Political Communication and Leadership

Mimetisation, Hugo Chavez and the Construction of Power and Identity

Elena Block

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317439561
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The long-lasting hegemonic rule of President Hugo Chávez not only involved significant rearrangements in the control of political power in Venezuela but also shifts in the way its citizens constructed, connected and interacted with politics. In this book, Elena Block explores the political communication style developed by Chávez to transmit his ideologies and engage with his publics — A style that unfolded incrementally between 1998, the year of his first presidential campaign, and March 13th 2013 when his death was announced after a long struggle with cancer. What sort of political communication did Hugo Chávez develop to establish hegemony in Venezuela? What made him so popular?

Block argues that Chávez's political communication style can be better understood through the concept of mimetisation, a systematic sequence of communicational events and practices whereby the Venezuelan President managed to build a bond with his constituents. Applying a mixed qualitative method of collection and analysis of relevant data, this phenomenon is examined via the President's emotional use of common cultural symbols; dramatized and informalised language; savvy use of communication and media, and boost of inclusive, compensatory, and participatory practices in which his constituents not only felt mimetically mirrored, but also endowed with an identity.

Shedding new light on contemporary theories of populism from the perspective of political communication and identity construction, the notion of mimetisation can be adjusted and applied to study the links of populist phenomena, the mediatisation of politics and government, cultural appeal and identity politics in other cultures and situations in contemporary times.

Part I

1 Janus and Chávez

Exploring an intriguing political communication style

DOI: 10.4324/9781315694436-1

The plane landed in Caracas at three in the morning. I saw through the window the mist of lights of the unforgettable city where I lived for three years, as crucial for Venezuela as they were for my life. The President took his leave with a Caribbean embrace and an implicit invitation: ‘We’ll see each other here February 2nd.’ While he moved off among his military escort and old friends, I shuddered at the thrill of having travelled and chatted pleasantly with two opposing men. One to whom an inveterate fate had offered the opportunity to save his country. And the other an illusionist who could go down in history as one more despot.

(Garcia Márquez, 1999, para. 44)

The paradoxical “thrill”, masterfully described by Nobel prize-winning author Gabriel Garcia Márquez after an inflight chat with Hugo Chávez between Havana and Caracas, could be applied, mutatis mutandis, to represent my own feelings when I watched the telecast of Chávez’s first address as President Elect of Venezuela in December 1998. The screens showed a compelling man in his forties in whom mingled the caffe làtte skin of the majority of Venezuelans, the ancient slanted eyes of the aborigines of the land, and the curly hair of the African colonial slaves; a man that employed the emotional allure of Walt Whitman’s (1980) epic Song of Myself to tell thousands of followers: “I am a little of all of you” (Chávez, 1998).

At that moment, when the traditional party leaders of Venezuela’s tired 40-year-old representative democracy were beaten, discredited, and hopelessly disconnected with the majority, I realised that this man had come to stay. As Manuel Castells (1999) wrote a few months later, Chávez belonged to an old lineage of Latin American “military populist nationalist” leaders whose message of political and institutional change resonated with the feelings of the majority of voters (para. 3). After all, Stephen Coleman (2013) argued, in matters of voting it is better not to undervalue the “vitality of affect”, because voting is, above all, a “cultural act” (p. 8) – the performance whereby citizens ultimately bare their political souls.

With Chávez, the man on the TV screen, there seemed to be no presidential distance or ceremonial pomp, just a spellbinding storyteller, who, despite the lefty clichéd anti-imperialist rhetoric that characterised him all his life, shamelessly used a common-people’s American poet to appeal to his compatriots’ affects or emotions. This man was culturally all and none of his fellow Venezuelans, a Janus¹-like duality that seemed embedded in his arguably populist ethos – he was the leader but he was also reflected in the faces of those he led. Thus, for the 14 years he remained in the Presidency of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, he tried relentlessly to steer disputes with specific opponents, usually from the various elites (political, economic, global, religious, and so on), to feed politically upon the confrontation and mutual outrage. However, he would also try to bond with those he considered his own – ‘the people’, formed by the poor, the underprivileged, the alienated or excluded – to feed emotionally, ideologically and electorally upon their trust and support.

The emotional bond that step-by-step Chávez established with his followers was made of a peculiar mimetic fabric that nonetheless superseded the mere act of ‘imitation’ conveyed by the definition of ‘mimesis’ provided by some Spanish and English dictionaries (Oxford English Dictionary, 2002; Real Academia de la Lengua Española, 2006). Rather, Chávez’s bonding process could be more accurately described by applying Theodor Adorno’s (1997) principles of articulation and mimesis developed in his posthumous work, Aesthetic Theory, which explains how, by virtue of the articulation of heterogeneous elements (which in politics, for example, could apply to the leader and the various groups that are led) processes of mimesis or imitation amongst those elements may evolve into something “essential”, into expressed “substance” – an articulating logic that may culminate in “the redemption of the many in the one” (p. 190). Thus, for Adorno (1997) “the more articulated the work, the more its idea becomes eloquent”, as “mimesis receives succor from its counterpole” (p. 191). This logic of mimetisation is the basic underlying idea that both underpins and links all the eight chapters of this book.

Chávez was a little of all those that voted for him_ his constituents. He claimed that he felt their feelings, talked their language, and that his goal was to make them acquire “consciousness” of their own collective identity and have a “protagonist” role in society because they were the only true “sovereign” (Chávez, 1999).

Consequently, 14 years later, during his fourth and last successful presidential campaign, Chávez’s style of communicating with his publics experienced another change – the ultimate mimetic turn. Instead of evoking Whitman, this time Chávez chose to echo part of a well-known quote of Colombian populist politician Jorge Eliecer Gaitán (1947; also Las Frases de Gaitán, 2012, para. 9): “I am not a man, I am a people”. In 2012, Chávez said several times, with various wordings and on different mainstream, digital, and social media: “Whatever happens they will never beat Chávez, because I am not Chávez, Chávez is an unbeaten people … You are Chávez” (Chávez, 2012b, 2012c). Thus, eventually, Chávez, the dualistic “illusionist” described in Garcia Márquez’s vignette, achieved his aim of articulating his constituents into a ‘collective’ (Chávez, 2012a, 2012d) endowed with self-consciousness and a distinctive identity that, however, turned out to be his own. Instead of Chávez being “a little of all” his followers, his followers seemed to have become him.

These distinctive events that occurred little by little during Chávez’s presidency in Venezuela served to articulate the main research questions of this study: What sort of political communication style did Hugo Chávez develop to build hegemonic power² and a ‘collective’ identity? Put simply, what made the late Hugo Chávez so popular for 14 uninterrupted years?

To answer these questions this book examines the communicational dimension of Chávez’s long-lasting hegemony. It examines the development of the political communication style that Chávez employed in the process of establishing hegemony and building collective identity in contemporary Venezuela. Specifically, I studied the links between the “hegemonic construction of power and displacement of traditional actors” (J. E. Romero, 2002, p. 73) with categories associated with a certain “politics of identity” (C. Capriles, 2008, p. 8). In addition, this exploration is linked with processes of populism, and more specifically of “populist rupture”, through which, according to Laclau (2005b), Chávez constructed a “collective actor of popular nature” called to lead “a more just and democratic society” (p. 60); a collective actor that eventually bore his name – Chávez.

Dualism

Who was Chávez? Much has been said, researched, written and theorised about the late Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías (July 28, 1954 to March 5, 2013), President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela for 14 years, from 1999 to 2013. The Lieutenant Colonel and former paratrooper made a spectacular entrance in the Venezuelan political arena leading a failed coup d’état in 1992 that surprised all sectors of society. Although the coup did not achieve its aim of overthrowing then President Carlos Andrés Pérez, Chávez was given the opportunity to appear on the public national network of radio and television to urge his fellow rebels to surrender. The TV screens showed a defiant paratrooper in a red beret and green uniform who captured, in mere seconds, the nation’s attention and imagination for many years that followed (Bermúdez, 2011; Mora, 2002). He said: “Comrades, regretfully, for now, our objectives were not achieved” (Chávez, 1992). Only those two words, “for now” (por ahora), became a symbol – a promise of hope and a threat for his political enemies. These words also represented a “courageous admission” of his responsibility in the coup, “an unusual characteristic in traditional politicians” (H. Salcedo, personal communication, December 14, 2010), and embodied³ the first link between Venezuelans’ anti-political frustrations and Chávez’s messianic identity (Mora, 2002).

Chávez went to prison and his case was dismissed two years later, in 1994. He then expressed his desire to continue his search for power, but this time via the democratic path. Chávez embarked upon an intensive electoral campaign that led him to his first win in 1998 (Gott, 2005; Harnecker, 2005; Petkoff, 2010). From then on, Lieutenant Colonel Hugo Chávez evolved into a highly polarising figure, beloved by half of the 19 million Venezuelan voters and disliked by most of the other half. Historian Margarita López Maya (2008) argued that the “charismatic” characteristics of Chávez’s leadership, which involved the “heterogeneity” of the groups that supported him, “the quality” of the policies that he developed during his rule, and his aim to reshape “the political development of the region as much as world order processes” (p. 55), made him a unique case within the left movements that came to power in Latin America during the first decade of the 21st century.

It is important to understand at this point that when Chávez arrived in power in 1998, Venezuela had had 40 years of a system of representative democracy, commonly known as puntofijismo, or ‘Punto Fijo Pact’, an allusion to the name of the house (Punto Fijo) where this institutional arrangement was conceived, agreed, and signed by the main party leaders in October 1958. Described by scholar Juan Carlos Rey (1991) as a “populist system of conciliation”, this elite⁴ political arrangement was destined to install democracy and pluralism in Venezuela and put an end to the recurrent insurgence of military caudillos that had historically plagued Venezuela for over 140 years.

Forty years later, however, puntofijismo evolved into trite bipartisanship, weak political institutions, mismanaged resources, and an increasing disconnection of the political elite with the poor, a context that paved the way for a nonpolitical kind of actor: Lieutenant Colonel Hugo Chávez. Venezuela was a hotbed of anti-political feelings and unsatisfied demands when an ‘outsider’, Chávez, emerged with an offer centred on changing the system from representative to participative democracy via a change of the constitution (Caballero, 2010; C. Capriles, 2006; Philip, 2003).

What made Chávez so popular? Garcia Márquez’s (1999) introductory vignette represented Chávez as a contradictory character who could become either a “saviour” or a typical Latin American “despot”. This representation suggests that Chávez’s leadership could be examined best as a paradox (Ellner, 2008), or rather, as pollster Jose Antonio Gil-Yepes (personal communication, November 23, 2010) argued, as a “Janus-like, two-faced character”, capable of leading processes of change, transitions or new beginnings, similar to the dualistic traits represented by the two-faced Roman god, Janus.

On the one hand, opposing economic and political commentators (academics, journalists, and experts) have called Chávez’s government “a great farce” (Quiros, 2012, p. 3) whose generalised mismanagement left “Venezuela a ruin” (Carroll, 2013, para. 7) with the highest rates of homicide and inflation in Latin America and the world (Guerra, 2012; Tarre, 2012). On the other hand, the grim socioeconomic landscape never prevented Chávez from being democratically elected President of the Republic of Venezuela by a clear majority four consecutive times, which made him stay in power “longer than Roosevelt, Thatcher or Blair” (Hausmann, 2013, para. 1). As Harvard Professor Ricardo H...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Front-other Page
• Half-title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table Of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Series Editors’ Foreword
• List of Abbreviations
• Preface: “You too are Chávez”
• PART I
• PART II
• Appendix 1: Periodisation summary
• Appendix 2: Elite interviews
• Index