Comandante: Hugo Chavez's Venezuela

by Rory Carroll

  He turned to his daughter and asked her to find him the poem “The Toothless Ones” by Venezuela’s great writer Andrés Eloy Blanco from her smart phone. “María has a little machine that finds everything. She presses a button like this, raaaa!, and everything appears.” She laughed. He returned to the theme of oligarchs exploiting Bolívar’s legacy. “They made him into something he wasn’t, the way some Catholics have made Jesus into something he wasn’t. Christ was a great rebel, and for that he died crucified. He was an anti-imperialist. He was born and died among the poor and for the poor and with the poor. And that’s what happened with Bolívar, the bourgeoisie transformed him.” This was a not-so-veiled criticism of the Catholic Church hierarchy, which the comandante regularly accused of elitism and siding with his enemies.

  A silence descended on the entourage. Rooted to the spot, a statue himself, the comandante lowered his voice to paint another graphic scene. At this very spot, he said, patriots from a 1797 rebellion were brought to execution scaffolds, some to be hanged, others beheaded. Among the transfixed spectators was a group of teenage boys, sons of criollo landowners, who sat on horses and watched from a corner of the square, flinching as nooses and axes did their work. The youngest of them was Bolívar, and he vowed vengeance against the Spanish Empire. “Right here!” The comandante’s audience seemed to shiver, oblivious to the baking sun, for they were on hallowed ground. “You realize,” he continued, “where we come from, what flesh and clay we are made of. You see? That is why we are here today saying more than ever: Fatherland, socialism, or death! We will prevail!”

  The entourage roared back: “We will prevail!”

  The comandante: “¡Viva Bolívar!”

  Entourage: “¡Vivaaa!”

  The comandante beckoned the municipal mayor, Jorge Rodríguez. A psychiatrist by profession, Rodríguez had been the comandante’s favorite egghead in the early years, appointed head of the National Electoral Council, a key position, then promoted to vice president despite having crashed his Audi into a friend’s Audi in a posh part of the city one night, a minor scandal that provoked scorn from the revolution’s poorer sectors. Rodríguez later lost the comandante’s patronage—he was blamed for his one electoral defeat, a referendum in 2007—and was cast out of the palace’s golden circle. Demoted to mayor, desperate to win back favor, Rodríguez ruled over a shriveled fiefdom that included Plaza Bolívar, and now the boss summoned him to his side, a glint in his eye.

  “The plaza has improved, changed, but it’s still missing something, no? Missing a special touch. That building over there, an old theater, right, but now in government hands?”

  Rodríguez: “Yes, at this moment it’s in government hands.”

  He pointed to a handsome ten-story block partly obscured by red banners suspended from lampposts: “And that building?”

  An expectant pause, a little intake of breath, because everyone knew, the comandante knew, that this was La Francia, a famous landmark filled with the country’s best jewelry stores. High-ranking government officials shopped there. Tourists did too until cruise ships stopped coming. Rodríguez himself recently bought an expensive emerald ring.

  He replied: “That is a building of private jewelry stores.”

  The comandante, arm outstretched, finger pointing, unleashed his bolt: “Expropriate it! Expropriate it!”

  Rodríguez simultaneously stiffened and bowed: “Okay.” The entourage gazed at the building as if expecting flames to shoot out. Some began to clap.

  The comandante wheeled and pointed at the other side of the square. “And that building over there, on the corner?”

  “That is also filled with stores,” said Rodríguez.

  The comandante looked affronted. “Bolívar lived there when he was newly married, right there in that house with two balconies. And now it has stores! Expropriate it!”

  The applause swelled, and Rodríguez caught the rhythm. “Yes! Why not, President!”

  The comandante pointed at another building. “This building here, what is it?”

  Rodríguez: “That’s also a center of private stores.”

  Comandante: “Expropriate it! Mr. Mayor, expropriate it!”

  Rodríguez, face shining: “Why not!” Now cheers as well as applause.

  Comandante: “Yes, expropriate. We have to make this into a great historic center. Well, it already is, but we have to make more of it, make . . . architectural projects, historic projects. We are in the heart of Caracas.”

  Rodríguez: “That’s right.”

  The comandante patted him on the shoulder. “Caracas, Caracas, the city of rebels. How are you, Jorge?”

  —

  What just happened? On one level it was obvious. Our own eyes and ears told us. Hugo Chávez had seized some buildings in the name of the state. We knew this because it was live on television. This was episode 351 of Hello, President, a weekly live show. The host and star, indignant at commercial desecration of the Liberator’s memorial, had taken swift, resolute action, earning acclaim and gratitude. How could there be doubt? We saw and heard it. Over the course of the show’s next five hours—some lasted eight—we would see the mayor prepare the expropriation paperwork and submit it to the president for inspection. The process could not be more transparent. It had been like this since Hugo Chávez was inaugurated in February 1999 and made live television a central part of his rule, inviting cameras to transmit official meetings, family events, and public engagements to twenty-eight million Venezuelans. In Plaza Bolívar we were able to see the buildings, the context of the president’s decision, and the reaction of those around him. Government literally in sunlight. Media mastery had helped the comandante win successive elections and turn his administration into what he called the Bolivarian revolution, a self-styled radical effort to transform state and society into a vision worthy of Bolívar, a beacon of democracy, socialism, and enlightenment. All on television.

  Except the cameras avoided panoramic sweeps, pointed only in certain directions, were selective about close-ups. Plaza Bolívar was pretty, but the rest of downtown Caracas in 2010 was decaying. Once it had seemed blessed, a verdant valley on Venezuela’s northern tip close to the Caribbean and protected from humid, coastal torpor (and eighteenth-century pirates) by the Ávila mountain range, which kept the air fresh. In the 1950s it seemed a modernist wonder of daring architecture and gleaming towers but half a century later reeked of dysfunction. Buildings peeled and crumbled, graffiti from old referenda stained walls (“Vote no” signaled 2004; “Now yes” meant 2007), potholes cleaved the asphalt, motorbikes roared through belching, paralyzed traffic, pavements were clogged with stalls selling knickers, bras, socks, jeans, pirated DVDs, batteries, mangoes, onions, fried chicken. The blackened shell of Parque Central, a fifty-six-story octagonal tower wrecked in a fire six years earlier (a sister tower was undamaged) and still unrepaired, scarred the skyline. Once South America’s mightiest skyscraper, now a hulking, charred reproach.

  None of that decay appeared in the February 2010 broadcast, which confined itself to the city’s vestige of colonial-era charm. The cameras were just as careful about timing because to film the expropriated buildings too soon or too late—that is, before or after Chávez gave the word on their fate—would have confused the narrative. Here, for example, were scenes not televised. Weeks before the broadcast, government officials sniffed around La Francia’s ninety-five little jewelry stores, asking questions, taking photographs. The owners, some of whom had been there since the 1950s, huddled in conference. Pessimists feared revenge for the store owners’ having once joined a nationwide antigovernment strike. Optimists noted the mayor and other high-rolling Chavistas were regular visitors to their gleaming display cases and that the stores employed two thousand people—surely that would count for something? The day before the comandante’s show a rumor gathered force: expropriation. With trepidation, owners and employees switched on Hello, President the following morning. The program shifted location each week, the
palace, a factory, a farm, you never knew where Chávez would show up. Seated at home, they watched the opening credits, a cascade of trumpets, drums, and whizzing graphics, then they saw the comandante leading his entourage into Plaza Bolívar.

  Later that night under cover of darkness, after the show had packed up and the plaza was deserted, the shop owners crept into their stores—the national guard had yet to move in—and poured all their gold, silver, pearls, rubies, and diamonds into cardboard boxes. By dawn they had loaded up and driven away. Fast-forward a year, to February 2011, and if you visited the expropriated stores, everything was boarded up, dusty, dilapidated, the architectural and historic projects yet to begin, possibly forgotten. A lone sentry, a teenager in khakis with a rifle over his shoulder, leaned against a doorway. He was bored and fiddled with his phone. “Nobody here but me,” he said, smiling.

  Chávez dominated screens day after day, year after year, nationalizing an industry here, hosting a summit there, hiring ministers, firing ministers, explaining, denouncing, reminiscing, campaigning. By the time of the Plaza Bolívar broadcast, state television had been airing increasingly polished, professional images for eleven years. The revolution was thriving. A new “geometry of power” had replaced old, corrupt ways with direct democracy. State enterprises espousing solidarity and dignity were replacing capitalist greed and individualism. Venezuela was leading Latin America to an era of unity and sovereignty free from Yankee imperialism, an example to the world. The comandante was more popular than ever and on track to win a third term in 2012.

  But turn off the television, wander the streets (taking care to avoid potholes), and the picture looked murkier. The comandante’s name and face were everywhere: billboards, murals, T-shirts. He presided over an authoritarian democracy, a hybrid system of personality cult and one-man rule that permitted opposition parties, free speech, and free, not entirely fair elections. A third of the population adored Chávez, a third detested him, and the rest were ni-nis, neither one nor the other, floaters adrift in the middle. Years of record oil revenues—Venezuela had the world’s biggest reserves—had flooded the country with cash and eased poverty. The state offered free education, medical care, loans, grants, scholarships, courses, jobs. But distortions were buckling the economy. Inflation burned through wallets, shortages left supermarket shelves sporadically bare of staple goods, and red tape choked businesses and ordinary people. Cuba and a few other allies bowed to Chávez (while eyeing his checkbook), but most of Latin America politely shunned his model. The rest of the world looked at this Caribbean drama from afar, intrigued but not really understanding, and according to taste cast the comandante as hero, demon, or clown. Venezuela’s opposition, a fractious coalition drawn from the middle class and traditional elites, had disgraced itself in Chávez’s early years by trying to oust him in a coup and a strike. By 2010 it remained weak but was staging a tentative comeback through the ballot box, clawing back city halls and governors’ mansions and hoping the presidential palace was next.

  —

  A muddy mound by the Orinoco resembled a log until it came to life, swished a tail, and blinked a yellow crocodile eye. On the plains of Apure a ship’s mast appeared to shimmer on the horizon, but there was no ocean, no ship, just immense, motionless grassland with a single palm trunk. Every night lightning flashed over Lake Maracaibo, sometimes twenty thousand bolts, but the clouds were so high no thunder sounded.

  This realm of impossible waterfalls and gigantic plants had long bewitched interlopers. Columbus called it the Land of Grace and declared the Orinoco waters so sweet that they must come from the fabled Terrestrial Paradise. He never found it, nor treasure, and ended up manacled by a disappointed Spanish monarch. More white men crossed the ocean. They saw humble thatched huts on stilts and coined the sarcastic name Venezuela. Little Venice. A country named in scorn. It played a joke of its own. While the Aztec and Inca empires enriched conquistadores in what is now Mexico and Peru, Venezuela offered only nomadic tribes, swamps, mosquitoes, and jaguar teeth necklaces. But its glinting light continued to hypnotize invaders. Diego de Ordaz saw a link between gold and the sun and led six hundred men into the Orinoco delta, following the celestial yellow orb. Insects stung, burrowed into skin, and rotted flesh, turning feet into blackened claws and driving the treasure hunters into murderous rages against the Indians. Their quest disintegrated, but others took their place. Indian prisoners told of a kingdom in the interior where pyramids rose over the jungle canopy and every day a monarch was dusted with gold: El Dorado. The invaders grew excited. Where, where? The answer always the same: a brown finger pointing to the horizon, there, over there. Expeditions clanked into the jungle, hacking vines, and perished as starved, diseased cannibals. Lope de Aguirre went insane, declared a kingdom of wilderness, and butchered his own men, murdering even his own daughter. After he was finally cornered, shot, and dismembered, Aguirre’s head was displayed in a cage in El Tocuyo to reassure all that the monster was dead.

  The quests abandoned, Venezuela slumbered for two centuries, a coffee- and cacao-exporting backwater of Spain’s American empire. By the late eighteenth century, with revolution shaking France and North America, Venezuela grew restive. Criollo elites, the landowning descendants of Spanish settlers, wanted to be rid of Madrid’s regulations and taxes; mulatto artisans and merchants yearned for better land and jobs; at the bottom of the pyramid black slaves demanded freedom, and Indians wished just to be left alone. Bolívar’s wars ousted the Spanish and delivered independence, but his dream of a South America united into a single, enlightened country evaporated. Republics seceded, and caudillos, regional strongmen, carved personal fiefdoms that perpetuated colonial inequalities. Bolívar died in 1830, broken and disillusioned. “America is ungovernable. Those who serve the revolution plow the sea.”

  Venezuela returned to slumber, an impoverished tropical outpost, until 1914, when it discovered a new illusion. An optical trick so spectacular it spent the next hundred years applauding. The black ooze that Indians had used for millennia to caulk canoes on Lake Maracaibo began to be pumped in commercial oil wells. The land of El Dorado, it turned out, floated on black gold that would fuel the automobile age and a fantasy of everyone becoming rich. The petrodollars turned a scrawny state muscular, built roads, railways, barracks, schools, then, after oil prices quadrupled in the 1970s, skyscrapers, shopping malls, the Caracas metro. The wealthy flew to Miami for shopping weekends and became famous for their delighted squeal: “So cheap, give me two!” Peasants migrated to bleak hills overlooking cities and became laborers, taxi drivers, maids, and security guards, meager wages supplemented by government subsidies, crumbs from the banquet. When oil prices collapsed in the 1980s, the cash-strapped government raised the price of crumbs, so in February 1989 the slums revolted, a wave of rage called the Caracazo that looted city centers and shattered the mirage. The state panicked, and troops mowed down hundreds, maybe thousands.

  The stage was set for Chávez’s 1992 coup, a military fiasco but propaganda victory for the previously unknown lieutenant colonel. The unpopular, despised government gave him two minutes on television to make a statement of surrender, a fateful mistake. Wearing a red beret and crisp uniform, eloquent and confident, even dashing, he introduced himself to a stunned nation and said his movement’s objectives had not been met “por ahora,” for now. Two words gleaming with defiance, promising return. He deserved thirty years in jail, went the joke: one for the coup, twenty-nine for failing. Pardoned after only two years, he stormed the 1998 election, an insurgent candidate, telling Venezuelans their old model of oil dependence and corrupt politics, their mirage of development, was dead. It was time, he said, for reality.

  —

  A decade in power later, what was one to make of Chávez? Part of my job as a foreign correspondent based in Caracas from 2006 to 2012, was to answer that question. An exotic assignment, and I thought I had come prepared. Born and raised in Dublin, I had started my career at a newspaper in Northern
Ireland disentangling propaganda and verity from IRA violence and sectarian conflict. After joining the Guardian, I was posted to Rome, around the time Chávez was inaugurated, and covered the intrigues of the Vatican, the Mafia, and Silvio Berlusconi. I caught the end of the Balkan wars and, after 9/11, the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the rise of the anti-U.S. insurgency in Iraq. Between stints in Baghdad, where I was kidnapped, I lived in Africa for four years, seeing democracy take root in South Africa and wither in Zimbabwe, a cautionary tale of a “big man” hijacking power. The ruins of Angola, Congo, and Liberia showed me what happened when countries fall apart.

  When the Guardian asked me to open a Latin America bureau, the obvious location was Caracas. Perched on the Caribbean between Central and South America, it straddled the region and hosted its most exciting story: Hugo Chávez. My arrival at the Caracas airport was not propitious. It was dark, raining, and chaotic. A viaduct connecting the airport road to the capital had collapsed some months earlier, forcing travelers onto narrow, winding mountain roads while a new viaduct was built. Taxis and trucks navigated mud and potholes and hillside slums to reach Caracas. From there I took an overnight bus to Mérida, a pretty university town in the Andes, to study Spanish and Latin American history.