Hugo Chavez was born on July 28, 1954 in the mud-brick house of his grandmother, Rosa Ines Chavez. It was in a small farming town in the western Venezuelan state of Barinas.
The son of teachers, Chavez was a 1975 graduate of Venezuelan’s Military Academy. Having risen to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the army, he participated in an unsuccessful coup against President Carlos Andres Perez in 1992 that resulted in a short term jail.
He is of mixed Amerindian, African and Spanish decent, much like Bolivar.
Early political influences on Chavez included his grandmother, a local Communist Party member. His grandmother, to whom he felt a deep emotional bond, told him stories about Ezequiel Zamora, who had fought his greatest battle in the region.
While in the military, Chavez founded the nationalistic and left-leaning Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement, which was later transformed into the Fifth Republic Movement in the 1998 elections when Chavez was first elected President.
Hugo Chavez
