Hugo! (35 page)

Venezuela's other major traditional party, Democratic Action, was
equally adrift. It nominated a political dinosaur to run for president. Luis
Alfaro Ucero was seventy-six years old and a relic from AD's past. Short,
mustachioed, and sporting a gray crew-cut, AD's secretary general was
an old-time
caudillo
, strongman, who ran the party with an iron fist. As
a candidate, he was about as uncharismatic as could be. A lifelong backroom
bureaucrat, he stumbled in public speech and inspired almost no
one. Few outside the party apparatus h
ad even heard of him. He had
one advantage, though. Despite its loss of prestige, AD remained one of
the largest parties in Latin America. More towns in Venezuela had an
AD outpost than a church, a significant accomplishment in the heavily
Roman Catholic country. AD was famous for its skill in using public
funds to entice voters through pork-barrel spending or gifts. This was
the party whose members handed out buckets of paint at election time,
for instance, so people could spruce up their homes and promote AD
at the same time. But even the party's well-oiled political machinery
could not salvage Alfaro's candidacy. It was a lost cause from day one.
He never got beyond single digits in the polls.

With the
traditional parties floundering and Chávez on the rise, the
United States stepped into the fray. The State Department announced
in April that it was denying Chávez a visa to visit the United States,
citing his 1992 coup attempt. It was telling, since the United States had
let numerous other coup leaders into the country without hesitation.
Several months later, former US ambassador to Venezuela Michael Skol
revealed what many other US officials may have been thinking but could
not publicly state: "I'm shocked and terribly disappointed that somebody
whose only actions to date have been terroristic, anti-constitutional and
anti-democratic has been able to reach this point. I've got real problems
with the evidence that he's going to be a good leader of Venezuela and
that he's going to be democratic."

Chávez made light of the US
rejection. Appearing on a popular
national TV comedy program, he said the decision didn't bother him
because he already had a visa. Then he pulled out a Visa credit card
from his pocket and flashed it for the camera.

Chávez hoped to address businessmen, academics, journalists, and
Wall Street investors in the United States to try to offset what he called
a "black legend" his adversaries were spinning around him. Some of the
Venezuelan
media made a tentative pact with Chávez as he appeared
headed for victory and sought some degree of objectivity in their coverage
in the hope of favors in the future. But others unleashed a vicious
smear campaign. Newspapers published a barrage of editorials attacking
him as a demagogue, a criminal, a dictator-in-waiting. Television stations
ran advertisements with crazy music, swirling pinwheel colors, and the
face of a deranged-looking person. The message was clear: Chávez is
un
loco.
One newspaper publisher, Rafael Poleo of
El Nuevo Pais
, warned
that "Chávez's messianic aim is to establish a pseudo-religious reign of
terror that would make every tyranny that Latin America has known
since the nineteenth century pale in significance."

Some of the international media joined in, too. One newspaper seemingly
with a particular distaste for Chávez,
The Miami Herald
— dubbed
by critics the "oligarch's daily" — published a long front-page news article
that referred to "unconfirmed reports of secret connections with rogue
Middle Eastern states like Libya, and
rumors that Cuba may have helped
train Venezuelan militias" organized by Chávez. The reports were unconfirmed,
but that didn't stop the newspaper from publishing them. Other
newspapers mentioned reports that Chávez had a list of journalists deemed
"shootable" if he won.

Much of the media emphasized the fears of the small upper class
that Chávez was a dangerous demagogue who was going to destroy
Venezuela's democracy and provoke civil war. They played down his
support among millions of poor people who made up the majority of
the population and saw him as a beacon of hope. As one official at the
US embassy, hardly a bastion of Chávez admirers, later put it: "The
smear campaign promoted by Chávez's opponents was picked up by US
journalists passing through here on assignment, who portrayed Chávez
as a wild-eyed radical and played up the possibility of violence."

At one point the anti-Chávez propaganda in Venezuela was so fierce,
Chávez felt it necessary to issue a statement denying he "was in the
habit of drinking blood or eating fried babies for breakfast." He called
the attacks part of a "psychological war lab" mounted by his well-heeled
adversaries. "A lot of people say I am Hitler combined with Mussolini,"
he remarked. "Others say I am Gadhafi with a bit of Castro."

In one famous episode, television networks ran spots of him
declaring he was going to "fry the heads" of members of Democratic
Action and COPEI in a pot of boiling oil. The remark was widely reported
in the local and international media, provoking images of a bloodthirsty
Latin American military gorilla like Augusto Pinochet exterminating
his opponents once he got into power. Chávez later alleged it was a
fabrication, made with the help of an actor imitating his voice. The
actor eventually confirmed it, saying he was unaware his work would be
appropriated for anti-Chávez propaganda purposes.

Still, Chávez made enough incendiary statements on his own to give
opponents ammunition to stir up fears he was a new Fidel Castro who
was going to set off a climate of terror leading to civil war. He declared at
one rally he would "sweep AD from the face of the earth." At another he
said those opposed to a constitutional assembly would go to jail.

Yet even when Chávez stumbled, his opponents failed to take
advantage. After the "fry the heads" episode, AD ran television commercials
showing images of poor people in front of a sizzling frying
pan. One woman remarks that Chávez will have to fry all of Venezuela,
because "we're all Adecos." The ad backfired, provoking numerous
jokes, earning the censure of the electoral commission — which pulled
it off the air — and merely reminding people how much they despised
the Adecos.

To combat the onslaught of negative publicity, Chávez tried to
soften his image. He traded his combat fatigues for a pullover sweater
or suits and ties. He hit the TV
talk-show circuit and granted interviews
as fast as he could. He darted from meeting to meeting with officials of
Citibank, J. P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, and other investment companies
to calm their fears. He said he would welcome
foreign investment, meet
Venezuela's foreign debt obligations, and respect private property. He likened
himself to Tony Blair and said he wanted to pursue a more humane
"third way" between hard-line socialism and "savage capitalism."

He also pulled out a new secret weapon: a woman.

Chávez had first come into contact with
Marisabel Rodríguez in 1995
during one of his whirlwind tours around the country. He was passing
through Carora, a stifling hot city in the interior near Barquísimeto,
Marisabel's hometown. She tried to fight her way through the crowd
and pass him a handwritten note with her name, her telephone number,
and her offer to help in his revolution in any way she could. She didn't
know Chávez, but she already admired him.

The note never made it into Chávez's hands, but by January 1996
they were formally introduced by a radio announcer in Barquísimeto.
Telephone calls and notes followed until finally, according to Marisabel,
they started dating on January 14, 1997, the day of a huge procession
in Barquísimeto honoring the Divina Pastora, the city's patron saint.
Marisabel ended up pregnant — it might have been that very night
— and by that December, two months after the birth of
Rosinés, the
couple married.

With baby in tow, Marisabel hit the campaign trail the following
year with Chávez. She was an attractive figure. Young, blond, bright,
with blue eyes and a background herself in the media, she was an asset
to El Comandante. Along with Chávez's pullover sweaters, she helped
soften the image promoted by his opponents of a bloodthirsty former
coup leader. Chávez, who had been living in
Luis Miquilena's small
apartment in Altamira after a disagreement with Nedo Paniz, moved
into his own place with his
wife. On his daughter's first birthday, he
beamed for newspaper photographers at her party.

The couple's honeymoon lasted throughout the campaign season,
but rough times were ahead. At home, Marisabel was an argumentative,
mercurial, and complicated figure. Adding in Chávez's own unorthodox
lifestyle, headstrong
personality, and obsession with transforming
Venezuela made for a combustible combination.

As Chávez emerged as the clear
front-runner in the campaign, his opponents
became desperate. Fearful that he was going to pull off a clean
sweep in the congressional and regional elections along with the presidency
on December 6, the AD-and COPEI-controlled Congress took the
unprecedented step of separating the votes. They moved up the other
elections by a month. They thought that might help their chances in
the congressional and state votes. But they still lacked a strong opponent
against Chávez for the presidency. For months, they talked about
throwing their support behind a single candidate in a last-minute "all
against Chávez" front. With Irene and Alfaro fading, they set their sights
on one put forth by another new party,
Proyecto Venezuela.

That party's candidate,
Henrique Salas Römer, was a classic
Venezuelan
elitist and oligarch. Born in Venezuela, he was educated
at exclusive Lawrenceville Prep outside Princeton, New Jersey, and
then at Yale, from which he graduated in 1961. His three brothers were
Yalies, too. Salas went on to a career as a successful businessman in
Venezuela, and by 1989 was elected governor of Carabobo state, an
agricultural and industrial powerhouse. A neo-liberal preaching governmental
efficiency in a land of waste, he claimed widespread success.
He slashed the payroll at the Puerto Cabello port from 5,300 to
190 workers, computerized highway tollbooths to avoid theft by collectors,
and created the only police emergency telephone system in the
country. Chávez's advisers scoffed at his boasts, painting him as an
elitist who governed for the richest 10 percent of the population and
ignored the rest. But Salas's campaign prompted interest as far way
as New Haven, Connecticut, where at his alma mater the
Yale Daily
News
predicted in late September that he was poised to win.

He had some problems to overcome first. In contrast to Chávez's
charisma, the sixty-two-year-old, gray-haired former COPEI member was
dry and staid on the campaign trail. To puff up his image, his managers
put out a series of nationwide television advertisements showing him galloping
on a white stallion. The idea was to make him seem less elitist
and more like Bolívar or Venezuela's rugged, earthy
llaneros
. Salas even
took to leading hundreds of supporters, including former Miss Universe
Alicia Machado, on a twelve-mile march on horseback that ended with
a run through the streets of Caracas. To many people in the street-tough
barrios, the scene was laughable and simply underscored how completely
Salas was out of touch. Chávez belittled him, referring to him dismissively
by the name of his horse, Frijolito (little bean).

As the two battled head-to-head and the November congressional
and regional elections approached, a surprising candidate emerged in
one of the races for a
Senate seat: Carlos Andrés Pérez. The
former
president's trial on corruption charges had come to an end in July 1996
when the Supreme Court convicted him of misusing $17.2 million in
secret national security funds but dropped the more serious embezzlement
charge. Pérez hailed it as a vindication. His lawyers argued that his
only "offense" was to send about three dozen bodyguards to help protect
Nicaraguan president
Violeta Chamorro in 1990 as she took power after
the defeat of the Sandinistas.

The court sentenced him to two years and four months of house
arrest. He'd already served most of it, and by that September he was a
free man. He quickly hit the campaign trail. A few months earlier, he
had become the first Venezuelan president to lose his lifetime seat in the
Senate. His colleagues voted to bar him because of his conviction. Now
at the age of seventy-three he wanted it back — and the parliamentary
immunity that came with it.

He traveled triumphantly to his home state of Táchira, where he
planned to run for a national Senate seat in November 1998, and swung
through ten more states. Even his enemies acknowledged he stood a
good chance of winning the seat in Táchira, one of the few places in the
country where he was still popular.

By April 1998, though, his campaign had hit a stumbling block. A
judge charged him in a new case: This one involved allegations that he
and his mistress Cecilia Matos deposited illicit funds in several joint
US bank accounts. Pérez claimed it was another ploy to derail his bid
for the Senate. Authorities placed him under house arrest again. But he
simply campaigned from home, conducting interviews with journalists
and making television and radio ads.

A week before the election, a federal court granted his request to
shift his residence temporarily to a cousin's house in Táchira for the final
days of the campaign. When he showed up in the state capital of San
Cristóbal, the city went wild. People cheered from balconies and ran out
to greet him.

A week later Pérez won. He was freed from house arrest and got his
parliamentary immunity. His "crucifixion and persecution" were over,
he told reporters. Now he would devote himself to stopping the man
who'd tried to overthrow him as president from reaching Miraflores
Palace himself.