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Rearranging the Deck Chairs on the Titanic: The Agony of Democracy in Venezuela

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2022

Aníbal Romero
Aníbal Romero*
Affiliation:
Simón Bolívar University
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If one is to believe what a good number of commentators on the Venezuelan political scene have written over the years, democracy in that country has been in perpetual crisis. By at least the mid-1970s, the view that the democratic system established in 1958 was deteriorating rapidly had become widely accepted in the Venezuelan press and among Venezuelan academic analysts. It was not always clear, however, exactly what was meant by “the crisis” (Peña 1978; Stempel-Paris 1981; Romero 1986). This perception of crisis intensified some years later, to the point that one outsider observed in 1984 that according to the prevailing view of democracy in Venezuela, the political system must be totally bankrupt and its survival could be explained only as the result “of an unprecedented act of political will or of the imbecility of the population” (Baloyra n.d., 2).

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 32 , Issue 1 , 1997 , pp. 7 - 36
Copyright
Copyright © 1997 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

∗

I am indebted to Robert Bond for the characterization used in the title. The original version of this article was presented to the Latin American Studies Association in Washington, D.C., 28–30 September 1995.

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