in an effort to mobilize local youth toward more positive
pursuits than drug peddling. This openness, however, this decision to take strategic advantage
of bourgeois legality, did not mark the end of the state policy of repression but merely the
beginning of a new stage. As Contreras recalls:
Even then we were persecuted, even then we were harassedthis was an irrational and intolerant state that would
criminalize anything that smelled like the left or like an organization. So the youth of 23 de Enero were criminalized,
stigmatized. First they called us guerrillas, in the decades of the 60s and 70s they called us angaras here in 23 de
EneroThen, after around 1985, they began to call all of the youth who participated in organizational political
activity and sports, in resistance, they began to call them Tupamaros.

Many, even locals, do not know this side of the story, and Contreras is eager to correct the
history; according to him, it was the police themselves and the DISIP that invented the term. In a
textbook deployment of the outside agitator trope, security forces painted these zealous
youngsters with the brush of the Uruguayan urban guerrillas of the same name in an effort to
stoke community fears:
It was the political police, the DISIP, that baptized this entire rebellion, all of these social organizations that emerged,
that categorized them as TupamarosThis was a nomenclature designed to stigmatize the youth of 23 de Enero, so
that the people would stay away from us, so that the social work that was developing and being carried out by those
young people would be rejected by the community. Because then, if you are linked to those idealistic young people
who painted murals, who defended the community from delinquents, who confronted police in street battles with
bravery and courage, the goal was to cut off their social base, their support base, by calling them Tupamaros.20

If all struggles are both ideological and militaryin Gramsci's terms, hegemonic and coercive
then this smearing of youth movements with the ominous label of Tupamaros was merely
the ideological and hegemonic face of the socially repressive state; desperate to prevent any
connection between the urban masses and the organized heirs of the guerrilla struggle, the
neoliberal state feebly attempted to win hearts and minds while stacking up corpses on the
side.
But if this effort succeeded, it was more for coercive than ideological reasons; many local
residents feared the very real threat of material reprisals for even erroneous association with
t h e s e angaras-turned-Tupamaros, reprisals that ranged from violent searches to
imprisonment, torture, and death. Despite such police effortsor perhaps because of them
relations between these nascent self-defense militias and the remaining urban guerrilla units
which were arguably more worthy of the name Tupamarowere tense. Juvenal of
Venceremos recalls that while he had been close with Juan Contreras in the past, this period
saw a deterioration of that friendship. We had a unit in 23 de Enero, but Juan at that time, he
didn't even want to see our faces, coo. For them, we were foquistas, adventurists, anarchists,
vaina de ese tipo, which wasn't our intention. Our intention was to say to them: look, the armed
struggle is still the way. He argues that Contreras and others saw self-defense as more local,

directed against malandros or delinquents, and not as fundamentally linked to the national
armed struggle. In the worst moments of repression, he adds, none of those groups helped
us. They closed the door to us.
But this question of precise origins had little bearing on the practical function of the term:
the Tupamaros became a myth, a new code word for both sides, the meaning of which
constituted an arena of struggle in its own right. Like all nomenclatures of stigmatization, the
Tupamaro moniker, once established, escaped the control of those who first deployed it. The
police used the term to denigrate; local residents to express an amalgam of respect, awe, and
uneasiness; and the militants themselves to symbolically unify their many struggles into one.
This symbolic unification would become formal in 1993, with the establishment of the Simn
Bolvar Coordinator. Its function lay in the name: this was a broad organization seeking to
coordinate and unify the activities of the various armed militia collectives that had emerged
spontaneously in response to the rising tide of state and parastate violence. It was only in the
late 1990s that the moniker Tupamaro became an official label for a variety of groups and
even political parties, which Contreras insists are really neo-Tupamaros. These Tupamaros
their myth as well as their reality (the two being not entirely separable)are key to grasping
contemporary Venezuelan reality and the dynamic of conflict that drives forward and deepens
the Bolivarian Revolution.

The Mass Military Line

While the mass repression of entire communities by the neoliberal state forced a turn to selfdefense in practice, these communities also took the initiative, often in conversation with
former guerrillas, transforming this practice of mass self-defense into a theoretical
breakthrough that grew out of the central lesson of the guerrilla war: the mass military line.
This was a perspective that vehemently rejected the tendency to seek out the masses through
electoral politics, instead insisting that only the violence of the organized people constituted
the natural channel for social revolutions, which in practical terms entails the construction of
mobile urban militias to carry out both peaceful-legal and violent-clandestine tasks.21 If
Carlos Lanz had been slow to break with the vanguardist tendencies of the Revolutionary
Commando Groups that carried out the Niehous kidnapping, he did so more fully in the 1980s;
Bonilla and El Troudi identify the theoretical origin of the contemporary Venezuelan militia
movement in the fusion of the Revolutionary Commando Groups with the Guevaraist
currents in 23 de Enero under the leadership of Jos Pinto.22
Lanz explains to me how their Revolutionary Workers' Movement ( MRT), a precursor to
Pinto's controversial Revolutionary Tupamaro Movement of the same acronym, constituted a
deepening of previous experiences. Like the CHS, they continued to develop and reaffirm the
Bolivarian project of the PRV, with its dedication to indigenous forms of struggle in the spirit
of Maritegui and the construction of a truly Indo-American socialism. This heterodoxy
extended even to their Marxism; the MRT began intensive study of the forgotten Marxisms, the
disqualified Marxisms, left Marxism, leading them to a rejection of the Leninist view of
vertical democratic centralism and toward an emphasis on crafting horizontalist organizational
forms drawing upon the council tradition. They broadened their understanding of military
strategy by linking it with local conditions in the insistence that combat is concrete but also

an everyday occurrence, and violence is not limited to armed combat, giving rise to a new
understanding of the intermediary space between legality and clandestinity. In addition, the
MRT sought to develop a deeper understanding of resistance on the basis of gender, race, and
other non-class-based struggles while situating these in conjunction with the theories of worker
control that Lanz would later put into practice during his tenure at Alcasa (see chapter 7).
Above all, and as the crowning lesson, the MRT firmly rejected vanguardism, thereby
constituting a hybridization of discourses that some have deemed a qualitative leap in the
national left that catapulted Lanz, Pinto, and the MRT beyond the limitations of the
traditional armed struggle.23
While the MRT as a specific organization was short-lived, this theoretical breakthrough
nevertheless set into motion a spiral of permanent creation (unity and diaspora) which
permeated various collectives and the theoretical episteme of an important part of the left for
two decades.24 When asked about the relationship between the MRT and the later Tupamaro
movement, Lanz is clear that the MRT was not an armed group or a militia in itself, but once the
organization dissolved, its remaining cadres in 23 de Enero joined Pinto's Tupamaros. Whereas
Pinto embraced the Tupamaro phenomenon, Lanz pushed the implications of this qualitative
leap in a slightly different direction, linking up with the student upsurge in the mid-1980s to
develop a strategy of street action under the name Popular Disobedience (DP), the importance
of which should not be underestimated (see chapter 4). DP channeled the growing unrest toward
the state into direct conflicts with the forces of order that were distinct from the guerrilla
struggle both in their location (the streets) and their composition (these were mass, not
foquista, actions). While many people don't see it this way, Lanz insists, DP was a precursor
to the Caracazobecause over several years we prepared the conditions for urban violence to
be considered legitimate. In other words, if Pinto and the Tupamaro-style groups were
pushing a strategy of mass self-defense, Lanz and DP were developing the offensive side of the
mass-military line. While Lanz is clear that DP did not lead the events of February 1989, they
immediately recognized this mass rebellion as a practical manifestation of their own theory,
joining immediately in what they realized would be a historic unfolding.
In the years after Caracazo, DP folded into a new project known as Proyecto Nuestramrica,
or the Our America Project, which was dedicated to a reconsideration of the concept of
hegemony and the need for struggles on the terrain of culture. But once a guerrilla, always a
guerrilla, and Lanz insists that Proyecto Nuestramrica would never abandon the strategy of
accumulating the necessary forces to annihilate the enemy and would certainly never cave to
the MAS/Radical Cause temptation of electoralism. Both positions proved crucial once 1992
arrived. These new urban movements were the children of the armed struggle, explains
Roland Denis, who was himself a member of both DP and Proyecto Nuestramrica. But as with
any children, the resemblance borne by these young rebels to their guerrilla parents (Papa and
Mama, as Contreras describes them) was partial at best.

Popular Militias and the Revolution

If the failures of the Venezuelan guerrilla struggle centered on the dangers of vanguardist
foquismo, the most notorious theoretical proponent of which was Rgis Debray, then the
organizational forms that emerged in the wake of that failure constituted yet another related

break with Debray. In Revolution in the Revolution, Debray had sparked a heated debate within
the revolutionary left by openly denouncing the strategy of armed self-defense then practiced
by the Colombian guerrillas and Bolivian miners of the 1950s. Debray simply could not
contemplate why a guerrilla army would confine itself to a fixed territory: armed self-defense
zones or base areas, he thought, were essentially sitting ducks waiting to be annihilated, and
this was a danger that he saw played out in practice.25 According to Debray, the defeats
suffered by Colombian self-defense zones in 1964 and 1965 marked the death of a certain
ideology, to which he added cavalierly, Today, self-defense as a system and as a reality has
been liquidated by the march of events.26 But it was Debray's own foquismo, and not armed
self-defense, that had proven most disastrous for Venezuelan guerrillas, and this disaster led to
the forging of new strategies, central among which is a renovated conception of urban selfdefense capable of confronting the socially repressive state.
Among the most adamant proponents of armed self-defense and the establishment of
popular militias is the Alexis Vive Collective, a Tupamaro-style organization whose zone of
influence lies not far from La Piedrita and just around the corner from the Simn Bolvar
Coordinator. That Alexis Vive takes self-defense seriously is evident to anyone who pays
attention while approaching: before coming within a block of the compound, I see and am seen
by rooftop lookouts. One dropped to his stomach, barking a message to a teenager below, who
immediately sprints off. Rather than ignore this telltale sign of airtight security, I approach the
single open kiosk beneath the lookout point and utter the magic words: Carlos Betancourt. It
was none other than Comandante Jernimo himself, veteran leader of the eastern guerrilla
front, who sent me. A barely perceptible glint in the eye indicates a metaphorical key has
turned and a formerly closed realm has opened to me. I am directed toward the compound.
That Betancourt's name would hold such weight and open doors in the barrios is not as
surprising as it might at first seem. After all, it was Betancourt himself who broke most
severely with foquista doctrine, experimenting with new forms of revolutionary organization,
integrating zones of mass support and armed self-defense into the activities of the eastern
Sucre Front, and even arguing that it was the rural areas that should serve as rearguard for the
urban and not vice versa.27 These days, Betancourt works with a group whose name is as
revealing as it is unsurprising: the Communards. Their mission is to radicalize the current
system of Communal Councils, transforming these into truly independent organs of
revolutionary popular power. For the Communards, the establishment of popular militias is
central to achieving such independence.28 This objective explains Betancourt's relationship
with the Alexis Vive Collective, for which he serves as a theoretical elder and ideological
mentor.
For Betancourt, the question of militias is a question of principle. Echoing Lenin's critique
of the state as an alienated apparatus separate from and standing above the people, Betancourt
insists that the question of security cannot be dealt with by a special force because it is a
collective problem that affects everyone. Taking aim at Venezuela's new National Police
Law, which seeks to transform a notoriously violent and corrupt system of policing through
greater centralization, Betancourt insists that the Chvez government has missed the point.
Security isn't a question of centralization or decentralization. Any national police force will
just be the same corrupt cops in a national uniform. Knowledge in the barrios is managed
collectively: everyone knows who sells and consumes drugs, who is armed and unarmed, so

why put security in the hands of anyone other than the people themselves? By establishing
popular militias, Betancourt insists that not only will the security situation improvethis
much is evident from the experience of 23 de Enerobut these militia structures will also
function as a political school for the armed people. In contrast to this attempt to centralize
security from above, militia groups in 23 de Enero and elsewhere have taken a distinctly
different strategy: expelling the police by force or, more recently, by agreement with friendly
mayors.29
But the question of centralization versus decentralization brings us back to the central
paradox of the Bolivarian Revolution: How do these antistate revolutionaries reconcile
themselves to a Bolivarian Revolution in which the central state plays such a decisive role?
Revolutionary militants, particularly those engaged in localized self-defense under the broad if
ill-fitting Tupamaro umbrella, do so, I argue, through two distinctions. The first, one
common among most Chavistas, is the distinction between Chvez and those who surround
him. Chvez has proven himself and gained the people's trust, so the argument goes, but most
of his advisors are merely corrupt opportunists who want nothing more than to constitute a new
ruling class.30 While this argument reaches the level of self-delusion among many Chavistas,
allowing them to reconcile psychologically the radical rhetoric of the Bolivarian Revolution
with the often disappointing continuities of daily reality, the most revolutionary of militants
supplement this distinction with one that arguably supplants it entirely: the temporal
distinction between the present and the future expressed in a distinction between Chvez and
the Revolution, the presidente and the proceso.31 Whereas the first often serves to excuse
Chvez for all his revolution's ills, the second maintains the possibility of moving decisively
beyond the president if conditions warrant it.
Valentn Santana of La Piedrita expresses these overlapping distinctions clearly: while
recognizing Chvez as the maximum leader of the revolution, without whom we'd all be at
war or disappeared, he is quick to add that from him on down, those carajos are worthless,
and that's the reality. With their taste for fancy cars, cologne, and women, they don't smell
like revolution. He pauses thoughtfully, then adds, In practice, they're nothing like Che. I
ask what he would say to Chvez: I would say, look, Comandante, read your history. The first
ones to betray Salvador Allende were his ministersWho has betrayed Chvez? His
ministers. But Santana is quick to insist that the process extends far beyond Chvez and that
the revolution doesn't belong to that little group [of leaders], not even to Chvez, it belongs to
my mother, to my child, to you, to a people who truly dreams of a better world. Their
relationship to the process is critical, but duro, a hardline critique: we follow the steps of
the processbut we need to be the ones who administer it here. Nevertheless, the question of
what to do with those useless carajos, commonly known as the endogenous right, the more
moderate sectors within the revolution, raises the specter of a renewal of revolutionary
violence that has come to be both a caricature and a truth of the Tupamaros.
This place was a dump, a drug zone, Santana explains. Here in 23 de Enero, if you wanted
to occupy a space it was necessary to use revolutionary violence. I had to use revolutionary
violence. It was only through such violence that the drug trade and even drug use was stamped
out and that La Piedrita and the local community established total control of the area. This is
the sort of popular security apparatus of which Carlos Betancourt speaks, in which
neighborhood kids participate, alerting members of the collective when they notice strange

cars, strange motorcycles, strange people. The kids in the barrio know everything. Do they
consider themselves a militia, I ask? Yes, we consider ourselves milicianos. The true militias
are in the barrios, in the countryside, Santana asserts, adding a pointed critique of the official
militias established in recent years: not in the barracks. When struggle breaks out, such
official militiasa contradiction in termswill be the first to desert, whereas Santana insists
that it is much more difficult to desert when you are defending your home, your block, your
neighborhood, and your loved ones.
Under the Bolivarian process, however, Santana suggests that revolutionary violence has
taken on a new meaning that echoes Fanon in its creativity, shifting from self-defense to
militant offensive: This Revolution is dirty, he says in clear reference to those surrounding
Chvez, I think we can cleanse it, strengthen it, but we might need to pass through a bit of a
bloodbath first.32 As he tells me this, a comrade nods solemnly in agreement, chiming in: it's
unfortunate but true. Another Tupamaro leader known as Mao puts it in a characteristically
inflammatory way: Chvez is surrounded by a ton of bureaucratic sons-of-bitches who should
be shot. Chvez came along with this history of peaceful revolution, and boy has it worked out
for him. But for me, the revolution doesn't have to be peaceful at all. What needs to be done
with those oligarchic sons-of-bitches and those bureaucrats is to kill them all. And then you
can start the revolutionYou know there are Ten Commandments in the Bible, right? Well
mine has eleven. The last one is that everyone dies. That's it.33 I worry that reproducing such
quotations contributes to sensationalism, but the truth is that many of these so-called
Tupamaros understand that such militancy of rhetoric and action functions to drive the
Bolivarian process forward, by blows if necessary.
We need look only briefly at the broad strokes of the Bolivarian Revolution to see that there
is some truth to this: this is a process that thrives upon conflict. The Enabling Laws of 2001
that jumpstarted the revolution, the short-lived coup against Chvez in April 2002 (see the
Second Interlude), and the oil lockout of 2002 and 2003: it was these moments, not the
elections, that cemented Chavista hegemony. It is conflict with the escualidos, the anti-Chvez
opposition, that pulls Chavistas tightly together under the banner of the people by
strengthening their collective identity, setting the parameters of what they are fighting for by
clearly identifying what they are fighting against. But this is not all. It is these same
pressurized moments of conflict between Chavistas and anti-Chavistas that radicalize the
Chavista bloc by forcing people (even Chvez himself) to choose sides, thereby driving out
moderates and waverers. In 2001, the man that many considered to be Chvez's puppet master,
Luis Miquilena, broke with the president only to join in coup efforts a year later. During that
coup, a whole litany of high-ranking Chavistas, both political and military, jumped ship. More
recently, in the run-up to the failed 2007 constitutional reform referendum, Chvez ally
General Ral Baduel also jumped the divider over proposals to transform the military. 34 It is
this process more than any other that is responsible for the Revolution's radicalization in recent
years. In short, every moment of heightened tension has resulted in the strengthening and
radicalization of revolutionary forces, and it is this that the radical Chavista left understands
better than most.
As a result, many have embraced their role as an accelerant and detonator of revolutionary
conflict. Much like the students, the unemployed, and the campesinos whose intransigent
demands and direct street action triggered the dynamic of anti-Betancourt conflict that

ultimately unleashed the guerrilla war, so too do many radical Chavistas in 23 de Enero seek
incessantly to push the process harder, faster, and in more overtly revolutionary directions.
Every revolution needs some joy, Valentn Santana explains to me, and La Piedrita and
others joyfully assume this incendiary role, tossing gasoline on the flames of social conflict.
Like Al Primera said, we exist between rage and tenderness. It is this function that explains
the central role that such groups play in the unfolding of the Bolivarian process despite their
seemingly small numbers; this dynamic of conflict far exceeds the local autonomous zones for
which the Tupamaro phenomenon is best known. It bespeaks instead a unification of the
offensive elements of the guerrilla war with the defensive elements of the Tupamaros. Of
course, the example of the guerrilla war shows that such dynamics of conflict depend on the
prevailing balance of forces and can lead to either popular disaster or popular victory. It is also
true that moderation can occasionally prove more powerful than conflict: the strength of the
Chavista coalition in the aftermath of the 2002 coup resulted in part from the moral high
ground that Chvez's moderate rhetoric allowed him to claim, whereas the opposition remained
tainted with the specter of golpismo, coup-mongering, for years.
But mass, popular, and militant action in the streets remains the bedrock of this revolution,
without which all would have been lost in 2002 (see the Second Interlude), and it is this
practical action that binds the realities of the present to the aspirations of the future, a future in
which Chvez's role is far from guaranteed. In the case of La Piedrita, this distinction between
Chvez and the Revolution has been pushed to its most extreme limits, but even in cases in
which Chvez seems to choose the wrong sideas when he recently called these revolutionary
collectives terrorists and fasciststhe faith many have in this dynamic of radical
polarization is such that his errors are overlooked temporarily. 35 For Santana, Chvez is the
only leader capable of staving off the threat of total civil war (although one might wonder
whether Santana would see such war as entirely a bad thing). If he isn't president, hermano,
we would be talking about a war, because there isn't anyone else in this country that can
maintain stability. Not on the right, and not on the side of the Revolution. The only one that
can do that right now is ChvezThat's why we're preparing for an armed confrontation,
because it's coming, it's coming. It could be right around the corner. But in no way is Chvez's
leadership guaranteed, and these revolutionaries are prepared to push forward without him if
necessary. Against the occasionally blind devotion of Chavista militant Lina Ron, who made
famous the slogan With Chvez, everything, without Chvez, nothing, the slogan of many
revolutionaries might be paraphrased as follows: With Chvez, hopefully, without Chvez, if
necessary.

First Interlude. The Caracazo

History Splits in Two

Previous chapters have shown that the history of popular struggle in Venezuela began long
before Chvez and that immediate dissatisfaction with the limited, elite representative
democratic regime that emerged after 1958 gave rise to a sporadic wave of resistance
sometimes powerful, frequently dispersedfirst expressed on the national level during the
guerrilla war of the 1960s. Nevertheless, if part of my objective is to reassert the long term, to
insist that what is going on today in Venezuela is nothing new, and to demonstrate above all
the continuity of struggle generated after 1958, which has supplied both the context and the
motive force behind Chvez's rise to power and the radicalization of the Bolivarian Revolution,
this is not to say that individual moments are somehow unimportant. Quite the opposite, in
fact: recent Venezuelan history has been punctuated by momentary ruptures and breakthroughs
that represent qualitative leaps in popular struggle, crystallizing and revealing long-term
developments, concentrating them into a single conflict, a unified image branded in the
popular imaginary, a single turning point that becomes emblematic of the struggle, past,
present, and future. However, once these moments are understood according to what they
embody and what they set into motion, we immediately become wary of those very same
historical dates that we have been told are most important: Chvez's 1998 election and his
failed 1992 coupin other words, moments in which the people enter the halls of power by the
ballot or by the bullet. These moments are important, but their importance is as veiled
expressions of other, more fundamental processes, pressures, and ruptures.
In this and the second interlude, I hope to destabilize 1992 and 1998 by drawing attention to
two such moments of rupture, one prior to Chvez's election and one subsequent to it, arguing
that from the perspective of popular struggles, these are the most crucial moments in recent
history. The first, the 1989 Caracazo, was a full-scale insurrection whose participants stared
revolution in the face only to suffer the crushing reply of the state's iron heel. But defeat
notwithstanding, the Caracazo sounded the death knell of the old system, simultaneously
reflecting and contributing to the inevitability of its collapse and thereby setting into motion
the entire process that came after. In symbolic terms, it smashed in a single stroke the faade
of democratic exceptionalism, revealing the bankruptcy and the violence of the existing
system for all to see. Neither completely spontaneous nor fully organized, the Caracazo was an
instant in which widespread disgust and revolutionary capacity met on the streets, generating
historical agency by emboldening the faithful and converting the waverers: it was 1989 that
enabled 1992, and 1992 that enabled 1998.1
The second moment, which I discuss in the second interlude, was that of the massive and
decisive popular response to Chvez's removal from power in a short-lived 2002 coup, which
demonstrated to political elitesChavista and anti-Chavista alikewhere the true power in
Venezuelan society, and the Bolivarian Revolution, lay. Moreover, for the moments discussed
in both interludes, the question of communication will be central because it is no more and no

less than the question of revolutionary organization writ large: just as the Caracazo's
constituents would be forced to generate their own forms of coordination and communication
in the very process of rebelling, so too would popular efforts to circumvent an oppositionimposed press blackout prove central to Chvez's brief removal and eventual return to power in
2002. For both, the question of spontaneity will come into tense interplay with organization as
well, revealing the importance and shortcomings of both elements and privileging a street
politics of tactical micro-organization that crucially operates in tandem with many of the longterm organizing efforts I have analyzed up to this point.
The Caracazo (known colloquially as 27-F) and the reversal of the 2002 coup (similarly
dubbed 13-A) can, therefore, be understood as constituent moments, those rare and explosive
instances in which the force of the people appears as the decisive actor. The importance of
such moments therefore eclipses the importance of Chvez's 1998 election and even his failed
1992 coup (known as 4-F), both of which, although undeniably important, represented but
muted echoes and reverberations in the halls of constituted power of that constituent roar that
made them possible in the first place.2 In emphasizing the importance of the Caracazo, we can
do no better than to follow one of the more critical and revolutionary voices of contemporary
Venezuela, one we have discussed earlier and to whom we will return repeatedly. Speaking
directly to our central task of constructing a popular history, Roland Denis writes:
This is a history that began not in the barracks but in the street, and it is from there, from the streets as principal
political actor, that we are going to attempt to assemble some clues that will allow us to reconstruct the genealogical
development of the process. To do sowe will not begin with 4-F, and nor with the long tales of civil-military
conspiracies that preceded it, but instead with 27-F, no longer as a simple historical reference-point for the crisis of
puntofijismo, but instead as the foundational moment of what and who would embody the decisive form of struggle
in the collapse of puntofijismo and the gestation of a new, democratic-popular way of thinking.3

Rather than merely reproducing traditional history in popular form by shifting the center of
gravity from one set of petrified historical facts to another, the task as I see it is to construct a
living history in which each concrete fact and moment expresses and is imbued dialectically
with popular content. To shift from the barracks to the streets is, therefore, to do more than to
simply change location. It is to turn our gaze away from already fetishized institutions and
toward those flows and circulations that have breathed into them a new life.

The Fourth World War Started in Venezuela

The origins of the global rebellion against neoliberalism are not to be found in 1999 Seattle or
even in the public emergence of the Zapatista movement on January 1, 1994.4 Before all these
seminal events, there was the Caracazo, an oft-overlooked upheaval that Fernando Coronil
described as the largest and most violently repressed revolt against austerity measures in
Latin American history. 5 Carlos Andrs Prez was inaugurated on February 2, 1989, for his
second (but nonconsecutive) term after a campaign that maintained much of the anti-neoliberal
rhetoric of his first, particularly his demonization of the International Monetary Fund as a
bomb that only kills people.6 However, in what has become a notorious example of baitand-switch reform, Prez immediately proceeded to implement to the letter the recently
formulated Washington Consensus. The precipitous nature of this about-face is evident from

the fact that Prez's neoliberal economic package (the paquetazo, as it has been dubbed)
was announced exactly two weeks after the inaugural speech that had attacked international
lending institutions and preached debtor-nation solidarity. The country must prepare itself,
Prez warned in his speech on February 16, for a Great Turnaround (Gran Viraje). Little did
he know how right he was or what would be the direction and severity of the coming viraje.
Venezuelan elites had been toying with neoliberalism for several years, and president Jaime
Lusinchi had even enacted a heterodox neoliberal package in 1984, but Prez's package was
notable for its severe orthodoxy. In a Letter of Intention signed with the International
Monetary Fund, the basic premises of the Prez plan were laid out as follows: there was to be
restriction of government spending and salaries, deregulation of exchange rates and interest
rates (thereby eliminating what were essentially interest rate subsidies for farmers), relaxation
of price controls, introduction of a sales tax, liberalization of prices of goods and services
(including petroleum) provided by the state, elimination of tariffs and liberalization of
imports, and, in general, facilitation of foreign transactions into and out of Venezuela. 7 In
practice, this plan promised a potent cocktail of stagnating incomes, skyrocketing prices, and
monetary devaluation; the lives of the many were going to get much worse. As might be
expected in the face of such a severe economic shock, poverty peaked later in 1989, claiming
44 percent of households (a figure that had doubled in absolute terms during the course of five
years), with some 20 percent of Venezuelans facing extreme poverty. 8 While rising prices had
been a source of anxiety at least since the 1983 devaluation of the bolvara day still
remembered as Black Fridayit was the common (and inarguably correct) perception that
Venezuelans possessed a common right to what lies under their soil that fanned the angry
flames of revolt as the earliest morning light broke over eastern Caracas on February 27.9

The Streets Rebel

February 27, 1989, was a Monday, but not just any Monday. On this day, the cyclically ill
temper of the worker torn from her much needed rest collided with the cold realities of global
capitalism. Over the weekend, Prez's liberalization of petroleum prices had kicked in, the first
stage of which entailed an immediate doubling of the price of consumer gasoline. Although the
government had attempted to coerce small transporters into absorbing the majority of the
increase, convincing the National Transport Federation to pass on to passengers only 30
percent of the increase, many smaller federations and individual bus drivers refused to respect
this agreement.10 Since their gas costs had doubled overnight, one can hardly blame them, but
for a time it seemed as though a conflict over national policy would be displaced onto the
individual drivers and the proverbial messenger shot. Thus, as the first protests kicked off
during the early commute of informal workers into Caracas, many refused to pay the newly
doubled fare, and rioting and the burning of buses was reported from a number of suburbs and
in cities across the country well before six in the morning. Demonstrations in the eastern
suburb of Guarenas, where looting was reported as early as 7:30 A.M., sparked off broader
resistance in the heavily Afro-Venezuelan regions to the east of the capital. 11 By 6:00 A.M.,
students had occupied Nuevo Circo station in Caracas, at the other end of the GuarenasCaracas commute, and were denouncing the drivers publicly with press clippings that listed the
government-approved fare increase in hand. The conjunctural demand for affordable transport

drew informal workers into a tactical alliance with the students, and the crowd at Nuevo Circo
moved north onto Avenida Bolvar, erecting barricades in front of the bust of the Liberator to
block traffic on this major metropolitan artery. By noon, blockades had spread eastward to
Plaza Venezuela and the Central University, south to the Francisco Fajardo highway, and west
to Avenida Fuerzas Armadas.
Revolutionary ferment united these students and informal workers with the hardened
revolutionaries, who quickly appeared on the scene, many of whom were veterans of the armed
struggle and later formations like Popular Disobedience. The alchemical transformation that
took place in this heated and swirling crucible was evident in the demands expressed by the
protestors; the initial anger at increased transport prices was generalized quickly and
successfully to encompass the entire neoliberal economic package, thereby channeling popular
anger not at bus drivers but instead directly at the president, the party system, and the state.
But who was the subject of such revolutionary demands? From what location were they
enunciated? It was not the working class at its point of production or the peasant in her fundo
that sparked this insurrection, and it was certainly not the traditional leftist parties who led it.
Moreover, while students played a key role, it was not the student-as-student who was the
subject of the rebellion, just as the university was not its locus. Rather, it was informal workers
(see also chapter 9) who provided both the driving force and the battleground for this
revolutionary moment. These urban poor, who eked out a living largely in the sphere of
circulation, would take up this fight on their home turf: the streets. The structure of the
informal economy provided more than just constituents and location: it also provided an
infrastructure for the coordination and communication of the rebellion, with Venezuela's nownotorious motorcycle couriers, or motorizados, zipping back and forth across the city, drawing
the spontaneous rebellionas if with invisible threadsinto a broader, coordinated picture
that more closely resembles what we would consider a revolutionary situation.
Meanwhile, a similar pattern was appearing spontaneously in every major Venezuelan city:
protests emerged early in the morning in San Cristbal, Barquisimeto, Maracay, Barcelona,
Puerto la Cruz, and Mrida and later in the afternoon in other major cities such as Maracaibo
and Valencia. Some have argued, with some justification, that the common moniker
Caracazo is misleading, concealing as it does the generalized and national nature of the
rebellion, preferring the more general term Sacudn, whereby popular upheaval is translated as
a sort of geological tremor. But, like everything else in Venezuela, the oil-bloated capital
would prove both detonator and center, and the rest of the country would, in the words of the
national anthem, follow the example that Caracas gave. As with most spontaneous popular
rebellions, this heroic example was coterminous with mortal casualties, of which Caracas
sacrificed more than its fair share, beginning as early as the afternoon of February 27, when
police opened fire on students near Parque Central, killing Yulimar Reyes (known by her
Popular Disobedience comrades as la Yoko). 12 As night fell, sacking and looting became
widespread (often facilitated by underpaid and impotent police), breaching the limitations of
geographical segregation and touching even the generally untouchable sectors of wealthy
eastern Caracas: more than a thousand stores were burned in Caracas alone.13
Many looted necessities, and most video evidence shows people hauling away household
products and food. Large sides of beef seemed to be especially popular, with looters eerily
using the same bodily motions, technique, and inexplicable strength that would later prove

necessary to carry off their fallen comrades. While speaking with Alfredo Vargas Sr., in 23 de
Enero, he tells me of how his son grabbed a side of beef on the Avenida Sucre and began to
carry it up the hill toward Block 5. Passing neighbors proceeded to cut off large chunks of
meat, and he was left with little more than a skeleton when he arrived. Lina Ron recalled
seeing looters on the Avenida Lecuna, not far from the flashpoint at Nuevo Circo: I remember
seeing a person carrying a refrigerator and I remember asking myself: how was this possible?
Under normal conditions it takes up to three men to carry a refrigerator and in this new
condition a single man was doing it.14 If necessities were the primary objective of the looters,
however, this did not mean that luxuries were exempt; the two-sided nature that Marx
discovered within the commodity was played out practically by the many barrio residents who
seized the opportunity to enjoy a taste of the life so habitually denied, celebrating in the eye of
the hurricane with fine food and imported whiskey and champagne.15

Between Spontaneity and Organization

I meet Roland Denis, a close friend and comrade of Yulimar Reyes, in a small caf hidden
away near Sabana Grande, where he insists that I try the papeln con limn, a typically
Venezuelan beverage, if ever there was one, composed almost entirely of sugar (albeit the raw
sort) with a touch of lime. For Denis, the Caracazo marked the birth of a new mode of
resistance, one that leaps from intimate spaces to mass rebellion with astonishing speed and
ease.16 Divided into times of revolt, times of constitution, and times of government,
Denis' book Manufacturers of Rebellion seeks to grapple with the same challenging questions
as my own popular history, namely, how to pose the question of constituent rebellion and
constituted, institutional power in a way that avoids the fetishization of either. In the context of
the Caracazo, this task inevitably raises the traditional question of the relationship between
spontaneity and organization, one embodied in the very title of Denis' book. After all, the
overwhelming force behind the Caracazo derived undeniably from spontaneous revolt, and the
standard bearers of organized revolution, especially the political parties of the left, were
notably absent. Nonetheless, this spontaneity simultaneously conceals while expressing a
history of organization: according to Carlos Lanz and other militants from Popular
Disobedience, such spontaneity had been practiced in the streets for several years before the
revolt and in many ways resulted from conscious and organized efforts to overcome the
failures of the guerrilla struggle.
Moreover, the influence of organized militants was not limited to prior example or tactical
innovation; instead it emerged in the process of transitioning from rioting to rebellion to fullscale insurrection, a function only possible through a deep and organic relationship between
militants and barrio residents, something earlier generations of guerrillas had notably lacked.
Denis, who is to a younger generation what Lanz was to an older one, describes this process of
street coordination as it emerged in one small corner of Catia during the Caracazo:
Bit by bit, the efforts of those few to bring together a degree of coherence in the action and a less immediatist sense
of what was being sought began to achieve their goal. Soon, weariness toward the pure disorder motivated by
expropriative euphoria led to meetings by small groups which in a matter of minutes chose a particular approach in
order to channel the actions of the multitude in a more resounding and effective manner. It was enough that
agreements were rapidly reached for the massive activity to begin to take on a new appearance, drawing in by

example an infinity of beings who, to the extent that they discovered the possibility of giving constructive meaning to
their violence, simultaneously began to produce words, concrete and precise acts, with an increasingly rational level
of action and organization.17

Even in their fragmentation, these groups linked up with one another, converting
indiscriminate looting into a mobilized multitude and into a powerful force.18 But these
spontaneously organized chains of human will were not fully prepared for what was to come.
The morning sun of February 28 revealed a mixed picture: in some zones, the police fired
indiscriminately with automatic weapons, whereas in others, like the Antmano district of
southwestern Caracas, they agreed to permit controlled looting. Elsewhere, the police engaged
in a reverse-looting of their own, pillaging neighborhoods in search of stolen goods to keep
for themselves. The government's first attempt to control the rebellion was a spectacular
failure: the minister of the interior, Alejandro Izaguirre, appeared on live television calling for
calm, only to promptly faint, thereby forcing the suspension of the broadcast. According to
Denis, it was on the afternoon of February 28, at exactly 4 P.M., that the murderous reply of
the state abruptly cut off this gradual synergy of multitudes. Despite the resistance generated
by some disparate armed focos and counter-propaganda networks that confronted the militia
and the messages of the government, it was already too late.19
At 6 P.M., Prez himself appeared on television announcing the fateful decision to suspend
constitutional guarantees, establishing a state of siege and overnight curfew. His simultaneous
claim that the country was experiencing a situation of complete normality was hardly
credible given the decision, and this clear contradiction already suggested the momentous
symbolic impact the Caracazo was destined to have. Had the rebellion been successfully
contained within the barrios, it would not have merited mention by a news media whose only
important audience was white and wealthy. After all, the Venezuelan government had never
required a formal state of siege to shoot down the poor in the streets. But once the hills came
down, once the poor and dark-skinned had invaded the prohibited zones reserved for the
wealthyswarm[ing] into the forbidden quarters, in the words of Fanon20Prez was faced
with an impossibly contradictory task: to insist that nothing was happening (complete
normality) while reassuring wealthy elites that the government was taking care of the
situation. But for a government that derived its legitimacy from a myth of social stability, the
damage already had been done.
Prez's declaration marked both a green light for widespread government repression and the
beginning of the end for the popular insurrection that was 27-F. Those violating the curfew
were treated as harshly as could be imagined, with repression at its most severe in Caracas'
largest barrios: Catia in the west and Petare in the east. Police and the Armed Forces directed
their attention to the former, and especially 23 de Enero, which the government suspected, with
some justification, as being the organizational brain of the rebellion. Known organizers were
dragged from their homes to be either executed or disappeared, and when security forces met
resistance from rooftop snipers, they sprayed entire apartment blocks with automatic machine
guns. Just as the bullet holes left in these apartment blocks in the 1960s remained as scars and
political reminders well into the 1970s, so too are the bullet holes from the Caracazo visible to
this very day. Turning attention toward Petare, which today is the largest and most violent of
Caracas' slums, up to twenty were killed in a single incident when, on March 1, the army

infamously opened fire on the Mesuca stairway. Much of the country was pacified after three
days of such incidents, whereas Caracas saw rioting for more than five.
The human toll of the rebellion has never been fully revealed, especially because the Prez
government systematically obstructed any and all efforts to investigate the events. Subsequent
government investigations set the official number killed around three hundred, whereas the
popular imagination places it closer to three thousand.21 A recent study has shown that some
four million bullets were fired to quell the rebellion, and the Relatives of Victims Committee
(Comit de Familiares de Victimas ), an organization founded around the victims of the
Caracazo, reports that 97 percent of the documented victims died in their own homes.22
Rumors of mass killings led to the 1990 excavation of a mass grave in a sector of the Cemetery
of the South known, perhaps not coincidentally, as The New Plague. There, some sixty-eight
bodies in plastic bags were unearthed, and no one knows for certain how many more deaths
were concealed by government forces, how many nondescript bags of flesh were committed in
1989 to the national soil alongside the victims of Cantaura, Yumare, and El Amparo.23

From Caracazo to Coup, One Divides into Two

Where there had previously been one single Venezuela, there were now suddenly two. But as
with any sudden shift, we are dealing more with the realm of appearances than reality. The
myth of harmony, according to which all Venezuelans enjoyed a singularly privileged and
exceptional democratic existence when compared with their Latin American counterparts,
had suffered an irreparable blow. 24 In the words of former human rights campaigner and later
Chvez's Vice President Jos Vicente Rangel, Venezuelan history split in two. 25
Internationally and domestically, the democratic faade that had obscured Venezuelan reality
for decades was shattered in a single blow. Among other leaders, George Bush Sr. and Spain's
Felipe Gonzlez called Prez directly to express not so much their condolences as their shock
and dismay that such a dependable client state could have evidently unraveled overnight.
If the Caracazo represented the death knell of the old regime in political terms, it had done
similarly irreparable harm to military unity, awakening a radical military current the likes of
which had not been seen since the Trejismo of the 1950s and 1960s. According to former
guerrilla and women's leader Nora Castaeda, the repression that followed the Caracazo was
the pueblo against the pueblo, as poor and dark-skinned military recruits were sent into the
barrios to slaughter their brothers and sisters.26 Perhaps unsurprisingly, many refused to fire,
including some members of a clandestine revolutionary movement that had coalesced within
the armed forces years earlier as the Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement (MBR)-200.
Throughout the 1980s, these conspirators worked to recruit lower-level officials to their cause,
but the MBR's plans to foment a coup were still in the early stages when the Caracazo caught
them completely off guard. The polarizing effect of the rebellion and subsequent massacre was
as powerful within the ranks of the military as in the general population. Just as there were
now two Venezuelas, two armed forces appeared as well: one comprising powerful elites, the
other those poor and dark-skinned recruits and mid-level officers called upon to defend
privilege by gunning down the people and who now prepared for mutiny. 27 It was only after the
Caracazo that, according to Chvez, the members of the MBR-200 realized we had passed the
point of no return and we had to take up arms. We could not continue to defend a murderous

regime. The massacres were a catalyst.28 Without the Caracazo we wouldn't have been able
to do it, Chvez would later insist in an interview with Aleida Guevara (daughter of Che),
noting that the Caracazo reactivated a waning MBR-200, sharpening the movement's
opposition to the prevailing political system and providing it with new military recruits and
civilian allies.29
As revolutionaries scrambled to maintain the potent popular energies of 1989, their search
for the most effective combination of elements meant that none of the strategies developed
during earlier decadesmilitary or civilian, armed or electoralwas discarded completely.
Among the electoral elements, the Movement toward Socialism was the most blindly electionoriented, whereas Radical Cause (LCR), faithful to the roots of many of its members in the
Party of the Venezuelan Revolution ( PRV), maintained a degree of contact with the armed
underground. However, this complementarity of tactics would not prove to be sustainable, and
in December 1991 LCR had all but divided over the question of how to relate to the impending
military action; those who supported the coup, including Rafael Uzctegui, later went on to
form the Patria Para Todos (Homeland for All) party. Those who remained in LCR would
pursue electoralism and eventually move toward the anti-Chavista opposition.30 Life has
demonstrated that they were a minority, Uzctegui insists. Simultaneously, and from the
opposite direction, the various legal fronts for remaining armed factions legal in name
onlycontinued to deepen their base among the rapidly expanding segments of society that
were dissatisfied with and even enraged by the economic crisis and the neoliberal response: the
rebellious constituents of the Caracazo.
Along with the turn toward mass struggle and the mass military line in the 1980s, former
guerrilla leaders Douglas Bravo and Klber Ramrez Rojas had pursued a much more
traditional Venezuelan strategy: that of infiltrating cadres into the Armed Forces to provoke a
unified civilian-military insurrection that they had deemed the third way between
insurrections and elections. This strategy had passed from the Venezuelan Communist Party to
the PRV and on to Chvez, and while he and his comrades prepared their coup, previously
dispersed PRV cadres came together to support it.31 Klber Ramrez was even tasked with
drafting dozens of preemptive declarations to be issued by the coup leaders in the event of
success, as well as a general outline of the new state they would attempt to institute.32 For the
moment, however, history was not on their side, and both Chvez's February coup and another
attempt in November were crushed.
For Carlos Lanz, who himself participated in a fundamental way in clearing the ground for
what would become the Bolivarian program, the putschism of the civilian-military third
way spearheaded by Klber and Bravo was always questionable in theory and in practice. He
and other revolutionary militants from the Social-Historic Current and Popular Disobedience
were well aware of the planned military rebellion, but their skepticism prevented them from
participating until the very last minute. As the guerrilla struggle dissipated, Lanz, Juvenal,
Denis, and others had begun to study Gramsci's theory of hegemony in more detail, and as a
result began to place an increasing emphasis on ideology and culture. For Gramsci, what is
often determinant in the seizure and maintenance of power is not so much the instrument of
that powerthat is, the statebut rather the powerful system of fortresses and earthworks
that surround it and reinforce its strength.33 Lanz's concern was that by centering the struggle
on the military, the mass hegemonic element would be lost, thereby casting doubt on even its

chances for immediate success, but more importantly, in the absence of a more fundamental
struggle, he worried that this putschism would take the state but nothing more. February 4
was a Winter Palace moment, he explains, with reference to the Bolshevik seizure of power,
it lacked the truly organic elements necessary for a revolution. If the movement was to
prevent a severe and repressive backlash, the sort with which Lanz and others were wellacquainted, such organic elements must be developed and deepened. What was lacking was
a grassroots, organic vision, he insists, adding what had become a damning indictment of
lessons not learned: as late as 1992, military foquismo predominated.34
Nevertheless, like any good revolutionary, these concerns did not prevent Lanz from taking
up the fight and throwing his weight behind the coup. After Chvez's arrest, Lanz traveled to
the prison in Yare to explain his concerns and to chart a path forward. He and others
participated more fully in the November coup, one that boasted a more substantial mass
component in part due to Lanz's own efforts to transmit the concept of the mass military line
to some within the military. Rather than clinging dogmatically to his theses regarding mass
street rebellions or workers' autonomy, rather than insisting on a single path forward, Lanz
now sought a synthesis of the guerrilla, the military, and the mass elements. Despite his
more serious reservations toward elections, he even participated in Chvez's 1998 electoral
campaign, all the while insisting on the need for profound hegemonic transformations to shore
up the gains already made and to project these radically in the future. As Lanz puts it in a
recent work of the same name: the revolution must be cultural or it will reproduce
domination.35
All the while, the popular earthworks sought by Lanz were springing up like mushrooms
in the aftermath of the Caracazo in the form of an explosion of popular assemblies that was,
like the Caracazo itself, simultaneously spontaneous and organized. While the immediate
aftermath of the slaughter generated a period of denunciations of state repression, Denis notes
that such denunciations quickly translated into organized direct actions under the slogan no
hay pueblo vencido, there's no such thing as a defeated people. The defiance of this phrase
was clear in a massive demonstration on the first anniversary of the massacre, which was
dispersed only when soldiers opened fire from nearby rooftops, causing the crowd to scatter
(this scene would be repeated nearly identically on the second anniversary in 1991).36 By
1991, the Barrio Assembly of Caracas had emerged as a sort of general assembly representing
local groupings and functioning as a center for the inauguration of social power in the country
and as a coordinating agent for popular struggles.37 In other words, long before Chvez's
election, long before the communal councils, and long before even the Bolivarian Circles and
the Patriotic Circles that had preceded them, there were barrio assemblies, the fruit of a long
history of revolutionary failures and experimentation and the motor force of a new Venezuela.
In the end, all these divergent strategies proved useful in the run up to the attempted coups
of 1992 and, during this process, the Caracazo and the 1992 coups would become inextricably
linked, surging forth as both did from the same primal source. As one former guerrilla puts it,
this history wasn't born on February 4.38 In the words of revolutionary poet Luis Britto
Garca: The repression that had nearly dismantled the radical vanguards was useless in the
end. Without being called together by any vanguard, the people rose up spontaneously on
February 27, 1989, and their mobilizationwithout any plan or precise objectiveswas only
subdued after a bloody week. This mass charge without a vanguard was followed by a vanguard

that was not able to immediately coordinate its masses: the rebellions of February 4 and
November 27, 1992. Britto insists, however, that these were not merely military rebellions,
but events that themselves served as detonators for subsequent popular rebellions: they
showed that a social movement can catalyze a military movement, and vice versa, in order to
finally become synchronized and crystallized in the arrival in power by the institutional,
electoral path, to then set into motion a revolutionary project.39 Thus, if the previously
excluded people appeared explosively in the social life of the nation on 27-F-1989, these
rebellious soldiers erupted into political life on 4-F-1992. As former president Rafael Caldera
explained in a 1992 speech that would earn him reelection amid the smoldering ruins of the
Venezuelan party-system:
When the events of February 27 and 28, 1989, occurred, I observed from this very podium that what was going to
happen could be very serious. I did not claim to make prophetic claims, but it was clear that the consequences of that
[neoliberal] package that produced the first explosion of those terrible events wouldcontinue to bore deeply into
the consciousness and the future of our people. I said in an article around that time that Venezuela was like a
showcase window for Latin American democracy. The inhabitants of the Caracas hills smashed that window when
they descended, enraged, in February 1989. Today it has again been broken by the rifle-butts and the weapons in the
hands of the revolting soldiers.40

But we should be clear on one thing: it was the former that caused and made possible the latter.
If the revolutionary fruit that had been germinating since 1958 would not fully ripen until after
Chvez's failed 1992 coup, the 1989 Caracazo rebellion was its necessary fertilizer, and, as we
know, fertilizer is both nutritious and highly explosive.41

The Beginning and the End

As Luis Britto has long argued, World War IV began in Venezuela. If the third world war
(the Cold War) ended with the apparent victory of neoliberalism, the fourth began in
Venezuela on February 27, 1989, with the first rebellion by an entire nation against a
neoliberal package, thereby proving the impossibility of neoliberalism's global spread.
However, Britto adds that this rebellion teaches us as much about ourselves as about our
enemies because it was entirely popular and did not take its orders from any political or
intellectual vanguard. That's the signal that Venezuela sends: once again, the people are the
beginning and the end of everything.42
While the power of the people to act openly and rebelliously had always existed in potential
form, as I have shown in the multiple minor skirmishes described in the previous chapters,
what is equally clear is that something had changed drastically in the blood and fire of
February 1989. Despite the fact that History was broken, its actors dead or terrified, and the
pueblo was forced to withdraw, Roland Denis argues that this was a pueblo that had gained
its own personality, that had seen the measure of its own massive power and capacity for selforganization. As so often occurs, the repression of the Caracazo generated exactly the
opposite effect from that which its purveyors had intended: In the years that followed, despite
repression, collective and spontaneous violence became a recurrent form of struggle among
communities (above all on the peripheries of large cities) and protest groups (especially
students)Street violence was its image, the stone and the momentary control of space its

most common instruments of struggle, and the struggle against poverty its primary raison
d'tre.43
According to Britto, the Caracazo was an example of what he calls instantaneous social
movements, a form of organization that has proven central for the death of the two-party
system, Chvez's election, and Chvez's return to power in 2002. When I ask what it means
precisely for a social movement to be instantaneous, his response echoes analyses by other
noted decolonial thinkers like C. L. R. James and Frantz Fanon, who emphasized the potent
self-activity of the popular masses: for several decades now, the Venezuelan masses have
surpassed their leadership. I don't believe that one should depend on spontaneity, but it is a
good resource to have when everything else has failed, he adds.44 In the aftermath of the
guerrilla war, all else had indeed failed, and here Britto does his best to turn a vice into a
virtue. Although this spontaneous capacity for organization expressed in the Caracazo would in
many ways generate both Chvez's 1992 coup and 1998 election, its importance as a profound
expression of constituent energy would only increase once constituted power was formally in
the hands of the revolutionaries.

Four. Sergio's Blood

Student Struggles from the University to the Streets
Student, a great heart in your chest,
your homeland Venezuela
awaits much from your determination.
Seek out the working class
with which to make the Revolution.
Al Primera

In mid-1993, the Venezuelan political system was in a veritable free fall. The Caracazo
predictable for some of its participants but utterly astonishing for elites intoxicated by their
own mythswas followed soon after by a pair of attempted coups in February and November
1992. While the nominally social democratic ruling party Democratic Action ( AD) succeeded
in closing ranks against this military intervention into politics, a schism quickly emerged
within the ruling class as others saw political opportunity amid the turmoil. If AD supported
Cartos Andrs Prez in 1992, they would sell him up the river in 1993 to save their own skins,
and if, as in the case of AD, the party abandoned the leader, the opposite would be true of the
Christian Democrats (COPEI): the party's founder, Rafael Caldera, one of the architects of
Venezuela's exclusionary two-party system, effectively jumped ship with a speech in the
Congress that certainly did not support the coup attempt but nevertheless explicitly connected
it to the same popular rage that had fueled the Caracazo. Wistfully sensing popular
ambivalence toward the institutional order, Caldera insisted that there can be no democracy if
the people cannot eat.1 This was a truly visionary bit of opportunism, one that catapulted
Caldera back to power in the heavily disputed election of 1993.2

September 23, 1993

A large march set out from the Central University ( UCV); a joyful combination of music and
street party to the observer's eye. But the tension was in the context, and behind the playfulness
of the samba there lay the very real and imminent threat of a state violence that did not begin
or end with the Caracazo, the last deadly gasps of a decadent and flailing system. As Roland
Denis, then a young student leader, puts it, Joy and combat are never separable in good
popular mobilizations. This is not to say that these are the same, of course, but if it was joy
that inspired the students, combat was the inevitable result of seeking the joy of liberation
under a socially repressive, neoliberal state. This great parade of joy wound from the UCV
toward the old city center, and as the telltale signs of impending attack manifested themselves
in the subtleties of police maneuver, the forever warriors took the lead while the forever
defeatists attempted to dissuade them.
As the march arrived at the Esquina del Chorro, it was clear that the students would not
reach the Congress. But this was no surprise, and for a moment it seemed as though the day

would be merely a repetition of skirmishes past, another expression of the violent street tactics
that had become coterminous with Popular Disobedience. Tear gas, bullets rubber and real,
stones, burning tires, Molotov cocktails, scattering and regrouping, the resumption of battle at
other points of the city center's perimeter, some street vendors joining in, the solidarity of the
motorizados, even some broken windows, injuries, arrests, and a police contingent or two
surrounded. But in this case something would change. The repressive strategy would not
merely seek to disperse, control, and detain, but instead some assassins would be added to the
ranks of the police with precise extermination missions.3 The traditionally repressive
intelligence forces of the DISIP were present, carrying with them death sentences that had been
decided beforehand and simply awaited execution.
While Denis was escorting his young daughter out of harm's way, one such sentence was
carried out. The executioner loaded a large steel nut into a shotgun and fired it. The victim was
Sergio Rodrguez Yance, a student revolutionary well known for embodying, in Denis' words,
the joy and combat of Venezuelan popular struggles. The executioner, too, was joyful,
leaping with glee in untelevised video footage when the metal lump punctured Sergio's chest.
A close personal friend of Sergio, Denis' retrospective lament and homage is touching: Poet,
salsa singer, dancer, joker, friend, lover, child, disobedient, warrior, solidaristic, and with an
always smiling but almost exasperating humility. Sergio was life itself, its creator as its
product; he was what that marvelous goddess granted us as a prize for all the irreverent and
liberating pressure that had exploded and could not be stopped. Albert Camus and his
Rebellious Man would have certainly found in Sergio one of his best characters, but one for
whom existential melancholia was completely foreign. Sergio was our earth.4
Rodrguez always insisted that he would die with a smile on his face, and that's just how he
looked when Roland Denis saw him later that afternoon in the morgue, grinning a challenge to
the world he had just departed. Just months earlier, as it became clear that the shame of the old
system was devouring it and that the Fourth Republic was wheezing its last breaths, this young
revolutionary had penned the following words, which have become something of a mantra
among those who celebrate his life, adorning the walls near his childhood home in Block 5 of
23 de Enero:
Here I go, like a fleeting comet, a kite without strings ready to fly (without shackles or chains) toward the unknown.
I move through the world perhaps justifying my discourse on the integral nature of the human.
Seeking the equilibrium of man with nature.
Breaking the usurpation of the vanguards.
Here I am, a single individual, universalizing my existence.
Here I go, like a joyful madman, giving away my rags to the dispossessed, sharing the bread of libertarian ideas.
Here I come, like a silent Quijote, giving over my love like bread with a piece for all, adopting the dialectical nature
of life.
Here I come, with my shining sword, piercing the phantoms of contradiction and egoism.
I raise my sword against the chemically pure, impostors of honesty.
Here I am, friends and enemies of mine, compaeros, with my warrior's armor, prepared to give my life being
certain and convinced that death doesn't exist.

Sergio's death was met immediately by a torrent of tribute from local revolutionary
collectives, with the newspaper Yulimar Vive (named for the first victim of the Caracazo and
edited in part by Denis himself) celebrating his disobedient laughter and the newsletter of

the nearby La Piedrita Collective invoking the title of Sergio's own newspaper El Hombre
Nuevo in its insistence that Sergio, new men don't die.5 While the highest of human ideals
expressed in Sergio's poem have assumed many a human form during the past fifty years of
struggle in Venezuela, few have embodied the student demand for national relevance, for the
opening of a porous breach between university and society, more fully than Sergio Rodrguez.
Born and raised as one of several brothers in Block 5 of 23 de Enero (one of the same
cepillini we met in chapter 3), Sergio cut his teeth at the rapidly gentrifying UCV. He fought a
battle on two frontsin the barrio and on campusbut in both, his antagonists were largely
the same: repressive police on the one hand and vanguardist usurpers on the other. He was
the total package, local residents of Block 5 tell me within sight of one of the many murals of
Sergio that surround the building, a pure revolutionary who had participated in the popular
organizing in support of both 1992 coup attempts shortly before his death.6 It was somewhere
between these two battlefronts during the march that left the UCV and headed toward the seat of
government, beyond which his home peered just over the hills, that Sergio was shot dead by
police. While it may seem strange to begin an analysis of the Venezuelan student movement
through the lens of such an interstitial figure as Sergio Rodrguez, one whose existence was so
fully marked by the in-betweenness of student and barrio struggles, I hope my reasons will
become clear. Not only is it the case that the best student organizing often takes its cues from
Marx's self-abolishing proletariat, rejecting strictly student demands and seeking nothing so
much as to tear down the walls separating university from society and to fuse with the broader
revolutionary struggle, but this intersectional focus also helps to draw out the deep continuities
that connect the chapters of this book. Nor did student struggles emerge from the aftermath of
the guerrilla struggle, as revolutionary cadres experimented with the realm of legality; an
earlier wave of student struggles had served to catalyze the armed struggle itself.

From Students to Guerrillas and Back

Students have long played a central role in radical politics in Venezuela, but not always as
students. Rather, Venezuelan students have long sought to project their experiences onto the
national stage, sometimes embracing their status, sometimes abandoning or rejecting it, and
often circulating between campus and community life, leaving and returning for the evening,
the year, or in periodic waves according to the political demands of the moment. An exhaustive
catalog of political leaders of the past century from across the political spectrum shows that
the vast majority have been drawn from the ranks of student activists, and this phenomenon
has its historical roots in the transformation of the Venezuelan university itself.7 In the decades
after liberation from the Spanish, landed elites gradually wrested control of the reins of power,
which notably included the Church-influenced educational system, formerly the central
hegemonic apparatus of colonization. This new oligarchic university, itself a continuation of
the colonial university in many senses, sought to educate a new class of citizens to serve as
legitimating agents of the instruments of coercion and as mediators between oligarchic power
and the totality of the dominated classes.8
But these traditional intellectuals, to continue in Gramscian terms, would lose their
privileged position in the early twentieth century after the discovery of oil, the exploitation and
state mediation of which undermined the power of the landed oligarchy and generated a ruling

class whose power was more political than economic.9 This shifting economic structure
favored the development of an urban middle class, and as a result a new intelligentsia
organically linked with this rising class. These intellectuals sought the reins of national power
under the banner of the celebrated Generation of 28: Student Week in February 1928
sparked renewed opposition to the Gmez dictatorship and gave rise to a failed coup only
months later. Many student leaders, including Rmulo Betancourt himself, went into exile
shortly thereafter, but after the dictator's death, this shifting constellation of power was
reflected in a modernizing reform of the university system that opened the institution to the
urban classes.10 The university population began to grow and with it the influence of its
constituents, an influence that spilled over the limits that the rising elite had placed on it,
especially after university autonomy was declared in 1958.11
From the very beginning, then, the student movement that emerged from this structure was
not merely a superstructural outgrowth of new economic realities, but instead reflected a mix
of various perspectives and positions, from liberalism to technocratic developmentalism to
anti-imperialist communism. It was the radical students who would, in the early years of
Venezuela's two-party democracy, find themselves in the driver's seat, enjoying a degree of
influence that far transcended the walls of the university. When Betancourt came to power, he
sought to channel all social struggles into official representative organs, and the student
struggle was a central target of this domestication campaign. But the movements would not be
so easily straitjacketed, and much less the students, who were not pacified by having dispensed
with a dictatorship and who instead became the principal questioner of the vices of the
democratic regime initiated in 1958.12 This president, who previously had admired the
university as the battleground for a permanent conflict between the nation and those
governing against its will now assailed it as a den of terrorists.13 When students continued
to mobilize autonomously, Betancourt responded with characteristic force, occupying the
campuses in clear violation of the very autonomy he himself previously had championed and
forcing students to choose between docility and fierceness, between compliance and guerrilla
war.

The Academic Renovation

Alma Mater, they want to kill you with arrows of darkness
they want to close you off from your people with keys of darkness,
they want you to build machines to kill butterflies.
Al Primera

Betancourt's invasion of the UCV was but the first in a long series of incursions that would see
tanks rolling through the crown jewel of Venezuelan education, prompting Al Primera to pen
the chilling words quoted above some decades later. 14 Here, darkness is oscuridad, which
plays a double function as obscurity, suggestive of the gentrification of the university, its
separation and alienation as an ivory tower of no relevance to the poor. Primera also shows
immediately how this gentrification was accompanied by a technocratic turn in the university,
one concerned more with producing machines of deaththe same machines that had cleansed
the university in the first placethan people full of radical hope. If many revolutionaries were
forced out of the universities by repression, many more would be forced to return for the same

reason, seeking refuge as the guerrilla war reached a dead end, and transforming the
universities once again into a central battleground for the future of the country.
In the oppressive-looking blocks that house sociology and economics at the UCV, I meet with
Fernando Rivero, a longtime student leader with the M-28 Movement. A political philosopher
by training, Rivero skillfully cites Montesquieu and Marx to explain the history of Venezuela's
student movement as students stream by us.15 The point of departure for this post-guerrilla
student history is the 1969 movement for Academic Renovation, a slightly tame name for
what was, in effect, an effort to revolutionize academic institutions from the bottom up as
puntofijista governments attempted to pacify the remaining guerrilla fighters and demobilize
society from the top down. But the Renovacin, as it is called, was more than just student
politics; Rivero describes it as a sort of insurgency against the institution, one led by
workers as well as students, the goal of which was to both radically democratize the university
itself and give it national relevance, both practically and theoretically.
On the practical plane, the student movements engaged in the Renovation sought to develop
participatory organizational structures within the university, in part to resist the traditional
elected institutions of the universities (the Federation of University Centers, or FCUS), which
had long served as direct proxies for the two-party system. Instead, radical students formed
alternative, directly democratic council structures and fought for the creation of a general
university assembly. As Lpez puts it, It would horrify party leadersaccustomed to
deciding the destiny of the university community behind closed doorsto confront
multitudinous student assemblies which would cast into doubt their very status as leaders.16
While the proposed assembly would have equalized faculty and student participation (the
current weight of a faculty vote is forty times that of a student vote), it would also and more
radically have included university employees and workers on an equal footing. It was in this
sense that the Renovation became an insurgency against the institution, attempting to break
down the walls that separate the university from the society as a whole while being careful
never to sacrifice its prized autonomy. In reality, this was a radicalization of the very notion of
autonomy itself, one that asserted autonomy from the government while insisting that the
university be subservient to the needs of the wider society of which students and workers were
a part.
This radical and participatory praxis then nourished the Renovation's chief theoretical
breakthrough, by which it called into question the prevailing mode of knowledge
production.17 Students began to argue that the university functioned as what French Marxist
Louis Althusser would call an ideological state apparatus, reproducing the hierarchies
necessary for the division of labor as well as the ideological foundations of expertise,
competition, and meritocracy that would uphold such divisions. Because the divisions in
question were not merely internal to the student-faculty hierarchy and the disciplinary
structure of the university, but also included the division between social classes and the
university-society distinction itself, a broader response would prove necessary. 18 Thus the
Renovation posed a direct challenge to AD's and COPEI's efforts at technocratic university
reform, one that would have heightened the institution's role in perpetuating a new division of
labor by undermining the principles of liberal education.19 But if Venezuelan students
embraced the French critique of the ideological function of the university, they would
explicitly reject the pessimism that some attach to that critique. In part due to the irreverent

history of the Venezuelan student movement, the stifling view of education as mere
reproduction of hierarchy would never gain much traction in Venezuela. Carlos Lanz, who,
since his days as a guerrilla, has insisted on the importance of the hegemonic apparatus, and
education in particular, would therefore insist on balancing the insights of the education-asreproduction model with the radically liberatory education of Paolo Freire. For Lanz and
others, even the most repressive of educational structures contain the potential for spontaneous
resistance, and it is possible to unveil the hegemonic function in study plans, combating the
hierarchized being, fragmentation and reification, thereby creating a counter-hegemonic, or
counter-cultural space within the educational sphere.20
Some have argued that the Academic Renovation movement was too powerful to be
confronted head on, but Rivero reminds me that the state certainly did its level best, and the
student insurgency of 196970, like that of 196061, was put down en sangre y fuego, in
blood and fire, this time by Rafael Caldera, who sent tanks to close the UCV.21 This time,
however, there was no substantial guerrilla alternative toward which the students could turn,
and the immediate effect of the repression was to reveal the theoretical and organizational
weakness of the students' council structures, pushing them back into the hands of the more
durable FCUS and to the uncritical defense of autonomy as a minimal program. This is not to
suggest, however, that the Renovation was a failure; student resistance forced the Caldera
government to adjust, adopting both a war of position and a series of outflanking maneuvers to
defeat the students and carry forth its technocratic offensive.22 The first of these, the war of
position, took the form of both symbolic reforms that emptied the Renovation movement of its
radical content and, more insidious still, a subtle and long-term policy of ethnic cleansing
within the public university by limiting popular access and returning the institutions to their
previous status as refuges for the most elite segments of society.
Second, the government outflanked the university movements by encouraging private
education and putting its technocratic energies into a new, alternative system of
experimental universities, the first of whichthe Universidad Simn Bolvarwas founded,
not coincidentally, in 1969.23 Contrasting views exist with regard to the success of Caldera's
long-term strategy of pacifying the universities (as he and others had pacified the guerrillas)
through this sinister combination of carrot and stick. Some note the progressive decline in the
mobilizing capacity of student movements as the universities became more elite in their social
base; Fernando Rivero argues that by the 1990s the student movement was conspicuously
absent from national life. Others such as Roberto Lpez insist that the student movement has
nevertheless represented a consistent reservoir of revolutionary energies, citing periodic
explosions: the Renovation movement would be followed by the university rebellions of 1987
88, to which we could add the more recent Toma, or Takeover, of 2001, which birthed
movements like Rivero's own M-28.

Popular Disobedience and the 1987 Strike

This radical continuity of student movements did not stop at the walls of the university, and its
success or failure must, therefore, be measured in broader terms as well: in the dynamic
interaction between university and barrio. Specifically, many of the central actors in the chain
of events leading from guerrillas to the Renovation and later barrio assemblies, and the

victims stretching from Cantaura to the Caracazo, were one and the same. One leader who had
left the realm of student organizing only to return many years later was Carlos Lanz himself:
after a decades-long hiatus that would see him move from the rural guerrilla front to urban
foquismo, spending several years in prison in the aftermath of the Niehous action, Lanz would
be among those spearheading a new form of popular mobilization that sought to unite student
radicalism with a mass base in the barrios under the name Popular Disobedience (see chapter
3). Alongside other former members of the PRV and the Liga Socialista, as well as active
members of Bandera Roja, Popular Disobedience sought to reclaim the mantle of popular
democracy in the university that had first been raised by the Renovation by resisting official
structures of representation and demanding instead direct democratic self-governance for
students and workers alike.
By the mid-1980s, these base organizations had consolidated their antiparty hegemony to
such a degree that in many universities they were able to defeat traditional parties and take
control of the FCUS, snatching the leadership of a smoldering student movement.24 The spark
was provided by the death of a student at the University of the Andes in March 1987, triggering
what some deemed the worst violence the country had seen since January 23, 1958, only this
time it was AD itself that bore the brunt, its Mrida headquarters burned to the ground. The
rector of the UCV, Edmundo Chirinos, prefigured Caldera's response to the Caracazo,
describing this rebellion, deemed the Meridazo, as a collective manifestation of the
exhaustion of the dispossessed classes and the disapproval of the political leadership, with the
far more subversive addendum that, if well-channeled, the rebellion might generate a new
alternative.25 For now, however, innovations were to be, above all, tactical in nature, and
during subsequent rebellions in Caracas that April students began to incorporate the practice of
looting and redistributing goods to the urban poor as well as a closer coordination with
neighborhood organizations in the barrios.26
Before the summer was over, nationwide rebellions saw several students killed and dozens
facing charges before military tribunals, but the political landscape of the country had been
altered irreversibly. As Lpez Snchez describes it: It was in the universities that the
bipartisan forces of AD and COPEI first began to suffer massive defeats, and where the vices and
corruption of the political system were also called into questionThe actions by the student
movements in one way or another dignified violent street protests, while simultaneously
establishing by example organizational practices that questioned the way politics was done
under puntofijismo.27 The delegitimization of the two-party system, antiparty critique of
representation, rejection of formal channels for protest, cultivation of links with the popular
masses, and willingness to resort to street violence against the structural violence of the
prevailing system were all ways in which the student rebellions of the mid-1980s prefigured
not only the Caracazo of 1989, but also the attempted coups of 1992.28
This dynamic was not limited to the rebellious side of the equation: if the militant street
action of students and organizers paved the way for the Caracazo, the military side progressed
as well in a dialectical refinement of repressive forms, with the minister of defense stating
publicly that the student rebellions had taught the government to be ready to restore public
order when necessary. 29 The human cost of this lesson became perfectly clear in February
1989. If radical students had previously been either forced out of the university through
repression or cleansed through tightened entry requirements, the aftermath of the 198788

rebellions would see a more voluntary form of exodus as many young students, enamored of
their deepening contact with the urban poor, left the university voluntarily to focus their
attention on barrio organizing. This was overwhelmingly the case with Popular Disobedience
members such as Sergio Rodrguez and Roland Denis. Denis now characterizes this decision as
a serious political error that left the universities in more conservative hands for many years to
come.30

From Relevance to Absence

The 1990s were a tough row for radical students to hoe; the center of gravity for societal
rebellion shifted decisively outside of the university and students became divorced from
popular struggles.31 Meanwhile, the neo-liberalization of education continued full-steam
ahead, slowed only slightly by the disintegration of the old political system. After all, it was
Caldera who had spearheaded this elite technocratization of the university during his first term
(196974), and during his second term (199499) he attempted to finish the job. Where
Caldera had previously revoked the right of workers to participate in university governance (a
key victory of the Renovation), shortened school terms in an effort to disrupt cohort solidarity
to atomize the student body, and cleansed the universities of the poor (who by the 1990s
represented less than 7 percent of students), in 1997 he put forth a Draft Law for Higher
Education (the PLES) that would have entailed a sweeping privatization of the university
system, especially on the level of services.32 The election of Chvez thankfully stalled this
privatizing offensive, but Rivero notes that it has continued unabated in the autonomous
universities. The 1999 Bolivarian Constitution has meant serious gains for students, but as with
other sectors these advances have been partial at best, and the formal rights promised in the
Constitution would prove difficult to implement in practice.
Moreover, this gap between the Constitution and reality severely undercuts the traditional
aspiration of students to national relevance: The public university today represents a sort of
ghettoalienated from the problems of society and the problems of the poor, Rivero insists,
pointing emphatically to the very ground on which we are standing, This university doesn't
have social pertinence. It was this alienated institution that he himself had entered, and he
recounts that when he arrived in the late 1990s the students were already reified and
mediatized, wholly unlinked from popular struggles. The sense of the political, he
recounts wistfully, the Greek sense described by Aristotle, the polis and the Greek citizen,
was totally lost. In the Aristotelian equation of human as political, it was not only the latter
term that was under attack, but also the very question of the human itself within the bounds of
the university. The PLES, particularly in its proposal to eliminate philosophy, constituted a
frontal attack on the humanities according to Rivero: The authorities had decided that the
humanities, the study of the human, was no longer profitable. Do we situate man as a predicate
of things, as in reification? Or as an end, as in anthropocentrism, viewing humanity as the
alpha and omega of everything, of the economy, of society? For Rivero, this conflict between
the study of the human and the fetishization of technology represents a clash between two
different views of civilization, and this clashsimultaneously epistemological and political
provided the context for the 2001 Toma, or Takeover. While the tomistas, as they would
be known, maintained the directly democratic demands of their rebellious predecessors of

1969 and 1987, Rivero emphasizes the epistemological side of the Toma, one based on the
why and the for what of knowledge production.
The Toma comprised students, workers, and local community members (notably the
Chavista Patriotic Circles, predecessors to the Bolivarian Circles). It began with a general
assembly on March 28, from which the M-28 movement was born and derives its name, and
would later see the seizure of the Rectorate and, in the end, seventeen expulsions (including
one professor and one worker). Rivero himself was expelled for five years on charges of
irreverent behavior toward authorities, rudeness, and, ironically, the destruction of
national property, but behind these charges he sees a far more sinister effort to criminalize
protest more generally and to bury critical thought. While today's students must continue to
make demands within the university, especially with regard to internal democracy, admissions,
services, and curriculum (all of which carry radical potential), Rivero insists that they must
never forget that social relevance remains the central objective: the student movement must
be considered as a part of the broader totality of struggle, because its stellar moments, be they
right or left, are when the students insert themselves into national life. As Rivero and I were
having this conversation, it seemed as if some students were indeed preparing to reinsert
themselves into national life, but in ways that Rivero and others on the left would neither
anticipate nor celebrate.

Which Students? Which Movement?

Given the historic aim of the Venezuelan student movementto transcend the walls of the
university as actors in an essential struggle over the shape of society as a wholeit was ironic
at best when, in 2007, the student movement leapt once again to center stage. Why ironic?
Because rather than revolutionary students spurring on the radicalization of the Bolivarian
Revolution, those who brought the student movement once again to a position of national
relevance represented instead a newly organized and more conservative sector of the
Venezuelan student population. The irony of student politics reborn from the right would not
persist, however, as the whip of the counter-revolution set into motion a dynamic that
radicalized a new generation of students, some hailing from entirely new institutions.33
Whereas the material basis for this peculiarity lay in the gentrification of the university and
was exacerbated by the voluntary withdrawal of many revolutionary students, in the context of
mass disillusionment with traditional parties their replacements would not be drawn from the
traditional proxies of AD or COPEI. Rather, recent years have seen a peculiar campus alliance
comprising the far right (in organizations such as Primero Justicia, sponsored by the United
States' Department of State) and the former-far-left-turned-far-right in the guise of a newly
reborn Bandera Roja.34 In the context of the utter desperation of the anti-Chavista opposition
after Chvez's crushing victory in December 2006 and the rising participation of conservative
students in this new generation of opposition parties, the stage was set for a new student
showdown.
Like radical students of the past, this emergent conservative hegemony within the university
only needed a spark, a cause around which to rally, and this it found shortly after Chvez's
2006 reelection, when he declared that the broadcast concession for opposition mouthpiece
RCTV would not be renewed upon its expiration on May 27, 2007. I recall well the middle- and

upper-class rage that greeted RCTV's disappearance, whose class-basis became obvious when
rioting was restricted to wealthier neighborhoods and eventually sputtered out. One of the few
truly fearful moments I experienced while living in Venezuela occurred as I was walking
through a wealthy area late in the evening after RCTV went off the air. I had joined the
celebration with some of my own students from the embryonic Venezuelan Planning School,
who unanimously supported RCTV's replacement by TVes, a new national station that would,
they hoped, represent more directly the aspirations of the majority. Crossing the burning
barricades with my red shirt carefully concealed, I nevertheless was visually interrogated by
the crowds of well-to-do teenagers burning tires in the street, enjoying a rare moment of
sovereignty that spelled danger for anyone with a different perspective.
Despite the short-lived nature of the RCTV protests, opposition students were energized and
the universities tossed forth new leaders, from Yon Goicochea (subsequently of Primero
Justicia and a fitting recipient of the Cato Institute's Milton Friedman Prize) to the aptly
named Stalin Gonzlez (formerly of Bandera Roja and currently of Un Nuevo Tiempo). As a
struggle emerged over who precisely the students were and what it was they stood for, this
gentrified shadow of a formerly radical student body would attempt to seize the mantle of that
legacy. But if physics teaches of equal and opposite reactions, political dynamics are often
unpredictable in magnitude, direction, and effect, and this effort was met by opposition both
within the traditional university structure and outside of it, with the latter revealing a Chavista
twist on the outflanking strategy previously used by Caldera. Whereas Sergio's generation
was cut down at Esquina del Chorro, this new generation of Venezuelan students was invited
into the National Assembly, some four blocks west near Esquina la Bolsa, where the central
showdown of this symbolic battle would occur.
When conservative student leaders diffidently demanded the right to address the National
Assembly regarding the nonrenewal of RCTV's broadcast license, they hardly entertained the
possibility that their demand would be accepted. But in a stroke of tactical genius, Chavista
National Assembly president Cilia Flores did accept the challenge, thereby simultaneously
challenging both the conservative students' claims of political exclusion andby inviting
Chavista student leaders as welltheir claims to represent all students. In anticipation of the
reverberations this debate was bound to have, I headed to the National Assembly, located at the
heart of the old Caracas city center, where large screens were erected for those outside to
watch the debate going on inside.35 Hundreds had gathered, and the most militanthere I am
boasting without apologywere my own students, who had arranged the production of signs
and whipped the crowd into furious chants:
Education first for the children of the workers!
Education second for the children of the bourgeoisie!

It was then that a roar went up among the expanding crowd, alerting those gathered outside that
there were escualidos [i.e., opposition] dressed as Chavistas! Sure enough, we were able to
glimpse several leaders of the anti-Chavista student movement being escorted into the
Assembly wearing red t-shirts, the traditional uniform of supporters of the Bolivarian process.
At first we assumed that the donning of red shirts was merely a means for the students to
sneak undetected into the Assembly, but this was about far more than safety: the shirts were an

integral part of a professionally designed media strategy. The first speaker to the podium was
Douglas Barrios, an opposition student leader and economics student from the private (and
notoriously elite) Metropolitan University. His speech, although well crafted, contained no
arguments, only vague promises of continued struggle for RCTV's broadcast license and,
somewhat paradoxically, a process of national reconciliation. As he finished, Barrios said: I
dream of a country in which we can be taken into account without having to wear a uniform.
At this point, he and other opposition student leaders in the chamber removed their red t-shirts,
revealing instead white shirts bearing a variety of pro-RCTV messages. The opposition students
then began to withdraw from the Assembly, and it was only the entreaties of the Chavista
students and Assembly members that convinced them to stay to hear the speech by the first
revolutionary student, Andrena Tarazn of the revolutionary M-28 movement at the UCV.
Tarazn began by attacking the opposition students' antidemocratic threats to withdraw from
the debate. Comparing their performance with the recent behavior of Condoleezza Rice at the
summit of the Organization of American States, in which Rice had attacked Venezuela before
withdrawing to avoid criticism, Tarazn observed that they had a march, they demanded
freedom of expression, and when it is granted to them they leave. Tarazn continued,
demanding that the opposition students clarify their concepts: they seem to be confusing, she
argued, in a clever play on words that was greeted with resounding applause, libertad de
prensa (freedom of the press) and libertad de empresa (the freedom of private businesses).36
After Tarazn's speech and a brief speech by Yon Goicochea, in which he again asserted the
nonpolitical nature of their intervention, the opposition students withdrew from the chamber
and the debate, their exit carried live on a national cadena broadcast simultaneously on all
channels. After having demanded the right to speak in the Assembly, conservative students had
abandoned that right, refusing to debate with the Chavista students. This was the first time in
Venezuelan history that student organizations of any stripe were invited to address the
Assembly, and their departure rightly shocked both Chavistas and anti-Chavistas alike. From
the perspective of their claim to represent all students, however, a claim that was undercut by
the very presence of two opposing groups of students in the Assembly, the move was
understandable.
But the most interesting part of the day was yet to come. As the opposition students were
making defiant press declarations before being hustled out the Assembly's back door to avoid
the masses of pro-Chavista students gathered out front (who were, at the time, shouting
Cowards! Cowards! and Victory, victory, victory of the people!), they failed to notice that
they had forgotten something. When it was his turn to speak, Chavista student leader Hctor
Rodrguez of the UCV stepped up to the podium with a sheet of paper that he promptly held up
in front of the gathered deputies. It was the last page of the opposition's scripted performance
in the Assembly, which laid out the text of Barrios' speech and the exact moment at which he
and others were to remove their red shirts. And this was not all: the script was signed by ARS
Publicity, a company owned by none other than the Globovisin media empire. 37 Together with
Globovisin (as well as all other private media outlets), ARS was directly implicated in the
planning and execution of the 2002 mediatic coup against the constitutional order (see the
Second Interlude). Not only had the debate in the Assembly revealed that these opposition
students were only one part of the student body, they also now appeared as a part that, against
all claims of independence, was tied directly to the rabid anti-Chavista opposition; this was

confirmed later when most of these opposition student leaders joined anti-Chavista parties.

A New Student Movement

The National Assembly fiasco was a serious blow to the opposition student movement, but it
soon became clear that they would not go quietly. With RCTV off the air, opposition students
turned their sights on the proposed constitutional reform scheduled for December 2007, and a
wave of street violence in early November showed that they were drifting into desperation. On
November 7, as frustrated opposition students returned to the UCV after a march to the Supreme
Court, their on-campus adversaries were caught off guard. A group of Chavista students,
including M-28 militants and my former students, were pursued by a horde of opposition
students, taking refuge in the radical School of Social Work. The opposition students
surrounded the building, pelting it with stones, lighting a fire at the entrance, and even
shooting through open windows in an effort to pick off their Chavista counterparts. One of my
students was shot in the incident, but luckily it was only a large piece of shrapnel, not a bullet,
that had entered his abdomen. The Chavista students were rescued only when, in a testament to
the deepening student-community relations of recent years, armed militants from nearby
barrios arrived on motorcycles. The international press predictably ran with the wrong end of
the story, propelled by an Associated Press dispatch claiming incorrectly that gunmen opened
fire on students returning from a march, alongside a sensationalistic photo of Chavistas
brandishing handguns.38 Evidently, journalists in the United States did not wonder why the
gunmen appeared to be inside the burning building attempting to get out, and even when
confronted with video proof of their error, some refused to print retractions.39
The day after the assault on the School of Social Work, members of the Presidential
Students' Commissionthemselves revolutionary leaders at various public and private
universitiesissued a stark warning. In the words of Roberto Serra, a law student at the elite
Andrs Bello Catholic University, recently elected to the National Assembly: Some sectors
have told us that they are only waiting for us to say the word to take over the universities
everything under the sun has its timeTo the opposition: don't speed up time, because if you
know how to count, you should already know who has the majority. I don't think it would take
much for the Venezuelan people to take over the UCV or the [Andrs Bello Catholic
University], whichever gets in their way!40 This optimistic image of Chavista students biding
their time, simply waiting for the right moment to strike, is certainly a positive counterpoint to
the picture of demographic gentrification that we have seen up to this point, but in the years
since the Revolution began, it has gained some truth. Moreover, it was no coincidence that
Serra spoke these words from the Bolivarian University, the central institution in the Chavista
outflanking maneuver, one that follows Caldera's blueprint precisely.
Upon coming to power, the Chavista movement faced a peculiar difficulty. University
autonomy had always been the banner of the left, one proudly held aloft in opposition to the
historically repressive incursions of the established antidemocratic order. Certainly, many in
the student movement had long combined the negative demand for autonomy from the
government with more substantive positive demands: for direct democratic control within the
university alongside a total transformation of society outside the university walls. But from a
position of power, how could a radical leader intervene toward the positive transformation of

the university without appearing to violate its autonomy? This paradox of university autonomy
has led the Chavista government to adopt a different tack, a war of position that avoids
frontal attack while constructing alternative institutions in preparation for the war of
maneuver against the traditional universities that was predicted by Serra. But whereas
Gramsci viewed education and ideology as the terrain for such a war of position, here was a
struggle for the very instruments of that ideology. Just as Rafael Caldera undermined radical
students by establishing alternative experimental institutions, so too would Chvez seek to
outflank an increasingly conservative movement by establishing alternative Bolivarian
institutions.
The Bolivarian educational system grew out of the educational missions established by the
Venezuelan government beginning in 2003, but it has more distant roots in Plan Bolvar 2000,
which saw the military deployed into poor communities to confront poverty without
significantly increasing the government's budget. It was only after the recovery of the oil
industry from its autonomous board of directors in early 2003 (see chapter 7) that the country's
massive income could be made available for social programs. The first educational missions
focused on basic literacy (Mission Robinson) and primary (Mission Robinson II) and
secondary (Mission Ribas) education, but within six months this new, alternative educational
system had reached the university level with the establishment of Mission Sucre, at the center
of which stands the Bolivarian University. 41 The result of these educational missions has been
astounding: 1.6 million illiterate adults were taught to read and write; by 2007, nearly 350,000
had completed primary schooling and more than 450,000 had completed secondary schooling
in the alternative mission system. Perhaps most striking and relevant to our discussion is the
increase in higher education, where the number of matriculated students has nearly tripled in a
decade.42
Traditionally, nearly three-fourths of Venezuelan university students are drawn from the
wealthiest 20 percent of the population, whereas those added by the mission system derive
almost entirely from the lowest income bracket. It is this net gain in studentsmore than a
million at the university level alonethat offers the best indication of the outflanking
strategy in revolutionary education, to which the Planning School where I taught also
contributed. In recent years, this process has extended beyond access to transform the structure
of even primary education through Bolivarian primary schools that are still in the pilot stage,
in which students from kindergarten on participate collectively in administrating their own
educational process.43 Thus it was that Metropolitan Mayor Juan Barreto appeared on
television during the opposition student upsurge to brutally mock, as was so often his manner,
the self-seriousness of the opposition students. In Barreto's estimation, anti-Chvez students
had managed to mobilize only around 5,000 in a city boasting more than 200,000 students, but
this figure already shows that he is speaking of a very different student body, one that is not
limited to the traditional elite institutions of higher education.
Emphasizing the importance of this outflanking strategy, this war of position in the
educational sphere, is not to suggest thatin a repetition of the mistakes of a previous era
struggle within the traditional universities has been abandoned entirely. Rather, while these
new students mobilize outside and around the traditional universities, radicals within the
universities have been busy doing the same, specifically through efforts to chip away from
within and ultimately collapse the walls that separate the universities from society. The M-28

movement, for example, has been actively demanding equal voting representation for
professors and students, as well as the inclusion of workers and staff in the voting process.
This internal effort has coincided with the rejection by the M-28 of the cupo, or quota system,
which, by limiting the number of spaces available, has long been seen as a violation of the
constitutional right to education. By organizing simultaneously both accepted students and
those bachilleres sin cupo, those students not guaranteed a space, the M-28 is struggling to
break down the hierarchical barriers that divide accepted and rejected students. Other radical
organizations such as the former Revolutionary Fogata Movement (some members of which
more recently founded Bravo Sur) have equally sought to break down the barrier that separates
secondary from university education through the mobilization of liceistas, or high school
students. As one organizer, Fidel, tells me, we have discovered that high school students are
less ideologically invested in the political systemthey are more energetic and less
opportunisticthey have not yet undergone the disciplinary specialization that occurs at the
university.44
Small indications have recently emerged suggesting that the shift from war of position to
war of maneuver might be underway. In early 2011, the National Assembly approved a radical
new University Law that would have brought the fight to the traditional universities by
reviving some of the most potent demands of the Renovation of more than four decades ago.
According to the proposed law, student votes would be equivalent to those of professors,
participatory and democratic councils including workers and community members would be
instituted, administrative records would be made public, and services would be guaranteed.
Perhaps hesitating because of the backlash that the law might unleash and the claims of the
opposition that it represented an attack on university autonomy, Chvez refused to sign the
law, instead sending it back to the Assembly for revision and popular consultation. Against
opposition claims that such a law would impinge upon university autonomy, however, radical
students continue to insist that true autonomy is predicated upon education for everyone
education for the liberation and transformation of our people.45
For Fernando Rivero, whether it be in the war of maneuver to take over and transform
traditional universities or the war of position to create new, alternative institutions, the crucial
challenge is to not reproduce the Eurocentrism and the positivism of existing institutions.
Here we know everything about the Greeks, he exclaims, and yet we know nothing of preHispanic societies, even the most important ones like the Incas! Citing UCV professor Edgardo
Lander, Rivero sets as a fundamental task to break with the coloniality of knowledge! 46
Breaking with Eurocentrism and coloniality is more than mere history; it also has to do with
method and the rejection of the positivist transposition of methods from the natural to the
social sciences and its segmentation of knowledge into disciplines that prevents the Marxist
aspiration to grasp the totality. That's why we don't speak in terms of scientific socialism, we
speak in terms of socialism, period: revolutionary socialism. It is only by placing
insurgency at the very heart of educational institutionsas Klber Ramrez places it at the
heart of political institutionsthat the educational system will truly embody the needs and
aspirations of the new society.

A Song for Sergio

There is something satisfying about meeting urban guerrilla-turned-educator Carlos Lanz at

Esquina del Chorro, the same corner where Sergio was murdered but that today hosts the
Ministry of Higher Education. As a founder of Popular Disobedience, Lanz, like Denis, knew
Sergio well. In the years since Popular Disobedience's erroneous abandonment of the
university for more directly popular action, Lanz has returned to the question of education.
Like Rivero, Lanz is openly critical of the positivist encrustations that continue to plague
some Marxisms, specifically the division between intellectual and manual labor that these
often imply.47 He has worked to eliminate such divisions in both the economic and educational
spheres: addressing the former during his tenure at state aluminum plant Alcasa as a fervent
proponent of direct democratic control by workers (see chapter 7), and the second as a central
participant in the educational constituent in the run-up to the 1999 Constitution and later as a
key player in efforts to overhaul the educational system. The educational system that the
Bolivarian Revolution received from its predecessors was, according to Lanz, one whose
central function was to proliferate divisions between school and community, professor and
student, and a fragmentation and atomization of knowledge and its monopolization by
experts.48 This sort of fragmentation was the antithesis of the new man for which Sergio
Rodrguez's organization was named and the integral nature of the human of which he spoke
in his poem, embodying both in practice through his desire to tear down the walls separating
the university from the people. It was fitting, then, when this same corner hosted a tribute
entitled A Song for Sergio, in which Roland Denis himself participated, noting in his speech
that Rodrguez's ideals of struggle germinated and today flower in the thought of an entire
people, which is every day more conscious of its destiny and of the defense of this
revolutionary process.49
There was an old legend about this corner, la Esquina del Chorro. Around 1812, it was on
this same corner that the Canarian brothers Prez sold guarapo, a sublime indigenous nectar
that was all the rage. According to legend, the brothers invented a clever devicethe first
automatic dispenser in all Caracasthat would pour a cup of pineapple or sugarcane guarapo
through a spigot in the external wall, and it was this spigot, this chorro, that gave the corner its
name. But the backroom of this guarapera also served as the meeting place for reactionary
royalist conspirators plotting against Francisco de Miranda. In the popular imagination, the
political affiliations of the Prez brothers gave rise to a second and more sinister legend: after
one brother was executed and another disappeared, the spoutthe chorro from which guarapo
was meant to flowinstead gushed forth with the blood of patriots, blood that was still
warm.50 There was never any explanation for such a bizarre metamorphosis, an ominous
transformation paralleling a Christian miracle, but parables aside, we know for certain that the
blood of at least one patriot flowed on this spot: his name was Sergio.

Five. Manuelita's Boots

Women between Two Movements
A plane is heard in the sky, the bombs fall to earth
a rooster crowed, a child cried
she gave birth painfully, she birthed the future
Woman of blood and of sun, your soul is a song
Al Primera

September 25, 1828

Three dozen conspirators forced their way into the Government Building in Bogot, intent on
assassinating Simn Bolvar. Through a characteristic combination of folly and
misinformation, the Liberator himself dismissed the warnings of his long-time mistress
Manuela Senz, convinced that the conspirators had backed out of their widely known plan.
When the attack finally came, he was thoroughly unprepared. In The General in His Labyrinth,
Gabriel Garca Mrquez describes this moment in imaginative detail: Manuela helped him to
dress as quickly as possible, put her waterproof boots on his feet since the General had sent his
only pair of boots to be polished, and helped him to escapeWith the same shrewdness and
courage she had already demonstrated during other historic emergencies, Manuela Senz
received the attackers. Here, playing a role reminiscent of Odysseus's Penelope, Senz held
off the assailants with clever replies to their interrogation, toying with their self-seriousness
while puff[ing] great clouds of smoke from the cheapest kind of wagon driver's cigar to cover
the fresh scent of [Bolvar's] cologne that still lingered in the room.1
Manuela Senzor Manuelita, as she would come to be knownwas not the first to save
Bolvar, but her sheer daring and presence of mind on this occasion would see her deemed
The Liberator of the Liberator. Therefore, one might expect the legacy of Manuelita, who
had herself rescued the rescuer and saved the savior of the Latin American nation, to have a
tremendous impact on gender relations throughout the continent were it not for two factors.
The first is her near-complete erasure from much of what passes for Latin American history
and, more specifically, the misrepresentation of this, her most visible historical act. 2 Second,
while liberating the liberator might seem to place Senz in a position of momentary
superiority, the importance of her act nevertheless depends entirely upon her relation to
Bolvar. The limitation of this dependency is one that weighs heavily upon women's
movements in Venezuela, where women's contributions have long been measured in terms of
the great men they support, Chvez included.
But is this the only possible reading of Manuelita's role in history and her symbolic
significance for the present? Returning to that smoky room in 1828, if only for a moment,
would suggest otherwise. There we find Manuela, barefoot and unarmed (having given both her
boots and weapons to Bolvar), confronting with cool serenity a gang of assassins, all the while
puffing on a cheap cigar. Contrast this with the image of the Liberator himself: huddled under

a bridge, soaked to the bone, and wearing women's boots. His own vanitysending out his
only boots for shining, bathing himself head to toe in colognewould have meant his undoing
were it not for Manuela's cool rationality and tactical sense. Prevailing gender roles are
symbolically disrupted and reversed, and even liberating the Liberator seems to have been a
complexly gendered process in which Senz momentarily usurped Bolvar's position. This was
more than a mere moment, however: Manuela, to Bolvar's great disgust, habitually smoked
these same cheap cigars, dressed in men's clothing, rode horseback like the men and smoke
and drank like a soldier.3 He regularly consulted her on strategic and military matters, and she
was promoted to the rank of colonel (Garca Mrquez describes her as frequently entering
soldiers' barracks in Bogot in a uniform worthy of this rank).4 When her arrest was finally
ordered by anti-Bolivarian forces, moreover, the bedroom scene of 1828 was repeated, only
this time she was waiting for them with a pair of cocked pistols.5 This was hardly the
passively loyal companion that history might suggest.

Marianismo or Manuelanismo?
In an effort to grasp what distinguishes Latin American gender relations, many have turned to
the concept of Marianismo, a counterpart to machismo derived from the Catholic worship
of the Virgin Mary. While teaching that women are morally superior to men, this superiority
manifests as the infinite self-sacrifice, patience, chastity, and submissiveness observed in
some Latin American cultures. 6 While we cannot dismiss Marianismo entirely, there are some
immediate reasons to doubt its centrality for the situation of Venezuelan women. 7 First, the
Catholic Church is notably weaker in Venezuela than in many other Latin American countries;
but second, and more importantly, Venezuelan history is so littered with alternative Maras
to provoke skepticism about any single model of femininity. From Mara Lionza, a local
goddess who sits atop a giant tapir holding a female pelvic bone while presiding over an entire
pantheon of cult religious figures (within which Bolvar is but a lesser deity), to Mara Len,
longtime communist militant and the first minister of women's affairs, we are left wondering
which Mara matters most or, indeed, why we should privilege Mara Magdalena over
Manuelita herself.8
Furthermore, while the image of Manuelita as the liberator of the liberator might at first
glance seem to mimic Marianism in the dependent position it entails for women, we have
already seen how complex even this dependency is, and it is this complexitythe oscillation
between dependent savior and autonomous political actorthat is embodied in the relationship
between women's movements and the Bolivarian Revolution. Bound by a history of
colonization and imperialism to the promise of the nation and its almost exclusively male
leaders, Latin American women have been forced to walk a tightrope rarely crossed by their
Euro-American counterparts. As it emerged in the aftermath of the guerrilla struggle, the
Venezuelan women's movement was one heavily divided by class, race, and ethnicity, by
political priorities, and by the term feminism itself. In such a context, the figure of Manuelita
remains relevant not despite her ambiguity, but as a result of it, embodying as she does many
of the same hopes, contradictions, and radical possibilities that define the contemporary
women's movement.

Feminists versus Party Women

As I noted in chapter 1, the women's movement drew many members from the ranks of the
armed struggle, but while this contribution is rarely discussed in most histories of either the
guerrilla war or the women's movement itself, it had serious implications for women's
organizing.9 It was only with the collapse of the guerrilla struggle that what Nora Castaeda
describeshalf seriously and half tongue in cheekas the real women's work began, but not
without inevitable conflict over what this meant.10 The debates over the character of the
women's struggle in the 1970s included feminists and non-feminists alike, and Castaeda
counted herself among the latter: a fighting woman, a party member, and an avowed
communist, not a feminist. At the time, she recalls, to be a feminist meant to approach
revolutionary work in an unacceptably one-sided fashion that seemed incompatible with both
her principles and background: I lived in 23 de Enero, and there we worked for the rights of
the community. We were clear that the motor of this entire process needed to be the workers,
women and men. The biggest bone of contention dividing feminists from non-feminists
during this period was the question of autonomy, which in practical terms often referred to the
relationship women had and ought to have with political parties: The feminists argued that
we, the women of the parties, were sort of backwards, because we defended patriarchal parties.
We, the party women, said that the feminists were contributing to ideological diversionism.
That is, we felt that what was most important was the class struggle. They remained on the
level of the struggle between genders, which was for us a reactionary position. Despite such
profound differences, however, the debate led to an agreement, or at least a dtente: that one
could be a feminist and at the same time a militant fighting for the total transformation of
society, and that as a result, the class struggle and the gender struggle should move forward
and be developed jointly.
Alba Carosio, an exile from the Argentine dictatorship, emerged from this more rigidly
feminist position, or what she deems the line of feminist feminists. Admittedly middle class,
more often than not academic, and largely consisting of foreign exiles, this true feminism
came into immediate conflict with party feminism (which some pure feminists would even see
as a contradiction in terms), and its critique of the latter was stern:
We felt thatdespite having participated both in the guerrilla struggle here in Venezuela and leftist struggles in the
Southern Cone, we were always passed over. They had us make the food, put up the posters, callate un poco, quiet
down a bit. And we also felt the contradiction, since we were a generation of professional women, for whom it was
very difficult to exercise our profession due to the subject of the doble jornada, the second shift. So we began to
work on the subject of the second shift, the subject of the enjoyment of sexuality, and the effort to be included and
heard. And so small discussion groups began to form.11

Here, Carosio's collective we obscures the fact that she herself did not participate in the
armed struggle and, more importantly, that those like Castaeda and Ldice Navas who did join
the guerrilla chose to do so despite their concerns regarding the role of women.12
Despite such an ostensibly inclusive we, howeveror perhaps as a result of its uncritical
and imperious inclusivityduring this early period of struggle in the 1970s, some party
women felt excluded by their more academic feminist counterparts. As Castaeda recounts:
The women from the rank-and-file and from the political parties said, We are all feminists, but some feminists said

they were the only true feminists, above all the theorists, the academicsbut we said no, you aren't the only
feminists, and we reached a conclusion: there is no single feminism. To the contrary: there is a reactionary feminism,
and there is a revolutionary feminism. We ascribe to revolutionary feminismwe want to transform society so that
there is gender equality, so that there is social justice, so that there are no social classes, no hunger, no misery

Turning Toward the Masses

As Venezuelan guerrillas were reaching out to the masses through legal fronts in the 1970s and
1980s (see chapter 2), so too were Venezuelan feminists and women, guerrillas or otherwise,
attempting to establish similar mass relationships outside official efforts to co-opt the
movement. But given the division threatening to separate party women from feminist
feminists, mass work proceeded along distinct paths for a time. According to Carosio, this
process of reaching out to the masses, to the poorest women in Venezuelan society, developed
only after autonomous women's organizations, like her own Maracaibo Women's League,
composed almost entirely of philosophy professors from the University of Zulia, had proven
their strength. Many academic and middle-class feminists harbored leftist and socialist
leanings, a concern to reach out to the popular sectors, despite their hostility to party
participation. So, from around 1976, we of course began to realize that this, bueno, this wasn't
only for uswe visited the barrios, the popular sectors, to discuss contraception, the right to
decide how many children we wanted. This outreach gave rise to the Casas de la Mujer
(Women's Houses), which Carosio describes as a way of reaching the popular sectors, so that
the women of the popular sectors would approach us, in order to help them by providing
medical, gynecologic, and even legal advice to poorer women, all the while proliferating
radically feminist ideas. But given the class distinctions involved and the almost
condescending tone of teaching the masses, it should not be surprising that these efforts,
valuable despite their limitations, soon reached the limit of their growth.
Although such exclusively feminist efforts to connect with the masses peaked around
1979, more popularly rooted strategies continued to flourish, especially in what were known as
Popular Women's Circles ( Crculos Femeninos Populares , or CFPS).13 Drawing upon Paolo
Freire's pedagogy of the oppressed, these circles embodied the principle that poor women
were capable of organizing themselves and therefore operated in a more grassroots and
democratic fashion than many organizations at the time, feminist or otherwise.14 For the hardline feminists, however, these CFPS had two strikes against them: they were not avowedly
feminist and they had their origins in the Catholic Church. While these origins should be
qualified, the mutual suspicion felt by the two sides was, in part, justified; for example, the
CFPS largely opposed such cornerstones of Western feminism as abortion rights. Instead, by
situating the struggle of poor women in the concrete context of life in the barrio, they sought
to tackle machismo and the position of women as an integral phenomenon comprising a
multiplicity of aspects, most notably class.15 Thus, in 1979, the CFPS described themselves as a
popular women's organization which seeksthe solution of the problems of the popular class
in general and not a feminist organization which works only for women's rights.16
There was little more threatening to the prevailing order than such attempts by radical
political activists and guerrillas to establish substantial relationships with the swelling masses
of urban poor. But whereas efforts by groupings like the Social-Historic Current were met with

overt repression, the women's movement met more with the velvet glove than the iron fist. The
two parties comprising puntofijista democracyand Democratic Action in particularwere
by now expert in their ability to incorporate previously oppositional movements into their fold,
and thus it was that Carlos Andrs Prez, under pressure from women in his own party,
established the Women's Advisory Commission to the President in 1974. In 1979, true to the
Betancourt tradition, President Luis Herrera Campins continued the effort to fully incorporate
women into Venezuela's institutional structure by creating a women's ministry that bore the
revealing title of Ministry for the Participation of Women in Development. Despite the clearly
conditional and dependent role of women, who seemed to be valued only insofar as they might
participate in development, Carosio nevertheless expresses what was a widespread sense
of relief, since at least women were there.
Not only were women there, they would use whatever small institutional footholds were
provided as a strategic fulcrum for more radical developments, rendering government attempts
to take the wind out of their sails only partially successful at best.17 The establishment of the
ministry set the stage for the women's movement's first big legal struggle: the 1982 reform of
the Civil Code, which received the support of many institutional sectors, including President
Herrera Campins himself. While the concrete activity of pushing for the reform helped to bring
women together and establish the basis for more radical activity, this did not mean that the
divisions that previously had racked the women's movement had dissipated, and Friedman
notes the overwhelmingly middle-class character of many of the reform efforts: by focusing
their attention on property, marriage and divorce, and labor outside the home, such reforms
tacitly favored the more privileged women to whom such formal protections would be
afforded.18 Where such cross-class unity did indeed develop, it was often the result of concrete
cases rather than organized reform campaigns.19
It was out of both the co-optation efforts of the Women's Advisory Commission to the
President and the concrete struggle for Civil Code reform that arguably the most important
single movement of women in recent Venezuelan history emerged: the Coordinator of NonGovernmental Women's Organizations (or Women's CONG). As the third United Nations
Conference on Women approached in 1985, a small group of radical women and feminists
came together to establish an alternative umbrella organization capable of drawing together
these two distinct threads of the women's movement in defiance of efforts toward their
institutionalization. Despite the mutual suspicion that existed between feminist feminists
and popular women's organizations, Carosio insists that in the CONG, many different ways of
doing feminism converged. But despite this insistence on different ways of doing feminism,
this convergence was not without its conflict; the division between pure feminists and party
women reared its head almost immediately. When feminists attempted to exclude party women
from the CONG entirely by prohibiting double militancy, Nora Castaeda and Movement toward
Socialism founder Argelia Laya (also a Communist Party guerrilla) successfully beat back this
early threat to the unity of the women's movement.
Despite the persistence of divisions, however, by beginning to work through these
occasionally fraught questions with an aspiration to unifying the women's struggle, according
to Carosio, women began to come together, ca'vez ms, ca'vez ms, more and more all the
time. Despite its initial anti-institutional energy, however, the CONG was pulled immediately
in two seemingly opposing directions: toward women's participation in the state (what some

have called the new femocracy) and toward the provision of those services abandoned by
that state in its minimal neoliberal turn. For Carosio, it was this division and specialization
of the 1990s that meant the real institutionalization of feminism, in which the antiestablishment character of feminism was placatedand its anti-establishment capacity was
deactivated to some degree.
For party women like Nora Castaeda, double militancy allowed some room to sidestep this
process of institutionalization. She remained in the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) even
after it abandoned the armed struggle, only leaving when it joined Petkoff's (and Laya's)
Movement toward Socialism (MAS) in the early 1980s. After spending more than a decade as a
nominally independent women's organizer, Castaeda would later reunite with other former
MIR comrades Ldice Navas and Fernando Soto Rojas in the re-founded Liga Socialista
(Socialist League), but her decision to rejoin a party was not without its conditions. I joined
on the condition that I would develop a double-militancyas a member of Liga Socialista and
as a member of the women's movementand that Liga Socialista wouldn't try to trap the
women's movement within the party. To the contrary: it was Liga Socialista that would be at
the service of the women's movement. This was a commitment that was fulfilled. While
fulfilling this commitment to the women's movement, Liga Socialista and a multitude of other
organizations were simultaneously fulfilling a commitment to the Venezuelan popular sector
more generally by participating both legally and clandestinely in the popular upsurge that
propelled Chvez to the presidency.
In a pattern that would be recreated in many movements under the Fourth and Fifth
(Bolivarian) Republics alike, efforts to control the women's movement gave rise to new forms
of resistance, which used what institutional leverage they had to push increasingly radical
demands. Thus the Ministry for the Participation of Women in Development led to the reform
of the Civil Code, thereby providing the basis for the organizational super-session of
government co-optation attempts (with the CONG in 1985) as well as the effort to reform the
Organic Labor Law (1990), the creation of the Women's Ministry, proposals for a Domestic
Violence Law (put forth as a proposal in 1990, as a draft in 1996, and finally approved in
1998), the creation of a National Women's Council (Conamu, 1992) to replace the Women's
Advisory Commission to the President, and the reform of the Suffrage Law to include quotas
of women on party tickets (1997). This was, therefore, not an inevitable progression as liberal
historiography would have it, but instead a process marked by a dynamic and often conflictive
interplay between movements and the state. This dynamic would be most visible in relation to
the drafting of the 1999 Bolivarian Constitution, the replacement of Conamu with Inamujer
and the creation of the Defender of the Rights of Women (2000).

Chvez and the Constitution

Like so many other social movements in Venezuela, the women's movement, despite its
critiques, has greeted the Bolivarian Revolution with a near-unanimous degree of enthusiasm.
In Alba Carosio's words: Before Chvez came to power, it was like a stone was on top of
society weighing it down, as the generalized energy of the 1970s had given way to the
dispersal of struggles. With Chvez's 1998 electoral victory and the impending constituent
assembly, this stone was not lifted immediately, but the relationship between movement and

statethe intricate dance whereby women attempted to take advantage of institutional support
while avoiding its dangersassumed an entirely new form. This was largely due to the
importance of the new constitution itself, which represented for women, as for other
movements, not merely another small reform in a long history of partial steps, but a massively
important qualitative leap that provided, in turn, a foothold for further radicalization.
According to Carosio, womenespecially leftist womenpushed for four major provisions in
the new constitution: the constitutionally binding nature of international agreements,
affirmative action and reparations for women, sexual and reproductive rights, and recognition
of the value of domestic labor.
As Nora Castaeda describes the process, in so doing, the women involved rejected a strictly
feminist approach, seeking to foreground the human rights of women, but not just any
women: women in poverty, from the perspective of gender and class. While the CONG played a
significant role in putting forth the women's demands, Castaeda adds that a leading role was
played by Afro-Venezuelan women, by women rooted in Liberation Theology, as well as by
party women from the Communist Party and Liga Socialista. For her part, Castaeda refuses to
speak in terms of demands, but instead what we're going to push [impulsar]This was a
propositive relationship, and not one of demand and wait for them to give us something. And
so the radical women's movement embarked upon a dual strategy of pressuring the Assembly
through Conamu, which had recently come under the leadership of CONG member Mara Len,
and directly through the mobilization of women's base organizations in the streets.
With regard to women's presence in the streets, Castaeda insists that we had a strategy: to
be present every day in the Constituent Assemblywe were always there, and the indigenous
movement had a similar strategy, which contributed to the striking success both sectors
achieved. While some prominent Chavistas within the Assembly attempted to shrug off
women's demands as they had shrugged off those of indigenous and Afro-Venezuelans, the
women's movement also confronted some of its most serious opposition in the streets. Despite
the fact that many of the women involved identified as Catholic,
the Catholic Church, or rather the Catholic Church hierarchy, tried to make us out to be abortionists, [to say] that we
were there to make sure that abortion was included in the Constitution. But we had already decided that we weren't
going to deal with this subject for the ConstitutionWhat we did deal with were the sexual and reproductive rights of
womenThe hierarchy insisted that behind this, we were going to push for abortion. And so they showed up there
with horrendous photos of a terribly mutilated aborted fetus.

While this scene is certainly reminiscent of the anti-abortion movement in the United States,
the response by Castaeda and others was one that might fit less comfortably within a North
American feminism but it was arguably more successful in controlling the terms of the debate.
They appeared outside the Constituent Assembly with flowers in an effort to present
themselves according to maternal imagery as life-givers who sought to contribute to a
Constitution that would guarantee the lives of womenIn the end we were successful, because
every day we gave the assembly deputies pamphlets and every day we gave them flowersthat
was so expensive for us! The Church hierarchy gave themsymbols of death and we gave
symbols of life! It was this effort in the streets that would prove decisive to their success, and
this success was resounding: all four proposals were included in the Constitution. With regard
to these successes and the nonsexist language in which the Constitution was drafted,

Castaeda is veritably exultant: We believe that this is the most revolutionary constitution in
the world at this point in time, both in its content and in its language, but this was because the
organized women set themselves to work on it.
After the drafting of the new Constitution, some of the most important and committed
feminists began to form part of the state, the new state. Mara del Mar lvarez de Lovera
(widow of the disappeared communist Alberto Lovera) was named first National Defender of
Women, Nora Castaeda was chosen to head up Banmujer, and Mara Len, former head of
Conamu, took the reins of the latter's successor institution, Inamujer, and was eventually
named first minister of women's affairs. In what follows, I will discuss in detail two elements
of the state action that ensued. The first, embodying simultaneously the hopes and frustrations
of the Constitution, is Article 88, which enshrines wages for housework for the first time in
any country on earth. The second, on what Carosio calls the reparative side, is the
establishment of the Women's Bank, although, as we will see, there is much debate as to the
merely reparative status of this project.
WAGES FOR HOUSEWORK

No victory of the recent women's movement is so fraught with both expectation and
discouragement than that of wages for housework, enshrined in Article 88 of the 1999
Constitution according to the following brief words: The state recognizes work at home as an
economic activity that creates added value and produces social welfare and wealth.
Housewives are entitled to Social Security in accordance with law. How is it that it took a
revolution in Latin America to legally enshrine wages for housework, one of the most radical
elements of the European revolutionary feminist tradition? Part of the answer to this question
revolves in a coincidental way around the figure of Selma James, the former partner and
comrade of the late C. L. R. James and a participant first in the Trotskyist Johnson-Forest
Tendency and later in the European revolutionary women's movement. In The Power of Women
and the Subversion of the Community., a 1971 pamphlet penned jointly with Italian feminist
Mariarosa Dalla Costa, James sought to confront the traditional Marxist blind spot toward
unpaid labor in the home (an exclusion of the sphere of reproduction that parallels the Marxist
exclusion of circulation, which is discussed further in chapter 9).20 Because household labor
constitutes a necessary precondition for the functioning of the capitalist economy and because
the entire working class rests on the backs of unwaged labor, specifically that of women,
activists in the 1970s began to demand that this labor be recompensed.
But Venezuelan women did not merely import the framework of wages for housework from
European feminism. In fact, exactly the opposite was the case; what emerged as an organic
demand of the Venezuelan women's movement was initially opposed by their European
counterparts: when the CONG and other Third World feminists had put forth a demand for
recognizing domestic labor at the international women's conferences in Nairobi (1985) and
Beijing (1995), this was firmly rejected by their First World colleagues, who allegedly feared
that it would provide the basis for Third World women to demand what is theirs. It was this
kind of response to the demand for wages for housework that led some activists to characterize
Article 88 as anti-imperialist.21 While many of the feminist feminists of the 1970s were
likely familiar with James' and Dalla Costa's work, Castaeda had not even heard of the book

until decades later, when Selma Jamesin her more recent incarnation as head of the
international network around reproductive labor known as Global Women's Strikethrew her
weight behind the Bolivarian Constitution and Article 88.22
However, by demanding wages for housework, women from Europe as well as those from
the Third World often faced (and still face) the following concern: if the wage is the basis for
capitalism, how does this demand that housework be waged not re-inscribe women within
capitalism? For James and Dalla Costa, this question reflects a misunderstanding of the wage
itself, which, true to the autonomist tradition, they interpret not as the basis of capitalist power
but as a moment of struggle and a measure of the power of the working classes. As James is
fond of saying, wages for anyone is bad for business, or, in other words, capital would pay
workers nothing if this were possible (as is and has been the case with reproductive labor in the
home).23 What matters most is that the wage is a material starting point for a struggle for
women's power more generally understood, and having a wage plays a strategic role in that
struggle.24 This is precisely how many radical women's organizers in Venezuela understand the
promise of Article 88: not as ensuring that capitalism successfully incorporates women as well
as men, but as providing a material basis for women's liberation from the economic conditions
that often lock them into relations of dependency; not as trapping women's labor within the
labor market but instead totally revolutionizing the concept of work itself.25
When asked how it was that women from a so-called underdeveloped country were able to
succeed in demanding wages for housework where European women had largely failed,
Castaeda is clear: We were revolutionary militants for 20 years before becoming feminists,
that's the difference between here and 1970s Italy. While the same could be said of Selma
James, I take Castaeda's point to be a collective one rather than an individual one: it was the
power and perspective of revolutionary movements that made seemingly reformist measures
possible and filled them with more radical content, and in Venezuela, many such movements
find their origins in the revolutionary armed struggle. But while successes on the level of the
Constitution have been significant, a vast gulf exists between enshrinement and execution.
After all, if every homemaker is promised a wage, where does the money come from? In ways
that have been both understandable and unacceptable, budgetary restrictions have limited the
impact of Article 88 up to this point. It was not until six years after the Constitution was
drafted and approved that Article 88 was implemented in the form of the Mothers of the Barrio
Mission, and even this Mission was limited both quantitatively and qualitatively: at best, it
sought to provide a temporary salary to 300,000 poor homemakers, and it is unlikely that even
this figure was ever reached in practice.
Although some feminists might regard the very name of the mission as essentializing the
household and women's role therein, and although some revolutionaries might complain that
such a mission is oriented purely toward social welfare, Castaeda's response to both concerns
is the same: You can't tell a woman with three young children and no access to work that she
needs to be independent. To do theory is one thing, but when you arrive at reality, you need
to have human understandingwithout support, many women will never leave such a
position. And besides, she adds, the fact that middle-class women have largely rejected
Article 88 and many of those embracing it have been poor, single mothers suggests that, in
practice, it does little to reify the bourgeois family. 26 However, by limiting these incomes to
women who were poor and who frequently participated in additional social work in their

communities, the powerful impetus of universally valorizing domestic labor threatened to

disappear into simply another social program.27 Castaeda recognizes, of course, that Mothers
of the Barrio was not the best way of concretizing Article 88, but she insists that it does have
the potential to politicize domestic work and radicalize women. Thus, while functioning on the
one hand like a palliative, mientras tanto, in the meantime, it is also the material and
political precondition to the liberation, politicization, and empowerment of many of
Venezuela's poorest women.
THE WOMEN'S DEVELOPMENT BANK

Similar debates surround the other forms through which the revolution has institutionalized
and implemented the women's demands incorporated into the Constitution. The Women's
Development Bank (Banmujer), for which Nora Castaeda currently serves as president, was
founded to provide microcredits to poor women for the creation of small production
collectives.28 While broadly supportive of institutions like Banmujer, however, some
revolutionary feminists like Jessie Blanco fear the impact of institutionalizing the women's
movement and the danger that it might be relegated to a function of administrating poverty
rather than attacking it.29 We have been administrating poverty for more than 70 years! she
exclaims, insinuating that this continuity has escaped many women leaders. Social
achievements aren't made by ministries, but by social movements, by education, by the people,
by a popular women's revolution, she insists, indicating with no trace of ambiguity that a
systematic approach to eradicating povertya poverty in which women are the poorest of the
poorrequires nothing short of a total revolution.
Institutions such as Banmujer, however, serve a double function, and even Blanco
recognizes this: I value very much the work of Nora Castaeda, but not for the question of
poverty, a conception I don't share, but instead because her work isn't only that, she has
contributed to an entire process of women's education and self-organization. Because
requesting a credit to set up a sewing business, that's not going to create transformation or
revolution, it puts food on the table, it's the most basic thing, me entiendes? This government
is trapped by the repayment of the social debt of past governments, and that's not
revolution. Indeed, this is a dual function that Castaeda admits: Banmujer provides both
the financial credits necessary to pull women out of the worst of poverty and reduce gender
dependency while simultaneously packaging these credits alongside a revolutionary political
education and the self-empowerment that comes with organizing collectively. Here, Ldice
Navas is clear about how she sees the function of the Women's Bank: We don't administrate
poverty, she insists, seeing financial credits almost as a sort of bait that attracts women for
the cardinal purpose of education and organization.
This dual character of institutions like Banmujer results both from those who have been
chosen to run itdrawn largely from the ranks of longtime revolutionary militantsas well as
the organizational model it has assumed, which has far more in common with the CFPS than
with previous state institutions.30 Banmujer was built according to the experiences of the
women's base organizations, Castaeda insists, adding that everything that we had fought for
in those organizations, we have now incorporated as policies of the Venezuelan stateThe
idea is for us to empower the women's movement from the government, but always bearing in

mind the entire experience developed by the bases. Navas uses a similar language of
empowerment to describe the function of the Women's Ministry, as well as the push and
support that Chvez himself has provided women, which is not paternalistic but rather
comradely and encouraging, freeing their hands and urging them to seize the opportunity to
throw themselves into constructing a new society: Women have a very important role to play
in training the new generations in a new socialist ethic, a distinctive perspective, one of
solidarity, mutual respect, co-responsibility, transparency. Women have shown that they have
these capacities, and at this moment it is our task to take on that responsibility. Thus, while
many revolutionary women are not blind to the potential dangers of institutionalization, a
perennial risk to social movements in general and the women's movement in particular, they
nevertheless insist that the current phase is qualitatively different from the situation
confronted under previous, reactionary governments.

The Autonomy Question

According to Jesse Blanco, The biggest issue for the women's movementis the appearance
of the Ministry of Women's Affairs and the question of institutionalism, which, in line with
the subtext of this entire book, is another way of saying that the fundamental issue is one of the
relationship between movement autonomy and the Bolivarian Revolution as a whole. While
she identifies as a socialist, Blanco's anarchist background leads her to worry that the
movement is today being co-opted and demobilized as a result of the presence of a
revolutionary government.31 Many feminists, she argues, make the mistake of thinking the
battle is already won simply because Chvez was elected: We end up talking as though we
were the government. Blanco's critique is aimed less at grassroots revolutionaries like
Castaeda than at those like Mara Len, a longtime communist and women's leader who
currently leads the newly established Women's Ministry. While Blanco supports the Bolivarian
Process and the establishment of a ministry tasked with embodying the women's struggle on an
institutional level, in an article entitled Is Our Socialism Feminist? she takes aim at some
controversial statements by Len. In a 2005 interview, the then-president of Inamujer
described the relationship between the women's movement and Chvez in the following
eulogistic terms: There is nothing above the President's leadership in this country, God and
God alone stands with Chvez. And if our President takes on the decision to unite the women's
movements, they need to uniteuniting women is a task of President Hugo Chvez, as was the
task of uniting our people32 By making such profoundly uncritical statements, Len and
others fall into what Blanco calls a dangerous trap: they have delegated their autonomy,
they have delegated all of those things which predate Chvez, which were the result of historic
social struggles, construction and contradiction, how to advance and when to withdraw, or, in
other words, the entire history that fills these pages.
Rather than delegating movement autonomy, Blanco insists that now is the time to insist
more than ever on that autonomy since future gains will not be made without continued
struggle. In fact, in Blanco's view, there has been nothing but struggle since Chvez took
power: struggle infused with a new hope and optimism, struggle fired by victories large and
small, struggle alongside and with many sectors of the revolution, but struggle nonetheless. It
has been this struggle above all others that Blanco has attempted to foster and deepen in her

articles and through her participation alongside (but not as a member of) the women's section
of Patria Para Todos, aptly named for none other than Manuelita Senz. As feminists or as
female Venezuelan fighters for socialism, we are ourselves governed by the contradiction
inherent in fighting the battle against all forms of oppression and discrimination, both of
gender and of social class, against patriarchy and against capitalismFor that reason we have
a great historical task: to conceive and give birth to a socialism that is not only anti-capitalist
and anti-imperialist but also, above all, anti-patriarchal.33
In other words, autonomy for Blanco does not mean, as is the case for some bourgeois or
academic feminists (for whom she has equally harsh words), autonomy from social struggles
or the autonomy to be pure feminists. It is instead an autonomy that is fundamentally
intertwined with the intersectional position that many Venezuelan women occupy, and Blanco
is concerned that the state is becoming increasingly controlling, and it's encouraging the
people to withdraw. A new system of political exclusion is being created, and that's an
error. Thus, while recognizing in no uncertain terms that it's not the same thing to have a
leftist feminism in the context of a leftist government as a rightist one and that the
Venezuelan situation is much more complex than many in the opposition recognize, there is
nevertheless a danger that movements might lose their momentum and autonomy in the face of
a creeping state bureaucracy.34
When I ask Nora Castaeda, herself veteran of more than 50 years of revolutionary struggle,
about Blanco's concern for autonomy, she seems perplexed by the very terms of the question.
Why is it the women, and not Chvez, who are losing autonomy in this process? Is her
confusion rooted in the unbounded optimism and exhilaration of the present moment? Such
optimism would hardly hold up to the decades of disappointment and repression that she and
others have faced in their lives. As we have seen, the failures of the guerrilla struggle vaccinate
against just this sort of optimism, and this is a lesson that Castaeda knows the consequences
of better than others. Rather, it seems more likely that these decades of experience
experience in the trenches and alongside the people, not in the halls of power or among the
vanguardist elitemake Castaeda and others like her peculiarly qualified judges of popular
power, its realities, its potentials, and its setbacks.
Pointing a worn fingertip at her desk and drawing a triangle connected by bidirectional
arrows, Castaeda describes how Chvez made possible the closure of the triangle of the
Constitution, the organized people, and their leader. The role of the individual in history is a
central one, she insists, and Chvez operates as a centripetal pole, drawing the struggle
together, concentrating it like a single fist or the point of a spear: So we're talking about a
leader, yes, but also about the organized people and a platform for struggle, a program around
which we united. Here, dissenting from Mara Len's exaggerated Chavismo, she insists: We
didn't unite around the President, but around the programand this program in fact
developed against the president at certain pointsbut that program and those people need the
leader: it's a trilogy. This gathering together of elements around this trilogy of forces, this
closed triangle of the Bolivarian Revolution, is a process that Chvez is as much subjected to
as he is a subject of: The President can give speeches, but if those speeches don't find an echo
among the people: olvdalo! Forget about it!
The determining weight of popular revolutionary social movements, the imperative need for
Chvez to find an echo among the people, leads Nora Castaeda to a very different

understandingindeed, a total inversionof the question of autonomy as posed by those more

suspicious of the president and the state more generally: So you could say that we are losing
our autonomy, or you could say instead that the President is losing his autonomy. Why not?
One day the President asked me: Nora, I want to strengthen Banmujer, with new programs,
programs for disabled women, for the womenwhat is it that you call them? Sex workers? I
said to him, Yes, President, but that's a very complicated, prickly subject. And you know,
when he spoke he said for the sex workers. So he's the one who's losing his autonomy, not
us.
This forced shift in the president's consciousness is perhaps best expressed in the words he
shared about none other than Manuela Senz at an international women's forum in 2003:
Manuela was truly a great revolutionary, but in that badly written history that they told to us,
that imperialist history, that machista history, that exclusionary history that they sold to us,
that they injected into us for a long time, Manuela was presented as Bolvar's lover. But while
she was of course Bolvar's loverand Bolvar her lover as wellshe was much more than
thatEquality is no trick [Lo que es igual no es trampa]We cannot fully understand Bolvar
without Manuela Senz.35 To those like Blanco, for whom the loss of autonomy is the primary
concern facing the women's movement under Chvez as it was under reactionary governments,
Castaeda is blunt: What I want to say is that the compaera doesn't understand a thing.

Manuelita Reloaded
It is May 2007 and tensions over the nonrenewal of RCTV'S public broadcast license have
reached their apex; the city of Caracas is divided between the fireworks of celebration and the
burning barricades of outraged elites (see chapter 4). A march led by anti-Chavista students
has left the Central University, winding westward in an attempt to reach the seat of power in
old Caracas. The marchers pause halfway, in Plaza Morelos, to compose their forces and steel
themselves for what is expected to be a confrontational passage through Chavista territory. As
they prepare to depart, pushing out into Avenida Mxico, these opponents of the Chvez
regime confront not only riot police, but one of the president's most vociferous supporters:
Lina Ron. Riding at the head of a phalanx of motorcycles that trail the maroon and yellow flags
of her Venezuelan Popular Unity organization, flags that, not coincidentally, also bear the
image of a fist punching a palm (an informal symbol of the Chavistas taking the fight to the
enemy), Ron is flanked by a group of burly men with weapons drawn. The police,
uncomfortably positioned between two forces, are unsure how to proceed and finally negotiate
an end to the standoff.
I cannot help but be reminded of yet another description of Manuelita Senz who, in the
words of Garca Mrquez, her lance at the readypursued those who distributed broadsides
against the General, physically attacking those sullying Bolvar's name in the company of
two of her warrior slavewomen.36 Ron, who died of a stroke in early 2011, was not a liberator
of the liberator, however, but a comandante in her own right, as Chvez frequently referred
to her. She openly disrupted gender norms with her image as with her behavior: her hair
bleached blonde but pulled up into a cap, she spurned Venezuelan beauty standards while
ruling over her largely male organization with the iron fist of a dictator. Her relationship with
the president, moreover, was far from smooth: Chvez would oscillate between publicly

serenading her from the stage at rallies to having her arrested for provoking and even attacking
the regime's opponents, as when Venezuelan Popular Unity and others stormed opposition
media outlet Globovisin in August 2009, throwing tear gas canisters.
This image of a new revolutionary femininity, one among many possible variants, also
combines in the most paradoxical form the tension that exists over Chvez's role in the
revolutionary process. Well known for her occasionally blind support for the maximum leader
of the process, as expressed in her popularization of the phrase with Chvez, everything,
without Chvez, nothing, Ron nevertheless simultaneously stands behind another more
militant slogan that many would consider to be its exact opposite: Only the people can save
the people. When asked what it means to be a Bolivarian woman, she responded: It means to
be golden in your words, clean in all your actions, a lover of the weak, courageous against evil,
a friend of the good, and always dedicated to service. It means to give everything without
expecting anything, it means having no time to sleep or eat, it means to be a prisoner and to
suffer under all the humiliation and ill-treatment of the past, present, and future.37 However,
unlike Marianismo, this service is not undertaken and this suffering is not endured for a male
counterpart, but for a revolution of society as a whole. If we could refer to Manuelita similarly
as a Bolivarian woman, which we could only do in constant conjunction with the insistence
that Bolvar was a Senzian man, we could say that she too reflected this same spirit of
revolutionary discipline and service, only to be repaid more than her due in terms of the illtreatment of the past.
Of the neglect that Manuelita Senz had received at the hands of a history written by men,
the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda penned the following poignant words:
I stopped a child, a passerby,
an old man,
and no one knew where
Manuelita died,
which was her house,
or even of where, now,
lay the dust of her bones.38

This final line was more than mere hyperbole or rhetorical flourish: in the poem's title, Neruda
refers to Manuelita as the unburied of Paita, for the Peruvian city in which she died of
diphtheria in utter destitution, to be buried in an unmarked mass grave.39 More recently,
however, as the role of women in the Bolivarian Process has grown and as Manuelita has been
reborn as a historical figure in her own right, this unburied leader of Latin American
liberation and the dust of her bones that so preoccupied Neruda would, in fact, enjoy a proper
burial. In July 2010, the symbolic remains of Manuelita Senz were disinterred for one final
journey, passing through the countries previously comprising the Gran Colombia for which she
and Bolvar foughtPeru, Colombia, Ecuador, and, finally, Venezuelato be, in the words of
the poet Luis Britto, reunited with Bolvar in Caracas.40 In what can be seen only as a direct
response to Neruda's poem, Britto writes of Manuelita's remains: We have always known
where they were: those ashes are the continent on which we stand. Neither the freedom they
sowed nor the passion they felt have been extinguished. As Quevedo said in his Love Constant
Beyond Death: dust they will be, but dust in love.41

Six. Jos Leonardo's Body and the Collapse of Mestizaje

It depends, compaero, on how the leather is used,
if it's a whip in the hands of the master
which makes you, the black slave, cry.
If the drum is leather, this is something else, compaero,
the laughter of the drum reconciles you with Mandinga.
Al Primera

December 1552
Long before Toussaint L'Ouverture, what was quite possibly the first serious rebellion by black
slaves in the Americas nearly became a genuine revolution. But the first shot in this protracted
war against conquest and slavery was fired in 1499 by Venezuela's indigenous population at
Puerto Flechado, whose name derives from the torrent of arrows that rained down upon the
explorer Alonso de Ojeda as he approached the coast. 1 The two thousand warriors who met
Ojeda, armed with clubs, bows, and arrows, were considered at the time a strange novelty
compared with the hospitality, benevolence, and respect the invaders purportedly had
encountered elsewhere.2 This jutting stretch of Falcn State, between Puerto Cabello to the east
and Coro to the west, would prove one of the most rebellious areas of Venezuela for centuries
to come, and while resistance might have seemed a novelty at the time, the Spanish were in
for much more of the same: when Ojeda returned a decade later to conquer the stretch further
west near the coastal border with Colombia, his entire crew was slaughtered.3
Just as my history seeks primarily to disrupt the myth of harmony that prevailed during
the 1970s and 1980sa myth premised on the erasure of all disruptive voicesso too have
previous critical historians sought to debunk similar myths, specifically the claim that the
early phases of the Spanish conquest were more or less calm and even idyllic.4 Such myths
are as tenacious as they are pernicious, a perennial temptation for elites seeking to assuage a
guilty conscience. For one such critical historian, Manuel Vicente Magallanes, Venezuela has
always been inhabited by peoples with a chronic love for liberty; he sets about revealing those
intermittent explosions that disrupt self-congratulatory historical accounts that serve power
rather than liberation, tracking in minute detail those moments in which indigenous
Venezuelans and kidnapped slaves demonstrated their equality by practicing it in rebellion.5
During this earliest stage of indigenous rebellion, the fiercest and most notorious were
without a doubt the Jirajaras, who reduced local colonists to an almost perpetual state of terror
for nearly a century. 6 Their fierceness notwithstanding, however, the Jirajaras were eventually
forced back from the coast, settling in the mountains near Nirgua in what is today Yaracuy
State, just southwest of Puerto Flechado itself. It was but a few short miles from Nirgua, in the
small gold-mining town of Bura, that Venezuela's first revolution exploded into history only
to be quickly erased.7 In late 1552, Miguel del Barrio, a Puerto Ricanborn slave recently sold
into mine labor in Bura, led some twenty slaves and Jirajara Indians in a frontal attack against
the Spanish troops guarding the mine. Victorious in these initial skirmishes, the rebels

retreated into the nearby mountains, where they established an independent state that was
ostensibly patterned on the colonial order but nevertheless imbued with an entirely new
content: now numbering several hundred, this Afro-indigenous army crowned Miguel their
king and his wife Guiomar their queen.8
The rebels then proceeded to mount an even more significant offensive against the colonists
in the valley below, and in this the participation of the Jirajaras was both material and
symbolic: their faces painted black with the juice of the jagua, a local fruit, they provided a
squadron in support of Miguel's attack on New Segovia.9 Although arguably customary at the
time, it is worth imagining the terror of the Spanish when confronted by this specter of Afroindigenous unity worn on the skin. It is unclear how long such unity lasted and how precisely
the rebellion was crushed: some estimate that King Miguel ruled over this small and mobile
nation-in-rebellion for more than two years, terrorizing the colonists all the while.10 If the
Haitian Revolution would later be systematically erased from historic memory, the rebellion of
King Miguel has been purged even more fully, despite its continuing resonance among some
Afro-Venezuelan organizers to this day. 11 But this resonance should not be limited to AfroVenezuelans: Miguel's revolution was one in which slaves and indigenous people played an
equal part. While thousands of miles away, Spanish priests like Bartolom de las Casas
defended the humanity of indigenous peoples while condemning Africans to the purgatory of
perpetual enslaveability, Miguel and his compatriots embodied unity in the struggle for
liberation itself.
Was this rebellion against slavery and colonization merely preemptive, and was the unity it
engendered but a nave dream to be deferred indefinitely? Perhaps, in the words of the
Venezuelan poet Manuel Rugeles:
Still another century, King Miguel,
lost perhaps in the heavens,
looking for mines of gold
to adorn the hair of your queen.
Still another century, King Miguel,
King of the Blacks.12

If the Venezuelan masses would fire the first shot of the Fourth World War in their explosive
1989 response to neoliberal reform, then it is also true that they had fired the first metaphorical
shot against global colonialism and slavery more than four centuries earlier. And this first shot
was followed by a second, a third, as the flame of rebellionhere flickering, there burning
brightlyleapt back and forth between slaves and indigenous people, eventually circulating
throughout the Caribbean and across the Atlantic. Almost immediately, Miguel's rebellion
emboldened the valiant but haughty Jirajaras, and, his defeat notwithstanding, the mines
around Barquisimeto for seventy-four years burned with an intensity that made labor
impossible.13 This unity would be encoded, too, on the very rebels themselves, as a deepening
of mestizaje rendered firm phenotypic distinctions something of the past, but it would be more
than two hundred years before the unity that Miguel had crafted in the heat of battle would be
literally embodied in a new rebellion.
When Douglas Bravo took to the mountains of Falcnnot far from Puerto Flechado or
Burahe named his guerrilla front for Jos Leonardo Chirino.14 Chirino himself was a

product of mestizaje who wore Afro-indigenous unity on his skin and carried it in his blood: as
a zambo, his father a slave and his mother indigenous, Chirino was born free. As the specter of
revolution leapt from France to Haiti in the early 1790s, Venezuela was gripped by a spreading
discontent: among slaves at their condition of enslavement, among Indians at the tributes they
were forced to pay, and among the poor more generally over the increasingly severe alcabala
taxes charged at customs houses. As in Haiti, rumors swirled that the Spanish had abolished
slavery but that local leaders in Caracas refused to carry out the order. 15 However, this
supremely flammable combination of discontents would not have passed from agitation to the
realm of action without one additional element: the simultaneous examples of the French and
Haitian Revolutions provided the spark.16 This spark was carried by Chirino himself, who had
traveled to San Domingo, met the rebels, and read their texts and those of their French
contemporaries. C. L. R. James emphasizes how the Haitian revolutionaries both drew upon
and re-signified the experiences of their continental counterparts, constru[ing] it in their own
image, but Chirino and his cohort continued to re-signify the importance of this generalized
revolutionary wave to suit Venezuelan conditions, with a specific orientation toward Afroindigenous unity. 17 On May 10, 1795, Chirino led hundreds of slaves in rebellion, calling for
the establishment of a democratic republic based on the French model, the abolition of slavery,
the elimination of tributes paid by the indigenous people and of the alcabala taxes, and the
abolition of the white aristocracy.18
After seizing several local haciendas and killing a handful of whites, the slaves marched
directly on Coro, but facing a serious counterattack, Chirino and his rebel army took to the
Sierra of Curimagua, where he remained free for some months before finally being turned over
for a reward in August 1795. When his sentence was passed down in December 1796 after an
extensive trial that revealed the depth and breadth of the conspiracy, it became clear that
Chirino's biracial body was not merely incidental to the crime. He was condemned:
to death by hanging to be carried out in the central plaza of this capital [Plaza Bolvar, Caracas] to which he will be
dragged from the Royal Prison, and once his death [is] confirmed, his head and hands will be cut off and the former
will be placed in an iron cage atop a post twenty feet in length on the road that leaves this same city toward Coro and
the Aragua Valley, and the hands will be sent to that same city of Coro for one of them to be nailed to a post of the
same height and set in the vicinity of the customs house in Caujarao, on the road to Curimagua, and the other in the
same fashion high in the sierra.19

The precise status of the rebellionwhether it was the beginning of a struggle for
independence or a battle for freedom for the slavesis still debated to this day. 20 Perhaps this
question is impossible to answer or wrongly formulated. Or, perhaps the answer is, in fact,
both: that what was sought was a creative ideological fusion generated on the basis of both
revolutionary European ideas and the realities of slave existence, or what Afro-Venezuelan
leader Jess Chucho Garca deems the construction of a specifically African idea of
independence in Venezuela.21 After all, why should a slave not also want independence from
a colonial master? And why, conversely, should that slave entrust her freedom entirely to the
forces fighting only for national liberation?
These two simultaneous demandsfor unity with nationalists and autonomy from them
reflect in many ways the broader dialectic that drives this book, translated into the terms of the
Afro-indigenous struggle in the context of the Bolivarian Revolution. How to balance

autonomous demands for one's own community with the broader demands of national
liberation, of socialism, of a Bolivarian Revolution with a record toward such struggles that is
patchy at best? In this struggle, moreover, mestizaje has come to play an even more
complicated and even double role, representing both the potential for unified struggles and an
ideology deployed against those struggles (even by some Chavistas), one that, rather than
revealing the operations of power, serves instead to conceal them.

Two, Three, Many Indigenous Struggles

It is difficult to speak of the indigenous struggle in Venezuela as though it were a single and
unified phenomenon. Despite long-standing cooperation and coordination on a national scale
that would later give rise institutionally to the National Indian Council of Venezuela ( CONIVE),
there are ways in which aspects of this struggle could not be more distant from one another in
terms of both history and the everyday challenges confronted by communities. This difference
is personified in many ways by two high-profile indigenous leaders with whom I spoke: Jos
Poyo and Liborio Guarulla. Poyountil recently an indigenous representative to the National
Assemblyhails from Anzotegui State in eastern Venezuela and identifies as Karia, one of
the many indigenous communities that Europeans had lumped under the umbrella category of
Carib. While maintaining his Karia identity, however, Poyo is among many who
reappropriate and re-signify the term caribe to denote all those who engaged in militant
clashes with the Spanish colonizers, and it is this that sets more coastal indigenous
communities like the caribes apart from more geographically and historically insulated ones.
Given their location, the Karia could not avoid conflict, and earlier than many others they
learned the need to understand and master society's instruments of domination. The invasion
led to a hundred-year frontal battle, Poyo recounts with more than a little pride, and in
reflecting on the defeat of the indigenous, he notably echoes the self-criticism of the
Venezuelan guerrillas some centuries later: when all was said and done, we were not defeated
militarily. Rather, it was internal conflicts and divisions, often harnessed and manipulated by
the Spanish, that proved their undoing.22 They were divided and they were conquered: lessons
for the present resound.
Guarulla, a renowned artist and current governor of Amazonas State in deep southern
Venezuela, speaks of a very different and more recent history of domination. Born among the
Baniva (a Maipurean-Arawak community), Guarulla explains how his people did not
experience colonization until more than three hundred years after the caribes had begun their
struggle and nearly a century after that struggle was definitively crushed. The Amazonas
region, which borders similarly remote parts of Colombia and Brazil, was explored
systematically by Alexander von Humboldt only around the turn of the nineteenth century, and
when serious intervention by the white criollo Venezuelan population began, it centered
around what would become the state capital, Puerto Ayacucho (founded in 1924); the
importance of this area for the transport of rubber along the Orinoco River led the dictator Juan
Vicente Gmez to construct the first road to the region. While Guarulla characterizes the effect
on the surrounding areas as nothing short of a massive genocide, areas further afieldsuch
as eastern Amazonas, home to the Yanomami and othersremained largely untouched even
into the 1960s. Thus, compared with the fate of the Caribes, conflict arrived much later to the

indigenous Amazonians, and it was not with the Spanish but with their criollo descendants and
the evangelical orders they empowered to intervene into the zone.23
The political implications of this divergent history are significant: these communities did
not participate in the war of independence alongside the criollos as had many Caribes, and thus
their experience with the predominant forces of Venezuelan societyand the national state
that embodies those forceshas been marked by distant suspicion rather than any sense of
collaboration in a shared national project. By contrast, Poyo is emphatically proud of
indigenous participation in independence struggles; he cites specifically the close alliance
between the caribes and General Manuel Piar, a mulatto who he claims was fluent in
indigenous languages, and urges the reclamation of this history against prevailing efforts to
erase it. Such differing histories find an echo in the tension between autonomy and
collaboration that characterizes indigenous relations with the Bolivarian Revolution. The very
different origins and histories of Poyo and Guarulla, which represent only two extremes among
a far greater variety across Venezuela as a whole, have yielded in turn very different political
trajectories. After early experiences in labor organizing between 1977 and 1979, where the
Matancero movement, led by Radical Cause (LCR), awakened his class consciousness and
commitment to social struggles, Poyo turned his attention to indigenous organizing. He
founded a number of indigenous youth organizations before playing an integral role in
establishing the national structure that would become CONIVE in 1989, and in 2005, Poyo was
elected as an indigenous representative to the National Assembly, where he has worked
alongside the Chavista Fifth Republic Movement (MVR) and, more recently, the United
Socialist Party of Venezuela. 24 Guarulla, by contrast, rose through more strictly political
channels, joining the Movement toward Socialism during its golden age before abandoning it
for LCR, whose decentralizing politics he felt more suited Amazonian reality. When LCR split,
Guarulla followed the pro-Chvez majority into the Patria Para Todos, serving as a
representative to the 1999 Constituent Assembly. Later, he ran for governor of Amazonas in
the mega-elections of 2000, initially losing to the Democratic Action candidate, but after
convincing the Supreme Court that the elections were fraudulent, he was elected successfully
as governor in 2001.
As is so often the case, however, such differences are reduced to the same under the heavy
weight of contemporary racism, and it is this dynamic opposition between homogenization and
distinction that will mark both the indigenous and Afro-Venezuelan struggles as well as the
occasionally fraught relationship between the two. Whereas colonial laws in Venezuela had
long sought to prevent the mixing of African slaves with indigenous peoples as a mutually
corrupting practice, such mestizaje soon came to be viewed by elites not as the cause of the
country's ills, but as its solution. By the twentieth century, mestizaje had become a twopronged state strategy aimed at encouraging white immigration from Europe on the one hand
and the destruction of collective forms of communal property on the other.25
The Indian was to become a peasant as the country as a whole became whiter. The ideological
reverberations of this very material policy of mestizaje remains powerful in the present,
serving to conceal Venezuelan racism beneath the oft-repeated mantra: We are all mestizos26

The Cimarrn Front

Before meeting Jess Chucho Garca, founder and leading figure of the Afro-Venezuelan
Network, I had discovered something about his past that was surprising at the time but perhaps
should not have been. Garca, too, was a guerrilla, a member of the Party of the Venezuelan
Revolution (PRV) operating largely through its legal front, Ruptura. When I mention this to him
in a room full of Afro-Venezuelan leaders, the jig seems to be up: there are chuckles and
exclamations, pero, coo, you must have been reading my DIGEPOL file!27 His laughter
reveals that this was something of an open secret, but in this strange period of Venezuelan
history, one of ostensible openness paired with anxious clandestinity, it sometimes seems as if
every secret is open and every openness cloaks a secret.
Garca hails from the historically black zone of Barlovento, a loosely defined region
spanning more than half of Miranda State, just east of Caracas, and known historically for
cacao cultivation. It was between Barlovento and the capital that one of the more serious slave
rebellions of Venezuelan historythe 174749 insurrection fomented by Miguel Luengoleft
behind a lasting impact and a fierce culture of resistance.28 Given its location between the coast
and the mountains, Barlovento was strategic for the guerrillas and therefore for the government
as well: it was here that the Revolutionary Left Movement's (MIR) Bachiller guerrilla front
would sink its combative roots, and here that, in 1967, Cuban-supported guerrillas seeking to
reinforce the rebels landed and were apprehended near the town of Machurucuto. In response,
president Ral Leoni's government placed its contradictions on full view, carpet bombing the
region as a part of its pacification campaign. As a result, many Afro-Venezuelans found
themselves integrated into the guerrilla struggle by mere geographical circumstance, and
Garca recalls the presence of a Cimarrn Cell under Fabricio Ojeda's leadership, many of
whose participants followed Ojeda into the PRV. However, despite their identification as
cimarronesinvoking a long history of escaped slavesmany participated in the armed
struggle without linking it to any kind of identity as Afro-descended peoples, and this
disconnect of politics from identity is one that worries Garca even today.
Once in the PRV, Garca dedicated himself largely to cultural work through the less
clandestine channels of Ruptura, organizing militant cultural resistance first in Barlovento and
later in the southwestern outskirts of the capital itself, where he founded of the Caricuao
Cultural Front, at the time the first cultural network in all Venezuela. There, in an important
suburb surrounded by an ever increasing barrio population, he and others dedicated themselves
to fighting the racist-fascist regime of Carlos Andrs Prez during the latter's first
administration in the 1970s. Inspired by Amilcar Cabral's writings on culture, Garca
considered their work on the cultural front to be the key work of the revolution, because it
allowed for the linking and unification of all the barrios under a single umbrella, and the
stakes were certainly as high as any military action: During that period, if they caught you
painting graffiti, they would kill you. For their efforts, which included a full shutdown of all
Caricuao, Garca and others were rewarded with imprisonment and torture.29
It was within the PRV that Garca and other Afro-Venezuelan guerrillas made a key strategic
discovery that remains relevant to their struggles up to the present. When I ask if it is true that
t h e PRV fostered a greater openness to heterodox questions of ethnicity and culture than
previous organizations, Garca agrees, but, like Carlos Lanz and Juvenal, he adds that this
reputation for theoretical experimentation is exaggerated. He himself raised the subject of
Afro-Venezuelan struggles within the PRV, but, as he recalls with an exasperation that has not

faded with the decades, at the time it was far easier for the guerrillas to talk about the
Palestinian struggle than struggles in their own backyard.30 Yes, such debates began within the
PRV, Garca insists, but they were hardly finished there. Moreoverand here is the crucial
strategic point for the present: It was only as a result of us fighting them and all of the
coazos, the blows that we gave them that some openness developed. In other words, it was
only as a result of the autonomous struggles of Afro-Venezuelanstheir capacity to force their
comrades to take their concerns seriouslythat their demands were incorporated into the PRV
program, and this dialectic of autonomous conflict is one that is central to grasping more
generally the relationship between unity and autonomy in the Bolivarian process today.

Meeting Chvez on the Road

For Chucho Garca, the history of the Afro-Venezuelan movement can be divided into two
stages, marked by the watershed event that was the creation of the Afro-Venezuelan Network.
But this is more than mere organizational nationalism; what was important was not so much
the formal establishment of the organization, but the substantive shift it reflected in AfroVenezuelan politics. Previous Afro organizations had dedicated themselves primarily to
cultural survival, to the maintenance of inherited cultural and musical traditions such as the
African dance and tambr drumming for which Barlovento is known. But, although he
recognizes the value of such work, Garca insists that such organizations tended to remain
aloof from the needs and demands of the communities that it claimed to represent culturally, in
some ways doing the work of colonialism itself: This is exactly what colonial discourse wants
to see of the Afros, that they play drums, that they participate in witchcraft.
After his experiences in Caricuao, Garca and others would contribute to shifting AfroVenezuelan organizing away from such strictly cultural limitations and toward the present-day
needs of the Afro community, needs that were not strictly political but would inevitably
become so. In the late 1970s, a series of ecological struggles were sparked in Barlovento,
giving rise organically to a new form of organizing tied to the question of the land:
Barlovento was a central foco in beginning a turn in cultural struggles of Afro-descendents
linked to struggles around the territorial aspect, which was simultaneously ecological and
cultural. In fact, he goes so far as to insist that you can't speak of Afro-Venezuelans without
dealing with the question of territoriality, both echoing and broadening Maritegui's
insistence that the problem of the Indian is a problem of land in a way that establishes the
basis for Afro-indigenous unity around territorial struggles. 31 Garca speaks of fighting the use
of napalm to defoliate the region and successfully preventing the draining of a lagoon by
placing strategic pressure on the UNESCO to intervene; it was out of such concrete, territorial
struggles that the first Afro-Venezuelan Federation emerged.
During the 1980s and 1990s, Garca's own Afroamrica Foundation had been engaged in
joint work with the Union of Black Women in ways that deepened their strategic unity and
theoretical frameworks. For Garca, this alliance meant that gender was a part of our struggle
from the very beginning. In the 1990s, these groups fought to resist the demonization and
forced deportation of Haitian immigrants by then Mayor of Caracas Antonio Ledezmawho,
in a blow to the revolution, once again has assumed this same position todayand although
this struggle was nominally defeated, with more than one hundred Haitians deported in early

1998, it nevertheless contributed to the development of what Garca calls a diasporic alliance
against deportation. From a narrow focus on cultural memory, the Afro-Venezuelan
movement had transitioned in a few short years to locally based economic and political
struggles that, through their territorial focus, have since provided the basis for an everbroadening circle of alliances, one that would eventually beg the urgent question of the
relationship between Afro and indigenous struggles.
After Chvez's election and the creation of a Constituent Assembly to pen the new
Bolivarian Constitution, Afro-Venezuelan activists hoped that this momentum might carry into
the halls of power and the word of the law. In this they were satisfied only partially, and the
contrast with indigenous organizations such as CONIVE became glaringly apparent. Like the
indigenous communities, Afro-Venezuelans put forth proposals regarding both legal
recognition as communities and control over ancestral lands, but unlike indigenous demands,
theirs would go unfulfilled. Garca recounts the details of this process with frustration,
embodied in a litany of namesAristbulo Istriz, Claudio Fermn, La Negra Antonia
Muoz, Elas Jaua, Braulio lvarezof those who are either themselves Afro-Venezuelan or
associated with the struggles in Barlovento and yet just did not grasp the importance of Afro
struggles when the time came. Lacking political capital and support from established leaders
within the Constituent Assembly, Afro-Venezuelans are noticeably absent in the 1999
Constitution.
Most indigenous demands, by contrast, were incorporated successfully into the 1999
Constitution, and in an effort to explain the success of indigenous demands in the Constituent
Assembly, Guarulla notes that: We met Chvez on the road. By 1999, he argues, indigenous
communities and leaders already possessed a well-defined project that had been in the works
for some twenty years, and as a result the Constitution faithfully represents our program.
While this may be an accurate representation of indigenous successes, Guarulla's tone changes
in revealing ways when asked about the failure of Afro-Venezuelans in a similar effort to
establish recognition and autonomy. Certainly, indigenous organizers had established a
national network some twenty years before their Afro counterparts, and in purely institutional
terms, CONIVE predated the Afro-Venezuelan Network by more than ten years. But the
explanation Guarulla offers is quite different: they didn't show up to demand their rights. We
know this to be untrue, and it neglects not only the vocal presence of Afro-Venezuelan leaders
at the Constitutional Assembly but also the historic efforts by activists from both communities
to establish the basis for unity, specifically a 1998 meeting between eighteen Afro leaders and
sixteen indigenous caciques who sought closer Afro-indigenous collaboration. Despite
widespread support for such an idea among grassroots indigenous communities, Garca insists
that we received absolutely no support from the indigenous leadership for our demands. We
need to walk together, Garca maintains, but at the time, the Afro-Venezuelan community was
isolated and fought on alone, and Guarulla's terse dismissal only further contributes to this
isolation by erasing the recent history of black struggle.
Predictably, without popular support from other sectors or from sympathetic deputies inside
the Assembly, the demands put forth by the Afro-Venezuelan community for inclusion in the
new Constitution were vetoed by the right-wing elements that accompanied Chvez at the
time. It was in part this fight over the new 1999 Constitution, its disappointments and its
lessons, that forced Afro-Venezuelan leaders to recognize that they lacked a political

structure necessary to wage such battles, and it was out of this recognition that the AfroVenezuelan Network was born in 2000. In fact, as yet another indication of the relationship
between autonomous struggles and the Bolivarian process as a whole, Garca emphasizes
that the Network used the promise of the new Constitution itselfand specifically Article 62,
which establishes a basis for participatory intervention into public policyas a foothold for
launching the organization. Although Article 62 looked good on paper, however, the AfroVenezuelan struggle remained for the moment on the defensive, many ears deaf to their claims
precisely through the traditional declarations of mestizaje and the denial of racism: The state
did not accept the term racism, they said that this is a mestizo society. When Chavista leaders
proved unwilling to call out racism, Garca and others were more than willing to do so for
them, but they insisted on combining their critiques of overt racism with a diagnosis of its
internalized form, what they call endoracism, among those who would deny their own
background in favor of mestizo status: I denounced them all, a total vaina., when I declared
there was racism in the Bolivarian process.

The Pot Boils Over

Nothing reveals a society's latent racism as potently as crisis and resistance, and if recent
Venezuelan history is any indication, the two often work hand in hand to do so. The political
crisis of Chvez's brief removal from power during the short-lived coup of April 2002 (see
Second Interlude) tore back the thin veneer of mestizaje and the faade of equality it implied,
generating a resurgence of palpable racism in Venezuelan society that repeated events of 1983
and 1989. When the economic crisis first hit with the 1983 currency devaluation known as
Black Friday, the middle and upper classes sought scapegoats in the most traditional of
places, blaming blacks, Indians, and Colombians (all of which essentially meant the
same thing).32 This reversion to open racism under the pressure of economic crisis was both the
cause and effect of an increasingly open ethnic identification by Afro and indigenous
Venezuelans, and this feedback loop of racism and resistance would only deepen as the decade
wore on.33 As in so many other ways, the 1989 Caracazo represented a crescendo of this
dialectic of racism and resistance, as the poor and dark-skinned masses made unprecedented
incursions into forbidden wealthy sectors, leaving Venezuelan elites terrified and traumatized
by their own worst fears.34 If such racist fears were put aside briefly by many who voted for
Chvez amid the collapse of the old parties, this dtente would not last long, and elite paranoia
would soon find in this dark-skinned president a focal point for its anxieties.
When Garca speaks of right-wing elements who supported Chvez early on, few are as
notorious as former journalist Alfredo Pea. A well-known member of Chvez's MVR, Pea was
elected mayor in 2000 with the support of Chvez and the MVR, but quickly turned against his
former allies, supporting less than two years later the coup that temporarily removed Chvez
from power (it is suspected that Pea, who at the time commanded the Metropolitan Police,
was responsible for the bloodbath used to justify the coup). The Afro-Venezuelan Network was
far ahead of the Chavista mainstream in suspecting that Pea was far from the revolutionary he
painted himself to be, in part due to his unabashed racism. During his mayoral campaign, Pea,
whose opponent for the MVR nomination was none other than Aristbulo Istriz himself, drew
upon the racist criminological theories of Cesare Lombroso to stir up racial fear and justify a

mano dura, or hard-line approach to crime. The Afro-Venezuelan Network publicly opposed
Pea, despite that he was a prominent Chavista at the time, and they would continue to oppose
him after he was elected and sought to institute the Bratton Plan, a data-driven policing
strategy designed by former New York Police Department Chief William Bratton that Garca
sees as laden with the same phrenological distortions as Lombroso's theories.35 Here was the
person most responsible for murdering Afros and Latinos in the United States, and Pea hired
him as an advisor! Given Pea's later rightward break, the resistance that Garca and others in
the Afro-Venezuelan movement offered against his candidacy proved to be a vanguard
position. I'm proud that we took the risk of being dismissed as right-wing, Garca insists,
adding that, Our view was that we need to deepen the revolution. There can be no socialism
with racism, vale!
On April 11, 2002, however, the pot of racism boiled over completely as right-wing
populism was unleashed by Chvez's temporary removal from power and the subsequent witch
hunt for his cabinet members. It seemed for a moment that all aristocratic manners fell to the
wayside and tongues were loosed to say what they had long been wanting to. Especially in
wealthier areas, walls were daubed with such heartwarming phrases as Out with the vermin!
and Death to the monkey Chvez!36 Open expressions of racism once again displaced the
soothing discourse of mestizaje, becoming the norm rather than the exception: Indian,
monkey, and thick-lipped have been some of the more illustrative expressions of this racial
contempt that the opposition has displayed when describing ChvezAn unprecedented
classism can be added to this visceral racismreferring to the people of the lower strata as
vermin.37 The president of the National Assembly noted that the rabid opposition calls
Hugo Chvez a mixed-breed with fierce contempt, and the Venezuelan representative to the
Organization of American States observed that the private media, when referring to brown or
black-skinned high Venezuelan officials, openly call them monkeys, macaques, or
chimpanzees.38 Some members of the opposition parodied Chavistas who refer to their leader
as mi Comandante (my Commander) with the phrase mico mandante (monkey-in-charge),
and Tariq Ali reported that a puppet show to this effect with a monkey playing Chvez was
even organized at the U.S. Embassy in Caracas. But Colin Powell was not amused and the
Ambassador was compelled to issue an apology.39 Aristbulo Istriz, an Afro-descended
leader who himself became a microcosm of the painful dialectic that catapulted racism to the
forefront of the Bolivarian imaginary, was one who was subjected to the racist rage of those
who felt themselves uniquely entitled to political power. You who are a researcher, you can
do this: read the speeches that appeared before April 11, 2002: Chvez is a mestizo, Aristbulo
is a mestizo, everyone is mestizo, Garca insists incredulously. But during the coup,
Aristbulo was attacked, which allowed him to make a qualitative leap in consciousness, and
from this point on, the Chavista mainstream began to increasingly confront racism.
As a result of their dual loyalty to both the Afro-Venezuelan cause in the face of such
blatantly racist attacks and the Bolivarian Revolution as the vehicle toward a more just society
as a whole, the Afro-Venezuelan movement rallied to Chvez's defense during the coup, taking
to the streets like so many thousands of others to demand the return of their duly elected
president and the restitution of their Constitution, however imperfect. Indigenous groups were
not far behind, responding quickly with a declaration from CONIVE on April 17 denouncing the
coup in the name of both a history of indigenous resistance and their more recent constitutional

victories:
In the spirit of our ancestors and heroes of the indigenous resistance and in the face of the painful events of April
11we condemn the coup launched against the constitutional president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela
Hugo Rafael Chvez FrasWe steadfastly condemn the attempt by the de facto government to eliminate the
Constitutionwhich is recognized as one of the most advanced in the world in terms of indigenous rights, a product
of the struggles and resistance by more than 30 indigenous peoples living in this country for 500 years.40

As should be abundantly clear by this point, the demand for Chvez's return was not a question
of uncritical fidelity to a charismatic leader, but was instead about both the Constitution as a
direct product of popular struggles and the president as the symbolic mechanism serving to
unify those struggles in practice.

Between Autonomy and Opposition

The overwhelming support that Afro and indigenous organizations provided for the briefly
deposed Chvez government during the 2002 coup is a partial testament to the benefits that
their communities have received, and hope to receive in the future, from the Bolivarian
Process. But if this support and these benefits are inarguable, both sectors nevertheless view
the Venezuelan stateand the government currently in charge of that statewith a healthy
dose of suspicion that doubtless is the result of a long history of betrayal and genocide. Despite
cataloging the various benefits that indigenous communities have won in the process, Jos
Poyo, a fierce supporter of Chvez and the Bolivarian process, is nevertheless clear: this is
not our process, but we still need to participate in this government to gain the benefits of the
state while maintaining the survival of indigenous institutions. Certainly, some gains were
accomplished before the election of Chvez in 1998, but these were not to be had through
collaboration with the old parties. For example, the Christian Democrats established the
Indigenous Confederation of Venezuela in the 1970s not to help the people but rather to co-opt
their struggles to win votes. Instead, it was through their conjunctural linkages with leftist
parties like MAS and LCR, alliances that granted the indigenous movement and CONIVE some
leverage without compromising their autonomy in the long run, that the movement made gains.
According to Poyo, two elements characterize Chvez's own contribution to indigenous
struggles. First, as a representative of the national state, he has recognized the historical debt
that Venezuela owes to its original inhabitants. Second, as an individual who identifies as
Afro-indigenous, Chvez has contributed to the development of identity and consciousness of
historical roots. Lo importante es que lo asume, Poyo insists, highlighting the powerful
importance of Chvez himself adopting Afro-indigenous identity, but the relationship between
Chvez's own political will and the state remains complex: At present, we are
accompanying a revolutionary government, but one which is slowed by a bureaucratic state
and as a result, while the law is progressive, it lacks implementationWe agree with the
President, his political will, his discourse, and efforts to turn that will into practice. We
disagree with the functionaries that surround him and their vision. Poyo's position, which
notably echoes that of many on the radical wing of Chavismo, consists of pushing
implementation of the law and the constitutionspecifically with regard to the issuing of titles
for indigenous landwhile attempting to strengthen revolutionary elements within the

Chavista bloc.
For Guarulla, however, these questions of political will and the dangers of the central
government are ones that directly impact the indigenous movement itself, a movement that he
insists has lost its compass through its exposure to and corruption by state power: The
indigenous movement contains powerful contradictions because many are in positions of
power and this has had a fracturing effect. CONIVE divided in 2006 over political interests and
lacks leadership. Its leaders are now National Assembly deputies, and they shouldn't keep
running the Confederation. They must let new leadership develop, but people keep wanting to
maintain power.41 In what most likely is meant as a backhanded critique of Poyo himself,
Guarulla adds: being in positions of power consumes us, but I am left wondering whether he,
the governor of Amazonas, is not subject to the same tendency he identifies in others.
The leaders of the Afro-Venezuelan movement learned long ago, during the waning guerrilla
struggle and as members of the PRV during its period of self-reflection, that the best way to
advance was by forceful but comradely blows. But this fierce autonomy and conflictive
assertiveness never led the Afro-Venezuelan Network to break off relations with the
government. For example, after the government refused to support their trip to the Third World
Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa, in 2001, then-Minister of Foreign
Relations Luis Alfonso Dvila prepared a document pushing the traditional mantra that in
Venezuela there is no racism, only mestizaje. Members of the Afro-Venezuelan Network
confronted Dvila in Durban, attacking him and insisting that he had not read the document.
Somewhat to their surprise, he agreed to change the document to better reflect their concerns,
yielding an important lesson: At that moment, we had to choose between confronting them
directly and re-educating them, Garca recalls, using a term for re-education, realfabetizar,
which evokes a process of rebuilding from nothing, from the very basics of political literacy:
we chose the latter.
Directly echoing Nora Castaeda's reflections on the women's movement, Garca insists
with more than a touch of pride that, We put the word racism in Chvez's mouth.42 But the
role of autonomous struggles in pushing the agenda of Afro-Venezuelans is not the only lesson
here. The historic function of racism in Venezuela and the dynamics that led to the resurfacing
of open racial conflict where mestizaje had once predominated also teaches a second and
broader lesson: that autonomous struggles within Chavismo are not without their effects on the
broader struggle between Chavistas and the opposition. In fact, these struggles can
occasionally prove decisive, setting off broader chain reactions that accelerate and deepen the
revolutionary process both in its internal development and in its external opposition to the
escualidos.

Toward a Zambo Socialism

Jos Carlos Maritegui once famously called upon Latin American socialists to avert their eyes
from the shining gem of Europe and to seek out treasures of a more local sort. Breaking
acrimoniously with the Stalinist strictures of the Comintern, Maritegui advocated the
cultivation of an Indo-American socialism, which would draw upon indigenous communal
traditions as the basis for the development of a non-Eurocentric socialist society. As we saw
earlier, this Mariateguista vision had penetrated deeply into some sectors of the guerrilla

struggle, especially during periods of wrenching defeat and desperate soul searching, and it is a
vision that retains considerable weight for indigenous and Afro organizers today.
Liborio Guarulla insists that what he and others in Amazonas advocate is not Marx's
communism, and that profound dialogue is necessary around what twenty-first-century
socialism will eventually look like. His own vision, loyal to his history in LCR and now the
Patria Para Todos, is one that foregrounds decentralization. While indigenous communities
cannot avoid interacting with power, he argues, they must always remember that the ultimate
objective is to transform that power by altering relations both within communities and between
those communities and the state. This requires changing the paradigm of internal
neocolonialism that draws indigenous youth irrepressibly toward the cities in search of
opportunities. Unlike in other states such as Delta Amacuro in the east, as governor of
Amazonas, Guarulla claims to have gone some way toward stopping such emigration to Puerto
Ayacucho and from there to Caracas by providing local employment opportunities and
bilingual education. Education and nutrition have seen significant advances in Amazonas, but
Guarulla warns that health care and provision of utilities are still lacking, as is overall
economic development.
Even the Chavista government has a tendency toward centralism that Guarulla finds
worrying. For example, he was critical of the failed constitutional reform of 2007, which, in its
proposal for socialist cities, he interpreted as an attempt to institute geographical change
from above without consulting local communities, a gesture that threatens to repeat a long
history of colonialism and contempt for indigenous people. While this contempt may be more
subtle at present and manifest in different forms, the central bureaucracy still believes that
Indians aren't capable of thinking, and so doesn't consult them, but merely sends emissaries to
explain policy decisions, whether it be communal councils, cooperatives, or socialist
production enterprises. Nonetheless, despite whatever critiques he may have of the Chavista
government, Guarulla insists that neither he nor those he represents are looking back to the
Fourth Republic: under Democratic Action and the Christian Democrats, it was support the
parties or starve.43
The majority of Venezuelans, he pessimistically observes, ignore Indoamerican
socialism; they are looking more to Europe than to ourselves. He too believes that indigenous
structures and practices can contribute to the content of such a socialism, and whereas
Maritegui and others emphasize structures like the Incan commune, or ayllu, Guarulla speaks
in terms of the shabono, a communal structure used by the itinerant Yanomami Indians.44 How,
Guarulla asks urgently, can the existing structures of local government work for the Yanomami
of Alto Orinoco, an indigenous community that does not hold property and rarely remains in
one place for an extended period? The only possible answer lies in a radical
reconceptualization of government: If the people are nomadic, then the government must also
be nomadic. But regardless of the particularities of this vision, it springs from a very basic
and very indigenous foundation that is alreadyas Maritegui had insistedsocialist.
Guarulla insists that institutions such as the communal councils may be new to Venezuela, but
they are not new to its indigenous populations, who already possess a consciousness of shared
work and goods. Our rules are very simple: this is socialism, it is sharing.
For Afro-Venezuelans, it is not only indigenous tradition that bears the potential to
contribute to a future socialism, but also Afro-Caribbean traditions, some of which are rooted

in Africa itself and some of which emerged as a strategic response to the demands of escaping
and combating slavery in the Americas. Like Maritegui's ayllu and Guarulla's shabono,
Enrique Arrieta of the Afro-Venezuelan Network speaks of the cumbes that housed runaway
slaves, or cimarrones (these are referred to elsewhere as palenques, quilombos, or in the
Venezuelan llanos, rochelas).45 We need to look beyond the European tradition, studying not
only the Paris Commune but also the cumbes, which functioned as a sort of mutual aid society
for escaped slaves, arguably prefiguring socialist socioeconomic structures and systems for
education and self-defense. In this sense, Arrieta sees even the turn toward Maritegui
however necessary and fruitfulas problematic: even Maritegui said that blacks had nothing
to contribute.46 If this Indoamerican socialism is to benefit not only from indigenous
Venezuelan traditions but also from the struggles of former slaves, and if these two racialized
groups are to ever truly walk together, then this sharp warning must be heeded. And if
Maritegui insistently tied indigenous struggles to the question of the land and territoriality,
then Cimarrn strugglesfrom the cumbes of the past to the more recent environmental
struggles in Barloventoseem to hold some potential for drawing together Afro and
indigenous organizations. There are some hopeful signs that such a rapprochement might be
emerging. The proposed constitutional reform package of December 2007, among many other
things, would have granted Afro-Venezuelans the same degree of recognition and rights that
indigenous groups currently enjoy. This reform proposal provided an opportunity for closer
collaboration; Poyo, who insists that the fact of shared slavery in the past and discrimination in
the present generates an automatic affinity between indigenous and Afro-Venezuelans, is
visibly proud that indigenous organizations were among those who came out most strongly in
support of incorporating Afro-Venezuelan demands into the reform. While this effort failed in
a national referendum, others have been successful, providing hope that the existing divisions
between the two communities might be overcome.
October 12, previously known as the Day of Discovery and later Day of the Race, was
renamed in 2003 as the Day of Indigenous Resistance, and in 2005 the Bolivarian government
dubbed May 10 Afro-Venezuelan Day. There was nothing random about the chosen date: it
was on May 10, 1795, that Jos Leonardo Chirino first rebelled in defense of not only black
slaves, but all colonized and enslaved Venezuelans. We know that memorialization is, like the
state itself, a double-edged sword that can both empower and co-opt radical energies, and
although some argue that Chvez only instituted the May 10 holiday in an effort to win the
Afro vote, we also know that governments often are incapable of fully controlling the impact
of the memorials they themselves establish.47 Indigenous activists reminded us of this when, a
year after the establishment of October 12 to mark their own resistance, they took the
opportunity to destroy a contradiction standing in their midst by tearing down the statue of
Columbus in Plaza Venezuela. Such ferocious insistence reminds us that the only worthy
memorials are not to people but to the struggles that give them meaning.

Second Interlude. Every Eleventh Has Its Thirteenth

There is perhaps only one event more revealing than a coup, and that is a coup that, while
initially successful, is eventually reversed.1 Any coup serves to draw back the veil of polite
society (however threadbare) to reveal the lines of force that traverse it, and a reversed coup is
an even more powerful revelation of where, precisely, social power lies. It is in this sense that
the mobilization of the Venezuelan masses in opposition to the coup of April 11, 2002a
constituent show of strength second only to the Caracazorepresents the best evidence to date
that the sovereign people of Venezuela have the will and capacity to defend their vision of a
new society. But if the events of April 2002 revealed the ferocious will of the people and their
constituent power, thereby mirroring the lessons of the Caracazothis was the same people
and the same powerin concrete terms the picture was a far different one. After all, here was
an explosively constituent moment that was aimed not at unseating an established order but at
restoring one, an almost unprecedented alliance of constituent and constituted powers. This
peculiarity was visible in a curious circuit: ministers from the overthrown Chvez government
fled into the warm embrace of social movements, especially the armed militias of 23 de Enero,
while representatives of these radical elements of the Bolivarian process took to the streets to
fight the coup and make a return to the constitutional order not only possible, but imperative.
Thus, this was a central moment for grappling with the peculiar relationship that exists in
contemporary Venezuela between movement and state, constituent and constituted. Again,
however, an apparent paradox disintegrates once we recognize that it was not a constituted
order but a process itself comprising the dynamic interplay between constituent and
constitutedthat the most revolutionary elements of the Venezuelan people were defending on
those fateful days.

A Planned, Mediatic Coup

On April 11, 2002, the Venezuelan opposition activated snipers who fired on a largely proChvez crowd that had gathered near Miraflores Palace to defend the president from the threat
of an approaching and aggressive opposition march. This march, which was admittedly
massive, had counted on the unwavering and unanimous support of the private, anti-Chavista
media for its numbers; for days the media had called on the population not only to attend, but
to do what was necessary to remove the tyrant once and for all. On that day, opposition
forces gathered at Parque del Este for a scheduled march to the headquarters of the state-owned
oil company PDVSA. It was there that opposition leaders took to the stage, egging the crowd on
to more militant action against the government, and it was there that Carlos Ortega, head of the
discredited and corrupt CTV union confederation (see chapter 7), called for an unscheduled and
unpermitted march on the presidential palace, some seven miles to the west, where thousands
of Chavistas had already gathered. As the opposition march drew nearer to the palace,
confrontation of some sort seemed almost inevitable, and chants of Chvez, Fuera! (Out with

Chvez!) met with those of No Pasarn! (They Shall Not Pass!).

This was the point at which a society boils, and it was at this precise moment that bullets
began to rain down on the crowds below. As innocents on both sides were mowed down by
sniper fire, film footage of the ensuing gun battle, which showed Chavistas returning fire
against the snipers from Puente Llaguno (Llaguno Bridge), was inserted into a prefabricated
media strategy of repetition and voice-over to convince the Venezuelan population that
government supporters were responsible for the deaths and that they had acted directly on the
orders of Chvez himself.2 If the Venezuelan media was consciously playing to its own
population, it found the international press fertile ground for such misinformation as well, with
media outlets in the United States and elsewhere uncritically parroting the now-discredited
opposition line. Ray Suarez of PBS, for example, reported that, Yesterday, Chavez ordered
National Guard troops and civilian gunmen to fire on the nearly 200,000 protesters to stop
them from reaching his palace.3
That the opposition planned to slaughter innocents is clear from the fact that a public
statement by members of the high military command, which cited a specific number of
casualties (five dead) and urged Chvez to resign, had been filmed long before the deaths had
occurred.4 That the role of the media was paramount is clear from the revelation that this
statement was recorded at the home of opposition journalist and host of 24 Hours Napolen
Bravo. Indeed, it was on that very same program that many Venezuelans would first learn of
what had transpired overnight. Bravo opened his April 12 program with the following
statement, astonishingly saccharine under the circumstances: Good morning, it is 6:14 A.M.
Thanks to society and the armed forces, today we awake differently. Good morning, we have a
new president. Bravo continued, reading a falsified letter of resignation from Chvez and
discussing the seemingly successful coup with some of its leaders, who, in an unprecedented
display of honesty, expressed their indebtedness to all the private media for having made the
coup possible.
The media is a force to be reckoned with, and this fact had long been recognized in
Venezuela, where even sitting presidents have suffered the wrath of the mediatic veto. 5 As
the old party system collapsed, however, this critical veto power became a more
substantively proactive one, with the private media effectively stepping in to fill the vacuum
left by the discredited parties and constituting what Luis Britto Garca has called a fourth
power.6 The 2002 coup was the crowning achievement of this rising mediatic force, which one
of the coup leaders openly declared to be their most powerful weapon. But equally clear in
retrospect is that these golpistas, these coup-mongers, had overestimated the hegemonic
control that these media outlets exercised over the population as a whole. Demonstrating a
common if hubristic neglect for the poorest segments of Venezuelan society, one based on the
assumption that the popular masses are essentially inert, stupid, and incapable of autonomous
action, those in charge of the illegitimate coup government assumed that having control of the
military and the media would be enough. If history is any guide, they seemed to be right:
ninety-nine times out of a hundred, their strategy would have succeeded, as it no doubt would
have succeeded in almost any other place and at any other time.7 But despite the carefully
calculated media strategy, despite the collusion of almost every media outlet, and despite the
media blackout that ensued in the aftermath of Chvez's ouster, the coup was short-lived. The
fundamental question we must ask is, Why?

The answer lies in the recently popularized phrase: every eleventh has its thirteenth.
Popular rebellion against the coup was immediate; millions of poor Venezuelans streamed in a
seemingly spontaneous fashion down from the cerros, the hills surrounding Caracas. For
Samuel Moncada, former Minister of Higher Education and professor of history at the Central
University, this massive popular response shattered in an instant centuries of elitist ideology:
Those intellectuals who said that this was a government of brutes and that they represent the
enlightened part of the country, well as it turns out, the darkest, the people from the barrios,
recognized that they had woken up without rights on that Saturday [April 12]. The Venezuelan
people understood that we were being enslaved. Indeed, despite media distortions, those
present at the initial mobilizations on April 12 demonstrated a remarkable grasp of the
situation: signs could be seen blaming the fascist right for the deaths of Chavista protestors
on April 11 and demanding that the human rights of Chvez's ministers be respected.
At a recent commemoration of the deaths at Puente Llaguno, I spoke to someone who
participated in the popular uprising that day. What he remembers most vividly was the sheer
quantity of people flooding down from the poor barrios, blocking every highway and street and
converging on the historic center of Caracas to surround Miraflores Palace. That this onlooker
would be shocked in a country that regularly sees more than a million in the streets speaks to
the magnitude of the rebellion. As we are chatting, several hands tap me roughly on the back,
inviting me to meet a hero. I turn to find Jorge Recio sitting in a wheelchair. Recio had been
taking photos on the bridge the day of the coup when a sniper's bullet tore into him, lodging in
his back and leaving him permanently disabled. He and other photographers embodied a very
different kind of media, risking life and limb both taking photos and hiding spent film from the
police in an effort to reveal the truth of April 11.
Along with mobilizations outside the presidential palace on April 12, 2002, a large crowd
also gathered near Fuerte Tiuna, a military base in the south of the city that was the site of
frenetic negotiations among coup participants, civilian and military alike, and outside the
military base in Maracay, which housed Chvez's old parachute regiment. Former guerrilla and
radical women's organizer Ldice Navas recalls receiving a call from Nora Castaeda at 7 A.M.
on April 12 urging her to join the mobilization at Fuerte Tiuna. By the time Navas arrived on
the scene at 9:30 A.M., there were only about thirty people gathered, but the crowd swelled
exponentially as the day wore on. Agustin Prieto, an electrical engineer who helped to organize
the mobilizations outside Fuerte Tiuna, recalls the shock that the coup caused as well as the
determined struggle that it sparked: This process, for many Venezuelans, has meant a heavy
sacrifice and years of struggle. This is why we will never erase from our memories what
happened on April 11 and 12. We began to mobilize the concentration of all residents of
Caracas at Fuerte Tiuna, and that's where it began, starting at noon on the twelfth.8
Repression was swift and severe. At Fuerte Tiuna, the Metropolitan Police waited until
nightfall to attack the assembled crowd with tear gas, armored personnel carriers equipped
with water cannons, and live rounds. Video documentation shows the crowds scattering at
10:45 P.M., with one victim in a nearby hospital declaring that We are living in a dictatorship.
As Moncada puts it: On that day, more human rights were violated than had been violated in
the past, not three, but thirty years, a point that rings true despite its hyperbolic nature. Illegal
searches and detentions, a witch hunt and public flogging of Chavista leaders, the siege of the
Cuban embassy, and dozens shot dead in the streets: such was the rabid fury of Venezuelan

fascism. The smiling face of this fascism belonged to none other than Pedro Carmona Estanga,
the head of the national chamber of commerce, Fedecmaras, and interim leader of the coup
government. Before a rapturous crowd, Carmona gleefully dissolved all branches of
government and categorically declared null and void the 1999 Constitution, which embodied
the aspirations of decades of revolutionary movements and which had been ratified by nearly
72 percent of the electoratealthough in doing so he overstepped the limits of even many
coup supporters.
The hatred of this enraged minority could not compensate for their small numbers, however,
and their fury could not compare with that of a people robbed of their legitimate
representative. On April 13, despite the private media's continued blackout, this conflict
reached a tipping point, aided in no small part by Carmona's shocking hubris. With millions in
the streets, loyal members of the military were emboldened to act, thereby reconstituting the
military-civilian alliance that has been so essential to the Bolivarian Revolution from the
beginning. But the opposition's claim that Chvez's return was a largely military affair simply
does not square with people's memories of the event, be they civilian or military. The military
acted, but it did so at the signal of the people, and despite a total media blackout, the closure of
state-run Channel 8, and widespread police repression, this signal came across loud and clear
to those on both sides of events. For the loyal sectors of the military, the presence of the
masses in the streets was as decisive as it had been in 1989: it cemented their conviction not
only that it was necessary to fight, but that the fight could be won.

Soldiers, Led By the People

I n Soldiers Alongside the People, Marta Harneckerherself no stranger to the dangers of
military interventions in politics, having fled her native Chile after Pinochet's coup
interviewed several of the key military participants in Chvez's return to power. General Ral
Baduel, then commander of the Forty-Second Parachute Infantry Brigade in Maracay, was the
first to openly reject the coup and arguably the principal strategist in the efforts to reverse it.
This perhaps is unsurprising because Baduel was one of the founders of Chvez's revolutionary
movement in the military, and it was from Maracay that Chvez and others sought to take
power in February 1992. Baduel's declaration, however, only emerged on the afternoon of
April 13, long after the popular masses had shown their strength in the streets. This
announcement of a unified effort to return Chvez to power, deemed the Plan to Restore
National Dignity, represented for Baduel the detonator of the entire situation, giving the
green light to loyal troops among the presidential Honor Guard, who put into motion a plan to
retake the palace late on the afternoon of April 13. 9 This, too, was at the behest of the people:
one member of the Honor Guard recalls that there were no fewer than a million people
outside the palace, demanding the President's return.10
When asked what lessons he took from the experience of the coup, General Jorge Luis
Garca Carneiro, Commander of the Third Infantry Division at Fuerte Tiuna, responded that
The people speak for themselves, they say what they want, it is the people who give and the
people who take away, it is the people who give the orders. Garca Carneiro admits that on the
morning of April 12 he too was pessimistic, but afterward, when I saw those people [outside
Fuerte Tiuna], that multitude, fervently demanding the return of Chvez, of course this lifted

my spirits.11 After the Honor Guard had retaken the presidential palace, coup leaders began
efforts to detain Garca Carneiro and others, who then fled to seek refuge in the gathered
crowd. From there, within and under the protection of the people, they created a mobile
command post to organize the retaking of various military installations and eventually, in
collaboration with Baduel and others, the return of Chvez himself. As one participant recently
recalled, at one point Garca Carneiro appeared before the crowd with tears in his eyes,
thanking the people for making military action possible. Another officer, Ramn Silva,
estimates that some 70 percent of those who turned out to return Chvez to power did so
spontaneously, comparing the mobilizations explicitly to the one constituent explosion that
loomed largest in the Venezuelan psyche: It didn't surprise me that the people came down
from the hills. It was nothing new, I experienced it in 89 when those defiant hills [cerros
bravos] came down, just as they would do again in 2002, returning their President, whom
they had elected, to power. 12 Thus, to tell the history of April 13 strictly from the perspective
of the military is to miss the point entirely, but neither is the correct alternative a nave
emphasis on the very same mass spontaneity that Garca Carneiro and others emphasize as
being decisive for Chvez's return to power.
Just as a people's history requires, nay demands, the inclusion of April 13despite that
this was a day whose focal point was the president and the Constitutionso too does our
examination of the mass rebellion that marked that day demand that we move beyond an
equally nave opposition between the people and the state, constituent energy and
constituted force. So, although Silva is likely correct that the vast majority of those who turned
out did so spontaneously and in defiance of a total media blackout, and although this
spontaneity speaks volumes, we must not neglect the decisive importance of the other, more
organized elements that played a significant role in the events of April 13. Here, the
implications of our previous chapters come into focus in that small percentage of die-hard
revolutionariesurban guerrillas and Tupamaros alikewho came down from the hills with
a far more radical vision than the mere return of Chvez to his predetermined position of state
power. If we have learned one thing from this book, it is that mass spontaneity, while
fundamental in its importance, is often the result of serious organizing that, in the case of
Venezuela, spans decades. As with the Caracazo, then, this spontaneous mobilization and its
spontaneous grasp of the strategic realities of the situation it confronted should not lead us
merely to a panegyric of spontaneity for spontaneity's sake. Rather, every moment of this
spontaneity and every gesture of these spontaneous masses contained an aspiration toward
increasingly conscious organization. In this explosive dialectic between spontaneity and
organization that was resistance to the 2002 coup, such conscious effort would be especially
important in the realm of mediatic and popular armed organizing.

Fighting the Information War

Just as the coup was carried out largely via the media, so too would the sphere of information
provide a key terrain for resistance to it. Despite a complete media blackout, the spontaneity of
the Venezuelan masses extended to their understanding of the role played by the media in the
coup, and one banner visible on April 12 read No to the mediatic dictatorship, while a
printed flyer affirmed that We will not tolerate this dictatorship of economic power and the

media. Such informal efforts to resist and counteract the messaging (or more accurately, the
nonmessaging) of informational blockade were fundamental: if the motorizados were crucial to
the coordination of the dispersed explosions constituting the Caracazo, providing for their
generalization and unification, in 2002 the physical coordination of bodies in motion was
supported and facilitated by mass text messaging, alerting the population of events not covered
by the media. Again, this spontaneity both reflected and contributed to existing organized
currents: in the tension running up to the coup, popular forces in the barrios and the nascent
popular councils came together to form what was called the Revolutionary Popular Assembly
(APR), which participant Gonzalo Gmez later describes to me as an articulation of popular
power.13
Gmez, a longtime workers' organizer, had participated consistently in the radicalization of
information, first as editor of La Chispa, a radical newspaper founded shortly after Allende's
overthrow, and later in a series of radio programs and websites. In the context of the coup and
the ensuing media blackout, the APR, which was officially established only on April 10, decided
to prioritize the radicalization and democratization of information. As the coup approached,
those gathered in the assembly got the sneaking feeling that things weren't under control and
that this was partly because state discourse wasn't mobilizing the people. In the early
morning of April 11, several hours before the coup, the APR alone distributed some 100,000
flyers in the barrios around Caracas, calling on the population to march to Miraflores Palace
and defend their government.14 One opposition writer even credits the APR with having
performed a crucial intelligence function, claiming that members of the Assembly had
received information about the plan to divert the opposition march toward the palace.15
Less than a month later, the contingency organization birthed by the urgency of the coup
would assume the form in which it has since become a permanent fixture of radical
Venezuelan life: Aporrea.org. With its militant name invoking popular media as a
metaphorical bludgeon with which to beat or hammer the opposition into submission,
Aporrea is now one of the most visited websites in Venezuela, carrying a combination of news,
interviews, opinion, and regular contributions from noted Venezuelan thinkers on the more
radical wing of the Chavista movement. It sees as its task the maintenance of the spirit of
insurrection that characterized April 13, 2002, as a permanent feature of the Bolivarian
Revolution, driving its continued radicalization through the mechanism of popular
mobilization. Given the origins of Aporrea in both the APR and the struggle against the media
blackout during the coup, it would be no surprise to find that its participants subsequently
dedicated themselves to the spread of popular assemblies and the nascent communal councils
(see the conclusion).
But the role of the private media in this fleeting dictatorship was not limited to putting it
into power, and press magnates such as Gustavo Cisneros of Venevisin, Marcel Granier of
RCTV, and Guillermo Zuloaga of Globovisin did not simply abandon their posts once the
military had removed the president. Rather, after misrepresenting the deaths that occurred on
April 11, encouraging and supporting the coup, and insisting repeatedly that a coup was not a
coup (according to those involved, Chvez's falsified resignation instead created a power
vacuum into which they stepped), the private media immediately began to do all that it could
to conceal the massive popular rebellion that was occurring in the streets.16 In this, their tactic
was silence: Jesse Chacn, later named Minister of the Interior, observed that There are

protests in central Caracas, Guarenas, Petare, and you are seeing soap operas and movies. Ask
yourselves: Why aren't these protests being covered? Why didn't they report the twenty deaths
last night outside Fort Tiuna? Where is our media? The heads of the private media, as it turns
out, were fully aware of the popular efforts to reinstate Chvez, but journalists were under
orders to show zero Chavismo on the screen according to Andrs Izarra, at the time a
contributing journalist to RCTV's news program El Observador. 17 While this mediatic veil was
being circumvented by the proliferation of popular media and street mobilizations, it was also
ruptured, briefly and crucially, when Attorney General Isaas Rodrguez took a page from
Chvez's own 1992 playbook: having promised the opposition press that he planned to step
down in favor of the illegitimate government, Rodrguez instead announced live to the nation
that Venezuela had in fact suffered a coup d'tat. But the people already knew that.

A Revolution That Knows How To Defend Itself

Most accounts of the 2002 coup, from the right as well as from the left, emphasize twoand
only twoprotagonists in the struggle: the people and the military. For the opposition,
courageous officers responded to the call of the people to replace a failing government,
whereas for most Chvez supporters the inverse was the case: an equally courageous sector of
the armed forces responded to the call of the bravo pueblo in the streets to overthrow the
powerful interests and cowardly generals who did their bidding. To these principal actors in the
drama, Chavistas occasionally emphasize the pernicious role of the private media, and as we
have seen, the golpistas occasionally even admit to the importance of their secret weapon.
But just as both sides tend to neglect the active role of popular media and the struggle over
information in resisting the coup, so too do they neglect the popular military side of that
counter-attack, one that provided the organizational face of rebellion in the streets just as
Aporrea and others sought to break the mediatic blockade by organizing access to information.
The former urban guerrilla Juvenal tells this forgotten side of the story: while the masses of
poor Venezuelans of the barrios were more than angry and prepared for action, there were
nevertheless organized elements, ranging from active guerrilla units to the so-called Tupamaro
militias, that spearheaded the insurrectionary movement of April 13. The vanguard came
first, he explains to me, and then the masses followed with confidence. While we might
interpret this statement as yet another reproduction of vanguardism, it also reflects an
undeniable truth. On April 13, Juvenal was among those who were planning the direct takeover
of governmental installations and ministries, all in an effort to jumpstart a more radical
process, one that would include Chvez, certainly, but under new and infinitely more
radicalized conditions. Somewhat to Juvenal's chagrin, however, this same vanguard element
made the tactical decision to hand power back to the Fifth Republic Movement party structure,
sacrificing some of the explosive potential of the insurrectionary moment to the demands of
immediate re-stabilization.
Somewhat characteristically, this still-vanguardist viewpoint is one that the Tupamaro-style
groups only partially share. Valentn Santana of La Piedrita, for example, insists that no one
ordered the people into the streets on April 11; to say so would be an insult to the people.
Santana's group instead accompanied the people, dedicating itself to the humble work of
defending 23 de Enero from the attack by the Metropolitan Police that was launched on April

12. When the police attempted to enter 23 de Eneroan area they treated, for reasons that
should by now be obvious, as a military targetarmed groups descended to Block 1 to stop
them: Simn Bol-var's pueblo did not let them enter. Like Juvenal, however, Santana too
expected and hoped for a more radical conclusion to the events of 2002, rather than the
cautious period of national reconciliation that followed. We thought Chvez would come out
chopping heads after that! Like many other radicals, Santana was disappointed to find not
rolling heads but a call for national dialogue: I think the Comandante wants to win the Nobel
Peace Prize, but he doesn't understand that the enemy will fight. However, reconciliation may
have been strategic at the moment; the aftermath of the coup saw the opposition politically
annihilated, and it would take the opposition parties nearly four full yearsuntil the 2006
electionsto begin to shake the title of golpistas.
As with the Caracazo, the moment of rupture marked by Chvez's brief overthrow and return
to power revealed in a flash a number of factors that until then had been concealed beneath
layers of rhetoric and posturing at the intersection of political and economic interests. Above
all, the events of April 13, 2002, the spontaneous popular insurgency that returned Chvez to
power against all odds, provide the best proof of the popular character of the Bolivarian
Revolution. If 1989 marked its most concrete origins and 1992 its will to seize the institutional
manifestations of power, 2002 indicated a powerful refusal by the poorest sectors to stop there,
to be content with seizing the state and nothing more, and, more than that, it indicated an
insistence on picking up the pace in the forward march. In other words, 2002 proved both that
the Revolution enjoyed a substantial degree of popular support and that it relied on this support
for its very survival. Were it not for this support, Chvez would not be in power today, and
were this support to be withdrawn tomorrow, given the constellation of forces arrayed against
him, both domestic and international, his days would certainly be numbered. Paradoxically, the
threat posed by the opposition, the material and ideological odds stacked against the
Revolution, currently represent the best guarantee that the Bolivarian Revolution will continue
to deepen according to the wishes of the emboldened masses.
But that is not all that was proven by the events of 2002. They also prove that the people
are far more than the inert mass that many consider them to be, and this has severe
implications for the Chvez government. The failure of the coup derived in part from the
oligarchy's belief in this caricature, and the assumption that these poor hordes, the scum of
t h e barrios, the mindless lumpen, would not fight for their leader and their revolution
(especially once anesthetized by the media blackout). Not only are the popular masses the
driving force behind the Bolivarian process, as we have seen throughout this book, but they are
the deciders: those who give and those who take away, those who put people in power and
those who remove them. In other words, it is not merely a question of keeping the stupid
masses contentthis is the false image constructed by the opposition, in which the poor and
backward peasant sells her support for a few measly crumbsbut of giving in to mass
demands that have been percolating for many decades and the expression of which is as clear
as day. Seen in this light, the myth of Chvez as a great leader largely dissipates; the most
radical sectors of Chavismo are not bound to Chvez the man at all, but only to what he
represents. As long as he represents what they represent, as long as there is proximity between
the top and the bases, he will have their support. When combined with Chvez's need to
maintain popular support at all costs, we have a situation that holds the potential for further

radicalization as Chvez learns that his best defenseeven if only to save his own skinlies
in the hands of the people.
But what is it that the people need in their hands? Contemporary Venezuelan political
analysis is rife with comparison to the September 11, 1973, coup against Salvador Allende in
Chile. One is told that the error of Allende's revolution is that it was unarmed, and while this
refers in part to Allende's rocky relationship with the traditional military hierarchy, it also
refers to his unwillingness to arm the people and the workers to defend the government from
right-wing aggression. The Peruvian revolutionary Hugo Blanco, one of the harshest leftist
critics of Allende's strategy, recently suggested that the Venezuelan government has learned
the lessons of the past. Citing the development of popular militias like the Tupamaros, the
government's attempts to maintain what it terms food security by expropriating hoarders, and
the appearance of communal councils, Blanco's optimism is clear: That's how you respond
attack is the best defense.18
I am inclined to agree, albeit not wholeheartedly, because despite that Chvez's assessment
of the Chilean experience generally lines up with that of Blanconamely, that the government
failed to arm the populationhis conflict with armed radical sectors like La Piedrita has
occasionally led Chvez to put forth a contrasting and erroneous interpretation of the Chilean
coup: that rather than the result of the president's own failures in confronting the right,
Allende's fall was instead the fault of the ultra-left.19 But just as this so-called ultra-left was
Allende's only hope, Chvez should have learned by now that it was this very same ultra-left he
sometimes dismisses as CIA-infiltrated provocateurs that proved to be his salvation on April
13. If the Bolivarian Revolution is, indeed, one that knows how to defend itself (to borrow
the words of Lenin and Castro), this defense must not be understood in conventional, military
terms, but instead in terms of the popular and armed mobilization of the masses. As the
popular saying goes: If they bring it like the eleventh, we'll give it back like the thirteenth.

Ese pueblo creco!

If Chvez himself has not fully assimilated the lessons of either September 11, 1973, or April
13, 2002, there are nevertheless many within the radical wing of Chavismo who have. For
Ldice Navas, the former Eastern Front guerrilla who insists that the armed struggle gave her a
mstica, a spirit, a confidence in the people and the need to organize them, the widespread
refrain only the people can save the people is one that relies on precisely that: organization.
Navas recalls a bitter disappointment in 1995 with regard to the Venezuelan people's capacity
to self-organize in contrast to a Salvadorean people seemingly capable of overcoming any
obstacle, whereas she sees the events of April 2002 as marking a qualitative leap. Ese pueblo
creco! she exclaims, Our people grew! In 1989 there was no maturity, the people were
simply sick and tired, but 2002 marked a new stage in the development of popular
organization; the return of the president served as the condensation point for popular demands.
Roland Denis agrees, describing this moment as a qualitative leap by the masses, who,
despite demanding the return of the Constitution, were nevertheless capable of cutting
themselves loose from all constituted order.20
Unsurprisingly, former guerrilla comandante and Chvez critic Douglas Bravo does not
agree with this progressive interpretation of the period between the two popular explosions that

punctuate this history. In fact, rather than an advance from 1989 to 2002, Bravo sees exactly
the opposite. The former was an hecho constituyente, a constituent event, an expression of
popular sovereignty at its very moment of emergence, and this anti-institutional and anticonstitutional (in the sense of constituted power) rebellion sparked the mass expansion of
popular assemblies that sprouted up across cities and the country. By contrast, Bravo sees the
failed 1992 coup (which he had, in fact, supported during the early stages of its planning), and
by extension the events of April 13, 2002, as precisely the opposite: people said, why do I
need to do it if they will do it for me? This is the tragedy, and the bourgeoisie keeps ruling
Although Bravo has certainly learned the military lesson of 2002, insisting elsewhere on the
importance of the communal councils for defending the revolution, and although there is
reason to believe that he recognizes April 13 for the popular insurrection that it was, he
nevertheless seems stubbornly incapable of grasping in a more general sense the complex
relationship between insurrection and institution, between constituent moments and constituted
power, that lies at the heart of Venezuelan history and this book. 21 Bravo himself withdrew
from the planning of Chvez's failed 1992 coup, and he certainly did not support Chvez's 1998
electoral campaign, but the institutional appearance of those moments does not fundamentally
negate their constituent content. In reality, without recognizing 1992 and 1998 for what they
wereextensions of 1989 and the entire history of struggle that preceded iteven the
momentous events of April 13, 2002, the mass power expressed in the demand to return
Chvez and the Constitution, lose all meaning.

Seven. Venezuelan Workers

Aristocracy or Revolutionary Class?
Look for the worker in the factory
and take him by the hand,
tell him that the struggle is a long one
that we need to lighten the load
to blaze the path of the world he dreams of.
Al Primera

January 23, 2003

It is the forty-fifth anniversary of Venezuela's return to formal democracy, and the country is
in the grips of an unprecedented economic and political catastrophe: an oil industry lockout
has dragged on for more than 60 days, crippling the country in an ill-conceived effort to again
oust Chvez where the coup had failed. Leftists worldwide are initially hesitant, unsure of
which side to take in the conflict: that of the self-professed workers or a suspicious
populist leader with a military background. This event more than any other throws into sharp
relief the peculiarities of the Venezuelan union movement; the Venezuelan Workers'
Confederation (CTV) stands proudly alongside the business federation Fedecmarasas it had
during the coupin the hope of bringing down a nominally leftist leader, all the while
attempting, with some success, to convince the workers of the world that the oil shutdown was
a labor issue.1 But in the words of Steve Ellner, this was merely a middle class revolt
disguised as a general strike, one that stands Marx on his head.2 The oil lockout, or the paro,
as it is widely known, was an emblematic moment for Venezuelan labor, one that crystallized
its difficulties and ambiguities, pointing toward the imperative need for radical change within
that movement. Its lessons, however, were not limited to the labor movement; more broadly, it
marked a watershed moment in the Bolivarian Revolution. If the reversed coup marked the
political destruction of the anti-Chvez opposition, then the defeat of the oil lockout
effectively crushed the opposition's remaining economic power, wresting the national oil
company PDVSAoften referred to as a state within a state as a result of its de facto
autonomyfrom their greedy hands to be put instead into the service of the Revolution.
In reality, neither the working classes nor the majority of the Venezuelan population
supported the oil shutdown. This much is clear from the extraordinary resilience demonstrated
by the population; songs and games were invented to maintain a cheerful mood while standing
in line for cooking gas or food, all under the recently coined slogan: Con hambre y sin
empleo, con Chvez me resteo, or Even hungry and unemployed, I'm sticking with Chvez.3
This resilience was equally clear among workers, and spontaneous resistance to the lockout, or
the sabotage, as some deem it, emerged from every corner. When I ask Williams, one of my
young graduate students from a poor background in the barrios of southwestern Caracas, about
his political experience, he is visibly uncertain of how to respond: Well, I've never been a

member of a party or a political group, he tells me hesitantly, but during the paro my boss
closed the shop I was working in, so I organized the workers to force him to open it. That he
was uncertain whether this informal experience was sufficiently political is perhaps
unsurprising in a country as full of professional revolutionaries in the present as it was full of
party hacks in the past, but it is through these everyday acts of resistance that the real
revolution can be glimpsed.
While the population endured and spontaneous resistance emerged from the cracks,
resistance of a more organized sort developed at the heart of the lockout, from within the oil
industry itself. But this was an uphill struggle: the largely white-collar walkout took with it
those most skilled in the management of a highly technological industry as well as the
passwords necessary to run the machines, acts of sabotage that make clear that this was indeed
an unpopular lockout rather than a strike.4 Against such odds, however, the oil workers
prevailedthe real workers, not managers in workers' clothingand the radical nature of this
moment lies in the fact that they did so not only despite the bosses, but despite their own
ostensible leaders in the CTV. For Orlando Chirino, an oil union representative and militant in
the Socialist Workers Party, the defeat of the oil lockout was an event of unparalleled
importance for the Venezuelan working class. From my perspective, the triumph over the
shutdown-sabotage was a new revolution, working-class in nature, where the workers were the
protagonists and which called into question business leaders and their private property. 5
While this was not a revolution in the classic sensestrictly speaking, there was no power
vacuum, no regime changesuch crises did exist implicitly, in potential form, should the
shutdown have proven successful (the opposition was transparent in its hope for a successful
repeat of the coup). After all, if this book teaches anything, it is that the traditional story of
revolution as simply a seizure of the state machinery is wholly insufficient to explain
contemporary Venezuela.
For Chirino, the implicitly revolutionary nature of the popular response to the oil shutdown
derives from the generalized revolutionary trajectory opened by the 1989 Caracazo, the key
moments of which are marked by dates with which we are by now familiar: 1992, 1998, and
especially 2002. On April 13, it was already clear that a revolution had taken place. There was
a violent dispute for power in the streets and the popular actions that returned Chvez to
power exceeded bourgeois legality and even the Bolivarian Constitution itself. Look how
profoundly dialectical this process is: the people have to pass over what they have to
recuperate what they have and prepare to move forward.6 But, for Chirino, even the decisive
events of April 13 represented a largely defensive and restorative measure, whereas the true
working-class offensive occurred only when oil workers rallied together to defeat the bosses in
a violent struggle for economic power. In other words, if April 2002 represented a dual
power situationthe moment in which two forces vie for power in a decisive confrontation
in the political-military sphere, the oil lockout later that year marked the appearance of a dual
power situation in the economic sphere, one not strictly limited to the oil sector: in 80 percent
of the economy of the country a dual power or a dispute for control over businesses arose.7
The bosses did not hand over PDVSA, Chirino insists, we seized itIf that's not a revolution,
then the experts on revolution need to come and explain to me what it was that happened
between December 2002 and January 2003.8 If this was indeed a revolution, then it was one
carried out by workers against the official institutions of the working class, which prompts a

series of questions that parallel my interrogation of the concept of the people itself, namely,
What working class? Which union?

August 4, 1959
Perhaps the best way to approach such questions is to stretch a taut thread back in time to
another emblematic moment when the formal organs of the working class were notably absent.
Rmulo Betancourt took power in early 1959 largely through votes from the Venezuelan
interior, having lost Caracas to interim President Wolfgang Larrazbal, best known for his
Emergency Plan for employment and public works. Rioting greeted Betancourt's victory, and a
variety of sectors immediately mobilized to ensure that the progressive gains of the Larrazbal
presidency were not lost. Thus it was that fifty thousand unemployed workers converged on
Plaza La Concordia in early August, only to be fired upon, with three fatalities. Shortly
thereafter, the same happened during a student march, and again later, as campesinos occupied
land. A complex constellation of students, campesinos, and the unemployed were all pressuring
the new democracy toward radical reform, and were all put down violently.
But where, we might ask, was Marx's universal revolutionary subject, the working class? As
guerrilla leader Douglas Bravo describes the situation, the workers tried to hold
demonstrations and even peaceful meetings indoors, but they were attacked violently, as
occurred in Lagunillas, where the unions and the repressive apparatus of Accin Democrtica
(AD) attacked a meeting of oil workers.9 Tensions were even higher between union leaders and
the unemployed, and as early as February 1959, Juan Herrera, the notorious head of the ADdominated construction workers' union, lashed out in an effort to distinguish the latter from his
own skilled workers: We can attend to our affiliates who are unemployed, but we are not
going to convert the union into a national employment agency. 10 Without even realizing it,
Herrera was pointing to a fundamental contradiction: the unemployed people marching in the
streets for radical change vastly outnumbered his own union constituents.
Writing within a North African context, Frantz Fanon scathingly dismissed the formal
working class of colonized and formerly colonized countries as being pampered by the
colonial regime. According to Fanon, setting out from an analysis of colonial reality leads not
to a confirmation of Marx's eulogistic praise of the proletariat as the universal class with
nothing to lose but its chains, but to its complete inversion: In the capitalist countries, the
proletariat has nothing to lose and possibly everything to gain. In the colonized countries, the
proletariat has everything to loseby the privileged position they occupy in the colonial
system [the proletariat] represent[s] the bourgeois fraction of the colonized population. 11
While Fanon's dismissal of the colonized proletariat may seem intended to cause controversy
and this was indeed the predictable effectImmanuel Wallerstein has argued convincingly
that the heart of Fanon's point was far less controversial: in response to the Marxist insistence
on the revolutionary potential of the European proletariat, Fanon simply said, let us look
again to see who has how many chains, and which are the groups who, having the fewest
privileges, may be the most ready to become a revolutionary class.12 Although the details of
Fanon's analysis were in some ways particular to Algeria, his conclusions echoed those of
Maritegui, who had come to similar conclusions on the basis of Peruvian (and in some ways,
Latin American) reality some decades earlier.

For Maritegui, the international economic hierarchy blocks the development of a large and
vigorous bourgeoisie in colonized countries because their interests lie more in comprador
intermediation than domestic investment, and since it is the bourgeoisie who creates the
proletariat, this blockage has severe implications for class structure.13 While Maritegui was
not as venomously dismissive of the traditional working class as Fanon, he nevertheless turned
his attention away from this small and stunted class and toward a broader alliance that
included all kinds of workers and campesinos, as well as to the latent potential of the
indigenous Peruvian population. It is only from this broad alliance and on the basis of
preexisting indigenous communal structures that revolutionaries could build an IndoAmerican socialism that is mindful of and rooted in the particularities of the formerly
colonized world. The novel revolutionary subjects that Fanon and Maritegui would come to
emphasizethe peasantry in alliance with the so-called lumpenproletariatare dealt with in
subsequent chapters, but here I focus more directly on the traditional working class. This
distinction, however, only raises more questions: Who is part of the Venezuelan working
class? Is it industrial or rural, formal or informal? Does it lead the revolution, does it follow,
or, as Fanon occasionally suggested and as the oil lockout might at first glance concur, is it
even counterrevolutionary?
Like Fanon and Maritegui, we too must set out from local conditions; as in Maritegui's
Peru, the formal working class in Venezuela grew out of an extractive relationship, only this
time it was not the guano and nitrates of the nineteenth century but the oil of the twentieth. As
in much of Latin America, this burgeoning Venezuelan working class found institutional
support in the import-substitution industrialization policies of a series of governments and the
formal working class suffered disproportionately from the dismantling of these policies and
the shift toward neoliberal reform.14 But unlike much of the rest of the continent, the 1970s oil
boom over which Carlos Andrs Prez presided during his first term meant that, in Venezuela,
this dismantling would come later than elsewhere, with the formal working class actually
growing during the 1980s only to collapse in the 1990s with the neoliberal package of Prez's
second term.15 As the millennium drew to a close amid the grinding pain of generalized
pauperization and the shining hope for radical change, some estimates placed the manual
formal working class in Venezuela at scarcely one-quarter of the working population. 16 It is,
therefore, perhaps unsurprising that the relationship of both this formal working class and its
institutions to a broader people's history was to be a deeply ambiguous one.

A Bureaucratic History
While the kernel of a workers' movement in Venezuela can be found already in the middle of
the nineteenth century, a union movement proper would not emerge until much later. When
this movement emerged, moreover, it was nearly coterminous with the single federation that
dominatedcritics would say stifledworking-class organizing in Venezuela for more than
50 years: the CTV. In the words of one critic: Its importance is such that, since its foundation
in December 1936, its history can almost be confused with that of the workers' movement as a
whole.17 This unquestioned hegemony is in part due to a historical particularity: whereas in
many European nations the workers' movements predated the establishment of mass parties, in
Venezuela the two emerged contemporaneously, and it could even be argued that the nascent

mass parties were the most powerful motor for the development of an organized working
class.18 Nonetheless, the dangers of such a situation were not insignificant; the CTV soon would
be severely dependent upon the developing two-party political system and specifically on the
hegemonic influence of AD. As a result, this nominal vehicle of working-class power instead
became an integral element of Betancourt's strategy of domestication, containing workers'
struggles rather than supporting them.
This presents peculiar difficulties for my task of creating a people's history: if the
predominant organization of the Venezuelan working class was simultaneously allencompassing and so closely tied to the corrupt democratic system, then it would seem that
there was little outside the CTV, and that access to the history of this outside would be
limited at best. But as the task becomes more difficult, our attention to the in-between, the
cracks in hegemony, must grow all the more acute, and this attention must be directed as much
within the CTV as outside it; as Steve Ellner clearly has shown in his from above history of
the Venezuelan labor movement, the confederation was never the uniform, monolithic, or
homogeneously reactionary mass that it sometimes is made out to be.19 In what follows, I
attempt to remain simultaneously cognizant of these internal ruptures and tensions and of the
constitutive outside to which they refer and to which dissidents would often be banished. This
history, therefore, weaves in and out of the CTV (and later, the National Workers' Union [UNT]),
recreating the same delicate dance toward official representative organs, party, state, or
otherwise, that we have seen in previous chapters.
Indeed, to deduce a heroic history from the CTV'S current appearance would be a difficult
task, an exercise that would be comical were it not also a tragedy and a farce, but the
confederation's early history was just that: heroic. Even the harshest critics insist that no
amount of subsequent political error can stifle the richness and vitality of the CTV'S long
history.20 The CTV was born of the early combativeness of the oil workers, who, under the
leadership of students and communists and the influence of the International Workers of the
World, undertook a radical strike directed in no small part against the transnational oil
companies closely associated with the recently deceased dictator Juan Vicente Gmez. 21 The
forty-three-day strike was a landmark in Venezuelan labor history, and although it resulted in
more repression than victory, it nevertheless set the stage for national unity against repressive
governments.22 As former revolutionary MIRista Domingo Alberto Rangel put it recently: it
was not an oil strike, it was a strike by Venezuela as a whole. 23 By the time of the brief
democratic interregnum that was AD'S 194548 trienio, the party had sunk its roots deep into
the labor movement, but its sectarian policy, which extended to labor as to politics, was
blamed by many for the return to dictatorship, and workers stood instead at the forefront of a
politics of unity after the fall of Prez Jimnez.24 This unity even extended to the Unified
Syndical Committee's failed effort to nominate a single candidate for the 1958 election
(Larrazbal), and immediate resistance to Betancourt must be understood in this context of
organized, working-class opposition to his nomination.
The CTV was officially reestablished at its Third Congress in late 1959, and while AD was a
majority presence, the Venezuelan Communist Party (PCV) and the Christian Democratic (COPEI)
party also gained significant representation. As a result of this fleeting labor unity, for a
brief period the CTV maintained an autonomous and critical stance toward the Betancourt
government, even rejecting the president's own hand-picked candidate for the Confederation's

leadership. While labor leaders continued to push for a united front, Betancourt and his backers
in the AFL-CIO sought to exclude the communists, and when Betancourt leaned on oil workers to
sign a 1960 contract that was lacking in several key aspects, the division of AD and the birth of
the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) was hastened (see chapter 1).25 This tense state of
affairs was exacerbated when the government devaluated the bolvar, eliminated Larrazbal's
Emergency Plan, and reduced public sector salaries by 10 percent with what opponents were
quick to dub the Hunger Law. As pressure from below threatened to boil over, increasingly
severe measures were required, and the massacres of the unemployed at La Concordia and
elsewhere found their counterpart within the labor movement in AD'S thugs and shock troops.
Central among these was construction leader Juan Herrera himself, whose cabilleros derived
their name from the steel rebar rods they would wield against those workers who resisted AD
hegemony.26
In 1961, Betancourt got the division he seemed to be hoping for, and as the left faced
repression in the streets, it simultaneously suffered defeats within the CTV: first in a report
sanctioning the PCV and MIRistas (approved only while many voting representatives languished
in prison) and later in hard-fought union elections marred by continued AD thuggery. The left
boycotted the CTV'S Fourth Congress in late 1961, only to be expelled by the confederation's
leadership body, setting up an alternative federation that later was formalized as the United
Workers' Confederation of Venezuela. 27 With the MIRistas and the PCV excluded from the CTV as
they had been more violently excluded from legal political life, the path was cleared for AD
hegemony, but this would be won only at the expense of further splits in the party itself, many
precipitated from within the CTV: both the ARS group (1962) and the People's Electoral
Movement (1967) left AD, although the latter would remain within the CTV until it was too
late.28 As the guerrilla struggle wound down in the late 1960s, the government lost its main
excuse to justify moderating labor demands, and as guerrilla leaders re-entered the factories
either through the front door with Caldera's pacification or through the back door in groups
like the PRV'S Ruptura fronta decade's worth of pent-up demands sought violent release.29
Factory occupations, slowdown strikes (colloquially called morrocoy, or tortoise operations),
and radical wildcat strikes led by ultras against unionists characterized the end of the
1960s. Counting only officially registered strikes, the number of man-hours lost in strikes
increased nearly a hundredfold between 1968 and 1971: of 233 registered strikes, only five
were considered legal.30
While this spike in initial strike activity coincided clearly with Caldera's presidency, during
which AD initially allowed the CTV a free hand against the COPEI administration, the drastic
increase in 1971 (following a bipartisan pact) was a testament to worker combativeness.31
When Carlos Andrs Prez rode to electoral victory in 1974 on leftist and anti-imperialist
rhetoric and oil-drunk promises of full employment, the CTV was in no position to question his
motives. But if the 1960s saw the CTV'S further alignment with and dependence upon Prez's
AD, the late 1970s saw the party leading the union into the welcoming hands of business
interests. At first, however, the oil bonanza masked this tendency, as Prez instituted a number
of pro-labor policies: Venezuela's first minimum wage, job security for low-wage workers, and
price regulations on basic goods constituted real gains for workers. But these emerged within a
corporatist framework that set a precedent for resolving conflict through tripartite
commissions, including labor, business, and the government, rather than through autonomous

worker mobilizations. When oil prices declined, however modestly, so too did Prez's patience
with the workers: in 1977 and 1978, not a single strike was declared legal by the government,
and when Prez's Copeyano successor Luis Herrera Campins devalued the bolvar in 1983, this
pattern reemerged immediately: a spike in strike activity not witnessed since 1971 was met
with total prohibition.32

Sidor and the New Unionism

While PCV splinter groups like Teodoro Petkoff's MAS, which eventually rejoined the CTV in
1974, were busy reincorporating themselves into the electoral and union mainstream, the
grouping centered around former guerrilla leader Alfredo Maneiro instead dedicated itself to
the task of rebuilding political organizing from the bottom up (see chapter 2). One of its key
strategies for doing so was a similarly bottom-up approach to union organizing, and in 1972,
the newly established Radical Cause (LCR) dispatched a single member, Pablo Medina, to the
massive state-run Siderrgica del Orinoco (Sidor) steel plant in Ciudad Guayana. This remote
eastern zone had recently proven its revolutionary credentials through its willingness to engage
in militant strike action and, more importantly, to go it alone in a wave of wildcat stoppages
between 1969 and 1970. Medina almost singlehandedly began to publish a workers' newspaper,
El Matancero, successfully attracting new members like Andrs Velsquez, an electrical
technician who became a frequent orator and agitator at the Sidor gates.
The popularity of the new unionism of the Matanceros was due largely to its insistent
critiques of the AD-CTV complex and the tradition of corrupt, bureaucratic unionism: Aside
from the honesty they wielded against the corruption of traditional unionism, the Matancero
group fought for such demands as the democratic participation of workers in the union
decisions affecting themsomething nonexistent in the regional unionismand the hygiene
and safety of the workers on the job, subjects untouched by other union leaders.33 When the
Matancero slate gained control of the SUTISS union in 1979, the threat was so great that AD and
the CTV saw fit to intervene, dissolving the new grouping and sacking its leaders, who would
return to the helm of SUTISS only after a long struggle in 1988, but this was only after Maneiro's
death in 1982 and a serious division that separated LCR'S workers in the east from their urban
counterparts.34 In 1989 and again in 1992, Velsquez himself was elected governor of Bolvar,
where LCR governance was orientated around the idea of democratic participation, the fight
against corruption, the provision of services, and the development of medium industries.35
Although LCR soon abandoned its radically critical orientation, the seeds planted by the new
unionism at Sidor would bear fruit in a new generation of young militants who saw in
Chvez's election the potential to topple the CTV entirely. But Chvez's election and the
destruction of the two-party system notwithstanding, there was little initial support for the
wholesale replacement of the CTV and, in Chvez's words, the union mafia that it
represented. If anything, the initial strategy was a reformist one: a Bolivarian Workers' Force
(FBT) emerged within the CTV to test the waters of worker militancy. Given its own critique of
the CTV'S intimate relationship with AD, however, the FBT would have to contend with fears that
it was poised to become merely another party-dependent confederation, one subservient to
Chvez's Fifth Republic Movement rather than AD. However, such hesitations and fears were
overtaken by events. In May 2001, SUTISS president Ramn Machuca, an independent formerly

associated with LCR, called a successful strike of steel workers at Sidor, which had been
privatized in 1997 during the last gasps of the Fourth Republic. Although some, but not all,
Chavistas supported the strikewhich was, after all, directed against a multinational
corporation rather than the new Chvez governmentthe CTV under Carlos Ortega attempted
to turn the struggle into a political one aimed against Chvez.36
Ortega would pay dearly for this politicization of union affairs; the tensions he provoked
carried over into the CTV elections of October 2001, in which the FBT decided to run a slate of
candidates in the hopes of defeating Ortega's list. In a confrontation that reeked of all-toofamiliar corruption, Ortega's list was pronounced victorious, but the victory was a Pyrrhic one,
as Ortega was unseated as head of oil union Fedepetrol by the FBT-supported and former
Copeyano Rafael Rosales, and a powerful independent sector emerged within the CTV
comprising Machuca (who had since broken with LCR), Rosales, and Franklin Rondn. This
sector would prove crucial, as Ortega immediately consecrated an alliance with Fedecmaras
to initiate the series of general strikes against the government that led up to the ill-fated coup
and oil lockout (Ortega remains an international fugitive for his participation in both).37 While
largely moderates, these independents were understandably perturbed by such an uncritical
alliance with the bosses and the politicization of trade-union demands that were largely being
met by the Chvez government. As a result, and with the firm push of the disastrous oil
stoppage, these independent sectors spearheaded the creation of a new confederation: the UNT.
38

The UNT Is Born

While Orlando Chirino insists that the UNT was actually born on January 23, 2003, during the
waning days of the oil sabotage and on the anniversary of Prez Jimnez's fall, the new
confederation's founding conference was not until March of the same year. Since then, in the
words of Jonah Gindin, the UNT has grown astonishingly fast, and in 2003 and 2004, more
than 76 percent of all collective agreements were signed with the UNT compared with a mere 20
percent signed with the hemorrhaging CTV. This growth was helped along by a 2003
government moratorium on firing low-wage employees, which allowed those workers critical
of the CTV the breathing room to establish alternative unions without retribution.39 But this
growth has not been without its debilitating weaknesses. From the beginning, the UNT has been
divided between radical and autonomous sectors led by Chirino and Machuca-Rondn,
respectively. Neither sector is without its links to the government, however, and although the
radical current comprises most FBT leaders, Chirino himself insists on union autonomy from
the state (sometimes to a controversial degree), and it was because of this issue of autonomy
that a new division emerged within the UNT in 2005 between Chirino's Unified, Revolutionary,
Classist, Autonomous Current (C-CURA) and the Workers in Revolution Collective led by
Marcela Mspero. This rift marred the Second UNT Congress in May 2006 during which, in
alliance with Rondn, Mspero sought to delay UNT elections, ostensibly to prioritize the fight
for Chvez's re-election, but more than likely also to prevent a C-CURA victory. 40 Inside the
Second Congress, Mspero and Rondn were greeted with chants of Elections! Elections!
Elections! by a crowd that evidently supported Chirino, and they chose to withdraw rather
than face a losing vote on the floor.41
In the aftermath of Chvez's 2006 re-election and the launching of the United Socialist Party

of Venezuela (PSUV), conflicts within the UNT have grown even murkier. Whereas Chirino
resolutely opposed the PSUV and the 2007 constitutional reform referendum, the majority of CCURA members, including Stalin Prez Borges and Gonzalo Gmez, disagreed, forming a
current known as Marea Socialista (Socialist Tide). 42 Moreover, tensions intensified after
Bolivarian Socialist Workers' Force leader Jos Ramn Rivero was placed at the helm of the
Labor Ministry, with allegations piling up that Rivero was using the post to favor his own
minority current while delaying elections. According to Gmez, Rivero's tenure represented a
return to the Fedecmaras-AD-CRV tripartite at its worst, a recrudescence of shady dealings
between the bosses and the bureaucratic stratum.43 These tensions reached a boiling point in
early 2008, in a familiar place of conflict: Sidor. After more than a year battling for a new
contract, Sidor workers had come into conflict not only with the company's transnational
owners and local Chavistas such as Governor Francisco Rangel Gmez (who violently
repressed the Sidor workers), but also with the labor minister himself, who branded the
workers as counter-revolutionaries and falsely alleged they had supported the boss's lockout
of December 2002, when in fact, they had heroically seized control of the plant to help break
it.44
In early April 2008, under clear pressure from the workers' struggle, Chvez intervened
directly, announcing that Sidor would be renationalized and named for LCR founder Alfredo
Maneiro. This surprising victory has reinvigorated Venezuela's workers; in the words of public
sector unionist Marcos Garca, The workers movement, with the triumph of the Sidor workers
and the people of Guayana, who achieved the nationalization of the principal steel producer in
Latin America, has produced a change throughout the country. 45 Rivero, increasingly
dismissed as the minister of capital, seemed not to have learned his lesson: a mere two days
after being overruled from above, the labor minister issued new attacks against the UNT,
eventually calling for the formation of a new, presumably more government-aligned
confederation. But Chvez seemed to disagree: speaking on the anniversary of April 13a
symbolic date, as we have seenhe celebrated the triumph of the steelworkers before firing
Rivero and replacing him with former Communist Party member Roberto Hernndez.
However, if the victory of the Sidor workers has shown that a strong push from below can have
a dramatic impact above, it has done little to resolve the underlying tensions within the UNT
and the formal working class as a whole.46
Optimism was running high in mid-2008, and only time will tell whether the momentum can
be maintained, in part because of the ambiguities of the president himself, who, after declaring
not only the nationalization of Sidor but also that of the strategically important cement
industry and part of the banking sector, was making overtures to the national bourgeoisie in the
guise of a re-launch of production.47 Despite the renationalization of Sidor, class conflict has
not evaporated, and contract workers formerly employed at the plant continued to fight for
back pay.48

The Comanagement Debate

Latent in these many complex conflicts and debates is not merely the question of workingclass autonomy vis--vis the state and political parties; it also includes the far more important
question of what society is to be created and how best to move toward it. Should workers

prioritizein a Leninist veina war of maneuver for the acquisition of political power with
which to propel forward their economic demands? Or is it in the practice of economic selfmanagement in councils that the working classes undertake the necessary Gramscian war of
position that prepares them not only to seize power but also administrate a revolutionary
society? This tension between the political and the economic-cultural aspects of workers'
struggles persists in the debates swirling around the heavily contested term comanagement.
Comanagement, or cogestin, has a long and checkered history in Venezuela, one tightly bound
up with the corrupt class-collaborationism of the CTV. Indeed, early comanagement proposals
within the CTV were opposed successfully by the PCV and other leftist delegates on the grounds
that cooperation between bosses and workers would prevent socialist revolution.49 As AD's
platform shifted away from social democracy toward neoliberal reform in the late 1970s, the
CTV followed suit, endorsing cogestion as a middle course between the twin dangers of state
interventionism and working-class autonomy and celebrating the Venezuelan tradition of
dialogue over conflict.50 Given this history, it should hardly be surprising to find that many
revolutionary workers see comanagement as a trap and instead demand authentic workers'
control.
Many self-professed revolutionaries don't like to use the term cogestin, says Chirino,
What's more, they try to satanize it.51 In a characteristically dialectical fashion, however,
Chirino insists that what matters is content rather than form, that Marxism is movement, not a
snapshot, and what matters is to gauge the development of the workers' consciousness and
will and how they are bending institutions toward their own ends.52 For Chirino,
comanagement at its best constitutes a dual power situation within the factory in which
workers and owners stand face to face in a struggle for control, a situation that can be resolved
either by progress toward workers' power or retrogression toward capitalist domination. This,
he argues, is what distinguishes contemporary Venezuelan comanagement from its prior
manifestations: today's co-managed factories represent spaces won through the effort and
strength of the workers, whereas in the past it was part of a bosses' offensive and the
treason of the union bureaucracy. Revolutionaries cannot be blamed for fearing
comanagement, given its past: As they say where I'm from: al que lo pica una culebra,
cuando ve un bejuco brinca, those who have been bitten by a snake jump when they see a vine,
but we need to be able to judge its utility based on its content. The true value of
comanagement, for Chirino, is as a process of working-class education that is simultaneously
technical and political. The capitalists live as much by cheating as by exploitation, and so it
is urgent that workers understand the factories from within, to see how they are managed, to
understand accounting and corruption, to realize with their own eyesand not because we
told themthat their interests are incompatible with those of the employersThe workers
need to rummage through the garbage and disgrace of capitalism and arrive at the conclusion
that this can't go on, that the bosses need to go, that the workers and the people need to be the
owners.53
But this easy slippage between the workers and the people leads us toward an
unavoidable worry: if comanagement is about workers learning the tricks of the capitalist,
then what guarantees that some workers will not adopt these tricks as their own, with workers'
control caving to technocratic temptations? This concern parallels traditional worries about
comanagement and cooperativism and becomes even more acute in a context marked by a

tendency toward a labor aristocracy. 54 As Michael Lebowitz correctly argues, the

orientation towards higher wages in some revolutionary trade unions is linked to their
tendency to act like a labor aristocracy in a society where so many people are poor. 55
Moreover, the implications of this concern far exceed the sphere of production with its
questions of employment, wages, and outputs: in a society like that of Venezuela, arguments
for workers' autonomy inevitably come up against the question of society as a whole. Put
bluntly, the question is this: Do the products of a given factory or workplace belong only to the
workers or to the broader community as well? Given the history of even Venezuela's recent
revolutionary comanagement, it would seem that such concerns are warranted.
Comanagement in the Bolivarian Revolution has taken different forms according to whether
the company in question is state owned or recently nationalized, but the same questions and
difficulties have arisen in both, and the dangers of both uncritical workers' autonomy and state
intervention have reared their ugly heads.
Much of the debate regarding the potential dangers of privileging workers' autonomy under
capitalist relations of production centers on the experience of cooperatives, especially the
Mondragon Corporation in Spain's Basque region.56 According to some, the danger is that there
is nothing inherently anticapitalist about cooperatives, and when left to their own devices and
evacuated of political content, many become perfectly compatible with capitalism. In the
Venezuelan context, this danger has been visible in the experience of the Invepal paper
company (formerly the privately owned Venepal). When Venepal went bankrupt in December
2004, the workers rallied around a militant slogan evocative of the recent Argentine experience
Closed factory, occupied factoryseizing the company and demanding nationalization.
Once nationalized, the workers' assembly dissolved the union, forming a cooperative that
would hold 49 percent of Invepal shares. However, according to Angel Navas of the national
Federation of Electrical Workers (Fetralec), it was at this point that Invepal began to exhibit
some dangerous tendencies:
they seem to be thinking like managers. According to what we heard yesterday, they want to own all of the
company's shares. Eight hundred workers will be owners of a company. And if it becomes profitable, are these
workers going to get rich? This is a company that is supposed to belong to the entire country; my company can't only
belong to the workers, if we make profits they belong to the entire population. This is a responsibility that we all have
workers in the oil industry, those who make the most: how do we spread this to the rest of the country? These
profits are not for me. It doesn't make sense that just because I work in the oil industry, for example, I can make 90
million bolvares [US$42,000] when the minimum wage is [4 million bolvares or US$1,900].57

These concerns have proven warranted in recent years; Invepal workers began to contract out
the work to casual workers, becoming bosses themselves in the process and reproducing
capitalist relations within the factory. 58 Despite such temptations, however, Camila Pieiro
Harnecker has shown that the oft-maligned cooperative structure is not without its radical
potential in practice.59
According to Joaqun Osorio, a leader in the Fetralec union at the state-owned electrical
company Cadafe, a radicalized understanding of comanagementunderstood as power in the
hands of the workerscould help to counteract this tendency. As he describes it,
comanagement is a system of management and administration that includes the state,
workers, and (in our case) the users, in equal conditions.60 But the struggle to institute this

reformulated and radicalized understanding of comanagement at Cadafe has revealed an

equally pernicious threat from the opposite direction, from some sectors of the revolutionary
state. As Fred Fuentes observed, The management of Cadafe went out of its way to sabotage
and defeat moves to introduce comanagement, with the ultimate result that, if you go to most
workers in the electrical sector and even mention the word comanagement, it sends a shiver
down their spines.61 Real worker participation at Cadafe has been curtailed even more since,
with workers' committees essentially limited to decisions over what Christmas decorations
would fill the halls of administration offices.62

Between Autonomy and the State

In recent years, other currents, movements, and struggles have sprung up that have managed to
unite, to some degree, rigidly political demands with working-class democracy and autonomy
from the Chvez government. Despite these twin concerns regarding comanagementthe
dangers of apolitical autonomy and state interventionthere remains a significant sector
pushing for comanagement as a revolutionary step forward, crucially doing so outside the
factional squabbles that have crippled the UNT. As with Cadafe and Invepal, moreover, such
experiments span the divide between state-owned and worker-occupied factories in such
emblematic examples as the state aluminum corporation Alcasa and occupied valve producer
Inveval (not to be confused with Invepal).
Just down the road from Sidor, Alcasa had been hemorrhaging money for more than a
decade, since worker-state comanagement was introduced as part of Chvez's 2005 push for
comanagement in basic industries. Under the leadership of none other than former guerrilla
and education czar Carlos Lanz, managers were elected democratically by the workers but kept
their previous salaries. This was not, however, simply a case of autonomous workers' control;
according to Trino Silva, then head of Alcasa's union, Alcasa does not only belong to the
alcasianos, nor to Trino Silva and the Alcasa workers, but to all of the people. 63 However, the
comanagement experiment at Alcasa has been plagued by the remnants of capitalist culture in
the workplace, leading to monetarist demands by the workers, technocratic imposition from
above, and factional power struggles in the unions.64 Not only that: as a showcase for workerstate comanagement, Alcasa also became a target of more conservative sectors both within and
outside Chavismo: there are a lot of vested interests in ensuring it doesn't succeed.65 Despite
such inherent difficulties and opposition, in 2007 Lanz insisted that the model was not only
stable but was actually moving forward into a third phase characterized by the establishment of
a factory council, a participatory budget, the reduction of the workday, a critique of
production for production's sake, the humanization of the workplace, and an attack on the
social division of labor through the decentralization and democratization of decision making.66
Lanz himself would not see this experiment through, however, with more conservative and
bureaucratic sectors practically running him out of town, according to one observer.67
At Inveval, this experiment in balancing workers' control with the needs of the revolution
has taken place more from the bottom up, but not without clashing with some of the very same
forces. In April 2005, workers who had been picketing outside the failing valve manufacturer
took the step of seizing the factory with the assistance of elements of the Bolivarian
government. On paper, Inveval might seem comparable to Invepal (the workers' cooperative in

the former owns 51 percent of shares, whereas in the latter it owned only 49 percent), but in
some ways their experience has been the opposite. According to Inveval treasurer Francisco
Pinero, Initially we never had in mind workers control, we were just struggling for our jobs.
But such limited self-interest dissipated quickly during the course of the workers' struggle
against their former bosses: We spent two years picketing at the gates before we decided to
take it over. Through this process we developed political maturity very fast, not just through
our own personal struggle, but the broader political struggles of the constituent assembly and
the recall referendum.68 Soon, Inveval workers began to realize that Cooperatives have a
capitalist structure in reality. 69 Pinero insists that today the real power lies with the workers'
assembly; not only that: Inveval workers have developed organic linkages between their own
self-management within the factory and the self-management of the local community,
developing a system of delegates who move between the assembly and nearby communal
councils.70 It is hoped that such a relationship will help to vaccinate the workers against the
self-centeredness endemic among some cooperatives. Simply avoiding this danger from
within, however, has not helped Inveval to avoid what is in some ways a more serious danger
from without: economic aggression from many still-capitalist sectors within the state
apparatus. As a valve manufacturer, moreover, Inveval has been subject to this danger even
more than most: since the worker takeover, Inveval has had difficulty acquiring raw materials,
and more ominously still, the state oil company PDVSA has flatly refused to purchase their
previously contracted valves from Inveval, which the workers attribute to the persistence of
corrupt elements within this nominally revolutionary corporation.
Workers encountered little support for their struggle within the ranks of the UNT either,
where leaders were more interested in factional struggles and winning elections, and so the
workers founded their own Revolutionary Front of Workers in Occupied and Co-managed
Factories (FRETECO) as a weapon to propel the struggle forward. The Front's first congress in
2006 comprised workers from fifteen occupied factories, and by 2007 FRETECO represented
workers in twenty factories. With the support of FRETECO and others, the struggle for a
revolutionary form of workers' autonomy took a major step forward in late 2006 when the
workers at the ceramic factory Sanitarios Maracay not only took over their workplace but also
became the first occupied factory in Venezuela to reopen their doors autonomously and restart
production.71 Despite having clearly demonstrated their capacity for autonomous control,
however, even these workers have consistently demanded that the factory be nationalized,
something that makes little sense from the strict perspective of workers' autonomy but that
gestures instead toward a complex dialectic between autonomy and the state that parallels what
we have seen in other chapters. This dialectic is as unavoidable as the dialectic of movements
and state more generally; the most conscious workers occupying factories demand
nationalization not as a relinquishment of their power but as a foothold for its multiplication.
Inveval treasurer Francisco Pinero describes his aspirations in the same sort of paradoxical
way that we have seen elsewhere: We want the state to own 100%, but for the factory to be
under workers' controlfor workers to control all production and administration. This is how
we see the new productive model; we don't want to create new capitalists here.72
The workers of Inveval and FRETECO are not the only ones attempting to chart this difficult
course between autonomy and the state, capitalism and bureaucracy. In steamy Barquisimeto, I
meet with leaders of the Gayones Movement, a revolutionary workers' organization that has

been quietly building its strength in Venezuela's industrial heartland of Lara State through a
combination of rank-and-file organizing and ideological education. If their organizing is quiet,
however, their symbolism is fierce: We chose the symbol of the Gayones for their tactics,
Jackeline explains, herself more ferocious than her stature might suggest, they were known
for rapid attacks and strategic retreats that threw the Spanish into disarray, making them the
most feared of the Venezuelan Indians. 73 While Gayones participates in the UNTand is
actually predominant in the Lara UNTthey pull no punches when it comes to the prevalent
model of trade unionism in both the confederation and the country as a whole. We are not
kidnappers of the will, Jos Luis Pinto tells me, pointing out that they have incorporated
constant oversight (contralora) and recallable representation into the practices of their local
UNT, which, as a result, is considered by workers to be far less corrupt than the national
confederation.
But this is far more than merely a question of corruption, and Pinto explains how the petty
bourgeois unionism of the CTV has been reproduced by Chirino and others, who conceal their
economism behind seemingly radical demands for autonomy. 74 Such autonomy is a farce, he
explains, little more than autonomy to blackmail the workersto separate the economic from
the political. Economic demands that improve the lives of workers are crucial, Pinto explains,
but these must be understood as a means rather than an end. Ultimately, the issue is not a
strictly economic one, but rather a political-ideological one tied to the Bolivarian Revolution
as a whole but that exceeds it. Like FRETECO, the Gayones Movement would rather see a
national workers' confederation that is built from the bottom up and that is openly socialist: the
workers' movement, Pinto insists, must be willing to play the rosalinda, to risk it all as
contradictions heighten, and as the process sharpens, the masks of the pseudo-revolutionaries
will begin to fall. In his view, this process began when Orlando Chirino came out in
opposition to the December 2007 constitutional referendum (opposing the proposed six-hour
workday) and in the conflict surrounding the PSUV.75
Workers' organizing must march in lockstep with political demands for broader social
transformation in an effort to build nationally what FRETECO has instituted locally: an
integrated relationship between producers and community (here we might look optimistically
on the developing commune structures and the multiplication of council structures across
Venezuelan society). While providing a fertile basis for the transformation of workers
themselves, this relationship and the participation it entails must also be reinforced with
ideological transformations; in many ways, consciousness has been the most fundamental
limitation to the expansion and radicalization of workers' power. 76 However, were these tasks
not sufficiently complicated in their own right, the struggle for workers' power must also
confront its own conditions of existence in the rapid urbanization and neocolonial economic
structure that wrench the population toward increasingly informalized, precarious, and
circulation-based work.77

Eight. Oligarchs Tremble!

Peasant Struggles at the Margins of the State
Campesino of my people
I see you moving your hands
without trapping the wind
And you are leaving behind
pieces of other people's land,
you have not fought for your footprints.
Who reaps without having sown?
Al Primera

December 10, 1859

As the Conservative Party's Central Army approached Santa Ins, rumors spread like the
prairie fire that Federal general Ezequiel Zamora himself would later unleash on the enemy:
the Federal troops, so went the rumors, were badly outnumbered and poorly supplied. Only
Zamora was calm: You haven't seen what I have done, and what I am doing, to receive the
approaching godos [oligarchic conservatives]; if they fall into the trap as I believe they will, I
will catch them all.1 This trap was more than mere metaphor, and one participant in the
battle described the scene as follows: As dawn broke on the morning of December 10, Santa
Ins was a labyrinth and an immense war machine capable of belching lethal fire from any
location without putting its defenders at risk.2 Antonio Guzmn Blanco, who would later
govern Venezuela as an enlightened dictator, described the scene as the labyrinth of Crete,
prepared by a genius of war. 3 Untrained as a soldier, Zamora was nevertheless a guerrilla by
instinct, and a brilliant one at that. In what Venezuelan General (and Chvez mentor) Jacinto
Prez Arcay later characterized as a classic delaying maneuver, Zamora had deployed a
security squadron tasked with engaging the enemy at a distance, before tactically retreating
and drawing the Conservative forces through a veritable thicket of guerrilla-style attacks that
would whittle away at their superior forces before finally delivering a single, crushing blow.4
The victory at Santa Ins was Zamora's crowning achievement, and it sent the Central Army
scurrying into Mrida to lick its wounds, but mere military victory does not make a legend to
the measure of Zamora. Among Venezuela's founding fathers, none has been so controversial
as he, a man deeply imbued with the class hatred expressed in his memorable slogan: Horror
a la oligarqua! Hatred of the oligarchy! And it was from this hatred that Zamora's politics
leapt with unusual ferocity: more than a decade prior to his victory as a general at Santa Ins,
fed up with the abuses of rural landholders in the llanos, Zamora had pulled together a rag-tag
bunch of slaves and indigenous people into what he christened the Army of the Sovereign
People to lead an ultimately unsuccessful insurrection against wealth and privilege. For these
reasons and others, many a Venezuelan revolutionary has sought the sort of inspiration in
Zamora that could not be found in Bolvar and Francisco de Miranda: here was not a spirit of
national reconciliation or a calculating politician, but a revolutionary driven purely by hatred

of oppression and love of the poor. In other words, Zamora's legendary status was as much the
result of his early rebellion from below as from his later military victories from above.
Thus it was that the MIR guerrillas would name their front in El Bachiller for Zamora, and thus
it would be that a young cadet, raised in Barinas, would find himself similarly drawn to this
potent figure whose blood still pumps in the veins of the Venezuelan campesinado.
For Chvez, the connection to Zamora was even more direct, the pumping blood more
literal: his great-great grandfather, Pedro Prez Prez, fought alongside Zamora, and his great
grandfather, Pedro Prez Delgado, known as Maisanta, followed in these footsteps by waging
a guerrilla war against the Gmez dictatorship in 1914. Chvez's grandmother would often tell
him the story of Zamora's crossing of the nearby Bocon River, in which he himself fished and
whose waters flow directly from the Andean guerrilla zone that birthed Fabricio Ojeda. The
young Hugo would often trek to Santa Ins in the hope of finding old bayonets in the sand,
and Santa Ins looms as large in the consciousness of the president today as it did those many
years ago.5 He has repeatedly deployed the lessons of Zamora's most important battle, dubbing
first the constitutional referendum of 1999, his later 2004 recall referendum, and even his 2006
re-election campaigns each as The Second Battle of Santa Ins. But while these were
certainly important battles, Chvez's appropriation of the image of Zamora is not
unproblematic since it allows him to transform his own errors and defeats into the sort of
tactical withdrawals that brought victory at Santa Ins and, more importantly, threatens to
replace the image of Zamora the insurgent with that of Zamora the general.
But Chvez is far from the only one to invoke the burning image of Zamora, and Barinas
was home not only to the line of llanero soldiers stretching from Zamora and his comrade
Prez to Maisanta and Chvez. This peculiar region, where the mountains abruptly meet the
plains, has proven to be a particularly potent flashpoint of conflict between campesinos and
landholding terratenientes, in part because it contains 80 percent of Venezuela's best land. 6
Once known as Zamora State, Barinas was later stripped of that title in a spate of reactionary
fury that would eventually see Zamora's ceremonial bust dumped quite unceremoniously in the
San Domingo River, only to be recovered years later by a fisherman. 7 Zamora, it would seem,
was never forgiven for his unrelenting hatred of the landholding classes, a hatred expressed
most potently when he burned the local archives of land titles to the ground to aid peasant
squatters.8 Today, this same elite rage puts Barinas at the center of a low-level war between
peasant and landlord, a war in which elements of the Venezuelan state often play an ambiguous
role, although no longer squarely on the side of reaction. It would be in the heat of this conflict
that Barinas would also generate what is arguably the most powerful embodiment of
campesino power in today's Venezuela: the Ezequiel Zamora National Campesino Front
(FNCEZ).9
The FNCEZ, which currently represents more than fifteen thousand families, is described by
one member as an organization of battles, of struggle, of strengths, and of tools for the war
against the latifundio.10 The Frente, as it is described by members and admirers alike, is,
like Zamora himself, an outgrowth of the severe and unrestrained class warfare occurring in
the Venezuelan llanos, a struggle located at the margins of state power on that uncontrolled
frontier that either rises precipitously toward the Andes or drops southward toward the
Colombian border and where paramilitaries are more common than police. This is not a
lawless land, as we will see; it is merely one in which a very different law rules, one whose

organic relationship to brute force and economic wealth is less concealed. Al Ramos of the
FNCEZ situates the phenomenon of latifundismo in the context of colonization and the
positioning of the oligarchic classes that emerged in its aftermath and against which Zamora
fought with such fury. Much as with the oil economy later, early land distribution in Venezuela
passed necessarily through political hands as independence leaders became caudillos and
appropriated vast tracts of land for themselves. Access to politics, moreover, was heavily
controlled, and the dark-skinned pardos, who predominated in the rural areas and comprised
the majority of the population, were virtually excluded. In the early part of the twentieth
century, the dictator Juan Vicente Gmez continued this trend, scooping up vast expanses of
land, so that by the end of his rule, Venezuela's largest farms occupied 88.8 percent of the
country's arable land but were held by only 4.8 percent of the population. By contrast, the
smallest plots served to sustain 55.7 percent of the population on the tiniest sliver (0.7 percent)
of the national territory.11
But something else had happened during the Gmez dictatorship, something that would
eventually spell the near-destruction of Venezuelan agriculture: oil. In what had previously
been a predominantly agricultural economy, there was suddenly a new prize to be had, and
private and state capital turned to face it, dragging an entire economy in tow. By the time of
Gmez's fall, Venezuela was the world's largest oil exporter, but for the massive wealth this
brought, something fundamental was lost: agricultural self-sufficiency, or what has been more
recently dubbed food sovereignty. Where agricultural production had once been
predominant, it constituted a mere 22 percent of Venezuela's gross domestic product by the
time Gmez left power. 12 While this shrinking percentage of the national pie still supported 60
percent of the population, it was a clearly unsustainable situation, and decades of state neglect
of agriculture led inevitably to mass internal migration to the cities, and capital flight from the
campo was followed in short order by population flight: from a country of 70 percent rural
inhabitants at the close of the nineteenth century, Venezuela soon became one of the most
urbanized countries in all of Latin America. In 1960, only 35 percent lived in the countryside,
and by 1990, the tendency had picked up speed as a result of neoliberal reforms, with the
increasingly proletarianized rural population plummeting to 12 percent.13 As the population
moved off the land and oil prices conspired with currency controls to keep imports artificially
cheap, food production plummeted as well, and today Venezuela receives the lowest
percentage (6 percent) of its gross domestic product from agriculture in all Latin America and
is the region's only net importer of agricultural products.14
For Fanon, such dynamics are rooted deeply in the process of colonization and the global
structure of inequality that this process left in its wake. Thus, extraction for the benefit of the
colonial power and extraction for sale on the global market yield a similar demographic
distortion in which the towns and villages are deserted, the unaided, uneducated, and
untrained rural masses turn their backs on an unrewarding soil and set off for the urban
periphery, swelling the lumpenproletariat out of all proportion. 15 Their arrival in the capital,
which we will discuss more in chapter 9, contributes to the deepening of what Fanon sees as a
powerful and harmful legacy of colonization: the centrality of the national capital itself (a
centrality all the more severe in an oil economy like that of Venezuela). Against such global
odds, the only way to revive regions that are dead, the regions that have not yet woken up to
life, the only way to combat the process of urban macrocephaly and the chaotic exodus of the

rural masses toward the towns is a concerted development plan that prioritizes
decentralization and reverse migration to the backcountry regions.16 Despite these massive
transformations (and deformations) introduced by oil exportation, over the course of nearly
one hundred years, little had changed when it came to land tenure: by 1997, only 5 percent of
Venezuelans held title to 75 percent of the land, and the vast majoritysome 75 percent of the
populationwere confined to 6 percent of arable territory. 17 Put differently, those campesinos
remaining on the land at the dawn of the Chvez era faced a situation very similar to that
which drove Zamora to insurrection. But where were their movements?

A Policy of Domestication
Folk singer Al Primera once described the dynamics of popular power in terms familiar to any
llanero: if the people are manso, tame and docile, they will be easily corralled and herded, but
this doesn't happen if they are montaraz, if they are wild or fierce. For a while, campesino
movements in Venezuela were characterized by such fierceness, although you might not know
it from reading most historical accounts. As the exiled Chilean radical Luis Vitale described it,
history does not register important campesino struggles prior to the death of Gmez, and this
despite the fact that the many insurrections against Gmezlike those of Jos Rafael
Gabaldn and Maisantawere rooted in the Venezuelan peasantry. 18 Central to this hidden
history is the spontaneous emergence, documented by Federico Brito Figueroa, of clandestine
peasant organizations known as Cajas Rurales in the late 1920s, especially in the centralwestern states of Lara, Yaracuy, and Portuguesa (later guerrilla strongholds). After the death of
Gmez, these preexisting underground organizations provided the basis for the emergence of
Ligas Campesinas in 1936. In the radical ferment surrounding the first openings toward
democracy and the revolution by coup of 1945 that put Rmulo Betancourt into power for
the first time, the peasantry staged a march of five thousand in the capital in support of radical
land reform, leading to the country's first collective agreement on rural labor. Vitale cites a
government agency's concern that, as a result of debates surrounding the agrarian reform of
1946, campesino agitation reached an insurrectional climate and that it was all the
Betancourt-led junta could do to prevent the explosion of this campesino insurrection.19 This
same insurrectionary ferocity led organically to the creation of the Campesino Federation of
Venezuela (FCV) in 1947.
After the return to dictatorship under Marcos Prez Jimnez, peasants again rebelled in the
western heartlands that had spawned the Cajas and the Ligas and in the eastern plains of
Monagas and coastal Sucre, partly in response to the confiscation of previously redistributed
lands.20 But if dictatorship keeps alive the low flame of resentment and resistance, democracy
is a powerful accelerant when tossed onto even the smallest of flames. Thus, the waning days
of the dictatorship saw a powerful reemergence of the Ligas and land occupations that once
again threatened to escape the domesticating efforts of Betancourt's Democratic Action ( AD).
Fronts for the Right to Bread formed spontaneously, occupying lands in a direct and combative
challenge to landed elites, and just as Betancourt oversaw (limited) agrarian reform aimed at
calming tensions in 1946, so too was he forced by the spontaneous actions of campesino
organizations to do the same on a larger scale in 1960 in an effort to put a brake on peasant
radicalism.21 Just as Betancourt turned to land distribution as a tactical maneuver aimed at

quelling the flames of rural dissent, so too did he see the FCVformally affiliated with the
Venezuelan Workers' Confederation ( CTV) from its very foundingas a mechanism for
harnessing the all-too-montaraz peasant struggle into a dependable and manso support base for
AD politics.22 The result of this integration of working-class and peasant organs was an
unusually centralized system of labor representation that was the very embodiment of
Betancourt's dream of a fully compartmentalized society, a people thoroughly tamed
(amansada) by institutional mediation.
Despite this strategy, however, the very nature of agrarian demands meant that the FCV was
never as fully domesticated as the CTV, and FCV leaders repeatedly clashed with both the CTV
a n d AD and threatened the possibility of resorting to violence if agrarian reforms were
blocked.23 These tensions came to a head around two opposing understandings of agrarian
reform: the first, championed by Betancourt and formally adopted in 1960, sought to avoid any
and all possible conflict with landholders by instituting a series of steps prior to considering
any private land for expropriation, and even then productive and capitalist lands were to be
spared and only unproductive and feudal lands redistributed. Against this limited
understanding of agrarian reform, one that notably sought to leave intact the latifundios, the
large landholdings, the FCV argued that the key challenge was the social plague of landlessness
rather than economic production and that its solution could only take the form of the
destruction of latifundismo and widespread redistribution. In other words, whereas Betancourt
sought the implantation of rural capitalism, many in the FCV, including then president and AD
member Ramn Quijada, pushed a more thoroughly anticapitalist vision. Betancourt's vision
prevailed, and despite the clear contradiction posed by the reform, Quijada and the FCV
leadership toed the party line, welcoming the reform as a step in the right direction, voting
against Communist-proposed amendments, and critiquing those to the left of AD for supporting
land occupations and attacking the reform plan.24 But Quijada had held his tongue for too long,
and by the time he and other prominent adecos left AD in 1961 as the ARS faction (see chapter
1), it was too late, and the peasantry was left largely to the able hands of AD and its official
appendage, the FCV.
In announcing the 1960 land reform, Betancourt made its political motivations absolutely
clear, insisting that his government would not tolerate the violent seizure of lands and that
no individual was authorized to take justice into his own hands.25 However, such insistences
ring hollow to those living today in the aftermath of this policy, one far more violent than
any land occupation and one in which justice certainly rests in some well-funded and heavily
armed hands and not other hands, poorer, darker, and scarred by years of hard labor. Indeed, as
if to prove that he only responded to threats and that his resorting to land reform was more a
matter of expediency than principle, Betancourt's reform essentially ceased land distribution
after 1962, when land takeovers themselves had declined. According to Al Ramos of the
FNCEZ, as was the case in 1946, the 1960 land reform law didn't affect [landholding] interests,
it didn't touch anything, but only served to channel energies so that they wouldn't overflow. 26
Indeed, whereas some 200,000 families benefited from the reform, the majority of the lands
distributed were uncontested public property, and large private landholdings in the countryside
remained untouched as the law was essentially forgotten within two years of its passage.27
On top of this successful disarming of peasant demands, however, campesinos faced an
additional challenge that undercut their movements: demographics. This historically rebellious

constituency was shrinking at an alarming rate, and at times, to organize campesinos must have
seemed as futile as collecting sand in a colander. The most rebellious spirits, those most
impoverished and with the least to lose, simply up and left to seek opportunity in the city,
whereas those peasants who remained would have confronted the same pressures that always
assail a declining and desperate class: be forced to behave or be replaced by one of thousands
in the reserve army of rural poor. When combined with the bureaucratization of the FCV,
we should not be surprised to find in Venezuela an absence of any sort of national campesino
movement in the decades before the Bolivarian Revolution. However, this did not prevent the
flickering flame of Zamora from manifesting in the spontaneous emergence of decentralized
struggles for land.28

The War against the Latifundios Begins

Chvez was elected with the support of many individuals and campesino organizations, but
Betancourt's AD had so effectively harnessed and co-opted rural struggles that the Venezuelan
countrysidetoday a Chavista strongholdwas the last bastion of power for the traditional
parties, AD and COPEI.29 This tide began to turn soon enough, however: as the Chvez regime
came under unprovoked attack from the opposition in 20012, it began to radicalize, and this
radicalizationexpressed in government programs such as the Missionsbrought with it a
new support base drawn largely from the poorest segments of society. In the countryside, the
key turning point in this rupture with AD hegemony and the attraction of especially small
farmers to the government's side was, as it had been in the past, land reform. While the 1999
Constitution is unambiguous in its critique of the rgimen latifundista, which it declares to be
contrary to the interests of society (Article 307), its position on large, private landholdings is
far more vague. This is because the Constitution does not define latifundios, but simply speaks
in terms of tierras ociosas, idle lands, thereby implying that cultivated land of any size and
structure is socially acceptable. Other elements of the Bolivarian Constitution are more
subversive, however, such as the concept of integral rural development, which seeks to
increase production toward food security while enshrining new, associative [i.e., collective]
forms of property (Articles 3057).30
If the Constitution is purposely vague on the future of the Venezuelan countryside, the
president himself would be less so. When empowered by the National Assembly in 2001 to
pass a series of laws by decree, Chvez included among these the Ley de Tierras y Desarrollo
Agrario (Land and Agrarian Development Law). The Ley de Tierras, as it is known among
supporters and detractors alike, was greeted with immediate hostility by the opposition, and
this and the other decrees passed by Chvez in 2001 unleashed a series of increasingly acute
confrontations that eventually led to the failed 2002 coup and the subsequent oil lockout.
However, although the Ley de Tierras was clearly more radical than previous efforts at land
reform in its provision that private lands could be targeted for redistribution, Gregory Wilpert
is correct to note that, in comparative terms, the law was not all that radical, since to be
expropriated, private lands must be deemed idle and compensated at market value.31 In 2002,
moreover, the Venezuelan Supreme Court, still very much in the hands of anti-Chavista forces,
struck down two key articles of the Ley de Tierras, one of which allowed landless peasants to
preemptively occupy disputed land. Because this was the key tactic utilized by campesinos in

Venezuela throughout the twentieth century, as well as by powerful movements elsewhere such
as the Brazilian Landless Workers' Movement, the ruling threatened to severely undermine the
effectiveness of the law, and the government was forced to skirt the decision by issuing cartas
agrarias, temporary permits allowing occupations to continue.32 Despite such setbacks, the
president was committed to enforcing the Ley de Tierras, first through the aptly named Plan
Ezequiel Zamora, which had distributed more than 1.5 million hectares of land to more than
130,000 families within a year (for a total of two million hectares by the end of 2004). In a
surprising parallel to the 1960 land reform, however, this initial stage of the redistribution
drew entirely from state-owned lands.33
In 2005, however, the approach became more ambitious and more conflictive, with Chvez
inaugurating the similarly named Mission Zamora to undertake the redistribution of another
two million hectares to one million farmers, this time drawing from privately held lands.
Whereas the law made ample provision for expropriating idle land, this rationale was blurred
in well-known expropriation efforts such as the British-owned El Charcote Ranch; the
government disputed the legality of the ownership of the land rather than simply seizing those
portions that lay fallow. 34 By taking such an approach, however, the government assumed the
contentious task of proving illegality while arguably neglecting the larger questions at hand.
After all, what do legal ownership documents issued by corrupt regimes in the past actually
prove? Legal claims to El Charcote, for example, date back to 1848, when Zamora himself sat
in prison, sentenced to death for leading a rebellion against the unequal and undemocratic land
tenure system.35 Rather than seeking to determine the legality of such documents, Zamora had
rightly viewed such legality as little more than the written expression of force and fraud,
summarily declaring latifundismo illegitimate when he burned the archive house of Barinas to
the ground. But while Zamora's name would be applied to such legalistic efforts under the
Chvez government, his spirit would find more accurate and unmediated expression in the
three hundred peasants who stormed onto El Charcote, taking matters into their own calloused
hands. After all, they had been taught the hard lessons of the Venezuelan campo, namely, that
even today what the landholder says is law and that no scrap of paper printed in distant Caracas
can promise protection from his wrath. This lesson would soon be reinforced in the most brutal
of ways.

Where the State Doesn't Reach

For Al Ramos of the FNCEZ, it is with the Ley de Tierras that the contradictions begin to
generate, and the bloody reply of the landowners took the form of class violence that
killed seventy-five organized campesinos in the seven months that followed, a figure that since
has well exceeded two hundred.36 Again, Barinas was a flashpoint. According to his wife, Pedro
Guerrero was a first-class fighter (as his name might imply) who had been actively
organizing local campesinos as well as documenting the rising tide of violence they were
suffering at the hands of landlords. Guerrero had collected a file of evidence of that violence,
which he was planning to bring to Caracas himself to make a public complaint, but after his
murder on May 15, 2003, the file went missing. Just days earlier, the terratenientes had
attempted to evict a large group of farmers from occupied land, and Guerreroalongside
Ramn Molletones, an organizer with the FCVwas targeted just days before the Chvez

government issued cartas agrarias to the farmers, legitimizing their claims.37 According to
Braulio lvarez of the Chavista Ezequiel Zamora National Agrarian Coordinator ( CANEZ), who
himself later received a (nonfatal) bullet at the hands of the landed elite, their murder was a
display of force by leaders of the Ranchers' Association [ FEDENAGA], headed by Jos Luis
Betancourt.38
Betancourt, already notorious locally, became emblematic nationally when he publicly tore
a copy of the Ley de Tierras to shreds in front of television cameras. While Betancourt (no
relation to either the former president or guerrilla comandante of the same surname) soon left
his post at FEDENAGA to take the helm of the national chamber of commerce (and central
instrument of the 2002 coup), Fedecmaras, his cattle-ranching successor, Genaro Mndez,
would not hesitate to embrace the same honest brutality of his predecessor. According to
Mndez, Chvez was originally elected with the support of the ranchers, but the Ley de Tierras
was the breaking point in that support because it is a law that is destined to put an end to our
properties.39 As early as December 2001, FEDENAGA had taken its place as the rural spearhead
of the anti-Chavista opposition, calling a national strike in the run-up to the coup, a full year
before the oil lockout. Despite his insistence that the ranchers possess a profoundly
democratic sentiment, Mndez nevertheless is evasive regarding the coup itself, repeating
what are now standard opposition shibboleths: that in 2002 Chvez resigned leaving a
power vacuum in need of filling. When it comes to the land, however, all talk of democracy
falls to the wayside, to be replaced by the rancid traditions of the wealthy: we have sown our
past, present, and future on these fincas, and we are not willing to hand that over, Mndez
insists, adding ominously, if there's no one to defend me, I will defend myself, and many of
us are willing to give our lives defending our property.
As is so often the case, in the campo things are put more plainly, and the violence of reaction
is rarely dressed in the rhetorical fineries of class. When asked whether the ranchers are armed
(and about the presumed illegality of those weapons under Venezuelan law), Mndez insists
that there is a long tradition of allowing ranchers to carry weapons because they operate in
areas where the state doesn't reach. While he admits that those weapons have been turned on
campesinos in the past, he insists that this was in self-defense and that the cases are few and far
between: our sector has no intention of starting a war. But the war has already begun, or,
better put, it never ended. Personal testimony of this war is commonplace: an escalation from
threatening phone calls to visits, houses burned to the ground, warning shots, and finally
targeted assassination, these are its chosen tactics, and they are deployed especially against
those considered campesino leaders. Especially in those areas governed by the opposition
Zulia State as well as Yaracuy until 2004this vigilante violence by landlords often went hand
in hand with the military and the police; political conflicts on the national level were played
out locally, leaving dead campesinos in their wake (in both states, campesinos insist the
governors, and especially Manuel Rosales of Zulia, were tied directly to assassinations). As
one occupier of Hato El Charcote put it: I'm a landless peasant. I've got land, but it's in the
graveyard.40
In one case, members of the Barranquilla Cooperative in Zulia recount how the National
Guard arrived in trucks owned by a local rancher to intimidate, attack, and finally arrest those
legally occupying the land. The landlord had previously branded collective members with the
traditional pejorative of the landholding classes: they were invasores, invaders, and despite

appealing to the local judicial police with evidence that the land had been deemed idle by the
national government, the police too called them invasores. The verdict thus given, the National
Guard arrived to carry out the sentence, beating the farmers with rifle butts and even firing live
rounds. The soldiers later denied the charge, but the farmers had collected the spent bullet
shells: this is from an FAL [military-issue rifle], one farmer insists, displaying a handful of
shells, this is a weapon of warwe have proof.41 The most perverse part, however, was that
the National Guard lieutenant brought those arrested before the landowner as a display of the
obedience of the military to economic power: we've brought you these robatierras, these land
thieves. To be able to beat these poor farmers under the approving gaze of the rancher was a
sort of prize the young recruits were more than willing to collect: as one victim described it,
they felt big in front of the ganadero.
If many Venezuelan campesinos find themselves in a war against power and privilege at the
margins of the Venezuelan state, this impunity extends as well to their demands for justice.
Many a widow recalls appealing to the local and state authorities, to government ministers, to
the press, and even to the president himself, for the most part to no avail: for the murders of
more than two hundred campesinos, only seven have been jailed, and only one of them was a
wealthy landowner accused of planning and funding the murder. 42 The late Willian Lara, a
former Chavista minister and state governor, once spoke of inheriting a long tradition of
impunity: Certainly in Venezuela there exists a long history of impunity, particularly when
those who commit the crime are economically powerful. And this is what we have inherited,
not only as a culture of conduct by the powerful elites, but also in the structure of the state.
When we manage to put those who pay to have campesino leaders killed behind bars, we will
see impunity cease and we will manage to leave in the past these painful events, this mourning
by campesino families for murders carried out by sicarios.43
While CANEZ and the human rights organization PROVEA approvingly note a shift in which it
is no longer the government itself murdering peasants but privately hired assassins, they
nevertheless lament a lack of government follow-through.44 Here, at the margins of the
Venezuelan state, power is more obviously political than elsewhere, and legal appeal to the
courts is adjudicated in the violent practice of local petty sovereigns. This does not prevent the
campesinos from appealing to the law; in fact, it was the Ley de Tierras itself that sparked
renewed conflict in what in recent decades had been a relatively docile patch of earth. One
widow of this low-scale war in Yaracuy insists that everything [her husband] did, he did by
the legal route, and another in Zulia notes how her late husband, in his defense of the Chvez
government, would repeatedly insist that Chvez is alone, that he cannot possibly
accomplish everything on his own without support.45 In other words, while appealing to the
law, many campesinos fighting the war for land in the Venezuelan llanos recognize that the
law in and of itself cannot protect them, and this recognition gestures toward new
organizational forms gestating far from the seat of power.

Rural Militias or Guerrilla Army?

If there is one aspect that sets the campesino struggle apart from many of those movements
discussed in other chapters, it is precisely this distance from the state of which Genaro
Mndez, the unapologetic spokesperson for a murderous counter-revolution in the countryside,

speaks. Indeed, the first wave of the Venezuelan guerrilla struggle was located in these and
even more remote spaces, but it was also mesmerized by the lure of the capitalthe seizure of
powerand failed to connect with the campesinos in a sustainable way. Even the more recent
urban militia phenomenon, which responded to a sort of lawlessness with autonomous selforganization and self-defense, understood the police as its most direct antagonists and sought
to establish autonomy from the state. Many other movements, especially since Chvez's
election, have been centered at the seat of government powerCaracasand therefore
justifiably have turned their attention to pressuring the state for increased protection and
deepening reform, using the 1999 Constitution as leverage. While there is some parallel
between such demands for protection by, for example, the women's movement and Afroindigenous movementsdemands that seek to protect the physical security of women from
abuse and the racialized from discriminatory assaultsand while the campesinos have also
clearly sought to leverage the law in similar ways toward a radicalization of their struggles, the
location of these struggles at the far reaches of the state's periphery leads to some qualitative
differences in the demands they express and the methods to which they turn.
In the vast grey area of the Venezuelan llano, where one is occasionally more likely to come
across FARC guerrillas or right-wing paramilitaries from Colombia than representatives of the
Venezuelan state itself (and where indeed it is more likely that these institutions themselves
are intertwined), the question of self-defense and popular militia structures is posed with a
heightened urgency. The Jacoa Cooperative in Barinas, one of the original land occupations
that would later give rise to the FNCEZ, emerged out of the beautiful battle surrounding the
2001 Ley de Tierras. 46 But not all was beautiful; the occupants of the land soon faced off
against the full weight of local landlords and state institutions, to which the only possible
response was struggle and spontaneous recourse to self-defense: The fight was hard. People
were wounded. An encampment kept watch for more than four months to protect our
campesino brothers and sistersAnd when the courts ordered the land evictions, we had to get
support en masse, with one hundred to two hundred peopleThere was no turning back.
Armed, we defended our land with hammers, machetes, and pothooks. And that's as far as the
police came.47 In February 2003, after an extended period of occupation and conflict, Jacoa
was one of many occupied areas handed over to their occupants by Chvez live on his Al
Presidente television program, but the fact that spontaneously organized self-defense was the
concrete precondition for state action has not been lost on collective members.
In recent years, such spontaneous resistance in the countryside has developed alongside a
variety of organizational forms, the most shadowy of which is the Bolivarian Liberation Forces
(FBL), which made its public appearance with a spate of communiqus and photos (reminiscent
of 1994 Chiapas) of masked campesinos armed with everything from hunting rifles to military
FALS. While the history of the grouping is as murky as its present, the FBL seems to have been
formed in the immediate aftermath of Chvez's 1992 coup as a traditional urban guerrilla unit:
its first claimed action was the failed assassination attempt against CTV head Antonio Ros on
September 23, 1992, which soon was followed by a grenade attack on the home of former
president Jaime Lusinchi and the stabbing of the national social security chief.48 According to a
communiqu and interview with Comandante Zacarias published in El Nacional on September
24 and October 3, respectively, the FBL's early objective was to punish corrupt government
officials whom, citing Simn Bolvar, they sentenced to death.

For more than a decade, the FBL was silent, knees to the ground alongside our people
contributing to the revolutionary hurricane that brought Chvez to power and that then was
strengthened.49 When the group reemerged, it was with a very different tone: distancing itself
from terrorist acts that had been attributed to it, the FBL now insisted on its dedication to the
peaceful deepening of the Bolivarian Revolution. This was not the only difference: the FBL had
relocated to the Venezuelan southwest, those very same llanos across which Zamora once
marched. While this transition was not always a smooth onepress reports indicate
intermittent clashes with the Colombian National Liberation Army ( ELN) for territory in Apure
the imperative need for a response to paramilitary violence at the hands of the landlords led
the FBL to grow to a force reputedly of several thousand soldiers. While the FBL has suffered
divisions as some key comandantes have opted to abandon the armed struggle entirely, they
remain a shadowy presence in the Venezuelan llano; in the words of Lina Ron: They are like
God or the devil: no one knows if they exist until they appear.50
Another guerrilla comandante from a previous eraCarlos Betancourtquestions the
strategy of the FBL in the countryside, which he sees as fundamentally contradictory: they
want to wage a guerrilla war with Chvez's support, which isn't possible. A guerrilla war
attacks an established order, and there isn't a government in the world that would allow this.
It's a rivalry with the state, and the state is obligated to strike at it. Betancourt, whose
Communard Movement seeks to deepen the development of popular militias, is quick to
distinguish between the two approaches, which many lump together. Whereas the FBL as I
understand it is a military apparatus superimposed in the countryside without popular support,
popular militias would ideally operate as organic outgrowths of the communities, providing
security for the campesinos from both the landlords and Colombian paramilitaries while also
contributing to economic redevelopment.

Zamora Takes Caracas

This emphasis on the development of popular militias in the countryside is one that is shared
by the FNCEZ, which has recently thrown its weight behind the government's establishment of
national Bolivarian militias. It is on the basis of such a project that this organ of the rural
struggle has begun to coordinate more closely with its urban counterparts, such as the Alexis
Vive Collective (with which Carlos Betancourt works closely; see chapter 3), with the two
recently constituting the Revolutionary Bolvar and Zamora Current within Chavismo.51
Briggitte Marin, an organizer with the FNCEZ, agrees with Betancourt with regard to the
contradiction posed by the FBL: she insists that Chvez cannot accept the existence of this rural
guerrilla army because he needs to take care of himself, especially with regard to support in
the Armed Forces. 52 The FBL isn't the path at the moment, she argues, but it is a preparation
for other scenarios which remain possible. Furthermore, Marin notes a dynamic interplay
between the military and the political: without the military side, she insists, the political could
not advance, and this is especially the case in a situation of low-level war against the
campesinos. Despite their tactical disagreements, however, the FNCEZ has the same objective
and the same vision as the FBL.
According to Marin, the FNCEZ supports the development of a framework for integral
security that would comprise the communal councils, the national reserve, and the territorial

guard, but she recognizes that these government-sponsored institutions are not the real
militia: instead, the FNCEZ has organized their own security brigades in Apure and Barinas to
respond directly to the immediate security needs of their members. We can't wait for the law
to arrive, she insists, reflecting the positive lessons of proactive land occupations as well as
the negative experience of violence by landowners, and this spirit of impatience characterizes
most of the FNCEZ's activities. It would be alongside those forces that agree about the need for
self-defense in the countrysideand that similarly refuse to waitthat the FNCEZ occupied
central Caracas on July 11, 2005, in an action deemed Zamora Takes Caracas. In an
unprecedented display that was repeated in March of the following year, some seven thousand
campesinos marched through the capital with cows in tow, slowing traffic to a crawl to draw
attention to impunity for murdered campesino leaders and to urge a relaunching of the war
against latifundios.
This laudatory spirit of impatience, this refusal to wait for problems to be solved from
above and the insistence on pushing demands from below, also describes the FNCEZ's
relationship with the Chvez government. After Chvez was first elected, there was a brief
effort to Bolivarianize the FCV, and the FNCEZ emerged in part out of the failure of this
effort.53 As with the UNT, Chavistas then attempted to unify peasant organizations under CANEZ,
but more radical groups such as the FNCEZ maintained a cautious distance, critiquing CANEZ for
its relationship to the state, whereas CANEZ critiques unnecessarily provocative land
occupations. As Marin explains to me, they see the potential in forming strategic alliances with
sectors of the state to gain resources with which they can respond to the demands of their base,
but the FNCEZ is under no illusions and recognizes that their power comes only and directly
from the people, posing an inherent threat to the institutions. There are right-wing elements in
the institutions, Marin insists, but government ministries are forced to work with the FNCEZ
because of our power. Just like the workers at the Sidor steel facility in 2008, the FNCEZ,
Marin boasts, was able to force the removal of a previous minister of agriculture and land, who
was replaced by the more radical and committed Elas Jaua in 2006 (who was later and until
recently vice president). We fight from the base, not from the institutions, Marin tells me,
and this is a fight in which no leader is safe: Chvez is the only leader who can guarantee the
revolution, but he's also human. We will have to make the revolution with Chvez, without
Chvez, and even against Chvez.54
This constant and unswerving strugglewithin, outside of, and against institutionsis
perhaps the only true meaning of the Second Battle of Santa Ins, and we might be able to
discern in the recent FBL split and the conscious decision to reinforce popularly organized selfdefense militias something of a tactical withdrawal similar to that of Zamora. Whereas
Chvez has insistently mobilized the metaphor of Santa Ins for electoral challenges and
deployed Zamora's name and image in association with much-needed reforms in the campo,
there is something disingenuous about invoking such an insurrectionary figure in the name of
state action. Neither Zamora himself nor the FNCEZ that today bears his name could deny the
importance of such action, but governmental reform and the painstaking research of the
legality of land titles hardly evoke the hatred of the oligarchy from which Zamora derives his
mythical force. If anything, this Second Battle of Santa Ins has yet to even get underway in
earnest. While the struggle within Chavismo continues, relations with the enemy remain on the
level of a war of position (although not without its casualties). Al Ramos notes that the

strange thing, or the paradox of all this is that the Land Law hasn't been implemented more
than 30 percent, and it has generated this whole situation. If the political will of the
institutionscombined to implement it, bueno, we could imagine a situation of powerful
confrontations and powerful victories for the Venezuelan people if the government
accompanies us with a single voice.55 For Ramos, the true war of maneuver, that of frontal
conflict with the enemy, will only emerge once the battle within the Revolution has been won
or at least deepened. With a keen eye to lessons for the future, one FNCEZ member recalls the
meaning of Santa Ins: They fought from behind the mills, behind the trenches, behind the
river, behind the mountain with their shirtless men, as the legend says. 56 This revolution
within the Revolution is the basis for the FNCEZ's current push behind the Bolvar and Zamora
Revolutionary Current, which recently marched on Caracas once again in a renewed push to
radicalize the revolution.57
A mysterious bullet from the oligarchy took the life of Ezequiel Zamora, hater of
oligarchs and mortal enemy of landed privilege, almost exactly one hundred years before
Rmulo Betancourt would sign a land reform law whose intention was not to fulfill Zamora's
legacy, but to betray it and rob it of its mythical force.58 But the myth would not go quietly into
the night, as Ruiz-Guevara passionately insists: the living thought of Ezequiel Zamora is
latent in the heart of the people of Barinas, and for every detractor to his principles, there are
and there will be thousands of defenders who with revolutionary faith attempt, in one way or
another, to continue the struggle initiated by this formidable gladiator. 59 Central would be
those members of the Frente who bear his name, those for whom hatred of the oligarchy is a
tangible reality, who insistently claim that rage and hope also belong to us, and who echo
Zamora's refrain:
The overcast sky warns of the storm to come,
while the sun behind the clouds loses its brightness
oligarchs tremble, long live freedom!
The troops of Zamora, at the bugle's sound,
will destroy the brigades of the reactionary scoundrels.

Nine. A New Proletariat?

Informal Labor and the Revolutionary Streets
How sad the rain sounds
on cardboard roofs,
how sadly my people live
in cardboard houses.
Al Primera

October 13, 2002

The Chvez regime is perched precariously between two crises as the anti-Chavista opposition
discredited politically in the defeated April coupprepares to flex its economic muscle in
the run-up to the oil lockout to begin in December. Popular reaction to such open threats is
resounding, giving rise to a migration paralleling that of 13-A, the day Chvez was returned to
his leadership position through an unmediated expression of mass power in the streets. The
capital fills with the poor and darker-skinned multitudes, arriving either on buses from the
countryside or coming down from the hills as they had during the Caracazo. Such migrations
are but a concentrated manifestation of an overlapping and twofold process comprising both
the decades-long process of urbanization, which binds this chapter intimately with chapter 8,
as well as the more mundane daily circulation of poor laborers within the Venezuelan capital.
Moreover, both circuits reflect the impact of subaltern capitalism rooted in global economic
dependencywhat Andre Gunder Frank termed lumpendevelopmenton the sphere of human
geography.1 Therefore, to pick up where we left off with Fanon, the exodus from the
countryside as a result of oil-drunk neglect of agriculture swells the barrios, the residents of
which pause in their new homes only briefly to recuperate and collect their strength for the
often grueling trek, the daily pilgrimage to the overpopulated valley floor in search of an
economic encounter with the wealthy residents concentrated therein. These ex-peasants forced
from the land circle the towns tirelessly, with this circular motion coagulating tentatively in
the geography of the shantytowns and their concentric, generational circles.2
Al Primera spoke in heartrending terms of cardboard roofs and cardboard houses, but that
was in 1974, and as the barrios gained permanence, their physical appearance would begin to
change. Those first migrants who settled at what must have seemed an immense distance from
economic opportunity some decades ago now hold a privileged position amid the bustling
barrio centersCatia, El Valle and Coche, San Augustn, Petare, to name just a few notable
barrios caraqueoswhich are the result of the collision of a bloated and expansive city with
the developing internal market provided by the poor for their own reproduction as a labor
force. Here, the houses are no longer cardboard, but rather solid structures built with cement
blocks and often several stories high. To find cardboard, one need climb higher (although even
here, tin is more common), to the more precarious and unstable soil that gives way periodically
to flooding in torrents of mud, cement, and flesh. Thus it was in December 1999 that the

human and manmade landscape of Vargas, on the down slope between Caracas and the sea, was
redistributed forcibly by tens of thousands of bodies and the wreckage of homes transformed
into a massive stain visible even in satellite images, a painful testament not to the power of
nature but the failures of society (the parallels to Hurricane Katrina are not to be
underestimated).
The complexity and multiplicity of this human geography are reflected in the labor force it
engenders: some barrio residents are now established in formal employment or have even
themselves built small capitalist fiefdoms that respondat a profit, of courseto the demand
of local residents for everything from basic foodstuffs to cellphones and bootlegged DVDs.3 But
the vast majority simply survive, eking out a living with informal labor and odd jobs, all the
while dodging the malandros whose attempts to do the same by other means make these
barrios some of the deadliest patches of soil on earth. This very multiplicity collides with
occasionally orthodox and mechanical theories to produce deep and acrimonious debates as to
the political importance of the barrios and those who live here. As I have shown, Venezuelan
guerrillas failed to grapple quickly enough with the demographic transformation the country
was undergoing, and when some finally did so in the 1980s, the state reacted as though a vital
and painful nerve had been touched, and a cold layer of repression spread across society and
the barrios in particular, a New Plague whose name marks the location of only the most
notorious of mass graves fertilized during the Caracazo.
This double threat of state repression and social violence gave birth to the incipient popular
militia movement, which played a crucial role in Chvez's rise and return to power. But old
errors die hard, and some lessons are learned only when it is far too late. Today, the threat of
misrecognizing the barrio residents remains, and despite Chvez's increasing reliance on these
constituents as his most unshakeable support base, the comforts of power have led some
Chavistas to reassert Marxist orthodoxy in a way that echoes elite denigration of the horde
and the scum.4 However, the economic exclusion of barrio residents and informal laborers
from the sphere of production and its concomitant struggles has led many of these urban poor
to seek refuge in struggles located instead on the political and territorial levels, struggles that
the Chvez government resists or dismisses only at its own peril.

Lumpen? Me?
As is often the case, it was the enemies of the Bolivarian Revolution who brought a necessary
debate most forcefully to the fore, one whose resolution bears at least the potential for
dialectical progress. Writing on the editorial page of El Nacional (known among detractors as
El Nazional) the day after this mass outpouring of support for Chvez and the Revolution on
October 13, from which we began this chapter, anti-Chavista journalist Miguel Enrique Otero
Silva, seething venomously at the display, sought to undermine the validity of that support in
the most ad hominem of ways by calling into question the very status of his objects as homini.
Those who had poured into the city center from the countryside and their advance posts in the
shantytowns were simultaneously opportunists and dupes, perennial bus riders willing to sell
their political loyalty for a trip to the capital, a bread roll and a flask of rum. Otero branded
his political opponents, these drunk, gullible hicks and hoodlums incapable of grasping either
the fineries of culture or the art of governing others, with the worst label he could muster: el

lumpen de siempre, the same lumpen as always.5 A political firestorm erupted, forcing El
Nacional to apologize (which is striking in a country in which the opposition press has felt
little need to apologize for seemingly more serious offenses).6 Chavistas had long been
accustomed to such pejoratives; rabble, mob, hordes, and scum, along with more
openly racial epithets, had long constituted arrows in the opposition's rhetorical quiver. Such
arrows, moreover, usually bounced effortlessly off the seemingly impenetrable armor of
reappropriation, rendered all the more impenetrable by the unity such attacks tend to generate.
Thus, when the opposition attacked the Chavista rabble (chusma), for example, Chvez's own
response was as unequivocal as it was unhesitating: Yes, we are the same rabble that
followed Bolvar!7
But whereas in other instances this homogenization by the enemy yielded an equal and
opposite closing of ranks by Chavistas, the accusation of being lumpen had touched a nerve,
and rather than prompting a unifying rallying cry, the controversy instead revealed deep
fissures within Chavismo and disagreements over which class was to lead the Revolution. As a
result, outrage took the form of two opposing responses: whereas some Chavistas sought to
reclaim the term as denominating a positive subject for historical action (We, the
lumpen), others rejected the very suggestion that such a label might apply at all (Lumpen?
Me?)?8 One explanation for this painful divergence toward the term lumpen is quite simple:
the truth hurts, and its pain varies directly according to its undeniability. While rabble,
mob, and scum are sufficiently vague to avoid their derogatory content, the term lumpen,
in contrast, seems to have a very precise content, especially among traditional Marxists. After
all, had not the Marx of the Communist Manifesto shielded the proletariat from the taint of
association with the mob by defining it as the heart of the future society in contrast to the
dangerous class of social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers
of the old society that might occasionally join the side of the revolution, but which is far more
likely to serve as a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue?9 And has not this very same class
come to increasingly constitute the Chavista base? Here of course there is more moralism than
conceptual precision, but in a society where Marx is on the tip of all tongues, such words are
painfully resonant.
Fanon's position on the lumpen was in some ways the inverse of his critique of the formal
working class of the colonies, and if his dismissal of the latter was poorly received by many on
the left, his analysis of the lumpen has become positively infamous (albeit largely through
deliberate misinterpretation). While Fanon was careful not to eulogize this species of
subhumans comprising the pimps, the hooligans, the unemployed, the petty criminalshe
did not transform an economic problem into the unambiguous heroic protagonist of national
liberation (this role he reserved for the peasantry)he nevertheless did insist on recognizing
both the undeniably structural origin and potentially progressive function of the lumpen within
a revolutionary situation. Possessing an instability matched only by desperation, this cohort
of starving men would serve as crucial fodder for either liberation or reaction, and if
anticolonial forces played their cards right, the lumpen might even furnish the urban
spearhead of the struggle, reclaiming their humanity in the process.10 But is this the same
lumpen of which Otero speaks and which Chavistas alternatively embrace or deny? Do the
poor residents of the barrios of Venezuela, and Caracas in particular, reflect Fanon's analysis
in their origins, their class composition, and above all in their potential for revolutionary

political action?

Who Has the Most Chains?

As I have suggested above, the residents of Venezuela's sprawling shantytowns emerged in
many ways from the very same forces Fanon identified in colonial Algeria, namely, dependent
development and the resulting exodus from the rural areas and concentration in the capital in
search of opportunity. This process of urban macrocephaly, moreover, would only be
exacerbated by Venezuela's reliance on oil, an economic resource which, if its benefits are to
reach the population at all, requires a necessarily political disbursement and thereby further
concentrates opportunity in the capital.11 But if Fanon's category of the lumpen accurately
reflects the origins of many barrio-dwellers, what about their class makeup? Here there is far
more multiplicity than mere pimps and hustlers, but I also suspect that Fanon's openly
provocative description did not accurately describe the makeup of those masses concentrated
in the outskirts of Algiers, either. Rather, I take his provocative description of the lumpen as
simultaneously constituting a location, a condition, and a practice: a vast gray area at the
margins of the city, the margins of respectable society, the margins of the economy, and the
margins of the law. Unsurprisingly, then, these semiurban, poor barrio residents once were
dismissed as marginals, as an unfortunate exteriority, a frightening, liminal presence, there
but not there. Embedded within this phrase was more than a bit of elite contempt and liberal
guilt, both of which seek to cleanse wealthy hands of all responsibility for the poverty
surrounding their urban citadels. But how marginal are they in reality?
Anyone who rides the Caracas Metro at six o'clock in the morning, as I once was
accustomed to doing, will observe yet another peculiar migratory phenomenon whereby the
city is drawn together into something approaching a single and unified whole. But it is not
wealthy elites that carry out this seemingly Herculean task of unifying the two Venezuelas,
one that we associate with the coordinating functions of the managerial class. Rather, it is the
poor and largely informal working class that coordinates the city, moving west to east on tired
feet to provide the reproductive labor, services, and circulation of goods that sustain the city's
operations. The wealthy, needless to say, rarely make this pilgrimage in reverse; hysterical fear
prevents them from climbing the steep hills into the barrios (this lack of firsthand knowledge
does not prevent many from spouting their opinions of the barrios, however). If Marx and
Gyorgy Lukcs after him insisted that only the proletariat was capable of grasping the totality
of the capitalist system, we might say in a similar way that it is only this quasi-lumpen barrio
dweller who can grasp the totality of Venezuela's lumpen-capitalism. Thus, if this lumpen is
frequently (although not entirely) absent from the sphere of production, this absence is more
than compensated for by its contributions to the remaining spheres of circulation (buying and
selling commodities) and reproduction (varieties of domestic labor and services), which are,
after all, prerequisites to capital accumulation.12 Given the general invisibility of domestic
work (see also chapter 5), the most visible form of this contribution tends to be in the sphere of
circulation as either street vendors (buhoneros) or their mobile counterparts, the motorizados
(motorcycle couriers), who literally circulate constantly throughout the city and whose
unpredictable mobility strikes fear into the heart of the wealthy.
As the integration of these groups within the economic system and the manifold ways in

which their activities contributed to capitalist accumulation became undeniably clear, the
term marginals gave way to the more accurate but not unequivocal phrase informal labor. 13
According to some estimates, informal workers, or those excluded from modern capitalist
relationswhich must survive through unregulated work and direct subsistence activities,
ballooned after the dismantling of state-led import-substitution industrialization programs and
now constitute the numerically most important segment of the employed population in Latin
America.14 In the wake of Carlos Andrs Prez's neoliberal reform package and the Caracazo
it provoked, Masses of peasants migrated to the cities, real wages dropped substantially, and
the informal sector ballooned. In just three years 600,000 people migrated to the cities. The
campesino labor force, rural peasants and farmers, shrank by 90 percent. The proportion of
workers in the informal sector rose from 34.5 percent in 1980 to 53 percent in 1999. The
industrial labor sector decreased.15 When combined with the ranks of the formally
unemployed, this figure reaches well over half of the active population, with fewer than 20
percent of the population as a whole employed in the formal sector. These informal laborers
are overwhelmingly women and include a sizeable segment of downwardly mobile former
middle class.16 In the period of economic stability following the 2002 coup and oil lockout, this
trend was reversed slightly, and recent statistics suggest a rate of informal employment of 43.5
percent.17
In response to this growing predominance of the urban informal sector and its relative
homogeneity of economic condition, some, like Portes and Hoffman, speak of a new category
entirely: the informal proletariat. While certainly better than marginals, this attempt to
maintain the dignity of proletariat while escaping the indignity of lumpen nevertheless
abandons the potent indictment contained within the latter. On the one hand, this concept risks
neglecting and even naturalizing the perversity of economic structures and processes that
generate the lumpen in the first place: as Gunder Frank powerfully insists, it is not the poor
who are lumpen, but the entirety of the system of lumpendevelopment. In this sense,
informal seems to be a weak stand-in for illegal, and yet it is illegalityhere stripped of
its pejorative contentthat best characterizes many aspects of informal labor and barrio life:
from openly criminal activities associated with the black market and smuggling to the more
mundane illegality of the buhoneros' occupation of public space and illegal use of electricity.
The key is to grasp the two-sidedness of this illegality, which results in equal part from the
capitalist need to circulate goods and from the preference for an underpaid and unprotected
workforce, and this generalized situation of illegality, this broad grey area at the margin of the
law, is visible not only in the number of informal workers, but also in political phenomena
such as corruption, in which an entire political system operates outside the law.18
On the other hand, we also risk losing sight of the fact that this two-sidedness constitutes
informal workers as well, giving rise to what Fanon sees as the central characteristic of the
lumpen: a political instability driven, at least in part, by a situation of economic precarity.
When seen historically, this instability, rather than a negative or pejorative marker, should
remind us that in recent decades the informal sector, the poorest of the poor in Venezuela and
Latin America as a whole, have behaved in a far more revolutionary fashion than their more
nominally working class counterparts. If the politically salient questions are, Who has the
most chains? or, Who has the least to lose? then events from January 23, 1958, to the Caracazo
to April 13, 2002, should give us a clear enough answer: informal and lumpen sectors have

long been at the forefront of Venezuela's most radical and militant struggles. In the early years
of Venezuelan democracy, it was the unemployed workers who first tasted the repression of
the Betancourt regime while Betancourt's union thugs jealously guarded the privileges of
formal workers. But the arguably vanguard role of lumpen sectors was most visible during
the Caracazo: in the words of Nora Castaeda, it was so-called malandros, the street
criminals, who defended the unarmed peoplethe street criminals, not the leftist parties, were
the ones who confronted the army. 19 In more recent years, moreover, this same sector has
come to provide not only the support base for Chvez and the Bolivarian Revolution, but also
its most intransigently radical leadership. From the popular militias growing organically from
the struggle against barrio violence to Lina Ron's Venezuelan Popular Unity ( UPV), which has
consistently represented the demands of informal workers, this has been a sector that not only
has supported Chvez but pushed him further, faster, and in more radical directions: the
metaphorical whip of the revolution.
Finally, it is this sectorfrom motorizados to buhonerosand its armed components that
provide the only guarantee for Chvez's persistence in power because it was they who took to
the streets in a show of force on April 13, 2002, to demand his return. 20 It was even the poor
residents of the ostensibly nonpoliticized barrio of Petare in eastern Caracas that stormed the
state television station, bringing it back on the air to inform the country of the coup, rallying
Chvez' supporters to successfully demand his return.21 But for Fanon, this tendency toward
extremism in the name of the revolution has as its counterpart the possibility for a swing
toward the same extremism in the name of counter-revolution and reaction, and this danger is
lost in the label informal proletariat. Here, the experience of the barrio militias is instructive
as well; Juan Contreras told me of many former comrades who went over to the other side,
transitioning from armed resistance against the drug trade to active participation in it. But
what much of the moralistic Marxist dismissal of the so-called lumpen refuses to recognize is
thatas C. L. R. James arguedthis dual nature extends even the traditional industrial
working class, explaining its manifest propensity toward both revolution and reaction.

Barrio Culture
As this example suggests, political instability does not derive mechanically from objective
class structures, from the distance that separates informal laborers from the means of
production. As struggles shifted to the community level during the 1970s and 1980sstruggles
for public services and against the drug tradedifferences vis--vis the means of production
tended to melt away. Regardless of where people worked and in what capacity, they needed to
come home, needed to walk the streets safely, needed running water and spaces for sports and
cultural activities, and these shared needs and the struggles they generated gave rise to a sort of
barrio consciousness and barrio culture. While Marx would not have been sympathetic to such
an idea, it nevertheless shares some elements with his description of the proletariat, whose
class consciousness grows in part from its physical concentration (unlike the dispersed and
therefore idiotic peasantry). It was this element that allowed C. L. R. James to describe the
Haitian slaves, working and living together in gangs of hundreds on the huge sugar factories,
as being closer to a modern proletariat than any group of workers in existence at the time.22
Should we be surprised to find political consciousness and spontaneous organizational capacity

sprouting up from the fertile concentration of millions into the Venezuelan barrios?
Here, rural community traditions both remain and are transformed in yet another challenge
to Rgis Debray's dismissive phenomenology of the abstraction and the corruption of the city.
Here hervidos are cooked collectively over open flames, with communal drinking rituals and
even a gossipy culture that many describe as a vestige of life in the pueblo; the colloquial
refrain pueblo pequeo, infierno grande, or small town, big hell, that refers to the nosy
neighbors and prying eyes of the countryside is frequently deployed in the barrios as well,
where such intimate relations remain on a block-to-block basis. This barrio culture,
coagulating in those moments of rest in the human flows that unite the city, cuts against the
purported class pathologies of the lumpen, generating a community of vecinos, or neighbors,
where economic structures and violence press toward atomization.23 It was into precisely these
countervailing pressures of violence and community that many militia groupings intervened in
an effort to regenerate the cultural fabric of barrio communities. Furthermore, some have
observed in the physical appearance of the barrios a powerful expression of human creativity
and the self-activity of their poor residents, evocatively describing the constantly shifting
geography of shantytowns in the following terms:
It is creation.
It is urgency.
It is the unprecedented.
It is surprise.
It is the humility of the worker who is constantly constructing.
It is making a world in which to live, in which to take refuge.
It is putting brick upon brick, sheet to sheet, until arriving at who knows where24

Class consciousness and culture thus emerge in a spatial and geographic aspect and are
transformed in the process, sometimes intermingling with and sometimes plainly overruled by
geographical concentration. But barrio culture also explains in part the peculiar way in which
these actors have expressed themselves in action; class demands have been subsumed to
territorial, neighborhood demands that manifest, above all, politically. This tendency, what
former guerrilla Klber Ramrez termed the social homogenization of the barrio, is pushed
by both internal and external barriers that make organizing informal workers according to
strictly economic demands difficult.25
On the one hand, informal workers (as well as the unemployed and peasants, for example)
have been excluded systematically from most labor unions, thereby blocking strictly economic
outlets for their demands. The collapse of the Venezuelan Workers' Confederation ( CTV) and
its replacement by the National Workers' Union ( UNT)a radical union confederation that at
least claimed it would incorporate informal workersinitially seemed to bode well for the
unity of economic struggles, but despite such initial good intentions, partisan bickering has
trumped the important work of building a union movement from below that would include
all oppressed workers. According to Kiraz Janicke and Federico Fuentes, the UNT, like the CTV
before it, has largely avoided any attempt to organize workers in the informal sector, focusing
overwhelmingly on the demands of the most privileged layer of Venezuelan workers, which
has led to a disjuncture between the organized trade union movement and the masses of poor

Venezuelans who form the backbone of the Bolivarian revolution. 26 On the other hand,
however, there are also internal barriers to organizing informal workers as a strictly economic
force. Namely, when one operates in the realm of pure circulationas do buhonerosis there
any exploiter other than the global market itself against which to organize and make claims? In
the end, demandsfor greater protections, for public services, for recognition as workers, and
for social securityare directed toward (and occasionally against) the state, rendering them
more political than economic.27
Economic organizations of informal workers have indeed emerged, notably the powerful
United Federation of Non-Dependent and Similar Workers of Venezuela, which was founded in
1992 and claims some seventeen thousand affiliates.28 But, given this dual difficulty, it should
not be surprising when the modes of organization expressing the demands of the informal
sector assume political and geographical forms rooted in barrio culture.29 From the early
popular assemblies that blossomed in the run-up to and immediate aftermath of the Caracazo,
to the Patriotic Circles and later Bolivarian Circles, to today's communal councils, these have
been the mechanisms of choice for many informal workers in Venezuela.

Buhoneros and the Revolution

In the years following the lumpen controversy sparked by Otero's El Nacional editorial, such
struggles would increasingly come to center on a single figure: the buhonero. Although this
oft-maligned street vendor has been identified according to economic function, both the
attacks on buhoneros and their chosen mode of self-defense have leaned toward broader
political claims regarding public space and the imperative need to confront the phenomenon of
lumpendevelopment in a systematic manner. As this controversy has developed and deepened,
the Chavista government has experienced the double-edged blade of the lumpen that, if not
handled properly, threatens to cut into the hands of those who seek to wield it. In recent years,
it has become clear that those very same Chavistas who would have rejected the label
lumpen for themselves when it came from the opposition were surprisingly willing to apply
this weapon of elite derision to others, and specifically to the buhoneros.
According to radical Chavista Reinaldo Iturriza Lpez, the buhoneros, like their mobile
counterparts, the motorizados, are political subjects that have played a decisive and
determinant role in the toughest moments of political confrontation and yet are seen
disdainfully by those who participate, shall we say, in formal politics. While there is some
truth to critiques of the buhoneros, Iturriza insists on engaging in an exercise in historical
memory: these same buhoneros who are attacked for their lack of political consciousness and
individualism, according to Iturriza, were on the front lines of the struggle against the 2002
coup, also playing an economic role in breaking the oil lockout through their commercial
activities. I will go even further, he adds. How many of the first victims of the Carmona
dictatorship [during the 2002 coup] were not buhoneros from central Caracas, repressed in
blood and fire by the Metropolitan Police? Without a doubt, some of the first street combat
against the dictatorship, on April 12, was led by the people/buhoneros.30 In 2005 and 2006, the
phenomenon of informal capitalism was at its peak; the walking boulevards of Sabana Grande
and Chacaito were choked with stalls whose occupants hawked clothing, DVDs, and other
wares, the buhoneras, or knick-knacks, from which the name derives. For a time it seemed as

if the Chvez government would tolerate this quasi-illegality that was the product of economic
structures rather than individual predilection, the product of lumpendevelopment rather than
the so-called lumpens themselves. After all, the revolutionary Constitution of 1999 clearly
enshrines the right to work and declares the promotion of employment to be an obligation of
the state (Article 87), although this right is mitigatedas was the case with land
expropriationsby the qualifier productive. In recent years, however, as the buhonero
controversy deepened, the interpretation of this phrase has become a point of sharp
disagreement.
Beginning as early as 2004, local governments began to resist the spread of street vendors
and, even more controversially, began to physically remove stalls from densely packed or
politically contested areas. This was particularly controversial because the deployment of
(historically despised) police against street vendors had previously been a tactic of wealthy
elites seeking to ethnically cleanse the poor from their sphere of control, as with the 1998 ban
on the informal economy in Chacao, the wealthy center of Caracas, which effectively sought to
outlaw an entire class of people.31 It was no surprise, therefore, that when Chavista officials
took up the battle against the buhoneros, presenting it as a struggle for access to public space,
the response was spontaneous but determined resistance that revealed the lines of force
economic as well as politicalbehind the controversy. Serious conflicts began to surface
between the heavily Chavista street vendors and Freddy Bernal, then mayor of western
Caracas; in December, arguably under pressure from business interests whose Christmas
profits were undercut by cheaper wares on the street, Bernal deployed the hated Metropolitan
Police in an effort to clear buhoneros from the street, prompting clashes that left dozens
injured.32 To the undiscerning eye, this must have looked like the Caracazo all over again.
While Bernal was allegedly scolded by Chvez and some officers were disciplined, tensions
continued to rise, with sporadic clashes and shootouts marring Bernal's desalojos, or evictions
of informal workers.
At one such clash in Vargas State, Lina Ron's UPV stepped forward as the most vociferous
defender of the informal sector, from which its militant ranks tended to be drawn, thereby
bringing Ron into direct conflict with local Chavista leaders such as Bernal and Vargas Mayor
Alexis Toledo (a Chavista closely tied to the official Tupamaro Party). Ron, who had been
disparaged before her recent death as the commander of delinquents (jefa de los malandros)
and the hope of the prostitutes, can collectors, and beggars, was perhaps the single public
figure most directly associated in the popular imaginary with the lumpen masses.33 Ron
knew the life of informal labor from harsh experience, and her politicization came through the
Popular Struggle Committees (see chapter 2), legal mass fronts through which the oncerevolutionary Bandera Roja sought to connect to the barrios (Ron insists that she was only a
member when Bandera was Bandera).34 When the buhoneros in Vargas sought to block the
streets in protest of efforts to remove them, the UPV stepped in to help, prompting conflict with
local police and even the Tupamaros that resulted in gunfire, one death, and the arrest of nine
UPV supporters. Amid the melee, an old woman dressed in Chavista red reputedly turned a
traditional slogan of the poor majority into a threat aimed at the local mayor (and possibly
even at Chvez himself): Nosotros te pusimos, nosotros te quitamos , she shouted, we put
you [in power] and we can take you out.35 Thus, revolutionary organizations and institutional
structures intermingle and clash in the frequently disorienting whirlwind that is the

Venezuelan war of position; the desalojos and the resistance that almost inevitably greets them
continues to the present.36
During the buhonero controversy, in which Chavista leaders mimicked their elite
counterparts by banishing the informal economy from the streets, I made a habit of asking my
students at the Planning School what they thought of buhoneros. They are criminals, some
would say. They are capitalists, others would add, echoing the traditional Marxist critique of
the lumpen as aspiring petty bourgeoisie: they would own twenty stalls and exploit workers if
they could.37 But in a city like Caracas I would inevitably have students who had been
buhoneros and who would attempt to defend themselves by presenting it as merely a job like
any other and, above all, as the only possible response to a situation of economic necessity. For
example, Gonzalo Gmez places the onus for solving what is a social problem squarely on the
government while recognizing the distortions embedded within the informal economy, by
which he means its tendency toward a capitalist consciousness and criminal practices. Chavista
leaders, both nationally and locally, have lacked a policy to combat this, appealing to the
democratic organization of the buhoneros, choosing instead to ignore the problem until the
only remaining solution is physical eviction. This is not the way to resolve problems, Gmez
insists, arguing instead for attacking the capitalist and corrupt elements that exist within this
sector, fighting for leadership, and opening up alternatives in the social economy for these
sectors.38
While it is true that the Bolivarian government is ultimately responsible for treating the
effects of lumpendevelopment, I want to go one step further to argue that the vanguard position
played thus far by the buhoneros and the lumpen more generally is no accident, but is instead
precisely the result of this strategic position this massive class currently holds in Venezuelan
society. Their overwhelming numbers, their high degree of mobility, their necessarily political
demands, and their location in the bustling streets of the capital make this a class that, if
pushed toward revolution, is capable of providing more than merely the spearhead foreseen
by Fanon. In fact, just as the barrios express this dual consciousness and potential for creative
self-activity in their physical being, Roland Denis insists on the potential for radical
consciousness among the informal workers, those millions of persons who, as a result of
forced immigration from the countrysidehave been left only the street as their space, a
forcible relocation of politics best expressed in the Caracazo. These nomad workers, landless,
nationless, and jobless are the most genuine product of capital's global chaos and
possibly its most genuine gravediggers as well.
But many Chavistas have failed to recognize either the structural origins of the lumpen or its
explosive potential, opting instead for the language of accusationblaming the pariah for
their own condition, the poor for their poverty and repeating the old nonsense of: Long live
the working class! Down with the lumpen! Bolivarian socialism has, through its
spokespeople, decided brilliantly in Caracas to exclude from its project half of the country's
workers, including women and men who have at times been those who have risked their skin
when it was time to defend this revolutionBullets for the people, long live the revolution!39
Making pariahs of the buhoneros by excluding them from the revolutionary process will only
lead to a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy whereby the negative potential of their consciousness
will win out over the positive and economic mafias will gladly fill the space left by political
exclusion (and here Denis and Iturriza echo Fanon).40 For Denis, we must

take advantage of this reality of nomadism, to rummage through its garbage and its asphalt and cement world, betting
that we might discover within it a new and unknown revolutionary miracleNomad Communitiesthe capitalist
world, just as it invades, expropriates, and exploits the creative qualities of human beings for its advantage and profit,
also generates the conditions for a rebellious and anti-capitalist subjectivity which is the basis for its own demise.
Might there be something of this in our streets, so full of reggaeton, robberies, garbage, violence, disregard,
irresponsibility, individualism, and all types of mafias?

It was this very same wager on the revolutionary potential of the Venezuelan massesdriven
as much by revolutionary hope as by an acute recognition of the failures of the guerrilla war
that had driven Denis and others to sink their roots into the barrios in the first place,
contributing to the Caracazo and crucially making possible all that has come since. It is this
perspective that the Bolivarian leadership neglects at its own peril.
Denis proposes a concrete model of Communal Councils of the Street, which echoes what
we heard from Liborio Guarulla, the indigenous governor of Amazonas (see chapter 6):
representative institutions must respond to human geography, moving where people move and
adapting spatially to the constituents in question. Indeed, this sort of fluid democracywhat
Lina Ron referred to as direct elections in the streets41was expressed in a powerfully
concentrated form in the Caracazo and on April 13, 2002. But its institutionalization into
directly democratic institutions radicalizes thinkers like Marta Harnecker, who envisions a
proliferation of councils across all branches of production and circulation alongside thematic
councils of women, students, the elderly, and the disabled, among others. 42 This aspiration has
also been visible in the recent street action of the newly formed Settlers' Movement
(Movimiento de Pobladores), which has stirred controversy by participating in takeovers of
idle land in Caracas, prompting Chvez to meet with the organization and make some
declarations in favor of squatting that shocked moderate Chavistas.43 Just as the buhoneros
demand an access to public space that reflects their economic centrality, so too do these new
settlers bring the spatial demands of the barrios into the heart of the opposition-controlled
zones of the capital. But in line with all the other movements we have discussed, Iturriza
correctly warns radical Chavistas that this and other victories were won in the streets, not in
the halls of power.44
Writing from Venezuela, the Canadian economist Michael Lebowitz identifies a new
revolutionary specter haunting Latin America, but he is quick to clarify what this specter is
not: this specter is not a focus upon the industrial working class as the revolutionary subjects
of socialism, a privileging whereby all other workers (including those in the growing informal
sector) are seen as lesser workers, unproductive workers, indeed lumpenproletariat. Nor does it
suggest that those industrial workers by virtue of the difference between their productivity
with advanced means of production and their incomes (i.e., the extent of their exploitation)
have a greater entitlement to the wealth of society than the poor and excluded.45 Nothing
could be as dangerous for the Bolivarian government as clinging to old Marxist dogmas and
neglecting the fact that its own success came only as the result of the desperate and decisive
action of these so-called lumpen de siempre.

Conclusion. Dual Power against the Magical State

Dispersed people, dispersed hearts,
dispersed struggles, let us find the reasons
Why not unite, if the rifle and the gospel
have already united in Camilo's hands?
I ask, I ask, why do we divide ourselves,
if this only makes our enemies happy?
Why do we insist on isolating our struggles,
the struggles that should lead us to final victory?
Al Primera

In many ways, this people's history has been a history of the dispersal of a people: the failure
of the Venezuelan guerrilla war, a struggle that represented the people in its aspirations but
never in its constituency, led to a dispersal of popular forces. This dispersal then gave rise to a
period in which a multiplicity of movements and struggles developed autonomously across
Venezuelan society, in factories, barrios, schools, homes, parties, and a multitude of
revolutionary organizations and political formations. However, while this period of dispersal
and autonomous development has been crucial to the consolidation of Afro, indigenous, and
women's identities, few would consider this dispersal of the movement to be an unambiguously
positive development, an end in itself. Thus, although I disagree with Primera's suggestion that
any division of the struggle necessarily constitutes a weakness, and certainly with the idea that
there might be such a thing as a final victory, I nevertheless take his point that these
dispersed struggles must ultimately seek some sort of reunification if any victory is to be won.
After all, reunification of the struggle is also a part of this history, as those many dispersed and
diverse movements were eventually bound together in an explosive chain of events: the
Caracazo, the pair of failed coups in 1992, and Chvez's election in 1998. This reunification,
moreover, was more than the mere negation of their dispersal, marking instead a clear
dialectical progression: the movements of today are much more powerful and developed than
they would have been had they not dispersed in the first place.
Nevertheless, I wonder how to square Al Primera's lamentation of dispersal with, for
example, Ral Zibechi's recent insistence on dispersing power. Reflecting on recent
rebellions in the Bolivian community of El Alto, the radical Uruguayan theorist argues for the
construction of a non-state power that, in its horizontalism and absence of institutions,
leadership, and singular logics, disperse[s] the state without re-creating it.1 Do Primera and
Zibechi stand fundamentally opposed to one another on the question of how to create
revolutionary change? Would Primera allow any dispersal of forces in the present? Would
Zibechi see the struggle of the future as requiring any reunification of our power at all? For
Enrique Dussel, the dissolution of the state (what Zibechi calls the dispersal of power) is
much like the classless societya normative postulate that serves to orient our strategy for the
present.2 But he insists that a grave error is committed when we confuse or substitute that
ideal, that ultimate horizon toward which we aim, for strategy itself, deeming the destruction

of the state our immediate task in the present. The mortal danger posed by such an error can be
seen in the position that some contemporary anarchists assume toward the process underway in
Venezuela: blinded by the perceived need to destroy the state now, they fail to see the
revolutionary forest for the trees. Prioritizing our ultimate aims in the present can lead to a
blindness to how it is that revolutionary change occurs and how it has been occurring in
Venezuela. Rather than the revolution underway in Venezuela, then, some see merely the
continuity of the state, of corrupt institutions, of charismatic leaders. It is in contrast to this
viewthe blind insistence that all power must be immediately dispersed in the here and now
that Primera describes his people as
Wood fragrant of jasmine and coffee,
precious wood, precious wood,
wood of hope, wood of song.
Let us make this wood into a hand
to strike powerfully at those who forever
strike, strike, strike at us.

In other words, we must first strategically accumulate, consolidate, and develop our own power
if we are ever going to be in a position to disperse the power of our enemies later. Lest this
distinction provoke anxiety (as I am certain it will), I will be clear: this is not a question of
putting off the real revolution until later or of accepting institutions as is for the present,
but of insisting on the need to understand the accumulation of forces as a revolutionary
alternative.
How do we build this other power, and what does it look like? As I have shown in the
chapters comprising this study, the initial unification of revolutionary forces in the years
leading up to Chvez's election certainly emerged around the image of Chvez, the concept of
the pueblo, and the Constitution that later emerged at the intersection of the two. All three of
these can be understood as what Ernesto Laclau calls empty signifiers, sufficiently vacant
vessels in which to deposit revolutionary aspirations and focal points around which power can
be consolidated.3 But there is more to it than that. The years since Chvez's election, during
which this unification has turned to development and accumulation of forces, a deepening of
popular power, have seen a process closer to what Dussel, following Boaventura de Sousa
Santos, calls dialogue and translation, in which the constituent elements of the Chavista bloc
have learned from one another and translated their struggles into mutually legible terms,
yielding an increased understanding of the intersecting function of race, gender, and class
oppressions.4 Female organizers have increasingly recognized that poor women of color bear
the brunt of neoliberalism, Afro and indigenous Venezuelans have sought to hammer out a
long-awaited if still preliminary alliance around questions of land, students have come to
understand that an entire society exists beyond university walls, and aging guerrillas and their
contemporary progeny let slip their vanguardist tendencies and begin to learn all of these
lessons at once.
But, as previous chapters have shown, such dialogue and translation are rarely undertaken
voluntarily by those occupying positions of relative privilege. Thus, alongside dialogue and
translationand indeed as a fundamental component of thesewe have witnessed a process of
combat whereby some groups and movements, notably women and Afro-Venezuelans, have

issued strong demands and even ultimatums that force such translation to occur. This intrarevolutionary conflict, this dialectic within a dialectic that occasionally proceeds by blows, has
proven fundamental to the unification of the pueblo, far more so than the image of the great
leader fetishistically exaggerated by the foreign and opposition press. If anything, this process
has gradually filled the empty signifier that is Hugo Chvez with an increasingly definite
content as the revolutionary movements discussed in previous chapters have pushed him
radically to the left. This history of struggle is the best vaccine against the very real tendency
toward homogenization that mutes controversial demands in an effort not to rock the Chavista
boat; for Afro-Venezuelan organizers, taking the risk of rocking that boat has paid off in the
past, and this lesson has not been lost. But if this internal process, whereby revolutionary
forces draw closer to and are interwoven with one another like the rifle and the gospel of the
revolutionary Colombian priest Camilo Torres, is a fundamental one, we must now turn to the
broader question at hand. How does this consolidated and unified bloc, this newly radicalized
people, relate to its enemies and, more generally, to the state?

Shattering State Magic

This has been a history of struggle, failure, and yet more struggle. This struggle has been both
for and against the state, undertaken largely by those with a healthy skepticism toward that
state, skepticism earned by decades of struggle that could only be against, and tempered only
slightly by, the recent suggestion that this against might also be a for: for the strategic use of
elements of the state, for the creation of an alternative, for the ultimate deconstruction of the
state apparatus as a whole. Thus, without this being a history of the state per se and despite my
insistence on crafting a history from below that is embodied in an alternative power, this
history inevitably draws the question of the state into its consideration. As should by now be
clear, few Venezuelan revolutionaries of the past fifty years have approached the state with the
simplistic goal of seizing power: such Winter Palace schemas have long since expired,
albeit not without leaving behind a rancid and pernicious residue. This is not, however, a
history of evading power, evading the state, and attempting to change the world by doing
anything possible but touching that negative talismanic force that is the state.
I have attempted to avoid these twin fetishes by consciously centering the histories and
voices of those whose struggle has been generally located outside the traditional halls of power
and its commanding heights, voices that have transitioned only recently from outright
opposition to such power to a more complex dialectic with the constituted power of the state
and its institutions. But this does not, has not, and cannot lead to a neglect of the question of
the nature of the state in general and the Venezuelan state in particular, and once we turn to
this issue, we find some justification for the skeptical, anarchist position: this is not just any
state, but, as in the late Fernando Coronil's seminal phrase, it is a magical state. In his selfprofessed attempt to diagnose the deification of the state in twentieth-century Venezuelan
history, Coronil's task shared much with my own objective of diagnosing and resisting the
fetishism of the state (and of Chvez the man) that accompanies much discussion of
contemporary Venezuela. 5 But Coronil admitted that this task required that he look at
Venezuelan history from the top, and that if he himself became trapped in such a top-down
perspective, subordinated sectors might be excluded from view or remain shadowy figures

in the background.6
For Coronil, the state's magic derives from its power to disburse what is contained in the
subsoil over which it claims legitimate authority: oil. But if we are to avoid becoming trapped
in the view from above, we must ask, What has been the response from below, from the
subordinated sectors, to this oil-lubricated state magic? After all, was it not the insistence
that the oil belongs to the Venezuelan people that unleashed the Caracazo? As Coronil himself
observed, the doubling of domestic gasoline prices in February 1989 shattered the bond that
united the body politic as the collective owner of the nation's natural body and thereby
ruptured a moral bond of protection between state and people.7 In other words, just as oil
grounded the magic of the state and its mythical bond with the people, so too did it
simultaneously threaten that bond. Unfortunately, as though a prisoner to the very magic he
sought to debunk, Coronil could view the 1989 rebellion only as an unmitigated tragedy in
the terms of Walter Benjamin's angel of history: the nation divided, polarized between rich
and poor, he could perceive only wreckage upon wreckagecatastrophe. 8 Coronil remained
mesmerized by the object of his analysis; seeing from above, he could only mourn.
But what of those people who hurled themselves into the streets in late February 1989? In
the repression that followed, there was, of course, tragedy, but there was also much more than
that. As Coronil had himself recognized in an earlier coauthored piece, the Caracazo shook
assumptions concerning the relationship between civilization and barbarism, leader and
pueblo, and state and citizen that have ordered populist discourse.9 In other words, popular
rebellion and constituent explosion have the potential to fundamentally transform and
challenge the very foundations of the state itself, its magic.10 Fanon, too, was concerned with
the conservatizing magic of the national state, but his answer to the magicians came
resolutely from below, from the sort of mass action exemplified in the Caracazo: Enlightened
by violence, the people's consciousness rebels against any pacification. The demagogues, the
opportunists and the magicians now have a difficult task. The praxis which pitched them into a
desperate man-to-man struggle has given the masses a ravenous taste for the tangible. Any
attempt at mystification in long term becomes virtually impossible.11 As the Caracazo has
shown more clearly than any other moment in recent Venezuelan history, popular rebellion is
entirely capable of shaking off such illusions, but this potential is only visible from below. It is
only by retelling history from below that we can come to terms with the undeniable reality of
recent Venezuelan history: rather than standing as barriers to the transformation of Venezuelan
society, the sorts of polarization that Coronil mourned in the aftermath of the Caracazo
between Chavistas and anti-Chavistas, revolutionaries and escualidos, or pueblo and
oligarquahave instead been the motor of such transformation through their inauguration and
deepening of oppositions. But the question of how to leverage popular rebellion against the
state while avoiding the hypnotic effects of its magic remains. What complexity is introduced
once we understand the president of the state himself is a result of these movements, this
rebellious history, especially the constituent explosion of the Caracazo? Can elements of the
state rebel against that state, devour and disperse it, if given sufficient support from that
outside and from below that constitutes the bulk of this history?

An Entirely Different Kind of Power

How to think about this newly reunited people that, after having dispersed in the failure of the
guerrilla struggle, came together not primarily to support Chvez's 1992 coup attempt, but
rather through the momentary flash of the Caracazo and the process of social polarization it
accelerated? How to conceive this alternative power that propelled Chvez to power in 1998
but that refused even then to lay down its arms, both metaphorical and material, as evidenced
by the events of April 2002? What concept both speaks to the existence of this power beyond
the state and attests to its continued function as lever or fulcrum to radically transform that
state?
I propose to speak of this reservoir of rebellious energy that exists outside, beyond, and
against the state according to Lenin's concept of dual power. 12 Writing to Pravda in early
1917 from the unprecedented and previously unforeseeable political crossroads of the brief
interregnum separating the February and October revolutions, Lenin spoke of the emergence of
an entirely different kind of power: alongside the Provisional Government of Kerensky, an
alternative government had emerged, a dual power (dvoevlastie) consisting of workers
councils (notably alongside armed peasants) positioned outside and against the existing state
structure.13 Here, dual power refers not only to the unstable situation of tense equilibrium
between this alternative structure and the traditional state but also to the second, nonstate, dual
power itself. It is the condensation of popular power from below into a radical pole that stands
in antagonistic opposition to the state but functions not as a vehicle to seize that state (unlike
Lenin's initial formulation), but instead as a fulcrum to radically transform and deconstruct it.
This alternative power is irrevocably marked by its situation, its dual-ness, and this is what
makes it entirely different: it is not and cannot be merely another power, but is instead
fundamentally a power-against-the-state.14 Dual power is, therefore, not a state of affairs but a
political orientation and the transformative institutions that uphold that orientation, and the
question in contemporary Venezuela is whether this orientation will expand or recede.
The relevance of the concept of dual power to contemporary Venezuela is no coincidence.
Lenin saw himself as fighting a war on two fronts against those opportunists who sought to
simply take control of the state and the anarchists who sought to avoid it at all costs, and his
response to each was clear: against the former he insisted that the ready-made state
machinery must be smashed and replaced, and against the latter he added the proviso that
the old state will be replaced for a time by a proletarian semi-state that must then wither
away.15 The dual power embodies this intermediary form: still an instrument of class power (a
state), but one oriented toward its own abolition. In today's Venezuela, the opponents are
largely the same: the opportunists are those conservative sectors of Chavismo that would
like nothing more than to become a new ruling class, whereas the anarchists are those who
mostly from a distancereject any dealings with the state as tainted a priori.16 In other words,
I speak of dual power because it points us in the right direction, toward the simultaneous
preservation and radicalization of the revolutionary process in Venezuela and the
transformation of that coercive apparatus generally bearing the name state. Moreover,
whereas some Chvez supporters simply hope for radicalization from above, my history attests
instead to the consolidation of a dual power as a fulcrum to force that radicalization from
below.
If dual power is oriented inherently toward its own abolition, this orientation is determined
both by the source of that power (the people, directly seizing from below) and the two concrete

mechanisms that made this dual power the same type as the Paris Commune. According to
Lenin, the two pillars of the bourgeois statethe bureaucracy and the militarywould be
replaced by new structures organically linked to this popular power, namely, autonomous,
armed councils directly comprising the people as a whole.17 In what follows, I track these three
components of the entirely different kind of power gestating in today's Venezuela. I describe
in broad strokes the development of the political (council) and military (militia) aspects of
dual power in Venezuela, showing first that these powers effectively predated the Bolivarian
Revolution proper. I then show, crucially, that rather than being uniformly seized from below,
these councils and militia structures are today constituted by a double-motion from below and
from above, existing at the intersection of a tense relationship with the state as both an
instance of popular powerthe result of the history I have told up to this pointand an
inherent danger to that very same power.
a power directly based on revolutionary seizure, on the direct initiative of the people from below, and not on a law
enacted by a centralized state power.18

There is no denying the role of the centralized state power in the Bolivarian Revolution, and
while this would seem to negate the applicability of Lenin's concept of dual power, I argue that
things are not so simple. The starting point for grasping this new and alternative power from
below is the history of the Venezuelan people itself. The failure of the guerrilla struggle and its
subsequent period of dispersal and recomposition has generated two organizational forms that
closely parallel Lenin's criteria for this new power: on a more (but not exclusively) military
level, the alienation of the guerrillas from the masses generated the phenomenon of armed
self-defense militias, whereas on a more (but not exclusively) political level, we have seen the
spontaneous appearance of self-governing barrio assemblies. Both of these forms emerged
organically from the ashes of past failures, thereby engendering what Lenin calls the direct
initiative of the people from below, and both were largely in place before Chvez's 1998
election. While most participants in both the barrio assemblies and the popular militias
supported to some degree the 1992 coup attempts and Chvez's electoral bid, few would be so
nave as to believe that the victory was complete in 1998 or even that the state had been
seized. Moreover, their cynicism derived not from some assessment of Chvez himself but
from the historic failures of guerrilla immediatism and the turn toward a more prolonged
struggle, one located largely on the hegemonic terrain.
However, what is crucial is that this cynicism was not transformed into the opposite error; as
Oswaldo, a veteran of the Venezuelan guerrilla struggle and himself no friend of state power,
cautions, we wouldn't want to compare Chvez to Kerensky. In other words, Chvez is not a
provisional leader to be deposed by the true revolutionaries but instead is an object of
hegemonic struggle to be won or lost, a microcosm of the state more generally. But, more
importantly, any stateparticularly the bloated and bureaucratic Venezuelan variantis far
too complex to simply be seized. If Latin American history tells us anything, it is that even
the instruments of force that uphold the state must also be subjected to hegemonic control if
counterrevolutionary coups are to be avoided. Rather than seizing the state, a strategic position
within the state apparatus has been occupied by an individual, Chvez, as an expression of this
alternative power from below. As the title of this book puts it, we created him.

Since 1998 we have witnessed a complex process in which Chvez himself has been
radicalized as a result of both pressure from below and the hostility with which he was
received, almost immediately, by the remnants of the old system. As he has become
increasingly radical, moreover, Chvez has intervened from above to facilitate the
development of this revolutionary dual power from below. In other words, as revolutionaries
have pressed on from below, the state has reached down from above, taking clear steps toward
the institutionalization of popular power, harnessing its powerful motor to the machinery of
the state. Unlike populisms past, however, and despite all the ambiguities and dangers that this
process entails, this harnessing is not done for the sake of the state itself, but frequently toward
its dissolution.
Venezuelan history, therefore, introduces a dialectical twist internal to Lenin's concept of
direct seizure of power from below. This twist is found in the interplay that I have been
tracking throughout this work: not only is power built and consolidated from below in an
orientation toward seizure, but that seizure itself becomes a process in which Chvez is
thrown forth as the result and partial expression of energies surging up from below and in
which he thereafter contributes to a top-bottom dialectic that transforms, decentralizes, and
begins to disperse state power. Here, ironically, and in contrast to traditional theories in
which sovereignty features as undivided, the enemythe utmost expression of state power that
becomes the target of revolutionary transformationis not the executive, not the president
himself, but rather a vast middle sector, a broad swath of the midlevel bureaucracy (as well as
local executives on the state and municipal levels) that, by dint of its tendencies toward inertia
and the power-sharing privileges it enjoys, has proven the most resistant to change.
Whereas the presence of direct from below institutionsbe they barrio councils or
popular militiaswas an undeniable fact by the mid-1990s, one that would testify to the
developing presence of those elements that Lenin associates with a radically dual power, the
dialectical torsion introduced into the first element, the concept of direct seizure, has had its
own implications for both the political and military institutions of this new power. Recent
years have seen the establishment of official communal councils and, more recently, of
official militias as the state has reached downward toward the institutionalization of energy
from below in both spheres. In both, elements of the traditional state apparatus have been
transformed and radicalized in ways that approximate, without ever constituting, a properly
alternative power while always simultaneously generating an ambiguous effect on
revolutionary movements.

The Explosion of Communal Power

Officialdom, the bureaucracy, are either similarly replaced by the direct rule of the people themselves or at least
placed under special control; they not only become elected officials, but are also subject to recall at the people's first
demandthey become workers of a special arm of the service, whose remuneration does not exceed the ordinary
pay of a competent worker.19

By 1992, barrio assemblies had emerged in close alliance with organizations like Popular
Disobedience, and they were joined by other organs of popular power with a scope that was
more national than local. First, after the failed coups of 1992, Patriotic Circles sprouted up as

vehicles for expressing the widespread rejection of the existing system and as an eventual
means of supporting Chvez's electoral campaign some years later. Around the drafting of the
new Constitution in 1999, these morphed into Bolivarian Circles whose professed objective
was to study the draft Constitution and work toward its approval in a national referendum.
While neither of these institutions were limited solely to these taskspopular power is often
as protean as it is powerfulthese were nevertheless popular council structures closely
associated with the radical left wing of the Chavista movement, to be joined later by such
instances as the Popular Revolutionary Assembly, which emerged around the 2002 coup and
birthed Aporrea.org.
In light of such powerful pressure toward radically democratic self-governance from below,
it was not much of a surprise when, in the aftermath of Chvez's landslide re-election in
December 2006, the Bolivarian Revolution took a radical turn toward popular power. The
enemies of the process had been soundly defeated in the 2002 coup and 2003 oil lockout, and
the 2006 election was but confirmation of an established fact. Moreover, with six years of
leadership ahead of him, Chvez enjoyed a brief respite from the demands of his allies,
allowing him to take serious steps against those corrupt bureaucrats within the Chavista ranks
who would halt the revolutionary process. In short, the way had been cleared for the deepening
and radicalization of the revolutionary process both within and outside of Chavismo. The
program for this radicalization was described in terms of the five motors driving the
revolution, the fifth and most substantial of which was dubbed the explosion of communal
power.20 This refers to the official establishment of local communal councils throughout
Venezuela, a process that began in earnest with the 2006 Law on Communal Councils, which
encouraged the proliferation of small, self-governing units throughout the country. 21 Within
one year, 18,320 communal councils had been established, and that number has since exceeded
40,000.22
According to the 2006 law, these councils seek to allow the organized people to directly
manage public policy and projects oriented toward responding to the needs and aspirations of
communities in the construction of a society of equity and social justice (Article 2). These
councils, moreover, are required to operate according to criteria that include mutual
responsibility, cooperation, solidarity, transparency, accountability, honesty, efficacy,
efficiency, social responsibility, social control, equity, and social and gender equality (Article
3), and they are broadly empowered to adopt those decisions essential to life in the
community (Article 6). In short, the communal councils embody one of Lenin's central
criteria for dual power, seeking to subject the official bureaucracy to the will of the people
through direct participation at the local level (and ultimately to replace that bureaucracy
entirely), and their directly democratic function is the first plank in this attack on the
bureaucracy. In addition, in line with Lenin's emphasis on revocable mandates and limited
wages, committee members of communal councils are elected, through the direct participation
of the community, to short, revocable terms of two years (Article 6), and all elected posts are
explicitly ad honorem, or unpaid (Article 12). The directly democratic nature of
participation in the councils coupled with the lack of remuneration for their elected leadership
militate against the corruption and bureaucratization of the councils themselves, thereby
making them a more stable and self-sufficient reservoir of dual power. Moreover, the capacity
of the councils to attack bureaucracy and corruption exceeds their own internal functioning,

extending as well to their capacity to supervise other levels of government: every council
elects a five-person committee for social oversight [contralora], which, in the words of
Lenin, places bureaucrats under special control on the national, regional, or municipal
level (Article 11). This authority therefore represents a powerful weapon against the corrupt
state and local bureaucracies that many hope the councils will eventually replace entirely.
The committee that authored the Law on Communal Councils was chaired by David
Velsquez, who was then a member of the Communist Party and was later named Minister of
Participation and Social Development. Velsquez sees in the councils the basis for the
revolutionary transformation of the state, arguing that what is sought is to transfer power and
democracy to organized communities to such a degree that the State apparatus would
eventually be reduced to levels that it becomes unnecessary. 23 Drawing directly and
consciously on the distinction between constituent and constituted powers, a distinction
that Chvez himself has cited on several occasions, Velsquez's justification for the councils
parallels this people's history by envisioning a dialectic between constituent and constituted
and a constant intervention by the constituent masses against sterile legality. 24 This
extralegal intervention of the constituent masses, which we have seen as clearly in 1989 as in
2002 and in many moments between and beyond, has largely been responsible for the
transformation of the Venezuelan state and the laws that ostensibly govern it. Here the
Constitution stands out above all else as embodying this dialectic: like Chvez, the new
Constitution was the result of popular power, and, like Chvez, it has since served as a foothold
for further advances, as we have seen clearly in the case of the women's and Afro-indigenous
movements.
In the case of the communal councils, the foothold in question comes through the vague
Constitutional enshrinement of the right to popular participation, a foothold that allowed for
the development of the councils. But this dialectic of popular power and the lawlike the
dialectic of revolution and the state more generallydid not cease with the 2006 Law on
Communal Councils. Rather, the law was recently amended (rewritten, really) on the basis of
accumulating experience with the councils, reflecting this relationship between constituent and
constituted even in the process whereby it was reformed. An initial draft revision of the law
was approved by the National Assembly in May 2009, which then was sent to the councils
themselves for discussion, debate, and consultation. It was only after this process, which
purported to include some 61,850 council spokespeople, that the final reform was approved in
November 2009. While some elements of the reform seem to be minor technicalities aimed at
improving the councils functioning and levels of participation, the most significant change
refers to the very status of the councils themselves. The reformed law, unlike the 2006
original, is an organic law that refers by definition to a fundamental power, and as a result the
councils now stand as a public power on par with any other.25
Beyond their strictly legislative aspect, the Communal Councils have come to embody in
many ways the conflicts and contradictions within the Bolivarian process as a whole. Against
those who dismiss the councils as mere appendages to a populist state, for example, Sara Motta
engages in a participatory analysis showing that popular subjectivity is capable of
transcending the merely legal enshrinement of the councils, and she quotes one early
participant: This process began as a decree. It is we who have made it real, have given it its
meaning and content, through our struggles, our mistakes, and our successes.26 This effort to

fill the councils with revolutionary content, however, has not been without its challenges,
coming from supporters as well as opponents of popular power. As Wilpert argues, a tendency
to problem solve from the top means that Chvez supporters in the communities, who have
been empowered by communal councils and worker-managed workplaces, end up in bitter
conflicts with state functionaries who try to implement the top-down directives from their
ministers, who get their directives from Chvez.27 This inherent challenge is more serious
from those who see the councils as a threat to their own power; Fernando, an organizer with the
Simn Bolvar Cultural Foundation in the 23 de Enero, expresses a common concern that
most mayors are playing too big a role in the creation of communal councils, trying to control
them.

Revolutionizing the Military

The replacement of the police and the army, which are institutions divorced from the people and set against the
people, by the direct arming of the whole people; order in the state under such a power is maintained by the armed
workers and peasants themselves, by the armed people themselves.28

While there was certainly resistance to the proposed communal councils from within the ranks
of Chavismo (notably by Planning Minister Jorge Giordani, who according to a ministry
official opposed the small scale of the councils), and while in practice this resistance was
coupled with that of even Chavista mayors and state governors who have found the incipient
councils a threat to their personal power quota, efforts to transform the military have proven
even more sharply controversial, and this controversy has swirled around one figure above all:
Alberto Mller Rojas. When I met the chain-smoking, retired general (who has since died), he
had recently been named the first vice-president of Chavez's United Socialist Party of
Venezuela ( PSUV), but this was a far cry from a year earlier, when Mller's relationship with
t he PSUV sparked a nationwide polemic regarding the status of the military. As ostensibly
apolitical members of society, Venezuelan soldiers and officers traditionally are not allowed
to join political parties, but in 2007, Mller spurned existing law by joining the PSUV while on
active military duty. Military neutrality, Mller argued, is a myth that only encourages
secret militancy (such as his own in earlier decades) that stands alongside professionalism as
twin pillars of reactionary military organization.29 Advocating recognition of the inherently
political role of the military alongside the development of a broad-based and popular militia
structure to offset military hierarchy, Mller urged that the upcoming process of constitutional
reform be used to clear the way for this new vision.30
Mller was promptly assailed by moderate Chavistas, who accused him of feeding into
opposition paranoia that the military was becoming increasingly politicized. What happened
next offers a rare window into the shadowy corridors of Venezuelan power: Chvez joined in
the attack on Mller, insisting on the apolitical and professional nature of the Venezuelan
military, and the impertinent general was duly ostracized from the president's inner circle for
daring to suggest the sort of militia structure that Chvez and so many other Venezuelan
officials had proposed in the past.31 But when Chvez's proposed constitutional reform
conformed almost point for point with Mller's arguments, it became clear that this attack on

Mller was merely a tactic to calm the nerves of the military hierarchy. Later defeated in the
December 2007 referendum, the proposed reform of Article 328 would have meant that the
military was no longer an explicitly apolitical institution, but instead patriotic, popular, and
anti-imperialist. Moreover, a reformed Article 329 would have converted the existing reserve
into a more institutionally powerful force referred to as the Bolivarian Popular Militias.32
Mller was quick to suggest that military pressure was behind Chvez's prevarications on
the matter, and it soon became clear just how right he was, as the intrigue did not end with
Mller's ironic ostracism. On November 4, less than a month before the constitutional reform
referendum, Chvez warned that someone might soon be saltando la talanquera, or
jumping the divider, between Chavismo and the opposition. Such a statement meant
something serious was afoot, but few understood just how serious. The next day, longtime
Chvez ally General Ral Baduel stunned the millions for whom he had come to represent the
epitome of loyalty: it was Baduel who spearheaded Chvez's return to power in 2002, yet now
he came out publicly against the president. According to Baduel, the 1999 Constitution was
sufficient and required no further reform. Whereas the function of constitutions, according to
Baduel's negative liberal view, is to limit and control power, the proposed 2007 reform
would consummate, in practice, a coup d'tat, shamefully violating the text of the
constitution. However, when Baduel called upon the military to profoundly analyze the
proposed text, he revealed his deeper motivations: the reform, he feared, would undermine the
professionalism and necessary verticalism of the traditional military hierarchy. Given such
concerns, many would rightly wonder if it was in fact Baduel who was behind Mller's
ostracism.
Mller didn't hesitate to hit back, accusing Baduel of fomenting support for a coup through
his declarations. But the most intriguing and revealing part of this long saga would not be
played out until Mller Rojas was invited to give his opinion on the Baduel affair on the VTV
evening program Contragolpe. Mller proceeded to explain that he had never considered
Baduel a committed revolutionary and that in the past he had criticized Baduel's policies as
defense minister, which, according to Mller, hindered the government's military-civilian
integration. The show then received an unexpected call from Chvez himself, publicly
thanking the retired general for the incisive advice he had always offered. This was a public
apology and an admission that Baduel had come between the president and Mller's proposed
radicalization of the military. History had effectively absolved Mller, which explains the very
different circumstances under which I met him.
While the proposed constitutional reform failed at the polls in December, the dialectic it had
unleashed arguably had deeper implications than even its passage would have. In a pattern we
have already seen played out with other radical voices within the Bolivarian Revolution,
Mller, a longtime Chvez confidant, was expelled from the president's inner circle only to be
brought back into the fold, and, more importantly, Badueland the hierarchical, professional
view of the military he advocatedwas out for good. The results were clear: on October 22,
2009, a reformed Organic Law of the Armed Forces, establishing Bolivarian militias, came
into effect only a month before the reformed Law of Communal Councils, the latter of which
tasks the councils with security and integral defense and links them directly with the
militias.33
This relationship between the newly established militias and the communal councils was

deepened in early 2010 with the new push for communal power from above in the form of
government-sanctioned communes, which Chvez has called the building blocks of a new
Venezuelan state. 34 By early 2010, 187 such communes were already in formation and a
Federal Government Council had been established to reinforce the legal status of the
communes and councils and to decentralize powers away from traditional municipal and state
authorities and transfer those powers to grassroots communal councils.35 Moreover, these
councils were no longer limited to the communal level; the organic law enshrining the Federal
Government Council specifically makes mention of workers councils, campesino councils,
and essentially any other councils representing a concrete segment of society. Thus, as the
councils have been integrated vertically into communes, they have also proliferated
horizontally across society as a whole, as have militias. On the anniversary of Ezequiel
Zamora's Federal War, Chvez unveiled a new statue of the revolutionary campesino leader in
El Calvario Park, which he renamed for Zamora; at the same time he formally established
peasant battalions as a component of the Bolivarian Militia, the function of which would be to
protect campesinos from the wave of violence that had been unleashed by landed oligarchs.36
Less than a month later, Chvez officially renamed April 13the day on which the
constituent masses returned him to powerthe Day of the Bolivarian Militia, the Armed
People, and the April Revolution, further insisting that The militia is the people and the
people are the militia, the armed people and the armed forces are one.37 This renewed push
toward communal power in recent years, therefore, is one that directly fuses democratic
governance with militia structures on the local level. It would be no coincidence, then, that
Chvez announced these transformations with a quote from the former PRV guerrilla Klber
Ramrez: The time has come for communities to assume the powers of state, which will lead
administratively to the total transformation of the Venezuelan state and socially to the real
exercise of sovereignty by society through communal powers.38

A Revolution Beyond the Law

If the state has been reaching from above toward the popular movements from below, however,
this gesture is not without either its contradictions or dangers.39 The contradictions are as old
as sovereignty itself: the state does not like to share power, and much less does the military.
Thus, while we can celebrate the institutionalization of communal power as being on par with
other public powers, this certainly does notfor the moment, at leastput popular organs of
power in a position of supremacy. The official militias, too, remain firmly within the structure
of the state and subject to hierarchical control (albeit one that now comes more from Chvez
than from the generals). As one revolutionary organizer told me: Despite Chvez's
pronouncements on the need for a citizens militia, many of those within the structure still
believe in the state's need to maintain a monopoly of violence.
Former guerrilla and self-identified Communard Carlos Betancourt puts this as clearly as
anyone. Pointing to a copy of the Law of Communal Councils, he is emphatic: The law claims
to create, but laws don't create, the will of the masses does! The law claims to regulate, but
you can't regulate popular movements without a straitjacket! While he does not necessarily
oppose the efforts of the government, he cannot help but see in these efforts a fundamental
contradiction: that reaching down to build dual power is simply not the same thing as building

it from the bottom up. The embryo of the new state, Betancourt concludes, is not a rigorous
theory but a new organizational practice that while apparently similar to Chvez's objectives,
with its councils and its militias, nevertheless far exceeds these. Despite such contradictions,
many have opted to function within or in association with these new legal structures. Valentn
Santana, for example, explains to me that the local population around La Piedrita attempted to
hand their communal council over entirely to collective members, but he and others refused.
Now, half of the council members are members of the revolutionary collective, and half are
elected, thereby leading to an organic institutional fusion that hopefully will prevent these
local structures from becoming alienated. But, echoing Carlos Betancourt, Santana insists that
the true militias are in the street, not in the barracks, and that you cannot build a dual power
from above.
In his analysis of the Niehous kidnapping, penned in 1979 from within San Carlos prison,
Carlos Lanz rejected two opposing revolutionary strategies prevalent at the time. The
gradualist conception, he insists, builds alternative institutions but lacks any strategic
orientation, whereas the putschist-insurrectionalist view, which is in fact a parody of the
idea of the Winter Palace, neglects the need to build an alternative, a dual power: No
revolutionpast or presentcan be conceived outside the duality of powers.40 While
maintaining the need for an assault on power and the installation of a class dictatorship,
Lanz argued instead that this entails, at the same time, the gradual construction of a parallel
power, citing council and militia structures as noteworthy organs of this incipient power. 41 To
the question of how to conceptualize the dynamics of this dual power in the present moment,
Lanz's younger comrade Roland Denis argues that: The old slogan of dual power (bourgeois
and working-class) valid for the summit of the revolutionary movement today becomes a
permanent strategy in accord with the need for the organization of a socialized and non-state
power.42 What once expressed the revolutionary moment par excellence now becomes a
continuous process, a negative dialectic with no telos outside of its incessant deepening, dual
power no longer understood from above, but from below and in a tense interplay with
existing institutions.
Denis himself has embodied this tense interplay in a particularly personal way: a veteran of
decades of antistate struggles in Popular Disobedience and active in both the Caracazo and
resistance to the 2002 coup, Denis was briefly named vice-minister of planning after the coup
was defeated. While in that post, moreover, he spearheaded a series of meetings with popular
organizations and barrio councils.43 Perhaps the best evidence of the peculiarity of dual power
in the Venezuelan context lies in the fact that this proponent of non-state power heads up an
organization deemed the April 13th Movement, named for the day that the Venezuelan
masses showed their true dual power credentials, invoking their constituent authority to return
Chvez to his position within the constituted structure.44 Despite his overall support for the
revolutionary process, however, Denislike Betancourtis wary of the dangers that tend to
trickle down from above. In particular, Denis has opposed the way in which the government
has recently sought to legislate the communes from above, referring to the same source of
revolutionary inspiration as Chvez: It is not the law that gives the revolutionary Commune
permission to enter into history, in our case it is the echo left to us by our ownby now,
historicrevolutionary debate, when it has spoken, following the guidelines provided by
Klber Ramrez, of the formation of the communal state or the self-governing republic.

Against what he deems a verticalist and even feudalist legislation of the communes from
above, Denis aspires to the development of communes without the law. 45 Nevertheless,
despite his specific concerns regarding the more recent 2010 Organic Commune Law and the
general wariness toward transformation from above that these concerns indicate, Denis has
provided, in his insistence on dual power as a permanent process, a powerful concept for
understanding the dynamics of the Bolivarian Revolution.46

Por Ahora
We return to the ostensible paradox from which we began, according to which antistate
militants like La Piedrita pledge loyalty to the president, and the late guerrilla Klber Ramrez
speaks of a powerful dynamic of constituent and constituted power under a framework of a
government of popular insurgency. 47 To these we could add the apparent paradox of the
numerous former guerrillas who have assumed powerful positions within the state apparatus,
negativity incarnate assuming the uncomfortable mantle of the positive.48 While the few
former guerrillas who oppose Chvez tend to do so from the right, as with Teodoro Petkoff,
guerrilla comandantes and PRV founders Douglas Bravo and Francisco El Flaco Prada do so
from an ostensibly radical position. While under normal circumstances, it might not be
surprising to find a former guerrilla leader who distrusts or even opposes those leftist
movements in power, it should be clear by this point that there is nothing normal about
contemporary Venezuela, where the traditional state apparatus houses an explosive
combination of guerrillas and opportunists, authentic decentralizers and a new, power-hungry
elite dressed in red. In this Venezuela, the vast majority of those who formerly opposed the
state, rifle in hand, now accompany the process with Chvez at its ostensible head. Those who
have felt the hot breath and hotter lead of the DISIP and felt the damp cold of the torture
chambers of San Carlos are certainly much more skeptical of the process and partial in their
praise. But this does not change the fact that they see the Bolivarian Revolution as the only
path currently available.
Back in Douglas Bravo's apartment, he scrutinizes me. You are among the 80 percent who
sympathize with the process, he declares, before attempting to convince me otherwise. He
insists that the fundamental error was for the people to give their sovereignty over to Chvez.
What we are seeing nowhis mind clearly moving quicker than his wordsis a struggle
between two right wings, with the people standing on the sidelines. Chvez's position is
increasingly weaker since the 2007 referendum defeat, he seethes. Chvez is playing the role
of CAP [Carlos Andrs Prez] now, and like CAP they will get rid of him to maintain the system.
Say we said it! he shouts as if shaking me to see something that is right in front of my eyes.
But in the end I fail to see what he is seeing: I fail to see the impossibility of the Bolivarian
process, I fail to see how it can be understood as unambiguously evil rather than as an instance
of struggle in itself, I fail to see what alternative exists to the process, and I fail to see how
Douglas is impervious to this. All I see, in the end, is an isolated former guerrilla who cannot
accept the reality of the battle ahead, a comandante without troops.
According to Juvenal, himself no friend of the constituted power of the state, Douglas Bravo
is so critical of Chvez precisely because of his own role in bringing the latter to power. After
all, it was the PRV above all that spearheaded the putschism of the civilian-military alliance

known as the third path. He feels like the father of the process, says Juvenal, and as a
result he rejects it all the more vigorously, placing himself on the wrong side of history as a
result. Yes, we are critical, Juvenal insists, and this is evident from the fact that the majority
of his current activities remain clandestine in preparation for an unpredictable future. But we
will give our lives for the process, within the process. Others, like Rafael Uzctegui, would
prefer not to speak of the subject, insisting sharply that Douglas failures are his own
reflections, whereas another former PRV member, who today coordinates activities at the
Cuartel San Carlos, where he had previously been imprisoned, is defiant: I am still part of the
PRVwe didn't leave Douglas, he abandoned us.
In his simultaneous analysis of the French and Haitian Revolutions, The Black Jacobins, C.
L. R. James insists that, in a revolution, It is force that counts, and chiefly the organized force
of the masses. This much and more we have seen throughout our own history of a very
different revolution: for every significant transformation of constituted power during the past
fifty years, the constituent masses have stood as either inspiration or threat and occasionally as
both. According to James, the implications of this revolutionary maxim for the question of
leadership and the state are profound, and here the historical lessons of both Haiti and France
are more negative than positive: Toussaint, like Robespierre, destroyed his own left-wing, and
with it sealed his own doom.49 In other words, both leaders neglected their support base and
thereby cutor, in the case of Robespierre, guillotinedtheir own throats. The same lesson
holds today for Chvez and anyone else seeking to occupy the constituted power of state
institutions through the organized will of the people, and as revolutionaries and leftists have
recently been swept to power across Latin America, this lesson has gained a continental
relevance.
In the meantime, popular movements and grassroots revolutionaries have been forced to
walk the tightrope between the state and the opposition, fighting a war on two fronts against
the forces of reaction and against attacks from above on their own autonomy. 50 It occasionally
seems as if Chvez has indeed grasped this lesson; after all, were the revolutionary importance
of the popular masses not crystal clear in 1989, by 2002 it was undeniable. But Chvez
sometimes vacillates and equivocates, as when he blames Allende's overthrow on the ultraleft in a thinly veiled warning to those to his own left. But it is always difficult to distinguish
the rhetoric of a political leader from the depth of his or her understanding of the situation;
many among that same ultra-left ignore such criticisms, dismissing them as necessary
subterfuge for someone occupying a position of national power. It is this complex position, one
that transcends a merely academic critical support, that we must grasp and assume and that I
have sought to capture, at least in part, through a resuscitation of the concept of dual power, in
which popular organizations represent a reservoir of revolutionary energy at the base that
intervenes against the state structure in its traditional bureaucratic and military form.
However, such a view does not entail that Chvez as an individual is purely a representative
of the repressive apparatus that is the bureaucratic-military state. His position is far more
complex and nuanced than that. In the struggle to push the contemporary revolutionary process
forward, Chvez has, for the most part, been an ally up to this point. While engaged in the
complex doublespeak of the state, more often than not he has pushed a radical agenda that
facilitates the transformation of that state, a fact most visible in the recent development of
communal councils and popular militias. Here there are no guarantees, and despite the fact that

the collective we of the Venezuelan revolutionary movements documented in this book

indeed created him, this does not mean the creation will not betray the creators. However,
given the institutionalization of popular power and Chvez's clear reliance on the movements
for support against a host of other enemies, to do so would certainly require a fight. So, we
must move beyond the nave dichotomy of pro-Chvez or anti-Chvez to say, alongside the
most revolutionary segments of Venezuelan society, that we support Chvez as long as he
supports the revolution; or, to paraphrase this most complex of all figures in contemporary
Venezuela, turning his own words into a threat and a promise: Chvez, we are with you, pero
slo por ahoraonly for now.

Notes

Introduction: What People? Whose History?

The collected lyrics of Primera's songs are available in Al Primera, Que Mi Canto No Se Pierda (Caracas: Euroamericana de
Ediciones, 2006), from which all my epigraphs are drawn. I am grateful to Dante Canoura and the Primera family for
permission to reprint these.
1. In his discussion of La Piedrita, Alejandro Velasco also notes their strategic location: We Are Still Rebels: The
Challenge of Popular History in Bolivarian Venezuela, in Venezuela's Bolivarian Democracy: Participation, Politics, and
Culture under Chvez, ed. D. Smilde and D. Hellinger (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). See also Sujatha
Fernandes, Who Can Stop the Drums? Urban Social Movements in Chvez's Venezuela (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2010), 6061.
2. For more about the Matthews myth, see Anthony DePalma, The Man Who Invented Fidel (New York: Public Affairs,
2006).
3. Interview with Valentn Santana, May 24, 2008.
4. See YVKE Mundial. (2008). One Person Dead after Explosion at Fedecamaras, tr. K. Janicke, Venezuela Analysis,
February 24, http://venezuelanalysis.com/newsbrief/3195.
5. In what follows, I draw upon George Ciccariello-Maher. (2008). Radical Chavismo Bares Its Teeth, Venezuela
Analysis, April 15, http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/3358?quicktabs_2=1; and George Ciccariello-Maher. (2008).
Embedded with the Tupamaros, Counterpunch, April 25, http://www.counterpunch.org/maher04252008.html.
6. Sebastiana Barrez Prez. (2009). La Piedrita pasar por la armas a enemigos de la revolucin, Quinto Da,
February 6, 2223.
7. Mara Lilibeth Da Corte. (2009). Chvez califica de terrorista y fascista a Colectivo La Piedrita, El Universal,
February 9.
8. For more about the concept of the Bolivarian processa phenomenon far broader than Chvez himselfsee
especially Roland Denis, Rebelin en Proceso: dilemas del movimiento popular luego de la rebelin del 13 de Abril
(Caracas: Ediciones Nuestra Amrica Rebelde, 2004), 1517. Sujatha Fernandes, following Jos Roberto Duque, defines
the proceso as a parallel and underground movement that defends the Chvez government, but which has its own
trajectory independent of directives from the central government (Fernandes, Who Can Stop the Drums?, 5), but I worry
that shifting too quickly from Chavismo to proceso evades the most crucial question of the relationship between the
two.
9. Such a complex sentiment is new to neither Venezuela nor to Latin America more generally. In contemporary
Venezuela, one frequently hears or reads reference to the words of the Mexican Revolutionary General Plutarco Elas
Calles: the Revolution has degenerated into a government. This idea, moreover, existed within revolutionary movements
seeking to go beyond the mere seizure of state power long before Chvez, as when Alfredo Maneiro cited these same words
in Notas Negativas (Caracas: Ediciones Venezuela 83, 1971), 31.
10. From the anarchist left, see Rafael Uzctegui, Venezuela: Revolution as Spectacle (Tucson: See Sharp, 2011);
although there is a massive amount of anti-Chavista literature on the right, see A. C. Clark, The Revolutionary Has No
Clothes (New York: Encounter, 2009). Of the many excellent and necessary works that nevertheless share a top-down
approach, see Richard Gott, Hugo Chvez and the Bolivarian Revolution (London: Verso, 2005) and Gregory Wilpert,
Changing Venezuela by Taking Power (London: Verso, 2007). From the growing critique of this tendency, see Fernandes,
Who Can Stop the Drums?, 35; Fernandes notes the predominance of state-centric analyses and a top-down
perspective that locates all agency in Chvez while presenting the poor as incapable of autonomous action; see also
David Smilde's introduction to Venezuela's Bolivarian Democracy. In that same volume, see Velasco's critique of topdown structural analyses that leave local trajectories of organizing and mobilization unexamined (We Are Still Rebels,
159); and Carlos Martinez, Michael Fox, and JoJo Farrell, eds., Venezuela Speaks! Voices from the Grassroots (Oakland,
CA: PM Press, 2010).
11. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage,

[1938] 1963), x.
12. Interview with Juan Contreras, April 21, 2008.
13. Iraida Morocoima, cited in Martinez, Fox, and Farrell, Venezuela Speaks!, 42.
14. See, for example, Paolo Virno, Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, trans. I.
Bertoletti, J. Cascaito, and A. Casson (New York and Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), [2001] 2004); Michael Hardt and Antonio
Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004).
15. Furthermore, the grammatical ambiguity of the peopleis it plural or singular?cannot therefore be resolved
entirely into the distinction between the (singular) pueblo and the (multiple) gente. Rather, multiplicity cuts into the pueblo
itself, and I hope the reader will excuse any clumsiness and ambiguity that emerges in what follows between what the
people is and what the people are.
16. Fidel Castro Ruz, History Will Absolve Me, trans. C. Gonzlez Daz (Havana: Editorial Jos Mart, [1953] 1998), 56.
Many translations butcher the meaning of this sentence. After listing the various groups that compose this struggling mass
in Cuba, Castro adds, This is the people, the one who knows misfortune and is therefore capable of fighting with
boundless courage! (5758). Enrique Dussel, Twenty Theses on Politics, trans. G. Ciccariello-Maher (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, [2006] 2008), 7475.
17. Dussel, Twenty Theses, 72. As we will see, however, such dialogue and translation is rarely voluntary and often the
result of an internal struggle within the people.
18. Fernando Coronil and Julie Skurski, Dismembering and Remembering the Nation: The Semantics of Political
Violence in Venezuela, in Politics in the Andes: Identity, Conflict, and Reform, ed. J. M. Burt and P. Mauceri (Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004), 96.
19. The national anthem contains sufficient material to justify both conservative and revolutionary interpretations. The
second line specificallyLa ley respetando la virtud y honorpresents an ambiguity that plagues translation: who is the
subject? Occasionally, the people becomes the subject and is thereby subject to respecting the law, but equally plausible
is the law personified as subject, which thereby is bound to obey the people.
20. This current struggle is one that, as others have argued well, pits this representative democracy, with its
institutionalized channeling of popular energy and its efforts to buffer the state from the popular will, against a new
experiment in democracy that is at once more direct, more radical, more fundamentally driven from below. Velasco
speaks of a contest over competing visions of democracy and revolution that emerged long before the Caracazo in radical
barrios like 23 de Enero (We Are Still Rebels, 180). See also Steve Ellner, The Radical Potential of Chavismo in
Venezuela: The First Year and a Half in Power, Latin American Perspectives 28, no. 5 (September 2001); Jennifer McCoy,
From Representative to Participatory Democracy? in The Unraveling of Representative Democracy in Venezuela, ed.
McCoy and Myers (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).
21. Terry Lynn Karl, The Paradox of Plenty: Oil Booms and Petro-States (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1997); Michael Derham, Undemocratic Democracy, Bulletin of Latin American Research 21, no. 2 (2002), 27089; Luis
J. Oropeza, Tutelary Pluralism: A Critical Approach to Venezuelan Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1980); Michael
Coppedge, Strong Parties and Lame Ducks: Presidential Partyarchy and Factionalism in Venezuela (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1994); Jennifer McCoy et al., Venezuelan Democracy Under Stress (Miami, FL: University of
Miami, 1995).
22. Rmulo Betancourt, Tres Aos de Gobierno Democrtico, v. 2 (Caracas: Imprenta Nacional, 1962), 245.
23. This distinction is not hard and fast; even within the workers movement, Betancourt relied on sectarian processes of
exclusion alongside cooptation. In making this distinction, I am complicating Maneiro's emphasis on the frontal attack
and dictatorial regression carried out by Betancourt (Negative Notes, 63).
24. Cabieses Donoso does the calculation as of January 1963: of 1,421 days in office, 761 were under a state of
emergency. Manuel Cabieses Donoso, Venezuela, Okey! (Santiago: Ediciones del Litoral, 1963), 168.
25. Velasco, We Are Still Rebels, 166.
26. Daniel H. Levine, Goodbye to Venezuelan Exceptionalism, Journal of Inter-american Studies & World Affairs 36,
no. 4 (winter 1994), 147.
27. The neglect of this bottom is no coincidence: Sujatha Fernandes has skillfully dissected the assumption by most
social scientists that the poor masses are fundamentally incapable of autonomous action (Who Can Stop the Drums?, 4).
28. James, The Black Jacobins, 55.
29. Daniel H. Levine, Conflict and Political Change in Venezuela (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 259.

30. Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays, trans. R. Fagles (London: Penguin, 1982), 96. As Maneiro noted, this
overload of tension was increased by a political framework that prevented its partial release (Negative Notes, 20).
31. For an analysis of the myth of harmony and its replacement in social scientific circles by a critique of
polarization, see George Ciccariello-Maher, Jumpstarting the Decolonial Engine: Symbolic Violence from Fanon to
Chvez, Theory & Event 13, no. 1 (2010).
32. Some had been diagnosing two Venezuelas for years. See, e.g., Maneiro, Negative Notes, 16, 85, and 83.
33. Mainstream social scientists often deem Chvez an antiparty candidate, again centering the individual leader,
whereas a broader antiparty sentiment had been growing in popular sectors for decades, as documented in, e.g., Maneiro,
Negative Notes, 2223.
34. In the Euro-Atlantic world, this pair of concepts has been popularized by Antonio Negri and others, but arguably in a
way that sees them as absolutely opposed. For a theoretical attempt to resist such an absolute opposition, see Dussel, Twenty
Theses. For an example of the use of constituent power and the multitude in a Venezuelan context that does not fall into
such an opposition, see Denis, Rebelin en Proceso. For a comparative analysis, see George Ciccariello-Maher,
Constituent Moments, Constitutional Processes, Latin American Perspectives (May 2013).
35. Velasco, We Are Still Rebels, 180. Here I am thinking of, e.g., Gott, Hugo Chvez; Wilpert, Changing Venezuela
by Taking Power; and Hugo Chvez and Marta Harnecker, Understanding the Venezuelan Revolution, trans. C. Boudin
(New York: Monthly Review, 2005). Even the more comprehensive history provided by Luis Bonilla-Molina and Haiman
El Troudi, Historia de la Revolucon Bolivariana: Pequea Crnica, 19482004 (Caracas: Universidad Bolivariana, 2004),
remains far too Chvez-centric. These texts are essential, and I do not intend to question their credibility; I merely
emphasize what is in many ways neglected by or excluded from them.
36. As Sujatha Fernandes rightly observes, To see Chvez as an independent figure pontificating from above, or
popular movements as originating in autonomous spaces from below, would be to deny the interdependencies between
them that both constrain and make possible each other's field of action (Who Can Stop the Drums?, 5).
37. John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today (London: Pluto, 2002).
38. See, e.g., the Debate on Power, featuring responses to Holloway (http://marxsite.com/debate_on_power.html) and
Wilpert, Changing Venezuela by Taking Power. See also Martinez et al., eds., Venezuela Speaks!, 24, about the false
opposition of the from below and the from above.
39. Dussel, Twenty Theses on Politics, 18.
40. Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power, 19. One proponent of horizontalism notes that Horizontalidad
implies democratic communication on a level plane and involvesor at least strives towardsnon-hierarchical and
antiauthoritarian creation rather than reaction. It is a break with vertical ways of organizing and relating. Marina Sitrin, ed.,
Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina (Oakland: AK Press, 2006), 3.
41. See Dussel's analysis of the fetish in Twenty Theses on Politics, 30, and especially footnote 23.
42. See the critiques that some proponents of horizontalism, namely Marina Sitrin's Horizontalism and Naomi Klein's
film The Take (2004), misrepresent the object of their analysis. See, e.g., the statement signed by dozens of workers
cooperatives in Argentina against Klein's film, insisting that she has misrepresented their relationship with the state:
Movimiento Nacional de Fbricas Recuperadas. 2004. La Toma no refleja la realidad de las fbricas recuperadas en
Argentina, April 20, http://argentina.indymedia.org/news/2004/11/239016.php. Although Sujatha Fernandes does maintain
a sufficiently complex position, insisting that I do not advocate an antistate position (Who Can Stop the Drums?, 28),
there is some reason to worry that the movements she discusses were chosen for their horizontality rather than for their
strategic importance.
43. Klber Ramrez Rojas, Historia documental del 4 de febrero (Caracas: El Perro y la Rana, 2006), 203. Ramrez
insists, however, that this disunity was not solely the result of the horizontal orientation of the movements, blaming as well
the vanguardists who had cut ties with the movements from above and the opportunists who sold them up the river (206).
44. Ramrez Rojas, Historia documental del 4 de febrero, 207.
45. Dussel, Twenty Theses on Politics, 2429.
46. George Ciccariello-Maher, An Anarchism that Is Not Anarchism: Notes Toward a Critique of Anarchist
Imperialism, in How Not to Be Governed, ed. J. Klausen and J. Martel (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010). The
Zapatistas themselves recognize the dangers of model-building, and Holloway cites Subcomandante Marcos: The only
thing that we proposed to do was to change the world; everything else has been improvisation. Our square conception of
the world and of revolution was badly dented in the confrontation with the indigenous realities of Chiapas. John Holloway,
Dignity's Revolt, in Zapatista! Reinventing Revolution in Mexico, ed. J. Holloway and E. Pelez (London: Pluto Press,

1998), 161.
47. James, The Black Jacobins, 81.

Chapter 1: A Guerrilla History

1. Fabricio Ojeda, Carta de Renuncia de Fabricio Ojeda, June 30, 1962, available from the Centro de Documentacin
de los Movimientos Armados: http://www.cedema.org.
2. Ojeda was not the only radical to argue that the myth of 23 de Enero had come to mask its opposite. Alfredo Maneiro
came to use the term 23 de Enero as a metaphor for the evacuation of the radical content of struggles (Notas Negativas
[Caracas: Ediciones Venezuela 83, 1971], 6365, 101).
3. Ojeda, Carta de Renuncia.
4. Leslie Bethell, ed., The Cambridge History of Latin America, Volume VIII: 1930 to the Present (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991), 754. The URD was never an equal partner in this arrangement, and AD hegemony gave
way to a two-party power-sharing system with COPEI only in the 1970s.
5. Interview with Douglas Bravo, May 2324, 2008.
6. Richard Gott, Guerrilla Movements in Latin America (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971), 176.
7. Betancourt, in fact, ranked fourth in Caracas. Bethell, Cambridge History of Latin America, 754. According to Clara
Nieto, Larrazbal had been the only Latin American head of state to openly support the Cuban rebels (Masters of War
[Boston: Seven Stories Press, 2003], 4142).
8. Maneiro emphasizes that the first critique of Betancourtthe December riotscame not from the leftist vanguard, but
instead from a spontaneous and popular mass movement. But this dramatic revelation of the latter's potential was not
grasped by the political parties, who lagged behind and failed to transform their relation to the masses (Notas Negativas,
71).
9. Fidel Castro, speech at the University of Havana, March 13, 1967, in Gott, Guerrilla Movements in Latin America,
16364. This moment also is recounted in Rgis Debray, Problems of Revolutionary Strategy in Latin America (1965), in
Strategy for Revolution (Middlesex: Penguin, 1973), 16162.
10. In so doing, Betancourt also became one of representative democracy's most notable gravediggers. Manuel
Cabieses Donoso, Venezuela, Okey! (Santiago: Ediciones del Litoral, 1963), 6869. Cabieses Donoso provides a full list of
Betancourt's victims between 1959 and 1963 (26976).
11. Interview with Douglas Bravo in Sucesos (December 1966), as cited in Gott, Guerrilla Movements in Latin America,
167. See also Maneiro, Notas Negativas, 57.
12. This last phrase is perhaps the most commonly heard with regard to this pioneer of Venezuelan democracy.
Betancourt also is widely reported to have boasted to the National Press Club in Washington, DC, that he doesn't transport
tied-up prisoners, a tongue-in-cheek way of suggesting that he would rather have them executed outright (the phrase dates
to the brutal royalist leader Jos Toms Boves). Interview with Francisco El Negro Herrera of the Pez Front, May 4,
2008.
13. Gott, Guerrilla Movements in Latin America, 17075.
14. Ibid., 170.
15. Ibid., 168. See also Venezuela: Plagued by Castro, Time, September 19, 1960. According to Luigi Valsalice, it was
this international element, and not government repression, that was decisive and rendered the conflict irreversible.
Valsalice, Guerrilla y Poltica: Curso de accin en Venezuela (19621969) (Buenos Aires: Editorial Pleamar, 1975), 1718.
About this entire process, see as well Cabieses Donoso, Venezuela, Okey!, 17678.
16. Gott, Guerrilla Movements in Latin America, 170.
17. Moiss Moleiro, El MIR de Venezuela (Havana: Guairas, 1967), 15455. Agreeing with this view are Douglas Bravo
(in both my interview and in Sucesos); Fabricio Ojeda (in Gott, Guerrilla Movements in Latin America, 181); Cabieses
Donoso, who notes that popular organizations were cornered and attacked before resorting to self-defense (Venezuela,
Okey!, 165); and Alfredo Maneiro, who argues that violence did not serve the revolutionaries and came from the other
side (Notas Negativas, 58). Without denying the repression, Rafael Uzctegui adds left infantilism (interview on April
2627, 2008), and Valsalice speaks of a determinism that prevented radicals from maintaining multiple tactics in the face
of repression (Guerrilla y Poltica, 34).

18. Pedro Pablo Linrez documents the occupations in Lucha Armada en Venezuela (Caracas: Universidad Bolivariana,
2006), 3031. About the press closures, see Cabieses Donoso, Venezuela, Okey!, 14345.
19. Moleiro, El MIR de Venezuela, 15556.
20. According to Bravo, the government had devised a plan called Operation Macuare to destroy the insurrectionary
elements of the capital, but before the plan was to be put into action, several of these commanders met secretly with Bravo
to pass a message to the PCV leadership. He told the central committee, At 4 P.M., we will have control of the government,
because they aren't going to attack the insurrection, but will instead take Betancourt and his government hostage. Gott
astutely notes the PCV's insistent if irrational hope that it could exert pressure on the Betancourt government. For example,
as late as June 1960, the Party expressed solidarity with Betancourt after an assassination attempt, only to have it thrown,
unsurprisingly, back in their face. Gott, Guerrilla Movements in Latin America, 17475.
21. Interview with Jess Jimnez, May 4, 2008.
22. Valsalice, Guerrilla y Poltica, 39nn1516.
23. Ibid., 2427. About the military rebellions, see, e.g., Asdrbal J. Duarte Parejo, El Carupanazo (Caracas: Ministerio
de Comunicacin e Informacin, 2005); Al Brett Martnez, El Porteazo: Historia de una Rebelin (Caracas: Andaro,
1973).
24. Teodoro Petkoff seconds Bravo's claim that these rebellions came too late. Norman Gall, Teodoro Petkoff: The
Crisis of the Professional Revolutionary. Part I: Years of Insurrection, January 1972,
http://www.normangall.com/venezuela_art4.htm.
25. Cabieses Donoso, Venezuela, Okey!, 17273. In another decree on the same day, Betancourt established military
tribunals for extremists. Both measures were likely unconstitutional and certainly ironic because Betancourt previously
had attacked the dictatorship for employing precisely the same measures.
26. Interview with the Pez Front, May 4, 2008.
27. Interview with Alberto Mller Rojas, May 14, 2008.
28. In the later words of Teodoro Petkoff, democracy in Venezuela was a new toy recently taken out of the box and it
still remained unbroken in the eyes of the masses; in Norman Gall, 1973, Teodoro Petkoff: The Crisis of the Professional
Revolutionary. Part II: A New Party (January), http://www.normangall.com/venezuela_art4_2.htm.
29. Interview with Elio, May 17, 2008.
30. Valsalice, Guerrilla y Poltica, 2023.
31. Gott, Guerrilla Movements in Latin America, 176.
32. This threat became public with the discovery of the Turimiquire camp in early 1962, coinciding with mass arrests in
the cities (Valsalice, Guerrilla y Poltica, 39n17). Linrez attributes the Turimiquire camp to a short-lived and littlementioned Venezuelan Revolutionary Directorate, DIREVE (Lucha Armada, 2526, 3839).
33. Linrez, Lucha Armada, 4546.
34. Cabieses Donoso, Venezuela, Okey!, 22124.
35. Valsalice notes that at this time even the most important front dwindled to some seven members (Guerrilla y Poltica,
21).
36. Ibid., 1015.
37. Linrez, Lucha Armada, 15; also notes Afro-Indigenous support for the Chirino Front in Falcn; Valsalice, Guerrilla
y Poltica, 106109; interview with Jos Luis Escobar, May 4, 2008.
38. Valsalice, Guerrilla y Poltica, 108. This area had seen the only Communist victories in the 1958 elections (106).
Further to the south, in Portuguesa, a small front was established under Juan Vicente Cabezasalias Comandante
Pablo which later joined the nearby Pez Front (later headed up by Fabricio Ojeda) (10910). It is worth noting the
Ezequiel Zamora Front, in the Bachiller mountains near Caracas, which was largely run by the MIR, but which has been
deemed more a place of refuge than a military organism (111). The same might be an accurate description of other
eastern fronts, also largely under MIR control (with the exception of those later under Maneiro), although with the
withdrawal of the PCV and the decline of the western fronts, some eastern fronts were reinvigorated (11314).
39. Alfredo Pea, Conversaciones con Douglas Bravo (Caracas: Ateneo, 1978), 89. Valsalice summarizes this as a shift
toward Maoism without the objective conditions (Guerrilla y Poltica, 53).
40. Interview with Bravo in Sucesos. In the aftermath of the 2002 coup against Chvez, this tendency would be analyzed
by Marta Harnecker, Venezuela: Militares Junto al Pueblo (Barcelona, Spain: El Viejo Topo, 2003). See also Valsalice,

Guerrilla y Poltica, 2829.

41. Pea, Conversaciones con Douglas Bravo, 4245.
42. Cabieses Donoso, Venezuela, Okey!, 278; Gott, Guerrilla Movements in Latin America, 199.
43. Cabieses Donoso, Venezuela, Okey!, 3067.
44. Gall, Teodoro Petkoff I. Later, Manuitt even went so far as to address a letter to his eternal brothers of the
traditional Armed Forces, urging them to come over to the right side of the struggle (Cabieses, Venezuela, Okey!, 22930).
45. Interviewed by Debray, Report from the Venezuelan Guerrilla, 12829.
46. Enrique Rondn Nieto. 2002. Asalto al tren de El Encanto, ltimas Noticias, September 22, 20; see also Luis
Bonilla-Molina and Haiman El Troudi, Historia de la Revolucon Bolivariana: Pequea Crnica, 19482004 (Caracas:
Universidad Bolivariana, 2004), 44; and Valsalice, Guerrilla y Poltica, 36; Linrez, Lucha Armada, 6970.
47. In Gott, Guerrilla Movements in Latin America, 202.
48. Valsalice, Guerrilla y Poltica, 2830.
49. This is not to say that the PCV had a policy of favoring the rural struggle. According to participants like Douglas
Bravo, PCV policy generally favored the military coup and opportunistically sought legalization at the expense of both the
urban and rural combatants.
50. Gall, Teodoro Petkoff I.
51. John Gerassi. 1967. Latin Americathe Next Vietnam, Viet Report, JanuaryFebruary.
52. Gall, Teodoro Petkoff I. Douglas Bravo seconds this assessment in an interview with Sucesos, as does Valsalice
(Guerrilla y Poltica, 37).
53. Gall, Teodoro Petkoff I. In a second interview, Petkoff suggests that perhaps our greatest error of this period was
to try to stop the elections instead of participating in them. Norman Gall, Teodoro Petkoff II.
54. Valsalice, Guerrilla y Poltica, 49.
55. Pea, Conversaciones con Douglas Bravo, 109.
56. Valsalice argues that because Betancourt benefited politically from the presence of the guerrillas, he made no serious
effort to eradicate them (Guerrilla y Poltica, 81n3).
57. Ibid., 110. Cabieses Donoso catalogued prevalent torture methods and revealed the existence of terrorist
organizations linked to Betancourt (Venezuela, Okey!, 2026).
58. Pea, Conversaciones con Douglas Bravo, 11617.
59. Gall, Teodoro Petkoff I.
60. Valsalice, Guerrilla y Poltica, 50.
61. In reality, Valsalice notes that the unexpected (and undisciplined) ferociousness of Bravo's attack on the old guard
led many moderates to oppose him (Guerrilla y Poltica, 67).
62. Pea, Conversaciones con Douglas Bravo, 120.
63. Interview with Elio, May 17, 2008.
64. Pea, Conversaciones con Douglas Bravo, 122.
65. For Valsalice, this splintering was the predictable effect of the degeneration of guerrilla autonomy to mean even
the autonomy of detachments from their own nominal commanders, giving rise to a number of small petty fiefdoms
(Guerrilla y Poltica, 54). Pea, Conversaciones con Douglas Bravo, 131. Interview with Punto Cero member Elio. About
MOSAN, see Linrez, Lucha Armada, 14754, 170; about Punto Cero, see 15253, 16871.
66. Pea, Conversaciones con Douglas Bravo, 128.
67. Valsalice, Guerrilla y Poltica, 112; Linrez, Lucha Armada, 164.
68. Interview with Nora Castaeda, May 2, 2008.
69. Interview with Ldice Navas, May 23, 2008.
70. Ldice Navas. 2005. En esta lucha no hay fronteras, Servicio Informativo Ecumenico y Popular, April 6,
http://www.ecumenico.org/leer.php/320#. Navas continues: There are no borders in this strugglethe struggles of other
people is our struggle as well.
71. Here, Navas echoes the insights of Frantz Fanon, who showed more than anything else the radical transformation of

social structures in revolutionary processes. A Dying Colonialism, trans. H. Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1965).
72. By contrast, these guerrillas are critical of one of the only accounts of the guerrilla struggle written by a woman,
namely Angela Zago's semifictional Aqu No Ha Pasado Nada (Caracas: Sintesis Dosmil, 1972), for the openly dismissive
tone expressed in the title.
73. For example, Elizabeth Friedman's account of the women's movement notably is centered on traditional politics and
the social movements operating at the periphery of such politics (without noting the origin of many of those movements),
and she devotes less than one page to female participation in the guerrilla struggle: Unfinished Transitions: Women and the
Gendered Development of Democracy in Venezuela, 19361996 (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2000), 128
29. What is needed in the present is a full account devoted to women's participation in the Venezuelan armed struggle, of
the sort that is beyond the scope of this book. For an excellent example that is limited to an earlier period (but that includes
some later involved in the guerrilla struggle, see Fania Petzoldt and Jacinta Bevilacqua, eds., Nosotras tambien nos jugamos
la vida [We too risked our lives]: testimonios de la mujer venezolana en la lucha clandestina, 19481958 (Caracas:
Editorial Ateneo de Caracas, 1979). Such an account would begin with Livia Governeur, an organizer of shock brigades in
the UCV who was killed by the Betancourt government in November 1961, and in whose name revenge actions would
quickly be carried out (see Linrez, Lucha Armada, 3336).
74. Rgis Debray, Revolution in the Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967). Debray's progression
between 1965 and 1967, during the course of which the foco becomes the beginning and end of revolutionary wisdom,
completely self-contained, responsible to nothing and to no one, is well-described by Martin Glaberman. 1968. Regis
Debray: Revolution Without a Revolution, Speak Out, April.
75. Cited by Fabricio Ojeda in Hacia el poder revolucionario (1967), http://www.cedema.org/ver.php?id=2209.
76. Pea, Conversaciones con Douglas Bravo, 129. This same language is used by Rafael Uzctegui and Juvenal.
Valsalice characterizes Debray's theses as dogmatic and agrees that by 1968 the myth he had cultivated was critiqued
thoroughly by even the most radical proponents of the Venezuelan armed struggle (Guerrilla y Poltica, 12).
77. Pea, Conversaciones con Douglas Bravo, 128.
78. Ibid., 129.
79. Debray himself was critical of this; Castroism: The Long March in Latin America, in Strategy for Revolution
(Middlesex: Penguin, 1973), 2999.
80. Linrez, Lucha Armada, 97.
81. Interview with Carlos Betancourt, May 23, 2008.
82. Linrez argues that Alfredo Maneiro of the PCV, who would later break radically with vanguardism before founding
La Causa R, was in fact the most vanguardist of the eastern comandantes (Lucha Armada, 92). Betancourt briefly formed
part of the Committee for Revolutionary Integration in 1969, alongside Bravo and others (Valsalice, Guerrilla y Poltica,
97n181).
83. Notably, Carlos Lanz, interview, May 26, 2008.
84. According to Valsalice, even attempts at mass-based struggles after 1964 maintained the division between street
battles and the class struggle, leading them to continue to rely on students as their shock-troops (Guerrilla y Poltica, 57).
85. Maneiro argues that the guerrillas never truly understood the rural areas and that they fell into a Debray-inspired
Eurocentric belief that Third World countries could only yield rural insurrections (Notas Negativas, 46).
86. Again, the MIR was the most egregious with regard to such mimesis, copying even the styles of the Cubans
(Valsalice, Guerrilla y Poltica, 1112, 21), but Maneiro sees this argument as a cathartic self-absolution (Notas Negativas,
72).
87. Maneiro, Notas Negativas, 75.

Chapter 2: Reconnecting with the Masses

1. Interview with Rafael Uzctegui, May 27, 2008. In the words of Chris Marker's cinematic critique of vanguardism
(which includes a self-critical interview with Douglas Bravo), they were a spear point without a spear, and in reference to
Lewis Carroll's vanishing Cheshire Cat, a grin without a cat. A Grin Without a Cat [Le fond de l'air est rouge] (Paris: Arte
France, 1977).
2. Alfredo Maneiro, Notas Negativas (Caracas: Ediciones Venezuela 83, 1971), 2123.

3. United Nations, World Urbanization Prospects: The 2003 Revision (New York: United Nations, 2004), 174.
4. Rgis Debray, Strategy for Revolution (Middlesex: Penguin, 1973), 7677.
5. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. R. Philcox (New York: Grove Press, [1961] 2004), 81. While Fanon
certainly distinguishes the urban from the rural, he recognizes that this distinction is rooted in the structure of the dependent
economy and places the two zones into a dialectical relationship. Debray, Strategy for Revolution, 7682.
6. Norman Gall. (1972). Teodoro Petkoff: The Crisis of the Professional Revolutionary. Part I: Years of Insurrection,
January, http://www.normangall.com/venezuela_art4.htm.
7. Gott would later deem Plaza one of the intellectual authors of the project of Hugo Chvez (Hugo Chvez and the
Bolivarian Revolution [London: Verso, 2005], 79). See also Steve Ellner and Miguel Tinker Salas, Venezuela: Hugo Chvez
and the Decline of an Exceptional Democracy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 36. Fuenmayor did not
himself join the PRV, but many of his collaborators, such as Margot Garca Maldonado, did.
8. Interview with Douglas Bravo, May 2324, 2008.
9. Interview with Rafael Uzctegui, April 2627, 2008.
10. The PRV initially was close to Cuba, but they broke over Debray's foquismo, moving closer to China. Although
Uzctegui attributes the openness of the PRV more to experiences with orthodoxy on the domestic level than to the SinoSoviet split, both the PRV and Maneiro's later LCR had official relations with China.
11. Interview with Isidro Ramirez, Caracas, May 15, 2008.
12. These were Comisin Ideolgica de Ruptura, El Imperialismo Petrolero y la Revolucin Venezolana, Tomo I:
Capital y Propiedad Territorial (Caracas: Salvador de la Plaza, 1975); Tomo II: Las Ganancias Extraordinarias y la
Soberana Nacional (Caracas: Editorial Ruptura, 1977); Tomo III: La OPEP y las Nacionalizaciones: La Renta Absoluta
(Caracas: Salvador de la Plaza, 1979). While the PRV-Ruptura position on oil plays a large role in Bravo's own opposition
to Chvez, many of those involved in the Ruptura analysis have worked closely with the Chvez government, including Al
Rodriguez Araque (former head of OPEC and PDVSA), Rafael Ramrez (current head of PDVSA and former energy
minister), and Bernard Mommer (OPEC minister and vice minister). See Bernard Mommer, The New Governance of
Venezuelan Oil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Mommer, Subversive Oil, in Venezuelan Politics in the Chvez
Era, ed. Ellner and Hellinger (London: Lynne Rienner, 2003), 13146.
13. Bravo denies that the PRV ever dissolved, but the article Cual Partido? Cual Socialismo? published by the PRV
Central Committee in the late 1970s prefigures many of these developments in its references to the need for a parallel
popular power and a new type of party.
14. Pedro Jorge Solans. (2009). Hctor Vivas, el arquitecto de la fuga del cuartel San Carlos, El Diario de Carlos Paz,
October 30, http://www.eldiariodecarlospaz.com/octubre_09/30_10_09/oc0929k.html.
15. About the history of the recovery of San Carlos, see Carlos Martinez, Michael Fox, and JoJo Farrell, eds., Venezuela
Speaks! Voices from the Grassroots (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2010), 15253.
16. Norman Gall. (1973). Teodoro Petkoff: The Crisis of the Professional Revolutionary. Part II: A New Party,
January, http://www.normangall.com/venezuela_art4_2.htm.
17. About Simn the Arab and the escape, see Alejandra Otero. (2006). Siete Dias, El Nacional, August 20, D4. See
also Gall, Teodoro Petkoff II; Guillermo Garca Ponce, El Tnel de San Carlos (Caracas: Ediciones La Muralla, 1968);
and Petkoff, Como nos fugamos de San Carlos, Elite (1967), 4753.
18. Gall, Teodoro Petkoff II.
19. Ibid.
20. Steve Ellner, De la Derrota Guerrillera a la Poltica Innovadora: El Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) (Caracas:
Monte Avila, 1992), 57.
21. Gall, Teodoro Petkoff II.
22. Ellner, De la Derrota Guerrillera a la Poltica Innovadora, 67.
23. Ibid., 72.
24. Margarita Lpez Maya, Del Viernes Negro al Referendo Revocatorio (Caracas: Alfadil, 2005), 135.
25. Ellner, De la Derrota Guerrillera a la Poltica Innovadora, 6970.
26. Ibid., 79.
27. Ibid., 81.

28. Ibid., 111.

29. Ibid., 9495.
30. Interview with Luis Britto Garca, April 24, 2008.
31. Ellner, De la Derrota Guerrillera a la Poltica Innovadora, 97.
32. Ellner, De la Derrota Guerrillera a la Poltica Innovadora, 70; Lpez Maya, Del Viernes Negro, 138.
33. Ellner, De la Derrota Guerrillera a la Poltica Innovadora, 155.
34. Maneiro, Notas Negativas, 56, 10. Thus Margarita Lpez Maya's statement that Comandantes like Maneiro and
Petkoff would struggle to find a new connection with popular movements is a partial truth (Del Viernes Negro, 13738).
Luis Bonilla-Molina and Haiman El Troudi distinguish between reformists like MAS and PCV and centrists like LCR
(Historia de la Revolucin Bolivariana: Pequea Crnica, 19482004 [Caracas: Universidad Bolivariana, 2004], 48).
35. Maneiro, Notas Negativas, 102103. Maneiro and others did not reject the concept of the vanguard outright, but
instead saw it as both necessary and dangerous. A proper vanguard, they argued, must be the result and not the cause,
emerging from genetic linkages with the mass movement (3940).
36. Ellner, De la Derrota Guerrillera a la Poltica Innovadora, 104.
37. Lpez Maya, Del Viernes Negro, 14142. Goldfrank notes that, according to Pablo Medina, an early LCR member,
an additional area of focus existed, consisting of contacts within the military (Deepening Local Democracy in Latin
America: Participation, Decentralization, and the Left [University Park: Penn State University Press, 2011], 43). Ellner
critiques Maneiro as anti-ideological, whereas Guillermo Ypez Salas deems him anti-intellectual (La Causa R: Origen y
Poder [Caracas: Tropykos, 1993]). See also Bonilla-Molina and El Troudi, Historia de la Revolucin Bolivariana, 50
51n53. About the LCR's role in ironically stabilizing the corrupt system, see Julia Buxton, The Failure of Political Reform in
Venezuela (London: Ashgate, 2001).
38. Lpez Maya, Del Viernes Negro, 14546.
39. Ibid., 146.
40. Ibid., 144.
41. About experiments in LCR governance, see Marta Harnecker, Haciendo Camino al Andar: Experiencias de ocho
gobiernos locales (Caracas: Monte Avila, 1994).
42. Lpez Maya, Del Viernes Negro, 149.
43. Interview with Rafael Uzctegui, May 27, 2008.
44. Interview with Juvenal, Maracaibo, May 18, 2008.
45. Pedro Pablo Linrez, Lucha Armada en Venezuela (Caracas: Universidad Bolivariana, 2006), 168.
46. One Punto Cero member I spoke with (Elio) was in San Carlos from 1971 to 1979 but unable to participate in the
1975 escape because he was being held on the prison's upper levels. He was only released after Punto Cero members began
to join other parties as a path to legalization.
47. Bonilla-Molina and El Troudi, Historia de la Revolucin Bolivariana, 5354.
48. Pedro Reyes Milln. (2004). 1975: la fuga del Cuartel San Carlos, Aporrea.org, January 16,
http://www.aporrea.org/ddhh/a19479.html.
49. San Carlos remained a political prison until 1988, when then-leader of Bandera Roja, Gabriel Puerta Apontewho
had fled the prison in 1975 only to find himself there once again in 1982was released. However, San Carlos would return
briefly to this role in the aftermath of Chvez's failed 1992 coup; the future president found himself confined by these
familiar walls until his 1994 pardon by Rafael Caldera.
50. Gaspar Castro Rojas, Como Secuestramos a Niehous (Caracas: Editorial Fuentes/Tres Continentes, 1979). See also
Pedro Mathison Leon, Las Verdades y Mentiras del Rescate de Niehous (Caracas: Comala, 2001); Ezequiel Daz Silva, Los
Secretos de Niehous (Caracas: Seleven, 1979).
51. Venezuela: Terror and Takeover, Time Magazine, April 19, 1976,
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,9140761,00.html.
52. Although no domestic press outlets published the manifesto, likely for fear of political repercussions, this did not
prevent government attacks on press freedom: RCTV was searched and its director questioned for purportedly interviewing
a GCR member, and the newspapers El Nacional and La Verdad were searched and their print runs confiscated. Carlos
Lanz Rodrguez, El Caso Niehous y la Corrupcin Administrativa (Caracas: Editorial Fuentes/Tres Contintentes, 1979), 20.

53. According to some, it was Ivan Nolasco Padilla, who has been vice-minister of culture under the Chvez
government, who submitted to torture and identified Rodrguez as a participant (Martinez et al., Venezuela Speaks!,
158n12). For Padilla's account of his role in the formation of the GCRS and the Niehous operation, see Linrez, Lucha
Armada, 18183.
54. Lanz, El Caso Niehous, 2022.
55. Leslie Bethell, ed., The Cambridge History of Latin America, Volume VIII: 1930 to the Present (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991), 777.
56. Lanz, El Caso Niehous, 10.
57. Ibid., 11.
58. Ibid., 177.
59. Interview with Carlos Lanz Rodrguez, May 26, 2008.
60. Juvenal agrees, describing the PRV as an orthodox organization that merely sought links with critical Marxism.
61. See also Lanz, El Caso Niehous, 125.
62. Ibid., 10. This assessment is shared by Bonilla-Molina and El Troudi, Historia de la Revolucin Bolivariana, 61.
63. Linrez, Lucha Armada, 168.
64. Bonilla-Molina and El Troudi, Historia de la Revolucin Bolivariana, 65.
65. Lanz, El Caso Niehous, 21.
66. Bonilla-Molina and El Troudi, Historia de la Revolucin Bolivariana, 65.

Chapter 3: Birth of the Tupamaros

1. This outpost, located just a few blocks away on the Calle Real de la Caada, was seized by the Simn Bolvar
Coordinator and today serves as its headquarters.
2. Luis Britto Garca. 2008. El 23 de Enero Vive, January 25, http://luisbrittogarcia.blogspot.com/.
3. Interview with Juan Contreras, April 21, 2008.
4. Norman Gall. (1972). Teodoro Petkoff: The Crisis of the Professional Revolutionary. Part I: Years of Insurrection,
January, http://www.normangall.com/venezuela_art4.htm.
5. Juvenal seconds this assessment (as does Maneiro, Notas Negativas [Caracas: Ediciones Venezuela 83, 1971], 74),
but whereas Petkoff attributes it to the distinction between insurrectionary versus non-insurrectionary periods, Juvenal
instead sees the tension with local communities as one rooted in vanguardist foquismo.
6. A popular subversion of Carlos Andrs Prez's official 1988 electoral slogan. See Fernando Coronil, The Magical
State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 237. Luis Bonilla-Molina
and Haiman El Troudi cite its origin as a chant among students during Prez's first term in office (Historia de la Revolucin
Bolivariana: Pequea Crnica, 19482004 [Caracas: Universidad Bolivariana, 2004], 314n68).
7. Margarita Lpez Maya, Del Viernes Negro al Referendo Revocatorio (Caracas: Alfadil, 2005), 23.
8. Ibid., 3138. Elements of what follows appeared in George Ciccariello-Maher. (2008). The Yumare Massacre, 22
Years On: The Very Model of Murderous Democracy, Counterpunch, May 10,
http://www.counterpunch.org/maher05102008.html.
9. Interview with Roland Denis, April 15, 2008. This is not to suggest that repression had never been widespread in the
past. As Maneiro noted in 1971: if three people met they were broken up by blows, and if thirty, by gunfireany group of
neighbors demandingminimum services was considered a potential guerrilla foco and treated as such (Notas Negativas,
20).
10. Interview with Isidro Ramrez, May 15, 2008.
11. Domingo Alberto Rangel. (1987). La Masacre de Cantaura, o Cuando la Democracia Tambin Mata, ltimas
Noticias, October 18, http://www.aporrea.org/actualidad/a5053.html. See also Rafael Hurtado Bravo, Cantaura: La Masacre
Anunciada (Caracas: El Perro y la Rana, 2008); Alexis Rosas, La Masacre de Cantaura (Caracas: Texto, 2005).
12. The operation was spearheaded by former DISIP head Henry Lpez Sisco, who was responsible for nearly the entire
Venezuelan state policy of massacre and targeted killings, including Cantaura, Yumare, and El Amparo, and the murder of
Jorge Rodrguez. In 1989, after a sham trial in which the victim's families were threatened and not allowed to testify, a

military judge ruled that because the victims were themselves guilty of rebellion, the DISIP was not at fault. A higher
military court later overturned this decision, citing vegetation unsuitable for an ambush, the manner in which the victims
were killed, the lack of police casualties, and the absence of any indication that the victims had fired weapons. In September
2006, twenty-nine participants in the Yumare massacre were charged, including both former president Jaime Lusinchi and
Lpez Sisco himself, who was ordered to be detained immediately but managed to slip out of the country; he currently is
seeking political asylum in Costa Rica. See the investigation by Aporrea.org at http://www.aporrea.org/ddhh/n113632.html.
For accounts of Yumare, see Ral Est, Adn Navas, and Alvaro Carrera, La Masacre de Yumare (Caracas: Carlos Aponte,
1986); Alexis Rosas, Yumare: La Masacre Impune (Caracas: Texto: 2006).
13. To mention only a few: Dilia Rojas, a barrio organizer and founder of the Carabobo Neighborhood Association who
had participated in the 1975 escape from San Carlos; Pedro Jimnez, a transport union organizer; Ronald Morao, active in
the Popular Culture Front and who edited a radical newspaper in Catia; Jos Silva, founder of the Francisco de Miranda
Cultural Center in Valencia; Simon Romero, an accomplished singer-songwriter; and Rafael Quevedo, a student leader at
the Pedagogic University of Caracas.
14. On the profound impact of the Amparo Massacre on public trust in the government, see Coronil and Skurski,
Dismembering and Remembering the Nation.
15. Francesco Relea. (2005). 23 de Enero, bastin del chavismo, El Pais, December 3,
http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internacional/23/Enero/bastion/chavismo/elpeputec/20051203elpepiint_15/Tes.
16. Some claim that this was an open policy under the first Carlos Andrs Prez administration (Carlos Martinez, Michael
Fox, and JoJo Farrell, eds., Venezuela Speaks! Voices from the Grassroots [Oakland: PM Press, 2010], 274).
17. Elements of what follows first appeared in George Ciccariello-Maher. (2008). Embedded with the Tupamaros,
MRZine, April 23, http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2008/cm230408.html.
18. Martinez et al., Venezuela Speaks!, 27475.
19. This anecdote originally appeared in George Ciccariello-Maher. (2007). Dual Power in the Venezuelan
Revolution, Monthly Review 59, no. 4 (September), 51. A similar description appears in Martin Markovits and Vincent
Bevins. 2008. Venezuela's Tupamaros on the Side of the Law, San Francisco Chronicle, November 16,
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/11/16/MNMA12JFVS.DTL.
20. This is not the whole story, and the DISIP did not merely snatch the name out of thin air. Contreras recalls how these
very same searches often turned up texts by the Uruguayan guerrillas such as Actas Tupamaras (Madrid: Editorial
Revolucin, 1982), not to mention classic texts like Carlos Marighella's Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla (Punta Gorda,
FL: Crashing Rocks Books, 2008 [1971]).
21. Bonilla-Molina and El Troudi, Historia de la Revolucin Bolivariana, 66, 315n80.
22. Ibid., 67. This fusion emerged from behind the heavy walls of Cuartel San Carlos, of all places, before Lanz's 1984
release.
23. Ibid., 6769.
24. Ibid., 69.
25. Eric Hobsbawm responded by noting that the self-defense zones actually had not been crushed and had, in fact,
come to represent the most durable bases for Colombia's FARC rebels, adding that Debray's critique of armed self-defense
was both politically motivated and poorly informed. Eric Hobsbawm. 1970. Guerrillas in Latin America, The Socialist
Register, 5355. It is worth noting that the FARC long outlasted most of the movements associated with Debray's foquista
approach.
26. Rgis Debray, Revolution in the Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967), 27.
27. Interview with Carlos Betancourt, May 23, 2008; Luigi Valsalice, Guerrilla y Poltica: Curso de accin en Venezuela
(19621969) (Buenos Aires: Editorial Pleamar, 1975), 112.
28. Los Comuneros. (2008). Cuadernos Ideolgicos, No. 3: Los Consejos Comunales, 14.
29. See, for example, Martinez et al., Venezuela Speaks!, 27778.
30. This distinction hinges decisively on Chvez's attempted coup in 1992, one that is interpreted as a principled stand
against the odds. Predictably, when jockeying for position, many prominent Chavistas attempt to portray themselves as
having taken similar risks in the past.
31. It is worth emphasizing that almost every interviewee with whom I spoke, as well as those appearing in Martinez et
al., Venezuela Speaks!, spontaneously refer to these distinctions.

32. Interview with Valentn Santana, May 24, 2008.

33. David Beriain. (2007). En la cuna del chavismo, ADN.es, November 28.
34. See George Ciccariello-Maher. (2007). Of Submarines and Loose Screws: A Chvez Ally Jumps the Divider,
Counterpunch, November 17, http://www.counterpunch.org/maher11172007.html.
35. In one interview, a militant from 23 de Enero claims to respect but not share Chvez's harsh critiques of La Piedrita,
arguing that La Piedrita's history of community work is beyond question. Martinez et al., Venezuela Speaks!, 278.

First Interlude: The Caracazo: History Splits in Two

1. Thus, while the claim that, until that moment in 1989, Venezuela was almost entirely devoid of social movements is
certainly false, it nevertheless contains a kernel of truth. Jonah Gindin. (2005). Chavistas in the Halls of Power, Chavistas
on the Street, NACLA Report on the Americas, March 5.
2. Thus, if 1998 and 1992 admittedly were crucial turning points, then, 27-F and 13-A might be better understood as
points of inflection, marking fundamental qualitative leaps that made further institutional development possible, yet by
virtue of their very nature generally remain hidden from view.
3. Roland Denis, Los Fabricantes de la Rebelin: Movimiento Popular, Chavismo y Sociedad en los aos noventa
(Caracas: Editorial Primera Linea, 2001), 5.
4. What follows draws upon George Ciccariello-Maher, The Fourth World War Started in Venezuela: The Legacy of the
Caracazo, Counterpunch, March 3, 2007, http://www.counterpunch.org/maher03032007.html.
5. Fernando Coronil, The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1997), 376.
6. Ibid., 375.
7. Margarita Lpez Maya, Del Viernes Negro al Referendo Revocatorio (Caracas: Alfadil, 2005), 2228.
8. Ibid., 36, figure 3.
9. Coronil's correct diagnosis of the ideological function of such state magic does not decrease the urgent validity of
this claim.
10. Here and in what follows I draw heavily on the description in Lpez Maya, Del Viernes Negro, 6570.
11. For Nora Castaeda, it is crucial to note that the Caracazo was sparked largely by Afro-Venezuelans from the cacaocultivating regions of eastern Miranda State. Creating a Caring Economy (London: Global Women's Strike, 2006), 27.
12. Dexy Garca. (2008). El 27F nos dej una gran enseanza a los militantes de izquierda, MINCI, February 29,
http://www.minci.gob.ve/entrevistas/3/174876/el_27f_nos.html.
13. Coronil, The Magical State, 376.
14. Joaqun Murieta, Lina Ron habla: su verdadera historia (Caracas: Editorial Fuentes, 2003), 29.
15. Lpez Maya, Del Viernes Negro, 70. Vargas explains that some grabbed expensive imported whiskey at first, only to
drop these later in favor of household necessities.
16. Roland Denis, Los Fabricantes de la Rebelin: Movimiento Popular, Chavismo y Sociedad en los aos noventa
(Caracas: Editorial Primera Linea, 2001), 5.
17. Ibid., 7.
18. Ibid., 8. In his concrete complexity, Denis far surpasses the abstract implausibility of Hardt and Negri's multitude
as an actor lacking institutional mediations or representational functions.
19. Ibid., 8.
20. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. R. Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 6.
21. Lpez Maya, Del Viernes Negro, 75; Coronil, The Magical State, 37778.
22. Emma Grand. (2010). El Caracazo: Cuatro millones de balas se dispararon contra un pueblo desarmado, YVKE
Mundial, February 26, http://www.radiomundial.com.ve/yvke/noticia.php?43605; Yolanda Valery. (2009). A 20 aos del
Caracazo, BBC Mundo, February 27, http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/spanish/latin_america/newsid_7914000/7914048.stm.
23. Coronil, The Magical State, 378. One witness from 23 de Enero recalls seeing bodies stuffed into bags there as well
(Carlos Martinez, Michael Fox, and JoJo Farrell, eds., Venezuela Speaks! Voices from the Grassroots [Oakland, CA: PM

Press, 2010], 276).

24. See Ciccariello-Maher, Jumpstarting the Decolonial Engine: Symbolic Violence from Fanon to Chvez, Theory &
Event 13, no. 1 (2010).
25. More recently, Chvez has used the same language to describe not the Caracazo, but his own coup, reflecting either
a profound misunderstanding or cynical misrepresentation. Yaileth Argelles. (2011). Chvez conmemora el 4F en el
Cuartel Libertador, La Verdad, February 4, http://laverdad.com/detnotic.php?CodNotic=51770.
26. Castaeda, Creating a Caring Economy, 28.
27. Vijay Prashad notes the historical difference between general's coups and colonel's coups, and this distinction is
revealing in the Venezuelan context. The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World (New York: Free Press,
2007), 14849.
28. Hugo Chvez and Marta Harnecker, Understanding the Bolivarian Revolution, trans. C. Boudin (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 2005), 32.
29. Fernando Acosta Riveros. (2009). Febrero bolivariano y venezolano, Aporrea.org, February 7,
http://www.aporrea.org/actualidad/a71974.html.
30. In the 1998 election, Radical Cause (LCR) threw its lot in with right-wing reformer and former Miss Universe Irene
Sez. After polling upward of 70 percent, Sez demonstrated an utter lack of understanding of the moment by accepting the
endorsement of COPEI, one of the discredited traditional parties. By election time, Sez polled less than 3 percent (Michael
McCaugan, The Battle of Venezuela [New York: Seven Stories, 2005], 37). LCR's subsequent electoral results outside of its
stronghold in Bolvar State have been nothing short of miserable.
31. Interview with Juvenal, May 18, 2008.
32. These documents are collected in Klber Ramrez Rojas, Historia documental del 4 de febrero (Caracas: El Perro y la
Rana, 2006). Klber was a former PRV-Ruptura member who had separated from the organization in the early 1980s, later
founding Patriotic Hope (Esperanza Patritica).
33. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), 238.
34. Valentn Santana is more forthright in his skepticism: we don't believe in soldiers, they have always been
treasonous, like when Pez betrayed Bolvar.
35. Carlos Lanz Rodrguez. (2004). La Revolucin es cultural o reproducir la dominacin, Aporrea.org, August 30,
http://www.aporrea.org/actualidad/a9897.html.
36. Denis, Fabricantes, 13.
37. Denis, Fabricantes, 11.
38. Martinez et al., Venezuela Speaks!, 161.
39. Luis Britto Garca, Reflexiones sobre el 4 de febrero de 1992, February 16, 2008,
http://luisbrittogarcia.blogspot.com/2008/02/pueblo-y-ejrcito.html.
40. Angela Zago, La Rebelin de los ngeles (Caracas: Fuentes, 1992), 30.
41. By linking the Caracazo to the coup and documenting the long history of prior organizing, I thus contest the topdown and conspiratorial histories by the late Alberto Garrido, especially Historia Secreta de la Revolucin Bolivariana
(Mrida: Editorial Venezolana, 2000).
42. Luis Britto Garca. (2007). Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution Tells Us: People Are the Beginning and the End of
Everything, Venezuela Analysis, February 26, http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/2242?page=21&quicktabs_2=2.
43. Denis, Fabricantes, 8.
44. Interview with Luis Britto Garca, April 24, 2008.

Chapter 4: Sergio's Blood: Student Struggles

1. Angela Zago, La Rebelin de los ngeles (Caracas: Fuentes, 1992), 30.
2. Many believe that the real winner of the 1993 election was Andrs Velzquez of Radical Cause (see chapter 2) and
that Caldera's victory was fraudulent.
3. Roland Denis, Los Fabricantes de la Rebelin: Movimiento Popular, Chavismo y Sociedad en los aos noventa
(Caracas: Editorial Primera Linea, 2001), 48.

4. Ibid.
5. The second quote is from La Piedrita 10 (September/October 1993). Denis book is dedicated to the memory of both
Sergio Rodrguez and Yulimar Reyes, for whom Yulimar Vive was named. Reyes was murdered under similar circumstances
on the Avenida Bolvar during the first moments of the Caracazo.
6. Luis Bonilla-Molina and Haiman El Troudi, Historia de la Revolucin Bolivariana: Pequea Crnica, 19482004
(Caracas: Universidad Bolivariana, 2004), 127.
7. Luis Beltran Acosta, Las Luchas Sociales en Venezuela (16001814): Antecedentes histricos del movimiento
estudiantil (Caracas: Fondo Editorial Carlos Aponte, 1984), 1824.
8. Roberto Antonio Lpez Snchez, Movimiento estudiantil de LUZ y proceso politico venezolano, 19581989
(Maracaibo: LUZ, 2007), 43.
9. See also Gregory Wilpert, Changing Venezuela by Taking Power (London: Verso, 2007), 11.
10. Lpez Snchez, Movimiento estudiantil, 44.
11. Ibid., 46.
12. Roberto Lpez Snchez. (2006). Los Movimientos estudiantiles en Venezuela, 19581990, Historia Actual Online
10 (Spring), 76.
13. Manuel Cabieses Donoso, Venezuela, Okey! (Santiago: Ediciones del Litoral, 1963), 218.
14. The UCV was occupied in October 1960 and again in December 1966 (Luigi Valsalice, Guerrilla y Poltica: Curso
de accin en Venezuela [19621969] [Buenos Aires: Editorial Pleamar, 1975], 74).
15. Interview with Fernando Rivero, April 17, 2008.
16. Lpez Snchez, Los Movimientos, 77.
17. Ibid., 76.
18. Lpez Snchez, Movimiento estudiantil, 49.
19. As a result, Lpez characterizes the Renovation as an alliance between liberal-bourgeois and revolutionary
perspectives on the university against the threat of technocratic-developmentalist reform (Lpez Snchez, Movimiento
estudiantil, 53).
20. Ibid., 4950. See Carlos Lanz, El poder en la escuela (Caracas: Primera Lnea, 1990).
21. See Lpez Snchez, Los Movimientos, 78.
22. Ibid., 78.
23. Ibid., 7879.
24. Roberto Lpez Snchez and Carmen Alicia Hernndez Rodrguez, Movimientos estudiantiles y crisis del sistema
politico en Veneuzuela: 19871988, Espacio Abierto 10, no. 4 (OctoberDecember 2001), 64951.
25. Ibid., 65162.
26. Ibid., 654.
27. Ibid., 66162. See also Lpez Snchez, Los Movimientos, 80.
28. It would be difficult to agree that the student rebellions wrote the script that the popular action of the Caracazo
would put into practice, but nevertheless there is some truth to this claim. Lpez Snchez, Los Movimientos, 82.
29. Lpez Snchez and Hernndez Rodrguez, Movimientos estudiantiles, 653.
30. Interview with Roland Denis, April 13, 2008.
31. Hctor Ruiz. (2007). Los Consejos Estudiantiles: Herramienta para la transformacin diaria, Aporrea.org, August
5, http://www.aporrea.org/educacion/a39299.html.
32. The quote is from Fernando Rivero. The 7 percent figure is from Kiraz Janicke. (2007). Venezuela's Resurgent
Revolutionary Student Movement, Venezuela Analysis, September 3, http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/2581.
33. Kiraz Janicke eloquently describes this dynamic in Venezuela's Resurgent Revolutionary Student Movement.
34. On Primero Justicia, see Golinger, The Chvez Code: Cracking U.S. Intervention in Venezuela (London: Pluto Press,
2006). Today's Bandera Roja emerged from a 1976 split in which Gabriel Puerta Aponte expelled Carlos Betancourt and the
guerrillas of the eastern front, but the vast transition Bandera Roja has undergone is best illustrated in a single decade: from
supporting both 1992 coups against Carlos Andrs Prez, Bandera Roja would support the 2002 coup against Chvez as
well, arguing that the president is a false communist and must be overthrown. According to some, it was the opportunism

inherent in student electoral politics that prompted this shift.

35. In what follows, I draw upon George Ciccariello-Maher, Behind Venezuela's Student Rebellion: Who's Pulling the
Strings, Counterpunch, June 910, 2007 http://www.counterpunch.org/maher06092007.html.
36. This turn of phrase has a long history in Venezuela and had been deployed against the Betancourt government's
censorship campaign of 1960. Cabieses Donoso, Venezuela, Okey!, 136.
37. According to right-wing apologists, the story of the script was false, but rather than denying the existence of the
script, the anti-Chavista students instead claimed that the Chavistas had stolen their property.
38. Sandra Sierra, 8 Injured After Anti-Hugo Chvez March, The Associated Press, November 8, 2007. While no
formal retractions appeared, the Wall Street Journal corrected its own version of the story later: John Lyons and Jos de
Crdoba, To Oppose Chvez, Youth in Caracas Rally Behind Stalin, Wall Street Journal, November 24, 2007.
39. Before the attack on the School of Social Work, I was contacted by Casey Woods from the Miami Herald, who
hoped to speak with some Chavista students about the protests. However, after the shooting at the UCV, I emailed Woods
all the available information about the events, including several videos showing clearly what happened, yet the Herald
refused to cover the Chavista side. These videos are available here: Luigino Bracci, Varios heridos en la UCV por agresin
opositora contra estudiantes, YVKE Mundial, November 7, 2007, http://radiomundial.com.ve/node/143737;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFrYOWDORPU. Woods contribution can be seen in the article by Phil Gunson, AntiChvez Marchers Ambushed on Campus, Miami Herald, November 8, 2007, as well as her profiles of Stalin Gonzlez and
Chavista student leader Hctor Rodrguez: Casey Woods, Student Critic of Chvez Comes from Marxist Ranks, and
Student Leader Works for Chvez, Miami Herald, November 24, 2007.
40. Luigino Bracci. (2007). Al pueblo no le costara tomar las universidades si siguen con la violencia, YVKE Mundial,
November 8, http://radiomundial.com.ve/node/143746.
41. For an account of struggles within the UBV, see Martinez et al., Venezuela Speaks!, chapter 16.
42. From 668,109 in 1997 to an estimated 1,796,507 students in 2007. Ministerio del Poder Popular para la Planificacin
y Desarrollo, Boletn de Indicadores, No. 3: Logros Sociales, May 2008, 4558. Thanks to Megan Morrissey at the
Venezuela Information Office for making this document available to me.
43. See Tamara Pearson, Venezuela's Dreams and Demons: Has the Bolivarian Revolution Changed Education?
Venezuela Analysis, March 18, 2011, http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/6072.
44. This turn to the liceistas was nothing new; Denis notes an upsurge in organizing among secondary school students
around 1991 (Fabricantes, 13).
45. Janicke, Venezuela's Resurgent Revolutionary Student Movement. See also Martinez et al., Venezuela Speaks!,
23741.
46. See Edgardo Lander, ed., La colonialidad del saber: eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales. Perspectivas
latinoamericanas (Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 1993).
47. Carlos Lanz Rodrguez, La Divisin social del trabajo y su impacto en la educacin, July 27, 2007,
http://www.kaosenlared.net/noticia/division-social-trabajo-impacto-educacion.
48. Ibid.
49. Agencia Venezolana de Noticias, Rinden tributo a luchador social Sergio Rodrguez, October 1, 2010,
http://www.avn.info.ve/node/20716.
50. Carmen Clemente Travieso, Las esquinas de Caracas (Caracas: El Nacional, 2007), 74. The history is told by
General Francisco Tosta Garca in his Leyendas patriticas: segunda parte de las leyendas de la conquista (Caracas:
University of Los Andes, 1898), 3542.

Chapter 5: Manuelita's Boots: Women between Two Movements

1. Gabriel Garca Mrquez, The General in His Labyrinth, trans. E. Grossman (New York: Knopf, 1990), 5455.
2. See Pamela S. Murray, Loca or Libertadora?: Manuela Senz in the Eyes of History and Historians, 1900c.
1990, Journal of Latin American Studies 33, no. 2 (May 2001), 291310. Murray documents this erasure of Senz and
even of her saving Bolvar, which occasionally has been described in such a gendered manner to give Bolvar credit for
saving himself and describing Manuela as hysterical (293).
3. Pilar Moreno, Jos Mara Crdova (Bogota, 1977), 404, as cited in Murray, Loca or Libertadora?, 295. Garca

Mrquez, The General in His Labyrinth, 19293. Murray also discusses Palma's description of Manuela as a mannish
woman (296).
4. Garca Mrquez, The General in His Labyrinth, 193.
5. Ibid., 227.
6. Evelyn Stevens, Marianismo: The Other Face of Machismo in Latin America, in Ann Pescatelo, ed., Female and
Male in Latin America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973), 91.
7. For a critique of the presumed universality of Marianismo, see Tracy Bachrach Ehlers, Debunking Marianismo:
Economic Vulnerability and Survival Strategies among Guatemalan Wives, Ethnology 30, no. 1 (January 1991), 116.
8. Fernando Coronil explains how the cult of Mara Lionza was repressed as it was incorporated into national folklore,
shifting from that of a pagan popular figuresensual and muscularto a chaste image that has an uncanny resemblance
to the [more marianista] Virgin of Coromoto (The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela [Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1997], 171). For a discussion of the centrality of the cult of Mara Lionza for interpreting
contemporary Venezuelan gender relations, see Elizabeth Gackstetter Nichols, The Power of the Pelvic Bone: Breaching
the Barriers of Social Class in Venezuela, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 26, no. 3 (2005), 71105.
9. For example, Elizabeth Friedman's Unfinished Transitions: Women and the Gendered Development of Democracy in
Venezuela, 19361996 (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2000) devotes less than a single page to female
participation in the guerrilla struggle (12829).
10. Interview with Nora Castaeda, May 2, 2008.
11. Interview with Alba Carosio, April 28, 2008.
12. Furthermore, through either a dismissal of Nora Castaeda's supporting role or a misunderstanding of her history,
Carosio insists that Nora was never in the guerrilla struggle.
13. Friedman, Unfinished Transitions, 140. The Popular Women's Circles were founded in 1974, and just four years
later, they numbered thirty-six, of which seventeen were in Caracas alone (170).
14. Ibid., 17071.
15. Ibid., 173.
16. Ibid., 174, my emphasis. However, Friedman also notes a later turn by the CFPs toward more feminist questions.
17. As Sarah Wagner puts it: These government initiatives were the catalyst in consolidating the women's movement
and in laying the foundation for those who would follow. Wagner. (2005). Women and Venezuela's Bolivarian
Revolution, Venezuela Analysis, January 15, http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/877.
18. Friedman, Unfinished Transitions, 186; see also Sujatha Fernandes, Who Can Stop the Drums? Urban Social
Movements in Chvez's Venezuela (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 58. Friedman notes that the class makeup
of the women's movement was most apparent in the reform of the Labor Law, in which many women who relied on paid
domestic labor for their own professional careers were unwilling to extend labor protections to the very women they hired
(194).
19. Nichols discusses two such cases, that of Ins Mara Marcano, a poor barrio resident and single mother who in 1987
was charged with child abandonment after her daughter was kidnapped, raped, and killed while she was out of the house,
and of Linda Loaiza Lpez, who in 2001 was kidnapped and held for three months, during which time she was tortured and
raped by a wealthy man who eventually was freed (but later re-arrested) on the grounds that she had been a prostitute. Such
concrete cases, in drawing women together, also challenged the middle-class nature of the movement (The Power of the
Pelvic Bone, 7475).
20. Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (London:
Falling Wall Press, 1975).
21. Nora Castaeda, Creating a Caring Economy (London: Global Women's Strike, 2006), 71.
22. The book appeared in Spanish translation by 1975 (Madrid: Siglo XXI). Selma James recounts Castaeda's surprise
in her introduction to the latter's Creating A Caring Economy, 11.
23. See, e.g., Laura Sullivan, Wages for Anyone is Bad for Business, Mute Magazine, January 9, 2006,
http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/wages-anyone-bad-business.
24. James and Dalla Costa, The Power of Women, 36n16.
25. Castaeda, Creating a Caring Economy, 68. This does not mean that tensions do not persist within and between
those advocating wages for housework, however. Lizardi Prada, founder of the Venezuelan Homemakers Union and head

of its chapter in Merida State, does not seek to destroy housework as Selma James does, but instead seeks to dignify
women without necessarily transforming the household. James Suggett. (2009). Venezuela's Homemakers Union: An
Interview with Founder and Coordinator Lizardi Prada, Venezuela Analysis, July 7,
http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/4597.
26. Castaeda, Creating a Caring Economy, 66.
27. In early 2010, some participants even denounced the fact that corruption and bureaucracy had devoured the
mission. Comit Propulsor. (2010). La corrupcin y el burocratismo se comen la Misin Madres del Barrio, Aporrea.org,
March 18, http://www.aporrea.org/misiones/a97237.html.
28. See Castaeda, Creating a Caring Economy, 5460.
29. Interview with Jessie Blanco, May 7, 2008.
30. Banmujer draws directly on the pedagogy of the oppressed in its participatory nature and uses grassroots
educators to draw out the latent knowledge of popular women rather than teaching them (Castaeda, Creating a Caring
Economy, 58). Furthermore, its decentralized structure in some ways prefigures the communal council phenomenon (64).
True to her political origins, Selma James describes these elements in terms of self-activity, a central concept of the
Johnson-Forest Tendency (8).
31. Blanco collaborated in the past with the anarchist grouping El Libertario before breaking with it over its right-wing
positions, especially around the time of the 2002 coup against Chvez. She now works on a political level alongside
Roland Denis and others in the M-13A Movement (and previously Proyecto Nuestramrica).
32. Edith Franco, El Socialismo del Siglo XXI es el Comunismo, interview with Mara Len, Rebelin (September 3,
2005), http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=19606.
33. Jessie Blanco, Is Our Socialism Feminist? Socialist Outlook 12 (summer 2007), http://www.isg-fi.org.uk/spip.php?
article497. Originally published in Revista Matea, which Blanco founded.
34. While slightly less pessimistic about the balance sheet of progress in recent years, Sujatha Fernandes has shown how
the ability of women to challenge the recreation of gender norms within the Bolivarian Revolution has depended upon their
ability to organize on a grassroots level beyond the reach of the bureaucratic state. Sujatha Fernandes, Barrio Women and
Popular Politics in Chvez's Venezuela, Latin American Politics & Society 49, no. 3 (2007), 97127. See also Fernandes,
Who Can Stop the Drums?, esp. 58.
35. Hugo Chvez Fras, Rindamos tributo a Manuela Senz, in Mnica Saiz, ed., Bolivarianas: el protagonismo de las
mujeres en la Revolucin Venezolana (Caracas: Ediciones Emancipacin, 2004), 14849.
36. Garca Mrquez, The General in His Labyrinth, 226, 193.
37. Saiz, Bolivarianas, 56.
38. Pablo Neruda, Ceremonial Songs/Cantos Ceremoniales (Tempe, AZ: Latin American Literary Review Press, 1996),
18.
39. In Chvez's speech, he recites several of Neruda's poems for Manuelita, insisting that I believe that Neruda was in
love with Manuela (Saiz, Bolivarianas, 149).
40. Not only with Bolvar, but also with other recently resuscitated symbols of Afro-Venezuelan womanhood such as
Negra Hiplita and Negra Matea, two slaves who raised Bolvar, whose remains were interred in the Pantheon only two
months before those of Manuelita.
41. Luis Britto Garca, Manuela Senz se reune con Bolvar en Caracas, July 18, 2010,
http://luisbrittogarcia.blogspot.com/2010/07/manuela-saenz-se-reune-con-bolivar-en.html.

Chapter 6: Jos Leonardo's Body and the Collapse of Mestizaje

1. Manuel Vicente Magallanes, Luchas e insurrecciones en la Venezuela colonial (Caracas: Editorial Tiempo Nuevo,
1972), 1115.
2. Martn Fernndez de Navarrete, Coleccin de los Viages y Descubrimientos que Hicieron por Mar los Espaoles, vol.
3 (Madrid: Imprenta Real, 1829), 1617.
3. Magallanes, Luchas e insurrecciones, 1820.
4. Ibid., 7.
5. Ibid., 7.

6. Ibid, 32.
7. Jos de Oviedo y Baos dedicates almost the entire eighth chapter of his account to El Negro Miguel (The Conquest
and Settlement of Venezuela, trans. J. J. Varner [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987], 9498). Whether this was
truly the first serious resistance to black slavery in the Americas depends on our definition; Jos L. Franco documents
some limited rebellions and massacres before Miguel in his Afroamrica (Havana: Junta Nacional de Arqueologa y
Etnologa, 1961), 11521. In 1551, the latent rebelliousness of the zone led to the imprisonment of El Negro Cristbal, a
slave suspected of mounting a rebellion in the mines of Chirgua. Chirgua was soon abandoned for the richer veins at Bura,
and as if equipped with golden blinders, the Spanish transferred many of Cristbal's followers there in 1552. As an
indication of the dialectic driving resistance and colonization, it is ironic the mines at Bura were discovered on a mission to
pacify the Jirajaras. Jess Mara Herrera Salas, El Negro Miguel y la primera revolucin venezolana (Caracas: Vadell
Hermanos Editores, 2003), 9899. Bura boasted Venezuela's highest concentration of slaves of the period, although they
numbered only around eighty. Pedro M. Arcaya, Insurreccin de los Negros de la Serrana de Coro (Caracas: Instituto
Panamericano de Geografa e Historia, [1910] 1949), 15.
8. According to Arcaya's admittedly white supremacist account, Miguel's new state was a grotesque caricature of
Spanish institutions that the slaves and Indians were incapable of even understanding (Insurreccin de los Negros, 15).
9. Herrera Salas, El Negro Miguel, 116.
10. Federico Brito Figueroa, Las insurrecciones de los esclavos negros en la sociedad colonial venezolana (Caracas:
Cantaclaro, 1961), 43; Ricardo E. Alegra. (1978). El Rey Miguel: Hroe puertorriqueo en la lucha por la libertad de los
esclavos, Revista de Historia de Amrica 85 (JanuaryJune), 16.
11. Sybille Fischer, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2004). For one reference to King Miguel by contemporary organizers, see Martinez Carlos Martinez,
Michael Fox, and JoJo Farrell, eds., Venezuela Speaks! Voices from the Grassroots (Oakland: PM Press, 2010), 222.
12. Martha Cobb. (1972). Africa in Latin America, Black World 21, no. 10 (August), 8. Cobb mistakes the town of El
Tocuyo for the name of an indigenous leader, erroneously suggesting that the colonists turned to the indigenous population
for assistance in crushing Miguel's rebellion.
13. Oviedo, The Conquest and Settlement of Venezuela, 98. While such rebelliousness would wane eventually, its
subterraneous basis remained in the Cult of Mara Lionza, whose center at Cerro Sorte was not far from Bura and in whose
pantheon King Miguel figures as a lesser deity (he himself had been a practitioner of voodoo). Herrera Salas, El Negro
Miguel, 112.
14. The intersection of Afro-indigenous resistance and the guerrilla war was limited, but not entirely symbolic, since
guerrilla fronts occasionally grew out of previous Afro-indigenous struggles. Pedro Pablo Linrez, Lucha Armada en
Venezuela (Caracas: Universidad Bolivariana, 2006), 1415.
15. Arcaya, Insurreccin de los Negros, 2728.
16. Ibid., 31, 36.
17. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage,
1963 [1938]), 81. Jos Marcial Ramos Gudez places Chirino in a forgotten tradition of Black Jacobins in Venezuela:
150 aos de la abolicin de la esclavitud en Venezuela: de Jos Leonardo Chirino a Jos Gregorio Monagas, Tierra
Firme 22, no. 85 (2004).
18. Arcaya, wearing his racism on his sleeve, insists that Chirinolike Miguelcould not even comprehend the
meaning of the words for which they risked their lives (Insurreccin de los Negros, 38).
19. Arcaya, Insurreccin de los Negros, 5455. See also Jos Gil Fortoul, Historia Constitucional de Venezuela, vol. 1
(Berlin: Carl Heymann, 1907), 131.
20. One historical account places Miguel's revolt under the category of more economic than political, whereas
Chirino's rebellion is considered the first movement with freedom as its objective. Edgar Esteves Gonzlez, Batallas de
Venezuela, 18101824 (Caracas: Los Libros de El Nacional, 2004), 8, 12. Regarding contemporary debates, see Jos
Leonardo Chirino y la insurreccin de la Serrana de Coro de 1795. Insurreccin de libertad o rebelin de independencia
(Mrida: Universidad de Los Andes, 1996).
21. Jess Chucho Garca, Demystifying Africa's Absence in Venezuelan History and Culture, in S. Walker, ed.,
African Roots/American Cultures: Africa in the Creation of the Americas (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), 285.
22. Interview with Jos Poyo, May 20, 2008.
23. Guarulla was involved in Chvez's efforts to force one particularly virulent evangelical group with ties to the United

States governmentthe New Tribes Missionto leave Venezuela and Amazonas in particular.
24. Poyo has since been at the center of controversy within the CONIVE itself. After being nominated by CONIVE as an
indigenous candidate to the National Assembly for the September 2010 elections, some accused Poyo of rigging the vote, at
which point he withdrew and his critics named their own candidateJos Luis Gonzlez (previously a deputy to the
Constituent Assembly of 1999)who was elected successfully (http://www.aporrea.org/actualidad/n158681.html).
25. Csar Uzctegui. (1995). Aproximacin al estudio de la poltica indigenista venezolana del siglo XIX, Montalbn
28, 201.
26. This is not to say that racism toward these two groups does not function differently. Whereas anti-black racism in
Venezuela largely reflects the epidermally overdetermined schema described by Fanon, anti-indigenous racism often
takes its cues from the sphere of language.
27. Interview with Jess Chucho Garca, May 27, 2008. DIGEPOL was the predecessor of the DISIP.
28. Magallanes, Luchas e insurrecciones, 10810.
29. To this day, Caricuao is known as a center of culture and resistance and is home to the revolutionary Radio Perola
and various Tupamaro-style groups.
30. According to Valsalice, the fact that the Bachiller Front, despite its strategic location, was more a place of refuge
than a fighting front was in part due to a lingering racism and underestimation of Afro fighters (Guerrilla y Poltica: Curso
de accin en Venezuela [19621969] [Buenos Aires: Editorial Pleamar, 1975], 111).
31. Jos Carlos Maritegui, Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, trans. M. Urquidi (Austin: University of
Texas Press, [1928] 1971), 22.
32. Jess Mara Herrera Salas. (2005). Ethnicity and Revolution: The Political Economy of Racism in Venezuela, Latin
American Perspectives, 32, issue 141, no. 2 (March), 74.
33. On these nascent groups, see Mara Martha Mijares Pacheco, Reflexiones para enfrentar al racismo en Venezuela,
in D. Mato, ed., Polticas de identidades y diferencias sociales en tiempos de globalizacin (Caracas: FACES-Universidad
Central de Venezuela, 2003), 6378. See also Colectivo Red Afrovenezolano, Somos la Red de Organizaciones
Afrovenezolanos (Ministerio de Cultura, n.d.).
34. See George Ciccariello-Maher. (2007). Toward a Racial Geography of Caracas: Neoliberal Urbanism and the Fear
of Penetration, Qui Parle 16, no. 2 (spring), 3972.
35. The so-called Bratton Plan was instituted in Catia, and a recent Business Week article notes that during Pea's
institution of the plan graffiti appeared in Catia reading Bratton Go Home. Susan Berfield, Bill Bratton, Globocop,
Business Week, April 1, 2010, http://www.businessweek.com/stories/20100331/bill-bratton-globocop.
36. Herrera Salas, Ethnicity and Revolution, 111.
37. Heiber Barreto Snchez, Lo que se olvida a la oposicin poltica: raza y clase en la V Repblica, Amrica Latina
en Movimiento (December 16, 2002), 1, cited in Herrera Salas, Ethnicity and Revolution, 82.
38. Herrera Salas, Ethnicity and Revolution, 83.
39. Ernesto Cardenal, Venezuela: una nueva revolucin en Amrica Latina (August 1, 2004), cited in Herrera Salas,
Ethnicity and Revolution, 84; Tariq Ali, Why He Crushed the Oligarchs: the Importance of Hugo Chvez,
Counterpunch, August 16, 2004, http://www.counterpunch.org/tariq08162004.html.
40. Cited in Herrera Salas, Ethnicity and Revolution, 1078.
41. On the division of CONIVE, see Martinez et al., Venezuela Speaks!, 216. Chapters 12 and 13 document both the
advances and setbacks for indigenous communities under the Bolivarian Revolution.
42. Tal Abaddy, Venezuelan Leader Wins Praise For Efforts To Help His Nation's Minorities, South Florida Sun
Sentinel, April 9, 2007, http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/2327.
43. In the run-up to the 2012 presidential election, Guarulla joined an anti-Chvez split from the PPT, the Progressive
Movement of Venezuela (MPV), that supported opposition candidate Henrique Capriles Radonski.
44. Jorge Montiel, a Wayu from western Venezuela, speaks similarly of the concept of Yanama (Martinez et al.,
Venezuela Speaks!, 217). For more contemporary discussion of the ayllu, see Ral Zibechi, Dispersing Power: Social
Movements as Anti-State Forces, trans. R. Ryan (Oakland, CA: AK Press, [2006] 2010).
45. On rochelas, see Sujatha Fernandes, Who Can Stop the Drums? Urban Social Movements in Chvez's Venezuela
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 1.
46. Interview with Enrique Arrieta Chourio, May 17, 2008. Arrieta refers to the following statement by Maritegui: The

contribution of the Negro, who came as a slave, almost as a merchandise, appearsworthless and negative. His
conditiondid not permit him to help create culture (Seven Interpretative Essays, 280).
47. Abaddy, Venezuelan Leader Wins Praise.

Second Interlude: Every Eleventh Has Its Thirteenth

1. The following draws upon George Ciccariello-Maher, Every 11th Has Its 13th: The Failed Coup Against Chvez,
Five Years On, Counterpunch, April 13, 2007, http://www.counterpunch.org/maher04132007.html.
2. The opposition strategy and the maneuvering of police and military forces involved were revealed in the film by Kim
Bartley and Donnacha Briain, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (Ireland: Power Pictures, 2003). The accuracy of the
film has been debated, but when the critics of the film include Phil Gunson, whose own lack of journalistic integrity I
encountered more recently during the student struggles in Venezuela (see chapter 4), one should immediately be skeptical
of the critics. See the debate in Columbia Journalism Review (MayJune 2004) between Phil Gunson, Director's Cut (59
61) and Kim Bartley and Donnacha Briain, Who's Right? The Filmmakers Respond (6061).
3. The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, April 12, 2002, transcript available at
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/latin_america/jan-june02/venezuela_412.html. Even the Guardian made this mistake by
claiming that pro-Chavez snipers had killed at least 13 people (Alex Bellos, Ousted Chavez Detained by Army, The
Guardian, April 13, 2002, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/apr/13/venezuela.alexbellos). Most evidence now points
to the notorious Metropolitan Police as having furnished the snipers, but initially this did not help to clear up the events:
were the multiple mayors of Caracas not confusing enough, the Metropolitan Mayor Alfredo Pea, who found himself in
command of the Metropolitan Police on that day, had been elected with Chvez's support, only to turn rapidly and
ferociously against the government in the months leading up to the coup. Many still contest this, including Brian Nelson in
The Silence and the Scorpion (New York: Nation Books, 2009). However, even for Nelson, the question of the snipers
remains a riddle. Gregory Wilpert is rightly critical of Nelson's book and points to overlooked film footage of the
Metropolitan Police captured in the popular documentary Claves de una massacre. Wilpert, The Venezuelan Coup
Revisited: Silencing the Evidence, NACLA Report 42, no. 4 (JulyAugust 2009), https://nacla.org/node/5944.
4. Bartley and Briain, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. This message was filmed by a CNN correspondent, Otto
Neustaldt, who publicly denounced those involved and leaked the video to the public.
5. When Luis Herrera Campins restricted television advertising for cigarettes and alcohol, he was pilloried and defamed
without hesitation.
6. Luis Britto Garca, Dictadura Meditica en Venezuela (Caracas: MPPCI, 2008).
7. This also applies to the 2009 coup against Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, who lacked the organic relationship
with well-developed social movements that the Chvez regime enjoyed. See George Ciccariello-Maher, The CounterRevolution Will Not Be Tweeted: The Honduran Coup and the Limits of Hope and Change, Counterpunch, July 3, 2009,
http://www.counterpunch.org/maher07032009.html.
8. Crnica de un golpe, part 2, El Rostro del Fascism (film), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxQzKNPwEoQ.
9. Marta Harnecker, Venezuela: Militares Junto al Pueblo (Spain: El Viejo Topo, 2003), 212. Baduel, one of Chvez's
most loyal military allies, would later join the opposition in the run-up to the failed 2007 constitutional reform referendum
(see the conclusion).
10. Ibid., 113.
11. Ibid., 39, 41.
12. Ibid., 59.
13. Interview with Gonzalo Gmez, May 19, 2008.
14. See La Asamblea Popular Revolucionaria: Origen de Aporrea.org, http://aporrea.org/nosotros.php.
15. Francisco Toro, Venezuela's 2002 Coup: The Evidence Two Years On, http://www.proveo.org/11A.pdf.
16. The claim of a power vacuum was reinforced later by a high court in a ruling that blocked efforts to hold the
soldiers involved responsible.
17. Son of Willian Izarra, one of Chvez's co-conspirators in 1992, Andrs Izarra quickly tendered his resignation and
has since worked alongside the Chvez government, most recently as head of international news channel TeleSUR and
Minister of Communication.

18. Hugo Blanco, Chile: La leccin que Venezuela aprendi? Rebelin.org, March 9, 2007,
http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=47858. For Blanco's early reflections on the Chilean coup, see Hugo Blanco et al.,
The Coup in Chile: Firsthand Report and Assessment (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973) and Les Evans, ed., Disaster in
Chile: Allende Strategy and Why It Failed (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1974). For contemporary references to Allende, see
Unidad Socialista de Izquierda, Si se viene un golpe, que no agarre al pueblo desarmado, como en Chile, Aporrea.org,
September 13, 2008, http://www.aporrea.org/tiburon/a63718.html; Chvez himself has said the same: Prensa Presidencial,
Presidente Chvez: Defiendo la verdad en la que creo y la defiendo con pasin, November 10, 2007,
http://www.aporrea.org/venezuelaexterior/n104506.html.
19. See, for example, Chvez acus a oposicin de intentar promover guerra religiosa y los reta a retractarse, Prensa
Web YVKE, February 10, 2009, http://www.aporrea.org/oposicion/n128656.html. The editor of the Venezuelan Communist
Party periodical Tribuna Popular notably agrees with this analysis of the Chilean coup. Oscar Pea, El imperialismo, la
oligarqua y la ultraizquierda contra Allende, Aporrea.org, February 29, 2008,
http://www.aporrea.org/tiburon/a52037.html.
20. Roland Denis, Rebelin en Proceso: dilemas del movimiento popular luego de la rebelin del 13 de Abril (Caracas:
Ediciones Nuestra Amrica Rebelde, 2004), 8.
21. Eduardo Jos Rangel, Douglas Bravo: Consejos Comunales tienen que ser las primeras clulas de defensa de la
Revolucin, Aporrea.org, June 21, 2006, http://www.aporrea.org/tiburon/n79634.html; Douglas Bravo et al., Del PRVTercer Camino a la nacin venezolana, Aporrea.org, March 2, 2003, http://www.aporrea.org/actualidad/a2481.html.

Chapter 7: Venezuelan Workers: Aristocracy or Revolutionary Class?

1. In this effort, the CTV enjoyed the support of the AFL-CIO's notorious American Institute for Free Labor
Development (AIFLD) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
2. Steve Ellner, Middle-Class Revolt: Venezuelan Elites Go On Strike, In These Times 27, no. 4 (December 2002),
http://www.inthesetimes.com/issue/27/04/news2.shtml.
3. While this slogan often is denigrated as reflecting an acceptance of the failures of the government, it was coined
amidst an economic crisis precipitated by the opposition.
4. PDVSA's software, moreover, was managed by the company SAIC-INTESA, which some have linked to the CIA. See
Manuel Arias C., Relaciones Peligrosas PDVSA, SAIC, INTESA y la CIA, Soberana, April 13, 2003,
http://www.soberania.org/Opinion/opinion_007.htm.
5. Gonzalo Gmez, Amrico Tbata, and Nelson Gmez, eds., Orlando Chirino Responde (Caracas: Instituto Municipal
de Publicaciones, 2005), 11.
6. Ibid., 3637.
7. Ibid., 42.
8. Ibid., 41. Even Roland Denis, who emphasizes the importance of 13-A, argues that it was only with the paro that the
mass response took on a revolutionary quality beyond merely an insurgent event. For Denis, the dual power struggle at
that moment extended within the governmentof which he was a partto reveal two camps: one that sought to use the
state's financial resources to weather the stoppage and another that sought to legitimize the popular appropriation of goods.
Rebelin en Proceso: dilemas del movimiento popular luego de la rebelin del 13 de Abril (Caracas: Ediciones Nuestra
Amrica Rebelde, 2004), 910.
9. Mario Menndez Rodrguez, Venezuela empua las armas, Sucesos, December 17, 1966, as cited in Richard Gott,
Guerrilla Movements in Latin America (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971), 16667. See also Steve Ellner, Organized
Labor in Venezuela, 19581991: Behavior and Concerns in a Democratic Setting (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 1993), 7.
10. Ellner, Organized Labor in Venezuela, 11.
11. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. R. Philcox (New York: Grove Press, [1961] 2004), 64.
12. Immanuel Wallerstein, Fanon and the Revolutionary Class (1979), in The Essential Wallerstein (New York: New
Press, 2000), 26.
13. Jos Carlos Maritegui, Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, trans. M. Urquidi (Austin: University of
Texas Press, [1928] 1971), 1112.
14. Ruth Berins Collier and Samuel Handlin, eds., Reorganizing Popular Politics: Participation and the New Interest
Regime in Latin America (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2009), 5556.

15. Alejandro Portes and Kelly Hoffman, Latin American Class Structures: Their Composition and Change during the
Neoliberal Era, Latin American Research Review 38, no. 1 (2003), 55.
16. Portes and Hoffman, Latin American Class Structures, 5253. Portes and Hoffman arrive at this calculation by
adjusting to reflect only those enjoying formal labor protections. It should be noted, however, that the final figure of 27.2
percent is only among the working population (thereby excluding the unemployed and others) and only counts those aged
fifteen and older (thereby excluding a largely informalized youth contingent). Considered in terms of the total population of
all ages, the formal working class is but a tiny fraction.
17. Bernard Lestienne, El Sindicalismo venezolano (Caracas: Centro Gumilla, 1981), 15.
18. Steve Ellner, Tendencias recientes en el movimiento laboral venezolano: autonoma vs control poltico, Revista
Venezolana de Economa y Ciencias Sociales 9, no. 3 (SeptemberDecember 2003), 157.
19. Ellner, Organized Labor in Venezuela. Ellner sets himself the task of writing a history of Venezuelan unionism from
above, that is, from the perspective of the CTV, while recognizing the need for a bottom-up history of the labor
movement (xii). Although such a task cannot be accomplished in a single chapter, I hope to make a modest contribution to
the subject.
20. Lestienne, El Sindicalismo venezolano, 15.
21. See Kelvin Singh, Oil Politics in Venezuela during the Lpez Contreras Administration (19361941), Journal of
Latin American Studies 21, no. 1 (February 1989), 89104.
22. Fernando Coronil, The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1997), 126.
23. Domingo Alberto Rangel, Qu molleja de huelga! La huelga petrolera de 19361937 (Maracaibo: LUZ, 2007).
24. Ellner, Organized Labor in Venezuela, 2. As early as April 1958, the Unified Syndical Committee signed a stability
pact with Fedecmaras, declaring general strikes only against efforts to oust the democratic regime from the right (contrast
this with the more recent CTV-Fedecmaras alliance to overthrow the democratically elected Chvez) (56).
25. Ibid., 1315.
26. Ibid., 1819.
27. Ibid., 2022.
28. The People's Electoral Movement only abandoned the CTV in 1970, after COPEI and AD had effectively
consolidated a bipartisan labor puntofijismo. See Ellner, Organized Labor in Venezuela, 47.
29. Ellner, Organized Labor in Venezuela, 42; Lestienne, El Sindicalismo venezolano, 2223. According to Lestienne,
the action of leftist political militants seems to have intervened to resuscitate worker combativeness.
30. Lestienne, El Sindicalismo venezolano, 22. The year 1968 saw 13 strikes with 45,795 man-hours lost, whereas by
1971, this number had reached 4,164,750 man-hours.
31. Furthermore, according to the ratio of illegal to legal man-hours, a higher ratio of illegal to legal strike-hours were
seen during the presidency of AD's Carlos Andrs Prez (197479). We could add that some of the most significant strike
activity of the Caldera presidency, like that at Sidor, was opposed by AD. See Ellner, Organized Labor in Venezuela, 48
50.
32. Ellner, Organized Labor in Venezuela, 51, 49.
33. Margarita Lpez Maya, Del Viernes Negro al Referendo Revocatorio (Caracas: Alfadil, 2005), 13940.
34. Ibid., 146.
35. Ibid., 15556.
36. Steve Ellner, Trade Union Autonomy and the Emergence of a New Labor Movement, in S. Ellner and M. Tinker
Salas, eds., Venezuela: Hugo Chvez and the Decline of an Exceptional Democracy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield,
2007), 8485.
37. Ibid., 8687.
38. Ibid., 8889.
39. Jonah Gindin, Made in Venezuela: The Struggle to Reinvent Venezuelan Labor, Monthly Review 57, no. 2 (June
2005).
40. See Paul Pollack, Building Labor's Revolutionary Voice in Venezuela: The UNT's Second National Congress,
Upside Down World, June 5, 2006, http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/311/35/.

41. Jim McIlroy and Coral Wynter, Venezuela: UNT Divisions Cause Congress Suspension, Green Left Weekly 670
(June 7, 2006), http://www.greenleft.org.au/2006/670/6529.
42. See Federico Fuentes, Venezuela: Socialist Tide (Marea Socialista) Activists on the Referendum Defeat and the
PSUV, Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal, March 2, 2008, http://links.org.au/index.php?q=node/294.
43. Gonzalo Gmez, Venezuela 2008: Balance del proceso revolucionario, Marea Socialista 15, December 8, 2008,
http://www.aporrea.org/ideologia/a68403.html.
44. Kiraz Janicke and Federico Fuentes, Venezuela's Labor Movement at the Crossroads, Venezuela Analysis, April
29, 2008, http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/3398.
45. Quoted in Janicke and Fuentes, Venezuela's Labor Movement.
46. Perhaps realizing the danger posed by a Bolivarian Socialist Workers Force (FSBT) federation or perhaps optimistic
about the ministerial shuffle, UNT leaders were quick to respond. In a July press conference, leaders of all major currents
except the FSBT announced plans to relaunch the confederation. Federico Fuentes, Venezuela: Encouraging Steps Forward
for Union Movement, Green Left Weekly 759, July 19, 2008, http://www.greenleft.org.au/2008/759/39198. However, the
efforts of FSBT to construct a new labor confederation from above recently have been renewed, with Chvez's ostensible
support. The response from many in the UNT has been to ignore these official efforts, but Stalin Prez Borges insists that
while he disagrees with the methodology of the FSBT, such efforts cannot simply be ignored. El Universal desinform
ayer sobre el sindicalismo bolivariano, Prensa Marea Socialista (September 6, 2011).
47. On other nationalization efforts, see Federico Fuentes, The Struggle for Industry to Serve the Venezuelan People,
Green Left Weekly 765, August 29, 2008, http://www.greenleft.org.au/2008/765/39466. Some justified this as necessary in
the context of regional elections, but Marea Socialista member Stalin Prez Borges insists that such an alliance is
strategically dangerous, potentially giving rise to a Chile scenario in which a strengthened national bourgeoisie successfully
brings down an elected government. Stalin Prez Borges, State Alliance with Employers Puts Brakes on March Toward
Socialism, Venezuela Analysis, August 8, 2008, http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/3703.
48. Agencia Bolivariana de Noticias, Ministro Sanz: Reclamos de tercerizados de Sidor no son viables, January 1,
2009, http://aporrea.org/actualidad/n126396.html. Contract workers at Sidor, the vast majority of the workforce during its
years as a private corporation, earned 60 percent of the wage of regular employees. After renationalization, some contract
workers were incorporated as permanent, but those who were not continue to demand a hefty payout of US$9,300. Tamara
Pearson, Sidor Contract Workers in Negotiations for Bonus, Following Brief Strike, Venezuela Analysis, November 5,
2008, http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news/3929.
49. Ellner, Organized Labor in Venezuela, 16.
50. Ibid., 99100.
51. Gmez et al., Orlando Chirino, 43.
52. Ibid., 38.
53. Ibid., 4547.
54. Steve Ellner has sought to undermine the thesis of Venezuelan labor aristocracy, especially as applied to petroleum
workers, by demonstrating that the thesis is not generalizable throughout history and that oil workers were politically radical
prior to the 1960s and increasingly vulnerable to economic instability in the 1980s (Organized Labor in Venezuela, 144
46). However, as correct as such an objection may be, it does not represent a sufficient response to the danger of labor
aristocracy, especially with respect to the broader Venezuelan class constellation. While all workers saw increased
instability as economic crisis set in and neoliberalism took hold, this merely served to underline the privilege that formal
employment promised and the imperative of maintaining that employment at all costs, thereby encouraging passivity and
further alienating the formal from the growing informal sector.
55. Quoted in Kiraz Janicke, Without Workers Management There Can Be No Socialism, Venezuela Analysis,
October 30, 2007, http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/2784.
56. See, e.g., Sharrin Kasmir, The Myth of Mondragon: Cooperatives, Politics, and Working-Class Life in a Basque Town
(Albany: SUNY, 1996).
57. Quoted in Gindin, Made in Venezuela.
58. Kiraz Janicke, Venezuela's Co-Managed Inveval: Surviving in a Sea of Capitalism, Venezuela Analysis, July 27,
2007, http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/2520.
59. Camila Pieiro Harnecker, Workplace Democracy and Collective Consciousness: An Empirical Study of
Venezuelan Cooperatives, Monthly Review 59, no. 6 (November 2007), 2740. About the mixed fates of several

cooperatives, some of which also recreated capitalist structures, see the film by Clifton Ross (producer and director),
Venezuela: Revolution from the Inside Out (Oakland: PM Press, 2008).
60. Quoted in Gindin, Made in Venezuela.
61. Stewart Munckton, The Struggle for Workers Power in Venezuela, Green Left Weekly 719, August 1, 2007,
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/38068. At the time of this interview, only one small sector of Cadafe maintained a degree
of comanagement. Fuentes suggests that Chvez had sided largely against worker participation, but after the Sidor
intervention he speaks instead of an antiworker right wing within Chavismo toward which the president's position is far
more complex.
62. Janicke and Fuentes, Venezuela's Labor Movement.
63. Marta Harnecker, Aluminum Workers in Venezuela Choose Their Managers and Increase Production, Venezuela
Analysis, March 28, 2005, http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/1025.
64. Janicke, Without Workers Management.
65. Fred Fuentes, quoted in Munckton, The Struggle for Workers Power in Venezuela.
66. Carlos Lanz Rodrguez, Balance y perspective de la cogestin en CVG-Alcasa (Puerto Ordaz: CVG Aluminios del
Caron, May 8, 2007), http://www.aporrea.org/ideologia/a34468.html.
67. Patrick O'Donoghue, New CVG-Alcasa Aluminum President Elio Sayago Addresses Workers, VHeadline, May 20,
2010.
68. Janicke, Venezuela's Co-Managed Inveval.
69. Janicke, Without Workers Management.
70. Janicke, Venezuela's Co-Managed Inveval; Janicke, Without Workers Management.
71. Munckton, The Struggle for Workers Power in Venezuela.
72. Janicke, Venezuela's Co-Managed Inveval.
73. The ferocity of the Gayones is described by Jos de Oviedo y Baos in The Conquest and Settlement of Venezuela,
trans. J. J. Varner (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 45. See Movimiento Gayones, Una Visin del proceso
venezolano: revolucin, marxismo y bolivarianismo (2005).
74. Interview with Jos Luis Pinto, May 3, 2008.
75. Interview with Gonzalo Gmez; Orlando Chirino on Chavez, Trade Unions and Socialism in Venezuela,
International Socialism, May 9, 2007, http://www.isj.org.uk/?id=328. More recently, Chirino even ran against Chvez in the
2012 presidential election, coming in dead last with a paltry number of votes.
76. See Fuentes, quoted in Munckton, The Struggle for Workers Power in Venezuela.
77. Here too there are examples of workers breaking down the barriers between formal and informal labor. Martinez et
al. document the struggle of Mitsubishi workers to absorb subcontractors and unite with their local communal councils
(Venezuela Speaks! Voices from the Grassroots [Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2010], 11718, 123), and the camaraderie
between slaughterhouse employees and irregular contractors led to the creation of a co-op, which then provided subsidized
meat to the community (131, 13536).

Chapter 8: Oligarchs Tremble! Peasant Struggles at the Margins of the State

1. Zamora's campaigns in Barinas are documented masterfully by Jos Esteban Ruiz-Guevara, a founder of the
Communist Party in Barinas and a victim of puntofijista repression who sought to reclaim Zamora from historical oblivion.
Ruiz-Guevara's history, Zamora en Barinas, was recently re-released and distributed free on the 150th anniversary of the
Battle of Santa Ins (Caracas: El Perro y la Rana, 2009), this quote from 132.
2. Ruiz-Guevara, Zamora en Barinas, 161.
3. Ibid., 166.
4. Jacinto Prez Arcay, La Guerra Federal: Consecuencias (Caracas: Editorial Gnesis, 1974). Prez Arcay argues that
the Federal War and the unequaled triumph of the oppressed class it represented contributed to the untimeliness of the
guerrilla struggle by preemptively robbing it of the psychological fuel of social separation and class hatred (203).
However, he did leave the door open for armed struggle in the future, should the political system become rigid (as it had
already become at the time).

5. Richard Gott, Hugo Chvez and the Bolivarian Revolution (London: Verso, 2005), 27, 112.
6. Martinez Carlos Martinez, Michael Fox, and JoJo Farrell, eds., Venezuela Speaks! Voices from the Grassroots
(Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2010), 51.
7. See Ruiz-Guevara, Zamora en Barinas, 3089.
8. Gott, Hugo Chvez and the Bolivarian Revolution, 111.
9. Officially founded in 2004, the FNCEZ was a fusion of several organizations that emerged in the heat of the
Bolivarian process: primarily the Simn Bolvar Revolutionary Campesino Front (FCRSB), founded in 2000 and based in
Apure, and the Ezequiel Zamora Revolutionary Campesino Front (FCREZ), founded in 2001 and based in Barinas, with the
later addition of smaller groupings in Barinas and Tchira in 2003. FNCEZ, Libro del FNCEZ, 34; Martinez et al.,
Venezuela Speaks!, 51.
10. Martinez et al., Venezuela Speaks!, 49.
11. Gregory Wilpert, Land for People Not for Profit in Venezuela, in P. Rosset, R. Patel, and M. Courville, eds.,
Promised Land: Competing Visions of Agrarian Reform (New York: Food First, 2006), 251.
12. Ibid., 250.
13. Ibid., 250. The International Labour Organization documented this drift from the land (which reached some
85,000100,000 annually in the 1970s) and concomitant proletarianization and increasing average farm size in The
Federacin Campesina de Venezuela (Geneva: International Labour Organization, 1982).
14. Wilpert, Land for People, 25051.
15. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. R. Philcox (New York: Grove Press, [1961] 2004), 129.
16. Ibid., 12829.
17. Wilpert, Land for People, 252.
18. Luis Vitale, Estado y estructura de clases en la Venezuela contempornea (Caracas: UCV, 1984), 23. Jos Luis
Escobar, an aging guerrilla from Lara, told me the story of Sandalio Linares, one of Gabaldn's lieutenants, for whom a
small plaza stands in Goajirita. When Gabaldn explained to this illiterate, indigenous peasant the dangers to come, Linares
reputedly reversed the situation by asking Gabaldn why he was so afraid. That's the kind of campesino we have today,
Escobar insists to me, we can count on them because they really fight. They have balls to spare, and we're still scared.
19. Ibid., 23.
20. Ibid.; International Labour Organization, The Federacin Campesina de Venezuela, 4.
21. Vitale, Estado y estructura de clases, 23. Thus the 1960 land reform was not aborted, as Martinez et al. describe
it (Venezuela Speaks!, 48), but rather a conscious effort to undermine radical demands. See also Manuel Cabieses Donoso,
Venezuela, Okey! (Santiago: Ediciones del Litoral, 1963), 11117.
22. Whereas elsewhere peasant organizations are prevented legally from joining union confederations due to the threat
of a unified movement of workers and peasants, Ellner attributes the affiliation of the FCV with the CTV to the relative
passivity of the Venezuelan peasantry (Organized Labor in Venezuela, 19581991: Behavior and Concerns in a
Democratic Setting [Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 1993], 25). While the Venezuelan peasantry might have been passive in
relation to that of other countries, the affiliation of the FCV with the CTV must be understood not merely as a reflection of
passivity, but also as an attempt to undermine militancy.
23. Ellner, Organized Labor in Venezuela, 25.
24. Ibid., 2628.
25. Ibid., 26.
26. Frente Nacional Campesino Ezequiel Zamora (with ANMCLA and Primera Lnea), Ley de Tierras y Violencia de
Clase contra los Campesinos [DVD, 2005]). This observation is supported by the International Labour Organization, The
Federacin Campesina de Venezuela, 2.
27. Wilpert, Land for People, 251. Wilpert also notes that nearly one-third of these beneficiaries dropped out and that
90 percent never gained title to their lands.
28. Vitale recalls that struggle committees sprang up in Carabobo, Yaracuy, Lara, Portuguesa, and other states;
unaffiliated campesino fronts entered into struggle in Santa Luca and San Juan in 1977, demanding the ability to occupy
and expropriate lands; and in 1980 a caravan of seven thousand tractors headed for Caracas was prevented from reaching
its destination (Estado y estructura de clases, 24).

29. Gregory Wilpert, Changing Venezuela by Taking Power: The History and Policies of the Chvez Government
(London: Verso, 2007), 26869nn1920.
30. These objectives draw upon what has become a central tenet of Chavista economics: the idea of what is called
endogenous development, a balanced scheme for socioeconomic development that is driven from within (according to
national needs) rather than from without (by the demand for goods on the international market).
31. Wilpert, Land for People, 254. The law further stipulates that idle land that is not expropriated be subject to
taxation. Peasants working redistributed land for three years are eligible to apply for a legal title to the land, but this title is
non-transferrable (an effort by the government to avoid the capitalist resale and accumulation of redistributed lands),
which according to some leads to a black market of land titles in which the peasants are paid far less than would be the case
otherwise (255).
32. Ibid., 256. The other article that was struck down had to do with the compensation process, insisting that the
government must compensate landowners for previous improvements made to expropriated lands even if these were
illegally held in the first place. The Ley de Tierras was later amended to reinstate a modified version of this article.
33. Ibid., 257.
34. Ibid., 25758.
35. See Karen Hill, A Visit to Lord Vestey's Ranch in Venezuela, Venezuela Analysis, October 3, 2005,
http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/1397.
36. FNCEZ, Ley de Tierras y Violencia de Clase. By mid-2010, this figure had reached 227, according to PROVEA,
Informe Anual, 2010 (Caracas: PROVEA, 2010), 228.
37. PROVEA, Informe Anual, 2003 (Caracas: PROVEA, 2003), 251.
38. Venpres, Muerte de dirigentes agrarios es obra del sicariato, afirma Braulio lvarez, August 6, 2003,
http://www.aporrea.org/actualidad/n8815.html.
39. FNCEZ, Ley de Tierras y Violencia de Clase.
40. Maurice Lemoine, Venezuela: The Promise of Land for the People, Le Monde diplomatique English (October 7,
2003), http://mondediplo.com/2003/10/07venezuela.
41. FNCEZ, Ley de Tierras y Violencia de Clase.
42. Martinez et al., Venezuela Speaks!, 58.
43. FNCEZ, Ley de Tierras y Violencia de Clase.
44. Wilpert, Land for People, 259. One FNCEZ member argues that because the state stepped in to spearhead recovery
of idle lands, conflicts do not fall as directly on the farmers. Martinez et al., Venezuela Speaks!, 58.
45. FNCEZ, Ley de Tierras y Violencia de Clase.
46. Martinez et al., Venezuela Speaks!, 51.
47. Ibid., 54.
48. These actions are all cited in the declassified report by the U.S. Department of State, Venezuela: 1992 Annual
Terrorism Report, www.state.gov/documents/organization/143362.pdf.
49. Fuerzas Bolivarianas de Liberacin, Las FBL no estn en proceso de desactivacin, July 18, 2009,
http://www.cedema.org/ver.php?id=3411.
50. El Universal, FBL se transforma y divide, May 7, 2009, http://politica.eluniversal.com/2009/07/05/pol_apo_fbl-setransforma-y_1458811.shtml. One comandante, Gernimo Paz (alias Gabino), recently dissolved the Western Bloc of the
FBL (in Barinas and Apure) to work within the Bolivarian Revolution (Gernimo Paz, Las FBL anuncian que se
encuentran en un proceso de desactivacin como organizacin armada, June 24, 2009, http://www.cedema.org/ver.php?
id=3359). Soon thereafter, the Central Bloc of the FBL (which some locate in Cojedes and Portuguesa) publicly insisted that
they would maintain both the name and the methods of the FBL (Las FBL no estn en proceso de desactivacin).
51. See La Corriente Revolucionaria Bolvar y Zamora y la construccin del poder armado del pueblo: La milicia
nacional, March 30, 2011, http://www.crbz.org/content/site/module/pages/op/displaypage/page_id/13/format/html/.
52. Interview with Briggitte Marin, May 27, 2008. However, she also recognizes that the FBL is willing to overlook
Chvez's criticisms of them as a necessity of government, which we also have seen in the cases of Lina Ron and La Piedrita.
Chvez's regaos, his scoldings don't affect them, she argues.
53. Martinez et al., Venezuela Speaks!, 49. The FCV still exists and remains friendly toward the government, but its

policies and tactics are more moderate than those of the FNCEZ.
54. This general sentiment is seconded by other FNCEZ members. While insisting that everything changed under
Chvez. There's no turning back, and that the Land Law changed things 100 percent, they nevertheless add that this
revolution is apathetic, and you need to give it a kick so it reacts. Martinez et al., Venezuela Speaks!, 5459.
55. FNCEZ, Ley de Tierras y Violencia de Clase.
56. Martinez et al., Venezuela Speaks!, 52.
57. CRBZ, El pueblo organizado est movilizado: Marcha de la CRBZ para radicalizar la revolucin, December 13,
2010, http://www.antiimperialista.org/es/node/6696.
58. Martinez et al., Venezuela Speaks!, 52.
59. Ruiz-Guevara, Zamora en Barinas, 261.

Chapter 9: A New Proletariat? Informal Labor and the Revolutionary Streets

1. Andre Gunder Frank, Lumpenbourgeoisie: Lumpendevelopment, trans. M. Davis Berdecio (New York: Monthly
Review, [1970] 1972).
2. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. R. Philcox (New York: Grove Press, [1961] 2004), 81.
3. Some testify to the poorest even being forced out of the barrios by such newly established hierarchies (Carlos
Martinez, Michael Fox, and JoJo Farrell, eds., Venezuela Speaks! Voices from the Grassroots [Oakland, CA: PM Press,
2010], 39).
4. Whereas I have shown that Chvez relies militarily on the barrio residents and their militant organizations, his
electoral reliance on the same sectors has increased steadily as well. See Gregory Wilpert, Changing Venezuela by Taking
Power: The History and Policies of the Chvez Government (London: Verso, 2007), 26869nn1920.
5. Miguel Enrique Otero Silva, El Nacional (October 14, 2002).
6. Steve Ellner, Middle-Class Revolt: Venezuelan Elites Go On Strike, In These Times 27, no. 4 (December 2002),
http://www.inthesetimes.com/issue/27/04/news2.shtml. Otero even denied responsibility for the purportedly collective
editorial: LB, El Nacional publica rectificacin; Miguel Henrique Otero evade su responsabilidad y atribuye el escrito a
otros editors, Aporrea.org, October 18, 2002, http://www.aporrea.org/actualidad/n902.html.
7. Jess Mara Herrera Salas, Ethnicity and Revolution: The Political Economy of Racism in Venezuela, Latin
American Perspectives 32, issue 141, no. 2 (March 2005), 113. Chusma can also be translated as scum.
8. Violeta Bujanda, Nosotros, el lumpen, Aporrea.org, December 27, 2002,
http://www.aporrea.org/imprime/a1642.html; Mercedes, Lumpen, Yo?, Expresin Cvica 80.
9. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London: Penguin, 2002), 231.
10. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 8182.
11. Ibid., 128.
12. In the Grundrisse, Marx associates the lumpen with simple circulation, in contrast to the moralistic dismissals of
the Manifesto. Grundrisse (London: Penguin, 1973), 27273.
13. Alejandro Portes and Kelly Hoffman, Latin American Class Structures: Their Composition and Change during the
Neoliberal Era, Latin American Research Review 38, no. 1 (2003), 50. See also Sujatha Fernandes, Who Can Stop the
Drums? Urban Social Movements in Chvez's Venezuela (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 16; Janice Perlman,
The Myth of Marginality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976); Jos Nun, Marginalidad y exclusin social
(Mexico: FCE, 2001).
14. Portes and Hoffman, Latin American Class Structures, 53.
15. Marta Harnecker, After the Referendum: Venezuela Faces New Challenges, Monthly Review 56, no. 6 (November
2004), http://www.monthlyreview.org/1104harnecker.htm.
16. Margarita Lpez Maya, Del Viernes Negro al Referendo Revocatorio (Caracas: Alfadil, 2005), 34; Ruth Berins
Collier and Samuel Handlin, eds., Reorganizing Popular Politics: Participation and the New Interest Regime in Latin
America (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2009), 56. About women, see Amy Bellone Hite and Jocelyn S.
Viterna, Gendering Class in Latin America: How Women Effect and Experience Change in the Class Structure, Latin
American Research Review 40, no. 2 (June 2005); Sarah Wagner, The Bolivarian Response to the Feminization of Poverty

in Venezuela, Venezuela Analysis, February 5, 2005, http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/918. On the former middle

classes, see J. P. Leary, Untying the Knot of Venezuela's Informal Economy, NACLA News, December 6, 2006,
https://nacla.org/node/1427.
17. Venezuelanalysis.com, Venezuelan Unemployment at New Low, GDP Continues Strong, Venezuela Analysis,
February 28, 2007, http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/2246.
18. The phenomenon of corruption was analyzed and indicted by the kidnappers of William Niehous, as we discussed in
chapter 2. For a more recent theoretical analysis of corruption, see Enrique Dussel, Twenty Theses on Politics, trans. G.
Ciccariello-Maher (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, [2006] 2008).
19. Nora Castaeda, Creating a Caring Economy (London: Global Women's Strike, 2006), 28.
20. See Reinaldo Iturriza Lpez, Los buhoneros y el partido/movimiento, Aporrea.org, December 29, 2010,
http://aporrea.org/actualidad/a114782.html.
21. Jonah Gindin, The Possible Faces of Venezuelan Democracy, Venezuela Analysis, October 11, 2004,
http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/729.
22. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage,
[1938] 1963), 85.
23. Fernandes, Who Can Stop the Drums?, 25961. See also the concept of the convive in Alejandro Moreno, El aro y la
trama: Episteme, modernidad y pueblo (Caracas: Centro de Investigaciones Populares, 1995).
24. Teolinda Bolvar, Rehabilitacin y reconocimiento de los barrios urbanos. Su necesidad y riesgos, T. Bolvar and
J. Bald, eds., La cuestin de los barrios (Caracas: Monte Avila, 1995), 78.
25. Klber Ramrez Rojas, Historia documental del 4 de febrero (Caracas: El Perro y la Rana, 2006), 200. As a result of
this process and what he perceives to be the shortcomings of the spontaneous horizontalism of existing assemblies, Ramrez
proposes that the barrios themselvesthrough a general and not merely local assemblycan provide the organizational
form necessary for overcoming the contradiction between spontaneity and vanguardism (201).
26. Kiraz Janicke and Federico Fuentes, Venezuela's Labor Movement at the Crossroads, Venezuela Analysis, April
29, 2008, http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/3398.
27. This crucial question also applies in a slightly different form to the armies of state workers in Venezuela.
28. Marcial Guillermo Prez Herrera, La experiencia organizativa de la FUTRAND, Venezuela, Haciendo Camino,
October 13, 2007, http://marcialperezherrera.blogspot.com/2007/10/la-experiencia-organizativa-de-la_13.html.
29. Portes and Hoffman identify the growth of community political organizing as a general tendency throughout Latin
America that corresponds with the decline of the formal working class and the rise of the informal proletariat (Latin
American Class Structures, 76).
30. Iturriza, Los buhoneros y el partido/movimiento.
31. On the importance of this bansymbolic and historicalin the establishment of Chacao as a fortress municipality,
see my article Toward a Racial Geography of Caracas: Neoliberal Urbanism and the Fear of Penetration, Qui Parle 16,
no. 2 (spring/summer 2007).
32. Jonah Gindin, Venezuelan Street Vendors in Violent Clash with Metropolitan Police, Venezuela Analysis,
December 11, 2004, http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/833. Although I follow Gindin's reference to the Metropolitan Police,
Bernal's authority is generally limited to Policaracas, the police force for Libertador Municipality.
33. Joaqun Murieta, Lina Ron habla: su verdadera historia (Caracas: Editorial Fuentes, 2003), 15.
34. Ibid., 28, 20.
35. Ron claims to have been shot at by Toledo's police (his police chief is Tupamaro Party leader Jos Pinto). R.
Escalona, Violentas refriegas en Maiqueta por desalojo de buhoneros, El Universal, September 21, 2005,
http://www.eluniversal.com/2005/09/21/ccs_art_21401D.shtml.
36. See, e.g., the notice of a shootout in May 2005: Migdalis Caizlez V., Desalojo de buhoneros en la Fuerzas
Armadas termin en tiroteo, El Universal, May 27, 2010, http://www.eluniversal.com/2010/05/27/ccs_ava_desalojo-debuhonero_27A3912331.shtml.
37. For a similar argument, see Oscar Flores, Concepto de lumpenproletariado para principiantes, Aporrea.org, March
18, 2007, http://www.aporrea.org/ideologia/a32084.html.
38. Federico Fuentes, Venezuela: Socialist Tide (Marea Socialista) Activists on the Referendum Defeat and the PSUV,
Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal (2008), http://links.org.au/node/294/.

39. Roland Denis, La comunidad nmada de la calle, Aporrea.org, February 28, 2007,
http://www.aporrea.org/actualidad/a31258.html.
40. Denis, La comunidad nmada de la calle; Iturriza, Los buhoneros y el partido/movimiento.
41. Murieta, Lina Ron habla, 43.
42. Marta Harnecker, Popular Power in Latin America: Inventing in Order to Not Make Errors, trans. C. Wynter and F.
Fuentes, Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal, July 12, 2009, http://links.org.au/node/1136. In another
interview, Gonzalo Gmez also identifies the new and broader commune structures as possible solutions to the challenges
of informal labor. Jeffery Webber and Susan Spronk, Voices from Venezuela on Worker Control and Bureaucracy in the
Bolivarian Revolution, Against the Current 148 (SeptemberOctober 2010), http://www.solidarityus.org/current/node/3023.
43. Rory Carroll, Chvez Tackles Housing Crisis by Urging Poor to Squat Wealthy Parts of Caracas, The Guardian,
January 26, 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/26/venezuela-chavez-housing-crisis-squats-caracas. This
movement builds upon the experiences of the Urban Land Committees and their Pioneer Camps, which, like their rural
counterparts, struggled for land titles in urban areas. For discussion of one such camp and its conflicts with local Chavista
leaders, see Martinez et al., Venezuela Speaks!, 3038.
44. Reinaldo Iturriza Lpez, La poltica es en la calle, Ciudad CCS, January 13, 2011, http://ciudadccs.info/?
p=136010.
45. Michael A. Lebowitz, The Specter of Socialism for the 21st Century Haunts Latin America, Links: International
Journal of Socialist Renewal, July 10, 2008, http://links.org.au/node/503.

Conclusion: Dual Power against the Magical State

1. Ral Zibechi, Dispersing Power: Social Movements as Anti-State Forces, trans. R. Ryan (Oakland, CA: AK Press,
[2006] 2010), 56. It is possible that I am overstating this distinction in a way that is unfair to Zibechi, and others have
suggested to me that, for Zibechi, dispersion is in fact a way of building power that might be compatible with my argument.
But it remains unclear what exactly is being dispersed: state power or the power of the community itself, the fragmentation
of which Zibechi correctly celebrates as a barrier to state control. In the end, and as a result of this ambiguity, I think
Zibechi's insistence on building a necessarily nonstate power differs fundamentally from my conception of a dual
power that constantly attacks, pressures, and transforms the centralized state.
2. Enrique Dussel, Twenty Theses on Politics, trans. G. Ciccariello-Maher (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, [2006]
2008), 13132. Dussel speaks of dissolving the state rather than Zibechi's power because he insists that power resides
fundamentally in the community of the oppressed and is therefore not something that could ever be dispersed.
3. See especially Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2006). According to Roland Denis, it was the
Constitution, and not Chvez, that was able to unite these heterogeneous movements: Nobody had been able to centralize
this movement around a program, not even Chavez. His leadership is unquestioned, but his ideas were not sufficient to
unite the movement. The constitution filled this emptiness (Gregory Wilpert, Land for People Not for Profit in
Venezuela, in Promised Land: Competing Visions of Agrarian Reform, ed. P. Rosset, R. Patel, and M. Courville [New
York: Food First, 2006], 253).
4. Dussel, Twenty Theses on Politics, 72.
5. Fernando Coronil, The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1997), 2.
6. Ibid., 1315.
7. Ibid., 376.
8. Ibid., 385. The tragic view of the Caracazo is common among Venezuelan elites seeking to assuage their own
consciences.
9. Fernando Coronil and Julie Skurski, Dismembering and Remembering the Nation: The Semantics of Political
Violence in Venezuela, in Politics in the Andes: Identity, Conflict, and Reform, ed. J.-M. Burt and P. Mauceri (Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004), 86. The authors also connect this effect to the 1988 El Amparo massacre (see chapter
3).
10. If we are tempted to pardon Coronil's from above perspective in The Magical State, such generosity cannot be
afforded to his more recent attempts to demonstrate the continuity of state magic in contemporary Venezuela and the

Bolivarian Revolution, in which he diagnosed the Chvez regime as yet another manifestation of state magic and even
perhaps the most magical of all. Fernando Coronil, Magical History: What's Left of Chvez?, LANIC Etext Collection
(2008), 3, 5, http://lanic.utexas.edu/project/etext/llilas/vrp/coronil.pdf.
11. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. R. Philcox (New York: Grove Press, [1961] 2004), 52.
12. In what follows, I draw upon elements that appeared in George Ciccariello-Maher, Dual Power in the Venezuelan
Revolution, Monthly Review 59, no. 4 (September 2007). To be clear from the outset, this is not another model-building
exercise: my conception of dual power is not a model to be imposed on an unwieldy reality, but rather a provisional lens
that I have found useful for clarifying the relationship between movements and the state, a lens to be transformed in the
course of its very usage and discarded when necessary.
13. V. I. Lenin, The Dual Power, Pravda, no. 28 (April 9, 1917), in Lenin: Collected Works, vol. 24 (Moscow:
Progress Publishers, 1964), 38.
14. This is why, for example, Lenin himself does not speak of a dual power situation as would later thinkers like
Trotsky, why his title invokes instead The dual power, and why he argues that this power was previously inconceivable
(whereas a situation of dual sovereignty certainly would not have been). It is this potent aspect of the concept of dual power
that has led to its appropriation by anarchists and other antistate thinkers and activists. See Christopher Day, Dual Power in
the Selva Lacandon, in A New World in Our Hearts, ed. R. San Filippo (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2003), 1731.
15. V. I. Lenin citing Marx in The State and Revolution, in Essential Works of Lenin, ed. H. Christman (New York:
Dover, 1987), 297.
16. Although the category of opportunists is admittedly amorphous, many would associate it with what has come to be
called the endogenous right within Chavismo, which many associate with former Vice President Diosdado Cabello. See
George Ciccariello-Maher, Counterattack of the Bureaucrats, Counterpunch, March 6, 2008. According to Kiraz Janicke
and Federico Fuentes (Venezuela: Danger Signs for the Revolution, Green Left Weekly, February 26, 2008), this current
support[s] implementing some reforms without breaking with capitalism. Michael Lebowitz characterizes this current as
emerging new capitalists (the boli-bourgeoisie), the high officialswho are opposed to power from below in workplaces
and communitiesthe party functionaries and nomenklatura (The Specter of Socialism for the 21st Century Haunts Latin
America, Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal, July 10, 2008), http://links.org.au/node/503). Patrick Larsen
provides a useful account of this endogenous right, members of which pay lip-service to the revolution, in order to live
off it, in recent PSUV primaries (Venezuela: Sharpening Contradictions between Left and Right of the PSUV, In Defence
of Marxism, May 11, 2010). For an example of anarchist critics, see Rafael Uzctegui, Venezuela: Revolution as Spectacle
(Tucson: Sharp, 2011).
17. Lenin, The Dual Power, 38; see also State and Revolution, 29799.
18. Lenin, The Dual Power, 3839.
19. Ibid., 3839.
20. The first two were concrete mechanisms: an enabling law for the president and a constitutional reform. The second
two were broad interventions into education and decentralized endogenous development.
21. Repblica Bolivariana de Venezuela, Asamblea Nacional, Ley de los Consejos Comunales, April 7, 2006.
22. Consejos comunales han sido una experiencia exitosa, ltimas Noticias, April 7, 2007; Tamara Pearson,
Venezuela's Reformed Communal Council Law: When Laws Aren't Just for Lawyers and Power Is Public, Venezuela
Analysis, December 4, 2009, http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/4980; Patrick J. O'Donoghue, Communes Minister:
Communal Power More Visible and Relevant in 2010, VHeadline, February 11, 2011.
23. El Nacional, January 12, 2007.
24. See Hugo Chvez and Marta Harnecker, Understanding the Venezuelan Revolution, trans. C. Boudin (New York:
Monthly Review, 2005), 41. Chvez recalls reading Negri while in prison after the failed 1992 coup. Once placed in its
context, however, the Venezuelan understanding of constituent power is arguably closer to Enrique Dussel's formulation of
potentia against potestas, which resists exaggerating the opposition between these two terms. See his Twenty Theses on
Politics, especially 1820.
25. Pearson, Venezuela's Reformed Communal Council Law.
26. Sara Motta, Populism's Achilles Heel: Popular Democracy beyond the Liberal State and the Market Economy in
Venezuela, Latin American Perspectives 38, no. 1 (January 2011), 39.
27. Gregory Wilpert, An Assessment of Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution at Twelve Years, Venezuela Analysis,
February 2, 2011, http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/5971.

28. Lenin, The Dual Power, 3839.

29. Alberto Mller Rojas, El partidismo de los militares, ltimas Noticias, June 6, 2007.
30. Alberto Mller Rojas, No hay apoliticismo military, ltimas Noticias, April 24, 2007, and Entrevista con Alberto
Mller Rojas: La FAN est politizada y partidizada, ltimas Noticias, July 1, 2007.
31. Mller responded by openly critiquing the profound contradiction of Chvez's position, which speaks of the
professionalization of the active forces while simultaneously referring tothe war of resistance, and these are two
absolutely incompatible concepts (La FAN est politizada y partidizada).
32. What follows draws upon George Ciccariello-Maher, Of Submarines and Loose Screws: A Chvez Ally Jumps the
Divider, Counterpunch, November 17, 2007, http://www.counterpunch.org/maher11172007.html. Shortly after the reform
proposal appeared, Chvez announced that, after consultations with the military high command, the new militia force would
be known as the Bolivarian National Militias rather than popular ones. What is more interesting than this seemingly
minor semantic change is the (presumably powerful) political pressure that must have been brought to bear to cause it.
33. Kiraz Janicke, Venezuela Creates Peasant Militias, Enacts Federal Government Council, Venezuela Analysis,
February 22, 2010, http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/5150; Pearson, Venezuela's Reformed Communal Council Law.
34. Fred Fuentes, Venezuela's Revolution Faces Crucial Battles, Green Left Weekly, February 20, 2010,
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/43252.
35. Fred Fuentes, Venezuela: New Moves to Build People's Power, Green Left Weekly, March 20, 2010,
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/43484/; Janicke, Venezuela Creates Peasant Militias. These moves coincided with a
notable crackdown on high-level corruption.
36. Janicke, Venezuela Creates Peasant Militias.
37. Kiraz Janicke, Venezuela Celebrates Day of the Bolivarian Militias, the Armed People and the April Revolution,
Venezuela Analysis, April 14, 2010, http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/5276.
38. Chvez cites this passage in his column Onwards Towards a Communal State! trans. K. Janicke, Venezuela
Analysis, February 22, 2010, http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/5160. The passage from Ramrez was penned after the
first failed coup, in August 1992 (see Klber Ramrez Rojas, Historia documental del 4 de febrero [Caracas: El Perro y la
Rana, 2006], 146).
39. These dangers are well recognized by Sujatha Fernandes, Who Can Stop the Drums? Urban Social Movements in
Chvez's Venezuela (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 2728.
40. Carlos Lanz Rodrguez, El Caso Niehous y la Corrupcin Administrativa (Caracas: Editorial Fuentes/Tres
Contintentes, 1979), 12829.
41. Ibid., 130.
42. Roland Denis, Revolucin vs. Gobierno (III): De la Izquierda Social a la Izquierda Poltica, Proyecto
Nuestramrica-Movimiento 13 de Abril, August 11, 2006, http://www.aporrea.org/ideologia/a24361.html.
43. Mnica Bergos, Es necesario ir ms all de la vigente Constitucin bolivariana, Peridico Diagonal 42 (November
23December 4, 2007). Denis claims that his eventual removal from the ministry resulted from a powerful reaction by
conservative sectors of the Venezuelan state and Chavista movement. See also Denis, Rebelin en Proceso: dilemas del
movimiento popular luego de la rebelin del 13 de Abril (Caracas: Ediciones Nuestra Amrica Rebelde, 2004), 9.
44. For Denis, this is less about Chvez than about the Constitution. As he told Greg Wilpert: What united them was the
project to develop a common foundationthat is to say the constitution. Nobody had been able to centralize this movement
around a program, not even Chavez. His leadership is unquestioned, but his ideas were not sufficient to unite the
movement. The constitution filled this emptiness. Wilpert, Land for People, 253.
45. Roland Denis, Por unas comunas sin ley, Aporrea.org, October 19, 2010,
http://www.aporrea.org/ideologia/a110539.html. See also, more recently, Turki Al Maaz, Los Consejos Comunales,
secuestro o liberacin del Poder Popular, Aporrea.org, February 16, 2011,
http://www.aporrea.org/actualidad/a117815.html.
46. Michael Lebowitz formulates this duality of power in terms of a transitional period characterized by walking on two
legsthe old state is replaced by the new, the state from belowThat implies having a traditional army that can protect
people, but we should also arm the people and develop the militias from below. Jos Sant Roz, Michael Lebowitz: It's
necessary to arm the people and develop militias from below, trans. K. Janicke, Venezuela Analysis, November 5, 2009,
http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/4916. There is much to this argument, but this metaphor does not stand up (quite
literally) because these are two legs that are battling one another constantly. Sujatha Fernandes is closer in her insistence on

reciprocal alliances and interactions between movements and state, but such formulations can sound static because both
sides are in constant motion as a result of the process (Who Can Stop the Drums?, 2829).
47. Ramrez, Historia documental del 4 de febrero, 207.
48. These include such examples as Al Rodrguez Araque, alias Comandante Fausto, who was active in the guerrilla
struggle under the PCV and PRV, before passing through what was simply known as The Revolutionary Tendency into
LCR in 1988 and later the PPT. Other noteworthy PRVistas associated with the government include Rafael Uzctegui,
Dimas Petit (who lost eleven family members in the armed struggle and participated in the 1975 escape from San Carlos
alongside Uzctegui), and Chvez's brother Adn; as we have seen, several leaders of the feminist (Mara Len, PCV; Nora
Castaeda, MIR; and Ldice Navas, MIR/BR/LS) and Afro (Chucho Garca, PRV) struggles; and recent vice-president and
arguable heir to Chvez, Elas Jaua, was reputedly a member of BR. The list goes on and on.
49. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage,
[1938] 1963), 286.
50. Carlos Martinez, Michael Fox, and JoJo Farrell, eds., Venezuela Speaks! Voices from the Grassroots (Oakland, CA:
PM Press, 2010), 7.

Index

2 de Diciembre, 69
23 de Enero (date), 2324, 7072, 190, 262n2. See also Prez Jimnez, Marcos
23 de Enero (neighborhood), 24, 28, 38, 67, 94, 96, 1078, 129, 246, 259n20, 274n35, Figs. 3, 5, 6, 7, 14, 17; 2002 antiChvez coup and, 167, 176; Caracazo and, 71, 275n23; guerrilla presence in, 7172, 79; history, 6971; Tupamaros
and, 7685
Accin Democrtica (AD) , 11, 2425, 36, 38, 48, 54, 105, 111, 114, 117, 13132, 152, 163, 183, 205, 207, 262n4,
290n28, 290n31; ARS group splits from, 187; control of CTV, 18593; FCV and, 2056; MEP splits from, 187; MIR
splits from, 27; violent thuggery by, 183, 187
AFL-CIO, 187; and American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), 288
Afro-Venezuelan Day, 165
Afro-Venezuelan Network, 153, 15564
Afro-Venezuelans, 17, 20, 32, 4950, 6874, 135, 14665, 212, 234, 23637, 245, 264n37, 282n40; in the Caracazo, 92,
274n11; communal traditions of, 164; in the guerrilla struggle, 15354, 283n14, 28485n30, 304n48
agrarian reform, 46, 2059, 217, 294n21. See also Ley de Tierras
Alcasa, 62, 81, 124, 196
Alexis Vive Collective, 83, 215
Algeria, 184, 222
Ali, Tariq, 159
Allende, Salvador, 84, 173, 17778, 254, 287n18
Al Presidente, 4, 213
Althusser, Louis, 111
Alvarado, Cornelio, 4849
lvarez, Braulio, 156, 209
lvarez, Rubn, 71
lvarez de Lovera, Mara del Mar, 136
American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, 26
Amrico Silva Front, 74
Amparo massacre, 75, 97, 272n12, 273n14, 301n9
anarchism, 6, 20, 48, 79, 140, 235, 238, 240, 258n10, 282n31, 301n14, 302n16
Andrs Bello Catholic University, 121
anti-Chavistas, 3, 35, 70, 86, 89, 120, 162, 181, 208, 210, 218, 239, 255, 258n10; Bandera Roja joins, 11718, 278n34;
LCR joins, 98; media arm of, 167, 220; some of PPT joins, 285n43; student movement of, 11720, 122, 143, 278n37.
See also coup d'etat: April 2002 (reversed) against Chvez government
Antigone, 13
Aporrea.org, 17475, 244
April 13th Movement (M-13A), 251, 282n31
Arcaya, Ignacio Lus, 27
Aristotle, 115
Armed Forces, 29, 36, 43, 86, 9699, 114, 122, 168, 17173, 175, 177, 215, 24750; guerrilla strategy toward, 34,
265n44; hierarchy and professionalism, 24749; Organic Law of the Armed Forces, 249; radical tradition within,

3335, 49, 98; particularity of Venezuelan, 33, 171. See also Armed Forces of National Liberation; Bolivarian
Revolutionary Movement; Trejismo
Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN), 3437, 45, 49, 51, 62, 71, 99
Army of the Sovereign People, 201
Arrieta Chourio, Enrique, 164, 286n46
ARS group, 187, 206
ARS Publicity, 120
assemblies, popular: appearance in barrios after Caracazo, 100, 113, 17374, 178, 228, 24143, 251; guerrilla experiments
with, 42, 228, 24344; horizontalism and, 1820, 298n25; student struggle and, 111
autonomy: Afro and indigenous, 150, 152, 154, 156, 16062; dual power and, 241; guerrilla, 266n65; local, 16, 86, 212;
of popular masses, 46, 168, 258n10, 260n27; PDVSA's de facto, 122, 181; of peasantry, 21214; of social movements,
1518, 20, 23437, 254, 261n36; of the state, 6; university, 10912, 121, 12324; women's, 12830, 14043;
working-class, 62, 100, 18699
ayllu, 164, 285n44
Baduel, Ral, 86, 17172, 24849, 287n9
Bandera Roja (BR), 39, 5860, 65, 71, 7475, 113, 230, 270n49; opposition to Chvez, 11718, 278n34
Baniva (Maipurean-Arawak) people, 151
Banmujer (Women's Development Bank), 3839, 136, 13940, 143, 281n30
Barlovento, 15356, 164
Barranquilla Cooperative, 211
Barreto, Juan, 122
barrio assemblies. See assemblies, popular barrios (shantytowns), 14, 7576, 83, 96, 108, 154, 21928, 297n3; effect of
concentration on consciousness, 22627; culture, 22628; development of, 219; guerrillas turn attention to, 6365;
resistance to 2002 coup, 169; resistance to Rmulo Betancourt in, 11, 35, 7072; strategic importance of, 4647,
298n25; students turn attention to, 114. See also Caracazo rebellion; lumpenproletariat; mass fronts; militias, popular;
urbanization; violence: social
Barrios, Douglas, 11920
Bassiruque (newspaper, LS), 65
Benjamin, Walter, 238
Bernal, Freddy, 22930, 299n32
Betancourt, Carlos (Jernimo), 4243, 5859, 8385, 21415, 25051, 267, 278n34, Fig. 15
Betancourt, Jos Luis, 210
Betancourt, Rmulo, 2629, 3336, 45, 48, 71, 86, 132, 260n23, 262nn78, 26667, 278n36; guerrilla struggle against,
2336, 26364n20, 266n56; peasants and, 2057, 217; the people, critique of, 1012; repressive measures of, 11, 24,
2628, 38, 225, 263nn1012, 264n25, 266n57, 267n73; strategy of domestication, 11; student movement and, 10910;
workers and, 183, 18587. See also democracy: representative; social democracy
Black Friday, 73, 92, 158
Black Panthers, 77
Blanco, Hugo, 177
Blanco, Jessie, 13943, 282n31
Block 5 Collective, 68, 78
Bolvar, Simn, 2223, 45, 4849, 51, 12628, 14345, 176, 214. See also Bolivarianism
Bolvar (Liberator) Front, 32, 42
Bolivarian Circles, 100, 116, 228, 243
Bolivarianism, 18, 4851, 62, 66, 74, 80

Bolivarian Liberation Forces (FBL), 21316, 296nn5052

Bolivarian Militias, 214, 24849
Bolivariano, El (newspaper, PRV), 49
Bolivarian primary schools, 122
Bolivarian process, 6, 84, 167, 258n8
Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement (MBR-200), 57, 98
Bolivarian Socialist Workers' Force (FSBT), 291n46
Bolivarian University, 42, 12122
Bolivarian Workers' Force (FBT), 18991
Bolivia, 33, 82, 235
Bratton, William, 159, 285n35
Bravo, Douglas, 52, 62, 70, 99, 148, 183, 268n1, Fig. 1; critiques of Chvez, 17879, 25253; PCV guerrilla, 2537, 42,
26364n20, 265n49; PRV guerrilla, 37, 4851
Bravo, Napolen, 168
Bravo Sur, 123
Britto Garca, Luis, 54, 69, 1012, 145, 168
buhoneros (street vendors), 22325, 22832
bureaucracy, 5, 14, 65, 85, 142, 161, 163, 24145, 281n27, 282n34; in peasants' movement, 206; in workers' movement,
18598
Cabello, Diosdado, 302n16
Cabezas, Juan Vicente (Pablo), 26465n38
Cabral, Amilcar, 154
Cadafe, 19596, 292n61
Cajas Rurales, 2045
Caldera, Rafael, 5556, 101, 1056, 11215, 118, 12122, 18788, 270n49, 276n2, 290n31
Calles, Plutarco Elas, 258n9
Campesino Federation of Venezuela (FCV), 2057, 209, 215, 294n22, 296n53
Cantaura massacre, 7475, 97, 113, 272n12
Capriles Radonski, Henrique, 285n43
Caracazo rebellion (Caracas), 18, 25, 56, 59, 7576, 88103, 1057, 11314, 148, 158, 166, 17273, 179, 182, 218, 228,
235, 251, 276n41, 277n5; as constituent moment, 1315, 21, 89, 103, 166, 176, 23839, 275n25; lumpenproletariat
and, 22425, 23032; racism and, 158; repression of, 22, 71, 9697, 219; student movements pave the way for, 8182,
114, 277n28; as tragedy, 238, 301n8
Caribes, 63, 15152
Caricuao Cultural Front, 154
Carmona Estanga, Pedro, 3, 170, 229
Carosio, Alba, 12936, 280n12
Carpanazo rebellion (Carpano), 29, 32, 34
Casas de la Mujer, 131
Castaeda, Nora, 3840, 98, 12943, 162, 170, 225, 274n11, 280n12, 281n22, 281n25, 281n30, 304n48
Castro, Fidel, 2, 8, 10, 2627, 37, 61, 178, 259
Castro Rojas, Gaspar. See Revolutionary Commando Groups
Catholic Church, 109, 128, 131, 13536
Catia, 4, 5556, 6970, 9596, 219, 272n13, 285n35, Figs. 10, 11, 12

Catia 83 (Venezuela 83), 5556

Causa R, La (LCR), 51, 82, 98, 152, 161, 163, 268n10, 269n34, 270n37, 270n41, 276n30, 304n48; joins anti-Chavista
opposition, 57, 98; New Unionism, 18891; origins of, 5557; Patria Para Todos (PPT) splits from, 98
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 4, 30, 178
centralism, 8384, 163, 204, 241
Central University of Venezuela ( UCV), 28, 43, 55, 92, 106, 108, 114, 11921, 124, 267n73, 278n39; military occupation
of, 27, 110, 112, 277n14. See also university system
Chacao municipality (Caracas), 229, 299n31
Chacn, Jesse, 174
Chvez, Adn, 49, 304n48
Chvez Fras, Hugo, 48, 51, 176, 212, 301n10; Afro-indigenous movements and, 16061; importance of Caracazo for, 98;
critiques of ultra-left, 45, 178, 254, 296n52; election in 1998, 6, 1416, 2021, 89, 100, 103, 161, 179, 236,
24142; as empty signifier, 236; origins, 201; peasant movements and, 216; reelection in 2006, 117, 176, 191, 202,
244; revolutionary social movements and, 57, 1421, 8487; women's movement and, 14143; on Zamora, 2012
China, 43, 268n10
Chirino, Jos Leonardo, 14850, 165, 284nn1718, 284n20
Chirino, Orlando, 182, 19091, 193, 19899, 293n75
Chirino Front, 3233, 37, 40, 148, 264n37
Chirinos, Edmundo, 114
Chispa, La, 173
cimarrones, 15354, 164
circulation. See informal sector
Crculos Femeninos Populares (CFPS), 131, 140, 280n16
Cisneros, Gustavo, 174
Colombia, 33, 74, 82, 12627, 147, 151, 158
coloniality of knowledge, 124
colonization, 48, 109, 128, 14648, 15052, 155, 165; and class structure, 18385, 2034; internal, 151, 163
Columbus, Christopher, 165
comanagement, 19299, 292n61
Committees for Popular Struggles (BR), 65, 230
Committees for Revolutionary Student Struggles (BR), 65
Committees for Workers' Struggles (BR), 65
Communal Councils, 83, 174, 177, 179, 197, 228, 232, 24347, 281n30, 293n77; Bolivarian militias and, 215, 249; Law
on Communal Councils, 24446, 24950; popular assemblies as predecessor to, 100; popular militias and, 250, 254;
traditional communal structures and, 16364
Communard Movement, 8384, 214
communes, 199, 249, 252, 300n42; Organic Commune Law, 252
communication, 89, 93
Communist Party of Venezuela ( PCV), 2532, 3435, 41, 4344, 45, 4849, 55, 64, 99, 188, 192, 206, 245, 26364n20,
26465n38, 265n49, 267n82, 269n34, 293n1, 304n48; excluded by Punto Fijo Pact, 25; expelled from CTV, 187; FCV
and, 206; MAS splits from, 5253; participation in overthrow of Prez Jimnez, 24; turn to guerrilla struggle, 2931;
withdrawal from guerrilla struggle, 37, 57; women's movement and, 128, 133, 135, 140
Communist Party USA, 48
Communist Youth (JCV), 31, 4849, 62
community struggles, 7679, 22628. See also barrios
Constitution (Bolivarian) of 1999, 142, 160, 172, 17879, 182, 243, 245; Article 62, 157; Article 88, 13639 (see also

wages for housework); Afro and Indigenous proposals, 135, 15657; dissolved during 2002 coup, 170; education in,
115, 124; as empty signifier, 236, 300n3, 304n44; on land and latifundismo, 2078; reform proposal of 2007 (failed),
86, 120, 16365, 199, 24748, 253; right to work, 229; women's movements and, 13439
contralora (oversight), 198, 245
Contreras, Juan, 7072, 7682, 225, 273n20
cooperatives, 163, 19399, 211, 213, 261n42, 292n59
COPEI (Christian Democratic Party), 2425, 27, 5455, 105, 111, 114, 117, 161, 163, 188, 190, 207, 262n4, 276n30
Coronil, Fernando, 91, 23839, 274n9, 280n8, 301n10
corruption, 50, 224, 226, 235, 298n18; Carlos Lanz analyzes, 61, 63; communal councils as a weapon against, 245; CTV
and, 167, 186, 18990, 192; in informal sector, 231; persistence within Chavismo, 84, 161, 197, 24445, 281n27,
303n35; police and, 83; under previous system, 3, 5, 13, 1718, 24, 5455, 60, 114, 193, 209, 214; UNT and, 198. See
also democracy: representative; Punto Fijo Pact
councils, 81, 11112, 123, 196, 199, 232, 24041, 24344, 24951. See also assemblies, popular; Communal Councils;
communes
coup d'etat: February 1992 (failed), by Chvez and others, 6, 1415, 18, 2021, 35, 49, 5457, 8990, 99103, 105, 108,
114, 171, 174, 176, 17879, 213, 239, 241, 270n49, 278n34, 302n24; November 1992 (failed), 14, 56, 99101, 105,
108, 241, 278n34; April 2002 (reversed) against Chvez government, 3, 21, 8687, 8990, 102, 15860, 16679, 182,
225, 232, 249
CTV. See Venezuelan Workers' Confederation
Cuban Revolution, 2, 12, 19, 2627, 3133, 41, 43, 267
cultural struggle, 78, 82, 99, 15456, 22627, 284n29. See also Cabral, Amilcar; Gramsci, Antonio
cumbe, 164
Czechoslovakia, Soviet invasion of, 52
Dalla Costa, Mariarosa, 13637
Dvila, Luis Alfonso, 162
Day of Indigenous Resistance, 165
Debray, Rgis, 19, 4041, 4647, 62, 8283, 226, 267nn7479, 267n85, 268n10, 273n25
decentralization, 8384, 163, 196, 204, 235
de la Plaza, Salvador, 48
de las Casas, Bartolom, 148
democracy: direct and participatory, 10, 42, 56, 113, 12124, 157, 196, 259, 281n30; formal, 9, 2324, 17980;
representative, 911, 13, 25, 29, 31, 36, 55, 66, 88, 259n20, 263n10
Democratic Republican Unity (URD), 2427, 262n4
Denis, Roland, 82, 115, 178, 25152, 275n18, 277n5, 279n44, 282n31, 288n8, 300n3, 304nn4344; on the Caracazo, 90,
9496, 99100, 102; on informal sector, 23132; on Sergio Rodrguez, 1068, 12425; on socialization of repression,
7376
DISIP (Intelligence Services, previously DIGEPOL), 61, 68, 71, 74, 7779, 106, 153, 252, 272n12, 273n20
Draft Law for Higher Education (PLES), 115
drug trade, 34, 73, 7778, 83, 85, 22526
Duque, Jos Roberto, 258n8
Dussel, Enrique, 8, 16, 20, 23536, 260n34, 261n41, 298n18, 300n2, 302n24
ecology and environment, 5051, 155, 164
economic crisis, 13, 54, 7273, 9192, 99, 158, 291n54. See also Black Friday; neoliberal reform
El Charcote Ranch, 2089, 211

El Encanto attack, 3436

Ellner, Steve, 5354, 18081, 186, 289n19, 29192n54, 294n22
El Salvador, 3940, 178
Enabling Laws: of 2001, 86, 208; of 2007, 302
endogeneous development, 295n30
Escalona, Julio, 58
Escobar, Jos Luis, 294n18
escualidos. See anti-Chavistas
Esquina del Chorro, 106, 118, 12425
Eurocentrism, 50, 124, 137, 163, 267n85
exceptionalism thesis, 12, 23, 25, 89, 97
Ezequiel Zamora National Agrarian Coordinator (CANEZ), 209
Ezequiel Zamora National Campesino Front (FNCEZ) , 20217; product of fusion of Simn Bolvar Revolutionary
Campesino Front (FCRSB) and Ezequiel Zamora Revolutionary Campesino Front (FCREZ), 294
Fanon, Frantz, 46, 96, 102, 266n71, 268n5, 284n26; on the lumpenproletariat, 22122, 22425, 23132; on urbanization,
204, 219; on violence, 85, 239; on the working class, 18384. See also lumpenproletariat; violence: revolutionary
Fedecmaras, 3, 170, 180, 19091, 210, 289n24
FEDENAGA, 210
Federal Government Council, 249
Federal Wars, 33, 249, 293n4
Federation of University Centers (FCUS), 11113
Fermn, Claudio, 156
Fernandes, Sujatha, 258nn810, 260n27, 261n36, 261n42, 282n34, 304n46
fetishism, 1619, 21, 48, 61, 90, 94, 23738, 261n41
Fetralec, 19495
Fidel (interviewee), 123
Fifth Republic Movement (MVR), 152, 158, 175
First Guerrilla Conference, 33
Flores, Cilia, 118
FMLN (Farabundo Mart National Liberation Front), 39
food sovereignty, 177, 203, 208
foquismo, 17, 19, 3244, 46, 5859, 6263, 65, 7172, 77, 79, 8183, 99100, 113, 267n74, 268n10, 271n5
Freire, Paolo, 112, 131, 281n30
French Revolution, 8, 149
Front of Workers in Occupied and Co-managed Factories (FRETECO), 196
Fronts for the Right to Bread, 41, 205
Fuenmayor, Juan Bautista, 48, 268n36
Fuentes, Fred, 195, 227, 292n61, 302n16
Fuerte Tiuna, 16972, 174
Gabaldn, Argimiro, 32, 42, 60
Gabaldn, Jos Rafael, 32, 204
Garca, Jess Chucho, 150, 15362, 304n48

Garca, Marcos, 191

Garca Carneiro, Jorge Luis, 17172
Garca Mrquez, Gabriel, 12627, 144
Garca Ponce, Guillermo, 37, 52
Gayones Movement, 19899
Generation of 28, 109
Gente 80, 51
Giordani, Jorge, 247
Global Women's Strike, 137
Globovisin, 4, 120, 144, 174
Gloria al Bravo Pueblo (national anthem), 9, 13, 23, 93, 259n19
Goicochea, Yon, 11719
Gmez, Gonzalo, 173, 191, 231, 300n42
Gmez, Juan Vicente, 32, 109, 151, 186, 201, 2035
Gonzlez, Stalin, 118, 279n39
Gonzalito (interviewee), 43
Governeur, Livia, 267n73
Gramsci, Antonio, 49, 79: hegemony, 99100, 112; intellectuals, 109; war of position versus war of maneuver, 63,
112, 12123, 192
Gran Colombia, 145
Granier, Marcel, 4, 174
Guarulla, Liborio, 15052, 156, 16164, 232, 284n23; joins anti-Chavista opposition, 285n43
Guerrero, Pedro, 209
guerrilla struggle, 1112, 15, 1718, 20, 2344, 62, 82, 265, 293n4, 3045n48: Cuban support for, 38, 153; contemporary
rural, 21215; failure and lessons, 4344, 232, 234, 242; origins, 2629; urban, 3536, 41, 4647, 5763, 7172,
7677, 83, 172. See also foquismo, vanguardism
Guevara, Che, 3, 46, 49, 80, 84, 98
Gunder Frank, Andre, 219, 224
Guzmn, Julio Cesar, 39
Guzmn Blanco, Antonio, 200201
Guzmn Navas, Julio Cesar, 39
Haitian Revolution, 7, 12, 14849, 226, 25354
Harnecker, Marta, 171, 232, 265n40, 270n41, 287n9
Hegel, G. W. F., 44
Hernndez, Roberto, 192
Herrera, Juan, 183, 187
Herrera Campins, Luis, 132, 188, 287n5
Hobsbawm, Eric, 273n25
Holloway, John, 16, 1920, 261n38, 262n46
Hombre Nuevo, El (newspaper), 108
horizontalism, 1620, 53, 81, 235, 261nn4043, 298n25
House of Calm Waters (Venezuela 83), 56
Humboldt, Alexander von, 151

Hurricane Katrina, 219

import-substitution industrialization, 185, 223
Incas, 124, 164
indigenous peoples, 32, 4849, 63, 74, 81, 135, 14652, 16065, 184, 201, 212, 232, 234, 236, 245, 285n41; in the
guerrilla struggle, 264n37, 283n14, 294n18; racism against, 284n26. See also colonization; National Indian Council of
Venezuela
informal sector, 7, 20, 5354, 184, 199, 21833, 289n16, 292n54, 293n77, 299n29, 300n42: in the Caracazo, 9293; and
illegality, 224. See also lumpenproletariat
International Monetary Fund, 73, 91
International Workers of the World (IWW), 186
Invepal, 19495
Inveval, 19698
Istriz, Aristbulo, 56, 156, 15860
Iturriza Lpez, Reinaldo, 22829, 232
Izaguirre, Alejandro, 96
Izarra, Andrs, 174, 287n17
Izarra, Willian, 287n17
Jackeline (interviewee), 198
Jacoa Cooperative, 213
James, C. L. R., 7, 21, 102, 136, 149, 226, 25354
James, Selma, 13638, 281n22, 281n25, 281n30
Janicke, Kiraz, 227, 278n33
Jaua, Elas, 156, 216, 305n48
Jimnez, Carlos, 30
Jimnez, Demetrio, 30
Jimnez, Jess, 30
Jirajaras, 63, 14748, 283n7
Johnson-Forest Tendency, 136, 281n30
Juvenal (interviewee), 5760, 6365, 79, 99, 154, 17576, 253, 267n76, 271n60 (ch. 2), 271n5 (ch. 3)
Karia people, 15051
Kerensky, Alexander, 240, 242
Klein, Naomi, 261
La Azulita, 32
Laclau, Ernesto, 236
Lander, Edgardo, 124
Landless Workers' Movement (Brazil), 208
Lanz Rodrguez, Carlos, 51, 58, 99100, 154; Alcasa, 62, 81, 124, 196; on Caracazo, 95; corruption, analysis of, 61, 63;
critique of bourgeois legality, 6366; critique of putschism, 99100; on dual power, 251; on education, 11213,
12425; GCRS and Niehous operation, 5961; history and influences, 6263; Popular Disobedience (DP) , 8182;
Revolutionary Workers' Movement (MRT), 8081, 273n22
Lara, Willian, 211

Larrazbal, Wolfgang, 26, 183, 18687, 262n7

latifundismo (large landholdings), 2023, 2067, 209, 215
Laya, Argelia, 133
Lebowitz, Michael, 194, 233, 302n16, 304n46
Ledezma, Antonio, 15556
Lenin, V. I., 48, 50, 81, 83, 178, 192, 23945, 301n14
Len, Mara, 128, 13536, 14042, 304n48
Leoni, Ral, 36, 45, 51, 153
Levine, Daniel, 12
Ley de Tierras, 20813, 216, 295n32, 296n54
liberation theology, 4950, 63, 74, 135
Libertario, El, 282n31. See also anarchism
Ligas Campesinas, 205
Liga Socialista (LS), 51, 61, 64, 113, 133, 135, 304n48
Linares, Sandalio, 294n18
Lionza, Mara, 50, 128, 280n8, 283n13
Lombroso, Cesare, 15859
Lpez, Warner, 4
Lpez Sisco, Henry, 272n12
L'Ouverture, Toussaint, 7, 146, 254. See also Haitian Revolution
Lovera, Alberto, 75, 136
Luengo, Miguel, 153
Lukcs, Gyorgy, 223
lumpen-capitalism, 223
lumpendevelopment, 219, 224, 22831
lumpenproletariat, 7, 20, 177, 184, 204, 22033, 297n12: as revolutionary subject, 22425, 22829, 231. See also informal
sector
Lusinchi, Jaime, 91, 213, 272n12
Luxemburg, Rosa, 49
M-28 Movement, 110, 113, 116, 11920, 123
Machado, Eduardo, 52
Machado, Gustavo, 52
Machuca, Ramn, 18990
Machurucuto landing, 153
Magallanes, Manuel Vicente, 147
Maneiro, Alfredo, 51, 53, 191, 258n9, 260n23, 260nn3033, 262n2, 262n8, 263n17, 267nn8586, 269n34, 270n37,
272n9; founds LCR, 5556, 188189, 268n10; guerrilla commander, 32, 49, 265n38, 267n82; on the vanguard,
270n35. See also Causa R, La (LCR)
Manuitt, Elas, 34, 37, 265n44
Maoism, 62, 265n39
Mao Tse-Tung, 49, 62
Maracaibo Women's League, 130
Marea Socialista, 191, 291n47

marginals. See informal sector; lumpenproletariat

Marianismo, 128, 144, 280nn78
Maritegui, Jos Carlos, 50, 6263, 81, 155, 16264, 184, 286n46
Marin, Briggite, 21516, 296n52
Marker, Chris, 268
Mrquez, ngel J., 48
Mrquez, Pompeyo, 5253
Mrquez Finol, Jess Alberto, 58
Martn, Amrico, 27, 38, 57
Martnez, Tulio, 34
Marx, Karl, 94, 108, 110, 163, 181, 22126, 297n12
Marxism, 44, 48, 6163, 111, 124, 137, 193, 230, 233; autonomist, 62; heterodox, 49, 62, 74, 81, 271n60;
lumpenproletariat according to, 22026; revolutionary subject according to, 18384; spiritualization of, 50
Mspero, Marcela, 191
masses, popular. See people, the
mass fronts, 6366, 7576, 9899, 230
mass military line, 8082, 99100
Matancero, El (newspaper, Venezuela 83), 5556, 152, 189
Matthews, Herbert, 2, 257n2
media, 2, 96, 115; foreign, 121, 168; opposition, 11820, 144, 159, 16768; popular, 17375; role in 2002 coup, 120,
16775, 177
Medina, Pablo, 18889, 270n37
Mndez, Genaro, 210, 212
Meridazo (Mrida), 114
mestizaje, 148, 150, 15253, 15760, 162. See also racism
Mesuca stairway massacre, 97
Metropolitan Police, 6768, 7780, 84, 96, 158, 170, 176, 229, 286n3, 299n32
Metropolitan University, 119
Miguel, King (Miguel del Barrio, El Negro Miguel), and Queen Guiomar, 14748, 282nn78, 283n13, 284nn1820
militias: official, 85, 21415, 243, 24751; peasant, 21215; peasant battalions in official, 249; popular, 42, 70, 7680,
8287, 167, 17578, 220, 22526
Miquilena, Luis, 86
MIR. See Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR)
Miraflores Palace, 2, 69, 16769, 173
Miranda, Francisco de, 125, 201
mission system, 207; Mission Barrio Adentro, 78; Mission Mothers of the Barrio, 138, 281n27; Mission Ribas, 122; Mission
Robinson, 122; Mission Sucre, 122; Mission Zamora, 208
Moleiro, Moiss, 2728
Molletones, Ramn, 209
Mommer, Bernard, 26869n12
Moncada, Samuel, 16970
Mondragon Corporation, 194
motorizados (motorcycle couriers), 93, 106, 173, 223, 225, 228
Motta, Sara, 246
Mount Sorte, 50, 283n13

Movement for National Salvation (MOSAN), 38

Movement toward Socialism (MAS), 5258, 65, 82, 98, 133, 161, 188, 269n34. See also Petkoff, Teodoro
Mller Rojas, Alberto, 31, 24749, 303n31, Fig. 16
Muoz, Antonia, 156
Muoz, Freddy, 52
Nacional, El (newspaper), 214, 22021, 228, 271n52, 297n6
angaras, 6768, 7779
national bourgeoisie, 28, 184, 192, 291n47
National Guard, 35, 168, 211
National Indian Council of Venezuela (CONIVE), 150, 152, 156, 16061
National Liberation Army (ELN), 214
National Police Law, 83
National Workers' Union (UNT), 186, 19092, 195, 19798, 215, 227, 291n46
Navas, Angel, 19495
Navas, Ldice, 3940, 42, 130, 133, 139, 178, 266, 304n48
Negra Hiplita, 282
Negra Matea, 282
Negri, Antonio, 49, 62, 260n34, 275n18, 302n24
Negro Cristbal, 283
Negro Miguel. See Miguel, King
neoliberal reform, 13, 56, 73, 9192, 102, 148, 185, 19293; and urbanization, 203, 22324
Neruda, Pablo, 145, 282n39
Neustaldt, Otto, 286n4
New Autonomous Movements, 51
New Plague, 97, 220
Niehous, William, kidnapping of (Operation Argimiro Gabaldn), 5966, 80, 113, 251, 27071nn5253, 298n18. See also
Lanz Rodrguez, Carlos; Revolutionary Commando Groups (GCR)
Nolasco Padilla, Ivan, 271n53
North Korea, 62
occupations: factory, 188, 19499; peasant, 11, 2627, 41, 183, 20511, 21316, 295n28; student, 11, 28, 92, 113, 116,
263n18; urban, 69, 71, 232
oil, 26, 50, 54, 57; agriculture and land distribution, 203, 219; and class structure, 18485; and educational system, 109;
Ruptura studies, 26869; and the state, 238; and urbanization, 93, 219, 222. See also oil lockout; Patrleos de
Venezuela
oil lockout, 86, 18082, 184, 19091, 208, 210, 218, 224, 229, 244, 288n8
Ojeda, Alonso de, 14647
Ojeda, Fabricio, 2224, 3738, 42, 48, 75, 153, 201, 262n2, 265n38
Ojeda Ros, Filiberto, 69
oligarchy, 8, 33, 85, 109, 177, 200201, 203, 21617, 239, 249
Operation Condor, 68
opposition. See anti-Chavistas
Organization of American States, 27, 119, 159
Organization of Revolutionaries (OR), 58, 60, 64, 71

Ortega, Carlos, 167, 190

Osorio, Joaqun, 195
Oswaldo (interviewee), 242
Otero Silva, Miguel Enrique, 22022, 228, 297n6
Owens-Illinois, 60
pacification, 25, 36, 38, 45, 57, 62, 111, 113, 153, 187
Pez, Jos Antonio, 276n34
Pez Front, 2931, 36, 40, 4344, 265n38
Palestine, 154
paramilitaries, right-wing, 202, 21314
Paris Commune, 164, 241
party-form, critique of, 5051, 5556, 81, 114, 269n13: antiparty sentiment, 55, 11314, 260n33
Party of the Venezuelan Revolution ( PRV-FALN), 37, 41, 4851, 5559, 6265, 7071, 74, 81, 9899, 113, 15354, 162,
187, 250, 25253, 268nn712, 269n13, 271n60, 276n32, 304n48. See also Bolivarianism; guerrilla struggle
Patria Para Todos (PPT), 49, 51, 57, 98, 141, 152, 163, 285n43, 304n48
Patriotic Circles, 100, 116, 228, 243
Patriotic Hope, 50, 276n32
Paz, Gernimo (Gabino), 296n50
peasantry (campesinos), 7, 11, 2627, 3233, 4142, 4547, 49, 93, 153, 177, 18384, 200217, 219, 222, 22627, 240,
247, 249, 294n18, 294n22, 295n31
Pea, Alfredo, 15859, 285n35, 286n3
people, the (el pueblo), 1, 614, 20, 43, 144, 193, 204, 231, 23439, 25354; and the 2002 coup against Chvez, 166,
17172, 17579; and the Caracazo, 8690, 1012; concept, 8; and dual power, 24149; guerrilla struggle and, 1718,
44, 46, 234; history of, 9; Rmulo Betancourt's critique of, 1012
People's Electoral Movement, 187, 290n28
Prez, Carlos Andrs, 6061, 105, 132, 154, 18588, 253, 27172n6, 273n16, 278n34, 290n31; neoliberal reform
package, 13, 9192, 223; repression of the Caracazo, 9697
Prez, Lisandro (Mao), 85
Prez Arcay, Jacinto, 201, 293n4
Prez Borges, Stalin, 191, 291nn4647
Prez Delgado, Pedro (Maisanta), 2012, 204
Prez Jimnez, Marcos, 9, 2224, 27, 33, 6971, 190, 205. See also 23 de Enero (date)
Prez Prez, Pedro, 2012
Petare, 7, 96, 174, 219, 225
Petit, Dimas, 50, 304n48
Petkoff, Luben, 3233, 38
Petkoff, Teodoro: guerrilla, 25, 31, 32, 3537, 47, 5758, 7172, 264n24, 264n28, 265n53, 271n5; and MAS, 5255, 133,
188, 269n34; opposition to Chvez, 57, 252. See also Movement toward Socialism (MAS)
Petrleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), 167, 18182, 197, 268n12, 288n4
Piar, Manuel, 152
Piedrita Collective, La, 16, 17, 78, 8387, 108, 154, 17577, 250, 252, 257n1, 274n35, 296n52, Fig. 9. See also militias:
popular; Tupamaros
Pieiro Harnecker, Camila, 195
Pinero, Francisco, 19697

Pinochet, Augusto, 171

Pinto, Jos, 4, 8081, 299n35. See also Revolutionary Tupamaro Movement
Pinto, Jos Luis, 19899
Plan Bolvar 2000, 122
Plan Ezequiel Zamora, 208
polarization, 87, 98, 23839, 260n31
Ponte Rodrguez, Manuel, 34; guerrilla front, 49
Popular Disobedience (DP), 8182, 9293, 95, 99, 106, 11314, 124, 243, 251
Porteazo rebellion (Puerto Cabello), 29, 30, 32, 34
Posada Carrilles, Luis, 71
poverty, 13, 91, 102, 122, 223, 231; women and, 135, 139
Powell, Colin, 159
power: antipower or non-state power, 251, 300; constituent power, 1521, 8890, 9495, 103, 16667, 172, 17879,
245, 260n34, 302n24; constituted power, 245; dual power, 19, 182, 193, 23950, 288n8, 300n1, 301nn1214
Poyo, Jos, 15052, 16162, 165, 284n24
Prada, Francisco El Flaco, 37, 50, 5859, 252
Prada, Lizardi, 281n25
PRAG (Venezuela 83), 5556
Prashad, Vijay, 275
precarity. See informal sector
press freedom, 2829, 119, 27071n52
Prieto, Agustin, 170
Primera, Al, 11, 13, 14, 23, 6970, 86, 110, 204, 219, 23436, 257
Primero Justicia (PJ), 11718, 278n34
Progressive Movement of Venezuela (MPV), 285n43
PROVEA, 212
Proyecto Nuestramrica (PNA), 82, 282n31
pueblo. See people, the
Puente Llaguno, 16769
Puerta Aponte, Gabriel, 58, 270n49, 278n34. See also Bandera Roja (BR)
Puerto Flechado, 14648
Punto Cero, 38, 58, 71, 270n46
puntofijismo. See Punto Fijo Pact
Punto Fijo Pact, 10, 25, 27, 90, 111 114, 131, 290n28. See also Accin Democrtica (AD); COPEI; Democratic Republican
Unity (URD)
putschism, 35, 43, 62, 99, 251, 253
Quehacer (BR), 65
Quijada, Ramn, 206
racism, 15253, 15762, 284n18, 284n26, 285n30; endoracism, 157
Radio Caracas Televisin (RCTV), 4, 11720, 143, 174, 271n52
Ramrez, Isidro, 4950, 6465
Ramrez, Rafael, 50, 268n12

Ramrez Rojas, Klber, 1819, 49, 99, 124, 227, 250, 252, 26162n43, 276n32, 298n25, 303n38
Ramos, Al, 2023, 206, 209, 216
Ramos Jimnez, Ral, 27
Rangel, Domingo Alberto, 27, 37, 57, 74, 186
Rangel, Jos Vicente, 54, 97
Rangel Gmez, Francisco, 191
Recio, Jorge, 169
Red Brigades, 6263
Relatives of Victims Committee, 97
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), 213, 273n25
Revolutionary Bolvar and Zamora Current, 21517
Revolutionary Commando Groups (GCR), 5963, 80, 271n5253
Revolutionary Fogata Movement, 123
Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) , 2729, 31, 3740, 4243, 45, 52, 5758, 74, 133, 153, 18687, 201, 265n38,
267n86, 304n48
Revolutionary October 8th Movement, 60
Revolutionary Popular Assembly (APR), 17374
Revolutionary Tendency, 51, 304n48
Revolutionary Tupamaro Movement, 4, 8081, 230, 299n35
Revolutionary Workers' Movement (MRT), 8081
Revolution Will Not Be Televised, The (film), 286n2
Reyes, Yulimar, 9394, 277n5
Rice, Condoleezza, 119
Ros, Antonio, 213
Rivero, Fernando, 11013, 11516, 124
Rivero, Jos Ramn, 19192
Robespierre, Maximilien de, 254
rochela, 164
Rodrguez, Hctor, 120, 278n39
Rodrguez, Isaas, 17475
Rodrguez, Jorge, 58, 61, 65, 75, 271n53, 272n12
Rodrguez, Simn, 49
Rodrguez Araque, Al (Fausto), 51, 268n12, 304n48
Rodrguez Yance, Carlos, 67
Rodrguez Yance, Ricardo, 6768
Rodrguez Yance, Sergio, 6768, 1068, 114, 118, 12425, 277n5, Fig. 4
Ron, Lina, 87, 94, 14344, 214, 225, 230, 232, 296n52, 299n35. See also Venezuelan Popular Unity (UPV)
Rondn, Franklin, 19091
Rosales, Manuel, 211
Rosales, Rafael, 190
Rousseff, Dilma, 60
Rugeles, Manuel, 148
Ruiz-Guevara, Jos Esteban, 217, 293n1
Ruptura (newspaper), 65

Ruptura (PRV), 50, 6465, 15354, 187, 268n12, 276n32

Russian Revolution, 19, 99, 23941; Winter Palace metaphor, 16, 99, 237, 251
Sacudn. See Caracazo rebellion
Senz, Manuela, 12628, 141, 14345
Sez, Irene, 276
Sez Mrida, Simn, 27
San Carlos prison, 3637, 51, 6162, 25153, 269n15, 270n49, 273n22, Figs. 8, 13; 1967 escape, 52, 269n17; 1975
escape, 51, 5759, 270n46, 272n13, 304n48
Sanitarios Maracay, 196
Santa Ins, battle of, 200202, 21617
Santana, Diego, 4
Santana, Valentn, 15, 8487, 17576, 25051, 276n34, Fig. 9
Santera, 50
Seattle protests of 1999, 91
self-activity, 9, 102, 227, 231, 281n30
self-defense. See militias
Serra, Robert, 121
Settlers' Movement, 232
sex workers, 143
shabono, 164
Siderrgica de Orinoco (Sidor), 55, 18892, 196, 216, 290n31, 291n48, 292n61
SIFA (Intelligence Services), 38
Silva, Amrico, 58
Silva, Ramn, 172
Silva, Trino, 196
Simn Bolivar Coordinator, 70, 78, 80, 83, 271n1
Simn Bolvar Cultural Foundation, 246
Simn Bolvar University, 112
Simn the Arab, 52, 269n17
Sino-Soviet split, 49
Sitrin, Marina, 261nn4042
slavery, 48, 14650, 153, 165, 283n7
social democracy: AD and, 26, 105, 192; MAS and, 54
Social-Historic Current (CHS), 7375, 80, 99, 131
socialism, twenty-first-century, 16364
Socialist Workers' Party, 182
Sonora Poncea, 69
Soto Rojas, Fernando, 58, 133
Sousa Santos, Boaventura de, 136
spirituality, 4851
spontaneity, 8990, 9395, 102, 17273, 181, 262n8, 298n25
Stalinism, 28, 62, 16263
state, the: dissolution of, 235, 242, 245, 249; magical, 23739; seizing, 176, 182, 240, 242; semi-state, 240; social

movements and, 521, 134, 161, 167. See also autonomy

streets, as political location, 43, 65, 81, 87, 90, 93, 13536, 171, 182, 23233
strikes, 2829, 64, 18890, 289n24, 290nn3031; general, 36, 186; morrocoy (slowdown), 188; wildcat, 18889
students, 11, 20, 2629, 43, 55, 64, 74, 81, 10625, 183: in Caracazo, 9293; Chavista, 11824; in guerrilla struggle, 43,
86, 110; opposition, 11720. See also Popular Disobedience (DP); university system
Sucre Front, 38, 42, 83
Suez Crisis, 26
SUTISS, 189
Tactical Combat Units (UTCS), 3536. See also guerrilla struggle: urban
Tarazn, Andrena, 119
Techo de la Ballena, 48
Tercer Camino, 51. See also Bravo, Douglas
Toledo, Alexis, 230, 299n35
Torres, Camilo, 237
Torres, Eloy, 25
torture, 5, 14, 24, 30, 36, 38, 40, 51, 61, 65, 68, 74, 79, 154, 252, 266n57, 271n53, 281n19
Trejismo, 3335, 97
Trejo, Hugo, 33
Tupak Amaru, 63
Tupamaros, 6768, 72, 7880, 8287, 172, 17578, Figs. 10, 11, 12
Turimiquire Peak, 32, 264n32
TVes, 117
unemployed, 11, 26, 86, 183, 222, 22425, 227. See also informal sector
Unified, Revolutionary, Classist, Autonomous Current (C-CURA), 191
Union of Black Women, 155
United Federaton of Non-Dependent and Similar Workers of Venezuela, 228
United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), 31, 152, 191, 199, 247
United States of America, 12, 24, 27, 36, 77, 117, 121, 135, 159, 168, 284n23
United Syndical Committee, 186, 289n24
United Workers' Confederation of Venezuela, 187
University Law, 123
University of the Andes, 113
University of Zulia, 130
university system: Academic Renovation, 11012, 115, 277; autonomy, 10910, 112, 121, 124; development, 109; direct
democracy in, 111, 113, 116, 121, 123; gentrification of, 108, 110, 112, 115, 11718, 121; humanities, 116;
privatization within, 115; strike of 1987, 11314; technocratic reform of, 11112, 116, 277; Toma of 2001, 113, 116
Un Nuevo Tiempo (UNT), 118
urbanization, 46, 70, 199, 2034, 207, 21819, 222
URD. See Democratic Republican Unity (URD)
Uzctegui, Rafael El Negro, 4951, 59, 98, 253, 263n17, 267n76, 268n10, 304n48
Valera Mora, Chino, 48

vanguardism, 17, 20, 33, 35, 38, 4144, 45, 53, 5566, 7172, 77, 81, 1012, 108, 142, 17576, 236, 26162n43,
267n82, 268n1, 270n35, 271n5, 298n25. See also foquismo
Vargas, Alfredo, Sr., 94
Vargas mudslides, 219
Velasco, Alejandro, 15, 257n1, 258n10, 259n20
Velsquez, Andrs, 56, 189
Velsquez, David, 245
Venceremos Guerrilla Front, 3
Venceremos Organization, 63, 79
Venepal, 194
Venevisin, 174
Venezolana de Televisin (VTV), 248
Venezuela, 83, 5556
Venezuelan Homemakers' Union, 281n25
Venezuelan Planning School, 11718, 122, 230
Venezuelan Popular Unity (UPV), 14344, 225, 230. See also Ron, Lina
Venezuelan Revolutionary Directorate (DIREVE), 264n32
Venezuelan Workers' Confederation ( CTV) , 167, 18090, 19293, 198, 2056, 213, 227, 288n1, 289n19, 289n24,
290n28, 294n22
verticalism, 1718, 77, 81, 248, 252, 261n40. See also horizontalism
Vietnam, 62
violence: against campesinos, 20614, 249; domestic, 4, 134; revolutionary, 56, 8086, 95, 102, 11314, 182, 206, 239;
social, 4, 70, 78, 21920, 22526, 232; state, 35, 17, 36, 57, 68, 7276, 7980, 91, 9697, 1067, 183, 191, 220
Vivas, Hctor, 51
Wallerstein, Immanuel, 184
Washington Consensus. See neoliberal reform
Williams (interviewee), 181
Wilpert, Gregory, 208, 246, 286n3, 295nn2732
women, 17, 20, 3840, 42, 81, 12645, 212, 236: Afro-Venezuelan, 135; class divisions among, 12932, 138, 281; and
the family, 138; and feminism, 12931; and guerrilla struggle, 3840, 12930, 138, 26667; and informal labor, 224;
reform of Civil Code in 1982, 132; wages for housework, 13639. See also Banmujer; Constitution (Bolivarian) of
1999: Article 88; Women's CONG; Women's Ministry
Women's CONG (Coordinator of Non-Governmental Organizations), 13235, 137
Women's Development Bank. See Banmujer
Women's Ministry, 128, 134, 136, 140
Workers in Revolution Collective, 191
working class, 7, 20, 4546, 5354, 56, 62, 72, 81, 137, 18099, 224, 299n29; as labor aristocracy, 194, 29192n54; as
revolutionary subject, 93, 18485, 225, 231, 233
Yanomami people, 151, 164
Yulimar Vive, 107, Fig. 4
Yumare massacre, 7475, 97, 272n12
Zacarias, Comandante, 214

Zago, Angela, 266n72

Zamora, Ezequiel, 49, 200204, 207, 209, 21417, 249, 293n1
Zamora (El Bachiller) Front, 38, 153, 265n38
Zapatistas, 2, 1920, 24, 91, 262n46, 301n14
Zelaya, Manuel, 287
Zibechi, Ral, 235, 300nn12
Zinn, Howard, 8
Zuloaga, Guillermo, 174