The January 3, 2026 kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro revealed the depravity of US imperialism. It also revealed the extent of the rot that has infested Venezuela’s “Bolivarian” government over the past three decades. During a previous coup attempt in 2002, the masses moved into action to defend then president Hugo Chávez and beat back the coup. In 2026, the masses kept quiet and many even welcomed the coup. Meanwhile Maduro’s successor Delcy Rodríguez rapidly transformed herself into the Trump administration’s lapdog.
Today, the decline of Venezuela is held up by the right as a cautionary tale: “What about Venezuela?” has become almost as common a right-wing trope as “What about Russia?” As Donald Trump framed it in a 2018 speech, “Not long ago, Venezuela was one of the richest countries on Earth. Today, socialism has bankrupted the oil-rich nation and driven its people into abject poverty.” Meanwhile, far-right coup plotters of the past like María Corina Machado have been able to rebrand themselves as champions of freedom and democracy, with Machado even winning the Nobel Peace Prize.
In the aftermath of Chávez’s 1998 election, especially during the period of radicalization in the first half of the 2000s, things were very different. Coming during the “end of history” following the collapse of Stalinism, Chávez’s “Bolivarian Revolution” was one of the first movements to revive popular interest in socialism. Chávez carried out significant reforms, taxing and nationalizing big business while building state-run social services for the poor. This lifted millions out of poverty in a country long plagued by inequality. It also kicked off the original “pink tide” of left populist leaders in Latin America, which also included Lula in Brazil and Evo Morales in Bolivia.
To illustrate the extent of both the Bolivarian Revolution’s accomplishments and its degeneration, by 2008, Venezuela had the highest minimum wage in Latin America but by 2020 it had the lowest.
As revolutionaries we have a duty to answer the right-wing’s “What about Venezuela?” arguments. We can’t prettify the Bolivarian Revolution, as some on the left do, blaming all of its failures on US imperialism. We also can’t, as others on the left do, make a “no true Scotsman” fallacy and dismiss the whole legacy of Chávismo for not really being socialist. We have to explain how one of the most exciting mass struggles of the neoliberal era became a nightmare.
If there’s one key lesson from the Bolivarian Revolution it’s a point famously made by Marx and reiterated by Lenin: “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” This lesson isn’t limited to Venezuela. The limitations of reformism and a parliamentary road to socialism are an overarching issue facing the left globally.
Venezuela is a particularly useful example because of how long it lasted and how deep a challenge it posed to the ruling class. Lula tried to seize the state ready-made and failed because he immediately capitulated. Allende didn’t capitulate but was overthrown in a coup. Chávez didn’t capitulate and the masses beat back the 2002 coup, but he still failed because seizing the state machine ready-made is a fundamentally wrong strategy.
The Rise of Chavismo
When Chávez was first elected in 1998, he ran, not as a socialist, but as a nationalist “Bolivarian” populist. “Bolivarian” here refers to the 19th century independence leader and bourgeois revolutionary Simon Bolivar. It wasn’t until 2005 at the World Social Forum, that Chávez began talking about “a new type of socialism,” later dubbed “Socialism of the 21st century.”
Nonetheless, Chávez’s government posed a threat to the neoliberal order. His campaign was the product of a growing struggle against neoliberalism going back to the Caracazo uprising of 1989. His first major reform was a rewriting of the constitution to promote “broad citizen participation and comprehensive human rights protections.” The constitution took tentative steps towards the nationalization of natural resources, but it still upheld international financial commitments. He also launched the “misiones”: a series of measures to redistribute oil profits to poor communities through various social programs.
Limited as the reforms were, they provoked the wrath of both US imperialism and Venezuela’s own ruling class. These counterrevolutionary forces carried out a failed coup attempt in 2002, followed by a lockout from 2002 to 2003 (misreported as a strike in the bourgeois media), and a recall election in 2004, where the right-wing opposition engaged in extensive voter fraud. It was during the 2002 coup that Nobel Peace Prize winner Machado first appeared on the scene, signing the coup leaders’ “Carmona Decree” to dissolve the democratically elected government.
More importantly, these attacks served as what Marxists call the “whip of counterrevolution.” The masses had their sights raised by Chávez’s election and the struggles leading up to it but, after the election, they took a wait and see approach. When the masses saw the gains they had won threatened by the counterrevolution, they moved back into action at a higher political level. Following the 2002 coup, spontaneous mass movements marched to the Miraflores palace chanting “the thieves of the old regime have returned” and demanding Chávez’s return to power. But after the coup’s defeat, Chávez appealed for “national unity … national reconciliation and for people to return to their homes.”
Similar mass movements beat back the lock-out and the recall. After each attempted counterrevolution the masses beat back the forces of reaction while Chávez tried to contain the movement. But each time, the masses carried Chávez a bit farther to the left. This is what caused Chávez to start talking about socialism. This is also how Chávez came to fully nationalize Venezuelan oil production, when his initial plan was merely to increase the taxation and royalties to be paid by the oil companies. He also nationalized other companies voluntarily abandoned by the capitalists, while guaranteeing them financial compensation.
Pink Tide
It’s important to stress that Chavism didn’t exist in isolation. Chávez’s early years in power coincided with a wave of mass struggles against neoliberalism across Latin America. Protests in Peru in 2000 ousted the dictator Alberto Fujimori (father of current president Keiko Fujimori). Ecuador saw mass protests against three successive presidents: Bucaram in 1997, Mahuad in 2000, and Gutiérrez in 2005. Following Argentina’s financial collapse in 2001, protests forced the country through five presidents in the span of two weeks. In Bolivia, anti-privatization struggles known as the Water War (in 2000) and the Gas War (in 2003) culminated in the downfall of President Lozada.
Chávez was the first electoral expression of this wave of struggle. Into the 2000s, he was joined by other left populist leaders who were swept into power across Latin America in what’s been dubbed the “pink tide.” This included Lula in Brazil in 2002, Néstor Kirchner in Argentina in 2003 and Evo Morales in Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador, both in 2006.
All these pink tide leaders came to power in the wake of mass struggles, and all had the same reformist limitations of Chávez. But the individual trajectories of the different pink tide leaders played out differently. Lula capitulated to neoliberalism pretty much immediately. A few months after coming to power he rammed through a neoliberal pension reform. Left MPs within his Workers Party (PT) were expelled for voting against it. This laid the basis for the formation of the Party of Socialism and Liberty (PSOL). Evo Morales, on the other hand, had a trajectory closer to Chávez, provoking the ire of the ruling class, but still failing to decisively break from capitalism.
The Character of the Bolivarian Revolution
Under the pressure of the masses, Chávez shifted to the left, outflanking his fellow pink tide leaders. Not only did he start self-identifying as a socialist, he started using the phrase “permanent revolution” and even gave Obama a copy of Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America. Beyond the rhetoric, Chávez’s reforms had a real impact on the standard of living. From the start of Chávez’s first presidential term in 1999 until 2011, poverty was reduced by 37.6 percent, and extreme poverty by 57.8 percent.
Nonetheless the bulk of the economy remained under private ownership. During that same 1999-2011 span, the private sector’s share of economic activity actually increased from 65 percent to 71 percent. Without a monopoly on foreign trade, even nationalized industries like oil were subject to global market forces. The reforms Chávez was able to carry out were dependent on a global commodity boom, especially in oil.
Another consequence of seizing the state machine ready-made was a growth of Bonapartism. When Chávez appealed “for people to return to their homes” after they defeated the 2002 coup, that left the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state itself as Chávez’s main tool for combatting reaction. The private media company RCTV was one of the big mouthpieces of the coup plotters and a mass working-class government could have put the company under democratic workers’ control. But Chávez initially moved to make peace with RCTV only to take away its license five years later in 2007. Meanwhile the state-run Telesur operated as a government mouthpiece with no democratic oversight.
While the RCTV affair was directed against the ruling class, this Bonapartist approach impeded the workers’ movement as well. Also in 2007, Chávez launched the United Socialist Party of Venezuela or PSUV. On a democratic basis, this could have been an important step towards launching a new mass workers party in Venezuela. However, the PSUV launch came with an ultimatum that existing parties dissolve into the new party without the democratic right to fight for their program. This ultimatum also extended to trade unions, with Chávez describing the desire for trade union independence as “a kind of blackmail.” This ended up strengthening careerists and the right wing within the movement while muzzling the left.
This should make it clear that, while the worst crises of the Bolivarian Revolution came under Maduro, it’s not a simple case of “Chávez good, Maduro bad.” The problems with the Bolivarian Revolution were already present under Chávez and became gangrenous under Maduro.
The Road to Counterrevolution
As long as capitalism remains intact, reforms are limited by market relations and the threat of capital flight. Two months before the 2002 coup, the ruling class took $700 million out of the country as part of its campaign to destabilize the government. Beyond direct capital flight, Venezuela’s subservience to the market whittled away at Chávez’s reforms. Venezuela was able to sustain itself primarily because the country’s vast oil reserves provided a source of revenue to fund the reforms. But in 2014, the price of oil dropped dramatically, yanking away the economic foundations of the Bolivarian Revolution.
Inflation was a consistent problem throughout both the Chávez and Maduro governments, reaching 30% at the time of the 2002-3 lockout. Under the combined impact of the 2014 oil price drop and the 2017 sanctions, inflation became hyperinflation, peaking at a rate of 130,060% in 2018.
With the economic base of Chávez’s and Maduro’s reforms eroding, the right was able to gain popularity. At the beginning of 2014, hardline reactionaries Leopoldo López and María Corina Machado organized the 12F demonstrations, which combined popular protest with violent attacks. In the 2015 National Assembly elections, the right-wing opposition won a national election for the first time since Chávez came to power. As relations broke down between the right-wing-led National Assembly and the Maduro presidency, Maduro called for a new Constituent Assembly to be elected in 2017, which the right boycotted. In 2019, National Assembly president Juan Guaidó carried out another failed coup attempt. Unlike 2002, the masses didn’t take to the streets this time. The coup’s failure reflected Guaidó’s lack of support more than any support for Maduro.
With declining popular support, Maduro leaned more and more on repression to stay in power. The bourgeois media, more concerned with the plight of the dispossessed ruling class than that of the workers, fixates on Maduro’s repression of far-right activists like Machado. But Maduro’s repression was also directed against the left, including blocking the Communist Party of Venezuela, as well as Machado, from running in the 2024 election.
To counter the bourgeois media’s emphasis on the plight of reactionaries, it’s useful to highlight some overlooked examples of repression directed against left-wing activists. The following were collected by Ana Sofía Viloria and Juan García from the International Criminal Court’s report on Venezuela and published in the 2026 book Venezuela in Crisis: Socialist Perspectives.
In 2015, left-wing activist Luis Alcedo Mora Márquez was kidnapped by the SEBIN, the Venezuelan government’s intelligence and security agency, after filing a complaint over gasoline trafficking. Rubén González, an iron workers’ union activist and staunch Chávista, was arrested in 2018 on sabotage charges and subjected to a military tribunal. Teachers union leader Eudis Girot was arrested on terrorism charges in 2020 for union protests demanding fair wages and labor benefits. Aryenis Torrealba and Alfredo Chirinos, whistle-blowers exposing corruption at the state-run oil company PDVSA, were arrested on treason charges, also in 2020.
These developments culminated in a counterrevolution by Maduro against the gains of a Bolivarian Revolution and ultimately Trump’s coup against the memory of the revolution. While Chávez provoked the ire of most of the bourgeoisie, another section of capitalists, called the “boli-bourgeoisie,” enriched themselves on the basis of the growing bureaucracy around Chávez and Maduro. Following the economic crisis of 2017-18, the Maduro administration, under the lead of Delcy Rodríguez, rammed through large-scale privatization schemes. This included striking deals with Chevron and negotiating a detente with US imperialism under the Biden administration.
With Venezuela’s fraudulent 2024 election and the return of Trump in the US, that detente broke down, and Trump staged the 2026 coup and kidnapping. When Marxists talk about the “whip of counterrevolution” we don’t mean that all counterrevolution inherently spurs struggle. That happened in 2002 because the masses already had their sights raised by Chávez’s election and the struggles leading up to it. But after years of economic crisis and democratic backsliding, the 2026 coup couldn’t play the same role. The masses have stayed silent thus far, and Delcy Rodríguez quickly pivoted to her new master.
International Lessons
Just as the rise of the Bolivarian Revolution prefigured the rise of the wider “pink tide” so did its fall. In Brazil, the neoliberal failures of Lula and his successor Dilma, led to mass protests in 2013. Without an organized working-class opposition, the right gained the upper hand and, in 2016, they ousted Dilma in a parliamentary coup. In Bolivia, Morales was ousted in a more classical coup in 2019. New elections were held thanks to a mass movement but Morales’s MAS party split between his supporters and those of his successor Luis Arce. In the 2025 election, MAS lost all its congressional representation.
In Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, a more moderate pink tide leader, was elected in 2006 only to be ousted in a 2009 coup backed by Hillary Clinton. In Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega was elected in 2007 but has gone much further than Maduro in democratic backsliding. In July 2026, Ortega announced that he was suspending all elections indefinitely.
All these pink tide leaders failed in different ways but, fundamentally, they failed because of the inability of reformism to provide a viable alternative to capitalism.
Venezuela itself is now at a political low point. Struggle, organization, and the historical memory of the working class need to be rebuilt from scratch. Elsewhere in Latin America, a second pink tide developed around figures like AMLO and Claudia Scheinbaum in Mexico, Gustavo Petro in Colombia, Gabriel Boric in Chile, and the return of Lula in Brazil. But these governments are facing the same tests as the first pink tide, only now with capitalism in a more crisis-prone era less able to sustain reforms. Already these second-wave pink tide leaders have been found wanting.
Meanwhile the decline of the left has led to the growth of the right: Milei in Argentina, Kast in Chile, and Espriella in Colombia. But the fight against these governments can also be a new source of struggle, with the recent general strike in Bolivia against the right-wing Paz government being the most exciting example.
More struggles will emerge in Latin America. What’s needed is a revolutionary party that can draw the lessons of the Bolivarian Revolution and the wider pink tide, both their successes and their failures. Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, María Machado, and the global ruling class want to bury those lessons. And so do Nicolás Maduro and Delcy Rodríguez. Let’s make sure we don’t let them.
Photo: Bernardo Londoy, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
