Challenges for Reconstruction and Transition in Venezuela
HAVANA TIMES – What does the “Reconstruction of Venezuela” mean? Under what criteria and guidelines will it be carried out? Who will manage it?
The “Reconstruction of Venezuela” is, and will remain, a contested arena and a contested narrative.
What’s at stake is not simply the rebuilding of structures. Behind it lies the positioning of transnational capital, the creation of new avenues for capital accumulation, the redesign of geographic space, the reshaping of local governance and political governability, attempts by political groups to gain legitimacy in the name of the emergency, new security strategies, military positioning, and geopolitical dominance.
We are now living through yet another state of exception, one that is now intertwined with US intervention.
The question that could (re)emerge is: how does one resist within a “disaster capitalism”? Or how can an alternative vision of “Reconstruction” be articulated?
There is enormous popular discontent, but there is also a desire to “normalize” everyday life. There is a clear exhaustion with all the dominant political actors, with all the politics of those at the top. At the same time, there is widespread social exhaustion at the grassroots level. It has all been too much.
There are impulses to reclaim democracy, to reclaim the country. But we also have a broken, incapable, and externally supervised State that lacks the capacity to rebuild infrastructure and public services, or to provide the desperately needed humanitarian aid and social assistance.
Elections remain frozen, the government is profoundly unpopular and illegitimate, the opposition offers nothing different, there are collusions among the same old forces, a web of internal mistrust, structural problems that continue to go unaddressed. An empire that exercises tutelage while offering nothing to the population, and an empire that prevents the State from having even the minimum resources needed to sustain itself.
It is an extraordinarily complex web of contradictions that, it would seem, could eventually rupture from one direction or another.
*Venezuelan sociologist and social science researcher. Professor at CENDES-UCV.