Venezuela a Psychosocial Perspective

My country has sunk into a complex humanitarian crisis led by a corrupt autocracy. From the laments of the millions of migrants who comprise the Venezuelan exodus around the world, to country-wide demands for food, medicine, and basic services, to the denunciations of human rights violations and the cries of political prisoners, Venezuela is in grave decline.

Ever since Chávez attempted a first coup in 1992, the same questions have been posed from different perspectives and disciplinary fields: How did we get here? Why is Venezuela, praised for its conviviality, solidarity, and pacifism, now facing such conflicts? What are the socioeconomic and political roots and the sociocultural factors that have brought us to this state of crisis? How can the country with the biggest oil reserves in the world also register the highest poverty, inflation, violence, impunity, and insecurity indexes? When did the “paradigmatic” Venezuelan democracy lose its north? Is this the end of the democratic dream? In this essay, I intend to tackle these questions from a psychological perspective.

Explanations to our prolonged and exceptional crisis have revolved around economic variables, corruption, and impunity; around institutional frailty and the delegitimization of the party system; and around the transformation of the democratic State into a failed, Mafia-led one. Other analyses point at the fundamental role of what has been called the “Magical State” (Coronil, 2002). Just because Venezuela is sitting on the biggest oil reserves in the world, the fantasy has been that we only need to drill it out and distribute the income to create an ideal economy in an ideal democracy. It's our magical solution.

Now, again, we face the developmental illusion of swift change and progress derived from this allegedly providential, “magical” oil-producing state. This time the illusion is translated into a populist promise that is unable to distinguish democracy from dictatorship. Now again, Venezuela is wor