Hugo Chávez Frías: um comandante nas relações exteriores com os Estados Unidos

Abstract

The rise of Hugo Chávez (1999-2013) in Venezuela was accompanied by a series of inflections that the leader promoted, in the nome of his political project, the Bolivarian Revolution. Modifications were used not only in the country's domestic policy, but also in foreign policy, although both continuities and dissimilarities in the policies of the new government vis-à-vis its predecessors can be observed, so that we present the main points of Bolivarian diplomacy. In terms of the external posture adopted by the United States, we start from the observation that the ideology-pragmatism binomial was present in such agenda, that is, even in an antagonistic environment, approximations between Caracas and Washington can be seen. The work starts from this point to fulfill its main objective, which is to identify how Chávez centralized foreign policy decisions around his figure as a leader, focusing on the topic of trade relations with the United States. Furthermore, it promotes the analysis of which were the definitive decision-making units, in the terms of Hermann and Hermann (1989), that were present in relation to the foreign policy for the United States regarding the trade theme and investigates whether domestic actors were relevant to the foreign policy decision-making process and to what extent they agreed or not with the president, as well as their degree of decision-making autonomy. For that, it used the methodology of an exploratory research, which combines secondary sources with primary sources for its attainment. Documentaries, speeches by the President and Chancellors, episodes of the Aló Presidente program, as well as documents from the mapped domestic actors were used in the research. Through them, it was possible to identify that the definitive unit of decision for the selected theme was the predominant leader, since Chávez was very active and personally participated in foreign policy, having a low level of sensitivity to the environment. Domestic actors enjoyed low decision-making autonomy, agreeing with the President's ideals, so that they were not consolidated as decision-making units.