In January 2016, Henry Ramos Allup, president of the then newly installed Venezuelan parliament, hastened to make a demonstration of institutional power. The opposition bloc had obtained a strong victory in the legislative elections of 2015, and the veteran political leader of Acción [...]
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In difficult times, life histories by grassroots Venezuelan activists illuminate valuable lessons from the Bolivarian Revolution
There have recently been a number of pieces featured in NACLA and the progressive media outlet Jacobin evaluating the Nicolás Maduro government in Venezuela [...]
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Over the past few days, chavista leaders have been publicly boasting that 2016 has been a year of political victories. Convinced that the opposition has run out of short-term options to oust Maduro, high-ranking officials explicitly highlighted three fronts where the government had [...]
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With oil prices nearing historic lows, a new round of introspection about the pitfalls of oil-based development has kicked off in the media and development policy circles. The arguments, as to be expected, rehash some version of the ‘resource curse’ thesis, which holds that resource [...]
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Rodrigo Acuña (Macquarie University), 'Venezuelan Foreign Policy and Latin American Unification'
This is the third seminar in the [...]
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The notion of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ is widely vilified. Often linked to Stalin’s authoritarian rule in the Soviet Union, there is little positive said about it. Moreover, the negative evaluation is also regularly linked back to Lenin and his idea of a vanguard party taking [...]
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Venezuelans balloted last month – again. Nothing exceptional in a country where citizens have cast their votes in twenty different nationwide elections over the past 17 years – more than once annually, if one draws an average. Yet elections in the Bolivarian republic generate an [...]
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Why Venezuela’s Ruling Party Lost Big, and What Comes Next
Venezuela’s ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) suffered a devastating loss in Sunday’s parliamentary election. The opposition Democratic Unity Front (MUD) received 56 percent of the popular vote to the PSUV’s 41 [...]
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