Steve Ellner Courtesy
E.P. Thompson says that while a popular movement may be defeated, as happened to the Venezuelan left, it may reemerge many years later with its proposals reformulated. He also says that to understand current developments, you must look at history and see that continuity. In my book Rethinking Venezuelan Politics, I go back to the resistance to Juan Vicente Gómez [1908-35] and note that a movement that got off the ground in the 1928 rebellion was the very same that would emerge with full force in the 1936 oil workers strike. All this has to be taken into consideration to understand the Chávez phenomenon in a way that goes beyond Chávez’s personality, which gets overemphasized in both journalistic and scholarly works. When we analyze the Bolivarian Process and then look back, one instance of continuity with the present is the first presidency of Carlos Andrés Pérez [aka. CAP, 1974-79]. Just as de la Plaza was surprised by Pérez Jiménez, CAP also surprised many people on the left. By Cira Pascual Marquina. Full Text -> VenezuelaAnalysis
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