¡Hugo!: The Hugo Chávez Story from Mud Hut to Perpetual Revolution
Bart Jones
2008, Bodley Head
608 pages
IT HAS TAKEN a US reporter to challenge the purposeful distortions about the Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez repeated on a daily basis like mantras in the … US press. All credit to Jones for providing a bit of balance to make the Bolivarian revolutionary’s many enemies think carefully about the contradictions and hypocrisy inherent in their hysterical rants. It is about time someone with a bit of backbone stood up and told the truth, for we all know why Washington and Big Oil hates Hugo … he’s a socialist and he doesn’t do what he’s told. An experienced foreign correspondent who has based much of this book on first-hand experience of Venezuela and interviews with the man himself, Jones captures the defiant, and at times vulgar, character of Chávez with style, and his account will leave readers in no doubt why the Venezuelan strongman retains so much popularity among a people who can still remember how the country’s economy was massaged for decades by a privileged few. – EC
