The afterlives of Hugo Chávez as political symbol

In January 2016, the first publicized decision made by the president of the newly installed Venezuelan parliament, Henry Ramos Allup, was the removal of pictures from the legislative premises. In what transpired as a calculated performance, this member of the old political guard was captured on video dismissively instructing removal workers to send pictures of Chávez away to Sabaneta (Chávez's birthplace), or into the rubbish bin. He also commanded the removal of recent representations of Simón Bolívar, disqualifying them as ‘an invention of that mister Chávez], a crazy thing’. This episode signalled the intensification of an ongoing struggle over political symbols in Venezuela. This article discusses the background and implications of such a struggle, focusing in particular on the figure of Chávez as the epitome of a contested national symbol. The fate of Chávez's corpse, currently located in a mausoleum, is at stake, but also the configuration of the institutionally sanctioned symbolic order with which political actors aim to condition political manoeuvring in years to come.