ABSTRACT
Following the electoral victory of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela in the late 1990s, which marked the onset of a revolutionary process focused on the construction of a socialist alternative, Colombia’s paramilitary phenomenon acquired a transnational character. The central argument of this chapter is that the expansion of paramilitarism from Colombia into Venezuela is not merely a criminal or military issue of temporary nature but a mechanism that is part of a strategy (which also includes legal and ideological mechanisms) employed by the economically dominant classes in Venezuela, supported by their Colombian allies and the United States, to restore their political power and hegemonic position. Venezuela’s economic and political transformations under Chávez represented a tremendous challenge for local economic elites as well as imperialist ambitions. For the first time in the country’s history, a bottom-up empowering process took place that opened up political spaces for the participation of the most excluded and marginalized sectors of society. Laws and social programmes aimed at education, land redistribution, poverty reduction, and alternative units of economic production challenged the core of the capitalist relations of production. The Venezuelan-led transnational initiatives such as Bolivarian Alliance for the People of Our Americas (ALBA) and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) offer possibilities for building South-to-South alliances based on solidarity and social justice as well as countering the neoliberal model. Given all this, combined with the persistent democratic victory of the Left up until 2015, the elites have resorted to the one mechanism that has been commonly employed (when all else fails) as an answer to the historical question of “what to do with the poor”: violence. This chapter traces paramilitary activity in Venezuela and its political and economic consequences since 2000.
