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Overview

He is one of the most controversial and important world leaders currently in power. In this international bestseller, at last available in English, Hugo Chávez is captured in a critically acclaimed biography, a riveting account of the Venezuelan president who continues to influence, fascinate, and antagonize America.
Born in a small town on the Venezuelan plains, Chávez found his interests radically altered when he entered the military academy in Caracas. There, as Hugo Chávez reveals in dramatic detail, he was drawn to leftist politics and a new sense of himself as predestined to change the fortunes of his country and Latin America as a whole.

Portrayed as never before is the double life Chávez soon began to lead: by day he was a family man and a military officer, but by night he secretly recruited insurgents for a violent overthrow of the government. His efforts would climax in an attempted coup against President Carlos Andrés Pérez, an action that ended in a spectacular failure but gave Chávez his first irresistible taste of celebrity and laid the groundwork for his ascension to the presidency eight years later.
Here is the truth about Chávez’s revolutionary “Bolivarian” government, which stresses economic reforms meant to discourage corruption and empower the poor–while the leader spends seven thousand dollars a day on himself and cozies up to Arab oil elites. Venezuelan journalists Cristina Marcano and Alberto Barrera Tyszka explore the often crude and comical public figure who
condemns George W. Bush in the most fiery language but at the same time hires lobbyists to improve his country’s image in the West. The authors examine not only Chávez’s political career but also his personal life–including his first marriage, which was marked by a long affair and the birth of a troubled son, and his second marriage, which produced a daughter toward whom Chávez’s favoritism has caused private tension and public talk.

This seminal biography is filled with exclusive excerpts from Chávez’s own diary and draws on new research and interviews with such insightful subjects as Herma Marksman, the professor who was his mistress for nine years. Hugo Chávez is an essential work about a man whose power, peculiarities, and passion for the global spotlight only continue to grow.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781588366504
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Publication date: 08/14/2007
Sold by: Random House
Format: eBook
Pages: 352
File size: 2 MB

About the Author

Cristina Marcano is a journalist with extensive experience in the Venezuelan media. She has worked as the chief of international information and the political subeditor for the newspaper El Nacional in Caracas. She currently works as a correspondent for the Mexican newspaper Reforma and as an independent collaborator for El Nacional.

Alberto Barrera Tyszka is a widely read Sunday editorial columnist for El Nacional. In 2006 he won the prestigious Herralde literary prize for his novel La Enfermedad. He is the author of several books and regularly publishes in Letras Libres.

Moisés Naím is a former minister for trade and industry of Venezuela, and is currently the editor in chief of Foreign Policy magazine.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1
 
The Revolution Has Arrived
 
 
ON THE NIGHT OF DECEMBER 6, 1998, A LARGE CROWD GATHERED IN front of the Teatro Teresa Carreño, close to the center of Caracas. The atmosphere was festive. Moments earlier, the National Electoral Council had read the first official bulletin of the day’s election results. With 64 percent of the votes counted, there was no longer room for doubt. Fifty-six percent of the Venezuelan electorate had voted for Hugo Chávez, while his principal opponent, Henrique Salas Römer, a coalition candidate representing the traditional political parties, had garnered only 39 percent of the vote. Venezuela now had a new president, a man who had tried to reach the presidency scarcely six years earlier by attempting to overthrow the government. What had been unattainable by military uprising in 1992 became reality via the democratic process. He was not a career politician, nor did he have any experience in the public sector. And he was barely forty-four years old, much younger than the average age of the presidents who had preceded him. Invoking the memory of the Latin American liberator Simón Bolívar, Chávez vowed to end corruption and democratize the oil business, and he expressed his dream of a country free of poverty. And from deep within the shadows, he dragged out one of Latin America’s mustiest ghosts: revolution.
 
Though on the surface it may have seemed otherwise, December 6, 1998, marked the fulfillment of a deeply rooted obsession of the newly elected president. As his childhood friend Federico Ruiz recalls, on December 31 of 1982 or 1983, Hugo Chávez decided to take a day trip from the city of Maracay to Barinas, some 525 kilometers from Caracas, to visit their mothers and give their families a surprise New Year’s hug. Five hours there and five hours back, at least.
 
“It was just the two of us, in a Dodge Dart he had, passing a bottle of rum back and forth,” Ruiz recalls. Of their very lengthy conversations, one moment remains crystal clear in Ruiz’s memory. “He said, ‘You know something? One day I’m going to be president of the republic.’ And I said, ‘Damn! Well, you can name me minister of, of…I don’t know!’ And then we joked around about it.” Clarifying that this was not an idle comment made during a lull in the conversation nor due to an alcohol-infused bravado, Ruiz adds, “Hugo was very serious when he said that.”
 
Of course he was serious. He was dead serious. This wasn’t the first time the idea had popped into his friend’s head. As a nineteen-year-old cadet in the military academy, Chávez had marched in a procession shortly after Carlos Andrés Pérez had been elected to his first term as president of the republic (1974–79). The moment established an unforeseen link between the two men, though it is entirely probable that Pérez walked past the young Chávez without giving him a second thought. Why on earth would Pérez have bothered to think that this cadet, who hadn’t even graduated from the military academy, would one day conspire against him during his second term as president by staging a violent military coup against his government? How on earth could Pérez have ever imagined that this young soldier would become president of Venezuela one day? Young Hugo, on the other hand, had a very different experience of this moment. On March 13, 1974, he wrote in his diary, “After waiting a long time, the new president finally arrived. When I see him I hope that one day I will be the one to bear the responsibility of an entire Nation, the Nation of the great Bolívar.”
 
Twenty-four years later, he had finally done it. Most Venezuelans, however, were probably not aware of the fervent determination that had driven him for so long. Chávez had taken care not to publicize these aspirations. In a 1999 interview, Mempo Giardinelli and Carlos Monsiváis, two renowned Latin American writers, asked him, “Did you ever imagine that you would be sitting here today, in the presidency and in the seat of power?” Chávez’s simple response: “No, never. Never.”
 
Perhaps, on this December 6, the deeply personal meaning of this achievement was something he would celebrate on his own, for Venezuela was celebrating something else entirely: the triumph of antipolitics. The people of Venezuela had brought an outsider to the presidency, delivering a severe blow to the traditional political machine. A substantial sector of the middle class, fed up with the incompetence and corruption of the previous administrations, had fashioned a kind of revenge through the figure of this former military officer and coup leader. The media, dedicated as always to criticizing anything and everything in politics, were satisfied. The poor also identified with this message of “getting even,” with this man who spoke of Venezuela’s age-old debt to those who had always been excluded from the system. Chávez’s victory, in this sense, was a new version of an old product, wrapped up in a bright, shiny package: Great Venezuela, the kingdom of magical liquid wealth; the paradise from which so many Venezuelans had felt themselves marginalized; the fantasy of instant success.
 
The candidate representing an alliance known as the Patriotic Pole won the election with an unprecedented majority. According to the final count, he earned 56.44 percent of the vote. But who was Hugo Chávez, really? Where did he come from? Where was he going? How would his dreams and those of his country merge into one? On that victorious night in Caracas, after his rivals and the official institutions had formally acknowledged him as the new president-elect of Venezuela, this is what he had to say: “My dear friends: very simply, what happened today had to happen. As Jesus said, ‘It is accomplished. What had to be accomplished was accomplished.’” And beneath the long shadow of the early dawn hour in Caracas, Chávez began to sing the national anthem.
 
SCARCELY SIX YEARS EARLIER, when Hugo Chávez had appeared on television to claim responsibility for attempting to overthrow the government, all his family could possibly feel were shock and embarrassment. At that time, nobody thought that Hugo Chávez was on his way to a meteoric political career. One of his friends from secondary school said, “It’s something very difficult to digest. You have to take into account the significance of never having been a councilman, a congressman, a [political] leader, never having been a goddamn thing in politics…and then suddenly ending up president.”
 
Indeed, nothing indicated that this would be Hugo’s destiny. Many people probably would have said that simply being born in Sabaneta was a great disadvantage. On the other hand, it was also the ideal beginning of a grand myth, that of the humble man who rises to achieve untold powers—a potent, emotional dream for anyone with a melodramatic vision of history. There may have been presidents before Chávez who had risen to the pinnacle of power from simple, humble beginnings—in fact, none of the presidents from Venezuela’s democratic age had come from Caracas. Just like Chávez, all of them had come from the provinces—the majority from poor families, as well. Yet Hugo Chávez, the first one from Barinas, in the far reaches of the Venezuelan plain, was the first president to transform his geographic circumstances into a symbol.
 
Regionalism is a tricky thing. The simple recipes that use geographic ingredients to define cultural traits are so very easy to believe and are repeated over and over again: people who live near the ocean or sea are open, honest, spontaneous people, whereas those who hail from the Andes, who live in the cold, vertical silence of the mountains, are taciturn, withdrawn. These kinds of classifications are hard to avoid. According to the Venezuelan stereotype, the llanero, the man from the plains, is a reserved, skeptical type who, once you break the ice, reveals himself to be a loyal, talkative person who loves to tell a good story. They say that there is something about the plains, with their converging horizons and interminable, flat terrain, that produces an odd combination of silences and long musical corridos, filled with protracted screams and counterpoints. It is a territory that is also a climate of the interior, a place where cattle, ghosts, horses, and apparitions coexist.
 
Manuel Díaz, also known as “Venenito”—Little Poison—worked for some thirty years as a chemistry teacher at the Daniel Florencio O’Leary secondary school in Barinas, where Hugo Chávez was his student. According to Díaz, the llaneros “are hard to understand. They are very suspicious people. Always thinking about what people want from them. But once they know you, they are genuine…. They offer their friendship when they see that it is reciprocal.” He also adds another bit of insight: “They are marked by machismo. The man is the one who does everything.” According to a common maxim that the people of the plains often use to describe themselves, “The llanero is as great as the task he sees in front of him.” Obviously, there is nothing terribly specific about this refrain: a multitude of regional identities could easily jibe with this definition.
 
Of all Venezuelan presidents, however, Chávez has most consistently invoked the spirit of the region from which he comes, frequently peppering his speeches with personal anecdotes, cultural references, and songs relating to the plains and its inhabitants. He loves to regale his public with childhood memories, and when he speaks of his retirement, he talks about going back to his roots and spending his golden years on the banks of a river, in some faraway outpost of those vast plains.
 
Efrén Jiménez, Hugo’s childhood playmate and next-door neighbor, says of those days, “Sabaneta was made up of about four streets. At that time I think there must have been about a thousand people, maybe a little more. We all knew each other, we were all like one big family.” There was no regular electric light, but the village had a generator that delivered electricity every day from 6:30 P.M. to 10:30 P.M. Hugo’s father, Hugo de los Reyes Chávez, taught at the Julián Pino school, the only one in the village. Another childhood friend recalls the elder Chávez as a good educator, “strict, demanding, and disciplined, but not arbitrary.”

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