News Abroad

Chavez: The Story of a Bully Boy

by Michael Rowan

Mr. Rowan, a political strategist who has worked in 14 nations since 1970, including two presidential campaigns in Venezuela, where he lived from 1993 to 2006, is co-author with Douglas Schoen of Chavez: The Threat Closer to Home (Free Press, January 6, 2009).

Hugo Chavez has made a career of being rejected by authorities who then underestimated his ability to take sweet revenge. Chavez was rejected by his family, the military, the political elites of Venezuela and finally U.S. President George W. Bush, but survived to punish every one of them. Here is the sad story of the making of a bully boy.

Chavez experienced the bitterness of rejection early in life. Born in a dirt-poor village to a large family, his childish wild behavior was handled by locking him in a dark closet for days on end. His parents gave him to his grandmother to bring up -- he calls her Mama to this day. As a teenager he would cross the street to avoid even eye contact with his real mother.

While both his parents were teachers, at school Hugo was a dismal failure. He failed science in high school; he failed the test for university entrance; he faked his way into the military academy as a baseball player; and he finished last in his military class, blaming it on his teachers.

But Chavez was far from stupid. He was street smart, an endless talker and a show-off who harbored unbridled ambitions for power and fame. Seeing enemies everywhere, he trusted no one while ostensibly loving everyone.

In the mind of Chavez, everything bad about him was caused by someone else. After his presidency, when his psychiatrist published that Chavez was a narcissist with paranoid anti-social tendencies, he made writing about his mental life a federal crime. For Chavez, he is the only one who's allowed to be a rebel.

As a teenager he began planning a military coup and for twenty years he lived a double life of daily deception and betrayal, pretending to be a loyal soldier during the day and conspiring with communists, rebels and terrorists to take power by force at night. But as he got power, he turned against virtually everyone who helped him get there, including his longtime mistress.

In 1992, he launched a coup attempt where all his co-conspirators succeeded militarily, while Chavez failed absurdly at his task in Caracas when his cell phone battery went dead. When he surrendered, he made himself famous by going on TV, selfishly abandoning his co-conspirators who had militarily succeeded.

In jail for his coup, he divorced his wife and successfully secured aid from Fidel Castro and Colombia's narco-terrorist guerillas. Upon release from jail, he lived in the home of his aging communist political mentor, took his second wife for the 1998 presidential campaign, but soon after his election, abandoned both, calling them traitors.

Unprepared to manage a small shop no less one of the richest petro-states in the world, Chavez ignored governance in favor of the everyday pursuit of absolute power, which has continued for ten years now. He rewrote the Constitution, centralized legislative and judicial powers in his hands, put ignorant loyalists in charge of the national oil company, demolished the private sector and independent institutions, created a personal army outfitted with $4 billion of Russian arms, and silenced dissent with threats, prosecution, confiscation or payoffs.

A brain-dead opposition in Venezuela always assumed that Chavez would disappear in days or weeks because he was not one of them: white, educated, suave and moneyed. Ten years later, some in the opposition still believe Chavez can't last a day more, even as they take his money and orders just like the occupied Europeans did under Hitler's rule in World War II.

A megalomaniacal believer in his own charms, which are considerable if crude, Chavez has become the first all-TV-all-the-time ruler in the world, spending forty hours per week (imagine it: three times as much as Wolf Blitzer) for a decade exhorting Venezuelans to do as he says. And what Chavez was saying as he pocketed a trillion dollars from oil sales since 1999 is: the ultimate enemy is the “evil empire” of the United States and its “devil” George W. Bush.

While Chavez's opportunistic anti-Americanism is an expression of his childish rage against authority, the U.S. was particularly vulnerable to his attack because its relationship with Latin America is an historic atrocity. Starting with the Monroe Doctrine, the region has been treated as America's "back yard" -- a place to play or put junk.

That back yard was where the US launched military invasions and assassinations, cozying up to dictators and corporations that exploited the region's resources and people. When the United Fruit Company, which created the "banana republic" brand for the region, said jump, the US government said, how high?

The brief Camelot moments calling for an Alliance of the Americas by President John Kennedy were followed by the "Washington Consensus" -- rules for austerity and privatization that had to be followed or no money from the IMF, World Bank or USAID was paid. These rules, which were promoted mostly by Reagan zealots ideologically committed to minimalist government, backfired in Latin America, where the 200 million people living on $2 a day need an active government to survive.

Busy with Russia, China, and the Middle East, the US has long ignored its back yard under the assumption that it was simply not important. This is received in Latin American capitals as the height of humiliation and subordination and is resented everywhere.

Into this vacuum plopped Hugo Chavez, who easily turned half of Latin America against the US and invited or permitted Russia, Belarus, China, Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas, Al Qaeda and the FARC narco-terrorists to put their weapons, drug trade, money-laundering and terrorist training camps in Venezuela and in Chavez's dependencies -- Cuba, Bolivia, Dominica, Nicaragua, Ecuador and Argentina.

Meanwhile, recognizing the limited attention span of Americans in the age of globalization, Chavez used his money to make friends with politicians like Jimmy Carter and Jack Kemp, and entertainment figures such as Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover, Sean Penn, Naomi Campbell and Oliver Stone, who would tout him as a liberal democrat fighting against war, poverty and corruption, when in fact Chavez was precisely the opposite.

With Bush gone, Chavez loses his major prop to maintain his charade, but he should never be underestimated. Soon enough, Barack Obama may find that he is a symbol of white racism, war, slavery, genocide, global warming and corporate greed. For someone as skilled at deception as Chavez, anything is possible.