Hugo! (42 page)

The biggest blow to Chávez at the start of his second year did not come
from Petkoff's newspaper, though. It came from his former comrades
in arms. On the eighth anniversary of the February 4, 1992, revolt,
Francisco Arias Cárdenas, Jesús Urdaneta, and Joel Acosta Chirinos,
three key leaders of the rebellion, stunned the nation by holding a news
conference in the western city of Coro to denounce Chávez and his
inner circle. They believed his "peaceful revolution" was losing direction
and betraying the Bolivarian ideals they had all risked their lives
for. They thought it lacked internal democracy, was run by
caudillos
or
strong-arm bosses, and w
as fostering
corruption. They accused Chávez
of selling out to the corrupt oligarchy that had led to the creation of
the Bolivarian movement in the first place. They called on him to fire
Foreign Minister
José Vicente Rangel, former interior minister and
recently appointed United Nations ambassador Ignacio Arcaya, and
Luis Miquilena. Miquilena had turned into something of a kingmaker
in the administration. He was the president's closest adviser. Chávez
called him a father figure.

Arias Cárdenas, once Chávez's closest collaborator and co-leader
of the 1992 coup, had another opinion. "We were cheated, and this
is a grave disappointment to the nation," he said. Some of the president's
civilian aides "appear to have turned into criminals." Arias added
that "an organization that doesn't allow contrary opinion, that doesn't
debate, that doesn't discuss, in my opinion doesn't exist."

Urdaneta echoed the doubts about the president's top civilian aides.
"These men have put a blindfold on the president and are leading him
to the cliff," he said. For his part, Acosta Chirinos complained that the
Chávez government was turning into a
replica of the old Democratic
Action regimes that operated in almost a Stalinist manner, with
backroom
deals engineered by
caudillos
. "The party has turned into a kind
of clandestine organization where, it seems, decisions are made in a
style reminiscent of the Fourth Republic," he said. "The president is
surrounded by a group of servants who simply bow their heads and say,
'Yes, master.' " The three men said they were not breaking with the president
definitively. They were giving him a chance to "rectify" first.

The attack on Chávez was a shocker. It was coming from three of
what were once his closest and most powerful allies. Arias Cárdenas was
governor of oil-rich Zulia state. Urdaneta was Chávez's chief of intelligence,
the man who kept the secrets. Acosta Chirinos was the national
head of the MVR. Their protest threatened to pump life into a nearly
nonexistent opposition movement and open the first major fissure in
Chávez's government. Members of the all-but-defunct old regime were
gleeful.

A week after the press conference in Coro, the comandantes upped
the ante. Urdaneta, the former DISIP head who felt his agency was unfairly
scapegoated for the human rights abuses in the aftermath of the mudslides,
showed up at the national prosecutor's office. He handed over
files he said contained evidence of corruption against forty-six government
officials including Miquilena. It was another bombshell. Chávez
seemed stunned. Breaking a week's silence on the rupture, he gave a
nationally broadcast address. He said he was "pained" by the split but
that the revolution must march on. Many interpreted his statements as
a final good-bye to his former comrades.

Lying beneath the complaints and accusations lodged by the
former coup leaders, however, were petty jealousies, hurt feelings, and
an internal power struggle within the MVR between
civilians and
military men. Some believed Arias and the others lashed out because
they felt sidelined in the administration and were jealous of Chávez's
success. Arias Cárdenas had been passed over recently for the newly
created post of vice president. Urdaneta was fired as head of the DISIP.
Acosta Chirinos lacked real power as head of the MVR. He was in the
process of losing the post, anyway, as Chávez announced that he was
personally retaking control of the party after "letting them do what they
want" for the last year.

The men also had differences, some of them long standing, with
Chávez's civilian aides. Back in Yare, Miquilena had ordered Arias
Cárdenas to remain silent and out of sight from the media. He believed
the coup leaders had to make Chávez the star around which the movement
would coalesce. Arias resented it, and resented the overwhelming
power Miquilena had assumed in the government. Urdaneta had his
own feud with José Vicente Rangel, who accused him and the DISIP
of intimidating and trying to silence the journalists and human rights
groups investigating the killings in Vargas. Urdaneta believed Rangel
had convinced Chávez to bar him from responding publicly to the accusations.
He also thought he was forced out of his post because Chávez
did not want cases of corruption he was presenting to be investigated,
although the president did pledge to look into them.

Chávez was in a difficult position. He was under attack for his past as
a coup-monger and for appointing too many soldiers to his government.
To counter fears he was creating a military regime, he had brought in
generally respected, high-profile civilians from the left such as Rangel
and Miquilena to fill top posts. They could provide political experience
to help run a government where many officials, including the president
himself, were holding office for the first time. On the other hand, Arias,
Urdaneta, and Acosta Chirinos were his old comrades. Without them,
he never would have become president in the first place. But he could
not have it both ways. As one newspaper columnist put it, Chávez had
two choices: cutting off his left hand or his right. In the end, he went
with the civilians.

Rather than petering out, the mudslinging got worse. Urdaneta's accusations
against Miquilena included charges that he was a shareholder
in a printing company that won a noncompetitive contract from the
National Electoral Council to print one million copies of Venezuela's
new constitution. He also claimed Miquilena helped a friend win insurance
contracts with eleven different state agencies, and that Miquilena
pressured him to get the DISIP to sign one, too.

Miquilena fired back. He claimed Urdaneta was building an eightbedroom,
four-level chalet in an exclusive district of Caracas with slush
funds taken from the DISIP before he was fired. Eventually, the attorney
general opened investigations against both men. In the end, neither was
convicted.

As the mudslinging intensified, Chávez's three former military
comrades decided the president was not going to "rectify" and that they
would break definitively with him — at least for now, since politics
in Venezuela was a funny game of constantly revolving enemies and
allies. On March 10 they held another press conference in the city of
Maracay. They were joined by other rebels from the 1992 coup attempts,
including retired General Francisco Visconti Osorio and Captain
Gerardo Márquez. William Izarra, the air force pilot who studied at
Harvard and founded the rebel cell ARMA, also came.

The former soldiers released a "
Declaration of Maracay" criticizing
Chávez's government. They pledged to fight corruption, bureaucracy,
and demagoguery, and curb attempts to politicize the military. They
vowed to protect private property and decentralize power. They said
their "sea of happiness" would be built here in Venezuela, and not be
modeled after Castro's Cuba.

Then Arias dropped another bombshell: He would run for president
against Chávez. The new constitution had reset the clock on all
public offices, requiring elected officials to revalidate their term in
office in a nationwide "mega election" scheduled for late May. In all,
sixty-two hundred public posts from president to local mayor were to
be decided. Arias issued a blistering attack on the man who was once
his soul brother, was now his opponent, and would later become his
ally again. He accused him of demagoguery, of getting in bed with the
corrupt elites, of encouraging poor people to rob instead of work. He
warned that Venezuela could become another Cuba.

We do not believe we rebelled or suffered deaths and injuries so
that a person could disguise himself in Fidel Castro's shirt, and we
want to say it clearly. We respect Fidel, but on his island. We can
negotiate with Fidel and with the Cubans, respecting their revolution,
but our revolution we will construct here, without advice
from abroad . . . No one can give us an example from that sea
of happiness . . . We don't believe in authoritarianism. We don't
believe that you can repeat in Venezuela that tendency to concentrate
power and remain in power. No revolution can be tied to
a single person. That has been the dilemma, friends, what to do
about this. The president doesn't listen.

It was a devastating attack by the man who helped lead the February 4
rebellion. Chávez did not take it passively. The two men engaged in a bitter
electoral campaign. Arias ran ads showing chickens, implying Chávez
was a coward because he'd never left his post the night of February 4 to
attack Miraflores while his comrades were under fire and dying. Chávez
shot back, mocking Arias's decision to accept a post in Caldera's government
distributing milk to pregnant women. It was a job for a woman,
he implied, not a real man.

The real debate, though, was not about who was more macho but about
where Chávez was taking the country. Was he heading down the road
to another dictatorship like Cuba, as Arias and others charged? Or was
he creating a truly
participatory democracy that served the needs of the
poor majority for the first time in Venezuela's history?

Chávez provided plenty of ammunition for his detractors who
believed he was simply another authoritarian
caudillo
, a classic Latin
American strongman with little patience for democratic niceties. He
was a former coup leader who palled around with Fidel Castro, wrote
letters to Carlos the Jackal, wore his combat uniform, employed military
metaphors, pressed to extend the presidential term, and appointed
military men to his government. The spectacle of congressional members
clawing their way over the fence the previous August created the
impression there was no Congress. The temporary mini Congress that
replaced it in December lacked opposition members. Chávez added
fuel to the fire a few months later when he visited Saddam Hussein,
becoming the first world leader to visit the Iraqi dictator since the end
of the Gulf War.

Yet to argue that Chávez was installing a dictatorship was farfetched.
Unlike Castro's Cuba, it simply lacked the characteristics of a
totalitarian state.

He was elected in free and fair elections, and won three more referenda
to write and approve a new constitution. The jails held no political
prisoners. No
opposition parties were outlawed. No newspapers, television
networks, or radio stations were censored, even though the majority
were virulently opposed to Chávez. Private property was respected. The
government for now was not nationalizing entire industries the way
Castro did, although Chávez did start moving to nationalize a few companies
in early 2007. "Not even his staunchest critics can impugn the
democratic foundation of Chávez's power," reported
Newsweek,
which
named him
"Latin American of the Year."

Even the US ambassador, John Maisto, contended that Chávez's
revolution was taking place through democratic channels. "Whether
or not President Chávez's 'revolution' has been good for Venezuela, no
one can question its democratic legitimacy," he said. An article Maisto
wrote was titled
"Democracy Standing Tall in Venezuela."

Still, it did not mean Chávez was treading lightly. He was on
a mission to break up a mafia. It was not a job for the weak-willed.
Chávez played hardball, and his opponents didn't like it. A typical
example of how he sought to dismantle a corrupt political and economic
apparatus and remain within the bounds of democracy was
his relationship with the media. Chávez did not hold back in blasting
what he considered biased coverage. He claimed the media rarely
reported anything positive or balanced about his government. He
complained of an "international smear campaign."

His critiques often were justified. In an article published nearly
two years after it had declared Chávez "Latin American of the
Year" with a government of unquestionable democratic foundations,
Newsweek
ran another article titled "Is Hugo Chávez Insane?"
It quoted a political opponent from the discredited Democratic
Action Party asserting that "he's a psychopath." The
St. Petersburg
Times
picked up the theme. Its story, "Venezuelan Leader's Sanity
in Question," described Chávez as "a man many of his countrymen
regard as being dangerously unhinged."

The media's coverage of Chávez gave Venezuelans and the world a
distorted, one-sided picture. As Venezuelan political scientist Margarita
López Maya put it: "The national print media and television opinion
programs reflected . . . a reality almost diametrically opposed to that
expressed by the elections and polls. The criticism of Chávez was ferocious,
the rejection permanent."

Despite the media's unbridled, all-out attack on Chávez, international
media
watchdog groups accused him of threatening freedom
of expression. They charged that a provision in the constitution guaranteeing
citizens the right to information that is "opportune, truthful
and impartial" was a recipe for government censorship. The government
contended it was aimed at curbing outrageous abuses and fostering
more honest and ethical journalism in a country that essentially
lacked libel laws.

The conflict left its casualties. That May, Venevisión, owned by
media mogul Gustavo Cisneros, yanked its popular morning program,
24 Hours
, off the air. Its host,
Napoleón Bravo, was an acerbic critic of
Chávez's government and previous administrations. Venevisión initially
replaced
24 Hours
with cartoons.