Hugo! (25 page)

The newest one was presided over by Luis Miquilena. A former
leader of a bus drivers' union, Miquilena was one of the great survivors
of the Venezuelan left. He split from the Venezuelan Communist
Party in the 1940s, founded his own radical anti-Stalinist Communist
Party in 1946, and spent most of the Pérez Jiménez dictatorship in jail.
He was tortured so horrifically that the late writer Miguel
Otero Silva
made him the central character of
La Muerte de Honorio
, a novel about
the resistance movement against Pérez Jiménez. In the mid-1960s
Miquilena disappeared from public politics and went on to become a
successful businessman.

By the time Chávez burst on the scene, he was largely unknown by
most Venezuelans. Intrigued by Chávez's insurrection and his calls for
a constitutional assembly,
Miquilena contacted Chávez and visited him
in jail. He was to turn into a key political
mentor and father-like figure
who also helped bankroll Chávez's revolutionary aspirations. His front
included Douglas Bravo, the former guerrilla leader;
Manuel Quijada,
an intellectual with an Italian law degree who was jailed for his involvement
in the civil-military rebellions of 1962; Lino Martínez, a former
guerrilla fighter who later became a minister in Chávez's administration;
and William Izarra, the Marxist revolutionary who'd founded
ARMA and had recently retired from the air force after years of harassment
by superiors.

Chávez's older brother, Adán, served as a go-between with some of
the
Patriotic Front members, including Bravo, who could not visit the
jail for security reasons. Adán smuggled messages into the prison by
rolling up small pieces of paper, sticking them inside a pen, and slipping
the pen in between his sock and his shoe.

About the same time the Patriotic Front was forming, progressive
professors at the Central University of Venezuela in Caracas created
their own study group. They had heard the conventional wisdom
that Pérez's neo-liberal shock package was the only path Venezuela
could take to rectify its economic woes. They didn't believe it. They
started to search for alternatives. After the coup, they decided to seek
out Chávez, believing they shared common goals. The group included
Héctor Navarro, who was to become Chávez's education minister;
J. J. Montilla, later his minister of agriculture and land; Adina Bastidas,
who became his vice president; and
Jorge Giordani, who assumed the
post of planning minister and became one of Chávez's principal economic
advisers.

A tall, cerebral man with glasses and a white beard who looked to
some like an "anorexic Santa Claus," Giordani became the most regular
visitor to Yare of the group. He was a development economist trained
at the University of Sussex and was the economic guru of the leftist
Movement to Socialism (MAS) Party. Giordani established a close relationship
with Chávez. The rebel leader asked the professor to become
his tutor for a master's degree in
political science he was pursing at
the well-regarded Simón Bolívar University in Caracas. The only thing
Chávez needed to finish was his thesis. The coup had interrupted work
on it. The UCV group was to turn into a kind of shadow cabinet for
Chávez during his time in
jail and after. They accelerated work on
their book project,
The UCV to the Country: An Alternative Proposal
. It
became a blueprint for some of Chávez's early plans.

While Chávez and the others received some special privileges in Yare,
they were hardly in a honeymoon getaway. The section they were confined
to was on the first floor. Above them three floors full of inmates
lived in horrendous conditions. A lack of functioning toilets forced
them to defecate on newspapers. They tossed the soiled papers out the
windows onto the ground. They also relieved themselves in jars and
dumped the urine out the window. The waste fell near the rebels' quarters.
Foul odors and flies filled the hot, stagnant air.

Venezuela's jails were lawless
Midnight Express
-style places.
Guards wielded little control. Inmates executed their own style of justice.
Often free to roam the cell blocks, they carried large homemade
knives called
chuzos
. Drug dealing, rape, extortion, beatings, and
murder were common. One night Chávez and his colleagues heard
noises above them. "Ay, ay, ay," an inmate yelled. "No, no, no." Other
prisoners were raping him. After a while the prisoner started to yell,
"Don't kill me, don't kill me." To shut him up, the inmates slashed
his throat, prompting him to start "squealing like a pig," according to
Francisco Arias Cárdenas. Not long after, the rebels heard the sounds
of the inmates plunging knives into their victim. Then silence. Later,
Chávez and the others heard the prisoners throw something out the
windows. The next morning, they saw the knives on the ground.

During the attack Chávez, Arias Cárdenas, and the others yelled
at the top of their lungs for the guards to intervene. "Help! Run! Come
and save this man! They are going to kill him!" No one came. The
next day Arias Cárdenas angrily complained to a guard. The guard
responded that it was "internal justice" of the jail. There was nothing
he could do. Arias was livid.

Chávez and the others tried to make the best of the situation. They
imposed military discipline. They read, they held political discussions,
they smuggled out communiqués to journalists. They even held occasional
prayer groups, played soccer or volleyball on the patio, and cultivated
a small garden with peppers, tomatoes, and cucumbers. The
tireless Chávez often stayed up late into the night, reading or answering
the thousands of letters he received. Ronald Blanco La Cruz, who had
studied at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, and
Troy State University, organized English classes.

A large amount of Chávez's studying
and discussion centered on the
rebels' idea of convoking a
constitutional assembly to rewrite Venezuela's
constitution. He drew the idea partly from the French Revolution and
its notion of constitutional power, or
revolutionary power as Chávez
saw it. It was a concept most Venezuelans were unfamiliar with, but
eventually it would help upend the country's political establishment.

The rebels relied on some of their lawyers to smuggle in blank cassette
tapes and take them out with Chávez's recorded messages. They distributed
copies to his political allies, who played them on public buses.
By now the elite-controlled commercial media had reversed themselves
and were blackballing Chávez. They viewed him as a dangerous radical
and a threat to the system.
The rebels faced even larger dangers than censorship by the media.
They feared their enemies might try to kill them. Allies
smuggled
weapons into the prison for their protection. The rebels hid the guns
in their beds or amid their clothes. Guards frequently harassed them.
They tossed tear gas into their cells, conducted searches, and hauled
away their books and documents, forcing them to start from zero.

Despite the harassment, Chávez felt free in prison to pursue and
deepen his revolutionary movement:

I've always said the
jail was a school. In the first place, because it
feeds the soul, it consolidates your conviction and deepens your
conscience. All those days and nights in jail, we advanced ideologically,
above all because we were prisoners of conscience, prisoners
of dignity, prisoners conscious of why we needed to be there
. . . I never felt like a prisoner really, neither desperate nor closed
in. I felt free in that small space, because above all I was taking
advantage of the time.

Almost from the time he entered jail, plots were under way to free
Chávez. One of the first visits he received in San Carlos was from an
army lieutenant who entered with a false identification card. He told
Chávez about a plan to overthrow the government and liberate him from
prison. Helicopters were to swoop in from Maracay sixty miles away, the
lieutenant told him, and whisk Chávez out of San Carlos. Chávez convinced
him to hold off. His movement was in a state of upheaval after the
coup. The chances of another
rebellion succeeding were unclear.

Not long after, Chávez received another visit from retired army colonel
Higinio Castro. He offered Chávez his services. This time Chávez
told him to see what he could organize with the Bolivarian rebels who
had avoided prison or with other dissidents in the army. They soon
planned several rebellions. One plot even called for killing President
Pérez on July 5 during a parade marking Venezuela's independence
day. But the army rebels were still not sufficiently organized to launch a
rebellion, and none took place.

They needed help from other sectors of the
armed forces. About
the same time Chávez was making Castro his emissary to the army, he
received a message from Luis Reyes Reyes, the
air force pilot who had
tried but failed to get allies in the air force to fully participate in the
coup. On a jail visit, Chávez's son Hugo Jr. slipped him a small piece
of paper from Reyes Reyes. "Be tranquil. We're working," it said. "The
chatter of the parrots has grown." The parrots were the air force. While
Chávez's movement in the army had suffered a heavy blow with the
failed February 4 coup, rebels in that branch of the service had escaped
relatively unscathed.

Chávez put Colonel Castro in touch with Reyes Reyes, who contacted
fellow pilot Brigadier General Efraín Francisco Visconti Osorio.
Chávez had met with Visconti and Reyes Reyes a day before the February
4 coup, but could not convince Visconti to join the
revolt on such short
notice. He and Chávez, though, shared a common desire to overthrow
Venezuela's political system.

Visconti had spent much of the 1970s and 1980s immersed in William
Izarra's subversive air force group ARMA. He also met with civilians such
as Douglas Bravo and organized his own secret cell of pilots. Now, with
the failure of the February 4 coup and Pérez's grip on Miraflores slipping,
he saw an opening for another revolt.

Officers in the navy including
Admiral Hernán Grüber ódreman
had the same idea. Not long after Visconti and Reyes Reyes made contact
with Higinio Castro and the remnants of Chávez's MBR-200, they
also got in touch with Grüber. Visconti ceded overall command of the
operation to Grüber since he was the senior officer. In contrast with the
February 4 revolt carried out by young lieutenant colonels and captains,
this rebellion was to be led by experienced generals and admirals.

Chávez stayed in touch with them, receiving letters or cassettes of
meetings the groups held to plot the coup. He left the planning to the
others since he was confined to jail. "We collaborated with some ideas,
but we always felt they had sufficient military capacity to plan and execute
the operation," Chávez told interviewer Agustín Blanco Muñoz.
"Until that date in July [of the aborted coup against Pérez] there was
contact between the two groups, the ones outside and us, but after that
we let go of the reins . . . I never handled details of the plans. I never
had access to them."

Chávez's support for another coup did not receive unanimous support
from his comrades in jail.
Arias Cárdenas vigorously opposed the
idea. He believed the time for a military uprising had passed, and the
rebels now should pursue a peaceful political path rather than armed
insurrection. He thought the rebels no longer had enough strength in
the military to pull off another coup. Chávez disagreed. He still believed
Venezuela's political system was a fixed game controlled by the political
elites. Only a civic-military uprising could break their grip on power.

It was the most serious dispute they had in prison, and underscored
their differences about the direction the Bolivarian
movement should
take. The two fought bitterly. Tensions also built between them since
Luis Miquilena, Chávez's emerging alter ego, was advising the group
that El Comandante had to be the star of the group to focus public
attention. The others had to take a backseat. At one point he issued an
edict for Arias Cárdenas to remain silent with the media.

The new conspiracy fell into a "cold period" in August and
September 1992. But the rebels could not wait forever. Elections for
state governors and local mayors were coming on December 5. A week
before that, on November 25, practice sessions were to begin for an
annual air show on December 10. Most of the air force's jets would be
concentrated at the Liberator air base in Maracay. The rebels decided
it was their moment.

On the night of Thursday, November 26, Chávez received word that
the uprising was imminent. His son had smuggled a piece of a communications
radio into the jail. Reyes Reyes's son snuck in the other part. The
prisoners put them together, contacted some relatives, and got confirmation
of the revolt. Expecting the rebels to pluck them from jail, Chávez,
Arias Cárdenas — by now resigned to the coup's inevitability — and the
others in Yare put on their combat uniforms. They established a nighttime
guard to alert one another when the rescuers came. "I remember
that Arias and I almost did not sleep," Chávez said. "And about 5 A.M. we
heard on the radio that the rebellion had already started."

The November 27 rebels had learned some lessons from the failed
February 4 insurgents. Instead of launching the rebellion at midnight,
they waited until 4:30 A.M. The air force was to play a key role. They
needed daylight to see their targets and give civilian supporters a chance
to flood the streets. They also moved quickly to seize control of the
media. They took over the antennae that sent out the signal for three
major television stations. They also bought expensive communications
equipment so they would not be stranded incommunicado like Chávez
at the military museum.

The revolt started off well. The insurgents seized control of major
air bases including Liberator in Maracay. They were largely in control of
the skies. At one point Reyes Reyes thundered into the valley of Caracas
in an F-16, breaking the sound barrier for the first time in the capital
and shocking residents who heard their windows rattle and shake as the
jet fighter passed just three thousand feet overhead. The usual minimal
safety level was ten thousand feet.