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Special Report - Venezuela: will chavismo survive? (ISSN 17414474)
Managing the bad times
The last two sections have deliberately investigated contradictory hypotheses: that chavismo is a politically spent force, on the one hand, or that it is suffering a temporary setback and retains the capacity to recover, on the other. Both these hypotheses cannot be simultaneously true. The reality is of course that the question remains genuinely open: the future outcome of the Venezuelan political crisis is not predetermined. The discussion of the two rival hypotheses, it is hoped, while not providing us with a crystal ball predicting what will happen in future, may have shed at least some light on the different factors in play. In this section we propose to look in some further depth at other background issues. In particular we focus on Venezuela’s oil dependence, and the way in which the economy has been locked into a damaging sequence of cyclical booms and busts. We will examine the “busts” experienced during the Chávez era, their political consequences, how they were handled by the regime, and whether that offers any insights into how the current crisis may play out.
