Dictated by Fire

The narrative you are about to read is set against the social explosion in Venezuela on February 27, 1989 and the days following, called the Caracazo (the suffix -azo in Spanish is an augmentative, suggesting something like a big deal, or an explosion). The narrator writes from the point of view of a young militant in one of the several armed groups of the extra-parliamentary Marxist-Leninist Left in Caracas, which became involved in these events, seeking to lift them from riot and insurrection toward a revolutionary turn. But the aim of the book is not autobiographical or nostalgic, nor is it meant to be a political or historical reflection on the causes and consequences of the Caracazo. Rather, it is intended to elicit for an audience today, more than thirty years after the event, something of the radical excitement and possibility it generated, at a moment when the political movement that resulted from the Caracazo-Hugo Chavez’s Bolivarian project of a Twenty First Century Socialism-has become dilapidated and discredited. (Chavez himself was not involved in the Caracazo, or so it is said anyway, and his political movement at the time sought initially to distance itself from it; but his subsequent emergence in the early 1990s certainly is due in part to the repercussions of the event). John Beverley, Universidad de Pittsburgh