For decades now, efforts to understand Venezuela’s mutating crises have often reflected rather than risen above the same polarization that has turned the country’s politics into a winner-take-all conflict between Chavistas and anti-Chavistas. In turn, polarized accounts have often rested on incomplete pictures of Hugo Chávez and Chavismo aimed less at explaining than at apportioning or deflecting blame. Is a different account possible? What might a history of Chavismo that stresses contingency and contradiction over telos and consistency look like? This presentation offers a sweeping account of Chávez and Chavismo that emphasizes the evolving nature of both. Seen as a whole, Chavismo takes shape less as a single movement linked by an overriding ideology than as an assemblage of often contradictory movements and ideologies that developed in distinct stages. Though each stage created and responded to new challenges and opportunities, all were and remain thread together by the changing whims of its charismatic, polarizing leader, in life and long after his death.

Alejandro Velasco is a historian at New York University's Gallatin School and Department of History, and was Executive Editor of the NACLA Report on the Americas from 2015 to 2021. Velasco's first book Barrio Rising: Urban Popular Politics and the Making of Modern Venezuela (University of California Press, 2015), won the 2016 Fernando Coronil Prize for best book on Venezuela, awarded biennially by the Section on Venezuelan Studies of the Latin American Studies Association. A frequent media contributor, his editorials and analysis have appeared in NACLA, Nueva Sociedad, The Nation, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Current History, and others. Velasco also frequently contributes radio and television commentary in outlets including NPR, MSNBC, Al Jazeera, CBS, France 24, the BBC, and the CBC.