Who Can Stop the Drums: Urban Social Movements in Chavez’s Venezuela

"There are very few women who write on Venezuela, so Sujata is up there for me. What’s important about this book is the way she captures urban social movements. What Sujata is looking at in this book is the barrios of Venezuela, the shanty towns around Caracas and other urban centres. She talks about the relationship that urban social movements had with Hugo Chávez’s government. Chávez is usually understood as being quite a populist figure, and a lot of the media narrative created this idea of unswerving popular loyalty to Hugo Chávez. What Sujata Fernandez points out is that, actually, this was a two-way process. This is really neglected and misunderstood. She talks about the political history of the barrios, these urban shanty towns, this strong tradition of collectivization, revolution, struggle and resilience. She situates all of that in the 1960s with the growth of the barrios. Then, when she gets to the period of Hugo Chávez, she explains what the appeal of Chávez was to these communities, where people are excluded and living a life on the margins. But she doesn’t just explain the appeal of Chávez in the barrios, but most crucially, she also explains that Chávez was dependent on the support of the people in the barrios. It was not only to bring him back to power after the coup against him in April 2002: the barrios were always the bedrock of Hugo Chávez’s support. As a result, he had to listen to the people in those communities. He had to put resources in and listen to their political demands. It was a very, very important two-way process, and that’s missed a lot because we have this assumption that Chávez is this great, charismatic, populist figure at the head of an authoritarian state. Certainly, Chavez was a great populist figure. But the reality is that the Bolivarian Revolution would not have survived in the early days had it not been for that kind of reach into the barrios and the responsiveness to barrios’ demands. So some of the initial programs of the Venezuelan government—participatory democracy, devolving power down to local communities, a lot of emphasis on resources for community media—that’s all captured here by Sujata Fernandes, and she talks about how that was seen to democratize racial power, class power, and social power in Venezuela. The last book I have chosen talks about how this was all squandered later on in the Chávez presidency and most clearly in the Maduro presidency. But I think what’s lovely about Sujata’s book is that it really is a very rich ethnography that captures a very particular moment in Venezuela’s revolution, the part when it was seen to be at its most democratic and participatory."