Revealing the Chavez Paradox

He's the Latin American strongman Americans love to hate. Presiding over a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in 2006, he proclaimed U.S. president George W. Bush the devil, wondering aloud if dignitaries could smell a whiff of sulfur in the air.

Despite his undiplomatic bombast and predilection for hyperbole, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez remains popular with his people, proclaiming his leadership as the vanguard for a continent-wide "Bolivarian" revolution of democratic socialism for a new century.

Swollen with oil wealth and surrounded by democracies, Chavez has focused his efforts on trying to address the huge gap in wages and employment that plagues his export-based economy by nationalizing land, building low-income housing and ushering in new "collective" government employment programs.

But as a new documentary from Frontline points out, there remains a huge chasm between what Chavez has promised and what he's been able to deliver.

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"Despite surely thousands of hours of speeches and many billions of dollars in oil wealth pumped into the economy, we don't see huge changes," New Yorker journalist Jon Lee Anderson tells Frontline. "We see in fact that most of Hugo Chavez's revolutionary programs, his inventions to ameliorate and alleviate the social ills at home, simply have not worked."

A day after Chavez's party won 17 out of 22 gubernatorial elections in Venezuela, Frontline's documentary titled "The Hugo Chavez Show" provides a penetrating look into the complexities of the strongman's rise to power, his outreach to pariah nations, the manipulation of national media and his virulent anti-American streak.

The documentary is so thorough that it shatters the image of Chavez as caricature, painting a picture of the leader with such clarity that it makes you wonder how a guy like this can still cling to power in the modern age.

"He is very impulsive, dominated by his tongue," says Tal Cual newspaper editor Teodoro Petkoff. "So he comes out with things that he has to take back."

This is not some closed off, North Korean tyrant we're talking about here; Chavez is the leader of an elected government who allows a great deal of free speech, subjects himself to a democratic process and airs a weekly television show to discuss with the nation - and the world, if it's listening -- what's on his mind.

"He tells stories about his youth, he sings. It starts when the president decides it starts and it finishes when he's ready to finish," Economist reporter Phil Gunson tells Frontline. "It has a rough script, but it's basically the president improvising."

Take, for example, Chavez's continued rhetorical flourishes of an imminent CIA invasion. As one expert explains, Venezuela exports 1.5 million barrels of heavy crude oil to the United States per day - oil that can only be refined in specialized U.S. plants.

That's 60 percent of the country's oil exports.

"If Chavez cuts his supplies to the United States, he will remain in power a few weeks," former OPEC president Humberto Berti tells Frontline.

It's from this seemingly free access to opponents of Chavez, his supporters and open media sources that "The Hugo Chavez Show" gains much of its documentary strength. The Hugo Chavez you see from Frontline is a kaleidoscopic figure, one minute singing soft ballads of Venezuelan beauty, the next he's thumping his fist in anger at the death of a Colombian Marxist rebel leader with the help of American agents of the CIA.

Is he a madman, or a genius?

"Chavez is a myth in progress. He's entering into mythic territory," says Alberto Barrera, author of "Hugo Chavez."

"I think he sees himself as being different," Barrera adds. "He wants to be a legend."

Watching "The Hugo Chavez Show," it's hard to tell where Chavez is going with all his bombast. But one thing's for sure, it seems to be working. Chavez has been in power for nearly 10 years, and if local elections held Nov. 24 say anything, the final verdict on his style and substance is read at the ballot box.

Frontline's "The Hugo Chavez Show" will air Nov. 25 on Public Television stations nationwide.