Comandante: Hugo Chavez's Venezuela

by Rory Carroll

  THE PENGUIN PRESS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  New York, New York 10014, USA

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  First published in 2013 by The Penguin Press,

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Rory Carroll, 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Photograph credits

  1, 2, 3, 18: Luis Cobelo / Latin Focus; 4, 5: Jose Francisco Sanchez Torres; 6, 7, 8: Guaicaipuro Lameda; 9: Photo by Geraldine Afiuni; 10: Vladimir Marcano; 11, 12: Raul Baduel; 13, 14, 15, 16: Sean Smith / The Guardian; 17, 19: Reuters / Miraflores Palace / handout

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Carroll, Rory.

  Comandante : myth and reality in Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela / Rory Carroll.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-101-60579-0

  1. Chávez Frías, Hugo. 2. Presidents—Venezuela. 3. Venezuela—Politics and government—1999– 4. Venezuela—Foreign relations—1999– I. Title.

  F2329.22.C54C27 2013

  987.06'42092—dc23

  [B]

  2012039514

  For Ligi, for my parents, Kathy and Joe, and in memory of Heidi Holland

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Map

  PROLOGUE

  Throne

  1. HELLO, PRESIDENT!

  2. INSIDE MIRAFLORES

  3. DEFECTORS

  4. THE YOUNG LIEUTENANT

  Palace

  5. SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST

  6. THE ART OF WAR

  7. THE DEVIL’S EXCREMENT

  8. THE STORYTELLER

  Kingdom

  9. DECAY

  10. THE GREAT ILLUMINATING JOURNEY

  11. PROTEST

  12. THE ARTIST

  Photographs

  Bibliography

  Index

  Acknowledgments

  I didn’t know it at the time, but this book began upon my arrival in Venezuela in September 2006. I was a correspondent for the Guardian and found an apartment in Caracas, my new home after a decade covering Africa, Iraq, and the Mediterranean. Caracas was to be a base for covering Latin America, but the best story was on my doorstep. On trips to Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Haiti, and elsewhere, my mind would wander back to Venezuela and its unfolding revolution. When I returned, I would catch up with interviews and reporting trips, talking to street vendors, taxi drivers, security guards, housewives, farmers, prisoners, pensioners, professors, palace functionaries, ministers. All told different stories, but all, one way or another, lived in the shadow of the president, Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías. He bestrode society like a colossus, commanding attention, everywhere his voice, his face, his name. It did not matter whether you despised or adored him; you looked. Covering Venezuela was like wandering through a vast, boisterous audience that simultaneously booed and cheered the titan who turned the presidential palace, Miraflores, into a stage.

  My notebooks filled and I filed copy to London, but there was never enough scope to capture this experiment by the Caribbean that supporters called el proceso, the process. A laboratory of power and charisma that veered between hope, dread, and farce. There was no capturing that in five-hundred-word news stories. Thus Chávez retained a mystique abroad, depending on partisanship, as a tyrant or a messiah. Cartoonish images. The reality was more complex, strange, and fascinating. Thus was born the idea for this book. By 2012, I had four boxes bulging with notebooks, but they were not enough. I needed to see how Chávez constructed his stage. I needed to get inside the walls of Miraflores. I took six months’ leave from the Guardian to seek and interview those who had, at one time or another, access to the throne. Aides, ministers, courtiers, bodyguards, supplicants, all played a role in the court of Hugo Chávez. All, in different ways, bore witness. Some spoke eagerly to criticize and settle scores with a ruler they no longer believed in. Others spoke to laud, to eulogize a one-off, a man of unique, unforgettable talents. Others had to be cajoled, or offered anonymity, for fear their testimony would create ructions in what was left of the revolution. Most sources are named. A few are not. To all who spoke, named or not, I am grateful. Private letters from Chávez published in Cristina Marcano and Alberto Barrera Tyszka’s excellent 2004 biography helped plug gaps.

  I owe a debt to many others: Marianella García, my assistant, for her contacts, generosity, and friendship; Virginia López for her ideas, solidarity, and humor. Heidi Holland, Francisco Toro, Brian Ellsworth, Phil Gunson, and Dan Cancel, fonts of expertise, for reading the draft and intercepting blunders; Lolybel Negrin for the transcriptions; Will Lippincott, my agent, for shepherding each step with agility and wisdom; Ginny Smith, Laura Stickney, Ann Godoff, and Scott Moyers at the Penguin Press, and Nick Davies and his team at Canongate, for flair and dedication in turning a manuscript into a book; my colleagues at the Guardian for indulgence and support; my family in Caracas and Dublin for encouragement; and, above all, my wife, Ligi, for her patience, passion, and belief in helping me to write about her country. To all, thank you.

  Los Angeles, July 2012

  PROLOGUE

  It was approaching midnight when the Venezuelan air force plane climbed over Havana and wheeled south, skimming over a moonlit Caribbean, bound for Caracas. Gabriel García Márquez sat with a pen and notebook next to Hugo Chávez. There was little physical resemblance between the two men. The writer was small, with a white mustache, dark eyebrows, and gray, retreating curls over a lined, alert face. Chávez was not especially tall but was powerfully built, still athletic, with cropped black hair, a hatchet nose, and a smooth, dark complexion. Standing next to him, García Márquez resembled a gnome. Seated and buckled, however, they shrank to more equal dimensions.

  Both men had been guests of Fidel Castro. Cuba’s old fox had taken close interest in the Venezuelan, and now it was the turn of the Nobel laureate. It was January 1999, and Chávez was returning to his homeland to be sworn in as president. He had won an election a few weeks earlier and was now set, at forty-four, to become the republic’s youngest leader. A Colombian magazine had commissioned García Márquez to write a profile. Before finding fame as a novelist, Gabo, as friends called him, had been a newspaper reporter and still had a newsman’s instinct to interview and probe. “We had met three days earlier in Havana,” he subsequently wrote. “The first thing that impressed me was his body of reinforced concrete. He had an immediate friendliness and a homegrown charm that were unmistakably Venezuelan. We both tried to meet up again, but it was not possible for either of us, so we decided to fly together to Caracas so we could chat about his life and other miracles.”

  Chávez had yet to take office, and already his rise seemed extraordinary. Venezuela had once been considered South America’s most successful and therefore boring country, a realm of oil wealth and beauty queens that sat out the region’s cold-war–era dictatorships and revolutions in a haze of petrodollar complacency and bloodless elections. That changed one explosive night in Februa
ry 1992 when an unknown lieutenant colonel named Hugo Chávez attempted a coup and sent tanks and soldiers with camouflage-painted faces to assault the presidential palace, Miraflores. President Carlos Andrés Pérez escaped, the coup failed, and Chávez went to jail, but six years later he stormed back as an election candidate, swept aside rivals, and here he was, president-to-be, flying beneath the stars to an unwritten fate. Who was this man?

  García Márquez had special reason to accept this assignment. In novels such as The Autumn of the Patriarch and The General in His Labyrinth, he had explored the psychologies of Caribbean leaders. Many dictators had thrived on these humid coasts over two centuries and woven themselves into the culture as mythic personages. The master of magical realism studied and did not necessarily condemn them. Fidel, in fact, was a personal friend. Having just won a clean, landslide election, Chávez was no dictator but came with a whiff of cordite. Supporters called him comandante.

  García Márquez’s pen skimmed across the notepad as his interviewee related his childhood and political rise. The article observed: “The February coup seems to be the only thing that did not turn out well for Hugo Chávez Frías. He views it positively, however, as a providential reverse. It is his way of understanding good luck, or intelligence, or intuition, or astuteness, or whatever one can call the magic touch that has favored him since he entered the world in Sabaneta, in the state of Barinas, on July 28, 1954, born under Leo, the sign of power. Chávez, a fervent Catholic, attributes his charmed existence to the hundred-year-old scapular that he has worn since childhood, inherited from a maternal great-grandfather, Colonel Pedro Pérez Delgado, one of his tutelary heroes.”

  The son of poor primary-school teachers, as a boy he found among his mother’s books an encyclopedia whose first chapter seemed heaven-sent: “How to Succeed in Life.” Young Hugo did not last long as an altar boy (“he rang the bells with such delight that everyone recognized his ring”) but excelled at painting, singing, and baseball. His dream was to pitch in the major leagues, and for that the best route was the military academy. The cadet gradually abandoned his fantasy of a roaring stadium because in the academy he fell in love with military theory, political science, and the history of Simón Bolívar, the Liberator who expelled the Spanish from much of the continent in the nineteenth century. Lieutenant Chávez received his graduation saber from Carlos Andrés Pérez, the president he would try to overthrow two decades later, an irony he acknowledged. García Márquez prodded at this. “What’s more, I told him, ‘You were about to kill him.’ ‘Not at all,’ Chávez protested. ‘The idea was to set up a constituent assembly and return to barracks.’”

  Here the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude noted that in fact he did share one striking similarity with his concrete-built interlocutor. “From the first moment I realized that he was a natural storyteller, a product of Venezuela’s creative, exhilarating popular culture. He has a great sense of timing and a memory that has a touch of the supernatural, allowing him to recite poems by Pablo Neruda or Walt Whitman, or entire passages of Rómulo Gallegos.” The profile continued recounting Chávez’s narrative: his fascination with family history; his indignation at Venezuela’s social inequalities; his reluctant counterinsurgency hunt for Venezuela’s dwindling guerrilla bands in the 1970s; his gathering of fellow officers into a conspiracy in the 1980s to overthrow a corrupt state and usher in a real democracy to make Bolívar proud. Chávez gave García Márquez a small scoop, revealing a previously unknown coup co-conspirator, “a fourth man,” who happened to be on the plane. “He pointed a finger at a man in a seat by himself and said: ‘Colonel Baduel!’”

  All this the article related in an affectionate tone that was not surprising. In addition to storytelling, the famous chronicler shared Chávez’s leftward political tilt, friendship with Fidel, and anger at Latin America’s extreme wealth inequalities. When the plane landed, it was 3:00 a.m., and Caracas glowed in the distance, a swamp of lights. Chávez embraced García Márquez farewell and invited him to attend his inauguration. The old man stood on the asphalt and watched his subject disappear into the night, bound for power. Chávez had promised his followers utopia and seemed in a hurry.

  We do not need to wonder what thought went through García Márquez’s mind, a mind revered the world over as that of some kind of oracle. At the end of his article, a few short lines shook loose like a kaleidoscope everything that preceded them. “While he sauntered off with his bodyguards of decorated officers and close friends, I was overwhelmed by the feeling that I had just been traveling and chatting pleasantly with two opposing men. One to whom the caprices of fate had given an opportunity to save his country. The other, an illusionist, who could pass into the history books as just another despot.”

  THRONE

  To understand revolutions and their participants, we must observe them at close range and judge them at great distance.

  —SIMÓN BOLÍVAR

  1

  HELLO, PRESIDENT!

  A quiet Sunday morning in February 2010, the eleventh year of the revolution, and the comandante took a stroll outside the palace’s peach-colored walls. The sun was shining, the mood light. From a distance he was recognizable by the familiar walk, arms and legs in unison, one two, one two, a soldier still. Time had registered its passage in the face, fleshier than before, jowlier, and in a thickening of the torso, but old age remained at bay. Not a gray hair on his head, and the extra bulk, distributed evenly, carried well. A bear of a man. He wore black trousers and a red T-shirt beneath a tailored olive-green military jacket. It was plain, without medals or stripes or insignia, and fit perfectly. A favorite outfit. His daughter María, a gold chain glinting around her neck, held his hand and matched his pace. Aides and ministers in red T-shirts swarmed a few feet behind. When the entourage entered the plaza, a church bell pealed and pigeons fluttered.

  “What’s that song?” asked the comandante, slowing his stride. “Do you remember that song, María?” The young woman shook her head. He paused, concentrating, and the lyrics floated out. “Walking through Caracas, Caracas/the people passing and greeting me/I would raise my fraternal hand/and Caracas would embrace me.” He had a nice tenor voice and sang well. In fits of modesty he sometimes fibbed that it was a bad voice, prompting protests. “¡No, mi comandante!” He turned to his daughter. “María, do you remember when you were little? You would run around here chasing pigeons and then cry because you couldn’t catch any.” She blushed and smiled. “María, look, there’s one coming, grab it!” Everybody laughed.

  The comandante slowly circled the plaza, lined with evergreen jabillo trees and colonial-era buildings, scrutinizing the facades, then walked to the center of the plaza toward a giant equestrian statue on a marble pedestal. The bronze black stallion reared on its hind legs, veins and muscles bulging in its shiny flanks. It had a short mane, a broad, thick neck, and the head angled to the side, as if looking where to crash the mighty hooves. The rider astride this thrusting energy wore breeches, boots, and a magnificent tunic with epaulets and braid. A cape flowed over his shoulder. He was composed in the saddle and held the reins with one hand. For over a century he had gazed down at the plaza, serene and commanding, holding out his hat as if in salutation to a cheering crowd and glory eternal.

  “Look at Bolívar,” said the comandante. “Bolívar, Bolívar,” he repeated, savoring each syllable. Everyone looked. A small, darting movement caught his eye. “Look, a squirrel! Over there, look, look, look, there goes a squirrel.” Everyone looked. His attention returned to the statue. “Bolívar. Simón Bolívar, liberator of Venezuela, New Granada, Ecuador, and Peru, founder of Bolivia. Since when has that statue been there?” Before anyone could answer, he addressed one of the officials standing nearby. “What age are you, compadre?” Fifty-two, Comandante, came the reply. “Almost my age.” Turning to a woman. “And you?” Before she could reply, he answered: “You’re thirty.” She gasped. “Yes, absolutely.” The comandante nodded. “And how are you?”
Before she could answer, he turned to his daughter. “You’re younger, you’re twenty-five, right, María?” She nodded. “I remember I used to love coming here with Rosita, María, Huguito—they were very small—and we’d visit the house across the old plaza there where Bolívar was born.”

  The comandante paused at the statue and adopted a pedagogical tone, a cue for the entourage to cluster and form an audience. “The year they brought Bolívar’s remains here, they named it Plaza Bolívar, 1842. The oligarchy brought his remains here after expelling him in life. There was a lot of popular pressure to bring him back, and his remains stayed in the cathedral for a while. Then General Guzmán Blanco came and ordered them to put up the statue. Ah, there’s the date, look, 1874! That was after the federal war, another betrayal. They killed Zamora, and the oligarchy continued owning power. Then they started to use Bolívar, his myth, make him almost a saint, but for their own interests, to exploit the people using Bolívar himself. I started to understand all this when I was a cadet and we used to come here in dress uniform, white gloves, blue cap, there at the Pantheon and at the house he was born.” The audience nodded. Guzmán Blanco had been a dictator, Ezequiel Zamora a famous rebel.

  The comandante continued. “I wasn’t born here. You know that. I was born far away, in the south, but I love Caracas now. I was afraid of it when I came here as a kid, but I love it now. Bolívar. How does the song go, María?” He sang another ballad, this one comparing the Liberator’s voice to a candle showing the true way. Applause when he finished. The president turned to the statue. “Advancing again with Simón. We have arrived, we have come, and he leading the battle from the front.” More applause. The comandante squinted in concentration to remember a poem about the Liberator. Squinting turned his eyes into impenetrable slits, the more so now he had put on weight, and masked the object of his gaze. He always sought eye contact and would continue scrutinizing his audience left to right, right to left, a minesweeper of faces, appraising expressions. Mural artists tried to render that look by furrowing the brow and narrowing the eyes. The toy dolls of him had a little lever at the back of the neck to swivel them. When the real comandante’s brown eyes flashed back open, whoever was in his sight line at that moment would jolt.