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Weekly Report - 04 September 2014 (WR-14-35)

VENEZUELA: The big shake-up that never was

The sacudón (big shake-up) promised by President Nicolás Maduro two months ago was billed as ushering in a new stage of the revolution, sweeping aside inefficiency and reviving a listing economy. In the end there was not so much a shake-up as a barely noticeable tremor. The policies remain the same and the personnel were merely shuffled around, while preserving the delicate balance of power of the competing factions within the Bolivarian Revolution. In the time-honoured fashion of the late former president Hugo Chávez (1999-2013), Maduro’s crisis-response consisted of creating a few new ministries and six new ‘sectoral’ vice-presidencies, strengthening the military’s role in politics, and establishing a new recondite system of communal power to entrench the Revolution.

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