Petroleum Populist

HUGO!

The Hugo Chávez Story from Mud Hut to Perpetual Revolution

By Bart Jones

Steerforth. 570 pp. $30

HUGO CHÁVEZ

By Cristina Marcano and Alberto Barrera Tyszka

Translated from the Spanish by Kristina Cordero

Random House. 327 pp. $27.95

Venezuelans once almost universally held former president R?mulo Betancourt, who led their country's transition from military rule in the 1950s, in high esteem. When I visited Caracas last December to cover the presidential elections, however, supporters of Hugo Chávez spoke disparagingly of the politician who used to be called the father of Venezuelan democracy. "Betancourt was a fake man who gave us a fake democracy," one voter in the slums of Caracas told me. "It wasn't until Chávez that we had a president who looked out for us."

In recent years, Chávez has challenged the established order around the world, denouncing President Bush as "the devil" at the United Nations, lionizing Cuban leader Fidel Castro as a "father" on a national newscast and embracing Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a "brother" in Tehran. But it is at home in Venezuela where he has truly upended the political system. The poor adore him. The wealthy detest him, his socialist policies and his soak-the-rich rhetoric. After nearly a decade in office, he holds an iron grip on power in the country with the largest proven oil reserves outside the Middle East.

Chávez's rise has a made-for-Hollywood quality. His childhood home bore a roof of palm leaves and lacked running water. Classmates mocked him for not wearing proper shoes. On the streets he sold arañita s ( papaya sweets) prepared by the grandmother who raised him. Yet Chávez always dreamed big. At first, he wanted to be a professional baseball player. Then, as a young military officer, he confided to a friend that he would be president. Roughly 20 years later, after leading a failed coup and spending two years in jail, he achieved that goal, winning election in 1998.

Two biographies offer complementary, rather than competing, views of the Chávez phenomenon. Venezuelan journalist Cristina Marcano and her husband, novelist Alberto Barrera Tyszka, published Hugo Chávez in Spanish four years ago; Random House has just released a clunky English translation. A newer offering is Hugo! by Bart Jones, a Newsday reporter who spent eight years in Venezuela, mainly as a correspondent for the Associated Press.