Bulletin of Latin American Research, Vol. 40, No. 1, pp.

69–83, 2021

‘Democracy under Threat’: The

Foundation of the Opposition
in Venezuela
YBISKAY GONZÁLEZ
University of Newcastle, Australia

This article sheds new light on how the Venezuelan Opposition was cre-
ated and, more widely, on contemporary Venezuelan politics. By focusing
on the Opposition’s articulation of democracy, the article examines how
this movement became possible and how it succeeded in maintaining sup-
port. Opinion articles covering the period October 2001 to April 2002
were analysed using the theoretical framework of logics within discourse
theory. The article argues that although the Opposition succeeded in
maintaining its support throughout Chávez’s government, it contributed
to the polarised politics that currently characterises Venezuela.

Keywords: democracy, Opposition, polarisation, populism, Venezuela.

Since the former President of Venezuela Hugo Chávez introduced a new discourse of
political participation that attempted to redefine state-society relationships in 1999,
Venezuelan politics has been in constant turmoil. The cycle of Opposition protests, how-
ever, only started in November 2001 when a group of business and social actors rejected
some of the new decrees signed by Chávez as part of the Enabling Law passed by the
National Assembly. The Enabling Law had given the new President one year to pass a
set of laws to institutionalise new state-society relationships after approval of the new
Constitution in December 1999, and during that year Venezuela’s traditionally powerful
groups had not been able to influence the law-making process. These groups had become
accustomed to controlling government decision-making from 1958 to 1998, through an
inter-elite power-sharing agreement, the Punto Fijo pact, which served as the basis of
the democratic political regime after the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez.
During that first year, Chávez’s government had made changes affecting the demo-
cratic institutions such as increasing power in the executive branch, and the Enabling
Law gave him authority to legislate without congressional approval. However, the
government at that time was acting according to the new Constitution (Coppedge,
2003), and the Enabling Law was, in fact, legal and had been used by other democratic
Venezuelan governments in the past. Moreover, the changes introduced by those decree
laws were quite mild in their impact on the existing elitist formation of the state-society
relationship (Spanakos, 2011). Nevertheless, the cycle of protest very soon turned into
demands for the removal of the President, while the aforementioned group of business
and social actors began to present themselves as a movement defending democracy
from the Chávez government.

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This article analyses how this group used the signifier ‘democracy’ and articulated
a narrative of ‘democracy under threat’ to explain how traditional elites succeeded in
creating the Venezuelan Opposition. It is commonly argued that the Chávez govern-
ment was undemocratic from the beginning, and hence that the Opposition decided to
organise and mobilise support against it (Corrales, 2011). This article challenges that
argument by examining the emergence of the Opposition in a different way. It considers
the Venezuela’s socio-historical context rather than viewing exclusively the normative
considerations of democracy that have limited the political transformation demanded
by most Venezuelans.
Following Laclau’s observation that much of the success of any political project
depends on the formation of coalitions through logics of articulation, this article exam-
ines Opposition statements about democracy and calls to oppose the Chávez government
through an analysis of their discursive strategies. Even though the Opposition’s strategies
have received attention from various scholars (García-Guadilla, 2005; Cannon, 2008,
2014), little has been written about exactly how the Opposition succeeded in organ-
ising and mobilising support. This article pays special attention to the beginning of
the political conflict and the common elements of the Opposition during the conflict,
with a particular focus on the media as a site of struggle over the definition and mean-
ings of democracy. It considers newspaper opinion articles covering the period Octo-
ber 2000 to April 2002 to trace the common discursive strategies of the Opposition’s
movement.
The article is structured as follows. First, it examines analytical concepts to demon-
strate the Opposition’s logic of articulation to create its coalition. Second, it outlines
the methodological strategy used in the study. Third, it analyses the Opposition’s artic-
ulations of democracy in terms of its inner logics. Fourth, it discusses the binary dis-
tinction us/them used by the Opposition and provides an interpretation of its logic.
The article concludes by arguing that when the right is faced with the left’s political
projects, it moves into a terrain of claims to absolute truth. This becomes embedded in
the discursive creation of an ‘other’ who is an invalid political subject which favours
polarisation.

Discourse Theory and Logics

Combining deconstruction and discourse analysis methods, Laclau proposed ‘logic’ as
a category of analysis to explain articulatory practices (1996b: 59–60). A ‘logic’ refers
first to the rules governing a practice, institution or system of relations between objects
and, second, to the kinds of entities (and their relations) presupposed by the operation
of such rules (Howarth, 2010: 323). In Laclau’s theoretical framework, there is no stable
system of signification and the construction of meanings never ends, while the role of
politics is to try to organise such systems of signification through establishing what does
and does not threaten the very system. This framework is based on an understanding
of discourses as regimes of truth, similar to those proposed by Foucault (Mills, [1997]
2004: 45–46), which Laclau identifies as the sedimentation of meanings (Laclau, 1990:
59) or social logics. But since systems of meaning are not stable but contingent, the way
these systems settle is through repetition and power. Hence, Laclau refers to political
logics as the practices involved in ‘the institution of the social’ as well as its contestation
(Laclau, 2005: 117). Thus, in this approach, the focus of analysis is on the processes of
constructing, stabilising, and transforming society by which political groups seek either
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 The Foundation of the Opposition in Venezuela

to sustain the current socio-political order or to dismantle any opposition coalition while
building a new order.
In this endeavour, the formation of identity is essential to securing support. Identity is
constructed because individuals are not constituted by any particular pre-existing con-
dition guiding their political decisions (Howarth, 2013). Instead, individuals can act on
their own through the process of identification to become active agents or political sub-
jects under certain conditions (Laclau, 1996a: 54). Following Laclau’s framework, the
success of a political project depends both on the understanding and objectives shared
by its supporters and on the formation of identity, regardless of class, race, economic
or ideological differences. Fantasmatic logics are relevant here, as they aim to capture
the way in which subjects are attracted to a practice either to support or to reject politi-
cal projects (Glynos, 2008). Fantasy appears as an essential component of any political
project, since it provides a view of the world as well structured, hiding its political dimen-
sion (Laclau, 1990: 64). Through the construction of myths and metaphors, including
the metaphorical binary opposition of ‘us’ and ‘them’, fantasy constructs a totalising
horizon of meaning, an ‘ideology’, that denies the contingent, precarious, and paradox-
ical character of society.
Myth refers to ‘a narrative-based representation of intangible but evocative expe-
riences that are unconsciously linked to emotions such as sadness, happiness and fear’
(Charteris-Black, 2009: 100). Myths are used for positive or negative evaluation to repair
the dislocations experienced by the individual (Howarth, 2013: 171). This makes them
crucial in concealing the contingency of social relations and suppressing or contain-
ing the dimensions of challenge and contestation (Howarth, 2013: 205). On the other
hand, narratives are persuasive strategies that function to establish a text-intrinsic logic
(Montesano, 2011: 171). They ‘refer to the ways in which we construct disparate facts
in our own worlds and weave them together cognitively to make sense of our reality’
(Patterson and Monroe, 1998: 315). For instance, there are narratives of a promise of
fullness to come such as ‘modernisation’, and narratives of terror that foretell disas-
ter (Howarth, 2010: 322) such as ‘communism’. In narratives, a key role is played by
empty signifiers: terms that lack any direct observable relationship with specific mean-
ing. As Laclau (2006) argued, they represent an absent and transcendent totality that can
never be fully captured or obtained; examples of empty signifiers are ‘democracy’ and
‘freedom’.
For the purposes of this article, the first concept, social logics, helps characterise the
dominant values underlying the Opposition’s notion of ‘democracy’ and its implications
for social practice at that time, providing a picture of what they said. The second concept,
political logics, explains how the Opposition’s discourse of democracy evolved and func-
tioned, revealing how the Opposition sought to stabilise the contestation introduced by
the Chávez government. Finally, fantasmatic logics explains how some stories structured
the desires and fears of the Opposition, revealing why their discourse of ‘democracy’ was
appealing for some groups and not others.

Methodological Strategy
The data for this study consists of 27 pro-Opposition opinion articles published in
the period of eighteen months from October 2000 to April 2002 in the Venezuelan
newspapers El Nacional and El Universal. These two privately owned newspapers
were the most influential in shaping political debates on democracy at that time in

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Venezuela (Romero and Lugo, 2003). This period is considered the foundational period
of the Opposition, because October 2000 saw the first protest against the government’s
education policy, and January 2002 saw the first massive march against the government
itself. Furthermore, during this period the first national strike was convened and held on
10 December 2001 by an already constituted Opposition (according to the media). The
data covers opinion articles written by journalists and academics, collected using the
search criteria of topicality (democracy) and an explicit reference to a position against
the government.
It should be noted that this study does not address linguistic issues. Instead, it focuses
on discursive formations and discursive strategies, regarding these as the way to expose
the logics identified in the theoretical framework. Particularly helpful for this task is
Fairclough’s (2003) distinction between intertextuality (the linkage of all texts to other
texts both in the past and in the present) and assumptions (types of implicitness or
meanings that can be taken as given). To Fairclough, different texts share a discourse
when they are located in relation to the same (network of) social practice and represent
the same aspects of the world within the same chain of events. Thus, the analysis in
this article is concerned with identifying what discourses are drawn upon and how
they are articulated together (Fairclough, 2003: 128) while considering their underlying
assumptions. It is not concerned with how the newspapers represented the Opposition,
but with the discourses that were used at that time to oppose the government and how
they were articulated.

The Opposition’s Articulations

Social Logics: The Discourse of Democracy

Laclau (2005) observed that ‘democracy’ can function as an empty signifier because of
its ambiguous registration sites in which different forces try to establish their particular
meanings. Filling the meaning of ‘democracy’ is a battle in which a certain meaning
succeeds when it becomes common sense.
In Venezuela, ‘democracy’ was taken as a guide to capitalist modernisation, which
resembled the promise of turning Venezuela into a developed country with the help of
oil resources (Coronil, 2008). As in other Latin American countries, the democratisation
process was constructed using a framework of modernity and progress, which left unal-
tered traditional, unequal power relations. This process of democratisation, as Taylor
describes it, included specific normative conceptions about the nature of human beings
that are inscribed in a tradition of modern identity rather than specific sociocultural
realities (Taylor, 1994: 64–78). He points out that these normative conceptions focus on
the development of a prosperous society, and that underdeveloped countries understand
democratisation more as a prerequisite to promote a liberal regime than a process that
implies the capacity of a socio-historical system to generate and maintain the appropri-
ate political institutions for a particular society. Hence, liberal representative democracy
must be understood as a form of society, and not merely as a form of government (Lefort,
1988: 14), because it implies a universal normativity whose tendency to rationalisation
ignores cultural and historical differences.
To Foucault, this normative validity based on the law and administrative mecha-
nisms does not provide a guarantee of freedom, equality or democracy (Flyvbjerg, 2000:
11). Instead, Foucault demonstrates that those norms are discursive/power formations

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sustaining epistemic foundations that universalise a particular understanding of politics.

The political significance of such an epistemic foundation is that it normalises certain
relationships of knowledge, ethics and power, making sense of political frontiers that
favour a system of hierarchical social differentiation between those who are called
to govern and those who are governed. For instance, Urbaneja wrote in El Universal
that ‘what defines a democratic society is its ability to discuss everything, and that
putting society under the invocation of a man’s thinking goes directly against that
essential characteristic’ (Urbaneja, 2000). In the same article, however, Urbaneja’s main
concern was not how to make dialogue possible, but ‘the problem of Bolivarianism’,
which he summarised in the following way: ‘Venezuela becomes a country with its
Bible, or its Koran or its Torah or its particular Gospel: Bolivarianism’ (Urbaneja,
2000). While focusing on Bolivarianism as a problem, there were no more references
to the meaning of the term ‘democratic’. At that time, the main concern was ‘to
rebuild the confidence of the productive sectors’, as Garavini (2001) wrote in the same
newspaper.
Polyarchy is a dominant understanding of democracy that normalises and repro-
duces an understanding of political participation around ‘governance’ (Robinson, 2008).
Political agency remains in the hands of the representatives, but technocratic actors and
interest groups shape political decision-making. As Dahl (1989), the major theorist of
polyarchy, argues, citizens vote in elections and may later formulate their preferences
to their peers through collective action to influence government policy decisions. Under
this model, the spaces for political participation are formal and institutionalised, which
reduces the choices of those who are not professionals, associated with non-government
organisations or organised in some way. Consequently, not all individuals are recog-
nised as political agents and citizenship struggles are silenced or, when considered, are
mediated by political parties.
In Venezuela it is also evident that those who occupy positions of state control access
to oil wealth (Coronil, 2011). The political economy of wealth and privilege comes from
being close to political power, helping some individuals to capture access to oil income
(Tinker Salas, 2009; Sanchez-Lasaballett, 2012). During the Punto Fijo period, networks
and alliances between traditional economic power and a new middle class gave way to
the operation of informal and formal rules within the state: what Rey (2003) calls a
‘semi-corporatist model’ for making public decisions. This model allowed the elite to
access government decision-making, and limited possibilities for any popular agendas.
Thus, not only were patrimonial relations created within the Venezuelan state, they were
also legitimised as democratic politics.
With the new Constitution and the new model of participatory democracy under
Chávez, it was possible to see changes in the understanding of democratic politics in
Venezuela. Those changes had the potential to affect understandings and practices of
politics and therefore the process of the patrimonial relations with the state. Thus, the
objective of the new movement against the government may be seen as the defence of
a mode of regulation, a conservative force against political transformation. However,
given Venezuela’s crisis of representation in the 1980s, which Crips (1996) described
as the combination of Venezuelans’ perception of the dominant political parties as ille-
gitimate and the rigidities of the Venezuelan democratic institutions which restricted
participation in the policymaking process, Venezuelan political parties were not strong
enough to face the demands of change and the popularity of Chávez. It was the eco-
nomic sector that had to organise and mobilise support to mount challenges to the left.
To do so, these groups mainly used the private media (Domínguez, 2011).
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Political Logics, Politics of Truth-Telling

The media became the most important expression of the Opposition, as it was the
terrain of signifying practices in which they represented themselves as trustworthy and
possessors of the truth (Schiller, 2011). As Kitzberger points out, the Opposition concen-
trated its energies on the media once they considered themselves incapable of contesting
power in the electoral sphere (2009: 178). The media gave these movements an immedi-
ate space in which they could display what Samet calls ‘reporting journalism’ (2017: 5) as
factual evidence to produce authenticity and convince the audience of what democracy
means while they represented themselves as the legitimate enunciators of truth.
Analysis here shows how the media asserted that Chávez had not paid attention to
the recommendations or advice of traditional civil society organisations (CSOs) such
as the Federación de Cámaras y Asociaciones de Comercio y Producción de Venezuela
(FEDECAMARAS, Venezuelan Chambers of Commerce and Production Association),
the Confederación de Trabajadores de Venezuela (CTV, Venezuelan Trade Union Associ-
ation) and the Catholic Church. Indeed, the media at that time commonly referred to the
term ‘participation’ as a top-down approach of ‘informing’ actions and behaviours on
the side of those supporting the government or chavismo, and complained that there was
no dialogue between the government and the traditional elites. Chávez’s background as
a military official also contributed to this image. For example, Marta Colomina (2001),
a prominent Opposition media personality, opined that: ‘There is no participation on
the part of Chávez: either you obey him blindly, or you are his enemy’. To the CSOs,
Chávez had used the term ‘participation’ deceptively because of the absence of influence
by them on government policy. Because polyarchy was considered to be the only way of
organising the government as ‘democracy’, Chávez was not seen as democratic by those
traditional groups.
The Chávez government started to articulate popular demands for social and polit-
ical change by promoting a new discourse of participatory democracy (Ellner, 2008).
Chávez started a weekly broadcast, called ‘Aló Presidente’, something no Venezuelan
president had even done, and used the national ‘cadenas’ (a space that all private broad-
cast TV channels and radio stations are required to devote to government messages)
as a ‘way to combat’ the Opposition (Muñoz, 2009). Moreover, Chávez referred to
liberal-representative democracy in negative terms (Wilpert, 2011: 102), reflecting the
Latin American left’s distrust of this model of democracy (Pearce, 2004). As Ellner
demonstrates, early chavistas believed that Venezuela’s previous liberal democratic
regime had discouraged and blocked popular participation in political life (Ellner,
2011: 425), a view which is shared by most Latin American social movements that
have demanded social and political change through more direct political participation
(Dagnino, 2006).
The dominant media, however, did not give coverage to popular demands, and when
these demands were considered, the media represented them as uncivilised and undemo-
cratic. The media also legitimised its claims by publishing opinion pieces written by
academics and qualified ‘expert’ individuals. This reinforced a traditional hegemonic
political culture of legitimacy which is deeply raced and classed. In doing so, it down-
played and elided the participatory innovations of popular politics and was able to
accuse the government of being anti-democratic or illegitimate. As such, the opinion arti-
cles adopted conviction rhetoric, which Charteris-Black defines as a style of communicat-
ing opinions by defining what is right and wrong in no uncertain terms (Charteris-Black,
2009: 224–225). Such a style limits the arguments available to political transformation
and normalises certain discourses regarding what is or is not legitimate.

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This conviction rhetoric sought the removal of Chávez from office. However, the
strategy also anchored the Opposition within the model of polyarchy as speaking ‘truth
for truth’s sake’, implying that it was rationally pointless to question the polyarchy model
even though there were increasing demands for change. This reasoning had three main
implications for the Opposition movement. First, the Opposition saw popular demands
for transformation as wrong. They barely mentioned the struggles and popular reali-
ties at that time, whereas Chávez was creating subversive ideological messages capable
of mobilising large masses of the public towards radical political action and identifica-
tion. Thus, the Opposition could organise and mobilise its support around the signifier
‘democracy’, but this signifier was not enough to articulate a discourse capable of desta-
bilising the new articulation of radical change.
The second implication of the Opposition’s strategy was that the possibility of dis-
cussing democracy as something other than just polyarchy was considerably reduced.
This path led away from deliberation or negotiation with ‘the other’, which is simi-
lar to the practices from the Punto Fijo period reproducing a protective relationship
between the enlightened elites and the ‘people’, and a technocratic consensus around
‘governance’. In this sense, the politics of truth enacted by the Opposition reiterated
an earlier, old-fashioned form of exclusionary practice, emphasising continuity with the
discredited democracy of the Punto Fijo era. Furthermore, instead of articulating a polit-
ical project capable of adapting its understanding of democracy to the popular demands
for transformation or able to deliberate with the government, the Opposition identified
themselves as reluctant to change their way of thinking.
The third implication was that any action by the government had to be wrong, even
when the government was attempting to bring some benefit to the majority of the pop-
ulation. These accusations of wrongness were made through a normative framework
whereby government actions in favour of the poor were hidden. Furthermore, the truth
of the Opposition’s claims could become verifiable only by the government’s failure,
which made it possible to classify the Venezuelan Opposition as rejecting the regime
and political system altogether rather than just disagreeing with it.
In this way, the Opposition became trapped in their representation of truth/falsehood
narratives, blaming the other as wrong while representing themselves as correct. But
such a politics of truth offers a way of thinking about self-other relations in which the
‘wrong other’ is an enemy, a practice which the Opposition consistently accused Chávez
of using. Clearly, this way of representing existing social reality cannot contribute to
conflict resolution, because it sustains a representation similar to a battle between ‘good
and evil’ that locates blame on one side of the conflict and only gains supporters when
the other is represented as wrong.

Fantasmatic Logic, Democracy under Threat

In addition to the representation of the Chávez government as authoritarian, two discur-
sive formations were identified around democracy which worked to create a narrative
of ‘democracy under threat’: images of backwardness as a blockage to modernisation;
and an image of the country as divided as a consequence of the conflict originated by
the government.
Backwardness constitutes the risk of losing an imaginary that Coronil represents as
the nationalist discourse of civilisation advancing over barbarism, and the desire of the
Venezuelan elites to have a country that is recognised as civilised by the international

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community (Coronil, 1994: 652). For instance, expressions of backwardness and

underdevelopment are evident in the following text from El Universal:

Enough! Enough of abuses of authority, of voluntarism, of arbitrariness!

Enough of insults, disqualifications, and mockery! Enough of exacerbating
hatreds, of dividing the Venezuelans! … The country is awake, united in
civic action, and will not allow this government to continue taking it along
the paths of backwardness, confrontation and underdevelopment. (Jaimes,
2001)

The expression ‘backwardness, confrontation and underdevelopment’ exemplifies how

the Opposition articulated its opposite – ‘modernity, consensus and progress’ – as an
imaginary or desire that Venezuelans hold. By representing the Chávez government as
the negative identity of western ‘modernisation’, the logic of fantasy appears as the driv-
ing force behind this construction. In providing reasons and motivation for opposing
Chávez’s government, the Opposition was successful.
The most essential antagonistic dimension of this shared idea came from a nation-
alist imaginary and neoliberal discourse that articulated economic development with
the state’s power to favour national or transnational business sectors. This dominant
understanding of whom the state has to benefit also helped to represent the Chávez gov-
ernment as vulgar and populist, although most of the former presidents of Venezuela had
used populist articulations to win elections (Rey, 1991). As Brading (2013) argues, the
main difference between the Chávez administration and those of previous administra-
tions was that the traditional groups could not influence the decision-making process, as
they had done previously. In other words, this ‘anti-populism’ discourse could, in effect,
be articulated with a neoliberal economic discourse (Estrada, 2008: 415). Hence, by
including terms such as ‘lies’, ‘populism’ and ‘traps’ in the text cited from El Universal,
the Opposition represented the government as wrong. As Rovira Kaltwasser argues, the
Latin American right presents itself as an advocate of macroeconomic equilibrium in
the face of the irresponsibility of indebtedness and state spending, which characterises
its members as being mainly of neoliberal economic ideology (2014: 40). Regarding how
society was being divided, the Opposition stated that it was Chávez who brought the
conflict to Venezuela, as illustrated by the following text from El Universal:

While Chávez attacks, insults, disqualifies and entertains himself in his

exhausting cadenas, the Venezuelan people are dying of hunger and fall
into the hands of unleashed delinquency. Despite all these significant
problems, Venezuelan society is divided and fractioned more every day due
to this continuous discourse of hatred. (Alfonso, 2000)

In Latin America, elite groups represent conflict as one of the significant obstacles to
democracy. In Venezuela, particularly during the era of the Punto Fijo pact, dominant
political parties reduced the space for political opposition by arguing that political debate
could undermine the political regime. Indeed, during that period in Venezuela, there was
no political opposition (Zahler, 2017). Generally speaking, liberal theories of democracy
represent conflict as problematic. If we look at democratisation theory through the con-
cept of consolidated democracy, we see how the eradication of conflict is promoted in
the name of democracy, through the argument that political participation should not
challenge the rules of the democratic game. In fact, a consensual democratic politics has
been normalised as a paradigm, a line of interpretation, through which conflict must be

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eradicated (Little, 2014: 41–42). For instance, political opposition is considered to be

a positive thing in polyarchy when political parties oppose government policies, but if
debate generates conflict it is immediately assumed to be the fault of one side behaving
anti-democratically. Thus, conflict reinforced the representation of the Chávez govern-
ment as undemocratic.
The Opposition used what Cannon (2004) calls the ‘myth of a united Venezuela’ –
that is, an assumption that there is no long-standing social antagonism in Venezuela – in
order to blame Chávez for having originated the conflict. Cannon observes that this myth
emphasises consensus and the idea of a country with opportunities for all, regardless
of race or ethnicity, as the main tools to achieve democracy. However, this myth con-
ceals the existence of very real social and racial polarisation (Cannon, 2004: 286) and
maintains the self-representation of the Opposition as creators of ‘democracy’. What is
excluded from this myth is the historical and contemporary demands for recognition,
redistribution and representation of the popular sectors, including the black and indige-
nous communities. In such an understanding of consensus, the popular sectors pay a
high price by being silenced and excluded from politics, whilst their protests are seen as
undemocratic or even barbaric (Smilde, 2004).
By representing the Chávez government as not playing by the rules of polyarchy, as an
obstacle to modernisation, and as a threat to ‘the myth of a united Venezuela’, the Oppo-
sition portrayed it as the greatest hazard to democracy. This threat was articulated with
the support of dominant discourses and myths which provided a crucial background
into which Chávez himself was inserted, rather than by attacking the new but not yet
well defined, political project of chavismo directly. The singular focus on the figure of
Chávez helped articulate the narrative of democracy under threat, while ignoring popu-
lar struggles to transform democracy. This attention to Chávez can be seen as a strategy
not only to limit the field of action for the left’s political project but also to mask the
complexity of politics and power (Motta, 2011: 44; Cannon, 2018: 487).
Since these two discursive formations of backwardness and division as a consequence
of the conflict originated by the government appeared as a justification for opposing
the Chávez government, the beginning of the conflict may be attributed to how cer-
tain groups used democratic theory. There is no doubt that Chávez’s political style also
contributed to such a representation but, as this section has demonstrated, those tradi-
tional groups rejected the Chávez government based on a fear that increased with the
lack of political parties in a context of weak institutions. The social and political anxiety
among those who had enjoyed and represented the role of political agents for themselves
led them to perform a politics of exclusion in the name of democracy. Thus, the tradi-
tional groups could create a chain of equivalence around ‘democracy’, which was used
by them to denounce the populist and authoritarian practices associated with Chávez’s
government. This narrative helped create the Opposition’s identity. But, contrary to their
claims to be the defenders of democracy, the Opposition adopted an exclusionary dis-
course similar to the populist us/them division, excluding in the process a large number
of Venezuelans.

Taking on the ‘Us/Them’ Division

Once the narrative of ‘democracy under threat’ made possible the formation of the
Opposition, the process of identification became relevant. In other words, the empty sig-
nifier ‘democracy’ allowed the formation of an equivalential chain. However, since the

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government was re-articulating participatory democracy, the Opposition found itself

in the context of ‘hegemonic competition’. As a result, the Opposition faced the dif-
ficult task of persuading those people demanding change whether they supported the
government or not.
Within this broader context and the hegemonic competition between chavismo and
the Opposition, the ideological story positioning the Opposition as defenders of democ-
racy was possible through the use of the myth of moral authority attached to civil society.
In terms of emotional appeal, this myth represents civil society as virtuous, civic and
courageous in defending democracy, as can be seen in the following text:

The best opposition we have is in that democratic culture, not very organic
or too conscious, that does not need a leader to function, that has not
allowed any decision to become perversely collective and that, little by little,
turns its back on a ‘revolution’ that does not provide a more serene daily
life and a specific material well-being. (Caula, 2000)

In this opinion piece, Caula represents civil society as similar to ‘the people’ who, in all
great revolutions, fight for an ‘authentic’ society; they want the achievement of social
order and have the virtue of being a plural collective rather than ideologised groups.
Civil society is also exalted as a people who do not need a leader, which differentiates
them from the followers of Chávez who are represented as people paid and manipulated
by a populist. Those considered as ‘civil’ are not manipulated, but rational and thus
superior.
The myth of moral authority can be seen in the commitment to ‘national recon-
struction in a single nation’ without mentioning social differences. At that future time, a
destroyed Venezuela will be reconstructed by the participation of civil society. As already
shown, the Opposition referred to ‘civil society’ as ‘productive’ and ‘civilised’, which
made the Opposition a moral authority that alone could give political direction. In this
way, the Opposition appeared detached from political ideologies, and even from institu-
tional constraints, as the attempted coup in April 2002 demonstrated (Buxton, 2004).
The construction of ‘us/them’ by the Opposition involved not only the construction of
civil society but also the representation of chavistas as resentful, irrational and inferior.
This representation reproduced historical racist tropes of dehumanisation, reinforcing
the lack of political agency of the poor, which was precisely the key element offered by
chavismo to that group. This is shown in the following text from El Universal:

[The chavistas] will take buildings, properties and lives … They remember
when [Chávez] said that whoever has hunger can steal … [Chávez] tries
to enchant the poorest with words that sow anger and rage, that do not let
them see that they become a blind arm to defend the ambition of one man,
and are poorer, more manipulated than ever. (Bruzual, 2001)

With this representation of the supporters of the government, the Opposition not only
reproduced the representation of chavistas as ‘irrational people’, but also disqualified
them from belonging in the accepted universe of left/right politics. In other words, it was
the use of universals and the representation of the other as illegitimate which enabled
the Opposition to gain support and alliances.
The construct of ‘us/them’ is used by political actors to build political alliances and
coalitions among social actors who are differently positioned. Since Laclau’s theory of
populism represents this ‘us/them’ construction as one introduced by populist leaders, it

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78 Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 40, No. 1
 The Foundation of the Opposition in Venezuela

is assumed that the ‘us/them’ division is exclusive to populism. However, this construc-
tion has also been included in narratives of modernisation such as barbarism versus
civilisation and tradition versus modernity, as post-colonial studies have demonstrated
(Maldonado-Torres, 2007). When such a division is normalised, it is not visible anymore
because it is reproduced by an epistemic relationship between those who are accepted as
legitimate and those who are perceived as illegitimate. That is to say, most of the time
social divisions are omitted from political analysis because of an elite’s commitment to
understanding politics through the lens of modernity. It is this rational subject, or the
eurocentric subject, which becomes the equivalent of ‘civil society, whereas popular sub-
jectivities are considered as pre-political or politically impotent and irrational because
they are a danger to political stability’ (Motta, 2009: 32). Although this articulation of
‘us/them’ is similar to populist articulations in which the populist leader claims to speak
in the name of ‘the people’ against the elite, there are different examples in the history
of liberal democracy where the people have been excluded from politics.
The articulation ‘us/them’ is essentially an understanding of politics that Laclau iden-
tified with democracy and populism, but whose ability to achieve the democratic promise
of equality is limited. As Ochoa (2017) explains, an idea of ‘the people’ as a particular
group is incompatible with the view of democracy promising equality for all because
it means that the space of power has been already occupied. Therefore, the Venezue-
lan Opposition shares with populism a similar understanding of politics in which some
(‘us’) are denying others (‘them’) the attributes of a legitimate political agent. Although
no populist leader was articulating this division, the Opposition managed to represent
themselves as the legitimate people capable of saying which government is legitimate
and which is not. In effect, the Opposition did not articulate the people against the elite,
as populist leaders do, but they recreated an ‘us’ through the representation of ‘civil soci-
ety’ and a ‘them’ as those unable to participate as political agents. In this sense, both the
Opposition and the government shared the same logic of populism: the representation
of ‘the people’ as homogenous and more importantly as the ‘legitimate’ people (Ochoa,
2017).
By reproducing a social classification between those called to define democracy and
blaming the other as wrong, the Opposition contributed to polarisation as populists
do. Although it is fashionable in the present context to blame the populist government
(Cannon, 2018), the Opposition also used the division us/them and a politics of truth
as a practice of building political alliances. Indeed, using dominant understandings of
meaning and practices makes invisible the use of such a division. In this case, polyarchy
provided the Opposition with the floating signifier that allowed their ideological for-
mation to be perceived as a ‘depoliticised ideology’, as a truth that appeals to a moral
subject. In this sense, the success of the Opposition has depended on keeping its hege-
monic character hidden, while at the same time denouncing the very same traits and
practices in the Chávez government.

Conclusion
This article has demonstrated how the new protest movement opposing the Venezuelan
government reconstructed the signifier ‘democracy’ as polyarchy, in which the Chávez
government appeared to fit a terror fantasy. First, it analysed the Opposition’s artic-
ulations through the lens of three logics, demonstrating how an ideological usage of
the discourse of polyarchy was key to delegitimising an elected government. By using

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 Ybiskay Gonzalez

the lens of social logic, the article explained how the discourse of polyarchy influences
the way the Opposition understands democracy and political agency. Through the lens
of political logic, it exposed how the Opposition reconstructs polyarchy and its impli-
cations, particularly by fixing discourses of democracy to conservative forces. Finally,
by borrowing/appropriating the lens of fantasmatic logic, the article demonstrated how
those discourses exposed through social logic were articulated as a narrative of threat
to modernisation and progress.
By offering an account of the articulatory logics in building the Opposition, we can
see how this building process has three implications for this analysis. First, the Oppo-
sition articulated the division us/them, leading to the exclusion of the popular sectors
and those who demanded political transformation. Second, such practices were invisible
because of the normalisation of an understanding of politics in which social divisions,
instead of the left/right division, were key to building political alliances and coalitions. In
other words, the representation of the civilised and modern subject was used not only to
reject Chávez but also to create a positive identity for the Opposition. Third, the Oppo-
sition shares with populist governments a certain understanding of politics, reflected in
the use of a metaphorical, binary opposition between ‘us’ and ‘them’.
Following on from this analysis, the article argues that polarisation is the result of
two groups having the same understanding of exclusionary politics. But, on the part of
the Opposition at the beginning of the conflict, there was a clear move to prevent any
novel political transformation. This made the Opposition’s understanding of democracy
an authoritarian ordering since democracy ceased to be understood as a plural society
that must find institutional and legal means to solve conflicting interests. The problem
was not so much the conservative ideological defence of such an order, but the perverse
consequence of blaming the other, which denies the nature of the power that makes
polarisation possible. In other words, in its self-portrayal as prudent and ‘correct’, the
Opposition sought to save democracy, as long as the specific meaning of democracy
was polyarchy. When this meaning was challenged by other meanings, rather than seek-
ing deliberation within plural interests and recognition of differences, the Opposition
attempted to move into the terrain of absolute truth. Such a tactic is political, ideo-
logical and affective, working to reject leftist governments’ projects and to advance the
interests of elite groups in returning to power.
The construction of the Opposition via the presentation of a supposed absolute truth
defines the nature of the Opposition’s identity process. By refusing to acknowledge other
perspectives, Opposition members protect the truth they promote and are intolerant
of any criticism. For instance, in the lead-up to the May 2018 presidential elections,
the dominant voices of the Opposition decided not to support Henri Falcón, who was
considered a traitor for having decided to run. The Opposition had often questioned
the legitimacy of the elections under Chávez, but at that time, with the severe economic
crisis and widespread disapproval of Nicolás Maduro’s government, they might have
won. Similarly, Falcón was considered a Trojan horse, because he is not along-standing
member of the Opposition and was associated with chavismo while serving as a state
governor. But Falcón’s middle ground status might have made him more appealing than
the usual Opposition candidates. This example demonstrates the Opposition’s ongoing
rejection of the government as well as its ongoing demonstration of loyalty to pure
oppositionists or those who have rejected the government of Chávez since the beginning.
In this way, internal differences within the Opposition’s target audience are neu-
tralised and made equivalent by a common rejection of the government. Creating its
identity in this way hampers the Opposition’s ability to expand its coalition; it is, rather,
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80 Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 40, No. 1
 The Foundation of the Opposition in Venezuela

dependent on waiting for or generating situations in which it can demonstrate its truth.
This means that the only way to expand its support is through the government’s cre-
ation of enemies. Thus, the division ‘us/them’ works for the Opposition as it works for
populism. The success of the group rests on its ability to appeal to frustration and aspi-
rations to mobilise different social classes. As a consequence, when reality gets worse,
interpretation of events is simplified, as with the phrase ‘I told you so’, which neither
helps to create a bridge with popular sectors nor offers a framework to evaluate reality
beyond the wrong other.
The same ‘wrong other’ framework also marks the current Opposition leadership of
Juan Guaidó. Guaidó became parliamentary deputy for Vargas state in 2016 and then,
following an agreement among Opposition parties in the National Assembly, became
president of that body on 5 January 2019. After the National Assembly of Venezuela
declared the sitting President Nicolás Maduro as illegitimate, based on the alleged illegit-
imacy of the May 2018 elections, Guaidó as President of the National Assembly declared
himself ‘interim’ President of Venezuela on 15 January 2019 by invoking Articles 333
and 350 of the Venezuelan Constitution. Nevertheless, Maduro still maintains executive
power with the support of the armed forces. This polarisation has been extended into the
international sphere, as different states recognise both ‘presidents’, which could result
in the zero-sum logic that has split the country until now, tearing it even further apart.
Guaidó has utilised the existing situation of crisis to declare all those who wish to see it
end to be his supporters. Hence, Venezuelans are mobilised to support one or the other
‘president’ in a new context framed by issues of sovereignty and human rights. With this
kind of zero-sum logic dominating Venezuelan politics, a change in political grammar is
needed in order to move towards the construction of democratic subjectivities that are
more inclusive, less hierarchical and able to facilitate dialogue.

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