What to read to understand Venezuela

Doña Bárbara by Rómulo Gallegos (1929)

As well as becoming Venezuela’s first democratically elected president in 1948, Rómulo Gallegos was a towering literary figure. Published in 1929, just as the country was pivoting into an oil economy, Doña Bárbara captures an older truth: land is power. Its central figure is often read as an allegory of Latin American strongmen, including Juan Vicente Gómez, the military general who seized power in 1908. Beyond its politics, the book blends reality and fantasy in a way that foreshadows magical realism – and it remains one of Latin America’s most popular novels.

Comandante: Inside Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela by Rory Carroll (2013)

Before Nicolás Maduro, there was Hugo Chávez, who ruled Venezuela for 14 years, promising to transform oil wealth into social justice. In Comandante, foreign correspondent Rory Carroll brilliantly tackles the challenge of explaining “chavismo”, a movement that began as a charismatic pillar of Latin America’s “pink tide” before sliding into corruption and mismanagement. Published in 2013, the year of Chávez’s death, the book combines deep reporting with sharp, often funny prose to show how Chávez’s myth endured even as his state unravelled.

Motherland: A Memoir by Paula Ramón (2023)

Major upheavals are often narrated blind to the domestic wreckage they leave behind. Not in journalist Paula Ramón’s memoir. With raw and brave honesty, she traces Venezuela’s recent collapse through the intimate story of her own family – entangled also with older fragments of Spanish and European history through her father. First written in Portuguese while Ramón was reporting from Brazil, the book shows how nations and families fall apart, as seen from the gaze of someone whose sense of belonging is balanced by their global vantage point.

Carolina Unzelte is a Latin America correspondent for The Observer

Photography by AP