Hugo Chavez Read online

  HUGO RAFAEL CHÁVEZ FRÍAS was born in Sabaneta, in the state of Barinas, on July 28, 1954, the second of six brothers. His mother, Elena, has admitted that during those years “my work was all family. I couldn’t do anything else.” They lived in a house with a roof made of palm leaves. That was where all her boys were born: “With a midwife. Like a pig, because back then there was no hospital, no doctor, nothing. It was just you in childbirth. And the pain was the same with all of them. All of them.”

  The Chávez family finances were very precarious; the money disappeared as fast as the children appeared. Perhaps for that reason, Rosa Inés Chávez, Hugo’s paternal grandmother, would become an important figure in his life. Because of the family’s strained budget, she was the one who raised young Hugo, and Chávez has openly acknowledged the tremendous role his grandmother has played in his life. When his second wife bore him a daughter, she was baptized Rosa Inés. Those close to Chávez’s grandmother confirm that she influenced Chávez in a way that would have been all but impossible in his parents’ home.

  Elena Frías de Chávez was eighteen years old when she gave birth to Adán, her first son. A year and three months later, she gave birth again, to Hugo. Another year and three months later, she gave birth to yet another baby. At that point, her mother-in-law offered to lend a hand, and it was agreed that Adán and Hugo would move to their grandmother’s house. Economically, it was probably not much of an improvement, but at least the responsibilities were spread around. In her kitchen, Rosa Inés would prepare arañitas, papaya sweets, and Hugo would go out and sell them in the street. In a diary entry dated June 12, 1974, Hugo recalled, “Around here, in the area nearby, there was lots of mountain broom and just looking at it brings back the distant but indelible image of my life as a child, in the fields of Sabaneta, with Adán and my grandmother, gathering handfuls of that plant to sweep our modest house with the dirt floor.”3 Chávez’s many fond references to his grandmother clearly reveal that her affection and love were and are of paramount importance to him. As far as anyone knows, she was a quiet, good-humored woman. Her death, in 1982, was a terrible blow to the two brothers whom she raised.

  Elena eventually decided she wanted her children to return home, but by then it was already too late.

  “Afterward, when I wanted to get my children back, my husband said to me, ‘Elena, if you take those little boys away from her, my mother will have a heart attack. And if my mother dies it will be your fault.’ And so I didn’t say anything, because if she died, they were going to blame it on me…. After a while I brought it up again, I said, ‘Hugo, I want my sons to come back here with me.’” The verb “take away” may sound harsh, but that is precisely what they would have been doing. The years went by, and the two little boys would never return to live in the home of Hugo and Elena. They would often spend much of the day at their parents’ house, but at night they always went back to sleep at their grandmother’s. According to Elena, her house was home for the two boys “until Hugo went to the Academy and Adán left for college.”

  The influence of his grandmother and the early separation from his mother have served as fodder for many hypotheses regarding the evolution of Hugo Chávez’s personality and character. Some people feel there is a connection between the circumstances of his early life and the incendiary tone of his political rhetoric. Some people sense in him a perpetual aggression that they believe stems from a deep-seated resentment regarding his early childhood experiences. This would be supported by a related theory suggesting that Chávez harbors muted feelings of ill will toward his mother.

  Herma Marksman, the history professor who was Chávez’s lover for nine years, says, “I felt that he loved his father more than his mother. I think that he really missed the warmth of his mother during those early years. That is my personal perception.” Marksman also recalls a heated discussion they once had as a couple, which ended with the following exchange. “‘So you don’t love your mother?’ I asked him. And he said, ‘No. I respect her.’ On two separate occasions,” she says, “he brought up this distance from his mother. It was so extreme that, for a time, if the two of them crossed paths on the street, they would avoid each other so they wouldn’t have to say hello. That’s what he told me.” According to Marksman, there was a period of two years when Chávez did not speak to his mother at all.

  In an interview with the magazine Primicia, in 1999, a confession from Elena added more fuel to the fire: “I didn’t want to have children…I don’t know, I didn’t like them, it didn’t seem appealing, but since God told me, ‘That is what you are going to do,’ I got married and a month later I was pregnant.”4 She also admits that she was very strict, and would often hit her sons to keep them in line, a common practice in Venezuela in those years.

  When Chávez entered the military academy in 1971, the very first letter he wrote was to his grandmother Rosa Inés, and she was the person he would write to again and again after that, his letters filled with expressions that confirmed their closeness: “Dear Mamá,” he often wrote to her, and he also referred to her on occasion as “mamita.” His words reflect genuine warmth and affection, a strong, profound emotional bond. At the end of one of these letters, dated August 31, 1971, he said as much: “Finally, I want you to know that I have always felt proud to have been raised by you and to be able to call you Mamá. And I ask you to bless me, your loving son.” This deep-seated devotion contrasts a bit with the feelings he expressed in letters to his birth mother. The correspondence with Elena de Chávez was also loving and affectionate but far more sporadic, which does seem to suggest that young Hugo’s maternal bond was with his grandmother. That, at least, is how he put it on the eve of his graduation from the military academy: “I have been alive for twenty years, sixteen of which I spent with you. I have learned so many things from you: to be humble but proud, and the most important thing, which I inherited from you, was that spirit of sacrifice that I hope will take me far, although perhaps, if I am unlucky, it will cut my illusions short.”

  While some believe that the circumstances of his childhood were extremely traumatic, others feel the exact opposite is true: one childhood friend remembers Hugo as a happy child and points out that this type of family arrangement, in which grandparents or uncles and aunts raised grandchildren or nieces and nephews, was quite normal in the rural Venezuela of those years. In general, Chávez himself has also tended to recall his childhood as a happy time in his life; he has never spoken of his early years as a hell from which he needed to escape. On his Sunday radio show of October 17, 2004, he remarked that his early years had been “poor but happy,” and he has often delighted in telling stories about his two great childhood passions: painting and baseball. Elena also remembers the talent and skill her son demonstrated: “He liked to draw a lot. He painted everything. He would sit down right here and look at a little dog, and in a flash he’d paint it. He would make drawings of his brothers, his friends…anyone who came his way would say, ‘Huguito, make me a drawing.’ And right away he would draw a little something. Just like that.”

  His other great passion was el juego de pelota: baseball. Almost all little boys in Venezuela, at one time or another, dream of being baseball players, and around that time, a Venezuelan pitcher whose last name also happened to be Chávez had made it to the American big leagues with a promising future. His first name was Isaías, though thanks to his superlative pitching skills, he became known as “Látigo”—the Whip. Huguito took an immediate shine to the Whip, who was ultimately more than just an idol—he was a model, a dream that Hugo could aspire to. Whenever Hugo played in the streets or in one of the empty lots in his village, he would daydream about one day becoming a real-life baseball player, a celebrity who could command ovations from the crowds in a massive stadium somewhere.

  Others from Sabaneta who were close to the family during those years also agree that Hugo Chávez’s childhood was not a wretched experience that warped his personality and made him resentful, aggressive,
and vengeful. Aside from speculations about what went on inside the family nucleus, there seems to be only one distant story offering any suggestion of a childhood marked by humiliation. His aunt Joaquina Frías describes it: “The first day Hugo went to school they wouldn’t let him inside. He was wearing an old pair of canvas slippers, the only ones he had. His grandmother Rosa Inés cried and cried because she couldn’t afford to buy him shoes. It was heart-wrenching to watch that woman, so strong-willed in general, break down like that. I don’t know how she managed to buy another pair of slippers, but the boy was able to go back to school.”5 This scene hardly seems like something that could define the totality of a man’s character, but yet again it does underscore the importance of his grandmother: after all, it was Rosa Inés who accompanied him on his first day of school, and it was Rosa Inés who confronted even the tiniest of everyday mishaps and troubles.

  Edmundo Chirinos is a nationally renowned psychiatrist. Associated with leftist politics, he is the former rector of Venezuela’s Central University and was once a candidate for the presidency. After the 1992 coup attempt, he became acquainted with Hugo Chávez.

  When he was imprisoned in Yare, he didn’t know many people in the civilian world. He called some of us who had a certain prestige or were known by people. That’s how he called the current vice president [at that time, José Vicente Rangel], his mentor, Luis Miquilena, and many others that have come into his government. He called me because I had been a presidential candidate and had political experience; second, he had family problems, and required my services as psychiatric counselor. He was not perturbed; he only had common problems anybody could have had with wives or children. That’s how I became his friend and counselor.6

  When Chirinos describes Hugo Chávez, he does not single out the president’s relationship with his grandmother, but he does highlight some notable personality traits that are clearly linked to his life experience, including his childhood: “Chávez feels genuine scorn for oligarchic people, not only in the sense of possessing money but of affectation, through gestures, language…and so in that respect, he exhibits an evident bipolarity, of an affinity for the humble and a rejection of the all-powerful.”

  As time goes by, it will become more and more difficult to study the facts of Hugo Chávez’s journey through life. His story already has an “official version,” a party line that has been reconstructed and retold from his position of power. Any anecdote about his childhood, any distant event, is now seen in a different light, either magnified or diminished, reinvented or dropped. This is almost part of the natural process by which power invents a new kind of memory. When Elena was asked if she had ever known of her son’s intentions of becoming president, she replied, “We hadn’t planned anything, anything at all. Look, all this has come to us by the work and the grace of the Holy Spirit. Nothing more.”

  BUT IT WAS MORE than the Holy Spirit that shook the country on December 6, 1998. It is no coincidence that the person running Venezuela today came of age in the army. Nor is it anything new: between 1830 and 1958 the country was governed by civilians for a scant nine years. In 1958, the demise of General Marcos Pérez Jiménez’s dictatorship marked the beginning of the longest period of democracy Venezuela has ever known. During this era the main parties opposing the military regime came together and, with the exception of the Communist Party, drafted an agreement of governance, later known as the Punto Fijo Pact. Ultimately, Democratic Action (the Social Democratic party) and the Christian Democrats’ Independent Political Electoral Organizing Committee (known as COPEI, from its initials in Spanish) took control of the public sector in Venezuela. During four decades, the two parties took turns in the presidency. The adecos, as the Social Democrats are called, governed for five terms, and the copeyanos, as the Christian Democrats are known, led the government on three occasions. By 1998, this model was so deeply in crisis that Hugo Chávez’s main promise to the country was to end “forty years of corrupt democracy.” This was the central theme of his campaign: to do away with the past.7

  On December 7, 1998, the editorial page of the newspaper El Nacional neatly summarized the sentiments of the majority of the voting public:

  The results of this Sunday’s election speak very clearly about Venezuelan society, not just about the great hopes for change that have been evolving at its core, but also about the tremendous levels of frustration that have turned the majority against the old political leadership. It is absolutely clear that the entire country has chosen an option that is different from that which the traditional ruling class was trying to impose.8

  It was clear that the punishment vote had worked, and that democracy—at least the kind that the Venezuelan elite had engendered—was no longer a promise that people felt they could believe in. In 1998, everyone in Venezuela, even those who did not vote for Hugo Chávez, wanted a change.

  This evaluation of the immediate past, however, may be unfair. It may also be influenced by the way Venezuelans relate to their own reality, to the culture of a country that has never quite figured out how to assimilate its oil wealth. There is little doubt as to how or why, in scarcely forty years, Venezuela’s civilian-democratic project became so warped and so corrupt, dissolving in a debilitating crisis that touched every area of society and its institutions, from the economy to political representation to the delivery of justice and beyond. On the other hand, it is also important to recognize that, at least in the beginning, the democratic experience modernized the country and served to interrupt the militarist tradition—and temptation—of Venezuelan history, introducing educational reform, agrarian reform, the decentralization process, the nationalization of the oil business, the creation of scholarships and specialized study programs abroad. No legitimate assessment can overlook the country’s very deep complexities during this period. Even in economic terms, the verdict always requires a good deal of qualification.

  In 1997, a group of academics and researchers decided to undertake a serious and exhaustive analysis of poverty in Venezuela. In 2004, they published the results of their study:

  By the middle of the twentieth century, there was already a deeply rooted conviction that Venezuela was rich because of oil, because of that natural gift that does not depend on productivity or the enterprising spirit of the Venezuelan people. Political activity revolved around the struggle to distribute the wealth, rather than the creation of a sustainable source of wealth that would depend upon the commercial initiatives and the productivity of the majority of the Venezuelan people. Under democracy (starting in 1958), the income from oil (which represented almost 90 percent of exports and 60 percent of the national budget) was distributed more broadly, but this distortion in the mentality and the economic dynamic became a permanent factor in the country. Politicians rested on their promises—as well as some successful initiatives to expand public services—of distributing the wealth that was in the hands of the state.

  More and more, the country harbored the illusion that it could advance toward modern consumer habits (through imports purchased with its petrodollars) without having to develop a diversified production through a modern culture of productivity. To a certain degree, this was possible for 10 percent of the population in a Venezuela of less than 5 million inhabitants, but there is no way that in Venezuela today, with 25 million inhabitants, 11 million workers will enjoy decent, steady jobs while clinging to the oil dynamic and the culture of easy money. Twenty-five years ago, after sixty years of growth from 1918 to 1978, a period in which the gross national product grew more than 6 percent annually and Venezuelans experienced the sensation of social mobility, the country fell into decline, and poverty began to grow at an alarming and sustained rate.9

  Hugo Chávez was born in that Venezuela of less than 5 million inhabitants. He benefited from the advantages of that first democratic, modernizing impulse of the governments that succeeded the Pérez Jiménez dictatorship. But he also witnessed and lived through the decline. In this sense, he was a link between the
se two countries: one captivated by the quest to build a fairer, more evolved society with solid institutions and enterprises, the other in thrall to the great national illusion, a utopia in which the state is the providential benefactor, all structure and rules are dispensable, effort is a distraction, and destiny is not a future to build but a heaven that already exists, a treasure already won that needs only to be meted out properly.

  Those who worked on Chávez’s presidential campaign took brilliant advantage of the widespread desire for a clean break with the system. “The country had expectations for Chávez,” says Juan Barreto, a journalist close to the president. “[This was] because he was the person who, in the most frontal way imaginable, had stood up to the symbolic forms of political power: the central government and Carlos Andrés Pérez, who at that moment was the living incarnation of corruption.”10 Though the people who designed his electoral campaign say that Chávez did not let people advise him and “created his own image,” it is clear that they did have to fix certain things along the way. For example, Chávez often sounded extremely aggressive when he made speeches. He also had a tendency to use a confrontational, macabre vocabulary—the word “death” frequently popped into his speeches, which led people to think of his candidacy as something frightening. In addition, the many groups that supported him, which were lumped together in an alliance called the Patriotic Pole, included the Communist Party and other leftist organizations with extremely radical postures. His campaign strategists soon realized that the real debate and the real issues were more than just a repudiation of the past and of the country’s traditional parties and their corrupt practices. Nobody, they realized, could win an election without offering hope.