Hugo! : The Hugo Chàvez Story from Mud Hut to Perpetual Revolution

by JONES, BART

• ISBN13: 9781586421359
• ISBN10: 1586421352
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-09-04
• Publisher: Steerforth

Summary

Hugo!is a work of narrative nonfiction for the general reader by an American journalist who knows the country intimately and who witnessed Chavez's rise to power. This up-to-the-minute political biography provides extensive new information about Chavez and the modern history of a country that is one of the world's top producers of both oil and beauty queens. In dramatic fashion Hugo! gives full accounts of Chavez's impoverished childhood, his years in the West Point of Venezuela, the discovery of his guiding light, Simon Bolivar, his secret, decade-long conspiracy in the military, the 1989 massacre that shocked the nation and propelled his movement into action, the 1992 coup that lifted him from obscurity to fame, his two years in prison, his road to the presidency as he fought off the challenge of a former Miss Universe, the 2002 coup in which he was kidnapped and nearly killed, and a strike a few months later that shut down the oil industry and nearly strangled the economy. The full stories of many of these episodes have never been told before in English or Spanish. Based in part on interviews with key people in Chavez's conspiracy and his presidency, the book gets at "Who is Hugo Chavez?" and "What is Venezuela?" unlike any previous work. This balanced account will enable readers to understand the controversial man behind the famous September 2006 UN speech in which Chavez called George Bush "the devil."

Author Biography

Bart Jones is currently a reporter for Newsday and worked for eight years in Venezuela, mainly a foreign correspondent for the Associated Press. A graduate of Fordham University, he holds a master’s degree in Social Studies from Columbia University. He has also reported for The Atlantic City Press in New Jersey, where he won awards from the Philadelphia Press Association. He lives with his family on Long Island. Hugo! is his first book.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
Hurricane Hugo	p. 1
Roots of Rebellion	p. 21
A Revolutionary Is Born	p. 38
Testing the Waters	p. 56
A Sacred Oath	p. 67
The Conspiracy Deepens	p. 83
First Betrayals	p. 98
The Massacre	p. 111
Waiting in the Wings	p. 125
Rebellion of the Angels	p. 131
Jail	p. 161
Secret Comandante's Good-Bye	p. 177
On the Road	p. 187
Beauty and the Beast	p. 205
To Power	p. 226
A Birth and a Tragedy	p. 248
First Defections	p. 261
Oil Man	p. 278
First Revolts and the Return of the Iran-Contra Crowd	p. 291
The Coup	p. 311
The President Is Missing	p. 341
The Aftermath	p. 366
Oil Strike	p. 372
The Social Missions	p. 388
The Recall	p. 402
Striking Back	p. 417
Twenty-First-Century Socialism	p. 433
Afterword	p. 457
Acknowledgments	p. 473
Notes	p. 475
Index	p. 531
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Hugo Chávez and I were sitting alone on the second floor of the Miraflores Presidential Palace in Caracas, Venezuela. It was close to midnight on April 30, 2007. Venezuela was minutes away from making a small bit of history by taking majority control of four multi-billion dollar oil projects in the eastern Orinoco River basin from international companies including ExxonMobil, Chevron Corp, Conoco and Total. Like many of Chávez’s moves, the oil takeover was controversial. His detractors claimed it was another step in creating a totalitarian dictatorship modeled after his mentor in Cuba, Fidel Castro. His supporters responded that he was proudly re-establishing national sovereignty over a strategic natural resource where for years foreign companies had enjoyed a virtual tax holiday. I had a privileged bird's-eye view of Chávez coordinating the takeover. We were alone on the patio from 11:10 p.m. to 1:30 a.m. – prime time for the president. It was my second interview with him in two days – a rare opportunity to spend time with a man flooded with interview requests. The conversations that night and the previous one amounted to nearly four hours. We covered a lot of territory, from Chávez’s impoverished childhood to the 2002 coup in which he was almost killed…and at least one sensitive topic he had never spoken about publicly before and I feared might bring the interview to an abrupt end. — From the Preface

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Excerpted from Hugo!: The Hugo Chavez Story from Mud Hut to Perpetual Revolution by Bart Jones
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.