Recall the political centrality of the idea of the "people" (pueblo). You should read the whole article, but this...
The political parties that directed Venezuela’s exclusionary electoral democracy prior to Chávez’s election in 1998 claimed to represent the pueblo as a national collectivity and to speak in the name of the pueblo. Chávez and the social movements backing him transformed the state's claim. They asserted that they themselves embodied the true pueblo: the non-elites, the poor, the indigenous, the revolutionary, and the defenders of Venezuelan sovereignty who had taken power and now spoke for themselves. In so doing, the Chávez regime cast the pueblo as active sovereign subject, rather than mere object of representation.
The noble, combative pueblo that Chávez celebrated was reimagined through the new place names, commemorations, and iconographies he helped create. Chávez dressed himself and these projects in the colors of the national flag and in symbols of a subaltern national history. In frequent speeches and chatty televised open meetings, he fashioned a discourse of the pueblo that was at once paternalistic and egalitarian.
These representations gained political salience as they acquired further material and social dimensions. In particular, the reorganization of the petroleum industry played an important role in redefining the pueblo. The national oil company, PDVSA, was charged with directing major projects designed to benefit poor sectors. This reorientation tied the shaping of an active pueblo to the creation of new forms of oil-rent distribution. What the poor had perceived in previous regimes as the trickle of oil rents from an indifferent state, appeared under Chávez as a gushing geyser.Keep reading.
