A Review of The Paradox of Violence in Venezuela: Revolution, Crime, and Policing during Chavismo

The Paradox of Violence in Venezuela: Revolution, Crime, and Policing during Chavismo by David Smilde, Verónica Zubillaga and Rebecca Hanson (Eds.). (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023)

Editors David Smilde, Verónica Zubillaga and Rebecca Hanson—who are among the most insightful and knowledgeable analysts of contemporary Venezuela—have done a remarkable job bringing together a multi-disciplinary set of scholars that bring to bear a diverse array of perspectives and methodological tools to elucidate two key, inter-related puzzles. The book’s title references the “paradox” of rising violence amid decreasing poverty and inequality—in contrast to scholarly research and conventional wisdom linking poverty and violence. But an additional paradox the book masterfully tackles is the extraordinary levels of state violence deployed against the social groups the state purports to represent. These questions are integral to understanding the multiplicity of crises afflicting Venezuela, and The Paradox of Violence in Venezuela is integral to addressing them. The editors highlight four key factors to account for the country’s spike in violence: extraordinary oil revenues and the “hypertrophic” growth of the state, revolutionary governance characterized by state fragmentation and intra-state competition, failed citizen security reforms and resurgent militarized policing, and unevenness of redistribution that resulted in continued concentrated disadvantage.

One of the book’s central contributions is its meticulous analysis of the contours of violence in Venezuela, shedding important light on its dynamics at both the macro, meso, and micro level. In the book’s first chapter, González Mejías and Kronick go to painstaking lengths to open the black box of homicide statistics in Venezuela, constructing and validating a novel dataset of violent deaths based on health ministry data. Their diagnosis of the profound flaws in Venezuelan homicide statistics—and stark discrepancies between police and health ministry data—underscores the challenge of coordination across agencies. It also makes salient how the book’s central thesis of state fragmentation and intra-state competition contribute to the dramatic rise in violence in Venezuela. Moreover, their alternative measure enables sober analysis of some of the conventional explanations for the recent dramatic spike in homicide rates, such as that it’s attributable to Chávez (they find the violent death rate doubled in the years before Chávez’s election), or that it’s attributable to the 2000s oil boom (no such spike in violence occurred in a previous oil boom in the 1970s).

Chapters by Andrés Antillano and Verónica Zubillaga bring to bear rich ethnographic detail of the micro-level dynamics of violence in the country’s prisons and barrios. Antillano captures well the uneven social inclusion under Chávez and offers poignant reflections linking uneven redistribution and social inclusion, state fragmentation and the increase in violence, revealing how redistribution through government social policies enabled by oil windfalls reaches the barrios only to be subjected to violent extraction and exploitation in prisons and barrios alike, including by state agents. The author also captures the state fragmentation that contributes to this uneven inclusion with striking depictions of the uneven state presence in both the prisons and the barrios—absent in everyday governance and regulation of social relations, but present through extreme repression. Zubillaga, meanwhile, provides rich ethnographic detail about the proliferation of intra-class violence and the role of the state in its reproduction. She traces how the importation of legal firearms in the service of the “peaceful, but armed, revolution” also led to the proliferation of weapons in illegal markets that flooded the barrios with handguns. As Zubillaga’s analysis makes clear, the state was a key contributor to rising violence both by fostering “a radical and chronic absence of justice” (p. 127) and by serving as “the main providers of ammunition” (p. 119).

Chapters by Keymer Ávila and Leonardo Gómez and Rebecca Hanson, meanwhile offer stark accounts of the meso-level bureaucratic logics that drive violence from the perspective of state security forces. Ávila offers a granular look at the shocking rates of lethal violence wielded by state security forces against the social groups the regime purports to represent, leaving Venezuela with the highest rates of state violence in the Americas—and arguably among the highest in the world. Gómez and Hanson deepen our understanding of the “necropolitics” diagnosed by Ávila, shedding light on the reasoning and incentives of ordinary police officers charged with executing it. The authors provide a rare and sobering look at police killings from the perspective of officers themselves, who openly justify unleashing unrelenting violence against those they view as “the dregs of society” and bluntly admit “we have a green light, we are untouchable” (198). This “street-level bureaucracy” perspective is invaluable for understanding the drivers of state violence. The authors also offer rich evidence of how the proliferation of highly lethal militarized operations led to a proliferation and territorial reconfiguration of gang violence: militarized raids in urban barrios led many gang members to migrate to rural areas, bringing new modalities of violence with them.

But the book does not only describe the complex nature of violence in Venezuela, it also explains the particularities of the Venezuelan case that contributed to the rise in violence, offering new perspectives on standard explanations of violence. A key contribution of this volume is that at first glance it looks like a standard “resource curse” story (a paradox in which abundant natural resources lead to negative economic and political outcomes), but it adds an important and under-explored mechanism in the literatures on the resource curse and violence, demonstrating how the influx of vast oil resources led to competition within the state and among social groups (especially those the revolution claimed to represent) that resulted in the pluralization of violence. Scholarship by Angélica Durán-Martínez has demonstrated the importance of state fragmentation as a driver of violence, but The Paradox of Violence in Venezuela shows us that one source of state fragmentation is this increase in economic resources that drives intra-state competition. The book’s focus on state fragmentation and intra-state competition is also an important corrective of state capacity-based explanations of violence, instead “unpacking” state capacity to move us away from a model of a unitary state or the pursuit of uniform interests. In doing so, the book offers a rare and important multi-level analysis that shows us how macro-level economic growth and resulting intra-state competition has implications for micro-level dynamics such as conflict resolution and the inability of state institutions to address it.

Another important contribution of the book is how it elucidates the relationship between political polarization and the rise in violence, moving away from a conventional story about political repression against the opposition. The book’s empirical chapters offer ample evidence of one of its central claims, that the spike in violence “has not been an expression of Venezuela’s national-level political conflict” (p. 7) but rather “intraclass” violence among and against residents of low-income barrios. Nevertheless, the book, and in particular the chapter by Rebecca Hanson and David Smilde, illustrates the role played by the country’s bitter political divisions in perpetuating violence by rendering the implementation of urgently needed citizen security reforms all but impossible.

The authors provide compelling survey data demonstrating that Venezuela’s chief political cleavage—namely whether one supported chavismo or was in the opposition—profoundly shaped views about an ambitious police reform, leaving a transformative citizen security agenda without a real constituency that favored it. Police reform typically faces many hurdles and powerful opponents, making broad citizen support essential for sustaining it. But, as the authors demonstrate, societal polarization and intra-state divisions— between reformers and Chavista hardliners who viewed police reform as “right wing”—were the death knell of police reform. Instead, such divisions led to erratic and inconsistent security policies, leading to the coexistence of human rights/citizen-security oriented police reform alongside ever greater military incursions into domestic security provision.

While the book offers needed correctives to many existing explanations for violence, its exploration of the relationship between poverty and inequality and violence could be developed further. While some of the empirical chapters offer rich empirical evidence of how social exclusion and violence are mutually reinforcing, the lack of a theoretical framework exploring this relationship is a notable gap. The book’s introductory chapter provides a cursory discussion of the relationship, while drawing on scholarship based in the United States. A more comprehensive conceptual exploration of how poverty and exclusion relate to factors such as state fragmentation and societal polarization would make for a stronger contribution.

The book offers crucial insights for contemporary debates about addressing crime and insecurity, which have been salient in Latin America for decades but which has gained prominence more broadly, as debates about policing, crime and social policy in recent U.S. presidential elections demonstrate. The authors’ cogent analysis demonstrates the importance of moving beyond ideological debates, showing that neither social policy approaches associated with left-wing governments nor mano dura policies preferred by right-wing leaders are a panacea. Rather, as the book demonstrates, both can contribute to the reproduction of violence in expected and counterintuitive ways. Instead, the book demonstrates the perils of uneven social inclusion, intra-state competition, societal polarization and the militarization of security. Notwithstanding the distinctiveness of the Venezuelan context, these challenges afflict Latin America as a whole, and leaders throughout the region should heed the lessons of the Venezuelan case.

Yanilda González is the Ford Foundation Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her research focuses on policing, state violence, and citizenship in democracy, examining how race, class, and other forms of inequality shape these processes. She is the author of Authoritarian Police in Democracy: Contested Security in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

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