The limits of legal pluralism in Venezuela: tensions and horizons of the imaginary of the nation state and the struggle for the recognition of indigenous peoples

Abstract

The 1999 constitutional process in Venezuela yielded a new constitutional text that, at least formally, recognized indigenous peoples, established a robust catalog of rights and claimed to install legal pluralism. However, various factual and normative conditions have limited or rightly blocked this general framework of recognition and the development of legal pluralism. Twenty years after this political and normative opening, in the middle of a galloping social, political and humanitarian crisis, it is necessary to review the factual
and normative conditions that allow us to understand the limits and possible projections of legal pluralism in Venezuela. Thus, in this work, it is verified that first, within the framework of the crisis that is going through Venezuela, there have been a set of transformations of the political imaginary of the nation state, which was being forged from the new Bolivarian Constitution of 1999, which today it has blurred to reconstitute a new form of national state hegemony, in a version that is not yet possible to
project. Second, over the reasons for the crisis itself, the question arises as to whether, at the same time, this crisis and transformation process not yet resolved, will be able to open democratic and intercultural horizons, as presuppositions of an effective egalitarian legal pluralism.