Margarita López Maya

Venezuela is undergoing a deep and global crisis with roots in structural problems related to the oil rentier economy that has shaped society and the political order since the first decades of the 20th Century. It has made Venezuela extremely vulnerable to the international market prices of hydrocarbons, and created a highly consumerist society and an inefficient and corrupt Petroestado. All these features were present before Hugo Chávez won the 1998 elections. He offered to the Venezuelans to overcome these problems through a deep transformation that implied first going to a “participatory and protagonistic democracy” and in his second administration to a “revolutionary democracy” that would transform Venezuela into a 21 Century Socialism. In this talk, the interplay between “chavismo” and the structural problems will be analyzed in order to understand the current crisis and sketch possible ways out of it.

Margarita López Maya is Professor at the Center for Development Studies (CENDES) at the Central University of Venezuela. She has been a researcher and lecturer of Contemporary Political History of Venezuela for more then twenty five years. López-Maya has studied political and social participation in different historical periods of Venezuela’s democracy, as well as participatory innovations in the Bolivian revolution.

text: the NorLARNet homepage.

This recording is distributed thanks to the kind permission both from Margarita López Maya and the Norwegian Latin America Research Network.