1

The Return of Mano Dura in Venezuela

The political economy of transitions in urban security policies since 1950

by

Daniel S. Leon

Introduction

“There is too much democracy, [the police] needs to repress more, [and] they don’t
repress more because of human rights; only criminals have human rights? No! ...If
a criminal has killed before, why is he still alive?” (Resident of the Petare barrio in
eastern Caracas Interview with the author, May 25th, 2016, original in Spanish)

The quote above by an informant in Caracas, Venezuela expressed a widely held view in
the barrios–or slums–of Venezuela, namely, that state security forces have been mostly absent from
the barrios, which are the spaces where most urban violence occurs. Barrio inhabitants view the
lack of mano dura or zero-tolerance urban security policies as a prime cause of high violence rates–
measured through the annual rate of homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. An informant from the
barrio of Minas de Baruta in southern Caracas stated that “we need a Perez Jimenez” (original in
Spanish, May 11, 2016). The informant refers to the Venezuelan military junta’s leader in the
1950s, which notoriously used security forces to crack down on criminals and political opponents.
Mano dura security policies make a return since 2015, which has resulted in more urban violence
instead of pacification. This chapter argues that the return of mano dura is a result of a militarized
security policies, which were given free rein to violently repress actual or imagined criminals in
working-class urban communities, because of the collapse of oil incomes after 2014 and
Venezuela’s political transition to an authoritarian regime.

“Olga Meza, a 38-year-old Villa Zoita resident [in Margarita island]…said that at
2:30 a.m. on August 17 [2016], approximately five men dressed in black with their
faces covered but wearing badges of the CICPC [investigative police] raided her
home…The agents pulled Meza and her husband out of bed and forced him to lie
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down on the living room floor, where they beat him and threatened to kill him,
Meza said. The agent holding Meza grabbed her face and forced her to look towards
the room where her two sons, a 16-year-old and a 6-year-old, were in bed with the
lights off. Meza said that she witnessed a CICPC agent enter the room and shoot
her 16-year-old, Ángel Joel Torrealba. She recalled hearing four shots before the
agent turned on the lights. Then he turned over Torrealba’s dead body, saw his face,
looked at the agent who was holding Meza, rolled his eyes, and shook his head, she
said, implying that Torrealba was not the person for whom they were searching”
(Human Rights Watch 2016).

The second quote, a testimony provided by an informant to Human Rights Watch, a human
rights organization, shows the violent and poorly planned modus operandi behind the with the
implementation of mano dura urban security policies, such as the Operación de Liberación del
Pueblo (OLP) or People’s Liberation Operation since 2015. Briefly, these operations consisted of
the use of large numbers of military and police special operations units to raid allegedly high crime
areas, most of them working-class barrios (Ávila 2017; Zubillaga and Hanson 2018). These
security operations aimed to quickly and forcefully eliminate supposedly organized criminal
organizations, which according to the government presided by Nicolas Maduro (2013-present)
included organized basic staple hoarders, large criminal gangs, and Colombian paramilitaries
(Human Rights Watch 2016). As depicted in figure 1, the implementation of the OLPs
corresponded with the dramatic rise of people killed by security forces as the percentage out of
total homicides in Venezuela since 2015 to an all-time high. Nevertheless, not all violent deaths
caused by security forces were the results of OLPs, but these special operations by Venezuelan
security forces exemplify the institutionalization of mano dura security policies during the Maduro
government.

Mano dura urban security policies such as the OLPs are not new to Venezuela or Latin
America. These special operations that see many heavily armed police and military agents raiding
barrios, or socio-economically marginalized urban neighborhoods, became standard procedures by
security forces in Venezuela since the second half of the twentieth century (Hernandez 1991, 157).
The names for such special police operations from the 1970s to the 1990s were redadas or raids.
OLPs just like redadas before them seem to be erratic and poorly planned security interventions.
Jose Vega, a resident of a barrio in western Caracas, told Human Rights Watch (2016) that:
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“security agents stormed into his house when he was getting ready to go to work,
beat him, and threatened to kill him. Vega said that the agents pressed the muzzle
of a gun to his forehead and forced his fingers to grip another gun, telling him they
could kill him in a “confrontation” if he didn’t provide information on who the
‘criminals’ were.”

Due to the violent, poorly planned, and erratic behavior by security forces, a political commentator
described that “just like the redada, the OLP is macho bullshit masquerading as police strategy”
(Toro 2016). According to figure 1, it appears that mano dura security policies increased sharply
from 2015 to historically unprecedented rates. These rates of state violence are high even for Latin
American standards. In 2016, Brazilian security forces, which readily use lethal force, were
responsible for seven percent of all homicides in their country, while the violence rate of their
Venezuelan counterparts was almost four times higher (Zubillaga and Hanson 2018).

Figure 1. Percentage of killings by security forces out of the total number of homicides in
Venezuela, 1950-2017
30

25

20

15

10

0
1976
1950
1952
1954
1959
1961
1963
1965
1967
1970
1972
1974

1978
1982
1989
1991
1993
1995
1999
2001
2003
2005
2007
2009
2011
2013
2015
2017

Source: Figure created by the author with data from: Ávila (2018), Ministerio de Sanidad y Asistencia Social (various
years, 1950-1998), Ministerio de Salud y Desarrollo Social (various years, 2000-2004), Ministerio de Salud (various
years, 2005-2006), Ministerio del Poder Popular para la Salud (various years, 2007-2014).
Note: The figure presents percentages from 1950 to 2009 in decade averages for visualization purposes. As shown in
the sources, all data on overall homicides and killings by security forces come from the Health Ministry except for the
years 2010 to 2017, which come from the Interior Ministry (Ávila 2018).
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The literature on security policies in Latin America documents the counterproductive

effects of mano dura or zero tolerance security policies extensively (Lessing 2018; Wolf 2012;
Rodgers 2010; Labate, Cavnar, and Rodrigues 2016). However, the academic literature on the
Venezuelan case blames the country’s high violence rate–which nationally skyrocketed from about
20 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants per year in the 1990s to over 60 in the 2010s (Leon 2020)–
on impunity and the absence of the state security apparatus from enforcing the law in barrios of the
country’s cities (Briceño-León 2012; 2006; Tremaria 2016). The claim that the state’s
unwillingness or inability to enforce its legitimate monopoly of force in the barrios mirrors the
views of barrio inhabitants as exemplified by the first two informants cited above. Indeed,
government intervention has historically been critical in controlling violence by non-state actors.
The state can pull the necessary resources together to achieve such goal-oriented collective action
(Fukuyama 2014). State penetration can also substitute violence as a conflict resolution mechanism
by institutionalizing bureaucratic governance, commonly known as the rule of law (Collins 2011).
However, the way urban security policies and practices evolve impact whether they bring the
violence rate under control or allow it to propagate further (Arias 2006; Hoelscher and Nussio
2016; Kubrin and Weitzer 2003; Lessing 2018; Zinecker 2014).

Police researcher Keymer Avila’s (2017) aptly describes the Venezuelan penal system as
behaving “like a pendulum constantly swinging between absences and excesses” (59). This chapter
argues from a historical-institutional perspective that swings of the penal system pendulum to more
mano dura or repressive urban security policies since 2015 in the Venezuelan case occurred during
periods of low oil revenue windfalls, which conditioned transitions to more authoritarian political
orders. Therefore, politico-economic transitions in Venezuela conditioned changes to more
repressive and deadly urban security policies. The implementation of heavy-handed security
practices occurred mostly in socioeconomically marginalized or working-class urban
neighborhoods such as barrios. The official governmental discourse was that heavy-handed
operations by security forces were actions to crack down on crime and violence (Ávila 2017;
Zubillaga and Hanson 2018). However, the fact that these urban security policies appear during
times of depressed oil revenues–and thus low economic productivity–points towards the use of
such policies as tools of the state to control urban areas viewed by elite political actors as politically
volatile such as working-class barrios. Moreover, the persistence of such security policies, viewed
from a political economy perspective, rested on rent-seeking organizational arrangements. Rent
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refers to economic revenues that surpass opportunity costs (Buchanan 1980), which elite actors
accrue because of political power (Elsenhans 2011).

Through a structural politico-economic analysis following the new institutional economics

school’s longitudinal methodology (North, Wallis, and Weingast 2009), the following analysis
examines the politico-economic institutional evolution of urban security policies in Venezuela. The
sources for this analysis are primary sources on homicides from different Venezuelan authorities,
and secondary sources such as journalistic and academic publications. The development of mano
dura security policies is not a new event in Venezuela and has followed a reactive path dependency,
which refers to a historical change of events where one event, such as the return of mano dura, is
the result of previous events (Mahoney 2000).

The following section provides an analysis of the institutional-historical development of

mano dura of urban security policies in Venezuela to understand the reactive path dependencies
leading to the use of mano dura urban security policies. The analysis provided in this section starts
with a brief overview of the country’s political economy and discusses why urban security
remained highly militarized. After that, the next section analyses the politico-economic reasoning
behind the rise and fall of mano dura urban security policies from the 1980s to the 2000s and
examines why urban security policies centered on the so-called “War on Drugs.” The last empirical
section discusses the return of mano dura urban security policies after 2015. This section explains
why the politico-economic transition to an authoritarian regime in Venezuela conditioned the
dramatic increase of deadly use of force by state agents. Finally, the chapter closes with a short
concluding discussion.

The Institutional-Historical Development of Mano Dura in Venezuela since the 1960s

It is essential to review the structure of Venezuela’s political economy to understand the behavior
of violence committed by Venezuelan security agents. The transition from the last caudillo-style
military dictatorship of General Marcos Perez Jimenez to democratically elected governments after
1958 took place under the context of high oil rent windfalls (Karl 1997). Similarly, the stability of
democratically elected governments–and polyarchy–after the Perez Jimenez dictatorship depended
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on the investment and distribution of oil rent revenues to a wide range of stakeholders such as the
military, commercial elites, political activists, and impoverished urban sectors like barrios. These
clientelist networks allowed for what Terry Karl (1987) termed a “pact democracy,” where
stakeholders within and outside the ruling coalition reaped benefits from the distribution of oil
rents. Naturally, the political economy behind “pact democracy” rests on high oil revenues.

The conditions supporting the political economy behind “pact democracy” started to change
after the 1970s. The global oil price bust of the mid-1980s, along with a bulging urban population
due to rural-to-urban migration, resulted in reduced oil revenues per capita, which severely strained
the clientelist networks supporting “pact democracy,” leading to their collapse (Karl 1997; Leon
2020). The global oil process recovered and boomed after 2003. However, Venezuela’s political
order at that time had become less polyarchic, meaning that a condition for accessing oil rent
windfalls was to belong to the ruling coalition. Moreover, the agency of the political elite at the
time, during the Chávez governments, gave the military a more central role in the ruling coalition,
which further harmed polyarchy in Venezuela (Penfold-Becerra 2007; Pion-Berlin and Trinkunas
2005b; Corrales 2014). It is under these political-economic transitions that changes occurred
towards and away from mano dura urban security policies in Venezuela.

From the period of the 1960s until the end of the 1980s, the focus of Venezuelan urban
security policy was the control of political violence by Cuban-inspired guerrilla movements. Until
1974, violence rates in Caracas remained under ten homicides per 100,000; spiking above this
threshold between 1958 and 1963 since this was the main period of political violence (Leon 2020).
It occurred after the ousting of General Perez Jimenez’ right-wing dictatorship in 1958, and the
exclusion of the Venezuelan Communist Party from the newly elected governments–spearheaded
by the social-democratic Acción Democrática party and the military (Karl 1997). The exclusion of
the communist party from the new ruling coalition prompted attempts at armed insurrection by
urban guerrillas in western Caracas. The newly elected government in 1960 made use of both police
and the military to quell this urban security threat that dissolved mainly after 1963. However,
employing the military to deal with urban security threats remained a consistent security policy
(Velasco 2015), even if violence rates remained low in the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s, at
about 10 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants per annum (Leon 2020).
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By the end of the 1960s, the government of Venezuela attempted to demilitarize urban
security policies starting with the creation of the Policía Metropolitana or Metropolitan Police
(PM). It had the objective of providing demilitarized law enforcement and preventive security to
Caracas and other large cities of Venezuela. The PM was to replace the role of Guardia Nacional
or National Guard–Venezuela’s military police–as the primary security force in the large cities.
Moreover, the demilitarization of security forces was an attempt to help the country to move on
from the political violence experienced during the early 1960s and the country’s dictatorial past.
Policymakers created an academy for the PM to train agents in urban civilian police practices.
However, the PM’s implementation was mostly unsuccessful as an attempt to demilitarize urban
security policy over the long run. Although its rank-and-file agents received training in civilian
policing, its leadership from the start was almost exclusively composed of officers from the
National Guard (Velasco 2015; López Maya 2003; Ungar 2003). Hence, the PM maintained many
repressive military practices that its leaders brought from military institutions. These military
practices have deep historical-institutional roots, as the military was the only security institution
until the mid-20th century.

A reason for the dominance of the military on urban security policies and practices despite
attempts by policymakers to purge military doctrines in favor of civilian ones was that the military
has historically been the only state institution that follows a bureaucratized pyramidal structure. It
is the only public service branch that received any training and professionalization to meet the goals
of the bureau. As economist Jocefina Brunicelli explained in an interview (May 19, 2016), this has
increased the conviction among its leadership that they are the only institution capable of efficiently
running security policy, among other areas of government. The lack of a bureaucratic or
professional civil service permits for the path dependence of inefficient institutions, as they cannot
adjust policies more rationally–in the Weberian definition of a rational bureaucracy–and thus the
Venezuelan security institutions reproduce practices that may or may not achieve the desired policy
goals (Fukuyama 2014). This historical development corresponds with not only the continuity but
with the deepening of the “war on drugs” during the Chávez government after 1998.
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From Redadas to the “War on Drugs”: The rise and decline of mano dura, the 1980s-2000s

The violent events of the Caracazo in early 1989 illustrated the collapse of “pact democracy,” as
the lubricant that was petrodollars or oil rent revenues could no longer grease the wheels of the
Venezuelan political system (Karl 1997). The Caracazo was a series of protests and riots from
mainly working-class barrios of Caracas that went to the streets to voice their discontent at a rapidly
deteriorating economic situation and the sudden lifting of key government subsidies such as
gasoline and transport subsidies following an IMF-sponsored structural adjustment program. The
government responded with heavy-handed military force to quell these riots, leaving hundreds of
dead in its wake (Velasco 2015). Ever since the Caracazo, all elite political actors in Venezuela
have considered the barrios or working-class urban sectors as a sort of powder keg that can become
a volatile source of political instability if not appeased properly (Leon 2020). The redadas of the
1980s and 1990s was, to a certain extent, a tool of the state to fill the void left by the absence of oil
rent revenues, which allowed to impart social control at low costs to security agents (Hernandez
1991; Toro 2016). The costs of raids to security agents were low not just because raids by many
heavily armed agents reduced risks to their wellbeing, but also because they were more cost-
effective than traditional police work requiring a permanent presence in socio-economically
marginalized urban neighborhoods.

Figure 1 depicts violence by security forces during the 1980s and 1990s as relatively low
compared to other periods from 1950 to 2017, even though this was a period of low oil rent
revenues. It was also a period when mano dura urban security was an official policy as mentioned
above. Two factors can explain this. First, the violence rate started to increase dramatically at the
end of the 1980s, both nationally and in Caracas (Leon 2020). Hence, the violence rate by security
forces depicted in figure 1 may show a downward trend from the 1980s to the 1990s relative to the
period from the 1950s to the 1970s, as the rate of state violence was not rising as rapidly as the
overall violence rate. A second explanation could merely be underreporting. The data from the
period from 1950 to 2009 comes from the Health Ministry, which reports violent deaths committed
by security agents only when reported to them as so by the authorities. These explanations are not
exhaustive, and importantly, they are not mutually inclusive.
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As Hugo Chávez came to power in 1999, the discourse explaining high violence rates
during his presidency was one of blaming poor socio-economic conditions and excessive use of
force by state authorities for the country’s violence rates in the cities and nationally. The political
discourse under Chávez translated into practices that moved away from mano dura policies, which
meant the partial withdrawal of security forces from high violence areas of the country, particularly
high violence barrios (Ávila 2017; Briceño-León 2015). Conditioning the change in urban security
policies during the Chávez government was the global oil price boom after 2003. The Chávez
government moved away from mano dura, replacing social control in working-class barrios with
clientelist networks of oil rent distribution (Corrales 2014; Leon 2020).

Perhaps the transition away from mano dura urban security forces was a strategy to avoid
politically costly violent confrontations with criminal gangs as was the strategy in other Latin
American countries. Benjamin Lessing (2018) argues that security policies can condition
crackdowns on violent non-state actors to avoid violence between the state and these organizations.
For example, the “pacification” strategy rested in applying mano dura policies to cartels located in
favelas only when they engaged in violence with other actors, which gives cartels an incentive to
use less violence as a means of conducting their businesses. Similarly, violence rose significantly
in Mexico as the state applied mano dura policies without any conditionality, which resulted in
greater state-cartel violence during the 2000s, as cartels had no incentive to use less violence to
conduct their business (Lessing 2018). In Venezuela during the 2000s, however, violence rates at
the national level and in Caracas kept on rising or at very high rates, while violence by state agents
decreased relative to other periods, as a comparison between figures 1 and 2 shows, which points
to a political strategy behind its security practices.

Security forces during the Chávez government did not enforce the law on violent non-state
organizations such as gangs, mostly found in working-class barrios, by arguing that since around
70 percent of homicides in Venezuela during the 2000s were results of violence between these
groups (Fernandez and Tabares 2012). The government argued that “ajuste de cuentas” or
reckonings between violent gangs was the cause of urban violence and not the withdrawal of the
state from barrios (Aguillón-Vale 2010). This reasoning was not entirely false, but not wholly
accurate either.
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The Chávez government’s reasoning of blaming violence in the barrios on inter-gang

violence blamed the victims of violence for their cause, thus privatizing responsibility for security–
a public good–from the state to the inhabitants of the marginalized barrios because the costs of
engaging gangs were higher than the politico-economic opportunities. The politico-economic
reasoning behind security policies during the 2000s explained why security forces had been
enforcing the law, but selectively, in the barrios of Caracas. Additionally, state institutions are not
electorally affected by high violence rates in urban spaces, as the population has not blamed
governmental ineffectiveness for this socially undesirable outcome (Corrales 2014; Kronick 2014).
The electoral success of the Chávez government relied on a strategy of political polarization, to
create a sizeable political enclave, and a series of oil-rent distribution policies to sway ambivalent
voters that included subsidies of food staples and services, cronyism, and public sector employment
patronage that discriminated beneficiaries based on the continued political support of the
government (Corrales 2014).

Since high violence rates were not an electoral issue, it further lowered the opportunities of
risking workforce and resources in engaging non-state organizations during the 2000s.
Nevertheless, moving away from mano dura policies did not translate into a complete absence of
the state security apparatus from urban areas, and especially working-class barrios. Urban security
policies during the Chávez government shifted significantly to enforcing Draconian drug laws, as
it was economically rational to do so from the state security apparatus.

Venezuela has followed the global “War on Drugs” security policy started by the United
States since the 1970s. Prohibiting the commercial chain of drugs increased the financial
opportunities of meeting the demand for them (Becker et al. 2006), which resulted in the rise of
organizations like gangs that used violence to control high-yield drug-trafficking businesses (B.
Bagley and Rosen 2015; Rodrigues and Labate 2016). Security policies Venezuelan, mainly
enforced by the National Guard, have joined the transnational U.S-led “War on Drugs,” even if the
official discourse during the Chávez government was anti-hegemonic and anti-American in
content.
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Security policies regarding the role and enforcement of drugs were highly paradoxical
during the decade of the 2000s, as it had mixed an anti-American discourse with mano dura or
zero-tolerance anti-drug enforcement. The official security discourse was a mixture of situational
and dispositional explanations for the occurrence of urban violence. It blamed a structure of poverty
and inequality left by the previous governments that enacted neoliberal economic policies, but at
the same time blamed individualistic motivations of greed and want by both drug traffickers and
consumers. Following the Anti-American rhetoric of the Chávez government, in 2004 it suspended
Venezuelan cooperation with the American DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) and expelled its
operatives stationed in Venezuela (Antillano, Zubillaga, and Ávila 2016). However, security
policies and practices maintained the “War on Drugs” as a law enforcement priority, and even
deepened it despite the official discourse.

The Chávez government amended the country’s drug law of 1984 in 2005 and 2010 to
increase the severity of prison sentences for drug traffickers. The 2005 amendment established a
prison sentence for convictions on drug trafficking counts, which ranged from 3 to 20 years in
prison depending on the amount and type of drug in question. The 2010 amendment increased such
penalties to a range of 8 to 30 years imprisonment (Antillano, Zubillaga, and Ávila 2016). It is
noteworthy that from 2005 to 2010 Chávez’s ruling party had complete control of the national
legislature, as opposition parties boycotted the 2005 legislative election. These practices do not
conform to the official discourse that distanced Venezuelan policies from that of the United States’
and the neo-liberal policy paradigm. Notwithstanding the paradox in discourse and practice, the
“War on Drugs” deepened in Venezuela, which resulted, in part, because institutions in charge of
security policies have benefitted from enforcing drug-related offenses. Giving priority to drug-
focused security policy provided state institutions with increased sources of rent accumulation.
Among these sources, one finds rent extraction from the penal or prison system, which is a less-
discussed mechanism of rent procurement by security organizations.

The penal or prison system is a source of resource extraction by security institutions as the
swelling of prisons with detainees and informal self-rule by prisoners created vertical governance
structures allowing for rent production and accumulation. The state had lost the monopoly of force
to control its prisons during the 2000s because it was economically rational (Antillano et al. 2016;
Moreno et al. 2009). The state, through the National Guard, has had control over the perimeter of
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all Venezuelan prisons, but since the 2000s in many Venezuelan prisons, the inmates themselves
were in control of such spaces and not the state. The state’s loss of its monopoly of force within
many of its prisons was primarily due to increased rent predation by parallel governance structures
formed inside prisons, which increases revenues for National Guardsmen guarding prisons and at
the same time reduces their risk-exposure inside their grounds.

Venezuelan prisons seem inhumanely overcrowded, plus heavily armed prisoners instead
of the National Guard often guard prison courtyards; one would think that a Hobbesian chaos
reigns. However, the informal governance structure of the Venezuelan prison has become very
hierarchical and governed by a long array of strict rules created and enforced by rigid pyramidal
organizational structures of criminal gangs endogenous to the Venezuelan prisons (Antillano et al.
2016). The informal inmate-run governance structure of Venezuelan prisons allows the extraction
of rents in mainly two ways. The first one is the smuggling of forbidden goods such as alcohol,
drugs, women, and firearms. Like the drug market, the smuggling of forbidden goods has a higher
“market value” within the prison because of higher costs and risks such as bribing an entire network
of National Guardsmen to look the other way. The director of the Caracas-based NGO Paz Activa,
sociologist Luis Cedeño, mentioned in an interview (April 14, 2016) that firearms and ammunition
inside a Venezuelan prison cost about ten times the price of the legal retail set by the Venezuelan
state-owned manufacturer of military equipment. The second source of rent is the Causa, which is
a fee that inmates must pay to be able to live in minimally humane conditions inside the prison.
The informal governance structure of the prison forces inmates that cannot afford to pay this fee to
live in marginalized and inhumane conditions and could endure violence for their inability to afford
them (Antillano et al. 2016).

Furthermore, a larger inmate population increases the demand for smuggled goods. The
Venezuelan prison population increased dramatically from 2001 to 2011. During this period, the
incarceration rate per 100,000 inhabitants per year doubled from about 75 to over 150 (Leon 2020).
This political economy likely contributed to such high imprisonment rates (Antillano et al. 2016).
Overcrowding in prisons reduces the elasticity of demand for prohibited goods smuggling and
causa payment, as the threat of violence or being incarcerated in unbearable inhumane conditions
by the gang structure running the prison maintained their demand high even if their price was high
relative to the average market price.
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The political economy of the penal system described in this section occurred during a
decade when socio-economic indicators at the macro-level improved significantly during the 2000s
and up to 2014. The rates of households under the national poverty line decreased nationally from
45 percent in 2002 to 24 percent in 2012. In Caracas, the drop in household poverty rates was just
as significant, dropping from 37 percent in 2002 to 15 percent in 2012 (Instituto Nacional de
Estadística 2016). To understand this paradox the intensification of the “War on Drugs” helps to
explain the swelling of the prison population and the politico-economic logic of partly maintaining
security policies from the so-called neoliberal era, even if the official discourse changed with the
Chávez government.

Institutionally, the “War on Drugs” has been beneficial for the military-led security
apparatus. It provided a raison d’être for the militarized security institutions such as the National
Guard by creating a “public enemy.” The historical-institutional security policies negatively
affected marginalized barrios disproportionally, as impoverished individuals from these urban
areas are more likely to be persecuted by security institutions. Some of the persecuted individuals
are violent criminals that the justice system is legitimately trying to exclude from society. However,
security forces imprison other non-violent individuals from barrios such as drug consumers or
micro-drug sellers because they are easier to catch in the act of committing a crime, and the risk of
engaging them is lower to security agents. The dramatic increase of drug charges as reported by
the Venezuelan prosecutor’s office from 3,374 in 2001 to 112,010 in 2011 shows the role of the
penal system in the political economy of Venezuela’s urban security policy (Leon 2020).
Moreover, this was a period when Venezuela’s population growth rate was descending. Actively
protecting the urban population, especially barrio residents, from violence seems to produce higher
costs than opportunities from the state’s security apparatus, which is one of the reasons
policymakers moved away from using mano dura urban security policies during the 2000s.

The return of mano dura urban security policies after 2013

Mano dura urban security policies officially returned in 2015 with the implementation of the OLPs
by the Maduro government (Ávila 2017; Zubillaga and Hanson 2018). However, as one can
appreciate in figure 1, deadly violence by security forces starts to increase after 2013, before the
implementation of the OLPs, even if state violence does skyrocket after 2015. This section argues
 14

that the return of mano dura urban security policies followed a reactive path dependence of rent-
seeking and military practice to structure and re-structure police policies and forces. Therefore, the
behavior of data on deadly violence by Venezuelan security forces since 2013 and the official
return of mano dura since 2015 were due to the restructuration of urban police forces since 2011
that further increased the militarization of urban security forces, which promoted the
implementation of heavy-handed urban security policies. Moreover, the country’s politico-
economic crisis significantly reduced the Maduro government’s ability to quell sources of political
instability, such as working-class barrios through economic clientelism. Therefore, the Maduro
government made ever more use of militaristic repression as a tool of social control, which was
also a strategy by security forces to continue seeking rents.

The restructuring of urban security forces such as with the creation of the PNB occurred
during the Chávez government to respond to domestic political challenges and because of the
centrality that military organizations had gained in its government. In 2011 the Chávez government
officially disbanded the Metropolitan Police (PM) and replaced it with the Policía Nacional
Bolivariana (PNB) or Bolivarian National Police. The PM started to be faced out after 2002 due to
its support of the 2002 coup d’état against President Chávez. This renewed attempt at urban police
reform did not create a caesura in security policy, as the militarized police practices of the National
Guard remained the norm (Carrillo, Herrera, and Ortega 2015; Zubillaga and Hanson 2018).
Civilian-centered security policies did not accompany reforms of urban security forces, much like
security policy reforms in the second half of the 20th century. Moreover, during the PM’s
transitioning period from 2002 until 2011, the National Guard strengthened its position as the
primary security force at the urban and national levels (Antillano, Zubillaga, and Ávila 2016).
Resulting from this was a continuity of military practices in urban security policies that show a
historical-institutional reactive path dependence, as explained in previous sections (Mahoney
2000).

Changes in the role of the military in the Venezuelan political order affected the
restructuring of the urban security forces. The military became a central political organization
within the ruling coalition presided by Hugo Chávez from the early beginnings of his presidency
(Corrales 2014; Pion-Berlin and Trinkunas 2005a; Penfold-Becerra 2007). Military organizations
started undertaking tasks other than national defense, and Chávez appointed high-rank military
 15

officials to key public-owned enterprises. Furthermore, the military became bloated, as evidenced
by the number of military brass that jumped from a couple of dozen, before Chávez’s election as
president, to about 2000 (Ellsworth and Armas 2019). However, the Chávez government had the
incentive to restructure and centralize urban security forces because of domestic political
competition. After 2008, Venezuelan opposition parties started to gain control of crucial
municipalities and states, which took control away of municipal and state police forces from the
national government. Hence, the creation of the PNB also served to centralize security forces under
the command of the national executive.

The centralization of urban security policies and the increased importance and centrality of
the military in many areas towards the last years of Chávez’s government created the foundations
for mano dura security forces to make a comeback after 2013. The increase of killings committed
by security forces even before the official return of heavy-handed security policies in 2015, shown
in figure 1, evidenced that the foundations of mano dura laid by the Chávez government. Security
forces had not been absent from high crime areas like working-class barrios, but they followed
policies of enforcing the law on crimes that brought more politico-economic opportunities than
costs, such as enforcing Draconian drug laws (Leon 2020), as explained in the previous section.
Venezuelan security policies during the Chávez government avoided engaging violent criminal
gangs as the costs of doing so were higher than the opportunities, which explains why violent
deaths by security forces were relatively low during the 2000s, as depicted in figure 1. However,
the militaristic path dependence exhibited by Venezuela’s security policies alone does not explain
the skyrocketing of violent deaths committed by security forces after 2013. The high quantitative
increase of the use of deadly force by the state is also a product of the country’s transition of its
political order.

Venezuela’s political order changed substantially after 2015 when the country experiences
a transition from a competitive authoritarian order to a full authoritarian one. Changes in
Venezuela’s political economy have conditioned political transitions in the past. Thanks to an oil-
induced booming economy from the 1950s until the 1970s, Venezuela transitioned from military
dictatorships into a democratic regime that gave all political actors access to oil rent windfalls
regardless of whether they were in government at the time or not. After the 1970s, access to oil
rents becomes ever more exclusive to political actors outside the ruling coalition due to decreasing
 16

amounts of oil windfalls, which resulted from the global oil price bust in the early 1980s (Karl
1997). During the Chávez government, the global oil price boom of the early 2000s compounded
with the return of the military as the central actor in Venezuela (Corrales 2014; Pion-Berlin and
Trinkunas 2005a). Although the Maduro government gave continuity to many of his predecessor’s
political and economic policies, Venezuela’s politico-economic conditions changed when high oil
revenues no longer sustained high economic productivity after 2014, thus causing a severe
economic crisis.

The changes to Venezuela’s political economy forced a change in the country’s political
order. In December of 2015, the Maduro government lost that year’s parliamentary elections by a
large margin. After that, the incumbent government has not allowed for free and fair electoral
contests to take place. An illustrative example was the presidential elections of 2018, when the
government banned all main opposition parties and candidates from challenging Maduro at the
ballot, among other electoral irregularities (Corrales 2018). In addition, the use of security forces
to repress public demonstrations against the incumbent government has become the norm (Human
Rights Watch 2016; OHCHR 2019).

The political decay of Venezuela’s political order since the 1970s descended into what a
competitive authoritarian regime (Levitsky and Way 2002), which is one where polyarchy (Dahl
1971) became absent, but that utilizes regularly held free elections to legitimize its claim on power.
In other words, Schumpeterian electoral conditions existed, but without the main characteristics of
a liberal democracy such as the rule of law, separation of powers, and polyarchy. Importantly, high
global oil prices and high domestic oil production levels conditioned the ability of the Chávez
government to legitimize its claim on power through the ballot box, as they financed large
clientelist networks of patronage that assured the regimes political support by the majority of the
population (Corrales 2014; Penfold-Becerra 2007).

The conditions sustaining a competitive authoritarian regime for more than a decade
changed dramatically after 2014 with the global oil price bust and massive drops in domestic oil
production in the subsequent years. Global oil prices collapsed from the annual average of USD
106 per barrel in 2013 to roughly USD 49 per barrel in 2015 (U.S. Energy Information
 17

Administration 2019), while average oil production per day declined from 2.15 million barrels per
day in 2016 to 1.34 million barrels per day in 2018 (OPEC 2013-2018). The decline in global oil
prices and domestic production made themselves felt in macroeconomic indicators such as real
annual GDP growth, which precipitated from 5.6 percent in 2012, to -18 percent in 2018. Similarly,
the annual inflation rate skyrocketed from 21 percent to an astonishing 1.3 million percent, also
from 2012 to 2018 (International Monetary Fund 2019). The severe changes in Venezuela’s
economic structure led to a transition from a competitive authoritarian regime to a consolidated
authoritarian regime. Similarly, macroeconomic changes conditioned changes in the political
economy of urban security policies, which led to radical increases in mano dura security practices
as exemplified by the OLPs.

Tellingly, the return of mano dura urban security policies corresponds with waves of nation-
wide anti-government protests of 2014 and 2017. During both years, hundreds of thousands of
people protested worsening economic conditions and the Maduro government’s authoritarian
creep. Unlike protests in previous years, and especially when Chávez was still alive, these protests
involved many people from working-class urban areas such as barrios, and many protests even
took place in those urban areas. The Maduro government deployed the National Guard and the
PNB to quell the mass protests since 2014 forcefully. From 2014 to 2018, Venezuelan security
forces arbitrarily arrested 12,949 people due to their participation in anti-government protests, and
security forces subsequently arraigned 812 of these detained individuals at military courts, which
stands in clear violation of both Venezuelan and international law (Luis Roche, Bronce, and
Miranda 2018). Furthermore, the incumbent government readily made use of colectivos armados
to aid security forces in quelling street protests, which are proto-paramilitary armed criminal gangs
that are loyal to the Chavista government in exchange for economic and political benefits. Out of
the 134 protesters killed in 2017, about 40 percent of these were killed by security forces, while an
estimated 52 percent murdered by colectivos armados (Foro Penal 2018).

The mass protests of early 2014 occurred early in the Maduro presidency. The claim to the
power of the incumbent government was frail, as Maduro won the presidency by a margin of just
1.5% in 2013, which shows its limited political capital. Importantly, the 2014 protests occurred
while the global price of oil was high, and thus oil rent windfalls were plentiful. However, since
late 2012 it was evident that the expansive clientelist networks guaranteeing popular support for
 18

the Chavez and Maduro governments were reaching its limits and hyperinflation was a real
possibility if global oil prices were to bust (Freije 2014; Vera 2017).

The subsequent drop in oil prices after late 2014 marked the end of the clientelist
distribution of oil windfalls as the primary method of maintaining popular majoritarian support and
of preventing working-class barrios from becoming a source of political instabilities as per the
Venezuelan social imaginary. The Venezuelan political class has seen barrio inhabitants as a
population that can destabilize a government if not adequately controlled ever since the Caracazo
of 1989 (Velasco 2015). Perhaps this was one of the reasons why the Maduro government initiated
the OLPs in 2015, although it was an electoral gambit for his party to gain popularity towards the
parliamentary elections of late 2015 (Ávila 2017). Whatever the initial reasoning was, Maduro’s
party lost the 2015 parliamentary elections by a margin of about 15 percent to the opposition party
coalition and the OLPs did not go away.

The implementation of mano dura urban security policies remained after Maduro’s
electoral defeat in 2015, as shown in figure 1, which was the last election where opposition parties
could freely compete with the incumbent government. Following the national wave of protests in
2017, the Maduro government created the Fuerzas de Acciones Especiales (FAES), which were
nominally the special forces division of the PNB. However, the FAES was a heavily militarized
unit that went on to consolidate the leading and most loyal strike force of the incumbent
government. Police researcher Keymer Avila explains that:

“The FAES don’t respond to the law, but to a logic of war, or worse, extermination,
because wars usually happen between two sides with a relatively equivalent
firepower: this is completely asymmetric. When we study the deaths caused by state
security forces in these operations [by the FAES], the death rate between policemen
and civilians is 1:122, in other words, 122 civilians die for every police officer
killed…It’s not under the logic of citizen security, where a criminal must be
detained within the law: they just understand that they must ‘take down elements’
that aren’t people but enemies” (quoted in Caracas Chronicles 2019).
The mano dura security policies enforced by the FAES and other Venezuelan security forces
overwhelmingly affect working-class barrios, which is why the UN high commissioner for human
rights recently called for the Venezuelan government to disband the FAES and end the OLPs
(OHCHR 2019). However, these operations have taken place as they replaced the expansive
clientelist network of oil rent distribution as tools of social control due to the transition from a
competitive authoritarian to consolidated authoritarian political order. Importantly, in times of
 19

depressed oil rent windfalls, the institutionalization of mano dura urban security policies places
the security apparatus in a privileged position to rent-seek (Ávila 2017). Therefore, Venezuela’s
political transition to a consolidated authoritarian political order under a path dependence of
militarized urban security policies has allowed for the spectacular and socially detrimental return
of mano dura since 2015.

Conclusions

The skyrocketing share of homicides by security forces since 2015 shown in figure 1 results from
a reactive path dependency (Mahoney 2000). Military institutions or “rules of the game” remained
the backbone of urban security policies, and policymakers and security organizations brought mano
dura security policies in reaction to prolonged decreases in oil revenues. Attempts to demilitarize
urban security policies and forces were mostly unsuccessful, as military agents headed civilian
police forces such as the Metropolitan Police, and thus, they carried over their institutional
practices. The implementation of military institutional practices in urban security policies formed
the foundation of mano dura, which involved the use of heavily armed military-trained units that
raided high violence areas such as working-class barrios. Since the mid-20th century, Venezuelan
policymakers made use of mano dura urban security policies contingent on oil rent windfalls.
During times of high oil rent windfalls, such as during the Chávez government in the 2000s,
distribution of oil rents through clientelist networks substituted militarized repression as a tool of
controlling and stabilizing marginalized urban areas such as barrios. Similarly, during times of
depressed oil rent windfalls, as it was the case since 2015, policymakers resorted to mano dura
urban security forces as a tool of social control, which one measures through the indicator of state
killings as a share of total homicides.

However, this chapter pushes back against the argument that Venezuelan state institutions
were absent from the Venezuelan barrios when policymakers officially moved away from mano
dura policies, as the literature often suggests (Briceño-León 2006; 2015). During the last decades,
security forces enforced the law only when the opportunities for rent extraction outweighed the
costs. For example, enforcing the law disproportionally on individuals and groups, mainly from
the barrios, engaged in micro-drug trafficking followed the global “War on Drugs” paradigm, gave
 20

security forces a raison d´être, and became a source of rent extraction and distribution by security
organizations.

However, Venezuela is not a Latin American outlier concerning the implementation of

mano dura by security forces as a way for these organizations to gain a raison d´être and optimize
rent-seeking. The vilification of the Maras Salvatruchas in Central America gives security forces
in those countries a clear enemy–usually located in poor urban communities–that must be
eradicated by them (Wolf 2012). In countries such as Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico declarations
of “war” against drug cartels also provide security forces with a clear enemy. The raison d´être
provided by the actual or constructed presence of organized criminal entities allows security forces
in many Latin American countries to lobby for further governmental funds, legal privileges, or
reach lucrative co-habitation agreements with drug traffickers (Lessing 2018). What probably
makes the Venezuelan case different than other Latin American counterparts is that the dramatic
return of mano dura security policies after 2015 coincided with, and was a product of, the country’s
political transition.

The skyrocketing share of killing by security forces illustrated in figure 1 is also due to the
country’s political transition and not just to the absence of oil rent windfalls. The transition from a
competitive authoritarian political order to a consolidated authoritarian one placed the military, and
thus the entire security apparatus, as the vital component of the ruling coalition presided by Nicolas
Maduro. Therefore, mano dura security policies make a dramatic comeback not only because of
following the historical-institutional logic of using militarized repression as a tool of social control
but because such policies put the security apparatus in a privileged position to rent-seek in
conditions of depressed oil rent windfalls. The need for a governmental agency such as security
forces to assert their raison d´être did not exist during times of high oil rent windfalls. During
periods of high oil income, different stakeholders of the ruling coalition had less need to prove their
raison d´être to rent-seek. Moreover, the need to legitimize the ruling coalition through competitive
elections made the use of state violence politically toxic. These conditions were no longer present
after oil rent windfalls plummeted. Security forces had free rein to enforce mano dura policies after
the ruling coalition no longer required electoral competition to legitimize its stake in power, which
helps explain the dramatic return of state violence since 2015 in the name of law enforcement or
“pacification” that disproportionally affected working-class urban communities.
 21

This chapter contributes to the literature on security policies and political transitions in
Latin America by examining the historical-institutional processes that brought about the return of
mano dura security policies to Venezuela. These findings do not pretend to predict the future paths
of security policies, in line with this volume’s definition of socio-political transition. Transitions
are processes with uncertain outcomes. However, future research ought to examine the outcome of
the military’s return to Latin American politics. Although the time of classical military
dictatorships has passed, militaries have become crucial organizations in the ruling coalitions in
other countries such as El Salvador. Future research on security policies and politics ought to
inquire how to put the military genie back in the bottle and how to transition to effective civilian
police forces that can gain the trust and cooperation of the communities in which they operate,
especially working-class urban areas.

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