Hugo! (26 page)

Down on the ground, rebels took over the state-run
channel 8 in
eastern Caracas during a bloody battle. But a video Grüber had taped
announcing the rebellion and calling on the nation to rise up never
got played. Instead, one Chávez had recorded a few months earlier in
jail came on. Worse, another video of masked men bearing arms and
talking in crude, violent language appeared. They urged Venezuelans
to haul out clubs, bottles, and homemade arms to overthrow the government.
Few did. The images of the thug-like figures merely frightened
the public, which was still terrified of the violence from the Caracazo.
To this day, the rebels don't know how the video got on the air.

While rebel pilots took quick command of the skies, the army was
almost nowhere to be seen. Ground support was crucial, since the insurgents
couldn't take Miraflores and other targets with airplanes alone.
But the army was fractured. At least three different rebel tendencies
existed, and they could not coordinate their actions.

Even the air force suffered problems. When the rebels took over the
air base at Maracay shortly before dawn, one pilot led a minor defection
and took off with two F-16s. He flew to Barquísimeto in the interior
of Venezuela. Operating under orders of the government, he engaged in
midair dogfights with rebel planes as shocked residents below looked on.

By about 9 A.M. the air force insurgents realized they were alone in
battle. About the same time, loyalist forces shot down the first rebel airplane
in Maracay. The pilot ejected himself to safety. But the insurgents
realized the government orders were to engage in combat and kill.

Infuriated, they changed their original plans. They started to
bomb some targets. They fired rockets at the DISIP political police headquarters
in Caracas. They dropped bombs on Miraflores presidential
palace, blowing a sixty-foot-wide hole in the wall of the white, colonial-style
structure and leaving craters in surrounding streets. At the height
of the bombing the seventy-year-old Pérez reportedly crawled on his
hands and knees to an underground bunker, from which he rallied
loyal units. They responded by attacking more rebel airplanes.

Part of the coup plan called for liberating Chávez and his cohorts.
Some army officers accompanied by civilians went to Yare that morning
to try to free them. They rode in on a tractor, with others following
close behind. A much larger and more powerful force of guards and
soldiers turned them back. At one point they fired a rocket at them,
tearing off the face of one would-be liberator.

The rebels in this coup had done a better job than Chávez's forces
of controlling the media. But they left Pérez with one opening: They
failed to take over Televen channel 10. Pérez made his way to the station.
In a repeat of February 4, he declared that he was in control of
the country; the rebellion had failed. Grüber soon followed at midday
by announcing that he was surrendering. By around noon the government
took over La Carlota air base in Caracas. By 2 P.M. it seized Base
Mariscal Sucre in Maracay. By about 3 P.M. rebel leaders at the nearby
Liberator base realized they were next.

Government ground troops were surrounding the air base with
tanks and preparing to take it. The insurgents piled into two C-130s
inside a hangar and took off down an emergency strip. They left behind
helicopters that were still running but had no pilots inside. The rebels
had no idea where they were going. Up in the air, Visconti decided
Peru was the best destination. Its government had broken diplomatic
relations with Pérez and was most likely to grant the ninety-three rebels
political asylum. They headed for Lima but landed prematurely in the
Amazon jungle city of Iquitos because of engine trouble.

Despite the precautions and the array of forces lined up — air
force, navy, army, National Guard, even significant groups of civilians
including the Patriotic Front, the UCV professors, Douglas Bravo's
Third Way, the Causa R, and the ultraleftist Bandera Roja — the coup
attempt had turned into a bloody fiasco. The death toll reached 171. It
was far worse than the February 4 putsch.

After the second coup attempt in ten months and with the country on
edge, Pérez defiantly rejected demands that he resign. "My presence
in the government has been a guarantee of democratic stability," he
declared, although the opposite was true. When he led reporters on
a walk around the bullet-pocked palace, several bystanders shouted:
"Pérez, get out of here!"

The winds of change were evident in elections a few days
later. Little-known geography teacher and anticorruption crusader
Aristóbulo Istúriz of the leftist Causa R Party won the mayor's election
in Caracas, breaking Democratic Action's and COPEI's decades-long
grip on the post. "His passionate speaking manner and appearance
alone — he is black — sent shock waves through the political system
and the generally white
Venezuelan elite, which is still comfortable
with racist jokes."

Venezuelans were so desperate for change, they elected a former
beauty queen as mayor of the upscale Chacao district in eastern
Caracas. In a typically vacuous post-victory statement, Irene Sáez, a
six-foot-one bleached-blond former Miss Universe who ran as an independent,
told supporters, "You will always have a friend in me." But in
beauty-queen-crazy Venezuela, she quickly became one of the most
popular politicians in the nation.

As newcomers like Sáez and Istúriz took power, Pérez's once dominant
Democratic Action Party suffered one of its worst electoral setbacks
in decades. Opposition control of powerful state governorships
increased from one-half to two-thirds. Even though on paper 1992 was
a "banner year" for the country with 7.3 percent economic growth
and $2 billion in new foreign investment, little trickled down to the
masses. From his exile in Peru, coup leader General Francisco Efrain
Visconti captured the national sentiment: "There is no human being
in the country that does not feel beaten down by the effects of the
brutal economic policy imposed by the IMF."

With hatred of the president intensifying, a new breed of antiestablishment
politicians on the rise, and Democratic Action mired
in the deepest crisis in its five-decade history, party leaders decided
that if Pérez would not go out on his own, they would get rid of him
themselves.

The seeds of his destruction were planted two weeks before the
November coup. Muckraking journalist José Vicente Rangel reported in
his newspaper column that the politically influenced judicial system was
investigating charges that the president and two ministers had enriched
themselves through a
currency speculation scheme.
Pérez allegedly
withdrew 250 million bolivars from a secret government account earmarked
for national security just days after he was sworn in during his
"coronation" in February 1989, exchanging them for $17.2 million. Then
two weeks later, after the government devalued the bolivar by 88 percent
as part of the
paquete
that provoked the Caracazo, Pérez and the ministers
allegedly changed the dollars back into the national currency at the
new, higher rate. The scheme allegedly netted anywhere from $3 million
to $10 million. Some speculated that Pérez had used the money to
pay for the lavish inauguration ceremonies.

In May 1993 the Supreme Court ruled that Pérez could be tried
on the charges and prepared to begin his trial. The next day the Senate
suspended him from office. The half-century-long career of one of the
grand old men of Latin American politics was for all intents over.

The
political demise of Pérez was a badly needed boost for the rebels
in jail and particularly for Chávez. He was going through roller-coaster
rides that ranged from basking in unalloyed adulation to deep depression.
The rebels were demoralized by the failure of the second coup, and
racked by infighting. Some in the November movement blamed Chávez
for the coup's failure, claiming that he had prevented the video of Grüber
ódreman from appearing on television and replaced it with the one of
himself. They believed he was trying to wrest control of the rebellion.
Chávez insisted he had nothing to do with the botched videos.

In Peru, Visconti bad-mouthed him, and word spread in Yare and
San Carlos. "Arias himself became contagious with it," Chávez told
interviewer Agustín Blanco Muñoz. "In one of many letters he wrote,
he pointed to me as the one responsible for the failure. One sector of the
November twenty-seventh rebels started to see in us and especially in
me the cause of all their problems. And they instilled this in some of the
officers from February 4th, who came to believe it . . . After this defeat
they pointed their cannons at me in an unjustified manner." It turned
into some of the lowest moments of his time in prison. "In the months of
December 1992, January 1993, I was a solitary figure in the jail, where for
the first time I felt the ice of bitterness. I'd never felt it before, not even
with the surrender of February 4th, the pain of the bitterness of being
pointed to by my friends as the one responsible for the failure."

He'd seen better times in prison, when his comrades exulted in his
newfound stardom and hailed him as a courageous leader. Chávez's
image of himself as the heir to Bolívar, Zamora, and Maisanta, entrusted
with the historic mission of rescuing Venezuela, could reach dizzying
heights. Herma Marksman thought it bordered on messianic delirium at
times. Shortly after he arrived at San Carlos, the grandson of Maisanta
whom Chávez had met in 1983 brought an original medallion that Pedro
Pérez Delgado had worn and was handed down through the family. In
an impromptu ceremony in the jail, the grandson presented the medallion
to Chávez and told him he now "incarnated" Maisanta. Chávez put
on the medallion and never took it off again.

One night months later in Yare, he and some of the coup plotters
were drinking rum and whiskey and smoking cigars that had been
smuggled in. Chávez had spent weeks arguing with Arias over whether
the group should support an outside candidate against the two traditional
parties in the upcoming 1993 presidential
election or simply call
on Venezuelans to abstain from the election, which was Chávez's position.
The night before they decided, he was trying to win over the other
rebels. When Arias walked into the room Chávez told him they were
"invoking the spirits." With Maisanta's medallion hanging around his
neck, Chávez started to tremble and talk like an old man. "How are you,
boys?" he said. One jumped up and said, "My General Bolívar!" Chávez
responded, "I'm not General Bolívar. Don't put me up so high." Ronald
Blanco La Cruz then interjected: "My General Maisanta!" Chávez
responded, "Of course, my son, I am here."

The next day Chávez insisted the liquor-fueled incident was all in fun
and designed to persuade his younger charges. It did. Arias thought he
had a six-to-three advantage going into the vote, but he lost by the same
margin. The rebels issued a communiqué calling on Venezuelans to boycott
the "illegal and illegitimate" elections. Arias refused to sign it. Beyond
that, the
Maisanta incident seemed to underscore Chávez's belief that he
was the vehicle his trilogy of heroes was using to refound the country.

While Chávez was wrestling for power with Arias, another one of
his key relationships was also undergoing a shift. His relationship with
the secret comandante was ending.

Herma Marksman didn't care for all the adulation and attention Chávez
was receiving. She thought his ego was ballooning out of control and
he was turning into a person she barely knew. She also didn't like many
of his new friends. She believed that some, like Luis Miquilena, were
nothing but communist leftovers who were betraying the nationalist
and Bolivarian roots of the movement she had helped Chávez build
over a decade.

On the other hand, Chávez's new allies didn't always appreciate
Marksman's presence. She believed some of them, in particular
Miquilena, wanted her to disappear from Chávez's life. She represented
an inconvenient and potentially embarrassing liaison that could hurt
the rising star's reputation. That was especially so since Chávez presented
himself as the antidote to the immorality and corruption of political
leaders such as Carlos Andrés Pérez, who had two daughters by
his
mistress
Cecilia Matos, and Jaime Lusinchi, whose mistress Blanca
Ibáñez was nearly running the country in the late 1980s. "I think that if
they could have dug a hole and put me in it and covered me up forever,
they would have done it," Marksman commented years later.

People like Francisco Arias Cárdenas didn't think there was any
comparison to Matos or Ibáñez. Marksman was a serious woman, a
well-read historian who played an important role in the clandestine
Bolivarian conspiracy starting in 1984, risking her job and throwing
herself into the movement. If anything, she was
Chávez's Manuela
Sáenz, the sharp-witted intellectual and revolutionary who had stood
by Bolívar in his bleakest moments and even went into battle with independence
troops, earning the rank of colonel.

Chávez had indirectly admitted as much to people who knew the
story of their secret relationship — which really wasn't a secret at all
to the members of the movement, who often received messages from
her, saw her at meetings, and called her on the telephone. According to
Chávez interviewer Agustín Blanco Muñoz, Marksman "wasn't just the
sentimental companion of Hugo Chávez for ten years . . . She was his
principal and at times only collaborator . . . She was the key person for
the meetings, the contacts, the discussions, the resolutions, to process
the conflicts, to resist the actions of the leaks, to clean up fingerprints
and to put together the archive of that time."

One leading rebel who was imprisoned for two years with Chávez
in Yare, Luis Valderrama, has contended that Marksman played a "key
role" in the decade-long
Bolivarian conspiracy, serving as a "guide" and
"teacher" for Chávez. During the time in jail, Yare turned into a focal
point for the movement, attracting everyone from leftist intellectuals
to priests to relatives of the rebels, and it became more difficult to conceal
the fact Chávez had two women. "Remember that Chávez had
his wife, Nancy, who lived in San Joaquín, and at the same time had
the woman of his dreams, who was Herma," Valderrama has recalled.
"Herma is the woman who along with him serves as the motor for everything
having to do with that crazy conspiracy. She's the one who serves
as his handkerchief, the one who helps him, including psychologically,
who gives him encouragement."

After gaining access to the rebels in Yare, former guerrilla ángela
Zago published her best-selling book
The Rebellion of the Angels
in
October 1992. She dedicated the glowing account of Chávez and his
comrades "especially to
Comandante Pedro, a person who one day we
will discover and who in a meticulous and responsible way, with profound
love, has collected, archived and saved every little paper that
takes us through a history that goes beyond the nine years since the
movement was founded."

Comandante Pedro was Marksman. She was unknown to the
nation and even today remains largely a mystery to most Venezuelans.
Zago wrote that Comandante Pedro "during two months was busy gathering
any document that showed who 'his boys' are. Comandante Pedro
believes profoundly in the philosophy of his comrades and feels a profound
respect and affection for Comandante Chávez. Only a person
who admires the other is capable of — at whatever hour, in whatever
place — leaving their job with all the risks that entails and following the
path the rebels followed in these past years. To this
secret Comandante,
my thanks, admiration and respect."

Marksman even wrote the prologue to the book, signing it by her
nom de guerre. After entering the
MBR-200 eight years earlier, she
wrote, she set herself to collecting, putting in order, and saving the letters,
work papers, and documents that were produced in the rebels'
meetings. In the clandestine gatherings they "not only deepened the
study of the
historic roots of our movement,
Simon Rodríguez,
Simón
Bolívar and
Ezequiel Zamora — the tree of the three roots — but discussed
and analyzed the national problem, the deepening of the crisis,
and the moral deterioration in all the institutions that make up the
country, proposing possible solutions without, of course, detaching ourselves
from international events." The Bolivarians' ultimate goal, she
added, was "to rescue the dignity of the Venezuelan people."

A month after the book came out, Chávez himself indirectly
acknowledged Marksman's contribution to the movement in a handwritten
dedication he wrote to Zago in a reprint of the best-seller.
Calling it a "marvelous book," Chávez started his dedication by stating,
"In the name of dreams, of comrades alive and dead, of Felipe Acosta
Carles . . . and Comandante Pedro, who inhabits Yare."

In the later editions, Zago gave further hints of the identity of the
secret comandante. On a separate page from the dedication, she wrote,
"Some people exist who have the capacity to understand that history is
constructed in every moment. To this group of people belongs Herma
M. Marksman B., professor of history, post-graduate in economic-social
history of Venezuela, a degree she received magna cum laude." Zago
added that without Marksman, "this book would have been very difficult
to achieve."

But Herma Marksman seemed destined in ways to repeat the history
of Manuela Sáenz. Venezuelans had a conservative streak when it came to
demigods like Bolívar. For decades his lover and partner was erased from
the country's official history. Historians left her out of books. Authorities
destroyed or hid old documents that referred to her. Barred from her
native Ecuador and from Colombia after the Liberator's death in 1830,
"Manuelita" spent her last twenty-five years despised and destitute. She
sold tobacco in a seedy port town in northern Peru and translated letters
North American whale hunters wrote their lovers in Latin America. In 1856
she died in disgrace during a diphtheria epidemic. Authorities dumped
her body in a mass grave, and burned her belongings — including most
of Bolívar's love letters.

The demonization of Sáenz lasted decades. Even as recently as the
mid-1980s, a proposal to erect a bust of her in a square in the Andean
city of Mérida provoked fierce opposition from the Roman Catholic
Church. It wasn't until the late 1980s and the 1990s that Venezuelans
and South Americans began to reassess "the Liberator of the Liberator"
as one of the continent's greatest heroines. A series of newspaper articles,
movies, and books came out, including one by Colombian writer
Gabriel García Márquez, who wrote warmly of her in his 1989 novel
The General in His Labyrinth
. Today she is considered a national heroine
in her native Ecuador and is gaining respect in Venezuela.

The end of Chávez's
relationship with Marksman came on his
birthday, July 28, 1993, as she has told the story. That day, Chávez gave
a radio
interview from jail. Speaking on a cell phone that was smuggled
into the jail and presenting himself as a model family man, he went on
at length about how his wife, Nancy, whom he would divorce the following
year, had supported him wholeheartedly throughout the years
he conspired, playing an important role in the movement. Not a single
mention of Marksman, his true love and co-conspirator.

Zago heard the interview on the radio. She called Marksman,
hoping she could head her off from listening. But Marksman heard
it all. She was both crushed and livid. On top of the pressure from
Chávez's advisers to squeeze her out, the long lines of women anxious
to throw themselves at El Comandante, and what she thought was the
dramatically changed personality of a man who had turned into a messiah,
it was more than she could take. "For me, he died July 28, 1993,"
Marksman told interviewer Agustín Blanco Muñoz. She felt like she'd
become a widow.

The interview — and the end of the relationship — was devastating
for another reason. By Marksman's account, Chávez's attachment to her
had become so deep that in the late 1980s and early 1990s he had told
her he wanted to divorce Colmenares, marry Marksman, and have a
child together. At one point she became pregnant, but lost the baby prematurely.
Their plans for marriage never materialized.

Chávez has never publicly spoken about Marksman or recognized
their relationship — at least not until an interview in April 2007. "I was
very fond of her," Chávez confessed, using the verb
querer
, which could
also be translated as "love" but is not as strong as the verb
amar
, meaning
a much deeper love. Chávez said Marksman was a "fighter" who played
an "important" although not "definitive" role in the conspiracy, mainly
on the logistical rather than ideological side. Marksman demonstrated
"great loyalty and a great capacity for work," he said, helping prepare
places for meetings, preparing and archiving documents, and assisting
with other tasks.

He dismissed any comparisons to Manuela Saenz, saying "I'm
Bolívar?" with a laugh. "It would never be comparable. Bolívar is the
giant. I am a tiny soldier. I don't think the comparison is valid. There
are not grounds for comparison in this case. Manuela Saenz accompanied
Bolívar in war, in battle, in the campaign. She accompanied him
in his final days, until his death. She was loyal until death. There is no
comparison possible here on any side."

He also provided a different account of possible plans to have a
child together and Marksman's assertion she became pregnant at one
point but miscarried. "She at one time had the desire to have a child,"
Chávez said simply. "We were never in agreement."

In contrast to Chávez's acknowledgement of the relationship during
this 2007 interview, Blanco Muñoz noted that in fourteen extensive conversations
he conducted from March 1995 to June 1998 for his 643-page
book of interviews,
Habla El Comandante
, Chávez never mentioned
Marksman once. Marksman was to remain invisible to the public for
the next decade, nursing her wounds, until she finally granted several
interviews to television and newspaper reporters on the tenth anniversary
of the February 4 coup. She later collaborated with Blanco Muñoz
and Alberto Garrido for her own books of interviews. By then she'd
become a bitter critic of Chávez, whose supporters wondered how
much of her anger was stoked by their failed romance. Despite the occasional
bursts of publicity, she remained a largely unknown figure to
most Venezuelans.

As Chávez's nine-year relationship with Marksman was ending in 1993,
the presidential electoral campaign was revving up. Former president
Rafael Caldera was roaring back to political life. After leaving office in
1974, Caldera had faded away to the point that by the early 1990s journalists
joked that the aging patriarch of COPEI was a "political cadaver."
But with the speech he delivered in Congress the day of Chávez's coup,
Caldera "left the grave," according to Zago. As the December election
neared, the seventy-seven-year-old Caldera was in the midst of a heated
four-way race.

Whoever won, Chávez believed the rebels stood a good chance of
gaining their freedom. Pressure was building in the streets to release
them. Besides, Caldera had won fame in his first term by "pacifying"
the guerrilla movement, offering them amnesty if they laid down their
arms. On the night of the presidential vote, December 5, Caldera —
who was running as an independent backed by a coalition of small parties
nicknamed the
chiripera
for small insects that make a noisy racket
when they chirp together — squeaked out a victory. It was marred by
allegations of fraud from Causa R leader Andrés Velásquez. He finished
fourth, but many people believed he had really won. Ballot boxes containing
results favorable to him turned up in garbage dumps.

While Caldera was a political relic who had started his political
career when Franklin D. Roosevelt was in his second term in the White
House, he was also one of the few politicians in the nation seen as honest.
In a country where presidential mistresses were so well known that they
were called by their first names, Caldera had been happily married to
the same woman for half a century. He attended Roman Catholic Mass
every Sunday. He campaigned on a pledge to reverse Pérez's free-market
austerity program. He promised a low-key inauguration, in contrast with
Pérez's ostentatious, self-glorifying bash. After the recent shocks of the
Caracazo, two coup attempts, an economic austerity package, and the
impeachment of a president, Venezuelans wanted the stability of the past
that the reassuring grandfatherly figure of Caldera offered. The night he
won, Chávez spoke with him on a cell phone smuggled into Yare, congratulating
him on his triumph. Caldera told him to avoid provocations
while he prepared to assume the presidency.

He soon had other problems to deal with. Even before he was
elected, rumors were circulating in Venezuelan financial circles that
the country's second largest bank,
Banco Latino, was in trouble.