Abstract
Venezuela is an example that runs counter to all the contributions in this book. On the face of it, there has been no change of government since 1999, and the current head of state, Nicolás Maduro, continues to develop a socialist and revolutionary rhetoric in the tradition of his predecessor Hugo Chávez. Governing a country for more than two decades, now in a context of economic collapse, is a challenge and Nicolás Maduro's continued rule may thus be an enigma.
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Notes
- 1.
The Puntofijo Pact was a political agreement concluded in 1958 between the three main Venezuelan parties (AD, COPEI, the anti-imperialist nationalist Republican Democratic Union [URD]), excluding the Venezuelan Communist Party, to ensure the stability of the country and the sharing of power.
- 2.
The Cantaura massacre of October 1982 refers to the assassination of 23 unarmed young people, suspected of participating in a guerrilla war, by a military detachment. The Caracazo was a spontaneous revolt in February 1989 in the main Venezuelan cities that was repressed by the government at the cost of between one thousand and three thousand deaths (according to different estimates).
- 3.
Freedom House has rated all the countries in the world every year since 1972 on the basis of uniform questions, assigning two scores from 1 (total respect for rights and freedoms) to 7 (no respect for rights and freedoms).
- 4.
While it takes 9 bolívars to get a dollar in the summer of 2012, it already takes 921 bolívars on the day of the December 2015 legislative elections (source: dolartoday.com).
- 5.
Annual inflation in Venezuela has been above 10% since the second half of the 1980s. However, from 2012 onwards, the rate has been increasing, reaching 40.6% in 2013, 62.2% in 2014 and 121.7% in 2015 according to IMF data.
- 6.
Nicolás Maduro's partisans won 18 states out of 23, 308 municipalities out of 335, 67.8% of the votes cast in the presidential elections and 256 seats out of 277.
- 7.
Since Hugo Chávez came to power, the two leading candidates in the presidential elections have received more than 95% of the votes cast (more than 99% in the 2006, 2012 and 2013 elections). In 2018, Nicolás Maduro and Henri Falcón together received ‘only’ 88.8% of the votes cast, a decrease that mainly reflects the fragmentation of the opposition. The first-past-the-post voting system is one of the factors explaining this polarization.
- 8.
We have deliberately left out issues of morality (recognition of same-sex couples, legalization of abortion) which have never been high on the political agenda in Venezuela, either before the presidency of Hugo Chávez, or by the presidential majority since, or by the opposition. Javier Corrales’ LGBT Rights Index places Venezuela in fifteenth place out of 17 Latin American countries surveyed, ahead of Panama and Paraguay (Corrales 2015).
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Posado, T. (2023). The Authoritarian and Conservative Turn of Nicolás Maduro. In: Dabène, O. (eds) Latin America’s Pendular Politics. Studies of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26761-1_16
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