Hugo! (36 page)

But Chávez was on a roll that could not be slowed. Pérez's victory in
his home state was one of the few bright spots in the congressional and
regional elections for the forces opposed to Chávez. Many viewed the
contests as a first round in the presidential vote. Chávez's
Patriotic Pole
took eight governor's seats, including Barinas state, where his father
pulled off a surprising and emblematic victory. The coalition matched
the number of triumphs by a stunned Democratic Action. AD had figured
that in the worst-case scenario they would retain the eleven governorships
they'd won in 1995. They thought even gaining fourteen was
possible. The party's disappointing showing of only eight victories was
a sobering message that change was coming. On top of their triumphs,
the Patriotic Pole also placed second in ten of the thirteen gubernatorial
contests they did not win, showing they were clearly a force to be
reckoned with. In total votes nationwide, the PP nearly doubled those of
Democratic Action: 1,096,116 compared with 564,391. In the House and
Senate, where no party won a majority, the Patriotic Pole took about
one-third of the seats.

As the days ticked down to the presidential vote, the opposition
forces got desperate. Their campaign to paint Chávez as a monster
had failed among the country's millions of peasants and shantytown
dwellers, as he noted. "They've called me everything — terrorist, dictator,
killer, coward. Yet my popularity keeps going up." Now they
decided their only chance of victory lay in combining forces.

On Friday night, November 27, just over a week before the election
the following Sunday, Democratic Action leaders met. In a session
marked by an outbreak of fistfights, they voted to dump Alfaro Ucero
as their candidate. The next day they ordered their followers to vote for
Salas Römer. It was laughable on many levels, for one because the party
had spent months attacking the governor from Carabobo. For his part,
less than two weeks earlier Salas had sworn he would not accept the
support of the traditional parties.

Alfaro Ucero, who had devoted a lifetime of service to AD, did not
take kindly to its decision and refused to abide by it. So the next day AD
leaders threw him out of the party. They asked the National Electoral
Council to transfer any ballots marked for him to Salas Römer. Under
Venezuelan law, this could be done only if the original candidate
resigned, died, or was declared incapacitated. But that didn't seem to
matter. The council granted AD's request anyway.

Two days after AD ejected Alfaro, on Monday, November 30,
Venezuela's other leading party, COPEI, dumped its candidate, too: Irene
Sáez. They also called on backers to vote for Salas Römer. Like Alfaro,
Irene refused to drop out of the race, and said she would soldier on with
or without COPEI's support. The opposition's efforts were turning into
a circus. It seemed obvious they could do little to head off Chávez's
victory. "Chávez will not be beaten by any earthling," former Caracas
mayor and Chávez ally Aristóbulo Istúriz stated a week before the vote.
"Someone would have to come from another planet. Let them fabricate
a Martian to see if he could do it."

Venezuela's elites were terrified of Chávez's seemingly imminent
triumph; rumors of a right-wing coup to prevent it ran rampant in the
final days. While legitimate questions existed about whether a former
coup leader might usher in an authoritarian government, the opposition
campaign bordered on hysteria. They turned Chávez into a cartoon
figure. "He's nuts. He's completely out of his mind," one university
architecture professor said. Salas himself joined in. He claimed that not
only the presidency was at stake in the vote, "but liberty."

Chávez won in a landslide. He took 56.20 percent of the vote to
Salas's 39.97 percent. Chávez's share was the same figure his movement's
polls had predicted two years earlier. Out of about 5.2 million cast, he
garnered 3,673,685 — about 1.2 million more than Salas. Irene was so
far back, she was nearly out of sight: 184,568 votes. Alfaro barely managed
to register a blip on the screen: 27,586. Most of Caracas exploded
into celebration, with people dancing in the streets, setting off fireworks,
and honking their horns. In wealthier neighborhoods the streets
remained eerily quiet. One resident in upper-class Altamira summed
up the mood when she cast her vote earlier that day: "He's a crazy man
on the loose, a communist."

That night after the
results were announced, Chávez appeared
on a terrace
outside the Teresa Carreño Theater where Pérez had
held his "coronation" nearly a decade earlier. It was almost midnight.
Floodlights lit up streets jammed by a throng of his wildly cheering supporters.
A huge Venezuelan flag flapped below him. It was a historic and
electric moment. A new era was dawning. AD and COPEI were all but
dead. "The resurrection of Venezuela has begun," Chávez bellowed,
"and nothing and no one can stop it."

Many analysts and journalists interpreted Chávez's victory as a blow to
the conventional wisdom that democracy and free markets were inescapable
in Latin America. They were right about the second point.
Venezuelans and Latin Americans were disillusioned with the "free-market
revolution" pushed throughout the region over the last decade
by the
International Monetary Fund, the
World Bank, and the US government.
The wealth had not trickled down. Latin America still suffered
the widest gap between rich and poor in the world.

Venezuela had one of the most
unequal income distributions anywhere.
Nearly half the country's income went to the richest 20 percent
of the population, according to the
United Nations Development
Program. It was a country where the poor scrambled to eat, while the
rich lived in large mansions protected by towering walls, barbed wire,
and private security guards. They employed legions of servants to meet
their domestic needs and took personal jets for shopping sprees to
Miami or vacations on remote Caribbean islands. Venezuela had one
of the largest numbers of
private jets per capita in the world. To many,
the country's reality of two separate worlds was captured by the phrase
social apartheid
.

While the pundits were right about Venezuelans' anger over the
failure of neo-liberal economic policies to improve their lives, however,
they were wrong about their supposed antipathy to democracy.
Most wanted a democracy — but one that worked and served
the interests of the majority, not just a tiny, fabulously rich elite. For
decades Venezuela's democracy had functioned as a
racket designed
to enrich the wealthy. In 1998
Transparency International ranked the
country one of the ten most corrupt in the world. One US-born analyst
who was not sympathetic to Chávez and moved in elite circles in
Venezuela described the country's practice of democracy as a fixed
network that would be illegal in the United States. It encompassed
businessmen, judges, lawyers, police, journalists, politicians, priests,
and even soldiers. "This interlocking system of privileges and graft
that runs through Venezuela wouldn't last a half-hour with a RICO
grand jury," he said, referring to the American law for prosecuting
organized crime. "It's a racket and has been run like a racket for a very
long time."

Chávez was the man who was going to break up the racket and the
mafia that ran it. Shortly after his triumph, he declared, "Venezuela
is a ticking time bomb, and I have been elected to defuse it." The oligarchy
was terrified. Their game might be over. But the poor masses
and even a few in the moneyed classes were cheering in streets. In the
president-elect's home state of Barinas, a twenty-four-year-old market
worker summed up the sentiment: "Democracy is infected," she said.
"And Chávez is the only antibiotic we have."

Hugo Chávez started his presidency by shocking Venezuelans. On
February 2, 1999, he stepped to the dais in the ornate congressional
building to be sworn in by Luis Alfonso Davila, his ally who was now
Senate president. Outgoing president Rafael Caldera, ordinarily the
indicated
oath-giver, could not bring himself to do it. He stood between
the two men with a dour look on his face. Venezuelan politicians and
dignitaries from sixty countries filled the hall, among them Fidel Castro
and Carlos Andrés Pérez, now a senator from his home state of Táchira.
Chávez raised his right hand in the air, placed his left hand on the
constitution, and promptly broke with the traditional pledge repeated
by every president during forty years of democracy. "I swear in front of
my people that over this moribund constitution I will push forward the
democratic transformations that are necessary so that the new republic
will have an adequate
magna carta for the times."

The crowds of his supporters inside Congress and out erupted
into cheers. His opponents gasped. Chávez's message was unmistakable.
The constitution of Caldera's generation was moribund, on its
deathbed. The Bolivarian revolution had arrived.

With the blue, yellow, and red presidential sash draped over his
shoulder, he delivered a one-hour-and-forty-five-minute address lambasting
the oligarchy for turning Venezuela into an "immense and
putrid swamp." Proclaiming it a "mathematical mystery," he asked how
a country so blessed with
natural resources could have so much poverty.
"So many riches, the largest petroleum reserves in the world, the
fifth largest reserves of gas, gold, the immensely rich Caribbean Sea.
All this, and 80 percent of our people live in poverty." Turning to the
observing heads of state, he asked, "Who can explain this? What scientist
can explain this?"

Chávez compared the
nation to a
"social time bomb" of hunger,
disease, and malnutrition that was going "tick tock, tick tock." Quick
and dramatic action was required to disarm the bomb before it
exploded. Surprising his opponents, he announced that he planned to
issue his first decree the same day. It would call for electoral authorities
to schedule a national
referendum within sixty to ninety days on
whether Venezuelans wanted to convoke a constitutional assembly to
write a new constitution. He wasn't going to wait for the oppositionladen
Congress to decide the issue. "The constitution, and with it the
ill-fated political system to which it gave birth forty years ago, has to die;
it is going to die, sirs — accept it," he said.

It was nearly seven years since Chávez had launched his coup. Far
from apologizing, he took the opportunity to praise his comrades in
arms. "The Venezuelan military rebellion of 1992 was inevitable," he
said, "just like the explosion of volcanoes." He announced that the military,
rather than repressing the people, was to be sent into the streets
to help rebuild the country. At the end of his speech, he shocked the
country again by walking over to the first row and shaking the hand
of the man he had tried to topple, Carlos Andrés
Pérez. The normally
hyperkinetic and loquacious CAP stood dumbfounded.

Chávez's first performance as an elected official and Venezuela's
youngest president ever at forty-four was electrifying, as even his critics
had to admit. He weaved in blistering critiques of Venezuelan democracy
with quotes or references ranging from
Walt Whitman to Pablo
Neruda to
Galileo. At least thirty times the audience interrupted with
applause. He was off to a good start.
Opinion polls pegged his approval
ratings at an astronomical 90 percent. He had the country at his feet
and a golden opportunity to transform what
The New Republic
called
"one of the region's most inexcusable basket cases." As one middle-class
Venezuelan journalist who came to despise the president but was disgusted
by the country's corruption put it, "We all had a little Chávez
in us."

Chávez was clearly a gifted and brilliant speaker. He wrote his own
speeches, although most of what he said was extemporaneous. He was
so good and so smooth, he simply made it up as he went along. Not long
after the
inauguration,
Jorge Olavarria, a prominent historian and journalist
who turned into one of Chávez's fiercest critics, called him "the
most important orator Venezuela has had this century."

Even the United States, which denied him a visa during the campaign,
was coming around. After Chávez's victory, it reversed course
and not only granted him a visa but arranged a
meeting with President
Bill Clinton and other top administration officials, including national
security adviser
Sandy Berger. Chávez met with Clinton for about
twenty minutes on January 27, albeit in Berger's office and not the
Oval Office. The United States wasn't ready for a full-fledged embrace
quite yet. The meetings a few days before Chávez's inauguration went
well. White House spokesman Jim Dobbins proclaimed that Chávez
and Clinton established "good chemistry." Clinton "expressed broad
support to the direction President Chávez is going," Dobbins said.
He added that Chávez "impressed everybody. He was vital, articulate
and saying the right things." Chávez convinced the North Americans
that he was "clearly not the person he was in 1992" and that "he would
pursue change through a democratic and constitutional framework,"
Dobbins said.

For his part, Chávez praised Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and
"the land of democracy." He called previous tensions over the visa "a
thing of the past."

Relaxed after his meetings, he declared, "We have begun this
relationship between Venezuela and the United States on a good
footing."

It only got better after his inauguration. The United States sent
Energy Secretary
Bill Richardson as its official representative. He was
full of praise after Chávez's swearing-in. "I think Chávez is a potential
leader in the hemisphere," Richardson told reporters. "He is a bright,
street-smart individual who is developing a lot of political skills . . . He is
off to an excellent start . . . It's a good start in the American-Venezuelan
relation."

The US decision to engage Chávez rather than isolate or try to topple
him led to a kind of
peaceful coexistence between the two nations initially,
albeit with some tensions. US ambassador
John Maisto led the
engagement faction, becoming famous for his oft-repeated statement,
"Watch what Chávez does, don't listen to what he says." The rhetoric
may be radical, he suggested, but the actions are not. And as he started
off his presidency, Chávez's actions — while bold — weren't radical. He
operated within the bounds of democracy.

Although Chávez was wildly popular at home, not everyone was
cheering his ascent to power. The elites saw disturbing signs. He was,
after all, a former coup leader. Some worried that Chávez had "little
respect for the rule of law and even less understanding of the importance
of checks and balances." His penchant to don his red paratrooper's
beret, and his admirers' tendency to follow suit, created a militaristic
image his detractors found troubling. On other occasions he wore
combat fatigues or a medal-studded officer's uniform. His language was
laced with
military jargon like
battlefronts
and
taking to the trenches
.

At the same time, he brought significant numbers of retired and
active military officers into the government. He appointed them to
help run everything from the state oil company to the tax collection
agency to the secret police — a job he gave fellow MBR founder Jesús
Urdaneta. Chávez also named Hernán Grüber ódreman, one of the
leaders of the November 1992 coup, governor of the Federal District of
Caracas. Meanwhile, Francisco Arias Cárdenas had won reelection as
governor of oil-rich Zulia state with Chávez's backing. Two days after
his
inauguration, during a military parade marking the anniversary of
his February 4, 1992, coup attempt, Chávez reinstated many of the coup
participants into the armed forces. He called them "heroes."

Chávez's critics wondered whether he was
militarizing the government
and installing an old-style Latin American authoritarian regime.
The night before he was sworn in, he talked into the wee hours with his
friend Fidel Castro.

Some of his first comments as president ramped up the worries.
When the
Supreme Court received eleven lawsuits challenging
Chávez's assertion that he would decide how members of the constitutional
assembly would be chosen, the president warned that his supporters
"will take to streets" if the court tried to block his decree. Some
interpreted it as a veiled threat of violence and an attempt to bully the
court. "About the only thing he didn't do was call on the people to
lynch the judges if the Supreme Court annuls his decree," commented
Henrique Salas Römer, who had lost the December presidential race.

Chávez also called for the
Congress and Supreme Court to be dissolved,
raising fears among opponents he wanted to install a dictatorship.
Hundreds of his supporters surrounded Congress for a couple of
days in April, blocked lawmakers from leaving or entering, and shouted
"Dissolve Congress!" Chávez called opposition political leaders "a nest
of dying venomous vipers" and "worm-eaten and decadent." He also
indicated he hoped to eliminate a ban on immediate reelection and
serve for ten years.

His supporters viewed his
high-voltage statements as the rhetorical
give-and-take of democracy — a bargaining tool to get what he wanted
and to get people out to vote. He wasn't going to wipe out the Congress
and Supreme Court, but replace the discredited institutions with new
ones that would be more responsive to the people. They also noted that
mass street protests were a political tool frequently used by the US civil
rights movement. They saw Chávez's red beret not as a sign of danger
but a sign of hope that change was coming. Reelection, they argued, was
common in countries around the world including the United States. In
the end, when the Supreme Court ruled against Chávez on the issue of
his decree, he accepted the decision and tried to make the decree conform
to the court ruling.

Nonetheless, as time passed he would have to prove to skeptics in
the elite and in the media who pounced on every misstep that he was
a true democrat. To Chávez, the same held true: The oligarchy would
have to prove they would permit a true democracy that benefited the
majority and not only a small minority.

Chávez spent the weeks before his inauguration on a whirlwind tour of
Latin America, Europe, and the United States, trying as he put it "to convince
anybody out there that still believes Chávez is the devil or a cross
between Hitler and Mussolini" that he was really a committed democrat.
Some of his moves were outright conservative. In mid-January he
announced the reappointment of Caldera's economy minister, Maritza
Izaguirre, a longtime technocrat at the
Inter-American Development
Bank. The day before his inauguration, he named
Roberto Mandini
president of the huge state oil monopoly, Petroleos de Venezuela
(PDVSA). A respected businessman, Mandini was vice president of Citgo,
a PDVSA subsidiary and one of the largest gas station chains in the United
States.

Chávez made other clever moves "to neutralize opponents and
pacify followers." He recruited two of the nation's most prominent journalists,
José Vicente Rangel and
Alfredo Peña, as foreign minister and
chief of staff. He also named a Wayuu Indian, university professor Atalá
Uriana Pocaterra,
environmental minister. Many of his allies from the
Central University of Venezuela, the Patriotic Front, and his days in
Yare and touring the country also joined the government. They included
Jorge Giordani, Héctor Navarro, Luis Miquilena, and Manuel Quijada.
At the same time, after the controversial Argentine sociologist Norberto
Ceresole resurfaced in Venezuela around the time of Chávez's inauguration,
the president quietly ordered him to leave.

On February 20 Chávez announced his first major initiative besides
the constitutional assembly. He planned to pull 70,000 of the nation's
120,000 soldiers out of the barracks and send them into the streets and
countryside. They were to repair roads and hospitals, conduct medical
campaigns, clean up trash, and sell meat, cheese, chicken, pasta, and
other food out of the backs of trucks at rock-bottom prices. He called it
Plan Bolívar 2000. With the nation's treasury empty, its governmental
institutions collapsed, and the "social time bomb" ticking, the plan was
an attempt to bring immediate relief to the most desperate Venezuelans.
Chávez also called for eighty thousand civilians to join in the effort,
with some receiving small salaries. Two days later five thousand people
in tattered clothes and even on crutches lined up outside Miraflores
presidential palace, clamoring to sign up.

Plan Bolívar officially kicked off on February 27, the tenth anniversary
of the Caracazo riots. Chávez picked the date intentionally. "My
order to my men was, 'Go house to house combing the land. Hunger
is the enemy.' And we started on February 27, 1999, ten years after the
Caracazo, as a way of redeeming the military. I even made the connection
when I said, 'Ten years ago we came out to massacre the people.
Now we are going to fill them with love. Go and comb the land, search
out and destroy poverty and death. We are going to fill them with love
instead of lead.' And the response was really beautiful."

The response was, in fact, largely positive. Shantytown dwellers and
peasants were shocked and delighted to see soldiers out helping improve
their communities. "I never thought I would ever see the army doing
this, but it is welcome," one teacher remarked as she waited in line to buy
food in a Caracas barrio. "Just the presence of the military here inspires
order and discipline, and that is exactly what this country needs." The
soldiers — from the army, navy, air force, and National Guard — did
everything from running medical clinics offering pediatric, gynecological,
and dental care along with surgery and vaccinations for children,
to helping fishermen repair boat motors or form cooperatives. They flew
residents in and out of remote villages and ventured into isolated Indian
communities in the Amazon jungle accessible only by boat along rivers,
bringing doctors and medicine. In cities
National Guardsmen stood on
street corners in an effort to reduce crime. In rural areas soldiers helped
farmers develop agricultural projects. They even gave people haircuts.