COLUMN ONE : Dazzling Debut in Venezuela : In office for only eight months, President Hugo Chavez has mesmerized his country and become a force in the region. He says he is a democrat, but others call him a despot.

The crowd at the hospital went wild when the president arrived.

They broke through the phalanx of soldiers in red berets, calling his name, pushing letters at him, rushing him with such fervor that the first lady was shaken up in the crush and retreated to the motorcade.

President Hugo Chavez--a boxily built ex-athlete sporting a blue suit and the easy smile of a working man among working people--kept going. He marched down newly painted hallways that his administration had swept clean of rubbish, the evidence of a neglect and corruption so scandalous that the hospital’s top floor had lacked running water for 15 years.

Chavez, 45, stopped at the bedside of Ramon Ortiz, a native of his home state whom a stroke had left half-paralyzed and unable to talk. With his good hand, Ortiz waved an identification card of the president’s Bolivarian political movement, struggling to sit up, moaning loudly.

“Calm down, papa!” Chavez ordered, and the patient’s whimpers subsided. “I can see you are a great Bolivarian. The important thing is that you have your family at your side. You will get better. Have faith!”

The president leaned over and rubbed Ortiz’s forehead with his own, as if transmitting healing energy through the contact.

This recent scene summed up the Chavez phenomenon. For many Venezuelans, the hospital symbolizes a thoroughly looted and decrepit nation. The patient represents the Venezuelan people, crippled by economic and political misfortune but imbued with hope.

And Chavez is the supposed savior: a populist former paratroop colonel and coup leader expected to resurrect a nation. Eight months after being elected, Chavez has consolidated an almost messianic popularity and power. His whirlwind style, self-proclaimed “democratic revolution” and virtual shutdown of Congress make him one of the most fascinating, enigmatic leaders in Latin America today.

Chavez captures the imagination of Latin Americans and Latin America-watchers alike. The region’s intellectuals have joined the debate over his impact on Venezuela--a top U.S. oil supplier and a key neighbor of violence-torn Colombia--and on a region disillusioned by traditional politicians and economists’ failure to alleviate poverty and injustice.

In a recent article titled “The Enigma of the Two Chavezes,” Gabriel Garcia Marquez recounted a conversation with Chavez aboard a flight from Havana to Caracas. The left-leaning, Nobel Prize-winning author described Chavez as charming, intellectually restless and in possession of a “supernatural” memory for the poems of Walt Whitman and Pablo Neruda.

But Garcia Marquez, a Colombian, echoed widespread doubts and fears about a leader who spent two years behind bars for instigating a 1992 coup attempt that caused at least 80 deaths.

“I was struck by the inspiration that I had traveled and talked delightfully with two opposite men,” he wrote. “One whom good luck had given the opportunity to save his nation. And the other, an illusionist, who could go down in history as just another despot.”

Chavez generates scorn, admiration and interest, just like the strongmen to whom he is routinely compared: his ally Fidel Castro, former Argentine President Juan Domingo Peron and President Alberto Fujimori of Peru. But Chavez remains a work in progress, a curious, sometimes disturbing melange of influences--militaristic discipline, contempt for corruption, simultaneous affinities for heroes and for outlaws. For better or worse, he seems destined to become a dominant figure beyond Venezuela’s borders.

“Everyone feels this is kind of like a threshold experience for Latin America,” said Eric Ekvall, a veteran U.S.-born political consultant here.

Changes Sweep Away Country’s Congress

Unlike Fujimori, whose tanks shut down the Peruvian Congress in 1992, Chavez can make the case that his methods are democratic. After his December election, his Patriotic Pole coalition won resounding victories in two ballots that created an assembly to write a new, reformist constitution.

In recent days, that assembly delivered the coup de grace to an already moribund Congress by declaring a “legislative emergency” and absorbing parliamentary functions. Street skirmishes broke out as opposition legislators climbed fences to get into the Congress building and alleged that a dictatorial takeover was underway. Chavez called his opponents “gangsters” and defied their attempt to withhold funding for presidential trips.

Moreover, last week the chief justice of the Supreme Court resigned to protest the assembly’s assertion of emergency judicial powers to pursue pending corruption cases against about 2,000 judges.

Even before the assembly went into action, the traditional governing elite here had all but evaporated, repudiated by voters. Chavez insists that Congress will reopen after the new constitution is ratified and new elections are held by year’s end. (The constitution would permit reelection of the president, who now cannot hold consecutive terms.)

“Our intention is to rebuild institutions, to strengthen democracy,” Chavez told journalists at the presidential palace recently. “We respect our adversaries and their ideas. We respect liberties. We persecute no one.”

The seven-member opposition bloc in the 131-seat assembly and other critics disagree. Historian Jorge Olavarria, an assembly member, describes the president’s moves as “an unfilmable coup d’etat.”

“You don’t have a sergeant with a machine gun evicting a Supreme Court justice,” said Olavarria, a former Chavez supporter. “[But] an assembly has convened to write a new constitution and, in their first act, they decide they will also do everything the new constitution would permit. . . . Venezuela during its history has been heroic and tragic but never ridiculous. It is becoming ridiculous.”

Another hot-button issue in which Chavez is involved, especially for U.S. diplomats, is Colombia, where anarchic combat among security forces, leftist guerrillas, drug lords and rightist militias threatens regional stability. Chavez has angered Colombian leaders by declaring that he will meet soon with representatives of the Colombian guerrillas in Venezuela to discuss a peace plan.

“Chavez could become not just another player in the Colombian labyrinth but a very dangerous player,” Olavarria said, suggesting that the president’s sympathies lie closer to the guerrillas than to the Colombian government.

Chavez responds that he can do what he pleases on his own soil. He says he wants to help resolve a conflict that is having a direct impact on Venezuela, particularly along a lawless border where Colombian guerrillas kidnap Venezuelan ranchers, hijack planes and clash with Venezuelan troops.

“No country is more affected than ours,” Chavez said. “What moves me is exclusively a desire for peace.”

Although the U.S. State Department expresses growing concern about the moves against Congress, U.S. officials have generally given the president the benefit of the doubt. They say his deeds are more restrained than his sometimes incendiary rhetoric.

For example: Chavez, citing national sovereignty, has prohibited U.S. anti-drug surveillance planes from entering Venezuelan airspace. But his security forces have seized twice the quantity of drugs so far this year that the last government did in all of 1998.

The disconnect between words and deeds, between the two Chavezes, was evident during the president’s recent conversation with journalists. Shedding the theatrical baritone of his marathon speeches, Chavez was engaging and down to earth. He listened carefully, joked about his long-windedness and, with Caribbean cordiality, addressed questioners as hermano (brother).

The president also downplayed past statements that were interpreted as menacing, as when he said his opponents “should keep real quiet.” His habit of improvising speeches occasionally gets him into trouble, he said.

“Sometimes I use expressions, it is a style,” he said. “But no one can say we are threatening anyone, we are muzzling anyone.”

Words have consequences, though, especially on the international front. Chavez practically solicited criticism by inviting Saddam Hussein and Moammar Kadafi to an OPEC meeting here next year. He also wrote an affectionate letter to a notorious Venezuelan-born terrorist, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, known as “Carlos the Jackal,” who is serving a life sentence for murder in France. Chavez expressed “profound faith in the cause and the mission, for now and always.”

Most alarming to many are Chavez’s contacts with Norberto Ceresole, a shadowy, anti-Semitic ideologue and author from Argentina tied to the “painted faces” commandos--Argentine extremists who attempted several armed uprisings a decade ago. They later formed a rightist fringe party whose members under suspicion of helping terrorists bomb a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1994, killing 86 people.

Ceresole accompanied Chavez in the mid-1990s when the future president roamed Venezuela sowing the seeds of his upstart political coalition, according to Foreign Minister Jose Vicente Rangel.

Authorities ejected Ceresole from Venezuela in 1995, but he returned after Chavez became president. Opposition leaders accused Ceresole of acting as a secret advisor to the president, and the Argentine again left Venezuela. Ceresole praises the Chavez government as his ideal of a nationalist, “post-democratic” Latin American regime.

Chavez has not expressed intolerant attitudes, and the president’s defenders say Ceresole was not an advisor. The president acknowledges a friendship with Ceresole, said Rangel, but he rejects his anti-Semitism.

Chavez has been “Satanized” by Venezuelan elites and superficial press coverage, Rangel said. “He is not a fascist,” he said. “If people dig past the anecdotes, past the circumstantial, there is an interesting phenomenon here. It is a process of true change without violence.”

Among the changes during Chavez’s reign have been an early masterstroke by his energy minister, who sat down with OPEC representatives and negotiated an end to Venezuela’s practice of oil overproduction. The price of Venezuelan oil shot from $9 a barrel to about $18, giving the administration direly needed new resources to deal with the nation’s economic mess--including a yawning budget deficit and 20% unemployment.

Chavez has also cut the budget by 10% and has plans to fuse 20 ministries into 12 and continue privatization in such sectors as electricity.

Another change is Chavez’s commitment to the poor, who make up about two-thirds of the population. Predecessors “turned the [presidential] palace into a house of business for themselves and their mistresses,” said Alfredo Pena, who resigned as Chavez’s chief of staff to serve on the constitutional assembly.

In contrast, no one accuses Chavez of being dishonest or lazy. He works 18-hour days, running his entourage ragged with late-night meetings, forays into slums and grand plans to manufacture a Venezuelan automobile and to populate the sparse southern interior.

Chavez has also eliminated a $100 registration fee for public schools, increasing the rolls by 600,000 students, and created 519 schools, including one at the headquarters of the presidential honor guard. The construction and repair of schools and hospitals are part of a $950-million public works plan in which soldiers work alongside civilians. Most Venezuelans welcome the role of the military, which has an unusually good image.

Nonetheless, the insertion of the military into public life worries critics. As Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa pointed out recently in a blistering anti-Chavez essay, the notion that soldiers can impose discipline and efficiency on a society has produced disasters in Latin America.

Man of Ideas, Man of Action

Chavez’s inner circle is not monolithically military. It includes former guerrillas, university professors and journalists. Its members are as eclectic as their president, a voracious reader who can quote Abraham Lincoln and Eduardo Galeano, dean of the continent’s leftist thinkers, in the same sentence.

Chavez has written plays and poems, has dabbled in painting and was a talented baseball player who joined the army as a route to the major leagues. This restless mix--man of action and man of ideas--adds to a cult-like mystique. Caracas is full of street vendors selling pocket-sized editions of his favorite book about military philosophy, “The Oracle of the Warrior.”

It is not a huge exaggeration to compare Chavez’s popularity among Venezuelans today to that of his idol, Gen. Simon Bolivar, the early 19th century liberator who dreamed of uniting South American nations into a glorious alliance. Chavez’s absolute control of the political landscape gives him a rare opportunity to remake a nation with vast potential.

But even supporters say the clock is ticking, that the government needs to move. The economy is an Achilles’ heel, the decision-makers are slow and divided, and political turmoil makes investors nervous, analysts say.

The coming months will reveal whether Chavez can preserve democracy and move ahead with his visions of progress. Venezuelans want him to live up to their almost impossible expectations. They want desperately for him not to turn into another aloof, parasitic ruler of the kind he says he despises, the ones who neglect the people and spend their time jetting off to pompous summit meetings.

“We go from summit to summit,” Chavez said recently. “And our citizens go from abyss to abyss.”

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Rotella was recently on assignment in Venezuela.

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Considering Chavez

Respected Latin American writers and political thinkers have joined the regional debate about Hugo Chavez, Venezuela’s new president, and whether his “democratic revolution” represents true reform or a menace to democracy.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Peruvian author and former presidential candidate

“That such an elevated number of Venezuelans support the populist and autocratic deliriums of the laughable personage that is Hugo Chavez does not make him a democrat: It only reveals the extremes of desperation, frustration and lack of civic culture in Venezuelan society.”

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Nobel Prize-winning Colombian author

“He has the immediate cordiality and the creole charm of a pure Venezuelan. . . . As he told me about his life I discovered a personality that did not correspond in the least to the image of the despot we have formed through the media. He was another Chavez. Which of the two was the real one?”

Tomas Eloy Martinez

Argentine novelist and professor

“Chavez is the last authoritarian democrat that this continent of madhouse rulers has offered the 20th century. His story is so similar to that of Juan Peron that Chavez himself has more than once underlined the similarities in campaign speeches.”

Jorge Castaneda

Mexican political scientist and author

“Chavez is not Peron. His appearance on the scene, his strength and popularity and his perspectives should not be simplified to the extent of ignoring or disdaining the more complex explanations for the rise of what could constitute a novel element in the Latin American political panorama.”