Front Burner - Chavismo, Maduro, and the making of Venezuela

Episode Date: January 8, 2026

In 1999 Hugo Chavez was elected President of Venezuela, beginning a years-long ‘Bolivarian Revolution,’ following multiple coup attempts, and time in prison. Chavez would go on to govern the country as President until his death in 2013 — passing sweeping anti-poverty programs, nationalizing oil and industry, and opposing US hegemony in the region. Just before his death, Chavez hand selected Nicolas Maduro as the person to carry forward his political program and legacy. Maduro’s time in power was hamstrung between domestic mismanagement, US sanction regimes, and authoritarian crackdowns. But at the core of his time in power was the ‘Chavismo’ political ideology, created in the image of his predecessor. For a better sense of Venezuela’s modern political history, we have a look at its central characters: Simon Bolivar, Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro. Today, we’re joined by Alejandro Velasco, a professor of Latin American history at New York University, and author of ‘Barrio Rising: Urban Popular Politics and the Making of Modern Venezuela.’For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

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Donate at lovescarbro.cairbo. This is a CBC podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Prosson. I think that the first people who should read this book are our brothers and sisters in the United States because their threat is in their own house. So that was former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez delivering a speech at the U.N. General Assembly in 2006. One day after U.S. President George Bush delivered his speech to the same body.

Standing behind the podium, Bush had just used the day before. Chavez says, yesterday the devil came here. Right here. Right here. And it smells of sulfur still today. At an event three years later, Chavez would approach Barack Obama, pat him on the back and hand him a book in front of a gallery of cameras. The book was called Open Vanes of Latin America, five centuries of the pillage of a continent, and tracks the history of Western imperialism and colonization in the region.

Those two stories are really emblematic of Hugo Chavez, a man many consider a hero. of Latin American history, though that sentiment is by no means universally held. Before his death in 2013, Chavez handpicked his right-hand man, Nicholas Maduro, as the person to carry on his political legacy, a political tradition known as Chavismo. It's a tradition whose tenants include opposition to the U.S. and foreign interests, the nationalization of oil, but also under the rule of Maduro, economic collapse, human rights, abuses, and U.S. sanctions. For a better sense of the modern political history of Venezuela, we're joined today by Alejandro Velasco, an associate professor of Latin American history at New York University, an author of Barrio Rising, Urban Popular Politics, and the Making of Modern Venezuela. Alejandro, thank you very much for coming on to the show.

Thanks so much for having me. So let's get right into it. We have spent the last few days talking a lot about the contemporary, Nicholas Maduro, about oil, and about this most recent U.S. military operation in Venezuela. But let's go back to the political tradition responsible for a lot of this. And why don't we begin with former longtime Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who governed the country from 1999 to the day of his death in 2013. He was a socialist firebrand of the old school, Fidel Castro's friend and his successor as leader of Latin America's leftist revolution. He came to power following this grassroots movement called the Bolivarian Revolution.

And can you tell me about that movement and what it stood for? Yeah, the Bolivarian Revolution in the 90s was more of a patchwork that really brought together various sectors of disenchanted Venezuelans, who, for the better part of a decade, going back to the 1980s, had felt increasingly left out of the promises of what had been, at the time at least, seen as a very stable democratic two-party system known as Punto Fijo. That system began to suffer real deep crises in the 1980s. It suffered from what would later also plague Chavismo, which was the ebbs and flows of oil money. Very high oil prices in the 1970s led to a spending spree, which then by the time oil prices collapsed in the 1980s, really left the state with very little money to do what it needed to do. And so poverty increased. people felt left out of the political system

and you began to see protests in the streets as never before. What you also saw were coup attempts, one of which was led by Hugo Chavez himself when he was a colonel in the army in 1992. Comrades, unfortunately for now, our objectives in the capital were not reached. We in Caracas were unable to take power.

That coup attempt failed and he went to jail, but he nevertheless seemed to stand and to represent present for many in Venezuela an alternative. He spoke in nationalist terms. He spoke about a return to pride for the nation. He spoke about a return to a kind of vision of democracy that was more participatory. So by the time in 1994, when he was pardoned and released from jail, he began to build this movement. And he began to build it on the basis of a vision of the hero of Venezuelan independence and a lot of Latin American independence, Simon Bolivar, as a way to restore a sense of not just national but really hemispheric pride.

And so this message of pride of a bolivarian identity, coupled with a discourse about transforming the Venezuelan state to be more participatory, became the hallmarks of this Bolivarian movement that brought together certainly working class sectors, but also middle class sectors who felt that the government's in power then had become very corrupt. and even some upper-class sectors who felt that there were really few possibilities for economic growth with the kind of instability that had settled into place in the late 1990s. You've been talking about Simone Bolivar there. So this is one of the most legendary figures in the history of Latin America.

Bolivar was a proponent of a unified Latin America, which he believed to be the way to prevent and resist colonial interference. And at the time, he led what are currently the countries of, Venezuela, Ecuador, Panama, and Colombia as a single federal republic. And I just wonder if you could tell me a bit more about Simone Bolivar and his place in the politics of Venezuela and Latin America writ large. Yes, Bolivar really led the liberation of Latin America, parts of Latin America from the Spanish Empire in the early part of the 19th century. He was a larger-than-life figure that was nevertheless, at the time of his life,

also very controversial, much like Hugo Chavez would later be in his life. Yes, he had led independence movements throughout parts of Latin America, but he also moved towards consolidating control under the assumption that people in Latin America at the time were not ready yet for independent Republican rule. And so that split many, especially political elites from Simon Bolivar. And it wasn't until, you know, decades later that a kind of mythology emerged around Simon Bolivat as, you know, the father of not only the nation, but as you suggested, the kind of bulwark of Latin American independence, which over time got taken up by political movements of various stripes, left, center, and right, to satisfy very different and sometimes contradictory political aims. You know, for those

On the left, they, of course, saw Bolivar as a paragon of independence and liberty. For those on the right, they saw elements of Bolivar as an elite figure from Venezuelan aristocratic society. And so there's something about what the Venezuelan historian Hermann Carrera-Dama is called the cult to Bolivar that seemed to stand above ideology in some ways. And so part of the project of Hugo Chavez and reclaiming Bolivar for his particular vision was simultaneously to bring many different visions of Bolivar into one. Let's talk a little bit more about Hugo Chavez and his vision and what he accomplished.

So he was an avowed socialist. in the tradition of Fidel Castro and others, those who believe that the only solution to the problems of their time could be found through the implementation of socialist policy. And how did he come to this conclusion and how close were the politics of Chavez and Castro

two of the figureheads of socialism in Latin America? I think we, of course, remember and rightly so Ugo Chavez as a kind of socialist firebrand, but it's important to, also understand that that's not how he started and that's not how his Bolivarian movement started. In fact, the primary premises for the Bolivarian Revolution that eventually brought him into office in 1999 had nothing to do with socialism. They had more to do with ridding the state of

corruption and also rebuilding state capacity through also at the same time, a more participatory vision of politics. At the age of 44, Chavez was elected as the youngest president in Venezuelan history. We have never entertained even the slightest idea of a dictatorship. No, we are guerrillas. We are not tyrants. We are Democrats, and we will now demonstrate. So socialism was later incoming in Chavez's worldview.

But it's not to say that it wasn't present as part of his larger sense, not only of self, but of what may have been necessary for Venezuela. He himself, as a young military officer, had been charged with eradicating what at the time in the late 1970s, early 1980s, were small pockets of leftist guerrilla insurgency in Venezuela. His brother, Adan Chavez, had long links with the Marxist movement in Venezuela.

And he, Hugo Chavez, saw the ways in which, which Venezuela's political system was decaying or beginning to decay in the early 1980s and grew very disenchanted. And in fact, there was a time where he thought he would leave the military and perhaps join the guerrillas. But instead, the context that he established with the leftist movement said, like, no, you should work from the positions of power that you have and try to influence the government from within and perhaps even overturn it as he tried to do in 1992 with this coup. When he leaves jail after the failed coup attempt, one of the first people that he visits is Fidel Castro in Cuba. And he is embraced warmly. He calls, you know, Fidel's, his spiritual

father. And that, of course, raised some alarms among Venezuelans as he, as of which I was mounted an electoral campaign that eventually brought him to the presidency. But again and again, Chavez said, Like, yes, I have socialist beliefs, but that's not the way that my political movement is framed. It's really framed around state capacity and participatory democracy. It's not until later, and by that I mean 2004, 2005, that Chavez begins to speak much more openly, not only about socialism, but what he called socialism of the 21st century. President Chavez defines his program in generalized terms. This nation belongs to everyone. It is everyone's property, and that property must be distributed

equally in harmony. And he did that as a way to, on the one hand, resist what had been this neoliberal hegemony of the 1990s and early 2000s imposed by the United States, but also as a way to figure a political project that could marshal the resources of the nation, and in particular oil well at the service of the poor, especially, right, through a series of social programs that were deeply redistributive of the nation's wealth. This ascent isn't for everyone. You need grit to climb this high this often. You've got to be an underdog that always over delivers. You've got to be 6,500 hospital staff, 1,000 doctors, all doing so much with so little.

You've got to be Scarborough. Defined by our uphill battle and always striving towards new heights. And you can help us keep climbing. Donate at lovescarbro.cairbo.com. Hi, Steve Patterson here, host of the debaters. The show are comedians go head to head on questions like, is a mullet superior to a perm. Warning, this debate may get a little hairy. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. During all of this, you know, right before, during and then after the

Bolivarian Revolution and as Chavez comes to power, how does the nature of the relationship with the United States change? He had warm, friendly, and funny relation with Bill Clinton. Of course, he, Bill Clinton was president of the United States in his, in Hugo Chavez's first couple of years in office. And as Clinton was leading the presidency in the United States, they would meet and they would chat and they would joke. And a lot of that relationship was founded on two things. The first is that Chavez himself, as nationalist and Bolivarian as he was, he also harbored a very, you know, soft spot. and it's hard for the United States, especially around his love of baseball. As a young person, he felt himself, and he was, by all accounts, a pretty standout baseball player in a country where

baseball is really king when it comes to sports. And he harbored this kind of fantasy of perhaps one day going to the major leagues, which incidentally, he made real as president when he threw the first pitch at a baseball game in New York early in his presidency. So he had a kind of of, you know, soft spot for the United States. So, you know, to suggest that he was always kind of stridently anti-American would be a tremendous exaggeration. What began to change, oh, the other component around that relationship with Clinton was around oil. He was trying to get Clinton and the United States government to accept that oil prices being as low as they had gone. They reached $8 per barrel when Chavez was first inaugurated as president.

was a problem not only from a financial standpoint for oil exporting nations, but really for the stability of the world. And so those were the primary premises of that, you know, friendly relationship. That really changes after 2001 and 2002 when George W. Bush becomes president. And in particular, it changes in 2002 when Hugo Chavez is briefly ousted from the presidency in a coup that the United States very promptly. recognizes and supports. Against all historical precedent, Chavez overturned that coup and came back into office two days later. And so the United States was now in a position of having

back the coup government and the coup and now had to backtrack. That really irrevocably changed the relationship. By that point, Chavez realized that this new government, recently new government in power in the United States was not going to be an ally and also the government in in the United States, began to position itself distantly from Venezuela. The first sanctions that are imposed on Venezuela are imposed under the Bush administration back in 2005. And so that's the moment when we begin to see this deep fraying of the relationship, which then Chavez kind of presses the gas on when, of course, the misadventure and the tragedy

of the U.S. invasion of Iraq really turns catastrophic. and Chavez begins to build on that basis, what he calls a multipolar vision of the world. The man who called George Bush Mr. Danger and worse on his own weekly TV show. Ostracized by the West, Chavez cultivated a resistance front, getting closer to leaders like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran and buying advanced weaponry from Russia. And so he really benefits from some of the massive missteps of the Bush administration, but those, that relationship have been soured beginning in 2002. You know, I've seen Chavez described as a generational politician. I think his supporters and detractors will say that he was a very charismatic person,

that he had a unique capacity to appeal to broad coalitions of people. His supporters will point out that he have Venezuela's unemployment rate, doubled income per capita, caught poverty by half as well. Most of the indicators for social success did increase in Venezuela. As I understand it, from the economy to education to public health, but there are many that will also point to what they describe as like authoritarian tendencies. And how would critics of Chavez, good faith critics, describe his time and power? And what do you make of those critiques? Chavez-Mal always held to... competing and contradictory strands within its heart.

The first is an authoritarian strand, and it goes all the way back to, as I said before, this kind of more aristocratic vision of Simon Bolivar, that the way to transform states and to revolutionize governments and to really advance the welfare of Latin American nations was through strong man rule, enlightened strong man rule. But it also, because of these leftist tendencies and beliefs on the part of Chavez and others in his movement,

also held a very participatory strand, much more democratic, much more oriented towards grassroots sectors, et cetera. And what Chavez was able to do is marshal his charisma and later the oil wealth to build a really powerful electoral movement that could do multiple things simultaneously. one of them was to concentrate power in the executive representing this authoritarian strain, but the other of which was to distribute not only wealth, but democratic politics through

communal councils, through direct elections, through, you know, the expropriation of private industry, and then handing those over to workers themselves, right? So all of these things could happen simultaneously, and in fact, were necessary for each other to advance. But it was a balance that was very much held together by Chavez's political acumen. And it was also, of course, held together by oil prices. And so the question in Venezuela is always, you know, what oil enables and what oil collapses. And what oil enables is, you know, visions of grandeur, whether they be democratic or authoritarian, dictatorial or socialist, capitalist, list or otherwise. You know, when times are good, when all prices are high, you can do whatever

you want. But then you also have to deal with the inevitable collapse of those prices and what it fends, right? And so, you know, yes, I think critics that call Chavez authoritarian are absolutely correct. Unfortunately, what is missed often in, you know, readings of Venezuela and Chavez and Chavez more in particular are more complete, complex, nuanced narratives. It's sort of, you know, he was a socialist firebrand or he was this authoritarian dictator. In fact, he was both things and many more at the same time. And just a human being as you are, no more nor less, but totally devoted to this struggle for equality and justice to see we can save the planet. And the major, the great crazy guy is in Washington, not here.

So this is probably a good time for us to move on to his successor, then given some of what you've just said, much of what you've just said. So as we have talked about, he died, Chavez died in 2013 following a battle with cancer. But before his death, he hands-selects Nicholas Maduro as the man that he wanted to continue his legacy in government, this legacy of Chevismo. And at this point, Maduro had been Chavez's vice president. He had worked as foreign minister. Maduro's time, I think it's fair to say, was complicated by an unpredictable oil economy by U.S. sanctions, which began in 2014. Channeling the fiery rhetoric of his predecessor, he said sanctions show a lack of respect. I think we need to gather signatures

and send them to them with a photo of a U.S. visa so they can shove their U.S. visas where they should be shoved. Arogant Yankee imperialists. Domestic mismanagement, all kinds of shortages of food and medicine and it helped produce the highest inflation rate in the world

And also there are all kinds of human rights concerns and abuses that Maduro is accused of having perpetrated against his own people at home. Election fraud as well. Tell me just a little bit more about his time and power and how we saw him wield power against the Venezuelan people at home. I mean, here is sort of a similar story, as we were talking about with Chavez, that it's easy, but I think inaccurate to project too neatly how it ended up from how it started. In the case of Maduro, yes, of course, as I'll talk about in a moment, he was hampered not only by oil prices, but by other dynamics domestically and internationally that he had no control over. But the reality is that his tenure begins extremely fragile when he wins snap elections following Chavez's death in March of 2013. even though Chavez had won with a massive margin presidential elections in 2012, Maduro is only able to win those elections by a razor-thin margin of 1.5%.

That already indicated that Maduro as head of the Chavista movement was in a very weak position, just at the time when the opposition, which had long been in the wilderness, because of missteps and mistakes of its own, as well as, of course, the popularity of Chavez was mounting a comeback. And that comeback in 2013 and into 2014 as oil prices collapse, then comes together with a different approach for politics that Marudo takes from Chavismo, which is to say the way to be able to remain in power is not actually to cultivate an electoral majority, which had been the case for Chavez.

way to remain in power is to consolidate the various factions within the Chavista elite so that because I don't have that domestic source of support, that local base of support, at the very least, I can command these various factions around myself. And that has increasingly meant the military and the police apparatus, especially as you began to see a much more emboldened opposition take to the streets beginning in 2014, then win the National Assembly in 2015, then try to stage recall referendum in 2016, et cetera, et cetera. And so relying increasingly on the military through, especially as you mentioned, reduced resources coming in as a result of sanctions on the part of the United States, especially

in the oil industry, meant that less and less money was able to go. to the population, the Chivista population, and more and more of it was going to fund these alliances with the military and other groups. And so the Madurista government really became primarily concerned with only staying in power as its final aim, further and further leaving aside any kind of ideology that had really figured in the Chavista government. And so here what you see over time is that it's a government and Maludo becomes a president who rules primarily, if not exclusively, through the repression of the state, which of course tremendously minds his popularity, you know, forces him, not forces him, but leads him to steal elections in order to remain in power. Nicholas Maduro remains the president today, at least in his eyes. But for countless Venezuelans who deem his election last year,

rigged, who blame him for the country's extreme economic misery, the key moment in yesterday's protests when opposition leader Juan Guaido declared himself acting president, quickly recognized by Canada, the U.S., and others, but significantly not by Venezuela's powerful military. And it creates this kind of vicious cycle. where the more you rely on repression, the more unpopular you are, which means you have to rely more on repression in order to stay in power. And Venezuela is still governed by what's left of this government, right, which outside of him, they all remain in place. And the current acting president is a woman named Elsie Rodriguez.

Is she also a product of this Chaviso tradition? And how does she fit into this? She is and she isn't. She has the longer independent trajectory in leftist politics in Venezuela. Her father was a leftist guerrilla. He was assassinated by the governments and power in the 1970s. And her and her brother, Jorge, then had a long career as student activist, student leaders, and then eventually joined up with the forces of Chavismo as they were rising in the Bolivarian Revolution to, occupy ever-increasing positions of power. Delsi herself, you know, has been president of the National Assembly, has been president of Pederesa, has been foreign ministers. So she's occupied different positions of power, first under Chavez and later under Maduro. And she also has, much like Chavez, a very kind of stridently, very vocal, very loud, anti-imperialist

and anti-American position. And so her credentials as a leftist really go far back, but she also has over the last three to four, perhaps even as late as five years, more of a pragmatic streak in her. She helped, for instance, to engineer the dollarization of the economy, which helped to curb the hyperinflation cycle that we saw in Venezuela around 2017, 18, 19. She helped to keep relations with some oil companies like Chevron to make sure that they remained in Venezuela during those years of tremendous crisis. And so, you know, she's a power player with the public persona of a firebrand, but increasingly the policy perspective of a pragmatist. All of these figures that we've been talking about today are complicated figures in the way that they're conceived of both at home and abroad, like other socialists and leftist figures throughout Latin American history. Many diaspora Venezuelans in the U.S. and here in Canada have taken to the streets to celebrate this U.S. operation in Caracas and are among the loudest constituencies asking for American intervention in Venezuela. Venezuela, similar to the Cuban diaspora in places like Miami and the U.S., again, probably the

loudest constituency asking for U.S.-led regime change in Cuba. And at the same time, you know, maybe not Maduro, he doesn't have this kind of broad-based support, but certainly Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, do regarded by many on the left as international icons for their resistance to U.S. Empire. And just you're an expert on this stuff. How do you reconcile the Gulf between these two conceptions of these leaders and some of the diaspora politics involved here when compared to the opinions of people actually living in these countries.

Yeah. I can't speak too much about Cuba, but I can definitely speak a lot about Venezuela and Venezuela and reactions. The center of gravity of opposition politics in Venezuela shifted from the domestic opposition to an expatriate opposition around 2018. So this, of course, coincided with Trump's first administration. and the push even at that time to try to oust the government in Venezuela.

And of course, if you're outside Venezuela, your incentives and your political opportunity structures and how you see political action is very different than if you're inside Venezuela. And so already there had been this emerging rift between a domestic opposition whose primary aim was, of course, to come to power and to. to oust the government of Minnesota, but through democratic, peaceful means of building grassroots political support, right? Rather than, for instance, pushing for severe sanctions that would harm, you know, the population generally, rather than calling for interventions, et cetera. I think what we saw over the weekend was the kind of dramatization of this rift between a domestic and an expatriate

opposition, and especially around not the question of whether or not you support Maduro, there's very little love loss for Maduro, even among those who don't consider themselves opponents. But there is a lot of, there are a lot of big feelings around the way in which Maduro is no longer in office, right, an armed intervention by the United States, which included, you know, bombing of parts of the capital, you know, deaths of certainly soldiers, but some civilians as well. And to see Venezuelans, you know, abroad, you know, celebrating openly, not only the capture of Maloudo, but the armed intervention by the U.S. in the country has further split the opposition in Venezuela from that outside of Venezuela.

And I think what it points to is what it means for the potential for reconciliation in Venezuela in an eventual democratic transition. You know, how people respond to this moment, wherever you find yourself in the political spectrum, will really determine how you can return if you're abroad or remain, if you're in Venezuela. if at this critical moment, your primary aim was just to get rid of the government at whatever cost, even if it meant the bombing of your own country. So I think what we've seen is a kind of nationalist strain within Venezuela that has really cut across the ideological divide, and yet at the same time made even sharper the differences between Venezuelans abroad and those who remain. This was great. Alejandro, thank you so much for this. Thank you so much. I really appreciate the conversation.

All right, that is all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. Go to cBC.ca slash podcasts.