ABSTRACT
Hugo Chávez was the leader and central figure of the Bolivarian revolution, from his landslide win of the presidential election in 1998 to beyond his death in March 2013, at the start of his fourth term in power, envisioned as the period for the culmination of the transition towards the socialist state and communal popular power. Hugo Chávez embodied a New Magical State (Coronil, 1997; López-Maya, 2007); he condensed the Bureaucratic Power of the state in his persona to completely refashion the country using the ‘magical powers’ of the oil windfall to push forward a model based on the dyad oil wealth-socialist state, Petro-Socialism, using oil wealth as many governments had before him, as the vehicle for transforming the nation. His unexpected death was particularly problematic because the transition to a socialist state was ultimately tied to his persona; when he introduced PetroSocialism to the National Assembly in August 2007 (López-Maya, 2013, p. 102) he emphasised that this was his personal project, penned by his own hand. Hence, there are inevitable entanglements between Chávez’s discourse of PetroSocialism and the mobilisation of Bureaucratic Power to reorganise socio-spatial relations through new spatial strategies for the materialisation of a Socialist State Space (Brenner and Elden, 2009). If policy instruments are legal entities of space that conceptualise the administrative boundaries of State Space that function as containers of absolute-representations of space, what are the representations of space produced under Petro-Socialism? A study of Chávez’s national plans for the nation and the new legal instruments for the management of territory elucidates what kind of spatiality could be conceived in Petro-Socialism, informed by a particular institutional resource curse (Corrales and Penfold, 2011) while it entrenches diminished state capacity to enable PDVSA to construct its own parallel State Space. This chapter engages with the underlying contradictions of Petro-Socialism that inform the distortions of the institutional apparatus of urban governance fostered by Chávez’s transfer of Bureaucratic Power to PDVSA. It also provides the basis to understand the diverse institutional and discursive mechanisms utilised by PDVSA La Estancia to appropriate and re-imagine the material space of the city as an oil field within the jurisdiction of the Oil Social Districts.
