Introduction
How did contemporary Leftist governments in Argentina and Venezuela interact with popular mobilisation? How have popular sectors engaged with and participated in Leftist governance? And what are the effects of these relationships for contentious politics?
A burgeoning body of research on the Left turn in Latin America has attempted to define what it represented and classify the governments that have catalysed and even sustained it in certain countries.Footnote 1 Analyses that underline the importance of checks and balances and are wary of charismatic politicians tend to see the Left turn as the latest iteration of populist regimes that, in their view, undermine the quality of democratic institutions.Footnote 2 A different literature, rooted in a Marxist perspective, argues that governments characterised as Leftist stifled revolutionary potential that preceded their rise and consolidation.Footnote 3 Other analyses within this perspective with a more sympathetic stance towards Left-of-centre governments declared their rise ‘a utopia reborn’.Footnote 4 A third strand of scholarship engages post-structural political theory and cultural studies, expressing an interest in autonomous forms of popular mobilisation and contrasting the ‘multitude’ to the subject interpellated by popular leaders (‘the people’).Footnote 5
Rather than defining what it means to be a Leftist government in Latin America or evaluate their democratic nature (whether liberal or socialist), our goal here is more modest: we show how governance has been enacted in Argentina and Venezuela since the turn of this century and how these governments legitimised themselves in the eyes of supporters. We analyse the (admittedly diverse) viewpoints of activists and constituents, inspecting the relationship and links between governance and mobilisation as seen ‘from the ground’, focusing on the meaning-making processes that constitute them. By focusing on people's interpretations and responses, we are able to show how contentious politics within popular sectors were transformed, while also contesting the notion that they were simply co-opted or indoctrinated by populist leaders.
We argue that the relationships between popular mobilisation and governance in Argentina and Venezuela were built through three social mechanisms: recognition, incorporation and supportive mobilisation.Footnote 6 Given the distinct histories and political contexts, these mechanisms had different outcomes in each country. In Argentina, massive mobilisations in 2001–2 moved the country away from neoliberal politics, while the incorporation of activists into the Kirchners' governments resulted in a re-constitution of the Partido Justicialista (Peronist/Justicialist Party) and its political machines, and of Peronist symbols and identifications. In Venezuela, traditional political machines were not reconstituted but replaced when the collapse of institutionalised politics led to widespread support by the poor of a new political project backed by the Chávez government. Thus, while in Argentina recognition, incorporation and supportive mobilisation dampened disruptive contention and reconstituted Peronism during the Kirchner presidencies, in Venezuela these mechanisms fed popular mobilisation in defence of the Chávez government and contributed to the creation of a new political identity built around the ‘Bolivarian Revolution’.
In the next section, we define recognition, incorporation and supportive mobilisation, and situate these mechanisms within research on Latin American politics. The following section discusses our methods and the contributions of an ethnographic approach to these debates. We argue that this approach allows us to shift the focal point away from the state and onto how local actors construct meanings of the state and invest in its current iterations. Then we turn to the analysis of these social mechanisms on the ground, first in Argentina and then in Venezuela, and to how these mechanisms both facilitated and constrained actions of local-level actors. We show that while recognition and incorporation created new challenges and problems for local actors, they successfully mobilised support for governments because they were extended to actors previously excluded from the polity. Thus, in order to understand the political legitimation of governance under the Kirchners and Chávez, we must take into account all three mechanisms and how they interact. In the conclusion we present the thrust of the argument that we develop in ethnographic form throughout the article, namely, that the social mechanisms connecting governance and popular mobilisation produced different results in these two countries.
Social Mechanisms Mediating between Popular Mobilisation and Governance
Following a pragmatist perspective,Footnote 7 the social mechanisms we offer in this article seek to capture the ways in which popular sectors attempt to solve everyday problems through their interaction with institutional politics.Footnote 8 Scholars have long studied processes of recognition, incorporation and mobilisation in Latin America. Footnote 9 We argue that all three of these mechanisms, as well as their interdependence, can help us to understand the legitimisation of Leftist governance in the region. By paying attention to the forms in which meaning-making processes and location (both in geographical and social terms)Footnote 10 shape social mechanisms in politics, we show how particular mechanisms that underpinned governance in two countries with Leftist national administrations produced distinct results. Thus, we bring together key concepts in studies of Latin American politics to show how they simultaneously operated to produce support in distinct ways given different local contexts.
The concept of recognition has figured prominently in ethnographic studies on the dislocations caused by neoliberalisation.Footnote 11 Whereas Nancy Fraser and others originally used recognition in reference to identity politics and gender inequalities, Footnote 12 we take heed of Fraser's later emphasis on the interplay between recognition and redistribution, thus extending the concept to encompass class relations.Footnote 13 Extending work that focuses on redistribution and poverty reduction,Footnote 14 we argue that material redistribution is as important as symbolic recognition and that neither is complete without the other. In other words, we claim that popular sectors supported Left-of-centre governments not only because of the material benefits that they distributed, but also because of the recognition these material benefits signalled to previously disenfranchised popular sectors.Footnote 15 Thus, along with Fraser, we define recognition as the legitimisation of ‘individual group members as full partners in social interaction’ through the acknowledgement and inclusion of their demands.Footnote 16 Recognition can be counterpoised to misrecognition, which was the prevalent relationship between governments and popular social movements under neoliberalism in Argentina and Venezuela, when popular sectors were seen as ‘inferior, excluded, wholly other, or simply invisible’.Footnote 17 In Latin America, this lack of recognition of popular sectors as ‘full partners’ was expressed in the ‘unwillingness of pro-neoliberal governments over time to acknowledge the legitimacy of the protestors or their demands, much less to seriously engage them, [which] perpetuated political and economic exclusion and feelings of injustice’.Footnote 18
If recognition refers to the acknowledgement and legitimisation of actors and their demands, incorporation refers to one way in which these demands can be acknowledged and addressed – integration into the polity.Footnote 19 Recognition and incorporation are deeply intertwined. As Federico Rossi has noted, ‘[A] popular sector's struggle for recognition might lead to a struggle for incorporation – or reincorporation – as a subject and member of society that merits esteem and is entitled to some of the rights that the (neoliberal) context has (abruptly) altered’.Footnote 20 In the case of Argentina and Venezuela, the recognition of popular sectors was quickly followed by their incorporation. With the failure of the Washington Consensus, Latin America experienced a second incorporation crisis, what Ruth and David Collier would call a ‘critical juncture’.Footnote 21 Though this crisis allowed Leftist leaders to build bases of support, it also restructured the means by which that support could be organised. Governments in the twentieth century could rely upon hierarchical organisations like labour unions to incorporate popular sectors. In contrast, state actors are now more likely to interact with a myriad of associational networks with which they have a more intermittent relationship.Footnote 22 As community organisations have become providers of services, parties have been decentred as the principal medium through which interests are pursued.Footnote 23 We seek to contribute to this work on incorporation by providing ethnographic accounts of the role of popular mobilisation in this process, pushing beyond the paradigm that neatly divides the polity and social movements.Footnote 24 Canonical social movement theories understood social movements as ‘challengers’ acting outside institutional politics, yet current social movement studies converge in acknowledging the fuzzy boundaries between the two. Our contribution builds on studies that have inspected the governance–mobilisation interface in the Latin American context from an ethnographic perspective.Footnote 25
Our argument regarding recognition and incorporation comes full circle by analysing how these two social mechanisms resulted in the supportive mobilisation of popular sectors. ‘Mobilisation’ is the cornerstone of the array of studies analysing Latin American social movementsFootnote 26 and several analyses offer insights into the relationship between populism and popular mobilisation.Footnote 27 We contribute to this literature by comparing the impacts of recognition and incorporation on mobilisation in different contexts. In Argentina, disruptive forms of mobilisation organised by popular sectors progressively diminished during the Kirchners' regimes.Footnote 28 In contrast, in Venezuela contentious mobilisation increased as tension between those in support of the government's socialist project and those opposed to it produced annually increasing protests and counter-protests.Footnote 29 In both countries, however, popular sectors were increasingly interpellated as a force to be mobilised in support of the government. By supportive mobilisation we do not mean that popular mobilisation disappeared, but rather that disruptive forms of action were increasingly replaced by mobilisations seeking to bolster specific government initiatives, show support when these governments faced a political threat, or demonstrate strength on the eve of elections. As Kenneth Roberts explains, mobilisation can be a powerful resource for leaders in times of political contestation, even when ‘mass organization has ceased to be a prerequisite for electoral success'.Footnote 30 By focusing on the actions of politicians and supporters rather than types of party or ideology, we seek to ‘shift the focus from the social content of populism and the ends toward which it is directed to the means by which it is done’.Footnote 31 We use the term ‘supportive mobilisation’ (colloquially referred to as a ‘movilización de apoyo’) to keep pejorative labels at bay (i.e. populism) and maintain focus on social practices.
We argue that all three of these mechanisms underpinned governance in Argentina and Venezuela. It is not enough, however, to understand the deployment of these mechanisms; we must also grasp how local-level actors interpret their deployment and why or why not this process of interpretation results in support. Ethnography, we argue, is the most appropriate methodological approach by which to capture these mechanisms and how they interact with people on the ground.Footnote 32 An ethnography of politics allows us to eschew ‘top-down’ views showing how political action is situated. Taking a cue from the ‘symmetric anthropology’ developed by Brazilian scholars and actor-network theory,Footnote 33 we argue that the national state need not be conceived as the privileged locus of political action. We assume that any global and national factor ‘combines with local historical, institutional, and cultural traditions in numerous and uncertain ways, and patterns of societal acquiescence or resistance need to be problematised and explained rather than presumed’.Footnote 34 We cannot deduce the actions or motivations of localised activists from those of national authorities alone, since they act in places where other actors also inform their actions (from governors and local politicians to neighbours and non-mobilised constituencies).
Our ethnographic approach draws attention to the fuzzy boundaries between governance and mobilisation. We use these terms rather than the nouns ‘government’ or ‘social movements’, because they are closer to the verbs ‘to govern’ and ‘to mobilise’ and thus better convey the emphasis on interactions that we highlight here. They also capture relational processes, helping to avoid the reification of institutions and groups that are ultimately made and remade through social interaction.Footnote 35 We also believe this approach allows us to explore the ambiguities, tensions and contradictions created by the spaces of interaction between governments and popular sectors.Footnote 36 The social mechanisms of recognition and incorporation expose the tensions that Gianpaolo Baiocchi identified in projects of participatory democracy in Brazil, namely, the pulling forces of ‘disruptive, rowdy, and contestatory’ contention and the expectations of ‘virtuous, civil, and cooperative’ participation.Footnote 37 By paying attention to what governance does (and not only to what authorities, government documents, and official statistics say they do) we are in a better position to capture not only the relations of cooperation and negotiation but also the frictions and conflicts between Leftist government and popular sectors. And we are also able to show how, despite frictions and conflicts, recognition and incorporation led to supportive mobilisation.
The social mechanisms that we propose, in short, have been used in various analyses. Our contribution extends and enriches their implications by examining their interconnected and interdependent relationship. We extend their methodological reach by using a comparative ethnographic approach; we expand the available empirical research by studying the aftermath of neoliberalism; and we enrich social theory by adapting social mechanisms used for the study of contentious politics and applying them to the intersection of contentious and institutionalised politics.
Ethnography in Argentina and Venezuela
Studies of the second incorporation crisis and the rise of the Left in Latin America have largely focused on a single country or case studies that are used to demonstrate the diversity within the Left. The comparative work that does exist has often relied on surveys and quantitative methodologies to capture sweeping changes, but does not allow us to understand how these large-scale processes are experienced and negotiated in the day to day. Our methodology closely follows the theoretical approach elaborated in the previous section to address this gap.
Believing that more attention should be paid to the ways in which ‘the people’ might contest, acquiesce and offer critical support to the initiatives of ‘populist’ governance, we focus our analysis on what people think, feel, say and do. We believe, in other words, that ‘conventional political analysis should move beyond the study of official rhetoric by looking at the ways in which it resonates (and, in the process, is transformed) in the everyday life of ordinary folks'.Footnote 38 We thus aim to capture the frictions, dilemmas and paradoxes that emerge from these interactions.Footnote 39 We seek, in short, to keep agency in close sight and eschew labels like co-optation or populist manipulation, believing that governance involves performative acts that cannot be reduced to direct control.Footnote 40
The two countries we compare share important characteristics but differ in ways that allow us to demonstrate the diverse impact of social mechanisms. Charismatic leaders emerged in both Argentina and Venezuela in the aftermath of profound socio-economic and political crises, and these leaders have built their power on the shoulders of popular social movements and poor people's support. These countries also shared similar models of economic development, based on the redistribution of the income generated by export commodities (oil in Venezuela, soya beans in Argentina), which provided ample resources with which recognise, incorporate and mobilise previously excluded actors.Footnote 41 In their typology of the Latin American Left, Levitsky and Roberts characterise the Argentine and Venezuelan governments as structured around concentrated authority while differing in the level of institutionalisation of the political parties supporting these governments (established party in Argentina, new movement in Venezuela).Footnote 42 We extend their analysis by focusing on popular mobilisation (rather than on political parties), paying attention to the ways in which grassroots leaders, activists and constituents engage with established and new governance.
The mechanisms that we discuss here emerged through an inductive comparison of Argentina and Venezuela. We worked through an iterative process moving between ethnographic data and general developments in each country to build a theory of popular mobilisation and governance in two countries that represent different forms the Left turn has taken in Latin America. Though we seek to theorise mobilisation and governance, we do not claim that the mechanisms we discuss operate in all countries in the region that underwent a ‘Left turn’. A key aspect of our argument is that these mechanisms are shaped by the distinct contexts in which they are embedded. Thus, these mechanisms may look very different in other Latin American countries, depending on similarities and differences regarding political systems and the context from which the Left turn emerged. For example, we would expect that recognition and incorporation in Bolivia, where authority is more dispersed, would operate differently in Venezuela and Argentina, where authority is concentrated. Or take the case of Chile, where the party system is quite different from both Argentina and Venezuela. The Chilean Socialist Party's attempts to appeal to a broader base resulted in a distancing from social movements. Thus, in contrast to Argentina where the government's support base depended heavily on social movements, the ability of the Leftist party in Chile to recognise and incorporate social movements would be much more limited.Footnote 43
Rebecca Hanson lived and worked in Catia, a grouping of poor and working-class barrios in Caracas, Venezuela between 2009 and 2014. During this time she worked with three different communal council groups, collecting data from 2010 through to 2013, resulting in a total of two years of observations, during which time she attended meetings and spent informal time with members from all three communities. In 2010 she conducted 16 semi-structured interviews with key informants. The ethnographic data on Argentina is based on more than 12 months of fieldwork developed between 2003 and 2013 in Fontana (a province of northern Argentina) and Buenos Aires. Pablo Lapegna conducted 45 semi-structured interviews, took part in the activities organised by a peasant social movement, lived in the houses of peasant families in rural communities, and participated in meetings. Notes on interactions and dialogues and transcribed interviews were analysed using open and focused coding.Footnote 44 We use pseudonyms for specific localities and people.
Fontana, Northern Argentina
As in other northern provinces in Argentina throughout the twentieth century, the socio-economic development of the province of Fontana was based on agrarian production promoted and subsidised by the state.Footnote 45 In Fontana, this development relied on the production of cotton by small farmers, while the provincial elite exploited large cattle ranches. Peasants occupied a subordinate position within the cotton agro-industry, yet a system of prices controlled by the state and the support of institutions of rural development allowed for their economic reproduction. A process of neoliberalisation initially launched during the military dictatorship of 1976–1982 and deepened in the 1990s greatly dislocated this economic system. In a typical movement of ‘roll back’ and ‘roll out’ that characterises processes of neoliberalisation,Footnote 46 state control over cotton prices was eliminated, rural development institutions were dismantled, and peasants increasingly relied on welfare programmes to make ends meet.
Fontana is also similar to other Argentine provinces in terms of its political structure. It is a stronghold of the Peronist party and is tightly run by a political machine controlled by a governor and strongman. Nildo Corvalán was deputy governor of Fontana between 1987 and 1995; once elected governor in 1995 he reformed the provincial Constitution to remove term limits, allowing for the indefinite re-election of the governor. He has been governor ever since, and was re-elected for the 2015–2019 period. At the end of this term, he will have had 24 years of uninterrupted control over the provincial government.Footnote 47
The Movimiento Campesino de Fontana (Peasant Movement of Fontana, MCF) was created in the late 1990s as an organised response of peasants threatened by economic neoliberalisation that sought to build a movement independent from the provincial political machine. In 1999, MCF organised roadblocks in different areas of the province against the consequences of the liberalisation of cotton production. In the ensuing years, the movement also organised massive assemblies and publicly denounced the wrongdoings of political brokers.
These actions and the fact that MCF became an oppositional voice in the province put the movement at odds with the provincial government. For MCF activists, participation in the movement meant that they were under permanent surveillance by the police. The situation of Nélida is a case in point. She was a local leader of MCF in the rural community of Monte Azul, where she tended her small farm and worked as a cook in the local elementary school. ‘[The police] were following me, I didn't know who they were’, she said in 2008. A plain-clothes policeman from the servicios de inteligencia (intelligence services) also visited the local school and asked people about her activities. She eventually met the officers face to face, and they told her she had been under surveillance for two years.
Through its alliance with the Federación de Tierra y Vivienda (Land and Housing Federation, FTV) – a national social movement federation and one of the largest piquetero Footnote 48 organisations in Argentina – MCF gained access to unemployment subsidies in the late 1990s. From 2002, FTV managed a large amount of benefits from the Plan Jefes y Jefas de Hogar Desocupados (Unemployed Heads of Households Plan, PJyJHD), a national welfare plan providing a monthly income of 150 pesos (then 50 dollars). Many of these planes (benefits) were passed on to MCF.
Recognition
In May 2003, Néstor Kirchner was sworn in as President, after which he sought to openly distance himself from the neoliberalism of the 1990s. Notably, he took office after interim President Eduardo Duhalde rescheduled the national elections for April 2003 following the shooting dead of two piquetero activists by policemen during a roadblock in Buenos Aires, in June 2002.Footnote 49 Kirchner had been governor of the Patagonian province of Santa Cruz throughout the 1990s. During the Presidential campaign, he was barely known by the public and had the support of only a fraction of the Peronist party.
Shortly after taking power, Kirchner built political support through a two-pronged strategy: creating alliances with governors (including Nildo Corvalán, the governor of Fontana) and creating or strengthening relationships with popular social movements. The Kirchner administration recognised the piquetero organisations by tolerating roadblocks and meeting with leaders – a contrast with previous governments, who oscillated between piecemeal concessions, repression and dismissiveness. Piquetero leaders offered ‘a truce’; the leader of FTV declared: ‘If Kirchner sends clear messages, an important sector [of the piqueteros] will be aligned with him.’Footnote 50 President Kirchner received the petitions of piquetero leaders and took their proposals as guidelines for social policies, while also integrating organisations of the unemployed in public works initiatives. The government also agreed to create a special commission to investigate the June 2002 killings of the piquetero activists.Footnote 51 During its initial months, the Kirchner administration confronted the public voices that were demanding a repressive approach (‘mano dura’, ‘iron fist’) towards the organisations of the unemployed. Responding to these pressures, President Kirchner said: ‘I didn't come to repress. Whoever thinks I'm willing to do that, is wrong.’Footnote 52
This recognition of piquetero organisations and other popular social movements resulted in many advantages for both the movements and the government. The latter built political support when the Partido Justicialista was still not fully aligned with the President and the memory of recent years of tumultuous political upheaval was still fresh. For the movements, recognition translated into a less confrontational relationship with law enforcement, controlled by the national government, as well as a renewed access to resources. This recognition had deep implications for localised social movements.
The resources flowing from the national government to piquetero organisations like FTV reached localised movements like MCF, providing access to unemployment subsidies and other welfare benefits. These resources were crucial in the post-2001 scenario, when the constituents of popular movements had trouble making ends meet. But this recognition went beyond straightforward material support or a simple quid pro quo. In 2008 Isidoro, a local leader of MCF, and Nélida mentioned the importance of the benefits, not only as material resources but also as proof that the movement could be an alternative way of getting things done outside of the governor's political machine. ‘We were able to say “See? We can do things amongst ourselves. Not just the mayor or the minister can do things, we can too”’, as Nélida put it. Isidoro said that ‘People tell you “What are you going to do? You cannot do anything”’, yet their administration of the benefits ‘demonstrated that things can be done outside the municipal institutions’.
Managing the benefits thus showed to current and potential constituents of MCF that the organisation could be an effective channel to solve problems. Not only the offices associated with the clientelist network of the governor (i.e. the municipality) but also the MCF could deliver results. In a context dominated by patronage politics this meant that the political machine of the governor did not hold the monopoly over being a ‘problem-solving network’.Footnote 53 A peasant organisation could also fulfil this function and build its powerbase in the process. The management of the benefits, however, also created challenges for the movement. In 2011, three years after the interviews quoted above, Julio (a local leader of MCF) had mixed feelings about the benefits and how managing them sucked up activists’ time and energy: ‘There are two thousand things you have to do so that people can collect [their benefits], so you devote all your time to management; you have to be here, you have to be there, and you end up taking a path different from the one you wanted to take.’
Being recognised by the national government thus afforded a series of advantages, both material and symbolic, to the MCF at the local level. This recognition, however, was not without its pitfalls. In a province where patronage politics is the norm and contentious collective actions are seen as out of place, the identity of piquetero took on a negative connotation. The term was used with an apologetic tone when uttered by activists and one of scorn when used by people not involved in the movement. In one of the meetings observed by Lapegna, while staying at the MCF offices in Curuzú, Julio was speaking to three prospective members of MCF and said that ‘some call us piqueteros, and some call the [unemployed welfare] subsidy “the piquetero subsidy” [smiling]. It's not that we like to blockade a road, but we do that so people from other provinces, or from Buenos Aires, know what's going on, to make ourselves heard.’ When the meeting was over, Julio said that one of the more talkative girls from the meeting told him: ‘I agree with you [the movement], but I don't like it when you block the road’, to which he replied: ‘No, I understand, we don't like it either!’ In another context, Isidoro said: ‘This [welfare] programme is called “the piquetero programme”, so you know [laughing].’ ‘We looked like piqueteros’ was an expression frequently heard during fieldwork, used by activists of MCF in an apologetic tone and echoing the public statements of officials saying they were ‘troublemakers’. Besides the issue of the management of resources, in summary, recognition also created dilemmas in terms of a process of identification.
Incorporation
Scholars of Argentine politics have recently argued that the Kirchner administrations represented a second process of incorporation, equivalent to the process led by President Perón between 1943 and 1955.Footnote 54 What did this process look like from the point of view of the social movements and activists on the ground?
There is a popular saying in the Argentine provinces: ‘God is everywhere, but His office is in Buenos Aires.’ For MCF, the way of gaining access to ‘God's offices’ was an alliance with the FTV, as explained above. This alliance provided a ‘national umbrella’, as activists put it, giving access to contacts in national offices located in Buenos Aires and offering activists at local level the possibility of being hired by national programmes. For instance, at least eleven activists of MCF were appointed as Promotores Territoriales para el Cambio Social (Territorial Promoters for Social Change), a programme within the national Ministry of Social Development. The stated goal of this programme was to ‘strengthen processes of community organisation and participation’ and to connect governments and ‘civil society organisations’.Footnote 55 Promotores who are members of MCF donate part of their wages to fund the movement's activities (for instance, travel costs for meetings in other provinces or in Buenos Aires). These appointments thus provided resources for the movement and job security for activists, offering a certain level of autonomy vis-à-vis the provincial government. In this and similar provinces ruled by authoritarian regimes, being an activist means being unemployable in state agencies or programmes. As a relative of one of the Promotores said when she tried to recruit him to the movement: ‘I'm more than forty years old and I'm unemployed … do you think I'm going to oppose Nildo [the governor]?’
Being incorporated into a national programme thus offered concrete advantages to the movement and the activists. The programme's goal of ‘articulating’ community organisations and governments was thus in sync with the discourse put forward by the Kirchner administrations, namely, the idea that activists had to put disruptive protest aside to concentrate on ‘working’. For activists at local level responding to this call, however, this translated into constant bickering with provincial authorities and the organisations affiliated with the political machine of the governor. As Telma, an MCF activist and Promotora Territorial, put it:
Me, for example, They don't want anything to do with me in some towns, because the mayor knows which organisation I am from, and he doesn't want to hear anything about it. He doesn't want to talk to me … I don't deny that I am from the movement, I told him, but I am here because the movement put me in the programme, through the minister.
Activists also felt that their participation in government programmes was encouraged and their voices were heard, but this also came at the price of being increasingly pressured to collaborate with certain factions of the government. This is how Nélida put it:
I saw that the nation [the national government] at one time gave lots of attention to organisations in many places. They allowed them to participate, to talk. And afterwards, they faded away when they had what they wanted, they solved one thing, they fixed another thing and it is a strategy they have to win you over. When we went to Buenos Aires, with the people from the Secretary of Agriculture, we took part in the Ministry for Social Development, we are still there today, but they have conditions. We can't go with neighbours asking for things, or work directly with the people. No, now you have to work for Kolina [a faction of the national government led by Alicia Kirchner, the sister of Néstor Kirchner and minister for social development from 2003 to 2015]. You have to do politics for the new politicians that are going to work for Kolina. I don't give a damn about that.
Similarly, as time went by, social movement activists grew increasingly dissatisfied with national authorities pigeonholing them as problem-solvers. Isidoro, a local leader of MCF, put this situation in these terms:
We had an opportunity to talk with [a public official from the agricultural programme]. He didn't agree with me: ‘the organisation is here to find solutions’ [he said] and I told him that the organisation is not here to solve problems, it's here to fight so that everyone has the same solutions. I told him that the organisation helps a group of smallholders, but not in a universal way … They say to the organisation, ‘No, don't make this move because you are going to screw the provincial government, and then I won't give you a tractor.’
In short, as the Kirchner government consolidated, the internal factions of the national government permeated the actions of activist networks, and the participation of social movements was increasingly subsumed under the imperatives of the national government to maintain a good relationship with its allies (for instance, the governor of Fontana).
Supportive Mobilisation
The mobilisation of popular social movements buttressed specific government policies and offered Kirchner's administration political support at critical moments. For instance, in March 2005 President Néstor Kirchner confronted the Shell oil company over a spike in gas prices. Several piquetero organisations organised a boycott against the company, blocked petrol stations, and protested at the company's offices.Footnote 56 In November 2005, the government–movement alliance took a transnational turn. The diplomatic representatives of the United States, Canada and Mexico intended to launch the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) during a summit in Argentina. A ‘presidential counter bloc’ led by Hugo Chávez, Néstor Kirchner, and Brazil's Lula da Silva derailed this plan. They were bolstered by massive demonstrations in the streets of Mar del Plata against the FTAA, organised by piquetero organisations that eventually ‘began to be considered part of the territorial allied sector of the [Kirchner] government.’Footnote 57
The support of social movements was thus key at specific junctures, particularly when the national government was threatened. This was the case of a conflict between national government and agribusiness in 2008, when popular social movements mobilised in support of the government.Footnote 58 That year of intense mobilisation took a toll on grassroots social movements. Hugo, an MCF social movement leader, said they supported the government against agribusiness, but that involvement had them ‘bouncing from place to place’ (‘estuvimos de acá para allá’). They mobilised in Buenos Aires and neglected the inner workings of the movement (‘descuidamos lo de adentro’). ‘We tried to be in every place to make sure we didn't miss anything, and we [ended up] missing ourselves’, he said metaphorically (‘Tratamos de cubrir todos los espacios para no quedarnos afuera, y quedamos afuera de nosotros mismos’).
The supportive mobilisation of social movement organisations in Cristina Fernández de Kirchner's first term in office (2007–11) was increasingly deepened during her second term (2011–15). In the 2011 Presidential elections, Cristina Kirchner built her political support on three pillars: the Peronist party, provincial governors, and those social movements created after 2003. In the aftermath of the 2008 conflict between the government and agribusiness, her administration tightened the alliance with governors and the Peronist party, which afforded political stability and support in Congress. At the same time, the national government increasingly sidelined the social movement organisations created in the 1990s (those predating the Kirchners’ regime) and relied more heavily on the organisations that emerged during the Kirchner period. These social movement organisations begin to increasingly concentrate their time and energies to manoeuvre within the Peronist party and/or gain the favour of factions of the national government. The social movements–government interface was formalised in 2012 through the creation of a network called Unidos y Organizados (United and Organised). Very tellingly, several groups within this network had close ties to the President. For instance, Máximo, the son of Néstor and Cristina Kirchner, led La Cámpora and Alicia Kirchner was the leader of Kolina, as mentioned above. As Unidos y Organizados gained prominence, the movements predating the Kirchner regime were marginalised. However, these movements also found it difficult to sever their ties with the government, since that entailed the risk of becoming even more isolated and losing access to resources.
In 2009, these paradoxes emerged during a meeting at the office of MCF. Hugo argued for closer engagement with the Central de Movimientos Populares (Central Committee of Popular Movements, CMP), an initiative to create a confederation of grassroots organisations and movements. Addressing a group of MCF activists, Hugo said:
CMP has a political goal; if we're not interested in participating in electoral politics, then we're not going to rise up or grow. The CMP is targeting the 2011 elections, but if we want to get things through CMP we have to commit. I talked to [an official of the under-secretary of rural development] and he told me that they want to support CMP. He underlined that they will do that with ‘compañero [fellow] organisations’; in other words, Peronist organisations.
Supportive mobilisation thus resulted in social movements becoming increasingly ensnared in the bickering of different factions within the national government and the Peronist party, while getting entangled in the logic of resource management. In Argentina, in short, recognition and incorporation revived Peronism's appeal to ‘the people’ and selectively mobilised supporters when the Kirchner governments were challenged. In Venezuela, on the other hand, as we shall see, recognition and incorporation of sectors of the poor did not resuscitate a faltering party system but contributed to its demise, requiring mobilisation to support a weakly institutionalised government.
Caracas, Venezuela
As the country transitioned from an agricultural to an oil-based economy, Venezuela's rural population migrated en masse to urban centres. In 1950 53 per cent of the population lived in urban areas; by the 1980s this figure had surpassed 85 per cent.Footnote 59 Greater Caracas was the primary destination of urban migration and foreign immigration.Footnote 60 Areas like Catia, where Hanson conducted her research, swelled quickly over a short period of time as they absorbed waves of poor migrants who expanded housing, roads and infrastructure with little to no support or planning by the state. Though largesse resulting from the oil economy allowed governments to provide a minimum standard of living for the working poor for a period of time, a dip in oil prices provoked a decade-long economic downturn in the late 1980s.Footnote 61 Poverty and inequality increased dramatically in the country – by the mid 1990s over half of the population lived below the poverty line. The governments of Jaime Lusinchi, Carlos Andrés Pérez and Rafael Caldera, already suffering a drop in revenue due to the 1980s oil glut, became ‘increasingly corrupt, ossified, and insular’, doing little to soften the impacts of the economic crisis for those least prepared to weather the storm.Footnote 62 In 1989 the government of Carlos Andrés Pérez accepted a structural adjustment loan from the World Bank with the provisions that social spending be slashed, fuel prices raised, and national companies sold off to the private sector. These changes ignited the Caracazo, massive instances of urban rioting and looting that exploded in February 1989. When the government of Carlos Andrés Pérez sent the police and National Guard into the barrios with orders to kill anyone found in the street, Catia bore the major brunt of this violence.Footnote 63
These same neighbourhoods, whose buildings remain marked by bullet holes left by state forces, have provided crucial support for Chavista governments since the early 2000s.Footnote 64 In explaining their support, many residents of Catia contrast the marginalisation and repression they suffered under the ‘cuarta república’ governments (those founded before the 1999 Constitution) with the Chavista governments’ partnership with poor sectors.
Once elected, the Chávez administration was faced with extensive social mobilisation but few institutions through which to build support.Footnote 65 By sponsoring new forms of participation like worker cooperatives and community initiatives, the government extended recognition to and incorporated the poor. These mechanisms, in turn, motivated popular supportive mobilisation in a country with weakly institutionalised politics.Footnote 66 One of the key participatory initiatives founded and funded by the Chávez government are the communal councils. By 2011 there were around 30,000 councils registered with the government.
Councils are organised at the neighbourhood level and were created by the Venezuelan National Assembly with the passage in 2006 of the Ley Orgánica de los Consejos Comunales (Organic Law of the Communal Councils, LOCC).Footnote 67 After council spokespeople (vocero and vocera in Spanish)Footnote 68 are elected, and once the correct paperwork is filed, a council is considered active.Footnote 69 A variety of committees – each headed up by spokespeople – can be formed within the same council; these include (but are not limited to) committees fighting for improved access to water, medicine and education as well as those that organise sports teams and cultural activities. Most funding for council projects comes from the state oil company (PDVSA) and is channelled through national government institutions, such as the Ministerio del Poder Popular para las Comunas y los Movimientos Sociales (Ministry of Empowerment of Communes and Social Movements, MPCyMS). Apart from acting as nodes through which resources are channelled, the councils also act as points of contact for various state programmes. The councils have also taken on functions previously performed by the municipality, such as issuing residency letters.Footnote 70
Community organisations have been utilised by the Venezuelan state for decades to distribute resources and organise support in the barrios.Footnote 71 The 1980s saw a growth in the Asociaciones de Vecinos (Neighbourhood Associations, ADVs), which Sujatha Fernandes has described as ‘a self-help and cross-class movement of residents organized to resolve local problems’ that promoted a middle-class model of citizenship by linking it to property ownership.Footnote 72
By acting as conduits between the state and popular sectors, initiatives such as the communal councils mirror previous ones that were ‘fostered over three decades of a redistributive welfare state’.Footnote 73 However, the ADVs did not have the same level of access to financial resources as the councils. The number of councils and other participatory initiatives in poor sectors, and the recognition they have received, also sets them apart from their predecessors. While neighbourhood associations had been expanding since the 1960s, most were in middle-class areasFootnote 74 and were ‘peripheral when compared to the reach, salience, and political importance of labor unions’.Footnote 75 The councils exist in a profoundly distinct political landscape – they are more active in, and are the principal means of incorporating, popular sectors.
Recognition
One evening Hanson was with communal council participants in Catia, drinking coffee and watching television, always tuned to the government-run station. The evening news was dedicated to the unveiling of a system of gas pipelines that had been built in a neighbouring community, allowing gas to reach homes directly without the need for transportation of gas tanks. This project was the result of collaboration between councils in the area and the state-owned gas company. Throughout the night, interviews were broadcast with council members, representatives from the municipality, MPCyMS, PDVSA, the gas company and other state institutions. The women sitting around the television commented that this government was the first to allow communities to decide what needs they had and address those needs through community engagement.
The communal council in the women's neighbourhood, however, was largely defunct. After numerous conflicts between neighbours, almost all of the former spokespeople and participants stopped coming to meetings. The group had been unable to successfully secure financing for projects for over five years. Despite this, the women were exuberant as they watched the recognition of their neighbours’ needs that resulted in a remedy to a local problem. According to Vanesa, a council spokesperson, the problem with previous governments was that they ‘did not listen’ and the projects that they funded benefitted their group of friends, not the country. In comparison, by recognising organisations like the councils, Chávez had allowed communities to decide what projects they needed.
Previous work has argued that Chavista support ‘rests on a mass base more bent on destroying the state than seizing the state’.Footnote 76 From this perspective, support and mobilisation for Chavismo is dependent upon the government relinquishing control to el pueblo, effectively working towards the dissolution of its own institutions. Chávez himself described the communal councils in this way.Footnote 77 However, on the ground numerous state institutions and representatives are involved in bringing projects like the gas pipeline to fruition, and thus provide recognition to the communal councils. The politics of recognition qua redistribution enacted through new institutions, representatives and laws have signalled to many the acknowledgement and inclusion of poor people's demands and have been instrumental in building popular support for the Chávez government.
Put another way, Chávez operated as a symbol of the new relationships that his government built with poor communities through state institutions. Thus, while we agree with George Ciccariello-Maher that a portion of Chavistas support a withering away of the state,Footnote 78 we argue that the recognition represented by institutionalisation is key to understanding support for Chávez's government.
Incorporation
In our section on Argentina, we focused on the incorporation of social movement actors into state programmes, with community leaders becoming brokers between the state and the poor. Here, however, we look at a ‘softer’ form of incorporation through the communal councils. The state has indeed outsourced some of its functions to the councils and – as Matt Wilde noted in his study on councils in Valencia, Venezuela – residents can confuse council spokespeople with ‘quasi-professional politicians’.Footnote 79 These participatory initiatives have allowed the government to incorporate a significant portion of the poor population into government programmes, specifically those who had not been engaged before Chávez became president.Footnote 80 Very few of those who actively participated in the community councils included in our study had been engaged in neighbourhood or political associations before this participation. This participation allows community residents to acquire skills and practise community activism and leadership.Footnote 81
Nevertheless, council spokespeople are not fully incorporated into the state. Whereas in Argentina local activists were given appointed positions by the Ministry of Social Development, participants in the Venezuelan councils do not receive official positions within state, nor are they paid for their work (though they may gain political contacts and status through their participation).Footnote 82 Indeed, when state representatives were present at council meetings, they reminded council spokespeople that they were not representatives of the state but voices of their community. Council spokespeople have their positions because community members have elected them, not because they are nominated or chosen by government actors. Nor are council spokespeople supposed to dole out resources to individuals as is the case with the Argentine benefits; instead, councils receive resources for predetermined projects that are, in theory, approved by the community.
Neither is incorporation in Venezuela principally mediated through political parties or political leaders, as is the case in Argentina; instead, this process occurs through new state institutions that stand between citizens and resources. Council spokespeople act as interfaces between community members and these institutions, informing residents as to which state institution to visit with a complaint or inquiry and contacting pertinent institutions that will then set up pop-up food markets, immunisation days and days in which people can register for identity cards. In an interview, Vanesa described how this kind of incorporation changed governance:
Before you had to go to so many institutions, and it was all a massive bureaucracy to solicit something and achieve things and there was always preference for privileged people. This is what we are working on now, that you have a direct link with all of the institutions so that there aren't so many intermediaries. To give you an example: Before, to get an identity card you would waste all day, they would give you supporting documents that you had to go and laminate [and use] until three months later when you would go and pick up your laminated identification. And that laminated ID, if it arrived with an error, which is what happened in my case … After three months waiting for a laminated ID and then fixing that error, it makes you lazy, angry, all that. That was one of the things that could happen. Now with all of the ID days that are held in the community, you have the system right here, they do what they have to do, they take your photo there, and they give you your ID immediately.
By bringing state institutions into the community to get things done (such as getting ID cards made), councils make these institutions more effective and accessible. These community organisations and the community members that participate in them have become key interfaces between state institutions and citizens. When state institutions need to organise activities in poor areas they do so by contacting the local community councils to arrange space, publicity and participation. Because of their unique position, the communal councils often operate as particularly effective channels through which people can access state services.
While incorporation opened the state up to the poor – largely by transferring to community residents functions previously assigned to the state– it also formalised the ‘acceptable’ means of lodging grievances with the state, which can work to filter out those claims that do not adhere to institutional procedure. Furthermore, quasi-incorporation has also placed on poor people the onerous task of mobilising and organising others – not only for rallies or national and municipal electoral events, but also for council and members’ election and debates about projects within the community itself – in order to reap the benefits of being included in the polity.
For example, when a number of community meetings were held in 2012 in the community of El Mar in Catia to deal with an old water pipeline system that had burst, representatives of Hidrocapital, the government-run water company, told residents that the community had to reorganise and re-elect their then-defunct communal council – a task that would require months of work and delay– before they could submit a project and request funds to fix the pipes. Like clientelistic networks, this form of redistribution operates to shore up support for the government. When the representatives of Hidrocapital state that they cannot work without a council and citizens acquiesce by reorganising one, state representatives have buttressed the state's position in neighbourhoods. This encourages those who support the government to organise institutions reliant on its continued presence in office. This distinguishes Venezuela from Argentina, in that a semi-functioning participatory organisation – not only party affiliates and brokers – must exist in order for resources to be transferred to a community.
Supportive Mobilisation
Since the 1980s Venezuela has been characterised as a society in ‘constant mobilisation’Footnote 83 and popular sectors have consistently mobilised to hold liberal democratic governments accountable for their responsibilities to the electorate.Footnote 84 This culture of active protest did not subside once the Chávez government came into power. Indeed, the number of protests recorded annually increased during Hugo Chávez's presidency, from 1,037 in 2003 to 1,521 in 2006.Footnote 85 In 2013 demonstrators took to the streets over 4,400 times (resulting in an average of 12 protests per day). In contrast to Argentina, we argue that the mechanisms of recognition and incorporation have not reduced mobilisation. However, they have shaped why mobilisations occur.
When poor people place demands on the state, they often do so through protests that call upon the government to provide resources to initiatives and programmes through which recognition and incorporation are accomplished. Thus, they are intended to force the government to follow through with programmes founded by and directly linked with Chavismo, programmes that the poor have heavily supported. For example, in 2008 communal councils in the western part of the city mobilised and ‘kidnapped’ the then vice-president of Caracas's Mercal system when their neighbourhood Mercal had been closed for over six months.Footnote 86 When relating this story, council members were clear that they were acting in the spirit of the Bolivarian Revolution, proudly describing how they had kicked Globovisión, an anti-Chavista news station, out of the neighbourhood as it tried to report on the event. According to Cristina, one of the council members, ‘We knew what we were doing, were defending our rights … and when Globovisión arrived we didn't give them any kind of information … we told them that we supported our Comandante [a term for Hugo Chávez] and they had to leave or we were going to kick them out.’ Rather than fracturing the relationship between poor people and the government, these mobilisations reinforce poor people's support for a political project they identify with the government.
The recognition and incorporation of sectors of the poor through government-sponsored participation allowed for the mobilisation of support despite weak institutionalisation and a fragile and oftentimes unpopular party. Indeed, while Hugo Chávez's charismatic authority proved resistant to institutionalisation, this authority is grounded in a much higher level of grassroots organising.Footnote 87 This support base was key for Chavista governments during elections, but also through the years of political turmoil that the Chávez government experienced and the first year of turmoil experienced by the Maduro government. Footnote 88
Before presidential elections in October of 2012, Hanson attended a meeting to plan housing construction in the poor and working-class sector where she lived. The discussion turned ‘political’ when a woman interrupted the meeting and announced that a friend had just texted her to say that ‘El Majunche’ (a derogatory term used for Henrique Capriles, the opposition candidate) might be passing through the area and that ‘everyone should be prepared to go out and confront him’. People around murmured their agreement and acknowledged that council members from surrounding neighbourhoods would keep them up to date should they need to leave the meeting. Similarly, in meetings in a popular sector of La Vega, a western section of Caracas, after Nicolás Maduro won the presidential election in 2012, residents agreed that a neighbourhood watch would be organised to protect government-sponsored medical centres, believing that these would be targeted by the opposition. And when massive protests that demanded la salida (the exit) of the then President Nicolás Maduro took off in February 2014, poor sectors were conspicuously absent. Instead, meetings in poor sectors of the city were dedicated to planning mobilisations in support of the government or to counter opposition protests. During the meetings, participants cited the numerous victories they had won since the Chavista governments had been in power – the Mercales, medical centres and communal councils – which they believed were endangered by those opposed to the Chavista governments. It is important to note here that it was participants, not representatives of the Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (United Socialist Party of Venezuela, PSUV), that were organising marches and neighbourhood watches at meetings. When representatives were present, they vociferously supported these ideas, but neither instigated nor planned them. Instead community residents exchanged phone numbers and suggested days that they were free to meet with others to plan actions. In these cases, it was investment by the poor in the programmes associated with the Chavista governments that mobilised support and bodies, not their concern over the victory of the Chavista political party or candidate (though it is of course difficult to disentangle the two). The recognition and incorporation extended by the government presented powerful incentives for mobilisation when compared to many poor people's memories of the past.
Conclusion
This article has sought to capture the situated logics of popular mobilisation in terms of their place-based politics. In doing so, our goal was to eschew the normative perspectives often attached to labels such as ‘populist’ and ‘reformist’. Rather than attempting to define what the Left in Latin America is (or is not), we concentrated on the interplay between mobilisation, participation, and governance, favouring these terms to keep a close focus on actions and interactions, and on the loose networks and blurry boundaries between activists and public officials. Indeed, given that relationships between citizens and the state have become increasingly intermittent and less clearly defined,Footnote 89 it is important to utilise methodological approaches that can capture these loose, flexible, and oftentimes nebulous networks.
Drawing on previous work on recognition, incorporation and mobilisation, we have argued that together these three mechanisms define the relationship between popular mobilisation and populist governance in the Kirchners’ Argentina and Chávez's Venezuela. By using an ethnographic approach, we were able to investigate the double-edged sword of these mechanisms by viewing them from the standpoint of everyday people. From this viewpoint, recognition, incorporation and supportive mobilisation create opportunities and tensions that subordinate actors learn to navigate in order to solve concrete problems.Footnote 90 In both countries, poor people's organisations were able to ‘get things done’ once recognised by and (quasi) incorporated into the political apparatus; but this incorporation also placed new responsibilities on these organisations and circumscribed the means by which resources could be accessed. Despite pitfalls and drawbacks (more on this below), these mechanisms mobilised support for Left-of-centre governments, which poor people juxtaposed to previous administrations when the prevalent relationship between governments and popular sectors was misrecognition. By examining how these mechanisms operated on the ground, we have been able to show why subordinate actors acquiesce to and even support certain initiatives, without relying upon concepts of co-optation or populist manipulation.
We have extended previous work on recognition, incorporation and mobilisation by comparing how similar mechanisms operated in both countries, yet produced different results, due to differing historical trajectories and social contexts. In Argentina, a phase of heightened popular mobilisation in the 1990s characterised by disruptive tactics was followed by the rise of Left-of-centre governance in the 2000s. This governance was characterised by a growing softening of transgressive forms of action, the revival of Peronism among popular sectors, and an integration of activists into the public administration. In Venezuela, in contrast, the lack of popular organisations preceding the rise of the Chávez government determined a different relationship between mobilisation and governance. Chávez drew on a discourse appealing to popular sectors and his administration encouraged popular mobilisation – disruptive or otherwise – in support of the Bolivarian Revolution. Unlike in Argentina, where the consolidation of the Kirchner regime was built on the re-constitution of Peronism and its political machine, the dissolution of political parties in Venezuela and the creation of a pro-government Socialist party determined a new form of political incorporation and mobilisation.
An ethnography of Leftist governance in Argentina and Venezuela highlights the importance of taking into account the trajectory and points of view of subordinate actors in order to understand how popular mobilisation not only targets governments but also underpins them. Our comparison of Argentina and Venezuela underscores the social embeddedness and path dependency of social mechanisms. In both countries, certain resources such as export income and charismatic leadership resulted in powerful and successful recognition and incorporation. The differing levels of institutionalisation meant that these were achieved through different means in each country, resulting in distinct forms of supportive mobilisation. However, recent downturns in the Argentine and Venezuelan economies have certainly affected the ability of these governments to recognise, incorporate and mobilise.
Considering that the governments that we analysed here were either ousted from power via elections (in Argentina in 2015) or became immersed in a profound crisis (in Venezuela since 2014), it is relevant to close this article with a brief reflection on the relationship between this demise and the mechanisms that we proposed.Footnote 91 Whereas recognition, incorporation and supportive mobilisation promoted and cemented the popular support of charismatic leaders in Argentina and Venezuela, they also contained the seeds of their own destruction.
Leaders (Chávez or the Kirchners) and their movements (Chavismo or Peronism) were the ones taking the active role in recognising and legitimising popular actors. Whereas this was a relationship of mutual support, it was far from being an equal one. In other words, participatory groups and social movements remained subordinate to the governments they supported. Furthermore, the appeal of these governments lay in great part in the charisma of their leaders, which was also strongly associated with a centralisation of power. This centralised charisma eventually became a liability. Charisma, by definition, is entwined with a personality and thus could not be easily transferred – particularly when a handpicked or aspiring successor is ill suited to the task, as is arguably the case with Nicolás Maduro or Daniel Scioli. The importance of charisma also concentrated decision-making processes in top leaders by redistributing resources but not political power. This was the crux of the type of incorporation practised by the Chávez and Kirchner regimes: it involved the recognition of popular sectors and allowed them access to resources, yet this was a subordinate incorporation.
Changes in the global market also weakened the governments’ abilities to redistribute the resources that were key to recognition. A decline in prices for each country's main export commodity (more pronounced in oil than in soya beans) meant that governments had fewer resources to enact or perform their support of marginalised groups.
Future research could assess whether the mechanisms we proposed here are useful to explain the relationship between governance and popular participation in other countries with different forms of leadership, political systems and dynamics of mobilisation.
