Hugo! (18 page)

The indiscriminate repression went on like that for three days after
Pérez suspended the constitutional guarantees. It turned into the worst
massacre in Venezuela in the twentieth century and one of the worst in
modern Latin American history. Soldiers and police operated without
restraint, filling the air, especially at night, with the terrifying sound
of automatic gunfire. Red Cross workers who ventured into the hills of
Catia near Tortoza's house to try to rescue the wounded and ferry them
to overwhelmed hospitals saw one victim slumped on the street. The
top of his head was blown off.

Hugo Chávez had barely avoided being among those ordered to repress
the population. On Sunday, February 26, he was working in Miraflores
and went to see the palace's doctor because he had a fever. The doctor
diagnosed him with chicken pox and ordered him to go home immediately
so he didn't infect the rest of the palace staff with the contagious
disease.

Others in the Bolivarian movement were not so lucky. Francisco
Arias Cárdenas was taking an advanced training course at Fort Tiuna
in Caracas and was among those sent out to the
ranchos
to suppress the
uprising. He had little choice — he had to obey orders. But he resolved
to keep the men under his command from firing indiscriminately on
people who were "unarmed, hungry, long-punished and condemned to
suffer the consequences of a
package of economic measures that were
unjust and perverse from every point of view."

He was assigned to a barrio in Catia. When he got there, residents
were seething at the military. One tossed a toilet out of a high-rise; it
smashed to bits on a tank. If one of Arias's soldiers had been sticking
his head out of the tank, he could have been killed. Arias was appalled
at what he found in Catia, where some apartments were riddled with
scores of bullet holes:

As soon as I arrived at the place that was to be my center of operations,
I realized that the officer from whom I had taken over had
already been firing against the tower blocks, in an irresponsible
and inhuman fashion. I also heard stories of the excesses committed
by the political police, the DISIP.

Immediately I gathered my troops together and said: "Hands
up those who belong to the County Club!" I looked at their expressions
of surprise, and saw that they all remained motionless and
silent. I repeated my request: "Hands up all those who live in Alto
Prado, in Lagunita Country Club or in Altamira [the wealthiest
and most exclusive sectors of Caracas]!" Nobody moved.

Then I said, "Well, that means that we all come from the barrios
and the poor sectors like this one. The people who live here
are like us, they are the people, our brothers. That means that no
one must fire without authorization. No one must shoot unless we
are attacked."

Most of the mayhem ended by Saturday, March 4, five days after
the first protests broke out in Guarenas. By the time it was over, at least a
thousand businesses were burned and looted in Caracas alone, twenty-nine
hundred nationwide. The pillaging left an estimated $1.5 billion in
losses to businesses. The official death toll stood at 277, the government
later grudgingly conceded, although Venezuelan human rights organizations
eventually identified 399 by name. Others believed the figure
was far higher. One anthropologist from the University of Chicago cited
medical personnel who estimated a thousand to fifteen hundred dead
in Caracas. A reporter for the Caracas daily
El Nacional
summed up
the mayhem when he wrote, "Yesterday, Caracas was Beirut."

But the suffering still wasn't over. Many victims were missing.
Rumors soon spread that the government dumped them in a secret mass
grave in a remote section of the Southern General Cemetery called La
Peste (the plague). The government denied it, but by November 1990
a new human rights group named
COFAVIC won a court order to search
the cemetery. Accompanied by the judge, prosecutors, human rights
workers, nuns, priests, and relatives of the missing, they found to their
horror what they were looking for: black plastic garbage bags containing
corpses. Many were mutilated, with arms, legs, and hands chopped off
so they could fit in the bags. Others, young men, had their hands tied
behind their backs and gunshot wounds to their heads, apparently executed
by authorities.

Within weeks, they found a total of sixty-eight bodies believed to be
victims of the Caracazo. Three were identified by name and turned over
to their grieving families. Then the government stopped the investigation.
The remaining sixty-five bodies were stored in individual niches
in a concrete mausoleum several hundred yards above La Peste. To this
day the unidentified bodies remain there. Their anguished relatives still
don't know their fate.

The
Caracazo left Venezuela traumatized, and its image as Latin
America's model democracy in tatters. It marked the beginning of the
end of the ancien régime. Venezuela's elites, who imported not only
scotch whiskey but water from the Scottish Highlands to go with it
and who helped give the country the highest per capita consumption
of scotch in the world, had "been living in a fool's paradise," one foreign
economist observed. In a post-riot document, the hierarchy of
Venezuela's Roman Catholic Church, among the most conservative in
Latin America, put it another way: "The luxury of the few has become
an insult to the misery of the masses."

The Caracazo also marked a turning point in the history of Chávez's
Bolivarian conspiracy. It served to stiffen the rebels' resolve to overturn
a system they considered corrupt and evil, and provided a jump start
to a movement that had fallen into one of its lulls. "For us it was a real
trauma to fire at unarmed people who were robbing because they were
hungry," Arias Cárdenas commented nearly seven years later.

When Chávez returned to his job at the Palacio Blanco across the
street from Miraflores Palace a few weeks after the Caracazo, he was
stopped one night by a young palace guard traumatized by the repression.
The officer had an inkling Chávez was involved in a subversive
movement and wanted to join in. Chávez was returning from classes at
Simón Bolívar University, where he was studying for a master's degree
in political science. The two went to his office to talk.

The young officer told him that nearly a week after the riots broke
out, he was sent on patrol near Miraflores and detained a group of
young men who were sacking a store. He ordered them to sit down on a
basketball court, told them they shouldn't be looting, and promised to
release them. But before he could, he was ordered to turn them over to
the DISIP political police. They took the young men away. Half an hour
later, as the officer and his troops patrolled the neighborhood, he found
the young men. They were lying on a street, dead. There were twelve
to fifteen of them.

Now he sat in Chávez's office, horrified. "He was saying his heart
couldn't take it and ended telling me, 'Look, major, if you have a movement,
tell me. Because if you don't I'm leaving here. I'm not cut out to
be in this army.' " The encounter with the young officer was telling. So
were similar ones with others, part of President Pérez's honor guard,
who told him, "We're not prepared to go on killing people." These were
elite soldiers in charge of protecting the president and trusted by the
government. Even they were turning in revulsion against the crackdown,
as Chávez recalled:

The truth is that was a horror. People protesting in the street
against neo-liberalism, against the shock programs of the
International Monetary Fund, against the privatization of everything,
against unemployment, hunger. And they send us to spray
them with bullets in the chest. And the political leaders, the supposed
democrats, talking about justice and democracy. That was
no democracy. It was a dictatorship of the parties and the elite,
using the armed forces and using the media to brainwash and
confuse people. Here there was never democracy.

The members of the MBR-200 realized we had passed the point
of no return and we had to take up arms. We could not continue
to defend a genocidal regime. The massacre was the catalyst for
the MBR-200. We began to accelerate our organizing, our search
for civilian contacts and popular movements.

The uprising hit Chávez's movement close to home for another
reason: One of its founders was killed. In an unexplained incident,
Felipe Acosta Carles, one of the four men who jogged to the Samán
de Güere on December 17, 1982, and took the famous oath creating
Chávez's Bolivarian organization, was shot dead. The thirty-six-year-old
major was killed in the working-class neighborhood of El Valle while
leading a group of soldiers who were pursuing snipers in a secluded hut
near the Pan-American Highway. When they got to the hut, a burst of
gunfire erupted.

President Pérez himself referred to Acosta Carles's death, describing
it emotionally as an ambush and an example of the wanton violence
unleashed by irresponsible radicals he insisted sparked the riots. But
some people including Chávez believed the government itself was
behind the killing. They suspected that the DISIP knew of Acosta
Carles's participation in the Bolivarian conspiracy and took advantage
of the chaos of the uprising to kill him, knowing his death could be
blamed on rioters. They also felt that if Chávez had not been at home
sick, he could have met the same fate.

Devastated by both the loss of Acosta and the bloody upheaval,
Chávez wrote a long poem to his fallen comrade and classmate from
the military academy, using the Venezuelan term of affection
catire
—
"the blond, white one" ("the black one" is likewise a term of affection).
He also invoked a plethora of Venezuela's historical leading lights, from
Bolívar to Simón Rodríguez to Francisco de Miranda.

Ay, they killed the blond one Acosta
The blond one Acosta Carles
Acosta Carles
The storm of the people
Let loose on the streets
Nothing was left standing
From Petare to La Valle.
And Caracas was thirsty
And the thirst was for blood.
Ay, a bullet in just one instant
Took you away my compadre.
They killed Felipe Acosta
Felipe Acosta Carles
I didn't want to believe it
I swear to you before my mother
That just before yesterday
I saw you there in the alma mater
With all your being
You entered the classroom
And we shouted like always
Maisanta, there are so many!
You are still here with us
They didn't kill you, compadre.

The wake and funeral for Acosta Carles was held at the military
academy. It attracted many members of the Bolivarian conspiracy as
well as new recruits who wanted to join. As they stood over their dead
comrade's body, seething with anger over his killing and the massacre
of the
Caracazo, they silently repeated the Bolivarian oath and
swore to take action against the country's sick government and society.
Venezuela's
facade of democracy had collapsed. More upheaval was on
the way.

After a rocky start, Carlos Andrés Pérez's second presidency and his
neo-liberal economic "shock" package bounced back, in a way. It ended
up producing impressive macroeconomic
growth rates. By 1991 the
economy was growing at an annual rate of 9.2 percent, the fastest in
the Americas.

But the protest rate was also probably the fastest in the Americas.
Little of the new wealth trickled down to the masses. The economic
model created a "scandalous concentration of wealth," as one of Pérez's
political opponents, COPEI congressman and onetime presidential candidate
Eduardo
Fernández, put it. Daily protests by students, teachers,
workers, and others became the routine in one of the most tumultuous
presidencies of Venezuela's democratic era. The first three years of
Pérez's tenure saw five thousand street protests — an average of nearly
five a day. Some 2,068 of them ended violently. Police and National
Guardsmen often opened fire on demonstrators. More than a few died.
Pérez's presidency was, in effect, over before it ever really started. The
Caracazo killed it.

The food riots and the ongoing political discontent and repression
provided an ideal incubator for Chávez's secret movement. Just like the
economy, it boomed. New recruits joined, and the group regained some
of the strength it had lost in the late 1980s. Military authorities continued
to investigate reports that Chávez was conspiring against the
government.

The most serious probe occurred in December 1989, nine months
after the Caracazo. General Carlos Peñaloza, one of Chávez's main
nemeses, uncovered new information that Chávez and his cohorts were
plotting a coup that by some (exaggerated) accounts included plans for
assassinating Pérez during the annual Christmas dinner at Miraflores
Palace. Peñaloza and other officials hauled in a dozen Bolivarians for a
nightlong interrogation. It became known as
"the night of the majors"
for the rank of Chávez, Urdaneta, and others who were questioned.

Chávez denied everything, but Peñaloza remained unconvinced.
According to Peñaloza's account, he had at least one spy inside Chávez's
movement who was delivering information to him. Peñaloza was especially
angry that the plot was said to include a plan to capture him and,
if that failed, to kidnap his son. "I told him, 'Look, Chávez, you can be
conspiring all you want, and it's my duty to stop you from conspiring.
But at the same time when you get involved with my family, then the
problem is personal.' "

Livid, Peñaloza challenged Chávez to go outside and settle their
difference in a duel. Chávez declined. He denied again he was plotting
to overthrow the government.

Peñaloza failed to prove anything. Chávez was set free. But his troubles
were not over. During 1990 and 1991 he took a mandatory course
in preparation for assuming direct command of a battalion for the first
time. He failed part of the exams and was forced to retake them. Chávez
believed superiors suspicious of his activities were purposely flunking
him to derail his career.

But while some like Peñaloza were convinced Chávez was leading
a subversive movement, many others were not — or chose to allow him
to conspire. Among those who didn't believe it was Carlos Andrés Pérez.
Peñaloza repeatedly told him about Chávez's activities. The skeptical
president didn't want to hear it. "CAP said don't talk to me again about
the topic," according to Peñaloza.

In the end Chávez passed the course. By the summer of 1991 he
was due to receive direct command of troops. But July 5, Venezuela's
Independence Day and the traditional date for new assignments, came
and went. Chávez, by now a lieutenant colonel, was empty-handed. So
were two of his MBR-200 cohorts, Urdaneta and
Joel Acosta Chirinos.
Eventually the defense minister,
Fernando Ochoa Antich, intervened
to help Chávez and Urdaneta land posts. Acosta Chirinos got one, too.
They all ended up in charge of elite
paratrooper units in Maracay. It
was an amazing stroke of luck.

Ochoa's intervention later prompted widespread suspicions he was
aiding the rebels. Chávez denied it. He believed Ochoa had little choice
but to promote him. He was a charismatic, high-profile young officer
who'd graduated from the military academy high in his class and had
a large following. Passing him over would have provoked unrest in the
barracks. Chávez also thought the high command was simply inept and
didn't realize what he and his comrades were doing. "What other explanation
could there be that we were working right under their noses for
years? . . . We even openly sang the songs of
Zamora while jogging" at
the academy, where Ochoa also was posted in the mid-1980s.

For his part, Ochoa believed that while suspicions abounded over
Chávez's conspiratorial activities, little concrete proof existed. He could
not lightly derail a promising officer's career. Others concluded that
the promotions implicated Ochoa, whose brother Enrique was a leader
of the leftist political party MAS, in the conspiracy. Yet another theory
was that the military high command did not take seriously the idea that
young officers were planning a coup. This was Latin America's "model"
democracy. Coups didn't happen anymore.

Whatever the reason, it was a decision Ochoa came to rue. "We
made a mistake. We didn't think they were going to launch an insurrection
. . . There was a penetration of the left in the armed forces. They
had tricked us."

Chávez's assignment was nonetheless an odd one. He hadn't
jumped out of an airplane in ten years. He had little experience in parachuting.
His specialty was tanks. His superiors told him he could accept
the assignment or wait for the next round. Chávez knew that must not
happen. It was imperative that he and the Bolivarians immediately take
command of troops. "Truly you felt the movement was galloping ahead
and you had to have a command in hand," Chávez recalled. "It didn't
matter if it was paratroopers or artillery or tanks. The important thing
was to have the military force in hand."

It was a critical turning point for the rebels. At last they had soldiers
they could unleash against Pérez and the corrupt system he symbolized.
Within weeks Chávez and his cohorts were plotting their first
coup attempt:
Plan Ezequiel Zamora.