Welcome to the Nineteenth Century: Venezuelan Elections
by Fernando Calzadilla

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In Venezuela’s social imaginary, dictators stand for repression but also for peace and order (11). Juan Vicente Gomez and Marcos Perez Jimenez loomed close to Chavez’s promise for order, a new republic where the people had the first priority. Days before the re-legitimating elections of July 2000, Chavez celebrated Independence Day (July 5) parading in a military uniform that brought memories of the Perez/Jimenez dictatorship. The reading that a theatre audience makes of a costume when watching a play is similar to the reading people made of this performance. It informed us about meanings that escape the narrative, meanings that are embodied rather than textual. In one performance, in a coup de théâtre, Chavez assumed control of the country’s civil and military authority at a moment when his constitutionality was contested because he was not yet the president of the new fifth republic, nor was he the president of the already dismissed fourth republic. A few days later, he performed another mythic figure from the broader Latin American imaginary, the 1960s revolutionary. To close his electoral campaign he chose July 26, Cuba’s national day in memoriam of Asalto al Cuartel Moncada, Fidel Castro’s first action against the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship. He wore fatigues and red beret like the ones in this 2004 picture.

The elections of 1998 made history for several reasons, but most important, of course, for the change of direction that signified the triumph of Hugo Chavez. On paper, Venezuela moved from representation to participation, but in reality the performance of the Chavez administration is presidentialist, personalist, centralist, and overall the enactment of the 19th-century caudillo social imaginary based on his incarnation of Bolívar’s ideals, which is why he was elected.