Hugo! (33 page)

Simon Bolívar was never far from Chávez's
thoughts. During a
Hello, President
broadcast
in 2003, a portrait of the Liberator gazed down
on the man who hoped to fulfill his dream of a
united and more just Latin America. (Agencia
Bolivariana de Noticias)

A former Miss Universe, Irene Sáez was the mayor of the glitzy Chacao
section of Caracas. In a nation that worshipped beauty queens, Sáez
was the most popular politician in the land, according to the polls.
A six-foot-one strawberry blonde who referred to herself as a political
"atomic bomb," she was sweeping the imagination of the public, the
media, and the establishment with her clean-government agenda in
Chacao and the good looks and manners she'd learned to cultivate as
Miss Venezuela. It was a combination that seemed hard to beat.

In Venezuela beauty pageants were a religion. On the night of the
Miss Venezuela contest, the country came to a halt, with millions of
people glued to their television sets. The four-hour extravaganza was
the highest-rated show of the year, attracting at least two-thirds of the
viewing audience. It was the same routine the night of Miss Universe if
Venezuela's representative was in the running. She almost always was.
By the time Sáez rose to prominence in the political arena, Venezuela
was the undisputed beauty-queen capital of the world. Between 1979
and 1997 its women won ten major international titles. That was more
than any other country, even though Venezuela accounted for just 0.4
percent of the world population.

To some people Venezuela's obsession with beauty and beauty
pageants was a troubling sign of superficiality, of a tendency "to settle
for appearance rather than substance, and to avoid serious thinking."
Clearly, it was a nation virtually untouched by feminism. With an
average tropical temperature of eighty-two degrees in Caracas, and
even hotter in the interior, women dressed scantily to display their
charms. Skintight pants, blouses with plunging necklines, and open-back
or short dresses were standard attire for everyone from secretaries
to lawyers. It created a "strange city, with an aura of sexuality bordering
on the absurd." Men were free to voice their admiration; they were
almost expected to.

A national institution almost off limits to criticism, the Miss Venezuela
pageant produced a string of successful actresses and prosperous business
women. Irene Sáez chose a different route: politics. When she first
ran for office in 1992, most people thought it was a joke. She was a
mindless Miss. Or so they believed.

The youngest of six children of businessman Carlos Sáez and his
wife, Ligia, Irene was three years old when her mother succumbed to
cancer. Her death at forty devastated Irene and left a lasting mark. "I
used to look at the night sky and see my mother as the brightest star.
Since then, she's my guardian angel, my inner voice," Sáez told
People
magazine in a glowing portrait titled "Not Just Another Pretty Face."
After her mother's death, two older sisters helped raise her in a well-off,
conservative household. By the time she was nineteen and a university
engineering student, Irene's inner voice spoke to her. It told her to
compete for Miss Venezuela. Though she'd never had much interest in
pageants before, she entered at the last minute, just two weeks before it
took place.

With no dieting, no plastic surgery, no modeling experience, and
little preparation, Irene won. Shortly after she went on to take the Miss
Universe title. "I just knew in my heart and soul that I'd win," she told
People.
"I only wish that my mother had been with me to share the
moment." She spent a year traveling the world, meeting everyone from
Ronald Reagan to
Margaret Thatcher to Augusto Pinochet. After her
reign ended, she reportedly gave up a multimillion-dollar contract to
star opposite John Travolta in a movie. Hollywood, she said, "didn't
attract me."

Instead, she switched majors and took up political science at the
Central University of Venezuela, one of the country's top public universities.
She went on to serve for a year as Venezuela's cultural representative
to the United Nations. Sáez cultivated a reputation as a
devout Catholic who attended Mass almost every day, opposed abortion,
and volunteered in a church group. Still, she wasn't merely a Girl
Scout trying to do good for herself and her country. For nearly a decade
she "enjoyed something of a playgirl existence. She had a prominent
Venezuelan banker for a lover and traveled the world on behalf of his
bank," Consolidado, where she was employed as a spokeswoman.

By the early 1990s Sáez had turned her energy to electoral politics.
She was motivated by a
"vocation of service" and believed she could
use her fame, her worldwide contacts, and her training in political science
to improve life in the oil-rich but impoverished nation. She won
the race for mayor of Chacao a week after the November 1992 coup
attempt. She quickly shut up critics who thought she was nothing more
than a brainless blonde. She cleaned up Chacao.

With its Baskin-Robbins stores and drive-in McDonald's, Chacao
seemed in ways like a slice of the United States in Venezuela. Nestled
in the foothills of verdant Mount Avila, it was Caracas's richest section
and home to many of the capital's diplomatic missions. But it had fallen
into disrepair. Crime was rampant, making it dangerous to head out at
night. Hold-ups by armed bandits in fancy restaurants were common.
The streets were dirty. Public plazas were falling apart.

Irene's first attack focused on the crime wave. To make the streets
safe again, she professionalized the police force. She hired university
graduates as officers, hiked their pay dramatically, and outfitted them
with the kinds of white pith helmets she'd seen British bobbies wearing
when she'd visited London as Miss Universe. She put transit officers
on golf carts dubbed "Irene-mobiles" — an idea she imported from the
Far East. She sent out other police on roller skates, mountain bikes,
and motorized children's scooters. She also bought a fleet of shiny new
police cars that cruised tree-shaded streets.

Crime plummeted. The streets filled with pedestrians at night
again. Restaurant-goers could eat out in peace. Sáez also spruced up
public squares, including Plaza Altamira, where old people took to sitting
on benches under trees sparkling with lights at night and children
roller-skated past gushing fountains that for years had been dry. The
attractive young mayor offered early-morning tai chi classes for senior
citizens, set up a paramedic team that made house calls, and improved
garbage collection. She hired top-notch administrators and listened to
their advice about everything from setting the budget to running public
services. Chacao turned into an oasis of safety, cleanliness, and cultural
life in a city where most people locked themselves in their homes at
night, the streets were filthy, and culture consisted mainly of watching
maudlin soap operas on TV. It bordered on the miraculous. People
dubbed it "Irene-landia."

Sáez was so popular by the time she ran for reelection in December
1995 that she didn't bother to mount a campaign organization. The only
person who dared to run against her, lawyer Paulo Carillo, was scolded
by his own mother and the high school he graduated from. About the
only thing Carillo could attack was Sáez's well-coiffed, stylishly dressed
figure. "She's a plastic doll," he sniffed. Sáez crushed him, taking 96
percent of the vote. It was the most lopsided victory in Venezuela's
thirty-seven years of democratic rule.

Not long into her second term, people were talking about Irene for
president. She was seen as that rarity in Venezuela — an honest and efficient
public servant. Besides, she was young, beautiful, and had a performer's
sense of how to win admirers. She donned Indian headdresses,
swiveled to salsa music, rode to ceremonies on the back of police motorcycles,
and planted kisses on old men's cheeks. Former president Luis
Herrera Campins called her "capable."
The Times
of London ranked
her among the one hundred most powerful women in the world. At
number eighty-three, she beat out Jodie Foster and Mother Teresa.

Sáez flirted with the presidential rumors, although she kept her
distance from the traditional parties Herrera Campins represented.
She didn't join any party, or form one of her own. Instead, she created
a "movement" her followers could join. She called it
Integration,
Renovation, and New Hope. In Spanish, the initials spelled out
IRENE
As the
presidential campaign entered the defining year of 1998, she was
the odds-on favorite to win, at least in the mainstream polls.

Hugo Chávez was off the establishment's radar screen. The major media
mostly ignored him, or lambasted him. He made some
missteps that provided
them ammunition. One was his relationship with the Argentine sociologist
Norberto Ceresole. An intellectual with an interest in progressive
military regimes who later moved to the far right, Ceresole was intrigued
by Chávez's coup in 1992. He sent some of his books and a card with his
telephone number on it to El Comandante in Yare. When Chávez was
released and traveled to Argentina a few months later, he called.

Ceresole was controversial. He claimed he was a member of the
Montoneros, the radical leftist and nationalist Peronist guerrilla group
that carried out a series of spectacular assaults, assassinations, and kidnappings
in the 1970s. He later argued in favor of the military coup that
overthrew Juan Perón's widow Isabel Perón in 1976 and led to a bloody
dictatorship under General Jorge Videla. Ceresole claimed human
rights organizations that criticized the abuses during Argentina's 1976
to 1983 dirty war — when the military regime killed or disappeared
at least thirty thousand people — were part of a "Jewish plot" against
the nation. He also cast doubt on whether the Holocaust had really
happened.

Despite some of Ceresole's unsavory, even bizarre viewpoints,
Chávez was attracted to him for a number of reasons. One was his early
interest in progressive military leaders. A radical Peronist, Ceresole had
written books in support of the
Peruvian general Juan Velasco Alvarado,
whose reformist government sparked Chávez's interest when he was a
cadet at the military academy in the early 1970s and traveled to Peru.
Ceresole also wrote favorably about Panama's General Omar Torrijos,
another figure who inspired the young Chávez as he sought a way to
fuse his emerging social conscience with his career as a soldier.

Ceresole considered Peronism "the most important dignifying
movement in the history of mankind." Recalling his own humble roots,
he told interviewer Alberto Garrido why:

My family did not have shoes before Peron. When Peronism
ended, we had our own house, with the loans completely paid
off. My parents had never gone on vacation. I had never been to
the sea. I was able to see it when I was ten or twelve years old.
There were vacations. They were free, absolutely free. Well, this
is called dignity.

The middle-class and the upper-class hate populism because
this means sharing. But we who come from the lower class say,
"Long live populism!" That dignifies us. When I was ten years old
I had never seen a soccer ball. I saw them in photos and Eva Peron
and the Eva Peron Foundation gave us soccer equipment, a soccer
ball, a real one. It was leather, an authentic soccer ball. And she
gave us shirts . . . and shoes.

We're talking about the people and of course, it is the mortal
enemy of the oligarchies, naturally. That's why they created the
black image of Peron, as if Peron were the son of Hitler . . . Every
dollar that we give to the people is one dollar that we won't give the
to International Monetary Fund. That's why, long live populism.
There's no other form of revolution in the Americas than that.

Chávez was attracted to Ceresole for other reasons, too. Much of
the left in Uruguay and Argentina, wary of another coup-leading military
officer after right-wing military dictatorships had devastated their
nations, closed the door to Chávez during his trip to the Southern Cone
in 1994. Ceresole was one of the few willing to meet with him. He
also had other ideas that interested Chávez, such as integrating business
and transport along some of South America's major rivers including La
Plata, the Amazon, and the Orinoco.

Most importantly, however, Ceresole offered Chávez a vision
of how to achieve and maintain power by going around the discredited
traditional political parties. It was Ceresole's celebrated triangular
notion of uniting the
caudillo
, the military, and the people. "The caudillo
would transform the military into the armed wing of a nationalist
revolutionary project and enlist the poor as its popular support base."
Ceresole believed that

the leader of such a political project would provoke a strategic
confrontation between a unipolar and multipolar world, in which
the
caudillo would face down the global hegemony of the United
States by rallying all factors hostile to US power. A multipolar
axis would emerge, involving left-wing guerrillas, progressive
social movements, and nonaligned governments in Europe, Latin
America, and the Middle East. Ceresole described his ideas as
"post-democratic," as the caudillo would sweep aside parliament,
courts, and other institutions that slowed down decision-making
processes and reined in ambitious presidential projects.

After Ceresole met with Chávez in Argentina, they reunited later
that year in Colombia. Ceresole remembered the second meeting more
for Chávez's desperate financial situation than any profound intellectual
exchanges. "He didn't have anything. There wasn't a single cent. It
was so bad we had to change hotels several times because there was no
money to pay. I'm talking about low-level hotels where we slept three to
a room . . . What Chávez was looking for at that moment was
financing,
which he couldn't find anywhere."

Ceresole accompanied Chávez as he returned to Venezuela,
crossing the border by land since he didn't have money for an airplane
ticket. The Argentine joined Chávez on some of his tours around the
country and then left for Madrid. Eventually he returned to Venezuela
in 1995. By now the government of President Rafael Caldera had
reached its limit with the controversial sociologist, and expelled him
from the country.