Sabaneta, 1954 – Caracas (Venezuela), 2013
By Gilberto Maringoni
Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías was born on July 28, 1954, in the small town of Sabaneta, in the state of Barinas, about 450 kilometers from Caracas. His parents — Hugo de los Reyes Chávez and Elena Frías — were public school teachers and part of the lower middle class. The family had some involvement in local politics. His father had been a member of COPEI, a social-Christian party, and one of his great-grandfathers, Colonel Pedro Pérez Pérez, was a guerrilla leader in the 1840s. One of the colonel’s sons, General Pérez Pérez Delgado, known as Maisanta, rebelled against the dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez (1860–1923).
“I entered the Military Academy in 1970, at seventeen, and I was almost a boy. I had no political motivation. At that time, one of my aspirations was to be a baseball player,” Chávez told Chilean researcher Marta Harnecker. The academy had the best baseball coaches in the country.
Chávez belonged to the first generation of military personnel involved in the Andrés Bello Plan. The program is named after the educator, poet, and philosopher Andrés Bello (1781–1865), a contemporary of Bolívar. Launched in 1971, the plan was an attempt to improve the military career by sending officer candidates to universities. As a result, the generations trained through the Andrés Bello Plan were more professional, better prepared, and more critical than those before. Furthermore, this new direction reduced the influence of the U.S.-based School of the Americas on the Venezuelan Armed Forces. The school, founded in 1946 at the dawn of the Cold War, was a training center for Latin American military personnel and was closed in 2001.
Chávez chose to study political science at Simón Bolívar University. He became a voracious reader. His favorite authors at that time were Clausewitz, Bolívar, Napoleon, and Mao Zedong.
“We were a generation of boys from small towns, neighborhoods, and countryside who entered the Army at a time when the guerrilla war was ending,” he declared. He recounted a unique episode that happened in 1975:
“I was in an anti-guerrilla territory, and an intelligence group brought in some arrested peasants. At night, they started torturing them. I refused to accept that. I had a harsh confrontation. My stance earned me a threat of being court-martialed for inciting military rebellion and insubordination.”
Soon, the aspiring baseball star had the opportunity to see the other side as well:
“I also witnessed how the guerrilla group Bandera Roja massacred soldiers: they were riding in a truck, half asleep, exhausted from walking through the mountains; the guerrillas ambushed them on the road and opened fire; they didn’t give them a chance to defend themselves.”
Sometime later, as he told Gabriel García Márquez, he experienced his first existential crisis:
“What am I doing here? On one side, peasants dressed as soldiers torture peasant guerrillas, and on the other, peasant guerrillas kill peasants dressed as soldiers. At this point, with the war over, it makes no sense for them to keep shooting at each other.”
Since the late 1970s, Chávez and his companions had contact with leftist groups. Douglas Bravo, then a guerrilla leader, was very impressed with Hugo Chávez, “the most active man within the Armed Forces, both practically and theoretically.”
In December 1982, Chávez and other comrades began organizing the Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement 200 (MBR-200), with a nationalist character and egalitarian rhetoric, in honor of the bicentennial of Simón Bolívar’s birth (1783–1830). The group’s first major action would only happen the following decade. Between February 3 and 4, 1992, Lieutenant Colonel Hugo Chávez and his comrades led uprisings of several military units — in Caracas, Maracaibo, Valencia, and Maracay — and surrounded the government palace in an attempt to overthrow President Carlos Andrés Pérez. Although the coup attempt was defeated, it propelled the young military officer onto the political stage amid a backdrop of economic crisis and the discrediting of those in power. Four months later, public opinion polls showed that the rebel lieutenant colonel, now imprisoned, had extremely high popularity: 64.7% of the population considered him a trustworthy person to lead the country.
Granted amnesty in 1994, Chávez and several military members began advocating for the need for constitutional change in the country, showing themselves reluctant to participate in existing political representation channels. They had a basic political agenda: dissolve Congress and call for a Constituent Assembly.
President Hugo Chávez celebrates with his supporters during the September 2010 elections, in Caracas, Venezuela (Globovisión)
With growing popularity, Chávez began to change his mind about not participating in institutional life. In early 1997, members of the Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement decided to run in the following year’s elections under their own banner. To make a candidacy viable, they sought to expand their movement beyond the Armed Forces, legalizing it as a political party. This is how the Fifth Republic Movement (MVR) was born.
As the elections approached, Chávez’s advantage and his message of renewal became clear over the candidates from traditional parties. In the elections on December 6, 1998, he received 3.67 million votes, achieving 56.2% of the valid ballots.
Although elected with bold political rhetoric, his economic program was moderate, with key guidelines focused on maintaining international contracts and using pension funds as the main component of domestic savings for productive investment. At the same time, the new president promoted profound transformations in the institutional framework. He called for a plebiscite to ask the population whether they wanted a new Constitution, followed by the election of the constituent assembly. Once the new charter was approved, elections were held for federal, state, and municipal executive and legislative positions. The country’s name was changed to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.
Chávez governed in an adverse international scenario and sought to support his gradual economic advances with deep institutional changes. His administration was targeted by at least three major attacks from the ruling classes.
The first was the coup d’état that removed him from the Miraflores Palace between April 11 and 13, 2002. Pressured by crowds in the streets, the Army split and aborted the rebellion. The second was the oil strike, a national shutdown between December 2, 2002, and February 3, 2003. The protest reduced oil production to almost zero and resulted in a 17.8% drop in GDP that year. The third attack occurred within the framework of the Bolivarian Constitution, through the recall referendum mechanism. The opposition gathered more than 20% of eligible voters’ signatures and called the referendum for August 15, 2004. The president won the vote with 58.9% in favor of remaining in office.
Benefiting from a structural rise in oil prices, Chávez financed various social programs, confronted the opposition, and became a symbol of resistance against the White House and neoliberalism in Latin America. The great novelty of his government was that it began with a centrist economic program and consistently moved toward the left.
Chávez won several elections and referendums, including the 2009 one that abolished term limits, allowing him to remain in power. He often said that he needed more time to complete the socialist revolution in the country.
In May 2012, he announced that he was recovering from an unspecified cancer after undergoing surgeries and chemotherapy. In October, he won the election for another six-year term. However, in December, he publicly revealed that he would undergo a new surgery in Cuba to fight the cancer that had returned, naming Nicolas Maduro as his successor. He returned to Venezuela in February 2013, weakened by a series of postoperative respiratory infections. He died on March 5 in a military hospital in Caracas. According to the Constitution, new presidential elections were called one month after the leader’s death. The polls gave victory to Vice President Nicolas Maduro.
