We Created Chávez

<div>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 <i>We Created Chávez</i> 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.<p>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.<br></p></div>