Hugo!: The Hugo Chavez Story from Mud Hut to Perpetual Revolution »

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.

Ruling elites in Venezuela, the United States and Europe, and even Hugo Chávez himself though for different reasons, have been eager to have the world view him as the heir to Fidel Castro. But the truth about this increasingly influential world leader is more complex, and more interesting.. The Chávez that emerges from Bart Jones’ carefully researched and documented biography is neither a plaster saint nor a revolutionary tyrant. He has an undeniably autocratic streak, and yet has been freely and fairly re-elected to his nations presidency three times with astonishing margins of victory. He is a master politician and an inspired improviser, a Bolivarian nationalist and an unashamed socialist. His policies have brought him into conflict with the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and major oil companies. They have also provided a model for new governments and social movements in Ecuador, Bolivia, and Argentina. When in September 2006 he declared at the United Nations that ‘the devil came here yesterday … the President of the United States’, it was clear that he was taking on challenging the most powerful nation on earth, in conscious imitation of the Liberator, Simon Bolivar.

The Washington Post - Alexandra Starr

Jones provides a superb description of the economic inequities that helped create the conditions for a populist such as Chavez to come to power.

Preface     ix
Hurricane Hugo     1
Roots of Rebellion     21
A Revolutionary Is Born     38
Testing the Waters     56
A Sacred Oath     67
The Conspiracy Deepens     83
First Betrayals     98
The Massacre     111
Waiting in the Wings     125
Rebellion of the Angels     131
Jail     161
Secret Comandante's Good-Bye     177
On the Road     187
Beauty and the Beast     205
To Power     226
A Birth and a Tragedy     248
First Defections     261
Oil Man     278
First Revolts and the Return of the Iran-Contra Crowd     291
The Coup     311
The President Is Missing     341
The Aftermath     366
Oil Strike     372
The Social Missions     388
The Recall     402
Striking Back     417
Twenty-First-Century Socialism     433
Afterword     457
Afterword to the Paperback Edition     473
Acknowledgments     489
Notes     491
Index     547