Hazel Marsh - Hugo Chávez, Alí Primera and Venezuela

School of Politics, Philosophy, Language, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK

On 4 February 1992, a Venezuelan colonel called Hugo Chvez, together with other officers from a movement that had formed within the military, led an unsuccessful coup attempt against the countrys repressive and deeply unpopular government. Given time on national television that evening to call for the surrender of all remaining rebel military and civilian factions, Chvez assumed full responsibility for the failed attempt and announced that, for now, the movements objectives had not been met. Just over two years later, as he was released from prison on 26 March 1994 having served time for his role in the failed coup, Colonel Chvez was asked by a journalist if he had a message for the people of Venezuela. Yes, he announced, Let them listen to Al Primeras songs!. In December 1998, having formed a new political organisation and mounted a campaign rooted in these very songs, Hugo Chvez was elected president of Venezuela with 56 % of the vote, thus becoming the first head of state without links to the countrys establishment parties in over 40 years.

This book is about the dynamic ways in which music and politics can intertwine in Latin America; it explores how a popular national music legacy enabled Chvez to link his political movement at a profound level with pre-existing patterns of grassroots activism and local revolutionary thought. It is about the significance of Al Primeras music, and collective memories of that music, in Venezuelan political life, about how and why Chvez linked his political movement to Als music, and about the ways in which this association affected the reception of Als legacy in the Chvez era.

Al Primera (19421985) was a cantautor and the Ministry of Culture funded a number of documentaries and publications about Al Primera and his music. For Venezuelans, and notably for Hugo Chvez himself, Al Primeras songs apparently mattered a great deal. Even when he addressed a shocked nation with the news of his cancer in June 2011, Chvez quoted lyrics from one of Al Primeras songs as he called for optimism:

Yet in spite of the surge in international academic and journalistic attention that Venezuela attracted after the election of Hugo Chvez in December 1998, the importance of Al Primeras songs for the Venezuelan public and for the Chvez government has been almost entirely overlooked outside the country. If Al Primera has been commented on at all, he has tended to be referred to only in passing as a folksinger or a protest singer whose songs happened to be sung by Chavistas when they gathered to demonstrate their support for the government. Chvezs frequent singing of these songs in speeches and on television seems to have been generally regarded as little more than an amusing or entertaining aside.

Music, however, is not mere entertainment; it embodies political values, memories and feelings, and it constitutes a realm within which political ideas and social identities are asserted, resisted, contested, negotiated and re-negotiated. In the twenty-first century, Al Primeras popular music legacy, and collectively remembered stories about his life and death, were in a unique position to serve specific and significant political functions both for the Chvez government and for the Venezuelan public. Venezuela in the Chvez era thus offers a distinctive case study of the complex and dynamic processes that render popular music constitutive of political thought and actions.

Nueva Cancin constitutes perhaps the most widespread, organised, and deliberate challenge to corporate music industry manipulation by any artistic movement (Manuel : 120) has argued that the movement produced a body of popular music which remains emblematic of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s; the songs which Nueva Cancin artists composed and performed became part of the social struggles they were tied to, yet these songs were not merely seen as symbols of those struggles. According to Fairley, the very act of engaging with the songs constituted a form of social and political activism in and of itself:

For Fairley (: 369).

However, collective memories of Nueva Cancin have played an important role in the so-called pink tide, a marked turn to the left in early twenty-first century Latin American politics, and the elections of several leftist governments have rendered the movement relevant in new ways. In Venezuela, Al Primera and his legacy of Cancin Necesaria provided Chvez with significant cultural resources with which to construct a legitimate political persona that immediately resonated with and appealed to broad sectors of society. This book does not aim to evaluate the successes or failures of the Chvez government and its policies, though I accept the evidence that in the Chvez period previously excluded sectors of the population benefitted both materially and in terms of access to social services and levels of political inclusion which had not been possible for them before (Hawkins et al. : 21).

Julia Buxton (: xix).

Scholars have noted that Hugo Chvez, by any standard and regardless of what one thinks of his politics, must be regarded as an exceptional communicator (Smith : 99).

Richard Gott (: 91116) details how Chvez connected with the poor by representing Bolivarianism as being based on three ideological roots. These roots were drawn from and resurrected the thought and writings of Venezuelan protagonists from the nineteenth century who had been marginalised or cleansed of subversive associations under previous governments; the land reformist Ezequiel Zamora, the pedagogue Simn Rodrguez and the Liberator, Simn Bolvar. Chvez was able to reinterpret the lives and thought of these figures to provide a template for a new society in ways that were deeply meaningful for Venezuelans.

However, the literature on Venezuelan politics in the Chvez period has overlooked the central role that Al Primeras Cancin Necesaria played in constructing political discourses and in enabling Chvez to so profoundly connect with the poor and marginalised masses. This is arguably because international scholars unfamiliar with the Nueva Cancin movement within which Al Primera operated have failed to recognise the historical significance of these songs for the Venezuelan public, and the importance of shared collective memories of Als life and music as a form of grassroots activism which Chvez was able to tap into via his references to Al Primera.

In Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Traditions in the Twentieth Century , Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison (: 38), social movements are central in the making and remaking of music traditions, with the ideas that motivate social-movement actors being mapped onto revived traditions and articulated as much through new or re-interpreted music and songs as through formalised written texts (ibid.: 42). However, Eyerman and Jamison fail to explain how and why specific songs are likely to be collectively remembered and, therefore, become available to function as cultural resources for new social movements to subsequently re-use. In locating agency predominantly with social movements as constructors of meaning, which is then mapped onto the music, Eyerman and Jamison neglect to account for the precise mechanisms that cause particular songs to remain in the collective memory while others appear to be forgotten.