Hugo! (10 page)

The wood in Venezuela was wet. Chávez wanted to light the
flame of social revolt, but it wasn't possible. There weren't the conditions
because the country's economy was soaring. Fueled by booming
oil prices sparked by the rise of OPEC, the Arab-Israeli War of 1973,
and the consequent Arab
oil embargo, Venezuela was awash in
petrodollars.
The price of Venezuelan crude, which dropped to a nadir of
$1.76 per barrel in 1970, recovered to $3.56 in 1973 and nearly tripled
to $10.31 in 1974. Between 1973 and 1983 oil earned Venezuela's sixteen
million people more than $150 billion. They enjoyed the highest
standard of living in South America.

Drunk with oil money, the country's middle class went on a
binge.
Lawyers, doctors, teachers, real estate agents, and others routinely flew to
Miami for weekend shopping sprees and became famous for the saying
Está barato. Dame dos.
— It's cheap. Give me two. The bonanza the
country reaped from the 1974-1981 "oil crisis" earned it the nickname
"Saudi Venezuela." The intoxicating mood was captured by a book with
the same name. Splashed across its cover was a depiction of President
Carlos Andrés Pérez in the robe and headdress of an Arab prince.

Politically, Venezuela was one of the most stable countries in
Latin America. At a time when bloody military dictatorships reigned
throughout the region, Venezuela was an oasis — a "model democracy."
It held presidential elections every five years, passed power back
and forth peacefully between two parties, and enjoyed a vigorous
press,
albeit one largely controlled by the oligarchy. Those in the lower classes
who missed out on the
oil boom dreamed of getting some.

In 1976 Pérez made history by nationalizing the oil industry.
Venezuelans were taking control of their country's principal resource —
at least in theory. While a vast swath of the population remained mired
in poverty, the oil riches and the crumbs thrown to the underclass were
enough to extinguish the possibility of a massive social uprising. The
guerrillas were all but dead. Most Venezuelans did not want to see a
return to the "violent decade."

Sitting in the mountains of Anzoátegui on a forlorn mission he sympathized
with less and less, Chávez was a frustrated man. His mind
turned to a local woman from Barinas, Nancy Colmenares, whom
he would soon marry and start a family with. Chávez had apparently
become involved with her during his assignment in Barinas,
and now after his transfer hundreds of miles away thought of her
with nostalgia. He dreamed of them fighting the revolution together
like Bolívar and Manuela Sáenz or even dying together like Romeo
and Juliet, although in reality Colmenares shared little of Chávez's
budding revolutionary consciousness and by some accounts was
partly the object of a falling-out between him and his mother, who
disapproved of the marriage. A humble woman from the working
class, Colmenares has kept a low profile over the years and is almost
unknown to Venezuelans. She and Chávez were to have three children
together —
Rosa Virginia in September 1978,
María Gabriela
in March 1980, and Hugo Rafael in October 1983. The couple's marriage
eventually ended in divorce in the early 1990s; Chávez later
remarried just before he ran for president in 1998, although that
union also dissolved.

That October 1977, eleven months before Colmenares gave birth
to their first child, Chávez wrote warmly of his future first wife in his
diary — although with thoughts of revolution and romance all mixed
together. "My little black one is far away," Chávez wrote, using a
common Venezuelan term of endearment. "If I could be with her, feel
her warmth. Be happy with her. The truth is I love her. It's very hard
to live without her. Mami, everything is going to be OK. Wait for me.
Maybe one day I will bring you with me. And you can learn with me.
And triumph with me. Or die with me. This war is for years . . ."

Beyond the separation from the current love of his life, Chávez was
morose because even his favorite baseball team, the Magallanes, had
lost a game. The man who entered the military academy in the hope
of reaching the major leagues was now experiencing mixed emotions
about a sport imported by the imperialists:

I lost that fanaticism. This baseball isn't ours. It's also from the
North Americans. Over there I hear a "joropo" song. That's our
music. It's also trampled on by the foreign music. The Venezuelan
has never been able to find himself. With his land, with his people.
With his music. With his customs. We lack an identity. We import
everything. We have "dough." We are "petroleum producers."
That's all we care about: getting "dough." Having the latest model
car. Being tourists. Having "status." It's the consciences of these
people, corroded by "petro-dollars." "Gold corrupts everything."
Once again Simón José Antonio [Bolívar]. We can't avoid him.
It's the only real and beautiful thing that we have left, those of
us who love this land: to hold fast to that heroic past and its men,
constructors of its history. What else?

Chávez was increasingly disgusted by the Venezuelan middle
class's
American-style consumerism at a time when many people
struggled to get by. The abuses by the
military and the government
also disturbed him. But he didn't think the guerrillas were the answer
to Venezuela's woes, either. He saw things with them he didn't like.

On a trip to the city of Barcelona one day to pick up supplies, Chávez
was at the local military base when a helicopter landed. It unloaded several
soldiers. Some were injured, others dead. Chávez walked over to
the helicopter to help. One of the soldiers still alive recognized him. He
grabbed Chávez's arm. "Lieutenant, don't let me die," he pleaded . . .
but it was too late. He expired a short time later in the hospital.

Chávez learned that the soldier and his unit had been ambushed
by guerrillas linked to Bandera Roja. The soldiers had taken a long
hike in the mountains. Half asleep, they were returning in a truck
coming down a country road. The guerrillas were waiting for them.
When the truck came around the corner, the guerrillas opened fire.
The soldiers did not even have time to defend themselves.

The incident left Chávez wary of both the
counterinsurgency
campaign by the military and the guerrilla warfare by the rebels. "I
said to myself, 'I am neither in favor of torturing these farmers because
they might be guerrillas nor of the guerrillas massacring those soldiers
who were innocent guys just doing their jobs.' Moreover, this was a
guerrilla group that had already been defeated, that no longer had any
kind of popular support; these were small isolated groups."

Chávez didn't see much hope in either path. So he decided to pursue
his own. At the age of twenty-three, he formed his first subversive cell
within the military. It was made up of several soldiers, including two
sergeants from the llanos who were also stationed in Anzoátegui. They
called their group the
Venezuelan People's Liberation Army (
ELPV).

They had no specific agenda or plan of action. They were simply
outraged by the abuses they saw. Their vague goal was to somehow
combat the injustices of Venezuela. "What were we going to do?"
Chávez asked rhetorically in an interview in 1995. "We didn't have the
slightest idea what we were going to do at that moment." He later commented
to the author Gabriel García Márquez that "we did it to prepare
ourselves in case something should happen."

As their first action, they secretly dug a hole in the ground and
buried a few grenades. It was their "arsenal," Chávez later joked. The
cell didn't go very far. It died off not long after. But it marked an important
step in Chávez's evolution. It was his first concrete act of rebellion
in the military. It was 1977, fifteen years before he launched his coup.

Outside the armed forces, Chávez also was taking tentative steps to find
allies for his embryonic struggle. He maintained close contact with
the Ruíz brothers back in Barinas and their father, the historian and
founder of the local Communist Party. As a cadet in Caracas and a
second lieutenant in Barinas, Chávez visited them when he could. The
Ruíz brothers were pursuing their own activities. They helped found
the left-wing La
Causa R (the Radical Cause) workers' party. It was
an offshoot of the Communist Party and grew out of the union movement
in the industrial powerhouse of Ciudad Guayana — Venezuela's
Pittsburgh. In time the Causa R turned into one of Venezuela's major
political parties and a serious threat to the traditional parties that dominated
the corruption-filled
democratic era.

Its founder and leading light was former guerrilla fighter and
Communist Party cadre
Alfredo Maneiro — a charismatic, legendary
figure on the left. In 1971 Maneiro published
Notas Negativas
, a document
outlining his vision of a left-nationalist group that would abandon
socialist dogma and embrace grassroots
"radical democracy." It helped
lead to the birth of the Causa R not long after.

By 1978, with Chávez's restlessness growing, the Ruíz brothers
helped arrange a meeting between Maneiro and the young second
lieutenant. The brothers also invited
Pablo Medina, another Causa R
leader. Medina spent years working in the factories of Ciudad Guayana
in eastern Venezuela and clandestinely organizing workers. He even
published a workers' newspaper between shifts. Medina was to turn into
a major figure in La Causa R and the left in Venezuela.

The secret meeting between Chávez and Maneiro took place in
an apartment Chávez rented in front of a military base in Maracay, a
ninety-minute drive west of Caracas. The encounter did not last long
— fifteen minutes or so. Chávez was in awe of Maneiro. He said little.
Maneiro did most of the talking. He was interested in meeting with
Chávez. He was looking for what he called the "fourth leg" of a figurative
table to complete a revolutionary alliance.

The alliance would comprise workers mainly from Ciudad Guayana
and residents of the sprawling Caracas barrio of Catia. It would also
include
progressive middle-class university intellectuals and, finally,
the military. "I remember Maneiro quite clearly," Chávez later stated.
"He said, 'We have the fourth leg for the table.' . . . And he added: 'I
am only going to ask one thing of you. You have to agree that whatever
we may do, it is not for right now. It is for the medium term, ten years
from now.' " Revolution was not going to break out anytime soon in
Venezuela. Chávez would have to remain patient. The wood was wet.

It was the only time Chávez met Maneiro, who died five years later
in 1983. Chávez did not see Medina again, either, until they met at
Maneiro's funeral. But the initial meeting served as a seed that later
yielded an important element in Chávez's rebellion — his link with the
civilian left.

During the same period, Chávez ran into one of his classmates from
the military academy,
Jesús Urdaneta Hernández. They met at a military
base in Maturin in
Anzoátegui state. One night when Urdaneta was
on duty Chávez approached him. He confided in him about the formation
of his tiny revolutionary group, the Venezuelan People's Liberation
Army. Chávez said he was disappointed by his experience in the military.
It wasn't what he had expected. Why don't we create something entirely
different? he suggested. We're not going to join the guerrillas. That's over
and done with. Anyway, our outlook and education don't fit with theirs.

What Chávez had in mind was another path, a movement within
the armed forces. Urdaneta was receptive. He was frustrated with the
corrupt government and military, too. He was also imbued with the
ideals of Bolívar. He agreed to join in the embryonic project. He said
he would contact two other officers,
Felipe Acosta Carles and Miguel
Ortiz Contreras, to see if they wanted to participate. It was little more
than a vague idea at that point. But Chávez was reaching an important
turning point.

That night he told Urdaneta, "I'm not going to go on like this in the
army all my life."

William Izarra's plan to bring revolution to Venezuela was born at
Harvard University. In 1978, around the same time Chávez was forming
his first subversive cell in the military and starting the tentative search
for revolutionary allies, Izarra won the chance from Venezuela's military
to study at Harvard for a year. Ensconced in the university's library,
he delved into the teachings of
Mao Tse-tung and other revolutionaries.
He came back to Venezuela with a plan to overthrow the system.

Izarra was an air force pilot, but he harbored the same kinds of
doubts about the military and Venezuelan society in general that
Chávez soon developed. As a freshly minted pilot in 1967, Izarra was
assigned for about six months to antiguerrilla "theaters" where Marxist
rebels still thrived.

Like all soldiers, Izarra underwent intense ideological training
depicting the guerrillas as bloodthirsty communistic subversives bent
on destroying Venezuela's "model" democracy. But like Chávez years
later, Izarra started to feel sympathy toward the people he was supposed
to be fighting.

One day he was handed the assignment of interrogating a captured
Cuban guerrilla leader who was aiding the Venezuelan rebels. Izarra
encountered not a thug but an intelligent officer who provided compelling
arguments about why rebels were rising up in Latin America to
fight social injustice. The next day the Cuban officer showed up dead
— supposedly shot when he tried to escape. Izarra saw his mangled face
and was horrified.

Eventually he started holding informal talks with other disgruntled
officers. He also made contact with a legendary Venezuelan guerrilla
leader, Douglas Bravo. By 1978 Izarra reached a turning point when he
was sent to Harvard to study full-time for a year. "My goal at Harvard
was just one: to finish shaping my revolutionary thesis for the Armed
Forces . . . In Harvard my
political project was born, conceiving of a different
social system."

By now imbued with Trotskyist leanings, Izarra came back to
Venezuela in 1979 convinced that provoking change in Venezuela
through electoral means was not feasible. He believed a combination of
ballot-box fraud and
patronage handouts by the two main parties, AD
and COPEI, made it impossible for anyone outside the
two-party system
to win the presidency.

Venezuela was a democracy on paper but run mainly for the benefit
of the elites, who maintained a tight grip on power through political
surrogates. Besides controlling the
national budget, the president
and his party appointed state governors — amazingly, they were not
elected by popular vote until 1989. The president and his party also
controlled posts all the way down to mayors and councilmen in tiny
villages. Congressional members were not elected by name or district;
voters simply selected a
plancha
or slate put up by the party, which
then named the person to fill each seat. Senators and Congress members
were virtually unaccountable to the public, who often did not even
know the name of their representative.

The ruling party handpicked the members of the
Supreme Court,
which almost never decided against party interests. The party also
appointed judges throughout the court system. Law firms known as
"tribes" that were well connected to AD and
COPEI could assure anyone
with the money to pay for it that they would get the ruling they wanted.
Those poor and unconnected were out of luck.

The hands of the two parties reached into seemingly every aspect of
society. If you wanted a job as a teacher, you needed a connection with
one of the local party heads. Some schools even divided up the spoils
— the principal of the morning session was an Adeco and the afternoon
session a Copeyano. If you belonged to neither party, you weren't likely
to get hired.

The genius of the system was that it provided just enough patronage
and handouts to a keep a resentful
underclass at bay. Each electoral
season AD and COPEI threw barrio dwellers a crumb by handing out free
buckets of paint to spruce up the fronts of their cement shacks. For a few
weeks, people were grateful. The government also passed out thousands
of low-paying, make-work jobs. Some employees stood around all day
at the entrances of government buildings that sometimes had eight or
ten doormen for a single door. Or they didn't show up at all. It created
one of the most bloated, inefficient government bureaucracies in Latin
America. But it also created a loyal class of party devotees. Some swore
they would be Adecos until the day they died.

Izarra concluded that the only way to break the monolithic grip
of AD and COPEI on Venezuela's corrupted political, judicial, economic,
and educational institutions was a
civic-military uprising. He
envisioned something akin to the revolt that had overthrown the dictator
Marcos
Pérez Jiménez in 1958. Returning from Harvard, Izarra
formed a revolutionary cell in the air force. He called
it R-83. The
R
was for "revolution,"
83
for the year he optimistically thought they
would triumph.

Izarra's goal was to replace Venezuela's practice of "democracy"
with something that met the needs of the majority. "The R-83 was based
on the implementation of a socialist system — possibly different from
the ones already existing, but a socialist system," he stated. He gathered
like-minded officers and started holding clandestine discussion groups.
He even devised an oath to swear in new members. They took it late at
night in front of the National Pantheon in Caracas where the remains
of Bolívar and other founding fathers were entombed.

Izarra resumed the contact he'd entered into several years earlier with
Douglas Bravo. The former guerrilla leader was hunting again for disgruntled
military officers to help with a revolutionary project of his own.

Short, dapper, and barrel-chested, Bravo was a legend on the left in
Venezuela and throughout Latin America. For a time some believed
that after Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, he was the man highest on
the CIA's
most wanted list. The son of a landowner, Bravo joined the
Venezuelan Communist Party in the 1950s as a teenager and participated
in the movement to overthrow Pérez Jiménez. Joining the Soviet-influenced
communists in those days was not unusual. Between 1928
and 1968 they were the second most powerful party in Venezuela,
overshadowed only by Democratic Action. In the 1950s they played a
leading role in overthrowing Pérez Jiménez, who was enthusiastically
supported by the United States.

By backing a string of dictators and oppressive regimes in
Latin
America, from the Somozas in
Nicaragua to Fulgencio Batista in Cuba,
the United States had sown ill will across much of the region throughout
the twentieth century. The Americans quickly recognized Pérez Jiménez
after he seized power in 1952. Dwight Eisenhower's decision to award
him the Legion of Merit two years later added to a bitter taste.

Bravo and his cohorts in the Venezuelan Communist Party
launched an initiative in 1957 to draw military officers into an alliance
to overthrow Pérez Jiménez. The next year another sector of the military
aligned with civilians beat them to it. But Bravo and the others
kept building their ties to the barracks — they believed the new government
installed by Democratic Action was anything but
revolutionary.
"There has always been a link with sectors of the armed forces in the
revolutionary processes of Venezuela," according to Bravo. He found
Venezuela's military to be fertile recruiting ground. Most Venezuelan
soldiers were from poor or working-class families. They had little interest
in maintaining the status quo. Neither did Bravo.

By February 1959 AD's
Rómulo Betancourt replaced Pérez Jiménez
as the nation's leader, ushering in Venezuela's return to democratic
rule. Before long he found himself under siege by both the left and
the right. On June 20, 1960, he was nearly killed in a car bomb attack
authored in part by rightist Venezuelan officers. At the same time,
small
focos
of leftist guerrillas were forming, and frequent street protests
were breaking out. By 1962 leftist naval officers had led two failed
coup attempts against Betancourt.

The president cracked down on dissent, ordering troops to fire
on marchers and jailing communists, including some congressmen.
Eventually he outlawed the entire Communist Party and
MIR (Left
Revolutionary Movement). The MIR was created in 1960 after some of
the more radical and youthful members of AD became disillusioned
with Betancourt for turning his back on the country's admirers of Fidel
Castro and moving closer to the foreign and domestic bourgeoisie. Many
young AD members had worked closely with Venezuela's communists
to help overthrow Pérez Jiménez. The nickname for party members
reflected the tie:
Adeco.
The
Ade
came from Acción Democratico, the
co
from communist.

Amid the upheaval, Bravo's Communist Party and the MIR were
convinced an armed, broadly backed insurrection similar to Castro's
revolt in Cuba was inevitable in Venezuela. Besides cultivating support
among leftist military officers, they began to train guerrilla cadre. Soon
after, the
PCV, MIR, and other leftist groups formed a centralized guerrilla
command structure. The Armed Forces of National Liberation
(
FALN) handled military operations. The National Liberation Front
(FLN) took care of political affairs and organizing.

They launched a series of audacious, bloody, and controversial
attacks between 1962 and 1964. Their offensives often provoked pitched
battles with the military. With many residents caught in between, the
guerrillas won scant public support.

By 1965 some of the Communist Party and FALN leadership had
decided to abandon the armed struggle. But Bravo refused. He still
believed it was the only way to change Venezuela. The Communist
Party ejected Bravo, who kept fighting in the hills with the FALN. At
the same time, he formed the
Revolutionary
Party of Venezuela (
PRV)
as the political arm of his movement. For years Bravo lived clandestinely
with an arrest warrant hanging over his head. He frequently traveled
incognito to Europe, where his group enjoyed support from leftist
intellectuals and others. Alienated from the Russians and Cubans, he
made trips to Iraq, Libya, China, and other nations seeking financial
and military assistance. He didn't get much.

Bravo was not simply a crazed rebel bent on senseless, wanton violence.
His goal was creating a utopian world where social divisions were
erased and justice reigned. He was a dreamer, envisioning a society
where people worked five or six hours a day and devoted the rest of their
time to writing poetry, painting, or reading. Part of Bravo's project aimed
at preserving the environment, especially the Amazon rain forests. He
also wanted to rescue the indigenous population's culture, which was
under assault from the North American consumerism invasion. He
sought to resurrect the images of Simón Bolívar, Simón Rodríguez, and
Ezequiel Zamora as well. He believed the trilogy could provide the ideological
foundation for a new Venezuela. His embrace of Bolívar was
another reason for his separation from the Communist Party, which
remained loyal to Soviet orthodoxy and considered Bolívar anathema.

By the late 1960s the armed revolutionary movement was dying
out. In overwhelming numbers Venezuelans were taking part in presidential
elections every five years.
President Rafael Caldera, who took
office in 1969, all but finished off the rebels by offering an amnesty.
Most accepted, but Bravo refused, saying he would not accept a pardon
because he had done nothing wrong. He became the best-known
guerrilla leader never to accept the amnesty. He continued working
underground, creating urban guerrilla cells and maintaining some
armed fighters in the hills, although they undertook few violent actions.
The
political wing, the PRV, operated in major cities across the country.

One was the picturesque Andean town of Mérida, where the city's liberal
University of the Andes (ULA) proved a fertile recruiting ground.
One of the students at the
ULA was Hugo Chávez's brother Adán. The
oldest of the six Chávez boys was the most politically precocious. While
Hugo's mind was mainly on baseball as a teenager and he never joined
any political movements, by the time Adán was sixteen he had joined
the MIR. He described it as a "Marxist-Leninist organization. There I
started my political and revolutionary education." To this day Hugo jokingly
refers to his older brother as "the communist in the family."

Adán spent a few years in the party, into the early 1970s. But it
"started to degenerate, becoming a revisionist party which even split
into two factions: one which continued to call itself the MIR and the
other called New Alternative. I decided not to join either of the groups.
I did not agree with revisionism and I was of the opinion that we needed
to build a genuine revolutionary party in contact with the masses. We
were a group of youngsters, doing work in the university. We spent more
or less a year and a half like that, until we joined another party."

The party was the PRV. Adán joined
Ruptura, a legalized political
arm of Bravo's struggling armed revolutionary movement. To Adán
Chávez, it seemed to be the most promising vehicle for revolutionary
change in Venezuela. As he graduated from the ULA and landed a post
there as a physics professor, he also moonlighted as an organizer for the
PRV-Ruptura, engaging in "urban guerrilla work." His job was mainly
to recruit students for the movement. It was not an easy task. Even
though
Ruptura was a legal party, it still faced persecution from the government
because of its ties to Bravo. Ruptura members operated semiclandestinely
because they might be arrested or even "disappeared" by
the government. "Because of its clandestine character this party did not
have contact with the masses," Adán Chávez said. "Furthermore, they
were very dogmatic and sectarian."