Reading the morning headlines in the 21st century can be a white-knuckle thrill ride; today was no different.
As much as Venezuela and related issues have figured in national news during the 2020s, these have never significantly affected the US. It’s a different story in Latin America, however, where more than two decades of Chavismo and American opposition against it have had significant consequences for local politics and quotidian life. One of the most dramatic recent manifestations of this phenomenon was the triumph of José Antonio Kast in the second round of the 2025 presidential election in my parents’ home country of Chile, a result powered in great part by widespread frustration over unprecedented levels of Venezuelan immigration.
In my childhood, Venezuela seemed like a glamorous country; a place that telenovelas, vaudevillian comedy programs, and other shows produced by Venevisión enticed me into believing was populated entirely by elegant gentlemen of leisure and beautiful women. The latter was a recurring cultural idée fixe growing up, perhaps because one of my mother’s friends, a Venezuelan lady, ostentatiously prided herself on that popular notion.
There are achievements in high culture, too, foremost among them those by Andrés Bello, an eminent polymath whose impact in Latin American history and the Spanish language are comparable to that of Goethe’s in Germany.
Dudamel, the single most recognizable Venezuelan fine artist in the entire world, maybe of all time, came much later, of course. His face and name are ubiquitous here in Los Angeles. You don’t have to go very far to see “The Dude” plastered on a billboard, hanging from a street lamp banner, or decorating the side of an MTA bus.
Whatever one’s opinion of Dudamel as a conductor, he undoubtedly possesses an instant brand recognition that is exceptionally rare in recent classical music history. It has been a blessing for a career unblemished by scandal, but this is increasingly being tried by his longstanding association with Chavismo. Gone are the days when sympathy for Hugo Chávez and his jumbled ideology was fashionable among the discontents of the Bush II era. As mainstream American and European media narratives on Chavismo have soured, scrutiny into Dudamel’s personal political beliefs has increased.
The first warning shots were fired at Dudamel before his international career had really begun, in 2007, goaded by media outrage over Chávez’s unsuccessful constitutional referendum that year. However, it was an op-ed published five years later in Commentary that broadened public attention into Dudamel’s connections to the Venezuelan government. Not satisfied with earlier critics’ implication of Dudamel as an unwitting accomplice, the essay’s author took a step further and accused the conductor of being a willing co-conspirator or at least enabler of Venezuela’s anti-democratic turn:
Instead of using his international prestige to stand up against Chávez’s efforts to subvert democracy, Dudamel may have become one more artistic façade for a government hell-bent on destroying human rights in Venezuela. In doing so, he has become part of a long tradition of morally obtuse musicians who played for dictators. [...] So while the likeable Dudamel has become a classical star here in the United States, he has also become a symbol of the way every aspect of Venezuelan culture has been taken over by the Chávez regime to the detriment of his country’s freedom and the security of the region.
Others expanded this line of attack, most notably the pianist Gabriela Montero, a fellow Venezuelan and former friend. Just last year, while urging on a boycott of the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra, she called for regime change in her home country.
Circumspect annoyance with the “over-politicized” state of the world notwithstanding, Dudamel has maintained his composure. For neoconservatives and the present day equivalent of those people that Mencken long ago referred to as “world savers”, Dudamel’s neutralism has been insufficient. A few hours ago, one tabloidist vaguely said that the conductor had to make some kind of correct public statement on the ongoing situation in Venezuela, lest he “be held to account” for his relationship to its government. What that actually involved and whether anything illicit resulted from it, as this tabloidist intimated without evidence, is unclear.
Shortly after the end of World War II, Richard Strauss grumbled that Americans were too obsessed with politics. He had a point, but there is more to it than that. (And it is not just Americans anymore.) Most people are either unable or unwilling to parse information given to them, exacerbating political partisanship that in the last two decades has become akin to the rivalry of the demes in Constantinople. In such an environment, where puerile “good guy/bad guy” dynamics define mainstream political discourse, and such perceptions can fluctuate on a whim, holding Dudamel to task for his mostly undefined ideological affiliations is a waste of time — his as much as ours.