Hugo Chavez may be an icon of the Latin American left, but his older brother, Adan, is the original revolutionary in the family.

While the young Hugo Chavez dreamed of playing professional baseball, Adan Chavez was reading Karl Marx and conspiring with rebels. It was Adan Chavez who set up a fateful meeting between his brother and a prominent guerrilla commander who helped forge the future president's leftist ideology.

Unlike his better known brother, who relishes an audience and routinely gives four-hour speeches, Adan Chavez has shunned the spotlight and did not grant an interview for this article. But political analysts here describe the bespectacled, 53-year-old physicist as a disciplined Marxist who holds strong opinions as well as his brother's complete trust.

"Adan is Hugo's alter ego," said Diego Urbaneja, a political science professor at the Central University of Venezuela.
Some compare Adan Chavez to the taciturn Raul Castro, who lacks Fidel Castro's stage presence but long has played a powerful role in Cuban politics and was designated acting president last year when his brother fell seriously ill.

Now, after spending years behind the scenes as his brother's top adviser and diplomatic troubleshooter, Adan Chavez is taking on a high-profile government role. His brother named him education minister in January, and his marching orders include the promotion of socialist values in Venezuelan schools.

"Venezuela has entered a more radical phase of the revolutionary process, and the symbol of this new phase is Adan Chavez," said Alberto Garrido, the author of several books about Hugo Chavez.

The early years
The eldest of six Chavez children, Adan Chavez was born just 15 months before the future president in the western town of Sabaneta. Some analysts say that their brotherly bond was cemented when their schoolteacher parents, who couldn't make ends meet, sent the two boys to live with their grandmother in the nearby city of Barinas.

"I didn't even want to have children," their mother, Elena Chavez, told the Venezuelan magazine Primicia in 1999.
Adan Chavez emerged as the early radical. He studied and taught physics in the city of Merida, then the epicenter of left-wing politics in Venezuela. Soon, he joined the clandestine Party of the Venezuelan Revolution, which was founded by Douglas Bravo, the country's most prominent rebel leader.

"We conducted urban guerrilla work," Adan Chavez told a British interviewer in 2005. Meanwhile, Hugo Chavez joined the army, which was known for its talented sports trainers, whom he figured could turn him into a pro baseball player.

"At first, Adan was much more revolutionary than Hugo," said Nelson Sanchez, a former insurgent who befriended Adan Chavez in Merida. "But then Hugo progressed."

By some accounts, Hugo Chavez grew disillusioned with the army in 1976 after taking part in counterinsurgency operations against rebels in the countryside. He began spending more time with his brother and his radical buddies.

"They all had long hair, and some had beards. I didn't fit in with my short hair and uniform, but I felt good in this group," Hugo Chavez said in a 2004 documentary film.

By the early 1980s, guerrilla leader Bravo had settled on a strategy to topple the Venezuelan government in an alliance with left-wing military officers. "Adan told us he had a brother in the army who might be interested, so we set up a meeting," said Sanchez, who was one of Bravo's bodyguards.

Bravo preached the use of the country's vast oil reserves as a political weapon, building closer ties with the Muslim world, and forging a Venezuelan nationalism based on the ideas of Latin American liberator Simon Bolivar. Hugo Chavez led a failed 1992 military coup, then folded many of Bravo's ideas into his philosophy when elected president six years later.

Since then, Hugo Chavez has swapped oil for doctors with Castro, spent billions in petrodollars to win friends and gain influence throughout Latin America, and shepherded Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on a tour of the region. He even changed the country's name to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

A political family
Many of the president's relatives have jumped into politics. Chavez's father, Hugo de los Reyes Chavez, is governor of Barinas state. A brother, Argenis Chavez, serves as a top official in the Barinas state government , while another brother, Anibel Chavez, was elected mayor of Sabaneta. Asdrubal Chavez, a cousin of the president, is on the board of the state-run oil company.

But Adan Chavez wields the most influence.
He served as his brother's private secretary and was then named ambassador to Cuba, where he hammered out subsidized-oil agreements that have helped to keep the Castro government afloat.

In January, President Chavez declared education one of the five "motors" driving his socialist revolution, and named his older brother as his new education minister.

Under Hugo Chavez, annual per capita spending on education has nearly doubled, while the government has reduced illiteracy and set up free schools so adults can earn high school diplomas and university degrees.

Garrido, the author, said Hugo Chavez is frustrated that few Venezuelans consider themselves socialists eight years into his rule and has said his government wants to use the schools to push its ideas.

In Havana in January, Adan Chavez declared, "You can't have a revolution without revolutionary ideology."
Public opinion
But in a recent poll by the Caracas firm Datanalisis, 85 percent of respondents said they opposed using the classroom to instill ideology.

"It's fine if Adan Chavez wants to believe in Marxism or any other of history's erroneous theories," said Leonardo Carvajal, president of the Education Assembly, a Caracas organization that promotes improvements to the schools. "But ministers should not try, at any cost, to impose their own beliefs."

Last week, Adan Chavez sent hundreds of red-shirted "brigade" members to different parts of Venezuela to hold workshops outlining the government's plans for education. He told Venezuelans to remain calm about the pending changes, which he said are designed to promote unity.

"We are not going to inject communism into children from the day they are born," Adan Chavez told the state-run VTV. "We simply plan to include in the curriculum ... the authentic values of society, which means socialism."

john.otis@chron.com