We Created Chávez: A People's History of the Venezuelan Revolution

by George Ciccariello-Maher

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822378938
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	04/17/2013
Series:	e-Duke books scholarly collection.
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	352
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

George Ciccariello-Maher is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Drexel University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Map of Venezuela xii

Introduction. What People? Whose History? 1

1. A Guerrilla History 22

2. Reconnecting with the Masses 45

3. Birth of the "Tupamaros" 67

First Interlude. The Caracazo: History Splits in Two 88

4. Sergio's Blood: Student Struggles from the University to the Streets 105

5. Manuelita's Boots: Women between Two Movements 126

6. JoséLeonardo's Body and the Collapse of Mestizaje 146

Second Interlude. Every Eleventh Has Its Thirteenth 166

7. Venezuelan Workers: Aristocracy or Revolutionary Class? 180

8. Oligarchs Tremble! Peasant Struggles at the Margins of the State 200

9. A New Proletariat? Informal Labor and the Revolutionary Streets 218

Conclusion. Dual Power against the Magical State 234

Notes 257

Index 307