[.ca] In The Shadow Of The Liberator (ISBN 1859843654)

Worthless and outdated. Gott owes an update to his readers:
This appears to be just another propaganda pamphlet paid by the Chavez administration. This book omits facts that not even the well paid P.R. machinery have denied such as the wild increment in poverty and misery indexes as well as the index for administrative corruption and crime to levels unheard of during the previous Venezuelan governments. There are lots of other maladies created or incremented during this tragic (and comedic) regime that one does not expect to read about in a book like this one since they could be construed as subjective, such as the horrendous administration of public funds, the blatant intromission of the Cuban government and its intelligence services in Venezuela's internal affairs, the destruction of the Venezuelan economy while having more oil revenue than in the last 20 years together. But leaving out documented facts as the ones briefly mentioned at the beginning of this review just makes this book worthless of any credibility. Hugo Chavez bought himself a brand new Airbus 320, which he had repainted because he did not like that paint scheme previously ordered (total tab: over $15 million), while Yanomami (Amazonian native) children starve in the streets of Caracas (so much for the rights of indigenous people) and hospital do not have gauze, syringes or clean water. The Venezuelan Left have distanced its self from Chavez in disbelief. I did not read about any of that either. Many things have happened since this book was published. Luis Miquelena abandoned Chavez, Chavez was briefly ousted in April 2002 only to return in the wings of the horrible mistakes of the ousters, Marisabel Chavez left the president in a much-publicized public dispute in the best tradition of the cheesiest soap opera, the country is in fact living a much worse disaster (an orgy of corruption and violence) than that imagined before Chavez's rise to power. For its objectivity and informative value this book is not worth much. For historic value it probably will hold a prominent place with Ignacio Ramonet's articles in Le Monde Diplomatique and others, as the flies that made their party around the stinkiest garbage can in Latin America and got handsomely paid for it. Enjoy Mr. Gott!

What the...:
This might be just another of the well paid efforts of the Venezuelan Goverment to improve its international image with the nation's taxpayers money. This country is on the verge of civil war thanks to its communist and authoritarian tendencies. Anyone who likes dictatorship should back this holdum we have as a president.

Totally Biased:
This book is a double edged sword. On the one hand it is the first and only(to my knowledge) account of the Hugo Chavez debacle in Venezuela. This volume documents the rise of Chavez. The failed coup, the army, the prison term and his present role as dictator-in-making of Venezuela. This is a fine account of the life of this controversial leader who embodies the 1970s communist idealism with the standard Latin American coup mentality and obsession with military strongmen. He is a caudillo in every sense of the word, except he is living in modern times when Caudilloism is no longer appreciated because it subverts democracy. This book highlights the present problems in Venezuela. The major flaw here is the authors opinion that Chavez is a romantic communist who is reforming his country. Well this is just not true. Average Bolivians, especially the urban unions hate Mr. Chavez and the oil workers walked off the job to protest his treatment of them. Mr. Chavez is a typical leftist who has used divisive politics to 'help' indigenous rural Indians and divide the country along race and wealth lines. In this he has failed, which is why the country came to an economic standstill last year. Chavez suspended the rule of law, arrested his political opponents and pounded his chest in daily 4 hour TV broadcasts. He is a disgusting gutter like gangster and the author doesn't look at this side of him at all. The author in point of fact was a writer on the guerrilla movements of the 60s in Latin America and has apparently been taken under the Chavez spell, because Chavez once met Castro, who is the authors hero. The book is terribly biased and does not tell the whole truth, namely that ordinary proletariat factory workers in Venezuela hate Chavez and his programs. He has systematically crushed the unions in his attempt at dictatorship.

Not only bias but published too soon:
Perhaps the greatest misfortune of Gott's book is that it was published in the year 2000, before Chavez and his close followers showed - to the few that still could not see it - their true authoritarian face. Therefore, it presents to the English reader, an interpretation of the contemporary political situation in Venezuela from a very narrow point of view. Many crutial events have happend since Chavez came into power, which make this book not only obsolete, but misguiding. Most of - not to say all - "best people in the country summoned by his side" (p. 228) mentioned in the book have abandoned his personal project of power. Among them, just to mentioned two insignificant ones, Luis Miquilena "the principal political brain...and the key figure of the Fifth Republic movement" (p.222), and his wife. "Chavez, it was claimed, was against the political parties, against the business community, against the media, and hostile to the Catholic Church". Now, after three years of constant violent and sometimes physical attacks on all of these groups, it cannot be just "claimed", it is a daily fact that Venezuela has to live under the government of Chavez. "His intelligent and discrimitating attitud towards the politics of oil" (p 229) have taken PDVSA from one of the most prestigious oil companies in the world, manage almost exclusively by Venezuelans, to one that at the moment(2003) is forced to hire workers from Argelia and India because more than 40% of its employees have bee fired because they participated in a strike against Chavez, who considers anybody who says anything againts him an enemy that only deserves to be destroyed and humilliated. At the end, even Gott himself admits that his book is bias since "reporters have always been susceptible to the charms of Latin America's radical strongmen, and I am no exeption" (p. 226). Hence, by writing a book following a obviously strong and self-admitted subjective perspective Gott simply failed to see that "Venezuela is still a society of gangsters and looters" (p. 227) and that Chavez is one of them.

Fool yourself at your own risk.:
It is hard to talk about Chavez without emotion, without passion for me. I left Venezuela over three years ago because I decided I didn't want my family to be raised in what was to come (and I don't regret having left), so I will not deny that I am an open anti-chavista. Now, on to this author and his views... First of all, the period covered in the book (before 2000) could be a pretext for the author's views, since (like he did in his book), many intellectuals, leftwing and not-so-leftwing too, were supportive of the Lieutenant Colonel back until 2001 even: after all and although I did not like him from the start, Chavez could have been a true alternative to decades of corruption and traditional politics in Venezuela. Also many, many middle-class, educated people (to my dismay, some still to this day) supported him. I emphasize the word "educated", because it is no surprise that his demagogical approach results appealing to the lower-income strata of Venezuela, much like it was the case with previous Presidents. On a side note, I saw the reaction that a figure like Castro provoked in the media in Venezuela (in case you're wondering, I am from Venezuela) during the visit for the ceremony where Carlos Andres Perez took on the presidency for the second time: they were running around Castro like puppies, fascinated my the "comandante". Therefore, it doesn't surprise me that Gott acknowledges that "reporters have always been susceptible to the charms of Latin America's radical strongmen, and I am no exception". What's my point here? Gott's views cannot be excused as being accidentally biased in this book, simply because Chavez had not taken his mask off by the time he wrote his book, allowing the unaccounted deaths of dozens of his opposers, the looting of the country's main industry (PDVSA, the Venezuelan oil company), and the gradual shut-down of the economy leading to shortages in basic foods and medicines. Gott's views (is it coincidence that his last name means "God" in German?) had not changed much by early 2003.... This book is just another leftist manifesto, supportive of the barbaric attrocities of a regime who is perfectly willing to say with a straight face that the country cannot be in better shape and blame the opposition for everything, while inflation, unemployment and several other macroeconomic indicators are at their worse levels in over a century, in spite of the fact that the country has over $16 billion in international reserves. Sadly, I can't say that I entirely support the work of the opposition either, one that has come out of the struggle against Chavez as a fragmented block, and one that doesn't show enough signs of acknowledgement that politics-as-we-know-it will no longer work in Venezuela after this past few years of political and social nightmare. Knowledge of a country or expertise about a region doesn't give the author's opinion any more credibility than the opinion of any of the government's spokespersons.