VENEZUELA'S MAN OF MANY FACES - HUGO CHAVEZ

Unlike Korean leader, Kim Jong IL, who sits on a couple of nuclear devices as tiny as himself and taunts America, Venezuela’s strong man, Hugo Chavez only has to use his country’s oil riches and a microphone to send temperatures rising in Washington.
So how can a former paratrooper like Chavez, whom many Americans are being told is a nasty little dictator with a big mouth, cause so much consternation within the Bush Administration and lead a left wing crusade that is beginning to change the political face of Latin America? The answer is a simple one. Chavez is extremely clever and has been able to tap into growing anti-US feeling at a time when the Bush White House has been so preoccupied with Iraq it has taken its eye off Latin American politics. This at a time when China has been sneaking in through America’s door and forging economic ties with a host of Latin American nations, including Brazil and Argentina.
Chavez has a keen intelligence as well as a face for every political season and a unique knack of being able to speak to the disenchanted masses of Venezuela and its neighbors. He has also closely studied his hero, Cuban leader Fidel Castro, who has proved more resilient and harder to dislodge than the last seven American presidents ever thought he would be. Chavez sees in Castro a role model and has employed many of his political tactics such as long televised speeches perfectly tailored to his audiences.
Contrary to popular opinion in the US, Chavez grew up in a family that promoted the values of a good education. He was born in 1945, the second son of two schoolteachers near a small town called Sabeneta. At school he excelled in the arts and was such a fine baseball player that by age fifteen he was selected to play in his country’s national baseball championships. When he turned 17, he joined the Venezuela Academy of Military Sciences and emerged six years later with a degree in Military Arts and Science. He was by then a sub-lieutenant but the Military permitted him to attend the Simon Bolivar University to do a post graduate degree in political science. Simon Bolivar was 19th century political revolutionary who believed in tough leadership to bring order to a country. He also fused ideals from the French Revolution of 1789-99 with Greco-Roman models of government based around a Senate-type political structure.
While at university, Chavez forged close ties to other young military officers who believed in Bolivar’s political principles. Later, when advocating what he called Bolivarism, Chavez defined capitalism as “the road to hell” and said Venezuelans would have to choose between it and socialism which was for those who wanted to “build the kingdom of God here on earth.” In his opinion, Jesus was the first socialist. Chavez left the Bolivar University without completing his post-graduate studies and threw all his energies into building a military career. In a subsequent span of 17 years, he steadily rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel and during that period lectured from time to time at the Military Academy. It was there he first became known for long lectures, often laced with an over abundance of colorful phrases and occasionally with risqué jokes and rhymes. But no one doubted his intelligence or his ability to command an audience and to exploit his intimate knowledge of his country’s history. He was also very adept at detecting what an audience wanted to hear and used that knowledge to his advantage. On a personal level he had a stable married life and his first marriage lasted eighteen years but collapsed because of an affair he had with a young, vivacious historian. He married a second time to a journalist but that marriage also failed.
Throughout his life he has talked little about his Roman Catholic faith yet he has inserted references to God and to a “revolutionary Jesus” into his political rhetoric. Some critics have defined his tendency to avoid any discussion of his personal faith to the fact he has flouted his Church’s rules on personal relationships, especially in respect of its laws on marriage and divorce. In the background may be an even more potent reason for him to neglect any mention of his faith. For example, by fusing Marxism and Catholicism into a form of liberation theology, Chavez has consistently ignored the church’s stiff opposition to that form of political philosophy. The last Pope was so opposed to liberation theology, he threatened to excommunicate priests who supported it and the present Pope is no less determined to confront it. Therefore, Chavez prefers to portray himself as a good Christian and not especially a Roman Catholic. But in publicly depicting Christ as a socialist, he has frequently found himself in conflict with both the Catholic and Protestant leaders of his country. That has not stopped him, however, from using Biblical and New Testament references in public speeches to convince the electorate he believes in God. He even recently asked Venezuelans to say prayers for the health of his hero Castro, a self confessed atheistic Marxist-Leninist.
Throughout Chavez’s rise to power, following an abortive coup in 1992 and a successful one in 2,000, he has created an ever widening gulf between the country’s elite and its poor, convincing the poor he is the country’s savior and his brand of socialism will enable them to share in the country’s huge oil wealth. He has benefited politically by being able to exploit the historical failure of US intervention in Latin America and the fact that major corporations for too long exploited Latin America’s natural resources. He has, with some authority, pointed to the fact that successive US administrations shaped their Latin American policies to benefit conglomerates and not the nations in which they were making huge profits.
Chavez has been so successful in doing that, he has become a lightening rod for change across the Latin American continent. He has cleverly used his country’s oil to put himself on as world stage, knowing oil is liquid gold and just as powerful a weapon – and perhaps more politically valuable - than Kim Jong Il’s North Korean bombs. Like most shrewd leaders, Chavez has never shrunk from using broadcasting to get his message across and in doing so has hit all the rights points in his speeches. When he wanted to attack corrupt oil executives, whom he said had bled Venezuela dry in their greed to make money, he described them as living in luxury chalets where they engaged in orgies and drank excessive amounts of whisky. It was a powerful and effective piece of imagery. When he wanted to damage the standing of the Catholic Cardinal who had openly questioned his leadership of the country, he accused him of “not walking in the path of Christ.”
While Chavez has not radically changed the lives of most of his country’s poor he has still managed to launch many social programs and to maintain a large grass roots following. Washington has seen him as the lightning rod for anti-American sentiment and has gone so far as to secretly fund and help organize opposition against him. In so doing, the Bush Administration has exposed its covert hand in Venezuela’s politics and provided Chavez with even more verbal ammunition. No longer are his speeches restricted to Venezuela. He can now appear at the UN and challenge George Bush or go to China and be welcomed like any other world leader, especially one who controls a fifth of the world’s oil reserves.
He appears to have a separate persona to suit any eventuality. Recently, he has taken to writing poems about his love affair with Venezuela and has unashamedly read them on nationwide broadcasts. That is the face of the creative, gentle and thoughtful artistic leader. When authority is called for he is just as likely to don his former paratrooper’s uniform and a clump of medals. He can also look very presidential by wearing an expensively-tailored suit and by talking in grandiose terms about world events. And he can be a man of the people who dresses down and goes out into the countryside to talk to farmers and kiss their children.
Washington underestimated Chavez and by the time the Bush administration realized he was nobody’s fool he was at the height of his game, strutting across the world stage. It becomes difficult to bring down a man like Chavez using the familiar dirty little war tactics the US once promoted in countries like Chile, Nicaragua and so on.
Nowadays, every move Chavez makes is news and it will have to be his own people who decide to get rid of him. Perhaps they will get tired of seeing all of the same Chavez faces which he removes from cold storage when events warrant them. One thing seems certain; he is not going to ride off into the sunset any time soon. And, by the time he does, he will have left an indelible left-wing slant on Latin American politics.