Seven Oaks Magazine.

For admirers and critics alike, the polarized discussion around the radical political process unfolding in Venezuela in recent years has often taken the form of a debate over the motivations of the country’s fiery president, Hugo Chavez. Whether he is cast as a demagogue, a dictator, or as a heroic saviour of the poor, the argument about what is known as the Bolivarian Revolution inevitably seems to get reduced to an argument about the man who infamously called George W. Bush “the Devil” from the pulpit of the United Nations.

Missing in the action of this battle of Bush vs. Chavez – which is the title, in fact, of a new account of “Washington’s War on Venezuela” by U.S. lawyer and activist Eva Golinger – is the context that gave rise to what is today arguably the world’s most radical and significant political movement. The world knows precious little about Venezuela before Chavez, who was first elected in December 1998. And that’s where Charles Hardy’s unique new book, Cowboy in Caracas, comes in.

The writer of this North American’s memoir of el proceso and the years predating Chavez’s explosion onto the scene, Hardy is not your typical foreign correspondent, nor a mere revolutionary tourist.

The author, in fact, as a Catholic priest working for the Maryknoll missionaries, lived for years in Nueva Tacagua, one of the teeming poor barrios on the hills that surround the Venezuelan capital. There for a number of years in the late 1980s, Hardy shared the reality of the poor majority.

In those years, respectable foreign commentators lauded Venezuela as a stable democracy and reliable supplier of cheap oil, and the desperate poverty was invisible. Hardy brings it out into the light. Along with his co-habitants of cardboard walled tenements, he describes enduring torturously scarce clean water, a total lack of sewage, and little to no access to health care, education and meaningful employment. Hardy’s privilege, as an American, allowed him to escape the barrio one day a week, and thus to observe some of the arrogance and racism of Venezuela’s elite.

His status as a Man of God may have helped him escape death during el Caracazo in 1989. A forgotten episode that took place several months before the Tiananmen Massacre in China, the police and armed forces savagely repressed protests and riots against a series of unpopular neo-liberal austerity measures. During these dangerous days, Hardy risked his neck to keep residents of Nueva Tacagua alive. It is estimated that as many as 3000 died during el Caracazo. But in those days the seeds of a new Venezuela were planted. Among those outraged by the bloodshed, and galvanized to rebellion, was a young army officer named Hugo Chavez Frias.

Charles Hardy left Caracas in the early 1990s, only to return a couple years later, no longer as a missionary. He has stayed and observed with great hope the popular movement that has so angered the rich of Venezuela and, indeed, the powers-that-be throughout the world.

To get an idea about where the country is heading, this book is a good place to start. His memoir serves as a useful reminder that the historic events of today haven’t emerged merely from the exhortations of a charismatic politician. Instead, the Bolivarian Revolution can better be understood as the long overdue expression of the hopes of millions of people who are no longer resigned to their fate and without hope.