Daily Fix

The Man in Caracas:
Venezuela's Hugo Chavez

T. SHER SINGH

We were in Venezuela for a two-week holiday. It was the closing days of 1998, and the first few of the new.

It didn’t take us long to realize we were in the midst of an election campaign. There was electricity in the air, not just because there were posters on every open space, and a rally in the offing wherever we turned up. The populace was energized because it had found a leader.

We stayed away from Caracas, and spent most of the time in smaller towns and the countryside; even a foray deep into the Amazon for a hike in the wilderness around Angel Falls.

Everywhere, they were talking about young Hugo Chavez. He had charisma; he seemed to give the people hope. The poor and the middle-class felt inspired by him. It was clear, by the time we left -- on the eve of the election -- that Venezuela was experiencing a mini-revolution, and that he would be a shoo-in.

He was sworn in as President in early 1999, and has remained a large presence on the world stage ever since … until his untimely death to cancer yesterday.

I liked him, having spoken to a lot of people there about what they saw in him. He’s never failed to dazzle, then or since, even though the sheen wore off a bit through the years. Like all in power, he became complacent, even corrupt.

But what made him stand out, from his very first day, all the way to the day he died, was his defiance of George W. Bush and his cronies.

Built in the Fidel Castro mold … in fact, sharper, wittier, with a better sense of timing, and more finesse … he took on the pomposity of the American might and was successful in bursting its bubble by repeatedly calling their bluff.

Bush was not only considered by the world the equivalent of a village idiot, but he behaved no better than a school-yard bully.

The world applauded when Chavez took him on over and over again and cut him down to size. He reached across the continental divide and poked Bush in the ribs. He teased him, prodded him, goaded him, taunted him, until the silly poseur in the White House fled to his corner, sulking and whimpering.

Thus, like all bullies, the US helped create its antithesis, Hugo Chavez, and then let him chase them around the block at will, a David hammering away at an ever-weakening Goliath.

In a world bereft of heroes, he became one in a Robin Hood sort of way. As a result, he was forgiven many of his excesses. He’s died still a hero in the eyes of the world … and his own people.

Not without reason.

He had his qualities.

He was gutsy. He was intelligent. Unlike his goofy American counterpart, he could speak in intelligible and intelligent sentences. Better still, he was an orator, though at times he did tend to ramble, Castro-like, ad nauseum.

I don’t know enough about him or the state of Venezuela today to have an informed opinion on his legacy.

But I do know that, no matter what, he’s left a lasting impression on us all by standing up, tall and defiant, against the might of a world power that had lost sight of its great founding principles.

Pity that he has predeceased even the ailing Castro, his mentor and hero.

But you know, history and nature have a strange way of correcting things. Not only do the George W. Bushes of this world -- Chavez called him the “devil” and the label stuck! -- pave the way for the likes of Barack Obama, but the Bush brand of evil spawns its own pockets of resistance, defying all expectations of doom and gloom.

The result: the likes of Hugo Chavez.

He’s a loss to the world like few others that are still around, will be.      

March 6, 2013

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