Alejandro Velasco

Venezuela Before and After the Protests: An Interview with María Pilar García-Guadilla

I n February, opposition protests rocked Caracas and other major cities in the most prolonged— and violent—political unrest to hit Venezuela in over a decade. When they abated in late April, the protests had claimed 42 lives, among them students, police, and bystanders. They also left an already strained economy reeling, an already splintered opposition more divided, and President Nicolás Maduro—whose leadership over Chavismo was already tenuous barely a year after Hugo Chávez’s death—further weakened. For now Venezuelans have returned to their daily lives in a tense calm. But the outlook remains troubling. Crime, shortages, inflation, and corruption are still acute. Anti-chavistas face deep differences over what, if anything, three months of protests accomplished. And although he appears to have solidified control over his own fractious base, President Maduro faces the task of keeping aloft the Bolivarian Revolution, while considering political and economic choices— devaluation, privatization, and subsidy elimination—at odds with the vision of the revolution’s Comandante Supremo. María Pilar García-Guadilla is Professor of Sociology at the Universidad Simón Bolívar in Caracas. For 20 years she has studied the ways state policy in Venezuela has shaped grassroots democracy, and vice versa. Her latest project is a multi-sited investigation on communes, the Bolivarian Revolution’s most ambitious effort to bring socialism to Venezuela (for a definition and history of Venezuela’s communes, see Velasco and Azzellini in NACLA’s Summer 2013 edition). In the following interview, conducted in July, García-Guadilla offers a critical assessment of the ALEJANDRO VELASCO

Looking for the Left Turn

Abstract Beyond binaries and generalizations, vilification and glorification, where do we find Latin America’s “left turn” today?

Communes in Progress: An Interview with Atenea Jiménez

B EFORE HuGO CHáVEz’S PASSING EARLIER THIS year, building the so-called “communal state” figured among the most ambitious— and controversial—goals of the Bolivarian Revolution. Imagined at first to coexist with, and eventually to replace, Venezuela’s political apparatus, the communal state would extend from communal councils to larger, self-organized and self-governing entities—communes—to form the new social and economic bodies of a common territorial space. Though formally enshrined in law in December 2010 and now numbering in the hundreds, the communes and their broader project, the communal state, remain tentative, their record mixed, and their future uncertain in the wake of Chávez’s death. In the mid 1990s, while studying sociology at the Universidad Central de Venezuela, Atenea Jiménez formed part of the student movement against austerity and privatization. After graduating in 1998, she joined Chávez’s first presidential campaign. Though never a member of any political party, Jiménez eventually went on to work with various government ministries and programs at the national and state level to help promote grassroots organization. In 2009, she helped found the Network of Communers, a fledgling group linking together commune participants nationwide. She is now a national spokesperson of the Network. She was interviewed in May 2013 by Alejandro Velasco.