CARACAS, VENEZUELA
Americans might well marginalize President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela as the megalomaniac who denounced President George W. Bush as “the devil” who left the smell of sulfur in the air after he spoke to the United Nations in 2006.
Chávez derides “imperialists,” including the United States, and embraces Cuba, Iran, Belarus, Russia, Ecuador and Nicaragua — much to the dismay of U.S. officials. Indeed, he revels in the disdain cast upon him as a divisive antagonist. But the role of fiery champion of the downtrodden plays well to his political base. His social programs and bellicose rhetoric only reinforce his support among the poor and underemployed majority that dwarfs his country’s small elite class.
Chávez’s vitriol seems more befitting a professional wrestler than a head of state, and, in fact, he operates deftly behind the curtain of his political theater. Other leaders may dismiss him as a crank — or worse — but this makes the mistake of underestimating him and overlooks the importance of a South American country of 28 million people best known for two exports: crude oil and Major League Baseball players, including Cesar Izturis of the St. Louis Cardinals.
Modern Venezuela fuses a quasi-free-market economy with Cuban-like socialist social programs and economics. Chávez passionately promotes what he has called 21st-century socialism. His administration funds and operates social programs and subsidizes nationalized industries including oil, electricity, cement and telecommunications. With the price of crude oil rising past $130 a barrel, Venezuelans still pay about 10 cents a gallon at the pump.

Whether a ranting radical or a bold reformer — or a calculated blend of both — Chávez recently drew back the theatrical curtain and offered a more intimate look at his complex country and its contradictory leader to a visiting delegation of journalists from the American Society of Newspapers Editors.
“I beg for a pardon from them [the American people],” he told us in a private 90-minute briefing at the historic Palacio de Miraflores, the Venezuelan White House. “I beg for forgiveness if in my speech I’ve hurt any feelings back in the States. I ask for forgiveness. . . . When I speak about the United States, I do not speak of the people, to the citizens. I refer to the elite ruling the United States, not even referring to all of the elite governing the United States.”
Chávez is a political survivor. He ran for president in 1992 and lost, ran and won in 1998, survived a coup attempt in 2002 (in which he was ousted from office briefly) and then won a resounding reelection victory in 2006.
“I would love, for instance, to be able to work with the United States, together — and other countries as well, regardless of the ideology — to work in the field of health, for instance, infant mortality, food production. In Latin America, we have 19 million malnourished people,” he said.

Chávez spoke of the eight combative years of the Bush administration and said he hoped that the new U.S. president elected this fall would be more collaborative.
His incendiary comments about Bush and other leaders aside, Chávez is well aware of how deeply Venezuela and the United States are linked economically. This reciprocal relationship often gets lost in the media’s fascination with outrageous sound bites.
The fact is, more than 50 percent of Venezuela’s gross domestic product comes from exports to the United States, the biggest chunk of which is oil. At least 10 percent of the oil consumed in the United States originates in Venezuela, home to the largest petroleum reserves outside the Middle East.
Chávez told us that Venezuela is producing about 3.3 million barrels of oil per day now, about half its ultimate capacity. He plans to increase that to 5.5 million barrels daily over the next three to four years. That would mean more oil for the United States at prevailing prices — and more U.S. dollars pumped into the Venezuelan economy.
The point: Venezuela relies on the United States much more than the reverse. Severing relations would be cataclysmic for Venezuela’s economy, and there is no doubt that Chávez knows it.
But Chávez, a former lieutenant colonel in the Venezuelan army, also spoke to us of his concerns that the United States might invade Venezuela in pursuit of oil, which, he insisted, was the main motivation for the Iraq war. The idea might seem ludicrous to Americans, but defending Venezuela’s national honor plays well with his core constituency. Just after our group arrived in the country, for example, he spoke defiantly about protecting Venezuelan sovereignty after his government accused a U.S. military fighter jet of violating its air space on May 17. He vowed to protect his people from any imperialist invaders.
At our briefing several days later, Chávez asked, ”Have we invaded anyone? Do we have plans to invade any other country? We are not a power. We do not have atomic bombs. We do not have missiles that destroy people, to attack other people.”

Venezuela is the sixth-largest nation in Latin America. It has been under civilian leadership for 50 years. Chávez, 53, will finish his second six-year term in 2012. He has plenty of time left to act as a significant player in his country and abroad. Chavez waxed eloquently and profusely about fighting poverty in Venezuela and the world, something he has discussed at length with former U.S. presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter.
In 2003, the Chávez government started an extensive anti-poverty program called Misión Barrio Adentro (Mission Inside the Neighborhood), community-based centers that offer free medical, eye and dental care. Doctors refer patients to hospitals for serious ailments. Subsidized food staples such as rice, beans, chicken, cooking oil and bread are sold at reduced prices.
Government officials say that more than 1,500 Barrio Adentro centers operate nationally, including in the most remote areas where doctors from Cuba work out of new hexagonal two-story brick buildings that provide shelter and a medical clinic.

Despite Venezuela’s striking inequality of wealth, the country has remained remarkably stable compared to other countries in the region. On that basis, Venezuela might seem like a natural U.S. ally in the hemispheric economy and in the battle against illegal drugs.
But its socialist economic and social agendas have clashed with U.S. policies since 1999. Most recently, computer files discovered in March at a rebel camp in Colombia purportedly revealed that Venezuela has been supplying millions of dollars to assist the efforts of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia to overthrow that country’s government, a U.S. ally.
At a televised news conference that preceded our private briefing, Chàvez vehemently denied the conclusion of the international police agency, Interpol, that the computer files were authentic. Chávez dismissed the files as frauds and condemned Interpol as a “show of clowns” headed by Ronald Noble of the United States, whom he derided as a “gringo policeman.”

“We have made mistakes,” he acknowledged to us. “We have many problems in this country. But to say we have a dictatorship in this country? There is no evidence no evidence whatsoever of a dictatorship in this country.”
If a dictator is someone who possesses absolute and supreme authority, Chávez is not one. He is, rather, an authoritarian. He also is a democratically elected president who changed his country’s name to the Bolivarian Republic de Venezuela in honor of the revered liberator of several South American countries, Simón Bolivar.
Venezuela is not a one-party state like Cuba. Wide-ranging politics are lively and reported in detail in the media, especially among the non-government, independent media that Chávez accuses of being aligned with his political opposition. That opposition, although fragmented across multiple parties, includes many wealthy Venezuelans who vilify him for leading a failed “revolution,” the term he uses to describe his Chávista movement. They condemn him for squandering the riches of an oil boom by frittering away money on pet projects and political cronyism.
After voters reelected Chávez in 2006, they handed him a major setback in December when they rejected constitutional reforms that would have allowed him to be president without term limits, among other measures. His opponents are preparing for electoral battle this fall in which many local and regional elections nationwide will define the contemporary support for Chávismo.

Venezuela is layered with contradictions beyond blips of Chávez’s televised rants. In some districts, tony shopping malls tout logos such as TGIF, McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Papa John’s and KFC, along with consumer brands like Fendi and Gucci. These stand in stark contrast with the daily life of 4 million Caraqueños who endure traffic jams, buses bursting with passengers and hard-scrabble lives in the mountainside slums where, on some weekends, more than 50 men — mostly young — have been murdered.

Venezuela — like its mercurial leader Hugo Chávez — is complex and contradictory. But whatever the politics of the moment, the economy and fortunes of this tropical South American nation will remain intertwined with those of the United States.

— Gilbert Bailon
Editorial page editor