Hugo Chavez Read online

  Rafael Céspedes, who served as an adviser to Dominican president Leonel Fernández on two occasions, played a key role in fine-tuning Chávez’s public image. One of his principal strategies was to use Marisabel Rodríguez, the candidate’s second wife, in the campaign. Marisabel was part of an elaborate plan intended to soothe the Venezuelan populace by softening the candidate’s image. Marisabel is well educated, kind, attractive, and spontaneous. Her type of beauty was especially useful to the campaign because there is something about her that recalls the stereotype that so many people seem to adore: she is white, she has blue eyes, and in fact, she had even participated in a competition sponsored by Revlon to find the most beautiful face in Venezuela. At the side of the unpredictable, aggressive soldier, suddenly there was a real-life Barbie doll who even made sense when she talked.

  All through 1998, Chávez and his team plugged away, and his campaign went from strength to strength. The statistics are overwhelming: in January the polls reported a 9 percent approval rating, whereas by October, just two months away from the elections, the same polls revealed that 48 percent of the electorate was on his side. It hadn’t always been smooth sailing. In June, Bandera Roja (Red Flag), one of the leftist groups that had supported his candidacy, dissociated itself from the campaign and accused Chávez of working a “double discourse”: “In front of the nation he acts like an avenger who wants to sweep the decks and start with a clean slate, turn the country upside-down, but when he is among the powerful he shows his true colors and confesses his true intentions, which are to carry out nothing but superficial changes.”11 Also that month, Teodoro Petkoff, the leader of the Venezuelan leftist opposition and founder of MAS (Movimiento al Socialismo, the Movement Toward Socialism party)12 and an internationally renowned activist, called him a populist and compared his demagogy to that of Carlos Andrés Pérez. Chávez did not even flinch.

  On July 24, the date on which Simón Bolívar’s birthday is celebrated, Hugo Chávez registered his presidential candidacy with the National Electoral Council and declared, “Let the whole world know that in Venezuela, a true social revolution is now under way. Nothing and nobody will be able to stand in the way of the triumph of the democratic revolution.”13 The parties that made up the Patriotic Pole and supported his candidacy were the Movimiento V República (Fifth Republic Movement), an entity founded by Chávez himself; Movement Toward Socialism; PPT (Patria para Todos, or Homeland for All); the Venezuelan Communist Party; and the Movimiento Electoral del Pueblo (People’s Electoral Movement). This was not a massively organized machine by any stretch of the imagination—quite the opposite, in fact. It was a collection of relatively small leftist parties, united behind the personal figure of the candidate. With his unusual talent for communication, Chávez capitalized on the collective desire for change by cultivating and promoting the idea that his election, in and of itself, already represented a rupture in the historical continuum, a transformation. Jimmy Carter, who attended the elections that Sunday, December 6, 1998, as an observer, confirmed this by stating that he had witnessed a democratic and peaceful revolution.

  Chávez’s campaign chief, the retired general Alberto Müller Rojas, suggests a less heroic version of that election day: “The campaign won pretty easily. The victory had more to do with his adversaries’ political errors than the quality of our own electoral campaign, which was relatively disorganized because that was the only way it could be. The elections were won more because of what the opposition didn’t achieve than because of what chavismo [the Chávez movement] actively achieved. I am absolutely convinced of that.” Anyone who studies the performance of Chávez’s opponents will undoubtedly discover a number of grave miscalculations. First, his opponents seemed unaware of the fact that the country was changing. They never seemed capable of reading the reality of what was going on—neither in the very beginning, when Irene Sáez, a former Miss Universe without much substance, enjoyed tremendous popular support, nor at the end, when a number of parties and organizations, in desperation over Chávez’s imminent triumph, came together far too late in support of Henrique Salas Römer, the only candidate with a chance of beating Chávez, according to the polls. The opposition simply had not offered any coherent political alternative for the Venezuelan voters—not even in their electoral demagogy was there the glimmer of a serious proposal. Their only objective was to avert a Patriotic Pole victory. Quite aptly, the press labeled the movement the “anti-Chávez front.”

  Nedo Paniz, another close Chávez collaborator during this period, clarifies that the campaign was not all improvisation and guesswork. It was very expensive, and Chávez doggedly pursued the strategy of nothing but ferocious, constant criticism of those in power. He also refused to take part in a broadcast debate with his main opponent, and it was this aloof, fierce attitude that ultimately brought the traditional political parties and the entire political class to their knees.

  The rest of the country, however, was jubilant. It had been years since so many Venezuelans had come together to celebrate a victory like this. When he assumed the presidency, Hugo Chávez enjoyed 80 percent of the population’s support. Müller himself confirms that Gustavo Cisneros, the wealthiest man in the country, supported the Chávez cause with cash donations and free airtime on Venevisión, his television channel. This gesture of confidence is an interesting example of the enigmatic and ambiguous relationship that has always existed between the president and the magnate. Cisneros has long since been the emblematic enemy of the Venezuelan left as well as the living image of the reactionary far right. Some years later, Chávez would say Cisneros was conspiring against his government. On a radio program in May 2004, Chávez bristled when he spoke of Cisneros: “The day will come, and hopefully it is not far off, when we will have a body of judges and prosecutors who are afraid of nothing and who will act according to what the Constitution says, and send capos like this Gustavo Cisneros to prison.” Shortly thereafter, however, a private meeting was held between Chávez and Cisneros under the stewardship of Jimmy Carter. The Chávez camp claimed that Cisneros was involved in drug trafficking and had been one of the masterminds behind the April 2002 coup to remove Chávez from the presidency. Apparently, things have always been like this between the two men. Müller recalls that at one dinner together, both men were surrounded the entire time by their respective aides, who acted as intermediaries because the two refused to speak to each other directly.

  “The compromise that Chávez reached with Cisneros was that he would give [Cisneros] a monopoly on educational television in Venezuela,” says Müller Rojas. If that was the case, Chávez never made good on his promise.

  With respect to support and alliances, this was far from the only bit of unexplained business on the path to electoral victory. In 2002, the Spanish newspaper El Mundo reported that Banco Bilbao Vizcaya had donated $1.52 million to Chávez’s electoral campaign. Luis Miquilena, the head of finances for the Patriotic Pole, was involved in this relationship. One of Venezuela’s veteran leftist leaders, Miquilena was Chávez’s mentor and his first interior minister. He and his business partner Tobías Carrero were rumored to have accepted money from a foreign institution for an electoral campaign, which is a crime in Venezuela. This revelation led to another bit of information that raised even more eyebrows: on January 11, 1999, during his first trip to Spain as president-elect of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez met with Emilio Ybarra, president of Banco Bilbao Vizcaya, and then with Emilio Botín and his daughter Ana Patricia Botín, of Banco Santander. At first, the new administration denied everything, but the situation soon became unmanageable: according to the Spanish daily El País, the central bank of Spain reported that BBV (which has since merged and is now Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria) had diverted funds of “more than $1.5 million through two payments to the Chávez campaign with the intention of protecting itself in the event of a possible nationalization of the finance industry in this Latin American country.” On April 6, 2002, General Müller acknowledged the BBV donations
, adding that the majority of international banks operating in Venezuela had also contributed to the Chávez campaign.

  A few days later, however, on April 25, Hugo Chávez said on the Spanish TV station Telecinco, “I have not received one dollar from these people, this bank…what is it called?…Bilbao Vizcaya.” It is also rumored that the campaign had received $1.8 million from Banco Santander. In Spain, on June 20, Emilio Ybarra, the former co-president of Banco Santander, admitted to Spanish magistrate Baltasar Garzón that in fact he had donated money to finance the Chávez campaign in 1998. Müller has said that “Luis Miquilena handled these resources in a secret manner. Nobody—neither the parties that comprised the Patriotic Pole, nor the apparatus I had in place at campaign headquarters—knew how much money was there, what it was spent on, or how much was spent on each individual item.” Venezuelan justice sank into these shadows. The charge against Chávez of illegal campaign financing, which was filed with the attorney general of the Republic, never went anywhere.

  On the night of December 6, 1998, however, the country was in the throes of euphoria and had little interest in such details. In the gathering in front of the Teresa Carreño Theater, Hugo Chávez began to speak. The cameras of every media organization in the country were firmly fixed on the new president’s face, and the entire country anxiously awaited his words. William Izarra, a retired military officer and the secret protagonist of many a military conspiracy, watched as if he couldn’t believe it was really happening. As he walked past Izarra, Hugo Chávez stopped to embrace him. And in the middle of this emotion-filled moment, the president-elect whispered, “We did it, brother. After all those years, the revolution can finally begin.”14

  CHAPTER 2

  “Me, a Communist?”

  “I, HUGO CHÁVEZ, AM NOT A MARXIST, BUT I AM ALSO NOT AN ANTI-MARXIST. I am not a Communist, but I am not an anti-Communist, either.”1 With vague contradictions, the brand-new president of Venezuela evaded his political adversaries whenever they tried to pin a label on him. Ever since emerging from political anonymity, Chávez has always used ambiguity when asked to explain how his political pendulum swings. During his long battle for the presidency, he clung to the expression “I am neither left-wing nor right-wing,” and every effort to get him to identify his position on the ideological spectrum was fruitless. A great admirer of vernacular history, he has always preferred to situate himself two centuries in the past. “I am Bolivarian,” he has often said, referring to the ideas of Simón Bolívar, liberator of half of Latin America, including Venezuela, Colombia (which at the time included Panama), Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia. He has consistently operated within the realm of the same enigma. Is he a left-wing Bolivarian? A right-wing Bolivarian? Publicly, the furthest he has ever gone in this sense was his open appreciation of British prime minister Tony Blair’s Third Way, but that was back when Chávez was at the door to Miraflores, the Venezuelan presidential palace.

  Was he simply being sincere and never really saw himself as a left-wing politician, even when many people from all ends of the political spectrum saw him as such?

  “As far as I see it,” says Luis Miquilena, “he is a left-winger. Obviously. But he has gotten into bed with the failed left.” Miquilena, a veteran ex-Communist, is widely considered to have been the architect behind the creation of Hugo Chávez the presidential candidate. And though on the one hand, it is entirely possible that Chávez’s ambiguity was just part of his campaign strategy, given that his opponents constantly accused him of being a veiled Communist who would wipe out private property in Venezuela, it is still astonishing that for so many years he consistently refused to reveal his true political inclinations. “Me, a Communist?” he would say. He would deny it every time—that is, until 2005. That was the year he decided to declare himself a socialist and set out to invent twenty-first-century socialism.

  This did not take anyone by surprise. Despite his ambiguity, his rhetoric has always been dominated by a rudimentary amalgam of leftist ideas. “So what if they call me a radical, a revolutionary? That’s exactly what I am, and I believe that’s exactly what I have to be,” he retorted in early 1995, when his popularity was nil and he agreed to participate in a series of talks with the Venezuelan historian Agustín Blanco Muñoz, which culminated in the publication of the confessional book Habla el comandante (The Commander Speaks)2 three years later. At the time he was the self-proclaimed leader of “an anti-exploitation, anti-imperialist movement” and prescribed the following rather obvious solution: “For a movement to be revolutionary, it has to be transformative, it has to take a swing at the powerful.”

  Where does Chávez’s revolutionary fervor come from? When did he become inspired to subvert the Venezuelan system? When did he become so drawn to power?

  Chávez was around twelve or thirteen when he first met José Esteban Ruiz Guevara at the Ruiz family home in the city of Barinas. Hugo was a slender teenager who had befriended Guevara’s sons Vladimir (named after Lenin) and Federico (named after Engels) while playing baseball. In honor of their new friend’s big, ungainly feet, the two young boys took to calling Chávez “Tribilín,” the Spanish name for Goofy, the Disney character. Young Hugo had just arrived in Barinas with his grandmother and older brother Adán from the village of Sabaneta, where education ended with primary school. The boy’s father, a schoolteacher, had managed to secure a house for them in Barinas, the state capital, so that the boys could study at the large secondary school there.

  An old-school Communist, Ruiz Guevara openly acknowledges his political orientation: “I have always been a Communist Party militant,” he says. Chávez, along with Vladimir and Federico, would sit on the rug of the Ruiz family library in the afternoons and listen to the stories and lessons imparted by the impassioned Communist with the long beard.

  “Listen kids, this is the book you have to read,” he would say, and their eyes would follow him up to the shelves upon which Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract and Machiavelli’s The Prince sat. Ruiz also introduced the boys to eighteenth-century Venezuelan political theory, “so that they might familiarize themselves with our own socioeconomic issues.” Ruiz recalls that Chávez “was not much of a talker in those days, he spoke very little. And so, basically, the boys would usually just listen to me talk and every so often utter an ‘Uh, umm’ along the way.”

  The rest of the Chávez family relocated to Barinas shortly afterward, settling down in a house on Carabobo Avenue, across the street from the Ruiz family and just a few yards away from the home of Hugo’s grandmother. At the time, the state capital was a large town of sixty thousand inhabitants, but for the Chávez family it was the big city.

  Vladimir, Federico, and Jesús Pérez (who would later become Chávez’s foreign minister and currently serves as the Venezuelan ambassador to UNESCO in Paris) were young Hugo’s closest friends in those days. Their tight-knit foursome served as a kind of social nucleus for the other teenagers in town, and they would gather together in a small plaza between the Chávez and Ruiz homes every weekend. This is where Chávez spent his adolescence, often organizing baseball games, a childhood passion he inherited from his father.

  In the plaza, sometimes the young men would talk about current events. They would also play cuatro music, and they would sing, too—almost always the llanera music of the Venezuelan plains. Upon hearing himself sing, Hugo became fascinated with the sound of his own voice. Together, the teenagers crooned their first serenades, organized parties, and went down to the river to go fishing. More than anything, however, the four young friends cultivated one of the qualities that is most often associated with llaneros: they talked. They talked and they talked and they talked. For hours. About everything. Sports, movies, politics, girls. Everything.

  Sometimes on Sundays they would go to see westerns or kung fu movies, or to the Derby Theater, where they might be able to grab hold of a pretty girl’s hand. On those evenings out, Chávez was the ugly duckling alongside the Ruiz brothers. He was friendly and
likable, but he wasn’t the kind of boy that the girls fought over. “He had one or two girlfriends that everyone knew, but they were ugly—boy, were they ugly. He was pretty ugly himself,” recalls his secondary school classmate Rafael Simón Jiménez, a former Chávez party congressman who was vice president of the National Assembly during the early years of the Chávez administration.

  ON WEEKDAYS, HUGO AND ADÁN, who lived with their grandmother, would walk to the O’Leary secondary school with Ruiz Guevara’s wife, Carmen Tirado, and the couple’s three oldest children, Vladimir, Federico, and Tania. At O’Leary, Hugo passed the time with other Barinas teenagers, including Rafael Simón, a chubby, rebellious kid who was the coordinator of the local Communist Youth groups. Hugo never exhibited any interest in this particular organization, but “he did participate in some activities. Just as he himself said, ‘When Rafael Simón said we had to throw stones, we threw stones,’” according to Jiménez.

  Throwing stones, however, was not part of Hugo’s agenda. The only activity that interested him was the kind that took place on the baseball field. But then one Sunday in March 1969, when Chávez was fourteen, the llanera music playing on Radio Barinas was interrupted by a breaking news bulletin. Chávez later described it:

  My grandmother Rosa was preparing my breakfast, and turned on the radio to listen to some music. Then, suddenly, we heard a news flash, and for a moment, I felt as if death had struck me, right then and there. An airplane had gone down shortly after taking off from the Maracaibo airfield, and there were no survivors. Látigo Chávez was on that plane. Terrible. I stayed out of school that Monday and Tuesday. I fell apart: I even came up with a little prayer that I said every night, vowing that I would grow up to be like him, a big-league pitcher. From that point on, my dream of being a painter was completely eclipsed by the desire to be a baseball player.3