Marc Cooper on Hugo Chavez

Venezuela’s fiery, self-proclaimed socialist president, Hugo Chavez, had been dreaming of and conspiring, sometimes in tragicomic ways, to seize state power ever since he was a young military officer in the late 1970s. But his sense of timing in finally executing the task has been simply staggering. Consider:

After a failed coup attempt in 1992 and after building a following as a populist alternative to Venezuela’s discredited two traditional political parties, Chavez was voted into office in 1998. His tenure has fortuitously overlapped that of the most unpopular U.S. president in recent memory, offering Chavez an unprecedented opportunity to posture as the Western Hemisphere’s David against a faltering and reviled Goliath. Because the former chief antagonist of Yankee imperialism, Fidel Castro, hovers near death and has effectively been retired, the path is clear.

And over the last decade a tenfold rise in the price of oil — Venezuela’s life-blood export — has flooded Chavez’s coffers with tens of billions of petrodollars. Never before has a Third World revolutionary leader had so much dough to spread around to fatten both his domestic and international constituencies.

A mere decade ago, Latin America was in the thrall of conservative, pro-American and free-market regimes, all enthusiastic subscribers to what’s been called the Washington Consensus. But after repeated failure to see much if any of the prosperity promised, the wheel has turned. With only a few exceptions (notably Colombia and Peru), every major Latin American country is now governed by some sort of center-left, leftist, or even socialist regime, with Chavez happily presiding as the loudest, if not the leading, voice.

But is Chavez truly a revolutionary? Has he genuinely embarked on an innovative path of democratic radical reform and redistributive social justice that he has dubbed “21st Century Socialism”? Or is he, like Argentina’s Juan Peron before him and countless previous caudillos, just one more former ex-military demagogue more interested in personal aggrandizement? Or is he some combination of the two, perhaps an updated model of Castro, his closest ally? Is he pioneering a new path between savage capitalism and failed Soviet-style communism? Or is he a power-grubbing wiseacre who governs increasingly by decree, shuts down opposition media, and relishes the attention he galvanizes by calling Bush an “asshole” and “Satan” while lavishing the term “brother” on Libya’s Muammar Kadafy and Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?

A rat-tat-tat of three nearly simultaneously published biographies of Chavez addresses these questions, and, taken individually, none of them provide much of a satisfyingly nuanced answer (though the fact that a Venezuelan president has three books published about him in English punctuates the hemispheric if not global fascination that Chavez now commands).

“Hugo!: The Hugo Chavez Story From Mud Hut to Perpetual Revolution,” published by Steerforth Press, is by Newsday reporter Bart Jones and stands as the most authoritative and best-researched among this new crop of studies, and one with rather a unique rooting. Jones arrived in Venezuela in 1992 and worked in some of the poorest barrios as a Maryknoll missionary just as then army paratrooper Col. Chavez failed to seize power in a putsch. After stringing for some Catholic publications, Jones was given a job as an AP reporter and covered Venezuelan politics from a more mainstream perch. And while Jones’ Maryknoll past has been laundered out of his official dust-jacket bio, his passion for justice and for the poor of Venezuela — to his credit — permeates his text. To his credit, except when it gets in the way of his otherwise extensive reporting.

The compelling story of Chavez’s rise as the impoverished son of provincial school teachers into and through the military and right into today’s international headlines is scrupulously gathered and expertly assembled by Jones. He offers insight into the passion for justice, if not lust for actual revenge against Venezuela’s tiny and indifferent elite, that forged the Chavez we know today. “Hugo Chavez touched the souls of the impoverished,” Jones writes, “because he was one of them. He grew up at a time when Venezuela’s oil wealth was creating fabulous fortunes for a fortunate few.”

Jones also excels in providing sufficient historical context to understand Chavez’s ideological formation: his obsessive, if not fanatical, infatuation at an early age with legendary 19th century liberator Simon Bolivar (hence Chavez’s call for a “Bolivarian Revolution”); his deep (and I would argue disturbing) faith in the military as an instrument of national salvation; and the enduring impression left on him by the experience of the short-lived military-led reform regime of the late 1960s and the 1970s headed by Peruvian Gen. Juan Velasco Alvarado.

The Venezuelan leader’s escalating battles with the Bush administration — which was an embarrassingly enthusiastic booster of the failed military coup against Chavez five years ago — are also vividly depicted. Jones does a comprehensive job of reminding us just how many of the old Reagan-era interventionists from the Iran-Contra days have been recycled into the Bush administration and how their knee-jerk Cold World views of continental relationships remain permafrosted.

That said, there’s a palpable sense of collective Yankee guilt that seeps through Jones’ book and undermines his portrait of Chavez. The scolding he dishes out over past American follies and crimes in Latin America cannot in itself be challenged (from overthrowing Guatemala’s Jacobo Arbenz and Chile’s Salvador Allende to subverting the Sandinistas and propping up the corrupt petro-kleptocracy of Venezuela, all are indisputable). But U.S. crimes are too often deployed by Jones to temporize or outright apologize for what are clearly some egregious transgressions by Chavez. His recourse to governing by decree, his packing of the Supreme Court and other government branches with cronies, his demonization of anyone who opposes him (when I met Chavez in Brazil a few years ago he wrote them all off as “fascists, terrorists and counterrevolutionaries”), the permeation of military officers throughout his administration, are all understated by Jones as minor “flaws” or “mis-steps.” The arguments offered by Jones in justifying Chavez’s shutdown earlier this year of the main opposition TV channel are unconvincing and unseemly coming from a fellow journalist. Equally annoying are Jones’ contortions in describing the American and European media’s critical reaction to Chavez’s proposal to meld his governing coalition into one unified, socialist party as having “miscontrued” the facts.Indeed, Jones bookends his narrative with a write-up of two prolonged, late-night personal encounters with Chavez during which he, quite obviously, succumbs to the president’s legendary charisma and magnetism. There are a few too many fawning references to “El Comandante” in those passages for my taste — reading eerily similar to the writings of those who were seduced by Castro in those famous all-night marathon interviews in the 1960s and 1970s only to find, later, that Comandante Castro would personally hold power for a full half-century. Funny, isn’t it, how regimes that claim to be building a nation of new socialist men can find only one man worthy of actually ruling.

Nary a trace of that deference to Chavez can be found in “Hugo Chavez: The Definitive Biography of Venezuela’s Controversial President,” published by Random House. Venezuelan journalists Christina Marcano and Alberto Barrera Tyszka do all they can, and only fairly well, to conceal their palpable contempt for their subject. Translated from the original Spanish-language edition, the biography carries an introduction by economist Moises Naim, who served as a Venezuelan Cabinet member during the 1990s. It was Naim’s austerity policies that helped spark the deadliest mass uprising in Venezuelan history and provided rocket fuel for the eventual rise of Chavez.

No wonder, then, that this particular account of Chavez’s life conveniently omits any mention of the Caracazo riots that cost hundreds of lives, discredited the ruling political class, and cleared the way for Chavez. Indeed, any characterization of Chavez’s opposition and its sometimes excessively exuberant dismissal of the needs of the poor, or of democracy itself, has been as much as airbrushed out of this volume. To be sure, the authors take a few stabs at evenhandedness, as in this description of the open warfare that sizzles between Chavez — who can often spend three, four or seven hours at a time on state TV — and the rest of the opposition-led media: “[Venezuela] is a country that it is intoxicated, overinformed, saturated by the manner in which one single story is told over and over again, subjected to the most endless and exhausting media diatribes. In the middle of this cross fire, the everyday citizen ends up in the worst position of all. … On several occasions, the media associated with the opposition have made the mistake of disseminating information that was later discovered to be false. … The state-run media, on the other hand, have become veritable propaganda brigades that seem willing to stop at nothing in their defense of the president.”

So much for the he-said/she-said portion of this book, the remaining bulk of which is devoted to a one-sided but nevertheless revealing and often quite amusing rundown of the foibles and follies of El Comandante. Chavez wasn’t interviewed for this book nor were any of his current (as opposed to former) supporters, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some valuable baubles to be sorted through. For example, just how much government function Chavez has turned over to the military is eye-opening. The authors report that by four years into his tenure Chavez had a military man as vice president as well as the heads of several ministries, the national oil company, the national network of gasoline distributors, the customs office, several major banks, and many key transport, telecom, and broadcast agencies. Military officers also sit as governors of several Venezuelan states as well as members of Congress and as officials of his governing political party.

Unfortunately, the authors are more interested in Chavez’s ex-wives and girlfriends, his recently acquired taste for Brioni and Gucci, the inordinate amount of time he spends globetrotting (more than you can imagine) and the painfully precise totaling up of how much time he spends in front of TV cameras. That two U.S. administrations might have embarked on crusades to undermine him and other, thornier parts of the Chavez story pretty much go missing. However, the Washington-phile authors do offer an implicit warning that the overtly hostile U.S. policy toward Chavez might be counterproductive. When Chavez first came into power in 1998, say the authors, the Clinton administration “misread” him and failed to sufficiently co-opt him. There’s a similar suggestion that the Bush administration’s “indifference” (itself a gross understatement) to the failed 2002 coup against Chavez cost American credibility and only strengthened Chavez’s hand.

If your tastes run to reading through 300 pages brimming with phrases like “the dialectic of counter-revolution and radicalization,” then Gregory Wilpert’s “Changing Venezuela by Taking Power: The History and Policies of the Chavez Government,” published by Verso, might be your preferred selection among the latest Chavez biographies. If there’s going to be a Lincoln Steffens of the Bolivarian Revolution, it’s Wilpert. A former Fulbright scholar who has lived in Caracas through much of the Chavez period, Wilpert has become one of the most prolific of American admirers of El Comandante. After voicing a few doubts about the immediate course of Chavez’s project, Wilpert affirms he has seen the red-tinged future: “Venezuela’s Bolivarian …Socialist project remains one of the best beacons of hope for a newly reinvigorated left in Latin America,” he writes. “As the Chavez government moves forward and experiments and sometimes stumbles with new forms of politico-economic organization, it leads by example and provides inspiration that a better world is indeed possible.”

Wilpert does a dutiful, albeit tedious, job of systematically exploring and mostly praising every aspect of Chavez’s economic, social, political, and foreign policy. But gingerly tap-dance as he might around some inconvenient truths, even a misty-eyed Wilpert can’t fully avoid pointing to what he calls the “internal obstacles” facing the future of Chavismo: “the persistence of a patronage culture, the nearly complete dependence of the Bolivarian movement on Chavez, and Chavez’s own top-down governance.” Translation: massive corruption and a slide toward one-man rule.

After a comfortable re-election at the end of last year, Chavez kicked off 2007 with a bang, announcing both a radicalization of his program and a further concentration of his personal power. Given their publishing deadlines, this trio of biographies, then, could only summarily touch upon what might easily become landmark events in Venezuelan history. With a two-story-high inflatable float of his image rolled into a central plaza, Chavez asked the National Assembly to grant him power to legislate in 11 key areas by simple presidential decree as well as demanding that the two-term limit on the presidency be lifted. After the opposition stupidly boycotted the last election, leaving 100 percent of the Assembly seats in pro-Chavez hands, El Comandante will be granted his wishes, opening the way for him to fulfill his vow to stay in power until least 2021.On the foreign plane, Chavez has also consolidated his position, lubricating a number of regional trade agreements with billions of dollars. And not just regional. He’s built an ever-closer relationship with oil-rich Iran, whose leader he has praised as a “great anti-imperialist.” Coming from a socialist, it is a rather discomforting characterization of an Iranian regime committed to the suppression of all socialists, leftists, and secularists.

No one can predict how the Chavez story will end. But some basic lessons can already be drawn from his first near-decade in power. The Washington Consensus of free-market capitalism, at least as implemented by paper-thin democracies in Latin America, has utterly failed to provide a decent way of life for a majority of the population. As grotesque as he sometimes looms, Hugo Chavez is but a Frankenstein monster cooked up in the lab of failed economic and political orthodoxy. But just as certain, Chavez’s alternatives are still a long way from the “better world” prophesized by Wilpert. With each passing day, it seems, “21st Century Socialism” as served up by Hugo Chavez is more redolent of the same authoritarian and demagogic stench that permeated the failed revolutions of yore.

Marc Cooper is a contributing editor to The Nation and a special correspondent for The Huffington Post. He teaches journalism at the USC Annenberg School, where he also is associate director for its Institute for Justice and Journalism. A former translator to Chilean President Salvador Allende, his memoir “Pinochet and Me” was a Los Angeles Times bestseller.