Is Chavez Crazy Like a Fox?

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez at the Venezuelan mission in New York, September 21, 2006.

STEVE PYKE FOR TIME

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Having vanquished Venezuela's political establishment, Chávez has set his sights on bigger targets. Exploiting the fact that the U.S. gets about 15% of its foreign oil from Venezuela, he pushed the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, of which Venezuela is a founding member, to pump up crude prices. In 1998, Venezuela's state-run oil monopoly, PDVSA, earned less than $14 billion in export revenue; this year it is expected to rake in almost $40 billion. In 2002 the White House was widely perceived to have backed a failed coup attempt against Chávez. (The Bush Administration denies that.) The resulting sympathy Chávez won coincided with the new petro-largesse he could spread around Latin America to curry favor for his Bolivarian revolution--including epic projects like a proposed $20 billion, 6,000-mile-long gas pipeline from Venezuela to Argentina to help integrate South America's economies. Chávez's anti-Yanqui message has changed the hemisphere's political equation, catapulting Latin leftists like Bolivia's Evo Morales into power and helping nonhemispheric powers like China gain a stronger economic foothold. "The U.S. fears Venezuela's presence on the Security Council," Chávez says, "because it knows we'll be a genuinely independent vote for the Third World."

Chávez has also poured the country's oil windfall into a New Deal's worth of social programs in Venezuela, including the first medical clinics that many dirt-poor Caracas barrios have ever seen--usually staffed by doctors from Cuba whom Castro sends in exchange for cut-rate oil. "I don't care if our doctors are from Mars," says Manuel Tejera, who is helping build a clinic and lay potable-water pipes in the La Vega barrio. "We feel more like real citizens here for once."

But Chávez is also a polarizing figure at home. Although his approval ratings are in the high 50s, there is growing impatience with the country's stubborn unemployment and violent crime. Teodoro Petkoff, an erstwhile socialist leader who is a campaign strategist for Chávez's main opponent in the December presidential election, Manuel Rosales, says Chávez's "21st century socialism" is only a short-term fix. "The real fight against poverty is a fight against unemployment," Petkoff says. Others complain that Chávez is a Castro wannabe who has subverted Venezuela's democratic institutions, especially the courts, and may well seek a constitutional change to let him run for a third term in 2012 if, as expected, he wins re-election in December. For the most part, Venezuelan media are still free to rail at Chávez--and they do. "Just watch two hours of television there," Chávez says. "My God, devil is the least of things the opposition is allowed to call me on the air."

What may ultimately erode Chávez's stature are exactly the things that he has skillfully used to boost it. As the price of oil begins to fall, critics predict Chávez's radical influence will too. Some analysts believe that Mexico's leftist candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, narrowly lost the recent presidential race in large part because his conservative opponent painted him as a Chávez clone. The same thing happened a month earlier in presidential elections in Peru.