VENEZUELA Rethinking Capitalist Democracy
From 1990 through 1992 Venezuela had the highest rate of economic growth in the Americas. A product of the country's neoliberal free-market reforms, this growth was accompanied by sharply...
...A product of the country's neoliberal free-market reforms, this growth was accompanied by sharply increasing inequality, and record levels of poverty and malnutrition...
...Rafael Caldera, who turned 78 just before his February inauguration, was one of the founders of the country's social Christian party, Copei...
...On the other, the economic reforms of the past five years have sought to privatize virtually everything...
...In 1992, there were two populist-oriented military coup attempts...
...mass participation over vanguard leadership...
...If "Calderismo" holds together and establishes a working coalition with Causa R, President Caldera will still need at least some members of the traditional parties, AD and Copei, to opt for citizenship over privatization, and help the country chart its uncertain course...
...With no viable socialist model to draw upon, the choices range from the unregulated trade and investment strategies and extreme individualism of neoliberalism, to a controlled, socially oriented capitalism...
...and social reform over socialist revolution...
...In Venezuela, the slow social-democratization of MAS, and the dramatic rise of the workers' party, Causa R, give the country two paradigmatic faces of that new Left...
...The debate once again casts a spotlight on the Left...
...In February, 1989, the population greeted the announced austerity package with widespread rioting that left hundreds-perhaps over a thousand-dead...
...As Venezuela passes through a period of uncertain transition, it is being observed carefully because it has embarked on reforms that can take it one of two ways...
...He and a band of followers abandoned Copei last year over the party's support of the neoliberal policies of the Acci6n Democritica (AD) government...
...And in May, 1993, the individual chiefly associated with the economic reforms, and the subsequent increase in misery-President Carlos Andr6s P6rez-was indicted and impeached on charges of corruption...
...The elections highlighted the fierce debate that has broken out in Venezuela-within and between the parties-over what kind of capitalist development the country should pursue...
...Venezuelans went to the polls on December 5th, and elected an old Christian democrat who has aligned himself with the new politics of social solidarity...
...That course will have no small effect on the prospects for democratic development in Latin America, and on the future of what Petkoff calls "the emerging democratic Left...
...The reforms were designed to stabilize and restructure the country's battered economy by means of incentive packages offered to national and foreign investors, and an austerity program directed at those with the least power to resist it...
...On the one hand, democratic reforms have sought to open up the political system and to reinsert the citizen into the mechanisms of the state-to recreate the "public citizen...
...As veteran MAS leader Teodoro Petkoff points out, a new Latin American Left is developing which stresses democratic over authoritarian development...
...In his run for the presidency, he was supported by a broad anti-neoliberal coalition, whose principal members were his fellow-dissident Christian democrats grouped together in a movement called Convergencia, and the leftist members of what had long been the country's third party, Movement Toward Socialism (MAS...
...The latter might build on Venezuela's newly reformed and decentralized set of political institutions, and emphasize questions of social justice and solidarity...
Vol. 27 • March 1994 • No. 5
