The Bolivarian Project

Misrepresentations of Venezuela abound. Data is limited and people interpret it in quite contrary ways. Information deficit plus skewed interpretations cause many people who ought to support the Bolivarian Revolution to instead doubt or even reject it. Useful lessons from Venezuela go largely unreported and thus have less than their widest possible effect.

In our country the issue of socialism is very complex. We have always been clear that there are no manuals or pamphlets that can resolve the numerous theoretical and practical problems that the socialist project puts in front of us. Similarly, there are no models, no revolution is identical to another.

A spectre is haunting capitalism. It is the spectre of socialism for the 21st century. Increasingly, the characteristics of this spectre are becoming clear, and we are able to see enough to understand what it is not. The only thing that is not clear at this point is whether the spectre is real – i.e., whether it is actually an earthly presence.

Sometimes you hear a stray sentence on the news that makes you realise you have been lied to. Deliberately lied to; systematically lied to; lied to for a purpose. If you listened closely over the past few days, you could have heard one such sentence passing in the night-time of news.

Wilpert has not just produced a comprehensive look at the social, economic and political transformation that has shaken the foundations of Venezuela over the past decade; he has also delivered a sharp rebuke to one of the trendiest, if dubious, political theories to appear on the academic left in recent years.

I’m in the land of the Master Chess Player, Franco reminds me. It’s sunset and we’re a few kilometers outside of Barquisimeto, Venezuela after a dizzying trip filming in just a small part of western Venezuela which took us, among other places, through the home state of President Hugo Chavez.

Bart Jones is the author of Hugo! The Hugo Chavez Story from Mud Hut to Perpetual Revolution. Jones lived in Venezuela from 1992 to 2000, working initially as a Maryknoll lay missioner and then as a foreign correspondent for The Associated Press. Daniel Denvir talks to him about the media, recent events, and his motivation for writing the book.

Can Chavismo outlive Chavez? Jones does not say, but his portrait is compelling for its ring of authenticity. The result is a refreshing departure from the ideologically charged tracts that tend to dominate the debate about Chavez. A book review.

President Chavez is "trying to fulfill Simón Bolívar’s dream of uniting Latin America, in part to fight the great monster to the north,” says Bart Jones, the author of the Chavez biography ¡Hugo! In Jones’ nuanced portrait, the iconoclastic president comes across as neither the savior sought by his followers nor the demon painted by his opponents, but as a well-read, self-made man.

The opposition’s problem is that Venezuelan democracy is taking the country in a direction that has stripped them of their political power, and threatens to empower the working class beyond all recognition. Now the schooling system is a new principal target for outright revolution.