All these sectors were subsidized by the State, a fact which inhibited any possibility of criticism about the future consequences of the clientele model of conciliation adopted at the time.
It is necessary to underline this premise: it is not possible to understand Venezuelan political life starting from the beginning of the democratic period in without understanding the role developed by the petroleum resource, nor is the country's economic life comprehensible without an understanding of the role of the State as protagonist, that, as a last resort, presents itself as the sole owner of the petroleum resource Cf.
Villa, Supported on this political base of the Punto Fijo Pact, and the material base derived from petroleum, Venezuela's political system had solid institutional engineering that persisted for nearly thirty years, and came to be described in terms of the following constitutive points:. In other words, the democratic system counted on mature political leadership that, learning from past experiences, discarded sectarianism and provided advantageous pacts between parties.
As Levine suggests , pp. Ellner, , p. Alexander, They were multi-class parties, but their primary composition, however, originated in the middle class. The petroleum resources are important for explaining this fact. According to Karl and Hellinger , the petroleum economy had a positive political impact to the extent that such resources helped in the formation of a strong urban middle class, from which emerged the leadership of the principal political parties and unions.
This social background of the leadership, however, did not prevent them from having a multi-class party dialogue and affiliation, avoiding having AD any more than Copei becoming particularly identified as representatives of the middle class. This can be summed up by the fact that the distribution of the petroleum resources made itself felt among all strata of society, which kept the level of social conflict under party control.
Both were rigid, almost Leninist structures, which could not forgive dissidents. The two large parties took care not to turn governing into a zero sum game. Representatives of the small political parties were incorporated into the exercise of second level responsibility of positions, and some of the sectors from the left had some proportional representation in the powerful Worker's Center of Venezuela CTV-Central de Trabalhadores da Venezuela , which, in turn, was controlled by the AD.
This integration of representation of political interests, besides transferring institutional stability, prevented an attraction to radical political options from either the left or the right. Besides this, there were also incorporated "[ ] other actors, such as the armed forces, the church, entrepreneurs and the sense of its institutionalization and in the aggregation of social and corporate interests" Villa, , pp.
Such facts, in this way, reveal that the closing of the party universe enabled those sectors of society that had become institutionalized to negotiate their interests directly with the leadership of the two parties. Actors such as the unions, which at that time were mainly represented by the CTV, developed a corporatist link with AD, which then guaranteed them the exchange of its support, distribution of positions and benefits, a system similar to the Brazilian corporatism of the Vargas era.
Given this solidity of the Venezuelan pact of governance, the political instability that began in early surprised the political actors as much as it did analysts.
The period between the years and is of fundamental importance for the definition and comprehension of the depth of the crisis that began, and the room the principal actors of puntofijismo had for maneuvering. However, the measures were not well received by the popular Venezuelan sectors. The neoliberal option instituted in , which included a strong financial adjustment, privatization of the principal state companies with the exception of the petroleum industry, and the drying up of the State's administrative machine in a country where the State and its companies were the principal employers , never roused the same popular enthusiasm "as the interventionist policies of the past.
At this confrontation approximately three hundred people died, according to official figures, and more than a thousand according to unofficial sources. The escalation of political instability, in turn, did not end with this incident. In fact, the Venezuelan democratic institutions derived from the Punto Fijo Pact would never overcome the destabilizing effects of Caracaso.
The relationship between the behavior of the petroleum economy and the political system are also important in explaining the crisis of puntofijismo. The economic downturn in the s affected in a relevant manner the essential material goods that were redistributed to the Venezuelan regime, a fact which showed that the political efficacy of the Punto Fijo Pact was intrinsically linked to the behavior of the petroleum profit model.
With the crisis of the s, the so-called lost decade, all of Latin America confronted an economic collapse that ended by profoundly conditioning the neoliberal economic options taken by the political elite of the Latin-American region. In the case of Venezuela, the situation was aggravated due to the fall of the international prices of oil at the beginning of , and also to the increase in weight of foreign debt.
The democratic regime, which between and had been able to maintain a relatively constant rhythm of salary increases in relation to social spending as a clear result of the oil price increases, had this capacity reduced. With a certain perplexity analysts recognized that Venezuela seemed to be the victim of its own institutional and socio-economic success of its thirty years of democracy. The same factors that had previously been so important for the success and stability of the Venezuelan democracy, such as excessive centralism and state paternalism, the party pacts originating from within the State, the excessive institutionalizing of bipartisanism, its export economy based on petroleum, and even the electoral system based on proportional representation, were now identified as causes of the democratic instability itself.
The diagnosis pointed out that such factors, which had previously guaranteed the success of Venezuelan democracy, closed the space for incorporating new political and social actors "with decision-making capacity in the political system" Ellner, , p.
A State reform that might have administrative decentralization as a goal was then tried. The governors who had previously been recommended by the President of the Republic and the mayors, who were indirectly elected by their own city legislatures, came to be elected by popular vote. These mild reforms, however, were insufficient to politically relegitimize and reinstitutionalize the Punto Fijo actors, who were by then incapable of understanding that it was not possible to placate and maintain intact a system mounted by them, at the same time that the institutional and material conditions of such a system were deteriorating.
Nevertheless, the burial of puntofijismo only occurred in the second term of Rafael Caldera, who had previously governed the country between and Caldera took advantage of his ability to interpret the significance of the crisis in a different manner and, having abandoned his original party Copei and offered himself with a populist speech that approached the demands of the popular sectors and the middle class, was elected president at the end of More than putting puntofijismo back on its track prior to , Caldera's second term deepened three nearly irreversible feelings among the Venezuelan social sectors about the political system: low esteem of traditional political parties and their leadership, of which Caldera was a symbol; a sense that there was an absence of power that a political elite reminiscent of was incapable of replacing; and, finally, the desire of the popular sectors, and even from the middle class, to renew their elite directors so that they could once again operate the redistributive clientele system that had operated until the 's.
A clear example of this was the fact that The Radical Cause La Causa Radical , a regional party and labor's social base, was able to be a viable electoral option in the elections. See Hellinger, With the weakening of puntofijismo, a kind of vacuum was established in Venezuelan politics in spite of the willingness of several political sectors to fill in that vaccum, within what could be identified as "the unions, the professional and management sectors and the military quarter" Hellinger, With this it became almost vital to modify his sustaining political action strategy.
It became necessary to defend his participation in the next political contests. The radicalism of the Chavista discourse, which preceded the presidential elections, transformed him into the one who best interpreted the desire for popular change in relation to the politically dominant class, as well as in relation to the institutions inherited from the Constitution of This politically independent former Miss Universe had had two sufficiently well-accepted managerial positions in the s as mayor of the city of Chacao, one of the various municipalities that divide the capital, Caracas.
This positive political past qualified her as a candidate of substance, a fact that was rapidly expressed in high numbers reached in electoral polls, which she led for more than a year.
The effect was devastating: in a few months her candidature declined. The popular judgment was obviously not made about the candidate, but about the traditional party. It was questioned whether the candidate would have sufficient strength and political will to break with AD and Copei, the parties of the elite pact, which were judged as being principally responsible for the country's political and social crisis. Her fall in the polls could not necessarily be credited to the emergence of an anti-party or anti-political feeling, but to the anxieties, as much on the part of the middle class as the popular sectors, of a renovation of the parties and the political class.
Or, to use the expression known from Pareto, of an anxiety over the "recycling of the political elite. In the second place, despite a lack of confidence regarding his personal style, creating institutional change which reverted to the Constitution, transformation of the bicameral parliament to unicameral, election of judges, and above all, the evacuation of the old bipartisan system, indicate a strong preference for the management of change by democratic means" Lombardi, , p.
Such a strategy, in this manner, transcended simple appeal, reaching ancestralism. Thus, the Bolivarian discourse ceased being only one extra-historical factor in the mixture of elements of Venezuelan nationality, transforming itself into a concrete political instrument, in the name of which was launched a fight against the immense corruption of Venezuelan institutions, in the name of which was justified the frontal attack on traditional parties and the threat to close institutions such as Congress and the Judiciary.
What could be called his party, the Movement V Republic MVR , is one more heterogeneous front of political and social forces, in which were housed nationalistic and traditional leftist sectors as well as sectors emanating from the hegemonic parties of puntofijismo. There were no "adecos" or "copeyanos," as the sectors and militants of the two largest Punto Fijo parties were known.
On the contrary, there is a militancy and a political and electoral identification that is merely Chavista. The programmatic proposal seems, in some way, to have become reduced to an anti-Chavist proclamation. Moreover, the weakening of the old party system left an institutional vacuum that went on to be filled by organizational experiments in which the line that divided politics from the paramilitary is quite debatable.
In the absence of the renewed framework of social institutions, representation and aggregation of interests took place by means of the Bolivarian vicious circles tied to bureaucratic practices, or corrupted corporate institutions, such as the Workers Center of Venezuela CTV and the Fedecamaras representatives from the workers and patronage, respectively , who have support from the major part of the television and print media Cf.
How then can this paradox be explained in which political legitimacy does not correspond to social consensus? At least some scholars of the Venezuelan political process have pointed to such a process as transformation of social polarization into political polarization Planes, ; Ellner and Hellinger, How could this have occurred? The Chavista forces received an overwhelming majority in the ANC, electing deputies, while the opposition only managed to elect six. Approved in December of , the new Constitution has among its safeguards the fact of having established new agendas for restoration of judicial power and raising the number of public branches of power to five : besides the three classic branches Executive, Legislative and Judicial , Citizen and Electoral branches were both present in MBR documents in the s.
Besides this, the new Constitution, which changed the name of Venezuela to Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, also gave the vote to the military and transformed the legislative branch from bicameral to unicameral, giving the National Assembly maximum jurisdiction Cf.
Maya, Among the criticism of the new Constitution, foremost was the excessive concentration of power in the hands of the president, who went on to have inclusive power to legislate by means of the Enabling Act with respect to any matter. At the end of , the National Assembly approved a package of 49 enabling decrees.
Two of these decrees, in particular, caused considerable controversy in the country:. The Hydrocarbons Law, which governs the petroleum sector, and the Land Law, which deals with agrarian reform and development. Question : Which statement about Venezuela is not true? Its annual per capita GNP is less than that of the Guianas. Venezuelas landscapes are varied. Fishing and farming are major activities in the Guianas.
Related Answer. Which antibiotic streptomyces Venezuela produces? Streptomyces venezuelae is used to obtain:.
Streptomyces venezuelae yields. Streptomyces venezuelae produces antibiotic. What are the grasslands of venezuela called. Campos in Brazil and Llanos in Venezuela are examples of. Which are the smallest spoken languages? What is the average annual per capita consumption of eggs in our country?
What is the annual consumption of the right amount of food per capita in our country?
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