Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez (born 1954) has seized an important role on the world political stage with his stance of confrontation toward the United States and his ambitious program of social reforms.
Even more so than other Latin American countries, oilrich Venezuela has historically been a country sharply divided between rich and poor. Chávez has faced vigorous opposition from the country's traditional elites, spending two years in prison after a 1992 coup attempt, surviving a coup launched against him in 2002, and beating back a recall attempt in 2004. He was popular, even venerated, among poor Venezuelans, for he took steps in the first years of his rule to distribute more of the country's burgeoning oil income among its poorer citizens. Yet Venezuelans were deeply split over the merits of Chávez's reign, and international observers pointed to a growing atmosphere of repression and a concentration of power in Chávez's hands. After meeting Chávez, Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez said, according to the London Independent: "I was overwhelmed by the feeling that I had just been with two opposing men. 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."
Became Star on Diamond
Chávez was born in Venezuela's Western grasslands region, near the town of Sabaneta in the state of Barinas, on July 28, 1954. Both his parents were schoolteachers, but that was hardly a lucrative profession in the Venezuelan backcountry; his father had only a sixth-grade education himself, and the family was poor as well as dark-skinned, in a country with strong racial divisions and an almost exclusively white-skinned elite. Chávez was sent to live with his father's mother in Sabaneta and helped raise extra money for the family by selling homemade candies produced by his grandmother. The young Chávez possessed an ability that set him apart from the crowd in Venezuela: he was an excellent baseball (and softball) player in a baseball-crazy country. He played on a national baseball team called the Criollitos de Venezuela in 1969 and continued to excel at the sport as an adult, playing for teams connected with military or educational institutions.
With a desire to make something of himself, Chávez thought about trying to become a major league baseball player. He also thought vaguely about entering politics. After attending the inauguration of Venezuela's president when he was 19, he wrote in his diary (as quoted by Alma Guillermoprieto in the New York Review of Books) that he "imagined myself walking there with the weight of the country on my own shoulders." But a political career was not a feasible option, and Chávez joined the military. He studied engineering at Venezuela's national military academy, and though he was never a top-notch student he focused on his work and graduated eighth in his class in 1975. Chávez was immediately popular with his fellow soldiers, and he rose through the military's officer ranks. He was elevated to colonel, heading an elite unit of paratroopers.
Along the way he noticed that the Venezuelan military, like many of the country's other institutions, was riddled with corruption. Chávez spent his spare time reading about his country's history, and he flirted with the Marxist ideas that had made inroads in Nicaragua and other Latin American countries, often nurtured by progressive religious figures. But his real heroes were the nationalist military leaders who had thrown off Spanish rule in the nineteenth century - above all Simón Bolivar, the father of Venezuelan independence and a figure of mythical dimensions, sometimes known as the George Washington of South America. With his natural charisma, Chávez drew other soldiers to his ideas. Starting with small cells, he built a network of supporters within the Venezuelan military. It was called MBR 200, the Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement.
A defining event in Chávez's military career came in 1989, after falling oil prices had devastated the Venezuelan economy and led President Carlos Andrés Pérez to institute a series of austerity measures. Riots erupted in the capital city of Caracas after an announcement that bus fares would be increased, and the army was sent into the streets to quell the protests. Chávez was part of the group deployed, and he was angered by orders to shoot at Venezuelan citizens who he felt had legitimate grievances. The experience was a primary motivation for the military coup he organized against the Pérez government three years later.
Radio Announcement became Popular Slogan
The 1992 Chávez coup was quickly put down, but his co-conspirators launched attacks on government installations around the country. In hopes of preventing further bloodshed, the government allowed Chávez a 45-second television address so that he could tell others to lay down their arms. It was a mistake on the government's part, for Chávez made the most of the time he had available, announcing to his fellow Venezuelans that his movement had for now - "por ahora" - been unsuccessful in achieving its goal. Within a few days, "por ahora" graffiti appeared around Caracas, and Chávez had emerged as the standard-bearer for Venezuela's masses of hillside slum dwellers.
Chávez was jailed but was given the comparatively mild charge of rebellion and spent only two years in prison, despite the fact that his associates mounted a second coup attempt nine months after the first. After he was pardoned by president Rafael Caldera and given an honorable discharge from the military, Chávez launched a bid to win power by peaceful means. He and a group of leftist politicians formed a new party called the Fifth Republic Movement, which fielded Chávez as its presidential candidate. On December 6, 1998, he was elected to the Venezuelan presidency, his first political office, with 56 percent of the vote.
Chávez moved quickly on both political and public relations fronts to consolidate his power. He pushed through a new constitution that replaced Venezuela's American-style bicameral legislature with a single National Assembly, and provided for a six-year presidential term that could be extended by re-election. In 2000 Chávez scheduled a special election that would install him for the new six-year term. Running on an anti-corruption platform, he was elected with 60 percent of the vote, Venezuela's largest mandate in several decades.
Like Cuban leader Fidel Castro, with whom he cultivated closer ties, Chávez had the habit of giving lengthy speeches to his people, speeches that combined policy statements and general pep talks. Sprinkled with quotations from Jesus Christ and Simón Bolivar, Chávez's addresses took the form of a television program, Alo, Presidente. Chávez might touch on any topic from baseball to nutrition to the United States, which Chávez blamed for the problems of South America's poor. As the United States sought to expand hemispheric commerce through free-trade agreements, Chávez emerged as a major opponent of globalization and a general thorn in the side of the new U.S. administration of President George W. Bush.
Opponents Staged Coup
Chávez was also despised by Venezuela's upper classes, partly out of prejudice against his modest origins and partly over substantive policy disagreements. After Chávez fired the managers of Venezuela's national oil company in 2002, a group of business executives with supporters in the Venezuela army and in large labor unions launched a coup against the Chávez government on April 12. Groups of antiand pro-Chávez demonstrators clashed in front of the presidential palace, and Chávez was taken away by the coup plotters. When the insurgents announced that they were dissolving the constitution, however, the tide turned in Chávez's favor; a palace guard contingent that had remained loyal to him joined with a large crowd of demonstrators, and the coup collapsed after 50 hours. The United States, which had hailed the change of government, was forced to backtrack, and Chávez blamed Americans - accurately, according to many foreign press reports - for aiding the insurrection.
Chávez's opponents did not give up. In 2004 they gathered signatures for a recall election that, if successful, would have removed him from power. The recall went forward after judicial wrangling over the legitimacy of some of the signatures. But by this time the United States had invaded Iraq and oil prices were headed skyward. Average household income in Venezuela rose 30 percent in 2004, and Chávez began to spend lavishly on new schools and public works projects. The success of Chávez's antipoverty initiatives has been a matter of debate, but loans for small businesses and rural cooperatives, a centerpiece of Chávez's economic strategy, were abundant. Top religious leaders such as Venezuelan Cardinal Ignacio Velasco had backed the coup against Chávez and opposed him, but Chavez had support among the religious rank-and-file, and he often accused Catholic church leaders of not following Christ's path. Chávez handily beat back the August 15 recall with just under 60 percent of the vote.
Victory emboldened Chávez in various ways. Dissent within the Venezuelan armed forces was now dealt with harshly, and the 3.2 million Venezuelans who had signed recall petitions found themselves discriminated against. Chávez missed no opportunity to criticize the United States. He brought charges against an election-monitoring group, Sumate, that he claimed was a front for U.S. operatives, and he expelled U.S. missionaries after charging them with spying. Chávez claimed that Venezuelan spies had uncovered U.S. plans to invade the country, and he stockpiled arms in anticipation of such an eventuality. In 2005, a U.S. religious evangelist played into Chávez's hands by publicly advocating Chávez's assassination.
Chávez skillfully made use of such events, gaining supporters at home as well as in the United States, where he offered aid in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and directed Venezuela's state oil company, which did business in the United States under the Citgo name, to provide low-cost heating oil to residents of U.S. cities. Visiting the United States in 2005, Chávez greeted supporters in the New York borough of the Bronx and met for an interview with Newsweek, telling the magazine that "the media is trying to make the American people see me as an enemy." Questioned about his assertion that the United States was a terrorist state, Chávez told the magazine, "What I said is that this U.S. administration - the current [George W. Bush] government - is a terrorist administration, not all U.S. governments."
Despite clashes between Venezuela and the United States (Chávez also engaged in war of words with Mexican president Vicente Fox), Venezuela continued to supply between 8 and 15 percent of U.S. energy needs, and U.S. oil purchases financed the social programs that cemented Chávez's hold on power. Chávez-style populism seemed to be spreading in South America as Bolivians elected a socialist, Evo Morales, to the presidency. New tensions flared in early 2006 when Chávez expelled a U.S. naval attaché from Venezuela, charging him with spying. But Chávez seemed likely to win a second term in his re-election bid that year.
Books
Contemporary Hispanic Biography, vol. 1, Gale, 2002.
Gott, Richard, and Georges Bartoli, Hugo Chávez: The Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, Verso, 2005.
Periodicals
Christian Science Monitor, May 20, 2005; February 6, 2006.
Independent (London, England), March 20, 2004.
New Statesman, October 10, 2005.
Newsweek, October 3, 2005; December 19, 2005.
New York Review of Books, October 6, 2005; October 20, 2005.
Smithsonian, January 2006.
Sojourners, May 2004.
Online
"Profile: Hugo Chavez," BBC News, http://www.news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3517106.stm (February 11, 2006).
