Comandante: Hugo Chavez's Venezuela

by Rory Carroll

  If there were no emergencies, he took breakfast—arepas—on a terrace with a thatched roof, potted plants, a hammock, and a large wooden table that served as a desk and dining table. While eating, he would review letters thrust into his hand by supplicants during public events the day before.

  mr. president I direct myself to you to make a request for a house in the name of our lord jesus christ I am a mother of two children and unemployed I don’t have anywhere to live for twelve years I live cursed 0416-3627075 and 0426-7238700 24 of july barrio 170 N street 49E-89 it’s my mothers.

  Nouvy Pirela

  A cordial bolivarian greeting, I would like to please ask your help with a job and a pension for my mother. I give you my telephone number 02123228014 and 4129376741. Awaiting your prompt answer this comrade bids you farewell. MAY GOD BLESS YOU MY PRESIDENT.

  Gloria Camejo Mujica

  Mr. President I need your help I am disabled I want to work in the government like a true revolutionary . . . you are the true son of Simon Bolibar may God bless you.

  Hernán Cortés

  Mr. president my greetings, I write to you because in reality I need your help my name is jorge camacho of pensionable age I ask your intervention I have been married for 18 years and now want a divorse and have not been able to get it because of an error in the marriage certificate the number does not match my identity document and I have exhausted all my resources and have not been able to achieve anything I am an evangelical Christian and I want to marry the woman who has been my partner for 10 years . . .

  Jorge Camacho

  On and on, some just a few lines, others stretching over pages, stories of thwarted ambition, bad luck, ruined health, insurmountable problems, callous bureaucracy, all requesting something: a hip replacement, money to start a business, Christmas gifts for children, a car, a tractor. When he plunged into crowds, the president was mobbed by so many petitions an official wish taker accompanied him. “The palace gave me a waistcoat and backpack and I would follow the president through the crowds taking all the letters people thrust at him,” said a retired wish taker, whom I shall call Carmen. “My God, the whole city would turn up. We were asphyxiated by the quantity of people and the love they had for him. Everybody wanted to embrace him and ask him something.” The letters became so numerous the palace created a special department of clerks to summarize them overnight in typed digests. This was what the president read over breakfast. When he put down his fork to circle a petition with a pen, it would receive attention from the special department, which archived every letter. It was called the Sala de la Esperanza, the Office of Hope.

  The comandante liked the terrace in the morning for the breeze, the rustic feel, and the fact it overlooked Caracas. A century earlier Miraflores stood apart, a secluded mansion amid fields, but now the city tumbled in from all sides, a riot of concrete and honking horns. To the south rose a steep hill of grubby tower blocks with laundry hanging from the windows, the January 23 slum, named for the date in 1958 when this and other neighborhoods chased the dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez into exile. Now it was a bastion of loyalty to the comandante. Beyond it, looking east, shimmered the green slopes and cream condominiums of Valle Arriba, home to bankers and diplomats. Turn north and downtown’s jumble of office buildings and stores started just a block from the main palace entrance. You could hear but not quite see the roaring motorbikes and hissing buses. This urban maze stopped abruptly in the middle distance at the foot of a great wall of green, the Ávila mountains, which marked the city’s northern limit. On the other side, invisible, were fishing villages, resorts, and the Caribbean Sea.

  After breakfast, more coffee, and perhaps a cigarette—he smoked on occasion, never in public—the comandante went back inside and followed a shiny corridor leading to honor guards who flanked the yellow door of his office, the despacho del presidente. A hymn to cream and gold, its furniture largely unchanged since the night President Carlos Andrés Pérez, pajamas beneath his rumpled suit, grabbed an Uzi from a black briefcase to repel Chávez’s storm troops. There were Shah Abbasi Persian rugs, damask curtains, French Restoration armchairs whose legs tapered into bronze claws, an oval table of green alpine marble, and a rectangular writing desk of dark rosewood. Facing the desk, with its back to the window, was a wide leather chair with the nation’s coat of arms on a headrest and a gold-plated sphynx under each arm. The seat of power. There was a lever to adjust the height.

  Normally this would command attention, but the eye was drawn to thick, heavy pillars of solid iron welded from floor to ceiling. Samson himself could not tear them down. They were designed to withstand the earthquakes that periodically jolted Caracas. Venezuelan presidents were haunted by the fear of falling masonry. When Joaquín Crespo built Miraflores, he requested an “anti-seismic room” but died in battle in 1898 before moving in. His successor, Cipriano Castro, immediately occupied it to avoid repeating the experience of having once jumped from a second-story balcony during a tremor. The president, according to a ditty of the era, unfurled an umbrella to slow the fall but still broke an ankle and shat himself in fright. Chávez too was said to fear earthquakes.

  A door connected the president’s office to the cabinet meeting room, the consejo de ministros, a rectangular room with paneled walls, a large portrait of Bolívar, and a long oval table. The president’s chair was slightly taller than the others. In his first year he held weekly meetings here, quizzing each of his fourteen ministers in turn. In later years, after his interest in such meetings dwindled, the connecting door would remain shut, and the vice president would host the ministers (their numbers doubling as new ministries were created), leaving them all to peek at the door and wonder if the comandante was on the other side in his office, or perhaps in another part of the palace, and wonder what he was up to.

  Some afternoons he would visit his family at La Casona. It was in the east of the city surrounded by leafy, middle-class villas but still had the feel of the coffee plantation it once was, with hacienda architecture, mango trees, rustic gardens, a murky swimming pool, a bowling alley, and an outdoor cinema. In the election campaign he had blasted it as a symbol of oligarchy, saying his family could live in an apartment, and in truth he did not like it much. But still his family lived there. In late afternoon, if there were no public events to attend, the president returned to the palace and the sala situacional for another briefing: intelligence reports; a media update; political flash points; economic indicators. If something grabbed his attention, he would use one of his mobile phones to give instructions on the spot, or take the elevator to his office upstairs and get his secretary to make the calls. Visitors waiting in the annex would learn if they were to receive an audience or should return another day. If there was no official event that evening, the president would play softball with his guards or entertain guests in the Japanese suite. Whispers of romantic assignations swirled around this part of the comandante’s day.

  Whatever their truth, the comandante’s real passion blossomed later at night when he returned to the thatched-roof terrace and, fueled by fresh coffee shots, plowed through piles of documents, his pen circling, stabbing, underlining. At 11:00 p.m., he would turn up the volume of the television on a corner shelf to watch The Razorblade, a nightly chat show on the main state channel. The host, Mario Silva, a heavy, bearded man with a keen intelligence and lupine grin, wore red baseball caps and leather jackets. Seated at a desk surrounded by images of Che Guevara, Karl Marx, Bolívar, and Chávez, he interviewed occasional guests but mostly assailed the comandante’s foes in monologues of lip-smacking relish. He was famous for showing photographs that embarrassed the opposition. Silva also played excerpts of intercepted phone calls revealing, or purportedly revealing, opponents’ sleaze and hypocrisy. Some were edited to the accompaniment of farm animal noises. The host said the material came from anonymous sources, which everyone assumed to be the Directorate for Intelligence and Prevention Services, DISIP, the main intelligence agency. It was the coma
ndante’s favorite show, and he urged followers to watch it. Some nights he phoned in for on-air banter with Silva, or to make policy announcements.

  After The Razorblade’s credits rolled around 1:00 a.m., he would phone ministers with questions and instructions. Has your department finished that report? Have you seen these statistics? Speed up this, change that, talk to so-and-so. Other times he would phone just to chat and tell stories. Finally, with the city asleep and no ministers left to call, he would pluck a book from the stacks on his desk, or from the little bookcase in his chamber, and tumble into its pages.

  The best-thumbed volume contained Bolívar’s speeches and letters, which the president had memorized. For a time he was much taken with Path of the Warrior by the Argentine writer Lucas Estrella Schultz. “Warrior, when you win a battle, don’t lose time sheathing your sword, because tomorrow will only bring more battles,” it counseled. For months the president publicly praised the book, extolling its wisdom and erudition, but after jokes spread that the text was a gay metaphor, he never mentioned it again. Before being elected, Chávez denied he was a socialist, saying he had never read Marx, and in 1999 that was still true. Instead, he reached for García Márquez, Nietzsche, and, above all, Plekhanov. Several times he told the nation of the moment he discovered the Russian revolutionary’s philosophical tome The Role of the Individual in History while hunting guerrillas in the mountains as a young officer in the 1970s. “I remember that it was a wonderful starry night and I read it in my tent by flashlight.” (The Mexican writer Enrique Krauze was one of the first to recognize Chávez’s Plekhanov fixation.) The president kept his copy through the decades. “The same little book with the same little underlinings a person makes, and the same little arrows and the same cover I used as camouflage so that my superiors wouldn’t say ‘what are you doing reading that?’” Now that Chávez was in power, this book, published a century earlier, seemed to speak to him with more urgency than ever. “A great man is a beginner precisely because he sees further than others, and desires things more strongly than others.”

  The comandante would lie in his monastic chamber turning pages, making fresh notes and underlinings, embryos of future plans, and drift toward somnolence. By sunrise, when the first rays glinted off palace windows, he would be asleep.

  —

  The president had won the December 1998 election with 56 percent of the vote, crushing the two establishment parties, the social democratic Democratic Action and the Christian democratic COPEI. They had alternated power since Pérez Jiménez’s fall in 1958, a cozy system called the Punto Fijo Pact, which peacefully rotated presidents constitutionally barred from serving consecutive terms. From afar it looked an enviably stable, democratic arrangement, and Venezuela was called a model for the region. But the 1970s oil-boom sugar rush turned bitter when prices collapsed in the 1980s, bankrupting the economy. The two parties, by now ossified vehicles of patronage, flailed in vain at the crisis. The 1989 Caracazo riots, followed by Chávez’s 1992 coup attempt and a second, separate coup attempt by other military officers later the same year, exposed the system’s hollowness. Chávez, released from jail after only two years, swept to power as the charismatic figurehead of the Movement for a Fifth Republic, MVR, a coalition of trade union activists, environmentalists, students, former military officers, and small left-wing parties.

  By the time he was inaugurated in February 1999, the excitement of starting anew, turning the page, infected even those who had voted against him. When he took the dais of Congress to be sworn in, polls showed 90 percent of the country supported him. The priority, he declared, was a new constitution. The right hand aloft, the left resting on the constitution he had just vowed to expunge, he quoted a line from the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda: “It is Bolívar coming back to life every hundred years. He awakes every hundred years when the people awake.” The face was taut and the eyes gleamed. Years later people returned to this moment, paused the video frame by frame, and froze the expression. Look at the eyes, they cried. You can see it! See what? See what is to come!

  When he strode out of Congress, a cheering human magma carried him to Miraflores. Having tried and failed with the gun, Chávez now took Miraflores without blood, the guards standing aside, grinning, as the crowd surged through open gates.

  New ministers fizzed with ideas to boost this, tweak that, fingers twitching over levers, but the comandante called them to order. The priority, he repeated, was a new constitution. The old elite was wounded but still dangerous, still held a majority of seats in Congress. Power flowed through not just institutions but time, surging and ebbing to the pendulum’s rhythm. Now, with momentum on his side, he quickly held and won an April referendum to approve a constituent assembly, then the July vote to elect it. Dominated by his supporters, the assembly raced to produce a charter that proposed additional human rights guarantees, state benefits, protection for the environment and indigenous communities, and a more powerful presidency. The term was extended from five to six years with the right to immediate reelection. The executive would also gain control over promotions within the armed forces and be rid of the bothersome Senate with the merging of Congress’s two houses into one National Assembly. The draft constitution fluttered with progressive, enlightened language while offering a hammer to the palace.

  —

  The Ávila is part of Venezuela’s coastal mountain range and runs east to west along the Caribbean shore. Really it is an extension of the Andes, a fact best appreciated from the sea, where you gaze up at sheer cliffs that rise and rise and disappear into cloud. The Ávila National Park is fifty miles long and ten miles wide and jags along the valleys of Caracas, Guatire, Guarenas, and Barlovento. Its highest point, Pico Naiguatá, at 9,071 feet, is cold, sometimes close to freezing, but the rest of the range is lush and tropical.

  Human settlements climb up the slopes. They started arriving in the 1950s, migrants forsaking scrabbly little farms in the interior in the hope of jobs in the booming capital. They could not afford homes in the valley, so they built shacks called ranchos on the Ávila’s foothills. As more migrants arrived over ensuing decades, these little homes, of wood and tarpaulin at first, then cinder block and corrugated tin, crept higher up and spread across the slopes. They sprouted winding paths and crooked steps and turned into barrios, a word that according to tone can denote neighborhood or slum. Families lived here for generations, poaching electricity from power lines, hauling water up in buckets, neglected by successive governments. On one flank of the mountain they overlooked the Caracas of privilege, which nestled on the valley floor. On the other, which was in the state of Vargas, they overlooked fishing villages, the port of La Guaira, and beach resorts where the wealthy had weekend homes. When Hugo Chávez was born in 1954, Venezuela’s population was five million. By 1999 it was an estimated twenty-one million, with 80 percent crammed into crowded towns and hillside slums.

  Close to the equator and warm year-round, Venezuela traditionally had two seasons. The dry baked the earth from November to April, and the wet drenched it in short, thunderous bursts for the rest of the year. The Indians called this the rhythm of sun and rain. During heavy downpours gorges directed rocks and mud onto the Ávila interlopers, smattering their tin roofs. Two weeks before the constitutional referendum, Venezuela’s sun and rain lost their rhythm. Thunderstorms continued into December, saturating Caracas and much of the country day after day. On the fourteenth, the eve of the vote, the rain strengthened into fierce, hammering sheets. The comandante urged supporters to go out and vote regardless. “If nature opposes us, we will fight against her and force her to obey us.” It was a famous, defiant quotation from Bolívar after an earthquake destroyed Caracas in 1812, a catastrophe the pro-Spanish Catholic Church interpreted as divine retribution for Bolívar’s rebellion.

  Chávez’s invocation proved fateful. The weather turned even worse, a wild, savage tempest that dumped months’ worth of rain within hours. As polls closed on the evening of the fifteenth—le
ss than half the electorate voted—the peaks of the Ávila, sealed in cloud and night, began to move. Sodden soil liquefied, as if melting, and slithered down the slopes. Rocks, boulders, and trees, unmoored from the earth, tumbled and crashed in pursuit, one landslide begetting another, multiplying and fusing and accelerating into an avalanche of unimaginable dimension and force, hurtling through the blackness toward the sea in a great roar. Those in the way stood no chance. The cataclysm engulfed barrios on the upper slopes, sucking homes and lives into the whirling mash and throwing them onto neighbors below, and the ones below that, devouring all in nature’s maw. The mountain rushed down and down until there was nothing left to seize and it crashed into the foaming sea.

  It was Venezuela’s worst natural disaster. Hundreds of communities disappeared, washed out to sea or entombed in an alien, unrecognizable landscape. Around a thousand bodies were recovered, but estimates of the dead ranged from ten thousand to thirty thousand. The only people who knew their names were family and neighbors killed alongside them, so victims died as they lived, anonymous, their existence effaced. Vargas state was in ruins, its houses, bridges, roads, and port destroyed. Hundreds of thousands needed shelter.

  Sooner than he or anybody had expected here was an urgent test of Chávez’s leadership. At first he flunked it. While the nation clamored for news and reassurance, he disappeared from view, apparently paralyzed by the tragedy’s dimensions. On the second day he recovered and took personal command, surveying devastation from a helicopter, ordering evacuations, turning sports stadiums and even the presidential residence, La Casona, into temporary shelters, coordinating military, civilian, and international recovery efforts, driving himself over muddy trails, appearing on television, emotional but composed, to update, comfort, and articulate the nation’s grief. The emergency played to his personal strengths and military training.