From 1990 through 1992 Venezuela had the highest rate of eco-
nomic growth in the Americas. A product of the country’s neolib-
eral free-market reforms, this growth was accompanied by
sharply increasing inequality, and record levels of poverty and
malnutrition. The reforms were designed to stabilize and restructure the
country’s battered economy by means of incentive packages offered to
national and foreign investors, and an austerity program directed at those
with the least power to resist it. In February, 1989, the population greeted
the announced austerity package with widespread rioting that left hun-
dreds-perhaps over a thousand-dead. In 1992, there were two populist-oriented military coup
attempts. And in May, 1993, the individual chiefly associated with the economic reforms, and the
subsequent increase in misery-President Carlos Andr6s P6rez-was indicted and impeached on
charges of corruption.
Venezuelans went to the polls on December 5th, and elected an old Christian democrat who
has aligned himself with the new politics of social solidarity. Rafael Caldera, who turned 78 just
before his February inauguration, was one of the founders of the country’s social Christian party,
Copei. He and a band of followers abandoned Copei last year over the party’s support of the
neoliberal policies of the Acci6n Democritica (AD) government. In his run for the presidency, he
was supported by a broad anti-neoliberal coalition, whose principal members were his fellow-dis-
sident Christian democrats grouped together in a movement called Convergencia, and the leftist
members of what had long been the country’s third party, Movement Toward Socialism (MAS).
The elections highlighted the fierce debate that has broken out in Venezuela-within and between the parties-over what kind of capitalist development the country should pur-
sue. With no viable socialist model to draw upon, the choices range from the unregulat-
ed trade and investment strategies and extreme individualism of neoliberalism, to a con-
trolled, socially oriented capitalism. The latter might build on Venezuela’s newly reformed and
decentralized set of political institutions, and emphasize questions of social justice and solidarity.
The debate once again casts a spotlight on the Left. As veteran MAS leader Teodoro Petkoff
points out, a new Latin American Left is developing which stresses democratic over authoritarian
development; mass participation over vanguard leadership; and social reform over socialist revo-
lution. In Venezuela, the slow social-democratization of MAS, and the dramatic rise of the work-
ers’ party, Causa R, give the country two paradigmatic faces of that new Left.
As Venezuela passes through a period of uncertain transition, it is being observed carefully
because it has embarked on reforms that can take it one of two ways. On the one hand, democrat-
ic reforms have sought to open up the political system and to reinsert the citizen into the mecha-
nisms of the state-to recreate the “public citizen.” On the other, the economic reforms of the
past five years have sought to privatize virtually everything. If “Calderismo” holds together and
establishes a working coalition with Causa R, President Caldera will still need at least some
members of the traditional parties, AD and Copei, to opt for citizenship over privatization, and
help the country chart its uncertain course. That course will have no small effect on the prospects
for democratic development in Latin America, and on the future of what Petkoff calls “the
emerging democratic Left.”
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