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232 Rafael Sánchez

an acute economic crisis made more critical by the implementation,
10 years earlier, of a program of neoliberal structural adjustment imposed
by the International Monetary Fund that issued in the delegitimation of
most forms of cultural and political representation. Finally, bereft of all
credibility, under the impact of President Chávez’s polarizing rhetoric as
well as the policies of his administration, which were bent on replacing
what is left of the country’s liberal institutions with a direct democracy
focused on the President, such representational forms have in recent years
almost thoroughly washed away. In retrospect such an outcome was some-
thing of a foregone conclusion considering the extent to which Venezuelan
representative institutions relied upon the paternalistic ability of political
parties and other institutional instances to clientelistically channel
resources to the poor in exchange for loyalty and various forms of sup-
port. Given such cultural and institutional premises, it is not surprising
that, precipitated if not necessarily caused by the imposition of the
International Monetary Fund program, the nation’s dire predicament
eventually resulted in the thorough delegitimation and virtual collapse of
Venezuela’s representative democracy.

Avatars of the One

These were auspicious circumstances for the emergence of both a polit-
ical outsider like Chávez and the kind of Pentecostal spirituality that con-
cerns me here. Armed with a new constitution and informed by a virulently
totalizing Bolivarian political theology, since it came into power in 1998 in
the wake of general elections that President Chávez unexpectedly won by a
devastating margin, his regime seeks to make tabula rasa of every existing
circumstance while founding anew all aspects of the nation, from the
national assembly to workers’ unions, neighborhood organizations, and
the universities. Permeated by a fundamentalist nationalist ideology,
Chávez’s secret organization, the MBR200, sought to regenerate the
nation’s decay by returning the nation to the teachings of its founding

fathers, especially those of Simón Bolívar, father of the fatherland. So
much so, indeed, that collapsing time and space while obviating all repre-
sentative instances, Chávez often parades as the medium through which,
in “real time,” the Spirit of Bolívar instantaneously reaches, so to speak,
“live” Venezuelans from the past.
With its born-again emphasis, Pentecostal spirituality aims for no less
radical beginnings: a primeval condition in which, with all mediating, rep-
resentative religious instances gone, Spirit may once again directly seize