Hugo! (27 page)

Banco Latino was partly a creation, phenomenon, and symbol of
Pérez's presidency. It quickly rose from a middle-of-the-pack institution
to a high-flying financial operation with executives living the good life.
Many were close to Pérez, which led critics to dub Banco Latino "the
Bank of the Twelve Apostles" — the name for the president's kitchen
cabinet. Shortly after Pérez was sworn in for his second term in February
1989, he named Banco Latino's president and major shareholder, Pedro
Tinoco, head of the Central Bank of Venezuela. Other bank "apostles"
included
Ricardo Cisneros of the powerful and wealthy Cisneros family,
and the president's brother Francisco.

As part of the neo-liberal free-market
paquete
Pérez implemented
shortly after his inauguration, he deregulated the banking industry. But
he failed to put in place the beefed-up supervision a deregulated system
requires. The result was rampant mismanagement.

Three months after Banco Latino held an extravagant bash for clients
and directors, flying them to Paris in a Concorde and putting some
up in the Ritz hotel, the bank collapsed and authorities padlocked its
doors. Its spectacular failure in January 1994 sent shock waves through
Venezuela and set off a chain reaction of failures at more than half
the nation's banks. By the end of 1994, the government had spent $10
billion propping them up — more than half that year's entire budget.
Authorities issued arrest warrants for two hundred bankers, but most
had fled the country, taking millions of dollars with them.

It was a prime example of the corruption, mismanagement, and rot
that permeated Venezuela and propelled Chávez to launch his coup.
Meanwhile, a popular nighttime
soap opera was sweeping the country
with an amazingly true-to-life depiction of the rot.
Por Estas Calles
(
Through These Streets
) was the first television program to expose the
corruption and moral decay afflicting the nation. It also gave the rich
their first realistic view of what life was really like in the barrios where
Chávez was a hero.

One of the main characters was Governor Don Chepe Orellana.
His character bore a striking resemblance to former president Jaime
Lusinchi, who in real life had of course been manipulated by Blanca
Ibáñez. On the show, Don Chepe and his mistress Lucha pocketed
public money with one sleight-of-hand move after another, doled out
favors to campaign contributors, developed all kinds of illegal schemes
to hold on to power, and ruthlessly eliminated political enemies.

Another character was Dr. Valerio, a physician and "caricature of
the upper-middle-class scoundrel." He ran a private clinic and spent
most of his time developing schemes to obtain more money and power.
Dr. Valerio was what is known in Venezuela as
un vivo
— a "clever
one" who knows how to get one over on the system. Like many white-collar
criminals, he proudly bragged about his exploits. In contrast,
people who have a chance to steal or take advantage of a situation
for their own personal benefit and don't do it are known as
pendejos
— fools.

The series even featured a fourteen-year-old
malandro
, barrio
thug, who represented the new gangs that were terrorizing residents
with their guns and street violence. There was also a schoolteacher
in a poor neighborhood who denounced the corrupt, paternalistic
government. The program touched on subjects few others bothered
with, such as the shortage of water. In Venezuela, mismanagement by
the government utility company meant water might come to people's
homes and apartments as infrequently as once a month. When it did,
they dropped everything to fill up storage tanks or barrels.

In one memorable episode of
Por Estas Calles
, the schoolteacher
manages to pull together community activists for a meeting. Just as
they pledge to work together, the group scatters from the room in
a dozen directions. "Did I say something wrong," the teacher asks
a friend as they stand almost alone in the meeting room. "No, the
water's back on," a student answers. "We have to fill our buckets." In
another scene, after days of trying two lovers finally find the time to be
alone. Then the water starts flowing, and they run out.

It was all a perfect summary of why Venezuelans were so disgusted
with the system and clamoring for a rebel like Chávez to clean it up.

A few months before
Por Estas Calles
ended its two-year run, President
Rafael Caldera was preparing to
release Chávez from prison. He had
little choice. Much of the public was demanding it. Caldera figured the
rebel leader was more dangerous in
jail than out. Once out on the street,
the thinking went, the myth of Chávez would deflate. But Caldera made
one mistake. He failed to bar Chávez from future political activity.
Chávez's opponents would never forgive Caldera for the misstep.

On February 23, 1994, the president released Francisco Arias
Cárdenas and nine other officers, with the only condition that they
resign from the military. Little by little Caldera released the rest until
only Chávez and a few others were left. Chávez insisted on staying
behind bars until all the others were freed. As the end neared, he asked
to undergo eye surgery, which authorities had until then denied him.
Caldera approved his transfer to a military hospital. He underwent the
surgery and spent two weeks in the hospital. By late March, as Holy
Week approached, marking the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ,
Chávez was set to be freed.

He had one last demand before he went. He wanted to sign his discharge
papers at Fort Tiuna and visit the military academy one last time
in his paratrooper uniform. General Raúl Salazar, a heavyset friend of
Chávez's who was in charge of handling his discharge, told him he was
asking for trouble with military superiors. He pleaded with him not to
insist. But Chávez wouldn't back off. A part of his life that he loved and
that had served as the incubator for his rebellion was ending. He wanted
to say good-bye the right way, in his own style. Salazar finally ceded to
the request on the condition that no media would be present; they would
keep it secret.

Early in the morning of Saturday, March 26, Salazar snuck him
out of the hospital through the kitchen and a back door, avoiding the
reporters, photographers, and television cameramen gathered out front.
They hustled him into the car of the general's daughter to avoid drawing
attention, then whisked to him Fort Tiuna. As they pulled into the military
base, a tremendous nostalgia washed over Chávez:

I hadn't been to Fort Tiuna since the day they took me prisoner,
and it's very difficult to explain what was happening to me. I felt
like I was dying a bit, because the truth is I loved my entire military
career. When we got to Salazar's office, I felt I was crying. The
Fat One, who is a really good guy, realized it and moved away for
a bit. He left me alone. I went out on a patio and I looked at areas
where I had worked. After a while, Salazar asked me, "Chávez, are
you OK?" "Yes, general, I'm ready."

Chávez was to be released late that morning. Before he departed,
Salazar let him pay his final visit to the military academy on the other
side of the Fort Tiuna campus. He drove Chávez over to the gleaming
white academy building, which was empty because the cadets and professors
were on vacation for Holy Week. Chávez walked onto the patio,
"to a place that is like magic. I stayed there, and walked toward a statue of
Bolívar. I cried again . . ." He spoke to himself alone until Salazar finally
called him and they departed. Back at the general's office, Chávez took a
shower, changed into civilian clothes, and got ready to leave. It was the day
before Palm Sunday.

Outside the military base, journalists and admirers clamored to
see him. A crowd of hundreds of people, mainly women, was gathered,
waving Venezuelan flags, holding flowers, donning red berets. Their hero
was free after two years and two months in prison. He could have faced
thirty years.

At about 12:30 P.M. Chávez finally appeared. Pandemonium broke
out. The throng swarmed around him, clambering over a table full of
microphones and even knocking him down. One ally, Nicolas Maduro,
watched as people tried to touch him, or hand him their children so he
could hold them. If they managed to press a hand on El Comandante for
a moment, they would then place it on their children's heads, "as if he were
a saint," Maduro said. Others fell to their knees, cried, and shouted that
Chávez was Simón Bolívar. "That day I heard for the first time something
we heard many times during the trips throughout Venezuela: 'Chávez,
you are Bolívar reincarnated.' "

Chávez planned to give a formal press conference, but it was impossible.
He managed only a few statements. "This military generation that
chose the road of sacrifice and was forged at the military installations of
Fort Tiuna, is going to show Venezuela's hack politicians what it is to lead
a nation and restore its true destiny," he told reporters.

As he got ready to leave, one journalist shoved a tape recorder at him
and shouted out amid the tumult, asking where he was going next. Without
thinking, Chávez turned to the reporter and responded instinctively:

"To power."

The next day, Palm Sunday, Chávez visited the tomb of his hero Simón
Bolívar. It was just down the street from the San Carlos jail where he
had spent several weeks after the February 4 coup. He placed a wreath at
the Liberator's grave inside the National Pantheon, emerging from the
building to a cheering throng. Many were getting their first live glimpse
of Chávez since the day he'd appeared on television giving his famous
por ahora
speech. He'd spent the morning giving a long press conference
for local and international reporters. Outside the Pantheon he waded
through the crowd, then headed down the street and into the barrios
of Catia in western Caracas, where more fans mobbed him. People followed
him on bicycle, on motorcycle, and on foot, jogging behind him
as his entourage advanced and made stops along the way. Chávez's new
life in the outside world had begun. He was a star. Everyplace he went
crowds flocked to him. "I could not feel alone, because where I went
it would produce the same avalanche of people as when I left the jail.
After I left Yare, I could not walk one hundred meters alone . . . I don't
know the word solitude. I don't know what it is to be alone."

Chávez spent a few days visiting the barrios of Caracas, basking in
his newfound freedom and the adulation of his supporters. Then he
headed to his hometowns of Sabaneta and Barinas, where he spent the
rest of Holy Week, and got ready to embark on a
one-hundred-day tour
of Venezuela. He and his allies called it the
"Bolivarian Hurricane." It
was to take him to nearly every corner of the country, from the snowcapped
Andes to the sultry Caribbean coast to the Amazon jungle.
Their slogan was,
"The Hope Is in the Streets." Chávez wanted to meet
many of his admirers face-to-face for the first time, and build support for
the MBR-200 and his proposal for a constitutional assembly.

With a few of his military and civilian allies in tow, he hit the road.
They traveled in a four-wheel-drive jeep he dubbed
la burra negra
(the
black donkey). Chávez met with teachers, union leaders,
campesinos
,
fishermen, indigenous tribes, "people from the right, people from the
left, people from the extreme right, people from the extreme left, apolitical
people, everyone, but who in some way identified with the change,"
he recalled. At one point he even climbed into one of the precarious
holes gold miners in the Amazon jungle blasted in the earth with powerful
water hoses searching for their El Dorado. "I don't think that we
skipped a single city, town, encampment, Indian village or neighborhood.

We went from town to town with the flag of the constitutional
assembly, building the organization, strengthening it."

His appearances created a sensation almost everywhere he went.
Women kissed him, smearing his cheeks with lipstick. Children
donned imitations of his paratrooper's combat fatigues and red beret.
Men formed makeshift security details in case any of his adversaries
tried to physically attack him. Chávez didn't have to talk to provoke
cheers. He simply raised his arms in triumph and the crowds went wild.
After the rallies, autograph seekers and small-town reporters gathered
outside his room hoping for a minute of his time. In some places such
as his hometown of Barinas, graffiti messages adorned walls: BOLíVAR
LIVES AGAIN.

While Chávez and his supporters were so stretched financially that
they sometimes lacked money for gas and other basics, food was not
a problem. They had far more dinner invitations in each town than
they could possibly accept — often dozens. They slept in the homes of
supporters honored by the visit. When they heard El Comandante was
coming to town, residents — many of them dirt poor — pooled their
money and rented out a sound system or a hotel conference room for
Chávez's appearance. Others gave him clothes.

In an Andean village dotted with coffee fields, Chávez was dressed
in a rugby shirt, blue jeans, and his trademark red beret one day in May
1994 as he stood in a central plaza before a crowd of admirers. A torrential
spring rain poured down, rattling tile roofs, but Chávez and the
crowd in Humocaro Alto were undeterred. "The crisis is so deep," he
boomed to the shivering but enthusiastic audience, "the gangrene is so
profound, as Bolívar used to say, that it can't be cured by palliatives. The
only way is revolution."

Later, residents packed the village church, where the smell of wood
smoke mingled with farmers' sweat. Cheers and waving baseball caps
greeted Chávez's calls for a clean government and "a revolution to raise
our country from the swamp." One sinewy farmer wearing a red beret
watched admiringly from the back. "He's the only one who could put
the country back together, who could throw out the
corruptos
," the
farmer commented. After the rally, the village priest explained why he
opened the church to a man who spent two years in jail for trying to
overthrow the government: "Chávez is always in favor of the people,
against the
corruptos.
" As he left the town in his motorcade, Chávez
rubbed his cheeks clean of the lipstick left by adoring female fans.

A few weeks later at another rally in the city of Valencia, one
admirer, hairstylist Gladys Núñez, took the morning off when she heard
El Comandante was coming to town. She bought a 30¢ pamphlet of his
essays and waited three hours just to watch him walk by.

Diplomats and Venezuelan elites dismissed the adoration as a
passing and overblown fad. One diplomat suggested Chávez was getting
far more attention than he deserved. "He's a little weird, you know
. . . This is not the voice of reason." A retired National Guard general,
Enrique Prieto Silva, predicted Chávez was a mirage that would soon
vanish. "In a certain way, he's blind . . . Before the next elections, he'll
be forgotten."

Chávez's first tour out of jail was so successful, he was to repeat it several
times over the next few years. The trips were exhilarating but grueling.
Pedro Carreño, one of Chávez's military academy recruits who eventually
joined his entourage, and two other former soldiers often took turns driving
through the night while Chávez read or studied documents. When they
were exhausted, Chávez took over, sometimes driving at 3 or 4 A.M. To pass
the long hours traveling, he told jokes or stories of his days in Barinas. They
listened to music by the Venezuelan protest musician Alí Primera. "We
started our agenda early in the day and Chávez would do his rally even if
there were only five or six people," according to Carreño. "He would get
down from the car and get up on the back of the truck and give a speech as
if there was a multitude like the ones that fill Avenida Bolívar today." After
they finished their day's activities, they would drive through the night to
the next town or village, arriving in time for a morning event.

At one point a retired air force colonel who joined Chávez's inner
circle, Luis Alfonso Davila, obtained a flatbed truck for the tours. They
turned it into a mobile office and home complete with bedrooms, a
bathroom, and loudspeakers. On the side they painted a huge picture
of Chávez. They dubbed it the "Chávez mobile." After pulling into a
town, Chávez would get up on the back and give a speech preaching
revolution.

While Chávez was free to roam the country, he was also broke. He
was nearly forty. He had no job, no bank account, no place to live. He
owned almost nothing. His military career was finished. His only income
was a monthly pension from the army of about $170. He sent it to his three
children and his wife, Nancy, whom he was in the process
of divorcing.
Their relationship, while not hostile, had long since withered.

After their release from jail, some of his comrades decided to make
ends meet by joining the system they had tried to overthrow two years
earlier. Arias Cárdenas accepted a job from President Caldera running
PAMI, a government milk program for pregnant women. Urdaneta happily
took a post as Venezuela's consul in Vigo, Spain, where he stayed
the next five years. Chávez would have nothing to do with it. Unlike
Urdaneta, who was relieved at avoiding twenty-five years in jail, Chávez
refused to thank Caldera for signing his pardon. He would not even
meet with him. Instead he denounced the administration as more of
the same corrupt elitist rule that had destroyed the country.

Barely six months out of jail, Chávez publicly warned Caldera
of more violent outbursts unless he addressed the nation's deepening
social problems. After the arrest of four MBR-200 sympathizers, Chávez
accused the president of trying to crush his movement. He challenged
Caldera to put him in jail, too. "I'd bet to see who lasts the longest,
Caldera at Miraflores or me in any prison cell in the country," Chávez
boasted.

With no place to live, the newly freed coup leader accepted the
offer of an architect in Caracas to move into a guest cabin in his backyard
in the middle-class neighborhood of La Floresta. The architect,
Nedo Paniz, was a parachuting aficionado who had befriended many
soldiers — the military was the only setting in which he could practice
his hobby when he started out in the 1960s. Some of them turned out
to be rebels such as Jesús Urdaneta. Eventually Paniz, a tall, athletic,
youthful-looking man, became a supporter of the clandestine Bolivarian
movement. He missed out taking part in the February 4 coup because
he didn't bother returning a telephone message from a contact who
called hours before the revolt hoping to tip him off.

Besides giving Chávez a place to live, Paniz lent him his nearby
office in Chuao for meetings. The guest cabin and the office turned into
beehives of activity. Former soldiers streamed in and out of the cabin
at all hours of the day and night. When Paniz complained, Chávez
responded, "That's how I operate." He was a night owl, often going to
bed at 3 A.M. or later. He ate when he could, and whatever he could,
leaving the cabin strewn at times with chicken bones. At the office, visitors
flocked to see Chávez. Some out-of-towners slept on a sofa at night.
Many mornings one of the first guests to arrive was Jorge Giordani, the
bearded economics guru from the MAS. He and Chávez spent hours
developing documents, statements, and plans.

Chávez was an emerging leader for many Venezuelans, but he had
nothing suitable to wear. Friends bought him three sets of
liqui liquis
, a
traditional
Venezuelan outfit from the llanos with a Mao collar and buttons
down the front. It gave Chávez a look of elegance when he went for interviews
with the media or businessmen. It also accentuated his nationalist
outlook. He had three colors: blue, gray, and olive green, his favorite.

While most of Chávez's activities were focused on Venezuela,
he also wanted to broaden his perspective. He hoped to build support
for his movement in other countries and shoot down the negative
image of him promoted by some of the media. He'd barely been out of
Venezuela. He did not even possess a passport. Paniz and others helped
him obtain one. By July 1994 he had embarked on a tour of several
South American nations including Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile. He
also visited Colombia, where he met with former members of the M-
19 guerrilla movement and with some of the organizers of that nation's
recent constitutional assembly. In December he realized one of his
greatest dreams: He traveled to Cuba.

As Chávez recounted the story, although he met with Cuban embassy
officials in Caracas before the trip, he was simply expecting to take part
in a cultural exchange and conference honoring Simón Bolívar during
a two-day visit to the island. But when the plane landed in Havana
at about 9:30 P.M., it taxied to the other side of the airport to a spot
reserved for the reception of dignitaries. The pilot came back and told
Chávez and his personal assistant, Rafael Isea, that they were to debark.
By then Chávez had figured out that something was up. But he was still
stunned when he walked down the stairs in his green
liqui liqui
and saw
who was waiting to greet him:
Fidel Castro.

Flashbulbs lit up the night air as the Cuban leader embraced
Chávez with a bear hug. After a short exchange, they made their way to
the Palace of the Revolution. They stayed up talking until 3 or 4 A.M.,
even though Chávez and Isea had to be up at 7 A.M. for the next day's
activities. Castro fired question after question at Chávez — everything
from how many men he'd had for the February 4 coup to what kind of
arms they'd carried. Chávez eventually asked his own questions, especially
about the death of
Ernesto "Che" Guevara that had so worried
him as a boy in Barinas. Chávez, himself a history buff, was amazed
by Castro's knowledge not only of world history but also of Venezuela's
past. He brought up topic after topic, from Zamora's attack at Santa
Inés to the story of Maisanta, only to find that Castro knew all about
it. When he discovered that Castro knew the history of Pedro Pérez
Delgado intimately, "I said to myself, 'I give up, I give up. I'm not going
to try any more. This man is invincible.' "

By the time Chávez and Isea woke up a few hours after the
encounter with Castro, the morning edition of the Communist Party
daily
Granma
was out with a front-page photograph of Castro and
Chávez embracing. The newspaper quoted Chávez saying the warm
welcome from Castro was "an honor that in truth I do not yet merit."
But Castro wanted to send a message to Cubans and others who had
barely heard of Chávez and might be skeptical of a former coup leader
from Latin America: This was a man to be watched and respected.
"Never was there a more opportune or more fitting time to come to
the airport to receive a visitor like Lieutenant Colonel Hugo Chávez,"
he said in a statement published in
Granma
.