Hugo! (43 page)

Bravo's wife was ángela Zago, the former communist guerrilla
and constitutional assembly member who wrote the best-selling book
The Rebellion of the Angels
about the 1992 coup. By the time of the
24
Hours
controversy, she had split with Chávez and was
working briefly
on Francisco Arias Cárdenas's campaign.

Venevisión said it was promoting Bravo, who moved temporarily
to Miami to work on the network's cable channel. The government
denied it pressured Venevisión to fire him. But his transfer provoked
an uproar among journalists, politicians, and television personalities.
Five hundred staged a protest march in Caracas. Eventually Bravo
and Zago returned to Venezuela and were linked to the opposition to
Chávez.

A month earlier, the president faced more protest from the media.
When he showed up at a news conference in Maracay, reporters refused
to ask him questions. Instead radio journalist
Amira Muci stood up,
looked directly at Chávez, and said, "In view of your repeatedly disrespectful
attitude, and your assessment of our questions as irrelevant,
we, as serious professionals of the media . . . have decided not to pose
any questions this afternoon." The president was left speechless. He
got up and stormed out.

Muci and the head of the press workers' union, Gregorio Salazar,
later acknowledged there was no direct censorship by Chávez. No
media outlets were closed or reporters jailed. But they believed Chávez
was trying to intimidate them. They asserted that his pointed attacks on
journalists and media owners could incite his enraged followers to physically
attack reporters and cameramen on the streets — which eventually
some did.

Chávez consequently directed more of his attacks against the media
owners themselves and urged his supporters not to attack reporters.
"Our criticism is against manipulation by the owners of the media," he
said. "I will not accept aggression against any journalists who are only
doing their job."

As Chávez's battle with the media intensified, the presidential campaign
heated up as well. The two former "blood brothers" went at each
other mercilessly. Chávez, with a healthy lead in the polls, refused to
debate Arias. So
Arias took as many shots as he could. He declared
that Chávez's "unpleasant, thoughtless comments" sometimes gave the
impression he suffered "problems of mental equilibrium."

Chávez fought back. He called Arias a "traitor" who was bought off
by "the rancid oligarchy." On his Sunday radio program he suggested
that Arias was angry because Chávez had not selected him as his vice
president. "It's a good thing I didn't pick him. Can you imagine, having
a traitor for vice president?"

The media painted Arias as the more moderate of the candidates.
Pro-business and pro-United States, he was depicted as the
man who would lure foreign investment, decentralize power, distance
the country from Castro, end Chávez's rich-versus-poor class warfare,
smooth relations with the Catholic Church, bring good management
to government, and provide Venezuela with mature leadership minus
the president's antics.

But even though he publicly distanced himself from the traditional
parties, in the eyes of many Arias was the candidate of the oligarchy who
was going to roll back the Bolivarian Revolution. Even Carlos Andrés
Pérez endorsed him. More introverted and distant in a Caribbean land
where emotions ran hot, Arias lacked Chávez's charisma and thundering
rhetoric. He was an ineffective campaigner and orator. Polls put
Chávez ahead by as many as 20 percentage points. He had not one iota
of doubt he was going to win. "Even a rock knows that," he said.

His candidacy was not without problems. His Patriotic Pole was suffering
internal divisions. Angered by Arias's candidacy and the decision
by Urdaneta and Acosta Chirinos to run for governor in Aragua and
Falcon states, Chávez named his own slate of candidates for seventeen
of the twenty-three governorships up for grabs. His former colleagues
were not among them. The Movement to Socialism and Homeland for
All (PPT) were angry Chávez did not endorse some of their gubernatorial
candidates, and pulled out of the coalition — although some members
would eventually be back.

Chávez was also vulnerable because of the economy's weak performance
despite a quadrupling of oil prices since his election. He blamed
his predecessors and asked Venezuelans for more time. He argued that
he had inherited the controls of a "plane with the engines burned out."
He promised to usher in a "Venezuelan golden age." Most Venezuelans
believed him. There was only one problem: The
voting mechanism
was a mess.

The
"mega-election" called for a breathtaking vote
unprecedented
in Venezuelan and probably Latin American history. Some sixty-two
hundred posts, including president, congressmen, governors, local
mayors, and thousands of delegates to local assemblies, were on the
ballot. The number of candidates was astonishing: thirty-five thousand.
It was so complicated, Chávez and his allies came up with a yellow rectangular
"key" listing the names of candidates they backed. Most supporters
had no idea who many of them were.

Three days before the scheduled vote on Sunday, May 28, the
Supreme Court suspended the elections. Computer glitches were hobbling
a new electronic balloting system. The decision was an embarrassment
for the government. Chávez and others contended that the
Omaha, Nebraska-based company in charge of the machines was part
of a "destabilizing campaign." The company said it was overwhelmed
by eleven thousand requested changes to the ballots. Some international
observers praised the postponement, saying it would help ensure
a fair vote.

Chávez's
detractors charged that the
National Electoral Council,
handpicked by Miquilena, was incompetent. Its ten members and alternates
included Miquilena's daughter and former personal secretary.
They openly admitted they had no experience organizing an election,
which they saw as an advantage in Venezuela with its past corruptiontainted
votes. The day after the
mega election was supposed to take
place, the entire council resigned in disgrace.

The election was
rescheduled for July 31. The campaign started
again.

The extra time did not allow Arias and the opposition to make up ground
in the polls, as some had predicted. Chávez romped home to victory —
again. He took 59.8 percent of the vote, even higher than the 56.2 percent
he'd garnered in 1998. He won in every state except Zulia, an even
better performance than 1998 when he won in eighteen of twenty-four
states. His allies made a strong showing in the governors' races, too. The
Patriotic Pole took fourteen out of twenty-two races outright and seventeen
in all, including victories by the PPT and MAS, which were to
return in part to Chávez's side. AD, in contrast, saw its number of governorships
drop from eight to two. COPEI fell from five to one. Proyecto
Venezuela and Caldera's Convergencia clung to one each.

Chávez's forces did well in the National Assembly races too,
although they did not completely dominate. They took 105 of 165 seats.
That was less than the two-thirds majority needed to approve appointments
to posts including the Supreme Court and the attorney general,
pass the budget, and approve other items. The Chavistas would face
real opposition and be forced to negotiate at times. "A balance of power
has been restored," declared
Tal Cual
editor Teodoro Petkoff. "Now we
have to see how Chávez responds."

That night a euphoric Chávez appeared on the Balcón del Pueblo
at Miraflores. Speaking to thousands of ecstatic supporters, he quoted
the late Chilean poet Pablo Neruda as saying "Simón Bolívar awakes
every hundred years." Then Chávez added: "You, the Venezuelan
people, have awoken as a result of this process of revolutionary change."
It was a stunning victory. The economy was a mess — unemployment
was 18 percent, and the recession, in place since the start of his presidency,
showed few signs of easing. Yet Chávez won by 3 percentage
points more than his victory in 1998. It was a remarkable achievement
to maintain his popularity amid such a difficult backdrop.

Legitimate concerns about Chávez persisted among the opposition
and even some of those sympathetic to him. He was largely a one-man
show, with the coalition that supported him lacking well-defined,
long-term goals. Given his military background and the large number
of officers he appointed, some feared he was going to militarize the
government and turn his back on democratic rules. Others worried
he might "limit himself to an aggressive discourse in favor of social
change, while doing little to alleviate the lot of the poor in concrete
ways." The Plan Bolívar 2000 was useful as a temporary emergency
measure. But now Chávez had to move beyond that and the focus on
dismantling the corrupt political establishment. He needed to turn his
attention to the economy and pursue more long-term, structural solutions
to mass
poverty.

His supporters were hopeful and gave him their full backing. "I
have nothing to lose but hunger," one man said as he stood outside
a market to vote for Chávez that Sunday. But more sinister forces in
Venezuela were already looking for a way to derail the president.

The new constitution gave soldiers the right to vote in Venezuela
for the first time. It also assigned the army the role of "active participation
in national development," although soldiers were to refrain
from "acts of propaganda or political proselytizing." Chávez himself
encouraged soldiers to speak out in public if they discovered evidence
of wrongdoing in public institutions. It was an unprecedented liberty in
Latin American militaries.

Some soldiers took up Chávez on his offer, only not in a way he
expected. A few weeks after Chávez made his announcement, a National
Guard captain, Luis
García Morales, asked for an interview on the television
station
Globovision. Instead of airing the interview, the station
sent it to the defense minister. In it, García Morales called for Chávez
to resign. He also announced the formation of a
military-civilian
"Venezuelan Patriotic Junta." He insisted the junta favored peaceful
civil disobedience and not a coup, but acknowledged that the group had
discussed overthrowing Chávez. It had even considered killing him. "A
comrade of ours, a sniper, argued that it would be easy to shoot him,
and that would be the end of the problem," García Morales said.

Other voices warned of Chávez's presidency ending prematurely
through unconstitutional means. Retired general Fernando Ochoa
Antich, the defense minister during Chávez's failed February 4, 1992,
coup, was one of them. "I don't discount the possibility that there could
be a violent outcome," Ochoa Antich said. "I am among those who feel
the possibility is high."

In the United States,
Elliot Abrams, one of the central figures
of Ronald Reagan's dirty wars in Central America in the 1980s, was
watching Venezuela and Chávez closely. He didn't like what he was
seeing. "The criticisms of him, which so many people in Washington
think are obvious, are not obvious to all that many Venezuelans — yet,
anyway," said Abrams, who had been Reagan's assistant secretary of
state for Latin America. "I don't think his policy is going to change,
including his economic policy. At the same time, I don't see how it can
possibly succeed. It seems to me that bad days are ahead."

Before long, Abrams would be back in power in Washington, DC.

Barely a week after his latest electoral triumph, Chávez set off on
his next mission: reviving the Organization of Petroleum Exporting
Countries. He wanted a "fair"
price on the world market for the product
that accounted for three-quarters of Venezuela's exports and provided
more than half the country's income. Boosting oil prices and bringing
OPEC back to life were two of Chávez's chief goals and, as it turned out,
chief successes during his first eighteen months in office.

When he first won the presidency, the world petroleum market
was suffering its worst price collapse in at least fifty years.
Venezuelan
crude was selling for as little as $7.66 a barrel in December 1998. The
eleven-member OPEC was beset by internal bickering and a failure to
adhere to quotas. Iraq and Iran had even gone to war against each other.
Venezuela was one of the worst quota busters. Many believed it might
simply drop out of OPEC. Since its founding in 1960, the organization
had held only one summit in its forty-year history. That was in 1975,
some twenty-five years back. OPEC was on the brink of collapse.

One of Chávez's first moves as president was to shore up the price
of Venezuelan crude. He dispatched his energy and mines minister,
former leftist guerrilla and Causa R congressman Alí Rodríguez, to
negotiate a
deal with
Saudi Arabia and Mexico. He wanted them to cut
back on production and reverse the slide in prices. Saudi Arabia was the
world's biggest producer of petroleum, pumping out 7.4 million barrels
a day. Mexico was not an OPEC member but was nonetheless a major oil
producer. Venezuela was the top foreigner supplier to the United States
after Canada, and the third largest exporter in the world after Saudi
Arabia and Iran. Its oil
reserves were the largest in the world outside the
Middle East. The state oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela, had six
refineries in the United States. It also owned
Citgo, which had the franchise
for 14,500 American gas stations.

After an
OPEC meeting in March 1999 Rodríguez convinced Saudi
Arabia and Mexico to cut production by two million barrels a day.
Venezuela contributed half a million barrels' worth of that reduction.
The move would bring it back in line with its OPEC ceiling of 2.72 million
barrels a day. The agreement by the three countries encouraged
other OPEC members to follow suit and adhere to quotas. Prices quickly
started rising.

By one year later, March 2000,
Venezuelan crude hit a nine-year
high of $34.37 a barrel. The boost in prices gave the country a windfall
of $4.5 billion for 1999. Exports surged 33 percent to $16 billion.
The soaring prices helped offset some of Venezuela's economic troubles.
After shrinking 7.2 percent in 1999, the nation's
economy began
to show signs of reversing the decline in 2000. It had grown by 1.5 percent
by the middle of the year and 3.2 percent by the end of the year.
Inflation dropped to 14.2 percent, the lowest figure in fifteen years.

Chávez also hoped to avoid the vagaries of the world oil market
by enhancing an economic
stabilization fund established by Caldera's
government. The idea was to bank money when prices were high and
use it when they plummeted, providing the government with a steadier
source of income. The previous government had established a benchmark
of $14 a barrel. Any time prices rose above that figure, extra revenue
was channeled into the fund. Rodríguez took an even more
conservative approach, dropping the benchmark to $9. As the world oil
market boomed, millions flowed into the fund.

With prices solidifying, Chávez set his sights on his other goal:
unifying the nearly collapsed Organization of Petroleum Exporting
Countries. He had a grand vision. He wanted to organize the
second
summit in the group's history. And he wanted to hold it in Caracas.
He prepared to make another breakneck world tour, this time to personally
invite the head of each OPEC nation to the meeting. The list
included Saddam Hussein, the dictator of Iraq. He was, after all, an
OPEC member.

Reviving OPEC was a crucial component to Chávez's plans for transforming
Venezuela. Oil was the lifeblood of the country — for better or
for worse. Some people called it the "devil's excrement." It had brought
great riches to the country. It had also brought
corruption, distorted
values, dependency on a single product, and an economic roller-coaster
ride as the price of a barrel fluctuated wildly. Some people thought
it infected Venezuelans with a sense of easy money. "Venezuelans
lost their values," remarked a US native who spent years working as
a translator for an oil company in Venezuela. "It's much better to be
street smart and cunning than to be hard working and honest." One of
Venezuela's most famous writers and intellectuals,
Arturo Uslar Pietri,
believed historians might one day sum up his country's
history in nine
words: Columbus discovered it. Bolívar liberated it. Oil rotted it.

When Spanish explorers first showed up on the shores of Lake Maracaibo
in Zulia state in western Venezuela, they barely noticed the thick black
stuff oozing from the sandy earth. Local Indians used it to caulk canoes,
to make candles, and even for medicine. It wasn't until the advent of
the twentieth century and the mass production of automobiles that
Venezuela's potential reserves of oil attracted much attention.

While Venezuelans were carrying out scientific studies of oil to promote
its development as early as 1839, the first major deposit was discovered
and the first well was drilled in 1914. The companies initially
on the scene were
foreign: John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil of New
Jersey (later Exxon) and Shell. The boom in oil came eight years later,
in December 1922, when a Venezuelan subsidiary of Shell "blew out" a
well on the east coast of the lake. Dozens of foreign companies flocked
to the country. Hundreds of Christmas tree derricks soon rose from
the water, providing the image most of the world had of Venezuela.
Boomtowns sprouted up amid a "black gold rush." Engineers from
Texas and Oklahoma provided the technical expertise. Venezuelans
provided the muscle. It was a frontier environment of makeshift towns.
Brothels outnumbered food stores in some places. Prostitutes earned
nicknames like "Pipeline" or "Four Valves."

By 1928 Venezuela was the world's second largest oil producer and
its top exporter. Standard Oil and Shell remained the major players,
controlling 85 percent of oil extractions in Venezuela by the late 1930s.
The Americans brought not only their expertise in extracting oil but
also their culture. They introduced baseball. The oil companies were
so integrated into Venezuelan society, some people even named their
children
Esso
, Exxon's trade name.

Still, much of the profits remained in the hands of the foreigners,
who were given major tax breaks by the dictator Juan
Vicente Gómez
and other leaders who followed him. To regain control of the industry,
President Carlos Andrés Pérez nationalized it in 1976. It was a major
event in the nation's history, and a source of immense pride for most
people. The new state oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela, took over
eleven thous
and oil wells, eleven oil refineries, and fourteen oil tankers. It
also obtained pipelines, port terminals, and numerous office buildings.

The money poured in. Between 1973 and 1983 alone, Venezuela
earned more than $150 billion from oil, a staggering amount for a
country of sixteen million people. Yet despite the
boom in prices in
the 1970s and early 1980s, and the transfer of the industry to the government,
the bulk of the money never seemed to trickle down to the
masses. Venezuelans did enjoy the highest standard of living in Latin
America, and even working-class families could afford to eat out in
modest restaurants once a week. But the elites commandeered most
of the profits, accruing fabulous fortunes. Decades earlier, Uslar Pietri
had urged the nation to "sow the oil" by diversifying its industries and
spreading the wealth. This never happened.

By 1975
Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonso, the Venezuelan energy minister
who was a founding father of OPEC, wrote a visionary book titled
We Are
Sinking in the Devil's Excrement
. As oil prices plunged during the 1980s
and 1990s and one crisis after the other hit the nation — from Black
Friday in 1983 to the Caracazo in 1989 to the coups in 1992 to Pérez's
impeachment a year later — his warnings seemed especially prescient.

By the time Caldera took over the presidency in 1994, a proposed
apertura
— opening of the oil industry — was gaining momentum.
Venezuela was inviting private international companies back in. There
was even talk of disbanding PDVSA and privatizing the entire industry.
Nationalization, critics argued, hadn't worked.

The night Chávez won the presidency in December 1998, he charged
in his first press conference that PDVSA, the company that was supposed
to help "sow the oil," had instead turned into a "state within a state"
— an entity unto itself that was beyond the control of the government.
It fostered a "gold card culture," he continued, among an elite corps
of executives and managers who were out of touch with the masses
and enjoyed a lifestyle far removed from most Venezuelans. He vowed
to take control of the company and subject it to the oversight of the
Ministry of Energy and Mines as originally intended. Alí Rodríguez
was his point man. The answer to Venezuela's woes, Chávez believed,
was not the oil opening but rather regaining control of PDVSA, redirecting
its resources to benefit the majority poor, and resuscitating a
moribund
OPEC.

By August 2000 Chávez had set off on his mission to remake the
organization. He planned to personally visit each of the ten other OPEC
members and invite their heads of state to a summit in Caracas in late
September. The visit to Hussein attracted the most attention. Chávez
was the first head of state to enter Iraq since the United Nations had
imposed sanctions as punishment for its 1990 invasion of Kuwait and
aimed at ridding the country of weapons of mass destruction.

The United States, which waged war against Iraq a decade earlier,
was aghast. Ending its policy of public restraint regarding Chávez, the
State Department called his visit "particularly galling." State Department
spokesman Richard Boucher said it "bestows an aura of respectability
upon
Saddam Hussein which he clearly does not deserve." He questioned
why Chávez would want to elevate the prestige of a dictator "who
has invaded neighboring countries, occupied neighboring countries,
persecuted his own people and violated human rights." Chávez was
unfazed. Before the trip, he said almost gleefully, "Imagine what the
Pharisees will say when they see me with Saddam Hussein."

While the United States was livid, the Venezuelans argued that
Chávez was on a geopolitical tour to strengthen OPEC and that he could
hardly bypass one of its key members. They also accused the Americans
of hypocrisy. The United States had long maintained cordial relations
with military and communist regimes such as China when it suited
their purposes. In Latin America, it had even helped create or bankroll
some of the most brutal regimes throughout the twentieth century, such
as General Augusto Pinochet's in Chile or the Somozas' in Nicaragua.
The United States, in fact, was an ally of Saddam Hussein during the
1980s, when he received a visit from Donald Rumsfeld. It also maintained
close ties to oil-rich
Saudi Arabia, hardly a bastion of democracy.
In Afghanistan in the 1980s,
Osama bin Laden worked alongside CIA-backed
forces as the United States and the Soviet Union clashed in the
Cold War using surrogates. Realpolitik, as
Henry Kissinger knew well,
could be a rough business.

Chávez did not underplay the trip to Baghdad. He took two helicopter
rides from Tehran and then crossed the Iraqi border in a limousine
provided by Iran since flights into
Iraq were prohibited under the
sanctions. Then he was flown by helicopter to
Saddam International
Airport in Baghdad, where he met with Hussein. The Iraqis rolled out
the red carpet for Chávez, taking full political advantage of the breach
in the embargo. A large headline in a state-run newspaper trumpeted,
"Welcome President Chávez." Another government daily devoted more
than half a page to a story praising Chávez's "courageous decision to visit
Iraq." The newspaper added that "the Venezuelan president challenges
sanctions and decides to visit Iraq even if he had to do it riding a camel."
Saddam himself gave Chávez a tour of the city. A photograph of him
behind the wheel and Chávez riding shotgun flashed around the world.

The US and international media made much of the twelve-hour
visit, and never let the world forget it in subsequent stories about Chávez.
It became part of the boilerplate paragraphs about him, along with his
friendship with Fidel Castro. Yet besides the US government, few other
countries seemed perturbed, including Kuwait itself.

In Venezuela it was not even front-page news. The country was
more preoccupied with the installation of the new National Assembly.
Some of Chávez's most vociferous critics failed to raise a protest. "I think
if the trip is seen as being for purely commercial interest there is no
problem," opposition Congressman Gerardo Blyde said. "Chávez can
go to Iraq and not be supporting its political regime." Teodoro Petkoff,
whose front-page editorials normally blasted Chávez, commented that
"the only reason the visit has been a problem is because the United
States doesn't like it and that is not a reason. I don't think this trip worries
Venezuelans much."

Chávez even picked up some support during his next stop on the
itinerary,
Indonesia, when he called for an end to the sanctions against
Iraq because he believed they were simply hurting innocent civilians.
He described how his son Hugo, who accompanied him on the trip,
visited a mosque and saw a naked child who was dying from cancer
and could not get the drugs needed for treatment. "Who has the right
to really let an innocent child die there?" Chávez said in an emotional
plea. "Let God have pity on the soul of those who act that way."