Hugo! (69 page)

In the end Tascón was suspended temporarily from Chávez's Fifth
Republic Movement, and the president himself called on the country
to "bury the list." But the episode raised questions about how much
the Bolivarian Revolution had transformed Venezuela's political culture.
Government incompetence, a perennial problem in Venezuela
and throughout Latin America, did not vanish.

Critics also complained about a
concentration of power in
Chávez's hands. They alleged that he "controlled" the government,
the courts, the attorney general, the military, the National Electoral
Council, and just about everything else. It was true Chávez wielded
tremendous influence in Venezuela as the leader of the Bolivarian
Revolution. But it wasn't all his doing, or all that different from other
countries. In the United States, the president appointed judges to the
Supreme Court — George W. Bush named like-minded conservatives.
The US president also appointed his own attorney general — John F.
Kennedy, for instance, named his brother Bobby. Venezuela's opposition
initially accepted the makeup of the electoral council. Even if it
was politicized, no one could seriously argue that Venezuela's elections
were not free and fair. It was true Chávez had an overwhelming
majority in the National Assembly — by December 2005
Chavistas
held all 167 seats. But that was because the opposition boycotted the
vote that month after realizing they would suffer an overwhelming
defeat. The complete dominance of the assembly by Chavistas gave
the opposition what they wanted — ammunition to charge they were
living in a dictatorship.

One of the biggest
weaknesses of the Bolivarian Revolution was the
cult of
personality surrounding Chávez. He was a one-man show when
it came to leading the movement, and it was a serious question what
would happen when the day came for him to depart from the scene.
One Caracas-based analyst sympathetic to Chávez, former Fulbright
scholar Gregory Wilpert, did not predict a rosy picture:

If Chávez were to disappear from one day to the next, the entire
movement would fall into a thousand pieces because it would
have lost its unifying glue. This extreme dependence on Chávez
also means that it is extremely difficult for Chávez supporters to
criticize Chávez because every criticism threatens to undermine
the project because it gives rhetorical ammunition to the opposition.
A further consequence is that the lack of criticism insulates
Chávez and makes it very difficult for him to test his ideas
and policies against the outside world. Criticism from within
the ranks is rarely present and criticism from outside the ranks
is easily dismissed. The result is a strong potential for wrongheaded
policies.

One example, Wilpert concluded, was the media responsibility law
that increased maximum penalties for insulting government officials.
He called it "anti-civil rights" and believed it "did not serve any useful
purpose." The polarized political scene in Venezuela was creating an
unhealthy environment among Chavistas where anyone with anything
critical to say was "against the revolution." Some people wondered
whether in the end Chávez would suffer Simón Bolívar's fate as the
Venezuelan president's populist project (and oil prices) came crashing
down of its own weight, and the masses who adored Chávez just as
quickly turned to despising him.

Yet while it was possible Chávez was going to turn into just another stereotypical
tin-pot dictator and prove Simón Bolívar's adage that "those
who serve the revolution plough the sea," he also had the potential to
go down as the greatest president in Venezuela's history. His supporters
believed his social missions were the country's first serious and massive
effort to redirect the oil resources to the majority poor. It was a
Venezuelan version of
FDR's New Deal.

Cynics dismissed the programs
as populism, contending that
they did little to improve people's lives in the short or long term. They
declared they were not part of a viable economic model offering sustainable
growth and breaking Venezuela's dependence on fluctuating
world oil prices and its people's dependence on the state. Some journalists
and analysts claimed that despite the billions of dollars of oil revenue
that rained down on Venezuela,
Chávez had been unable to make
a dent in
poverty. It seemed like irrefutable proof of his folly. It turned
out to be another example of misinformation.

The
poverty rate when Chávez entered office in 1999 was 42.8 percent,
and it had indeed surged to 55.1 percent by the second half of 2003.
That wasn't surprising. The April 2002 coup and the December 2002 oil
strike sent the economy into a tailspin. But once the opposition's efforts
to create turmoil ran out of steam, the economy boomed. It grew by
17.9 percent in 2004 and 9.3 percent in 2005 — the best rates in Latin
America. Poverty plummeted, falling to 37.9 percent by the second half
of 2005, nearly 5 percentage points lower than when Chávez began.
And it only counted cash income. If the food subsidies and free
health
care were included, the rate would be substantially lower. The rate kept
dropping as Chávez's social programs expanded. By 2006, not including
the subsidies it was 33 percent.

Other indicators also showed that life really was improving for
millions of impoverished Venezuelans. The
United Nations Human
Development Index for Venezuela improved from 0.765 to 0.772
between 1999 and 2005. And that data was based largely on figures
from 2003, when the economy was still in deep recession. The numbers
would likely only get better as more data came in from subsequent
years with the economy on the rebound. "The Chávez government
has only had three years of
stability and control over the oil industry,"
economist Mark Weisbrot stated in November 2006. "In that time they
have dramatically increased access to health care and education . . .
I don't know of anywhere else in the hemisphere that has made these
kinds of gains."

Chávez embarked on or completed a series of major
public works
projects that culminated in late 2006 just before the presidential election.
They included everything from high-technology health centers to
petrochemical plants to a cable car system to ferry denizens of Caracas's
mountainside barrios down to the underground subway. He cut the
ribbon on a $1.2 billion, two-and-a-half-mile bridge that spanned the
Orinoco River and took five years to build. He celebrated the completion
of an $850 million subway line between the bedroom community
of Los Teques and Caracas. He sat in the driver's seat as the country's
first new railroad in seventy years made its inaugural trip to another
bedroom community, Cua. He even
proposed a
transcontinental railroad
stretching all the way south to Argentina.

To deepen the process of participatory democracy, he encouraged
the formation of thousands of
neighborhood communal councils
empowered to implement health, education, transportation, housing,
and agriculture projects at the local level. The government planned to
pump at least $1.8 billion into the councils in 2007.

The new spirit was symbolized by millions of people who proudly
walked around with pocket-sized copies of the 1999 constitution, the
blueprint for the Bolivarian Revolution. Many could cite specific articles
and claimed credit for certain sections their barrios suggested to
the constitutional assembly. Quotations from the constitution appeared
on packages of rice, beans, flour, and other foods in the Mercal markets.
One Manhattan College
religious studies professor visiting Venezuela
on a "reality tour" noted that the constitution's
human rights agenda
bore "a strong resemblance to
Catholic social teachings," including the
recently released "Compendium of Social Doctrine of the Church."
Despite allegations of a dictatorship, Venezuela was alive with politics
at the grassroots level.

Leading it all, Chávez barely had time to sleep; he was intensely
engaged in his presidency and curious about every detail down to
the arcane. At his cabinet meetings, there was no doubt who was in
charge. While debate might be open, in the end it was clear he was
the man making the decisions.

Five years after his divorce from his second wife, Chávez was still
an unmarried man. He didn't have the time or the lifestyle for a conventional
marriage. He contended his great love was the Venezuelan
people and his revolution. Often late at night after most people had
left the presidential palace, he would stay on, poring over reports and
reading books until 2 or 3 A.M. He would keep a television turned on
with the volume low. When a talk program caught his attention, it
wasn't unusual for it to be interrupted by a special phone call — the
president was on the line.

Chávez's old military academy mentor, General Jacinto Pérez
Arcay, had once told him he shouldn't complain about being alone.
Bolívar lived the same way after his wife died shortly after their
wedding, leaving him with the time and the drive to liberate Latin
America. "If she hadn't died," Pérez told him, "Bolívar would have
been nothing more than the mayor of San Mateo," the small village
where he had his hacienda.

Still, a tough-talking, hard-core Chávez street leader named Lina
Ron wrote a newspaper column in January 2007 urging Chávez to get
married — and to pick fellow revolutionary and former vice foreign
minister Mari Pili Hernández as his bride. "We need a First Lady
now!" Ron wrote. "My comandante [Chávez] is alone and he can't
continue that way." She added that Hernández should leave her jealousies
at the door, because Chávez "is the man most loved by the
women of this country."

Married or not, even if Chávez's run as president were to end immediately,
he would have left his mark on Venezuela. The country would
never be the same. He had broken the back of a privileged light-skinned
minority that for decades had run the country almost like a mafia. The
old order was dying. A new one was being born. Some believed that
with or without Chávez, the process would continue. He was simply the
symbol of a historic shift of power to the long-exploited brown-skinned
majority poor, who were now in control of their country for the first
time since the Spanish conquest five centuries ago.

With Fidel Castro suffering a major
health crisis in August 2006,
Chávez was his heir
apparent as the chief leader of the left in Latin
America and perhaps in the world. In ways, he already surpassed Castro
as he trotted the globe and preached the revolution that began with
Bolívar nearly two centuries earlier. He turned fifty-three in July 2007,
still a relatively young man. With Venezuela's opposition
self-destructed,
Chávez just kept getting stronger. He vowed to hold a
referendum on
eliminating term limits so the Bolivarian Revolution's indispensable
man could keep governing. Even his old comrade in arms, Francisco
Arias Cárdenas, who helped lead the 1992 coup and later turned against
him, abandoned the opposition and returned to the fold. He became
Venezuela's
ambassador to the
United Nations in 2006 and led the fight
for a seat on the Security Council.

On
Election Day, December 3, 2006, thousands of Chávez's supporters
streamed out of their homes at 3 A.M. and blasted tapes of reveille
from loudspeakers mounted on trucks to wake their neighbors and
head to the voting booths before dawn. The turnout nationwide broke
a record — nearly 75 percent of eligible voters. The combination of
Chávez's social programs and charisma — and the billions of petrodollars
raining down on the country — was too much for any opponent
to overcome. That night after his crushing 26 percentage point victory,
Chávez stood on the balcony at Miraflores Palace and addressed
a screaming throng who had waited hours in a torrential downpour.
"This is another defeat for the empire of Mr. Danger. This is another
defeat for the devil who wants to dominate the world," Chávez thundered.
Venezuelans, he declared, had "voted for 21st century socialism,
this new era of Socialist Democracy."

A new, more radical phase of the revolution was about to begin.
Chávez was a figure unlike any other in Venezuela's history. He was a
role model to millions, a teetotaling, history-loving, book-addicted, fire-spewing
workaholic from the underclass who was fighting to overturn
decades of injustice. "This is the real thing," stated
Juanita Ortega, an
American nun and nurse with fifty years' experience in barrios in the
country. "The revolution will last as long as there is no outside interference."

Chávez's supporters vowed to defend him at any cost. Even
their lives. He was giving hope to millions of Venezuelans, and that was
something they had not felt in a long, long time.

Like most of the world, I first heard of Hugo Chávez in February 1992
when he launched his failed coup attempt. I was in the process of
moving to Venezuela, initially as a Catholic Peace Corps-style worker
with a group called Maryknoll, the foreign mission branch of the US
Catholic Church.

I was in language school in Cochabamba, Bolivia, when Chávez led
the coup, and arrived to stay in Venezuela that July. By October, I moved
into a barrio in Barquisimeto, where I spent the next eighteen months.

The experience gave me a face-to-face view of life among the poor
majority in Venezuela, an invaluable lesson for a journalist. Many of my
neighbors in the
parte alta,
or upper part, of
El Trompillo inhabited shacks
made of corrugated tin sheets or even, as in the case of my neighbor across
the street, the kind of mud hut that Hugo Chávez grew up in.

One day the neighbor told me she had not eaten in two days, had
had only coffee to drink, and had no food for her three children. I
bought her a bundle of groceries.

The barrio of dusty dirt roads lacked running water and indoor toilets.
Like many residents, I bathed with a bucket in an outdoor "shower"
that consisted of four walls of corrugated tin. A water truck came by a
couple of times a week and filled barrels we kept in our front yards.

Six weeks after my
arrival, the sun had not yet risen one morning
when I heard what sounded like someone banging a pole into the
ground somewhere outside my small concrete house. It turned out the
noise was from people shooting off fireworks. Another coup attempt
was underway. It was November 27, 1992. Civilian collaborators in
another part of the barrio were heralding the rebellion. Before long, my
neighbors gathered on the dirt street. We all watched as security forces
stormed houses in the hillside barrio where the fireworks originated.
Frightened, the neighbors ran back inside their homes. I figured I'd
better do the same.

By later that day we could see rebel and loyalist jet fighters engaged
in dogfights above the city. Some pilots ejected from their planes,
landing in another barrio on the other side of the city. I wasn't sure
what to make of it all. I was helping a neighbor with English lessons that
day, and more experienced Maryknollers swung by in a jeep to instruct
me to stay indoors. By that evening, the shaken government of President
Carlos Andrés Pérez declared martial law. Anyone caught on the streets
after dark faced the possibility of being shot.

I first met Chávez in 1994, shortly after he was released from prison.
By then I had fully resumed my career as a journalist, joining the
Caracas bureau of the
Associated Press, which was certainly no bastion
of Chávez supporters and where I worked until 2000. I soon moved into
the upscale Altamira/Los Palos Grandes neighborhood, which in time
was to become an intense hotbed of opposition to Chávez, with people
furiously banging pots from their windows at night to call for his ouster.
The neighborhood sat at the foot of the lush Avila mountain range,
and featured elegant apartment buildings, trendy restaurants, and well-stocked
grocery stores. Diplomats, international businessmen, and other
high-powered people inhabited the area. It was the polar opposite of El
Trompillo. It was my home for the next five years.

I met El Comandante in a Chinese restaurant in the trendy Las
Mercedes section of Caracas a few days after his release, landing one of
the first post-prison interviews granted to a foreign correspondent. His
entourage that day included his son, Hugo, and lawyer Manuel Quijada.
There wasn't much time for questions. His cell phone wouldn't stop
ringing, and well-wishers kept coming by.

A year or so later I interviewed him again in the offices of an architect
in the Chuao section who was lending him the space. After Chávez
laid out some elaborate plans for the country, an aide and former military
officer, Luis Alfonso Dávila, asked what I made of it all. I wasn't
quite sure what to say. By then Chávez was being dismissed by the
establishment — including the media to which I belonged — as a semicrazed
has-been who was little more than a passing fad.

By 1998, when he was running for president, we sat down again. He
was surging in the polls and stood a real chance of winning; the establishment
had misjudged what was happening at the grassroots level.
The majority poor had never really forgotten El Comandante. As his
brother Adán, one of his closest collaborators, told me in April 2007,
"That was really a hurricane, a hurricane that has not stopped."

After chronicling Chávez's rise to power and the early part of his presidency,
I returned to the United States but kept close tabs on Venezuela,
making regular visits. In 2003, I began researching this book.

Several years had passed since I last had a chance to speak with
Chávez personally, and I wanted to visit with him again.

However, getting to him was no longer easy. I spent months trying
to arrange an interview. I lobbied aides, Venezuela's ambassador to the
United Nations, its ambassador to Washington, friends who had friends
who were supposedly connected, anyone I could think of. Most of it got
me nowhere. Some of the aides came and went. But by April 2007, I was
summoned to Caracas. I was finally getting close.

Chávez stood me up on the appointed day of our interview, so I
headed over to see his longtime vice president, José Vicente Rangel,
who had recently left the government.

Sitting in a living room filled with artwork and statues at his home
in the Alta Florida neighborhood, Rangel recounted for me the events
of the 2002 coup. He had been at Chávez's side for most of the night
of April 11. He said one of the most remarkable things was Chávez's
controlled, methodical demeanor, which was in sharp contrast to the
chaos, tension, and bomb threats that surrounded him. At one point
the president asked to be left alone to contemplate what he ought to do.
Rangel said it was characteristic of Chávez to ask for privacy whenever
he had a major decision to make.

"He was very serene, unbelievably serene," Rangel said. "He is very
contradictory in this aspect, because he is a very hyperactive, emotional
man. But in special circumstances he acts with an incredible
serenity, coldly. That's why the decisions he's taken until now have
been very good. I think one of the reasons that he removes himself is
precisely to avoid letting the pressures of the moment mark the path
he is going to take."

Later, in the evening, I met Adán Chávez at his spacious office
at the Education Ministry he now headed. The president's brother
was not known for giving interviews, much less to journalists from
the United States. He said he had a half-hour window. We ended up
speaking for an hour.

I recounted some of his
history of joining the MIR and Douglas
Bravo's PRV, and then his role as a link between Bravo and his brother
Hugo. I asked if it was all true. He seemed surprised that I was familiar
with details of his past that even many Venezuelans were not aware of,
and said that it was all indeed accurate. Hugo, he said, "was immediately
ready to make contact" with Bravo when he suggested the idea. They
finally met in early 1979, he said, adding, "It was important, because
it was the beginning of this process of constructing a civilian-military
movement."

He spoke a little about their childhood in Sabaneta, about how his
parents traveled between there and Los Rastrojos in the early years,
about his birth and that of Hugo in Rosa Inés's mud hut. He denied a
report that surfaced in a book originally published in Venezuela that
claimed Hugo and his mother had at one point not spoken for at least
two years. He talked about the Bolivarian movement's evolution in the
1990s, and Chávez's crucial decision in 1997 to run for
president.

As we got up to leave, I asked Adán to put in a word with his brother
for me, since I still wasn't convinced an interview would actually happen.
He said he would, but I didn't know if he was just being polite.

A few days later, after it looked like the interview with the president
would fall through, I was aboard the presidential jet with
Hugo Chávez
sitting in front of me. His office was smaller than I had expected, given
his critics' uproar over his purchase of the $65 million Airbus 319. The
aircraft in general seemed relatively modest for a presidential jet that
took Chávez around the world. It was certainly nowhere near the size of
Air Force One. It contained around forty seats for passengers. The gold
faucets and other objects lambasted by his opponents turned out to be
simply gold-colored.

Chávez was still wearing the
trademark red shirt he'd worn on the
final day of the summit he had arranged that weekend in Barquisimeto
with Bolivan president Evo Morales, Nicaraguan president Daniel
Ortega, and other leaders. He was accompanied by his oldest daughter,
Rosa, who sat on a sofa in the room.

Chávez said he was glad to see me again. He was friendly but
slightly reserved, a bit more formal than usual. There was no trademark
bear hug. I wondered if he was wary of talking to a US journalist, given
the lambasting he regularly received in the international media.

We sat down at a table in his office. Chávez had certainly changed
in the years since I had covered him in the 1990s. He was no longer the
flaquito,
the skinny one, who was so thin and big-footed in his youth
that his friends dubbed him
Tribilin,
Goofy. He face was fuller, his body
more robust.

I asked him how he had changed as a person and as a government
administrator since becoming president eight years earlier — and surviving
everything from the coup to the oil strike to the recall referendum.
Assassination was a real possibility, and security around him
was tight.

With Rosa listening from the couch, Chávez answered that he had
not changed at all. Rather, he had resisted great pressures from powerful
forces to cave in to the elites and abandon his revolutionary project to
transform Venezuela in the name of the poor. "I think I continue to be
the same — the same subversive, the same man who has spent years and
years thinking about how to help, how to be useful, how to lead a people
to a better destiny. . . . I'm a subversive in Miraflores. I'm always thinking
how to subvert the old order, how to turn things upside down."

I asked him to discuss the events and experiences that had played
the biggest role in his formation, and he started by talking about the
Bible and Jesus Christ. When he was an altar boy in Sabaneta the parish
priest had him read the Bible. One thing Chávez said he could never
understand was "why Jesus was born among animals in a manger, with
so many other places and him being the son of God." His grandmother,
Rosa Inés, tried to explain, saying that "when the poor die, we are going
to heaven." He told me, "But I couldn't understand that, why you had to
die to go to heaven. Why couldn't we live better here?"

Later in life, he continued, he began to understand why Jesus was
born in such dire circumstances. "Christ came to be born among the
poorest of the poor, to look for the road of liberation."

Chávez said books were the other great
influence of his early life.
From a young age he was a voracious reader. "I'm a reading addict,"
he told me. "I can't live without it, like someone who is addicted to
drugs." One of the first books he embraced was a set of reference books
his father brought from Caracas. The first chapter was called
"How to
Triumph in Life." It ended by saying, "Triumphing in life comes above
all else from being useful to society."

Chávez's detractors depict him as a power-hungry demagogue and
dictator who is destroying the country, but the president insisted that
that simple saying was one of the guiding lights of his life — and that
it cut against the grain of capitalist societies' core belief: you are successful
if you are rich.

"From when I was very young I learned to be happy helping others,"
he said. "I am happy when I give a hand to someone to help them pick
themselves up. . . . If someone doesn't have a pencil and I break mine
in half and give one to them, I'm happy." He crossed his arms across his
chest and smiled broadly to show his pleasure at the thought.

He recalled that since his family and neighbors in Sabaneta did
not have a television — and in fact he never watched television until he
arrived in Caracas as a cadet in the early 1970s, saving himself from the
"poison" of TV as a child — he often listened to radio soap operas. One
of his favorite characters was
El Gavilan — The Hawk — a man who
was dressed in black and was a just avenger for the poor.

Later, Chávez said, he discovered Bolívar, Zamora, and Maisanta.
He pulled out the century-old medallion that once belonged to Pedro
Pérez Delgado and that he had worn around his neck ever since a relative
had given it to him while he was in prison.

I asked Chávez how he responded to allegations that he is
power-mad
and is installing a dictatorship in Venezuela. "What kind of tyrant
takes pains to teach the people to read and write?" he said, referring to
the social missions. What kind of tyrant hands out weapons to thousands
of civilians to form military reserves? "I've never had a vocation
for power," he said. "Power for what?" Rather than a dictator, he insisted,
"I represent an antipower, a clash with the power of the empire."

If his main goal was simply amassing power for himself, he said, he
never would have continued pursuing a project on behalf of Venezuela's
majority poor that almost got him killed. "I have been close to the line
of death several times," he said. "If I had a concept simply of personal
power I never would have come close to that line."