The Caudillo in His Labyrinth

Hugo Chavez and his enablers

Michael C. Moynihan from the November 2007 issue

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Still, this is a comprehensive portrait of Chavez, a necessary antidote to the political mythologists who have, since the April 2002 coup that briefly ousted his government, exerted a disproportionate influence on the Venezuela debate. Previously the only biographies available in English were hagiographic. We have seen starry-eyed pamphlets by Chesa Boudin, son of the imprisoned Weather Underground terrorist Kathy Boudin, and Aleida Guevara, the daughter of Che. We have seen books like In the Shadow of the Liberator, written by Richard Gott, a former KGB “agent of influence” whose tome, in the words of The New Republic, is “platitudinous,” “cartoonish,” “outdated,” and written by a man whose “romantic predisposition has clouded [his] ability to judge any regional political development since the good old days of revolution in the 1960s.” What we haven’t seen, until now, is a thoughtful examination of the Chavez phenomenon from journalists with a wide-ranging, hands-on knowledge of Venezuela’s tragic political history.

Hugo Chavez is dispiriting reading, but there may still be hope for Venezuela. As Chavez tightens his grip on the country’s democratic institutions, a recent Pew Global Attitudes poll revealed Venezuela to be the Latin American country whose people are most favorably disposed toward the free market, with 72 percent of respondents agreeing that “most people are better off in a free market economy.”
Their country, alas, is going the other way.

Michael C. Moynihan is an associate editor of Reason.