A woman sips on a beverage sitting next to a sign that features jailed opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez, at an anti-government demonstration in Caracas, Venezuela, Tuesday, April 19, 2016. AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos
Today, the Venezuelan middle class is in free fall and suffering the impact of the severe economic crisis affecting the country since the beginning of 2015. The way of life of the middle class has been shattered, and the vulnerable groups, who left poverty behind between 2003 and 2008, are also suffering the adverse effects of the change in the oil cycle and of the economic model implemented by chavism.
Despite the heterogeneity of the sectors that comprise it, the concept of middle class in Venezuela became synonymous of a lifestyle representative of the rapid and substantial development undergone by the country between the 1950s and 1970s. A middle class professional could buy a house, change his car periodically, pay for private education and healthcare, have an active social life and travel abroad. The middle class, a fundamental social pillar of the party democracy established in 1958, suffered a marked deterioration in its quality of life in the 1980s, and especially in the 1990s, due to the aggravation of the economic crisis and the implementation of stabilization and structural adjustment measures in the context of the Washington Consensus. During Hugo Chávez’s mandate (1999-2013), changes intensified when the ruling elites took the option of a radically different model of society in terms of the state controls imposed by the state.
