Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

It would have been nice to read a spy thriller, but the author seems obsessed with demonizing Hugo Chávez and his government. Let's not forget, Chávez's administration reduced inequality by 54% and poverty from 70.8% (1996) to 21% (2010). Under Chávez, extreme poverty was reduced from 40% (1996) to 7.3% (2010). Over 2 million elderly people received old-age pensions – that is 66% of the elderly population - while only 387,000 received pensions before Chávez. Illiteracy was eliminated, and Chávez introduced tuition free education from daycare to university and built or refurbished thousands of schools, including 10 new universities. Before the Chávez government in 1998, 21% of the population was malnourished. By 2012, malnourishment was only 5%, and child malnutrition, which was 7.7% in 1990 was at 2.9% by 2012. During the 2000s, Venezuela even sent free heating oil to the US northeast, to help poverty-stricken Americans with their energy bills during the cold northern winters. Reading Moisés Naím's book, one might be tempted to think that none of these things ever happened, yet the reality is that Chávez's socialist programs were so successful that the US, fearing a red tide in Latin America, felt it necessary to launch a propaganda campaign the likes of which we haven't seen since the McCarthy era, and to impose crippling and illegal sanctions on the Venezuelan people that are still in effect to this day. Of course, none of this appears in Moisés Naím's novel. Instead we get a fantasy in which Chávez is basically a Castro puppet who completely ruins Venezuela's economy (and there's not a single mention of the aforementioned US sanctions which were the real cause of the Venezuelan economy tanking). Maybe the reason for this demonization is that Naím served as Venezuela's Minister of Trade and Industry in the administration that governed Venezuela before Chávez came to power. Maybe there's some shame over the fact that socialism achieved what neoliberalism abjectly failed to do for the Venezuelan people, and maybe that fuels a desire to outright lie about Chávez's character and ignore his achievements. Or maybe it's just that the author's political philosophy doesn't allow him to admit that Chávez's Bolivarian revolution was a resounding success. But whatever Naím's reasons for demonizing Chávez, instead of an honest assessment, we get a ridiculous caricature of Hugo Chávez as a narcissistic, petty and selfish dictator. Hugo Chávez surely had his flaws (don't we all?), and he may even have been prone to narcissism and self-aggrandizement (what national leader isn't?), but a petty and selfish dictator he certainly was not. He used Venezuela's riches to help the impoverished and educate the entire population, and this made him so incredibly popular that he was elected to the presidency four times. Needless to say, I won't be reading anything more from Moisés Naím - I prefer the novels I read to be entertainment, not thinly veiled propaganda disguised as entertainment.