Contested Spaces: The Communal Councils and Participatory Democracy in Chávez’s Venezuela

Since their launch in 2006, the communal councils have been heralded as a significant step toward the establishment of a radical, participatory democracy in Venezuela. Ethnographic fieldwork carried out in a working-class barrio in Valencia, Venezuela’s third-largest city, shows that local residents perceive and make use of the communal councils in a variety of ways. Older women in particular have become central players in community political life as a result of the reforms, although the burdens they take on arguably reproduce patterns of gendered inequality. Some residents express suspicion of new community leaders, accusing them of corruption, and there are conflicting views of what participatory democracy actually means in practical terms. The communal councils should be understood as contested spaces, the ambiguities and conflicts within them reflecting broader tensions within the Bolivarian project as a whole.