Hugo! (62 page)

Groups such as
Global Exchange in San Francisco organized tours
to Venezuela where visitors saw everything from cooperatives to the
medical missions. Skeptics dismissed the pilgrimages, arguing that the
visitors got a skewed view of Venezuela that left out the critiques of
those who opposed Chávez. Sociologist Amalio Belmonte likened the
ideological tourists to "nineteenth century anthropologists who travel
the world looking for primitive cultures. Then they return to their comfortable
lives in the First World and repeat Chávez's revolutionary discourse,
but with no interest in finding out the other side of the story."

In reality, many of the tour groups did meet with opposition
leaders to hear the other side of the story. They came away with a
deeper understanding of the dynamics of the Bolivarian Revolution
than many in the opposition — who had never set foot in a barrio.

The newcomers included Chesa Boudin, the son of Katherine
Boudin and David Gilbert, former members of the 1970s radical group
the Weathermen. A graduate student at Oxford, Chesa Boudin interned
briefly in the Venezuelan government's international affairs section.
The best-known American visitors to throw their support behind
Chávez were African American leaders including Jesse Jackson, singer
Harry Belafonte, and
Lethal Weapon
and
The Color Purple
star Danny
Glover. Another visitor, Princeton University professor Cornell West,
said one reason for the trips was to get beyond the mainstream media
portrayal of Venezuela. "We in the United States have so many lies
about President Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution," he said.

On one trip organized by the African American group
TransAfrica
Forum, Belafonte, Glover, and others stood by as Venezuela dedicated
its first Bolivarian school in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. The
school was located in the predominantly black town of Naiguata on
the Caribbean coast that was hard hit by the 1999 floods and mudslides.
Aristóbulo Istúriz, the first Venezuelan of African descent to
serve as education minister, oversaw the ceremony. In a rousing speech,
TransAfrica president Bill Fletcher noted the parallels between Chávez's
Bolivarian Revolution on behalf of Venezuela's majority poor and King's
leadership of the 1960s civil rights movement:

Dr. King was not a man who was fundamentally concerned with
changing laws. He was fundamentally concerned with social justice.
He was a man who abhorred the oppression of billions of
people on this planet and despised the vampires who absorbed
wealth for a small number of people. He was a man who abhorred
war and who had the courage to speak against the war in Vietnam
. . . Any movement that advances that kind of politics is a movement
consistent with the legacy of Dr. King.

While most upper-class Venezuelans retained a bitter hatred of Chávez,
a few followed his path, if not completely embracing him. When 457
pro-Chávez families invaded an estate owned by one of Venezuela's
wealthiest families and home to one of the country's oldest rum distilleries,
the owner,
Alberto Vollmer, did not have them arrested or hire
gunmen to kick them off. Instead he made a deal: He offered them
some of the land to build houses on if they would provide the labor and
respect the rest of his property.

Vollmer, in his thirties, was a scion to one of Venezuela's oldest families.
His father, Alberto J. Vollmer, went to prep school with the first
President Bush and was once Venezuela's ambassador to the Vatican. His
mother, Christine de Marcellus, was a Palm Beach socialite and antiabortion
activist in high-level Roman Catholic circles. The family bought
Santa Teresa Rum in 1885. The hacienda where it stood was founded in
1796. Two centuries later, in 1996, the factory was on the verge of bankruptcy
when the younger Vollmer, a former student at Valley Forge Military
Academy near Philadelphia, joined it and helped revive it.

In February 2000 the families invaded, but Vollmer's response turned
into a model of cooperation between Venezuela's wealthy
elites and the
impoverished masses. They built one hundred homes on sixty acres of
land in a project that won recognition from experts in conflict resolution
at Harvard University, among other institutions. The government pitched
in, too, providing roads and installing public services including electricity
and telephone lines. The families were required to pay mortgages to a government
housing agency.

The project didn't end there. When street gangs from a nearby slum
started harassing company workers, and two were arrested for stealing
a gun from guards, Vollmer made another deal. He offered not to press
charges if the gang members provided three months' labor on the estate,
receiving weekly rations of food in return. The gang members agreed.
Eventually the program grew to include seventy-five young men from
three rival gangs. After three months' labor, the gang members received
schooling and psychological counseling. Vollmer also helped them find
jobs with local businesses. He dubbed the program "Alcatraz" after the
prison off San Francisco. Eventually he flew one of the rehabilitated gang
members first-class to Sarajevo to attend a World Bank conference on
social programs.

Chávez took to mentioning Vollmer's program in speeches as
a model of what Venezuela could be. Vollmer, who did not vote for
Chávez, even appeared on television with him, provoking dozens of
angry e-mails from people who considered him a class traitor. Some customers
vowed never to buy from him again. But to the project's inhabitants,
it was a godsend in the same way Chávez's missions were changing
their lives. "If one quarter of the rich people were like Alberto," one
said, "this would be a different country."

As Chávez's missions solidified and his popularity strengthened, the
opposition was running out of options to oust him. The strikes failed.
The 2002 coup did not achieve it, either. The December 2002 to
February 2003 oil shutdown devastated the economy but left Chávez
ensconced in Miraflores — with the opposition more discredited
than ever after "canceling" Christmas and wrecking thousands of
businesses.

The oil walkout was barely over when the opposition seized on a
fresh tactic to push Chávez out of office. The 1999 constitution drafted
by the pro-Chávez constitutional assembly and approved overwhelmingly
by the public in December 1999 contained a clause that was
unique in the Western Hemisphere and perhaps the world: It allowed
for a binding referendum on whether the president should be recalled
from office.

To hold one, opponents had to gather the signatures of 20 percent
of registered voters, or about 2.4 million people. The recall election
could take place only after the midway point of the president's six-year
term — in this case August 19, 2003. To win it, opponents had to obtain
more votes than the number originally cast electing the president —
here nearly 3.8 million. And of course they had to gain more votes to
oust him than those who voted for him to stay. If the opposition won the
recall, a new election would be held within thirty days to choose a new
president. While the laws were not entirely clear, it appeared Chávez
could run again.

With tensions still high between the government and the opposition,
the two sides signed a landmark agreement in May 2003 pledging
to find a
constitutional solution to the crisis. The pact was the result of
six months of arduous negotiations by the two sides overseen by former
president Jimmy Carter's Atlanta-based
Carter Center, among others.
The mood was hopeful. The opposition was confident it would easily
win a recall vote. Polls backed them up. One by
Greenberg Quinlan
Rosner Research and Public Opinion Strategies, which did work for
both the Democratic and Republican Parties in the United States, predicted
in April that Chávez would lose by a two-to-one margin. News
articles routinely reported that Chávez's policies have, as one said,
"turned a majority of Venezuelans against him."

Venezuela still did not have an organization to oversee the recall. In
late August the Supreme Court broke a deadlock between the government
and the opposition by naming the five members of the
National
Electoral Council. Both sides along with the United States hailed the
appointments, saying the council was balanced — two members supported
by the opposition, two by the government. Board president
Francisco Carrasquero was a left-leaning university professor.

The board's first decision went against the opposition. It ruled that
the
petitions handed in by them in August and purportedly containing
three million signatures were not valid. The council said they were
gathered without any official oversight starting back in February 2003
— before the midway point of Chávez's term. The opposition claimed
that the government was trying to head off a recall and that it was intimidating
people from signing petitions by publishing on the Internet a
list of signers and denying them government jobs, passports, national
identification cards, or student grants. The government countered that
private companies were forcing employees to sign or lose their jobs.

In the end opposition leaders agreed to a new petition drive. It took
place the last weekend in November. Citizens stood in long lines at
schools, plazas, and churches to sign their names. A week earlier Chávez
supporters had held their own petition drive to try to recall thirty-eight
opposition Congress members. The process seemed a far better alternative
to coups and oil strikes. An elated César Gaviria, secretary general
of the Organization of American States, declared that Venezuela was
"finding a democratic way of solving the problem."

At the end of its two-day petition drive, the opposition claimed it had
the signatures needed to trigger the recall. But it refused to immediately
release the number. Then it took three weeks to hand in the petitions.
The actions raised suspicions among Chávez and his followers. Calling
the opposition's efforts a "mega fraud," the president held up scores of
petitions at a rally on December 6 and claimed that they contained the
names of people who were not registered to vote, had signed two or more
times, or were dead. He also charged that signature gatherers entered hospitals,
homes for the elderly, and mental institutions to pressure people
to sign.

After an intense review, in late February the electoral council
announced that the opposition had handed in about three million signatures,
not the 3.4 million they claimed. It ruled that 1.83 million
were valid. The council rejected 375,000 signatures outright as fakes.
Another 876,000 were in doubt because of similar handwriting on the
petitions. The council said they could be accepted if citizens came forward
to confirm their signatures. They needed about 530,000 to be confirmed
to convoke the referendum.

The opposition exploded in anger, accusing the council of fraud
and of siding with Chávez. They launched street protests with a new
tactic of "civil disobedience" they dubbed
Operation Guarimba. They
instructed supporters to set up roadblocks on key avenues near their
homes or other safe locations, and then retreat inside when the police
or other authorities came. After they left, the protestors could return
to the streets. The idea was to create chaos and prevent people from
going to work, school, stores, and hospitals. Robert Alonso, the brother
of Venezuelan actress Maria Conchita Alonso and owner of a Web site
that announced the day, place, and time of each Operation Guarimba,
believed the turmoil would provoke the intervention of the armed forces
and that Chávez would fall within a matter of days.

Operation Guarimba quickly triggered
violent clashes with security
forces. Protestors burned tires, vehicles, and bags full of garbage as they
blockaded streets, especially in wealthy eastern Caracas. Some threw
rocks and Molotov cocktails at soldiers, and tried to break through lines
of National Guardsmen called into the streets to control the crowds.
Some troops fired at the protestors. Opposition mayors in wealthy areas
where the protests broke out refused to send in police to restore order.
Henrique Capriles Radonski, the mayor of Baruta who failed to control
rioters at the Cuban embassy during the April 2002 coup, defended the
rights of the Operation Guarimba demonstrators. He said they were
doing "nothing less than exercising their legal right to protest."

The weeklong demonstrations came at a sensitive moment —
leaders of the
Group of 15 developing nations were beginning a summit
in Caracas. The government warned the protestors against storming
the meeting at the Hilton Hotel, although some tried. The riots forced
private banks to close twenty branch offices, halted garbage collection,
shut down gasoline stations, caused massive traffic jams, and hampered
transit by emergency vehicles. In the first week, they caused $1 million
in street damage in Caracas alone.

Human rights groups including
Amnesty International accused
security forces of using excess force to put down the protests, including
reports of torture and beatings. Ten people were killed and up to
three hundred injured. Another four hundred were arrested illegally,
according to the opposition, who contended that they were exercising
their constitutional right to protest. Critics seized on the clashes to
depict Chávez as a major human rights violator reminiscent of Latin
America's bloodiest dictators. Venezuela's ambassador to the United
Nations, Milos Alcalay, resigned, saying the crackdown "closely resembles"
the methods of Latin America's right-wing military dictatorships
of the 1970s.

But to the government, Operation Guarimba was nothing but
another CIA-style attempt to topple Chávez by creating street chaos
and violence, provoking the authorities into a reaction, and spurring the
military to step in to remove the "human rights abuser" president.

The opposition charged that Chávez was trying to derail the recall referendum.
They contended the
National Electoral Council, which they
had previously praised as balanced, was now under his control. They
argued that any procedural violations in the
petition signings were
minor. The Venezuelan and international news media reported the
council had thrown out hundreds of thousands of signatures because
of "technicalities."

But it was a little more than "technicalities" that prompted the
council to reject the signatures. The electoral council had set down
and publicized specific rules for the petition process. They included
the requirement that all signers other than those with a handicap must
fill in the information including name and national identification card
number themselves. But when the council received the petitions, tens
of thousands of the forms appeared to have been filled in with similar
handwriting. Even some signatures appeared the same. The opposition
conceded that volunteers at some booths had filled out the forms, but
insisted the signatures were legitimate.

In the end the electoral council did not throw out the questionable
signatures wholesale. It offered a compromise. During a five-day "repair
period," citizens could confirm they had signed the petition.

Chávez's supporters were suspicious of the recall effort partly
because of who was running it: the
NED-financed group Sumate. In
early 2004 mounting evidence of
NED interference in Venezuela had
of course emerged as Freedom of Information Act requests filed by
two North Americans, Eva Golinger and Jeremy Bigwood, produced
thousands of pages of internal documents detailing the group's activities.
Much of the organization's funding of about $1 million a year
in Venezuela was going to opposition groups, including some whose
leaders signed the
Carmona Decree wiping out democracy during the
April 2002 coup or showed up in the palace that day. One of them was
Maria Corina Machado, a founder and
leader of Sumate. Machado,
the attractive, English-speaking, fashion-plate daughter of one of
Venezuela's wealthiest families, insisted Sumate was an "independent"
pro-democracy organization dedicated to "voter education."

As the recall effort picked up momentum, the Venezuelan government
counterattacked. Prosecutors opened an investigation against
Machado and Sumate co-leader
Alejandro Plaz for conspiracy to
commit treason. If convicted, they faced up to sixteen years in prison.

The investigation set off a firestorm of international protest.
Machado's defenders depicted her as a brave pro-democracy activist
battling the evils of a dictatorial government out to crush the smallest
sign of dissent. "Hers is a heroic fight," a
Washington Post
columnist
wrote. "Maria Corina Machado smiles bravely but admits she is terrified.
They are after her, she explained; the machinery of the state."
Moisés Naím, the editor of
Foreign Policy
magazine and one of the technocrats
behind Carlos Andrés Pérez's 1989 economic "shock package,"
cast Machado's activities in a religious light. "This is God's work," he
said. By November 2004 more than seventy major figures had signed a
letter endorsed by the NED calling the prosecution of Machado and
others a "grave threat to democracy." The signers included former secretary
of state
Madeleine Albright and
Senator John McCain, who sat
on NED boards.

To Chávez and his followers, Machado was hardly an innocent
freedom fighter struggling to save Venezuelan democracy. Rather, they
saw her as a tool of the United States and its campaign to unseat him.
The NED approved a grant of $53,400 for her group. Chávez and his
supporters didn't question Sumate's right to organize a
recall referendum.
They did question their right to receive funds from a foreign
government to do so. They put it this way: What would be the reaction
in the United States if a foreign government helped finance a campaign
to remove President Bush from office? Would
that
be legal?

The
NED funding played into Chávez's hands. He cast the recall
campaign as a plot by Bush and the United States to
overthrow him.
David was trying to fend off another attack by the gringo Goliath. At
a rally February 29, organizers erected a huge papier-mâché piranha
representing the United States. Nearby was a small fish representing
Venezuela.

The haggling between Chávez and the opposition went on for weeks
more until late May when the opposition finally held its "repair period"
to validate the signatures in doubt. The National Electoral Council
ruled that they had obtained enough signatures — barely — to hold the
recall. The opposition was thrilled. They were convinced the results of
the recall were a foregone conclusion in their favor. Chávez was equally
confident. In June he predicted he would take five million votes and
easily walk away victorious.

The conventional wisdom among analysts, diplomats, and the
mainstream media was that Chávez was in serious trouble and likely to
lose, or that at a minimum the race was too close to call. Just one week
before the August 15 vote, two of Venezuela's "leading"
pollsters,
Luis
Vicente León and
Alfredo Keller, who were also Chávez critics, called
it a dead heat.
The Washington Post
reported that "Chávez's
popularity
has clearly diminished since he was first elected."

Besides the standard critiques that he was running an
inept,
authoritarian government that was crushing
free speech and heading
the way of Castro's Cuba, Chávez was under attack on other fronts.
The National Assembly passed a new law in June allowing it to expand
the
Supreme Court from twenty to thirty-two members and nullify the
appointments of sitting judges.
Human Rights Watch and other groups
accused Chávez of packing the court to help determine the outcome of
the referendum if disputes arose.