Hugo Chavez Read online

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Authors’ Note

  Introduction by Moisés Naím

  PART ONE

  1. The Revolution Has Arrived

  2. “Me, a Communist?”

  3. An Existential Conflict

  4. The Man, the Conspirator

  5. Preparing the Uprising

  6. Stroke of Luck

  7. A Model Officer

  8. “Bolívar and I”

  9. The Skinny Guy in the Liqui-Liqui

  PART TWO

  10. State of Grace

  11. Around the World in an Airbus

  12. Entangled April

  Photo Insert

  13. The Showman of Miraflores

  14. Bush the Pendejo and Fidel the Brother

  15. The Ugly Duckling

  16. La Chavera

  17. 2021: Looking Ahead

  Epilogue

  Appendices

  Notes

  Bibliography

  About the Authors

  Copyright

  I put for a general inclination of all mankind a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death. And the cause of this is not always that a man hopes for a more intensive delight than he has already attained to, or that he cannot be content with a moderate power, but because he cannot assure the power and means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more.

  —Thomas Hobbes

  AUTHORS’ NOTE

  IT IS ALWAYS A BIT OF A GAMBLE TO ATTEMPT A BIOGRAPHICAL ACCOUNT of someone who is still alive and who, moreover, plays an active and prominent role in current affairs. The task is even trickier when your objective is neither to sing praise nor issue judgments, when you wish neither to sanctify nor condemn—when you are not trying to turn your subject into the victim of your own premeditated, malicious intentions.

  At the other end of the spectrum lies the illusion of objectivity. Thanks to Georg Lichtenberg, ever since the end of the eighteenth century, we have known that “even impartiality is partial.” It would be foolish of us to try to deceive our readers into thinking that as the authors of this book we have no opinion, that we feel an academic indifference for the character that has inspired these pages.

  Our biography of Hugo Chávez represents an effort to contribute a certain amount of complexity to a process that many people seem determined to simplify. The polarization that the president of Venezuela generates, both in and out of Venezuela, reflects the complex and very broad range of feelings he tends to inspire in people. It is almost impossible to observe him without being affected by the strong sentiments of those who alternately idolize and demonize him.

  We chose to assess this reality by writing the story of a man’s life in the manner of journalists, basing our research on the testimonies of a number of people who have been at his side during different periods in his life. Some of these people have stood by him, whereas others have distanced themselves and now count themselves among the opposition. Through a labyrinth of different paths, this work also led us to a great deal of written material, including the president’s own personal diaries and a small sliver of correspondence from his early years. However, more than a linear narrative, this book offers something of a choral dynamic, a collective construction of the experience of Hugo Chávez Frías.

  We would like express our gratitude to all the people we interviewed and who agreed to work with us, people who offered us both their time and their trust. We would like to thank the journalist Fabiola Zerpa, our assistant in this endeavor, whose contributions were invaluable. And Gloria Majella Bastidas and Ricardo Cayuela, always precise and lucid in their reading and comments.

  Cristina Marcano

  Alberto Barrera Tyszka

  INTRODUCTION

  by Moisés Naím

  JANETTA MORTON LIVES ABOUT A HALF HOUR AWAY FROM THE WHITE House. Not that she has ever been there. The unemployed single mother of two girls shares a small house with her sister in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Washington, D.C. Morton does not know much about Hugo Chávez. But for her, the Venezuelan president is a hero. “I wish George W. Bush was like him,” she says. Morton is one of the 1.2 million poor Americans who get discounted heating fuel for their homes from CITGO, an Oklahoma-based oil company owned by the Venezuelan government. She also got a glossy brochure explaining that this was just an act of basic human solidarity from a president that cares for the poor everywhere, not just in his native Venezuela. “This is not about politics,” the brochure said.

  In South Africa, President Chávez also has admirers. In Soweto, a poor neighborhood in Johannesburg, political activists enthusiastically follow Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution, and some of them were invited to Venezuela to see it firsthand and even to meet with the president. They too say that they would like a leader like Hugo Chávez for their country. In Lebanon, some Hezbollah supporters have named their newborn sons Hugo.

  Andres Oppenheimer, a syndicated columnist for The Miami Herald, traveled to India in January 2007 to interview business leaders, politicians, and others about that nation’s profound transformation. One of his stops offered quite a surprise. Reporting from New Delhi, Oppenheimer writes:

  I happened to be giving a talk at the Jawaharlal Nehru University here the day that Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez announced the nationalization of key industries. I thought the news would help me make the case that Chávez is destroying Venezuela’s economy. How wrong I was!

  Far from applauding, the professors and students at the School of International Studies—a major recruiting ground for foreign service officials—were looking at me with a mixture of anthropological curiosity and disbelief. It was obvious that, for most of them, Chávez was a hero….

  “How many of you think Chávez is doing a lot of good for Venezuela?” I asked my audience. Most of the students raised their hands.

  “Why do you think that?” I asked. A doctoral student named Jagpal, who is doing his thesis on Venezuela, said that Chávez had put an end to a corrupt economic and political elite, and had focused the government’s attention on the poor.

  Janetta Morton, the Soweto activists, the Lebanese parents, and the Indian university students are only four examples of a rare and far wider phenomenon: a Latin American political leader who becomes a household name and a global icon.

  It is a rare phenomenon because Hugo Chávez is the only Latin American politician in the past half century who has been able to acquire the type of worldwide name recognition and star power enjoyed by Ernesto “Che” Guevara and Fidel Castro.

  How did this happen? How did a poor boy, born and raised in Sabaneta, a small city deep inside Los Llanos (“the plains”) of a country mostly known to the rest of the world for its oil and beauty queens, grow up to become almost as well known as—and far more admired than—the president of the United States? What does Hugo Chávez have that other leaders in Latin America or any other poor region in the world don’t have?

  The answers to these questions provide interesting clues not just about Chávez the man; they also reveal interesting trends in the politics and economics of the world in the early years of the twenty-first century.

  Of course, Hugo Chávez’s personal history is the earliest source of hints about his surprising performance. And herein lies the importance of this biography by Cristina Marcano and Alberto Barrera Tyszka, two of Venezuela’s best journalists, who produced this carefully reported and objective narrative of Chávez’s life as he approached his fiftieth birthday. Marcano and Barrera eschew easy generalizations and facile conclusions about the nature of the man and his motives. They are careful not to rely on psychological speculations or pass political judgments about a man
whose personal charisma and polarizing decisions have made it so hard for most commentators to retain objectivity and balance. But their dogged reporting and interviews with crucial individuals in Chávez’s life do yield interesting insights about this perplexing, contradictory leader. Readers will find interesting links between his past and his present and perhaps even his future and that of his political career.

  Personal histories, as we know, are shaped by the places and times in which they occur. In an increasingly connected and interdependent world, they are also shaped by what is going on elsewhere. And sometimes “elsewhere” can be very far away. Afghanistan, for example, is very far from Venezuela. So is Iraq. Yet Hugo Chávez’s performance and possibilities are closely intertwined with events in these places located at Venezuela’s antipodes or to the events in lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001. For many reasons unrelated to Chávez, he turned out to be one of the main beneficiaries of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 against the United States. Not that he had anything to do with the attacks. But partly as a consequence of 9/11, oil prices more than doubled—and sent a tsunami of petrodollars to the coffers of the Venezuelan government.

  Moreover, 9/11 also focused the American superpower almost exclusively on Islamic terrorism and on waging wars in faraway places. Leaders in the United States had no time to pay much attention to what was going on in their traditional geopolitical backyard, Latin America. Chávez deftly exploited this distraction. In addition, President George W. Bush’s decisions, rhetoric, and demeanor boosted anti-American sentiments worldwide to levels that may well be unprecedented. The Venezuelan president was ready, even eager, to seize the moment and become the world’s most strident critic of the U.S. president.

  Chávez was not just well positioned—financially and politically—to take advantage of these global trends; he was also ready to boldly act on his instincts. He understood very quickly that the emperor had no clothes and that challenging the American “empire” and its internationally unpopular leader was a sure bet. He could afford the gamble thanks to the oil money that had made Venezuela less reliant on foreign investors, U.S. credits, or aid. President Chávez calculated that insulting the American president carried low risks and would yield huge political benefits at home and abroad. Not even Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein had said in front of the cameras—or the United Nations—what the Venezuelan president says about George W. Bush. “Drunkard,” “asshole,” “coward,” “thug,” “assassin,” “baby killer,” and “genocidal war-criminal” are just some of the names that President Chávez regularly calls his American counterpart. Most of the world smiles and privately (and often not that privately) shares the negative feelings about one of the most disdained U.S. presidents in recent history. From Moscow to Malawi, the anti-Bush antics of Hugo Chávez are part of the regular fare of the evening news.

  But Hugo Chávez has not just been bold abroad; he has also been daring at home. There he detected another emperor who had no clothes: the traditional Venezuelan power elite. And, once again, he boldly acted on that instinct. He gambled on the possibility that the political parties, business conglomerates, media tycoons, oil-industry executives, and labor oligarchs that had called the shots for half a century in Venezuela were weak and vulnerable. He realized that the country’s power structure was ready for a hostile takeover. Further, he discovered that this takeover could be based on ballots, not bullets. And that in the twenty-first century in a country like Venezuela, democracy could be used to acquire enormous powers not afforded to democratically elected presidents elsewhere.

  In the opinion of some, the almost dictatorial powers acquired by Hugo Chávez are being put to good use. He needs the power to redress the injustices wrought by centuries of abuse against the poor and the powerless. To others, this is not different from any other authoritarian episode in a region where they have been all too common.

  So, is Hugo Chávez a democrat committed to helping the poor, or just an old-school, power-grabbing populist? Once again, in the answers to these questions lie interesting clues about larger trends in Latin America and elsewhere. But the answers, of course, depend not only on political and economic circumstances. They also depend on Chávez, the man.

  As Marcano and Barrera’s reporting shows, Hugo Chávez has harbored grand, enduring ambitions since he was a very young man. “One day I will be the president of this country,” he told an incredulous friend during a road trip when they were both in their early twenties. (“I told him he was drunk,” the friend recalls.) This book also documents how from a very young age, crude Communist ideas, plotting against “the system,” and becoming “someone that really matters in this country” were permanent drivers of Chávez’s behavior. These thoughts have not gone away. In fact, they have grown larger. For example, the now middle-aged president is obviously no longer satisfied to be someone who matters in Venezuela. He is already living that dream. Now he clearly hopes to be “someone who matters in the world.” And that dream too is becoming a reality.

  Unchecked access to a rich national treasury and the ability to spend it at his own discretion anywhere in the world have certainly helped President Chávez become an influential international figure. But his influence is not only driven by the money. It is also fed by the allure of his personal story and his irreverent, made-for-TV style. And, very important, his political message has also hit a global nerve that makes him internationally relevant.

  Chávez identifies themes that have political resonance beyond Venezuela. His denunciations of corruption, economic inequality, and social exclusion have been constant fixtures of his rhetoric. He was early in detecting that these perennial themes had acquired renewed political potency in the 1990s, and he very effectively made them the pillars of his political message at home. He soon realized that his themes had strong echoes elsewhere and that political leaders in other countries who adopted them made great strides in popularity. In many countries, fighting for equality became more important than promoting prosperity, fighting corruption became a larger goal than defending democracy, and fighting social exclusion became far more important than boosting economic efficiency.

  The messages that helped propel Hamas to electoral victory in Palestine or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran, for example, bear a striking resemblance to those that Chávez had been stridently hammering for a decade. The same ideas are fueling the popularity of countless politicians in Central and Eastern Europe, parts of Asia, and all of Latin America. Of course, they differ in context and nuance; religion, for example, weighs far more heavily in local politics in the Middle East than in Latin America. But despite their differences, what these successful politicians have in common is the ability to persuade the electorate that they are better than their rivals at listening to the poor, fighting public corruption, correcting longstanding inequities, or delivering food subsidies and social services, especially health and education. Their more concrete promises are far more powerful drivers of electoral support than the allure of the larger geopolitical struggles in which these politicians are also engaged. President Ahmadinejad in Iran was elected because he was seen as the honest and competent mayor of Tehran, not because Iranian voters were looking for a president who would wipe out Israel or build a nuclear bomb. Voters care more about getting a job or a cash subsidy, or ousting thieving politicians, than about the latest real or imagined threat coming from the devilish American superpower.

  Such similarities and their lessons, however, become invisible if the political dominance achieved by Hugo Chávez in Venezuela is written off as the inevitable—and probably fleeting—outcome of a flamboyant strongman with too much oil money. To critics, what happened in Venezuela is as obvious as it was predictable: Chávez’s popularity is the inevitable product of a population won over with oil money and mesmerized by the siren songs of a populist. Much of this is, of course, true. In the last election Chávez won, in December 2006, his campaign showed no compunction about freely tapping into government coffers or using p
ublic assets. The violations of electoral laws, tolerated by a compliant electoral arbiter whose members could never have gotten their jobs without Chávez’s personal approval, were myriad. Indeed some were even televised, as when the head of PDVSA, the state-owned oil company, was caught on video announcing to PDVSA workers that those who did not support the “maximum leader” and the “revolution” risked losing their jobs. The next day President Chávez reiterated the threat, saying that he hoped the oil company’s boss would repeat it “not once, but a thousand times a day.”

  Prior to the election an Associated Press survey showed that 57 percent of Venezuelans were concerned about facing reprisals for the way they would vote. Soon after being elected, Chávez named the former head of the electoral authority as his vice president, explaining that his new cabinet needed to reflect the even more radical orientation that his revolution would take in the new term. This appointment—and the revolutionary zeal exhibited by the new vice president—confirmed widespread suspicions that the electoral arbiter in Venezuela’s hotly contested elections was not exactly a paradigm of impartiality. After appointing his new cabinet, the reelected President Chávez announced sweeping changes to the Constitution, including no limits to his future reelection; forced the compliant National Assembly to grant him the power to enact laws by decree; and instituted the nationalization of oil, telecommunications, and electricity.

  But it would be a mistake to conclude that Chávez’s victory in 2006 was solely driven by unfair play and abuse. He would have probably won even without resorting to dirty tricks, albeit with a far smaller margin. And why not? Thanks to booming oil revenues and an equally booming public debt, Venezuela, with a population of only 26 million, has received revenues estimated at $175 billion. And President Chávez has not been shy in spending this windfall, especially on social programs targeting the poor. But this is hardly a first for Venezuela, and cannot by itself explain Chávez’s popularity.