Quotes of the Day

President Hugo Chávez wasn't the only Venezuelan who rose from the political dead after the mayhem of April 2002 — when two days after being ousted in a civilian-military coup he was restored to power by throngs of his supporters. Henrique Capriles Radonski, then the 29-year-old mayor of a Caracas borough — and a political opponent of Chávez — also experienced demise and resurrection in that episode. After the coup, Chávez's socialist government accused Capriles of inciting an anti-Chávez riot outside the Cuban embassy during the putsch. Capriles insisted that he'd tried to prevent the unrest, but he was jailed for four months in the headquarters of Venezuela's secret police (though he says he wasn't roughed up). He was eventually acquitted in a trial.

A decade later, the lingering tension between Capriles and Chávez has only grown, and for the first time since Chávez's prosecutors threw Capriles into a jail cell, the younger man senses a new vulnerability in his older rival. Now a state governor, Capriles, 39, has emerged as the first ever viable challenger to the radical, anti-U.S. Chávez, who has been President of Venezuela, the western hemisphere's most oil-rich nation, since 1999. Chávez has tried to dismiss Capriles, a former tax attorney and a scion of a wealthy Caracas family, as a bourgeois sifrino, or yuppie. But Capriles, a center-right politico heavily favored to win the opposition alliance's presidential primary on Feb. 12, has shown a common touch that could threaten Chávez's re-election bid in the Oct. 7 general election. In one credible poll last summer, Capriles was almost tied with Chávez (though his numbers have dropped since). "I'm not part of the old Venezuelan political establishment" that Chávez toppled in the 1998 election, Capriles told TIME at his Caracas campaign office. "I'm the last person he wants to be a candidate against him."

Capriles' campaign received a big boost on Jan. 24 when another leading opposition candidate, Leopoldo López, quit the primary race and threw his support behind Capriles. Chávez — who last month dismissed the criticism of another opposition contender, María Corina Machado, by declaring, "The eagle doesn't hunt flies" — seemed unimpressed by the Capriles-López pact. But even though Chávez remains Venezuela's most popular political figure, his ongoing battle with cancer has raised questions about his campaign stamina, and while he was once blessed with possibly the most feckless and fractured opposition in Latin America, he finally faces a more adept and unified front. "I feel proud," López said in backing Capriles, "that together we're demonstrating we can act with greatness."

Greatness is still a ways off, but the opposition parties are at least learning from their earlier blunders, like trying a coup in 2002. The key thing Chávez's rivals had to correct was their clueless depiction of him as a left-wing leviathan who suddenly burst forth from his native llanos, or plains, through no fault of their own. Pols like Capriles seem to understand that, in fact, Chávez's revolution was the result of decades of brazenly corrupt rule by Venezuela's political and business elite, which left most of the country in poverty. "Chávez did well to identify poverty as the priority in Venezuela," says Capriles, "and if we as the opposition don't engage that social reality, then it's game over for us."

Which is why Capriles, elected governor of Miranda state (adjoining Caracas) in 2008, has loaded his playbook with anti-poverty programs like Hambre Cero, or Zero Hunger. It provides food, housing, education and health care as well as job and business training for people like Deicis Pérez, 46, a poor, single mother of six in the rural Miranda town of San Antonio de Yare, the sort of traditionally Chavista barrio Capriles will need to win over. "We need something that doesn't just help us get by but helps us get ahead," Pérez says at a microenterprise workshop where she and two dozen other women are learning how to create and finance confection businesses. "I feel like the governor gets that."

It's no accident that Hambre Cero takes its name from a campaign hatched by former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who in the 2000s made the "third way" mix of socialism and capitalism the preferred model for most of Latin America's left — and for Capriles. To help the poor "more effectively, you also have to develop the country's economic capacity," he insists, blaming Chávez's anticapitalist drive to nationalize businesses and properties for Venezuela's 28% inflation rate, Latin America's highest, and its abysmal level of foreign investment.

Although Capriles shares few if any of Chávez's more radical foreign policy positions, he's been smart about keeping his distance from the U.S., the imperialista bogeyman that Chávez regularly evokes to whip up his base. "I understand the U.S. wants to promote democracy," says Capriles. "But it also has to understand that the best way to help Venezuela is to let Venezuelans take care of it."

Critics say Capriles, whose family owns Venezuela's largest chain of movie theaters, owes his fast political rise to his privileged upbringing. But Capriles' backers say he's no coddled rich kid and point to his resilience during the 2002 jail ordeal. Capriles, a Catholic, credits what he calls his tenacity and his social consciousness to his maternal grandparents, Holocaust survivors who emigrated from Poland to Venezuela.

He'll need a thick hide from here on out. Chávez has at his disposal a multi-tentacled state-run media apparatus as well as oil-fueled political patronage that he's set to dole out to his base before the October vote. And even if Capriles wins, a big question is whether the government — including the new Defense Minister, who ominously suggested last year that the armed forces' first loyalty is to Chávez's revolution — will respect the results. If it turns out that flies can hunt eagles, 2012 may have its own mayhem in store.
— with reporting by Girish Gupta / Caracas

• Tim Padgett / Caracas
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