Venezuelan ‘Chavismo’ revolutionized Latin America. Will it survive Maduro’s fall?

MEXICO CITY — Hugo Chávez called the United States “the empire,” and President George W. Bush “the devil.” Denouncing capitalism as “the road to hell,” he pushed an alternative economic model that nationalized key industries and redistributed wealth.

During his 14-year presidency of Venezuela, Chávez warned of a CIA plot to kill him and steal his country’s vast oil reserves, declaring: “Fatherland, socialism or death!”

Now, after the U.S. attacked Venezuela and imprisoned Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, the future of the leftist movement forged by Chávez — known as Chavismo — may be at stake.

Venezuela’s interim leader, Delcy Rodríguez, insists her country “will not be a colony” of any imperial force, but appears willing to tolerate President Trump’s demands that the U.S. get “total access” to Venezuela’s oil.

Rodríguez, Maduro’s vice president, has called for reforms to Venezuela’s energy sector to attract foreign investment and has freed dozens of dissidents once deemed enemies of the Chavista revolution.

“Venezuela is entering a new political era, one that allows for understanding despite political and ideological differences and diversity,” Rodríguez said last week. On Thursday, she sat down in Caracas, the capital, with CIA Director John Ratcliffe, whose agency helped plot Maduro’s abduction.

“It’s pretty interesting to see how a hard-line Chavista like Delcy has taken a 180-degree turn just one week after assuming the presidency,” said Imdat Oner, a former Turkish diplomat in Caracas.

Some analysts now wonder whether the days are numbered for Chavismo, which allowed Chávez to concentrate power under a banner extolling nationalism, populism and what he described as “socialism of the 21st century.”

“I think it’s in intensive care, and I don’t think it will leave the operating room,” said Enrique Krauze, a Mexican historian who wrote a biography of Chávez. The movement has been undermined by the U.S. attack, Krauze said, and discredited by authoritarianism, widespread corruption among leaders and an economic crisis triggered by falling oil prices and U.S. sanctions that prompted a quarter of the population to flee.

The ideas of Chávez, a charismatic figure who inspired a generation of Latin American leftists, have been irrevocably tarnished, Krauze said.

“Venezuelans are exhausted after 26 years of Chavismo,” Venezuelan journalist Boris Muñoz wrote in Time magazine. “Understandably, many are willing to accept American tutelage as the price to pay.”

Other political analysts say Chavismo remains strong, even if aspects of its identity have shifted since its namesake died of cancer 13 years ago.

“What is left of Chavismo? Everything,” said Javier Corrales, a political science professor at Amherst College. Except for the removal of Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, who now face drug-trafficking charges in the U.S., “not a single person has been displaced,” Corrales said. “The inner circle, the military generals, the colectivos, the governors, the mayors — they’re all there.”

He noted that Chávez, despite his fierce anti-U.S. rhetoric, maintained extensive oil trade with the United States. The current deal-making with the Americans, he said, “isn’t a departure from anything that Chavismo ever represented.”

In Caracas, where scattered faded portraits of Chávez still grace walls, there is a sense that little of substance has shifted since U.S. bombs jolted residents awake in the pre-dawn hours of Jan. 3. For the many Venezuelans who despised Maduro and his rule, that is disappointing. For those who support the government, it’s a relief.

On a sunny morning last week, about 2,000 Chavistas rallied on a downtown street.

“It won’t be easy to erase socialism overnight with a few bombs and the kidnapping of a president,” said Wilson Barrios, 37, who works at the Education Ministry.

“Chavismo is not a fad,” he said. “It is a lifestyle and a conviction with principles.”

Leader of the Pink Tide

Chávez, a former army officer inspired by Marxist thinkers and revolutionaries such as Simón Bolivar and Fidel Castro, was one of the most consequential political figures in recent Latin American history.

His election in 1998 helped unleash Latin America’s “pink tide,” in which leftist leaders swept into power from Argentina to Brazil to Ecuador.

His populist rhetoric and mixed-race background appealed to the masses in a nation long run by an elite minority of mostly white pro-business politicians with close ties to the U.S. and foreign oil giants.

At a rally in Caracas in 2024, a supporter holds a statue of late President Hugo Chávez as his successor, Nicolás Maduro, delivers a speech formalizing his candidacy to run for reelection.

(Getty Images)

Buoyed by record oil prices that inflated state coffers, Chávez launched social programs that cut poverty rates. His government built homes for the poor and provided free and subsidized staples for those in need. It opened hospitals and schools and slashed infant mortality.

An outspoken critic of U.S. intervention in Latin America and what he saw as rampant materialism in the “imperialist” United States, Chávez forged alliances with Washington’s adversaries, such as China, Cuba and Iran.

Addressing the U.N. General Assembly in 2006 a day after Bush gave a speech about the Iraq war, Chávez declared: “The devil was here yesterday … this place still smells of sulfur!”

Venezuela’s unhappy elites tried to unseat Chávez — mostly notably during a short-lived coup d’etat in 2002 — but he continued to win elections.

The tide began to shift after his 2013 death and the ascension of Maduro, a former trade union leader who lacked the charisma of his mentor. Then came a dramatic decline in oil prices — inevitable in an industry prone to boom-and-bust cycles.

As revenue sank, the economy collapsed amid soaring inflation. Bread and medicine lines stretched for hours. Malnutrition and infant mortality rose. Millions fled the country.

Support for Maduro plummeted, and the opposition handily beat his party’s candidates in 2015 parliamentary elections. Sanctions on Venezuela’s oil industry during Trump’s first term made things worse for Maduro.

From the beginning, Maduro had been deepening the authoritarianism that had begun under Chávez, a model Corrales said was “based on the idea that the revolution will never relinquish power.”

Maduro claimed he won a disputed election in 2018, although the U.S. and other countries refused to recognize the results. In 2024, Maduro declared victory again, though tally sheets from voting machines collected by the opposition showed he lost by a wide margin.

Maduro clamped down on dissent, jailing hundreds of activists, ordering government forces to fire on protesters and triggering another exodus of migrants.

These days, the pink tide is far in the rear-view mirror, with conservatives winning recent elections in Ecuador, Argentina and Chile.

John Polga-Hecimovich, a Latin America expert at the United States Naval Academy, said emigration from Venezuela to neighboring countries in recent years has colored many people’s views of leftist politics in general and Chavismo in particular.

Across the region, it is now common for right-wing candidates to accuse left-wing opponents of being like Chávez and wanting to turn their country into “another Venezuela.”

True believers or pragmatists?

Rodríguez has deep revolutionary roots. Her father was a Marxist guerrilla who was killed after he abducted an American businessman in 1976. Rodríguez, an early disciple of Chávez, whom she still refers to as “comandante,” said constructing a socialist state was “personal revenge” for her father’s death.

But in recent years, as she rose in the ranks of Maduro’s government, Rodríguez showed a pragmatic side.

To help right the economy, she made deals with business elites and pushed a reform that allows Venezuelans to use the dollar instead of the bolívar. She helped change laws to make the energy industry more attractive to foreign capital.

Her efforts attracted the attention of White House officials last year as they weighed a possible operation to remove Maduro.

Now Rodríguez must walk a fine line, continuing to signal her revolutionary bona fides to hard-line Chavístas while placating Trump, who has warned that she will “pay a very big price” if she does not comply with U.S. demands.

She denounced the “terrible military aggression” carried out by U.S. forces, but also had what she called a “long and courteous phone conversation” with Trump, saying that with “mutual respect” they discussed a bilateral agenda to benefit both nations. He, in turn, called her “a terrific person.”

A pro-government supporter holds paintings of late President Hugo Chávez during a campaign rally on Nov. 18, 2021, in Caracas.

(Manaure Quintero / Getty Images)

Oner, the former diplomat, said her coziness with Washington does not mean Rodríguez has abandoned her revolutionary ideology. He believes she and other leaders have sacrificed some key tenets of Chavismo in order to save it.

“They are doing this for the regime’s survival,” Oner said. “They have to be flexible to stay in power, or they’ll lose everything.”

Still, there’s little doubt, Oner said, that Chávez would be disappointed.

“He would feel deeply betrayed by Delcy’s actions.”

Linthicum and McDonnell reported from Mexico City and James from California. Special correspondent Mery Mogollón contributed from Caracas, Venezuela.