Hugo! (66 page)

They called the new station
Telesur — Television of the South.
Initially it was a joint effort by Venezuela, Argentina, Cuba, and
Uruguay. Bolivia later also joined. Brazil offered up its state-run television
network for collaboration. Venezuela footed most of the bill, providing
the majority of the $2.5 million in seed money. It opened bureaus
around the region and in Washington, DC.

Even before it went on the air, critics attacked Telesur as a mouthpiece
for Chávez. They dubbed it "TeleChávez" and compared it to Al Jazeera,
the Arabic-language satellite news channel designed to bring a non-
Western perspective to events in the Middle East and beyond. Republican
congressman
Connie Mack of Florida went so far as to propose beaming
US government radio and television signals into Venezuela to counter the
new station. He made the absurd charge that Venezuela's press was muzzled.
"In Hugo Chávez's Venezuela," he told Congress, "there is no free
press — just state-controlled anti-American propaganda."

Mack's ravings aside, whether
Telesur would become a mere cheer-leader
for its main benefactor was a legitimate question. It did have something
of a leftist bent, showing images of Che Guevara and Salvador
Allende in a promotional video introducing the network. Its president
was Andrés Izarra, who had quit RCTV in disgust during the 2002 coup
and become Chávez's information minister. Recognizing the conflict of
interest, he soon stepped down from the government post.

But Izarra, who once worked at CNN in Atlanta, along with
Aharonian and other directors also realized the network would have to
go beyond mere pro-Chávez rhetoric to attract and maintain audiences.
If it only broadcast speeches by Chávez and other presidents, "we would
have to take it for granted that no one would watch," Aharonian said. "If
this were to turn into a propaganda tool, we would all leave." He added
that "this is not a channel where we'll be saying, 'Viva Chávez.' "

Less than a year after Telesur went on the air, Chávez's government
proposed expanding the idea to include radio stations. They called it
Radiosur, and envisioned existing radio stations from across the region
joining in a single network. Compared with mounting Telesur, creating
an integrated
regional radio network would be comparatively easy.

Chávez also went on the offensive inside the United States itself.
He created the Venezuelan Information Office in Washington, DC,
to combat what he called widespread misinformation put out by the
corporate media about Venezuela. Its goal was to present what Chávez
and his allies considered a more accurate version of the Bolivarian
Revolution. The
VIO, as it was known, created a Web site, compiled
background reports, and sent out action alerts to supporters to contact
media outlets. The office, though, was no match for the massive corporate
media.

Chávez's efforts to counteract the corporate news media extended to
trying to rescue indigenous Venezuelan and Latin American culture
from the US-dominated mass media. Faced with an onslaught from
Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys, and other icons of the US music
scene, Chávez wanted to preserve the quaint
traditional Venezuelan
music that originated in the llanos, the Andean highlands, and the
steamy streets of oil-rich Maracaibo. The December 2005 media
responsibility law included a provision requiring at least 50 percent of
the music played on local stations to be Venezuelan, and at least half of
that to have a "
traditional aspect to it such as using the
llanero
harp."

The law sparked a boom among traditional Venezuelan musicians
who played harps, maracas, flutes, fiddles, and the famous
cuatro
, a fourstring
bandola. Suddenly the mournful, bawdy, or humorous songs and
ballads from Chávez's native llanos and elsewhere that commemorated
fast horses, romantic sunsets, or love lost were hotter than ever. Simón
Díaz, a troubadour in his late seventies who enjoyed international fame,
found his songs back on the airwaves again. The
Traditional National
Orchestra, which had previously been lucky to sell one CD at their concerts,
now sold two hundred at a single performance.

Chávez set his sights on another icon of the US mass media:
Hollywood. In June 2006 he created a film studio
complex in Caracas
called Cinema Town. It was aimed at offering an alternative to films
that often emphasized sex and violence and depicted Latinos as gang
members or drug barons. "It's a Hollywood dictatorship," Chávez complained
as he toured movie sets and sat in a director's chair. "They inoculate
us with messages that don't belong to our traditions . . . [about] the
American way of life, imperialism."

Chávez also extended his "cultural revolution" to literature. Books
were hard to come by in Venezuela — they were expensive, and public
libraries were scarce. So Chávez instructed the government to print
some and hand them out for free. On the four hundredth anniversary
of the classic tale
Don Quixote
by
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, he
ordered up one million copies. He also distributed five hundred thousand
copies of another personal favorite,
Victor Hugo's
Les Misérables
.

Internationally he was still widely seen as a "brutal Marxist dictator,"
as the head of the Christian Civic League in Maine put it.
Chávez had a serious image problem. To try to counteract it, he came
up with an ingenious idea. In the midst of record oil prices, he decided
to distribute discounted home heating oil to low-income people in the
United States.

The program started in the winter of 2005-2006 with the Venezuela-owned
Citgo Petroleum Corporation pledging to provide twelve million
gallons of home heating oil to residents in Massachusetts and
eight million gallons to people in the Bronx. The recipients would get
a 40 percent discount. Former congressman
Joseph P. Kennedy II, the
son of the late Robert Kennedy who now ran the nonprofit Citizens
Energy Corporation, helped broker the Massachusetts deal.

The plan was a masterstroke that even Chávez's fiercest critics could
not effectively attack, especially after no other oil companies responded
to a plea from a group of US senators to donate some of their record
profits to poor people. One analyst called it
"shrewd political theater."
Even the US government grudgingly saluted it. Venezuela did not fail
to capitalize on the positive PR. It took out full-page advertisements in
The Washington Post
and
The New York Times.
The headline was: "How
Venezuela Is Keeping the Home Fires Burning in Massachusetts."

As word of the program spread, requests flooded in. Before winter
was over, it expanded to Maine, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut,
Delaware, and the Philadelphia area. In Maine the beneficiaries
included members of four Indian tribes.
Citgo flew some of them and
others to Venezuela in April 2006 to meet Chávez. Donna Santiago,
the single mother from Philadelphia, broke down in tears. "You have
treated the American people like brothers and sisters," she said. "This
has saved lives, and that has no price . . . In times of desperation, God
sent us an angel. And you, President Chávez, are our angel."

Chávez managed to throw away much of that goodwill five months
later when he called Bush "the devil" during his speech at the United
Nations General Assembly. He had planned to triumphantly announce
during his visit to New York that the oil program was going to more
than double in 2006-2007, from forty to a hundred million gallons.
Some 400,000 families — up from 181,000 — were going to benefit
in sixteen states or cities, including Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin,
Virginia, Maryland, Pittsburgh, and Washington, DC. Indian tribes
as far away as Alaska who paid $8 a gallon for home
heating oil were
going to take part.

But the personal attack, something Chávez seemed incapable
of resisting in general, provoked a backlash even among some of the
home heating oil beneficiaries. Linda Kelly, a resident of Quincy,
Massachusetts, said Chávez "stepped over the line" with his comments,
which also included calling Bush an "alcoholic" and a "sick man"
during an appearance in Harlem. A seventy-five-year-old neighbor,
Agnes Crosson, said, "I'm not a Bush person, believe me. But I really
resented that." The governor of Maine said he was dropping out of the
program. Even some of the Indian tribes in Alaska backed away. Citgo
ran full-page ads in major newspapers again. But this time it was trying
to clean up the mess as lawmakers and citizens proposed boycotting the
company and its thirteen thousand gas stations.

Back in Venezuela most people were barely fazed by Chávez's
attack on Bush. Many thought he wasn't far off the mark about a man
they viewed as a buffoon. Chávez forged ahead undaunted. Another
presidential election was a couple of months off. He was dominating
the polls. He was still hugely popular in Venezuela and in many parts
of Latin America. With a new six-year mandate on the way, he was
poised to head into a more radical phase of his presidency. He planned
to implement his most advanced plan yet for remaking the country.

It was something he called twenty-first-century socialism.

Hugo Chávez stood before twenty-five thousand cheering fans in a soccer
stadium in Mar del Plata, Argentina. It was November 2005, and the
presidents of thirty-three
Latin American nations along with George W.
Bush were gathering for the fourth
Summit of the Americas. It was
aimed partly at cementing support for the US goal of a
free trade pact
stretching from Alaska to Argentina. But the summit had hardly begun
and Chávez was upstaging Bush. Standing next to him in the stadium
for a
"counter summit" was the greatest soccer legend in Argentina's
history, Diego Maradona. Demonstrators carried signs that compared
Bush to Adolf Hitler and chanted in unison as they entered the stadium,
"Bush, the fascist! Bush the terrorist!" Polls showed he was the most
unpopular US president ever among Latin Americans.

Chávez provoked roars of approval as he declared that Bush was
wasting his time trying to implement the Free Trade Area of the
Americas, a key component of the Washington Consensus. "Every one
of us has brought a shovel, because Mar del Plata is going to be the
tomb of the FTAA," Chávez said during a two-hour speech. "FTAA is
dead, and we, the people of the Americas, are the ones who buried it."
In an initiative he compared to John F. Kennedy's
Alliance for Progress,
Chávez announced a $10 billion decade-long assistance program to
eliminate hunger in Latin America.

While Chávez was talking, anger toward Bush and US-backed policies
that had helped plunge Argentina into the worst economic debacle
in its history turned violent in the streets. Demonstrators tried to breach
steel barriers and reach summit sites including the Sheraton Mar del
Plata. They tossed rocks, smashed windows, looted stores, and set a
bank on fire with a Molotov cocktail. Police fired tear gas and rubber
bullets. By evening fifty people were in jail.

The next day Chávez landed on the front pages of
The New York
Times
and other major newspapers after stealing the show from Bush.
The Washington Post
described him as assuming "the role of gleeful
outside
provocateur."

Even rabid critics such as
Miami Herald
columnist Andrés
Oppenheimer acknowledged that Chávez was "having a field day" as
he eviscerated Bush, who seemed lost as he took a "public relations
pounding." His visit to Latin America, meant to be a moment of triumph,
ended with riots and tear gas in the streets. He left the summit
before it was over, with no trade agreement in hand. "The great loser
today was George W. Bush," Chávez boasted. "The man went away
wounded. You could see defeat on his face."

The day before the summit began Venezuela staged a mock invasion
of its territory by the United States. The exercise was part of Chávez's
efforts to prepare for a possible attack by American troops. Camouflaged
soldiers jumped from boats into the surf off Venezuela's coast as hundreds
of residents who confronted them on the beach shouted "Gringo
go home!" and "Freedom!" While US officials laughed off Chávez's
fears as paranoia, the region's recent history of invasions was not forgotten
by the Venezuelan leader and his allies. The
interventions
included Panama in 1989 to depose
Manuel Noriega,
Grenada in
1983 to dethrone the radical successors to leftist Maurice Bishop, the
Dominican Republic in 1965 to overthrow Juan Bosch, and Cuba in
the failed 1961
Bay of Pigs attack to oust Fidel Castro. Sometimes the
rationales offered by the Americans for the invasions were risible. In
Grenada the Reagan administration claimed it was rescuing American
medical students. In Panama the first Bush administration demonized
Noriega as a drug trafficker, even though for years he was on the payroll
of the CIA, which Bush once headed.

Chávez also remembered how the United States stood by and let
armed right-wing rebels, including former CIA operatives, run democratically
elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide out of
Haiti in February
2004. The biggest recent US invasion was in Iraq, where the Bush
administration falsely argued that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons
of mass destruction and played a role in the 9/11 attacks. If the United
States demonized Chávez enough, it might create an environment
where the world would support and even cheer a US intervention.

Chávez made other moves to prepare for an invasion. He created
a
civilian reserve militia he hoped would number at least two million
people. Housewives, teachers, students, and taxi drivers spent weekends
learning about first aid, firing automatic weapons, and marching in formation.
Critics charged Chávez was forming a Cuba-style militia to
spy on opponents, stifle internal dissent, and defend his presidency at
all costs. But little evidence of that emerged, and the possibility of the
Bush administration launching an attack was not entirely far-fetched.
"The United States went to war in Iraq over lies, and now it is telling
lies about the Venezuelan government, so we must be prepared," said
retired general Alberto Müller Rojas, Chávez's national security adviser.

Moreover, the Bush administration was making moves to soften
Chávez's military
defenses. It refused to sell Venezuela spare parts
for its North American-made F-16 fighter jets. Then, in May 2006, it
declared that Venezuela was not cooperating with the war against terrorism.
That was on top of Venezuela's alleged failure to cooperate in
the war on drugs and in the war on human trafficking. The latest condemnation
meant the United States was imposing a ban on all
arms
sales to Venezuela. No more spare parts for any of the North American-
made airplanes that Venezuela's military owned would be sent. It was
no small matter. By some estimates, of the 277 aircraft in Venezuela's air
force, 177 had been made in North America.

If the United States would not sell arms to Venezuela so it could
defend itself, then Chávez would look elsewhere. He tried making deals
with Spain and Brazil, but the United States helped block them by
refusing to sell spare parts. So he turned to Russia. Chávez signed a deal
to provide one hundred thousand Kalashnikov assault rifles to replace
the Venezuelan military's aging Belgian FALs, which would be passed
on to the civilian reserves. He bought a license from the Russians to
build the first Kalashnikov factory in South America. In addition, he
ordered twenty-four sophisticated Sukhoi-30 fighter jets and fifteen
helicopters.

The United States called it an alarming
arms buildup, and warned
that some of the weapons could end up in the hands of Colombian guerrillas.
But Venezuela's military spent less than neighboring Colombia,
for instance, which expended $6.3 billion on defense in 2005, or Chile,
which laid out $3.9 billion the same year. And it spent far less than the
United States, whose defense bill in 2006 was estimated at $500 billion
including for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Chávez vowed to use
every means at his disposal to resist a
US invasion. The Venezuelan military
even enlisted the help of five hundred Indians with poison-tipped
arrows. "If they had to take a good shot at any invader," Chávez said,
"you'd be done for in thirty seconds, my dear gringo."

Besides an invasion by the United States, about the only real option
left for Chávez's domestic opponents to remove him from power was
assassination. It was not implausible. But the opposition may have also
realized that assassinating Chávez would not end Chavismo; it would
merely send the country into a cataclysmic civil war. Hundreds of thousands
of enraged Chávez supporters, many of them armed, would take
to the streets. "Venezuela will never go back to being governed by The
Squalid Ones," one Chavista told a reporter. "We won't go back to being
a country where the petrol money is used for a minority and not for
the barrios. So what will happen if Chávez is killed? Civil war. We are
ready."

The Bush administration's
antipathy to Chávez was driven by many
factors, although he believed the principal one was access to oil. Chávez
often warned that Venezuela would cut off supplies or blow up oil fields
Iraqi-style if the United States invaded his country or if he was assassinated,
presumably with the Americans' blessing. He was forging an
alternative economic model that bucked the Washington Consensus
free-market approach. He was setting a "dangerous" and "radical"
example that other
Third World countries might follow by challenging
US hegemony. Like the Sandinista experiment in Nicaragua in the
1980s, the Allende experiment in Chile in the 1970s, the Bosch experiment
in the Dominican Republic in the 1960s, the Arbenz experiment
in Guatemala in the 1950s, and virtually every other left-wing or progressive
project in Latin America since the dawn of the Monroe Doctrine
in 1823, the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela had to be crushed. The
North Americans had learned nothing from nearly two centuries of history
in their "backyard" or even
John F. Kennedy's famous observation
to Latin American diplomats in 1962: "Those who make peaceful revolution
impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." Chávez was
doing his best to keep his revolution peaceful in the face of relentless
US
hostility.

He first mentioned the phrase
twenty-first-century socialism
at the Fifth
World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in January 2005. It was a still-undefined
ideal and alternative to the neo-liberal model that had wrought
havoc in Latin America. It was something between "savage capitalism"
and failed communism. Whatever it was, it would not be a repeat of the
state socialism of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and even his beloved
Cuba. Chávez knew they were flawed, and that most Venezuelans would
not abide a clone of Castro's communism. But he was no fan of unbridled
capitalism, whose results he had seen firsthand in Venezuela and
throughout Latin America. "The capitalistic model is perverse," he said.
"It favors a minority and expropriates from the majority." His mission, he
added, was a "search for social justice, for equality."

The implementation of his new economic model did not always
follow a linear pattern. One state oil company manager compared it
to "changing a tire when the car is moving." But some clear elements
emerged as Chávez prepared for a reelection run in December 2006.
The most obvious ones were the social missions. The state was taking a
direct role in improving education, health care, food supplies, housing,
and other basics.

Another key element was the "endogenous development" model
aimed at making Venezuela self-sufficient. It was on display in the
Gramoven section of Catia, where PDVSA had converted an abandoned
oil storage facility for the cooperative where men and women made
shoes, T-shirts, and other items, and ran the business collectively.
Mission About-Face also included instruction that encouraged cooperative
solidarity over cutthroat capitalistic competition. The government
fostered the creation of thousands of similar cooperatives that produced
everything from corn to yogurt.

It also implemented something called "cogestion," or "co-management."
The idea was to help workers purchase shares and assume management
duties in sometimes failing companies. One of the most
prominent models was the obsolete state-owned Alcasa aluminum
plant in the industrial powerhouse of Ciudad Guayana. Workers
elected their own managers and transformed a top-down management
style into a roundtable format where laborers provided more input. The
state-owned electricity company Cadafe, which provided 60 percent of
Venezuela's energy, also implemented co-management.

Chávez extended the model to several failing or
idle factories, which
the government expropriated to keep alive. Among the best known
was the Venepal paper mill, a major paper and cardboard producer.
At its height it employed sixteen hundred workers and reigned over a
sprawling complex that included thousands of acres of land, houses, a
school, a baseball stadium, a hotel with a swimming pool, and its own
airfield.

Venepal's owners shut down the complex during the December
2002 to February 2003 oil strike, sending the company into a tailspin.
After a series of tumultuous reopenings and closings that included one
stint in which the workers occupied and ran the mill for seventy-seven
days, it went bankrupt for good in late 2004. Weeks later, in January
2005, Chávez announced that the government was nationalizing
Venepal. It paid the owners market value, helped restart the bankrupt
company with $6.8 million in credit, and handed over half the shares
to the workers. Chávez noted that the expropriation, while heralding a
new direction in the Bolivarian Revolution, was not the start of mass
nationalizations. "The expropriation today is an exception, it's not government
policy," he said, although his detractors were skeptical. The
workers ran the plant in "cogestion" style and envisioned using it to benefit
the revolution by producing paper or notebooks for the educational
missions. They dreamed of turning over the sports stadium and other
facilities to the community.

If Chávez was going to go after idle factories, he was also going
to go after idle land. As part of his twenty-first-century socialism, he
announced he was stepping up the land reform program that started
haltingly after the November 2001 decrees that led to the coup in April
2002. Just as Chávez wanted to use Venezuela's natural resources and
labor to manufacture its own goods, he wanted the country to become
self-sufficient in food. Despite having vast arable lands, Venezuela
imported 70 percent of its food. Landownership was wildly out of kilter.
By one government estimate, 5 percent of farmers and ranchers possessed
75 percent of the arable land. "Any self-respecting revolution
cannot permit such a situation," Chávez said. "It is a sign of feudalism,
it is pre-history."