End of the Revolution

Like his idol, Fidel Castro, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez was one of the most garrulous and pugnacious leaders Latin America has ever known. That made his death in Caracas on March 5, at age 58, after a long and secrecy-shrouded fight with cancer, feel all the more incongruous. Chávez, who for all of his 14-year rule was as loud and ubiquitous a fixture in Venezuela and Latin America as salsa music on the sidewalks, departed the stage in silence, having been neither seen nor heard from publicly for three months.

But Chávez’s demise promises to trigger a constitutional upheaval inside Venezuela, where he and his socialist, anti-U.S. revolution controlled the world’s largest oil reserves and where an electorate bitterly polarized by his heavy-handed governance must now hold a new presidential election within the next month. That contest will likely pit Chávez’s less charismatic but ideologically ardent Vice President, Nicolás Maduro, against Miranda state Governor Henrique Capriles Radonski, the popular opposition leader whom an ill Chávez nonetheless handily defeated in October to win re-election.

Whoever the candidates are, the race will be a decisive test of whether chavismo — the left-wing ideology advanced by Chávez — can survive without the man it’s named for. Maduro, 50, a former bus driver whom el comandante publicly anointed as his successor before leaving for Cuba and his final round of cancer treatment in December, will be considered the favorite. Still, without the benefit of Chávez’s quasi-divine stature on the Venezuelan street, Maduro will have a tougher time dodging the economic and public-security crises that Chávez left behind. And that’s why one of the most hotly debated issues is sure to be Chávez himself and his frenetic legacy — whether his firebrand reign ultimately represented an advance or a setback for the Latin American left.

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Chávez liked to call himself a “21st century socialist.” In reality he was a throwback to the dogmatic and authoritarian 20th century socialism of Castro — and to the 19th century caudillo tradition of Chávez’s demigod, South American independence hero Simón Bolívar. Chávez hoped that being democratically elected repeatedly 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 yanqui bashing — calling U.S. President George W. Bush a malodorous “devil” during a notorious 2006 speech at the U.N. — and an erratic messianic retro-revolutionary whose country’s vast petrowealth bankrolled his Marxist nostalgia.

Chávez was all 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 altered Latin America’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 negligent implementation only widened the region’s crippling economic inequality. Chávez’s bellicose neostatism was hardly the antidote, but his Bolivarian revolution — which steered much of Venezuela’s oil riches to the barrios for a change and enfranchised its poor — was a wake-up call. It reopened the door for the Latin American left and, fortunately, more moderates than Marxists walked through it, including former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, whose capitalist-socialist “third way” has since helped narrow the region’s wealth gap and brought troubled countries like Chile to the brink of development.

Leftists like Lula, in fact, are the genuine 21st century socialists, and their rise eroded Chávez’s influence well before his cancer was diagnosed in the summer of 2011. Ironically, that decline can be traced back to September 2006, when oil prices were soaring and Chávez was at the height of his power and popularity at home and across the developing world. He could taunt Bush at the U.N. and hear applause from Caracas to Karachi, yet in a TIME interview in New York City the day after that speech, he forecast how his global relevance would wither from then on. Chávez told me, with his famously caffeinated conviction, that he now planned to turn even harder leftward. “I no longer think a third way [between socialism and capitalism] is possible,” he said. “Capitalism is the way of the devil and exploitation. Only socialism can create a genuine society.”

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After winning another six-year term by a landslide three months later, Chávez did turn further left, and his pursuit of ideological purity led to creeping authoritarianism and a mismanaged economy. Chávez was never the dictator his critics claimed, and he did reduce Venezuela’s high poverty rate. That helped him remain the nation’s most popular political figure — he beat Capriles by 11 points last fall — even as cancer checked his campaigning. Still, thanks to his reckless and arrogant impulses, history isn’t likely to remember Chávez as fondly as his followers will.

From the Plains to the Putsch
Born in rural Sabaneta, Venezuela, in west-central Barinas state, Chávez grew up poor on the llanos, or plains, raised largely by a grandmother instead of his parents, who were teachers. In Barinas he absorbed the sort of nationalist Marxism that got a boost in 1959 from Castro’s revolution in Cuba. Chávez learned to demonize the imperialist U.S. of that era and to deify the Caracas-born Bolívar. He exalted the llaneros, the defiant plains cowboys embodied by his great-grandfather, who had led a revolt against an early 20th century dictator.

Once in the army — where he eventually became a paratrooper lieutenant colonel — his Bolivarian self-image and his resentment of Venezuela’s venal, Washington-backed upper crust helped form an officer poised for rebellion. On Feb. 4, 1992, Chávez directed a coup against President Carlos Andrés Pérez, a cogollo, or chieftain, notorious for corruption scandals even as he imposed austerity measures on Venezuela’s working class.

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The putsch, which killed scores of civilians as well as soldiers, collapsed after Chávez failed to take the Miraflores presidential palace in Caracas. Still, the insurrection was cheered by millions of angry Venezuelans, half of whom lived in poverty, and by millions more across Latin America who’d been left behind by the region’s capitalist reforms. The next year Pérez was ousted on corruption charges; in 1994, popular clamor forced 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 nearly 57% of the vote.

La Republica Bolivariana
Inaugurated in 1999, Chávez rewrote Venezuela’s constitution to make what he called its “sham” democracy more “participatory.” Under the new charter he won a special presidential election in 2000 that gave him a fresh six-year term. He began jetting all over the world to forge ties with leaders who, like him, disdained Washington — and, more important, to get fellow members of the Organization of Petroleum-Exporting Countries (OPEC) to pump up oil prices. The success of that campaign took the Bush Administration by surprise and increased the annual revenue of Venezuela’s state-run oil monopoly, Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), from less than $25.8 billion in 1998 to more than $126 billion when oil prices peaked in 2008.

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But despite Chávez’s democratic credentials and his misiones — vast social projects that brought many barrios their first clinics, schools, decent housing, local councils and even drinkable water — participatory democracy increasingly meant concentrating power in the hands of el comandante. His subordination of the legislative and judicial branches, his politicization of PDVSA and his frequent, hours-long television rants so divided Venezuela that in April 2002 Chávez himself became the target of a coup. For two days he was ousted from office, but Chávez’s supporters poured out of Caracas’ slums to restore him to power. The event hardened his socialist leanings and his hatred of the Bush Administration, which despite its denials was widely believed to have backed the coup.

That debacle was typical of Chávez’s 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 his petrodiplomacy abroad were lavish. A wave of leftist Presidents were elected across Latin America, including Lula in 2002 and Bolivia’s Evo Morales in 2005. Chávez was their standard bearer. His big aim, as he told me in 2006, was to replace the two-centuries-old Monroe Doctrine of the U.S. 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 realized that goal.

As Chávez’s petro power swelled, so did his head and his mission to be a global subversive. He began to overreach. If his verbal assault on Bush at the U.N. won him kudos in some quarters, it cost him standing in many others, especially as he allied Venezuela with international pariahs like Iran and Syria. Lula, who won re-election in 2006, was now Latin America’s standard bearer, and Chávez’s star began to dim. In 2007 he held a constitutional referendum whose central question was whether to eliminate presidential term limits; Venezuelan voters, fatigued by permanent revolution, defeated it. Chávez simply forced another plebiscite on the issue little more than a year later and won — el comandante rarely took no for an answer — but in the process he made himself look more like the despotic Castro.

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As the global recession sent oil prices tumbling, Chávez’s failure to rein in a raft of crises — including deep corruption inside his own revolution — began to stand out. So did declining investment and production at PDVSA. With Barack Obama in the White House instead of Bush, Chávez no longer had a convenient yanqui villain to help him distract Venezuelans from those domestic problems. As a result, the opposition began making inroads. Then, in June 2011, Cuban doctors found and removed a tumor near Chávez’s pelvis. Eight months later the cancer returned, and pundits questioned how Chávez could carry on a re-election campaign in 2012, especially now that the opposition finally had a viable candidate in Capriles to challenge him. After more treatment, Chávez went on to rout Capriles. Yet two months later he was back on an operating table in Cuba, where he could keep his true condition a more tightly guarded secret. The world would never hear from him again.

What Chávez couldn’t hide toward the end was the fact that his revolution was effectively a one-caudillo show, as evidenced by the awkward government indecision back in Caracas during his long absences in Havana. Add the fact that Chávez’s 2012 victory margin was almost 10 points lower than it was in 2006, and it becomes clear that Maduro could face serious challenges in the upcoming special election.

If Maduro wins — as he’s expected to do — the question will remain: Will Venezuela continue to be America’s most strident antagonist in the Americas, or it will seek the more “constructive relationship” Obama called for after Chávez’s death? One hint: hours before Chávez died, Maduro accused two U.S. embassy officials of being spies and ordered their expulsion.

Even if Maduro loses, 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 will too.

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