Chavez's magical realism: how the Comandante may get the last laugh, even from the grave.

• Author: Kurtz-Phelan, Daniel
• Position: On political books - Comandante: Hugo Chavez's Venezuela - Book review

Comandante: Hugo Chavez's Venezuela

by Rory Carroll

Penguin Press HC, 320 pp.

For months, the enemies of Hugo Chavez have hardly even tried to conceal their delight at his apparent end. With the Venezuelan president lying uncharacteristically silent on what may be his deathbed, the goal that has obsessed but eluded them for fifteen years seems within reach--thanks, ultimately, not to elite machinations or imperial meddling, but to simple mortality. The long chavista nightmare, as they see it, is finally over.

But if Chavez's past teaches us anything, it is that opponents should think twice before celebrating his defeat. His greatest successes have always come just as his antagonists are preparing to declare victory. In the early 1990s, when he was an obscure lieutenant colonel, his disastrously inept attempt to overthrow the government won him national fame and launched his political career. A decade later, a short-lived coup cheered on by the Bush administration secured his place as the world's premier anti-imperial hero and revolutionary standard-bearer. When the Venezuelan opposition was on the verge of deposing him in a referendum, oil prices shot up, and he poured the huge profits into popular social programs and cemented his control. If the pattern holds, Chavez will somehow get the last laugh after all, even from the grave.

Chavez has attributed these repeated resurrections to divine favor and good luck. The real explanation may have more to do with sheer political skill--with his "cunning, foresight, and subtlety," as Rory Carroll puts it in Comandante: Hugo Chavez's Venezuela, his sharply observed portrait of Chavez in power. Carroll, a correspondent for the Guardian, watches Chavez at work--powerfully and genuinely human in moments, clownishly charismatic in others, diabolically manipulative when necessary--and admits that "the effect [is] mesmerizing." Yet for Carroll, this appreciation only heightens the tragedy of what Chavez's "Bolivarian revolution" has wrought: "Here was a sublimely gifted politician with empathy for the poor and the power of Croesus--and the result, fiasco."

In a decade and a half as Venezuela's president (and almost as long as a global figure, notorious or valiant according to taste), Chavez has attracted plenty of chroniclers. Most of their chronicles, however, have been warped by adulation or animosity. Defenders tend to dismiss criticism as the griping of a vanquished predatory elite; detractors let...