Hugo! (40 page)

One reporter called him "a Castro without calories, with no
anti-American rhetoric, no expropriations of private property and no
squelching of domestic dissent."
Wayne Smith, former head of the
US Interests Section in Havana, saw Chávez as "a social reformer. His
objectives are social justice, a more equal distribution of income, a
better shake for the downtrodden." Even so, he added, "I don't see any
indication Chávez is going to follow the path that Cuba did in terms of
massive nationalizations. They may have very similar goals . . . but different
ways of achieving it."

While Chávez and
Castro were playing baseball on the diamond,
Venezuelan businessmen were busy exploring opportunities for
investing in the country. Three hundred accompanied Chávez on the
trip.
Cuba wanted Venezuela to invest $200 million to help revive a
dilapidated Russian-built oil refinery in the province of Cienfuegos.
They didn't get that amount, but Venezuela did eventually agree to sell
Cuba fifty-three thousand barrels a day at preferential prices. The deal
was similar to one signed by Venezuela and
Mexico in 1980 when they
agreed to sell oil to eleven Central American and Caribbean nations at
discounted prices.

Chávez's budding friendship with Castro was to provide ample
fodder for the elites in Venezuela and opponents elsewhere to paint him
as a dictator in the making. For weeks, Venezuelan newspapers printed
his "sea of happiness" comment nearly every day. Castro himself summoned
Venezuelan reporters to Cuba for a ten-and-a-half-hour meeting
to deny Chávez was a closet Marxist.

When Chávez returned to the palace after his trip to Cuba, the vote
on the
new
constitution was just a few weeks away. It was, admittedly,
a rushed job. Chávez needed to get it done before his political capital
wore out and the opposition regrouped. The constitutional assembly
worked frantically in the final weeks, laboring seven days a week. The
new magna carta they produced was progressive and impressive in
some ways, and lacking in others. Its main import was that it marked a
definitive and symbolic break with the old regime.

The constitution improved human rights guarantees and for
the first time recognized indigenous and environmental rights. The
Indian tribes'
collective ownership of properties and collective economic
systems were enshrined in the document. It also officially recognized
housewives as workers eligible for government benefits like
social security. It gave soldiers the right to vote; it took military promotions
out of the hands of Congress — where past presidential mistresses
such as Blanca Ibáñez dictated many appointments — and put them
into the hands of the
military and the president. It created an office
called the
"Defender of the People" to ensure that citizens' rights were
protected.

It also established public selection processes for judges that called
for input from human rights organizations and other groups. That
moved the process out of the cigar-filled back rooms of the past, where
congressmen appointed politically connected judges who were easily
controlled by the political parties. The constitution replaced the Senate
and the House with a single body, the
National Assembly, and created
the post of
vice president. It extended the
presidential term from five
years to six, and permitted immediate re
election. It also for the first
time in Venezuelan history created a mechanism to
recall elected officials
midway through their terms. These officials included everyone
from village mayors to the president.

The constitution was praised by some for making bold initiatives
like the recall referendum and criticized by others for concentrating
power in the hands of the president. Chávez's detractors were suspicious
of the provision extending his term by a year and allowing for reelection,
although the latter put Venezuela in line with many other countries.
They also worried that an enhanced "enabling law" gave Chávez
too much power to
fast-track legislation. Giving the vote to soldiers
raised fears he was "militarizing" the government, although soldiers
in the United States had the same right. Businessmen and neo-liberals
argued that the new magna carta allowed excessive
state intervention
in the economy. It also changed the name of the country — something
many Chavistas including Chávez's own brother Adán thought
was not Venezuela's most pressing need. But the president insisted, and
the name change made it in.

In the end the vote on the constitution was more a plebiscite on
Chávez's year-old administration than on the document itself. Some
polls indicated that only 2 percent of the population had actually read
it by December 15, although it would become a well-thumbed and
heatedly debated little book as time passed. Vendors sold them on the
streets. Chávez often pulled one out of his shirt pocket during nationally
broadcast talks. He called it the most advanced constitution in the
world.

The campaign leading up to the vote turned nasty. Critics
including the Catholic Church hierarchy warned that the constitution
would help Chávez usher in a dictatorship. The country's former apostolic
nuncio,
Cardinal Rosalio Castillo, even compared Chávez's tactics
to those employed by the former Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.

Chávez fired back, accusing the cardinal of condoning "immorality,"
branding
Bishop Baltazar Porras a "pathetic ignoramus," and threatening
to "exorcise" what he called "devils in vestments." He suggested the Son
of God was on his side. "If Jesus Christ were resurrected in Venezuela,
he would be walking the streets and calling on Venezuelans, without
doubt, to vote 'Yes,' " for the referendum, he said.

Chávez let loose his high-voltage attacks on other sectors of the
opposition. He called his detractors a "truckload of squealing pigs" and
"vampires," and referred to the elites as a "rancid oligarchy." He labeled
one newspaper publisher a "degenerate." Miguel Henrique Otero, publisher
of
El Nacional
, the country's leading daily, returned the compliment.
"No one in Venezuela can trust Hugo Chávez's democratic
credentials," he said. Chávez seemed to win the battle of words. Within
a week after he started actively campaigning for the constitution in early
December, support for it went up by 11 percentage points, to 67 percent.

The vote on December 15 was the nation's fifth in a year. Like the
others, the outcome was a foregone conclusion. Chávez romped to victory.
Some 71 percent of voters approved the new constitution. It should
have been a night of celebration, the culmination of one of Chávez's
greatest dreams. But as the votes were being counted, tragedy was
unfolding on the verdant mountainsides of Mount Avila overlooking
the azure Caribbean Sea.

Mount Avila rises almost straight up from the shores of the Caribbean.
Its tallest point, Naiguata Peak, is 1.7 miles high. Clouds often cover it
and other peaks. Hundreds of shantytowns blanket the mountainside.
Luxury apartment buildings where Caracas's elites often spend their
weekends sit closer to the sea.

"Winter" or the dry season in Venezuela usually starts in December.
But for two weeks prior to the vote on the constitution, a steady rain fell
in the capital and around the country. It was unusual. Still, no one could
have predicted what came next. Starting the evening of December 15, a
downpour of biblical proportions drenched Mount Avila. In two days it
dumped double the amount of rain that normally falls in a year.

The results were catastrophic. With Mount Avila already saturated
from the previous rains, the mountain collapsed on itself. Boulders,
trees, mud, and water came rushing down and crashed into the villages.
The debris had been building speed and collecting mass from
as far up the mountain as Naiguata Peak. By the time they reached the
villages, the trees were like flying torpedoes. The boulders were even
more horrifying. Many were the size of a truck or small house; one was
thirty-three feet high and weighed an estimated 840 tons. The boulders
crushed everything in their path. The wave of mud and debris was ten
to twenty feet high in places. It was like a tidal wave coming down the
mountain.

By the time it was over, anywhere from five to twenty thousand
people were dead. Officials would never know the real figure. Most
of the dead were buried under ten feet of rubble, or washed out to sea.
Some residents carried away dead bodies on the only thing they could
find — a broken door. In the little village of Carmen de Uria, the raging
wave carved a thirty-foot-deep trench through the middle of town,
wiping out everything in its path. It hurled cars into living rooms, tore
buildings in half, and swept scores of victims out to sea.

The government quickly launched a massive search-and-rescue
effort. Some twelve thousand soldiers and sailors flew helicopters,
manned ships, and drove vehicles into the disaster zone to pull residents
out, provide food and water, patrol streets, and search for bodies. In the
first four days they plucked more than 140,000 people from the flooded
coast to safety. Even US officials, who sent troops, airplanes, and equipment
to help, said they were impressed.

Chávez took personal command of the rescue operation. He
donned his combat fatigues, flew into the disaster zone, and visited stadiums
and military posts where survivors were temporarily staying. Plan
Bolívar 2000 had turned out to be perfect preparation for the military
to handle the relief effort. The mudslide was a horrifying tragedy, but
in ways it was Chávez's finest hour as president. He made a nationally
broadcast address each night, stoically providing Venezuelans with an
update on the rescue efforts and urging them to keep the faith. He
worked tirelessly, sleeping just two hours a night as he turned the operations
into a personal mission.

The recovery effort was grim. Authorities often did not find entire
bodies but pieces: heads, arms, legs. Three weeks after the disaster,
dozens of victims were found floating in the sea one hundred miles
away off Venezuela's western coast. Many were dismembered.

The government's reaction to the tragedy was energetic, but that
did not stop the opposition from trying to find fault. Chávez did not
appear on television the night of December 15 as the referendum results
came in and the mudslide began, prompting rumors picked up by the
media that he was on La Orchila island getting drunk with Fidel Castro
and other foreign leaders to celebrate his win at the polls. In reality,
Chávez later explained, he had spent the night in Miraflores in a cabinet
meeting. Around noon the next day, risking his life, he flew by
helicopter over Mount Avila to reach the worst-hit areas. He overruled
pilots who warned him it was too dangerous to fly in the near-zero-visibility
weather and with the rains still falling. He barred journalists
from the flight because it was too risky.

His detractors also seized on a report they said proved the government
was warned about the impending disaster but did nothing because
it didn't want to stop the vote on the constitution. But the heavy rains
were at a minimum a once-in-a-century event, as experts later stated,
and the national weather service was caught as off guard as anyone. "At
no time did we warn people about how bad this event could be," stated
the service's Alvaro Palache.

The attacks against Chávez even came from the Catholic Church
hierarchy when Archbishop José Ignacio Velasco claimed from the altar
that the tragedy was a punishment from God aimed at Chávez.

The president believed the cause was more earthbound. He thought
many of the people died because previous governments had irresponsibly
allowed entire villages to sprout up in
mudslide zones. As for the
luxury apartment complexes, payoffs to corrupt officials often speeded
the permit process.

In the aftermath of the tragedy, Chávez came under attack for his handling
of relations with the United States. Two days after the mud and
rockslides, the first of 120 US soldiers started arriving in Venezuela
to assist in the rescue-and-recovery effort. Black Hawk helicopters, a
Hercules C-130 transport plane, a DC-8, and $3.4 million in aid also
came. By December 23 an enormous C-5 Galaxy — the largest airplane
made in the United States — touched down at Simón Bolívar
International Airport carrying water-purifying machines.

But the smooth coordination hit a bump in mid-January 2000 when
the United States dispatched two ships to Venezuela to help rebuild the
main road along the coast at the foot of Mount Avila. The ships carried
bulldozers, tractors, engineering equipment, and 450 marine and
navy engineers. Chávez's defense minister, General Raúl Salazar, had
requested the help in a letter sent December 24.

In what was a case of either miscommunication with Salazar or
second thoughts by Chávez, the day after the USS
Tortuga
left Norfolk,
Virginia, Chávez abruptly announced that the help of the Americans
was not needed, although he would take the equipment. The United
States ordered the USS
Tortuga
to turn around. It also held back the
USS
Nashville
in Morehead City, North Carolina. US officials were
miffed and mystified. They said they could not send the machines
without the men.

Chávez was in a delicate position politically. While his relations
with the United States were still relatively good, the colossus to the north
had a long history of subverting leftist governments and movements in
Latin America. To allow 450 US soldiers and two ships to come ashore
would be like giving the American "imperialists" a practice landing on
beaches half an hour from the capital. It wasn't exactly the type of thing
a self-styled revolutionary government did. Citing national sovereignty,
earlier in the year Chávez also prohibited US airplanes from flying over
Venezuelan territory in anti-narcotics reconnaissance flights. Chávez's
detractors said they just wanted the disaster recovery help no matter
where it came from.