Chávez worshipped his fallen idol so fervently that five years after the incident, he continued to record the anniversary of the pitcher’s death in his diary.
At school, Hugo Chávez was just another kid in the crowd, but he did possess one special characteristic: he read anything and everything that was given to him—especially if it was given to him by Ruiz Guevara, his first political mentor.
“Another thing I was pretty insistent about,” notes Ruiz Guevara, “was the importance of reading Karl Marx, and Marxism in general. In the end, I said to them, it isn’t political science we’re talking about, it’s economic science, but you still have to deal with both things. You can’t practice politics without economics. There’s no way around it. And so I told them, listen, you better get Marxism into your brains, and good. Of course, they [the books] are a little dense.”
Ruiz also walked them through Venezuelan history. “I focused a lot on two figures in particular: Napoleón Sebastián Arteaga, a native of Barinas who was one of the ideologues behind the federal revolution (1840–50), and, of course, Ezequiel Zamora,” the latter being the foremost figure of Venezuelan federalism, an icon and recurring figure in President Chávez’s discourse. And naturally, Chávez’s impromptu instructor taught his pupil about Simón Bolívar, drawing him into the “religion” of that exclusively Venezuelan god. As Federico Ruiz recalls, “My father’s library was always the source from which Hugo Chávez drew his knowledge and understanding of Bolivarian thought…. Hugo always had this combined interest—and I mean long before he went off to the [military] academy, maybe it was just starting back then—in baseball and political thought, and in that area he already had begun to take an interest in Bolívar. And our house, most specifically my father, was where he found the most important repository of all this information. They would spend hours and hours just talking. I was a Marxist, a Communist, I didn’t understand. I thought it was a waste of time to sit around talking about Bolívar.”
Young Hugo stuck like glue to that library. The Ruiz house became the magnetic center and intellectual reference point of his adolescence. He devoured all kinds of books, from westerns to things like Los conceptos elementales del materialismo histórico (The Elemental Concepts of Historical Materialism).4
“I practically grew up with his [Ruiz Guevara’s] children,” Chávez once remarked, noting more specifically that the older of the two brothers was “something of a political guide for me.”5 The brother in question, Vladimir, an oddly affable yet terse man, recalls that “a kind of political empathy” sprung up between them.
Despite his bond with Vladimir and the friendly lessons imparted by the elder Ruiz, Chávez did not become active in the Communist Party, or any kind of political endeavor, for that matter. He may have had certain social concerns, he had read some books, but nothing more. He was not committed to any kind of revolutionary enterprise, and when he decided to join the army, he did so without any pretensions of infiltration.
“He didn’t go into the army under any kind of influence, the Communist Party had nothing to do with that. There is no question that by then he had a certain level of political education, no question at all, and that he had an understanding of the constructive function of the Red Army,” Ruiz Guevara acknowledges, but the veteran Communist does believe that in some sense, the young Chávez must have been somewhat inoculated by “that contact he had with us, with me and my sons, while he was in secondary school.”
The path toward the army barracks might have been otherwise. Once he became president, Hugo Chávez offered two versions of his academic inclinations. In a documentary about his life, broadcast by the state-run television station in August 2004, Chávez stated that when his father asked him what he wanted to study when he finished secondary school, he replied, “I’d like to study engineering.” He also discussed the topic in an interview, saying, “I told my father that I wanted to study the same thing as my brother: physics and mathematics.”6 In any event, his father brought up the possibility of securing Hugo a spot at the University of Mérida, where one of his uncles taught. “But I thought to myself, ‘Mérida? They don’t play baseball in Mérida! They play soccer there. No, for God’s sake, I’m not going to Mérida.’ And so you know what I did? I’ll never forget it. One day an officer from the military academy came to my school to give a lecture, it was mandatory attendance for all of us. I didn’t really want to go.” He knew, however, that the army had good coaches, and as he listened to the officer’s speech, an idea began to take shape.
“That’s it: that’s my future. I’m going to go to the military academy in Caracas, I’m going to get to know Caracas, and then I’ll quit the military academy and stay there.”7 His idea was to remain in the capital and focus all his energies on baseball. Hugo Chávez’s big dream was not the military life. The military was a shortcut; a picaresque South American solution, not a political utopia.
In 1998, Chávez declared that “social justice, equity, liberty, democracy, democratic revolution” were “the patriotic declarations I heard when I was a boy, in secondary school, back in Barinas right around the time MAS [Movement Toward Socialism] came about. That was right around the same year that I entered the army, in 1971.”8 He heard the call. But he wasn’t proclaiming it himself, at least not yet.
After he finished secondary school and moved on to the military academy, Hugo was hardly a Communist agent, as some have insinuated. Just seventeen years old in late 1971, he had never set foot in the Venezuelan capital, nor had he ever seen the sea. He was just a boy from the countryside who, like so many others, saw the armed forces as a way to make a living of some sort. That, at least, is the version offered by a close neighbor. “Hugo was one of three boys from our group who went to the military academy, and they all went for the same reason: because they were broke. In big families, that was one way of solving the situation for a boy like him.” His athletic prowess was what allowed him to enroll in the military academy with one failure on his record: chemistry. Manuel Díaz has frequently been referred to on Chávez’s weekly TV shows as the man who failed him in chemistry. Looking back on his former student, Díaz says that Chávez “would sit in the back of the class, at the back of the classroom. He was just another kid in the group.”
At the O’Leary secondary school he was just another face in the crowd. Average. Nothing about him back then could have foreshadowed what he would become. He was a happy, polite young man with a normal amount of self-confidence. In the eyes of his friend Federico, he was a kid with a strong character and a talent for organizing, someone who possessed a kind of intellectual compass that drew him toward certain authors and certain heroes and away from others. “The idea that someone laid a magic wand on him that turned him into the man he is today when he got his first uniform and pair of boots, that’s just not the way it was.” True enough: there was no magic wand. But there were most definitely several elements at play, not just the dreams of becoming a big baseball player. There were other things that young Hugo brought with him to the military academy. The book with which he started his new life, for one thing: The Diary of Che Guevara. That was the volume tucked under Chávez’s arm when he entered the military academy.
ON SUNDAY, AUGUST 8, 1971, a group of almost eighty young men lined up, with serious, anxious faces, in the courtyard of the military academy. Among them was a thin boy dressed in gray twill pants and a white khaki shirt, the cadet-in-training Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías.
“From those first six months, what I most remember about him was that he was an excellent baseball player, and he had a real way with words. He was always cracking jokes,” recalls his former classmate General Alcides Rondón. Their 1975 graduating class was the first in the history of the Venezuelan armed forces to graduate with degrees in military sciences and arts, a fact that would leave its mark on them as a group, and which would also incur some resentment from their predecessors, who would contemptuously refer to them as “the doctors.” Until then, the milita
ry academy had simply turned out high school graduates with military degrees. The new program, inaugurated during the first term of President Rafael Caldera, a Christian Democrat, was an attempt to professionalize the armed forces. The Venezuelan Army has always been made up of a strong working- and lower-class component, its barracks filled with men from humble backgrounds drawn by the real possibility of ascending to the highest ranks.
Hugo Chávez studied political theory from the very first year. Recalling his days in the military academy, Chávez once said:
We studied Political Science, and I began to feel motivated when we started studying military theory. I liked Mao a lot, and so I started reading a little more by him…. With that topic, I would read everything I could get my hands on…. I remember the book: The Military as an Agent of Social Change, by Claude Heller. I also read a lot about military strategy, Clausewitz on the history of war, and I also read Bolívar, the work of [ José Antonio] Páez, Napoleon, Hannibal.9
This new program, called the Plan Andrés Bello, was considered quite demanding by the students, but Hugo didn’t have too much trouble keeping up with things. He got along well with everyone in his class and made friends quite easily. On his first trip outside the academy as a cadet, Hugo was joined by his classmate Rafael Martínez Morales. A year older than Hugo and also a baseball fan, Rafael offered to act as Hugo’s guide around the capital of Venezuela, at the time a city of some 2.7 million inhabitants.10 But Caracas intimidated Hugo; it was a place where he would never quite feel at home.
At the military academy, Chávez was a competitive and, on occasion, rebellious student. He liked to make his opinion known, recalls Rondón, who says his classmates most definitely noticed Chávez’s “tremendous social calling.”
He also seems to have been rather apolitical: Rondón, at least, never heard him talk about the Central American guerrilla or spout left-wing opinions.
During his vacations, Hugo would return to the home of his grandmother, who would light candles and pray to the saints in the hopes of getting her grandson to leave the academy. “She didn’t like it one bit that I was in the military.”11 He would also visit his parents and his younger brothers, Narciso, Argenis, Aníbal, and Adelis, and every so often he would see his older brother, Adán, who had gone to study in Mérida. And he continued to visit the Ruiz family home.
“Whenever he came back home on vacation,” recalls Carmen Tirado, the ex-wife of José Esteban Ruiz Guevara, “he would come over here before he did anything else. The minute he arrived he would give me a big hug, because that’s the way he is, that’s how he’s always been. Then he would hug my mother and say to her, ‘Make me some coffee, your coffee, will you? Because the kind you make is the kind I like the best.’ And that’s the way he was with everyone in the house. Very affectionate. A man with his heart in the right place. All his life he was like that. José Esteban loved Hugo a great deal, gave him lessons in Marxism right in my house in Barinas, and Vladimir sat in, too, he studied history and was always ahead of things.” By this time the boys would hole up in Ruiz Guevara’s library, where there were three typewriters: one for the patriarch Ruiz Guevara, one for Vladimir, and one for Hugo. When she would return home from teaching school, Carmen would bring them coffee. Often, she would say to them, “Don’t you get tired of talking about communism? Good God, I have had it up to here with communism! I don’t want to hear another word about it.” According to Carmen, the three men would spend entire days like that, locked up in Ruiz Guevara’s library.
With his own family, however, Chávez seems to have been quite different from the young man he was at the Ruiz Guevara home. His mother, Elena, for example, swears that Hugo “didn’t like politics.” He didn’t even like talking “about those things” with his father, Hugo de los Reyes, an activist with the Christian Democrat party COPEI and director of education for the state of Barinas during the presidency of Luis Herrera Campins (1979–84). “He always said that you had to be neutral, not tie yourself down to anyone. He never got mixed up in things that involved his father or mother.” Elena does not believe that her son talked politics with the Ruiz family, nor does she acknowledge that they influenced him at all. “No, this thing grew inside of him, it was sent down to him by the power of our blessed God. My son did not inherit or learn anything from anyone. He cooked all this up himself, as they say, with the hand of God.”
As far as his mother is concerned, Hugo was just a typical boy who misbehaved every so often, nothing out of the ordinary—for example, stealing a chicken to make a stew along the riverside with his friends. Just a boy who sought approval from others and who occasionally overreacted when he felt rejected, as his friend Vladimir’s anecdote suggests: “One night we were out having a few drinks and we saw this girl. She was very pretty but she wouldn’t give us the time of day. Back then we drove around in an old jeep that belonged to Hugo’s father. Iván Mendoza, another friend of ours, was with us that night. Well, out in some bushes there was a dead donkey, and I don’t remember who came up with the idea, but we took that donkey’s head, which smelled like hell—can you even imagine it?—and left it for the girl at her doorstep, at around four in the morning. We woke up the entire block with that, and then we spent three whole days cleaning out the jeep.”
CHAPTER 3
An Existential Conflict
THE CHANGE FROM THE RURAL WORLD OF BARINAS TO CARACAS WAS an abrupt one for Chávez. In the capital, he no longer had the kind of time he had once had for drinking all night with his friends. At the academy, he had to get up at the crack of dawn. There he searched for definitions that would eventually bring him closer than ever to the Ruiz family, and once he graduated he began to make contacts with recalcitrant members of the military and prominent figures of the Venezuelan left, the most radical of whom maintained clandestine ties with the governments of Libya, Iraq, North Korea, and Algeria.
His first two years in the academy, however, went by without much drama. “I worked hard there, but it never felt like a burden to me,”1 he has said. Listening closely to his personal passions, Hugo Chávez combined his classes in military strategy and political theory with lessons in Venezuelan history, memorizing the long-winded proclamations of the South American Liberator Simón Bolívar that José Esteban Ruiz Guevara had taught him. Thanks to Ruiz Guevara, Chávez also fell under the spell of Ezequiel Zamora, a seminal figure in the history of the Venezuelan left whose motto was the unforgettable battle cry of “Popular elections, free land, and free men. Horror in the face of the oligarchy.”
Chávez rapidly acquired a taste for life in the military. “By the time I dressed in blue for the first time, I already felt like a soldier,”2 he once said. Once a goal, baseball was now a mere pastime. According to his own account, this was true from his very first year in the military academy, when he was given “a uniform, a gun, an area, close-order formation, marches, morning runs, studies in military science, and science in general…in short, I liked it. The courtyard. Bolívar in the background…. I was like a fish in water. It was as if I had discovered the essence or at least part of the essence of life, my true vocation.”3 This same enthusiasm bubbled forth in one of the letters he wrote to his grandmother, in which he described the military life as a great adventure:
Grandma, if you had only seen me firing away like a maniac in our maneuvers. First we worked on instinctive shooting—immediate action, daytime attack, infiltration, etc. Then we went on a march—120 kilometers—and at the end we performed a simulation of war. The enemy was attacking us at dawn, and we would have ended up soaking wet if we couldn’t pitch the mountain tents. We walked through little villages where the girls stared at us in awe and the little kids cried, they were so scared.4
In 1971, after being promoted to full-fledged cadet, Chávez was given two days’ leave. In his blue uniform and white gloves, he went alone to the old cemetery, the Cementerio General del Sur, in southern Caracas. “I had read that Látigo Chávez was buried there. And I went
because I had a knot inside of me, a kind of debt that came out of that oath, that prayer…. I was letting go of it, and now I wanted to be a soldier…. I felt bad about it.” Locating the spot where his old idol had been laid to rest, he prayed and asked him for forgiveness. “I started talking to the gravestone, with the spirit that penetrated everything there, talking to myself. It was as if I was saying to him, ‘Isaías, I’m not going down that path anymore. I’m a soldier now.’ And as I left the cemetery, I was free.”5
Why would Chávez, a young soldier, feel the need to explain his decisions to a dead idol? Beyond the possible psychoanalytic interpretations, events like this may suggest a way of viewing history as a series of hidden meanings, plans, and oaths that suggest the certainty that one has been tapped for a very great destiny.
Hugo Chávez continued playing baseball, and often, but as a diversion, not a vocation. He still painted occasionally, too, and would get up and sing every chance he got. A corrido llanero that begins “Furia se llamó el caballo” (Fury was the name of the horse) became a personal leitmotif of sorts. His fellow cadets, who considered him the best pitcher of the lot, baptized him “El Zurdo Furia”—the Left-handed Fury. Yet, despite all this, the decision had already been made. That, at least, is how Hugo Chávez, president, has processed his memories. “It wasn’t just that I felt like a soldier; at the academy my political motivation flourished, as well. I couldn’t pinpoint one specific moment, it was a process that began to replace everything that, until then, had been my dreams and my daily routine: baseball, painting, girls.”6
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