Hugo! (29 page)

But even Petkoff's charisma and credentials as a former card-carrying
leftist could not convince most Venezuelans of the merits of the program
or lift Caldera's fortunes. The package did little to improve life for average
workers. Inflation in 1996 leaped to a record 103 percent in a nation that
had never known soaring inflation until the 1990s. Caldera's popularity ratings
plummeted over two years, from 66 percent in May 1994 to 33 percent
in September 1996. Venezuela sank deeper into economic recession.

As criticism picked up, Caldera cracked down. In March 1995 he ordered
the third raid in less than a year against leftists suspected of fomenting a
plan to destabilize the government. Political police raided one hundred
offices and homes, and arrested 150 people including dozens of Chávez
supporters. Among them were former policeman
Freddy Bernal, the
coup leader's brother Adán, and even a former featherweight boxing
champion, Antonio Esparragoza. The government did not dare arrest
Chávez himself. They knew that this would provoke widespread unrest
amid a precarious political situation. Instead the people around him
were targeted. Chávez repeated his challenge to Caldera to put him
in jail and see who lasted longer: the rebel in prison or the president
in Miraflores. In the end police quickly released those detained. No
charges were filed, creating the impression again that it was more of a
political witch hunt than a serious investigation.

The detentions were part of an ongoing campaign of harassment
against Chávez and his supporters. Political police from the widely
feared
DISIP followed him around the country and in Caracas. Chávez
had to be constantly on the alert against agents who might try to discredit
him by planting drugs or illegal arms. A physical attack was not
out of the question, either. Davila, the retired colonel, carried a gun
or kept one on the seat next to him in the truck. Police agents maintained
permanent surveillance of Paniz's office in Chuao where Chávez
conducted many of his meetings. He sometimes held them in cars as
they drove around the city to avoid the DISIP's
spying. On more than one
occasion Chávez donned wigs, hats, and even fake mustaches so agents
would not recognize him.

Political police also
tapped the telephones of Chávez and his key
supporters, and stole some of their cars. Héctor Navarro, the Central
University of Venezuela professor who formed part of Chávez's
"shadow
cabinet" of leftist academics that by now was meeting with him almost
every Tuesday, figured he was about the only one in the group whose
car was not stolen. Authorities knew Chávez and his backers had little
money. Leaving them without vehicles was one way to trip up the movement.
Eventually the "Chávez mobile" itself was attacked and destroyed.
Someone set it on fire one night while it was parked in the Propatria
section of Caracas.

Caldera's
crackdown on dissent reached absurd proportions. In
October 1996 the feared DISIP arrested an
astrologer who had predicted
Caldera's "death" the following year. They held him incommunicado
for two days in DISIP headquarters, where he slept on a cement floor in
a cell. The rotund, bearded
José Bernardo Gómez was the president of
the Venezuelan Astrologers Association. He was also a university philosophy
professor with postgraduate degrees in history, education, psychology,
and philosophy from three Venezuelan universities. After his
release, he told reporters that when police asked him where he'd gotten
his information about Caldera's possible death, he'd responded that the
president's astrological charts showed trouble on the horizon. "Uranus
is over the sun, Pluto is in ascendancy, and Mars is going behind its
moon." Caldera's "death," he noted, might be symbolic, such as leaving
office. "I wish the president good health," Gómez said, adding that he
voted for Caldera in 1993. "I'm not betting on his sickness, much less
on his death. It's just that from an astrological point of view, 1997 looks
dark for Caldera."

Embarrassed government officials tried to play down the incident.
"He's not accused of anything," Interior Minister José Guillermo
Andueza said tersely. Political police merely wanted to know "what basis
he has for making this kind of statement."

Gómez, who had many accurate predictions to his credit, had
declared that if Caldera was still alive or at least in office by the following
June 8, he would give up astrology for good. When the date
arrived and Caldera was still in place, the government hailed it as a triumph.
Officials took steps on several occasions to beat down rumors
that the seldom-seen octogenarian president with ailing health was
no longer among the living. A few months earlier he'd walked from
Congress to the presidential palace to scotch rumors that he was dying,
or even dead. On another occasion the administration arranged frontpage
photographs in newspapers showing Caldera playing dominoes on
a Sunday afternoon.

Caldera's elected predecessor, Carlos Andrés Pérez, was suffering his
own problems. A year after his impeachment in May 1993, the Supreme
Court ruled that the investigation into corruption charges indicated
that
Pérez and two aides engaged in the
misappropriation of funds.
They decided to put the former president on trial. In an unprecedented
move, they also ordered his arrest and detention. It was the first time in
Venezuela's democratic era that authorities jailed a president, and was
a rarity in Latin America in general. The Venezuelan establishment
pointed to it as evidence that the system was working. Critics said the
system had no choice: The elites had to sacrifice one of their own to
keep the whole structure from crumbling.

Pérez showed up at the Supreme Court that morning for the
announcement. He denounced the case again as a political witch hunt.
Armed with a suitcase full of books, he departed for El Junquito jail in
Caracas's Catia section, scene of some of the worst repression of the
Caracazo. Pérez was spared the worst of Venezuela's squalid and dangerous
jails: El Junquito was among the most comfortable. His former
interior minister Alejandro Izaguirre was his new cell mate. Another
aide also ordered to jail, Reinaldo Figueredo, had fled the country.

Pérez's new world was a twelve-by-nine-foot cell. Cashing in on
his years of globe trotting, he received an outpouring of support from
leaders overseas outraged by his imprisonment. At home he was reviled.
Citizens in the streets cursed him, blaming him for the country's ills
including the banking collapse. Within hours of Pérez's arrest the executive
committee of his own party, Democratic Action, voted to toss him
out of an organization he'd helped found more than five decades earlier,
in 1941. The meeting turned into a melee, with flying metal chairs
and thrown fists — Pérez still had some supporters.

Taking a cue, his sixty-eight-year-old predecessor, Jaime Lusinchi,
resigned from the party a few weeks later, ending a lifelong membership.
Lusinchi was under investigation for allegedly diverting five
hundred thousand dollars in secret national security funds in part to
purchase sixty-five jeeps used during Pérez's 1988 presidential campaign.
Authorities were also investigating allegations that he allowed his then
private secretary and mistress, Blanca Ibáñez, to use $1 million in government
funds to throw lavish parties and import twenty-four white horses
from the United States for her daughter. By July, Lusinchi, increasingly
unnerved by Pérez's fate, slipped out of the country on a yacht.

Shortly after Pérez's imprisonment, Venezuela's attorney general
expanded the allegations against the former president. Jesús Petit Da
Costa claimed Pérez funneled huge amounts of stolen government
funds through his mistress Cecilia Matos, whom he charged had at least
$200 million in Swiss bank accounts the government could not touch.
Congressional investigators were making similar allegations. Matos, a
former government secretary who earned barely a couple of hundred
dollars a month, had landed in an apartment on exclusive Sutton Place
in Manhattan. She ended up working with the Venezuelan clothes
designer Carolina Herrera, and had two children by Pérez.

The former president, who grew up poor, spent his life in politics,
and by most accounts amassed a sizable fortune, denied all the
allegations. Ten weeks into his imprisonment he got a reprieve. The
Supreme Court freed him from jail. They placed him under house
arrest while his trial went on. Pérez, by now seventy-two, took advantage
of a law that permitted anyone over seventy to await trial at home.
He returned triumphantly to La Ahumada, the walled hilltop estate on
the outskirts of Caracas where his estranged wife, Blanca Rodríguez
de Pérez, was living.

Pérez settled into a routine as if he were still an important head of
state. He received journalists, political allies, and the occasional ambassador.
He took phone calls from foreign leaders. Photographs of him
with George H. W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, and others filled the walls of
his study. Two glass cases showed off dozens of medals bestowed on him
by foreign heads of state. A rifle from the Nicaraguan contras saluted his
role in that nation's transition from war to peace in the late 1980s.

He woke up every morning before dawn after a few hours' sleep,
worked out for ninety minutes, and then slipped into an impeccable suit
and tie for another day of business. He still exuded the magnetism that
used to make women faint at campaign rallies. But he couldn't go anywhere.
So he started communicating with people by Internet.

With Pérez under
house arrest, Caldera's administration crumbling,
and few promising alternatives for the nation in sight, Chávez struggled
with his political future. For several years he advocated abstaining from
Venezuela's elections. He believed they were a fixed game, a farce that
outsiders had no chance of winning. In Yare in October 1993, of course,
he and some of the other rebels issued a communiqué calling on people
to boycott that December's elections for president, Congress, and state
assemblies. "To take part in an election like this one, which has been controlled
by the elites, would be to make oneself an accomplice in a deliberate
mockery of the popular aspirations of a movement like ours," they
wrote. They called the elections "illegal and illegitimate" and ended the
communiqué with a quote from Bolívar: "All history indicates that gangrenous
politicians will not cure themselves with palliatives."

The communiqué and the debate over boycotting the elections
produced one of the most serious fissures among the rebels during
their time in jail. Arias Cárdenas firmly opposed Chávez's position.
The two fought bitterly. Arias believed the system would allow outsiders
like themselves to participate and win, and he was to soon show
Chávez how. Their dispute grew so acrid, Arias split from Chávez's
Bolivarian movement.

During his first year or two out of prison, El Comandante was
still thinking about a coup. He envisioned a civic-military uprising
followed by a constitutional assembly that would overhaul the established
order. "In those first years, 1994-95, we hadn't ruled out the
possibility of reverting to the armed struggle. But we wanted to evaluate
the possibilities in terms of real force, and we concluded we
didn't have what it would take . . . The situation at the time was not
ripe for another armed movement . . . Once we analyzed the situation
we realized that another military insurrection would have been
crazy."

With the prospects of success for another coup appearing dim,
some of Chávez's advisers, notably Luis Miquilena, urged him to
reconsider his opposition to Venezuela's elections. Miquilena thought
Chávez could win so overwhelmingly that even the elite-controlled
electoral machine could not deny him victory. To find out, Chávez
and his comrades decided to conduct a poll. They knew from the
reaction in the barrios that he had support in the streets, but they
wanted to find out in a more scientific way how much.

They organized teams of psychologists, sociologists, university professors,
and students to carry out the survey. They included people from
outside their movement to try to maintain some measure of objectivity.
They divided the country into three zones — east, west, and center —
and called on grassroots members of the Bolivarian movement to poll
residents. They questioned tens of thousands of people. There were two
main questions: Do you support Hugo Chávez's candidacy for the presidency?
Would you vote for him?

Chávez, Jorge Giordani, Héctor Navarro, and other allies pored
over the results on a computer. They appeared clear: The response to
the first question was 70 percent yes and 30 percent no. "That result
was totally clear: the people wanted me to run for president," Chávez
later told an interviewer. The results to the second question indicated
he might actually win: 57 percent said they would vote for him. The
numbers were revealing because in polls conducted by private firms
— many of them linked to Venezuela's elites — Chávez was almost
invisible.

He had another reason to reconsider his opposition to taking part
in elections run by the establishment. With the backing of the
Causa R
and other groups, Arias Cárdenas ran for governor of Zulia state in the
December 1995 elections. On the
campaign trail, it was evident he was
stirring up support, even though Chávez had eclipsed him as the more
charismatic coup leader. On one campaign swing through rural towns
outside Maracaibo, "mothers with their hair in curlers, young men
swilling beer and gray-haired retirees waved and cheered the noisy caravan
of trucks and cars accompanying Arias. 'Vote for the Comandante!'
blared the music from a truck. 'This is what we need in the country!'
cried a woman in a white-and-yellow house dress, as she rushed up to
the pickup truck where Arias stood."