Hugo! (41 page)

He also came under fire for alleged human rights abuses in the
aftermath of the disaster by soldiers and police dispatched to stop rampant
after-dark looting. On January 3, 2000, human rights groups
issued a report charging that security agents may have killed, beaten,
and looted in the disaster zone. An intrepid reporter for
El Nacional
,
Vanessa Davies, published a series of articles about the alleged abuses
based on firsthand although anonymous accounts.

Chávez reacted defensively. He called the human rights report "suspicious
and superficial." He attacked Davies' credibility, saying government
investigators had found "not one single piece of proof" to back up
her allegations. The DISIP political police subpoenaed Davies to come
in for
questioning.

On January 11 Chávez's own government contradicted him. State
Ombudsman Roger Cedeno said he believed security forces had killed
more than sixty people between December 17 and December 30 in
Vargas state on the coast. Foreign Minister
José Vicente Rangel, himself
a former highly respected journalist, criticized the DISIP for subpoenaing
Davies. He added that he wasn't surprised some security forces
may have committed abuses, since it was nothing new in Venezuela.

To his credit, Chávez shifted his position. In a stunning move, he
called Davies and invited her to accompany him to Vargas and visit
the families she spoke to who described the abuses. The two got into
a jeep with the uniformed Chávez behind the wheel and headed into
the disaster zone on a Saturday night, January 22. One man they met
took the president and his entourage to the site of an alleged mass grave.
He told Chávez soldiers had lined people up and shot them. Chávez
said authorities would exhume the site; no bodies were ever found. He
pledged to improve Venezuela's human rights record. "We have a terrible
culture here," he said, "and that is not going to change overnight."

Human rights groups praised Chávez's turnaround. But one man
was not happy. He felt the
DISIP was being turned into a scapegoat. His
name was Jesús Urdaneta, one of the founding members of the MBR-
200. He was the first person Chávez had appointed to his government,
taking over as head of the DISIP in December 1998 before Chávez was
even sworn in.

Urdaneta believed officials and the media were scapegoating his
agency by focusing the accusations on the DISIP, which had only a
handful of agents in Vargas compared with thousands of soldiers and
police. "There were eight thousand men there, and supposedly my
sixty were the ones who violated all the human rights," he later stated.
There was also a power struggle raging within the administration and
between Chávez and his old military comrades. Some of the Bolivarians
believed he was aligning himself too closely with political figures like
Luis Miquilena and José Vicente Rangel, whom they considered part of
the old regime. Urdaneta was disgusted and ready to quit.

Chávez was about to suffer the first major defections of his presidency,
with the comrades who were once his blood brothers deserting
and — in his eyes — betraying him.

As Chávez wrapped up his first year in office, he was still immensely
popular. To the underclass he remained a messiah who was going to
save the country from the corrupt oligarchy. But the first major signs of
discontent also were cropping up. A couple of weeks before the vote on
the constitution, residents in affluent Caracas neighborhoods opened
their windows during one of Chávez's nationally televised speeches and
banged pots and pans to protest against him and the proposed magna
carta. Pot banging as protest was made famous in Latin America by
middle-class housewives in Chile in the early 1970s before President
Salvador Allende was overthrown in a US-backed coup.

Chávez's opponents also held
candlelight vigils. They handed out
pamphlets. They honked car horns. They were sick of his virulent language,
of his calling them "a truckload of squealing pigs" and a "rancid
oligarchy." Many of them had nothing to do with the oligarchy. Far
from blue bloods born with silver spoons in their mouths, they were
middle-class citizens who felt they had worked hard to get what they
had. Chávez's revolution didn't promise much for them. Caracas mayor
Antonio Ledezma of the discredited Democratic Action party vowed to
keep up the pot banging if the president kept hijacking the airwaves for
hours with his high-voltage attacks.

Chávez's speeches were driving his
opponents crazy. He seemed
ubiquitous, giving two or three speeches a day and frequently showing
up live in prime time with talks that lasted an average of two hours. He
kicked off the month of February with a 171-minute televised prime-time
speech marking his first year in office on February 2. He came on again
February 5 for another 39 minutes, February 11 for 100 minutes, February
14 for 104 minutes, February 15 for 88 minutes, and February 16 for more
than an hour.

The
speeches were cutting into popular nighttime soap operas,
as well as television networks' profits since they were commercial-free.
Many of Chávez's detractors and even some of his supporters thought
it was overkill. "I can't take it anymore," one hairdresser complained.
"He talks morning, noon and night on all channels. It's like living in a
dictatorship."

Still, Chávez was an entertaining figure. No politician in the
United States or most other countries could match his ability to tell
jokes. One show in 2001 included a video of him visiting a rural town
and assisting military doctors during an operation — Chávez held a
flashlight. He turned to the audience and quipped, "You see? Now I
can even do surgery!" Poor people loved it. Chávez was a born storyteller
with "a great sense of timing," as Gabriel García Márquez put it.
With the cadences of a Baptist preacher, he drew in millions of viewers,
sipping a cup of coffee between rhetorical flourishes and pulling out a
copy of the ever-present new constitution. His ruminations ranged from
tales about his childhood to reflections about the meaning of love to
thoughts about why one of his relatives was nicknamed the Rifleman.
He quoted everyone from the German philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche
to
Thomas Jefferson to
Mao Tse-tung. He was part historian, part philosopher,
part statesman.

To his detractors, Chávez's long speeches before millions of viewers
were proof that his
ego was dangerously out of control. Without doubt,
he had a sizable one. Even some supporters such as his spiritual guide,
the
Reverend Jesús Gazo, acknowledged that Chávez was something of
a know-it-all who didn't always listen. Some people wondered whether
he would turn into a Castro-style all-knowing potentate issuing orders
from on high to the less enlightened masses or even his less enlightened
ministers. His enemies insisted he already was.

But millions of people loved his talks and clamored for more. In
his mind Chávez was leading a revolution, and that required a constant
indoctrination to change the evil ways of the past. Many supporters
viewed him as a teacher or the head of a family keeping the nation
informed of what was going on — a rarity in Venezuela. Some compared
the talks to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's "fireside chats" during
the Great Depression and World War II. Chávez was also from the
llanos, whose loquacious inhabitants would think nothing of droning
on for hours at a time. In Venezuela time and punctuality were irrelevant.
The personal relationship was what counted.

Chávez's public talks provided a measure of transparency to his
government. People knew what was going on. He interrogated and
sometimes even scolded ministers in the audience. He announced
appointments and firings. He pulled out graphics and maps to illustrate
his latest plans or trips overseas. To many Venezuelans with barely a
grade school education, it was an informal geography class. He offered
pocket histories of the countries, and described the people he met. Other
talks focused on Venezuela's history or his government's economic policies.
His informal, entertaining manner made it easy to swallow. He
spoke the people's language. He was a regular guy from the barrio.

Chávez was a live wire, especially compared with his moribund
predecessor Rafael Caldera, who rarely addressed the nation and had
to bat down rumors he was dead. "He's the only president we've had
who is interested in the people, in resolving our problems," a clothing
salesman commented. Chávez himself was not concerned about the
time people lost watching mindless television dramas. Just the opposite.
"Soap operas, no, no!" he told reporters. "We need more speeches to
explain to the people" what is happening in Venezuela.

His critics said his frequent speeches on television weren't filling
anyone's stomach. The elites mocked and made jokes about his appearances.
To them, he was an uncouth, indiscreet, long-winded embarrassment.
"Did you see our Clown Prince last night?" was a typical remark.
Others commented that "
el peon ha tomado la finca
" — the peon has
taken over the farm. A former State Department official offered one
explanation for why Chávez was isolated from most Venezuelan business
leaders: "I don't think they know how to talk to him. They've probably
never met anybody like him before, except maybe their houseboy."
The elites were tired of hearing about Chávez's grandmother Rosa Inés,
or listening to him compare world events to
baseball games. Instead of
talking incessantly, they thought, Chávez ought to shut up and run the
government.

They accused him of running a mediocre one. In January the former
comptroller issued a scathing report alleging that the government was
paying too much attention to politics and not enough to the economy,
crime, and corruption. Eduardo Roche Lander charged that Plan
Bolívar 2000 had turned into a hotbed of corruption. He noted that
the country's
economic performance was dismal: The economy had
contracted by 7.2 percent since Chávez took office, foreign investment
had fallen by $1.7 billion, capital flight had reached $4.6 billion, and
500,000 jobs had been lost.

Chávez's government dismissed the report as an act of political
revenge since the constitutional assembly had recently fired Roche
Lander. Foreign Minister José Vicente Rangel noted that under Chávez
the country had carried out the unprecedented act of firing two hundred
corrupt judges, with more to follow. The economy was weak, but
they'd
inherited a fiscal disaster from Caldera. They also had to deal
with the aftermath of the December floods.

Some US officials joined in the criticism of Chávez.
Peter Romero,
the State Department's top official for Latin America, told a newspaper
in Spain that "we've extended our hand to Chávez. But you don't see
a government operating, only plebiscites, referendums and more elections.
They tell us 'wait,' but we gringos aren't exactly known for our
patience." The comment sparked a minor diplomatic row.

It was the first open conflict between the two countries. Up until
then, the general US approach with Chávez — advocated chiefly by
Ambassador John Maisto — had been to seek engagement rather than
conflict. They wanted to avoid confrontation that could endanger oil
imports or the millions of dollars foreign oil companies were earning in
Venezuela. As José Vicente Rangel explained, "The State Department
has shown great caution toward Chávez because of what I call the
Cuba
syndrome: the fear that US inflexibility will push Chávez to the extreme
left, as it did with Castro." He was talking about efforts by the United
States to undermine Castro in the early years of his revolution, from the
Bay of Pigs invasion to the economic embargo.

As Maisto argued to Romero and others in the State Department, it
made sense to engage Chávez. He was tremendously popular at home
and had won a string of free and fair elections. His polices especially
on the economy up until that point were not radical. After pushing
for a moratorium on the foreign debt as a candidate, Chávez as president
stayed within the bounds of the agreement negotiated by Caldera
with the
IMF. He paid the debt and kept the bankers happy. As a populist,
Chávez thrived on "us versus them" confrontations. He took on
Venezuela's corrupt political elite, businessmen, media moguls, and
Catholic Church hierarchy. Maisto did not want the United States to
join the enemies list.

The incident with Romero passed. But more were to come. The
United States would have a new president by the turn of the year. It was
destined to repeat the mistakes it made with Cuba.

Chávez and his forces made more than a few
missteps that provided
ammunition for his opponents and provoked the ire not only of his
detractors but the president himself. After voters approved the new constitution
on December 15, Congress and the
Supreme Court were automatically
eliminated. A week later the constitutional assembly officially
declared the bodies defunct. In backroom dealings it named members
of a newly created
Supreme Tribunal of Justice, the nation's highest
court, along with an attorney general, national comptroller, public
defender, and
National Electoral Council. It also appointed a twenty-one-
member
"mini Congress" of Chávez allies to replace the old body
until
elections could be held for the new National Assembly. The elections
originally were scheduled for February, but were postponed for
months because of the mudslides and technical problems with voting
machines.

In contrast with the pronouncements of Chávez that the days of
backroom appointments by political elites were over, the constitutional
assembly did not consult
civil society groups or other members of the
public on the moves. Luis Miquilena, the head of the constitutional
assembly and the mini Congress, handpicked many of the new appointees.
One was Chávez's brother Adán. Critics accused the government
of taking advantage of the chaos of the mudslides to push through
the appointments. Chávez himself criticized the missed chance for
departing from "the old way of doing politics." Miquilena publicly
admitted the closed-door appointments of the electoral council members
were a "mistake." Opponents said the entire arrangement and the
delayed elections left power concentrated in Chávez's hands.

The opposition was frustrated, angry, and losing Venezuela's political
battle.

For them, hating Chávez had become a national pastime. But they
were finding comic relief in one place. A show called
La Reconstituyente
,
the reconstitution, was the hottest theater ticket in town. Its name was
a play on words of the pro-Chávez assembly that rewrote the constitution.
During performances, an actor romped around the stage with a
baseball mitt in one hand and a red beret on his head. He mercilessly
lampooned Chávez, imitating his speech and his habit of interrupting
speeches to greet friends he saw in the audience. One night one of the
actors, comedian Laureano Márquez, told the audience he'd like to see
more of Chávez's long-winded speeches. "While he talks, he's not governing,
and that's a strategic advantage," he joked.

Besides the jabs in
La Reconstituyente
, one of the opposition's
most articulate and energetic voices belonged to
Teodoro Petkoff. The
former 1960s Marxist guerrilla leader who had turned into Caldera's
czar for the neo-liberal economic reforms had a new reincarnation. In
this latest role he was a newspaper editor, heading the afternoon daily
El Mundo.
He was well suited for the post. He was something of a permanent
dissident. He had engaged in disagreements and suffered fallouts
with everyone from the Communist Party in the Soviet Union
after the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 to his colleagues in MAS
when they endorsed Chávez for president in 1998.

Petkoff brought the mundane
El Mundo
back to life, editing the
paper with flair, brilliance, and imagination. He put a large, scathing
editorial on the front page every afternoon. It became required reading
for Chávez opponents and even some supporters. The government
often did not know how to respond. Despite the large number of prominent
journalists in its ranks, it "proved notably poor at public relations,
and found it difficult to rebut the attacks of the overwhelmingly hostile
press" including Petkoff's operation. Chávez was so dominant that few
other voices in the
administration blossomed or got their chance at the
microphone.

Petkoff left his job at
El Mundo
after what he alleged was pressure
from a senior government official involving a pending legal case with
the owners of the paper, the Capriles family. In April 2000, at the age of
sixty-eight, he founded his own newspaper,
Tal Cual.
It quickly raised
a ruckus. The day after its debut on April 3, its front-page editorial featured
a headline that said, "The Official Line." Next to it was a photograph
of Chávez and a story. The entire text read, "Bla, bla, bla."