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My First Life
Hugo Ch�vez, military officer turned left-wing revolutionary, was one of the most important Latin American leaders of the twenty-first century. This book tells the story of his life up to his election as president in 1998.Throughout this riveting and historically important account of his early years, Ch�vez's energy and charisma shine through. As a young man, he awakens gradually to the reality of his country-where huge inequalities persist and the majority of citizens live in indescribable poverty-and decides to act. He gives a fascinating description of growing up in Barinas, his years in the Military Academy, his long-planned military conspiracy-the most significant in the history of Venezuela and perhaps of Latin America-which led to his unsuccessful coup attempt of 1992, and eventually to his popular electoral victory in 1998.His collaborator on this book is Ignacio Ramonet, the famous French journalist (and editor for many years of Le Monde diplomatique), who undertook a similar task with Fidel Castro (Fidel My Life).
544 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 23, 2016
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About the author
Hugo Chávez Frías
72 books35 followersHugo Rafael Chávez Frías (28 July 1954 – 5 March 2013) was a Venezuelan statesman and former career military officer who became president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela from 1999 until his death in 2013.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 21, 2020
Chavez's life story reads better than any fiction in the romantic, epic tradition.
August 12, 2023
This extended book of interviews, "Chávez: My First Life" is a joy. For an idea of Chávez before reading, the "Chávez: Inside the Coup" documentary on YouTube was shot while the April 2002 coup against him was happening. The book relates how a few days before it in 2002, the US Ambassador, Charles Shapiro, had assured him that his country “would never get involved in an adventure like a coup" against Venezuelan democracy.
Both Inside the Coup and My First Life offer a glimpse of an alternative Chávez to the Western government and media version. Another perspective comes from his achievements. Per Counterpunch, “Poverty at 70.8% in 1996 dropped to 21% in 2010. Extreme poverty, 40% in 1996 to 7.3% in 2010. In 1998, 387,000 people received old-age pensions; by 2012, 2.1 million. 1998, 18 doctors per 10,000; by 2012, 58. 1998 5,081 clinics, 13,721 in 2011. By 2012, the lowest regional inequality: down 54%."
Previous years featured the 1989 IMF ("shock therapy") riots, Chávez's 1992 leftwing military-civilian uprising, a dozen Venezuelan financial institutions collapsing by 1993; and by 1995, the murder of 50 people daily in Caracas.
Chávez is the ideal interviewee, a vibrant man of substance who is from the people and about the people. He illuminates, with guerilla history and quotes from poets, writers, and philosophers, minus pretension, his already vivid "first life" from earth floor and adobe walls of straw and mud onward, while side-stepping invitations for self-congratulation. He has a good, or forgiving, word for everyone, even coup plotters (other than perhaps Gabriel Puerta Aponte).
Politically most fascinating is Chávez's evocation, far more than Marx or Lenin, of the homegrown "pre-socialist thinker" and liberator of Latin American countries, Simón Bolívar. Bolívar resonated not only with Chávez: Chávez could talk of national liberation at the military academy and "no soldier could reject it; it had historical weight and contained all the revolutionary elements we needed to mobilize discontented offices."
Chávez reveals South American military alternatives to the US "Operation Condor"-sponsored and Fort Benning-trained regimes of torture and murder, as worthy role models. General Juan Velasco Alvaredo, as President of Peru from 1968 to 1975 nationalized oil, fishing, telecommunications, mines, and energy, plus enacting "the most far-reaching agrarian reforms of the 20th century in Latin America".
The most stunning moments here, politically, are of Chávez on TV given the opportunity to tell his compadres in the 1992 uprising to stand down, and the words he chose, including his famous "for now" that would turn him from a near-unknown to a folk hero.
More than this, though, the book is the broad swathe of Chávez's life: learning from the street, hawking homemade fruit sweets from age six or seven, to membership of a tolerant Venezuelan armed forces ("an institution of the people, very different from the tradition of hereditary "military castes" existing in other Latin American countries—in Chile, for example—where elite regiments are packed with the offspring of the upper classes").
Both Inside the Coup and My First Life offer a glimpse of an alternative Chávez to the Western government and media version. Another perspective comes from his achievements. Per Counterpunch, “Poverty at 70.8% in 1996 dropped to 21% in 2010. Extreme poverty, 40% in 1996 to 7.3% in 2010. In 1998, 387,000 people received old-age pensions; by 2012, 2.1 million. 1998, 18 doctors per 10,000; by 2012, 58. 1998 5,081 clinics, 13,721 in 2011. By 2012, the lowest regional inequality: down 54%."
Previous years featured the 1989 IMF ("shock therapy") riots, Chávez's 1992 leftwing military-civilian uprising, a dozen Venezuelan financial institutions collapsing by 1993; and by 1995, the murder of 50 people daily in Caracas.
Chávez is the ideal interviewee, a vibrant man of substance who is from the people and about the people. He illuminates, with guerilla history and quotes from poets, writers, and philosophers, minus pretension, his already vivid "first life" from earth floor and adobe walls of straw and mud onward, while side-stepping invitations for self-congratulation. He has a good, or forgiving, word for everyone, even coup plotters (other than perhaps Gabriel Puerta Aponte).
Politically most fascinating is Chávez's evocation, far more than Marx or Lenin, of the homegrown "pre-socialist thinker" and liberator of Latin American countries, Simón Bolívar. Bolívar resonated not only with Chávez: Chávez could talk of national liberation at the military academy and "no soldier could reject it; it had historical weight and contained all the revolutionary elements we needed to mobilize discontented offices."
Chávez reveals South American military alternatives to the US "Operation Condor"-sponsored and Fort Benning-trained regimes of torture and murder, as worthy role models. General Juan Velasco Alvaredo, as President of Peru from 1968 to 1975 nationalized oil, fishing, telecommunications, mines, and energy, plus enacting "the most far-reaching agrarian reforms of the 20th century in Latin America".
The most stunning moments here, politically, are of Chávez on TV given the opportunity to tell his compadres in the 1992 uprising to stand down, and the words he chose, including his famous "for now" that would turn him from a near-unknown to a folk hero.
More than this, though, the book is the broad swathe of Chávez's life: learning from the street, hawking homemade fruit sweets from age six or seven, to membership of a tolerant Venezuelan armed forces ("an institution of the people, very different from the tradition of hereditary "military castes" existing in other Latin American countries—in Chile, for example—where elite regiments are packed with the offspring of the upper classes").
October 12, 2016
A disgusting hagiography long steeped in the thickest nationalism. At a certain point I was admiring the moral integrity of Ignatio Ramonet who abstains from telling about the angels flying the future leader out of his mother at birth or about his first discourse when only 6 months old brought tears to the sad eyes of the old men in the village, let alone how Chaves fought the Chinese elephant poachers at the gates of his native village armed only with an oyster knife. Oh, those were the days!
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews