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MAMDANI CAN LEARN FROM LATIN AMERICAN MUNICIPAL SOCIALISM  
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Gabriel Hetland
November 1, 2025
Jacobin
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_ From 2005 to 2016, against the wishes of both the country’s
ruling and opposition parties, the small Venezuelan municipality of
Torres underwent a radical experiment in democracy, giving residents
direct power over the budget. It worked. _

From 2005 to 2016, the municipality of Torres in Venezuela was one of
the most deeply democratic cities in the world. A Zohran Mamdani
mayoralty could learn from its example. , Michael M. Santiago / Getty
Images

 

If you’re looking for successful cases of municipal socialism,
Torres, a municipality in the Venezuelan state of Lara, deserves to be
high on the list. From 2005 to 2016 Torres was one of the most deeply
democratic cities in the world. During these years, ordinary citizens
exercised an extraordinary level of control over local political
decision-making. Their most powerful tool? A participatory budget,
which gave residents binding control over the full municipal
investment budget.

In district-level assemblies, predominantly working-class participants
(agricultural laborers, domestic caregivers, small farmers, students,
teachers, and others) thoughtfully weighed the merits of spending
their limited funds on various projects. There was no exclusion based
on class, race and ethnicity, gender, religion, or political views,
with both ruling and opposition party supporters participating.
Turnout was massive, with between 8 and 25 percent of Torres’s
population of 185,000 taking part in the process. In addition to
providing actual popular control over decision-making, Torres’s
Participatory Budget simply _worked_. Decisions were effectively
linked to outcomes, with over 85 percent of projects completed in a
timely manner. And the process benefited the local incumbent party,
which was subsequently reelected multiple times.

Torres’s success and the way it was achieved offer important lessons
to democratic socialists elsewhere, including the one very likely to
be New York City’s next mayor. In fact, there are striking parallels
between the rise of Zohran Mamdani and Torres’s mayor Julio Chávez.
Like Mamdani, Julio (as he is universally called in Torres) entered
his race for mayor, in 2004, as a long-shot far-left candidate backed
by a social movement party and facing the incumbent mayor and other
powerful opponents supported by both Hugo Chávez’s national ruling
party and local elites. Like Zohran, Julio was given little chance to
win, and like Zohran he surprised everyone by doing just that.

Once in office Julio sought to make good on his campaign promise to
“build popular power.” In an interview he elaborated on this goal,
which he linked to socialism:

"We say all expressions of socialism should be based on the people’s
participation, a participation that impedes bureaucratism. . . .
This socialism should start with the idea of constructing popular
power . . . [and be based on] projects that make visible the
process of governing _with_ the people, not _for_ the people, so that
decisions are taken by the people. . . . We’d rather err with the
people than be right without the people."

Julio’s remarks point to one of two factors key to his
administration’s success, which was built, first, on adapting and
repurposing the ruling party’s discourse, laws, and institutional
forms. By this I mean an opposition party that utilizes the ruling
party’s political toolkit — the ideas, laws, and practices by
which it rules — in different ways and for different purposes.
During the Hugo Chávez era, ideas about participation, popular power,
and socialism became discursively and institutionally central
throughout Venezuela. When he was elected mayor, Julio Chávez was not
a member of the ruling party, the Fifth Republic Movement, but he
actively utilized ideas, laws, and organizational forms associated
with Chavismo, such as participatory budgeting, communal councils, and
socialism. Crucially, however, Julio’s administration embedded these
ideas and organizational forms in a local framework that differed from
the national one in critical ways. These included strong respect for
political pluralism, a genuine commitment to popular control over
decision-making (with the necessary institutional mechanisms required
to ensure it), and institutional effectiveness, in which the local
government genuinely delivers on its promises.

The second key to Torres’s success was the administration’s links
to highly mobilized and organized popular classes. Julio was clear
about where he stood in the class struggle, saying, “the oligarchs
had forty years ruling here and always controlled the local
authority.” His administration, by contrast, proudly aligned itself
with popular classes, and actively worked to redistribute wealth and
resources from the rich to the poor. One of Julio’s first mayoral
acts was to eliminate a lifetime pension paid to the head of the local
church, which was very conservative and aligned with the oligarchy,
and to reallocate the funds to indigent seniors. In coordination with
the National Land Institute, Torres’s City Hall expropriated five
large haciendas, totaling over fifteen thousand hectares. Julio said,
“We hope to return to the hands of those who’ve always owned it,
peasants of the zone. . . . We’ve undertaken a war against
latifundios, the struggle for the land.” Julio spoke proudly of
“municipalizing the fairgrounds,” which he said only “the
oligarchy [had previously] utilized. . . . Small peasants can now go
and display their goats with pride, the same peasants and goat
breeders who [cattle ranchers] have always contemptuously called
‘chiveros.’” Popular democratic commitments like this are
notoriously hard to reverse, with Edgar Patana, Julio’s successor as
mayor, pledging “unconditional support for small and medium
producers.”

Torres’s City Hall led a major effort to organize and mobilize
residents, spearheaded by the Office of Citizenship Participation. The
success of this effort was aided by the movement trajectories of key
state officials who joined the administration after years and often
decades of social movement leadership and organizing. Lalo Paez, who
like the mayor and many other top officials was a former social
movement leader, headed the participation office, which was located in
the recently municipalized fairgrounds. Lalo and his team first
organized communal boards and later organized and registered communal
councils and communes. This facilitated a boom in civic
associationalism, as shown in Figure 1, and was a boon to popular
power in Torres.

Figure 1

During Julio Chávez’s first two years as mayor, he faced repeated
resistance from the ruling Fifth Republic Movement, which had opposed
his candidacy. But this strategy soon backfired with Julio mobilizing
his popular-class base against their obstructionism. The result was an
even stronger link between City Hall and popular classes. In June
2005, Torres’s municipal council, under the control of the ruling
party, refused to approve an ordinance recognizing the results of
Torres’s municipal constituent assembly, a participatory process
that rewrote Torres’s ordinances. In response, the mayor mobilized
hundreds of supporters to occupy City Hall and pressure the council to
reverse its decision. The ordinance was finally approved in late 2005,
after an election in which councilors more favorable to Julio gained a
majority. The mayor also mobilized supporters in December 2005 when
the council refused to support the participatory budget. In May 2008,
Julio tried to get on the ballot to run for governor as a member of
the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, which Julio joined when it
was formed by Chavistas in 2007. Regional party leaders blocked this
move. Julio responded by bringing hundreds of his supporters to the
party’s regional office. This worked, and the party let Julio run.

These examples show how popular organization and mobilization very
literally undergirded and made Torres’s municipal socialist
experiment possible.

What Torres Can Teach Us

Torres holds two major and three minor lessons for a Mamdani
administration. The first is the usefulness of a local opposition
party that refracts the national ruling party’s political toolkit.
Mamdani has already learned this lesson well. He regularly references
President Trump’s 2024 campaign promise to lower the cost of living
and the manifold ways in which Trump’s policies have failed to do
this. Mamdani then outlines how his own signature policies —
freezing the rent, making buses fast and free, and establishing
universal childcare — will do some of what Trump promised but has
utterly failed to deliver.

The second key lesson is the importance of organizing and mobilizing
the working class, understood in a broad sense. Torres’s success in
facilitating an extraordinary degree of popular control over local
political decision-making and redistributing resources from rich to
poor rested on the organization and mobilization of the working class.
This was done in a highly inclusive, deliberately nonpartisan way. It
was crucial to Julio Chávez’s ability to overcome the resistance of
local and regional political elites, many of whom were leaders of
Venezuela’s national ruling party. When these elites sought to block
the mayor’s participatory and redistributive policies, he responded
by repeatedly mobilizing his working-class base.

Since he became a serious candidate, Zohran has faced significant
resistance from the Trump administration, as well as local, state, and
national Democratic Party leaders. And it’ll only get worse after he
takes office. Trump, other Republicans, and many Democrats will do
everything they can to block Zohran’s key policies and his preferred
solutions for funding these policies, such as modestly increasing
taxes on corporations and the rich. To overcome this resistance,
Mamdani will need to organize and mobilize his working- and
middle-class base, to wage a struggle inside _and_ outside the state.
There are already proposals by scholar-activists like Eric Blanc
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about ways to do this. Torres’s experience suggests that organizing
ordinary citizens in a nonpartisan way — and in a way that gives
them real power over decisions that matter to their lives — can be
an effective strategy. Torres also shows how working-class direct
action, orchestrated by reformist state officials, can effectively
counter intransigent elite opposition.

A third, more minor lesson is the importance of having state officials
with movement trajectories — that is, people who come to office with
long experience in social movement organizing and leadership. This was
key to Torres’s success in several ways. First, these officials knew
the importance of popular organizing and how to do it. Second, the
officials had long-standing links to popular organizations. And third,
these officials were ideologically committed to a vision of democratic
socialism in which, as Julio Chávez said, “the people make all the
decisions.” Through his links to the Democratic Socialists of
America and many popular organizations, Mamdani is well positioned to
put movement leaders into key positions in his administration, but he
is already facing significant pressure to put more traditional leaders
in high posts. Ensuring that experienced movement leaders are present
throughout his administration, particularly in top posts, remains
vital.

Another lesson concerns institutional design, and specifically the
design of participatory institutions. As other scholars
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shown, participatory institutions don’t always connect to the real
decisions that actually matter to people’s lives or simply don’t
give them effective control over these decisions at all. Torres’s
participatory institutions not only worked but actually fostered
democratic socialism because (a) they focused on issues that mattered
deeply to people’s lives; (b) they gave people real control over
these decisions, with institutional mechanisms ensuring that even when
officials sought to influence decisions — as they frequently did —
it was citizens who had final say; and (c) they involved citizens in
deliberative discussion and thus created a learning process in which,
to quote Torres official and social movement leader Lalo Paez, “the
people are the government.” Zohran has said little about fostering
participatory decision-making, but if and when his plans to do this
are revealed, the question of institutional design must be front and
center.

The final lesson points to exactly why Zohran must consider taking a
page from the Torres playbook: participatory institutions not only
contribute to institutional effectiveness, they can, in turn, foster
political effectiveness. I saw this clearly during my research in
Torres. Citizens said they were initially skeptical of Torres’s
Participatory Budget but came to trust it after seeing results year
after year. Torres’s Participatory Budget also proved a highly
effective tool for generating popular consent. When I provocatively
asked residents in Participatory Budget assemblies, “Why not just
leave this to the mayor?” I often heard replies like the following:
“In the past government officials would stay all day in their
air-conditioned offices and make decisions there. They never even set
foot in our communities. So, who do you think can make a better
decision about what we need? An official in his air-conditioned office
who’s never even come to our community, or someone from the
community?”

In a moment of rising authoritarianism — nationally and globally —
much is riding on Zohran’s success. Taking account of the lessons of
Torres and other cases of municipal socialism can help Zohran and all
who support him make the most of this unprecedented opportunity. We
have a chance to not only make New York City more affordable but also,
as Zohran said in his closing campaign rally, to “set ourselves
free.”

Gabriel Hetland is an associate professor of Latin American,
Caribbean, and Latinx studies at SUNY Albany and author of Democracy
on the Ground: Local Politics in Latin America’s Left Turn (2023)

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* Zohran Mamdani
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* Venezuela
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