This section will look at the biography of Hugo Chavez and assess the factors that brought him into Venezuelan politics and led to the emergence of his radical anti-American vision. It will seek to chart the various influences on Chavez's politics.
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1.1 Chavez and the 1960s revolutionary left
This will begin by examining the revolutionary movement that emerged in the wake of the Cuban revolution and its critique of the democratic settlement negotiated in the wake of the overthrow of the Perez Jimenez dictatorship in 1958. By the time that Chavez had joined the army in 1971—as a 17 year-old officer cadet—the guerrilla movement that had been defeated in a fierce counter-insurgency campaign. However, surviving former guerrilla leaders—of which the most well known is Douglas Bravo—continued to campaign for radical alternatives to the established order. A centre-piece of their thinking of groups such as the Venezuelan Revolutionary Party (PRV) was that left-wing forces should work with nationalist sectors within the armed forces in order to build a revolutionary military-civilian alliance.
1.2 Chavez and the Venezuelan army
This idea built on the fact that Venezuela's army—like that of Peru and other Andean countries but unlike those of Chile and Argentina, for example—drew its officer recruits from the lower middle class, rather than from the upper class. As a result, young officers such as Chavez were more open to left-wing ideas, such as those that in the late 1960s and early 1970s led the Peruvian and some other armed forces (Panama, Honduras, etc.) to seize power in military coups in order to introduce left-wing policies, including land reform and nationalization of the banks and energy sector.
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