Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is driving across the plains of Venezuela, raving about a Hollywood film in which the enslaved hero rises up to challenge the emperor of Rome.
"Gladiator -- What a movie! I saw it three times," the president told a reporter traveling with him in a Toyota 4Runner, along with his daughter and a state governor. "It's confronting the empire and confronting evil. ... And you end up relating to that gladiator."
The parallel is unstated but clear. To Chavez, the US is the empire, and he is the protagonist waging an epic struggle to bring justice to the oppressed of Venezuela and the world.
PHOTO: AP
In the eight years since he took office, Chavez has emerged as Latin America's most visible and controversial leader, electrifying leftist movements internationally while controlling a vast source of oil. Labeled a threat by the US government, he captured the world's attention a year ago at the UN General Assembly by comparing US President George W. Bush to Satan -- and he is likely to be just as defiant if he returns as scheduled to the UN this week.
Underneath the fiery persona is a man who both firmly believes in his vision and is shrewd enough to know how to sell it. Chavez sees the world in black and white and casts himself as crusader, a role that is at once genuine and expedient. He truly empathizes with the common people of Venezuela, but it is also vital for him to hear their cheers, be their hero and feel the power.
"Vamonos," Chavez bellows to his entourage in the hotel lobby. "It's a beautiful day."
Chavez gets behind the wheel, seatbelt off, and the motorcade sets out on a road trip through Apure State. He is visibly relaxed to be back in these southern plains, where he was once stationed as a soldier.
Entering a traffic circle, he abruptly veers away from the motorcade for a view of the Apure River, despite protests from his 27-year-old daughter Maria in the backseat.
To understand Chavez, it helps to see these plains, spreading lush and green in the rainy season, all the way from the Venezuelan Andes in the west to the Orinoco River in the east. This is the land where Chavez grew up poor in the town of Sabaneta and later spent three formative years in Apure. It is a personal history he draws on often in his speeches.
"A man from the plains, from these great open spaces ... tends to be a nomad, tends not to see barriers. You don't see barriers from childhood on. What you see is the horizon," says Chavez, whose first question to a foreigner is often: "Where are you from?"
The stereotype in Venezuela is that people from the plains, or llaneros, tend to be talkative, boisterous cowboy types with a rich tradition of folklore. Chavez fits the bill.
"I have deep roots here," he says. "When I die I want them to bury me here in this savanna, anywhere, because you feel like a part of it."
He says it was the injustice he saw here -- of "impoverished people living atop a sea of oil" -- that drove him in the 1980s to lead a secret dissident group.
As he drives past stands where poor people still sell pineapples and cantaloupes today, he reflects, "We're in the process of freeing the slaves. It's still slavery, disguised."
He has expressed the idea so often that it sounds almost rehearsed, yet still seems heartfelt.
The extent to which Chavez is actually leading a liberation struggle -- or just using Venezuela's oil wealth to buy popularity -- is one of the country's great debates. His government is carrying out agrarian reform and pouring billions of dollars into anti-poverty programs.
But to some old friends like Douglas Bravo -- a former Marxist guerrilla leader of the 1960s and 1970s -- a new Chavista elite today is in a power struggle with competing bourgeois factions.
"Chavez is an intelligent man, a man who dominates that game of the real elements of power and has the capacity to be constantly learning," argues Bravo, who respects Chavez but disagrees strongly with his policy of forming joint ventures with multinational oil companies.
Much has changed since the charismatic lieutenant colonel led a failed coup in 1992.
Chavez is now at the apex of power in one of the world's top oil-producing countries, accustomed to the finest tailored suits and the leather seats of the presidential jet.
Yet he seems to believe he is still that poor soldier from the plains, leading a revolution.
"I'm still a subversive," he says. "I think the entire world has to be subverted."
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