The struggle to define the life and legacy of the most iconic Latin American leader of the twenty-first century, Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, had begun long before his death in March 2013, not least in biographies by Bart Jones, Richard Gott, and Rory Carroll. Yet where their focus was very much on Chávez the man, Mike Gonzalez’ addition to Pluto Press's ‘Revolutionary Lives’ series provides a more explicitly political overview of the currents and contradictions underlying his regime.

Thus, though Gonzalez like his forerunners begins his story in the Venezuelan llanos, where the baseball-mad son of a poor family enters the military both to play ball and to get an education, even early chapters are couched in a close analysis of Venezuelan political history. Gonzalez takes a particular interest in the personalities and permutations involved in the formation and development of Chávez's Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement (MBR-200) within the army and its electoral successor the Fifth Republic Movement (chapters 1–3). This concern for social and political context persists as Gonzalez charts a course through the major events of the past quarter century in Venezuela: the social explosion of the Caracazo in 1989; Chávez's abortive coup in 1992; electoral success in 1998; the opposition coup and oil strike of 2002; and the turn towards ‘Twenty-First Century Socialism’ in 2005 (chapters 3–5). The final two chapters (6–7) tackle the more recent quandaries of Chávez in his decline and of Chavismo in his absence.

True to the aims of the series, to be ‘sympathetic not sycophantic’ and ‘political not personal’, Gonzalez focuses particularly on the effect of divisions within the movements supporting Chávez pre- and post-1998, suggesting that Chávez's centralising response defined the limits of his political project. Unusually but not uniquely, this critique comes from the far left and argues that Chávez's problems stemmed from a failure to transfer more power to el pueblo via cooperatives, worker management, and genuinely independent participatory institutions.

Gonzalez's familiarity with the history of the Venezuelan left makes this strain of analysis a strong point here, and indeed it is supplemented by new empirical material from interviews with relevant actors (not least Douglas Bravo). Another strength is clear identification of the many tensions and outright deficiencies that have hamstrung el proceso, particularly in recent years: centralisation of power (p. 76), ad hoc use of discretionary funds (p. 102), improvisation and lax planning (pp. 102–5), an inconsistent foreign policy (p. 109), a top-down party structures (pp. 130, 140), and widespread corruption (pp. 124–6). For the most part, Gonzalez also resists the siren song of caricature that lures so many accounts of Venezuelan politics onto the rocks.

Yet, though explicitly ‘political’, this remains a biography. And given the author's repeated assertion of Chávez's centrality to Venezuelan political life, the balance may sometimes be tipped too far away from the personal struggles of our eponymous hero, whose larger-than-life personality surely holds the greatest interest for non-specialists. It is a fine line, admittedly, but Chávez's absence from events sometimes gives this volume the feel of a more general account of contemporary Venezuelan politics. This focus on domestic politics also acts to underplay both the constraining role of Venezuela's international relations on policy at home and also Chávez's remarkable role in ending Latin America's ‘backyard syndrome’. History may yet see this latter achievement as Chávez's greatest, yet little attention is paid to the momentous shift in hemispheric relations brought about by defeat of the Free Trade Area of the Americas and delivery of a Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), a Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), and an attempt at cooperative regionalism (ALBA).

Like many right-wing critiques, Gonzalez's far-left perspective holds Chávez up to an impossible standard, with a seeming presumption that ‘real’ socialism would have resolved Venezuela's many intractable problems. While Chávez's contradictory position as both promoter of and barrier to advancement of genuine bottom-up democracy is discussed, an overriding faith in the self-fulfilling possibility of such a democracy sees the blame fall on Chávez's vanity, or even corruption (p. 78). These maximalist positions undervalue the incredible changes already wrought in Venezuela, a country virtually unknown to the world before Chávez (p. 1) and markedly inhospitable to any kind of socialist project given its fragmented, tribalist, and consumerist society. This is compounded by the confusion of ‘political practices that [Chávez] oversaw’ (p. 8), a kind of ‘on his watch’ approach, with the reality of bounded political control in such a complex and conflictive situation. This amounts to an academic mirroring of the same unhealthy centralisation on Chávez's figure that occurred in his political life.

The volume is rich in details that will interest scholars of Venezuela, but the same scholars might question some of Gonzalez's evidence. Taking the expression ‘social charity’ in one press release as indicative of the government's ‘paternalistic attitude’ (p. 101), for instance, ignores the more prevalent discourse of empowerment and self-improvement, not to mention the community-led practice of many misiones; as Gonzalez concedes, ‘[social charity] may simply be a bad translation’ (p. 101). Likewise, he deems ‘Chávez's failure to condemn the coup in Honduras’ (p. 132) evidence of centrist drift, yet there was no more ferocious opponent of this coup than Chávez, who threatened ‘even military action’, promised to ‘overthrow’ any successor, and expelled Honduras from Petrocaribe. Elsewhere, irrespective of one's opinion of opposition leader Leopoldo López, it is far from established that during the 2002 coup he gave the Metropolitan Police ‘explicit orders to fire on demonstrators’ (p. 85), though fire on demonstrators they did, yet no source for this accusation is forthcoming.

Despite these anomalies, there is something here for various readerships: for the generalist there is coverage of all the key events and stages of the Chávez era, and for the specialist plenty of local detail. Overall, Gonzalez provides an account of Chávez and Chavismo whose leftist critique and focus on internal politics both complement and supplement the range of existing English-language biographies.