Profile/Hugo Chávez:After Sunday's victory, Venezuela's president is talking about amending the constitution to allow him to run indefinitely for the office he has come to love, writes Tom Hennigan
Washington thought several times it had finally seen the back of him. But Sunday's victory for Hugo Chávez in Venezuela's presidential elections means the US is now set to endure another six years of its uppity Latin neighbour.
In front of thousands of delirious supporters Chávez wasted no time in proclaiming the start of the next stage in his "Bolivarian Revolution" to build "21st- century socialism" and end US hegemony over the world and Latin America in particular.
The vote, the fourth personal endorsement of his rule since 1998, solidifies his control over the world's fifth biggest oil exporter at a time when record prices have given him the means to fund his ambitions for a global role as leader of Latin America and one of the principle scourges of US president George Bush.
It is the latest instalment in a political career that several times looked like it had come to a sudden disastrous end only for Chávez to bounce back. Since launching himself onto Venezuela's national stage he has survived leading a failed uprising, being overthrown in a coup, a crippling national strike and a recall vote on his presidency.
Now, fresh from Sunday's victory, he is already talking of amending his own newly drawn up constitution to allow him run indefinitely for the office he has come to love.
Chávez's remarkable journey started on July 28th, 1954 when he was born to two schoolteachers in the town of Sabaneta, located where the Andes slope down to the vast llano grasslands, far from the centres of Venezuela's oil wealth and political power.
His interest in politics started early, supposedly inherited from his father whom he later appointed governor of their home state. At the age of 17 and against the wishes of his family he entered the army where, as well as being an able and popular student, he started his career as a serial conspirator.
He formed his first underground cell at the age of 23 and spent the following years working assiduously to expand it. He travelled around the country setting up clandestine networks and used his position as a lecturer in the military academy to indoctrinate new recruits into his evolving ideology of Bolivarism - an amorphous desire to improve the condition of an oil rich country where most lived in abject poverty, guided by the principles of his great hero, independence leader Simón Bolívar.
Since becoming president he has been known to pull up an empty chair during cabinet meetings, saying it was for the Liberator's spirit - whose presence would guide proceedings.
THROUGHOUT THE 1970S and 1980s Chávez combined two careers - a public one rising through the military ranks, and a private one building a secret revolutionary network within them, ready to strike when he decided the time was right.
His first wife and three children bore the brunt of his conspiratorial lifestyle with its endless trips to secret meetings, organising cells and resolving disputes while planning for a moment that never seemed to come. His companion in much of this work was the young historian Herma Marksman, who was his mistress and fellow-conspirator for nine years. Later his wife divorced him and a second marriage, which produced a third daughter, also ended in divorce.
By February 1992 he decided his moment had come and he launched his military uprising. The rebellion is now remembered as a fiasco but many of its participants achieved their early objectives. The weak link was the operation in the capital, where Chávez was in charge.
Here, failure was total and he surrendered meekly. But from defeat he snatched victory of a sort by turning a television address - ostensibly to call on his men to down arms - into a PR coup.
"Compañeros, lamentably, for now, our objectives were not achieved in the capital . . ." It lasted only 90 seconds but he appeared dignified in defeat and people remembered the promise to be back.
In this he was aided by serving only two years in prison for "rebellion". Rather than another coup, Chávez decided that the surest route to power was through the ballot box. In 1998, he easily beat the country's exhausted and discredited traditional parties to become the country's youngest ever president.
Since then he has moved inexorably to concentrate power in his hands.
At first he was given cover by an often hysterical opposition, which deposed him briefly in a coup in 2002. The coup crumbled once it installed a reactionary businessman Pedro Carmona as president and Chávez supporters took to the street demanding his return. "Pedro the Brief" fled and Chávez was back within 48 hours of surrendering office.
Chávez has been blessed by an opposition that consistently underestimates him and often displays a visceral hatred for him as a mixed-race country bumpkin who dared to assume he could be president.
Opponents nicknamed him the mico mandante (order-giving monkey) playing on the title mi comandante.
THE PROBLEM FOR the opposition is that open loathing of Chávez only boosts his popularity in a country where 70 per cent of the population lives in poverty, while a whiter, more European, elite enjoys wealth and privilege.
Since the coup Chávez has co-opted most institutions in the country by purging any that dared show signs of independence. The military, the courts and the giant state oil company are now all under his control.
He has earmarked much of the huge cash bonanza from record oil prices as his own discretionary spending and tried to ensure that anyone who wants to benefit from his myriad of social programmes is a supporter of his revolution.
Despite the widespread failure to improve the welfare of most poor Venezuelans in light of the oil boom, he has managed to keep the revolution moving forward by mobilising supporters for an endless series of confrontations with his enemies at home who he accuses of being controlled by his enemy abroad - the US. Mounting claims of corruption are drowned out in the clamour.
These struggles also have the benefit of keeping him centre stage, a role he clearly revels in. He has his own television show Aló Presidente (Hello President) and will commandeer all Venezuela's networks for rambling presidential addresses. Chávez can be an engaging speaker with a folksy manner, peppering his speeches with reminiscences of his youth and homespun reflections on Latin American history and is not averse to reciting a poem or breaking out in song live on air. (He once got Chinese premier Jiang Zemin to sing along with Julio Iglesias to O Sole Mio). The upper classes often look on in horror, but to poor supporters he is one of their own calling the shots for a change.
Dr Edmundo Chirinos, a Caracas psychoanalyst who Chávez visited after his second marriage failed, has said of him: "He loves power more than anything else. It possesses him. Caffeine is his drug; he drinks 26 to 30 cups of black coffee every day. Yet I like him as a person, despite his defects. He is like an adolescent. I like his spontaneity."
But, though frequently resembling the crude cartoon stereotype of the South American populist addicted to yanqui bashing and his own importance, Chávez has always shown a ruthlessly pragmatic streak, nowhere more so than in his relations with the US.
For all his fantastical claims about US invasion plots, Chávez has kept Venezuelan oil flowing north where it supplies 15 per cent of US demand. He knows that his popularity at home is in large part dependent on the cash from oil sales to the man he called "the devil" at a recent speech at the UN. And while he talks of eventually sending the oil elsewhere, he also knows that as long as his tankers keep docking on the Gulf Coast, the US is likely to tolerate his mischief-making in its backyard.
The Chávez File
Who is he?
President of Venezuela and leader of the Bolivarian Revolution
Why is he in the news?
He won a new six-year term in office on Sunday
Most appealing characteristic
Likes winding up George Bush
Least appealing characteristic
Cosying up with dictators such as Robert Mugabe and Alexander Lukashenko
Most likely to say
"Viva la revolucion!"
Least likely to say (publicly)
"When do you want the next shipment, George?"