Blogging the Revolution: Caracas Chronicles and the Hugo Chávez Era

by Francisco Toro, Juan Cristobal Nagel

Overview

For more than ten years, Caracas Chronicles (CaracasChronicles.com) has distilled Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela for English-speaking readers, providing both context and a home for lively discussion. This compilation by its editors, Toro and Nagel, brings together their best work.

With Hugo Chávez's passing, Venezuela enters a new era. The time has come to look back on a decade of unprecedented upheavals. From a sharply critical stance, Blogging the Revolution surveys the evolution of both chavismo and the opposition, the disintegration of Venezuela's public sphere, the political economy of the petrostate, and its impact on everyday life in the South American nation.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940016261775
Publisher:	Cognitio
Publication date:	03/01/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Francisco Toro founded Caracas Chronicles in September, 2002. Born and raised in Caracas, he studied at Reed College (Portland, Oregon) and the London School of Economics. A political scientist by training, his journalistic work has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, Foreign Policy, the International Herald Tribune, The New Republic, and the Financial Times, among others. He's currently a consultant based in Montreal, where he lives with his wife and daughter.

Juan Cristobal Nagel has co-edited Caracas Chronicles since 2004, and edited the present volume. Born and raised in Maracaibo, he graduated from Caracas' Universidad Católica, and then went to the University of Michigan for graduate work in Economics. His work on Venezuela has appeared in Foreign Policy, Americas Quarterly, Prodavinci, and El Mercurio of Chile, among others. He is currently Professor of Economics at the Universidad de los Andes in Santiago, Chile, where he lives with his wife and their three daughters. He divides his time between Chile and Venezuela.

Editorial Reviews

Caracas Chronicles is the most intelligent blog about the Chávez administration that I know of, covering every news, every opinion, every personality, and every new piece of research on Venezuela that is worth blogging about. It is criticism without extremism, and conviction without dogmatism. Read it, and discover why so many Venezuela watchers are addicted to it.

Professor of Political Science at Amherst College, Massachusetts - Javier Corrales

Caracas Chronicles is a rare voice of sanity amid the cacophony of nonsense that is spouted daily about Venezuela – much of it, sadly, by the people supposed to be running the country. A great blog, and now a book. Read it.

Caracas-based journalist and broadcaster - Phil Gunson

Caracas Chronicles has been an indispensable source of lucidity and perspective in these turbulent times in Venezuela. Toro and Nagel have been right on target, without pretending to be ludicrously impartial; they have been able to rise above polarization, trying hard to make sense of an often implausible reality. Blogging the Revolution shows them at their best. If you are not already a fan, you will become one.

RFK Visiting Professor at Harvard Kennedy School and Director, Center on Energy at IESA in Caracas. - Francisco J. Monaldi

Razor sharp, informed, witty, scholarly, irreverent and above all intelligent; an invaluable map for a poorly charted land. It's no fan of the Bolivarian revolution, and doesn't claim to be impartial, but avoids the foaming partisanship which infects so much debate about the topic. You come to it for analysis and the writing ends up hooking you into unexpected journeys through the revolution's surreal labyrinths. For anyone curious about Venezuela it's a must-read blog. And now it's a must-read

The Guardian's former Latin America bureau chief - Rory Carroll

Through the years of Chavez rule, the best writing about Venezuela in English appeared on a blogspot run by two Venezuelan expats, Francisco Toro and Juan Cristobal Nagel. With preternatural timing, the authors of that blog released a re-edited compilation of their very best pieces in the very week of Hugo Chavez's death. If you want to understand the deceased president's bizarre regime, Blogging the Revolution, the book-form version of Caracas Chronicles, is the place to start.

Contributing editor for Newsweek and The Daily Beast, CNN contributor. - David Frum