Free Hugo! by Bart Jones

the upper ranks and elite units of
the armed forces. In Venezuela many senior officers came frompoor
urban and peasant families, and knew from their own experience the
difficulties their people faced in putting food on the table. That did not
mean, of course, that all of them were "immune to the clever co-opting
maneuvers of the oligarchy with whom they inevitably come into contact
once they reach the higher ranks." But a large number of the new
cadets who rose through the ranks — like Chávez, Baduel, and another
classmate, Jorge Luis García Carneiro — never forgot their roots. Some
were so poor, their families could not afford shoes.
    The Andrés Bello Plan and the Venezuelan military's historical
openness to all social classes combined to produce a new kind
of soldier in the early 1970s — much different from the right-wing
officers who were launching coups and installing bloody dictatorships
elsewhere on the continent. "In sharp contrast to the archetypal,
muscle-flexing neo-Nazis that comprised the Armed Forces in
Argentina and Chile, in Venezuela a new type of soldier returned
to the barracks with professional skills,civilian contacts and a freshsocial sensitivity."
    The Andrés Bello Plan had a tremendous impact on Chávez, who
did not forget it or the men who created it. He was mesmerized by
the classroom lectures ofLieutenant Colonel Jacinto Pérez Arcay, an
author and historian who told tales of Zamora and the Federal War.
When Chávez reached Miraflores Palace three and a half decades
later, he gave Arcay — by then a retired general — a small office next
to his. He named the former director of the academy who conceived
of the Andrés Bello Plan,General Jorge Osorio García, ambassador to
Canada.
    Arcay and other professors also spoke in the classroom about
Venezuela's towering historical figure,Simón Bolívar. As a boy and a
teenager, Chávez received a cursory education about the Liberator in
school. "Instead of Superman, my hero was Bolívar," he once said. Now,
spurred by Arcay and others, he delved more deeply into the life of the
man who had freed six South American nations from Spanish rule and
turned into an icon in Venezuela. A small, wiry man who stood five-foot-
five and sported long sideburns and Napoleonic garb, Bolívar was
George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Jesus Christ all rolled into
one for Venezuelans, a "secular saint" in the words of political scientistDaniel Hellinger.
    Chávez developed more than a passing interest in Bolívar. His fascination
turned into deep devotion that bordered on obsession. He
started reading everything he could about the Liberator. After the 9 P.M.
bell rang at the academy calling for silence, he often headed back to
the empty classrooms, where cadets were allowed to stay until 11 P.M.
to study. Sometimes Chávez remained even later, occasionally falling
asleep on a desk where someone would find him with his head down
and a book open.
     
    It wasn't surprising that the Liberator was captivating Chávez.
    Simón Bolívar's life was a mind-spinning series of triumphs and
defeats played out on the world stage. Born into one of the most aristocratic
families in the New World, he was orphaned at a young age,
inherited one of the New World's greatest fortunes at twenty-one, and
then exhausted it pursuing a quixotic dream of first liberating and
thenuniting Latin America as the world's largest nation. Exiled from
Venezuela twice and the target of numerous assassination attempts,
Bolívar led some of the most audacious military campaigns in history.
During one, he marched a ragged, starving army of twenty-four hundred
men — many of them shoeless llaneros — across icy Andean peaks
to launch a surprise attack on loyalist troops in Colombia.
    Bolívar achieved part of his goal. He liberated Venezuela,
Colombia, Panama, Ecuador, Peru, and the country named for him
— Bolivia. He was feted as a hero in all the capitals as he marched
down pathways strewn with