Q&A with Alejandro Velasco, historian of Venezuela
A solution to the Venezuelan crisis must be made in Venezuela, says a scholar of modern Latin America.
Earlier this semester, Villanova’s Latin American Studies Program hosted New York University historian Alejandro Velasco for a round-table discussion titled, “The Venezuelan Crisis and U.S. Interventionism.” Following the event, Dr. Velasco sat down with Villanova historians Paul Steege, Faculty Director of the Lepage Center, and Cristina Soriano, Director of the Latin American Studies Program, to discuss U.S.-Latin American relations, democracy, imperialism, revolutions, and the ongoing Venezuelan crisis.
Paul Steege: If people want a broader historical context to understand what’s happening in Venezuela, where should they start?
Alejandro Velasco: Well, that depends on the answer you want to get. You could go all the way back to Simon Bolívar in the nineteenth century, or perhaps to the [Juan Vicente] Gómez era — the dictatorship which was installed in 1908 and lasted until 1935.
Cristina Soriano: And that’s also the period when oil was discovered in Venezuela.
Velasco: People who were opposed to Gómez began to see the United States as concerned not just with larger hemispheric issues but with Venezuelan oil in particular. And a new generation of politicians emerged in 1928, opposing the dictatorship but also opposing the idea that the U.S. can just take Venezuela’s oil.
Soriano: This Generation of ’28 emerged from a grassroots movements of students against Gómez. They were also skeptical of U.S. claims that it was promoting democracy and freedom; what they saw was the U.S. government supporting a dictatorial regime because of its interest in oil. In other words, even early in the twentieth century, Venezuelans questioned whether the United States was really interested in supporting Venezuelan democracy.
Velasco: And the reason that’s significant is because that generation of ’28, the student leaders of 1928, became the central architects of the democracy that would be installed after 1958.
Steege: How would you characterize this architecture of democracy? How was this generation able to create the structure for political conversation and democracy?
Velasco: What happened in 1958 is that there was a military dictatorship, which had consolidated power after riding an oil boom; but that boom was turning into an oil bust. The regime staged fraudulent elections, which then gave rise to a failed military coup in January 1958, and in turn provoked street protests and a national strike. And then on January 23rd of 1958 all these opposing forces came together — military dissidents as well as the various sectors in civil society. This, perhaps we can call it a democratic revolution, was not a constitutional thing. They recognized that what they needed to do was structure a new set of incentives in order to produce consensus. In the previous ten years, there had been a winner-take-all system that allowed the military to stoke divisions within civil society. But at that moment in time, in 1958, there was a clear recognition that what was required was some sort of power-sharing agreement. There was another problem, however: the U.S. was behind the dictatorship. But for a period of time in 1958, the United States was not a player in the game, and what got produced was something that was primarily Venezuelan-made.
Steege: Can this history tell us anything about popular political motivations and the ways they lead people to engage in these sorts of political contexts?
Velasco: In Latin America populism has been the vehicle through which social rights have expanded. But it’s also been the vehicle through which, because of this majoritarian vision of politics, the winner takes all.
Soriano: So, has it also been an instrument of authoritarianism?
Velasco: Exactly. In this winner-take-all, zero-sum dynamics, populism has been this double-edged sword. It provides for the expansion of social rights, because existing institutions tend to be very conservative; but it also provides for the conditions of a winner-take-all system that is the guarantor of subsequent stability.
Steege: So where does the ongoing relationship between the United States and Venezuela fit into this context?
Velasco: In 2013 [U.S. Secretary of State] John Kerry made a kind of slip in his testimony to the Senate, when they asked him about the Pink Tide [of leftist governments in Latin America] and what the United States was going to do about. He referred to Latin America as “our backyard.” Although he did so somewhat critically, his remark was indicative of a much longer, deeply-embedded sense in the U.S. foreign policy establishment: if we can’t set the agenda in “our own backyard,” how can we do that anywhere else in the world? Insofar as the United States sees Latin America, I think it’s more about asserting the possibility that it can be powerful elsewhere in the world because it can control this place, which it claims as its “backyard.”
“In Latin America, populism has been a double-edged sword. It provides for the expansion of social rights, because existing institutions tend to be very conservative; but it also provides for the conditions of a winner-take-all system.” -Alejandro Velasco
Steege: How do you push back against that hubris in a productive way? What vocabulary should historians use in these conversations? Is it helpful to talk about empire or imperialism?
Velasco: I guess part of me feels that strategically it’s difficult to talk about empire and imperialism in the context of trying to undermine its influence in the world. So I think strategically that’s a bit of an issue. I also think that one of the most amazing things the U.S. establishment has done is to poison “imperialism” as a broadly accepted category of analysis. So anytime you bring up the word it’s seen skeptically, even by someone who might otherwise be inclined to hear you out. Does that mean that we let go of the term? I don’t necessarily think so, but I think it’s important for us to be specific with our use of terminology and that when we talk about empire we say, “here are the ways this is an imperial move and here’s why.”
But because imperialism mutates, it also means that those fighting its influence have to be responsive to those permutations. So in terms of Latin America, I am often frustrated by people who say “it can’t be a coup, because a coup can only be done by the military.” Well, no. There are many ways you can undemocratically overthrow a government. So I think the fixation on a term, unless it’s specifically defined, can tend to make it harder to explain what’s going on.
Steege: Can talking about competing versions of democracy help to re-frame this critical conversation about the past without reducing it to a debate about whether you’re an imperialist or an anti-imperialist?
Velasco: For such a long time, certainly in the second half of the twentieth century, democracy had been narrowly circumscribed as either multiparty representative system or a complete rejection of that on the part of people like Castro and it really limits our horizons of something different. Ultimately, thinking through the possibilities with which people can articulate the relationship with states and the societies that they want, that I think would be a far more potentially useful way to undermine any singular definition of democracy. Ultimately, it’s a question of self-determination.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Our gratitude to Villanova History graduate student Kevin Fox for his assistance.
