Parallels between Thailand and Venezuela

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As in Venezuela, Thailand's political polarisation is colour coded, with the poor and working class 'Red Shirts' demanding new elections against the urban middle class 'Yellow shirts'. The Res shirts support populist policies of Shinawat Thaksin, the disgraced former PM who is in exile after being removed by the Army, while in Venezuela the Reds overcame their own army's coup attempt in 2002, thereby keeping their populist president in power. Thaksin was a business, whereas Hugo Chavez was an army colonel. So the parallels do break down. Chavez is a socialist, Thaksin a capitalist. It is harder to know where the mass of Red Shirts stand on the political spectrum, and there is the broader issue of the 2 countries' political cultures. I know a little more about Venezuela's history than Thailand's. The divisions in Venezuela are social and racial with the poor tending to be mixed race or black and the rich white. Thailand's history is ancient, while Venezuela was populated by indigenous tribes before the Spanish arrived 500 years ago. Since then it has had waves of migration and slaves brought from Afric, culminating in a mass migration from Italy and Spain since the 1950s. Due to its colonial history Venezuela is Catholic with strains of African religion fused to it through the culture of former slaves. The Thais were actually a Chinese people from Guangxi around 700. Its religions were Indian in origin - Hindu and Buddhist. The Thai Buddhist Kingdom of Ayutthaya established Buddhism as the state religion and also brought in a legal code. It came into contact with European traders from the 16th century onwards, and the Kingdom became very rich, with a capital of 1 million people. This contrasts dramatically with Venezuela which remained a Spanish colonial backwater exploited by the colonisers. Thailand was part of the Khmer empire until the 13th century when it established independence.

While the rest of South East Asia was colonised in the 19th century, Thailand maintained its independence, signing treaties with western powers. A military-led revolution overthrew the absolute monarchy in 1932 replacing it with a constitutional monarchy that has survived until today. Following independence from Spain in 1824, Venezuela was ruled by military strongmen until the revolutions of 1948 and 1958, when an era of democracy began.

The fight for democracy has been a common theme in both countries. Also the military played a prominent role in public life in both nations in the postwar period. Both were also stalwart allies of the United States since 1945. Thailand's neighbours Vietnam, Laos and China all became communist states in this period.

The fight for democracy in Venezuela did not end in 1958 as many people felt excluded by the two main parties who held an iron grip on power. In Thailand the army ruled intermittently until 1992 when civilian control was restored. However the history of Thai democracy has been unstable, and the tension with the military and elite control has continued with the election of Thaksin in 2001 and his overthrow in 2006. Meanwhile in Venezuela the Bolivarian revolution under Chavez continues with the goal of a peaceful democratic transition to socialism, not something the struggle in Thailand has yet to mirror. Class struggle has however played a part in both countries' political divisions in the last decade and this is where perhaps the parallels are strongest.

Anticommunism was a common theme in the politics of both countries. Thailand's neighbours fell to communism in the 1970s and the elite and middle class shifted to the right, fearing a communist takeover. In Venezuela, traditional links to Cuba were strong and like Thailand, a leftwing guerilla movement challenged the government from the 1960s to the 1980s. Both movements were defeated but the fear of Cuba's socialist revolution was strong in Venezuela's middle class. In Venezuela ex-guerillas moved into mainstream politics and influenced the rise of Chavez's Bolivarian movement. Interestingly, both venezuela and Thailand saw mass protests against the government in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with the military being used to violently suppress the protests. These massacres now form part of the popular consciousness in both countries. There was a failed coup in both countries in 1991/1992.

There are massive differences between the populism of Thaksin and the populism of Chavez. Thaksin's period of rule was characterised by a violent crackdown against crime with the police given free reign to go after criminals leaving thousands dead. Meanwhile in Venezuela violent crime has been an ongoing social problem, with the traditionally corrupt police doing little to stop it. However the government has tried to stop the torture and illegal shooting of alleged criminals.

Moreover, Thaksin continued neoliberal policies, including privatisation and trying to negotiate a free trade deal with the US. Yet rather than simple neoliberalism, Thaksin was a rightwing populist, carrying out some redistribution policies favouring the poor, and also whipping up resentment against the IMF and its structural adjustment programme for Thailand after the 1997 crisis, and so defying easy categorisation. Some have compared him to Vladimir Putin or Silvio Berlosconi. Like the Italian, Thaksin owned large parts of the media and used it to increase his star status.


In Venezuela, the private media was massively opposed to Chavez and even supported the coup against him in 2002. Now the government has the state media on its side, while most of the private media remain hostile. Moreover, Venezuela under Chavez turned decisively against neoliberalism, renationalising industry and bringing the state oil industry firmly under government control and using its income to fund anti-poverty and health projects.

For Chulalongkorn University's Pasuk Phongpaichit, what's important about Thai Rak Thai is its fusion of pro-business policies and programs for the poor-a combination she calls "neoliberal populism". This makes Thaksin closer to Berlusconi than Chavez, although whether this applies to Thaksin's supporters is worth exploring.

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