In the wake of a Newsnight interview that I gave on last Sunday’s referendum in Venezuela, my e-mail inbox has been daily stuffed with vitriol from British and American men who have accused me of spreading lies about President Hugo Chavez, their hero. As far as I can tell, though, not one of them has actually been to Venezuela.

In the internet age, any man can join his chosen crusade without leaving the drawing room. The virtual political tourist can cheer on the celebrities championing the “good revolutionary”, El Comandante Chavez, who lets them wave at hordes of Venezuelans from the balcony of his presidential palace before catching their flights back to London or Los Angeles.

Naomi Campbell, the supermodel renowned for abusing her employees, called Chavez her “rebel angel”, published their interview in GQ magazine and took a $1m (£700,000) donation for the Nelson Mandela Foundation. Danny Glover, the American actor, got $20m from Chavez to fund film projects, and Oliver Stone, the director, is giving the president a star turn in his own epic. I have to wonder how this latest vanity project is being funded.

Mind you, I am a particularly easy target for the ignorant foreign dilettante: a white child of the oligarchy, I was brought into being by the oil business, when my American mother met my Prague-born father in Caracas in 1965 while visiting her godfather, then vice-president of Royal Dutch Shell. Then again, my own story is exactly what puts paid to the foreign mythology about Chavez.

Royal Dutch Shell drilled the very first oil well in Venezuela’s Mene Grande in 1914, heralding an invasion of foreigners who lived like kings off Venezuelan oil until their sponsor, the Venezuelan government, kicked them out in 1976 and established Petroleos de Venezuela SA (PDVSA). It was the Anglo-Europeans and then the government who stole or mismanaged the oil wealth, never the “oligarchs”, and until Chavez came along with his self-serving perversion of history everyone understood this.

When my blue-eyed father drove his Mercedes home to the country club through the Puente de Chapellin slum, the locals waved at him, for they knew that we provided 3,300 jobs and the Neumann Foundation funded poverty reduction programmes from vocational training for single mothers to literacy programmes to free medical and dental care. Last time I drove through the Puente de Chapellin I was surrounded by an angry mob that took a baseball bat to my car. This is Chavez’s great achievement: violence and near civil war.

It is true that Venezuela, like the rest of Latin America, always had an enormous class divide and a lot of corruption. But it is not true that Chavez has resolved any of these. His claims of having cut family poverty from 50% to 33% have been disputed by former members of his own administration. The Gini coefficient of income inequality has actually risen under Chavez. What is true is that while the poor routinely cannot find their staple rice, eggs, beans, cornflour and milk, the government apparatchiks guzzle Johnnie Walker blue label whisky in Sawu, a popular nightclub in Caracas.

My grandfather must be turning over in his grave: he survived the Nazis (his parents died in the camps) and escaped communism to arrive in Venezuela, his very own garden of Eden. How he would cry to see his beloved country torn in two deliberately by its own president. Across 47 television channels, Chavez broadcasts incitements to riot against the white oligarchy over footage of looting and cars being set on fire. Prior to last week’s referendum, he went on national television clutching a list of names of government employees. He said he would fire those who did not vote yes for the constitutional amendment to eliminate electoral term limits - a referendum that was itself illegal and disallowed by his own rewritten constitution.

Lately the politics of race have added fuel to the fires of resentment. However, this is yet another myth. Most Latin Americans are actually “mestizo”: a racial mixture of white Europeans, African slaves and indigenous tribespeople. Descendants of the conquerors and the conquered, mestizo should be the personification of cultural assimilation. But for the past 10 years Chavez has led a bevy of politicians in cashing in on this centuries-old myth of racial division to their great personal benefit: Evo Morales in Bolivia, Rafael Correa in Ecuador and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua all now claim the role of cleansing revolutionary.

They have a receptive audience here. Dour, rain-soaked Anglos have always enjoyed fantasising about principled revolutionary heroes in warmer climes - to wit, Lawrence of Arabia and Che Guevara. Chavez plays these naive foreign supporters well, their words give Venezuelans the foreign attention and respect they have always craved. They lend him a legitimacy he would otherwise lack. Who are the real imperialists now?

- Vanessa Neumann is editor at large for The Diplomat

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