Hugo! (11 page)

Hugo Chávez knew very little of his brother's secret political activities
during this period, although he was aware of his increasingly radicalized
political ideology. When he was studying at the military academy
in the first half of the 1970s, Adán occasionally showed up in his sandals
and long shaggy hair to call on the clean-cut cadet. Other times, when
Hugo went home to Barinas, Adán came in from nearby Mérida, and
they went out with some of his hippie-like friends. They talked
politics.
"Adán was one of the ones who most
influenced my political attitudes.
He has a great responsibility for my formation," Chávez said in a 2004
interview. "My brother was in Mérida and was a member of the MIR.
I didn't know it, it just drew my attention that he and his friends went
around with long hair, some of them with beards. Apparently I was out
of place with my short hair, my uniform. I felt good with this group.
We'd go to a young guys' bar, near my mother's house. Especially to one
that was called Nights of Hungary . . ."

It was a time when another offshoot of the Communist Party
founded in 1968, the Movement to Socialism (
MAS), was growing into
an important political force, led by former guerrillas including Teodoro
Petkoff. Chávez's high school friends the Ruíz brothers were also
involved in the nascent Causa R. "We were friends, and they accepted
me with the uniform and everything," Chávez recalled. "There was
also a lot of discussion, of course. One time one of these guys, a young
man, told me, 'This soldier must be one of those parasites.' We almost
traded punches, but the group defended me. 'Respect him, man, this is
Hugo Chávez, our friend.' There was a lot of
political discussion and a
lot of reading. I was getting more and more interested in social issues.
However, if I look back, since childhood I always had sympathy for the
rebels. That area of Sabaneta was an area of insurgents."

By Christmas 1977, as Chávez's
disillusionment with the military was
growing, he went home to Barinas for the holidays and confessed
his frustrations to Adán. He told his brother that he was thinking of
resigning. He asked if he could find him a job at the ULA. Adán counseled
his brother to stay in the military. For the first time he revealed his
own clandestine activities with the PRV.

At the time, Bravo's group was in the midst of a transition from
the heyday of guerrilla warfare in the 1960s. They had long ago concluded
that this strategy was unfeasible in Venezuela, and in 1975 they
completely disbanded the FALN. They instituted what they called the
Virage Tactico
, tactical turnaround. Largely ending the rural insurgency
in part because many
campesinos
were flocking to the cities, they refocused
their work on urban centers.

They also implemented a strategy dubbed the
tres patas
, three legs.
It was similar to the four legs espoused by La Causa R's Alfredo Maneiro.
Bravo's first leg was
el pueblo
— union members, farmers, students,
barrio dwellers, cultural and community organizations. Organizers
such as Adán Chávez worked on this segment, trying to build support
among the masses. The second leg was the church. To advance that
agenda, Bravo's people conducted a series of secret
meetings with progressive
Roman Catholic priests including the
Reverend Arturo Sosa,
a bright young Jesuit from a well-to-do family who years later became
head of the religious order in Venezuela.

The third leg was the armed forces. PRV leaders met with Izarra in
the air force, with a subversive cell in the navy, and with Hugo Trejo,
one of the main military leaders of the civic-military movement that toppled
Pérez Jiménez. Bravo envisioned all three legs eventually uniting
to participate in a similar civilian-military uprising to overthrow the
AD-COPEI hegemony. He dreamed of some kind of socialist system distinct
from the Soviet and Cuban models he abhorred and infused with
a nationalistic, Bolivarian flavor.

After Hugo Chávez poured out his frustrations that Christmas
season, Adán informed him that PRV members had already been
talking about him. Hugo heeded the advice dispensed by his brother
and by José Esteban Ruíz Guevara, the old communist from Barinas.
He returned to the barracks and kept his eyes open for ways to advance
the cause of transforming Venezuela.

One soon presented itself. He was transferred from the antiguerrilla
unit in the east to a military base in the city of Maracay in central
Venezuela. He was still a communications officer. But when he arrived
in Maracay and saw an array of tanks, he realized how much more
useful they could be to his plans someday. "As a soldier, little by little I
realized that as a communications officer I would not have much
power
or capacity for action. So in Maracay when I saw the French AMX 30
tanks I asked for a change to tanks. That was the power." A year later,
his request was granted.

He kept talking to Adán. By early 1979 Adán broached the idea of
meeting with Bravo. Hugo "was immediately ready to make the contact,"
according to Adán.

The encounter would not be a simple task. Bravo was still a wanted
man. He was living clandestinely in the Montalban section of Caracas.
To avoid being recognized and arrested, he rarely left his apartment
during the day. When he did go out at night, he often wore disguises
including wigs, hats, and dark glasses.

The PRV assigned the sensitive task of arranging the meeting
between Bravo and Chávez to one of its most trusted operatives, Nelson
Sánchez. When
Douglas Bravo had hoped to accelerate his attempts to
infiltrate the armed forces in the late 1970s, he'd picked Sánchez to lead
the creation of a new
"career military front" of officers willing to align
themselves with the PRV with the goal of overthrowing Venezuela's
political system. Sánchez spent much of 1976 through 1978 studying
Venezuelan military history and everything else about soldiers, from
how they talked to how they thought to what they ate. "Since 1976 we
were studying the psychology and class composition of the members
of the armed forces, their likes, their customs, their worries. It was a
truly scientific study, since conspiracy and insurrection is not exactly
a game." He discovered that one way to reach the hearts and minds of
many soldiers was by talking about topics like corruption in the armed
forces and border conflicts with Colombia and Guyana.

Sánchez took on another code name for his contact with the military
— Harold. He met with Izarra and other members of his R-83 movement.
By 1979 he received the name of another promising officer who
might be willing to join the conspiracy: Hugo Chávez. By then Chávez
was on the road to being promoted again, eventually winning an assignment
to teach at his alma mater, the
military academy in Caracas. His
superiors had no idea of his growing restlessness.

Sánchez set in motion the plan to connect Chávez and Bravo. He
instructed Adán Chávez that the first contact would take place at Fort
Tiuna, where the military academy was housed. They established a
password so that when the PRV activists met Hugo, he would know it
was them. Gaining access to Fort Tiuna was not simple — Sánchez
could not just drive onto the base and ask for Chávez. So he contacted
a cousin of his,
Elizabeth Sánchez, who was divorced from a soldier
and had a special military identification card that allowed her onto
the base.

With Sánchez posing as her chauffeur, they drove late one morning
to Fort Tiuna. They entered and had a guard call Chávez. He came
down to meet them. When he asked who'd sent them, they said Adán,
and gave him the password. They met for about ten minutes in a parking
lot near some gardens. It was a brief but important encounter. Chávez
was entering into a relationship with Douglas Bravo and his forces. It
would play an influential role in forming the ideology behind a revolutionary
movement that eventually turned Venezuela upside down.

One week later Chávez and Bravo met. Separately, they were secretly
shuttled to Elizabeth Sánchez's house in the middle-class Altos Prados
de María neighborhood. It was a good location for clandestine meetings.
Cars could pull into a concealed driveway and let their passengers
enter directly into the house without neighbors seeing them. Besides,
it was night.

The two men met for about an hour. This time Chávez was far more
loquacious than in his meeting with Causa R leader Alfredo Maneiro.
He and Bravo spoke about current political events in Venezuela, the idea
of recruiting rebels in the military, the notion of a possible civilian-military
uprising. Chávez made a good impression on Bravo and Sánchez —
sure of himself and determined to reform the country. "I understood that
he was a very daring guy, very intelligent, and strong-willed," Bravo said
two and a half decades later and after a falling-out with Chávez. "He was
prepared to carry out this work over the long term . . . From that moment
on we started a long-term project."

Chávez and Bravo initiated a series of meetings that lasted for several
years, with "Harold" serving as the go-between. They sometimes met as
often as once a week, although the frequency of the encounters varied. The
rendezvous point often was Elizabeth Sánchez's house. They developed
code names of their own. Bravo was Martín; Chávez was José María. The
José
came from independence war general and Bolívar ally José Antonio
Páez, whom Chávez admired. The
María
came from Maisanta and the
"Madre Santa" he shouted each time he headed into combat.

The two men developed a close relationship, albeit one the
Venezuelan public still knows little about. Even some of Chávez's co-conspirators
in the military did not know about it. Chávez realized that
if they discovered his alliance with the communist Bravo, they would be
repulsed. He was forced to live a double life not only within the military,
but within the conspiratorial movement itself, concealing relationships
from those who would be alienated if they found out who else he was
aligned with. He did this by forming small "rings," cells whose members
did not know the identity of the members of other cells. Many such
soldier-members had no idea Chávez was cavorting with a communist
like
Douglas Bravo. One founding member of Chávez's movement in
the military, Jesús Urdaneta Hernández, did not discover Chávez's link
to Bravo until the early 1990s. "If I had learned he had these ties, I never
would have accompanied him" in the movement, Urdaneta said in 2005.
"Chávez is an astute man from this point of view. He played games with
us — he knew who was who. He navigated through those waters."

Likewise, Bravo would have wanted nothing to do with soldiers
such as Urdaneta, whom he viewed as a stereotypical right-wing military
gorilla. To appeal to his cohorts in the military, Chávez framed his
movement not in terms of Bravo's Marxism and communism, but in
terms of Bolívar's nationalism and Latin American unity. Bolívar they
could accept; Bravo, never.

He got the message clearly one day when he told a close ally in the
military he was going to meet with Bravo. "His reaction was to ask me
if I was crazy, that he was a communist, a guerrilla, that he killed soldiers.
Right away I told him no, that it was a lie" — he was not going to
meet with Bravo at all. "Later I spoke with another who didn't have the
years of the guerrillas so fresh in his memory to have a negative idea
about Douglas Bravo. But he also rejected him just like my other closer
friends . . . So I maintained a relationship with the movement [and
Bravo] more on a personal level. I continued working with a nationalist
Bolivarian profile, and realized this got through to the armed forces, this
fell like a seed on fertile ground. On the other hand, if you spoke about
ex-guerrillas it became very difficult to advance, to discuss. There was a
natural rejection, above all because of their military formation."

Chávez's incipient movement was neither purely communist nor
purely Bolivarian. It was a mix of things, and would continue to add new
elements as it developed. It eventually incorporated everything from Tony
Blair's "Third Way" in England to Mao's thoughts in China, although
Chávez's central underlying motivation was to correct the social injustices
of Venezuela. Urdaneta, who later broke bitterly with Chávez partly
because he believed the president was betraying the Bolivarian roots
of the movement and giving too much power to discredited civilians,
described him — perhaps harshly —
as a "sugar cane crushing machine.
He grabs you, he sticks you in, he squeezes you, he takes out everything
he has to take out, then he throws you in the garbage."

As Chávez's movement began to take shape in the early 1980s,
Venezuela's oil boom days were coming to a crashing and, for him,
fortuitous end. While the country took in a whopping $150 billion
between 1973 and 1983, much of the oil money disappeared.
Government
corruption and inefficiency were rampant. By 1978 the
Pérez administration "undertook the first fateful step toward the crisis
of the 1980s, when it contracted several large, short-term loans to cover
the balance of payments deficit and to continue industrial expansion
projects." Venezuela's external
debt started to balloon. A wide range
of government ministries and institutes took out international loans,
often without congressional approval. For several years the true size of
the debt was not even known. As it later turned out, half of it was not
recorded or approved.

When COPEI's Luis Herrera Campins ran for president in 1978, his
slogan was
"
Donde Estan Los Reales?
" — where is the money? He
won, and in his inauguration speech in February 1979 declared he was
receiving a "mortgaged country." He pledged to scale back spending.
But between 1978 and 1981 the Iranian revolution triumphed, war
between Iraq and Iran broke out, and oil prices took a second jump,
from $13 to the breathless figure of $34 a barrel. Herrera ended up
spending as much in the first three years of his administration as Pérez
had in five.