Is De-Chávezification Underway in Venezuela at Last?
4th August 2024
Hugo Chávez, the legendary socialist leader who preceded Nicolás Maduro, has long been a mythical figure. With his signature red beret and bombastic speeches, the man is to the West’s college Marxists what Justin Bieber once was to teenage girls. Some of this process has been organic—Chávez was indeed an icon, after all, and a person can be iconically awful. But much of the late leader’s mythologisation has been the result of an organised and persistent propaganda effort managed by adept political operatives, instructed by Cuba’s revolutionary regime, and exported by its backers.
Like the Soviets, the Chavista regime understood the importance of symbolism. They changed the official name of the country and its states; they changed their nation’s flag and shield; they added a little red heart and the words Hecho en Socialismo to the products of the companies they expropriated; they elevated historical figures like tribal leader Cacique Guaicaipuro; and they reimagined Simón Bolívar, the oil-rich country’s independence hero, as a Chavista God and made Chávez his son. They even remade Bolívar in the image of their revolution. The man whose portrait now hangs in public schools and government buildings looks nothing like the one painted more than two centuries ago.