Hugo! (64 page)

The opposition also alleged that Venezuela's new touch-screen
electronic
voting system was vulnerable to fraud, and that the government had
manipulated it to turn a crushing defeat into an overwhelming victory.
But election experts including the Carter Center's
Jennifer McCoy —
hardly a Chávez devotee — were convinced that this was virtually impossible.
McCoy said the machines created "the most technically advanced
election we have observed." When people voted, the machines took their
thumbprints, transmitted them by satellite, and compared them almost
instantaneously to prevent multiple voting. Besides that, the machines
also produced paper ballots that voters stuffed into boxes. To alter the
final results, someone would have to intervene with the machines electronically.
The military — historically the custodians of election material
in Venezuela — would have to reprogram "19,200 voting machines
to print out new paper receipts with the proper date, time and serial code
and in the proper number of Yes and No votes to match the electronic
result, and to have reinserted these into the proper ballot boxes," McCoy
later wrote in
The Economist
. "All of this in garrisons spread across twenty-two
states, between Monday and Wednesday, with nobody revealing the
fraud. We considered this to be supremely implausible."

The opposition looked especially silly because they had participated
in a pre-election check of the machines after tamper-proof
software was installed following controversy over the Florida-based
companies that were to provide the machines and software. It was the
first election for the companies, which were run by Venezuelans and
had offices in Caracas. A Venezuelan government-run credit agency
had given the small
software company, Bizta, a $150,000 loan, but the
company quickly repaid it after critics complained of a potential conflict
of interest since Bizta put up a 28 percent share in the company as
collateral. The pre-election check showed the machines to be working
perfectly. The opposition and acerbic Chávez critics such as Teodoro
Petkoff agreed to accept them and the outcome of the vote.

Now, in the wake of defeat, the opposition demanded an
audit of
the vote. The electoral council agreed to a partial one. They proceeded
to conduct it under the eyes of the Carter Center and other respected
international observers. But then the opposition dropped out of the very
audit it had demanded, claiming to have unearthed new evidence of
fraud that the review would not detect.

The opposition was beginning to look like something of a lunatic
fringe. They refused to accept reality. They lost. In an editorial
The
New York Times
, which was generally critical of Chávez, wrote that
"It is time for President Hugo Chávez's
opponents to stop pretending
that they speak for most Venezuelans. They do not." Some analysts
believed a type of "collective neurosis" or "hysteria" was overtaking a
large segment of the opposition. They were fed by a twenty-four-hour-aday
bombardment of harsh, mocking, and often false anti-Chávez
propaganda
on television. "They can't see reality," concluded the Central
University of Venezuela sociologist Margarita López Maya. "There is
a mental block . . . It's almost a pathology." Jesuit priest Arturo Peraza,
the human rights lawyer and critic of Chávez who took part in the
opposition march on April 11, 2002, believed the opposition leadership's
refusal to acknowledge the referendum results was creating a
perception to the outside world that "they are a bunch of crazy people."
He compared them to an eight-year-old child who throws a tantrum
when he doesn't get his way. "All the credibility they've had they've
thrown away," he said. "It's an act of suicide."

Peraza and others feared that with their loss in the referendum, followed
by the failed coup and economic strikes, radical right-wing elements
in the opposition might resort to the only option seemingly left:
assassinating Chávez. The worst nightmare of Peraza and others was a
Venezuelan version of
"El Bogotazo" in Colombia, where the
assassination
in 1948 of popular Liberal Party leader
Jorge Eliécer Gaitán set off
three days of bloody riots. The resulting civil war still rages.

Chávez shared the fears of physical attack — and not without
reason. Two months after the referendum, self-exiled Venezuelan actor
Orlando Urdaneta appeared on a
Miami television talk show and called
for Chávez's assassination. Speaking on the program
Maria Elvira
Confronta
, Urdaneta said, "There's no room for doubt. There's no other
way out. Physical disappearance, definitely." When he was asked how
this would happen, he replied, "This happens with a few men with
rifles and telescopic sights that do not miss . . . It's an order I am giving
right now, let's go, hurry up."

Venezuelan officials were astonished that the United States let
Urdaneta take to the airwaves to publicly call for the assassination of a
democratically elected head of state. If he had called for Bush's death,
he would be under arrest. Chávez's new information minister, Andrés
Izarra, the television news producer who resigned during the April 2002
coup when his bosses at
RCTV ordered "zero Chávez on the screen,"
said: "At this time, we want the US government to explain to us how
Orlando Urdaneta could call for murder without any type of sanctions
against him."

Chávez's nemesis, Carlos Andrés Pérez, also joined the calls for the
president's physical elimination. Shortly before the referendum, he said
Chávez "must die like a dog, because he deserves it. I am working to
remove Chávez [from power]. Violence will allow us to remove him. That's
the only way we have." Pérez, whom the conservative
Washington Times
called a symbol of the "kleptocracy and incompetence that originally gave
rise to Chávez," also said: "We can't just get rid of Chávez and immediately
have a democracy . . . we will need a transition period of two to three years
to lay the foundations for a state where the rule of law prevails."

The opposition and much of the media dismissed Chávez's repeated
references to assassination plots against him as paranoia. But clear
signs existed — and common sense dictated — that it was a real possibility
as his hold on power strengthened and the opposition's chances
of returning to power by democratic means faded. In November 2004
prosecutor Danilo Anderson, who was investigating four hundred suspects
in the April 2002 coup including some who received funding
from the National Endowment for Democracy, was killed when a
two-bomb explosion set off by remote control blew apart his car. His
murder shocked a nation unaccustomed to high-level political
assassinations,
unlike its neighbor Colombia or even the United States, where
in recent decades alone the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King Jr.,
and Malcolm X succumbed to bullets while Ronald Reagan, Gerald
Ford, and George Wallace survived assassination attempts.

With a physical attack against the president obviously a genuine
possibility, Chávez beefed up his
security. He got some assistance from
the Cubans, whose leader Fidel Castro had survived dozens of assassination
plots over four decades. By the time Chávez came to New York
in September 2006, bodyguards in civilian clothes stood near him on
stages at Cooper Union in the East Village and Mount Olivet Baptist
Church in Harlem. They held sinister-looking thin black "briefcases"
that actually opened into bulletproof shields.

Despite the increasing threats to his physical safety, Chávez emerged
from the recall referendum stronger than ever politically. His opponents
got what they wanted — a vote — and they lost, big-time. They
failed to present an attractive alternative to Chávez. Their only platform
seemed to be a
hatred of everything he did. Now Chávez was the undisputed
democratically elected president of Venezuela, supported by the
majority of Venezuelans in election after election. Segments of the US-backed
opposition leadership looked increasingly like they did not want
to play by the democratic rules of the game. They clamored for democracy,
but only when it gave them the results they wanted.

With the opposition all but obliterated, Chávez was free to turn his
attention not only to
strengthening the social missions that had catapulted
him to
victory in the recall referendum, but also to securing
his place on the world stage as the modern-day heir to Simón Bolívar.
He had turned one of the biggest challenges of his presidency into
an even broader mandate for his Bolivarian Revolution, and proven
the pollsters and the media that predicted his political demise to be
wrong. His dream of trying to unite Latin America and spreading the
Bolivarian quest for social justice to other continents was poised to take
off, although it would meet resistance and stumble over some of its own
mistakes as
Hugo Chávez grabbed the attention of the world.

Officially the Bush administration accepted Chávez's overwhelming
victory in the recall referendum. But in practice nothing changed. It
still wanted to see him gone. It tried to discredit him any way it could.
A month after the vote, the government announced that it was
"decertifying"
Venezuela in the global fight against
human trafficking. It
imposed sanctions that put in jeopardy hundreds of millions of dollars
in loans from international financial institutions including the Inter-
American Development Bank. Venezuela could lose up to $1 billion in
loans earmarked for a $750 million hydroelectric plant and other projects
aimed at clean drinking water, Amazon rain forest preservation,
judicial reform, school improvement, and tax collection.

The allegation was absurd and obviously born of the administration's
hostility toward Chávez. It charged that Venezuela was among
the six worst human-trafficking offenders in the world. Yet just a year
earlier, Venezuela was not even among the five worst offenders in the
Western Hemisphere alone, according to the State Department's own
annual report. Now it was suddenly catapulted into a group of countries
that happened to include major enemies of the Bush administration
— Cuba, North Korea, Sudan, Myanmar (formerly Burma), and
Equatorial Guinea. Human rights experts saw nothing to back up the
Bush administration's allegations against Venezuela.

The campaign against Chávez didn't end with human trafficking.
A year later the Bush administration "decertified" Venezuela again, this
time for alleged lapses in the
drug war. The only other nation in the
world decertified along with Venezuela was Myanmar. But again, the
government's accusations against Venezuela didn't match reality.

The US offensive against Chávez was moving forward despite the
absence of one of its key architects, Otto Reich. The hard-line anti-
Castro Cuban American stepped down in May 2004 as Bush's special
envoy to Latin America after two years in the administration. Reich
didn't abandon the fight, though. He soon published a cover story in the
National Review
:
"The Axis of Evil . . . Western Hemisphere Version."
The cover showed a photograph of Chávez and Fidel Castro.

Reich's replacement as assistant secretary of state was hardly more
enlightened.
Roger Noriega was a longtime aide to Senator Jesse Helms
and had played a key role in drafting the Helms-Burton Act of 1996 tightening
the US embargo on Cuba. He kept Reich's hard-nosed approach
to Chávez intact. The US hostility was underscored in May 2005 when
Bush received leading Chávez opponent Maria Corina Machado in
the Oval Office for a fifteen-minute meeting. A photograph of Bush
and Machado conversing in the White House was front-page news in
Venezuela.

A month later Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice singled out
Machado for a private meeting during an Organization of American
States general assembly in Fort Lauderdale. Venezuela's ambassador to
the United States,
Bernardo álvarez, had been waiting for two months
without success to meet with Rice. At her confirmation hearings the
previous January, Rice called Chávez a "negative force in the region."

Chávez had publicly held back much of his criticism of the US government,
even immediately after the 2002 coup when it all but endorsed
the putsch and Rice lectured
him
to respect democratic norms. But by
now he was holding back no longer. He lashed out at the attacks by Rice
and others with some of his typical personal invective and Venezuela-style
humor that played big with the home crowd but seemed offensive
to outsiders. In Venezuela, with its obsession for beauty pageants and
its stunning women walking the streets in skintight outfits that barely
covered their breasts, seemingly every other joking comment included
a double meaning pregnant with sexual innuendo. At a rally before
thousands of supporters, Chávez suggested that the problems with
Rice, a single woman, might stem from a lack of male companionship.
Moreover, maybe she fantasized about him. But "I will not make that
sacrifice for my country," he added, sending the crowd into titters, but
hardly amusing feminists overseas.

He also called the former Stanford University provost "illiterate" in
her understanding of Latin America and referred to her as Condolencia,
which means "condolence." In one of his most famous barbs, he called
Bush a
pendejo
. The international media incorrectly translated the word
as "asshole." More precisely, in Venezuela it meant "fool" or "a person
of whom others are taking advantage." But it was still a strong term.
Chávez also proclaimed Bush a "drunk," a "donkey," and a "coward."
He regularly referred to him as "
Mr. Danger," a blue-eyed American
character in Rómulo Gallegos's classic 1929 novel
Doña Bárbara
who
robbed land from unwary Venezuelan peasants.

The mud slinging went both ways. Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld compared Chávez to Adolf Hitler. (That prompted Chávez to
shoot back that "Hitler would be like a suckling baby next to George W.
Bush.") The Pentagon's head for Latin America, Rogelio Pardo-Maurer,
likened Chávez to a "hyena." Evangelical minister Pat Robertson, who
enjoyed close ties to the Bush administration, even called for Chávez's
murder. "If he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think we ought to
go ahead and do it," Robertson proclaimed in August 2005 on his cable
television show
The 700 Club
, setting off an international uproar. "It's a
whole lot cheaper than starting a war."

Robertson was not arrested or even questioned by authorities after
he made the widely publicized comment. That amazed Chávez. He
accused the United States of abetting "international terrorism." "The
only place where a person can ask for another head of state to be assassinated
is the United States, which is what happened recently with
the Reverend Pat Robertson, a very close friend of the White House,"
Chávez said. "He publicly asked for my assassination and he's still
walking the streets."

Robertson's call for Chávez's death and the US attacks initially did little
to dim his popularity at home or slow the spread of other leftist leaders
in Latin America. All around him, like-minded opponents of the neoliberal
Washington Consensus were rising to power as the "free-market
revolution" endorsed by Wall Street, the International Monetary Fund,
and others failed to decrease mass
poverty.

It started with the election in October 2002 of Luiz Inácio Lula
da Silva, the first president in Brazil's history from the working class.
He was followed by Néstor Kirchner in Argentina and in November
2004 by
Tabaré Vázquez, the first socialist elected president in Uruguay.
The most stunning victory came in December 2005 when Evo Morales
became the first indigenous person elected president in Bolivia. Of the
new leaders, whose opposition to the Washington Consensus came in
varying hues, Morales was the closest in outlook to Chávez. He grew
up in a family so poor that as a boy he ran behind buses to pick up the
orange skins and banana peels passengers threw out the windows. At
times that was all he had to eat.

The roll to the left continued as Chile elected the first female
socialist president in its history. By November 2006 Nicaragua brought
the Cold War icon Daniel Ortega and his Sandinistas back into power.
Less than a month later Ecuador elected Rafael Correa, a leftist economist
with a doctorate from the University of Illinois who lambasted the
Washington Consensus, pledged to throw the Americans off a military
base in Ecuador, and invoked Chávez's guiding light, Simón Bolívar.
"The dream of Bolívar in the 21st century is more than a dream," he
said. "It's a
decision of survival."

Correa's opponent, billionaire Alvaro Noboa, tried an increasingly
popular tactic to defeat his opponent — he linked him to Chávez. Not
surprisingly, the strategy helped Noboa to a degree. The United States
and the international media demonized Chávez so much that many in
Latin America believed he was the devil incarnate.

While ultimately the Chávez strategy failed in Ecuador, it worked
in other countries. In Peru cashiered lieutenant colonel
Ollanta Humala
was an Inca Indian version of Chávez who praised aspects of General
Juan Velasco Alvarado, the leftist Peruvian dictator whose 1968-1975
social experiment Chávez saw firsthand as a cadet. Humala even led a
failed coup against the corrupt government of
Alberto Fujimori. In the
end he lost the presidential election. Many people blamed his association
with Chávez.

Chávez's biggest defeat came in Mexico, where former Mexico
City mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador lost by a razor-thin margin
in July 2006 to conservative
Felipe Calderón. Obrador was leading the
polls until Calderón pulled out his secret weapon — Hugo Chávez.
He started running TV ads linking Obrador and Chávez. Obrador had
never met or spoken to Chávez. He insisted he was not going to recreate
a Mexican-style Bolivarian Revolution. But it didn't matter. The
ads worked. Obrador's poll numbers dropped.

Chávez's detractors charged that he was trying to sway races from
Mexico to Uruguay to Nicaragua and generally trying to win influence
around the world by dishing out some of his country's
oil largesse. He
was openly backing some candidates such as Humala and Ortega. In
Nicaragua he signed a deal offering ten million barrels of oil a year at
preferential rates to fifty-one communities allied with the Sandinistas.
Elsewhere he distributed billions of dollars in aid, bond purchases,
and subsidized oil deals. He sent $260 million to Jamaica to repave
a highway, $17 million to upgrade airports in Antigua and Dominica,
and $3 million in emergency food aid to Burkina Faso,
Mauritania, and
Niger.

To Chávez, he was simply doing what the United States and other
countries did all the time — building goodwill and winning allies. It was
all part of his plan to enact a modern-day version of Bolívar's dream of a
united Latin America, and to spread it beyond to encompass developing
nations around the world that could provide a multipolar
alternative to
United States hegemony. Besides, the United States, which enjoyed far
more resources than Venezuela, was also intervening directly in
elections
in Latin America. When Evo Morales first ran for president in
Bolivia in 2002, the US ambassador,
Manuel Rocha, warned Bolivians
that electing the coca leader could result in a cutoff of US aid. The
threat backfired, and Morales came soaring out of fourth place in polls
to lose the election by just 1.5 percent. He jokingly referred to Rocha
thereafter as his "campaign manager." US officials were more discreet
in 2005, but their opposition to Morales was no secret.

In Nicaragua the United States openly vowed to cut off aid if Daniel
Ortega won. Two years earlier in
El Salvador, Otto Reich had warned
that electing former Marxist guerrilla leader
Schafik Handal as president
would be a "radical change" that could adversely affect bilateral
relations. While his intervention wasn't the only reason for it, Handal
lost.

Despite efforts by Reich and the US government to sideline him,
Chávez's
popularity in some sectors simply grew. Once shunned by the
left because of his history as a soldier and coup leader, he increasingly
became the most prominent figure in a
worldwide
antiglobalization
movement hungry for a charismatic leader.

At the January 2005
World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil,
admirers greeted him like a rock star. The forum was a yearly event
mounted to protest against the simultaneous World Economic Forum
in Switzerland organized by
political and business elites. Sporting a
red shirt embossed with a picture of Che Guevara, Chávez provoked a
roar of appreciation from fifteen thousand activists who packed a sports
stadium and greeted him with cries of "Here comes the boss!" Chávez
responded with a denunciation of corporate-sponsored capitalism and
declared that a free trade agreement the United States hoped to enact
from Alaska to Argentina was "dead."

The day before, Brazil's Lula had drawn jeers at the forum. Some
participants accused him of failing to fulfill promises to eradicate
Brazil's mass poverty and of caving in to corporate interests, the IMF,
and the United States. Chávez had to defend him. "I love Lula!" he
yelled at the stadium. "I respect him. Lula is a good guy."

While Chávez's popularity was rising among millions, his image in the
mainstream media remained mostly negative. It frequently emphasized
the elites' version of events and never fully explained
why
he was so popular
at home, winning election after election. It often turned into not
only a mouthpiece for the elites but also a weapon. Chávez knew he had
to do something to bring the domestic media under control.

His efforts accelerated after the 2002 coup. The National Assembly
passed a
Law of Social Responsibility for Television and Radio that
aimed to establish limits on the media. The law banned "vulgar" language
and many images of sex and "psychological" or physical violence
from 7 A.M. to 11 P.M., times during which television networks routinely
broadcast scenes of blood, guts, and flesh that went far beyond that permitted
on noncable US stations at any hour. It also increased criminal
sentences from eight days to one year for slander or statements that
impugn "the honor, the reputation, the respect" of a person, including
public officials. Violations could lead to heavy fines or revocation of
broadcasting licenses.

Critics dubbed the measure the
Gag Law. After its passage in
December 2004, television networks initially edited explicit sexual
scenes and graphic violence out of often steamy soap operas or action-filled
sitcoms. Some news programs "self-censored" — in some cases
to an exaggerated degree to make a political point — such as stating
that there was a tragic car accident in Caracas today, but because of
the gag law details couldn't be reported until after 11 P.M. A couple of
fiercely anti-Chávez hosts including Venevisión's Napoleón Bravo (who
celebrated Chávez's overthrow by hosting some of the coup leaders on
his program
24 Hours
) were taken off the air by the network. Detractors
warned that the law amounted to another crackdown on freedom of
the press by Chávez. They noted that many Venezuelan
journalists
had come under physical attack by Chávez supporters in the streets,
although government television reporters also were attacked by the
opposition and Chávez spoke out against all the
assaults.