Hugo! (24 page)

The coup left fourteen soldiers, five police, and one civilian dead.
Dozens were injured. Some 1,089 soldiers — including 130 officers
— were detained and faced charges of sedition and criminal violence.
Some military units were left entirely leaderless because all of their officers
were involved in the uprising.

The attempt to overthrow Pérez failed, but it managed to catapult
a wholly unknown lieutenant colonel to national prominence. From
the jaws of military defeat, Chávez seized an unlikely
political victory.
While his actions left him open to the criticism of detractors who
doubted his democratic credentials, Chávez had taken a major step forward
in his struggle to transform Venezuela. The country would never
be the same.

As he headed off to jail, he would contemplate the next move to
propel the Bolivarian movement ahead. Because in the barracks, the
plotting was not over yet.

Hugo Chávez thought he was a failure. After surrendering, he and
some of the other coup leaders were whisked to military intelligence
headquarters. They spent two weeks locked up in cells in the basement
as investigators interrogated them. They were cut off from the rest of
the world. The lights burned twenty-four hours a day. A video camera
filmed their every move. Guards confiscated their shoelaces and belts
to prevent suicide attempts.

The rebels had little idea of what was happening outside. They had
no newspapers, no television, and for the first week no visitors. Chávez
tried to keep up his spirits by singing in his cell. But he was depressed.
He thought a decade of conspiring had gone down in ignominious
defeat. Worse, some of his comrades — including Urdaneta and Ronald
Blanco La Cruz — were seething. They blamed Chávez for the coup's
collapse, since he had failed to take Miraflores Palace.

A week into his
captivity Chávez received his first visitor and the first
hint that outside he was anything but a failure. "The first human being
who entered my cell was a priest, a chaplain of the military prison,"
Chávez later told an interviewer. "This priest secretly gave me a small
bible. He hugged me and whispered in my ear. I thought he was going
to tell me something spiritually uplifting. But he told me, 'Cheer up. In
the streets you're a hero.' "

Seventeen days after authorities dumped the rebel leaders in the
basement, they transferred Chávez and the others to the San Carlos
military stockade in central Caracas. There they joined hundreds of
lower-ranking officers and soldiers who had taken part in the revolt. The
trip was a revelation to Chávez and the others. Cheering supporters
filled the streets. "When we left military intelligence for the
San Carlos
jail was when we realized we had produced a true impact, that we had
shaken up the bases of the system itself," stated one of the leaders, Joel
Acosta Chirinos. "When we were transferred in a caravan and we saw
all the people in the streets . . . well, we said, we are like stars. The thing
didn't fail like we thought."

The government was still politically tone-deaf. They sent Chávez
to a jail just down the street from the National Pantheon, where his
hero Simón Bolívar was buried. Chávez did not miss the symbolism.
From the start of his captivity, he invoked the Liberator as the guiding
light of his rebellion. "The real author of this liberation, the authentic
leader of this rebellion is General Simón Bolívar. With his incendiary
words he has illuminated the path," Chávez told a journalist from
El
Nacional
who managed to interview him in San Carlos. He described
how he often gazed out his window toward the Pantheon and Bolívar's
remains. The journalist snapped a photograph of Chávez standing
serenely before his window.

His
popularity spread like wildfire. Newspapers, television networks,
and radio stations were full of reports of what could not be
hidden: Chávez was a hero. "The soldiers took up arms to fight for us,"
a nineteen-year-old student told
El Nacional.
"My aunt wept when they
gave up. Everyone applauded because they are heroes. I don't think they
should be punished. They should be given a medal."

Carlos Andrés Pérez tried to stem Chávez's soaring popularity by
eliminating the positive media coverage of him. Two days after the coup,
on Thursday, February 6, Pérez dispatched six agents from the feared
DISIP political police to search the offices of
Zeta
magazine. Its latest edition
featured a photograph of Chávez on the cover in his red beret. Inside
a story declared that "a substantial percentage of Venezuelans . . . hoped
for victory by the insurgents." Agents confiscated thousands of copies of
the magazine.

Later that day Information Minister
Andrés Eloy Blanco appeared
on television to warn that the news media should "contribute to public
tranquility" by imposing temporary self-censorship or face "severe sanctions."
The media ignored the threat. On Friday they put out more
reports depicting widespread support for the rebels and criticizing
Pérez's corrupt government.

Pérez intensified the
crackdown. The government seized twenty-five
thousand copies of another magazine,
Elite
. Its cover also featured
a photograph of Chávez. This one showed him with Pérez and his wife,
Blanca. In a move not seen since the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez
Jiménez, Pérez stationed censors in newsrooms. Their orders were that
television networks, newspapers, and magazines were not to broadcast
or print Chávez's picture or put out stories critical of the president.

Police agents allowed the Saturday edition of
El Nacional
to come
out only after ensuring that paid advertisements attacking the government
were pulled.
Political police also raided
El Diario de Caracas.
The
newspaper had told readers its Saturday issue would carry a full-color
supplement with exclusive photographs of the military uprising. Agents
ordered the paper to remove the photographs. Then police confiscated
most copies of the supplement.

Pérez appeared at a press conference on Saturday to defend the
crackdown. "You should not forget that just four days ago my own life
was in danger and our democracy was on the verge of perishing," he
said. "Don't exalt the man who attempted the military coup. Let's not
make a starring figure out of a felon who betrayed the armed forces and
caused death and damage."

That night, government censors ordered
El Nacional
to delete
a story about a retired general. He was arrested after a group of sixty-two
retired high-ranking military officers ran full-page advertisements
in Friday's papers attacking the government and supporting the rebels.
Patrol cars from the secret police blocked delivery trucks from leaving
the newspaper's printing plant until 1 A.M., after the censors gave their
final approval.

The next morning
El Nacional
appeared on newsstands with a gaping
white space on the front page where the article was supposed to go.

Late that night the government decided to shut down
El Nacional
completely. Just as the newspaper was going to print, twenty political
police stormed into the newspaper's offices and ordered editors to stop
the presses. The newspaper managed to print about 2,000 of its normal
run of 120,000 copies before the agents halted production. The copies
that got out had blank spaces with the word CENSORED where the government
ordered stories removed. All other newspapers in the city also
were censored.

With criticism of the
censorship mounting, Pérez later that day
promised to lift the restrictions. Political police withdrew from
El
Nacional
, which had been surrounded for about twelve hours. On
Tuesday morning the newspaper was back on newsstands with more
articles criticizing Pérez. Other newspapers also circulated freely for the
first time in four days.

But journalists were seething over the crackdown in Latin America's
supposed bastion of democracy. That morning more than one hundred
marched through downtown Caracas to Congress shouting "Democracy
with censorship is dictatorship!" Pérez's move to quell Chávez's growing
popularity had backfired. As much as government censors tried, hatred
of the president and admiration for Chávez could not be concealed.
"Nearly everyone interviewed on the streets of Caracas expressed negative
opinions about Pérez and his free-market reform program," the
Associated Press reported that Tuesday. "Chávez appeared to be shaping
up as a popular hero."

A few lone voices, mainly in the upper class and in diplomatic circles,
came to Pérez's defense. Michael Skol, the US
ambassador who
had praised Venezuela's 9.2 percent economic growth in 1991, agreed
"with the president's portrayal of the coup plotters as a small group of
arrogant
right-wing fanatics with opinions far removed from the mainstream,"
The Christian Science Monitor
reported.

Carlos Peñaloza, the army general who pursued Chávez for seven
years, told another reporter he was worried by the rebel leader's "messianic
personality." Chávez, he said, "considers himself a God-chosen
man, somebody whose destiny was signed by Simón Bolívar, and is not
ready to share power with anybody." Peñaloza claimed that the rebels
had published a twelve-page manifesto opening with a quote attributed
to Thomas Jefferson: "The tree of liberty should be irrigated from time
to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." He also claimed Chávez
and his cohorts planned to hang civilian politicians in public squares or
execute them by firing squads in sports stadiums. Pérez was at the top
of the list.

"The level of hate especially caught my attention," Peñaloza told
a television interviewer before government censorship cut off discussion
of the rebels. "They were convinced that the only way to wash the
honor of the humiliated fatherland was through a ritual bath using the
blood of corrupt men who had put our nation on its knees. Chávez Frías
was our
Saddam Hussein."

But the Bolivarians denied they were going to execute anyone, and
few Venezuelans were stirred by Peñaloza's remarks, at least not in the
barrios. One economist told
The New York Times
in hushed tones that
he was shocked when "the day after the coup, my secretary complained
that they failed to kill the president."

A month after the coup, elation over Chávez's rebellion was still burning
bright. In an evening demonstration organized by anonymous leaflets
and word of mouth, Venezuelans across the nation hung out their windows
or stood in their doorways and banged pots and pans. Denouncing
Pérez and hailing Chávez, the demonstration spread beyond the slums
to some wealthy areas. "Viva Chávez!" one resident yelled in the upscale
Las Mercedes district. "The people of Venezuela are with you!"

By now the few working telephone booths in Caracas were spray-painted
with messages like CHáVEZ TO POWER. At the Pantheon, admirers
lit candles in Chávez's honor near Bolívar's tomb. One even invented
a prayer based on the Our Father, dubbed
"Chávez Nuestro": "Our
Chávez, who art in jail, blessed be thy coup," was the first line. The last
was, "Save us from so much corruption, and free us from Carlos Andrés
Pérez. Amen."

By early April, eager to tamp down the hysteria over Chávez, officials
transferred him and nine other rebel leaders to a more remote
prison in Yare about two hours outside Caracas. The day they moved
the rebels, supporters lay down in the streets of the capital to try to block
the armored vehicles from leaving.

The transfer did little to dampen the commotion. The crowds of
admirers simply followed Chávez to Yare. They were like mesmerized
worshippers pursuing their messiah. People wanted to see him, touch
him, confirm that he was real. Some trembled in his presence. Others
grabbed at his clothes, or passed him notes of admiration or pleas for
help. They brought him flowers, clothes, food, a small refrigerator, a
microwave, a bookshelf. Long lines of women willing to throw themselves
at him fought with one another to be first in line on visiting day.
Others sent him letters from all over the country. Chávez was turning
into a rock star, a movie star, and a sex symbol, signing autographs as if
he were Rock Hudson, Herma Marksman ruefully noted. Except this
rock star wanted to overturn Venezuela's political establishment in the
name of a nineteenth-century revolutionary.

Authorities helped Chávez cultivate the myth. They allowed him
to keep his
uniform and red beret. He donned them for clandestine
interviews with journalists who snuck in. The authorities kept him and
the others in a special part of the jail normally reserved for conjugal
visits between inmates and their wives. Each rebel got his own small,
private room with a toilet. Outside was a courtyard with a statue of
Bolívar. Chávez visited it every day.

The wild adulation he was receiving didn't sit well with all the
rebels, though. Frictions invariably set in. Ten headstrong men were
living on top of one another in cramped quarters.
Arias Cárdenas, who
had his own large following among the Bolivarians and was a co-leader
of the movement by the time of the coup, was left out of the limelight as
Chávez soared to stardom. Serious conflicts erupted between the two in
a struggle for leadership and the path the movement should take.

Jesús Urdaneta, one of the founding members of the movement,
was back at San Carlos, wallowing in anger at Chávez over the failed
coup and the prospect of spending decades in jail. Before he was transferred
to Yare, Ronald Blanco La Cruz, the fiery young captain who
had nearly split from Chávez in December and launched a coup on
his own, spoke of convening a military tribunal in San Carlos to judge
Chávez for the failure of the February 4 putsch.

Still, the jailing of the rebels served to consolidate the
Bolivarian
movement and put them on the national stage. Chávez filled his tiny
room with books. On the days visitors weren't allowed he buried himself
in study. With plenty of time to read and think, he considered more
deeply the nationalist foundations of his political philosophy. Some of
the leading lights of the left soon aided him.

After the Caracazo, a group of leading civilians formed a
"Patriotic
Front" to try to take advantage of widespread dissatisfaction with the
state of the country and set it on a different path. It was a device that had
historically played an important role in Venezuela at crucial moments.
A
Patriotic Front of civilians working in conjunction with soldiers
helped lead the overthrow of Marcos Pérez Jiménez in 1958. Another
front was formed as far back as the days of Ezequiel Zamora in the mid-nineteenth
century.