Hugo! (70 page)

He spoke about the night during the 2002 coup when he was taken
from Fort Tiuna to Turiamo. He said word had gone out through the
Venezuelan and international media that he had resigned the presidency,
and "the only way I could be stopped from denying it was by
killing me. . . . The coup leaders didn't know what to do with me. The
order arrived from Miraflores that I had to be killed." He charged that
Pedro Carmona "gave the order that everything should appear to be an
accident" — an allegation Carmona has denied.

When Chávez arrived at Turiamo around midnight he did not know
where he was. As they reached some warehouses and a small house by the
sea, mercenaries sent by the coup leaders showed up in a helicopter and
were prepared to kill him, Chávez said. "I prayed, I asked God's blessing
for my children, I looked at a star in the sky, I held my cross. . . . I was
ready."

He said he recalled Che Guevara at the moment of his death in
the jungles of Bolivia, when the wounded revolutionary told his killer
to hold his fire so he could stand up and show him "how a man dies."
"I remembered Che. I said to myself, I'm not going to ask for clemency,
I'm not going to turn myself into a coward," Chávez said.

At the moment when he believed the mercenaries were about to
kill him, he confronted them, asking what did they think they were
going to do the next day, where would they hide, what would they tell
the people who asked what had happened to him? When some of the
soldiers assigned to the base realized what was going on, one of them
intervened and told the mercenaries, "If you kill this man here, we are
all going to kill one another." The comment "fell like a bomb in that
solitude," Chávez recalled, and ended the standoff. The loyalist soldiers
seized control of the situation and whisked Chávez away. The mercenaries
were forced to leave in the helicopter. One of the loyalists told
Chávez, "Don't worry. Nothing is going to happen to you. We guarantee
your life."

Rescued from
execution, Chávez was brought to the base's infirmary
— the only room with air conditioning — and a military doctor and
nurse tended to him, bringing him some medications. When the doctor
left momentarily, the nurse — tears streaming down her face — told
Chávez she had always wanted to meet him, "but not like this."

That was the encounter that triggered something in Chávez. By the
next morning, Saturday April 13, he became convinced that
el pueblo
was going to react to his disappearance and that he would return to
power.

By the time Chávez finished telling me about these events, the
plane had landed, and his cell phone was already ringing. I wanted to
confirm one point quickly before the interview ended. What year did
he return to the military academy to start giving classes? He jogged his
memory, told me 1981, and then answered another quick question: How
exactly did he organize the conspiracy in the academy?

He talked about his activities as an instructor at the academy, how
"I started it in silence, with a lot of discipline, with a lot of attention
to the boys" — the cadets. He explained how he initially focused his
recruiting efforts on the one hundred or so cadets directly under his
command. Then he turned to the approximately three hundred he
taught in classes. Then he got involved in as many activities as he could
to increase contact, from staging historical theater acts to organizing
sports teams.

It was time to go. Chávez's ministers and other aides were on the
tarmac waiting for him to finish the interview. He stood up, embraced
Rosa, spoke to her softly, and said good-bye. Then, to my surprise, he
invited me to accompany him in his car on the ride to Caracas.

I got into the backseat with Chávez. The only other people in the car
were the driver and an aide — a colonel who was the only military
woman to take part in Chávez's 1992 coup. A couple of vehicles and
guards on motorcycles drove in front of us. The rest of the caravan
carrying the ministers followed. Chávez offered me some cookies and
a small plastic cup of soda. It was close to 11 P.M. None of us had eaten
dinner.

The president seemed to warm up to me a bit more, and leaned
over as he gave me something of a guided tour on the way up Mount
Avila into Caracas. He spoke softly and seemed a bit like a proud father
describing the attributes of his newborn.

He pointed out how his government had removed tollbooths that
workers heading from the coast up to Caracas had had to negotiate each
day. He also noted how the government had taken down light posts located
on the highway median and placed them off to the side on a hilltop,
where they did a better job of illuminating the road. As we drove through
the two tunnels that cut through the mountains on the way to Caracas,
he boasted about cleaning the inside walls, which for years were poorly
ventilated and had been filthy — "like a cave belonging to wolves."

A minute later he was talking about his grand plans to create a
"socialist city" just off the highway in the Avila mountain range. Suddenly
he ordered the driver to stop so he could show me the entrance, which
set off a flurry of radio calls in the caravan. It turned out to be the wrong
spot, and we continued on.

Chávez explained that his vision of a socialist city included a place
where human beings and not motor vehicles would reign. People would
be required to park their cars outside the city, then walk five hundred
yards or so to the town itself. The city would be built to coexist
in harmony with nature. Solar and wind energy would be utilized.
Cooperatives, farms with animals, tourism, and small businesses would
pump the economy.

The idea was to draw people out of the teeming, dangerous barrios
of Caracas into an area between the capital and the Caribbean
coast where they could live in a new, more humane place. As they left
their
ranchos
in Caracas, the government would bulldoze the shacks to
reduce density.

Venezuelan and Cuban workers already were busy carving terraces
out of the mountainside where the government planned to build thirty
to forty thousand homes, Chávez said. "It's a new Caracas." He said work
was also underway on another socialist city to the east of Caracas, on the
way to Guarenas. About twenty thousand houses were planned for that
location. He said he hoped to expand the idea around the country.

Like many of his projects, I thought, this one could be a stroke of
genius or a stillborn case of fanciful dreaming.

Not long after we reached Caracas, we drove down the main street
of the sprawling barrio of Catia and pulled into Miraflores. I figured
that was the end of the interview, but Chávez surprised me again by
inviting me to climb a long set of stairs outside the palace that led to a
helicopter landing pad and a small garden on a hilltop. It was the same
set of stairs he'd descended early in the morning on April 14, 2002,
when he returned to the palace at the end of the coup.

The spot atop the hill offered a spectacular view of the Twenty-third
of January barrio high-rises constructed by the dictator Marcos
Pérez Jiménez in the 1950s. We could also see hundreds of
ranchos
that
covered the landscape. Beyond that on another hill stood the Museo
Histórico Militar that served as Chávez's base of operations during the
1992 coup. In the middle of the tableau was a Catholic church with a
cross atop it and a statue of Christ holding his arms open. Chávez had
ordered the church and the museum to be illuminated at night.

He commented that he enjoyed the same view from the "balcony
of the people" on the second floor of Miraflores. "If I had not occupied
that point during that dawn," he said, referring to the military museum,
"I would not be here" in the palace. "From there, '92, six years later, I
arrived here. It has tremendous significance for me." He added that the
view also summed up some of the
key elements of his life: Military,
God, and
el pueblo.

It was close to midnight, and we walked back down the stairs.
Chávez promised to see me the next day around noon to finish the
interview.

Noon came and went the next day. I heard nothing from Miraflores.
Shortly after five my cell phone rang: Be at the palace at 8 P.M. The
president will see you.

I showed up at the appointed hour, and then waited three hours.
Chávez was not in the palace, but at the Teresa Carreño Theater near
the Hilton Hotel. He was making a flurry of announcements on the
eve of
International Workers' Day, May 1. I watched him on an aide's
television.

Chávez said the government was raising the
minimum wage to the
equivalent of $286 a month, which when free food coupons were added
in gave Venezuela the highest minimum wage in Latin America. He
also said housewives would be eligible for government pensions when
they turn sixty-five, because their labor at home was as legitimate was
any worker's.

On top of that, Chávez announced that Venezuela would withdraw
its
membership from the International Monetary Fund and the World
Bank. Other countries, such as Ecuador, which blamed the institutions
for the region's economic debacles, were making similar moves. Critics
said the withdrawal might not be so simple since it might technically
imply a default on some Venezuelan bonds.

The president made yet another arresting announcement: He
wanted to reduce the legal work day from eight hours to six by 2010. He
noted that the massacred workers of the
Chicago Haymarket riots in the
nineteenth century had fought to achieve the eight-hour workday more
than a century ago, and many nations had not advanced beyond that.

His speech ended sometime after 9 P.M., and he made his way back
to the palace. I was finally summoned to the second floor of Miraflores.
An aide walked me through his spacious
despacho,
main office, and
then turned into a short hallway where a small elevator took us upstairs.
We walked down another hall, and onto a semi-enclosed outdoor patio
where Chávez was sitting alone at a table. He wore a green shirt and a
kind of green safari jacket. He seemed relaxed.

I was struck again by Chávez's demeanor. In contrast to the booming
orator that transfixed the masses at public rallies and who, according to
his detractors, would not listen to anyone, he was soft-spoken and attentive
to my questions. He had a pile of reports on his desk.

A television set was attached to the roof, and Chávez was keeping
a close eye on it. After the announcements earlier that evening, he was
preparing for another bit of history: the Venezuelan takeover of four
major oil projects in the eastern
Orinoco River basin. The government
was not kicking the foreign companies out, but was taking majority control
of the projects — at least a 60-percent share. The companies could
continue as minority partners if they wanted.

The move unleashed a wave of criticism; critics accused Chávez
of turning Venezuela into a communistic state where the government
was going to control all aspects of the economy and life in general.
Texas
senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, head of the Senate Republican
Policy Committee, declared that the seizures were "the latest and most
ominous scheme out of Fidel Castro's playbook." US State Department
spokesman Sean McCormack said Venezuela's negotiations with the
oil companies over terms of the takeover "will proceed as they will,"
but blasted Chávez's other actions, including the withdrawal from the
IMF and World Bank, saying Chávez was digging Venezuela into a
hole.

"You can't take the shovel out of the man's hand," McCormack
said. "He just keeps on digging. And sadly, it's the Venezuelan people
who are victimized by this."

In reality, Chávez's moves were hardly radical. Since the
nationalization
of Venezuela's oil industry by Carlos Andrés Pérez, in 1976,
until the early 1990s, Venezuela enjoyed complete control of its oil
operations. The government's oil "opening" in the early 1990s allowed
some foreign companies to come back in, but Chávez was now asserting
majority control of the projects on behalf of the government. Lost in
the debate was the fact that countries such as Mexico and Saudi Arabia
allowed
no
foreign ownership participation of any kind in their oil industries,
and that 75 percent of the world's oil reserves were controlled by
state companies like Venezuela's pdvsa. Would the United States, for
instance, allow foreign companies to have majority control over its strategic
natural resources?

Chávez defended the takeover to me, saying that Venezuela was
now regaining some of the sovereignty it had surrendered in the 1990s
over what new studies indicated might be the largest crude reserves in
the world — larger even than Saudi Arabia's. Chávez added that many
of the Venezuelan workers involved in the projects "were exploited by
the transnationals." He said many were hired on three-month contracts
so the companies would not have to pay legally required benefits, and
then rehired continually when the contracts expired. "Now the situation
will change radically," Chávez said. The nearly four thousand workers
would go on the pdvsa payroll, and receive full salaries and benefits.

The oil companies had complained that they had invested some
$20 billion in developing the Orinoco heavy tar belt, which requires
specialized technology, and were now losing out on their investment.
But Chávez said that for years the companies had gotten away with
paying almost no taxes. Even with the new arrangement, the situation
remained profitable enough that most decided to stay.

There was still time before midnight struck, so I launched into a
series of questions we hadn't had time to address the night before. I
asked Chávez when he came up with the idea of twenty-first-century
socialism. Was this a card he had hidden for years, merely biding time
before pulling it out, kind of like when Fidel Castro declared his revolution
socialist a couple of years into his reign?