Fidel's Heir.(Hugo Chavez)

A few years ago, when Hugo Chavez, the President of Venezuela, said that he wanted a new jet to replace the nearly thirty-year-old Boeing bequeathed to him by his predecessor, his critics raised an outcry. But Chavez went ahead with his plans. His new plane, which cost sixty-five million dollars, is a gleaming white Airbus A-319, with a white leather interior, seating for sixty passengers, and a private compartment. The folding seat-back trays have gold-colored hinges, and there is plenty of legroom.

Chavez has spent more than a year altogether on trips abroad since taking office, in February, 1999, and so the jet is a kind of second home. His seat bears an embossed leather Presidential seal. Paintings of nineteenth-century Latin-American independence heroes hang on the walls, including a prominent one of Simon Bolivar, known as El Libertador. Bolivar led military campaigns to free large parts of South America from Spanish rule, and in 1819 he helped create a vast nation called Gran Colombia, which encompassed the present-day republics of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Panama. But political rivalries and internecine warfare frustrated Bolivar's dream of a United States of South America, and Gran Colombia fell apart soon after his death, in 1830.

Bolivar is Chavez's political muse; Chavez quotes and invokes him constantly, and is unabashed about his desire to resuscitate Bolivar's dream of a united Latin America. In his first year in office, Chavez held a successful referendum to draft a new constitution, which officially renamed the country the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. More remarkably, he has adopted Fidel Castro as his contemporary role model and socialism as his political ideal, and, a decade and a half after the collapse of the Soviet Union, is leading a left-wing revival across Latin America. Chavez's hemispheric ambitions have made him one of the most compelling, audacious, and polarizing figures in the world--one of a number of post-Cold War leaders trying to form regional power blocs. A generation ago, Castro sought to undermine United States authority by supporting armed guerrilla forces; Chavez has pursued that goal mainly by using money--thanks, in large measure, to U.S. oil purchases. Venezuela is the fifth-largest supplier of oil to the U. S., providing around a million barrels a day, and its proved oil reserves are among the world's largest.

One recent Sunday, I flew with Chavez to La Faja del Orinoco, an oil-rich belt of land in eastern Venezuela. In May, 2007, Chavez ordered the nationalization of pumping and refining facilities in La Faja owned by foreign oil companies. The move was one of a series of measures that Chavez had taken to increase Venezuela's share of oil revenues, including increases in royalty payments from 16.6 per cent to 33.3 per cent, and its ownership stake from around forty to at least sixty per cent. (As recently as 2004, these companies were paying royalties of one per cent of the oil's value.) Most of the oil companies, including Chevron and B.P., agreed to the terms; ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil did not, and pulled out.

ExxonMobil had been pumping as many as a hundred and twenty thousand barrels a day out of La Faja. Seeking compensation, the company secured injunctions from judges in the United States, Great Britain, and the Netherlands that froze up to twelve billion dollars in overseas assets of Venezuela's state oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela, S.A., or P.D.V.S.A. Chavez, decrying "imperialist aggression," threatened to cut off all oil sales to the United States. Analysts estimate that if he should ever make good on that threat the price, which has already risen vertiginously, would spiral even farther upward. (A London court later overturned the British injunction, in what was seen as a major victory for Chavez, but the legal fight continues. ExxonMobil will not say publicly how much it asked for, except that the sum is "multiple billions of dollars.")

On the plane to La Faja were several of Chavez's ministers and aides, along with a dozen or so bodyguards and three Cuban doctors, who travel with him everywhere. Just after boarding, Chavez pushed through the curtains from his compartment to the main cabin and greeted everyone. He joked that the Cuban doctors must be guerrillas on an "internationalist mission." Halfway through the hour-long flight, I joined Chavez in his compartment. Chavez, who is about five feet seven, is a youthful-looking fifty-three, and has a thick neck and chest. He introduced me to General Gustavo Rangel, his Defense Minister, and Rene Vargas, Ecuador's Ambassador to Venezuela.

Chavez began our conversation by asking, "Tell us, why didn't Saddam put up more of a fight when the Yankees invaded?" Before I could reply, General Rangel said that the Americans had successfully degraded Iraq's air-defense system in the run-up to the war. Chavez looked at me for confirmation, and when I agreed he smiled, and said that, just in case the Americans were thinking of doing anything similar to Venezuela, he had bought an air-defense system from Belarus. (In the past four years, Venezuela has spent four billion dollars on foreign arms purchases, mostly from Russia.) The Belarusian system probably wasn't the most sophisticated in the world, Chavez said, but it was what Venezuela could get: "We do what we can to defend ourselves."