Hugo Chavez Read online

  Indeed, an oil boom that boosts government revenues, which in turn are spent on social programs that alleviate poverty, is not an unprecedented event in Venezuela—nor in other oil-producing countries. According to the Wesleyan University professor Francisco Rodriguez, the last time this happened in Venezuela was between 1996 and 1998, just before Chávez took power, when, thanks to higher oil prices and government spending, poverty dropped from 64.3 percent to 43.9 percent. Professor Rodriguez, writing in Foreign Policy online magazine in 2006, concluded that, on the basis of the data available at the time, “there is little or no evidence that Chávez is finally sharing Venezuela’s oil wealth with the poor. Most existing statistics do not show significant improvements in either the well-being or the share of resources directed at Venezuela’s most disadvantaged citizens.” This surprising finding contradicts not only Chávez’s propaganda but also the claims of critics who argue that his popularity has been simply bought with oil money. Indeed, if all it takes to buy political support is to spend oil money, why were Chávez’s predecessors so inept at capitalizing on their own populist policies that they are now political pariahs? Why were the political effects of their social spending so meager and fleeting? In contrast, one of Chávez’s main political achievements is the level of support he still enjoys despite the fact that, after all his years in power, dire social problems persist and some, like crime, have only gotten worse. Obviously there is more at work sustaining Chávez’s popularity among Venezuelans than government spending.

  For starters, it is important to recognize that Hugo Chávez is one of the most astute politicians in power today in Latin America. In the long run his economic policies will surely hurt the material well-being of most Venezuelans, and his authoritarian behavior is clearly eroding the basic political freedoms that the country enjoyed for decades. The damages inflicted by the cult of personality, institutional devastation, and militarization of Venezuela’s political life will take years to repair. But to a majority of poor Venezuelans, none of this matters. For them, Hugo Chávez is the leader who provides what no other before him gave them: a sense that he cares deeply, almost personally, for each one of them. A large number of Venezuelans voted for Chávez not as the lesser of several evils but as their leader, one who speaks to their wants and needs. “He cares about people like me.” “He represents me.” “Even if my situation has not gotten better, at least I know he is trying.” These are the phrases one hears in the barrios across Venezuela.

  But Chávez is reinforced by his clever exploitation of the three themes that drive the political behavior of most Venezuelans: the need to wage war against corruption, inequality, and injustice.

  These are far from new problems for Venezuela or Latin America. Indeed, they have been the fodder of many electoral campaigns, revolutions, and political movements. But during the 1990s Latin Americans’ historic tolerance for dramatic economic inequities and the thievery by their elites began to abate thanks to the heightened awareness brought about by political and economic globalization. People’s impatience was also fueled by the disappointments with the pro-business, market-oriented reforms known as “the Washington Consensus” (trade and foreign investment liberalization, privatization, deregulation, etc). The promise at the time was that these economic reforms, while initially painful, were the ticket to imminent prosperity. Instead, what most Latin Americans got for more than a decade were financial crashes, higher unemployment, mediocre economic growth, and, thanks to freer, more ubiquitous media, a daily window into how the rich lived and the politicians stole. Corruption—widespread, persistent, and cruelly damaging to the poor—became an obsession everywhere. And the war on corruption was corrupted by politicians who used it as a weapon to sink rivals. In this they were joined by media owners and journalists who found in the war against corruption a never-ending source of profits, power, and personal advancement. Becoming a corruption fighter was—and still often is—a tool more effective for making money and gaining political influence than for ridding society of the conditions that make corruption endemic.

  Chávez rode to power in 1998 on an anticorruption, antiestablishment platform. Far from eliminating corruption, he succeeded in bringing down the old corrupt order only to put in place a new one, the so-called boliburguesia, short for “Bolivarian bourgeoisie.” This was formed by a coterie of family and friends of the Chávez regime known for their conspicuous consumption, luxurious homes, private jets, and megayachts. (During Chávez’s reign Venezuela has become once again one of the world’s top markets for business jets, and eighty new Rolls-Royces have been sold in the last couple of years alone.) Surprisingly, this has hardly alienated Chávez’s core supporters. The poor who support him believe that “their” president cares not about money or power, but only about helping them. Chávez is more preacher than politician, and the hallmarks of his approach to corruption and the twin ills of social exclusion and economic inequality are his almost religious, missionary zeal and moralistic discourse. By his own account, Chávez is Jean Valjean fighting the evil Javert in a twenty-first-century version of Les Misérables. The social welfare programs he never ceases to tout are aptly called “missions.” The multiple misiones—all of which have colorful names derived from Venezuelan history and folklore—offer everything from subsidized groceries to stipends for those who enroll in the incipient Bolivarian universities. In typical populist fashion, Chávez eschews political parties and intermediary institutions, taking his message directly to “the people” through his weekly TV talk show, Aló, Presidente.

  The Venezuelan president has also been an early and enthusiastic adopter of GoNgos (Governmental-Nongovernmental Organizations). The government funds and controls these “nongovernmental organizations,” a powerful new political tool that the Venezuelan president has effectively deployed at home and in other countries where he is trying to build support for his agenda. In this, President Chávez was again early in taking advantage of two global trends of the 1990s: the disrepute of political parties and the popularity of “civil society” and nongovernmental organizations. Throughout the hemisphere, nongovernmental organizations that are aligned with Chávez’s politics or that explicitly support him and his Bolivarian revolution are direct or indirect beneficiaries of his cunning largesse. The Zapatistas in Mexico, the piqueteros in Argentina, Sem Terra in Brazil, the cocaleros in Bolivia, indigenous groups in the Andes, and myriad other “social movements” that are formally unrelated to political parties have received the president’s enthusiastic support. Even in the United States, Bolivarian Circles patterned after those operating in the Venezuelan barrios are sprouting on college campuses and in inner cities. Well-subsidized opportunities to travel to Venezuela to attend short “experiential” courses offered by the new “Bolivarian University” that give Americans a chance to learn about the revolution’s progress are promoted by nongovernmental organizations, churches, and YMCA branches in the United States. Meanwhile, in Venezuela the Chávez-controlled National Assembly has been actively considering a law whereby officials and members of local nongovernmental organizations that receive funding from any foreign organization will face criminal charges and long prison sentences.

  While some of these practices are offensive to a substantial segment of Venezuela’s society, they are applauded by the majority, which has given Hugo Chávez a political blank check. Through a variety of means—from his TV shows to the misiones and a well-funded, world-class propaganda machine with access to the best international talent money can buy—Chávez puts a name and a face on the anonymity of poverty. He makes virtues out of misfortune and inequality while demonizing wealth and its pursuit. The net effect is the perception among many that Chávez has brought “dignity” to the poor and the excluded, who constitute the majority of Venezuelans. Therein lies the key to understanding Chávez’s popularity. It helps that oil prices have allowed his spending to keep apace with many of his programs. It also helps that all Venezuelans learn early in school and thr
ough the media that theirs is a very rich country and that therefore the only possible explanation for the widespread poverty is not bad policies but the bad morals and corruption of the political and business classes. Put an honest man in power and the country’s wealth will almost effortlessly enrich everyone, goes the deeply rooted thinking that Chávez so brilliantly exploits. It helps that the political opposition in Venezuela is inchoate and leaderless and that the United States is unpopular, clumsy, and distracted. But none of these trends in Venezuela and abroad can really explain Chávez’s political ascendancy. For that one needs to look at the man himself and his almost incredible life history—a history that the pages ahead tell very well.

  CHAPTER 1

  The Revolution Has Arrived

  ON THE NIGHT OF DECEMBER 6, 1998, A LARGE CROWD GATHERED IN front of the Teatro Teresa Carreño, close to the center of Caracas. The atmosphere was festive. Moments earlier, the National Electoral Council had read the first official bulletin of the day’s election results. With 64 percent of the votes counted, there was no longer room for doubt. Fifty-six percent of the Venezuelan electorate had voted for Hugo Chávez, while his principal opponent, Henrique Salas Römer, a coalition candidate representing the traditional political parties, had garnered only 39 percent of the vote. Venezuela now had a new president, a man who had tried to reach the presidency scarcely six years earlier by attempting to overthrow the government. What had been unattainable by military uprising in 1992 became reality via the democratic process. He was not a career politician, nor did he have any experience in the public sector. And he was barely forty-four years old, much younger than the average age of the presidents who had preceded him. Invoking the memory of the Latin American liberator Simón Bolívar, Chávez vowed to end corruption and democratize the oil business, and he expressed his dream of a country free of poverty. And from deep within the shadows, he dragged out one of Latin America’s mustiest ghosts: revolution.

  Though on the surface it may have seemed otherwise, December 6, 1998, marked the fulfillment of a deeply rooted obsession of the newly elected president. As his childhood friend Federico Ruiz recalls, on December 31 of 1982 or 1983, Hugo Chávez decided to take a day trip from the city of Maracay to Barinas, some 525 kilometers from Caracas, to visit their mothers and give their families a surprise New Year’s hug. Five hours there and five hours back, at least.

  “It was just the two of us, in a Dodge Dart he had, passing a bottle of rum back and forth,” Ruiz recalls. Of their very lengthy conversations, one moment remains crystal clear in Ruiz’s memory. “He said, ‘You know something? One day I’m going to be president of the republic.’ And I said, ‘Damn! Well, you can name me minister of, of…I don’t know!’ And then we joked around about it.” Clarifying that this was not an idle comment made during a lull in the conversation nor due to an alcohol-infused bravado, Ruiz adds, “Hugo was very serious when he said that.”

  Of course he was serious. He was dead serious. This wasn’t the first time the idea had popped into his friend’s head. As a nineteen-year-old cadet in the military academy, Chávez had marched in a procession shortly after Carlos Andrés Pérez had been elected to his first term as president of the republic (1974–79). The moment established an unforeseen link between the two men, though it is entirely probable that Pérez walked past the young Chávez without giving him a second thought. Why on earth would Pérez have bothered to think that this cadet, who hadn’t even graduated from the military academy, would one day conspire against him during his second term as president by staging a violent military coup against his government? How on earth could Pérez have ever imagined that this young soldier would become president of Venezuela one day? Young Hugo, on the other hand, had a very different experience of this moment. On March 13, 1974, he wrote in his diary, “After waiting a long time, the new president finally arrived. When I see him I hope that one day I will be the one to bear the responsibility of an entire Nation, the Nation of the great Bolívar.”1

  Twenty-four years later, he had finally done it. Most Venezuelans, however, were probably not aware of the fervent determination that had driven him for so long. Chávez had taken care not to publicize these aspirations. In a 1999 interview, Mempo Giardinelli and Carlos Monsiváis, two renowned Latin American writers, asked him, “Did you ever imagine that you would be sitting here today, in the presidency and in the seat of power?” Chávez’s simple response: “No, never. Never.”2

  Perhaps, on this December 6, the deeply personal meaning of this achievement was something he would celebrate on his own, for Venezuela was celebrating something else entirely: the triumph of antipolitics. The people of Venezuela had brought an outsider to the presidency, delivering a severe blow to the traditional political machine. A substantial sector of the middle class, fed up with the incompetence and corruption of the previous administrations, had fashioned a kind of revenge through the figure of this former military officer and coup leader. The media, dedicated as always to criticizing anything and everything in politics, were satisfied. The poor also identified with this message of “getting even,” with this man who spoke of Venezuela’s age-old debt to those who had always been excluded from the system. Chávez’s victory, in this sense, was a new version of an old product, wrapped up in a bright, shiny package: Great Venezuela, the kingdom of magical liquid wealth; the paradise from which so many Venezuelans had felt themselves marginalized; the fantasy of instant success.

  The candidate representing an alliance known as the Patriotic Pole won the election with an unprecedented majority. According to the final count, he earned 56.44 percent of the vote. But who was Hugo Chávez, really? Where did he come from? Where was he going? How would his dreams and those of his country merge into one? On that victorious night in Caracas, after his rivals and the official institutions had formally acknowledged him as the new president-elect of Venezuela, this is what he had to say: “My dear friends: very simply, what happened today had to happen. As Jesus said, ‘It is accomplished. What had to be accomplished was accomplished.’” And beneath the long shadow of the early dawn hour in Caracas, Chávez began to sing the national anthem.

  SCARCELY SIX YEARS EARLIER, when Hugo Chávez had appeared on television to claim responsibility for attempting to overthrow the government, all his family could possibly feel were shock and embarrassment. At that time, nobody thought that Hugo Chávez was on his way to a meteoric political career. One of his friends from secondary school said, “It’s something very difficult to digest. You have to take into account the significance of never having been a councilman, a congressman, a [political] leader, never having been a goddamn thing in politics…and then suddenly ending up president.”

  Indeed, nothing indicated that this would be Hugo’s destiny. Many people probably would have said that simply being born in Sabaneta was a great disadvantage. On the other hand, it was also the ideal beginning of a grand myth, that of the humble man who rises to achieve untold powers—a potent, emotional dream for anyone with a melodramatic vision of history. There may have been presidents before Chávez who had risen to the pinnacle of power from simple, humble beginnings—in fact, none of the presidents from Venezuela’s democratic age had come from Caracas. Just like Chávez, all of them had come from the provinces—the majority from poor families, as well. Yet Hugo Chávez, the first one from Barinas, in the far reaches of the Venezuelan plain, was the first president to transform his geographic circumstances into a symbol.

  Regionalism is a tricky thing. The simple recipes that use geographic ingredients to define cultural traits are so very easy to believe and are repeated over and over again: people who live near the ocean or sea are open, honest, spontaneous people, whereas those who hail from the Andes, who live in the cold, vertical silence of the mountains, are taciturn, withdrawn. These kinds of classifications are hard to avoid. According to the Venezuelan stereotype, the llanero, the man from the plains, is a reserved, skeptical type who, once you break the ice, reveals himself
to be a loyal, talkative person who loves to tell a good story. They say that there is something about the plains, with their converging horizons and interminable, flat terrain, that produces an odd combination of silences and long musical corridos, filled with protracted screams and counterpoints. It is a territory that is also a climate of the interior, a place where cattle, ghosts, horses, and apparitions coexist.

  Manuel Díaz, also known as “Venenito”—Little Poison—worked for some thirty years as a chemistry teacher at the Daniel Florencio O’Leary secondary school in Barinas, where Hugo Chávez was his student. According to Díaz, the llaneros “are hard to understand. They are very suspicious people. Always thinking about what people want from them. But once they know you, they are genuine…. They offer their friendship when they see that it is reciprocal.” He also adds another bit of insight: “They are marked by machismo. The man is the one who does everything.” According to a common maxim that the people of the plains often use to describe themselves, “The llanero is as great as the task he sees in front of him.” Obviously, there is nothing terribly specific about this refrain: a multitude of regional identities could easily jibe with this definition.

  Of all Venezuelan presidents, however, Chávez has most consistently invoked the spirit of the region from which he comes, frequently peppering his speeches with personal anecdotes, cultural references, and songs relating to the plains and its inhabitants. He loves to regale his public with childhood memories, and when he speaks of his retirement, he talks about going back to his roots and spending his golden years on the banks of a river, in some faraway outpost of those vast plains.

  Efrén Jiménez, Hugo’s childhood playmate and next-door neighbor, says of those days, “Sabaneta was made up of about four streets. At that time I think there must have been about a thousand people, maybe a little more. We all knew each other, we were all like one big family.” There was no regular electric light, but the village had a generator that delivered electricity every day from 6:30 P.M. to 10:30 P.M. Hugo’s father, Hugo de los Reyes Chávez, taught at the Julián Pino school, the only one in the village. Another childhood friend recalls the elder Chávez as a good educator, “strict, demanding, and disciplined, but not arbitrary.”