Televising the revolution as cultural policy: Bolivarian state broadcasting as nation-building

Abstract

This article examines the role of the Caracas-based, pan-Latin American state broadcaster, TeleSUR, in the Latin American and Caribbean region. Drawing on Manuel Castells’ communication theory of the information age, in which global society has become a series of interlinked ‘networks’, and the ‘information economy’ has displaced manufacturing, the article argues that the Bolivarian Revolution, led by the late Hugo Chávez (1954–2013), is a network state, and as such is to be understood as a network of interconnected political, economic and communication interests. As an integral part of this network state, then, the TeleSUR broadcaster sets the agenda in the international sphere via satellite, cable and the Internet. Since petroleum is one of Venezuela’s main commodities – the country produces little in the way of manufacturing – and its main export, one of the ways in which Venezuela projects itself to the world is not with material commodities (oil notwithstanding), but images such as those that regularly appear on TeleSUR. This exportation of images of Chavismo and of Chávez himself, the article concludes, has become both a cultural policy and a form of incipient nation-building.

Keywords

Cultural policy TeleSUR Venezuela

The Venezuelan Bolivarian bureaucracy’s effort to cultivate at home and abroad congruent forms of identity in its favour is, I argue, the work of cultural policy, a form of governance at a distance whose goal is to reprogramme collective subjectivities to comport with the interests of the state. TeleSUR has become one of the state’s cultural policy instruments; when the Bolivarian regime introduced TeleSUR in 2005, its then president Aram Aharonian (2005) declared that the multipolar network was ‘more than a [television] signal; it is a meeting place for realizing understanding and integration’.

One of the effects of global capitalism’s attack on the welfare state has been a crisis-prone condition in which states have come to increasingly wield culture as a resource for sociopolitical and economic amelioration. The state’s expansion of culture’s role is attributable to the larger decline of social services in the post-Fordist era (Yúdice, 2004). Cultural studies scholar George Yúdice (2004) observes that

Today it is nearly impossible to find public statements that do not recruit instrumentalized art and culture, whether to better social conditions, as in the creation of multicultural tolerance and civic participation, through UNESCO-like advocacy for cultural citizenship and cultural rights, or to spur economic growth through urban cultural development projects. (p. 11)

For the Foucauldian Yúdice, the influence of post-Cold War era neo-liberal ideology, the effect of which was the transfer of responsibility for public welfare from the state to civil society, results in new forms of social management.

Using the theory of cultural policy, and drawing on Manuel Castells’ communication theory of the information age, in which global society has become a series of interlinked ‘networks’, and the ‘information economy’ has displaced manufacturing, this article proposes that the Bolivarian Revolution is to be understood as a network of interconnected political, economic and communication interests to construct an emergent ‘nation’. As an agenda-setter in this network of networks, then, the TeleSUR broadcaster establishes the discourse in the international sphere via satellite, cable and the Internet. Since petroleum is one of Venezuela’s main commodities – the country produces little in the way of manufacturing – one of the ways in which Venezuela projects itself to the world is not with material commodities (oil notwithstanding), but images such as those that regularly appear on TeleSUR.

To analyse Bolivarian network power and cultural policy in the region, this article examines the ‘flows’ of TeleSUR and the satellite ‘footprints’ of Venezuelan satellite Venesat-1 (also known as Satélite Simón Bolívar), which I propose contribute to new types of nation-building. These media and information technologies construct images that become reference points of everyday experiences within ‘Bolivarian’ nations beyond the Venezuelan borders. In other words, as Latin American ‘national identities’ further undergo postmodernization and globalization, these Bolivarian communications provide another mediation in that process, a response to Northern powers’ ‘McDonaldization’ of the region.

To legitimize itself in the hemisphere as a new socialist state, the oil-rich Venezuela established a contiguous tool in this emergent nation-building project: a system of economic barter with poorer countries, through multipolar initiatives such as the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), which began in 2004 when the Chávez government gave discounted oil to Cuba and, in exchange, Cuban doctors agreed to live and work in Venezuela. The goal of ALBA transmitted via TeleSUR is to transform social relations in favour of Global Southern countries.

Rethinking media imperialism

Bolivarian initiatives such as the ALBA-born TeleSUR elicit a new way of thinking beyond the cultural/media imperialism thesis, the Frankfurt School-influenced argument that mass media are tools of ‘mass deception’ through which the world’s powers colonize smaller nations. This thesis, mounted by global media experts such as Herbert Schiller, Armand Mattelart, Robert McChesney and others, has since the 1980s been critiqued for its reductionism but is still in vogue in some academic circles. Although, at present, the Global North still maintains considerable control over the production and distribution of the images and information the world’s population consumes, more than 20 years after the end of the Cold War, one can increasingly discern the effects of a multipolar media and information system characterized by a vertiginous multiplicity of contra-flows between and within regions, with the emergent superpower China having growing influence in the media markets. Nonetheless, counter-hegemonic operations such as TeleSUR, themselves multipolar, regional entities, remain dependent on a strident anti-imperialist rhetoric for their justificatory logic. Even in an increasingly heterodox, multipolar and fragmentary mediascape, with ascendant superpowers overseeing more ‘flows’, the Bolivarian government’s antiquated anti-imperialist grandstanding is still a successful approach to soft power diplomacy, so enduring are the ideas underpinning it. The outmoded anti-imperialist rhetoric will have to be measured against the multipolar realities.

Cultural resources as nation-building

The pan-Latin American, cross-border TeleSUR project, couched in anti-imperialist rhetoric, is to be understood as a Venezuelan state cultural resource, a mainstay of cultural policy, in the neo-neo-liberal age. In its early years, it was seen as the ‘Latin American Al Jazeera’ for good reason. Indeed, the pan-Arab network has proven a successful model in diplomacy, pleasing agents from across the spectrum. When the Doha-based broadcaster started in the 1990s, Western powers applauded its openness; unlike many state-run Arab media outlets, it talked to its enemies, such as Israeli politicians. Likewise, after the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Al Jazeera became one of the most respected news outlets among Western progressives, its reporters doing unembedded, investigative journalism. The Qatari royal family has benefitted considerably with its use of Al Jazeera as cultural policy (Miladi, 2006).

For the Bolivarian state, then, Al Jazeera is an exploitable reference point, used to legitimize TeleSUR. With an estimated annual budget of US$100 million (ProPublica, 2013), Al Jazeera is quite a larger operation than TeleSUR, whose budget former TeleSUR president Andrés Izarra claims is US$50 million (Martel, 2012). Nonetheless, at one point, the two networks function as allies; in 2006, TeleSUR and Al Jazeera began a partnership which included footage sharing and logistical and journalistic training (Cubaencuentro, 2006). As Cañizález and Lugo-Ocando (2008) write, ‘[Al Jazeera and TeleSUR are fundamental in establishing a postcolonial (or pre-Hispanic in the case of Latin America) notion of regional communities that are able to defy globalization (Americanization) on [their] own terms’ (p. 217). In July 2005, Izarra contributed to the hyperbole surrounding TeleSUR, referring to the upstart station as the start of the ‘construction of a new world order of communications’ (Sánchez, 2005). The TeleSUR management claims its editorial policy is to choose content that contributes to the integration process of Latin American peoples, based on the presentation of contextual and balanced information (Agencia Venezolana de Noticias, 2011). Upon its launch, Izarra was explicit that TeleSUR is a ‘political and strategic project, which aims to promote integration as a tool against imperialism’ (América Latina en Movimiento, 2005). The broadcast network was to transmit the message of the regional project, ALBA.

Revising history as cultural policy

The Zamoran root, the Bolivarian root, the Robinsonian root: three roots of the same trunk, and a tree rooted in national thought; this is the ideology that drives the new Bolivarianism. (Hugo Chávez, speaking on Aló, Presidente, broadcast from Valles del Tuy, 26 March 2006)¹

Central to the cultural policy of which TeleSUR is the continental agenda-setter is a rewriting of regional history. Chávez imitated Cuban ‘Fideslismo’, a term that describes the social revolution in Cuba led by Fidel Castro, as much as Latin American liberator Simón Bolívar. The late Venezuelan president and former Army lieutenant colonel referred to himself as ‘comandante-presidente’ and used a good deal of military analogies in everyday discourse. Venezuelan media analyst, Marcelino Bisbal (2009a, 2009b), argues that the figure of Chávez embodies a cultural model that is based on the old thesis of Latin American populism but has been renovated with new cultural and political devices of globalization, which comprise a neo-populism that intends to change Venezuelan and Latin American history (p. 26).

The turn to foundational myths often conceals the internal contradictions of any political project. In the 1920s, the Mexican Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) chose its name to associate itself with the iconography of Emiliano Zapata (1879–1919) while attempting to neutralize any radical potential from the party. Literary scholar Doris Sommer argues in Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America that many of the 19th-century Latin American romance novels that were published shortly after independence played a key role in the consolidation of the modern nation in the region, as successive governments exploited their depictions of romantic passion for social reproduction (Sommer, 1993).

More recently, as anthropologist Claudio Lomnitz discusses, a trend among ‘pink tide’ governments has similarly been to draw on foundational myths to legitimize political projects. In addition to Bolivarian Venezuela building a teleological narrative linking Simón Bolívar to Chávez, Argentina’s Néstor and Cristina Kirchner (2003–2015) view themselves as successors to that country’s populist head of state, Juan Perón (1946–1955 and 1973–1974); Uruguay’s Tabaré Vázquez (2004–2010) associated himself with that country’s progressive democratic period of the 1920s; and Bolivia’s Evo Morales (2006–present), the first Aymara to be president of Bolivia, considers himself a product of 500 years of anti-colonial resistance (Lomnitz, 2006). In a 2002 speech, shortly after the coup, Chávez remarked,

We are revolutionaries, we are nationalists because we believe in the Nation, in national values, but not only of Venezuela. Bolívar said the homeland is America! We are internationalists. To be Bolivarian is to be internationalist in nature. We prioritize the social. The economy is a social instrument. The most important thing is the human being. (Rojas Oliveros, 2009)

To legitimate his policies, Chávez relied on the iconography of the past revolutionary leaders, whom he often blended together willy-nilly. Three Venezuelan patrimonial leaders on whom he often drew and exalted in ‘cadenas nacionales’ (the practice of the federal government transmitting messages that all commercial and public broadcasters must air by law), Aló, Presidente and other televised addresses were Ezequiel Zamora (1817–1860), peasant leader in the Federal War of 1859–1863, a bloody conflict between the landowning Creole oligarchy and the poor majority; Simón Bolívar (1783–1830), an aristocratic-born political and military leader, who, for many, was instrumental in Latin America’s struggle for independence from Europe; and Samuel Robinson (née Simón Rodríguez; 1769–1854), philosopher and mentor of Bolívar, who organized educational programmes in Venezuela, Bolivia, Chile and Ecuador for poor, indigenous and Black peoples.

Expanding cultural policy: Broadcast and communication satellites

As one might glean from the TeleSUR–Al Jazeera partnership discussed earlier, to achieve ideological support beyond its Venezuelan borders, the Bolivarian state has turned to information and communication technologies, especially satellite communication, to export its cultural policy. The control over broadcast and communication satellite footprints is one of the crucial contests of the network society and one of the ways in which the Bolivarian state establishes its sovereignty over its transmissions, and in doing so, contests the Western media system. As media scholar Monroe Price argues, satellites are the information age’s equivalent of 17th-century nautical channels, dredged bodies of water to fixed dimensions that sovereign governments designated to guarantee that vessels would have safe passage. For Price, global power relations can be measured by analysing information flows: one must learn how satellite routes were assembled and who controls which orbital slots. Price (1999) writes, ‘A footprint that reaches a vast population or a wealthy population or a politically important one can be more valuable than one that does not’ (p. 148). To the extent that information is a commodity, the paths through which data are distributed via the satellite – including the server, the satellite uplink and the transponder – are not arbitrarily arranged but are selected to fit the interests of the satellite operator.

The onset of satellite broadcasting in the 1970s dramatically changed global media infrastructure in that, whereas before audiences would watch content in their countries of origin, now they had access to what seemed like a global village. Price (1999) writes,

[All of] a sudden, it appeared that the powerful images of television would be receivable without the check of a nation-based gatekeeper […] the psychological impact of [satellite’s] potential altered the way governments and broadcasters thought about the delivery of imagery. (p. 15)

Prior to the rise of direct-broadcast satellite technology, the dissemination of all information, such as mail through postal services and audio-visual broadcasting through government agencies, required national intermediaries. Since it could potentially obviate such national intermediation, satellite was seen as truly global. The North American deregulation of telecommunications in the 1980s made satellite, cable and video distribution into powerful state and non-state actors. Writing about satellite broadcasting, media scholar Lisa Parks (2005) argues,

[W]e should no longer think of television only as a system of global commercial entertainment or national public broadcasting because historically the medium has also been organized and used as a technology of military monitoring, public education, and scientific observation. (pp. 1–2)

Such is the case in Bolivarian Venezuela, where satellite television is used as much for information and entertainment as it is for disrupting global networks of corporate broadcasting; by challenging Western powers’ stranglehold over satellite technology, they are creating a form of spectacle, which sends a message that North American and European powers do not have a monopoly on these communication and information technologies.

Satellite television, by definition, interrupts traditional configurations between audio-visual flows and the boundaries of nation-states. To measure a satellite feed, one must look at footprints, which technically refer to the geographic boundaries in which a satellite signal falls. Parks (2005), however, maintains that footprinting is a cultural and ideological practice, formed through the dissemination of signals such as raw feeds for TV networks and programming made for viewers (p. 49). She writes that a footprint is ‘a cultural territory shaped by the practice of downlinking and uplinking television signals’ (Parks, 2005: 49). Since satellite footprints can traverse the demarcated borders of sovereign nations, thus rupturing and fragmenting such geopolitical spatialities, there is an inherent contradiction between TeleSUR’s purported mission of unifying the continent into a common ideological space and the fragmentary and contingent effects of footprints. Parks (2005) continues,

[J]ust as flow becomes a site of hybridity in the age of satellite filtering, the satellite footprint becomes a cultural topography in which spatial and temporal imaginaries accumulate, mix, sediment and stir. The emergence of satellite television networks has triggered so much anxiety about national sovereignty and cultural contamination over the past two decades precisely because footprints represent the power to transform, redefine, and hybridize nations, territories, and cultures in a most material way. (p. 70)

Whether consciously or not, through TeleSUR and Venesat-1, launched in 2008, the Chávez government was able to recycle the technological determinist views of Marshall McLuhan that the ‘medium is also the message’ and that media, in this case satellite, will unite diverse heterogeneous peoples. As Parks (2005) notes, McLuhan’s language, which Western powers used prominently during the Cold War, masks the degree to which the United States really used satellite broadcasts to maintain its hegemony amidst the post-World War II period of increasing decolonization and the space race (pp. 28–29). Although not a superpower in a unipolar world, the Chávez government used satellite broadcasts as part of a larger hegemonic construction whose goal is to absorb greater network power by way of transnational and provisional alliances, as discussed below. Doing so had the effect of minimizing the degree to which its utopian project is built on contradictions of neo-neo-liberal capitalism, not in the conspiratorial sense, but simply as a result of statecraft.

The Chávez administration, then, shifted the region’s political imaginary in its favour by centralizing media operations. The satellite footprints under its control became a means for flaunting and absorbing network power. As Parks (2005) observes, in the post-9/11 world, direct-satellite broadcasting has become increasingly a means for dividing and surveilling the globe, rather than the unifying force it was in previous decades (p. 178). Inasmuch as satellite is inextricably associated with global power, the Chávez government could augment its network power by reaching out to other countries that are self-described victims of media imperialism.

The Bolivarian government has used such communication power in Iran, where, in 2011, TeleSUR and the Cuban Institute of Radio and Television (ICRT) collaborated with the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB), Iran’s state-owned broadcasting company, on the project, Radio Televisión Pública de Irán (IRIB). That year, the project launched HispanTV 2011, a 24-hour, Spanish-language Iranian satellite and Internet news network. The Tehran-based HispanTV was announced shortly after then President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (2005-2013) expressed the importance of disseminating Iran’s ‘ideological significance’ to the world (Brockner, 2011). The news outlet, whose budget is 100 per cent provided by the Ahmadinejad administration, is a counterpart to the Iranian English-language satellite and Internet news network, Press TV, which also provides a pro-Ahmadinejad perspective to non-Iranian audiences (Sennitt, 2011). The Iranian regime sees Press TV and HispanTV as contestations against what it perceives to be the mendacity disseminated by Western imperialist media. HispanTV, the Middle East’s first Spanish-language television outlet, is a curious case of the Bolivarian government contesting the network society by way of the Iranian regime. It exemplifies how in order for the Bolivarian project to be successful, network power must be consolidated not only beyond Venezuelan borders, but beyond the Latin American region. Challenging media imperialism means confronting Western powers from many nodes across the world’s networks and making alliances with new protagonists. What unites disparate counter-hegemonic media projects such as HispanTV, Press TV, TeleSUR and Al Jazeera is the realization that as the post-industrial 21st century advances, information becomes increasingly inseparable from capital. Broadcast satellites such as TeleSUR and HispanTV rupture the established alignments between broadcasting flows and nation-states.

In 2013, Chávez’s replacement, Nicolás Maduro, announced an expansion of cultural policy in which their propaganda would penetrate the English-language market. On 24 July of that year, Simón Bolívar’s birthday, TeleSUR English, a Web-only platform with ‘Wherever the news you will be there’ as its slogan, was launched. In a press release, TeleSUR Spanish’s president, Patricia Villegas, described the English-language initiative as a ‘long-term bet and part of a geopolitical and communication strategy in the field of global information’ (PR Newswire, 2014).

But while TeleSUR presents itself as a global network, Venezuela remains the sole financial contributor. The Chávez government had invited Brazil to participate in the TeleSUR initiative, but the Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva government (2003–2010) declined and instead formed its own TV Brasil network. Former TeleSUR network vice-president Aram Aharonian, now a critic of that broadcaster, argues that the nominally multi-state TeleSUR company is really in the domain of the Venezuelan Popular Ministry of Information and Communication, now the Bolivarian System of Communication and Information (SIBCI). By 2008, Argentina, Cuba, Bolivia and Uruguay had still not met their financial commitments for the years 2005, 2006 and 2007 (Cañizález and Lugo-Ocando, 2008: 214). The fact that these other countries did not pay their pledges without incident can perhaps be interpreted to mean that TeleSUR exists for mostly symbolic reasons; it occupies a Latin American media market hitherto ruled by North American and European companies. If TeleSUR’s razón de ser is to thwart the Anglo-Euro-American gaze of Latin America, in an age of information capitalism, the multipolar network can be called a success. To use media studies scholar Cristina Venegas’ (2009) formulation, it has carved its own ‘regional’ presence in that regions can take on a multitude of shapes, and with the increasing fragmentation of media markets, ‘regions’ can be scattered throughout continents (p. 120).

Exporting culture: Broadcast and information satellite

The US$406 million communication network satellite, Simón Bolívar, also called Venesat-1, expands Venezuela’s influence in media politics, covering, according to the government, the regions from the southern half of Mexico to the bottom corners of Patagonia and Chile, through Central America and the Caribbean, and is symbolic of the future technological progress of the Revolution (El Universal, 2011). As part of the Simón Bolívar National Project (2007–2013), the satellite, administered by the Capitán Manuel Ríos Air Base in the Venezuelan Guárico state, has ambitious goals. It hopes to provide, among other things, long-distance education, telemedicine (such as real-time diagnostics), greater access to community media, the Internet access to areas of low population density, especially non-urban regions that have not been extensively covered by telecom companies, and maps and land inventories for agricultural activities (Valero Briceño et al., 2009). Already, through Venesat-1, CANTV provides inexpensive satellite television service to poor rural and urban populations, including the densely populated state of Miranda, the mostly jungle northern state of Aragua and the working-class neighbourhoods of Caracas. The package includes access to 48 domestic and international channels, including VTV, TVES, Televén, Live TV, TeleSUR, Venevisión and the pan-American satellite education channel, Colombeia (MinCI Website, 2011).

Venesat-1 is not creating content, but delivering it. Upon its launch, minister of communication and information, Andrés Izarra, emphasized that the new satellite expands the transmission of TeleSUR and the live show, Aló, Presidente, which had been transmitted through the services of a Dutch satellite company. Through Venesat-1, the show would be seen through ‘sovereign’ technology. Likewise, Izarra claimed, the new satellite would give the government greater control over the control of TeleSUR’s distribution (Desde Rubio, 2014).

If one considers Castells’ network frame, one might hypothesize that global media such as Venesat-1 constitute a new form of nation-building. Twenty-first century nation-building is not the same as that which took place in the 19th and early 20th centuries inasmuch as the power blocs are multipolar rather than unipolar. Likewise, the modality of ‘the state’ has changed in the 21st-century global media world. The Bolivarian government positions information technology as a means to expand its communication power beyond the geopolitical borders of Venezuela.

In the summer of 2011, 3 years after the launch of Venesat-1, the Venezuelan Popular Ministry of Science and Technology announced the 4-year long completion of the US$70 million submarine fibre optic cable, ALBA-1, stretching between Venezuela, Cuba and Jamaica, which was brought online by Cuba on 1 January 2013 (Aporrea, 2011). The political objective of the fibre optic cable is to resist the United States’ blockade against Cuba, which, among other things, has left Cubans without access to information technology. Moreover, ALBA-1 aims to strengthen integration between Latin America and the Caribbean. In early 2013, the underwater cable was made operational, after 2 years of silence by official media in Cuba, which had led many civilians to speculate that the project had failed due to mismanagement or lack of resources (Sánchez, 2013). Just as the 2004 ALBA accord offered health care and education to countless citizens in the region, this interconnection project promised the peoples of Cuba, Jamaica and Venezuela that it would ameliorate the digital divide (Cubadebate, 2013). But as of 2013, the situation has not been the promised utopia. Instead, it seems that ALBA-1 is mired in bureaucracy, as the Cuban government determines the routing of information traffic, controlling who has access. According to Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez, citing the US firm Renesys that analyses online traffic, Cuban civilians have not noticed any appreciable difference in the Internet speed or connectivity (Sánchez, 2013). Although it might not have produced the desired results, ALBA-1, like TeleSUR, has symbolic strength as communication power in the network age. Cuba and Venezuela realize it is a propitious time to build such infrastructure when US power is on the decline.

Soft-balancing diplomacy

I think if Mao Tse-tung and Bolívar had known each other they would have been good friends because their thinking was similar. (Chávez, speaking in China in 1999, quoted in Gott, 2011)

Chávez’s suggestion made on a diplomatic trip to Beijing that Mao Tse-tung and Simon Bolívar shared intellectual affinities performs the type of historical legitimacy and spectacular display of presidential politics I’ve been describing. Early in his presidency, the Bolivarian government attempted to forge relations with China, like Cuba’s Cold War era ties with the Soviet Union. In contrast to the command-and-control economies of the Soviet Union, however, ALBA adheres to the current mixed economic structures, though it expands the state’s role in that governments’ barter programmes increasingly displace the private sector. Unlike other trading blocs, the Bolivarian alliance, ALBA, is based not on a concrete set of policies as much as a philosophy. The Venezuelan government knows that since it does not have the hard power to compete with Washington-backed trade accords, it must do so ideologically.

Because it does not have the hard power of first-tier nation-states to build regional network power, the Venezuelan state must rely on a soft-balancing diplomacy – the act of states developing tacit understandings, short of formal alliances, among themselves to counter more powerful states – for its hegemonic programme in the region. Through TeleSUR, the Bolivarian state hopes to export its spectacles to cultivate an ethos of internationalism in its incipient nation-building enterprise. In some respects, it has succeeded, in that it achieved a cadre of famous leftist thinkers who have become cheerleaders for the Bolivarian regime, a solidarity that harkens back to Cold War era Third Worldism. Noam Chomsky, British Pakistani writer Tariq Ali, Australian columnist and documentarian John Pilger and North American writer Michael Albert, to name but a few, routinely sing the praises of the late Chávez. Likewise, filmmaker Oliver Stone, part of this laudatory group, produced the spectacular documentary, South of the Border (2010), ostensibly to challenge the US media’s vilification of Chávez and his fellow Latin American leftist leaders. But rather than demystify the corporate press’ negative narrative of South America’s ‘pink tide’, Stone’s hagiographic film creates another myth: ‘socialism for the twenty-first’ century is a cult of personalities or a clique of leaders. The Chávez government’s goal in adding international leftist celebrities to its stable is to create a pan-national legitimizing imaginary, whose effect is to bolster the network state.

As cultural studies scholars Toby Miller and George Yúdice (2002) explain, in the 1970s and 1980s, Southeast Asian states invented discourses of pan-Asian values because they

felt threatened by the popular-cultural corollaries of international capitalism and their message of social transcendence, whereby commodities are said to animate a new world, a new life. ‘Asian values’ became a distinctive means of policing the populace […] ‘Asianness’ became an alibi for domestic social control. (p. 22)

In Bolivarian Venezuela, the same is true. The Chávez government has created a discourse of Bolivarianism, one that resonates locally, nationally and regionally. While one of the by-products of this reinvention of the past is the minimization of the shortcomings of the administration’s economic policy, it has inspired the ranks of the popular movement to revive their own myths and traditions in this emergent people-nation (Ciccariello-Maher, 2013).

As this article has emphasized, essentializing a common Latin American space for political reasons is not a new practice. Peruvian sociologist and political thinker Rafael Roncagliolo (2005) explains that politicians, scholars and much of the public have, since independence, envisioned Latin America as a single region (p. 5). There is a widespread belief that the common language of Spanish and cultural and historical affinities can unite a continent. Thus, the notion goes, Latin Americans have a sui generis closeness that one is hard-pressed to find in other regions. Cañizález and Lugo-Ocando write, ‘Such reductionism emanates from the belief that language, religion and history alone are culture’s main determinants’. Through the Bolivarian network state, the Venezuelan government is attempting what both Latin American politicians and the general public have been endeavouring since independence: a romantic, essentialized, postcolonial vision of a common Latin American space.

TeleSUR, then, is to be another manifestation of Bolivarian soft-balancing diplomacy. When Venezuela announced the launch of the new broadcast network in July 2005, Representative Connie Mack IV (Republican, Florida, 2004) accused TeleSUR of being ‘a threat to the United States’ in its attempt to ‘undermine the power balance in the Western hemisphere’ (Copley, 2005). Britto García (2005) writes that Congress’ incendiary reaction is a useful index of TeleSUR’s importance. But this is more likely Mack’s rhetoric, as he represents a hard-line anti-Castro (and thus anti-Chávez) constituency in Florida. In 2011, the whistle-blowing organization, Wikileaks, released a cable documenting the Bush administration’s (2000-2008) expressed concerns about the Chávez government’s public relations programmes in 2005. US officials declared that if TeleSUR were to be successful, it could ‘promote Chávez’s ambitions for continental leadership’ and eventually ‘endogenous cultural development’ (Kozloff, 2011). Then-ambassador William Brownfield said that TeleSUR could mean the creation of ‘al-Chavezeera’, or ‘Chávez’s own CNN’. Brownfield’s hysterical tone and misguided analysis, along with realizations that, in 2004, he attempted to re-embolden the Venezuelan opposition via USAID, actually benefits the Bolivarian propaganda apparatus in that it justified the existence of projects like TeleSUR.

TeleSUR has always been a political project, one that must adjust to the vagaries of the post-neo-liberal order. Rather than attempt the impossible of creating a unified Latin American sphere, one of TeleSUR’s roles is to play an ambassadorial form of soft power. The absence of a viable history of non-commercial broadcasting in Venezuela and Latin America grants the Bolivarians considerable leverage to define the terms of what is to be considered ‘public’ broadcasting; ‘public’, in this context, means the way in which Venezuela uses broadcasting for diplomatic relations. The first step is to present TeleSUR as the apex of various visionaries. For example, Britto García (2005) maintains that the hemispheric network carries out Argentine writer Manuel Ugarte’s point from 1901 that for the continent to fight imperialism, the first step would be to establish communications between the different Latin American countries. Consequently, TeleSUR is seen as an awakening of the people, portraying the immediate realities of the continent, even though the total audiences in Venezuela are limited by the fact that, according to the Caracas-based lead ratings firm, AGB Panamericana, less than 30 per cent of the Venezuelan population has cable, the main means by which one accesses TeleSUR domestically (Cañizález and Lugo-Ocando, 2008). Cañizález and Lugo-Ocando (2008) propose that the pan-American broadcast operation

[N]eeds to be understood as a project that presupposes the existence of a common public sphere in Latin America in which the identities and citizens are defined by means of the confrontation with, and struggle against, US/neo-liberalism, but that at the same time operates in a region where these common spaces do not actually exist in practice. (p. 216)

Venezuela is using soft-balancing diplomacy not exclusively against US power, but as competition to other regional powers, including the Lula-Rousseff Brazilian presidency (2002–2016).Writing in 2007, political scientist Sean Burges (2007) commented, ‘In geopolitical terms Chávez’s strategy bears an inverted resemblance to the U.S. cold war containment strategy, with a protective ring being constructed around Venezuela to safeguard his Bolivarian revolution’ (p. 1345). Similarly, political scientist Mark Eric Williams (2011) observes that, after the Soviet Union, the Cold War and Cuba, Venezuela ‘is the most significant ideological challenge to U.S. hemispheric interests that Washington has faced in perhaps the last 50 years’ (p. 261). Through its missions and preferential oil pricing, among other things, Chávez was able to create alliances unheard of in the past taking advantage of the United States for the most part ignoring Latin America during the George Bush presidency. In the end, the Bolivarian Revolutionary state is characterized by its strategic use of asymmetrical confrontation in a network age, the essence of which is its instrumental cultural policy and the projection of spectacle.

Conclusion

Such alliance building or networking is made possible by the fact that in the early 21st century, there is a heterodox form of power that operates through the network state, one in which sovereignty is shared among state and society actors. Under informational capitalism, some nation-states have more power than others, just as some corporations and multilateral institutions have more influence than others. This is not to imply that the network society levels the playing field among nation-states in a utopian manner; rather, power in the global order is more horizontally dispersed than it was before network society. Chávez, a shrewd politician, understood these power dynamics.

For the ideological project of the Bolivarian bloc, a prerequisite of its network is Venezuelan state cultural policy, epitomized by the Venezuelan government’s broadcast satellite programmes that include the TeleSUR broadcaster, Venesat-1, and the fibre optic cable, ALBA-1. As the preceding discussion argues, the realities of the Chavista government’s policies undercut the logic of the network society with their incipient form of nation-building. Chávez’s myths of unipolarity and spectacular Bolivarian ideology ignored the fact that the imbalances of the globe are not attributable solely to a superpower. Recurring Chavista proclamations about US imperialism and the Monroe Doctrine overlook the realities of multilateral vagaries of power under the network society.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biography

Noah Zweig is a professor of film at the University of the Americas (Ecuador), where he is also a researcher in the Department of Communication and Audiovisual Arts. His current research interest is the New Ecuadorian Cinema.

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