With this in mind, I think it is very important to carefully interpret the past and present in a political sense. This means that we have to reflect on the decades in which we weren't protagonists. The youth had an important protagonistic role with Chavez, but my generation did not participate in key historical events such as the April coup. My generation began to play a part only after Chavez's death.
So I think that my generation and younger generations must work to understand the tributaries that flowed into the Bolivarian Process. We have to study the '90s which was a decade of struggles, and all the processes that lead to the 1998 electoral victory. We have to understand the genesis of Chavismo and of what we call the Bolivarian Process. We have to find the historical contradictions and problems to understand our present.
It is precisely because we weren't actors - and because we are in the midst of a very serious crisis - that we need to encounter these decades from a critical perspective. It is our duty to do so because those that participated may not have the emotional distance that will allow for a complete retrospective view.
Looking back at the genesis of the political process before 1998 will allow us to understand how contradictions have developed, the weaknesses of the Venezuelan process, and it will help us to better understand our moment.
Right now we can only understand the development of the political and social crisis if there is a "revision" of the '90s and the earlier decades. It is necessary to understand the political formation of the Chavista process, to understand the fountain from which we drink, but also, again, what were the political actors and the correlation of forces that led to the 1998 elections.
Understanding the tendencies within the political process, understanding the contradictions that come with inheriting the state apparatus through representative democracy, and understanding the problems that accompanied it - those are some of our pending tasks. In other words, the attempt to construct a participatory and protagonistic democracy through the channels of liberal democracy is something that we must investigate.
I suspect that the main weakness in a process whose objective was to radicalize itself was to do so with a class composition that wasn't necessarily favorable and that didn't improve with time. In synthesis, to do a thorough reading of the current situation with all its contradictions, we have to go back to the early days and the political conformation that led to the 1998 electoral victory.
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