Abstract
This study examines how nonviolent protests emerged as a strategic choice for civil resistance against authoritarian rule in Venezuela. This study explores the repertoire of nonviolent methods used in Venezuela during 2017, which included conventional tactics such as mass concentrations, street blockages, and strikes, as well as digital protests and creative demonstrations, plus the historical popular consultation against the spurious Constituent Assembly. Using testimonies from the civil resistance movement participants, the study underscores three dynamics often overlooked: the process of building a collective identity by leaderless crowds, the use of digital communication, and the role of pro-government militias in repressing peaceful demonstrations. The 2017 Venezuelan protest cycle did not achieve its aim of overthrowing the authoritarian regime and restoring the rule of law. Major factors for the movement defeat were the harsh repression combining military and paramilitary repression and the lack of alignment between strategic vision and innovative protest tactics.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
National Survey of Living Conditions (ENCOVI) 2017, carried out by the Andrés Bello Catholic University, the Simón Bolívar University and the Central University of Venezuela. Available at: https://www.ucab.edu.ve/investigacion/centros-e-institutos-de-investigacion/encovi-2017/.
- 2.
The trial of the opposition leader Leopoldo López and the military prosecution of 2014 demonstrators occurred while Luisa Ortega Díaz was the Nation General Prosecutor.
- 3.
Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). Human rights violations and abuses in the context of protests in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela from 1 April to 31 July 2017. Geneva, August 2017. Retrieved from: http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Countries/VE/HCReportVenezuela_1April-31July2017_EN.pdf.
- 4.
This was a short open question. I grouped the responses when they had the same meaning. However, I considered answers such as “to change the government” different from “to overthrow the dictatorship” and answers such as “to recover democracy” different from “to gain freedom”. I decided to maintain these answers ungrouped in order to keep semantic differences that may indicate different political values.
- 5.
All translations of interviews are mine and might be slightly edited to facilitate the readers’ understanding.
- 6.
See https://youtu.be/ijoJDhf0F34 (accessed March 23, 2018).
- 7.
See https://youtu.be/_0pA7YJUgGI (accessed March 23, 2018).
- 8.
Some examples of these songs and videos include Los Dueños De La Calle—Gian Varela Feat, Chyno Miranda and Tony Brouzee, available at: https://youtu.be/TZZH7ZRZTWk, and MASBURROCK—Rodrigore, available at: https://youtu.be/1qhW6F96ov4; Eight Moon Headdress—Felix Martin https://youtu.be/7ePkR14cbKc; Escudos—One Chot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkoC28hvbsk (accessed March 23, 2018).
- 9.
Data obtained from a national poll conducted by More Consulting (http://www.moreconsulting.com.ve/consulting.html) between May 5 and 6, 2017.
- 10.
Ibidem.
- 11.
The Organic Law of the Bolivarian National Armed Forces, approved in 2008, divided Venezuela into seven Strategic Integral Defence Regions (Central, Western, Eastern, the Plains, Andean, Guayana, and Sea and Islands).
- 12.
Albaciudad. 2016, December 28. Maduro a las FANB: En 2017 haremos una liberación territorial de las lacras del paramilitarismo. http://albaciudad.org/2016/12/maduro-a-las-fanb-en-2017-haremos-una-liberacion-territorial-de-las-lacras-del-paramilitarismo/.
References
Ackerman, Peter, and Jack DuVall. 2000. A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict, 113–174. London: St. Martin’s Press/Palgrave Macmillan.
Ackerman, Peter, and Christopher Kruegler. 1994. Strategic Nonviolent Conflict: The Dynamics of People Power in the Twentieth Century. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Ackerman, Peter, and Hardy Merriman. 2015. The Checklist for Ending Tyranny. In Is Authoritarianism Staging a Comeback? ed. M. Burrows and M.J. Stephan. Washington, DC: The Atlantic Council.
Agarwal, Sheetal D., W. Lance Bennett, Courtney N. Johnson, and Shawn Walker. 2014. A Model of Crowd Enabled Organization: Theory and Methods for Understanding the Role of Twitter in the Occupy Protests. International Journal of Communication 8: 27.
Álvarez, Ángel E. 2008. Venezuela: ¿La revolución pierde su encanto? Revista de ciencia política (Santiago) 28 (1): 405–432.
Ananyev, Maxim, Galina Zudenkova, and Maria Petrova. 2017. Information and Communication Technologies, Protests, and Censorship. Barcelona: Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
Bennett, W. Lance, and Alexandra Segerberg. 2015. The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics, Handbook of Digital Politics, 169. London: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Böhmelt, Tobias, and Govinda Clayton. 2017. Auxiliary Force Structure: Paramilitary Forces and Progovernment Militias. Comparative Political Studies. https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414017699204.
Böhmelt, Tobias, Andrea Ruggeri, and Ulrich Pilster. 2017. Counterbalancing, Spatial Dependence, and Peer Group Effects. Political Science Research and Methods 5 (2): 221–239.
Canelón-Silva, Agrivalca Ramsenia. 2014. Del Estado comunicador al Estado de los medios. Catorce años de hegemonía comunicacional en Venezuela. Palabra Clave 17 (4): 1243–1278.
Cañizález, Andrés. 2014. The State in Pursuit of Hegemony Over the Media: The Chávez Model. In Media Systems and Communication Policies in Latin America, ed. M.A. Guerrero and M. Márquez-Ramírez, 157–177. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Carey, Sabine C., Neill J. Mitchell, and Will Lowe. 2013. States, the Security Sector, and the Monopoly of Violence: A New Database on Pro-Government Militias. Journal of Peace Research 50 (2): 249–258.
Casanova, R. 2009. La revuelta de los estudiantes venezolanos del 2007. El levantamiento político de una generación. Cuadernos del CENDES 26 (70): 99–123.
Castells, Manuel. 1997. Power of Identity: The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture. Somerset, NJ: Blackwell Publishers, Inc.
———. 2015. Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age. San Francisco, CA: John Wiley and Sons.
Chaguaceda, Armando. 2015. Regímenes políticos y procesos desdemocratizadores en Nicaragua y Venezuela. Perfiles Latinoamericanos 23 (45): 5–29.
Chaguaceda, Armando, and María Isabel Puerta. 2015. “Quo vadis Venezuela”: De la democracia delegativa al autoritarismo del siglo XXI. Revista Mexicana de Análisis Político y Administración Pública 4 (1): 175–202.
Chenoweth, Erica. 2017. Trends in Nonviolent Resistance and State Response: Is Violence Towards Civilian-Based Movements on the Rise? Global Responsibility to Protect 9 (1): 86–100.
Chenoweth, Erica, and Maria J. Stephan. 2011. Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
———. 2014. Drop Your Weapons: When and Why Civil Resistance Works. Foreign Affairs 93 (4): 94–106.
Corrales, Javier, and Michael Penfold. 2015. Dragon in the Tropics: Venezuela and the Legacy of Hugo Chávez. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.
Gohdes, A.R. 2015. Pulling the Plug: Network Disruptions and Violence in Civil Conflict. Journal of Peace Research 52 (3): 352–367.
Goldstone, Jack A. 2014. Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Isidoro Losada, Ana María. 2015. Estrategias territoriales de control político en Venezuela. Iberoamericana 15 (59): 157–170.
Jácome, Francine. 2013. El papel de la Fuerza Armada Nacional Bolivariana en el nuevo contexto político venezolano: Implicaciones para la seguridad regional. Bogotá: FES Publikation.
King, Mary Elizabeth. 2018. The Ethics and ‘Realism’ of Nonviolent Action. In The Oxford Handbook of International Political Theory, ed. Chris Brown and Robyn Eckersley, 273. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lander, Edgardo, and Santiago A. Rodríguez. 2017. Venezuela: un barril de pólvora. Nueva Sociedad 269.
Lang, John C., and Hans De Sterck. 2016. A Hierarchy of Linear Threshold Models for the Spread of Political Revolutions on Social Networks. Journal of Complex Networks 4 (3): 426–456.
Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. 2018. How Democracies Die. New York: Crown.
López Maya, Margarita. 2011. Democracia participativa en Venezuela (1999–2010): orígenes, leyes, percepciones y desafíos. Caracas: Fundación Centro Gumilla/Universidad Católica Andrés Bello (Temas de Formación Sociopolítica).
———. 2014. Venezuela: The Political Crisis of Post-Chavismo. Social Justice 40 (4): 68.
Lugo-Ocando, Jairo, Alexander Hernández, and Monica Marchesi. 2015. Latin American Struggles | Social Media and Virality in the 2014 Student Protests in Venezuela: Rethinking Engagement and Dialogue in Times of Imitation. International Journal of Communication 9: 22.
Masullo, Juan. 2017. Making Sense of “La Salida”. Challenging Left-Wing Control in Venezuela. In Global Diffusion of Protest, ed. Donatella della Porta. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Moro, Alessandro. 2016. Understanding the Dynamics of Violent Political Revolutions in an Agent-Based Framework. PloS One 11 (4): e0154175.
Mourão, Rachel R., Magdalena Saldaña, Shannon C. McGregor, and Adrian D. Zeh. 2016. Support for Protests in Latin America: Classifications and the Role of Online Networking. Social Sciences 5 (4): 58.
Panzarelli, Alexandra. 2012. Valoraciones de la democracia en el socialismo del siglo XXI: Venezuela. En Alvarez, Ángel y Francisco José Virtuoso (coord). Valoraciones de la democracia en Venezuela y América Latina. Caracas: Centro Gumilla.
Pilster, Ulrich, Tobias Böhmelt, and Atsushi Tago. 2016. The Differentiation of Security Forces and the Onset of Genocidal Violence. Armed Forces and Society 42 (1): 26–50.
Poell, Thomas, Rasha Abdulla, Bernhard Rieder, Robbert Woltering, and Liesbeth Zack. 2016. Protest Leadership in the Age of Social Media. Information, Communication and Society 19 (7): 994–1014.
Puyosa, Iria. 2015a. Networked Social Movements: From the Emotional Trigger to the Propagation of Ideas for Political Change. Chasqui. Revista Latinoamericana de Comunicación 128: 197–214.
———. 2015b. The @PlzaResistencia Camp in the 2014 Cycle of Protests in Venezuela. IDP. Revista de Internet. Derecho y Política 21, 1–2.
———. 2015c. Political Control on the Internet in the Context of a Hybrid Regime. Venezuela 2007–2015. Revista Teknokultura 12 (3): 501–526.
Puyosa, I. 2018. Chavism Information War Strategies on Twitter. Observatory of Disinformation and Propaganda in Latin America. http://obserlatinf.org/.
Puyosa, Iria, and Armando Chaguaceda. 2017, November. Five Political Regimes in Latin America, Internet Freedom and Mechanisms of Control. University of Gothenburg, Varieties of Democracy Institute: Users’ Working Paper No. 12.
Ruijgrok, Kris. 2017. From the Web to the Streets: Internet and Protests under Authoritarian Regimes. Democratization 24 (3): 498–520.
Sandoval-Almazan, R., and J.R. Gil-Garcia. 2014. Towards Cyberactivism 2.0? Understanding the Use of Social Media and Other Information Technologies for Political Activism and Social Movements. Government Information Quarterly 31 (3): 365–378.
Santos, Miguel Ángel. 2017. Venezuela: Running on Empty. LASA Forum: 58–62.
Schock, Kurt. 2005. Unarmed Insurrections: People Power Movements in Nondemocracies. Vol. 22. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Spaiser, Viktoria, Thomas Chadefaux, Karsten Donnay, Fabian Russmann, and Dirk Helbing. 2017. Communication Power Struggles on Social Media: A Case Study of the 2011–12 Russian Protests. Journal of Information Technology and Politics 14 (2): 132–153. https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2017.1308288.
Uzcátegui, Rafael. 2014. Movilizaciones estudiantiles en Venezuela. Del carisma de Chávez al conflicto en redes. Nueva sociedad 251: 153–165.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Puyosa, I. (2019). Venezuelan Struggle Towards Democratization: The 2017 Civil Resistance Campaign. In: Mouly, C., Hernández Delgado, E. (eds) Civil Resistance and Violent Conflict in Latin America. Studies of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05033-7_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05033-7_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-05032-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-05033-7
eBook Packages: Political Science and International StudiesPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)