Chávez is known for speaking his mind. “He is totally transparent,” Maripili Hernández swears. But at other times, he seems the opposite. It is never easy to read him. Following his party’s victory in the Constituent Assembly, resulting in a governmental hegemony, he had this to say: “We will not see a concentration of power in the Assembly.” That, however, was precisely what people saw when the presidency of the Assembly went to his right-hand man, Luis Miquilena.
“These are just a few ideas for discussion,” Chávez said, handing over a ninety-page volume of proposals for the new Constitution. “I stayed up late writing them all down.” Nobody would doubt that: Hugo Chávez is a man of little sleep.
“Caffeine is his great drug,” says his friend and onetime psychiatrist Edmundo Chirinos. “He drinks twenty-six to thirty cups of black coffee a day.” A hyperactive insomniac, he has been known to sleep three or four hours a night and wake up in mint condition. Energetic. Ready for battle.
“He is a tireless worker. At the pace he goes, nobody can keep up with him. He works twenty-five hours a day,” says Hernández.
With few exceptions, everything the president proposed was included in the new Constitution. The progovernment constituents worked for four months straight, like industrious tailors determined to design and execute the most perfectly appointed custom-made suit for their president. Among the many points they wove in: reelection; the extension of the presidential term from five to six years, which would give Chávez the opportunity to remain in power for twelve years uninterrupted; the creation of a Moral Power, based on an idea of Simón Bolívar; suffrage for military personnel; and even a new name for the country: what was once the Republic of Venezuela was now the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Another novel and rather risky proposal was slipped in as well: the possibility of revoking the jobs of public employees, including the head of state himself. At least two of Chávez’s initial proposals either were not granted by the team drafting the new constitution or were withdrawn by the president himself: the provision for runoffs in the presidential elections, and the creation of various vice presidencies that would answer to a first vice presidency. In the end, the Constitution was approved via popular referendum, although there would not be any fireworks this time around.
“The hour of our nation has arrived. Of turning, once again, to a national referendum, the second in our entire history as a republic…it will be another magnificent day for history,”6 announced Chávez, battling the flu as he issued a brief address to the nation the day before the vote. Unable to resist temptation, he then offered his countrymen a dramatic quote by Bolívar, to convince them to get out and vote despite the dismal weather: “If nature opposes us, we will fight against her and force her to obey us.” The Liberator had uttered these very same words after the Catholic Church had suggested that the 1812 earthquake that leveled Caracas had been God’s way of punishing them for the independence movement. And just as if Chávez had cast a spell on Mother Nature, a thunderstorm of biblical proportions crashed down on Wednesday, December 15. More than half of the voting public stayed home, resulting in a 55 percent abstention rate.
The birth of the Bolivarian Constitution was a difficult one, and though it was approved with 71 percent of the votes of 45 percent of the electorate, it was not a night for celebration. In fact, few Venezuelans were particularly concerned about the Constitution at that moment. They were far more focused on what was going on half an hour outside of Caracas, where one side of the graceful mountain that separates the city from the sea crumbled away. The avalanche occurred on the side that faces the water, home to the people of the state of Vargas.
The early dawn hours of the following day were spent counting victims rather than votes. The death toll reached the thousands. The coastal city of La Guaira, the capital of Vargas state, was virtually buried beneath the mud, which broke free and slid down the slopes of Mount Avila, dragging massive boulders along with it. The country’s main port was leveled entirely. The main airport had to be shut down. It was the most devastating natural tragedy ever to hit the country. and on that day Venezuelans forgot about the differences that separated them, about whether they were pro-Chávez or anti-Chávez. Everyone waited for the president to declare a state of emergency, and the sleepless populace asked themselves the same question over and over again: Where was Chávez? Hypotheses abounded: some said he was on La Orchila, the island where Venezuelan presidents vacation, and couldn’t get into town because of the bad weather. Nobody knew. The following day, the newspapers did not help to clear up the mystery.
On Thursday, around noon, a stunned Chávez finally turned up on television in a military uniform after flying over what was now an unrecognizable coastline. With a religious timbre to his voice, Chávez said that twenty-five thousand victims were being transferred to parks and gymnasiums and that it was still not possible to calculate the number of dead and missing. He explained that he had ordered the Directorate for Intelligence and Prevention Services and the Metropolitan Police to stop any and all looting attempts in the area. He expressed his pain, and was then speechless.
It was the saddest December in Venezuelan memory, and the country’s citizens canceled their end-of-millennium parties and donated all they could. The casualty estimates were in the range of 15,000 dead, more than 90,000 displaced, and some 400,000 people in need of medical attention. During those nights, Hugo Chávez found neither solace nor advice in his bedside book, El oráculo del guerrero (The Oracle of the Warrior). For a few weeks, he would sheathe his sword, as he liked to say, but it wouldn’t be long before he would brandish it again, for the benefit of the gringos, the communications media, the Church, and anyone else who crossed him—or whom he suspected of doing so.
THE TRAGEDY KICKED UP a lot of mud, far beyond Vargas state. Thirty-six hours after the catastrophe, Washington sent four Chinook helicopters, eight Black Hawks, two Galaxies, and 146 soldiers to join the aerial aid shuttle.
“The U.S. got here in a day and a half,” recalls General Raúl Salazar, who was defense minister at the time. Salazar had solicited the aid of Bill Clinton’s government, after receiving authorization from Chávez. “The head of the Southern Command, Charles Wilhelm, came to visit the area on December 23. We began to discuss the idea, which I communicated to the president, of taking a look at the future of La Guaira, because it would take ten years and ten billion dollars to recover.” The U.S. engineers, who would take care of building the paths and the reservoirs for a considerable stretch of this area, would arrive by boat. “It was all going very well until January 2, when I received a call from the president at four in the morning, ordering me to stop the entire thing. That has to weigh on Chávez’s conscience. Whom did he talk to on the night of the second? I think it was someone in the Caribbean,” says Salazar, in a clear allusion to Fidel Castro. The boat, however, had already set sail from the United States and was heading for Venezuela. “Twelve helicopters and 150 gringos were already here. That aid should never have been rejected.” Days later, Salazar argued with Chávez about the incident. “I told him, ‘You are wrong.’ But he said it was intervention, he said some things about sovereignty, and that they could spy…. I think he got confused and was very poorly advised.”
Chávez’s bitter falling-out with his old friend Jesús Urdaneta, after twenty years of friendship, is another incident that reveals just what kind of power battles were raging inside the government. It was also Chávez’s first stumble in the world of corruption, a word that until then had not been part of the vocabulary of his administration. Urdaneta, who was the first government employee designated by the new head of state (as well as Chávez’s one-time roommate), was one of the first to abandon the government, after thirteen months on the job. “All throughout that period I had many differences with Chávez and his circle, because of things I learned and later reported.”
In one year, Urdaneta tracked at least forty cases of corruption inside the new administration. By mid-1999, he sa
ys, he was considering resigning from his position. “At one lunch in particular I was very hard on him. I said, ‘Listen, Hugo Chávez, I fought against a crooked, corrupt government, and your government is the same! I have given you the details of Luis Miquilena’s shady deals, of the entire infrastructure of power and corruption that he has built, plus what José Vicente Rangel has done, and you do not seem at all disposed to do anything about it. On the contrary—you have obstructed and hampered my efforts. I don’t want to keep on playing the useful idiot. I don’t want to stand by your side in this administration for one second more.’ I threw so many things in his face that day…. I do remember, though, that he exhibited a patience and a humility that were unsettling. He said to me, ‘The problem is that you, compañero, want to achieve change overnight.’” The head of state placed the situation in metaphorical terms, telling him that they were “in the middle of the Guaire River [a sewage stream that crosses Caracas], and the important thing is to get to the other side, not to end up getting carried off by the river.”
Urdaneta says he replied, “‘The river’s going to carry you away, because it just isn’t possible to try to cross it with guys like them, Miquilena and José Vicente.’ And so he said to me, ‘Don’t worry, compañero, just be a little patient, because when I have my new tools in place, the National Constitution, I’ll get rid of them. Those two are the kind of old political operators I need right now, because none of us [military officers] has what they have. I can’t force a friend to stay with me. Of course I need you there.” Urdaneta decided to wait. But he eventually realized that his condemnations had rendered him an inconvenient government employee. By year’s end, the Vargas landslide gave Chávez a reason to relieve him of his duties. According to Urdaneta, the government linked the Directorate for Intelligence and Prevention Services, which he supervised, to a series of supposed executions in La Guaira during the efforts to control looting.
Urdaneta tendered his resignation in protest against what he considered unwarranted interference by Foreign Minister Rangel, who criticized the Directorate for Intelligence and Prevention Services for calling in a journalist to testify about the crimes his employees had been accused of committing. Urdaneta was also bothered that Chávez did not authorize him to speak to the press to clear up any doubts regarding the Intelligence Services’ actions in Vargas.
“He said to me, ‘You’re not giving that press conference.’ ‘Why not?’ I asked him. ‘Because I’m going to look really bad.’ I told him that I didn’t understand, because the one who was going to end up looking bad was me. ‘It’s an order from me, and I am the president of the Republic,’ he said. That was the definitive break.”
Urdaneta was later accused of building a house that he could never have paid for, given his salary, though he said that “it was a lie and they never proved anything.” After resigning, he says that Chávez offered him the Spanish ambassadorship.
“I told him I was outraged that he thought he could buy my conscience. He insisted, though, and asked me why didn’t I re-enter the armed forces so that he could promote me to general. I told him that I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. ‘I will not accept anything you offer me.’ And so he asked me, ‘What are you going to do? Raise pigs?’ That made me even angrier, and I said to him, ‘If I can do it honestly and decently, yes.’” Though he hadn’t suspected it at the time, Urdaneta is now convinced that Chávez and Rangel engineered a “setup” to neutralize his negative claims. He says he discovered this when Chávez called the head of investigations at the Directorate for Intelligence and Prevention Services, ex-commander Luis Pineda Castellanos, and asked him to hand over “the files on all the corruption cases I had been handling.” The president apparently said to Pineda, “Jesús is very uncomfortable for me. I need you to go to Vargas and submit a report that implicates him in human rights violations.” This was confirmed by Pineda, who now opposes the Chávez government. Urdaneta was the first important resignation from Chávez’s government. Before long, all the other men behind the February 4 rebellion would tender their resignations as well.
Around this time, the bestselling book among the roving street vendors in the center of Caracas was El oráculo del guerrero (The Oracle of the Warrior), by the Argentinian Lucas Estrella. It was the latest literary fetish of the Venezuelan president, who had begun to cite it frequently in his speeches. The author, a biologist and martial arts practitioner, came to Caracas and stated that the message of his book was that “the ego must occupy the place of least importance, and service to others, the most.”
When asked what it was about the book that fascinated Hugo Chávez, Estrella replied, “I suppose he feels that the only way he will be able to carry out the massive undertaking that lies before him is by following the principles of the warrior.” One of these principles, for example, says, “Warrior, when you win a battle, don’t lose time sheathing your sword, because tomorrow will only bring more battles.” The head of state waxed on and on about the Oracle until someone came up with the idea that the book had been written in a code of sorts and intended for a gay audience.
“All summer long I have talked on and on about how, compared to Chávez’s favorite book, my novel is downright heterosexual,” joked the ingenious Boris Izaguirre, Venezuela’s most illustrious gay celebrity, while promoting his latest book in Spain. Apparently, this revelation was more than enough for Hugo Chávez to throw Estrella’s book straight into the garbage.
As his first year in office came to a close, the Venezuelan president decided to offer the world an assessment of sorts of “a process of profound change, carried out peacefully, without the rivers of blood that other nations have waded through and continue to wade through as they try to change a political regime.”7 His cornerstone program was the Plan Bolívar 2000, a $113 million social welfare project administered by high-ranking military officers employed by the administration. Soldiers would participate in the construction of state-subsidized residential buildings, and they would also work selling at the stands in the new local markets, an idea that dovetailed with Chávez’s plan to create a stronger bond between the armed forces and the populace. The state bureaucracy was now a sea of epaulets, as Chávez entrusted this aid work to his former compañeros in the barracks. Not long after the program was launched, some of the uniformed men close to Chávez became linked to a few very public corruption scandals. Overpricing, nonexistent or fraudulent bills and invoices, ghost employees, and a host of other irregularities that were long-standing traditions in Venezuela began to drag Plan Bolívar 2000 through the mud.
The president continued to use the vocabulary of war in public, but he may well have thought back to Lucas Estrella’s aphorisms as he faced his next battle, one that would affect him deeply. On February 4, 2000, the eighth anniversary of the 1992 uprising, his collaborators in that daring endeavor, close friends with whom he had spent long nights hatching plots, accused him of betraying the revolutionary objectives for which they had staged their rebellion. Jesús Urdaneta, Francisco Arias, and Yoel Acosta ( Jesús M. Ortiz, the fifth ringleader, had died in a car accident in Paris) surprised him one day with a press conference.
“Revolutions happen with revolutionaries, not with the same people that were part of the destiny that we, the Venezuelan people, do not deserve,” the former insurgents declared. Analysts interpreted this split as evidence of the power struggles that had erupted within the government. The leaders of 4F had turned against the more seasoned politicians, whom they accused of being part of the “old guard.” The former conspirators had already tried to express their concerns to Chávez in private, but, as they claim, he had been shunted away from them by then, isolated behind the wall that tends to encircle and protect the powerful.
Miquilena, considered the number two man in the administration, accused the former insurgents of lacking “the courage necessary to confront Chávez themselves and directly express their dissatisfaction with the political line he is pursuing; they are using u
s as a pretext to attack him.” Chávez, probably very hurt, left it at this, at least in public: “True brothers work as an eternal team, beyond the difficulties, beyond interests, beyond individual sentiment.”
Chávez’s opposition was delighted by this first conflict within the government, never imagining that two years later Miquilena and Arcaya would also abandon Chávez. At the time, however, the opposition was still against the ropes. The antipolitical stance favored by the president was not going out of style. Any Venezuelan who had spent a few years out of the country would have had a difficult time identifying the government officials who now appeared on the TV news. With few exceptions, the usual suspects had all but disappeared. And on the horizon was the campaign for the popular election that would be the last step toward ratifying the powers granted by the Constituent Assembly. The swell of popular support behind Chávez in 1998 had not died down, and the anemic opposition desperately searched for a candidate who could challenge Hugo Chávez. Ironically, they turned to a man with credentials similar to those of the man they wished to defeat. A onetime coup stager, though considerably more moderate than the comandante from Barinas, the man chosen for this task was none other than Chávez’s old ex-comrade Francisco Arias. A real face-off.
Though by now the president had stopped quoting El oráculo del guerrero, he continued to act like a warrior when running the country, for he has always thrived on confrontation. With no effort at all he would find people who would take his bait and get caught in conflict with him: the communications media, the Church, trade unions, the United States. Making enemies has always come easily to Hugo Chávez. Puffed up by his tremendous popularity, he has always reveled in provoking his adversaries with irreverent, over-the-top remarks. “Christ is with the revolution!” he would cry, and the Church would lunge at him.
Hugo Chavez Page 16