The King Of Venezuela

When Hugo Chávez was elected president of Venezuela in 1998, most of the world heeded the advice of the American ambassador in Caracas: Watch what Chávez does, not what he says. On the campaign trail, Chávez had railed against liberal economics, the Venezuelan elite and United States influence in Latin America. He had shown himself to be a savvy political performer who would intersperse off-color jokes and prankish gimmicks among proclamations of a revolution that would wipe out the old political leadership — the corruptocracy, as he put it. Ignore all that, the ambassadors line went. Despite the bluster, Chávezs actions would turn out to be fairly moderate.

HUGO CHÁVEZ

By Cristina Marcano and Alberto Barrera Tyszka. Translated by Kristina Cordero.

Illustrated. 327 pp. Random House. $27.95.

ˇHUGO!

The Hugo Chavez Story From Mud Hut to Perpetual Revolution.

By Bart Jones.

Illustrated. 570 pp. Steerforth Press. $30.

The opposite advice would have been more helpful: everything Chávez said he would do, he has eventually done. While gleefully playing the buffoon, he has dismantled and refashioned most of Venezuelas political institutions, taken control of its crucial industries (oil, most importantly) and rewritten its Constitution — twice. He has used headline-grabbing rhetoric, aggressive diplomacy and petrodollars to become one of the most famous political figures in the world. And he has recently set about abolishing term limits so he can stay in power as long as is necessary to build 21st-century socialism in Venezuela. Donald Rumsfeld has likened Chávez to Hitler; Chávez has likened himself to Jesus Christ.

His ability to make opponents underestimate him has always been one of Chávezs essential weapons. Just six years before becoming president, he was an unknown lieutenant colonel whose frequent talk of rebellion was dismissed as messianic delusion. When an intelligence report warned of an imminent Chávez-led coup, Venezuelas defense minister scoffed, and the reports author was ordered to undergo a psychiatric exam. Weeks later, Chávez tried to overthrow the government, failing but nonetheless turning himself into a national celebrity.

Two new Chávez biographies, Hugo Chávez, by the Venezuelan journalists Cristina Marcano and Alberto Barrera Tyszka, and ˇHugo!, by a Newsday reporter and former Associated Press correspondent, Bart Jones, set out to explain how Chávez turned himself into the international figure he has become, and why. Where they differ is on the question of underlying motivation. For Marcano and Barrera, Chávezs drive is explained mostly by megalomania — by the perpetual and restless desire of power after power, as their epigraph (from Hobbes) puts it. For Jones, it is explained by selfless outrage at the injustices of the world. Chávez may have an apparently unquenchable thirst for power, Jones concedes, but only because he needs it to triumph over the enemies of the people.

In interviews, Chávez has said he never imagined he would become president. But Marcano and Barreras meticulous, finely detailed account (in an updated, inelegant translation of a book published in Spanish in 2004) shows that he saw himself as a heroic figure long before anyone knew who he was. They gained access to Chávez himself and to scores of people who have known him, as well as to two decades worth of his personal diaries and letters (given to them by a former Chávez girlfriend). By the time Chávez was 19, a military cadet fresh from the impoverished Venezuelan interior, he was already talking to friends about saving the homeland. I hope, he wrote in his diary, that one day I will be the one to bear the responsibility of an entire nation.

Within a few years, the young Chávez was feverishly organizing revolutionary cells and fusing Marx, Mao Zedong, Che Guevara and Simón Bolívar into a rudimentary amalgam of leftist ideas. To some this may have seemed farcical, but Chávez was waiting for his main chance — the moment when mounting disaffection with an underperforming and vastly inequitable political and economic system would open the way for a boisterous military man promising to tear the whole structure down. Those cells later became an important power base for Chávez, and that rudimentary amalgam a framework for his 21st-century socialism.

Marcano and Barrera propose a few explanations for Chávezs undeniable popular appeal. Venezuelas combination of extensive oil resources and widespread poverty — a combination sadly common in petrostates — has long offered an opening for a peoples avenger. (It was a Venezuelan who first called oil the devils excrement.) If there is one thing the president has most successfully communicated, Marcano and Barrera write, it is that he cares about people. They also note the popularity of his social-welfare missions. Unfortunately, their enmity toward Chávez prevents them from fully conveying his savior-of-the-people charisma.

Jones does so much more successfully, in part because he is caught up in it himself. (At points, he veers into outright hagiography, admiringly quoting Chávezs poetry and going out of his way to excuse Chávezs rumored womanizing as the typical behavior of a Venezuelan man.) "Chávezs rise, Jones writes, represented the first time in the countrys history that the dark-skinned impoverished majority was seizing power. After decades, even centuries, of running the country like their own personal hacienda, the elites grip on the corruption-riddled and exploitative system was suddenly undone.

Daniel Kurtz-Phelan is a senior editor at Foreign Affairs.

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