Hugo! (68 page)

His
alliance with Iran had other benefits. After the overthrow of
the shah and the hostage crisis of 1979, Iran remained in possession of
American-made military aircraft including F-111s, F-14s, and F-5 fighter
jets purchased when the shah was in power. Iran figured out how to
keep the jets flying by jury-rigging them. Now it might share the tips
with Chávez to keep Venezuela's F-16s and other jets in the air despite
the US refusal to sell it replacement parts.

Venezuela's blossoming alliance with Iran set off alarm bells in the
Bush administration. Unfounded allegations swirled that Venezuela might
send uranium from its Amazon jungles to Iran to help develop nuclear
power. Nightmare scenarios emerged of Islamic radicals and terrorists
establishing a beachhead in Venezuela. In reality, close relations between
Venezuela and
Muslim countries were nothing new, dating to the formation
of OPEC in Baghdad in 1960 largely through the efforts of Venezuelan
oil minister Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonso. Chávez's alliance with Iran differed
little from the close relationships of the United States with controversial
regimes as part of what Henry Kissinger called "realpolitik."

Still, Chávez's growing friendship with Ahmadinejad underscored
his radicalization fostered by the Bush administration's antagonism. If it
had followed the more moderate approach of the Clinton administration,
it seemed reasonable to ask whether Chávez would be courting some of
the most openly anti-US regimes on the planet. The reign of Otto Reich
and his cohorts made that a moot question. Their ultraconservative leftover
Cold War fanaticism helped radicalize and alienate Chávez. Reich's
successor, Roger Noriega, was replaced by career diplomat Thomas
Shannon in October 2005, but the policies toward Venezuela changed
little. One regional expert dubbed it "harpoon diplomacy."

Even as the United States got bogged down in the war in Iraq and oil
prices skyrocketed, it did not seek to ease tensions with Chávez. Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice referred to Venezuela and Cuba as Iran's
"sidekicks." She announced the United States was pursuing an "inoculation
strategy" in other countries in Latin America to limit
Venezuela's
influence. In August 2006 the Bush administration appointed longtime
CIA official
J. Patrick Maher to oversee intelligence-gathering operations
on Venezuela and Cuba. Previously, it had similar posts only for
Iran and North Korea.
Venezuela was now absurdly considered a threat
on the level of the "axis of evil."

Escalating US hostilities toward Chávez and his government
did not go unnoticed by ordinary Venezuelans. When Ambassador
William Brownfield, the replacement to Charles Shapiro, visited a
barrio in Caracas in April 2006 to donate baseball equipment, Chávez
supporters gathered outside the stadium chanting "Go home! Go
home!" As he left they showered his vehicle with eggs, tomatoes,
and onions. A dozen motorcyclists pursued Brownfield's car down a
highway, pelted it with food, and pounded on it when the ambassador
got stuck in traffic. It was a repeat of 1958, when Venezuelans enraged
by US support for the dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez nearly dragged
Vice President Richard Nixon out of his vehicle. The United States
had learned little from past mistakes.

Since Chávez was considered a threat to democracy and stability
in Latin America and was, with dubious evidence, included in the
2005 US
Country Report on Terrorism for "providing haven" to terrorists,
the United States moved to investigate his allies — even ones on
American college campuses. In March 2006 two
Los Angeles County
sheriff's deputies working with an FBI anti-terrorism task force showed
up at the office of Pomona College professor Miguel Tinker-Salas. The
Venezuelan-born Tinker-Salas, a professor of Latin American history,
was generally sympathetic toward Chávez. The deputies questioned him
for twenty-five minutes, asking about his possible ties to the Venezuelan
government and the local Venezuelan community. They even questioned
some of his students who happened to show up for office hours,
and examined cartoons on his office door.

The university's president,
David Oxtoby, said the interrogation
had a "chilling effect," while Tinker-Salas said his students felt
"intimidated." For some people, the grilling carried eerie overtones of
J. Edgar Hoover's FBI investigations of civil rights leaders such as
Martin Luther King Jr. and antiwar artists including John Lennon
during the 1960s
COINTEL program of covert
domestic spying, blackmail,
and intimidation.

Despite the US efforts to discredit Chávez and intimidate his supporters,
he rolled to victory in the December 2006 presidential election.
He racked up a record 63 percent to 37 percent landslide victory in an
election that was a foregone conclusion for months. His main opponent,
Zulia governor
Manuel Rosales, was a former Democratic Action
member who signed the infamous Carmona Decree wiping out democracy
during the April 2002 coup. Still living in its bubble, the opposition
was convinced they were going to win a stunning victory with Rosales.
When they lost, some pulled out the same card they'd used in the 2004
recall referendum — fraud.

But to his credit Rosales accepted his defeat, and for the first time
some of the opposition acknowledged that Chávez was the legitimately
elected president of the country, while they were the minority. It opened
the possibility that Venezuela could move beyond the coups and economic
sabotage that marked Chávez's first term and enter into a new era
of normal electoral politics.

Emboldened by his crushing triumph, Chávez's plans for a twenty-first-century
socialism took a sharp, defining turn after the election.
As he was about to be sworn in to start his second six-year term in
January 2007, he announced that the government would nationalize
several utilities in the
telecommunications, electricity, and natural
gas sectors. He also said that on May 1 it would take a majority share
in four multibillion-dollar oil projects in eastern Venezuela where
international companies had a stake. At the same time, Chávez said
he was dissolving the MVR and forming a single socialist party, the
United Socialist Party of Venezuela, to meld the disparate groups that
supported him. He also announced the government would not renew
the license for
RCTV television network when it expired in May 2007.
He sought to rule by decree for eighteen months on certain issues
including the economy. He shook up his cabinet again, bidding farewell
to two of his closest allies — Vice President José Vicente Rangel
and Aristóbulo Istúriz, who was replaced as education minister by
Chávez's brother Adán.

It all climaxed when Chávez was sworn in on January 10 and
repeated Fidel Castro's famous phrase, "Fatherland, socialism or death
— I swear it."

The phrase and the machine-gun-fast delivery of the announcements
over the course of a couple of weeks set off alarm bells in the
establishment, the media, and the Bush administration. They declared
it was proof positive Chávez was finally moving to install a Castro-style
dictatorship. Critics claimed he was eliminating free speech by refusing
to renew RCTV's license, crushing political dissent by forming a unified
party, and moving to a state command economy by nationalizing
key industries.

The critics, of course, told only part of the story. Chávez was nationalizing
only one
telecommunications company, CANTV, which had
been privatized in 1991 and which held a monopoly on landlines in
Venezuela. While CANTV had improved some services in a country
where the phones were so bad companies employed full-time secretaries
simply to dial all day long, it was also far from perfect. It often
took two years and a bribe to get a landline installed. The attacks on
Chávez also left out the fact the government generally planned to compensate
at fair market rate any companies it bought. That had been its
track record to date, although in the case
of CANTV it said it was also
going to take into account debts the company owed to workers and an
unspecified "technological debt" it owed the state. After the opposition
nearly drove him from office in 2003 by shutting down the crucial oil
industry, Chávez believed it prudent to take control of the country's key
strategic economic sectors.

The refusal to renew the RCTV license was not simply bare-faced
censorship but based on the network's history of refusing to pay taxes
and fines to the government and, most damningly, its blatant support
for and participation in the April 2002 coup against Chávez and the
oil strike later that year. The network conducted itself in a manner —
inciting people to overthrow a democratically elected president — that
would not last two minutes with the FCC in the United States. It took
Chávez's government five years to shut it down, although it was still free
to operate on cable or by satellite dish.

His move to form a single party also was misconstrued. He wasn't
outlawing any political parties. He was calling for those that supported
him to unite into one. The opposition was still free to operate. They, too,
were trying to form a new unified opposition party. Chávez had no reason
to shut them down. He could easily beat them in free and fair elections.

Still, there was no doubt Chávez's revolution was moving into its most
radical phase yet, and the jury was out as to where it would end. Even
some supporters questioned why he needed to rule by decree on certain
issues when the
National Assembly was controlled entirely by Chávistas.
They also were disturbed by the loss of respected cabinet members such
as Aristóbulo Istúriz and José Vincente Rangel, who had stood by him —
literally — during some of the most difficult moments of his presidency.

It was certainly possible Chávez would move to replicate Castro's
revolution in Venezuela, creating a totalitarian state where the government
controlled everything from oil production plants to ice cream parlors.
But it seemed more likely he was moving in the direction of a
mixed economy and social democracy, nationalizing some key strategic
industries, unifying his political base to move his new socialist project
forward, and keeping free speech and democratic avenues open.

As Chávez launched into another six-year term in 2007, the critical
question was whether his Bolivarian Revolution was
improving people's
lives in a sustainable way, or whether it was just a lot of archaic leftist hot
air. Another was whether Chávez was going to deepen the revolutionary
process by instilling more power in grassroots movements, or entomb
himself as an irreplaceable one-man show whose revolution would collapse
the day he left office. If he opened and included others with critical
points of view in the power circle, the revolution would last. If his
ego ran away and he retreated into a bubble of adulation and "yes men,"
it might well collapse.

Like any government, his was a mixed bag. His opponents could
point to clear shortcomings. One of the biggest was the war on corruption.
Chávez had taken office pledging to attack corruption that
was among the worst in the world. But eight years into the battle, he
had little to show. Corruption remained a way of life in Venezuela.
Allegations of wrongdoing even reached into a huge government sugar
cooperative in his home state of Barinas. Chávez argued that corruption
was not simply a
problem.
It was a
culture
in a country where many
people thought only fools did not grab what they could
.
Chávez called
it a "monster with a thousand heads." Slaying it was not easy. It might
take years, even generations. To the government's credit, it arrested several
military officers implicated in the Barinas sugar factory scandal.
But even some of Chávez's allies acknowledged that he needed to attack
corruption more aggressively.

His critics pointed to
soaring crime rates as another failure.
Murder rates that were high throughout the 1990s did not decrease
under Chávez's reign and by some accounts got worse. One report by
the
United Nations asserted that Venezuela had the highest number
of deaths by gunfire per capita in the entire world. The government
insisted it was making progress in the battle against crime by fighting
one of its causes, mass poverty, and reforming notoriously corrupt, illtrained,
and underpaid police forces. But like the rest of Latin America,
in Venezuela the rule of law remained limited and the judicial system
weak, with judges vulnerable to financial and political pressures.

Chávez's detractors and even some supporters also criticized him
for failing to dismantle the country's culture of patronage. In Venezuela
palanca
(connection) was often more important in landing a job in the
public or private sector than education or qualifications. So was loyalty
to the two ruling parties, Democratic Action and COPEI. Critics
claimed Chávez did little to change the
palanca
mentality, and that it
pervaded his own government. The most notorious example was the
"Tascón List." Obtained by pro-Chávez National Assembly member
Luis Tascón, it was a list of more than three million people who'd
signed the petitions calling for a recall against Chávez. Tascón originally
posted the list on a Web site to allow Chávez supporters to make
sure their names were not fraudulently included. But eventually people
in the government used it to deny Chávez opponents everything from
jobs to driver's licenses and passports. Opponents called it the kind
of political discrimination that plagued the old Venezuelan regimes
Chávez was elected to dismantle. Chávez's supporters responded that
concern about opposition sympathizers holding public sector jobs
wasn't unwarranted. Many had helped destabilize or sabotage the government
during the oil strike.