Hugo! (9 page)

Chávez's passion to transform Venezuela was born not just from
reading books
about Bolívar. It was also forged by trips into the
barrios
of Caracas, where sewage trickled alongside the streets of some
neighborhoods and people lived in mountainside
ranchos
stacked precariously
on top of one another. In the status-conscious academy they
still told cadets to head to the more affluent eastern part of the city,
and to avoid taking public buses used by the masses. Chávez ignored
the instructions and spent Saturdays visiting a friend of his father's in
Catia. He wore his uniform, complete with white gloves, which surprised
many residents.

He started to see the reality of the world of the
ranchos
, and to listen
more to the songs of Alí Primera. Once he visited a family in the
wealthy
Prados del Este neighborhood. When he left he had to walk for miles
to get home because he had no money for a taxi and the family did not
offer him a ride. That was a problem he never encountered in the barrios.
"Among the poor there is so much love, so much solidarity. They share
their bread," he related. "Among the rich, there is coldness."

By some indications, Chávez harbored dreams of succeeding Bolívar
as Venezuela's savior from early on. After he marched in a ceremony honoring
the new president,
Carlos Andrés Pérez, he recorded in his personal
diary thoughts of one day reaching the heights of power too. "After
waiting a long time, the president arrived," he wrote on March 13, 1974,
at the age of nineteen. "When I look at him, I wish that one day I will
assume the responsibility of an entire country, the country of the Great
Bolívar."

He showed other signs he was on a mission. The following September
during a training exercise in the field he lamented how other young men
his age probably were living it up in discothèques. "If they knew what we
are doing they would say we're crazy," Chávez wrote. "But I'm not crazy.
I know very well what I am looking for and what I am doing and why
I'm sacrificing myself. I remember in these moments a thought of Che's:
'The present is the struggle. The future belongs to us.' "

By now he clearly possessed a well-developed social sensitivity borne
of his own impoverished childhood in Sabaneta and what he continued
to see all around him. In another diary entry he wrote of how "we passed
by the house where we drank coffee last night. The woman came out,
now with two children, and they put their hands out to say goodbye. I
saw the little ones with tremendous sadness, with bloated bellies, without
doubt full of parasites from eating so much dirt, barefoot, nude. With a
scene like that, I feel the blood boil in my veins, and I convince myself of
the need to do something, whatever it may be, for those people."

As he witnessed more and more of Venezuela's widespread poverty and
immersed himself in the life of Bolívar, contemporary efforts at liberation
in Latin America were sweeping other nations. One was Peru.
Chávez had turned into a budding expert on Bolívar and was often
asked to give talks to fellow cadets about his hero. He was among a
group informally known as the
Bolivarianos because of their devotion
to the Liberator. They even named their class for Bolívar, the first one
permitted that honor in decades. In late 1974 in his final year at the
academy, superiors selected Chávez and a dozen others to travel to Peru
for a special event: the
150th anniversary of the
battle of Ayacucho, witnessed
by Manuela Sáenz.

The day he learned he had been chosen for the trip, Chávez went
to the academy's library to start studying what was happening in Peru.
What he discovered caught his attention.

A nationalist military general named
Juan Velasco Alvarado was
leading a revolution called the
Plan Inca. In a pattern Chávez and his
allies would repeat two and a half decades later, a group of progressive
Peruvian officers angry over widespread corruption and the deteriorating
state of their country launched a coup in 1968. They overthrew
the civilian regime of its leader,
Fernando Belaúnde Terry. The officers
were disgusted by and distrustful of the country's main political party,
APRA, which he led.

Because of their experience fighting guerrillas in rural Peru, they
were also keenly aware of the abject poverty in the countryside. While
Velasco helped crush the guerrilla insurgency in the 1960s, he also
adopted much of their political program once in power. He nationalized
foreign oil companies and expropriated sugar haciendas. He
implemented extensive land reform. He made Quechua, the language
spoken by the dirt-poor indigenous population in the Andean altiplano,
an official language of the country. He expropriated conservative newspapers
and encouraged worker participation in the management of state
industries. To the annoyance of Washington, he also reestablished diplomatic
relations with Cuba and engaged in bilateral trade with the
Soviet Union.

Chávez landed in the middle of Velasco's Plan Inca, immersing
himself for several days in the revolutionary environment. He met
cadets from Peru, Chile, Colombia, Panama, and other countries. He
asked everyone he met about the Peru experience. He visited the homes
of the Peruvian cadets and went to parties where he met local girls. He
saw the impoverished conditions of the indigenous population when he
traveled to Ayacucho.

Toward the end of the trip, he and the other Venezuelan cadets
met Velasco himself at a reception for them at the government palace.
Velasco gave the cadets two books. One was
The Manifesto of the
Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces of Peru
. The other was a
small
blue booklet of speeches by Velasco called
La Revolución Nacional
Peruana
. The meeting made an impact on Chávez. "After listening to
Velasco, I drank up the books, even memorizing some speeches almost
completely," he recalled. For years afterward, he kept the little blue
book with him. Authorities eventually confiscated it and others after he
launched a coup attempt of his own seventeen years later.

Two years after Chávez's visit to Peru, Velasco's nationalist experiment
collapsed. It lacked popular support and it lacked money — its
foreign reserves were exhausted. Velasco had made two crucial mistakes.
First, his government consisted entirely of military officers; it had
no civilian presence. It also never reached beyond the immediate beneficiaries
of his reforms. They were lessons that did not go unnoticed
by Chávez. While the pro-leftist Velasco regime was derided by many
journalists and scholars, it did provide Chávez with one thing: his first
direct exposure to a progressive military regime, albeit one that differed
substantially from the project he eventually pursued. It also did not
escape his attention that Peru was a country where Bolívar's name was
still held in esteem.

Peru was not the only country in Latin America where progressive
military officers were leading revolutionary regimes. A similar experiment
was under way in
Panama, where
General Omar Torrijos also had
seized power in 1968. Chávez ended up studying with one of Torrijos's
sons at the military academy in Caracas, where he was sent for training,
since Panama did not have a university-level military school. The two
played baseball and became friends on the field and off. Intrigued
about the nationalistic experiment in Panama, Chávez asked him to
bring books about his father. Torrijos's son also gave him some photographs
showing the general giving a speech to peasants. Chávez was
impressed. Before he graduated, Chávez visited Panama, met Torrijos,
and saw the revolution in action.

Torrijos launched his rebellion for reasons similar to those that propelled
the military officers in Peru and, years later, Chávez himself. Torrijos
was disgusted by the corruption of the political elites and the income gap
between a tiny upper class and the poor masses. He also despised the military's
forced role in keeping the system in place and the virtual control
exercised over Panama by the United States. The Americans still controlled
the Panama Canal. It was sixty-five years after they had expropriated
a sweeping swath of Panama in 1903 to build the canal and then
turned large chunks of the country into US military bases.

In an interview in 1975 Torrijos explained why he launched the
coup that brought him to power. The Panamanian National Guard that
he led had turned into "the wage slaves of the oligarchy":

Our mission was to maintain the status quo, with blood and
thunder, with timely military deployment, or with a coup d'état. I
was forced to take part in acts of repression, indeed I got sick of so
much repression. As a direct result, the National Guard decided
to rebel, to decolonize the country. Above all, we wanted to solve
the problem of the canal, which for Panamanians was almost a
religion.

We were the sentries of the oligarchy until the mistakes of
the politicians became so serious that there was no prospect of
rectification. A generation of young officers, graduates of the
Panamanian Military School, decided not just to organize a coup
d'état, but to do away with the entire system of apparent "democracy"
in the country. People had grown accustomed to mixing
up politics with their economic activity, using their democratic
freedom in much the same way women use cosmetics.

As leader of Panama, Torrijos pushed through a land reform
program to try to benefit the peasants. He also won a pledge from
President Jimmy Carter in 1979 to turn over control of the canal to
the Panamanians two decades later. He didn't live to see his greatest
achievement fulfilled, though. Torrijos was killed in a plane crash in
1981, thirteen years after he seized power.

But his radical program of reform, along with the project in Peru,
served as a seductive example to the young Chávez. Torrijos and
Velasco were progressive military officers who used their power to try to
raise their country's living standards, regain their sovereignty from the
United States, and address issues of mass poverty. "One began to see
then that the military men weren't meant to massacre people, to wage
bloody coup d'états, to sever the rights of the people, but that rather
they could serve the people," Chávez told interviewer Agustín Blanco
Muñoz in 1995.

Torrijos and Velasco stood in stark contrast to other military leaders
who were also seizing power in
Latin America while Chávez was in the
military academy. On September 11, 1973, General Augusto
Pinochet
overthrew Chile's Salvador Allende, the first democratically elected
Marxist president of a nation in the Western Hemisphere. The United
States and the CIA backed the coup. Pinochet installed a regime that
"disappeared" at least three thousand people and maintained its grip
on power for seventeen years. In neighboring Argentina in 1976,
General Jorge Videla overthrew the government of María Estela, the
widow of Juan Perón. Videla imposed a junta that disappeared at least
thirty thousand people. Soldiers drugged some victims, put them on
military airplanes, and threw them from the air into the open sea.

At the time of the coup against
Allende, Chávez was training in
the mountains. He was horrified. Listening to the radio, he heard Fidel
Castro come on and denounce the putsch. One comment stuck with
him. "We recorded a phrase forever," Chávez recalled. " '
If every worker,
if every laborer, had had a rifle in his hands, the fascist coup in Chile
would not have happened.' Those words marked us so much, they
became a saying, a type of password that only we knew." After that,
when he and some secret allies in the military met, one often would
say, "If every worker, if every laborer . . ." The other would finish the
phrase.

The military uprisings throughout Latin America in the late 1960s
and early 1970s provided Chávez with a clear distinction between military
men who launched rebellions to liberate their people and those who
launched coups to oppress them. "We military men had the example
of Pinochet, which of course we did not share," Chávez later stated.
"He represented the military men who kill people, who destroy, who
decapitate, while those Peruvian military men spoke differently, spoke
of the people. Even though in the end that experience failed, unfortunately,
perhaps for lack of strategic clarity, at least they spoke and acted
differently."

As
graduation day at the military academy approached in July 1975,
Chávez was not thinking about launching a coup in Venezuela. He was
simply restless about what he saw around him — a land rich in oil with
millions of poor people and a corrupt political class in charge. His mind
was filled with the thoughts of Bolívar and other revolutionaries. His
soul was filled with increasing anger at the elites and sympathy for the
underclass. In the academy he was instructed to combat the guerrillas,
but now he was wondering if they were the real enemy.

"We studied
antiguerrilla tactics, but I was already
questioning
everything," he recalled:

I think that from the time I left the academy I was oriented toward
a revolutionary movement . . . The Hugo Chávez who entered
there was a kid from the hills, a
llanero
with aspirations of playing
professional baseball. Four years later, a second-lieutenant came
out who had taken the revolutionary path. Someone who didn't
have obligations to anyone, who didn't belong to any movement,
who was not enrolled in any party, but who knew very well where
I was headed.

Hugo Chávez thought he was lucky when he got his first assignment out
of the
military academy. In July 1975 he had graduated seventh out of a
class of sixty-seven who made it through the rigorous program. Most of
the original class of 375 didn't survive. Now Chávez was going back to
his home state of Barinas. He was named a communications officer at
one of thirteen counterinsurgency units the military established in the
early 1960s — "the violent decade"
as it is known in Venezuela. By the
time Chávez arrived in 1975, hardly any guerrillas were left to fight. He
would have plenty of time to dedicate to other endeavors.

With his first paycheck he splurged and rented a room in a hotel
near the Plaza Venezuela in Barinas. Then he bought a refrigerator, a
new bed, some furniture, a fan, and a big radio for Rosa Inés. When he
showed up at her house, she was thrilled by the gifts, if not by his new
life as a soldier.

While he was pleased to be home, Chávez was not greeted with
open arms by everyone. He was the first graduate of the Andrés
Bello Plan at the military academy assigned to the Manuel Cedeno
Hunters
Battalion in Barinas. Some old-guard officers did not take
kindly to the "college boy" Chávez. He clashed with one captain
who refused to call him lieutenant. Instead, in a mocking tone he
called him
licenciado
— the title used for college graduates. Chávez
refused to respond to the captain until he used his military rank.
Fresh out of the academy, the rebellious Chávez's troubles already
were beginning.

Chávez was immersing himself in the
military and coming to love
it, but he had not abandoned his passion for sports. He still played baseball
frequently. That was another thing the captain did not like. "He
told me, 'Are you a solider or a baseball player?' " Chávez recalled. "I
could never convince him you could do the two things at the same
time. He told me to dedicate myself to sports with the soldiers. 'I am
dedicated, Captain.' The team of the soldiers was good, but I wanted to
play in an organized league."

One day the manager of the Barinas team that played in a
national
league called Chávez and invited him to play that weekend in a game
against a team from Caracas that was coming to town. It was a big
game: The team was inaugurating a stadium that was to be used for a
national championship series later in the year. On top of that, the manager
needed a left-handed pitcher. Chávez doubted his superiors would
give him permission to play. So he went without telling them.

In the first inning in his first at-bat, Chávez cracked a hit. In his
second at-bat the pitcher threw a curve and Chávez knocked it out of the
park. It was the first home run in the new stadium. The crowd exploded
in cheers. So did Chávez's soldiers back in the barracks. Unknown to
Chávez, Radio Barinas was broadcasting the game live and his troops
were listening in. The radio announcer even identified Chávez as the
second lieutenant of the local battalion. It was after 9 P.M. The barracks
were supposed to be silent.

The ruckus woke up the captain. He angrily marched down to the
dormitory to see what was going on. "Turn on the light," he barked.
"What's happening here?" "Captain, we're happy because our commander
Chávez hit a home run," the soldiers said. What? Chávez
Frías? The second lieutenant was supposed to be in the barracks, not
out playing baseball.

The next day the captain tried to arrest Chávez for violating orders.
He hauled him into the commander's office. Chávez tried to talk his
way out of it. "Look, commander, here in this battalion there are some
ten second lieutenants," he said. "If you go at night to the Guayanesa —
a famous brothel in Barinas — you'll find them there with a bunch of
women and a bottle of rum. Or if you go to the military club, they'll be
there with their girlfriends, dancing and drinking. On the other hand,
I like sports. I can't understand why they are going to arrest me for
playing baseball, and for holding up high the name of the battalion that
you command."

The commander was listening. Chávez was still in his early twenties,
but he was charismatic and convincing. He continued. "Don't you
think it's better that I'm involved in baseball rather than women and
booze?" There wasn't much the commander could say. "You're right,"
he told Chávez. "I give you permission to play."

He kept on playing. A few times a week Chávez drove an old Volkswagen
from the barracks to the ball field and changed in the dugout from his
combat fatigues into his baseball uniform. He also got the chance to
expand his passion for sports throughout the battalion. His unit often
traveled to the Wild West-style border zone with Colombia to hunt
for whatever guerrillas still existed. The movement had largely died off
after Rafael Caldera assumed the presidency in 1969 and offered an
amnesty to any guerrillas willing to give up the armed struggle. Most
did. During the excursions to the border, as the officer in charge of
communications Chávez often stayed with the battalion's commander
or his top aide at the command posts. Chávez developed a good relationship
with the commander.

One day he asked Chávez to organize a sports program for the battalion.
In what he later described as a small-scale precursor to the "social
missions" he launched in hundreds of barrios as president, Chávez contacted
a friend of his who was the head of the National Institutes of
Sports in Barinas and recruited trainers to coach the soldiers for free.

The program was a big success. For two years straight the Cedeno's
soldiers were the interbattalion champions in baseball, soccer, volleyball,
basketball, and track and field. Chávez turned the treeless plain where
the men played baseball into an official-sized, snappy-looking diamond.
He procured white and red sand for free, and a truck to transport it. The
men chopped rectangles out of the grass for base paths. They erected
two dugouts, two small changing rooms, and a fence made of poles.
"When we finished, it was a tremendous stadium," Chávez later noted.
"We inaugurated it with a party that seemed like a festival." Chávez
believed it was the second best stadium in Barinas, outdone only by the
one where he played in the local league. The soldiers invited the public
to watch them play whenever they wanted.

His superiors also assigned the dynamic young second lieutenant
the task of recruiting candidates for the
military academy. Chávez regularly
visited the high schools of sprawling Barinas state — all ten of
them by now — giving talks to seniors and encouraging them to apply
to the academy. He took his evangelization campaign to the airwaves,
too, stopping by
Radio Barinas to put in his plug. Military superiors
in Caracas gave him and other recruiters a guide to read, but Chávez
injected his own commentaries. "I never told them they would have a
sure salary, but rather I spoke to them about
Bolívar and what [Cuban
independence hero José]
Martí said about him." He took to painting the
saying on the walls of the
barracks. He got some soldiers to whom he
gave painting classes to help.

Chávez also won permission to write a weekly column in the local
newspaper
El Espacio
— the space. He wrote about history and his
unit's activities — everything from playing sports to raising rabbits
and tending a tropical fruit orchard. In another precursor of his presidency,
Chávez wrote about a "civilian-military union." Besides the
weekly column, Chávez even found time to call the numbers at bingo
games and serve as master of ceremonies at the local beauty pageant.
His energy was endless.

Chávez's unit was dedicated to combating guerrillas, but he never
encountered any in Barinas. The closest he came occurred one day while
he was assigned to a sleepy outpost outside the capital and found an abandoned
car. It was a black Mercedes-Benz riddled with bullet holes. He
learned that it had belonged to a group of guerrillas killed in a shoot-out
with soldiers a decade earlier. Chávez pried open the trunk and found
a stash of moldy books, almost all of them Marxist. He brought them to
the military post, repaired them, and set up a small library.

He had plenty of time to read and think — the nights were long and
lonely in the llanos. There were books by Lenin, Mao, and other
leftists,
but the one that interested him the most was
The Times of Ezequiel
Zamora
. Chávez immersed himself in the books during the few months
he spent at the outpost, deepening the foundation that began with his
discovery of Bolívar in the military academy. "By the time I was 21 or 22,
I made myself a man of the left," he later commented.

His two years in Barinas also served as a testing ground for his
ideas about a new kind of soldier and a new kind of relationship with
society — inspired by Bolívar, Zamora, Torrijos, Velasco, and other figures.
"It was a very intense period, in which I was involved inside and
outside of the battalion in sports, journalism, recruiting students and
hosting the beauty pageants . . . The most important thing was that the
Battalion of Hunters started to have another profile. It was no longer
an antiguerrilla unit separated from the people, hated at times by the
people, but rather one whose boys participated in the athletic and cultural
life of Barinas."

With few guerrillas to fight against in Barinas, Chávez's unit was transferred
in 1977. In the eastern Venezuelan state of Anzoátegui a fresh outbreak of
guerrilla activity by the ultraleft
Bandera Roja, Red Flag, was cropping
up in the mountains. Chávez's new assignment soon provoked conflicts
within him about the role of the
military and some of its behavior.

Not long after his arrival he was left in charge of a remote command
post. One night a retired colonel from military intelligence
showed up with what he called "prisoners of war." They were three
skinny
campesinos
, their heads bowed and their faces full of fear. The
colonel wanted to spend the night, so Chávez sent them to an empty
tent. At 9 P.M. he ordered a small electric plant turned off, and the
camp went dark.

An hour later Chávez heard loud shouts coming from the tent. He
walked over and found the colonel beating the
campesinos
with a baseball
bat covered with a cloth. The colonel told Chávez to leave him
alone, he was busy. Chávez grabbed the bat and ordered him to stop.
He told the colonel to either end the torture or leave the camp. The colonel
left
.
Later he filed a report accusing Chávez of impeding military
intelligence work. Chávez had to fight off the threat of a court-martial
for instigating a military uprising and failing to recognize authority.

Chávez had done the right thing, yet he was the one who faced
punishment. The experience left him with questions about an institution
that on the one hand he loved but on the other was racked by the
same kind of
corruption that permeated most of Venezuelan society.
"That really affected me and I said to myself, 'Well, what kind of an
army is this that tortures these men? Even if they had been guerrillas,
there was no reason to torture them.' "

The seeds of Chávez's doubts about the military were planted back
in Barinas. He saw firsthand how the generalized corruption of the
political establishment was filtering into the armed forces. Ranking
officers fiddled with budgets and pilfered equipment for their own use
and profit. Even though their official salaries were modest, many lived
the high life, flying off to the Caribbean resort island of Margarita
on weekends, for instance. There were many ways to rob. One of the
easiest was through the food budget, as Chávez described in an interview
in 2004:

From the first days in Barinas I started to perceive the corruption,
immorality and arbitrariness of some superior officers. And
they wouldn't let you fight it in the barracks. One very vulnerable
point, for instance, was the food for the troops. When I was on
duty, I often went at 4 or 5 A.M. to the shack where they prepared
the food. I waited until the supplier's truck came, with the cheese
for breakfast and the meat for lunch. They put the food on the
scale. "How much for each soldier?" "Eighty grams for cheese,"
they told me, for example. You calculated it and most of the time
there was less than there was supposed to be. Or they delivered us
mountain boots that broke on the first march . . .

There were a million ways to rob. Later came the abuses in the
east against the supposed or real guerrillas. All this started to create
in me a feeling of resistance against the negligence and arbitrary
things I collided with in the barracks and that went beyond military
life. I started to look at the country and try to find explanations
for the contradictions I found myself in. Swirling around me were
situations, daily conflicts, that were very far from the Bolivarian
principles and the values we had been educated with. So this question
appeared that was uncomfortable for the military and political
elite, but someone obviously had to ask: What kind of a democracy
is this that enriches a minority and impoverishes the majority?

Chávez was supposed to be fighting the guerrillas. But by the time
he was sent on his first full-fledged counterinsurgency mission to hunt
guerrillas in the mountains of Anzoátegui in October 1977, he was
starting to feel some sympathy toward the people who were supposedly
the enemy. He kept a diary during the mission between October 21 and
November 18. It reveals a driven young officer drawn to Ernesto "Che"
Guevara, resentful of US
"imperialism," proud of Venezuelan
indigenous
culture, and convinced he is destined for greater things even
though at the moment his work is tedious.

"It's the first time I'm in a guerrilla operation," Chávez wrote on
October 22, 1977. "Here I am, fulfilling an insignificant role, that may be
immensely larger and productive." Three days later, he evoked Che —
"Vietnam. One and two Vietnams in Latin America." — and Bolívar
—
"Come. Return. Here . . . It could be." The next day, October 26,
he continued in the same vein. "This war is for years . . . I have to do
it. Even if it costs me my life. It doesn't matter. For this I was born.
How long can I be like this? I feel impotent. Unproductive. I must
prepare myself. To act." A day later, he added, "My people are stoic.
Passive. Who will light the flame? You can make a huge fire. The
wood is wet. There aren't the conditions. There aren't the conditions.
There aren't the conditions. Damn it! When will there be? Why not
create them? There aren't the conditions. Subjective, yes. Objective,
no. A huge excuse. We'll see each other there."