Hugo Chávez

Hugo Chávez failed at a coup, won an election six years later, and governed Venezuela for fourteen years on the price of oil. He was born in 1954 to two schoolteachers in the plains, joined the army for the baseball, and organised a clandestine movement of officers in the 1980s around a mixture of Bolívarian nationalism and left-wing politics. The Caracazo of 1989 is the origin of everything that followed: riots against austerity measures in which the army killed somewhere between 300 and 3,000 people in the streets of Caracas. His coup attempt in February 1992 failed, and he was allowed to make a televised statement telling his followers to lay down their arms because the objectives had not been achieved for now — two words that made him a national figure. He was pardoned in 1994 and elected in 1998 with 56 per cent. The presidency rewrote the constitution, survived a coup in 2002 that removed him for forty-seven hours, and after oil prices rose from 2003 funded missions that cut poverty sharply, brought Cuban doctors into the barrios, and produced measurable falls in illiteracy and infant mortality. It also nationalised widely, packed the courts, closed broadcasters, spent the oil company's maintenance budget, and imported almost everything. He was re-elected three times and died of cancer in 2013. The economy collapsed when the price fell, and some seven million Venezuelans have left since. His reputation depends almost entirely on which years are counted. The poverty figures from 2004 to 2012 are real and so is the collapse that followed, and the argument about whether a redistribution funded by a single commodity was ever going to survive its price has been running in Latin America ever since.

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