Hugo! (12 page)

His fiscal laxness came back to haunt him. In the early 1980s oil
prices collapsed. Revenue from petroleum exports plummeted from
just below $20 billion in 1981 to $11 billion in 1983. At the same time,
large short-term debts were coming due. Herrera Campins resisted
devaluing the previously rock-solid bolivar from its exchange rate of
4.3 to every US dollar to compensate for the changed economic reality.
But by February 18, 1983, he could no longer postpone the inevitable.
That day became known as
"Black Friday."

Herrera Campins announced a new, three-tiered exchange system.
By the end of the year the free-market rate for the bolivar, once widely
regarded as the blue-chip Latin currency, tripled. By the end of the following
year, unemployment in the urban sector nearly doubled, from
7.8 percent to 14.3 percent. The external debt — finally revealed to the
public — stood at $34.2 billion. That was nearly double the figure for
1978. It made Venezuela the fourth largest debtor in Latin America,
after Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina. The party was over. Things would
only get worse.

Two months before Black Friday, the Venezuelan armed forces were
preparing their annual ceremonies marking the death of the nation's
leading light, Simón Bolívar. At the military base in Maracay that was
home to the heart of the air force, they needed a speaker. Chávez, who was
taking a course there, was an obvious choice. He was a budding expert on
Bolívar and promoted him every chance he got, handing out books and
painting his image on barracks walls. At about 1 P.M. on December 17,
1982, the troops assembled on a patio. Chávez got up to talk.

His speech was not the typical ceremonial pabulum expected at
such patriotic events commemorating the dead forefathers. Instead, he
delivered a fiery, rebellious talk that grabbed the attention of his superiors
and fellow soldiers. Bolívar was still alive, he said, and angry over
the mess Venezuelans had made of their country and Latin Americans
of their region. It was a not-so-subtle call to revolt, as he later stated:

I started remembering [Cuban independence hero José] Martí.
"There is Bolívar in the heavens of America, vigilant and frowning
. . . because what he didn't do, still has to be done today." And I
tied in the situation of that moment. "How can you say Bolívar still
doesn't have anything to do in America, with so much poverty, with
so much misery? How can you say Bolívar has nothing to do?"

When I finished the speech after about half an hour . . . I
immediately felt the enormous tension of the officers. The formation
broke up and we left running, one along side the other. Major
Flores Gilán ordered everyone to stop and stand at attention, and
told me in a very hard tone, "Chávez, you seem like a politician."
During that time calling someone a politician, especially someone
in the barracks, was an offense. Politics had degenerated so much
it was like calling someone a liar, a demagogue . . .

A colonel broke the tension by ordering everyone to remain silent.
The night before, he continued, Chávez had informed him of everything
he was going to say. "No one believed him, but it saved the situation
for the moment," Chávez recalled. They returned to the barracks.
A friend of Chávez's, Felipe Acosta Carles, suggested they go for a run
to relieve the tension. They invited along two colleagues — Urdaneta
and Lieutenant Raúl Isaías Baduel, who was a year behind Chávez and
his classmates at the academy.

Chávez changed out of his uniform, but couldn't find his sneakers.
So he put on his baseball shoes with plastic cleats. It was about 2 P.M.
They took a slow, six-mile run toward a place known as La Placera and a
famous tree called the Samán de Güere. Simón Bolívar was said to have
slept beneath it with his troops before the crucial battle of Carabobo
in 1821. Chávez was seething with anger. As they jogged it occurred to
him to ask his colleagues to formally create an organization that would
rescue the values of the fatherland, dignify the military career, and fight
corruption.

When they reached the
tree, Chávez made his proposal. The men
accepted. Chávez improvised an
oath to swear them in. He invoked the
pledge Bolívar had made in 1805 in Rome before Simón Rodríguez when
he swore to devote his life to liberating Venezuela from the "Spanish
yoke." Chávez added three of
Zamora's key
slogans to the new oath:

I swear by the God of my parents, I swear by my nation, I swear by
my honor that I will not allow my soul to rest, nor my arm to relax,
until I have broken the chains that oppress my people through
the will of the powerful. Free elections, free land and free men,
horror to the oligarchy.

It was a historic moment. Chávez was finally creating a serious, secret
political conspiracy within the military. He was twenty-eight years old.
It was five years after his initial and short-lived attempt to create a tiny
conspiratorial cell in eastern Venezuela. They named the new group
the Bolivarian Revolutionary Army-200, or
EBR-200 in Spanish. The
letters were a play on the names of the heroes who were to serve as the
guiding lights of the movement: Ezequiel Zamora, Simón Bolívar, and
Simón Rodríguez. Borrowing a page from Douglas Bravo, they became
the "
three roots of the tree" of Chávez's movement. They added the
200
to mark the yearlong celebrations taking place to honor the two hundredth
anniversary of the birth of the Liberator in July 1783.

Chávez's movement was not clearly defined. He hardly had a concrete
plan to overthrow the government or launch a coup. "At that
moment, the Bolivarian movement that was being born did not propose
political objectives," he said. "Its goals were imminently internal. Its
efforts were directed in the first place to studying the military history
of Venezuela
as a source of a military doctrine of our own, which up
to then didn't exist . . . There we formed a movement that was essentially
democratic. There we discovered the teacher Simón Rodríguez,
the leader Simón Bolívar and the fighter Ezequiel Zamora."

Urdaneta, who eventually became one of Chávez's chief critics,
said the initial goal of the movement was not "to topple the government
. . . The purpose was to become conscious of the reality of our
country. In some ways they want to stick the soldier between the four
walls of the barracks and isolate him from what is a reality, which is
his country. And that is impossible . . . We detested the corruption
and we realized that one corrupt officer came with a group of officers
who were also corrupt. They went around together and were a combo.
That's why we called them combos of corruption. So we said, the vagabonds
unite and on the other hand the honest men are isolated and
stepped on by the vagabonds. Why don't we unite, too, to confront
them? That's how we started to organize."

The movement was amorphous enough to mean different things
to different people. To Urdaneta, a staunch anticommunist, it was a
democratic, nationalist movement based on
Bolívar's ideals, neither
of the left or the right. To Chávez, who was meeting secretly with
Douglas Bravo, the idea was to take the best of all systems and merge
them under the central unifying banner of Bolívar. The Liberator was
the trunk; Rodríguez
and
Zamora were the main roots to the side;
other thinkers and ideas were welcome to help nourish the tree. "This
tree has to be a circumference, it has to accept all kinds of ideas, from
the right, from the left, from the ideological ruins of those old capitalist
and communist systems," Chávez said. "There are elements or
ruins that are gigantic, and they must be taken."

While Bolívar was the central unifying force of the tree, Zamora
offered a key element to Chávez's ideology. A long-forgotten nineteenth-century
radical and revolutionary, Chávez brought him back to life. In
some ways he could identify even more with Zamora than with Bolívar.
The Liberator was a landowning oligarch and a white Creole — one
born in Latin America but of Spanish descent. His aristocratic family
in Caracas could afford to send him to study in Europe as a teenager.

Zamora, in contrast, came from the llanos, was of humble origins, and
had a direct connection with the
campesinos
of Barinas.
Zamora dreamed of uniting civilians and soldiers in his project.
In a famous portrait of the warrior-hero made after his victory at
Santa
Inés, Zamora is depicted wearing two hats, one atop the other in an
unusual way: The first is an ordinary bowler, the second a military
cap, together symbolizing his desire to unify the armed forces and civil
society. As a young man Chávez, still an avid painter, often painted
copies of the portrait. Years later he sent out Christmas cards adorned
with a drawing of Zamora's face. His devotion was so intense he suggested
to friends that if reincarnation were possible, he might have been
Zamora in an earlier life.

After taking the oath that day in Maracay, Chávez and the three
others started jogging back to the barracks, although he and Baduel
later jumped on a public bus to finish the long trip. Back at the military
base, they kept talking about their plans at the officers' club. They
discussed how they would organize themselves, how they would recruit
new members, who would carry out each task. They discussed setting
up a security system. They agreed they would bring no new soldiers into
the movement without first consulting the others.

Eventually they developed the system of "rings" of security. The
first circle comprised the "supersafe" members of the movement who
formed its inner core and could be trusted completely. The others
included a secondary group of trusted members, neutral soldiers, and
"enemies" — intelligence agents or traitors who could infiltrate and
betray the movement.

The group also developed an elaborate communications system.
They carried around a book about Bolívar by
Augusto Mijares and
devised a set of code words based on the text. "If you called me and
told me the telephone of your sister or your mother is 258342," Chávez
recalled, "the 42 was the number of the page, and there were the code
words that we wanted to say." The security systems worked well. Chávez
and his cohorts were to operate their clandestine subversive movement
inside the military for a decade with superiors unable — or in some
cases unwilling — to stop it.

The day after they took the oath under the great tree, Chávez was
in his office at the base when the impetuous Acosta Carles pulled up in
his car and ran in excitedly. He blurted out that he had his first recruit
for the movement. Chávez was pleased and angry at the same time.
They needed to exercise supreme caution. But they also needed new
members. Acosta assured him the new recruit was a good find: At least
come out and see him. He's in the car. Chávez walked outside. Sitting
in the vehicle was
Ronald Blanco La Cruz, a promising young soldier.
He was to become of one of Chávez's key allies.

Chávez's
recruiting efforts were soon to take off — right in the heart
of the military. His superiors had made the mistake of naming him an
instructor back in his alma mater, the military academy. Chávez would
have direct access to Venezuela's best and brightest cadets.

Chávez turned the military academy into his chief recruiting ground.
His appointment as an instructor in 1981 could not have been a luckier
stroke. He had at his feet a platoon of impressionable young cadets,
including many who came from humble families and shared his disgust
over Venezuela's corroded political and military institutions. They
eagerly ate up the rebellious talk of the charismatic captain who spent
hours extolling the thoughts of Bolívar, Zamora, and Rodríguez.

"We knew the enemies of Venezuela were hunger, corruption,
misery, unemployment and the handing over of the nation's immense
abundance of riches," remembered Pedro Carreño, one of the cadets
who two decades later won a seat in Congress as part of Chávez's coalition.
"In the military academy we spoke about this, because the topic of
security and defense is preponderant."

At the beginning Chávez was completely alone. It was some four
years after he had formed the ephemeral cell in eastern Venezuela
where he and a few other soldiers buried grenades in the ground. At
the academy "I started it in silence, with a lot of discipline, with a lot of
attention to the boys" — the cadets.

He began his recruiting efforts, he stated in April 2007 interviews,
by focusing on the one hundred or so cadets directly under his command
at the military academy. Then he turned to the approximately
three hundred he taught in classes. He said he tried to obtain as many
hours as possible in the classroom so he would have maximum contact
with cadets and possible recruits for his movement. He also ran
sports programs, which became another venue for attracting candidates.
In addition, he organized cultural activities, such as theatrical
shows that reenacted historical events. He would assign
cadets the
roles of various historical figures, including Bolívar and
Zamora. He
also talked to many individual cadets during guard duty and other
solitary activities. "It was a combination" of methods, he said, adding
that the cadets "were the backbone of the revolutionary movement in
the army."

Chávez meticulously studied each one to determine who might be
inclined to join his secret movement. He pored over their personnel
files. He learned about their families, their social status, their roots.
He automatically ruled out anyone who came from the upper classes.
Even those who came from poor families had to show they had the
proper outlook to be considered. "One error would have been fatal," he
said, noting that fortunately he never committed one in eleven years of
recruiting inside and later outside the academy.

When he was confident they would join and remain loyal to the
movement, he moved to incorporate them as members. They replicated
the oath-taking of December 17, 1982. Often they gathered at night on
the academy's patio to swear in new members.

Chávez spoke with the recruits alone and in small groups. They
talked in the academy, in an apartment Ronald Blanco La Cruz had in
Caracas, or in the small room above the garage at Elizabeth Sánchez's
house. Chávez spread his rebellious message at the academy under his
guise as professor of history and military doctrine. On billboards he
posted the sayings of Bolívar, Zamora, Rodríguez, and Maisanta, along
with other information about them. At times his efforts were hardly
subtle. Like other officers he took his troops out jogging at 4:30 A.M. But
instead of traditional war songs he had them sing a
hymn from the era
of the
Federal Wars that paid homage to Zamora:

The overcast sky warns of storms to come,
While the sun behind the clouds loses its bright shine
Oligarchs tremble, long live freedom!
The troops of Zamora, at the bugle's sound
Will destroy the brigades of the reactionary scoundrels.

The contact with the young soldiers reenergized Chávez and
pumped life into his fledgling organization. He was operating under
the noses of his superiors, yet few suspected he was building a subversive
movement. He often talked with or even acted like the "enemy" in
the military to fool higher-ups, he stated in April 2007.

"In my notebook I can demonstrate how we functioned in the classrooms
of the Military Academy, during normal class hours, on the patios
and when we jogged," Chávez once noted. When he arrived there, "I
still had my doubts . . . this dilemma, what am I doing here. I felt this
impulse for politics. I felt this thing inside me and lived with this contradiction."
But the cadets "stimulated me and erased the dilemma . . .
It gave me an extraordinary force and I forgot for good about requesting
a discharge or any other alternative . . . Every day with them, I returned
to being just another cadet. You live the pureness of youth there. That
was the seed bed of the rebellion . . . That's why I call it my second graduation
class. I was with them almost all four years."

Carreño calculates that by the time he and his classmates completed
their studies, at least 30 out of 133 graduates were sworn members of
the movement. Before they left and were assigned to posts all over the
country, they pledged to maintain contact with at least two cadets back
at the academy so the movement would not die. The
class of 1985 produced
some of the key members of Chávez's movement and comrades in
arms. They included
Diosdado Cabello and Florencio Porras, who two
decades later were to become state governors as Chávez rose to power.

Besides the classroom, Chávez had another
recruiting tool — baseball.
He organized a team at the academy. On weekends he sometimes
took the cadets in a military academy bus to Sánchez's house, where
they celebrated team victories and eventually held meetings of the
Bolivarian movement. Chávez was a regular at the house, where he
continued his secret meetings with "Martín" — Douglas Bravo.

Amid all the conspiring, Chávez was a family man, too. He and Nancy
Colmenares were busy with their three young children, Rosa Virginia,
María Gabriela, and Hugo Rafael. Even by the accounts of people who
later became his political enemies, Chávez was a doting and tender
father. He spent as much time as he could with his family amid his
numerous activities. He made sure the children had school uniforms,
books, and other necessities. Even in fatherhood, however, thoughts
of revolution were not far from his mind. As his children grew older,
he helped them draw Christmas cards. They featured a depiction of
Simón Bolívar.

The children sometimes seemed mystified by Chávez's unorthodox
lifestyle and the mysterious mission that consumed his time. In 1995
his second oldest, María Gabriela, by then fifteen, wrote him a moving
letter about their relationship. "Since I was a girl, I've been trying to
understand you, Dad," she said. "There were things I didn't understand
and now I understand. 'It was and is the struggle,' and that love
of country, of humanity." She recalled how he would take them to a
farm with an inviting river — but they didn't have bathing suits to swim
because of "that mystery." She remembered him reading them poems
about Bolívar and how he once tore up a piece of money the two girls
were fighting over, saying, "Money isn't worth anything, only love is."
She ended the letter by saying, "You are my great love, my teacher, my
brother, my best friend, my father. I ask you, please, don't let your boat
get far from mine."

María Gabriela and Chávez's other children from his first marriage
largely shun the public light. So does their mother, Nancy Colmenares.
Chávez rarely mentions her in public. While by some accounts she was
a humble, hardworking, and well-liked woman in her native Barinas,
she did not share Chávez's passion for history, his obsession with Bolívar,
or his growing restlessness over Venezuela's future.

In 1984 he met someone else who did. Herma Marksman was a
history professor who was going through a difficult divorce. She was
moving to Caracas from the eastern city of Ciudad Bolívar to start a
new life. She hoped to teach in a high school and pursue a postgraduate
degree in the economic and social history of Venezuela. Her sister
Cristina was living in Elizabeth Sánchez's spacious, three-story house
in Caracas. Herma and her two children joined her temporarily until
she could find permanent housing. She was in transition, shuttling back
and forth between the capital and Ciudad Bolívar.

One night in April 1984 Marksman and Sánchez were on an upper
floor of the house when a car pulled up outside. Out stepped Hugo
Chávez. Sánchez asked Marksman to greet him at the door and ask
what he wanted, since she was getting ready to go out.

Chávez was with his brother Argenis and had come to ask if he
could borrow Sánchez's house the following night. His baseball team
was finishing a championship series the next day. He wanted to celebrate
if they won. It was fine with Sánchez, Marksman told him, and
the two sat down to chat a bit. They found they had some things in
common. "That night we started to talk like anyone would. He showed
a great concern about the armed forces, about the deterioration of the
country, while I spoke about education . . . and the need to come up
with correctives, to implement reforms." As he got up to leave, Chávez
gave Marksman his business card. If you ever need anything, he told
her, give me a call.

By the next day Marksman had forgotten all about him. She went
out to dinner with friends and was surprised when she came home
about midnight and saw a military bus parked out front. Chávez and
his teammates were inside celebrating. Marksman went in, said hello,
went to the kitchen to get a glass of water, and then returned to bid him
good night. She had to get to bed since she was taking an early flight
to Bolívar. But Chávez wouldn't let her go so easily, as she recounts the
story. "He told me, 'No, let's talk. What we spoke about yesterday was
very interesting. Stay awhile with us.' So I stayed, and that's how we
started to get to know each other."

She flew to Bolívar in the morning to continue preparing her move
to Caracas. Chávez — according to her recounting — kept asking her
sister Cristina about her and requesting her telephone number. Cristina
told him he would have to wait until Herma returned. She finally moved
to Caracas for good in August 1984, and started to bump into Chávez
more and more at the house. "At first I thought he went to that house only
for reasons of friendship, because there was a very beautiful relationship
with that family, with Elizabeth, her children and him. But it bothered
me that sometimes he came and asked, 'Did Martín call? Has Martín
come?' And one time I asked Elizabeth, Who is Martín? Well, he's a
friend of Nelson [Sánchez] who comes sometimes to talk with Hugo."

Martín was a mysterious figure to Marksman. Every time he was to
arrive at the house, strange things happened. Herma had a room on the
second floor, and Elizabeth Sánchez would instruct her to stay there.
A meeting was going to take place in a room downstairs, Sánchez told
her, and no one should open the door. Marksman could not imagine
what was happening.

The mystery deepened one day when Elizabeth traveled out of
town. Marksman decided to clean up a cobwebbed storage room at
the back of the house where Sánchez often washed clothes and hung
them to dry. The room was full of magazines, books, and documents.
As Marksman started dusting, they caught her attention. Among them
were the magazine
Ruptura
from Bravo's group, Mao Tse-tung's
Red
Book
, and other leftist literature.

When Sánchez returned,
Marksman confronted her. I want you to
tell me what is going on in this house, she said, because I'm here with
my two children and my sister, too. Sánchez was caught off guard. She
could no longer hide the truth. She told Marksman what was going
on. The materials belong to my cousin Nelson, Sánchez said, and, you
know, he has leftist ideas. He's a member of the PRV. And I am going
to tell you who Martín is. I think it is time to tell you the truth. Martín
is none other than Douglas Bravo. My cousin Nelson is the right-hand
man of Douglas and he's involved in forming a civilian-military group.
"She explained to it to me, and I understood why he [Chávez] came on
a regular basis, and sometimes brought the boys from the academy,"

Marksman later recalled. "That's how I started to get to know him little
by little."
Marksman was intrigued more than alarmed by the revelation.
She and Chávez began to see more of each other. On her thirty-fifth
birthday that September, Chávez showed up at the house with a big
bouquet of flowers to celebrate with some other friends who were there.
As the evening ended and he went to say good-bye, he said he wanted
to have a "serious" conversation with her. He invited her to go out for a
cup of coffee away from the house.

The following Monday he swung by and took her to the commercial
district of Sabana Grande in eastern Caracas. As they sat in a café sipping
coffee, Chávez confessed everything. By Marksman's account, he
said he liked her and that he was going to be "frank." I am a person with
a double life, he told her. In the day I am an officer in the armed forces. I
belong to the army. I try to fulfill my duties. But I also have another, dangerous
activity. The rest of my time I dedicate to a conspiratorial movement
called the EBR — the Bolivarian Revolutionary Army. It's made
up of military officers, but we also need to recruit civilians. I want you to
accompany me in this struggle to the final days. "From that moment,"
Marksman said, "I started to help him prepare the meetings."

Chávez had something of a reputation as a
ladies' man, which was
not unusual in Venezuela, where few marriages were exclusive arrangements.
Marksman was not unaware of it when she met him. EBR-200
co-founder Jesús Urdaneta joked that "when Chávez was young, he
couldn't see a broom stick in a skirt because he would fall in love."