The Smell of Sulfur

One of the first things that truly struck me when I started fieldwork in the western plains of Venezuela in early 2007 was how often I heard disparaging remarks about the nation and its people. Anywhere people gathered to talk in the state of Barinas—in places like neighborhood cafes, bars, and bodegas—you could hear the aspersions being cast: “Venezuelans are lazy,” “Venezuelans are malicious,” and even “This country is a piece of shit [este país es una mierda].” In contrast to the stark and unwavering nationalism I had grown up with in the U.S. South, epitomized by slogans like “My country, right or wrong,” or “If you don’t love it, leave it,” patriotic feeling in Venezuela seemed shot through with a deep ambivalence.Footnote ³ Indisputably, Venezuelans had a strong sense of national pride and identity, but this feeling was accompanied by what I interpreted as a great deal of negative sentiment.

After nearly two decades of turmoil and the eclipse of the myth of Venezuela’s “exceptional democracy,” which held that the wealth of the petrostate had negated class conflict (Ellner and Tinker-Salas Reference Ellner and Salas2007), Venezuelans were prone to severe criticism of their fellow citizens and leaders. But these deprecating remarks were not just directed at particular individuals, or a political system badly in need of reform. Rather, they were critiques of the society as a whole, and a corruption imagined as having penetrated to its very depths. These critiques of social degradation kept returning to two central motifs: sin—whether of original or more recent vintage—and excrement—a sign of waste that indexed the valueless-ness of the contaminated object. These motifs, which could easily be interpreted as a Freudian psychic economy of pollution and expenditure (Raitt Reference Raitt, Hawkins and Muecke2002; see Douglas Reference Douglas1966), were also linked to the territorial body of the nation and the social body of citizens (Coronil Reference Coronil1997: 67–100).

During my first few weeks in Florentino—a Ministry of Agriculture enterprise built on the grounds of a former latifundio, seized from its private owner in 2005—I used my position as a foreign researcher to get to know the workers and ask questions about their everyday lives. To grasp workers’ worldviews and allow them to present themselves in what I thought would be a favorable light, I asked a classic fieldwork question, “What is the average Venezuelan like?” I was surprised to receive the answer that the average Venezuelan was a “malandro,” or anti-social criminal, who cared little for his neighbors and was willing to harm others to secure his own interests (Ferrándiz Reference Ferrándiz2004; Vargas Reference Vargas2007). As it turned out, crime was a regular topic of conversation in this industrial farm, tasked with cultivation of staple crops for state food-security programs, and it was not unusual to hear workers describe Venezuelans as “natural-born criminals” or apply the language of street crime to officials, with workers declaring they had “un gobierno de malandros,” or a government of thugs.

With high rates of crime giving rise to generalized feelings of vulnerability glossed as la inseguridad (Briceño-Leon, Avil, and Camardiel Reference Briceño-Leon, Avil and Camardiel2009; Samet Reference Samet2019), it was not surprising to hear Florentino workers mobilize a discourse of a loss of values. Workers professed that you could no longer trust “the man on the street” and that the bonds of intimacy and virtue, which had once characterized the nation, had been severed. These rural laborers, who spent their days swinging machetes, driving trucks, and tending cattle grazing on the farm’s 4,000 hectares, counted the breakdown of “the traditional family” and rise of a vulgar consumer culture, or consumismo, as leading causes of the insecurity.Footnote ⁴ But workers also suspected it was not just consumptive desires or broken families that drove the wave of violence.

Given the high frequency of murder and robbery in Venezuela, it was hard not to suspect something was deeply wrong with society. It was even harder not to suspect something was deeply wrong with Venezuela’s government, when nearly every month a high-ranking official was found to have been laundering money or charged with extortion. The more time I spent in Florentino, the more I realized why workers used such harsh language to describe their nation, and why so many felt this model enterprise with its neatly manicured lawns and pastel-painted outbuildings, was a utopian “fantasy,” which clashed with “Venezuelan reality.” However, I had yet to put all these images together as part of an affective discourse that could be used by political leaders to gain consent. This realization would come later following several incidents in the farm.

Image 1.

Florentino Headquarters. Author’s photo.

In the early afternoons, a fog rose from the rivers in the western plains of Venezuela, as the tropical sun heated the water flowing over ancient bedrock. The current exposed layers of sediment, long trapped beneath the surface, and the water evaporated, releasing a distinct odor into the air. The unpleasant smell carried on the wind was a subject of remarks by workers in Florentino, but I confess to having not given them much thought, taking the remarks literally. I later realized that these references were evidence of a deeper disquiet, however. One day, while riding with workers to one of the project sites in the farm, we crossed over a stream, and our truck driver turned to me, and asked, “Do you smell that?” I did not have to stick my head out the window to catch the foul odor. “It’s sulfur. Our whole country smells of sulfur.” The slightly pained look on his face, and the guilt it conveyed, signaled his intended meaning. When taken in light of previous conversations on insecurity and corruption, it was clear this miasma was fueling speculation that there might be a relationship between the nation’s geology and the behavior of its citizens.

Over time, I learned many Florentino workers believed that Venezuela’s oil wealth was a Faustian bargain and that the resource was responsible for some of the nation’s greatest virtues but also some of its greatest ills (Hellinger Reference Hellinger2006). As the critical component of an ecologically destructive economy, whose extractive processes release a smell commonly linked with the biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, it is not unreasonable to expect that a thick, black liquid pumped from the bowels of the earth would readily conjure associations with the underworld. But more work is required to show why the fossil fuel that is responsible for Venezuela’s relative affluence and historically high standards of living is depicted as a malevolent force, and why otherwise patriotic people should refer to their nation as “a piece of excrement.”

Analyses of devil cults in Latin America have explored how the symbol comes to host affective associations which link shifts in material economies to shifts in ethico-moral values as well as how the figure mediates tensions in the wake of rapid social change. The devil symbol has been deployed by groups as diverse as tin miners, plantation workers, indigenous campesinos, tourism agents, and urban street-performers, to name just a few (Nash Reference Nash1993[1979]; Taussig Reference Taussig1980; Gordillo Reference Gordillo2004; Gregory Reference Gregory2006; Riggio, Marino, and Paolo Vignolo Reference Riggio, Marino and Vignolo2015). One interpretation common to the work of scholars like Nash (Reference Nash1993[1979]), Taussig (Reference Taussig1980), Edelman (Reference Edelman1994), Nugent (Reference Nugent1996), and Weismantel (Reference Weismantel2001) is that the devil and other spectral figures mediate the destructive effects of capitalist production and exchange as well as the social dislocation that results from illicit or occluded forms of wealth accumulation (see also Comaroff and Comaroff Reference Comaroff and Comaroff1999; Ong Reference Ong1987; Gregory Reference Gregory2006; cf. Haynes Reference Haynes2013). While critically instructive, the analyses of these scholars are specific to their own contexts and should not be over-generalized.

An analysis of the devil symbol in Venezuela must be situated in its own socio-historical milieu, and it cannot be divorced from the specific political economy to which the symbol refers. The idea that the devil is present (albeit invisibly) in everyday life, and acts upon social relationships, is widely held in Venezuela. But the mere existence of such a belief does not explain why certain events are attributed to malevolent agency, while others are not, nor why certain causal connections should prove more convincing than others (see Tambiah Reference Tambiah1990; Evans-Pritchard Reference Evans-Pritchard1937). Why the symbol is attached to specific activities is a question that can be studied empirically but which requires that cultural discourses be treated as reasonable—although inevitably partial—explanations of reality, which are not always able to reflexively account for their own emergence.Footnote ⁵

The Devil’s Excrement

The history of Venezuela in the early twentieth century was indelibly marked by the rise of oil and a series of reifications (Lukács Reference Lukács1972), which accounted for the industry’s impact on society. The start of commercial exploitation of petroleum had a profound effect on society as well as citizen-state relations. Prior to the First World War, Venezuelan governments were chronically short of revenue and unable to enact nation-building projects. Yet, with the sudden influx of oil rent from foreign energy corporations, the Venezuelan state was able to take on a new leading role. Having previously fallen victim to the gunboat diplomacy of its creditors (McBeth Reference McBeth2002), Venezuela was now able to pay off its debts and enact a host of public works projects, converting the political-bureaucratic apparatus into a vehicle of economic progress.

In his seminal study of the Venezuelan petrostate, Fernando Coronil (Reference Coronil1997) analyzes the effects of this rentier economy on the practice of statecraft and popular consciousness. Offering a critique of what he calls “Occidentalism,” or representational practices which portray Western societies as “the home of modernity,” while casting non-Western societies as “marginal to global history,” Coronil suggests that resource-exporting nations like Venezuela are recursively depicted as “Others of a Western self,” or evidence of the absence of modernity, rather than a condition for progress at the global center (see also Coronil Reference Coronil and Pedersen2019). In reality, societies like Venezuela are integral parts of the world system with their own “subaltern modernity,” built on a series of reified images which justify specific patterns of capital accumulation. One of the characteristic reifications linked with Venezuelan modernity is “the deification of the state in everyday life.”

The fetishized image of the Venezuelan state as a unitary agency, standing above society, which is capable of reconciling conflicts among competing social groups, is aided by the ground rent that accrues to the state’s custodians, and which can be allocated without need for labor to mediate transactions. The capacity of state actors to allocate rent without enhancing productivity gave political elites the power to forge an “expansive form of hegemony” (Smith Reference Smith2011), which integrated surplus populations on the basis of citizenship, without challenging Venezuela’s structural position in the world system. But there were, of course, limits to this wealth and power. Rent capture in the raw materials industry is a variant of extractive capitalism with limited temporal horizons that seeks to maximize profit by externalizing ecological costs, while reducing outlays for fixed capital and variable capital in wages (see Arboleda Reference Arboleda2020). This strategy for reaping higher rates of return reproduces itself at the expense of the development of the productive forces and labor’s leverage over capital.

As one such regime, Venezuela’s oil-rent economy promoted patterns of growth in which the average rate of return in the non-energy sectors was less than what could be obtained by investing in extraction or activities linked to it. This, along with imperatives to curb social conflict, compelled state and non-state actors to optimize incomes via rent reallocation. Instead of creating a climate suitable for non-energy exports, which would have entailed strategic investments in production and restrictions on profit rates, Venezuelan leaders opted to increase local purchasing power via the national currency, facilitating imports of consumer and capital goods. The highly valued currency and exchange rates tied to the U.S. dollar meant oil rent tended to multiply in services, rather than industry, and that the deluge of petrodollars incentivized political leaders to act as “masters of largesse” for returns, which could not be absorbed productively (Baptista and Mommer Reference Baptista and Mommer1986; Coronil and Skurski Reference Coronil and Skurski1982).

Indeed, as Coronil argues, the circulation of capital absorbed the production process as “a mere phase of its motion” (Reference Coronil1997: 390), with average citizens and enterprises being incentivized to “attract cash,” rather than fabricate commodities that could lessen a growing dependence on the world market. This culture of “easy money”—or dinero fácil, in the local parlance—hindered the growth of stable wage jobs and use of land for anything other than low-intensity ranching and tenant farming. In the face of such “perverse incentive structures,” Venezuela’s industry and agriculture tended to wither, leading to the widely held stereotype that Venezuelans were “lazy” or lacking in work ethic. Yet, the circulation of petrodollars was uneven, and some citizens were better positioned to capture a portion than others.

Derogatorily referred to as escualidos or “squalid ones,” a class of compradors working on behalf of foreign energy corporations and importer-exporters, derived the bulk of its income from control of trade and capital flows in and out of the country. Living abroad in cosmopolitan cities like Madrid, New York, and Miami, these economic elites held immense prestige and often enjoyed lavish lifestyles, which set them apart from the rest of society. This social distance, combined with ongoing reliance on flows of wealth tied to Venezuela’s territory, led critics to argue these expatriates were essentially parasitic and that they had abandoned the nation.Footnote ⁶ In 1976, the nationalization of the energy sector gave renewed impulse to efforts to transition away from a regime of rent capture and to reduce the power of these “disloyal elites.”

The creation of the state oil company, PDVSA, fostered what was widely known as “petroleum euphoria” (ibid.: 238) or the belief that Venezuela’s stark poverty and inequality could be rapidly overcome and that an effective two-party political system would compel Venezuelan leaders to “sow oil” into satisfying popular demands. Putatively freed from its reliance on foreign energy corporations, Venezuela could now strengthen its sovereignty by investing in human capital and productivity. A new generation of Venezuelan professionals trained in petroleum engineering and geology would replace foreign experts in the energy sector’s upstream activities, allowing for value-adding and steadier prices. Yet the ability of Venezuelans to replace foreign expertise was limited by the complexity of operations and the time required to train new professionals (Coronel Reference Coronel1983: 169; Karl Reference Karl1997: 161). Gradually, it also became clear that these new experts constituted a privileged stratum inclined to take advantage of its structural position for enrichment.

The high salaries garnered by experts, along with “informal profit opportunities” afforded by the industry, resulted in preservation of the social distance between the petroleum sector and average Venezuelans, even as circulation of new revenues failed to absorb surplus labor created by a rural exodus. The trade unions which emerged to defend the interests of oil workers, meanwhile, equally served as a brake on the development of more radical social and labor movements. Closely aligned with the social-democratic party, Acción Democrática, PDVSA’s unions enjoyed higher wage rates than the rest of the workforce, and this labor aristocracy worked to preserve these special benefits by throwing its weight behind nation-building projects, which created jobs without challenging existing property relations.

In the late 1970s, Venezuela went on a construction spree, investing its now ample resources in public infrastructure (Muñoz Reference Muñoz1998). Venezuelan governments also funded mixed public-private enterprises in a variety of areas. But in practice, these enterprises were rarely competitive, and whatever profits they created were frequently used to sustain a caste of bureaucrats, rather than improve efficiency or industrial technique. These systemic inefficiencies were disguised, however, by gains in a flourishing real estate and services sector. Overnight, parts of Venezuela were transformed into cosmopolitan centers, as tall buildings and skyscrapers arose as if from nowhere in the capital and other coastal cities. The lifestyles of Venezuela’s new urban elites and the morphology of these cities relegated most citizens to social-geographic margins, but the country’s unprecedented affluence convinced many Venezuelans that recycling oil surpluses into rent or interest-bearing assets could be perpetuated indefinitely. Among the skeptics was the former Oil Minister and architect of OPEC Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo.

In the late 1960s, Pérez Alfonzo had been one of “the prophets of petroleum,” extolling its virtue and ability to liberate Venezuela from underdevelopment (Coronil Reference Coronil1997). Yet by the mid-1970s, he had become one of its most vociferous critics. In an interview given shortly before his death in 1979, he excoriated Venezuela’s economic policy, coining a phrase that would later become common currency: “Ten years from now, twenty years from now, you will see: oil will bring us ruin. It brings nothing but trouble. It hasn’t brought us any benefits. Look at all this waste, corruption, consumption, and public services falling apart—and debt—debt we shall have for many years. I call oil “the devil’s excrement”—we are sinking in the devil’s excrement” (quoted in Karl Reference Karl1997). The unbalanced growth on which Venezuela’s prosperity depended was unsustainable, and a decade later, when oil prices fell, his dire predictions came true.

At the height of the petro-boom, oil was called a “new religion,” and conservatives wary of its influence suggested the commodity was worshipped like a false idol (Straka Reference Straka2003). Oil financed a fast-paced, urban, consumer society and catapulted Venezuela into the fraternity of modern nations, making it into a fetish of progress. Portrayed as the “blessing” which had delivered society from poverty and backwardness, oil was construed as a force capable of overcoming any obstacle. Yet the resource’s exceptional power led some Venezuelans to question whether they had sovereignty over oil, or it had sovereignty over them.

As one observer wrote at the time, “…petroleum has seeped into every pore and taken ownership of the nation” (Rangel: Reference Rangel1970: 4). Oil had introduced petrodollars and the logic of rent capture into virtually every aspect of life from labor to consumption habits, and Venezuela’s citizens, who had once been mostly employed in agriculture, now largely resided in urban slums, heavily reliant on food imports. State enterprises were also highly vulnerable to price swings on global markets, and these industries could be severely prejudiced by currency revaluations undertaken to balance the energy sector with external conditions. By the late 1970s, Venezuela’s home market was effectively a massive rent-redistribution scheme, with low rates of investment and wages almost entirely divorced from productivity (DiJohn Reference DiJohn2009). Not surprisingly, as the OPEC crisis abated and energy prices bottomed out, Venezuela experienced capital flight and violent instability.

After the Caracazo riots of 1989, which by some estimates left upwards of three thousand people dead (Coronil and Skurski Reference Coronil and Skurski1991), “the devil’s excrement” came increasingly to be attached to the nation in popular discourse. Having cast their lot with oil, many Venezuelans viewed themselves as possessing a deep-seated or tragic flaw, which made them susceptible to the lure of the trade. Average citizens interpreted the ruin visited on society as punishment for greed and non-productive gains equated with sin. Consequently, the metaphor of the devil’s excrement morphed from an economic critique into a moral-social critique, as Venezuelans now used self-deprecating phrases like Somos una mierda or “We are pieces of shit,” to condemn the pursuit of individual wealth at the cost of collective welfare (Coronil Reference Coronil1997: 353–54 et passim).

Populist Demagoguery and Organic Crisis

At first glance, it may seem strange to argue that citizens referring to their nation as “a waste product” is an example of nationalism. But the metaphor of the devil’s excrement must be interpreted in light of a nationalist imagination that is qualitatively different from the liberal discourses of the Global North. Citizens of Western Europe and North America are often accustomed to talk of their nation’s great achievements and pride in a glorious past, which even if largely invented (Hobsbawm and Ranger Reference Hobsbawm and Ranger1983), still foreshadows the nation’s present merits. These achievements serve as evidence of “the bright future ahead,” and the nation’s status as a moral community (and in some cases, its right to impose its will on others). One can fault a portion of society for its defects—for example, the specific government in power, ethno-religious minorities, or fifth columns—but the morality of the nation itself is rarely if ever questioned. However, as Joel Robbins (Reference Robbins1998) stresses, negative sentiments can equally contribute to identification with a national community, and such feelings may be just as powerful as the forms of self-ascription grounded in overt displays of honor and pride (see also Cohn and Dirks Reference Cohn and Dirks1988; Herzfeld Reference Herzfeld1997; Urban Reference Urban1994).Footnote ⁷

While drawing on some of the same tropes as liberalism in the Global North, Venezuela’s left populism has a distinct temporality, which lends itself to specific images and metaphors.Footnote ⁸ In contrast to its competitors, Hugo Chávez’s political movement sought to “return” Venezuela to “its original path” by fulfilling an historic mission that was never fully achieved. This brand of left populism affirms the history of nineteenth-century Venezuela as its sacred touchstone, for example the cult of the revolution, and Simón Bolívar (see Anderson Reference Anderson1983), but it also operates by way of an existential contradiction between the early history of the Republic and Venezuela’s current status as an underdeveloped nation, whose stark deficiencies stand in contrast with this august legacy. This discourse involves a delicate dance between affirming the moral nature of the nation and deploying signs of its debasement, while pledging to return the nation to a path that will allow it to become “what it should always have been.” This dialectic of “virtuous being,” but “corrupted becoming,” is the force which held together a national-popular consensus (Gramsci Reference Gramsci1971) in what came to be known as “The Bolivarian Revolution.” But this articulation, it should be stressed, is not solely under elite control.

As Iselin Strønen argues, studies of the Venezuelan petrostate have focused on elite powerplays and largesse, but they have had less to say about “…how subaltern lives were actually lived in the shadows of oil-fueled spectacles” (Reference Strønen2017: 7). The question of how “the idea of the state” as a fount of justice that stands behind the play of ordinary politics (Abrams Reference Abrams1988) was preserved in the face of stark inequality and systemic failures cannot be answered solely by reference to the state’s ties with petroleum. In addition, an analysis of state fetishism must show how castigation of a segment of society that controls the flow of oil wealth through the political-bureaucratic apparatus allows, “the recapture of the state” to become the logical answer to the nation’s moral and material dilemmas, and how modes of political power that seek to alter the balance of class forces can harness, but equally restrict, subaltern agency (Hall Reference Hall1979).

In 1999, Hugo Chávez came to power, pledging to lift up a nation widely perceived as having descended into the depths of depravity. Attacking the graft and corruption endemic to The Fourth Republic (1958–1998), Venezuela’s newly elected leader vowed to “clean up” the state bureaucracy and rid the political system of clientelism (López-Maya and Lander Reference López-Maya and Lander2000). The Fifth Republic that he founded allegedly differed from its predecessors due to its fidelity to the ideals of Simón Bolívar, and its decisive break with neoliberal economic policies. In his first term, Chávez launched a series of “social missions” to improve access to education, healthcare, housing, and jobs (see Ivancheva Reference Ivancheva2023; Cooper Reference Cooper2019; Zúquete Reference Zúquete2008) and drew tremendous support, but his government soon faced a military coup, a strike in the oil sector, and a recall referendum organized by the opposition (La Fuente and Meza Reference La Fuente and Meza2012).

Image 2.

Statue of “The Liberator” in the Plaza Bolívar, Barinas. Author’s photo.

During the 2004 recall election, Chávez styled his campaign to stay in office as the “Second Battle of Santa Inés” and “Misión Florentino,” references steeped in Venezuelan history and folklore.Footnote ⁹ In these and other speeches, he would draw direct linkages between the defeat of “the oligarchy,” the end of the rentier economy, and the nation’s moral regeneration. In one such discourse, Chávez underscored,

Such linkages of the circulation of oil-rent with diabolical forces would become a regular feature of my fieldwork in a farming project dedicated to the recovery of land for productive use.

A few months into my stay in the Florentino enterprise, the devil made his first appearance. It was right before federal elections, and pro-government news media were busy demonizing the political opposition. News channels ran a series of television ads featuring photos of the leaders who tried to overthrow the Venezuelan government in 2002. The images of the coup plotters were overlaid with images of blood running in the streets and a caption that read, “The true face of fascism.” The faces of the plotters then morphed into a black-bearded figure with a nefarious smile accompanied by the sound of sinister laughter: the classic image of Satan. The ad was arresting, and I recall thinking it must have been the work of savvy media consultants (for analysis of pro-Chavista media, see Schiller Reference Schiller2013; Samet Reference Samet2019). But these images meant to obtain consent from the Venezuelan populus did not just sow division; they were also reflective of a logic that sought to restore societal bonds.

The word “demagogic” is often used to pejoratively describe populist discourse. Populism is derided as inherently “divisive” and giving rise to social disunity. Yet, as Ernesto Laclau suggests, however paradoxically, “…it is also through demonization of a section of the population that societies are able to reach a sense of their own cohesion” (Reference Laclau2005: 70). Elaborating on this point, Zizek (Reference Zizek2006) contends that populist discourse achieves social cohesion by explaining the objective position of social actors in relation to spectral figures that frustrate popular demands. “…[I]n populism, the enemy is externalized or reified into a positive ontological entity, whose annihilation would restore balance and justice…” The enemy is construed as “an intruder” or parasite to be exorcised from the social body, and concrete social actors are treated as instantiations of spectral figures. Thus, populism is built on a double reification, since neither “the oligarchy,” nor “the people,” exist as objective social groups, and the spectral figures attached to these categories are equally intangible.Footnote ¹⁰ Yet, as I delved into everyday life in Florentino, and the worldviews of the workers who labored there, it became clear that these figures did promote a sense of unity among the Bolivarian Revolution’s supporters.

After several weeks of fieldwork, I was still waiting to have a conversation with Florentino’s Social Development Manager, who was responsible for delivery of the farm’s social benefits. When I finally sat down with the manager, I still had a few simple questions about the project. One concerned the enterprise’s name. When I queried its meaning, his hurried answer was, “The enterprise is called Florentino because we are fighting the devil. Those devils—Adecos and Copeyanos!” Adecos and Copeyanos were partisans of the two major parties of The Fourth Republic, which had coalesced into a fractious, if nominally unified, opposition. As we walked to his office door at the end of the interview, he could tell from my confused look that I did not entirely understand what he meant, and when I asked, “But who is Florentino?” he responded, “He’s a character from a legend. It’s a legend. You can go to the library and read about it.” He directed me to the farm’s small library where I found a copy of the book on the shelves.Footnote ¹¹

National Salvation and the Geopolitics of Evil

The legend of Florentino y El Diablo first emerged during the colonial period from a mixture of indigenous and Christian cosmologies. Part of the oral tradition of the llanos, the original author of the tale is obscure after countless retellings, but the most celebrated version of the story is credited to the Venezuelan poet Alfredo Arevelo Torrealba. Known for his tales of magic and the supernatural, Torrealba’s writings are said to evoke “the telluric soul of the llano” and the dialectic between the enchanted landscape and its inhabitants (Acevedo Reference Acevedo2007: iv). Torrealba published two versions of the poem, the second and longer of which was published in 1956 and has since become the standard version. Set to the region’s traditional musical style, llanera, the tale is structured as a contrapunteo, or dual between two singers, with each line building on, or in some way negating the previous line, until the story reaches its climactic resolution.

The story opens with Florentino making his way home at dusk along a deserted byway in the llanos or plains. The sun is casting long shadows when Florentino stops at a spring to quench his thirst. He casts his drinking horn into the water but struggles to “drink a drop,” since at this very moment a stranger on horseback rides by saying, “Friend, if you dare, meet me in Santa Inés. I want to sing with you.” Florentino does not recognize the man, whose face is hidden, but he cannot refuse an invitation to sing, so he walks to Santa Inés. When he arrives in the pueblo, Florentino sees the mysterious stranger standing in the doorway of a rancho, yet despite the rain and brush he should have passed through, the stranger’s clothes are clean and dry. It is then that Florentino realizes this is no ordinary man. The stranger is none other than Satan, and Florentino has agreed to a test of wits which may cost him his soul. The contest, which takes the form of a series of riddles in verse, lasts all night. But at dawn, with one last lyrical flourish, Florentino solves the devil’s final riddle by invoking the blessings of God, the Virgin Mary, and the Holy Trinity, and the devil is bested, as the story comes to a close.

In the late Middle Ages, the devil was closely associated with the inscrutable forces of nature and chaos beyond the social order. As Omar Lizardo writes, “…those who left the protection of the primordial community and dared to wander on their own were vulnerable to his influence” (Reference Lizardo2009: 615). In the colonial imagination, the devil, along with his familiar identification with the underworld, was thought to possess an earthly kingdom separating heaven and hell (Cañizares-Esguerra Reference Cañizares-Esguerra2006). This kingdom was a battleground for angels, demons, and other supernatural figures (Pagels Reference Pagels1995), and Hispanic settlers brought this vision of struggle between the forces of light and dark to efforts to Christianize the Americas’ indigenous inhabitants (see also Behar Reference Behar1987).

The legend of Florentino y el Diablo more or less conforms to this schema, with the devil sometimes being read as a figure with dark, indigenous features, while Florentino is described as catire or “light skinned.” In step with this mapping of an enchanted landscape, Florentino meets the devil in the wilderness, and the devil lures him to a settlement on the frontier under his sway. In late-modern times, however, the devil’s symbolic meaning has progressively shifted, with the figure taking on human motives, such as lust, vanity, and greed (Pagels Reference Pagels1995). Originally a cautionary tale about wandering too far off the beaten path, Florentino y el Diablo has more recently come to symbolize the struggle between “civilization” and “savagery” as well as a rift in the nation between subalterns and elites.Footnote ¹² One version of the story, which appears in the novel Cantaclaro, written by the Venezuelan man of letters and President Romulo Gallegos, symbolizes the Liberal Party’s strugglewith a Conservative oligarchy in the nineteenth century as well as the Liberal Party’s victory at the Battle of Santa Inés during the Federal War from 1859–1863 (Marino Reference Marino2018).Footnote ¹³

Deeply impacted by the story and its various retellings, Hugo Chávez was said to have memorized the poem’s more than 350 lines, and he often recited portions during his weekly television program, Aló Presidente. As Katherine Verdery (Reference Verdery1991) notes, socialist governments have historically mobilized the folk traditions of the nations they represent to depict themselves as authentic embodiments of “the people”. In his role as organic intellectual, President Chávez brought together otherwise disparate, affective images and discourses into a cohesive narrative that re-signified the Florentino story as a critique of rentier dependency and the inevitable victory of his political movement. By invoking the devil as a symbol of the destructive power of petroleum and venal elites, Chávez rearticulated popular conceptions of oil as a “useless,” or corrupting, form of wealth (Taussig Reference Taussig1980, Akin and Robbins Reference Akin and Robbins1999) by suggesting its revenue could be “sown” into virtuous spaces.

Embodying a departure from the elite political discourses, which have historically marginalized large sectors of Venezuelan society (Ciccariello-Maher Reference Ciccariello-Maher2013), Chávez’s knowledge of the Florentino story burnished his credentials as a “man of the people” who grasped the cultural wisdom of average Venezuelans and who used their cultural traditions as a weapon in the nation’s defense. Not surprisingly, this discourse also targeted Venezuela’s largest oil purchaser, the United States, and the rentier elites closely aligned with it. This version of the tale mapped Venezuela’s struggle with a foreign power and segments of society allied with malevolent external forces as part of a “geopolitics of evil” (Cañizares-Esguerra Reference Cañizares-Esguerra2006). To bring an end to Venezuela’s client status, the Venezuelan people had to rise up against this “oligarchy” and break ties with its foreign backers, a set of neocolonial relations nicely embodied in the personage of George W. Bush, President of the United States and a Texas oil baron.

Unafraid to liken himself to Florentino, Chávez cast his fledgling political movement in the role of the giant slayer, retelling the legend as a “David and Goliath story” in which Venezuela would outwit its larger, more powerful enemy and emerge victorious despite the odds. The state enterprises which Chávez’s government created were concrete spaces where this “battle for the soul of the nation” was being waged, and where rural workers were cast as subjects who could redeem Venezuela with their productive labor, reaping just harvests from the oil money sown into them. But from the standpoint of those who labored in Florentino, the project was a far more ambivalent space, which led workers to create narratives that deployed the devil symbol differently.

Image 3.

Mural outside the office of The National Institute of Lands, Barinas. A campesino cuts off the devil’s tail, as the Liberal Party General Ezequiel Zamora looks on. Author’s photo.

One of my informants, Sergio, worked as a security guard at Florentino’s front gate. We spent a great deal of time together due to his affable nature, but also due to his role on the farm. Tasked with recording the entry and exit of all vehicles, Sergio was responsible for preserving order and facilitating transportation to towns in the nearby area, which meant if I wanted to leave the farm I had to rely on his good graces. In many ways, Sergio was an average Venezuelan keen to fulfill the archetypal roles set out for a man of his station. He lived several miles from the enterprise in a shack of his own construction on a parcel carved out of the wasteland between two latifundia estates. Sergio hoped to enjoy the honor and dignity which came from his role as masculine provider, and in that sense he was like many Venezuelans. Yet there was one area in life in which he was exceptional: he had seven children.

Sergio told me he came from a large family with four other siblings and that he wanted to have a large family himself. He had thought about stopping at six children—one more than the previous generation—but he and his wife had agreed to have another when she, too, was hired in Florentino. Although his wages were not overly generous, their combined salaries were enough to pay for the modest diet on which his family subsisted and so another mouth to feed felt like less of a risk. But Sergio faced a serious problem before the arrival of his seventh child: his family had far outgrown their rancho. Beyond his large family, he was distinguished from other Florentino workers by his strong critique of the enterprise’s leadership style. Sergio was upset by the way managers ordered workers around, a style he thought unbefitting a socialist enterprise, which “belonged to the Venezuelan people.” But more importantly, he faulted Florentino leaders for their failure to deliver social benefits that he regarded as a right.

The Devil Wins in Florentino

In the early years of Florentino, President Chávez had come to the enterprise and pledged to build houses for the workers. As Sergio recalled, “He asked us what we needed. And we said, ‘We need houses, comandante,’” and the President replied, “Anything for the workers of Florentino.” Yet not only had the work crews failed to arrive, Sergio also did not know where, or even if, he was on the list of future recipients. Like other Florentino workers, he had waited patiently for the delivery of his housing benefit, but it was repeatedly delayed for unspecified reasons. Nine months earlier, when the social development workers came to evaluate his situation, one asked him how many children he had and when he responded, “Seven,” the incredulous employee refused to believe him. Clearly thinking he was exaggerating the number to improve his chances or speed up delivery, the employee forced Sergio and his wife to assemble all seven children in front of her before she finally relented and recorded the figure. When Sergio told me this story, he was still visibly upset at the suggestion that he had lied or was somehow undeserving.

Thus, a few weeks later when managers stated in an enterprise-wide meeting that housing was taking up too much time on the agenda and that they should move on to other issues, Sergio jumped up and yelled, “It is a right! [es un derecho] The President said so!” Several of the other workers seated next to him followed suit, and they went on to complain that houses were first awarded to higher-level employees based on status and favoritism rather than true need and that this was another example of corruption plaguing the revolution. Sergio desired a house for his wife and children, and he felt the President’s pledge should be honored. Sadly, however, he would not be among the workers selected for the next allocation, and to make matters worse, there were now issues with payment of his salary.

It was never entirely clear to me where the source of the problem lay and why Florentino workers were not paid on time. Could it be, as managers alleged, that the enterprise was short of funds and waiting for cash infusions from PDVSA? Or had graft interdicted the funds at some other level of government? Workers like Sergio suspected Florentino managers were enriching themselves through schemes involving the housing project, but there was too much budgetary opacity to know for sure. In one especially onerous instance, the enterprise was several weeks late with Sergio’s pay, and his support network was starting to run thin. Nearly out of money and having already taken out loans from several friends and co-workers, myself included, he was desperate.

One afternoon, after a long day in the headquarters, I came upon Sergio and other workers talking in angry tones at the farm’s front gate. When I asked them what was wrong, Sergio declared, “They don’t pay us!” and then more circumspectly, “The devil is winning in Florentino.” I asked what they would do, envisioning a response focused on how they would make ends meet until their next paychecks. Instead, I was surprised when Sergio answered, “We will go out onto the highway and hold signs so that the comandante [i.e., President Chávez] knows what is happening in Florentino. The television stations will come, and they will tell everyone.” The tactic of blocking road networks to gain visibility is part of a long history of popular politics in Venezuela (Velasco Reference Velasco2015), but this action in a state enterprise was especially thought-provoking.Footnote ¹⁴

Up until this point, I had seen little evidence of what one might call “working-class consciousness,” or a sense of collective solidarity arising from the experience of wage labor and conflicts with employers. There were no trade unions in Florentino, and the organs which might have advocated for workers—”The Socialist Labor Committees”—were tightly controlled by enterprise managers. Thus, this spirit of combativeness and sense of common interest emerging from shared realities intrigued me. The form of resistance Sergio and his coworkers envisioned, holding signs on the highway that ran past the farm, was conceived to bypass the enterprise hierarchy and call upon a power that could intercede on their behalf. In a move characteristic of populist politics, this tactic of denunciation (Samet Reference Samet2019) sought to hail President Chávez as an incarnation of the popular will in hopes that it would force him to attend to his power base.

Sergio and the other workers stated that they would wait a week to act, but the protest never occurred, since a few days later their wages arrived and their anger seemed to subside. The incident was instructive, however. In giving voice to his critique, Sergio used the story of Florentino y El Diablo to play up the irony of corruption in a site fostering “virtuous” relationships. “The devil,” or the corrupting influence of rentierism and elite wealth capture, was seeping back into a space which was supposed to have been cleansed of the devil’s excrement. Old attitudes had persisted, and the enterprise was falling back into the clutches of “the oligarchy.”Footnote ¹⁵ Florentino was designed to create a “social profit,” which would make the enterprise self-sufficient and free it from oil revenue. But this plan required a degree of stewardship from leaders that was very much in question. Accusations of misuse of funds were rampant, and workers felt abused by delayed receipt of wages and benefits. Florentino workers, thus, mixed feelings of gratitude toward President Chávez for providing employment with a critique of a caste of bureaucrats they considered to be the source of their ongoing problems securing these rights.

Workers’ social distance from Florentino’s managers and the petrodollars which funded the enterprise were crucial dynamics that shaped how they made sense of their lives and developed strategies of resistance. In the context of Bolivia’s tin mines, Nash argued rituals invoking the devil were “active cults for the material improvement of [workers’] lives.” The devil fetish was part of a culture of transition (1993[1979]: 311), which explained the contract system and their perilous working conditions. Rituals seeking to propitiate malevolent forces could fight feelings of alienation and strengthen working-class consciousness. Not surprisingly, the devil was closely linked with strikes and rebellions. But the devil could also represent “compromise in the class struggle” in instances where employers paid for ritual sacrifices.

The lesson of this devil cult was that the symbol was one of ambivalence, and a syncretic blending of Marxist ideology with Pre-Columbian cosmology should not be read as “unnatural” or evidence of workers’ “backwardness.” Instead, it represented an effort by miners to make sense of harsh realities using available cultural signifiers. Nash argued that tin miners’ militancy and acute awareness of the world system owed to their position in “the international exchange setting” (ibid.: xxxiii) and a global value chain in which imperial states extracted surplus from developing countries through unequal terms of exchange. Workers, in turn, had an awareness of their role in generating the extractive revenues on which their society depended and hence, of their own potentially disruptive power.Footnote ¹⁶

Likewise, Venezuela’s oil-export dependency gave Florentino workers an acute awareness of the dynamics of the world market and its impact on their society. Oil prices printed in local newspapers were a daily reminder of the commodity’s behavior, and the extractive economy presented a less complicated picture than the abstract, financialized markets of the Global North. But such knowledge was also a requirement for survival. If precautionary measures were not taken, inflation could destroy a family’s savings and erode the gains made over years of work. Workers could lose everything in rapid currency devaluations, and so they sought to protect earnings by investing in durable goods and hard currencies which held their value. Venezuela’s unpredictable monetary policy, which saw the money supply adjusted in accordance with fluctuations in global markets, put workers at the mercy of external forces and the whims of officials.

This dependent position, along with the fact that Florentino’s products were not sold on the world market but destined for state food-security programs and domestic consumption, led workers to make incisive critiques of the enterprise and state bureaucracies. This devil discourse was not what I would call “a cult of material improvement,” but it was used to critique specific patterns of capital circulation and the frictions arising from them. In this sense, although the devil discourse was far less ritualized than what anthropologists have observed in other Latin-American contexts, the symbol still mediated the tensions of economic transition. The devil symbol could be attached to a variety of objects, including managers, the occult powers of oil, or the exertion of work itself. One of the office workers, frustrated with her schedule and long hours, circulated a short essay among her colleagues asserting that fatigue and time away from family were “the pathways” the devil used to enter into human relations. The essay argued long work hours led to disrespect for family life as well as infidelity in marriages. The worker used this essay to give voice to feelings of weariness and disillusion, but the critique lacked a systematic character. The worker had obtained the essay from the Internet, and it critiqued only labor’s intensity, not its specific form. This “devil talk” mattered, but it was diffuse, I suspect, because it mediated relations in which workers did not always participate. Moreover, such critiques could obscure as much as they revealed since it was through acts of resistance invoking the devil that workers acceded to the existing configuration of sovereign power and accepted the custodians of the petrostate as legitimate actors to whom one should petition for redress of grievances.

The Resource Curse as National-Popular Hegemony

In his writings on culture and power, Raymond Williams (Reference Williams1977) argues that hegemonic discourses serve to organize political consent by offering accounts for material relationships both within and beyond the direct experience of social actors.Footnote ¹⁷ Any hegemonic discourse worthy of the name must be able to incorporate “dissonant meanings” produced at “the boundaries of social control” by channeling subaltern consciousness into “the dominant modes of ideology.” One of the ways in which this is achieved is by equating essentially unlike things through integration of subaltern “cultural emphases” into elite narratives of statecraft. In Venezuela, political leaders used the devil to describe the negative effects of the rentier economy, including rapid swings in the value of currency and crushing external debt. But the devil was also used by average Venezuelans to excoriate corruption by elites with whom they did not interact, or whose graft was concealed by bureaucratic opacity.

Florentino workers could only speculate on what was occurring in the enterprise head office, and they did not enjoy the same leverage as Venezuela’s oil workers. Thus, it was more difficult to enforce their rights by simply withdrawing labor power. Yet, they also experienced the positive and negative effects of oil rent circulation, and as such, were compelled to respond to the field of force it shaped. Workers’ social awareness came from not just the labor process but also pressure on household reproduction and the fetishistic images attached to the commodity whose profits funded their workspace. The constant rearticulation of elite and popular discourses using the devil symbol led to critiques by workers that overlapped with, but also diverged from, those of political leaders. A few of these critiques were meant quite literally.Footnote ¹⁸

In one version of the discourse, oil was the devil’s work, and Venezuelans were collectively responsible for society’s failings. Defects such as “greed” or “lust for power” were behind the pursuit of a developmental path which led to the loss of economic sovereignty and stability. Faulting their own lack of values for a wave of crime and social decay, workers asked if they were recipients of divine retribution for dealing in the devil’s excrement. Notions of “sin” were readily invoked in this context, and it was easy for workers to make satanic associations when sulfur rose from the ground below them. It was also easy to wonder if they were “cursed” when oil offered no serious prospect for stable, long-term development and repeated attempts at “sowing” this “bitter money” (Akin and Robbins Reference Akin and Robbins1999) failed to yield lasting results.Footnote ¹⁹

These theories were not “unreasonable” in the most literal sense of the word. But alone, they did not perform the work of coalescing a subject capable of vanquishing Venezuela’s enemy—after all, a purely metaphysical evil can never truly be defeated. By contrast, Venezuela’s left-populist leaders tried to resituate these narratives of moral failure in another register. In official discourse, Venezuela was a virtuous nation which had lost its way when certain segments of society led it astray. Charging an “oligarchy,” rooted in the petroleum industry, with sapping the nation’s strength, Chavistas reworked the story of Florentino y el Diablo into a critique of the loss of work ethic and the productivity of land and labor. This was certainly a radical discourse, but it also had its limits.

Scores of intellectuals writing on natural resources have deployed the concept of the resource curse to account for the negative effects of extractive economies and their alleged tendency to promote graft, corruption, and social decay. In this literature, fossil fuels have been faulted for everything from war to poverty to capitalism itself (e.g., Mitchell Reference Mitchell2011; Collier Reference Collier2008; Altvater Reference Altvater, Panitch and Leys2007; Huber Reference Huber2009; Renner Reference Renner2006). This literature has also suggested that the history of natural resources can be used to trace the evolution of modern political systems and that the negative impacts of “excess” resource income include a “democracy deficit,” (Ross Reference Ross1999), declines in real economic growth (Sachs and Warner Reference Sachs and Warner1995), and kleptocracies whose sole objective is to enrich themselves while preserving power through gross spending on military repression (Klare Reference Klare2001). Although these phenomena are certainly recognizable features of the Venezuelan state, they are not directly attributable to oil or an “excess” of its revenue. Coronil (Reference Coronil1997) stresses that theories of the “resource curse” rarely consider that the “rentier effect” is a symptom of specific uses of oil revenue, not unearned income (see also Watts Reference Watts2004).

The inability of oil-exporters to use resource wealth to develop their own societies is not an “inexorable dynamic” but a social process, which even strident critics can reproduce (Coronil Reference Coronil1997: 42). Thus, writers who rely on the concept of the “resource curse” engage in a form of commodity fetishism that ignores already weak state sovereignty and tacitly endorses the idea that natural resources have intrinsic properties which induce decisions by political leaders. In their own way, scholars have “succumbed to the devil” by confusing oil with the social conditions under which it is extracted and the methods of disposing of its gains. Venezuelan leaders likewise deployed a local version of “the curse,” when they suggested oil wealth was “unearthed,” when in fact its value is constituted through processes of calculation, measurement, and extraction (Labban Reference Labban2010; Baptista and Mommer Reference Baptista and Mommer1986)––processes over which Venezuelans did not have complete control.

Following conventional readings of Venezuelan history (Tinker-Salas Reference Tinker-Salas2009; Coronil Reference Coronil1997: 67–117), Chavista discourse correlated the rise of oil with the decline of national agriculture and other sectors of the economy, using an image drawn from popular culture. In its most fetishistic versions, the narrative centered on the resource itself, while in others, it focused on the caste that controlled its revenue. In both cases, however, the narrative failed to account for the genesis of weak state sovereignty, which preceded the rise of oil, and value-realization in the hands of foreign corporations. It was not oil extraction per se that created dependency but rather a state system whose revenue policy privileged higher rates of return over labor productivity and industries which relied heavily on imported inputs (DiJohn Reference DiJohn2009). This structure of growth was part of the long process of Venezuela’s subordinate integration into the world capitalist market, which began with coffee in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Roseberry Reference Roseberry1985, Yarrington Reference Yarrington1997). Perhaps most crucially, this narrative also failed to call attention to the logics of state enterprises and their ties with petrodollars.

This local version of the resource curse portrayed state enterprises as decoupled from global energy markets when in reality they were anything but. Florentino was a space where exploitation was to be transcended in favor of a more just, egalitarian society. But the farm replicated central facets of capitalism, including the division between mental and manual labor, replacement of variable capital in wages with constant capital in machinery, and fiscal autonomy guided by profit-seeking. A belief in the harmful effects of oil and its link with diabolical forces indicated a critical awareness of the perils of a mono-export economy and the need to transcend it. But even at its most coherent, this narrative did not subject capitalist productive relations to scrutiny. Rather than a true theory of underdevelopment, the “resource curse” was a form of cultural-political mediation involved in its social reproduction. It was not an historicized account of peripheral capitalism but a form of fetishism which obscured the path out of export-dependency.

As an expression of populist logic, Chavista critiques of resource extraction reconciled workers with the petrostate via tropes which mystified its operation. The image of a unified center of power, endowed with exceptional wealth, could have a variety of signifiers attached to it. The petrostate could be portrayed as a munificent God which bestowed gifts on the populus or a malevolent devil to be vanquished by a hero like Chávez or Florentino. But neither image fully de-fetishized its object, and the latter discourse tended to imply the petrostate could be purified, rather than transcended. Insofar as the Bolivarian Revolution was directed from above, it constituted a passive revolution, which sought not to overturn the petrostate, but to lay hold of the ready-made state apparatus and wield it for its own purposes. Demonization of the petrostate was the other side of the coin of its deification and a step along the road to its “recapture.” A political coalition in favor of a diversified economy and the redirection of flows of extractive wealth could be forged with this critique, but its scope was restricted to these ends.