Further readingBooksFrom a history of its oil trade to a classic novel by a former president, here’s the books you need to read amid Venezuela’s current political turmoil
Riots in the streets, inflation exceeding 1 million percent, two men claiming to be the rightful president and warnings of civil war – Venezuela is making a lot of headlines, none of them good. Six years after the death of Hugo Chávez died, when power passed to his protege Nicolás Maduro, the economy has imploded, democratic trappings have been stripped away, millions have fled the country and Donald Trump is threatening to aid in ousting Maduro and establish the opposition leader, Juan Guaidó, as president.
Raul Gallegos’s Crude Nation shows how what was once South America’s most stable, wealthy country swerved towards the abyss. A former economic journalist who lived in Caracas, Gallegos dissects the nationalisations, expropriations, subsidies and controls on prices and currencies that warped the economy during Chávez’s 12-year rule. Petrol became virtually free while milk, sugar, coffee and toilet paper routinely vanished from stores. Gallegos blends analysis with reportage, including a picaresque roadtrip with a Che Guevara lookalike – to show how Maduro inherited a mess and made it worse.
Dragon in the Tropics, by the Venezuelan academics Javier Corrales and Michael Penfold, is a scholarly focus on the politics, explaining how Chávez bequeathed a system based on populism, personality cult, electoral success and authoritarianism to a hapless successor. Lacking the comandante’s charisma and his luck with high oil prices, Maduro dialled up the thuggery and militarisation.
Fernando Coronil’s The Magical State, published in 1997, is a prophetic, anthropological and at times lyrical meditation on how successive presidents used oil revenues to pose as transcendent figures who could conjure modernity, but in the end delivered dysfunction. “Between the cracks one could fleetingly see that the magic of oil money could no longer sustain the magical state.” After taking power in 1999, Chávez intensified the cycle. He masked the continuity by wearing a red beret and, after surviving a US-backed coup in 2002, raining insults on George Bush, who he said was “more dangerous than a monkey with a razor blade”.
Chávez renamed his country the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and called his revolution the “Bolivarian process” in honour of Simón Bolívar, the 19th-century liberator who ended Spanish rule. Marie Arana’s Bolívar gallops through an extraordinary life and a complex political legacy, both progressive and authoritarian, which laid the foundations of Venezuela. A bracing antidote to the Bolívar cult. When Chávez dug up his bones he gushed: “This glorious skeleton must be Bolívar because you can feel his ardour.”
Few contemporary novels have been translated, alas – Jonathan Jakubowicz’s rollicking skewering of the “boligarchs” in Las Aventuras de Juan Planchard deserves a wider readership. But for a portrait of an earlier elite there is a translation of Iphigenia, Teresa de la Parra’s sexually charged story of a young woman who seeks to escape stifling patriarchal decorum, which caused a sensation when published in 1924.
Rómulo Gallegos’s Doña Bárbara (1929) is Venezuela’s classic novel, the one schoolkids have to read. It depicts a battle of wills between the mercurial, eponymous heroine and a rancher, with lush, prolix descriptions of the great plains – the llanos – cowboys and spirits. Gallegos, Venezuela’s first democratically elected president, gives insight into the man who succeeded him decades later. Chávez was a llanero, a boy from the plains steeped in its lore, and in office commandeered the airwaves to regale the nation with its songs and stories and myths.
Rory Carroll was formerly the Guardian’s Latin America correspondent. He is the author of Comandante: Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela (Penguin).
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