Chávez still captivates

IT SEEMS that Hugo Chávez is on his last legs. Venezuela’s president has been battling cancer since the summer of 2011.

He disappeared from the public eye in December, too sick even to attend his inauguration on Jan 10. The only news of him comes from his Twitter account. Rumours abound that he’s in palliative care. What’s for sure is that Venezuela has never seen the likes of him before.

Ruthless, mercurial, woefully half-baked in his economic thinking but resolute in his defence of the poor, his personality comes vividly to light in Rory Carroll’s timely, nuanced biography, Comandante: Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela. Carroll, who was born and raised in Dublin, lived in Venezuela’s capital Caracas for six years from Sept 2006 while covering South America for The Guardian.