Hugo! (34 page)

Chávez thought it was hypocritical, since Ceresole had met privately
during his trip with some of Caldera's cabinet members, including
Border Minister
Pompeyo Márquez, a former guerrilla leader and MAS
member. Still, Chávez did not buy into all of Ceresole's ideas. "Of his
theses and opinions, some I share, others I don't," Chávez told an interviewer.
"But he was never an advisor, a mentor. He's an intellectual,
a writer." And Ceresole did not agree with all of Chávez's positions.
According to political scientist Daniel Hellinger, "Chávez's admiration
for Fidel Castro, his refusal to disavow liberal democratic norms and
civilian control over the military, and his pragmatic attitude toward the
United States alienated Ceresole." The self-exiled Argentine turned up
in Venezuela again after Chávez took office in 1999, but soon Chávez,
like Caldera, threw him out of the country.

Even after Chávez's announcement,
Irene Sáez seemed to some like
the candidate to beat. Newspapers referred to her as the "aircraft carrier,"
capable of carrying other candidates along with her to victory in
Congress and other offices. The Social Christian COPEI Party led by
former president Herrera Campins — a big Sáez supporter — was seriously
debating the idea of joining forces with the former Miss Universe
and backing her bid for president. Irene started preparing herself for the
nation's highest post. Consultants drilled her in economics,
constitutional
rights, oil industry politics. On her desk in the mayor's office she
displayed a copy of Margaret Thatcher's book
The Path to Power
.

But as potential presidential timber, she was beginning to look less
than sturdy by early 1998. In contrast with Chávez's tough talk about
destroying the status quo, convoking a constitutional assembly to rewrite
the constitution, and unleashing a
"peaceful revolution" on behalf of the
poor masses, Irene was full of sugary platitudes. She spoke about her love
for "my people" and the need to make politics more "human." In a country
suffering a severe crisis of corrupt politicians, soaring inflation, and plummeting
oil prices, her mushy, sentimental statements didn't seem to cut
it. She still spoke like a beauty queen anxious to avoid offending anybody
in any way in anyplace. People wondered if her success in affluent
Chacao — the "Disneyland" of Caracas — would translate to the rest of
the impoverished country with its deep-rooted problems.

She made moves that were outright silly. In late 1997 she banned
kissing in public plazas in Chacao. Alarmed by complaints from neighbors
that exhibitions of affection were going far beyond smooching in
public parks and plazas, Sáez dispatched her smartly dressed police to
crack down on couples whose embraces surpassed what she deemed
acceptable limits. Armed with whistles, they watched for couples who
squeezed too tightly, embraced too ardently, or kissed too long. Five
seconds could be too long. "Kissing in itself isn't a problem," one police
official explained. "The problem is when they do it in a way that goes
beyond normal." He acknowledged that defining such a kiss wasn't easy,
but "when you see it, you should know it." Some lovers said they were
arrested and briefly thrown in jail. As he sat with his girlfriend on a
bench under a vine-covered canopy in Plaza Altamira one night, a man
in his twenties remarked, "Whoever invented this law must not have a
girlfriend."

The campaign seemed especially ludicrous in a country where
presidents openly shacked up with their mistresses. During his 1984-
1989 term, Jaime Lusinchi even installed a bedroom in Miraflores presidential
palace for his mistress and personal secretary, Blanca Ibáñez.

About the same time Sáez was cracking down on kissing in public
plazas, press reports were linking her to real estate tycoon Donald
Trump, whose empire included the Miss Universe pageant. Irene said
they were only good friends, but some reports breathlessly spoke of a
"steamy romance" and predicted that marriage was imminent. "Friends
of Irene are saying she has captured his heart just like she has captured
the hearts of the Venezuelan people," the Caracas daily
El Nuevo Pais
wrote. The paper then quoted an unnamed friend of Sáez: "Irene is
Donald's dream girl. She has beauty, intelligence and ambition. All in
one very sexy package."

While Sáez was batting away rumors of a romance with Trump and
cracking down on kissing, Chávez was preaching revolution. His message
was catching on. He was gaining in the polls. Some said the election
was shaping up as a contest between "the beauty and the beast."

Chávez's new political group, the Fifth Republic Movement
(MVR), had grand
visions. Its goal was to create a new republic, with
Chávez leading the charge as president. Venezuela's first two republics
were formed during the wars of independence. The third emerged
at the time of the formation of Gran Colombia in 1819. A fourth came
eleven years later, in 1830. Founded by one of Bolívar's generals, José
Antonio Páez, it lasted the longest. But Chávez insisted that it was never
a true democracy, contending it was built by "a class of oligarchs and
bankers, on the bones of Bolívar and Sucre." His movement would give
the country its first new beginning in a century and a half, recovering
the ideals of the Liberator and throwing out the villains who had pillaged
the nation. While small at first, the MVR absorbed a number
of civilians with extensive experience from Venezuela's old left. They
included Luis Miquilena, economist
José Rafael Núñez Tenorio, and
attorney Omar Mezza Ramírez. What Chávez lacked in political experience,
they could help fill in.

At the same time he and his allies created the MVR, they kept the
MBR-200 intact. Some MBR-200 leaders had feared that a flood of new
members who did not share the ideals of the Bolivarianos would join
Chávez's bandwagon, blurring the movement's ideological roots. So
this separate entity, the MVR, was created to run the campaign activities.
It could absorb independent personalities and other groups with
distinct ideologies and political positions, while the MBR-200 would
remain the true bastion of Bolivarian beliefs. The MVR was "not conceived
to be a party, but rather an electoral front controlled by the MBR-
200." It also was not designed to be a democratic organization given to
drawn-out decision making by consensus like the MBR-200. Rather,
it would make rapid and hopefully good decisions related to the election.
It would be run by people Chávez had confidence in and whom
he appointed himself.

Like Chávez's early cells in the military, MBR-200 members continued
to meet in small study circles throughout the country to read
together and discuss politics and ideology. When they joined a local
"Bolivarian Circle," they took an oath pledging to be "honest, hardworking,
humble and exercise solidarity." The MBR-200 included a
large number of retired military officers, although the movement tried
to erase hierarchies between civilians and soldiers — with mixed success.
Its national directorate, for instance, comprised two former military
officers, Chávez and Luis Davila, along with a former police officer
and two civilians.

The MBR-200 and the MVR coexisted for several years, with membership,
activities, and ideology often overlapping. The initials of the
groups even sounded alike, in Spanish as well as English. The organizations'
novel use of the symbols and images of Venezuela's national
heritage represented by the
three roots of a tree — Bolívar, Rodríguez,
and Zamora — were to play a key role in Chávez's political success.
Eventually the MVR was to win so many victories in the political arena
that it overtook the MBR-200, which disappeared.

As Chávez built his own political organizations, existing parties on the
left began to take notice and migrate toward him and his presidential
campaign. The most significant leftist political party, the
Causa R, was
in the process of dividing. In April 1997, the same month Chávez and
the MBR-200 decided to seek the presidency, former Causa R presidential
candidate Andrés Velásquez expelled a number of leaders from
the party. The fiery former union leader wanted to pursue a more moderate,
centrist path. Aristóbulo Istúriz, Alí Rodríguez, Pablo Medina,
and others wanted to step up the party's anti-neo-liberal, nationalistic
stance in solidarity with the working class. The Causa R
split, and the
Medina faction formed their own party,
Patria Para Todos (PPT) —
fatherland for all.

By the end of 1997 it was apparent that
PPT and MVR shared a similar
political outlook. Early the next year the party formally endorsed
Chávez, bringing considerable political experience both in the streets
and in the nation's institutions. The PPT and the MVR formed the
core of what was to turn into Chávez's Polo Patriotico
(Patriotic Pole),
an amalgam of parties and movements that latched on to the former
coup leader's candidacy. Velásquez's Causa R, meanwhile, endorsed
Irene Sáez.

Venezuela's other major leftist party, the MAS, was also a significant
force, controlling four state governorships. Most party leaders,
including Caldera's planning minister and neo-liberal convert Teodoro
Petkoff, opposed backing the former coup leader. Some even wanted
to go with Irene. But many in the party's base favored Chávez. The
debate dragged on until June 1998, when the MAS finally decided to
join Chávez's Patriotic Pole. Of course, by then he was riding atop the
polls.

By early that year the tide was beginning to subtly shift. Chávez's
candidacy was official, and people were starting to take notice. Chávez
believed he always had the support of the masses — it just wasn't
reflected in the establishment's polls. The joke in Venezuela was that
pollsters would conduct their work by standing outside the subway station
in affluent Altamira and ask people what they thought. They never
ventured into the barrios. By late February the leading daily
El Universal
reported that even establishment polls showed Chávez quickly catching
up to Sáez. His support had increased from 4.6 percent the previous
September to 11 percent. Other polls put him at 16 or 17 percent. Sáez
was holding steady at 18.1 percent, the newspaper reported. A few other
candidates were behind them.

Chávez's support was growing for a number of reasons. Even his
opponents acknowledged that his blistering diagnosis of Venezuela's
institutional ills was right on target. And now that he was an official candidate
and attracting sizable crowds to his rallies, the media could no
longer ignore him. On top of that, his critique of
Caldera's neo-liberal
economic policies was resonating with many. After the trauma of the
1989 riots and crackdown, two coup attempts in 1992, the impeachment
of Carlos Andrés Pérez in 1993, and the bank collapse the next year,
Caldera had brought some sense of political peace to the country. In
1997 the economy even showed some signs of reviving. The GDP grew
5.12 percent,
inflation dropped to 50 percent from 99.97 percent the previous
year, and the reserves grew to $17.745 billion.

But Caldera had done little to resolve the institutional problems
of the country, and left it open to the vicissitudes of the oil market. By
October 1997 oil prices started to drop, ushering in another economic
debacle outmatched only by the banking crisis. Prices were to fall by 34
percent during 1998 compared with the previous year, reaching their
lowest point in years by December, at just $7.66 per barrel. It caused a
loss of $7 billion in
oil income, prompted the government to slash $2.3
billion in spending, and fueled a fiscal deficit of at least 5 percent of the
GDP. As Caldera's term was coming to a close, accumulated inflation
was 800 percent — the highest of any administration in Venezuela's
nearly forty years of democracy.

The
economic mess played into the hands of Chávez, who was the
only candidate attacking Caldera's neo-liberal policies. Above all, he
was a charismatic, dynamic, and colorful leader and showman who was
talking the language of the poor and vowing to topple an establishment
that had destroyed the country. His status as a former coup leader not
only didn't hurt him in the eyes of the massive working class, but actually
helped. At a rally in July 1998 launching his candidacy after the official
start of the campaign, Chávez donned his trademark paratrooper's
red beret and pumped his fist in the air before a cheering throng of ten
thousand supporters. He made no apologies for trying to overthrow the
government six years earlier. "Go ahe
ad, call me a coup leader," he bellowed.
Then he added: "Raise your hands if you think the coup was justified."
A sea of hands went up.

As Chávez established himself as the genuine
outsider and defender of
the poor, Irene caved in to pressure from the political elite. Her floundering
campaign increasingly took on a Hollywood-style, image-driven
look. A campaign kickoff party in May featured the salsa star Oscar de
León. Slipping in the polls, she tried changing her hairdo, tying up her
flowing blond curls in a bun that made her look to most people like a
Venezuelan imitation of Eva Perón. She denied she was trying to evoke
Argentina's revered champion of the poor. At the same time, Irene tried
to discredit Chávez and win back voters to her camp. At some rallies her
team mounted a cinema-sized screen and showed images of the bloody
1989 street riots and Chávez's failed coup attempt. It backfired.

Worst of all, she accepted the support of
COPEI. She needed the
help of a party with an established electoral structure that could get out
the vote. But the offer from COPEI was a "poisoned chalice." The traditional
parties in Venezuela were so deeply despised that accepting their
support was tantamount to political suicide. Sáez's poll numbers plummeted.
By August the Causa R withdrew its backing. "We simply feel
betrayed," party leader Andrés Velásquez stated. "Irene is no longer an
option for change. She's lost her status as an independent."