PROGRAM ON STATES AND SECURITY www.statesandsecurity.org Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies The Graduate Center The City University of New York 365 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10016-4309 Tel: 212 817-1935 Fax: 212 817-1565 e-mail: swoodward@gc.cuny.edu Venezuelan Democracy: Weakness or Hegemonic Struggle? José A. Laguarta Ramírez The Graduate Center – CUNY Oil-rich Venezuela has been on the international policy community’s list of possible fragile or at risk states since at least 1989, when structural adjustment measures set off mass riots that left several hundred dead. During the following decade, the former ‘exceptional democracy’ (Levine 1994) experienced two military coup attempts, the removal of a President by Congress amidst charges of corruption, a seemingly endless wave of protests, and the rise of political outsiders, culminating in the landslide election, in 1998, of former Lt. Col. Hugo Chávez Frías, who had led one of the coup attempts in 1992. Since then, Chávez has rewritten the Constitution, been re-elected twice (in 2000 and 2006), and survived a coup attempt, two oil- industry lockouts, and a recall referendum (all between 2002 and 2004). Detractors accuse the Chávez government of undermining democratic institutions, while supporters claim it is building “participative democracy” and “socialism of the twenty-first century” (Wilpert 2005). ‘Failure’ and the Venezuelan State By the late 1990s, ‘failed’ or ‘failing’ states had taken the place of ‘rogue’ states within the United States policy lexicon still framed by Cold War assumptions (Klare 1998; Bilgin and Morton 2004: 169). The distinction often signals whether the perceived threat is posed by states 1