In early 1999, Colombian novelist Gabriel García Marquez shared a plane trip with Hugo Chavez, who had just been elected to the presidency of Venezuela. Chavez had launched himself upon the political stage in 1992 at the head of a group of left-wing military men who tried to take power in a coup. This had collapsed; but in the aftermath, his time in prison only strengthened Chavez's appeal as a national hero, speaking for the dispossessed. In 1998, he ran for president against (this is, it seems, very Venezuelan) a former beauty queen, and won. The oligarchy was appalled. Here was a man who - while impressively well-read, and something of a scholar of Simon Bolivar, the great leader of South American independence - was also unmistakably the product of a poor background, and quite proud of that. Chavez was all rough edges. And he was angry that a country with the largest oil reserves outside of the Middle East should have done so badly by people like himself.

During their impromptu interview, the Nobel laureate got a sense of the politician's charisma. The combination of passion and showmanship left Marquez feeling ambivalent about Chavez, despite their shared left-wing politics. "I was struck by the impression that I had traveled and talked delightfully with two opposite men," wrote Marquez in an essay. "One who good luck had given the opportunity to save his nation. And the other, an illusionist, who could go down in history as just another despot."

Media coverage in the United States has leaned heavily toward the second interpretation - though it does on occasion also treat him as a buffoon, perhaps for balance. Two recent biographies of Chavez offer somewhat more nuanced readings of his career.

Hugo! by Bart Jones, a reporter for Newsday who previously served as Associated Press correspondent in Venezuela, is by far the more sympathetic of the two portraits - a book fully willing to do what American journalists mostly have avoided, which is to take Chavez seriously as a product both of local problems and of Latin American revolutionary traditions. (The title inevitably calls to mind the biopic Che! starring Omar Sharif.)

It is also the most comprehensive of the available books on Chavez - much more so than Cristina Marcano and Alberto Barrera Tyszka's Hugo Chavez, the subtitle of which calls it "the definitive biography." The authors are Venezuelan journalists who wrote their book (originally published in Spanish in 2004) for a public already saturated with the legend of the president's impoverished childhood and astonishing rise to power.

Indeed, it would be almost impossible for the country's citizens not to know the saga, given Chavez's regular marathon broadcasts on radio and TV in which he ruminates about the past, discusses political matters, and responds to mail from his audience. (Imagine a fusion of Ross Perot, Garrison Keillor and Noam Chomsky.) A sizable mass of documentation and commentary about his career has also been published by former comrades who broke ranks with him.

Little of this will be known to most American readers. Nor can Chavez's references to Bolivar - let alone to leading figures from 19th century revolts in Venezuela - be taken as self-explanatory here. So Jones devotes a considerable part of Hugo! to telling stories (biographical and historical) that Marcano and Tyszka can largely take for granted in their book.

Apart from making for a richer narrative, this approach has the benefit of showing Chavez as less an ideologue than a man improvising his program as he goes along. "It was a mix of things," writes Jones, "and would continue to add new elements as it developed. It eventually incorporated everything from Tony Blair's 'Third Way' in England to Mao's thoughts on China, although Chavez's central underlying motivation was to correct the social injustices of Venezuela."

Jones takes those injustices seriously, and sees the rise of Chavez as an understandable if unexpected response to the perennial corruption and indifference of the Venezuelan elite. The biographer acknowledges the president's ego, which is large enough to need its own zip code. But he is willing to credit Chavez with both benign intentions and some degree of success in improving conditions among the country's poorest citizens.

Marcano and Tyszka are more skeptical. They open Hugo Chavez with a long quotation from Thomas Hobbes about the "general inclination of all mankind" for "a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death."

They pass very quickly over the stories of his humble upbringing, yet do not hesitate to speculate that it may be the key to "the incendiary tone of his political rhetoric." Some who know him "feel there is a perpetual aggression that they believe stems from a deep-seated resentment regarding his early childhood experiences."

Chavez, they write, "masterfully exploits the disenchantment of people who feel excluded for whatever reason." That seems like a roundabout way of suggesting that his appeal derives from psychological misery, rather than the economic sort. They infer that Chavez believes "that the military order should always prevail over the civil" and otherwise seem inclined to regard Chavez as an old-fashioned caudillo (basically, a military-political chief with a cult of personality).

A recurrent theme of Marcano and Tyszka is that Chavez has embarked upon "the Cubanization of Venezuela" through "the ever-increasing authority of state institutions; the escalating hostility towards the United States; ... and the government's desire to militarize civilian life."

The regime has its share of authoritarian traits; and the latest revision of the constitution would permit the Chavez brand of populist militarism to hold power for decades to come. But the fact that two journalists at a prominent Venezuelan paper are able to publish such a critical book about the country's jefe suggests that the place is not quite a totalitarian hellhole.

Hugo Chavez is useful as a counterweight to the blither parts of Hugo! Taken together, they add up to a suggestion that Gabriel García Marquez was right: The leader "given the opportunity to save his nation ... could go down in history as just another despot."