Download or read book Changing Venezuela by Taking Power written by Gregory Wilpert and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exposes the self-serving logic behind much middle-class opposition to Venezuela's elected leader, and explains the real reason for their alarm. This work argues that the Chavez government has instituted one of the progressive constitutions, but warns that they have yet to overcome the dangerous spectres of the country's past.
Download or read book Hugo Ch vez and the Bolivarian Revolution written by Barry Cannon and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-19 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The emergence of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela has revived analysis of one of Latin America’s most enduring political traditions – populism. Yet Latin America has changed since the heyday of Perón and Evita. Globalisation, implemented through harsh IMF inspired Structural Adjustment Programmes, has taken hold throughout the region and democracy is supposedly the ‘only game in town’. This book examines the phenomenon that is Hugo Chávez within these contexts, assessing to what extent his government fits into established ideas on populism in Latin America. The book also provides a comprehensive and critical analysis of Chávez’s emergence, his government’s social and economic policies, its foreign policy, as well as assessing the charges of authoritarianism brought against him. Written in clear, accessible prose, the book carries debate beyond current polarised views on the Venezuelan president, to consider the prospects of the new Bolivarian model surviving beyond its leader and progenitor, Hugo Chávez.
Download or read book Changing Venezuela by Taking Power written by Gregory Wilpert and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since coming to power in 1998, the Chavez government has inspired both fierce internal debate and horror amongst Western governments accustomed to counting on an obeisant regime in the oil-rich state. In this rich and resourceful study, Greg Wilpert exposes the self-serving logic behind much middle-class opposition to Venezuela's elected leader, and explains the real reason for their alarm. He argues that the Chavez government has instituted one of the world's most progressive constitutions, but warns that they have yet to overcome the dangerous specters of the country's past.
Download or read book Dragon in the Tropics written by Javier Corrales and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2011-02-01 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since he was first elected in 1999, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez Frías has reshaped a frail but nonetheless pluralistic democracy into a semi-authoritarian regime—an outcome achieved with spectacularly high oil income and widespread electoral support. This eye-opening book illuminates one of the most sweeping and unexpected political transformations in contemporary Latin America. Based on more than fifteen years' experience in researching and writing about Venezuela, Javier Corrales and Michael Penfold have crafted a comprehensive account of how the Chávez regime has revamped the nation, with a particular focus on its political transformation. Throughout, they take issue with conventional explanations. First, they argue persuasively that liberal democracy as an institution was not to blame for the rise of chavismo. Second, they assert that the nation's economic ailments were not caused by neoliberalism. Instead they blame other factors, including a dependence on oil, which caused macroeconomic volatility; political party fragmentation, which triggered infighting; government mismanagement of the banking crisis, which led to more centralization of power; and the Asian crisis of 1997, which devastated Venezuela's economy at the same time that Chávez ran for president. It is perhaps on the role of oil that the authors take greatest issue with prevailing opinion. They do not dispute that dependence on oil can generate political and economic distortions—the "resource curse" or "paradox of plenty" arguments—but they counter that oil alone fails to explain Chávez's rise. Instead they single out a weak framework of checks and balances that allowed the executive branch to extract oil rents and distribute them to the populace. The real culprit behind Chávez's success, they write, was the asymmetry of political power.
Download or read book Extraordinary Threat written by Justin Podur and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2021-07-20 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The US foreign policy decisions behind six coup attempts against the Venezuelan government – and Venezuela's heightening precarity In March 2015, President Obama initiated sanctions against Venezuela, declaring a “national emergency with respect to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by the situation in Venezuela.” Each year, the US administration has repeated this claim. But, as Joe Emersberger and Justin Podur argue in their timely book, Extraordinary Threat, the opposite is true: It is the US policy of regime change in Venezuela that constitutes an “extraordinary threat” to Venezuelans. Tens of thousands of Venezuelans continue to die because of these ever-tightening US sanctions, denying people daily food, medicine, and fuel. On top of this, Venezuela has, since 2002, been subjected to repeated coup attempts by US-backed forces. In Extraordinary Threat, Emersberger and Podur tell the story of six coup attempts against Venezuela. This book deflates the myths propagated about the Venezuelan government’s purported lack of electoral legitimacy, scant human rights, and disastrous economic development record. Contrary to accounts lobbed by the corporate media, the real target of sustained U.S. assault on Venezuela is not the country’s claimed authoritarianism or its supposed corruption. It is Chavismo, the prospect that twenty-first century socialism could be brought about through electoral and constitutional means. This is what the US empire must not allow to succeed.
Download or read book Crafting Civilian Control of the Military in Venezuela written by Harold A. Trinkunas and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2011-01-20 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unlike most other emerging South American democracies, Venezuela has not succumbed to a successful military coup d'etat during four decades of democratic rule. What drives armed forces to follow the orders of elected leaders? And how do emerging democracies gain that control over their military establishments? Harold Trinkunas answers these questions in an examination of Venezuela's transition to democracy following military rule and its attempts to institutionalize civilian control of the military over the past sixty years, a period that included three regime changes. Trinkunas first focuses on the strategic choices democratizers make about the military and how these affect the internal civil-military balance of power in a new regime. He then analyzes a regime's capacity to institutionalize civilian control, looking specifically at Venezuela's failures and successes in this arena during three periods of intense change: the October revolution (1945-48), the Pact of Punto Fijo period (1958-98), and the Fifth Republic under President Hugo Chavez (1998 to the present). Placing Venezuela in comparative perspective with Argentina, Chile, and Spain, Trinkunas identifies the bureaucratic mechanisms democracies need in order to sustain civilian authority over the armed forces.
Download or read book We Created Ch vez written by Geo Maher and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-17 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since being elected president in 1998, Hugo Chávez has become the face of contemporary Venezuela and, more broadly, anticapitalist revolution. George Ciccariello-Maher contends that this focus on Chávez has obscured the inner dynamics and historical development of the country’s Bolivarian Revolution. In We Created Chávez, by examining social movements and revolutionary groups active before and during the Chávez era, Ciccariello-Maher provides a broader, more nuanced account of Chávez’s rise to power and the years of activism that preceded it. Based on interviews with grassroots organizers, former guerrillas, members of neighborhood militias, and government officials, Ciccariello-Maher presents a new history of Venezuelan political activism, one told from below. Led by leftist guerrillas, women, Afro-Venezuelans, indigenous people, and students, the social movements he discusses have been struggling against corruption and repression since 1958. Ciccariello-Maher pays particular attention to the dynamic interplay between the Chávez government, revolutionary social movements, and the Venezuelan people, recasting the Bolivarian Revolution as a long-term and multifaceted process of political transformation.
Download or read book Venezuela written by Jorge Joquera and published by Resistance Books. This book was released on 2003 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Each day the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean will be increasiongly convinced that there is no other road but revolution. For us there is no other road but revolution." (Hugo Chavez)A revolutionary process is unfolding in Venezuela, part of a continental rebellion unparalleled since the 1960s and '70s. Bourgeois power is being challenged by the emergence of a counter-power of the working classes. The reforms of the Chavez government have re-ignited the class struggle after years of defeat and decay of the left. This is not a simple replay of the Salvador Allende government in Chile 30 years ago. The Venezuelan army is deeply divided and within it there is a revolutionary current of officers and soldiers. Chavez himself has radicalised and fallen back not on the institutions of bourgeois democracy but the revolutionary power of the working masses.Internationally the left has become all too accustomed to analysing defeat and unfamiliar with the measure of a revolution. The development of the Venezuelan class struggle is an important opportunity to re-acquaint ourselves with the real-world development of class consciousness and the tactical complexities of a life-and-death struggle for power.This publication is only a condensed introduction to the evolution of the struggle and its key challenges but we hope that it might inspire others to study the Venezuelan revolution and draw from it the inspiration now feeding rebellion across Latin America.
Download or read book Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution written by Richard Gott and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2011-07-05 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The authoritative first-hand account of contemporary Venezuela, Hugo Chávez places the country’s controversial and charismatic president in historical perspective, and examines his plans and programs. Welcomed in 1999 by the inhabitants of the teeming shanty towns of Caracas as their potential savior, and greeted by Washington with considerable alarm, this former golpista-turned-democrat took up the aims and ambitions of Venezuela’s liberator, Simón Bolívar. Now in office for over a decade, President Chávez has undertaken the most wide-ranging transformation of oil-rich Venezuela for half a century, and dramatically affected the political debate throughout Latin America. In this updated edition, Richard Gott reflects on the achievements of the Bolivarian revolution, and the challenges that lie ahead.
Download or read book Ch vez Venezuela and the New Latin America written by Hugo Chávez Frías and published by Ocean Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book documents an encounter between Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, and Aleida Guevara, daughter of the legendary revolutionary Che Guevara and a prominent figure in the antiglobalization movement. Over the course of an extended, exclusive interview, Chavez explained his fiercely nationalist vision for Venezuela, the worldwide significance of the Bolivarian revolution and his commitment to a united Latin America. Their conversation, which was at times remarkably intimate, also covered Chavez's personal political formation and the legacy of Che's ideas and example in Latin America today. Included as an appendix is an exclusive interview with Jorge Garcia Carneiro, Venezuela's minister for defense, who played a key role in defeating the April 2002 coup. Today he is in the forefront of the project to transform Venezuela's army into an army of the people."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book We Are the State written by Cristobal Valencia and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2015-05-28 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chavistas are the local leaders and activists in Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, working to establish democracy through government-sponsored social missions, community self-governance, and popular collectives. We Are the State! tells the story of their grassroots activism. In perspectives gleaned from participant observation with barrio residents in workplaces, communal kitchens, city-wide forums, and grassroots meetings and assemblies, as well as family and recreational events, anthropologist Cristobal Valencia vividly recounts tensions between activists, local officials, and the wealthy opposition. The author offers an anthropological analysis of the state, social movements, and democracy as lived experiences of the poor, gendered, and racialized residents of two parishes in Caracas, Venezuela, and Afro-Venezuelan communities nearby. Ethnographic research reveals the shift in relationships of power and the evolving political practices among the Chavistas, the Chávez government, and the opposition. Examining the subjective experiences of barrio residents in everyday processes of state formation, this book provides a new perspective on the Chavistas, arguing that they are a broad-based social movement and driving force behind a revolution struggling to transfer state power to organized civil society. Through his intense engagement with the constantly changing social, political, and economic dynamics, Valencia dramatically challenges top-down understandings of the state and power in Venezuela. He shows the unequal relationships between sectors of civil society, and he shows state formation as a process enmeshed in the struggles for social justice, demonstrating that the state is a sociopolitical entity that acts through civil society, rather than above it.
Download or read book Revolutionary Has No Clothes written by A.C. Clark and published by Encounter Books. This book was released on 2009-09-29 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the forty or so years that preceded Hugo Chavez’s seizing of power, Venezuela had the most stable democracy in Latin America, the fastest-growing economy and the highest standard of living in the region. After Chavez seized power in 1999, however, things have changed radically. Today, Venezuela can no longer be seen as a democracy and rather than attracting immigrants as it once did, Venezuelans themselves are fleeing the country. Yet, somehow, the vast majority of contemporary references to Venezuela and to Chavez’s rule are laudatory. In The Revolutionary Has No Clothes: Hugo Chavez’s Bolivarian Farce, A.C. Clark corrects this warped take on Hugo Chavez and the “Bolivarian Revolution” in Venezuela and skewers those grotesquely admiring portraits of Mr. Chavez painted by panegyrists from Noam Chomsky to Sean Penn. Clark explores Chavez’s embarrassing public displays, perilous policy platforms and close relationships with rogue states to reveal Chavez for what he truly is: a dangerous “buffoon” leading a once prosperous nation down a path to ruin. Most shockingly, Clark exposes both Chavez’s ambitions for asymmetrical warfare against the United States and Venezuela’s insidious lobbying network within our own borders. In the end, The Revolutionary Has No Clothes is the definitive portrait of one of the world’s depraved leaders and a disturbing chronicle of Venezuela’s decline from a prosperous democracy to an autocratic bully-state.
Download or read book Autocracy Rising written by Javier Corrales and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2023-02-06 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How Nicolás Maduro reinvented authoritarianism for the twenty-first centurVenezuela, which once enjoyed periods of democratically elected governments in the latter half of the twentieth century, has descended into autocratic rule, coupled with economic collapse. In his new book, Autocracy Rising, veteran scholar of Latin American politics Javier Corrales explores how and why this happened. Corrales focuses on two themes: party systems and institutional capacity. He argues that Venezuela’s democratic backsliding advanced when the ruling party obtained far too much electoral clout while the opposition fragmented. The state then took control of formerly independent agencies of the state. This allowed the ruling party to use and abuse of the law to favor the president—which in turn generated a permanent economic crisis. After succeeding Hugo Chávez in 2013, Nicolás Maduro confronted, unexpectedly, another change in the party system: a rising opposition. This triggered deeper autocratization. To survive, the state was compelled to modernize autocratic practices and seek alliances with sinister partners. In short, Maduro concentrated power, paradoxically, by sharing power. Autocracy Rising compares what occurred in Venezuela to twenty other cases throughout Latin America where presidents were forced out of office. Corrales illuminates the depressing cycle in which semi-authoritarian regimes become increasingly autocratic in response to crisis, only to cause new crises that lead to even greater authoritarianism.
Download or read book The Real Venezuela written by Iain Bruce and published by Pluto Press (UK). This book was released on 2008 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A refreshing look at the meaning of socialism in Venezuela from the point of view of the country's ordinary citizens.
Download or read book The Revolutionary Has No Clothes written by A. C. Clark and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 'The Revolutionary Has No Clothes', A. C. Clark corrects this warped take on Chavez and his 'Bolivarian Revolution' in Venezuela. Clark analyzes Chavez's embarrassing public displays, policy platforms, and relationships with rogue states. Clark exposes the possibles Chavez's ambitions.
Download or read book Hugo Chavez written by Cristina Marcano and published by Random House. This book was released on 2007-08-14 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: He is one of the most controversial and important world leaders currently in power. In this international bestseller, at last available in English, Hugo Chávez is captured in a critically acclaimed biography, a riveting account of the Venezuelan president who continues to influence, fascinate, and antagonize America. Born in a small town on the Venezuelan plains, Chávez found his interests radically altered when he entered the military academy in Caracas. There, as Hugo Chávez reveals in dramatic detail, he was drawn to leftist politics and a new sense of himself as predestined to change the fortunes of his country and Latin America as a whole. Portrayed as never before is the double life Chávez soon began to lead: by day he was a family man and a military officer, but by night he secretly recruited insurgents for a violent overthrow of the government. His efforts would climax in an attempted coup against President Carlos Andrés Pérez, an action that ended in a spectacular failure but gave Chávez his first irresistible taste of celebrity and laid the groundwork for his ascension to the presidency eight years later. Here is the truth about Chávez’s revolutionary “Bolivarian” government, which stresses economic reforms meant to discourage corruption and empower the poor–while the leader spends seven thousand dollars a day on himself and cozies up to Arab oil elites. Venezuelan journalists Cristina Marcano and Alberto Barrera Tyszka explore the often crude and comical public figure who condemns George W. Bush in the most fiery language but at the same time hires lobbyists to improve his country’s image in the West. The authors examine not only Chávez’s political career but also his personal life–including his first marriage, which was marked by a long affair and the birth of a troubled son, and his second marriage, which produced a daughter toward whom Chávez’s favoritism has caused private tension and public talk. This seminal biography is filled with exclusive excerpts from Chávez’s own diary and draws on new research and interviews with such insightful subjects as Herma Marksman, the professor who was his mistress for nine years. Hugo Chávez is an essential work about a man whose power, peculiarities, and passion for the global spotlight only continue to grow.
Download or read book The Separation of Power in Venezuela under Hugo Ch vez written by Nadine Najim and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2015-12-22 with total page 39 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2015 in the subject Politics - Region: Middle and South America, grade: 2, University of Vienna, course: Proseminar, language: English, abstract: This essay focusses on how the state of democracy in Venezuela has weakened since Hugo Chávez became the president in 1998. I will focus on three areas of democracy which serve to highlight this deterioration. First, there had been a significant increase in the executive’s power at the same time as the capacity of judiciary and legislature to hold the executive to account had weakened, therefore limiting horizontal accountability in the separation of powers. Second, the military had become more politicised, and the lessening of civilian control over the armed forces had implications not only for the status of the profession itself, but also in the areas of human rights and corruption. Third, and last, freedom of expression had been curtailed in the news media, through sanctions imposed on the broadcasting agencies and the harassment of journalists.
