Herma’s sister, Cristina Marksman, who also supported Hugo in the coup, became so close to her sister’s boyfriend that he called her hermana (sister). He also had another connection to her: superstitious, as many people say he is, Chávez would ask her to predict his future.
“My sister would read his palm, and sometimes she got things right. He would ask her to read his cards, he liked that a lot. He really believed the things she said.” He would ask Cristina, who died some years later, to banish the bad spirits “because he is a tormented man,” as Herma puts it, underscoring another trait of her former lover. “He could be in one room, very bothered by something, and then if you came by for a visit, he would come out as if nothing at all was on his mind. He had that ability to change his expression. He could be laughing right now and then turn around to face someone else, and start crying…but with feeling! Yes, I believe he really is an excellent actor,” Herma remarks.
The relationship went on without any major hitches until the end of the 1980s. Herma describes what happened: “In 1988, he made the decision that we had to formalize our relationship…. One day he called me and said, ‘Herma, have you ever thought about the possibility of us getting married? I want to marry you, would you marry me?’ And I said to him, ‘My friend, you have to get a divorce first if you want to marry me.’ Hugo assured me, ‘If you say yes, I will get a divorce so that we can get married.’” As often happens in life and soap operas, obstacles began to pop up. Herma knows that Hugo tried: that he went to Barinas, talked to Nancy, and tried to leave her. She also knows that the Chávez family was against it. In the end, the marriage plans never made it past the first step: Hugo’s divorce. Slowly, their relationship waned: “I think it was in March of 1989 that he came to me and said his children were still small,” Herma remarks. With that comment, the chapter of the impossible wedding ended.
In 1990, Herma recalls, Chávez proposed that they have a child together. “He began to say that we needed to have a child. ‘But why should we have a child with this hectic life we have? At this stage?’ And he replied, ‘I just feel that everything is happening so fast, that everything is on top of us all of a sudden. And this will be like a bond between us, a link. We couldn’t get married, but our child will keep us together.’”2 Herma says that during 1991, they tried to have a baby, and she managed to get pregnant but had a miscarriage during the most stressful days leading up the conspiracy. That, Herma thinks, is the reason she lost the baby.
In all likelihood, Herma Marksman would never have guessed that the failed coup would turn out to be a success—a personal success, a leap to fame for the person who was, as they say, the man of her life. From inside the jail, her lover became a public figure. And much more. “There were people who would go there to touch him, to see if he was real…that was how the myth was born, and he believed it.” During his time in prison, rumors circulated about his affairs with other women, a situation that only escalated when Chávez was released. In the words of one of his companions from those days, “He was like that, he was very promiscuous with women. With the aura and the fame, that quality of his only grew more pronounced.” The list of women who had apparently enjoyed intimate relations with him grew longer and longer. He would later call upon some of them to work in his administration.
Marksman endured all of this with patience, but it was not easy. Angela Zago, however, a journalist who became a close friend of both Hugo and Herma during those years, suggests why. “The first serious separation happened because, while he was still in prison, he was once asked on a radio show about his wife, Nancy. ‘How did she manage when you [and your co-conspirators] were plotting [the coup]?’ His response was ‘If it had not been for my wife and everything she did, and the support she gave me, I don’t know how I would have put the movement together.’ Well, Herma didn’t just up and die that day, by coincidence. She risked her home and her children, everything, allowing military officers who were conspiring against the government into her home. For years, she was the one who safeguarded their papers, she was the one who had the plan for the 1992 uprising. She risked her life, her economic stability, her social stability, her personal stability, all for him.”
It is probable that this was the detonating factor, but there were plenty of other things bubbling beneath the surface as well. Herma herself has admitted how uncomfortable she was with Hugo’s popularity and the ensuing media frenzy, neither of which showed any signs of abating. It was not just a political problem: it had become something that affected her personally, as well. Perhaps that was when she began to feel that Hugo Chávez had started to slip away from her. She recalls, in particular, one very tense discussion between them at the jail. “‘Do you realize what this is like?’ she said to him. ‘I’m out here, but I’m as trapped as you are, the only difference being that you are in there safe and sound, but I’m trapped out here on the street, because they follow me, they take photographs of me, they even put my children at risk, and the minimum I should be able to expect from you is fidelity, loyalty.’”
Herma left Chávez in June 1993, while he was still in prison. She simply could not bear their relationship any longer—she didn’t like what was going on inside the prison, in both the political and the personal sense. It seemed that Hugo had slowly turned into someone else, someone she no longer knew. According to her, he turned into the “Chávez on the pedestal. I always said, ‘What a shame things had to happen the way they did.’ He was my ideal companion, and maybe that’s why I’ve never had another relationship since him. The man I lived with is dead. Yes, I am a widow. And I hold on to my memories. As for me, that thing out there, I don’t know who he is. He has no connection whatsoever to me, or to the man with whom I shared so much…. I feel that he betrayed the dream that the two of us tried to build for years. He threw everything out the window.”
They have not seen each other since then. And since he became president, they have spoken on only one occasion, in 1999, when he called her to offer his condolences after her mother died.
Of that intense relationship, there remains something of a “bequest” that Herma Marksman, history professor, has been meticulous about preserving, as if she knew that one day it might be of interest to the general public. The cache includes diaries that young Hugo Chávez kept while at the military academy, some letters he wrote to her, her grandmother, and her family, other letters that he received from them, several photographs, and the first lock of hair that his grandmother Mamá Inés clipped from his head back in Sabaneta.
Chávez has never made any explicit or public statement regarding Marksman or their relationship. Herma, on the other hand, began to speak in public in 2002, when a journalist friend convinced her to participate in a television program commemorating the ten-year anniversary of the 1992 coup attempt. She has appeared on numerous radio and TV programs and has cooperated with journalists and researchers. Laughing at herself a bit, she recalls one on-air incident: “One day, a woman called in to one of those call-in radio shows and asked me, ‘How can it be that you, being such an accomplished woman, could have gotten into bed with the devil?’ And I said to her, ‘Well, the heart has its reasons that reason cannot understand.’”
IT WASN’T UNTIL after he was released from jail and began to live his new and very public existence, that Hugo Chávez’s love life took off. Between 1994 and 1997, when he was divorcing Nancy, until Marisabel Rodríguez entered his life much later on, there was a period that might best be summed up by a song that could easily have served as background music to his life and times: “Livin’ la Vida Loca.”
Nedo Paniz, who is now affiliated with one of the most radical sectors of the opposition, gave Chávez a place to live after he was released from jail. “Nancy never came to visit him. Just the children. We really looked after Huguito and the girls. They were a very fractured family unit, no question. Sometimes we brought the girls or Huguito on the trips we made.” By the time he got his divorce, Paniz says, Chávez was already inv
olved romantically with a journalist. Their relationship had been rumored since he had been in jail. The affair was short-lived, and conflicts erupted. Nedo Paniz recounts, “One of his bodyguards told me something that made my hair stand on end. Chávez ordered them to throw her out of the car when they were in the middle of some road on Margarita [Island]. And they did.” A friend of the journalist confirms the incident, adding that it had been prompted by a private dispute between the two.
As far as Luis Pineda Castellanos is concerned, this woman was one in an almost endless list of women who had some kind of intimate relationship with Chávez during those years. The group includes women who have held positions in the Chávez administration. Many of them have repeatedly denied any relationship with Chávez, whereas others among them simply refuse to discuss the topic or say nothing.
Describing their days as they crisscrossed Venezuela promoting and stumping for Chávez, Luis Pineda tells of an effervescent playboy at the top of his game who carried a first-aid kit everywhere he went, “with merthiolate and Band-Aids, because the girls would scratch Chávez’s hands at the rallies.” According to Pineda, women went wild over Chávez. And he was not one to spurn the lustful impulses he inspired.
“He loved all of them. Really, I never was able to figure out what his ideal type was,” says Pineda.
In every town or village they passed through, there was always some woman—sometimes more than one—who wanted to spend the night with Chávez. According to Pineda, they even had a selection method worked out between them. “Every time, as we would step up to the platform, he would survey the female talent, and there were always a few stunners, you could always pick them out, so in the middle of an event he would look at me and indicate in one direction, he would make a little gesture with his mouth, and I would make my way over to the lady in question, the pick of the evening, until I finally got over to her and he would nod his head.”3 Later that same evening, Pineda would discreetly arrange the encounter, and he would remain on alert back at the hotel to make sure that the women who had not been selected that evening, or some spontaneous admirer, would not try to surprise the comandante in the middle of the night.
There are plenty of other stories like this one, and Pineda seems unconcerned about maintaining any kind of decorum on behalf of his old friend. In fact, he admits that when he finally realized that it would be impossible to control his friend’s romantic merry-go-round, “I went out and bought a sofa bed and stuck it in the office we used as our campaign headquarters…. And I told Hugo that this was his new method for receiving lady friends.” The system would come in handy sometime later, when Chávez and Marisabel Rodríguez began to see each other seriously, for it served as a kind of security routine that they baptized the “anti-Marisabel” and kept him from being discovered with his hands in the proverbial cookie jar. During this period, however, one woman seems to have touched the heart of Hugo Chávez in a deeper sense. A singer of folkloric music, she was not very well known, at least not in Caracas. Her nom de guerre was Aguamiel, and her true identity remains a secret, though some say she was married.
“She must have been twenty-seven, twenty-eight, about fourteen years younger than him,” Pineda recalls. “She was very pale, with brown hair, very stylish and discreet. Once he invited her to El Castillo de la Fantasía in San Cristóbal [a love motel], but she didn’t show up.” Not much more is known about her, but various people concur that Chávez fell deeply in love with this woman.
“The only time I ever saw Hugo cry was when he told me about her, in Gran Sabana,” says Nedo Paniz. Pineda similarly recalls how Chávez once broke down in tears over Aguamiel in his presence.
“He got tied down because Marisabel got pregnant and he had to marry her because he was running for president…he was in love with the girl, a singer and a cousin of a friend of ours, a general.” Nevertheless, no one can swear this is true. What is true is that Hugo Chávez was already a legend by the time his love story with Marisabel began.
MARISABEL RODRÍGUEZ FIRST SAW Hugo Chávez up close at a plaza in Carora, a city that sizzled beneath the relentless sun in the central-west region of Venezuela. By that time she had fallen under the spell of this new leader, who had already attempted to seize power as an armed insurgent and who invoked Bolívar and traveled the country preaching his new message. That day, amid the crowds of people waiting to see him, with her tiny son in her arms, Marisabel managed to make it over to Chávez and passed him a short note she had written: “Comandante, our homeland deserves everything, without reservations, and I am with you in heart and soul. When you need me for your struggle, please call me.”4 She included her name and telephone number at the end. But this message never found its way to Hugo Chávez.
They met for the first time in January 1996. As she recalls it, the encounter consisted of a handshake and a brief exchange of words, after a radio announcer in the city of Barquisimeto introduced them. That was their first direct contact, and it was followed by messages, greetings, and more telephone calls. Marisabel maintains that Chávez’s intelligence was what captivated her, that he was a great strategist in the game of courtship. Their incipient relationship became more official on January 14, 1997, the day of the Divine Shepherdess, the patroness of the region. According to Marisabel, that was the day they became a couple. During an interview the couple granted in 1998,5 a few mischievous sparks flew through the air when they reminisced about that evening. It was something of an ambiguous moment, a few smiles and a meaningful pause, giving the impression that Hugo and Marisabel, caught in the throes of passion, had sex that night. The surrender, it seems, took place inside an automobile and left Marisabel pregnant on their first night together. In a later interview, Marisabel neither confirmed nor denied anything beyond the fact that the pregnancy was indeed unexpected: “It happened our first time together, we were completely innocent and without any kind of preparation, neither he nor I was at all promiscuous.”6
The wedding of Hugo Chávez and Marisabel Rodríguez, at Christmastime in 1997, when their daughter was two months old, would be remembered for the very recent birth of their baby. While a pregnancy in the middle of a love story is certainly momentous, a pregnancy in the middle of a presidential campaign can be transcendental. The journalist Angela Zago, close to Chávez and a good friend of Herma at the time, has her own theory. “I even said to him, ‘Come on, what is that? She’s a thirty-six-year-old woman.’ If she slept with him, it was because she wanted it. We’re not talking about a man who slept with a young girl and got her pregnant. But then people began to gossip, saying that it was a marriage of political convenience.” There are those who believe that the matter went beyond questions of morality or of having to protect the image of a potential president by presenting him as a responsible father, a family man. Marisabel, some say, was a very big publicity boost.
She was an enterprising, modern, self-made woman. She also had several other attractive qualities that could help dispel the aggressive image the opposition had painted of Chávez: she was young, white, blue-eyed, blond. She was aware of this proposition, and consciously lent herself to it: “I was there to lower my husband’s rejection rate in the polls, and to win over a segment of the population that was totally unwilling [to support him].”7
The strategy was an incredible success. Marisabel soon became an independent figure, a trademark in her own right with a political profile all her own. Months after the presidential elections, she threw her hat into the ring as a candidate in the popular election for the representatives of the Constituent Assembly, and won. She had forever changed the country’s perception of the role of first lady. She wasn’t content to just be Mrs. Chávez, the president’s wife.
Beyond this image, however, family life in the Chávez-Rodríguez household was not easy. Marisabel did not have the best relationship with her mother-in-law. The first lady herself described it: “She was never a bonbon with me, you know, sweet. But she also never did anything to me that I couldn�
��t bear, that any other mother-in-law would do to any daughter-in-law…. Obviously, from the beginning she never cared for me, and maybe it would have been better if she had interacted more with me, to get to know me better.”8 Angela Zago, unconcerned with such considerations, is a bit more specific when she describes the day Hugo won the election. Everyone had gone over to Venevisión, the channel owned by Gustavo Cisneros, where Hugo and Marisabel were participating in a TV program. “Elena sat down next to me,” says Zago, “and when she heard what Marisabel was saying, she said to me, ‘She’s a phony, she’s real two-faced.’ She never liked Marisabel.”
Luis Miquilena, who let Chávez stay in his apartment until he married Marisabel, doesn’t believe that it was a marriage of convenience.
“No. She was a good girl, a pretty girl, and he was divorced. He thought it would be a good idea to try her out, but things didn’t go his way.” And with respect to family unpleasantness, far more vexing than her mother-in-law’s frostiness were Chávez’s three children and her problems with them. According to Luis Miquilena, “That marriage was a really troubled one, very problematic from the very beginning…. His children were the problem, they had conflicts with her, and he is a very good father to his first wife’s children. Those kids and Marisabel never saw eye to eye, and that was the beginning of some very serious differences. And those differences only grew deeper and, well, you know how those things are.” On several occasions Miquilena served as a mediator between the two when they would fight: “Our friendship ran so deep that whenever he had some kind of domestic problem, I would be the first to know about it, after him and his wife. And sometimes we would air it among the three of us. That was the kind of relationship we had, Hugo would tell me about his problems with Marisabel, and then I would go and look for Chirinos [Chávez’s friend and onetime psychiatrist].”
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