| Summary/Abstract |
The arrival of Hugo Chavez (1999–2013) to the government profoundly altered the role of the armed forces in the Venezuela political system. In this article we argue that Hugo Chávez’s government took the military to the field of politics by turning them into important political actors and Maduro’s governments (2013 -present) grants them a high degree of autonomy in politics and economics according to a model of political and ideological behavior. We advance our argument by proposing and testing the political and ideological model of military behavior through dissecting important events and dimensions (of the political, economic, and ideological nature) in Chávez and Maduro’s administrations. Through these events, the article aims to explain how the transformation of the armed forces into a political actor during the Chavista governments happened.
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