Don't cry for me, Venezuela

'I have more optimism every day. Joyful! Taking care of people! Solving problems. Looking to the future.' Alma Guillermoprieto hears an upbeat Hugo Chavez address his nation on the radio, and assesses his career

On the reality show that Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, stages at irregular but frequent intervals for the benefit of his nation, he is the only star. Most Sundays, he can be seen on the all-day programme Alo Presidente. He might reminisce about an episode of his past life, like the failed military golpe, or coup, that first brought him to public attention back in 1992, when he was an idealistic lieutenant colonel.

Chavez discourses on politics, Jesus Christ, history, the week's events, baseball and, at great length, himself. When he takes over all the private television stations for a talk – forming a "national network" – he is usually on his own.

"Hello, my friends! A very good evening to you... We're living in a peak moment of Venezuela's history, and all Venezolanas must be worthy of the peak of this supreme moment. Keep your eye peeled. Alert. Careful, because there's many campaigns that try to disinform, every day. So we revolutionaries must be clear about this. We Bolivarians must be very clear. What is going on? What path is the revolution taking?

"I have more optimism every day. More joyfulness every day: this morning I was singing, and this evening I was singing, some song or another. Perhaps I'll remember it later. Singing! Joyful! Taking care of people! Solving problems. Looking to the future."

Ten years ago, a failed golpista and retired military man, Chavez was dependent on friends for pocket money and transportation. Today, at 51, he heads a state with one of the world's great cash flows, enjoys popularity ratings of 80 per cent, faces a vehement but demoralised and perhaps terminally disorganised opposition, and appears to be a magnet to women.

Hugo Chavez was born into a dirt-poor family at a time when oil was making his country immensely rich. His father, Hugo Sr, qualified as a rural schoolteacher, but he still didn't earn enough to keep his family. The younger Chavez decided to apply to the army academy in Caracas.

In their indispensable biography, Hugo Chavez sin uniforme, Cristina Marcano and Alberto Barrera Tyszka provide an account of the backcountry cadet. He loves the army, feels at home in it, graduates eighth in his class. He plays baseball, the national sport, better than well. He is articulate and likable, and by the age of 21, having obtained a degree in army engineering, with a major in communications, he is the star of his own radio programme.

For nearly 20 years Chavez would foster his vague, romantic plot, inspired not by Marxism or any other ideology but by intellectual politicians and 19th century fighters who were his heroes.

Supreme among them is Simon Bolivar the daring, restless hero who liberated the Andean provinces one by one from the Spanish crown, and who realised too late that, once separated, the new nations of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia would never coalesce into the grand union he had dreamed of.

Chavez worships Bolivar, memorises his proclamations. Once in power, he would also amend the name of his country to "The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela".

At 23, Chavez formed his first clandestine cell within the army, worked constantly to expand it, travelled the country consolidating a core group of leftist conspirators who dreamed with him of a better Venezuela and of their heroic role in creating it.

As Chavez grew up he benefited from the stability and modernisation provided by the civilian regimes that followed the Perez military dictatorship. The country's enviable political stability was made possible in large part by the abundance of oil that left its seaports in those years.

But there was a great deal of corruption, a great deal of waste, and, as the rural population migrated toward the oil territories and Caracas, a huge accumulation of urban poverty and a dearth of public policy to deal with the needs of the poor.

Not all the oil income was lost to corruption and profligacy, though: ambitious educational systems, highways, museums, dams, and health and housing programs were created for a population that multiplied too quickly. (The last census counted some 25 million people.)

The last of the big public spenders was Carlos Andres Perez (CAP, as he is called), who nationalised the oil industry. Corruption became a way of life, and by the time Perez left office in 1979, the two-party system in Venezuela seemed bankrupt.

Venezuela produces very little of export value other than oil. The state oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela, SA, or PDVSA, accounts for 80 per cent of export income, 27 per cent of the gross national product, and 40 per cent of the government budget.

Those funds were insufficient to finance CAP's tireless spending: he left his successor to deal with the resulting inflation, crushing debt, high unemployment, and an empty treasury.

In 1988, CAP campaigned for, and won, a second term in office. A convert by then to the market approach known as the Washington consensus, he declared himself in favour of a currency devaluation, price hikes on all public services and an end to governement subsidies.

Three weeks later, the inhabitants of Caracas staged the first riot of the century. Descending from the steep hills to which they are normally confined, thousands of caraquenos set fire to entire city blocks and looted whatever they could find.

Dozens of people had already died by the time the president called out the troops and declared a state of siege. When it was all over, more than 250 people were dead, and Hugo Chavez was left with the feeling that, as he told Gabriel Garcia Marquez, he had missed "the strategic minute": desperately poor people were in worse straits than usual and the government was failing them, imposing austerity measures when it was emergency aid that was called for and then shooting them when they rebelled. Politicians were corrupt, at the service of the rich, and incompetent to boot. The civilian two-party system Chavez had known all his life was exhausted. It was time for him to make his entrance, he thought, and he had missed his cue.

When he at last staged his coup attempt on 4 February, 1992, the uprising itself was a complete failure.

His longtime co-conspirators fought bravely in other parts of the country, but the army did not split, and in Caracas itself Chavez surrendered with barely a shot fired.

Nevertheless, his fortune was made. On the morning following his surrender the army leaders allowed him to make a live televised statement about the failed coup, intending that he would discourage the remaining rebels. He talked for less than 90 seconds, but it was enough for him to establish an emotional connection with his viewers so intense as to guarantee him a permanent place in national politics.

"For now", the conspiracy had failed, he said. He and his comrades were charged merely with "rebellion". Two years later he was released from jail, and granted an honorable retirement from the service. Four years after that, in 1998, he put himself at the front of his movement, and won 56 per cent of the vote in the December presidential elections.

The size of Chavez' victory is interesting, because in the six years he has been in power he has held various sorts of elections (including one presidential election, one to elect a constituent assembly, and two referendums) and the percentage of his vote has never reached 60.

In a country where his target audience of the poor and the very poor together made up around 68 per cent of the population last year, nearly half the people who show up at the polls on election day still refuse to vote for him. And nearly three quarters of the adult population has stayed away from recent elections.

Chavez, who knows the voting results well, plays a high-risk game: he governs not as if he were the president of a divided nation, but as if he had a national mandate to carry out his Bolivarian revolution.

The definition of the president's ongoing Revolucion Bolivariana remains hazy. Like Bolivar, he would like to unify Latin America. In Venezuela he is the centre of power: Chavez has said in various contexts and in several ways that he is not averse to the word caudillo, or strongman.

The revolution's first priority is the poor. It has some elements of socialism. Sometimes it is anti-capitalist, and sometimes not: Chavez, who talks often of his own religious faith, has referred to capitalism as el demonio, but a great many businessmen have prospered under his rule, and he has made it clear that he sees a significant role for the private sector and, most particularly, for foreign investment. What there does not appear to be much room for is the opposition.

Within three months of his inauguration the new president won a referendum authorising him to call a constitutional convention, which replaced the "moribund" old charter with one that concentrates a great deal of power in his hands, and also threatens the very existence of an opposition: government financing of political parties' electoral campaigns is now outlawed.

In the course of a lengthy and high-risk, confrontation with the state oil company, PDVSA, Chavez also replaced the old meritocracy with his own directorate. This has, essentially, allowed him to run a foreign policy based on oil sales to poor countries on highly favorable terms (and in exchange for their support in international politics), and to use oil income to finance his various domestic projects.

Washington, in turn, is hampered in its foreign policy toward Caracas. Although the Bush administration appears to loathe Chavez and his pro-Castro policies, nearly 15 per cent of the US oil supply comes from Venezuela.

The instrument most frequently used by Hugo Chavez against his opponents is known everywhere simply as la lista – the list of signatures submitted in 2004 to demand a referendum on Chavez's recall.

People on the list cannot get government jobs, or qualify for many of Chavez's public welfare programs, or obtain government contracts. Its use was once surreptitious; officials asked for one's cedula, or ID/voter registration card, and the number was checked against la lista. But since December, when the list was put on the Internet by a chavista member of the National Assembly, it is used openly.

It is too soon to judge how well the many ambitious social welfare and education programs launched by Chavez – they are known as misiones – have succeeded in redressing Venezuela's deep inequalities, but they suffer already from an essential flaw: as with everything else Chavez creates, their existence depends on him.

This would seem to be a reflection of the President's apparent sense that everything that happens, that has happened – in Venezuela, and in this hemisphere as well – in some way relates to him.

In Caracas today it often seems as if there were no issues, only bilious anger or unconditional devotion – or gasping bafflement – all provoked by the President, who takes up so much oxygen that there is no breathing room left for a discussion of, say, the merits of his neighbourhood health policy, his relations with Cuba, or oher policies.

The President has no visible worries: the various misiones – in favour of ethnic culture, literacy, college equivalency, medical care in the barrios, in defence of street children – are thriving, in no small part because there are tens of thousands of highly skilled Cubans who have been assigned by Fidel to staff them, and also because they are lavishly financed in ways the health and education ministries could benefit from.

Who knows, Chavez says, he might even remain in power through the year 2024, or even 2030. And why not? In a country with an economy the size of the Czech Republic's, the value of Venezuela's currency reserves is now $30 billion. Oil prices are not expected to decline anytime soon. The Bush administration, for all its hostility to Chavez, does not seem able to hurt him seriously.

There are local and national elections of various kinds scheduled every single year between now and 2013, and Chavez and his political party can reasonably expect to win in all of them. Best of all, he has no local politicians – certainly none in his own movement – threatening his popularity. He can smile and go forward, singing. Joyful. Solving problems. Looking to the future.

© The New York Review of Books