Biographers tell us
that Hugo Chávez trained for a radical career ever since
childhood, though no one guessed he would be president. He learned
Marx and Machiavelli from a neighborhood historian but seemed
disinterested. In the Venezuelan Army, he joined a group of
left-leaning officers that secretly advocated Marxism and military
rule, calling themselves Bolivarians after the Venezuelan
patriot Simón Bolívar. They got little
notice.
When Chávez and
a handful of fellow officers attempted to overthrow President
Carlos Andrés Pérez in 1992, few took him seriously.
When Pérez got impeached a year later on corruption charges,
people saw Chávez as a reformer. Released from jail in 1994,
he formed his own Fifth Republic Movement and promised to
clean up government and relieve poverty.
Venezuela’s political
parties were running on empty. Its caretaker state, based…
