Redeemers (59 page)

Marcos preferred to avoid such issues. His concerns were different, and directed to the future: “The balance sheet of my role is still pending.” And he was right. In 1994 there had been dead on both sides. (Even Marcos, obsessed as he was with death, sometimes seemed to forget them.) But at the beginning of the new century, his historical balance turned remarkably positive. Without the upheaval of January 1, 1994, the national government would not have provided schools, roads, and medical services to those communities, at least not to anywhere near the extent it did.

And then, in the year 2000, forty million Mexicans went to the polls and ended seventy years of one-party rule. It was a triumph for the idea of democracy but Marcos did not join the tide of change, though a million Mexicans had signed their names to a request that he move from his guerrilla bastion in the jungle to an open life in politics. What options remained to him? In 2001 a Zapatista “long march” arrived in Mexico City and enjoyed a carnival of media coverage; its indigenous spokes people gave speeches before the Mexican Congress. Marcos himself declared in an interview with Gabriel García Márquez that armed resistance was no longer viable. The march was his moment of glory, but it also demystified his image and his movement, and made him ordinary. And public opinion noted and approved President Vicente Fox's change in policy from that of his predecessors. Behaving like a true fox, the president unilaterally withdrew the army from its posts in the area of conflict. But the Zapatistas did not negotiate. Even the legislation on autonomous indigenous rights that Congress approved was rejected by them.

Marcos was still free to attempt a transformation even more exciting than the one he underwent in the 1990s from conventional guerrilla to Internet guerrilla. He could become a political leader of the Mexican left, which was sorely in need of leaders. In that role he could have pressed for an economic policy that addressed the needs of the poor, and especially the poorest of the poor, the Indians of Mexico. Marcos preferred to cling to his myth, until the myth began to wither. And the leadership of the left fell to a man no less charismatic, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. When Marcos refused to support López Obrador and even verbally attacked him (thereby surely stripping him of votes that could very well have given him the victory in a very close election), much of the left simply turned their backs on the subcomandante. For the Zapatistas, certainly, the alternative was grim: the public, in the early years of the new century, was tiring of them. And as democracy in Mexico continued its process of consolidation, the movement became increasingly isolated.

Marcos remained popular among young Mexicans, but as a celebrity, not as a role model. Other leaders of Mexican and Latin American rebellion had died violently at the hands of the enemy (Túpac Amaru II, Che Guevara) or at the hands of their own comrades. Marcos chose the most romantic ending: disappearance into anonymity, the passage into legend. For many reasons—political, philosophical, generational, cultural—Marcos (now fifty-four years old, living more or less anonymously in Mexico City) could have led the Zapatistas into the civic life of the nation. But instead he held fast to Mariátegui's gospel of indigenist redemption. In 2009 an old friend of his sent a photo of him without the mask to various Mexican newspapers. Nobody cared.

And the lack of attention is due to the many changes, for better or for worse, that have come to the state of Chiapas and to Mexico. On the good side, there has been palpable improvement in Chiapas, economically evident in the growth of public works, politically in the advance of democracy. The PRI and the PRD have won power in various townships and in some cases, a peaceful state of joint government exists between one of these parties and the Zapatistas. But many Chiapenecos have emigrated to the United States. And those who remain are preoccupied with the same problems as the rest of Mexico: crime, insecurity, and the ravages of the drug trade.

They say that Marcos is ill and that he frequently visits La Realidad, but the village is very different without international floodlights. And Mexico is different today, harsher than that era fifteen years ago but more sensitive to the condition of the Indians. That newfound sensitivity is due, in large measure, to the repercussions of January 1, 1994, and the flamboyant passage (and performance) of Subcomandante Marcos across the stage of history.

PART VI

The Postmodern Caudillo

 

 

12

Hugo Chávez

THE HERO WORSHIPPER

Turning history into scripture is an old practice in Latin America. Within the region's Catholic countries, stories of the past, with their heroes and their villains, became instant paraphrases of the Holy Story, complete with martyrologies, holy days, and iconic representations of secular saints. But in Venezuela, where the presence of the Church has been less fecund and influential than in Mexico, Peru, or Ecuador, the transformation of the profane into the sanctified has been more intense, perhaps because of the lack of “competition” with strictly religious luminaries such as the Virgin of Guadalupe or the patron saints of Mexican towns. Venezuela's civic worship is also unusual in being monotheistic. It has centered on the life and practical “miracles” of a single deified man: Simón Bolívar, the Liberator.

In addition to parades, speeches, ceremonies, competitions, inaugurations, commemorations, unveilings of monuments, official publications, and other formal events in veneration of Bolívar that successive Venezuelan governments of all political varieties have instituted, there arose, already in 1842, a spontaneous and enduring popular cult of Bolívar just twelve years after his death. It was fueled by a kind of collective penitence for the sin of letting Bolívar die on Colombian soil. And so the Liberator came to be relentlessly exalted by the same nation that, through rejecting his project for a Gran Colombia (which would have unified Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Panama), caused him to be ostracized. This sacralization of Bolívar was blessed within the Church itself, by the cardinal of Caracas in 1980, who declared from the seat of his diocese that all of Venezuela's misfortunes, the countless civil wars (more than 150 during the 150 years of independence), and the dictatorships of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (longer periods of ferocity than in any other country of Latin America) all sprang from the “treason” that was originally committed against Bolívar.

Official, popular, manufactured, spontaneous, classical, romantic, nationalist, internationalist, military, civil, religious, mythic, Venezuelan, Andean, Ibero-American, Pan-American, universal: the cult of Bolívar became the common bond of Venezuelans, the sacrament of their society. Other sanctified heroes shared the altar, but they stood in Bolívar's shadow, and they were not always beloved: Francisco de Miranda, an early champion of independence; Antonio José de Sucre, Bolívar's loyal grand marshal; and General José Antonio Páez (Bolívar's right hand in war, his adversary in peace, and the founder of the Republic of Venezuela). Even in scholarly circles his immaculate image prevailed until the 1960s. When, in 1916, a young doctor dared to suggest that Bolívar was probably an epileptic, he was harshly attacked for this gesture of “patriotic atheism” against the Bolivarian faith—an “august, admirable, sublime religion . . . How is it possible, that a Venezuelan should ascend to the empyrean to remove Bolívar from Caesar's side, and relegate him to the inferno, beside Caligula?”

From a very young age, Hugo Chávez revered Simón Bolívar. And not just Bolívar. He had always looked for heroes. In his modest childhood in the small western plains city of Barinas, Chávez also intensely admired Chávez—that is, Néstor “El Látigo” (the Whip) Chávez, a famous Venezuelan pitcher who was killed in a plane crash after a brief passage through major-league baseball. Chávez recounts that, when he entered the Military Academy in 1971 at the age of seventeen, he visited the tomb of El Látigo to ask forgiveness for his diminished devotion. New heroes were now demanding his attention: Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. His personal pantheon also included Ezequiel Zamora (the popular leader in the Federal War of the mid-nineteenth century) and his own great-grandfather, a rebel of the early twentieth century with a somewhat murky career.

In Chávez's epic imagination, the interesting thing about this past inhabited by heroes was that they spoke directly to him and ended up being reincarnated in him. “Let me tell you something I've never told anyone,” he confessed to several friends. “I'm the reincarnation of Ezequiel Zamora.” (Some say he has always feared he would die like Zamora, by treason and a bullet to the head.)

With his contemporary heroes too, he craved direct contact. In an interview in 2005, President Chávez recalled his first encounters with Fidel Castro. “My God, I want to meet Fidel when I get out and I'm free to talk,” he prayed in prison, after his failed coup attempt in February 1992, “to tell him who I am and what I think.” Their first meeting took place in Havana in December 1994. Castro stood waiting for him in person at the foot of the steps descending from the airplane. From then on, Chávez came to see Castro “as a father,” and his children saw him as a grandfather:

 

The day he came to visit Grandma's little house in Sabaneta, he had to stoop. It's a low door, and he's a giant. I saw it with my own eyes, didn't I? And I remarked on it to [my brother] Adan. Seeing him there, as if it was a dream: “this is like something out of a García Márquez novel.” In other words, forty years after the first time I heard the name Fidel Castro, there he was in the house where we were raised . . . My God!

 

During the fifteen years in which he patiently plotted his revolutionary conspiracy, forging his spiritual links between his own genealogy and the nation's heroes, Hugo Chávez would convert himself into a being cast in the mold of García Márquez's magic realism. He would be the redemption, the climax—the supreme text prophesied by other texts—of the Sacred Scripture of Venezuelan history.

 

CHÁVEZ THE
cadet was a celebrant of this Bolivarian religion, not in a ceremonial or academic context but through his biography and his sense of theater. In 1974, as testified in his writings collected in 1992 under the title
Un brazalete tricolor
(A Three-Colored Armband), his outbursts of lyricism about the Liberator went beyond the reverential imagery (pictorial, verbal, sculptural) of neoclassical history, beyond the romantic and patriotic equation of Bolívar with Alexander, Caesar, or Napoléon, beyond even the grandiloquent official images of “the apotheosis of the demigod of South America.” In that year Chávez the cadet wrote an encomium for the hero that began with this curious sentence: “On June 23, on the eve of the anniversary of the great Battle . . . of Carabobo, Simón Bolívar gave birth to the nation.” As the Venezuelan historian Elías Pino Iturrieta has explained, Bolívar was, for young Chávez, God the Father; the nation was the Virgin; the Christ child—the offspring of this transcendental couple—was the liberating army, which, in a leap across the centuries, was the very army to which Chávez belonged. In 1978 this notion would produce a natural corollary: the Bolivarian army would return to the historical stage in order to redeem the honor “of the humiliated mother,” to continue the country's historical struggle for Independence and complete the work still to be done:

 

It [the army] is your child, Venezuela—and it gathers the people of the nation to its breast to instruct them and teach them to love and defend you . . . It is your seed, Fatherland . . . It is your reflection, country of heroes . . . your glorious reflection. As the years go by, our Army must be the inevitable projection of the social, economic, political, and cultural development of our people.

 

After that first very personal, filial, but still collective contact with the memory of Bolívar, his metahistorical father, Hugo Chávez gave a provocative, almost revolutionary speech on December 17, 1983, the anniversary of Bolívar's death. It earned him a reprimand from his superiors and was soon followed by the staging of a scene that has become famous in Venezuela: the Oath of the Samán de Güere. He urged four of his friends to put on a theatrical performance in which he connected his revolutionary project to the memory of the national hero. Under a very old tree, the Samán de Güere, beneath which, according to legend, Bolívar once sat down to rest, he repeated the oath that Bolívar took in 1805, in the presence of his mentor Simón Rodríguez, at the Monte Sacro in Rome: “I swear by the God of my fathers, I swear by my fatherland, I swear on my honor, that my soul will not be at peace nor my arm at rest until I see the chains broken that oppress us and oppress the people through the will of the powerful.” The year 1805 had been conflated with 1983. Chávez changed two words: instead of “the powerful,” Bolívar's oration had restricted his range to “Spanish power.”

In the military exercises under his command, Chávez would order his subordinates to begin the day with a thought selected at random from a book of Bolívar's sayings, and he repeated these phrases like quotations from a timeless and all-purpose gospel. His revolutionary movement had the same initials as Bolívar. In the first interview that he gave after his coup, gazing out from prison at the National Pantheon, under whose central altar the remains of his hero rest, the comandante uttered these words: “Bolívar and I led a coup d'état. Bolívar and I want the country to change.” Those were not metaphors. He was speaking in earnest.

When he got out of prison in 1994, fully equipped with the imagery of history he had absorbed into his own person, Chávez threw himself into the political activism that five years later would lead him to the presidency by democratic election. But in meetings with his ministers, he then initiated one of those disconcerting and idiosyncratic practices that have become a natural component of the Chávez narrative. He would place a chair at the head of the table. No one was allowed to sit there. He would stare at the chair with concentration. Only he could hear the elusive guest: Bolívar the Liberator.

Though his admiration for Bolívar was genuine, his appropriation of the myth was carefully and thoughtfully considered. In interviews from the period, Chávez referred to the “mystification” of which “Bolívar the man” was the object. He then proclaimed himself “a revolutionary first and a Bolivarian second.” Yet his revolution needed an ideology, and he needed one, too. And immediately. At the very least there had to be an “ideological banner.” He found it in his own cult of the hero. The Nicaraguan revolutionaries had adopted the figure of Augusto César Sandino, the legendary nationalist guerrilla of the 1920s. In Mexico, Subcomandante Marcos had recently invoked Emiliano Zapata with great success. But Bolívar meant much more to the nation of Venezuela: he was more than a hero, he was a demigod. Chávez would declare: “If the myth of Bolívar helps to get people and ideas moving, that's good . . .” When Chávez as president first visited Havana, Fidel Castro would also give his blessing to this credo. In a very Fidelian statement, he would say, “If today's struggles are called Bolivarianism, I agree, and if they're called Christianity, I agree.” But even Castro could never imagine the extremes to which Hugo Chávez, once securely in power, would carry the cult of his hero.

 

IN LATIN
America, poets are prophets. When he took office in February 1999, Chávez quoted some famous lines from Pablo Neruda, made the quotation the linchpin of his address, and built around it the most impressive theological-political performance ever seen in Latin America. The sermon was a long discourse larded with citations from Bolívar applied to the present day, full of religious shadings and grandiloquent turns that were extreme even by the permissive standards of Latin American rhetoric. Chávez heralded (in the Christian sense) his arrival in power as something greater than just an electoral or political or even historical triumph. It was still more: a
parousia
, the return to life of the dead and of the nation, the resurrection announced by the apostle Pablo (Neruda):

 

It is Bolívar who comes back to life every hundred years.

He wakes every hundred years when the peoples awaken . . .

 

Later in the same speech, Chávez turned to the idea of historical guilt, centering it around his country's overwhelming poverty, and decreeing a new historical truth: the republic that was born in 1830 by “betraying the Condor” (another of Bolívar's holy names) had brought down upon itself a curse that lasted nearly 170 years. The nuances of this republican past (which, despite wars and dictatorships, also included periods of civil liberty and material progress) were left out of the picture, condemned to the same hell as liberal democracy, which, against all odds, had been a growing presence in Venezuela since 1959, confronting coups of the right and guerrillas of the left but—with respect for the rule of law, civil liberties, and the electoral process—encouraging social and economic progress. For Chávez, this “odious political model” also had to die. Venezuela was now face-to-face with the greatest miracle, the “return of the Condor,” the “resurrection . . . which is nothing other than advancing the social revolution under the luminous beacon of Bolívar.” It was his first official unveiling of the new Bolívar, a revolutionary Bolívar, already in embryo a socialist Bolívar.

The initial civic rite of this “national re-foundation” was a baptism of the nation blessed by the presence of Bolívar incarnate, “our infinite Father,” “genius of America,” “shining star,” “shaper of republics,” “truly great hero of our times,” “true master of this process.” In honor of Bolívar, Chávez declared, the Republic of Venezuela would add the word “Bolivarian” to its name, and the new constitution would be “based on the doctrine of Bolívar,” omniscient, eternal, infallible.

From then on, the ceremonies of the cult of Bolívar—in official propaganda, in the media, in the marketplace—showed no limits. The Chavista masses would gather in the plazas of Caracas to stage the scene of the Oath of the Samán de Güere. They would chant “Watch out! Watch out! Watch out! Bolívar's sword is moving across Latin America! Bolívar lives! Bolívar goes on living!” The masses would hear Bolívar speaking through their president and across the centuries on every conceivable theme: oil, the labor movement, social revolution, the beneficence and necessity of socialism. They would begin to shop for Bolivarian plantains and rice, buy Bolivarian chickens, cut their hair at Bolivarian barbershops. “We have boldly sought a new frame of reference,” explained Chávez, in an interview he gave in the 1990s. “Original and all our own: Bolivarianism.”