Hugo! (15 page)

A few months later he came up with an even more grandiose plan.
He asked Marksman to make about one hundred smaller copies of the
flag. Then he gathered some soldiers, outfitted them in the clothes of
peasants from the Páez era complete with straw hats and pants cut off
at the knees, and mounted them on horseback. They set off on a weeklong
journey through the llanos, retracing Páez's path
.
They stopped at
villages along the route, making their way to each Plaza Bolívar, where
Chávez made floral offerings to the Liberator and gave incendiary
speeches. He attacked the government and hailed Bolívar as a revolutionary
who would be repulsed by the current state of Venezuela.

If Chávez's superiors had heard the speeches, they undoubtedly
would have considered them subversive. Instead, when he finally
reached
Carabobo, reenacting Páez's triumphant entrance into the
state, the general in charge of the parade commemorating the day
was so impressed that he made Chávez one of the stars of the event.
He instructed Chávez to give a speech at the beginning of the parade
explaining what he and the men were doing. Then he had them ride
proudly down the street as the closing act, their black flags waving in
the breeze as they sat atop their horses. It was a minor sensation, carried
live on national television and featured in the next day's
El Nacional
newspaper with a full-page spread including photographs. Chávez was
cultivating his Bolivarian movement right before the eyes of his superiors,
who apparently didn't notice or feel inclined to stop him.

But only apparently. Two months later, in September 1986, the movement
suffered its
first serious leak. After his transfer to Elorza, Hugo
Chávez ordered the Bolivarians to stop recruiting new members because
the group was growing too rapidly. He feared that authorities would discover
the movement and dismember it. But with Chávez's approval a
lieutenant named Valera Querales continued his efforts, trying to finish
off a recruiting job that was close to success.

One potential recruit, however, apparently got spooked at a meeting
in which Chávez was not present in San Juan de los Morros when the
conversation turned to the possibility of a coup against Carlos Andrés
Pérez if he won the next presidential election. Someone even made an
offhand remark about killing him if he resisted. The nervous recruit
alerted his commander, giving him Chávez's name among others.
Word quickly reached Peñaloza and other military chiefs at Fort Tiuna
in Caracas. They convened a meeting, instructed a secretary to pull
out Chávez's file, and launched an investigation. Chávez had been promoted
from captain to major just two months earlier.

Luckily for him, a fellow member of the military academy's class of
1975 was assigned to the office of the military heads. The generals asked
him to accompany them to Miraflores Palace, where they went to meet
with President
Jaime Lusinchi. When they left him alone in the car for
a few minutes he glanced inside an envelope at the classified report they
had outlining the allegations against Chávez and his colleagues. He managed
to see a few of the names mentioned. Later he called Marksman's
house, reaching her sister Cristina. He gave her a brief message in code:
"Peligro. La vieja esta grave. HCHVQCHR
.
"
Danger. The old lady is in
serious condition.
HCH
was Hugo Chávez;
VQ
, Valera Querales. The
CHR
wasn't clear. Something strange was happening.

Chávez was on vacation, and had come to Caracas to have minor
surgery on his eye. He was leaving the hospital that day. When he
arrived with Marksman at her house around noon with a patch over his
eye, they encountered a nervous Cristina and the message. A few hours
later they got a second, equally cryptic call from the classmate with the
same information. Chávez told Herma Marksman she needed to find
Ronald Blanco La Cruz, who was stationed at Fort Tiuna, so he could
locate Chávez's classmate and find out what was happening.

At about 7 P.M. Marksman took a taxi to Blanco La Cruz's house in
La Valle. She spoke to his wife, Guadalupe, who told her Ronald was
on duty at the military fort. Guadalupe drove the short distance to the
base, and told Ronald he needed to come home to talk with Marksman.
When he did, she told him what was happening. He instructed
Marksman to wait in the house while he looked into matters back at the
base. A few hours later he returned with the news: Officials had uncovered
evidence that Chávez, Valera Querales, and another officer named
Chacon Rojas were possibly involved in a conspiracy. You need to put
everyone in the movement on alert, he said.

Marksman returned to her house in El Paraiso, a fifteen-minute
drive away, and informed Chávez. He instructed her to burn all the
incriminating documents they possessed. They had plenty: notes from
meetings, documents compiled by the group, an agenda with a list of
the movement's members.

Chávez and Marksman threw the materials into a box and doused
it with kerosene. Then about 1:30 A.M. Marksman and her sister drove
to La Guaira on the Caribbean coast, half an hour away. They found a
remote spot on the beach in the Macuto section. Marksman scrambled
over a rock jetty, dropped the box into a crevice, and tried to get a fire
going using some candles and matches. The wind kept extinguishing it,
and she ran out of matches. She had to walk back up to the road to try
to find an open store where she could buy more. She had instructed her
sister to remain close by in case they had to make a quick getaway. But
when Marksman arrived at the road, Cristina was parked so far away she
could barely see her. She was terrified the authorities were going to find
Herma and arrest both of them.

Chávez had some documents of his own to burn back in Elorza.
Fearing authorities were going to detain him, he tore the patch off his
eye, got into his car, and started driving. He passed through Maracay,
about ninety minutes away, where he alerted one of the movement's
members. He continued on another half hour to Valencia, where he
gave the same message and instructed the Bolivarians to go underground.
Then he made the long trek to Barinas, another seven hours
away.

In a village outside the city, he contacted some
civilian members
of the movement. It had a significant presence in the area including in
Chávez's hometown of Sabaneta, where some residents had joined the
guerrillas and leftist movements in the 1960s. He connected with two
of his closest friends there, the Orta brothers, who agreed to drive their
truck down the bumpy road to Elorza. They alerted some of his underlings
at the military post, used a key Chávez lent them to enter his room,
and took out and burned all the incriminating books, documents, and
agendas he had stored there. "They went through everything, because
we suspected intelligence was going to take it all," Chávez said. "And in
fact the day after a plane arrived with people from intelligence. They
looked, and didn't find anything."

Chávez went on to Barinas to his mother's house, and with his
eye swollen called his commanding officer in San Juan de los Morros
to report that he was convalescing. He alerted his brother Adán, who
spread word about the
leak to other civilian collaborators. In the end,
despite strong suspicions that Chávez was involved in something, military
authorities couldn't prove it. The Bolivarians had managed to elude
the first serious breach in their security.

But Chávez did not escape unscathed. When he returned from his vacation,
authorities took away his troops in Elorza, telling him it was part of a
reorganization. They ordered him to create a new unit of "frontier development."
Chávez saw it differently: "They left me with nothing, with no
budget, no land, nothing, in the loneliness of the
Cajon de Aracua
, conversing
with the ghosts of Lorenzo Barquero" — a character in the famous
Venezuelan novel
Doña Bárbara
whose life is destroyed by misfortune and
vice and who lives in misery in a shack in the llanos. "In the end we made
a unit of ten soldiers and some Indians. They kept watching me. There
is even a report from the DISIP [political police] that links me with the
Colombian guerrillas and says that I was preparing an Indian rebellion!"

Chávez and the soldiers dedicated themselves to reviving a nearby
abandoned Colombian hacienda called Santa Rita. They planted some
crops and even tended to some pigs a neighbor gave them. They hoisted
the Venezuelan flag and alongside it Páez's big black flag, only this time
with the words SANTA RITA O MUERTE. By Chávez's account, they turned
into something of a ragtag outfit lost in the wilderness.

One day a general named Arnoldo Rodríguez Ochoa decided to pay
Chávez and his men a visit. It was midmorning. Chávez was still asleep,
since he had arrived late from a trip to Capanaparo in the llanos. A helicopter
appeared in the sky and approached the base. A soldier knocked on
Chávez's door. Major, a helicopter has arrived! Chávez and his outfit were
not exactly ready for a visit from a high-ranking commander. His troops

looked more like guerrillas, with rubber boots because the combat
boots had worn out, with ragged uniforms, some with blue jeans,
me with long hair and a beard . . . I put on a green t-shirt, a pair
of dirty pants, some boots full of mud. When I saw the general I
thought, "I've got myself into a problem." It didn't seem like a military
unit. There was no discipline. Some soldiers on horseback. So
the general stands there looking at me, like he was surprised. He
has a special subtle humor, and alongside his high command he
says to me real seriously:

Are you Chávez? That captain from the military academy?

Yes, general, I'm Chávez.

Jesus, and that black flag? And what are you doing with those soldiers
that they don't salute a general?

Welcome general . . . . I didn't know what to say to him . . . You
want a cup of coffee?

They went inside the house, which was filled with smoke from
the woodstove in the kitchen. Wandering nearby were some of the
pigs. Outside was a small field of corn. The general asked Chávez
what he was doing there. They sent me here, Chávez responded.
They say I am going around conspiring. And is it true? the general
asked. No, General, what happens is that I'm like that, you know me,
I talk, I say things. I'm a Bolivariano.

Chávez convinced the general he was not conspiring, and they
stayed in touch. Rodríguez Ochoa liked him. Eventually, in 1988,
Rodríguez Ochoa invited Chávez to become his
personal assistant.
He spent a few months with him at his command post in San Juan
de los Morros. Then one day he made an announcement: Rodríguez
Ochoa was being named head of CONASEDE, the national security
council. He was going to the Miraflores presidential palace in
Caracas. And he wanted to take Chávez with him.

It was another stroke of luck for Chávez. No one in the military
blocked the move to Caracas. Before long Chávez found himself
working in the
Palacio Blanco across the street from Miraflores.
Its main occupant, President Jaime Lusinchi, was coming to the end
of presiding over another five debilitating years of the country's history.
It was the
"Lost Decade" of mounting debt, spiraling inflation,
and economic retrenchment in Latin America. Venezuela was no
exception.

Lusinchi had taken over the country back in 1984, one year after
"Black Friday" when the once rock-solid bolivar was devalued,
shocking Venezuelans. Voters had thrown out of office the man who'd
ordered the devaluation, COPEI's
Luis Herrera Campins, and brought
back the more populist party of Carlos Andrés Pérez, Democratic
Action. Its new standard-bearer was Lusinchi.

When he took over, the full amount of Venezuela's mounting
debt was unknown even to the government because so many government
agencies and institutes were contracting loans on their own
without congressional approval. As it turned out, it had doubled since
1978, to $34.2 billion — with a high proportion of it short-term.

Lusinchi managed to pay not only the interest due on the debt
but the principal as well. He also stoked economic growth at a time
when oil prices were
plummeting. It all seemed like an act of economic
magic. How did he do it? In essence, he devalued the
bolivar
twice and raided the national
piggy bank. The country's noncommitted
foreign reserves dropped from $8.98 billion in 1985 to $1.77 billion in
1986. A positive
balance of payments of $1.7 billion in 1985 turned into
a deficit of $3.8 billion in 1986 and $4.4 billion in 1987. An economic
disaster was brewing, although few Venezuelans knew it.

Adding to it was a scandal known as
RECADI, for the national office
in charge of
currency exchange. Lusinchi created the office to handle
a three-tiered (four-tiered from 1984 to 1986) exchange rate and currency
control system that provided dollars at preferential rates for certain
imports. It turned into a massive money-laundering scheme for
Venezuela's elites. They could make tremendous profits merely by
buying the dollars at the preferential rate and then converting them
back to bolivars at the free-market rate.

Several businessmen and politicians associated with the scheme
were charged and detained, but the highly politicized Supreme Court
eventually annulled their arrest warrants on a technicality. It wasn't surprising
to most Venezuelans. If a journalist asked the man and woman
on the street "Do you think anything will come of this?" — referring
to the allegations of corruption — the common reply was
"Aqui no ha
pasado nada."
Nothing has happened here.

RECADI wasn't even the biggest scandal of Lusinchi's administration.
Not long after he moved into Miraflores, it became apparent to the
nation that he was having an affair with his personal secretary, a much
younger woman named
Blanca Ibáñez. A petite redhead who had risen
from an impoverished family in the Andes to a private office in the presidential
palace, Blanca Ibáñez fancied herself a Venezuelan version of
Eva Perón, although she lacked Evita's charisma.