THERE are many reasons why Herma Marksman still looks back fondly on the 10 years she spent as the mistress of Hugo Chavez, who at the time was an ambitious lieutenant-colonel on his way to becoming the president of Venezuela.

“I keep the best memories of him close to me,” Marksman said last week. “He’s the kind of man that showers you with flowers and chocolates, serenades you with romantic songs and never forgets your birthday. People say he is a violent man, but he never raised a hand or his voice to me.”

Yet Marksman’s tone changed when she talked about his role as the leader of the so-called Bolivarian revolution — the populist Latin American phenomenon that has turned Chavez into a global icon of anti-American agitation.

For almost a decade in the 1980s and 1990s, Marksman encouraged her military lover as he used her home to plot a coup against Venezuela’s decadent civilian government. The couple shared a dream, she said, of “a prosperous Venezuela where justice would reign”.

That dream, for her at least, is shattered. “Now you can’t trust him,” she went on bitterly in her first interview with any foreign media. “He is imposing a fascist dictatorship. A totalitarian regime is coming because he doesn’t believe in democratic institutions. Hugo controls all the powers.”

It would be easy to dismiss Marksman’s criticisms as the vengeance of a scorned woman. Chavez once begged her to marry him and promised to leave his wife. But the 1992 coup attempt turned him into a national celebrity, even though it failed and he was briefly jailed.

Emerging as a champion of the Venezuelan underclass, he was surrounded by adoring women. He split with both his wife and his mistress; later a second marriage also ended in separation.

Yet Marksman, now in her mid-fifties, is scarcely an angry ex-bimbo keen to slag off the man who dumped her. She is a professor of history who has written two books about Chavez’s politics.

During our interview she called him “sweet” and “kind” as a lover. But as a president, she added, “he’s the caudillo (strongman) you have to say yes to. At the rate he’s going, his end can only be violent”.

Somewhere between charm and menace lurks the real Chavez. The president who will sit down in London tomorrow for lunch with Ken Livingstone, the mayor, has made more headlines around the world than any South American icon since Evita Peron.

Yet rarely has any world leader — least of all one elected democratically — proved quite so hard to define.

“Is Chavez another Fidel Castro?” asked Alberto Garrido, a Caracas political scientist. “Is he a 19th-century caudillo? Or is he a Peron with oil? Venezuelans debate this continuously, and all we know for certain is that the Chavez phenomenon is different from everything that has gone before.”

In one sense, Chavez’s emergence as a rude and occasionally bellicose voice of South America’s downtrodden is easy to understand. If you take a ride on the gleamingly efficient Caracas metro — a model of 21st-century urban transport — and then take a dilapidated bus to the barrio slums — a model of 19th-century neglect — you arrive at a small supermarket in La Vega run by Ingrid Cordoba.

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