Suggested Films
- Once Upon a Time in Venezuela With the world’s largest crude reserves at Lake Maracaibo not far from Congo Mirador, Venezuela was one of Latin America’s richest countries through the 1990s. The lake’s namesake city was even referred to as “Venezuela’s Saudi Arabia.” But inequality was high, and the boom time wasn’t to last. In 1999, Hugo Chavez took power and launched the Bolivarian Revolution, centralizing power to the state, redistributing wealth and nationalizing industries including oil and banking. His socialist political reforms put him at odds with the United States, and a hostile relationship lasted until his death in 2013. His successor, Nicolas Maduro, continued Chavez’s legacy, but by 2016, oil prices had fallen by more than 70 percent, plunging the country into a humanitarian crisis. In addition, the Trump administration put sanctions on Venezuela and refused to recognize Maduro’s presidency after highly disputed elections in 2018. Suffering from hyperinflation, environmental degradation, and shortage of food and basic necessities, over 4 million Venezuelans left the country in the past few years, and many millions more are expected to continue to flee in what will be the world’s worst refugee crisis of modern times… When filmmaker Anabel Rodríguez Ríos visits a remote floating village in Venezuela to see its eternal lightning storms, she discovers another ongoing and alarming situation taking place… Congo Mirador was once a magical, thriving fishing community, built on stilts near Latin American’s biggest oil field. But more recently, Venezuela has been spiraling into chaos and violence, and the village itself is literally sinking from pollution and neglect – a prophetic reflection of Venezuela itself. At the center of the village’s existential fight stands two female leaders: Mrs. Tamara, the Chavez-worshipping coordinator, not above bribery and intimidation, and Natalie, her most vocal critic and school teacher. As confidence erodes under President Maduro and Venezuela shapes up to become the world’s worst refugee crisis in 2020, outpacing the displacement in Syria, will the village find a way to stay afloat or will it become a political and ecological sacrifice? Shot over seven years, ONCE UPON A TIME IN VENEZUELA bears witness to the corrosive consequences of corruption and government neglect that reaches the farthest corners and pits neighbor against neighbor in a struggle for survival.
Suggested Reading for more Social & Historical Context on Venezuela
Click on the "info" icon next to each book below to view details on these selected reading sources.
The Magical State by
In 1935, after the death of dictator General Juan Vicente Gómez, Venezuela consolidated its position as the world's major oil exporter and began to establish what today is South America's longest-lasting democratic regime. Endowed with the power of state oil wealth, successive presidents appeared as transcendent figures who could magically transform Venezuela into a modern nation. During the 1974-78 oil boom, dazzling development projects promised finally to effect this transformation. Yet now the state must struggle to appease its foreign creditors, counter a declining economy, and contain a discontented citizenry. In critical dialogue with contemporary social theory, Fernando Coronil examines key transformations in Venezuela's polity, culture, and economy, recasting theories of development and highlighting the relevance of these processes for other postcolonial nations. The result is a timely and compelling historical ethnography of political power at the cutting edge of interdisciplinary reflections on modernity and the state.
ISBN: 0226116018Publication Date: 1997-11-10
- The Necromantic State: Spectral Remains in the Afterglow of Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution by Irina R. Troconis In the spring of 2013, televisions across Venezuela announced the death of then-president Hugo Chávez, leader of the Bolivarian Revolution and key political actor in Latin America’s “turn to the left.” Chávez’s death, however, was not the end of Chávez’s life. In The Necromantic State, Irina R. Troconis examines how Chávez, as a “specter,” has lingered in Venezuela’s public, private, and digital spaces. Focusing on contemporary Venezuela and drawing from a diverse corpus that includes tattoos, toys, memes, graffiti, and a hologram haunting the streets of downtown Caracas, Troconis contends that, in moments of failed transitions, political tensions, and crises of legitimacy, the state brings the dead back to life to negotiate the terms of its survival. By showing how this necromantic performance enables the state’s material and visual manifestations in public and private spaces, Troconis untangles a sociopolitical moment in which the ghostly acts as the affective, social, and political force that grounds state authority and ensures the preservation of the status quo, as it circumscribes acts of political imagination and limits popular resistance.
We Created Chávez by
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.
ISBN: 9780822378938Publication Date: 2013-04-17
Who Can Stop the Drums? by
A vivid ethnography of social movements in the barrios, or poor shantytowns, of Caracas, Venezuela.
ISBN: 9780822391708Publication Date: 2010-04-02
Barrio Rising by
Beginning in the late 1950s political leaders in Venezuela built what they celebrated as Latin America's most stable democracy. But outside the staid halls of power, in the gritty barrios of a rapidly urbanizing country, another politics was rising--unruly, contentious, and clamoring for inclusion. Based on years of archival and ethnographic research in Venezuela's largest public housing community, Barrio Rising delivers the first in-depth history of urban popular politics before the Bolivarian Revolution, providing crucial context for understanding the democracy that emerged during the presidency of Hugo Chávez. In the mid-1950s, a military government bent on modernizing Venezuela razed dozens of slums in the heart of the capital Caracas, replacing them with massive buildings to house the city's working poor. The project remained unfinished when the dictatorship fell on January 23, 1958, and in a matter of days city residents illegally occupied thousands of apartments, squatted on green spaces, and renamed the neighborhood to honor the emerging democracy: the 23 de Enero (January 23). During the next thirty years, through eviction efforts, guerrilla conflict, state violence, internal strife, and official neglect, inhabitants of el veintitrés learned to use their strategic location and symbolic tie to the promise of democracy in order to demand a better life. Granting legitimacy to the state through the vote but protesting its failings with violent street actions when necessary, they laid the foundation for an expansive understanding of democracy--both radical and electoral--whose features still resonate today. Blending rich narrative accounts with incisive analyses of urban space, politics, and everyday life, Barrio Rising offers a sweeping reinterpretation of modern Venezuelan history as seen not by its leaders but by residents of one of the country's most distinctive popular neighborhoods.
ISBN: 9780520959187Publication Date: 2015-07-24
Spectacular Modernity by
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.
ISBN: 9780822982364Publication Date: 2017-07-15
Refined Material by
Venezuela's turbulent twentieth century saw boom and bust as the former Spanish colony transformed into a major postwar cultural player. In this sweeping study of visual and material production, Sean Nesselrode Moncada explores the integral relationship between the global oil industry and the celebrated rise of geometric abstraction, kinetic art, and modern architecture in midcentury Venezuela. Oil provided the crucible for national reinvention, ushering in a period of dizzying optimism and bitter disillusion as artists, architects, graphic designers, activists, and critics sought to define the terms of modernity. An innovative, transdisciplinary reevaluation of Venezuelan modernism, Refined Material reveals how the logic of refinement conditioned the terms of development and redefined our relationship to nature, matter, and one another.
ISBN: 9780520392465Publication Date: 2023-08-29
Dragon in the Tropics by
" This new and expanded edition of Dragon in the Tropics--the widely acclaimed account of how president Hugo Chávez (1999-2013) revamped Venezuela's political economy--examines the electoral decline of Chavismo after Chavez's death and the policies adopted by his successor, Nicolás Maduro, to cope with the economic chaos inherited from previous radical populist policies. Corrales and Penfold argue that Maduro has had to struggle with the inherent contradictions of a large and heterogeneous social coalition, a declining oil sector, the strength of entrenched military interests, and fewer resources to appease international allies, which have strenghtened the autocratic features of an already consolidated hybrid regime. In examining the new political realities of Venezuela, the authors offer lessons on the dynamics of succession in hybrid regimes. This book is a must-read for scholars and analysts of Latin America. "
ISBN: 9780815725930Publication Date: 2015-04-02
Dancing Jacobins by
Since independence from Spain, a trope has remained pervasive in Latin America's republican imaginary: that of an endless antagonism pitting civilization against barbarism as irreconcilable poles within which a nation's life unfolds. This book apprehends that trope not just as the phantasmatic projection of postcolonial elites fearful of the popular sectors but also as a symptom of a stubborn historical predicament: the cyclical insistence with which the subaltern populations menacingly return to the nation's public spaces in the form of crowds. Focused on Venezuela but relevant to the rest of Latin America, and drawing on a rich theoretical literature including authors like Derrida, Foucault, Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy, Lyotard, Laclau, Taussig, and others, Dancing Jacobins is a genealogical investigation of the intrinsically populist "monumental governmentality" that in response to this predicament began to take shape in that nation at the time of independence. Informed by a Bolivarian political theology, the nation's representatives, or "dancing Jacobins," recursively draw on the repertoire of busts, portraits, and equestrian statues of national heroes scattered across Venezuela in a montage of monuments and dancing--or universal and particular. They monumentalize themselves on the stage of the polity as a ponderously statuesque yet occasionally riotous reflection of the nation's general will. To this day, the nervous oscillation between crowds and peoplehood intrinsic to this form of government has inflected the republic's institutions and constructs, from the sovereign "people" to the nation's heroic imaginary, its constitutional texts, representative figures, parliamentary structures, and, not least, its army. Through this movement of collection and dispersion, these institutions are at all times haunted and imbued from within by the crowds they otherwise set out to mold, enframe, and address.
ISBN: 9780823263653Publication Date: 2016-04-28
The Paradox of Violence in Venezuela by
Crime and violence soared in twenty-first-century Venezuela even as poverty and inequality decreased, contradicting the conventional wisdom that these are the underlying causes of violence. The Paradox of Violence in Venezuela explains the rise of violence under both Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro--leftist presidents who made considerable investment in social programs and political inclusion. Contributors argue that violence arose not from the frustration of inequality, or the needs created by poverty, but rather from the interrelated factors of a particular type of revolutionary governance, extraordinary oil revenues, a reliance on militarized policing, and the persistence of concentrated disadvantage. These factors led to dramatic but unequal economic growth, massive institutional and social change, and dysfunctional criminal justice policies that destabilized illicit markets and social networks, leading to an increase in violent conflict resolution. The Paradox of Violence in Venezuela reorients thinking about violence and its relationship to poverty, inequality, and the state.
ISBN: 0822947129Publication Date: 2023-05-30
Engendering Revolution by
In 1999, Venezuela became the first country in the world to constitutionally recognize the socioeconomic value of housework and enshrine homemakers' social security. This landmark provision was part of a larger project to transform the state and expand social inclusion during Hugo Chávez's presidency. The Bolivarian revolution opened new opportunities for poor and working-class--or popular--women's organizing. The state recognized their unpaid labor and maternal gender role as central to the revolution. Yet even as state recognition enabled some popular women to receive public assistance, it also made their unpaid labor and organizing vulnerable to state appropriation. Offering the first comprehensive analysis of this phenomenon, Engendering Revolution demonstrates that the Bolivarian revolution cannot be understood without comprehending the gendered nature of its state-society relations. Showcasing field research that comprises archival analysis, observation, and extensive interviews, these thought-provoking findings underscore the ways in which popular women sustained a movement purported to exalt them, even while many could not access social security and remained socially, economically, and politically vulnerable.
ISBN: 9781477319154Publication Date: 2019-12-01
Venezuela Before Chávez by
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.
ISBN: 9780271056319Publication Date: 2014-01-27
Capitalist Outsiders by
Social polarization has roiled neoliberal political establishments but has rarely culminated in electoral victories for anticapitalist outsiders. Instead, outsiders who accommodate capitalists often prevail. Capitalist Outsiders revisits celebrated exemplars of Latin American populism in Mexico and Venezuela to shed light on this phenomenon. It reveals how anticorruption campaigns boosted Mexico's neoliberal-era capitalist outsider by drowning out salacious corporate scandals; how Venezuela's apparently enlightened capitalist outsiders of the 1940s relied on segregationist, punitive labor relations; and how corporate insiders of Venezuela's neoliberal political establishment unwittingly validated the anticapitalist Hugo Chávez as the true outsider. It weaves together these case studies to reveal an unlikely common origin for capitalist outsiders in both countries: their sequential insertion into global oil production and Mexico's early twentieth-century radical oil workers. Capitalist Outsiders moves beyond cataloging "populist" traits and tactics or devising the institutions that might avert their rise. Instead, it specifies the distinct social bases of capitalist vs. anticapitalist outsiders. It exposes how a nation's earlier incorporation into the capitalist world economy casts a long shadow over neoliberal-era outsider politics.
ISBN: 0822947633Publication Date: 2023-04-18
Revolutions in Cuba and Venezuela by
This book compares the sociopolitical processes behind twomajor revolutions--those of Cuba in 1959, when Fidel Castro came to power, and Venezuelain 1999, when Hugo Chávez won the presidential election.
ISBN: 9781683402718Publication Date: 2023-03-28
Las misiones sociales bolivarianas una política pública con enfoque de derechos fundamentales en el estado de justicia social by Call Number: HN363.5 .M577 2021ISBN: 9789807603713Publication Date: 2021
Homo Chavistus by
Para 2023, la sociedad venezolana ya lleva dos décadas de conflictos y transformaciones en todos los ámbitos, al término de las cuales son muy pocos los ganadores, y los perdedores se cuentan por millones. A pesar de eso, y justamente a causa de la destrucción sufrida, hay que seguir pensando en la reconstrucción social, económica e institucional del país. La Red FORMA reunió varias de las mentes más lúcidas de Venezuela para mirar las cosas más allá de la retórica política o el discurso de la autocompasión. Homo chavistus examina el paisaje político posterior a la pandemia y a los sucesos de 2019; la economía venezolana en toda su ambigüedad, opacidad y desigualdad; las condiciones en que se puede hacer y distribuir cultura en Venezuela para defender el individuo y a la sociedad del manto autocrático; y la ausencia del Estado de derecho y de una verdadera administración de justicia. Este libro también propone cómo reconstruir la justicia en Venezuela, invoca la historia de la descentralización como lección para un futuro que se apalanque en el poder local, y explora los términos en que el chavismo ha querido transformar a la sociedad venezolana y el lugar de Venezuela en el mundo
ISBN: 9789804251078Publication Date: 2023
Unfinished Transitions by
This analysis of Venezuelan women's organizing traces a sixty-year struggle to democratize political practice and represent women's interests. It also helps to explain some of the "unfinished business" of Latin American democratization: why women have had difficulty participating in regimes they fought to restore, and how they seek inclusion. Friedman's innovative theoretical approach uses gender analysis to explain the impact of the "political opportunity structure"--the institutions, actors, and discourses--of democratization on women's participation.
ISBN: 0271020237Publication Date: 2000-09-01
