Hugo! (14 page)

Arias did not like what he was hearing. He thought Chávez's proposal
was nothing more than a throwback to Bravo's failed guerrilla
tactics of the 1960s. Distrustful of civilians in general and of Bravo in
particular, Arias opposed letting the PRV take the lead in the movement
and the rebellion. For one thing, he sensed mutual distrust. Some
of the leftist civilians suspected some of the soldiers were right-wing
military gorillas similar to the thugs who'd overthrown governments in
Chile and Argentina. They wanted the civilians to control the revolt.

But Arias had little confidence in them, either. They seemed stuck
in a 1960s paradigm, not realizing that most Venezuelans wanted
nothing to do with the guerrilla violence of that era. He also believed
that they did not grasp the fundamental difference between Venezuelan
soldiers and those from elsewhere in Latin America. If we are the ones
who might die or go to prison for years, he thought, we are the ones who
should be in charge of the rebellion.

"The same thing that we felt, Douglas and his people felt: lack of
confidence," Arias Cárdenas later stated:

We thought we were putting the meat in the grinder while those
people were flying kites and playing around with ecology. We were
risking our lives every day . . . I thought we had to be more autonomous
and that we ourselves should control the movement and the
process. At times the interventions of Harold tended to cloister us
in a pre-conceived project that did not allow us to think, that did
not allow us to create, that limited the horizon a lot . . . We knew
that to grow within the armed forces we could not run the risk that
the proposals be linked with a Marxist vision of history, of man,
of the economy.

Arias rose to his feet at the meeting and declared that he would
not accompany "failures." If we as a group want to take power and produce
real changes, he continued, we can't abandon the role of the armed
forces by turning ourselves into quasi-guerrillas. We're going to lose legitimacy
if one of our members is caught blowing up a bridge or helping
civilians steal weapons. Let the civilians agitate on the outside, and we'll
be ready to join them at the end when the time comes for a revolt.

By now Chávez was getting frustrated. The meeting got heated.
Chávez tore into Arias, accusing him of being afraid to act. The
problem with you, he said, is that you arrive at a certain point in the
revolution, but you have a Social Christian stuck inside that keeps you
from taking the final step. Others picked up on the theme, as Arias
recalled. "Ronald Blanco, who very much agreed with the theory of
Chávez, came over to me and said, 'Look, major, we have to go for it.
Don't be afraid.' I responded, 'It isn't fear. What I have clear is that the
method that's being proposed here is wrong. I think that if we accumulate
more military power, we are going to be a lot more effective
than if we let ourselves get discovered and we reduce our possibilities of
growing inside.' "

As tensions simmered,
Major David López Rivas tried to break
the impasse. He walked over to the overhead projector, took one of the
plastic sheets, and drew a picture of Zorro on it. He placed it on the projector,
and the room broke up laughing. It relieved the tension, and the
discussion continued more calmly. As a condition for inserting himself
more fully in the movement, Arias wanted Chávez to distance himself
from Bravo. Chávez agreed, although he had other reasons, too. The
PRV was splintering. Amid the bickering, he did not want disgruntled
members revealing his clandestine activities.

Still, his meetings with Bravo did not stop completely. The men
remained in sporadic contact until a definitive rupture came five years
later. As Chávez's relationship with Bravo and the PRV dwindled, his
contacts with the Causa R intensified. The group came to play an
important role in the movement, producing the man who later became
Chávez's oil czar, Alí Rodríguez, although the military remained its
heart. To Chávez, the Causa R was closer to the pulse of the
masses and
was not out flying kites.

"My meeting with Maneiro and, why not come out and say it, my
certainty that Douglas Bravo's direction was not the right one, pushed
me closer to the Causa R, especially because of its work with the popular
movements, which was vital to my still developing vision of the
combined civilian-military struggle," Chávez said. "I was very clear on
the idea of the role of the masses, which Douglas's group was not; on
the other hand, in the Causa R I felt this presence."

As dawn drew near in
San Cristóbal, Arias took the Bolivarian
oath and was formally sworn in as a full member of the EBR. It was
a decisive moment in the movement's history. Arias was to play a key
role, rising to a level of co-leadership and offering a contemplative balance
to Chávez's sometimes impetuous nature. The two were to fall out
later in a bitter public dispute, until Arias finally returned to the fold
dramatically in 2006 when Chávez sent him to the United Nations as
Venezuela's ambassador.

Four months after the congress in San Cristóbal, Chávez and his
cohorts organized another one in Maracay. The central Venezuelan
city was teeming with military. It was home to the nation's main air
force base and other important barracks. The Bolivarianos had to take
extra precautions to avoid detection. As he drove west from Caracas
with Marksman, López Rivas, the major who had eased the tensions
at the meeting in San Cristóbal, pulled out a woman's wig and sunglasses.
He put them on and paid his fare at a tollbooth acting like a
woman. He also had a dress in the car. When they arrived at the zoo in
Maracay where some conspirators were to meet, he slipped into a bathroom
and put it on. His disguise was complete. He even tried walking
like a woman. He was fairly convincing, at least to Marksman.

Marksman was the contact person for some of the conspirators.
They would know her by the red hat she always wore for the rendezvous.
Usually she would meet them in the Bolívar Plaza of whatever city
or village the group was gathering in — they all had a plaza honoring
the Liberator. She would set a time — 8 A.M., for instance — and wait
exactly ten minutes before leaving. They could not linger around and
risk detection by intelligence agents.

In Maracay the group decided to make the popular zoo their initial
contact point. Marksman and López Rivas picked up some of the others
and made their way to an apartment building in the city. When they
walked in Chávez laughed at López Rivas's disguise. Marksman recalled
the meeting for one of the most emotional oath-takings she witnessed.
At the encounters all the participants, including those already sworn in,
usually gathered in a circle, took hands, and repeated the oath again
along with the newcomers. That day in Maracay one of the original
founders of the EBR-200, Felipe Acosta Carles, brought his two young
children — a boy and a girl — to the meeting. When it came time for
the oath, he propped them on each of his knees, held one of their hands
in the air, and repeated, "I swear by the God of my parents . . ."

As the meeting in Maracay ended, Chávez was sick and checked
into a hotel for the night. The next day he departed for Elorza in southwest
Venezuela while Marksman returned to Caracas. The movement
was on a roll. New members were flowing in,
congresses were
becoming regular events, Arias was on board, and spirits were flying
high. So many people were joining that the leadership decided to put
a temporary freeze on recruiting. They were afraid the movement was
getting too big; word would leak out.

At the San Cristóbal meeting, the members had decided to organize
Comandos de Areas Revolucionarias (CARs). They divided up the map
of Venezuela, assigned teams of civilians and soldiers to organize activities,
and named each section for a Venezuelan Indian tribe — Jirahara,
Guajira, Piaroa, Cumanagotos. Some of the civilians even pledged to
start publishing a newspaper. They called it
Alianza Patriotica
, patriotic
alliance. Chávez was excited. A newspaper was a concrete sign of
progress. The movement was consolidating itself. The man who struggled
for years to find a voice and create an organization to channel his
angst was optimistic. The Bolivarian movement and his dream of transforming
Venezuela were coming together.

The good times, though, were about to hit their first major setback.
At least one man in the military was on Chávez's trail.

Carlos Julio Peñaloza Zambrano had barely assumed his new post as
director of the
military academy in 1984 when he heard the rumors that
Hugo Chávez was organizing a conspiracy. Peñaloza wasn't surprised.
For at least a year he'd been hearing talk of a subversive cell among
junior officers in the armed forces; he just didn't know who was leading
it. The supposed rebels called themselves the
comacates
— Spanish for
colonels, majors, captains, and lieutenants.

In September 1984 the academy held a ceremony marking the first
time newly arrived cadets were granted permission to leave the grounds.
At the event Peñaloza ran into an old high school friend whose son was
one of the cadets. The friend pulled Peñaloza aside. "He told me, 'Look,
my son says there is a captain here by the last name of Chávez who is
talking about' " rebellion and coups, Peñaloza recalled years later. "This
was the first time I connected Hugo Chávez with conspiracy."

It was almost an open secret in the military that groups of soldiers
were conspiring. Chávez's was not the only one. There was William
Izarra's ARMA, which was dying off as its leader was forced out of the military.
There were also others. Officers with a higher rank than Chávez
knew about the movements and, in Peñaloza's view, let them thrive.
Disgust over Venezuela's political and economic decline was widespread
in the armed forces. So was a leftist indoctrination instilled in
part by the Andrés Bello Plan.

Peñaloza investigated Chávez's activities. He strongly suspected
Chávez was indoctrinating some cadets and organizing a conspiracy.
But he could not prove it. Chávez and the others were clever. They
weren't going to let themselves be caught easily.

Peñaloza's investigation did not lead to any conclusive findings, but
it was enough that superiors made sure Chávez was transferred. The
village of
Elorza was located deep in the llanos in Apure state near the
Colombian border — about as out-of-the-way as you could get. Until
1941 it wasn't even clear whether the area belonged to Colombia or
Venezuela, as Chávez once remarked. It was a
no-man's-land.

Elorza was reachable by a twelve-hour trip south from Barinas
over a crumbling highway. It featured shops run by Syrians, restaurants
owned by Colombians, and a couple of indigenous tribes who lived on
the outskirts of town. The mighty Arauca River thundered nearby.

Chávez arrived in Elorza in August 1985. He was heartbroken by
the move. The class of 1985 at the military
academy had produced some
of the star recruits of his movement; they would later play key roles in
his government. He called them
Los Centauros
— the centaurs. He
wrote a mournful poem the day they graduated.

The Centaurs are leaving
My soul fills up
With a profound pain

The graduates also were dispersing throughout the country. They
planned to spread the movement, Chávez wrote, like seeds sprinkled
across Venezuela.

But it doesn't matter
The seed will soon bear its fruits
And will germinate throughout Venezuela
Each one is going to be
What he must be in whatever place he goes.

Chávez might have sunk into a depression in Elorza. He was cut off
from his cohorts in the Bolivarian movement and far from the action of
Caracas and other cities. Instead, though, he threw himself into local
life. He played baseball with the locals. He helped organize annual
patron saint festivals, sack races, piñata parties, historic storytelling
events, running races, tree plantings, commemorations, Little League
baseball, medical treatment days, and children's folkloric festivals.

Elorza became another experiment for Chávez's ideas of merging
soldiers and civilians into a common force to transform Venezuela. He
turned himself into a kind of local mayor and a leader unlike any the
village had seen. He was wildly popular. He became so well liked, villagers
named him head of the prestigious local patron saint day organizing
committee. Two years in a row. Students at the local high school
twice honored him by naming him
padrino
, godfather, of the graduating
class — even though he never taught a single class there.

Some military superiors may have thought they were punishing
and isolating Chávez by sending him to Elorza. But Peñaloza believed
it was a mistake. "I was surprised when they sent him to a command
post where he was isolated, where he was the commander. For me it was
a barbarity, a tremendous error, because if someone is suspected of conspiring
the last thing you want to do is send him to a place where he is
alone and the top superior."

More than anything else, what drew Chávez's attention in Elorza
were the indigenous tribes living in the wilderness outside the village.
The
Cuiva and Yaruro peoples were among half a million Indians in
Venezuela who had survived centuries of exploitation. Shortly after he
arrived in Elorza, Chávez spoke with a local priest who told him about
the abuses the local Indians often endured at the hands of large landowners
who grew wealthy off their labor. "Look, Captain, a lot of those
gentleman that you see here now, that have ranches and are rich, twenty
years ago they used to go out and kill Indians like someone killing deer,"
Chávez recalled the priest telling him. "They massacred them and
threw them in the ground. He even told me how they burned them
alive."

Chávez's first contact with the Indians came one day when an
impoverished woman arrived at his command post complaining that
Indians had stolen her two pigs. Chávez often received complaints from
cattle owners, but he usually told them to contact the police. "The cattle
owners started to say that I didn't collaborate, because they were used
to the army abusing the Indians, and I always told them this wasn't my
job," he recalled. In the case of the woman, though, Chávez decided
to investigate.

He selected fifteen soldiers from his troops and contacted an expert
tracker who was a former soldier and spy in the troops of Marcos Pérez
Jiménez. The old man was skilled at finding Indians, as he soon showed
Chávez. He could pick up the scent of urine left behind by travelers and
differentiate whether it was a man or a woman — "women leave little
puddles while the men sprinkle it all over," he told Chávez.

Before long the old man advised Chávez that the Indians were
nearby.

Chávez took out his binoculars and spotted them under a mango
tree. They were eating the tropical fruits. Naively, he told a sergeant he
wanted to surround the tree and talk to the Indians. The old man told
him he would never be able to reach them. But Chávez insisted. He
stuck his pistol in his belt with the barrel pointing down. He told his
men no one was to fire unless ordered.

As soon as they saw Chávez and his men, the Indians were galvanized.
"They improvised an extraordinary and immediate defensive
action," Chávez said. "It was like twenty rays of light had come
shooting out of the mango tree. They dispersed like a mass of clouds in
the thicket, including the women with their children. In a blink of the
eyes the men opened battle against me. They pulled out their knives
and a rain of arrows fell down on us. One passed me so close it almost
hit my head."

Thinking quickly, Chávez grabbed his pistol out of his belt and
fired in the air. He ordered his men to pull back, although not before
two soldiers and an Indian scuffled. Luckily, no one was hurt.

The Indians left, but Chávez soon heard a shout in the dense
thicket. They headed over to the Cano Caribe River. It was at its rainy-season
peak, raging with water. In the middle of the river Chávez saw a
woman trying to cross. She was carrying her infant son in a shawl with
one hand; in the other she held a knife and was trying to swim. She kept
dropping below the water with the boy and coming up again for air.

Chávez thought she might drown. "I will never in my life forget
the eyes of that woman who shot me a look, a flash of hatred, and it
impacted me," he said. "I was anguished. 'She's going to drown.' You
know what the tracker told me? 'Captain, shoot her.' And he wasn't a
bad man as far as I knew him. He surprised me. 'What?' 'Kill them,
they're animals, and that kid when he grows up, he is going to shoot
arrows, too.' "

Chávez didn't shoot. He made sure the woman crossed the river
safely and joined the others. Then he returned to his command post.
He had survived his first encounter with the indigenous tribes, but it left
him unsettled. "Two things shook me up that day. First, the response of
the Indians when they saw me in uniform, and that 'Kill them, they're
animals.' I was reflecting over that for several days."

Chávez's musings prompted him to investigate the tribes more
deeply. He traveled to the state capital of San Fernando de Apure, and
visited the library of the regional office of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
On a map he located where they lived. He started to study more about
their history, their culture, their beliefs. He contacted
Arelis Sumavila,
a sociologist from the Central University of Venezuela who had studied
the Cuivas and the Yaruros for twenty years.

Chávez and Sumavila became friends. Eventually she invited him
along on one of her
field expeditions. Chávez let his cropped military-style
hair grow out, put on civilian clothes, and joined Sumavila as
she trekked deep into the llanos. She presented Chávez and two other
people she invited as students doing an investigation.

Chávez spent several days with the Indians, eating with them,
sleeping with them in their community, "trying to understand their
world." The Indians accepted him warmly. Two weeks after the expedition,
he returned on his own to see the tribe. He was dressed in his
uniform. The Indians did not recognize him, and at first they were
afraid. Chávez took off his hat and called the Indian captain by his
name, Vicente. The Indians "stood there paralyzed," realizing that the
anthropology student they had befriended was actually a soldier. They
sat down to talk. "There started a process of mutually drawing closer to
one another, which ended with mutual adoration," Chávez said.

His soldiers were soon visiting the Indians like old friends. Chávez
was to win their affection and trust to the extent he was able to persuade
them to take part in some of Elorza's cultural activities, participating
in sack races and the like. The Cuivas could never pronounce
Chávez's name correctly. So they called him "Chivas Frías." It was a
term of affection.

His friendship with the Indians had a profound impact on him. It
led him years later to implement some of the more progressive policies
in the hemisphere directed at indigenous tribes. They included provisions
in the constitution recognizing their languages, cultures, and
economic systems. "I felt their pain in the depths of my soul," Chávez
recalled in a 2004 interview. "I learned to love them. At their side I lived
terrible experiences and also beautiful ones. The Indians were abused
all their lives and I knew it but I really became conscious of it there,
when I was a captain in their territory, living at their side."

While Chávez was integrating himself into the world of the Indians and
life in
Elorza, he continued trying to clandestinely build the
Bolivarian
movement. He held meetings, traveled the country to stay in contact
with his cohorts, and kept studying. He delved more deeply into the life
of Maisanta, who was still remembered by some of the older residents of
Elorza. Chávez retraced Pedro Pérez Delgado's steps, arming himself with
maps and notebooks and making the aforementioned trip into Colombia
in which he was detained by military officers who thought he was a spy.

When he'd first arrived in Elorza, Chávez had met a woman who
told him she remembered seeing Maisanta when she was a girl. She
recounted how he arrived one day to find her mother and grandmother
in mourning because a colonel in the army of dictator Juan Vicente
Gómez had kidnapped one of the girls of the house. As Chávez recounts
the story, Maisanta asked which way they headed and took off on his
horse. He rescued the girl and brought her back a few days later. When
the woman in Elorza told the story decades later, she cried in gratitude
for Maisanta's actions. When Chávez informed her he was a descendant
of Pérez Delgado, she said her family had adored his great-grandfather
for generations. "Sixty years or so later," Chávez recalled, "I found
in that land the traces of the battles and hopes of Pedro Pérez Delgado.
I feel that in Elorza I finished finding myself."

Chávez's search for Maisanta's roots might have appeared to be an
innocent, if unorthodox, activity for a soldier in a remote outpost. In
reality, it was feeding Chávez's subversive movement. So were other
endeavors. About a year after he arrived in Elorza, he decided to reenact
a famous march General
José Antonio Páez had made from the depths
of the llanos north to
Carabobo state for the critical independence war
victory on June 24, 1821. The 165th anniversary of the battle of Carabobo
was approaching in June 1986. Chávez sent Marksman to a store in
Caracas to find a book that illustrated the rebel flag Páez and his troops
used to fly. The flag was black; in the upper left-hand corner were a
skull and crossbones, beneath which was written LIBERTAD O MUERTE
— liberty or death.

Using the book as a guide, Chávez asked Marksman to make two
large copies of the flag out of cloth. She sent them to Elorza. Chávez
put one up to fly at his military base and another at the spot of a key
battle Páez had won decades earlier, yelling
"Vuelvan caras!"
— turn
around! — to his troops in a move to outmaneuver the Spanish. Chávez
had to research to determine where the site was located. He proudly
called Marksman the day he found it and hoisted the banner.