Interview with Emiliano Terán Mantovani by Raúl Zibechi Originally published in Revista Brecha
Emiliano Terán Mantovani is a sociologist from the Universidad Central de Venezuela, researcher and activist. He has collaborated with various initiatives such as the Atlas of Environmental Justice and the Scientific Panel for the Amazon. Founder and Member of the Observatory of Political Ecology of Venezuela. It was not easy to put together the interview as he has to move with extreme caution in the face of the overwhelming militarisation that the country is experiencing. He assures that Maduro’s government is not a left-wing or even progressive government, but a ‘regime of corruption, abuses, precariousness of life and repressive violence’.
He also analyses the opposition, which advocates ‘orthodox neoliberalism, massive privatisations’ and a ‘geopolitical closeness to the United States’. He concludes that the competition is between two neoliberal forces and that the Maduro regime is in deep decline.
– How would you characterise the Maduro government?
– Since 28 July, an electoral fraud has been consummated in Venezuela that will be much talked about when people remember the biggest frauds in contemporary Latin American history, such as the ‘fall of the system’ in Mexico, Fujimori’s or some unusual cases in Central America. Today, a reconfiguration of Maduro’s political regime is being considered, in order to be able to govern in conditions of complete social, political and international illegitimacy. It is a dangerous reconfiguration because it aims to take repression and social control to unsuspected levels, but let me first consider where we have come from in order to see where we could be going.
Maduro’s government has evolved over the last 11 years in a way that tends more and more towards decadence, in every sense of the word. It has been pulverising the framework of social rights, seeking to asphyxiate all political and social dissidence, with brutal repression of the entire popular camp, even if you are a critical Chavista. Venezuela has been governed under a permanent state of emergency: a legal one, by decree, that lasted more than five years, from 2016 to 2021, something totally unconstitutional, but which paradoxically was normalised.
On the other hand, the power architecture of Maduro’s regime was shaped by a progressive restructuring of the state. The antecedent is the corporatist and militarist state configured in the Chávez government, its authoritarian and vertical ways of doing politics, which placed the utmost loyalty to the leader above all else as a fundamental principle. The structures and networks of state corruption are also an important antecedent. These elements saw continuity in Maduro’s government, but now without Chávez’s charisma and political legitimacy, without the enormous oil revenues that were once available, and in the context of Venezuela’s systemic collapse. So everything began to be imposed primarily by force and violence.
The National Assembly, widely won by the opposition in 2015, was disregarded and a parallel National Assembly of the regime was created in 2017; military companies were created for the direct and private appropriation and management of wealth; the enormous poverty left by the crisis was used politically, creating institutional channels for the selective allocation of wealth to state officials and supporters of the PSUV; access to information was eliminated.
Numerous state and para-state security forces were deployed, a structure of corruption and undisputed power, in an environment of maximum impunity and militarisation. This also consolidated a mafistisation of the state. All this, justified in the name of ‘defending the revolution and socialism’ and ‘fighting the right’. We thus had a regime change from within and a new type of dictatorship was consolidated, a patrimonial and oligarchic regime, which also allows the direct appropriation of regional wealth in order to maintain provincial loyalties. Venezuela is governed like a hacienda, an image that harks back to political regimes of the last quarter of the 19th and first quarter of the 20th century in Latin America.
– Yet it is considered by some to be leftist.
– There is no basis for claiming that this is a progressive government, let alone a leftist one. There is a strong liberalisation of the economy, with promotion and protection of transnational capital, large tax exemptions, low-profile privatisations, promotion of special economic zones, the creation of a VIP Venezuela (tourism, restaurants, bars, trips, luxury vans) only for foreigners, businessmen and high-level state officials; the programmed destruction of wages, keeping them in bolivars while the economy is totally dollarised (today it is equivalent to 4 dollars a month), abandonment of the public sector, among other factors.
Fedecámaras, the country’s main business chamber, which was always seen as the great enemy of Chávez, is now a friend of the Maduro regime. Analysing each economic measure, we can affirm that we are facing one of the most aggressive neoliberal restructurings in the region, although it is by no means conventional neoliberalism. The evolution of an authoritarian system and the neoliberalisation of the economy are two factors in the same process of regime change in Venezuela. One is a function of the other.
In addition to businessmen, the new alliance of the Maduro regime is with the evangelical churches, as Bolsonaro has done; chavismo criticised Uribe but Maduro has similarly deployed a network of para-state shock groups. Maduro has recently announced that his power is based on a ‘civil-military-police’ alliance. In these days of popular protest, forced labour prisons for ‘terrorists’ and ‘coup perpetrators’ are being promoted, reminiscent of Bukele. The two governments that have most promoted the destruction of rights in Latin America today have been precisely those of Milei and Maduro.
I believe that some leftists who continue to support this, have not even managed to understand the level of decadence, conservatism and mafisticisation of this regime. And they end up dragged down by this decadence, they end up bogged down supporting this disaster and undermining their own credibility. This is a symptom of a historical loss of direction that must lead us back to the question of what the left is in this crisis, which is a global crisis; what historical meaning does the left have today, what it represents, who it represents, how it understands the relationship between ethics and politics; how it responds to this changing and violent world. But when it comes to Venezuela, we reach a point where there is no nuance whatsoever.
The second conclusion is that this regime of corruption, abuse, casualisation of life and repressive violence is understood and felt by the vast majority of Venezuelans as a nightmare. A nightmare that they want to see come to an end. That was one of the antecedents of this election: a maximum popular weariness with Maduro’s government, a weariness never seen in the 25 years of the Bolivarian process, which created this critical mass of irrefutable generalised discontent and which was overwhelmingly reflected in the elections. Every sector of Venezuelans voted massively against Maduro, be it rural, urban, young people, adults, the most precarious, the middle classes, in Caracas, in the Andes, in the plains, in the Amazon, various sectors of the left, centre, right, religious, atheists, all, with a forcefulness that had not been seen in Venezuelan electoral history.
This does not seem to be understood by some on the left, who have sadly criminalised the popular protests in the most impoverished neighbourhoods of the country, calling them ‘ultra-right’, which reinforces the mechanisms of repression and persecution that are underway; and in other cases, infantilising and underestimating the population, claiming that they are confused, manipulated and without criteria, who are giving the country to the United States. They have no self-criticism or even the slightest understanding of what a failure this Chavista political project has had to be in order for people to flee across the borders. No self-criticism that would lead to a deep reflection on the mistakes made by the Bolivarian governments. On the contrary, I notice that this part of the left insists on constantly putting on the shoulders of the Venezuelan people the sack of stones of being suspected of protesting about the lack of water, about their miserable salary or because they want their vote to be respected, and telling them that they are ‘playing into the hands of the right’, and all this blackmailing story that has no end, that is perpetual. For these leftists the people have no right to rebel and should remain silent and support the government until the end of time.
– What we are probably witnessing is a new, more radical, more extremist political reorganisation of the regime to control the population. Constitutional guarantees are de facto suspended. Government spokespersons themselves have reported more than 2,200 arrests in a few days, without any legal procedure, affecting the entire social and political spectrum of the country. Security forces stop passers-by to check their phones to see if they have any anti-government content in order to arrest them. Social snitching mechanisms have been set up to denounce opponents, and an app has even been created to put their names, addresses and photos. The houses of those who protest or oppose the government have been marked.
Also, from official speeches and security agencies, content is disseminated to frighten the population, announcing that ‘they are coming for you’, and uniformed prisoners are exposed, Bukele-style, shouting pro-government slogans. There is strict surveillance of social networks and a ‘National Cybersecurity Council’ was created to formalise this surveillance. A law was passed to control NGOs.
As you can imagine, the Venezuelan population today is terrified and in shock. This is what the Maduro government has called a new ‘civil-military-police’ alliance. We live in a totally policed, quasi-Orwellian society. The regime seeks to control every sphere and expression of Venezuelan society.
How sustainable is this over time? It is difficult to know, but what is clear is that in this scenario the dispute is very much within subjectivity, within subjective integrity. It is biopolitics at its purest. The body/subject is a hostage in its own country.
What characterisation do you offer of the opposition led by María Corina Machado?
– Machado has an orthodox neoliberal political-economic programme of massive privatisations and alliances with international capital, and a geopolitical closeness to the United States and what these sectors call the ‘free world’. She is a woman who comes from the powerful economic classes, from a family of important businessmen. Her position on the Bolivarian process has always been classist, rupturist and confrontational, although surely, in order to make herself more drinkable and broaden her framework of alliances, she has recently been moving towards more moderate positions. But, in any case, what must be stressed is that the framework of the recent electoral and political competition for Venezuelans has been between two neoliberal forces. This shows us the kind of crossroads at which the Venezuelan people have been and will continue to be for the time being, and the great need to progressively build a political alternative to this, a path of popular, sovereign vindication that also seeks to change the model of society, that seriously begins to think beyond oil and extractivism.
But there are nuances about the opposition that need to be mentioned, in order to make an updated reading. This is not 2017. Although the vast majority of the population rejects the government, we are not facing two strong political blocs on equal terms of confrontation. Maduro’s government controls everything: the armed forces and security forces, the judiciary, the electoral power, the national assembly, the vast majority of regional and municipal governments, the national media, the oil industry, everything. The truth is that the situation of 2017 or even 2019 cannot be equated.
The opposition sector that Machado leads today is not homogeneous. She does not have total control and has had many political adversaries within that sector. For the elections she managed to articulate a unity with the other actors in the coalition, but it is difficult to know whether this unity would be maintained, given their conflicting backgrounds. To date, there has been no consensus on his orthodox economic programme, since, for example, not everyone agrees on privatising PDVSA. If it were to assume power, Chavismo would still control the Supreme Court, the National Assembly, the electoral body CNE and the other powers I mentioned. Even in power, it would possibly have Chavismo as an opposition. The Venezuelan population has not historically been prone to neoliberal ideas, but rather to an anti-oligarchic political culture. There is also the question of the level of military support for Machado, given the long-standing mutual antipathy. The Venezuelan context is very unstable and fragmented. This is probably what part of the left and various social movements have calculated when they decided that they would prefer to confront a Machado government rather than Maduro.
– Finally, how do you see the future, and do you think a civil war is possible?
– A first scenario is that Maduro’s government remains in power, through three factors: a regime of brutal repression that prevents the emergence of a significant dissident force or a strong political alternative; second, a regime that already knows how to manage the country with a very low political cost, that is, it knows how to govern in a context of collapse and chaos, and does not care much about international questioning and isolation. The Venezuelan population is the main loser here. And third, a regime that is able to consolidate some international trade channels for its natural resources, taking into account some oil and gas licences that could continue given global energy needs; support from China, Iran, Turkey, Russia, among others, also for the commercialisation of other commodities; and waiting for the waters to calm down before more openly inviting new international investors. The cruelty of extractivism is not the first time that it sustains and legitimises dictatorships.
Maduro’s government has tried to win back some of its former voters through various clientelistic mechanisms or demagogic speeches, and far from it, what we have witnessed is a sustained erosion of its support, a total debacle. It is difficult that sooner or later a scenario of rupture will not open up, although I repeat, we do not know when or what form that rupture will take. Another issue is the internal unravelling of the government bloc, which has also been gradual and which in recent days has seen demonstrations of public discontent such as that of Francisco Arias Cárdenas or the Minister of Culture, Ernesto Villegas. Obviously, at the heart of the questions that have arisen are questions about internal rifts, even in the military sector, which would have a defining influence on the crisis.
The outcomes will not happen by inertia alone. It will be the mobilisation capacities that will give it shape and dynamism. It remains to be seen how social resistance will evolve, how the discontent, fear and terror that people are experiencing will be channelled, whether with tendencies towards paralysis and habituation, or towards other expressions of unease, rage, the feeling of having no future and a new form of weariness that will mobilise, probably in much more intense and unknown forms. Social creativity and persistence will be crucial for popular recomposition in times of iron dictatorship. The international response will be important, albeit varied, and will likely be acted upon depending on how the alternatives for change move internally.
Finally, the domestic economic situation will be very decisive. The so-called economic recovery is based on very weak foundations, the distribution of wealth is still extremely unequal and we cannot forget that we are coming from a long economic crisis determined by the exhaustion of the oil rentier model.
– Can there be more violent confrontations?
It is a possible scenario if all the channels for a peaceful exit are definitively closed, although a civil war requires two armed sides, and in Venezuela this monopoly is essentially held by the national government.
