Download or read book Deadline written by Robert Samet and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-07-08 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since 2006, Venezuela has had the highest homicide rate in South America and one of the highest levels of gun violence in the world. Former president Hugo Chávez, who died in 2013, downplayed the extent of violent crime and instead emphasized rehabilitation. His successor, President Nicolás Maduro, took the opposite approach, declaring an all-out war on crime (mano dura). What accounts for this drastic shift toward more punitive measures? In Deadline, anthropologist Robert Samet answers this question by focusing on the relationship between populism, the press, and what he calls “the will to security.” Drawing on nearly a decade of ethnographic research alongside journalists on the Caracas crime beat, he shows how the media shaped the politics of security from the ground up. Paradoxically, Venezuela’s punitive turn was not the product of dictatorship, but rather an outgrowth of practices and institutions normally associated with democracy. Samet reckons with this apparent contradiction by exploring the circulation of extralegal denuncias (accusations) by crime journalists, editors, sources, and audiences. Denuncias are a form of public shaming or exposé that channels popular anger against the powers that be. By showing how denuncias mobilize dissent, Deadline weaves a much larger tale about the relationship between the press, popular outrage, and the politics of security in the twenty-first century.
Download or read book R mulo Betancourt written by Germán Carrera Damas and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Available here for the first time in English, Rómulo Betancourt has been a Spanish-language classic in Venezuela since its publication in 2013. This book is an extended essay on a transformational figure in the country’s history from an internationally-renowned public intellectual, Germán Carrera Damas. In this work, Carrera Damas captures a significant transition for the nation that began in the 1940s when Rómulo Betancourt and his colleagues overthrew the ruling military dictatorship and established a modern democratic regime. However, the system Betancourt created eventually deteriorated after his presidency. Carrera Damas not only delves into the evolving political thought of a leader who remained dedicated to his cause throughout a varied career, but also offers insights on what it takes to create and sustain a democratic republic under difficult circumstances. As the country’s current economic and political crisis intensifies, this book will help English speakers understand the cultural context of Venezuela’s contemporary moment as well as set a historical precedent for the next stages in the development of its position in the world. Funding provided by the Kislak Family Foundation, Inc.
Download or read book Spectacular Modernity written by Lisa Blackmore and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2017-07-22 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In cultural history, the 1950s in Venezuela are commonly celebrated as a golden age of modernity, realized by a booming oil economy, dazzling modernist architecture, and nationwide modernization projects. But this is only half the story. In this path-breaking study, Lisa Blackmore reframes the concept of modernity as a complex cultural formation in which modern aesthetics became deeply entangled with authoritarian politics. Drawing on extensive archival research and presenting a wealth of previously unpublished visual materials, Blackmore revisits the decade-long dictatorship to unearth the spectacles of progress that offset repression and censorship. Analyses of a wide range of case studies—from housing projects to agricultural colonies, urban monuments to official exhibitions, and carnival processions to consumerculture—reveal the manifold apparatuses that mythologized visionary leadership, advocated technocratic development, and presented military rule as the only route to progress. Offering a sharp corrective to depoliticized accounts of the period, Spectacular Modernity instead exposes how Venezuelans were promised a radically transformed landscape in exchange for their democratic freedoms.
Download or read book The Night written by Rodrigo Blanco Calderon and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2022-02-08 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For readers who love Bolaño, a new voice of Latin American fiction, winner of the Mario Vargas Llosa Prize. Recurring blackouts envelop Caracas in an inescapable darkness that makes nightmares come true. Real and fictional characters, most of them are writers, exchange the role of narrator in this polyphonic novel. They recount contradictory versions of the plot, a series of femicides that began with the energy crisis. The central narrator is a psychiatrist who manipulates the accounts of his friend, an author writing a book titled The Night; and his patient, an advertising executive obsessed with understanding the world through word puzzles. The author shifts between crime fiction and metafiction, cautioning readers that the events retold are both true and manipulated. This is a political novel about the financial crisis and socio-political division in Venezuela from 2008 to 2010. The title of the book, originally also in English, is a gesture towards Chavism's failure to resist US influence. Yet, the form is unapologetically literary, a reflection on the depiction and distortion of reality through storytelling. Blanco Calderón said about the potential of language, "I am convinced that all the evil in the world begins in them: in words" (Caracas, 2010).
Download or read book Venezuela Before Ch vez written by Ricardo Hausmann and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-06-13 with total page 549 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the beginning of the twentieth century, Venezuela had one of the poorest economies in Latin America, but by 1970 it had become the richest country in the region and one of the twenty richest countries in the world, ahead of countries such as Greece, Israel, and Spain. Between 1978 and 2001, however, Venezuela’s economy went sharply in reverse, with non-oil GDP declining by almost 19 percent and oil GDP by an astonishing 65 percent. What accounts for this drastic turnabout? The editors of Venezuela Before Chávez, who each played a policymaking role in the country’s economy during the past two decades, have brought together a group of economists and political scientists to examine systematically the impact of a wide range of factors affecting the economy’s collapse, from the cost of labor regulation and the development of financial markets to the weakening of democratic governance and the politics of decisions about industrial policy. Aside from the editors, the contributors are Omar Bello, Adriana Bermúdez, Matías Braun, Javier Corrales, Jonathan Di John, Rafael Di Tella, Javier Donna, Samuel Freije, Dan Levy, Robert MacCulloch, Osmel Manzano, Francisco Monaldi, María Antonia Moreno, Daniel Ortega, Michael Penfold, José Pineda, Lant Pritchett, Cameron A. Shelton, and Dean Yang.
Download or read book Society and Economy in Venezuela written by Vitor Eduardo Schincariol and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-10-28 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents an overview of the economic policies adopted by the Bolivarian governments of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela between 1998 and 2018, and the economic and social results of these policies. The recent history of Venezuela has attracted much attention due to Chávez’s and Maduro’s self-declared search for socialism since the beginning of the 21st century and the economic trajectory of the country in this period, which experienced significant economic growth during the international oil boom in the first decade of the century, followed by a huge economic crisis in the second decade. The volume adopts an economic history approach, taking into account both economic and social variables to analyze the Venezuelan overall socio-economic performance since 1998. Drawing on official documents and statistics, as well as on the available literature, it presents an empirical analysis of Venezuelan economic and social histories during the Bolivarian period, describing and analyzing the achievements and limits of the policies adopted between 1998 and 2018. Society and Economy in Venezuela: An Overview of the Bolivarian Period (1998-2018) will be a useful introduction to sociologists, political economists, political scientists, economic historians and other social scientists interested in understanding the multiple interrelations between economy and society in Bolivarian Venezuela. “This book offers a thoughtful, committed and illuminating analysis of the socialist experiment in Venezuela. Its strengths and weaknesses are examined in unprecedented detail, in order to identify the drivers and limitation of 'socialism in the 21st century'. An essential work for scholars, students and citizens concerned with Venezuela.” – Alfredo Saad-Filho, King's College London
Download or read book Venezuela Heroica Historical Vignettes Trans by Ignacio L Gotz written by Eduardo Blanco and published by Currents in Comparative Romance Languages and Literatures. This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than a century, Venezuela Heroica has been a source of inspiring stories for Venezuelan schoolchildren. Now ably translated and profusely annotated, the book retains the literary beauty and entertaining character of the original, presenting a vivid account of the Venezuelan wars waged against Spain while seeking independence. Stories of the major battles and the most famous heroes of the Independence Wars, as well as reflections on the conditions, political and otherwise, that attended the first decades of the Republic, can now be further enjoyed in this insightful and masterful translation.
Download or read book The Unraveling of Representative Democracy in Venezuela written by Jennifer L. McCoy and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2006-03 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For four decades, Venezuela prided itself for having one of the most stable representative democracies in Latin America. Then, in 1992, Hugo Chávez Frías attempted an unsuccessful military coup. Six years later, he was elected president. Once in power, Chávez redrafted the 1961 constitution, dissolved the Congress, dismissed judges, and marginalized rival political parties. In a bid to create direct democracy, other Latin American democracies watched with mixed reactions: if representative democracy could break down so quickly in Venezuela, it could easily happen in countries with less-established traditions. On the other hand, would Chávez create a new form of democracy to redress the plight of the marginalized poor? In this volume of essays, leading scholars from Venezuela and the United States ask why representative democracy in Venezuela unraveled so swiftly and whether it can be restored. Its thirteen chapters examine the crisis in three periods: the unraveling of Punto Fijo democracy; Chávez's Bolivarian Revolution; and the course of "participatory democracy" under Chávez. The contributors analyze such factors as the vulnerability of Venezuelan democracy before Chávez; the role of political parties, organized labor, the urban poor, the military, and businessmen; and the impact of public and economic policy. This timely volume offers important lessons for comparative regime change within hybrid democracies. Contributors: Damarys Canache, Florida State University; Rafael de la Cruz, Inter-American Development Bank; José Antonio Gil, Yepes Datanalisis; Richard S. Hillman, St. John Fisher College; Janet Kelly, Graduate Institute of Business, Caracas; José E. Molina, University of Zulia; Mosés Naím, Foreign Policy; Nelson Ortiz, Caracas Stock Exchange; Pedro A. Palma, Graduate Institute of Business, Caracas; Carlos A. Romero and Luis Salamanca, Central University of Venezuela; Harold Trinkunas, Naval Postgraduate School.
Download or read book Historia de la Conquista Y Poblacion de la Provincia de Venezuela written by José de Oviedo y Baños and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1987-01-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 Cumboto written by Ramón Díaz Sánchez and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2013-03-22 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This richly orchestrated novel, which won a national literary prize in the author's native land, Venezuela, also earned international recognition when the William Faulkner Foundation gave it an award as the most notable novel published in Ibero America between 1945 and 1962. Cumboto's disturbing story unfolds during the early decades of the twentieth century on a Venezuelan coconut plantation, in a turbulent Faulknerian double world of black and white. It records the lives of Don Federico, the effete survivor of a once vigorous family of landowners, and his Black servant Natividad, who since the days of their mutual childhood has been his only friend. Young Federico, psychologically impotent and lost to human contact, lives on as a lonely recluse in the century-old main house of "Cumboto," surrounded by descendants of African slaves who still manage, despite his apathy, to keep the plantation on its feet. Natividad's heroic and selfless struggle to redeem his friend by awakening him to the stirrings of the earth and life about him sets in motion a series of events that are to shatter Federico's childlike world: a headlong love affair with a voluptuous black girl, her terrified flight in the face of the bitter condemnation of her own people, and the unexpected appearance, twenty years later, of their extraordinary son. Throughout the novel runs a recurring theme: neither race can survive without the other. Black and white, Díaz Sánchez suggests, embody contrasting aspects of human nature, which are not inimical but complementary: the languid intellectualism of European culture must be tempered with the indestructible vitality and intuition of the African soul if humanity is ever fully to comprehend the living essence of the world.
Download or read book Venezuela s Petro diplomacy written by Ralph S. Clem and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: President Hugo Chavez has used the windfall of high oil prices to remake Venezuela internally along the model of 21st-century socialism and, even more audaciously, to rewrite global relations by directly challenging U.S. hegemony. The dramatic ascendency of the country in hemispheric and global international relations over the past decade is the subject of this title.
Download or read book El Techo de la Ballena written by María C. Gaztambide and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume, María C. Gaztambide presents an account of the visual arts production of the Caracas-based collective El Techo de la Ballena (active 1961-69).
Download or read book Venezuela s Movimiento Al Socialismo written by Steve Ellner and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Teodoro Petkoff and the other members of the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) in Venezuela had aroused the ire of the orthodox communist leaders by claiming to be both authentic communists and true nationalists, not bound by the dictates of either the Moscow or Maoist/Beijing wings of the party. To infuriate the traditionalists even further, Petkoff and his associates succeeded in being more than isolated critics, as MAS quickly eclipsed the traditional Venezuelan Communist Party and became that country's leading leftist group. The author places MAS in its international national, and historical contexts in order to determine the extent to which it is a unique communist party, as it claims to be. He traces the theory of "national democratic revolution, " which MAS rejects, back to Lenin, and discusses the Latin American left's reevaluation of that thesis. Ellner examines the guerrilla movement in Venezuela, the student movement of the late 1960s, and the emergence of the "New Left" in other countries, especially noting their influence on the formation of MAS. He also discusses the group's role in Venezuelan elections and it's relations with the other parties.
Download or read book Violence in the Barrios of Caracas written by Daniel S. Leon and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-07-02 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents an overview of the problem of urban violence in Caracas, and specifically in its barrios. It helps situate readers familiar or not with Latin American in the context that is Caracas, Venezuela, a city displaying one of the world’s highest homicide rates. The book offers a qualitative comparison of the informal mechanisms of social control in three barrios of Caracas. This comprehensive analysis can help explain high homicide rates, while socio-economic conditions improved due to substantial oil windfalls in the twenty-first century. The author describes why informal social control was not effective in some barrios, and points to the role of some organizational arrangements in increasing the incentives to use violence, even under improving socio-economic conditions. The analysis addresses a gap in the literature on violence, which mainly posits high violence rates after economic downturns. Specifically, it investigates social capital's moderating effect between Caracas' political and economic structures and high violence rates. This book concludes that perverse social capital found in the barrios of Caracas helps explain high violence rates while socio-economic indicators improved until the early 2010s. Students and researchers interested in security studies or Latin America will benefit from this book because of its extensive theoretical discussions, use of primary sources, and unique multidisciplinary analysis of urban violence.
Download or read book Do a In s Vs Oblivion written by Ana Teresa Torres and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Pegasus Prize for International Literature, this novel tells the history of a bitter family dispute, beginning in 18th century Caracas and spanning nearly two centuries. Translated from Spanish by Gregory Rabassa.
Download or read book Venezuela written by William Wardrope and published by Gareth Stevens. This book was released on 2003 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An overview of Venezuela that includes information on its geography, history, government, language, culture, and current issues.