Deciphering Venezuela's enigmatic Hugo Chávez

Hugo Chávez: The Definitive Biography of Venezuela's Controversial President
By Cristina Marcano and Alberto Barrera Tyszka
RANDOM HOUSE; 327 PAGES; $27.95

Ezequiel Zamora became something of an icon of the Venezuelan left when he spearheaded a peasant revolt in 1846, demanding "Free land and free men." After a brief exile, he returned to lead the Federal War and founded the Venezuelan state of Barinas, where Hugo Chávez was born about 100 years later.

Venezuela's president since 1999, Chávez is a polarizing figure not only in his own country but also throughout Latin America and around the world. A charismatic leader with an uncanny ability to inspire, he is also a paranoid narcissist who believes he is fulfilling an almost messianic destiny. In fact, some of Chávez's closest companions claim that he believes himself to be the reincarnation of Ezequiel Zamora.

Chávez is also adept at self-aggrandizing political theatrics, as when his colorful references to President Bush as the devil at the U.N. General Assembly last year earned him front-page media coverage across the world. "He loves to be defiant," write Cristina Marcano and Alberto Barrera Tyszka in their new biography of the Venezuelan president. "He loves to be newsworthy, and he does whatever he can to be at the center of controversy and confuse everyone." But to dismiss Chávez the man as a crackpot - as some U.S. foreign policymakers have foolishly done - is to overlook the enormous influence and appeal of Chávez the politician.

Reconciling Chávez the man and Chávez the politician, however, is no easy task, made all the more difficult by the chavista propaganda machine. Marcano and Tyszka, both prominent Venezuelan journalists, do just that. The authors explore some of the important questions about Chávez, from the origins of his leftist, at times socialist political leanings to the development of his disillusionment with Venezuela's political establishment.

Marcano and Tyszka have thus produced an exemplary biography of a man still defining and redefining himself. They use a range of sources, from newspapers to interviews to personal diaries, telling a multilayered story even if a single, finite truth remains indiscernible. Given that every observer of Venezuela today surely holds a strong opinion of Chávez and his government, the authors should also be commended for diligently presenting varying views, not to mention doing so without hampering their well-written narrative.

Chávez was born in 1954 in the small town of Sabaneta, the second of six brothers, and spent most of his childhood living with his grandmother. He lived through the country's transition to democracy in 1958 and the heyday of its oil-export boom years. Although he initially dreamed of becoming a famous baseball player, he began a career in the military in 1971.

The '80s were a turning point, both for Chávez and for Venezuela. Beginning with the currency devaluation of 1983, the economy fell into a series of crises, and government after government faced corruption scandals. Chávez began seriously thinking about a coup to bring down the broken political system, and started to form, over the following years, a military group called the Bolivarian Revolutionary Army.

It was not until 1992, though, that Chávez and his co-conspirators actually staged a coup. Though unsuccessful in bringing down the government of President Carlos Andrés Pérez, it was enormously successful in launching Chávez's image as defender of the people. In fact, it was from prison that Chávez began presenting himself as the spiritual descendant of Simon Bolívar, the Venezuelan-born liberator of half of Latin America. For many Venezuelans, these were the years in which Chávez became a household name, and Marcano and Tyszka might have dwelled longer on this period. Indeed, as the authors note, even today, "the root of Chávez's power resides in the religious and emotional bond he has forged with the popular sectors of the country."

By the time Chávez was elected in 1998, more than half of Venezuela's population - more than 13 million people - was living in poverty. Corruption had so tainted the presidency and the political parties that an outsider candidate like Chávez presented new hope.

The record since has been mixed. While lambasting neoliberal economic policies and U.S. imperialism, Chávez opened telecommunications and utilities sectors to foreign investors and paid Venezuela's debts punctually. Record oil prices allowed him to spend enormous sums on improving education, public provision of health care and reducing poverty. At the same time, recent reports calculate his own expenses at between $6,000 and $7,000 a day. And his penchant for Rolex and Brioni leads Marcano and Tyszka to call him "possibly the best-dressed president in the history of Venezuela."

The Hugo Chávez that emerges from Marcano and Tyszka's biography is at once a master of propaganda and a political pragmatist, both extraordinarily affable and fiercely antagonistic. Which version we choose to see often says more about us than about him. In Venezuela today, it is not uncommon to find single families split between chavistas and anti-chavistas.

Just before he took office in 1999, Chávez traveled with Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez to Cuba. "I was overwhelmed by the feeling that I had just been traveling and chatting pleasantly with two opposing men," Márquez later wrote of the two faces of Chavez. "One to whom the caprices of fate had given an opportunity to save his country. The other, an illusionist, who could pass into the history books as just another despot." With Chávez's legacy still unfolding, we are left to choose the face we prefer to see.

Noam Lupu is a doctoral student of political science at Princeton University.