Hugo! (4 page)

By the 1990s most dictatorships were gone in Latin America. The
United States under
Bill Clinton embraced a formula of free markets,
democracy, and less intervention. But the Bush administration reversed
that, openly encouraging Chávez's downfall. In contrast to almost every
other country in the hemisphere, it endorsed the 2002 coup attempt
against him. Officials ranging from Otto Reich to Condoleezza Rice
repeatedly denounced Chávez as a threat to democracy. US-funded
agencies including the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)
and United States Agency for International Development (USAID)
pumped millions of dollars into Venezuela for "democracy promotion."
Most of the money went to Chávez
opponents, including some who
backed the violent overthrow of the government.

Chávez offered some of his own bombastic responses to the US
attacks, calling Bush a "fool," a "drunk," and a "donkey." He made
other controversial moves. He attacked journalists by name for their
outrageously biased coverage, provoking his followers to physically
attack some in the streets. He flaunted his
friendship with Fidel Castro,
paid a visit to
Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and developed an alliance with
Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In Venezuela he came under criticism
for failing to stem
street crime and
unemployment. His cabinet seemed
to have a
revolving door. Some government programs were disorganized.
Critics accused him of
running roughshod over opponents and
politicizing the courts. His wildly popular social missions, while successfully
meeting short-term needs and energizing Venezuela's impoverished
masses, still left questions about their long-term
viability,
especially if soaring oil prices plunged. Even some supporters worried
that an increasingly hard-line revolutionary environment was shutting
down healthy
internal debate of the movement's faults. Others wondered
if Chávez was a
one-man show whose "Bolivarian Revolution"
would collapse without him.

But in the impoverished barrios and countryside of Venezuela,
Chávez remained a hero to millions. He was the first president in the
country's history to defend them, to talk their language, even to look
like them with his coffee-colored skin and curly hair. He used street
slang on national television, horrifying the upper class but endearing
himself to the lower classes, who could scarcely believe one of their
own was running the country. It was
as if a poor man from Harlem had
landed in the White House.

Chávez was a character unlike any the country had seen in Miraflores.
Allergic to
diplomatic protocol, he acted as president the same way he
would act in the backyard on a Sunday afternoon playing dominoes
or bocce. One
Valentine's Day he announced in a seductive voice to
his wife on national television, "Marisabel, tonight you're going to get
yours." Venezuelans are among the friendliest and most outgoing people
in the world, and love to make jokes. In the barrios many found Chávez's
comment hilarious, although feminists overseas hardly chuckled.

He hosted a weekly television and radio program named
Hello,
President
. It was the only program in Latin America and perhaps the
world where ordinary citizens could call in and talk to their nation's
leader about their problems, live and nationwide. His shows went on for
hours, and so did many of his speeches. He sang songs on the program,
cracked jokes, recited poetry, reminisced about his childhood, announced
cabinet changes, launched policy initiatives, and quoted everyone from
Jesus Christ to Simón Bolívar to
John Kenneth Galbraith.

He trotted the globe. He threw out the first pitch at a
New York
Mets baseball game while wearing a warm-up jacket with Venezuela's
national colors. He rang the bell at the
New York Stock Exchange.
He sprinted along the Great Wall of China. He played baseball with
Castro in Havana. He disarmed world leaders such as
Vladimir Putin,
dropping into a karate stance the first time he met the Russian leader to
show he knew Putin was a black belt.

He was a gifted communicator and storyteller. Even
Michael Skol,
former US ambassador to Venezuela and no fan of Chávez, acknowledged
that "he has a charisma, an ability to speak and be impressive
and empathetic, which I have never seen the match of anywhere in
Latin America, or for that matter in the United States." He was a one-man
whirlwind,
"Hurricane Hugo," sleeping barely a few hours a night,
working seven days a week, downing up to two dozen cups of espresso
a day to keep the adrenaline pumping, running his aides and allies
ragged with telephone calls at one or two o'clock in the morning. If
New York was the city that never slept, Chávez was the president who
never rested.

Beneath the jokes and the songs and the pranks and the outrageous
comments was a profoundly serious man. He was on a mission
to change Venezuela and the world in the name of social justice. Even
his enemies could not doubt that his instinct to help was genuine, even
if they thought his approach was misguided. He spent years reading
voraciously and absorbing the thoughts of revolutionaries from Bolívar
to Mao to Ernesto "Che" Guevara. He wasn't easy to define. He was a
mix of many things: capitalism and socialism, conservative economics
and liberal social programs. When asked to define himself, he once said
simply, "I'm a revolutionary."

He gave an unforgettable performance at the
United Nations General
Assembly in September 2006, emerging onto the world stage for
good. In an appearance that rivaled Nikita Khrushchev famously
banging his shoe on the podium during an address in 1960, Chávez
called
George W. Bush "the devil." He accused Bush of "talking as
if he owns the world," and suggested that a psychiatrist analyze his
speech of the previous day. "Yesterday, the devil came here. Right
here. Right here," Chávez said on the floor of the normally sedate
United Nations, setting off titters. "And it smells of sulfur still today,
this table that I am now standing in front of." He made a sign of the
cross, which in Venezuela is a common practice not only to show
one's Catholic faith but also to ward off evil spirits. Then he brought
his hands together as if praying and looked up at the ceiling. The
South American showman still wasn't finished. "Yesterday, ladies and
gentlemen, from this rostrum, the president of the United States, the
gentleman to whom I refer as the devil, came here, talking as if he
owned the world."

The next day, invoking triumphant visits by his mentor Fidel Castro
in 1960 and 1965, Chávez traveled to Harlem. He addressed a throng of
cheering supporters in the
Mount Olivet Baptist Church, announcing
that he was more than doubling his program to provide discounted home
heating oil to needy Americans. He also continued his tirade against
Bush, calling him an "alcoholic" and "a sick man" who acted like he was
John Wayne. He imitated what he called Bush's cowboy swagger, puffing
out his chest and swinging his arms. The crowd broke up in laughter.

While he won over the throng in Harlem, Chávez's statements set
off an uproar elsewhere in the United States. The incendiary comments
and personal attacks, one of his Achilles' heels and a habit even some
of his supporters opposed, opened him to criticism from detractors that
he was little more than a buffoon, a crazy banana republic dictator who
didn't know the bounds of decency.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
called the statements "not becoming for a head of state." Representative
John Boehner of Ohio, the Republican House majority leader, blasted
Chávez as a "power-hungry autocrat."
Senator John McCain of Arizona
dismissed him as a "two-bit dictator." In an editorial, the
Los Angeles
Times
mocked him as a "clown president" and "the clown prince of
Caracas."
The Wall Street Journal
published an editorial calling him a
"dictator" — three times. The
New York
Daily News
published Chávez's
photograph on the entire front page with a headline referring to an editorial
inside: "
News
' Message to Crackpot Venezuelan Leader."

Even liberal Democrats and Bush critics attacked him. "Hugo
Chávez fancies himself a modern day Simón Bolívar but he is an
everyday thug," House minority leader
Nancy Pelosi said. Former president
Bill Clinton weighed in. "Hugo Chávez said something that was
wrong yesterday — unbecoming a head of state." In a sign of how badly
Chávez's performance went over in many sectors, even Representative
Charles Rangel, a Democrat from Chávez's supposed US power base
of Harlem, thundered: "We resent the fact that he would come to the
United States and criticize President Bush . . . You don't come into my
country, you don't come into my congressional district, and you don't
condemn my president."

The governor of Maine announced his state would no longer accept
Chávez's discounted oil. A businessman in Alabama launched a boycott
of Venezuela-owned Citgo gasoline stations. In Boston a city council
member called for tearing down the large neon Citgo sign visible over
the left-field fence in Fenway Park that had for decades served as a city
landmark. The
7-Eleven chain, inundated with angry callers, formally
announced and hyped its separation from Citgo as the gasoline supplier
at twenty-one hundred of its convenience stores, even though the decision
had been made months earlier. The company blasted Chávez for
his "derogatory" remarks about Bush.

The Venezuelan president, in short, took a heavy political hit in
the United States for his attack on Bush, counteracting much of the
goodwill and positive publicity he'd generated with the Citgo-run discounted
home heating oil program he'd started a year earlier. But in a
larger context his comments were not so crazy or ill conceived. In the
United Nations, where more than half the member states are developing
countries, they provoked laughter and cheers. When he ended
his twenty-three-minute address, he received the largest ovation of any
speaker. The wild applause went on so long — about four minutes —
that UN officials had to cut it off.

During his speech Chávez waved a copy of leftist intellectual
Noam Chomsky's 2003 book,
Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest
for Global Dominance
, a diatribe against US empire building. He urged
people to read it. Sales soared overnight, putting it atop Amazon.com's
best-sellers chart.

The performance
at the United Nations was quintessential Chávez:
controversial, provocative, impulsive, devoid of diplomatic niceties,
winning enemies and admirers alike, playing to his base and sending
the rest to hell. He said what he believed and didn't care what others
thought. Despite the outrage among American leaders, some people
believed Chávez had merely verbalized what many other foreign leaders
thought about Bush but were afraid to say publicly. Like Chávez, they
were increasingly disturbed by the war in Iraq, the US government's
role in Israel, unfair trade practices, and the US cowboy-style domination
of the planet.

If Chávez had not called Bush a devil, would as many people have
paid attention to him and his speech? As
Washington Post
columnist
Eugene Robinson wrote, "Can anyone name the last president of
Venezuela, or remember when a speech by any president of Venezuela
made such news?" Even some critics of Chávez acknowledged that the
speech won him political points around the world, if not in the United
States. "Chávez's speech achieved a great deal, and it is foolish to
pretend otherwise. He raised his own standing. He got the world to look
at him," former Reagan speechwriter
Peggy Noonan wrote in
The Wall
Street Journal.
"Everyone this weekend will be discussing what he said —
exactly what he said and how he said it. He shook things up . . . He broadened
his claimed base . . . He claimed as his constituency everyone
unhappy with the uni-polar world."

At the time he spoke, Chávez was campaigning against the United
States for a nonpermanent seat on the UN Security Council. In the
end he failed to defeat the US candidate, Guatemala. Neither country
gained the two-thirds of votes required to secure the seat. Some interpreted
the results as a devastating loss for Chávez and evidence that
his comments at the United Nations were over the top. But there was
another way of looking at it: A Third World nation had battled the
world's only remaining superpower to a tie. Not bad.

While Chávez's comments shocked many Americans, other US
leaders and public figures traded similar insults without provoking anywhere
near the same type of uproar. Rangel himself, the Democrat
from Harlem, had called Bush "Our Bull Connor," referring to the
infamous 1960s Alabama police chief who turned fire hoses and attack
dogs loose on civil rights marchers. Rangel also called the president
"a stone-cold alcoholic who found Jesus." In another case, during an
introduction of Senator Charles Schumer at a college commencement
in 2006, New York State controller Alan Hevesi said Schumer would
"put a bullet between the President's eyes if he could get away with it."
Hevesi quickly apologized, saying the comment was "beyond dumb."
In the 1990s right-wing radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh ridiculed
Chelsea Clinton, then thirteen, as the "White House dog." In 2001
he routinely referred to Democratic leader Tom Daschle, literally, as
"El Diablo" and carried on "at length about how Daschle may well be
Satan in soft-spoken disguise," according to the director of the media
watchdog group FAIR.

If Chávez was taking off the gloves with Bush, and if he wasn't
apologizing, he had his reasons, no matter what the political cost in the
United States. The comments didn't come out of nowhere. The United
States was almost alone in the world in
endorsing the 2002 coup to
overthrow him. Its support was so blatant that following Chávez's ouster
the
US ambassador to Venezuela, Charles Shapiro, had breakfast with
Pedro Carmona in the presidential palace on his first full day in office
after he eliminated the Congress, the Supreme Court, the constitution,
and every other vestige of democracy in the country. Declassified CIA
documents later revealed that the Bush administration had advance
knowledge of the coup but lied about the events, claimed it wasn't a
coup at all, and blamed Chávez for his own downfall. Documents also
disclosed that the US-funded National Endowment for Democracy, created
during the Reagan era, was pumping nearly $1 million a year into
Venezuela, largely to groups that supported or took part in the coup.
The money flow kept climbing, with new agencies such as USAID stepping
in with millions more, but the United States refused to divulge
where much of the taxpayer money was going.