Left Government Strategies toward Business Groups and the Outcomes: The Mexican and Venezuelan Cases

Abstract

The progressive governments of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico and Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela followed a strategy of selective treatment to win over some businesspeople and neutralize others in order to weaken the opposition of a hostile business class. This approach had advantages and downsides. It succeeded in gaining support from business representatives for government initiatives in moments of difficulty and crisis and reducing the firepower of the commercial media. It was also, however, conducive to corruption. Many nonhostile businesspeople proved to be unreliable allies as they ended up withdrawing their support for the government. These capitalists were a far cry from the progressive “national bourgeoisie” with which Communists and other leftists attempted to form alliances in the twentieth century, but proestablishment actors attacked many of them, including such leading capitalists as Gustavo Cisneros in Venezuela and Ricardo Salinas in Mexico, who in some cases were considered “traitors.” In Mexico, major businesspeople before and after the left’s rise to power played a more overtly political role than, for the most part, in Venezuela. Chávez attempted to define the behavior of progressive businesspeople, which included limits on profits, and also promoted the formation of politically progressive business organizations.

Los gobiernos progresistas de Andrés Manuel López Obrador en México, y Hugo Chávez y Nicolás Maduro en Venezuela, siguieron una estrategia de trato selectivo para ganarse la confianza de algunos empresarios y neutralizar a otros con el fin de debilitar la oposición de parte de una clase empresarial hostil. Este enfoque implicó tanto ventajas como desventajas. Logró obtener el apoyo de los representantes empresariales para iniciativas gubernamentales en momentos de dificultad y crisis, así como reducir el impacto negativo de los medios de comunicación comerciales. Sin embargo, también dio lugar a la corrupción. Muchos empresarios no hostiles resultaron ser aliados poco confiables y, eventualmente, retiraron su apoyo al gobierno. Estos capitalistas estaban muy lejos de constituir la “burguesía nacional” progresista con la que los comunistas y otros izquierdistas intentaron formar alianzas en el siglo XX. Sin embargo, actores a favor del status quo atacaron a muchos de ellos, incluidos capitalistas prominentes como Gustavo Cisneros en Venezuela y Ricardo Salinas en México, quienes, en algunos casos, fueron vistos como “traidores”. En México, los principales empresarios antes y después del ascenso de la izquierda al poder desempeñaron un papel más abiertamente político de lo que ocurrió, mayoritariamente, en Venezuela. Chávez intentó definir el comportamiento de los empresarios progresistas, lo cual incluyó poner un límite a sus ganancias, y también promovió la formación de organizaciones empresariales políticamente progresistas.

Keywords

“National bourgeoisie,” Andrés Manuel López Obrador Hugo Chávez Fedecámaras Carlos Slim Gustavo Cisneros

All governments that are committed to revolutionary transformation but rule out a forceful seizure of state power or an accelerated radicalization quickly leading to socialism are confronted with a fundamental issue: given the predominance of the capitalist system, what relations, if any, with the capitalists should the left in power pursue? The progressive governments that came to power in Latin America in the twenty-first century, known as the “Pink Tide,”¹ faced this predicament, though the strategy they followed toward capitalist groups was never openly discussed or debated. This failure was especially striking because Pink Tide governments recognized that socialism was not an immediate prospect and therefore the capitalists would be around for some time. Hugo Chávez cautioned that socialism would take at least two decades to achieve, while Bolivia’s Vice President Álvaro García Linera predicted that what he called “Andean-Amazonian capitalism” would last a century. The debate that took place within and outside of leftist parties centered on economic policy while skirting the crucial issue of how to divide the business class by winning over or neutralizing some of its members and isolating the most intransigent ones.

In Pink Tide countries, prominent businesspeople occupied one of three groups in terms of their political behavior. The hostile business sector was aggressively opposed to the leftists in power and sometimes formed part of the disloyal opposition that questioned the government’s legitimacy. Businesspeople in the friendly business sector provided the government with political support, endorsed some of its policies, and in a few cases held government posts and belonged to the governing party. A third category represented a middle ground between these two poles. This article will examine the strategy toward businesspeople followed by the Pink Tide governments of Mexico under Andrés Manuel López Obrador (hereafter AMLO) and Venezuela under Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro. Venezuela, the most radical Pink Tide country, and Mexico, a moderate one, were chosen in order to explore contrasts and similarities. In both cases intense polarization and the existence of a powerful hostile business sector that included some of the nation’s leading capitalists convinced the leftists in power that preferential treatment of a select group of businesspeople was necessary and justifiable. The aim was to isolate and reduce the influence of intransigent members of the hostile business sector. The main approach of the AMLO government was to increase the size of the “middle ground” by drawing some of the intransigents into that category. In Venezuela, Chávez made greater efforts than AMLO to nurture the friendly business sector by formulating specific norms for “responsible” business practices, at the same time creating pro-Chavista business organizations (Ellner, 2020a: 167–169).

The examination of the relations between Pink Tide governments and business groups sheds light on various issues and lessons and raises questions that the article will explore. One issue is whether the terms “progressive bourgeoisie” and “national bourgeoisie”—both used by Communists and other leftists in the twentieth century—are fitting to describe the friendly business sector and middle-ground businesspeople in the age of globalization. A second is whether to consider the tacit agreements with friendly and middle-ground businesspeople “strategic alliances” or “tactical alliances.” A third issue is the tendency toward the preferential treatment of businesspeople based on political criteria to lead to corruption. A final question is what the Pink Tide experience has shown with regard to the reliability and resilience of the alliances with friendly and middle-ground businesspeople in situations of crisis.

The first section of the article will briefly explore the positions of the international Communist movement historically and show that its analysis of the national bourgeoisie in the South was frequently modified in connection with changes not only in Soviet foreign policy but also in the left’s political strategy. The second section will explore the nature of the business sectors that AMLO and Chávez attempted to win over or neutralize and the differences in the strategies they employed. The concluding section will discuss the larger implications of the Pink Tide’s strategy toward business groups. Specifically, the resultant alliances with friendly and middle-ground business groups demonstrate the shortcomings of analyses of Pink Tide governments that classify them as “populist” in the pejorative sense of the term. These writings define “populism” as the “politics of antagonism” and stress the tendency of populist leaders to polarize, a thesis that is at odds with the efforts of Pink Tide leaders to neutralize sectors of a business class that was openly hostile to the government.

Leftist Debate over the “National Bourgeoisie” since 1917

A brief discussion of the long-standing debate over the role of the “national bourgeoisie”² provides a historical context for understanding the relations between Pink Tide leaders and national business interests. At one extreme, some twentieth-century leftists supported alliances with the national bourgeoisie that were designed to achieve far-reaching goals corresponding to a stage of national development based on industrialization, democracy, and land reform. At the other extreme, certain leftist currents denied the existence of a progressive national bourgeoisie or else viewed it as highly unreliable and in practice ruled out a strategy of convergences and agreements with it (Ellner, 1981: 62–65). A majority of leftists stood between the two positions, though in the age of globalization beginning in the 1980s most ceased to view the local bourgeoisie as “progressive.”

The Communist movement throughout the twentieth century modified its position several times, demonstrating a correlation between hostility toward the national bourgeoisie and swings to the left in general. The two theses presented by Lenin and the Indian Communist M. N. Roy at the Second Congress of the Third International (the Comintern) in 1920 manifested a nuanced contrast in positions on the issue. Lenin defended alliances with the national bourgeoisie throughout the South, although he made clear that Communists rejected the submissive stance toward that class advocated by the Second International (1889–1916). Roy was more skeptical of the reliability of the national bourgeoisie in certain nations, especially his native India, and (in contrast to Lenin) viewed Mahatma Gandhi as belonging to the religious right. The relationship between aversion to alliances with the national bourgeoisie and what some pejoratively call “ultraleftism” is demonstrated by Roy’s insistence that the proletariat in India was numerically strong (contradicting Lenin’s assessment) and that “‘peasant and workers’ Soviets’” should be organized “as soon as possible” (Haithcox, 2019).

Subsequent changes in the position of the international Communist movement demonstrated the relationship between the refusal by leftists to ally themselves with the national bourgeoisie and their movement in a leftist direction. This tendency became evident at the Comintern’s Sixth Congress in 1928, which claimed that while the Second Congress’s call for alliances with the national bourgeoisie was correct for that period, the nations of the South had for the most part entered a new stage in which the “intermediate position of the national bourgeoisie between the revolutionary and imperialist camps was no longer to be observed” because for the most part that class had “passed over finally into the camp of counterrevolution” (Comintern, 1928). The Sixth Congress signaled the beginning of the so-called third period of international communism in which Communists preached “class versus class,” a strategy that has generally been labeled sectarian and “ultraleftist.”

The succeeding congress, held in 1935, reversed the Sixth’s claim that the national bourgeoisie had betrayed the anti-imperialist cause. The new Communist position was that the national bourgeoisie played an important role in the struggles for national liberation that furthered the antifascist and antiwar efforts embodied in popular fronts. This line of thinking continued throughout the World War II years, when Latin American Communists assumed an even more moderate position, broadened the base of the antifascist front, and backed diverse nonleftist governments that supported the Allied cause. A new reversal occurred with the outbreak of the Cold War, when Latin American Communists abandoned the broad-based strategy and, in some cases, censured the party’s World War II leaders for their “rightist deviations” (Ellner, 1981: 62–66). This position was again modified at the Twenty-first Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1959, which signaled the initiation of a strategy designed to establish close ties with governments that represented the national bourgeoisie and formed part of the emerging bloc of nonaligned nations. Nikita Khrushchev called these governments with “anti-imperialist” tendencies “revolutionary democrats” and claimed that they were embarking on a “noncapitalist path” that was not overtly socialist, even while some were not particularly progressive on the domestic front. In an indication of Moscow’s commitment to the national bourgeoisie, by 1960 Soviet-guaranteed loans to these nonsocialist nations were reported to have overtaken those granted to socialist-bloc nations (Friedman, 2015: 30–38).

The period of globalization beginning in the early 1980s represented a definitive change in much of the left’s position on the national bourgeoisie. In recent decades a near consensus has prevailed among leftist analysts that in the age of globalization the local bourgeoisie no longer has the potential—even if it once had—to play an active role in the struggle for national liberation (Desai, 2004: 182–184). Nevertheless, while Communists had minimized or denied the progressive potential of the local bourgeoisie in periods in which they moved farther to the left (specifically in 1928 and at the outset of the Cold War), that same position on the bourgeoisie since the 1980s did not imply a shift in a leftist direction. More accurately, it signified a recognition on the part of the left of the impact of global capitalism on local economies.

In spite of this near consensus on the left, some shades of difference exist. Some analysts on the left postulate that the national bourgeoisie has “exhausted its historical role” (Amin, 2006: 180) in favor of national liberation, while others recognize a relationship of “antagonistic cooperation” (Katz, 2015: 15) between local and global capital. At one extreme, Samir Amin (2006: 170–171; 2019: 90–94) points to the failure of nationalist movements in power, such as Nasserism, to retain their commitment to a politics of nonalignment and Third Worldism (as shown, for instance, by Anwar el-Sadat’s conciliatory foreign policy and move to the right). For Amin, these developments demonstrate that the national bourgeoisie no longer represents a force for change. William I. Robinson (2017a: 177; 2016: 8; 2020: 26–27) is nearly as pessimistic regarding the potential of local capitalists to defy hegemonic global capitalism, since they “must increasingly link to transnational capital” and “the emergent globalized system of production, finance, and services.” In contrast, Claudio Katz (2005) argues that the “increasing transnationalization” of the dominant sectors of national capitalism of the South have “not destroyed their local roots,” since they “remain . . . in competition with the corporations based outside the region” even though they now target exports instead of the domestic market. Far from promoting thoroughgoing change, however, the national bourgeoisie plays a key role in propping up Pink Tide governments by pushing them in an “increasingly conservative direction.” Only small fringes on the left, some associated with Maoism, continue to uphold the notion of a national progressive bourgeoisie (an example being the Movimiento Obrero Independiente y Revolucionario in Colombia [Mosquera Sánchez, 2009: 13–15: Robledo, 2009: 105–112]).

Given these theoretical revisions by analysts committed to the leftist cause, one might have expected that progressive twenty-first-century governments had ceased to view the local bourgeoisie or fractions of it as potential allies. Indeed, there were few references by those on the left to businesspeople as “anti-imperialist” or even progressive. Furthermore, in contrast to twentieth-century leftists, Pink Tide strategists did not openly debate the role of the national bourgeoisie in the struggle for far-reaching change. Nevertheless, Pink Tide governments, even radical ones such as those of Chávez and Evo Morales, followed strategies with regard to business groups. In addition, in spite of the absence of ideological debate regarding the national bourgeoisie, the concessions that were made to that class split the government parties between hard-line and soft-line currents.

Business Sector Alliances: The Venezuelan and Mexican Experiences

Major controversies including corruption scandals surrounding Pink Tide alliances with the private sector point to the need for taking a close look at leftist government strategies toward businesspeople. One example is President Lula da Silva’s close relationship with the construction company Odebrecht, which received numerous contracts for megaprojects both in Brazil and in Venezuela. Chávez also considered Odebrecht an “ally” and expressed gratitude for the company’s willingness to ship Venezuela needed material during the 2002–2003 opposition-led general strike (EFE News Service, 2008). Nevertheless, after being sentenced to more than 19 years in prison on charges of corruption, the company’s owner, Marcelo Odebrecht, reached an agreement with the state in which he confessed to supposed illicit dealings with Lula’s Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party—PT) and the government and accused Lula of receiving money in cash. In 2022, a significant number of other former PT supporters among the elite and middle classes ended up backing the rightist presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro against Lula, whom (in the words of Forbes) they “despised” even though “many of them made their way out of poverty during his mandate” (Fontevecchia, 2022).

A second example of controversy arising from strategies toward the business sector is the role of two wealthy businesspeople who have belonged to the Sandinista movement and government in Nicaragua: the banker and former Contra member Jaime Morales Carazo, who served as vice president in Daniel Ortega’s term of 2007–2012, and the anti-Somoza commander Bayardo Arce, who managed Sandinista financial assets in the early 1990s and went on to become a wealthy businessman and serve as a liaison between the Sandinistas and the business sector, in the process helping to neutralize the peak business organization, the Consejo Superior de la Empresa Privada (Superior Council of Private Enterprise—COSEP). Some analysts suggest that these “alliances may have gone too far, steering the party off its ideological path for the sake of maintaining elite support and holding on to power” (Cruz-Feliciano, 2020: 281).

A third example of a controversial relationship between the left and the business sector is President Evo Morales’s reconciliation with the main business organization Cámara de Industria y Comercio (Chamber of Industry and Commerce—CAINCO) of Santa Cruz beginning in 2009. For some actors and analysts, with the “shift from confrontation to accommodation and collaboration . . . the MAS government has essentially given up on its transformation agenda” (Wolff, 2019: 115). For others it was a master stroke in that it divided the enemy consisting of CAINCO and the Comité Cívico de Santa Cruz, both of which for several years had been defying the central government and promoting acts of violence. The Comité Cívico denounced CAINCO’s turnaround and called its president a “traitor” (Notimérica, 2009). In addition to appearing to be politically sound, the pact promoted economic development, but at the same time, as Morales’s critics on the left note, it set off deforestation with devastating environmental effects (Farthing, 2020: 198–199). The alliance proved fragile. At the first sign of instability following the controversial presidential election of October 2019, CAINCO issued a public letter to Morales demanding his resignation.

In Venezuela and Mexico, Pink Tide presidents aspired to promote the rise of a new business class (the friendly business sector) that would embrace goals of national development and greater social equality. Their strategies built on the thesis that the traditional bourgeoisie in the age of globalization was holding back progress and was shrouded in corruption. In Venezuela, the critique came from both sides of the political spectrum and dated back decades. In the words of one leading business analyst, the traditional business class consisted of “rich clowns” who were ill-suited to facing the challenges of globalization and, in contrast to their counterparts in Colombia, Chile, and elsewhere, lacked the boldness to enter politics and put forward viable plans for change. As a result of overreliance on easy oil money and “lack of competitive zeal, creativity, money coming from sweat and effort,” the Boultons, Mendoza Goiticoas, and other traditional families were unable to meet challenges such as the nation’s financial crisis of 1993–1994 and ended up losing most of their fortunes (Zapata, 1995: 10; see also Naím, 1993: 86–87). AMLO, for his part, characterized large Mexican capitalists as the mafia del poder (power mafia) and claimed that if true capitalism were able to function without the monopolies, the purchasing power of Mexicans would increase by 10 to 15 percent (Expansión, 2011). The strategies in both countries were predicated on the realization that. regardless of possible socialist goals, capitalism would be around for a long time and therefore a structural transformation of the capitalist system was necessary.

A second strategy employed in Venezuela and Mexico was pragmatic. Both Pink Tide governments provided a select group of businesspeople with certain benefits in order to neutralize them and in the process isolate the more intransigent members of the business class. Many businesspeople and groups in the middle ground had previously been prominent members of the antigovernment camp and, as a result of their switch, were labeled traitors, corrupt, and government collaborators by opposition hard-liners. One of the main accomplishments of the government’s pragmatic strategy in both nations was in toning down to varying degrees the coverage of communication media outlets, which had previously been aggressively antigovernment and clearly identified with the opposition.

Venezuelan Business Groups

Years before Chávez reached power in 1998, the Chavista movement established ties with members of the private sector through the efforts of Luis Miquilena, a leftist-trade-unionist-turned-businessman who was to become Chávez’s right-hand man. Miquilena obtained support for Chávez’s presidential candidacy from various leading Venezuelan businesspeople including the multibillionaire Gustavo Cisneros. In contrast, the peak business organization Fedecámaras (Federation of Chambers of Commerce) opposed Chávez’s candidacy. Issues of corruption, the almost inevitable consequence of privileging select business groups, manifested itself shortly after Chávez’s election with accusations against Miquilena’s ally Tobías Carrero, who had served as a conduit for large business contributions to the Chavista movement.

With the Chavista government’s radicalization in 2001 along with resistance to it from Miquilena, Chávez personally intervened in putting into practice a strategy designed to win over some businesspeople and isolate others. He unsuccessfully supported the government-friendly businessman Alberto Cudemus against the future coup leader Pedro Carmona in the election for president of Fedecámaras in July 2001 and limited official contact with that organization. At the time of the first general strike in December 2001, which led to the coup of April 2002, Chávez through his defense minister, José Vicente Rangel, met with a select group of businesspeople in an attempt to (in the words of Carmona) “intimidate and commit them to opposing the work stoppage” (Carmona, 2005: 38).

Following the Fedecámaras-led April 2002 coup and the general strike of 2002–2003, Chávez implemented exchange controls that excluded businesspeople who openly supported the regime-change attempts. The system, in which the state sold dollars for priority transactions at artificially low rates, made sense at the time of its implementation in February 2003 as a check on capital flight. In time, however, the system became unwieldy as the disparity between official and unofficial exchange rates significantly widened. Some analysts on the left, such as William Robinson (2017b), argue that the state’s sale of cheap or “preferential” dollars “reflects an alliance between the revolutionary bloc” and friendly businesspeople who use unethical means to obtain them. Venezuelan Chavista analysts such as the economist Pasqualina Curcio (2019) have attempted to show that the lion’s share of the preferential dollars has filled the pockets of hostile businesspeople—transactions that may have softened their opposition to the government (Ellner, 2020a: 172). Many of these financial operations were in association with foreign capital (Guillaudat, 2019) and were made more profitable as a result of the manipulation of the unofficial exchange rate, which, according to Curcio (2020a), was engineered from abroad by currency exchange companies such as the anti-Chavista DolarToday, headquartered in Miami (Dachevsky and Kornblihtt, 2017: 89–90).

Indeed, in addition to encouraging and favoring friendly and middle-ground businesspeople, the Chavista governments, especially in moments of crisis, have attempted to mitigate the opposition of the business class as a whole and Fedecámaras in particular. Fedecámaras’s two vice presidents under Carmona, Carlos Fernández (who played the lead role in the general strike of 2002–2003) and Albis Muñoz, succeeded him as president of the organization and maintained its relentlessly hostile stand toward the government. However, all three candidates including Cudemus, who ran to succeed Muñoz as Fedecámaras president in 2005, pledged to maintain a more harmonious relationship with the government. Subsequently, Fedecámaras President Jorge Roig broke with the Venezuelan political opposition by boldly opposing the four-month-long street protests of early 2014 designed to achieve regime change. Roig recognized that Fedecámaras had committed errors and claimed that the differences with the government were not irreconcilable at the same time that he accepted President Maduro’s invitation to engage in dialogue in the presidential palace, itself a novelty for the Chavista governments. In another situation of crisis, in October 2020 Maduro passed the Anti-Blockade Law, which allowed the executive to enter secret arrangements with the private sector—a law that drew heavy criticism from sectors on the left both in and outside of the governing Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (United Socialist Party of Venezuela—PSUV). Maduro’s intention was not only to stimulate much-needed private investment but also to distance moderate political and business leaders from those of the radical opposition (Carlos Ron, vice minister of foreign relations for North America, interview, October 6, 2020).

Chávez’s strategy toward the friendly business sector reflected the more radical leftist nature of the Pink Tide phenomenon in Venezuela in comparison with that of Mexico. By passing legislation and implementing policies that privileged “responsible” capitalists, the Chávez government was, in effect, promoting a new model of capitalism to replace the old one based on superexploitation and superprofits. Legislation designed to create “socially conscious” businesspeople went beyond mere rhetoric and included the obligation of banks to finance projects of national priority, social obligations for the recipients of public contracts, and checks on excessive profits. Thus, for instance, the chapter titled “Social Responsibility Commitment” of the Regulation of Public Contracts Law of 2009 ordered government monitoring of social programs that contractors were obliged to undertake prior to completion of their contracts and that were to amount to 1–5 percent of the value of the project. Fedecámaras especially objected to the cap on profits at 30 percent established by Maduro in January 2014 and attempted to annul the measure in court.

Another indication of the more radical thrust of the Pink Tide in Venezuela is that, in contrast to the situation in Mexico (as in the case of Alfonso Romo [Gonzalez, 2019: 140]), no friendly businessperson belonged to the president’s inner circle and few held official positions in the governing party or the federal government. The most politically prominent friendly businessman was Miguel Perez Abad, who as a member of the PSUV aspired to be governor of the state of Anzoátegui and then held two ministerial positions in 2017–2018, after which he was appointed president of the state Banco Bicentenario and in December 2020 was elected to the National Assembly on the Chavista ticket. In February 2023 he was appointed president of the Central Bank.

The vitriolic attacks on middle-ground businesspeople by members of the Venezuelan opposition reflected the intensity of the polarization in that nation and the precarity of staking out a middle position. Much of the opposition’s fire was directed at media personalities and owners, who were called “traitors” (a label that had much to do with the fact that nearly all news outlets had unequivocally supported the regime change attempts of 2002–2003). Subsequently, various major media firms toned down their attacks on the government and maintained a more balanced coverage of the news. Representatives of the opposition attributed these reversals (and those of others in the private sector) to payoffs from the Chavista government and labeled businesspeople with cordial government relations members of the boliburguesía, a term tantamount to “corrupt business operatives.”

The about-faces of Venevisión owner Gustavo Cisneros lent themselves to accusations of this sort. Shortly after Chávez’s election in 1998, some Fedecámaras businesspeople questioned whether, given his support for the president-elect, Cisneros could be considered a “serious” businessman (Robert Bottome Jr., owner and editor of VenEconomía, interview, December 12, 1998). Following his allegedly active role in the April 2002 coup, these same businesspeople lauded Cisneros (Bottome, 2003?). This view, however, changed again. Shortly before the presidential recall election of August 2004, Cisneros met with Chávez in a meeting brokered by Jimmy Carter, after which Venevisión maintained fairly balanced coverage. The Chavista hard-liner Lina Ron had warned against the Chávez-Cisneros meeting, while the soft-liner Vice President José Vicente Rangel had encouraged it. Cisneros’s detractors claimed that his alleged pact with Chávez was designed to eliminate competition from the rival TV channel Radio Caracas (which the government forced out of Venezuela) and, with his allies, to create one big monopoly in the nation.

Similar accusations of belonging to the boliburguesía and of unethical dealings were lodged against other middle-ground businesspeople, including the media magnate Raúl Gorrín and the bankers Juan Carlos Escotet and Víctor Vargas. However, in the case of Escotet, Cudemus, and others, tension between the Maduro government and middle-ground businesspeople intensified and led to a falling out. Gorrín, for his part, served as an intermediary between the Maduro government and Washington operatives in addition to attempting to further his own interests. In 2013 he purchased the TV channel Globovisión, which up until then had been an unrelenting critic of the Chavista governments, and made changes to balance the channel’s news coverage. Not surprisingly, Gorrín, who, according to the New York Times, “worked to broker U.S. investments in his country . . . while building close ties to both Mr. Maduro and the opposition,” was considered untrustworthy by hard-line Chavistas (Confessore, Kurmanaev, and Vogel, 2020: A-1; Ellner, 2020b).³

Escotet’s Banesco bank was the result of a merger with Banco Unión, which had previously been associated with the hard-line opposition, thus partly explaining the opposition’s resentment of him. Escotet (like the Mexican middle-ground businessman Ricardo Salinas) benefited from Chávez’s social programs, which were channeled through Banesco. While his relations with the government had their highs and lows, Escotet ended up breaking with Maduro and, from his exile in Spain, supporting the opposition. Vargas, owner of the Banco Occidental de Descuento, was called “Chávez’s favorite banker,” but his relations with Maduro were inconsistent. This volatility in relations with friendly businesspeople followed a pattern dating back to the financial crisis of 2009, when the Chávez government arrested two leading friendly businessmen, Ricardo Fernández Barrueco (considered the richest Chavista businessman) and Arné Chacón (brother of a member of Chávez’s inner circle). In all these cases, leading businesspeople who collaborated with the government and had fairly harmonious relations with it could hardly be considered a national “progressive” bourgeoisie as envisioned by the twentieth-century Communist movement. Nevertheless, the government benefited from cases such as that of the communications media, in which business groups went from supporting regime change to the middle-ground position.

The analysis of the boliburguesía by opposition members and their accusations against it, in effect, blur the distinction between the middle-ground and the friendly business sector. The former was hardly in the Chavista camp, as the opposition claimed, and its political and economic influence far outweighed that of the friendly business sector. In short, in spite of Maduro’s increasingly probusiness policies, the thesis embraced by much of the opposition that the so-called boliburguesía represented a “governing caste” failed to take into consideration the unstable and stormy relations that leading members of the middle ground had had with both Chavista governments (Ellner, 2020a: 174).⁴

Mexican Business Groups

One major difference between the Mexican and Venezuelan cases relates to the degree to which individual capitalists were publicly identified with positions on partisan issues and openly supported political candidates. Since the founding of Fedecámaras in 1944, Venezuelan businesspeople had generally been reluctant to assume highly charged political positions, at least publicly, a tradition that was momentarily broken in 2002–2003 with the two attempts at regime change. In subsequent years, Lorenzo Mendoza, owner of the nation’s largest privately held company, who was occasionally mentioned as a possible presidential candidate for the united opposition, always made clear that he lacked political ambitions and interests. In contrast, leading Mexican businesspeople played prominent roles in attempting to block AMLO’s presidential bids in 2006, 2012, and 2018. In the latter election, businesspeople of powerful economic groups including Germán Larrea (Mexico Group), Alberto Baillères (Bal Group), José Antonio Fernández Carbajal (FEMSA), and Andrés Conesa (Aeroméxico) issued statements to their employees calling on them to avoid electing a “populist” president, an obvious reference to AMLO.

Over the years, AMLO reciprocated by repeatedly denouncing the unethical dealings of the nation’s most powerful capitalists, who he claimed were part of the power mafia. In doing so, he went beyond generalizations. In his 2012 book La mafia que se adueñó de México . . . y el 2012 he claimed that the nefarious grouping consisted of 30 individuals, of whom 16 were businessmen, 11 politicians, and 3 technocrats. Among the businesspeople were Larrea, Bailléres, Carlos Slim, Emilio Azcárraga, and Ricardo Salinas (who allegedly headed the business mafia group), all of them among the nation’s largest capitalists. Slim was by far Mexico’s wealthiest, while Salinas and Azcárraga owned Mexico’s two oligopolistic television channels, TV Azteca and Televisa, respectively. AMLO blamed the power mafia for helping rig the 2006 elections that allegedly deprived him of the presidency.

AMLO, long known for combining pragmatism with vehement denunciations of specific acts of corruption, carried out a skillful strategy during the 2018 campaign of neutralizing and reining in former adversaries including some power mafia businesspeople. Since the 2012 elections, he had relied on the active backing of Alfonso Romo, who as one of Mexico’s wealthiest businessmen had previously supported conservative presidential candidates. Belonging to the friendly business sector, Romo served as an intermediary between AMLO and the private sector by arranging well-publicized meetings with representatives of business groups including those of Salinas, Azcárraga, Slim, and Carlos Hank González (top executive of one of Mexico’s largest banks, Banorte), all of whom indicated their openness to his candidacy. At the same time, the Consejo Coordinador Empresarial (Business Coordinating Council) maintained an officially neutral position in contrast to that of the past (Alba Vega, 2020: 613). Once AMLO was elected president, Romo occupied the position of Chief of the Office of the Presidency and created the Consejo Asesor Empresarial (Business Advisory Council), made up of Salinas, Hank González, and a representative of Televisa, among other leading businesspeople.

AMLO extended preferential treatment to members of the Consejo Asesor Empresarial, among others—a special relationship that ran counter to his previous call for the separation of political and economic power (Dresser, 2020). Thus Televisa and TV Azteca (along with two other channels), in the words of México Forbes (2020a), “closed ranks” with the government in reaching an agreement (worth over US$20 million) to provide remote education to public school students, in the process excluding smaller channels. AMLO also condoned tax debts for the TV and radio media, a measure that mainly benefited Televisa and TV Azteca, which held 282 and 182 concessions respectively. In 2019, shortly after assuming the presidency and at a difficult moment due to President Trump’s threats of imposing tariffs on Mexico, AMLO appeared publicly with Slim and Salinas when they announced their intention to collaborate with the government on major infrastructure projects (Beck, Bravo Regidor, and Iber, 2020: 114). Subsequently, México Forbes (2020b) reported that Salinas and Slim were among those who “most stand out in the contracts received from the government,” while the magazine Proceso indicated that Slim was the government’s “principal contractor” (Tourliere, 2020). Slim’s contracts included megaprojects such as oil pipeline construction and the Mayan Train in southern Mexico.

At first glance, it appeared that AMLO had made his peace with private capital. The case of Salinas was especially striking because he went from supposedly being at the helm of the businessmen’s “mafia” to AMLO’s closest middle-ground businessman. Nevertheless, the members of the Consejo Asesor Empresarial were hardly in the friendly business sector category, since tensions occasionally arose between them and the government. AMLO’s intention was to isolate the more intransigent hostile businesspeople, and thus he could hardly be accused of having “sold out.” Slim, for instance, unsuccessfully attempted to persuade AMLO in private not to suspend the construction of a new national airport outside Mexico City (in Texcoco) for which the entrepreneur had contracts, after which relations between the two temporarily soured.⁵ Salinas, for his part, used offensive language against and resisted the efforts of Labor Secretary Luisa María Alcalde to suspend nonessential commercial services in the face of the coronavirus epidemic (El Universal, 2020).

AMLO’s supporters rejected the charge that the president was unjustifiably kowtowing to big capital (John Mill Ackerman, e-mail interview, November 25, 2020). They argued, for instance, that his friendly relations with Salinas and Azcárraga were designed to isolate such aggressive government critics as the journalist-media heads Enrique Krauze and Héctor Aguilar Camín, who he claimed had received payoffs from previous governments to support their neoliberal policies (Mendoza, 2020). AMLO’s followers also justified the government’s use of Salinas’s Banco Azteca to distribute social stipends on grounds that most of the bank’s clientele belonged to the popular sectors and that the system eliminated middlemen and in so doing curbed corrupt practices and clientelism (Mario Mex Albornoz, president of the Movimiento Regeneración Nacional [National Regeneration Movement—MORENA] in Yucatán, interview, June 10, 2020).

AMLO’s special relationship with Salinas was clearly on display in late 2022 when he reached an agreement with the government in which he paid the back taxes that he allegedly owed. On calling on Salinas to pay the taxes, AMLO showed discretion and moderation, indicating that the government needed to take into account Salinas’s claim that he had been discriminated against by past governments. The agreement surprised the nation because until then Salinas had adamantly refused to pay and threatened to take the case to international tribunals. The announcement was a victory for AMLO especially because it set a precedent for his government’s efforts to collect back taxes from 20–30 large Mexican and multinational corporations. Some journalists, however, were skeptical, arguing that “juicy government contracts” would more than compensate for the payment (Ortuño, 2022), a claim that many of AMLO’s supporters did not consider far-fetched.

AMLO’s strategy of “divide and rule” appeared logical given the participation of businesspeople belonging to powerful economic groups in the attempt to remove the president from office. Nevertheless, the opposition and the hostile business sector in particular stopped short of the insurgency carried out by its counterparts in Venezuela. In 2020, the Consejo Coordinador Empresarial (CCE) hardened its opposition to the government because of its failure to devise a stimulus bill in response to the COVID pandemic and to honor past contracts such as those for the construction of the Texcoco airport. The CCE made plans to step into the vacuum created by the discrediting of the nation’s traditional parties and endorse candidates with no previous political experience, while also lending support to a presidential recall in 2022. Some prominent members floated the idea of not paying taxes for the duration of the pandemic. The business leader Gustavo de Hoyos. who headed the business organization Confederación Patronal de la República Mexicana (Mexican Employers’ Association) was also determined to use the resources of the private sector to unify the opposition around the objective of unseating AMLO.

A more strident and disloyal opposition was led by businesspeople grouped in the Frente Nacional Anti-AMLO (National Anti-AMLO Front) led by Pedro Luis Martín Bringas (from the family that owns the Soriana supermarket chain) and the firebrand Gilberto Lozano (part-owner and former top executive of the business group FEMSA). For various months in mid-2020, the Frente occupied Mexico City’s central plaza demanding AMLO’s resignation and ominously predicted that he would no longer be president by the end of the year. In short, the hostility and organized efforts of influential actors in the private sector convinced the MORENA leadership of the necessity of pursuing a selective approach to businesspeople even though that strategy ran counter to AMLO’s previous harsh-sounding rhetoric regarding the power mafia.

As in Venezuela, businesspeople who went from the hostile business sector to the middle ground were strongly attacked for having abandoned their previous positions. The harsh reaction of pro-establishment figures against those who migrated to the middle ground evidenced the country’s intense political polarization. The fact that the flagship companies of Slim and Salinas (Telmex and TV Azteca respectively) originated not from their own entrepreneurial efforts but from privatization carried out in the early 1990s contributed to the resentment. Salinas was especially singled out for allying himself with whoever was in power and under AMLO becoming the second- or third-richest man in the country, even increasing his wealth during the COVID pandemic in 2020.

Relations with Business Groups in Both Countries

The Advantages of the Governments’ Business Strategies

In both countries, the government succeeded in moderating to a degree the coverage of the media, which had previously been unrelenting in their attacks on the Chavistas and on AMLO before he rose to power. In Venezuela the change of ownership of several media outlets (Globovisión and the historically conservative newspapers Ultimas Noticias and El Universal) fed into the Chavistas’ middle-ground strategy and at least in the case of El Universal may have been facilitated by the government (Ellner, 2020a: 171). Indeed, the New York Times reported that Maduro claimed to have good relations with Globovisión’s Gorrín (Confessore, Kurmanaev, and Vogel, 2020: A-1). In Mexico AMLO, in a sharp departure from previous comments, said, “I have to be thankful for and recognize that [TV Azteca] has never engaged in a dirty war” (Linares and Rodríguez, 2019).

In addition to achieving less hostile media coverage, the governments’ middle-ground strategy paid dividends in various ways. Middle-ground and friendly businesspeople were especially helpful in moments of political uncertainty and crisis. During the Fedecámaras-called general strike in 2002–2003, they provided transportation services that were essential for the government’s survival. At the time of the four months of regime-change protests in Venezuela in 2014, they responded energetically to Maduro’s call for dialogue as a means to achieve stability. In Mexico, Carlos Slim denied that AMLO’s scheme to raffle off the presidential airplane was designed to divert attention from pressing problems facing the nation at the same time that he and Azcárraga committed themselves to buying raffle tickets. Middle-ground businesspeople also made a united front with AMLO in the face of Trump’s tariff threats and subsequently accompanied the Mexican president on his trip to Washington for a White House meeting in July 2020. Finally, the middle-ground businessman Alberto Vollmer (from one of Venezuela’s traditional oligarchic families) injected life into the ailing Caracas stock exchange by issuing stock in January 2020, its first public share offering in 11 years. Coming at a politically precarious moment, the move was described by Vollmer as possibly representing a step for socialist Venezuela comparable to the reopening of the Shanghai stock exchange 30 years earlier that had helped revive China’s economy.

Strategic Versus Tactical Alliances

Many social scientists have observed how capitalist groups adapt to a potentially hostile environment such as under leftist rule (see, for instance, Tinker-Salas, 2009: 192–193). In these cases, business leaders make statements such as “We are businesspeople, not politicians.” This was basically the attitude assumed by middle-ground businesspeople in both countries. Nevertheless, the environment proved to be extremely unstable, especially in Venezuela, because of the contradictions between the inherent workings of the capitalist system, with its drive to maximize profit, and a government committed to far-reaching transformation. One of the striking characteristics of middle-ground businesspeople in both countries was the large number of them (as well as some in the friendly business sector) who had previously supported conservative political parties, thus placing in doubt their reliability as allies. Their relations with the left in power contrasted with the strategic alliances with the national bourgeoisie envisioned by Communists and other Third World leftists in the twentieth century, which rested on two postulates: a common denominator between the left and this sector of the bourgeoisie in support of paramount national goals and an alliance based on the struggle against common adversaries (imperialism and fascism) and in favor of a new stage (national liberation).

Both Chávez and Maduro referred to government relations with certain business groups as a “strategic alliance” (a term also used in Mexico), an assertion that failed to prepare followers for the economic difficulties and turbulence that lay ahead. Chávez’s rationale for calling for a strategic alliance was the prospect that Latin American integration would be a win-win situation for the government and the private sector, but the proposal failed to prosper. In effect, what was at play was “tactical alliances,” as reflected by the phrase “productive businesspeople” used by the Chavista governments (and the “patriotic” businesspeople referred to by the Sandinistas in Nicaragua), a far cry from the term “anti-imperialist” or “progressive” bourgeoisie coined by the twentieth-century left.

Corruption

The strategy of preferential treatment for middle-ground and friendly businesspeople is conducive to corruption. The reason is simple. The decision to exclude those businesspeople who support regime change and isolate them and their allies means making exceptions to the rule of equality and transparency. Furthermore, those businesspeople who turn their backs on peak business organizations and (as in the case of Cisneros [Bottome, 2003?]) break family ties by drawing close to a leftist government run the risk of being vilified in pro-establishment circles, thus raising the stakes and making preferential treatment more costly. The first major scandal in Venezuela resulting from that strategy was the banking crisis of 2009, in which Chávez acted forcefully against corrupt friendly businesspeople, although he stopped short of nationalizing the banking system as advocated by some in his movement (Guillaudat, 2019). The second case broke out in 2014 and involved an estimated US$20 billion assigned under the system of preferential dollars. Maduro committed himself to a full-fledged investigation into the fraud but failed to take action.

The Venezuelan experience demonstrates that the left in power, upon implementing a business strategy of differentiation in its treatment of business groups, needs to prepare for the virtually inevitable side effects—corrupt dealings even from within its ranks. The 2009 banking crisis, with the jailing of Arné Chacón (a participant in the November 1992 Chavista-promoted coup attempt), was especially telling because it showed that even trusted, original members of the movement—and not just “fifth columnists,” as some leftists call the boliburguesía (Colussi, 2008)—were susceptible to engaging in unethical activity (as was allegedly the case with Bayardo Arce in Nicaragua).⁶

Both Chávez and AMLO on their road to power highlighted the fight against corruption and called it their number-one priority. In doing so, they disparaged existing anticorruption mechanisms as completely ineffective. The Chavistas rejected the separation of powers, including the autonomy of the Central Bank, which they considered a feature of “liberal democracy” and allegedly at odds with the participatory democracy they advocated. In its place, they promoted the system of “social controllership” (contraloría social), in which society in the form of, for example, community councils monitored state activity. Along similar lines, AMLO (López Obrador, 2018: 30–33) claimed that the system of bidding for government projects was frequently rigged and as a corrective favored the publication of the terms of contracts that were signed. One international observer reported that more than three of every four public contracts under AMLO were awarded “in a ‘no-bid process’” (O’Neil, 2020), and these included three major megaprojects: construction of the Dos Bocas refinery, the Santa Lucia airport, and the Mayan Train (Alba Vega, 2020: 615). The lessons, especially in the Venezuelan case (where corruption became a major problem), are clear: The left in power needs to rely on existing institutional checks (at least for the time being) and/or develop viable new ones in order to combat the corrupt dealings that should be anticipated as a result of the policy of favoring some business groups at the expense of others.⁷

Divisions within the Pink Tide

Well-defined, ideologically based factions did not emerge within the governing parties in Mexico and Venezuela as they did, for instance, in the governing Socialist Party of Chile under Salvador Allende. Nevertheless, a leftist tendency within MORENA and the PSUV occasionally expressed reservations about the government’s strategy of preferential treatment of middle-ground and friendly businesspeople. This critical outlook manifested itself in different circumstances. Thus, for instance, in Venezuela many rank-and-file Chavistas applauded Pasqualina Curcio (2020b) for her critical observations regarding the Anti-Blockade Law, which was designed to cultivate relations and open opportunities for U.S. business interests that favored reversing Trump’s policy of sanctions against Venezuela (Confessore, Kurmanaev, and Vogel, 2020: A-1).⁸

In Mexico, ever since AMLO’s emergence as the leading presidential candidate in 2018, many in MORENA’s rank and file adamantly objected to the party’s strategy of attracting nonleftist party members (pejoratively referred to as chapulines [grasshoppers]) to its camp by privileging them with positions on its slates. The same resentment manifested itself with regard to Romo, Salinas, and other friendly and middle-ground businesspeople who were previously identified with conservative parties and candidates. These MORENA members, for instance, commended Labor Secretary Luisa María Alcalde for her firm stand in opposition to Salinas’s failure to abide by anti-COVID-19 regulations that mandated the closing of commercial establishments like his chain of department stores Elektra (Mario Mex Albornoz, interview, June 10, 2020). In the opposite camp, MORENA moderates were open to business alliances and claimed that the party was split between “a democratic left” and a “radical authoritarian minority” that viewed “businesspeople as enemies of the people” (Sotelo, 2020).⁹ In spite of these differences, the more critical, left-leaning MORENA militants expressed faith in AMLO’s political acumen and assumed that he acted wisely in pursuing a policy of preferential treatment of individual business groups (Mario Mex Albornoz, interview, June 10, 2020).

Conclusion

Pink Tide government efforts to neutralize hostile business groups through what could be called “tactical alliances” bore little resemblance to Lenin’s strategy of promoting strategic alliances with the national bourgeoisie based on common political goals. Twentieth-century Communists envisioned a stage that would favor the interests of both the national bourgeoisie and the working class. In contrast, the Pink Tide strategy was short-term in that the governments sought to survive a politically precarious situation engendered by a disloyal opposition. The friendly business sector, as defined by Chávez involving social responsibilities and a limit on profits, did represent a “progressive” bourgeoisie. Nevertheless, the strategy toward business groups pursued by the Mexican and Venezuelan governments, while helping give rise to a robust middle ground, was not at all successful in creating a viable friendly business sector.

Certain institutional and noninstitutional mechanisms are essential for serving as checks on the corrupt practices that any government policy of differential treatment of business groups runs the risk of encouraging. Most important, excessive concentration of power in the executive branch of government (known as “hyperpresidentialism”) deprived the nation of necessary institutional checks. Furthermore, the Pink Tide movements in both countries went overboard in denouncing the institutional deficiencies of the past. Thus AMLO curtailed the practice of bidding for public contracts and the Chavistas disparaged the system of balance of power, which they viewed as a vestige of the failed liberal democracy of previous decades. In both MORENA and the PSUV, a lack of political and ideological education for members meant that the preferential treatment of certain business groups was not debated or understood as a necessary evil that required measures to guard against resulting abuses. Finally, the use of the term “strategic alliance” was deceptive and contributed to the failure to understand the downsides and limits of the government’s differential treatment of business groups.

The strategy of privileging middle-ground businesspeople goes a long way in countering the thesis that the salient characteristic of the AMLO and Chavista governments has been their tendency to polarize, with extremes on the left and right eclipsing centrists and moderates. As far back as AMLO’s term as mayor of the Federal District in 2000–2005, his detractors viewed him as a populist in the pejorative sense of the term, highlighting polarization and the politics of antagonism (Bruhn, 2008: 217–218). Other writers have analyzed the governments of Chávez and Maduro through the same lens (Hawkins, 2011: 5). One recent development that illustrates the misleading nature of this viewpoint is the efforts of President Maduro to isolate the extreme opposition headed by Juan Guaidó by allying himself with and making concessions to opposition moderates who favored electoral participation in 2018 and 2020 (Ellner, 2020c). The strategy of privileging middle-ground businesspeople to weaken and isolate those in the private sector who support regime change leads to the same conclusion regarding the simplistic nature of analyses that attribute polarization to the populism of Pink Tide governments.

This study has attempted to demonstrate what many Pink Tide supporters and others across the political spectrum tend to ignore: that privileging middle-ground and friendly business sector groups was the result of a strategy with advantages but also downsides and potential dangers. Indeed, both the PSUV and MORENA have failed to grapple with the very real possibility that the pragmatic strategy of concessions to business interests with the aim of neutralizing sectors on the right will become institutionalized and put the government on a path that reverses hard-fought-for progressive gains.

Footnotes

Notes

Steve Ellner taught economic history and political science at the Universidade de Oriente in Venezuela from 1977 to 2003 and is currently an associate managing editor of Latin American Perspectives. Among his publications are Venezuela’s Movimiento al Socialismo (1988), Organized Labor in Venezuela, 1958–1991 (1993), Rethinking Venezuelan Politics (2008), and regular contributions to NACLA: Report on the Americas.

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2009 The Enduring Legacy: Oil, Culture, and Society in Venezuela. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Mathieu

2020 “Carlos Slim: el contratista favorito de la 4T.” Proceso, May 14. https://www.proceso.com.mx/reportajes/2020/5/14/carlos-slim-el-contratista-favorito-de-la-4t-242927.html.

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1995 Los ricos bobos. Caracas: Alfa.