Hugo! (13 page)

Still, the relationship with Marksman was to be different. She
was a serious woman, an intellectual. She and Chávez were brought
together by a common passion for Venezuelan history and a desire to
reform the country. Marksman was hardly attracted to him for his looks
— Chávez was skinny and far from handsome. Instead, she was drawn
in by his interests and the Bolívar-inspired mission that propelled him.
He was also a charming
llanero.
He engaged in spirited conversation
for hours, telling stories, cracking jokes, singing
llanero
songs.

Before long Marksman turned, in a way, into Chávez's Manuela
Sáenz, the well-read, longtime companion of Bolívar who aided the
Liberator in his independence struggle and whom some consider one of
the most influential, though overlooked, women in Latin American history.
Marksman helped organize meetings of the Bolivarian conspirators.
She served as a key contact between Chávez and his military cohorts,
and alerted them when military investigators were hot on their trail. She
functioned as a bridge between Chávez and civilian groups. She took
notes at meetings, maintained an archive of Chávez's secret documents,
and burned some when authorities were closing in. She stored many of
his personal effects for safekeeping, including his first clip of hair, family
photographs, diaries, letters, newspaper articles, and certificates.

An apartment she bought in the middle-class section of El Paraiso
in Caracas in 1985 turned into a refuge for Chávez, who often ate,
slept, read, and met with co-conspirators there. Marksman sometimes
accompanied Chávez as he ran around the country secretly rallying
the troops in his free time. There were days when she would drive for
hours as the normally indefatigable Chávez, who slept as little as three
hours a night, collapsed in exhaustion in the passenger seat.

Much more than a chauffeur or a secretary, Marksman was a
respected partner for Chávez, who listened to her opinion and sometimes
heeded it. Like Sáenz with Bolívar in his bleakest moments, at
times she was nearly the only one at Chávez's side when the movement
seemed on the verge of collapse. She became so integrated into the conspiracy,
she earned own nom de guerre — Comandante Pedro.

It wasn't a typical romantic relationship. Before he entered into it,
Chávez once confessed to Marksman, he sent some friends to investigate
her and her background to make sure she wasn't a spy and wouldn't
betray him and the movement. But Chávez could be tender and
romantic — he often brought her flowers or chocolate, serenaded her,
and brought her medicine when she was sick.

But he was also Chávez. The first present he gave Marksman was
a copy of the book about
Maisanta by the Barinas doctor José León
Tapia that first revealed to Chávez the other side of the story about
his great-grandfather. On another occasion when she fell down some
stairs and cut open her forehead, Chávez came to visit her every day as
she recovered. One night he showed up with some tapes of a narrator
reading speeches and documents by Bolívar. The idea, Chávez told
her, was that she could play them while she was asleep so she could
have the Liberator ever-present.

Chávez didn't have time for frivolous activities — he was on a mission
to save Venezuela. "He said the purpose of his life was his project,"
Marksman later said. "He feels he has a mission to fulfill and he is going
to fulfill it . . . This preoccupation he has for those who have nothing
has always marked his life — the excluded ones. Perhaps because he
comes from a situation where he lacked so much."

In the nine years they were close, Chávez and Marksman almost
never had time to see a movie together. She remembers only one:
Fatal
Vision
. They didn't even go to the movie theater. It was on television.
But they got along well. Neither was inclined to spend time in bars or
at the beach like many Venezuelans. They preferred to stay home and
read, something Chávez often did at her house. "The image I have of
Hugo Chávez is of a man who was always reading," recalled Marksman,
who later broke bitterly with him. He read everything, but especially
enjoyed tales of history and great
leaders. He even had a book about
how to give talks on different occasions — funerals, Masses, political
events. From the moment she met him, Marksman believed Chávez
was going to go far. "He had an indefatigable tenacity. He knew what he
wanted and where he was going."

When Marksman met Chávez, his movement was on the upswing. It
was in the middle of a period of expansion that lasted from about 1982
to 1986. The group held regular meetings, mostly in private homes or
apartments, usually with just a few people present for security reasons.
They assigned tasks to members who made five-minute presentations
on different topics. Marksman, for instance, was assigned the topic of
Simón Rodríguez at one point and had to research him and give a short
talk. Others might be sent to investigate the problems of Venezuela's
educational system or economy, then report back to the group. Chávez
wanted to prepare them in case one day they took power. The military
officers did not know about his meetings with Bravo on the side, and
he told Marksman to keep it quiet. He knew most of them would not
accept it.

Besides his success in recruiting cadets at the military academy,
Chávez was also resuming his contacts with the Causa R. He was a
different man from the day in 1978 when he'd secretly met Alfredo
Maneiro and barely opened his mouth. Now Chávez was far surer of
himself and where he was headed. He had met briefly with Causa R
leader Pablo Medina in 1983 after Maneiro's death, although nothing
came of it. But two years later he decided to contact Medina again.

It could not have come at a better time for the Causa R leader. His
group was in disarray after the 1983 passing of central figure Maneiro.
It had suffered a string of defeats. The nation's largest union, the CTV,
which was controlled by Democratic Action, had intervened with the
workers' union in Ciudad Guayana, firing three thousand workers and
undermining the Causa R's influence. The group barely existed outside
Ciudad Guayana. In Caracas its membership numbered no more than
half a dozen. "We had to raise it from nothing," according to Medina.

Chávez's reappearance was more than welcome. He and Medina
established code names. The Causa R leader baptized him
luz
— light.
For Medina, Chávez potentially represented the light at the end of the
tunnel for his beleaguered party. From that point on, Causa R leaders
and Chávez established a close working relationship. Medina in particular
played a significant role in the logistics of Chávez's movement. He
arranged apartments or houses for meetings. He came up with money
to fix his car. He even sent an airplane to pick up Chávez when he
was stationed in remote parts of Venezuela to take him to clandestine
meetings in other parts of the country. Marksman served as the contact
between the two men.

Chávez had plenty to do. By now a captain, he was racing all over
the country in his free time to stay in contact with members and recruit
new ones. According to Medina, at one point Chávez wanted to convoke
a meeting of one hundred committed officers. Medina thought
the idea was crazy. Military intelligence probably would detect them
and put them in jail. He counseled against it and, according to Medina,
Chávez accepted the advice.
Douglas Bravo also was worried the movement
was growing too rapidly: With so many new members coming in,
he felt, intelligence agents could easily infiltrate. He advised Chávez to
stop expanding and close the circle. But in those days the up-and-down
movement was decidedly up.

Chávez's conspiracy was becoming so successful that starting in
1985 they launched a series of five national "
congresses" held around
the country. The first took place on November 9, 1985, in Catia La
Mar near the Simón Bolívar International Airport on the Caribbean
coast about half an hour's drive from Caracas. They arranged to use
the house of a friend of Ronald Blanco La Cruz for the weekend. They
invited about two dozen people — mainly soldiers and a few progressive
civilians. They held a cookout complete with barbecue, beer, and
music. But the party was just a cover. The real goal was to recruit new
members, discuss the group's project, and analyze the national
political
situation. Most met in a room inside the house, while some stayed
outside in the yard to maintain the appearance of a fiesta. A few even
danced to the salsa music.

Chávez got the idea of holding
congresses during a discussion with
a Communist Party leader in Mérida whose son, Ruben Avila, was a
cadet in the military academy. Borrowing their model, he came up with
an agenda, handed it out ahead of time, and assigned topics for members
to present. They kept the materials camouflaged in case they fell
into enemy hands.

By now Chávez had moved beyond his initial stage of mainly analyzing
Venezuela's sociopolitical situation and Bolívar's thoughts. He
was more actively weighing some kind of civil-military
uprising, acts
of sabotage, or even a coup. He didn't believe forming a political party
would work — AD and COPEI held a death grip on the electoral system
through fraud and patronage. It wasn't clear when would be the moment
to act to overthrow the system. The wood was still wet, although it was
drying out.

Five months later, in March 1986, Chávez convened another congress.
This one had a special purpose: to fully incorporate Francisco Arias
Cárdenas into the movement. Arias graduated from the military academy
a year ahead of Chávez. In the late 1970s and early 1980s Arias was in
contact with William Izarra's clandestine group based mainly in the air
force. Izarra eventually changed the name of the group to
ARMA (Alianza
Revolucionaria de Militares) since R-83 didn't fit anymore — 1983 came
and went with no revolution in sight. Arias also was in contact with
"Harold" — Nelson Sánchez, the PRV's liaison to the military. Sánchez
would stop by every so often to go out for a cup of coffee or a beer.

Chávez had a good impression of Arias Cárdenas. He was a respected
and cerebral officer who had his own following within the military.
Chávez wanted him to become more active in the EBR-200.

A native of the western oil city of Maracaibo, Arias Cárdenas had
spent ten years in a minor seminary as a boy and teenager during the
1960s. He passed hours poring over documents from Vatican II, the seminal
1968 meeting of Latin American bishops in Medellín, Colombia,
where they declared a "preferential option for the poor," and other progressive
materials of the period. He eventually left the seminary because
he thought the priests he met were too confined to the chapel and the
classroom. They were not out in the community and on the streets
enough. But Arias departed imbued with the ideals of Vatican II, liberation
theology, and social justice for the poor.

Still in his late teens, he figured he had two options. He could enroll in
the university, or he could join the military. His family didn't have money
for the university, so he applied to the military academy. He was a good
student and, like Chávez, embarked on a promising career as an army
officer coming out of Venezuela's West Point. But he was racked by the
same kind of anxiety over the corrupt political establishment and the suffering
of the impoverished masses that troubled Chávez. Short, slight, and
soft-spoken, Arias was a soldier but looked and talked more like a priest.

In March 1986 Chávez invited Arias to a congress he was organizing
in the city of San Cristóbal in Táchira state on the Colombian border.
Arias was stationed nearby. It was to be a small group that included one
woman — Marksman.

Chávez and the others were worried intelligence agents were on
their trail, so they took extra security precautions. They prepared both
for a raid of the apartment that would require a fast escape, and for a
siege where they would be forced to fight it out. They met in an apartment
on the fifth or sixth floor of a building, bringing with them ropes
they planned to use to rappel down the side of the building if they had
to flee. A bemused Marksman listened as they instructed her how to
use them. She figured there was no way she was going to lunge out a
window and slide down a rope. She would simply have to surrender.

The rebels also packed the apartment with assault rifles, grenades,
and a week's worth of food, bracing themselves for a prolonged standoff.
Chávez even drove a small tank all the way from the remote village of
Elorza hundreds of miles away in the llanos, where he had been transferred
several months earlier, to just outside San Cristóbal. It was one
way of showing that the movement was gaining force. Strikingly, no one
in the military stopped him. Most of his superiors seemed blind to his
activities, although — as he was learning — not all of them.

Chávez was intent on making a good impression on Arias. He
prepared meticulously for the meeting. He came armed with a series
of plastic sheets he placed on an overhead projector outlining his
Bolivarian project. He and the others talked about the three roots of
Bolívar, Rodríguez, and Zamora, the rot in the armed forces, and the
pathetic political situation. They spoke about the need for a civilian-military
movement and uprising to
break the oligarchy's grip on the
country through its political surrogates.

Arias agreed with most of the points. By about 3 A.M., six or seven
hours into the meeting, discussion turned to how to achieve their goals.
Chávez said he believed the group had to spark an insurrection by destabilizing
Venezuela. He wanted to blow up bridges, electric towers, and
oil wells. He wanted to help leftist civilians launch assaults on barracks
to steal weapons, and organize urban and rural guerrilla-style units. His
proposal was along the lines of Douglas Bravo's ideas of accelerating the
"objective situation" to provoke a mass rebellion.