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By IAN JAMES and FRANK BAJAK | Associated Press – 46 mins ago


CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — President Hugo Chavez was a fighter. The former paratroop commander and fiery populist waged continual battle for his socialist ideals and outsmarted his rivals time and again, defeating a coup attempt, winning re-election three times and using his country's vast oil wealth to his political advantage.

A self-described "subversive," Chavez fashioned himself after the 19th Century independence leader Simon Bolivar and renamed his country the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

He called himself a "humble soldier" in a battle for socialism and against U.S. hegemony. He thrived on confrontation with Washington and his political opponents at home, and used those conflicts to rally his followers.

Almost the only adversary it seemed he couldn't beat was cancer. He died Tuesday in Caracas at 4:25 local time after his prolonged illness. He was 58.

During more than 14 years in office, his leftist politics and grandiose style polarized Venezuelans. The barrel-chested leader electrified crowds with his booming voice, and won admiration among the poor with government social programs and a folksy, nationalistic style.

His opponents seethed at the larger-than-life character who demonized them on television and ordered the expropriation of farms and businesses. Many in the middle class cringed at his bombast and complained about rising crime, soaring inflation and government economic controls.

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Chávez called himself a “21st-century socialist.” In reality he was a throwback to the dogmatic and authoritarian 20th-century socialism of Castro, Cuba’s former dictator—and, in fact, to the 19th-century caudillo tradition of Chávez’s demigod, South American independence hero Simón Bolívar. Chávez hoped that being democratically elected would obscure the fact that he didn’t govern all that democratically. It didn’t. So it’s tempting to dismiss him as an anachronism, a vulgar populist famous for calling then U.S. President George W. Bush a malodorous “devil” at the U.N. in 2006, an erratic retro-revolutionary whose country’s vast petro-wealth let him indulge his Marxist nostalgia.

Chávez was all of those things. But if he was a leader behind his times, he still managed to influence them. Voters don’t make a radical like Chávez their head of state unless they’re mad as hell, and his stunning ascent in fact altered the western hemisphere’s conversation when it needed to be altered. When Chávez was first elected in 1998, post-Cold War Latin America was awash in free-market reforms. Those changes were necessary, but their implementation was criminally negligent, and the region’s already epic inequality simply widened. Chávez’s bellicose neo-statism was hardly the antidote, but his Bolivarian Revolution, which steered Venezuela’s oil wealth to the barrios for a change, was a wake-up call. It re-opened the door for the Latin American left—and, fortunately, more moderates than Marxists walked through it, including former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, whose capitalist-socialist “third way” has since helped narrow the region’s wealth gap and brought countries like Chile to the brink of development.

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After winning another six-year term by a landslide three months later, Chávez did turn further left. But chasing the mirage of ideological purity, be it capitalist or socialist, too often creates its own demons, especially authoritarian government and mismanaged economies. Chávez was never quite the dictator his critics claimed, and he did reduce Venezuela’s inexcusably high poverty—a large reason he won re-election last October despite Venezuela’s growing economic and security problems. Even as cancer made it hard for him to campaign, he remained the nation’s most popular political figure and defeated his opposition challenger by 11 points. Nonetheless, thanks to his own reckless and arrogant impulses, history isn’t likely to remember Chávez as fondly as his followers will.

It’s less likely to recall him as the crusader who toppled Venezuela’s criminally corrupt oligarchy in 1998, and more as the demagogue who led a failed but bloody coup in 1992. More as the President who oversaw disastrous property and business expropriations, “media responsibility” laws that made insulting el comandante a criminal offense, and the elimination of presidential term limits that he hoped would let him rule for life. It will view him less as the reformer who enfranchised Venezuela’s poor, and more as the blowhard who presided over food shortages, the world’s highest inflation rate and South America’s worst violent crime rate. Less as the Bolivarian who worked for Latin American integration and countered U.S. hegemony in the Americas, and more as the polarizer who hurled sophomoric insults at Washington as well as foes at home—like his centrist opponent in last year’s election, Henrique Capriles, whom he called “a low-life pig” during a national TV address.

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All that came to a head on February 4, 1992. Chávez, then a paratrooper lieutenant colonel, directed a coup against then President Carlos Andrés Pérez, a cogollo, or chieftain, notorious for corruption scandals even as he imposed austerity measures on Venezuela’s working class.

The putsch, which killed scores of civilians as well as soldiers, collapsed after Chávez failed to take the Miraflores presidential palace in downtown Caracas. Still, the insurrection was cheered by millions of fed-up Venezuelans, half of whom lived in poverty, as well as by millions more across Latin America who’d been left behind by the region’s capitalist reforms. Chávez, a charismatic speaker who Barrera and Marcano note had a “religious and emotional bond” with the poor, became the people’s hero when, while being led away in his trademark red beret, he declared on live television that his uprising was over only “for now.” He was right: the next year Pérez was ousted on corruption charges; in 1994, popular clamor forced then President Rafael Caldera to release Chávez from prison. The cashiered officer decided to take power via ballots instead of bullets—and four years later he won the presidency with an astonishing 57% of the vote.

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That debacle was typical of Chávez’s utterly incompetent opposition, as was its failed attempt to oust him in a 2004 recall referendum. By then, oil prices were in dizzying ascent, and Chávez’s social spending at home and aid abroad, called petro-diplomacy, was lavish. Leftist presidents were being elected across Latin America, including Lula in 2002, and Chávez was their standard bearer, if not the whole region’s. His big aim, as he told me in 2006, was to replace the two-centuries-old Monroe Doctrine, which had all but codified America’s dominance in the Americas, with his Bolívar Doctrine. It would be a “counterbalance” to U.S. hemispheric hegemony, he said, “a doctrine of more equality and autonomy among nations, more equilibrium of power.” And to a surprising extent, he and Latin America have realized that goal in recent years.

For much of his 2000-2006 term, Chávez’s socialist bark was usually worse than his bite. (U.S. diplomats were known for cabling back to Washington: “Don’t listen to what Chávez says, watch what he does.”) He revered Castro, and imitated the Cuban dictator’s cult of personality, but could emulate Fidel only to a point. As U.S. journalist Bart Jones wrote in his 2007 Chávez biography, Hugo! The Hugo Chávez Story From Mud Hut to Perpetual Revolution, “Venezuela was not Cuba, and [Chávez] knew it.” But as Chávez’s petro-power swelled, so did his head and his mission to be, as he told Jones, a global “subversive.” If his verbal assault on Bush at the U.N. won him kudos in some quarters—he even said the U.S. President had left behind a satanic “smell of sulfur” at the lectern—it cost him standing in many others, especially as he allied Venezuela more closely with international pariahs like Iran and Syria.

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After more treatment, Chávez declared himself cancer-free and went on to rout Capriles in October—because, he said, voters still revered him for “pulling Venezuela out of the swamp it was sunk in” before he came to power. Yet two months later he was back on an operating table in communist Cuba, where he could keep his true condition a more tightly guarded secret, and the world would not hear from him again. What he couldn’t hide was the fact that his revolution was far too much a one-caudillo show, evidenced by the government indecision back in Caracas during his long absences in Havana. Chavez’s Vice President and hand-picked successor, Nicolás Maduro, is likely to win the upcoming special election to succeed him. But, given that Chávez’s 2012 victory margin was almost 10 points lower than what he got in 2006, it’s hardly certain that Chavism can be the same force without Chávez that populist Peronism, for example, has remained in Argentina after Juan Perón. Still, whatever Chávez’s legacy is, Washington and the rest of the world need to remember the unmistakable reasons for Chávez’s rise to power—chief among them a failure to build the kind of democratic institutions in Latin America that can close the region’s unconscionable wealth gap. That flaw still lingers, which is why the memory of Chávez should too.

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