A Blessing and a Curse: Oil, Politics, and Morality in Bolivarian Venezuela

By Matt Wilde

A Blessing and a Curse examines the lived experience of political change, moral uncertainty, and economic crisis amid Venezuela's controversial Bolivarian Revolution. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in an urban barrio over the course of a decade, Matt Wilde argues that everyday life in this period was intimately shaped by a critical contradiction: that in their efforts to capture a larger portion of oil money and distribute it more widely among the population, the governments of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro pursued policies that ultimately entrenched Venezuela in the very position of dependency they sought to overcome. Offering a new synthesis between anthropological work on energy, politics, and morality, the book explores how the use of oil money to fund the revolution's social programs and political reforms produced profound cultural anxieties about the contaminating effects of petroleum revenues in everyday settings. Tracing how these anxieties rippled out into community life, family networks, and local politics, Wilde shows how questions about how to live a good life came to be intimately shaped by Venezuela's contradictory relationship with oil. In doing so, he brings a vital perspective to contemporary debates about energy transitions by proposing a new way of thinking about the political and moral economies of natural resources in postcolonial settings.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Oct 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9781503637085

Book preview

A Blessing and a Curse

OIL, POLITICS, AND MORALITY IN BOLIVARIAN VENEZUELA

Matt Wilde

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2023 by Matt Wilde. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Wilde, Matt (College teacher), author.

Title: A blessing and a curse : oil, politics, and morality in Bolivarian Venezuela / Matt Wilde.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023006790 (print) | LCCN 2023006791 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503636620 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503637078 (paperback) | ISBN 9781503637085 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Working class—Venezuela—Valencia (Carabobo) | Petroleum industry and trade—Government policy—Venezuela. | Petroleum industry and trade—Moral and ethical aspects—Venezuela. | Valencia (Carabobo, Venezuela)—Social conditions. | Valencia (Carabobo, Venezuela)—Politics and government. | Venezuela—Politics and government—1999- | Venezuela—Economic conditions.

Classification: LCC HN370.V35 W553 2023 (print) | LCC HN370.V35 (ebook) | DDC 305.5/62098732—dc23/eng/20230614

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023006790

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023006791

Cover design: Susan Zucker

Cover photograph: iStock / Marc Bruxelle

Typeset by Elliott Beard in Adobe Jenson Pro 10.75/15

In memory of Karl Chidsey

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

1. Sowing the Oil

2. Portrait of a Political Family

3. Aspirations and Disparities in the Bolivarian Barrio

4. Insecurity and the Search for Moral Order

5. The Moral Life of Revolution

6. Petro-democracy and Its Ambiguities

7. The Weight of the Future

8. The Unraveling

9. Beyond the Magical State

Notes

References

Index

Illustrations

FIGURE 1.1. Portrait of Hugo Chávez, former president of Venezuela (Matt Wilde)

FIGURE 2.1. Graffiti for and against Hugo Chávez’s proposed constitutional reforms in 2009 (Matt Wilde)

FIGURE 3.1. The author’s room in Rafael and Yulmi’s annex (Matt Wilde)

FIGURE 4.1. Guns prohibited in public spaces, at a local social mission (Matt Wilde)

FIGURE 5.1. Moral y Luces (Morals and Enlightenment) at Mission Sucre (Matt Wilde)

FIGURE 6.1. A children’s futbolíto tournament organized by the communal councils (Matt Wilde)

FIGURE 7.1. New squatter settlements being established in Valencia, 2012 (Matt Wilde)

FIGURE 7.2. A revolutionary mural painted by the Frente Francisco Miranda (Matt Wilde)

FIGURE 8.1. In this communal space, we don’t speak ill of Chávez (Matt Wilde)

FIGURE 9.1. Hugo Chávez and his daughters on the wall of Maria and Manuel’s house (Matt Wilde)

Acknowledgments

This project began over a decade ago and has been shaped by so many people down what has been a long and somewhat meandering road. Although she was never able to see this book completed, I am deeply indebted to Olivia Harris for igniting my interest in Latin America and anthropology, and for guiding me through the early stages of research.

In Venezuela, I have received kindness and generosity ever since I first arrived in the country in 2008. Ceverina Marín and Felix Crudele welcomed me into their home and their family, introducing me to the joys of arepas and joropo and giving me the foundation for a life in Venezuela. I owe a huge debt to Lesbi López, who was a patient and inspiring Spanish teacher as well as a sympathetic and supportive friend. Bex Mair had a significant influence on my early forays in Venezuela, which were also shared with Adam Gill, Caribay Godoy, Andy Krieger, Vladimir Jolidon, Pablo Navarette, Hannes Senti, Hannah Strange, and Jesus Vincent. I am hugely grateful to Jim McIlroy and Coral Wynter for suggesting I visit Valencia, to Freddy Bello and Pedro Téllez for the long discussions of the city and its history, and to Angel Guevara and Yulmi Carrillo for their warmth and friendship. Karl Chidsey and Germania Marquina gave me a home away from home during difficult times, while Oscar Elieser has taught me so much about Venezuela and gone above and beyond on multiple occasions. I regret that I cannot name the most important people here.

As a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics, I was surrounded by an eclectic array of fellow travelers who shared in the ebbs and flows of doctoral life. In particular, I owe thanks to Gustavo Barbosa, Michael Berthin, Gus Gatmaytan, Ana Gutierrez, Michael Hoffman, Daniela Kraemer, Giulia Liberatore, Dina Makram-Ebeid, Aude Michelet, Xandra Miguel Lorenzo, Zorana Milicevic, Amy Penfield, Sitna Quiroz Uria, and Martyn Wemyss for sharing the experience and providing thoughtful feedback in our writing-up seminars. I am indebted also to Max Bolt, Ryan Davey, Deborah James, Insa Koch, and George St Clair for their friendship and guidance. My thanks extend to those who provided feedback on my work in various stages of development, particularly Laura Bear, Fenella Cannell, Kimberly Chong, Ben Coles, Matthew Engelke, Stephan Feuchtwang, Tom Grisaffi, Angela Last, Mathijs Pelkmans, Miranda Sheild Johansson, Charles Stafford, Hans Steinmuller, Matt Tillotson, Chiara Tuckett, and Miranda Tuckett. As doctoral supervisors, Mukulika Banerjee and Sian Lazar offered meticulous attention to draft chapters, constructive and challenging feedback, and moral support both during and after my doctorate. David Graeber was a colleague, a comrade, and a friend whose presence I miss deeply in many ways.

This book was influenced by many fruitful discussions of Venezuela and Latin America with colleagues such as Keymer Ávila, Stefano Boni, Aaron Kappeler, Martijn Koster, Mariya Ivancheva, Manuel Larrabure, Nadia Mosquera Muriel, Antulio Rosales, Naomi Schiller, Julie Skurski, and Iselin Strønen. A panel at the Latin American Studies Annual Congress in 2021 on Ethnographic Encounters with Morality, Crisis, and Extractivism in Venezuela was the perfect testing ground for the book’s main argument, and I am grateful to Eva van Roekel and Marjo Theije for arranging such a stimulating exchange. I also owe a huge debt to Amy Cooper and Robert Samet, whose support during the summer of 2021 gave me the confidence to finally finish. Amid the fog of COVID lockdowns, their encouragement was vital. Most recently, I thank my research team in Colombia—Laura García Juan, Polina Golovatina, Peter Kramer, and Alba Pereira—for helping me understand the challenges facing Venezuelan migrants abroad, and for overcoming myriad difficulties amid the pandemic.

Awards and grants were integral to the various periods of fieldwork that shaped this book. I would like to thank the Economic and Social Research Council for my 1+3 Studentship (Award ES/F022107/1), the Camel Trust, the Society for Latin American Studies, and the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF/29409). Material from some chapters appeared in different formats in Latin American Perspectives, Critique of Anthropology, and Bulletin of Latin American Research. I thank the editors and reviewers of these publications for their critical feedback.

At Stanford, Dylan Kyung-lim White, Dawn Hall, Tiffany Mok, and Sarah Rodriguez have made the publication process a genuine pleasure. From the first conversations and proposal through to final submission, their feedback and guidance has been generous, prompt, and supportive. I am grateful for their patience and professionalism.

Beyond the world of academia, I am blessed with a caring infrastructure that makes everything else possible. Alex Blackie, Ben Everitt, Corin Golding, Ewen Lappin-Cook, Brook Morgan, and David Soutar provide, quite simply, the best company I could ask for in a world of constant flux. My parents, Jan and Wilf, gave me the freedom to dream and wander. My sister, Rachel, has been a co-conspirator since the beginning. I thank them all deeply.

Most of all, I want to thank Anna: for her beautiful spirit, for being the center of my world, and for bringing out the best in me. I delight in the life we are building together. This book is dedicated to our sons, Gwyn and Dylan, whose smiles and laughter animate these pages, and whose irrepressible energy gives me hope for a better future.

ONE

Sowing the Oil

FIGURE 1.1 Portrait of Hugo Chávez, former president of Venezuela (Matt Wilde)

Toward the end of my first stay with Rafael and Yulmi, the couple mounted the portrait of their president, Hugo Chávez, on the wall of their front room.¹ They had asked a friend who specialized in family portraits to frame the image for the newly furnished space they had been gradually improving since my arrival as a doctoral researcher in early 2009. As they explained at the time, the portrait was an expression of loyalty and pride from a working-class family who had come to see their own fortunes as intimately tied to the figure whose protective gaze now looked down from the wall. Before Chávez, most people thought that politics wasn’t important, or that it was dirty, Rafael told me as we stood back to admire the picture one evening. Our identity was really weak. We didn’t know about our own history, and politics wasn’t about social action. What Chávez gave us was a national identity that didn’t exist before.

In the decade that followed Chávez taking office in 1999, the lives of Rafael, Yulmi, and their family had changed significantly thanks to a series of government initiatives aimed at improving the lives of Venezuela’s poor majority. As state revenues accrued from oil exports were redistributed under Chávez’s leadership, new opportunities emerged in education, employment, and political participation for previously excluded sectors of the population. Rafael and Yulmi were in many ways typical of the local-level pro-government activists—chavistas, as they called themselves—who benefited from these reforms and became critical to Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution as it advanced through the first decade of the twenty-first century. Rafael and Yulmi were both born and raised in El Camoruco, a low-income urban community that is classified as a barrio—a term that literally means neighborhood in Spanish, but which in Venezuela acts as a byword for the self-built peripheries that characterize sizeable parts of the country’s urban landscape. Having cut their teeth as neighborhood organizers in their home city of Valencia, they were drawn into political activism shortly after Chávez’s election. Together with others in Rafael’s large extended family, they became key local activists during the launch of the government’s flagship pro-poor projects such as the misiones sociales (social missions) and consejos comunales (communal councils). They also campaigned in support of Chávez during his numerous election victories throughout the early 2000s and by the time I arrived in El Camoruco had become prominent local members of the Partido Socialista de Venezuela (United Socialist Party of Venezuela, PSUV), the party the late president founded in 2007. By late 2010, as I finished the first stint of my doctoral fieldwork, Rafael and Yulmi had each taken on formal employment in the expanding Bolivarian state and were considered important figures in the local chavista milieu. The portrait that hung in their front room marked the significance of the material and symbolic changes the family had undergone over the course of a decade, its presence attesting to the totemic value that Chávez had come to play in their lives.

In 2017, nearly a decade after I had begun research in Venezuela and five years since my last visit, I returned to Rafael and Yulmi’s home amid very different circumstances. Chávez had died from an aggressive form of cancer in 2013, and the country’s fortunes had deteriorated under the leadership of his chosen successor, Nicolás Maduro. The high global oil prices that had powered Chávez’s dream dropped dramatically in 2014, precipitating a wider economic and social crisis that has now gripped the country for almost a decade. An antigovernment protest movement that began in 2014 was reignited in 2017 amid spiraling hyperinflation, widespread shortages in food and medicine, and a growing discontent with the increasingly authoritarian direction of Maduro’s government. As I returned to carry out further research in the midst of this crisis, my fieldwork was shaped by the new realities of everyday life in Venezuela: day-long queues at cash machines, regular hikes in the prices of basic commodities, burning roadblocks erected by the antigovernment protestors, and increasing numbers of friends making plans to leave the country in search of employment and stability. The portrait of Chávez still hung in Rafael and Yulmi’s front room, but the inhabitants of this proud chavista household now found themselves struggling to make sense of the alarming downturn in the prospects of their country and their revolution. As they did so, our conversations frequently turned to the subject of oil and the ambivalent relationship that Venezuelans have with the substance that powers their economy and shapes their politics. If we want to solve this crisis, remarked Rafael one morning as we prepared arepas from a bag of state-subsidized cornmeal, we have to become self-sufficient. We have to grow our own food, produce our own things. For too long we’ve been dependent on petroleum rents and that’s why we have this problem. You see, that’s the thing with our oil: it could be a blessing or it could be a curse.

*   *   *

This book is an ethnographic study of the relationship between oil, politics, and morality as seen through the eyes of working-class barrio residents in El Camoruco, a low-income urban periphery located in the industrial city of Valencia. It draws on research conducted in three phases over the last decade—2008–10, 2012, and 2017—and documents the everyday lives of El Camoruco’s residents during a period of rapid and conflictual social change. In what follows, I explore how Venezuela’s contradictory relationship with oil shaped both the conditions in which barrio residents made their lives and the terms in which they understood them over the last decade. I argue that everyday barrio life in this period was intimately shaped by the defining contradiction of the Bolivarian Revolution: that in its efforts to capture a larger portion of oil money and distribute it more widely among the population, this disjunctive political project pursued policies that ultimately entrenched Venezuela in the very position of dependency that Chávez sought to overcome. In the process, the revolution created a peculiar imaginative void between the future it envisioned through narratives and symbols and the reality it was able to deliver as a material experience. For barrio residents, this heightened long-standing cultural anxieties about oil wealth that shaped everyday moral questions about how to be a good person and how to live a good life in turbulent and uncertain times.

Under the late president’s leadership, state control over Venezuela’s oil sector enabled a left-nationalist government to channel petroleum revenues into communities like El Camoruco through its social programs, and these endeavors had a real and visible impact on the quality of people’s lives while oil prices were high. For many barrio residents, Chávez’s reforms meant that they were able to access primary health care in their own communities for the first time. There were also new opportunities to study, find work, participate politically, and fashion new forms of personhood. In this sense, the first decade of Bolivarian rule was a period in which the ability to imagine and pursue better and more fulfilling lives, both individually and collectively, was significantly enhanced among the most marginalized sectors of the population.

But at the same time, the reliance on oil money to deliver seismic social transformations reproduced the very development model that had left Venezuela so vulnerable to global economic downturns in the past. Economic policies designed to maximize the state’s spending power—chiefly dollar controls and an overvalued currency—increased Venezuela’s reliance on global commodity markets and ultimately undermined the drive to transition to a less volatile national economy. As a result, the Bolivarian era was characterized by deeply entrenched economic fragilities and political intransigencies that predated Chávez’s emergence and continued despite the revolution’s powerful narratives of rupture and renewal. Even before the present crisis began in 2014, new opportunities for barrio residents were often only momentarily realized or partially formed. They were distributed unevenly, experienced haphazardly, and inhibited by deep-seated structural shortcomings that the revolution reproduced in spite of itself. In El Camoruco under Chávez’s rule, many of my interlocutors still struggled to find reliable and secure work, youth violence and street crime seemed to worsen by the year, and promised infrastructural improvements failed to materialize. And when the present crisis unfolded under Maduro’s leadership, chronic shortages in food and medicine, a climate of worsening political violence, and grotesque levels of private and state corruption undid many of the revolution’s achievements. As old problems returned in new guises, the Bolivarian Revolution inhibited, weakened, and finally unmade the very progressive reforms and radical possibilities that it had opened up.

In this book I argue that the promises and failures of the revolution brought to the fore long-standing cultural anxieties about the influence of oil money on the moral constitution of the Venezuelan nation and its people. My reading of Venezuela’s relationship with oil is that it not only constitutes a structural backdrop to the everyday in political and economic terms but also operates as what Raymond Williams termed a structure of feeling (2001) that shapes ideas about morality in profound ways. In some instances, such as Rafael’s rumination about blessings and curses, these anxieties took the form of discussions about the political and economic imbalances associated with petro-states at the national level. But in others, such concerns would emerge through doubts and suspicions about the circulation of petroleum revenues in local settings, and about the perceived connection between oil money and quotidian issues such as corruption, family values, individualism, and violence. As they appeared alongside the very visible public spending of the chavista state, these anxieties seemed to encapsulate a wider set of material and symbolic disjunctures that characterized the revolution as a whole. For barrio residents, new opportunities for self-advancement were accompanied by new social tensions, producing a disorientating fusion of aspiration, hope, disillusionment, and fear in everyday life. This book explores the myriad political, moral, and practical challenges that working-class Venezuelans encountered as they made their lives amid the openings and dead-ends that appeared in this tumultuous period.

Oil, Politics, and Morality

When Hugo Chávez was elected in 1998, Venezuela was suddenly thrust into the global political spotlight. A radical army colonel who had been jailed for an attempted coup in 1992, Chávez gained notoriety for his colorful and fiery oratory performances and soon established himself as the de facto leader of an unprecedented regional political shift—the so-called Pink Tide—that saw a string of left-leaning governments take power in Latin America during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Naming his movement after Simón Bolívar, the Venezuelan general and statesman who liberated much of Latin America from Spanish rule in the nineteenth century, Chávez and his Bolivarian Revolution came to symbolize both the region’s rejection of the Washington Consensus and the alternatives it proposed to neoliberal models of governance and development (Barrett, Chavez, and Rodríguez Garavito 2008; Burbach, Fox, and Fuentes 2013).² His forthright defiance of the United States garnered favor with many on the political left, while his policy of using oil money to finance new forms of social welfare, democratic participation, and regional integration was heralded as emblematic of a wider post-neoliberal turn across Latin America (Goodale and Postero 2013; Petras and Veltmeyer 2016). But the late president’s attacks on the vested interests of domestic and foreign elites also won him many enemies, and chavismo was hampered from the start by significant opposition at home and abroad. Chávez survived a short-lived coup in 2002, a shutdown of the country’s oil industry later that year, a recall referendum in 2004, and was opposed by a hostile private media throughout his presidency (Ellner 2008; Golinger 2005). By the time I arrived in the country in 2008, Venezuela’s political fault lines had largely polarized along lines of class (García-Guadilla and Mallen 2019; Samet 2019), with the bulk of the revolution’s activists and supporters found among the country’s rural and urban poor.

Scholarly interest in Venezuela mushroomed as the Bolivarian era unfolded. For much of Chávez’s time in power, debates centered on the roots of his popularity and the question of how to define his political movement (Castro 2007; Hawkins 2010). Some viewed chavismo as a product of the failure to adequately reform Venezuelan liberal democracy during the 1980s and 1990s and warned that Chávez’s government was eroding pluralism by concentrating power in the hands of the executive and promulgating a divisive brand of populism (Corrales and Penfold 2011; McCoy and Myers 2004). Others took a more sympathetic view, pointing to the role class conflict played in bringing Chávez to power, highlighting the widespread popular support for the Bolivarian Revolution, and defending its achievements in reducing poverty, improving public services, and enfranchising previously excluded sectors of the population (Ellner and Hellinger 2003; Ellner 2008; Roberts 2006; Spanakos 2008; Wilpert 2007). A third strand of work located the origins of the Bolivarian movement in long-standing traditions of militant organizing in Venezuela’s barrios (Ciccariello-Maher 2013a; Fernandes 2010; Velasco 2015) and explored the complex dynamics that characterized themes such as neighborhood politics, democracy and the state, national and community media, and public health initiatives as el proceso (the revolutionary process) unfolded in local settings (Boni 2017; Cooper 2019; Samet 2019; Schiller 2018; Smilde and Hellinger 2011; Strønen 2017).

My approach builds on these studies but aims to take our understanding of Bolivarian Venezuela forward by accounting for the oil dependency that both enabled and undermined the revolution’s drive for radical change. While the subject of oil is often mentioned in ethnographic accounts of the country, it is frequently presented as a contextual background to other thematic concerns rather than being a central focus in its own right. My contention is that the significance of Venezuela’s very particular relationship with oil deserves greater ethnographic attention, as well as a conceptual framework that connects the macrodynamics of oil—that is, the question of how the globalized trade in petroleum shapes the fortunes of petro-states—to the microdynamics of everyday social life. Using what Iselin Strønen (2017, 6) terms a lens of oil to make this connection, this book provides a longitudinal perspective that spans both the revolution’s most prosperous period under Chávez and its descent into turmoil under Maduro. In so doing, it explains how an outwardly progressive political regime ultimately ended up sabotaging many of its own social achievements.

Alongside this attention to debates about Bolivarian Venezuela, this book also makes a wider anthropological argument concerning the relationship between cultural understandings of oil and everyday political and moral life. Anthropologists have consistently highlighted oil’s often ambiguous social and cultural status, underlining its common association with greed, corruption, and crisis in a variety of settings (Behrends, Reyna, and Schlee 2011; Rogers 2015). Yet such work has tended to focus on either the extractive and commercial sites of oil complexes or on elite-level governance within petro-states, rather than on how political economies of petroleum might structure the quotidian moral frameworks of national communities. My interest is in oil—and specifically oil wealth—as a cultural phenomenon that shapes how citizens interpret their relationship with the state in moral terms and think of themselves as particular kinds of ethical actors as a result. Recent anthropological work at the intersection of morality and politics has demonstrated how political subjectivity can be central to wider forms of ethical self-cultivation (Lazar 2013, 2017; Razsa 2013, 2015). This book extends such insights by examining the ways in which barrio residents experienced and understood the contradictions of the Bolivarian Revolution through their own struggles to create more hopeful, secure, and meaningful lives.

Amid myriad conflicts and crises at the national level, barrio livelihood strategies in the Bolivarian period have been shaped by fleeting, contingent hopes and by persistent fears about the presence of nefarious social forces in everyday life. My principal lens on this phenomenon