In The Shadow Of The Liberator [Hardcover]

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!

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.

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.