He was born into a middle-class family

One of the interesting facts about Hugo Chávez is that he was born into a middle-class family. Chávez was born on July 28, 1954, in the home of his paternal grandmother Rosa Inéz Chávez, in a humble three-room house in the rural village of Sabaneta, Barinas State. The Chávez family had Amerindian, Afro-Venezuelan, and Spanish ancestors. Hugo de los Reyes Chávez, a devoted COPEI member, and Elena Fras de Chávez, schoolteachers in the small village of Los Rastrojos, were his parents.

Hugo was the second of seven children born. Hugo portrayed his upbringing as poor but happy, yet his childhood of claimed poverty has been challenged, since Chávez may have revised his background story for political reasons. Chávez was a student at the Julián Pino Elementary School when he became fascinated with the 19th-century federalist general Ezequiel Zamora, in whose army his own great-great-grandfather had served. Hugo's parents left Hugo and his older brother Adán to live with their grandmother Rosa, who resided in a government-subsidized lower middle-class home, where they attended Daniel O'Leary High School in the mid-1960s. Hugo was an altar boy at a nearby church, and she was a fervent Roman Catholic. Despite earning the wages of a teacher, his father assisted Chávez and his siblings in paying for college.