Comandante: Hugo Chavez's Venezuela
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And then, as weeks passed and the initial shock faded, it played to something else. The crisis became tangled in palace politics. Initially, the comandante had welcomed help from everyone, including the United States, which sent helicopters and dozens of soldiers within two days. The defense minister, Raúl Salazar, accepted a further U.S. offer to rebuild the coastal motorway with 450 marines and navy engineers. Then, after the USS Tortuga set sail from Norfolk, Virginia, laden with bulldozers and tractors, Chávez phoned Salazar at four in the morning to say the gringos could not come. It was a matter of sovereignty, he said. The general was furious and suspected Fidel had whispered concerns about imperialist troops rehearsing beach landings. Chávez’s relations with the U.S. president, Bill Clinton, were cordial, and clearly there was need for the aid, but not at the cost of inviting in the meddling Yankee superpower. Projecting a revolutionary image counted for more. Salazar obeyed and told the Americans they were no longer wanted. The USS Tortuga turned around.
With the rain clouds finally dissolved in early 2000, the Ávila, with its new topography, was once again visible from the palace terrace. But the comandante’s attention drifted the other way, into the hallways of Miraflores and a political battle unfolding within. His longtime comrade and fellow coup conspirator General Jesús Urdaneta was unhappy. Chávez had appointed his friend, typically blunt and outspoken like people from the western state of Zulia, to head DISIP, the intelligence service. Urdaneta received reports that two of the president’s most important civilian allies, Luis Miquilena, head of the National Assembly, and José Vicente Rangel, the foreign minister, were lining their pockets. Both were veteran political operators who had guided the comandante, a political neophyte, after his release from jail on the hidden strings between state, media, and business interests in the so-called Fourth Republic. Urdaneta complained to Chávez that they were bringing the old, corrupt habits into the fledgling Fifth Republic. According to the general, the president acknowledged the duo’s corruption but said he needed their dark arts to consolidate power. The feud spilled into the Vargas aftermath when security forces were accused of executing looters. Of eight thousand men in the field, only sixty were from DISIP, but Urdaneta found his agency singled out and pilloried—allegedly due to Miquilena and Vicente Rangel pulling their invisible strings. (Years later Miquilena fell out with Chávez and was charged but acquitted of corruption. Vicente Rangel was never charged with any crime.) Chávez barred Urdaneta from speaking to the press. His old friend claimed he had been set up and resigned in protest, the revolution’s first major defection.
There were rumblings that others would follow, that some of those closest to the throne were plotting, sharpening daggers. The comandante spent less time gazing at the Ávila or touring the ruins of Vargas. So although the government released emergency funds, disbursed tens of millions of dollars in international aid, hired foreign consultants, announced ambitious reconstruction plans, and said survivors should be called not damnificados, which means those rendered homeless by a natural disaster, but dignificados, the dignified ones, it all came to little.
With the palace distracted, the recovery effort crawled, then stopped. Lethargy infected Vargas. Bulldozers came late or not at all, engineers made blueprints but did not come back, cement went missing. Aid seemed to evaporate in the haze. As months passed, survivors left their refuges and returned to the shells of collapsed homes to eke out existence amid the debris, boulders, and dried mud. More than a decade later they were still there, still waiting for help, and climbing the bare, slippery slopes above them was not scrub but the cinder blocks and tarpaulin of new ranchos. The cycle repeating itself. But that is to skip ahead of the story, to miss important stages in the evolution of the palace.
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By 2000, Hugo Chávez cut a colorful, curious figure on the international stage. Foreign governments did not know what to make of a coup leader turned democrat who lauded Fidel Castro and proclaimed himself a revolutionary but said he was neither capitalist nor socialist but seeker of a third way. On his frequent travels, punishing marathons, he included Venezuelan businessmen in his entourage, courted investors, rang the New York Stock Exchange bell, pitched a ball at the Mets’ Shea Stadium, met Bill Clinton at the White House, shook the hand of a Texas governor called George Bush in Houston, expressed third-world solidarity with African leaders, lauded Asia’s economic success. Chávez fizzed with energy, ambition, and irreverence, overturning protocol with glee. He broke into a sprint on China’s Great Wall, hugged Japan’s emperor, who was not supposed to be touched, greeted the Russian president Vladimir Putin with a judo pose, visited Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, and crooned to Colombia’s young female foreign minister. Hosts were perplexed and charmed. Who was this man?
The U.S. ambassador in Caracas, John Maisto, urged his wary masters in Washington to relax. “Watch what Chávez does, not what he says.” Fidel adoration aside, the young president retained a conservative finance minister from the previous government, improved tax collection, punctually paid Venezuela’s debts, and pursued conventional economic policies. His most radical move was convening a meeting in Caracas of OPEC, the oil producers’ cartel to which Venezuela belonged, and herding its squabbling members to production cuts. Partly because of this the price of a barrel, just $8 when Chávez was elected, began to rise sharply, boosting the government’s meager treasury. On swings through Venezuela’s Andean towns, Amazon jungle, Caribbean ports, and pampa-type plains, a varied landscape nearly twice the size of Spain, he always honored local saints, folklore figures, and independence war heroes. His entourage would return to Miraflores exhausted, but Chávez with his superhuman energy would immediately go on television with maps and photographs to explain in detail where he had been, whom he had met, and what he had done.
But the internal discontent rumbled and erupted in mid-2000. Two veteran comrades, Francisco Arias Cárdenas and Yoel Acosta, army officers who collaborated in the 1992 rebellion and swept into government with Chávez, announced that they were breaking with him. They accused him of authoritarianism, of ruling as if on a throne and allowing civilian allies to stuff their bank accounts while flattering his ego. In the army they were roommates and held equal rank. Was it too much to see their comrade now on an elevated perch giving orders? Arias Cárdenas was a year older, which under military custom made him senior, yet in government he struggled to have his voice heard. In the July 2000 presidential election—the new constitution required fresh elections—he ran against Chávez with the support of other disaffected groups. In a bitter campaign he accused Chávez of cowardice during the 1992 coup, of cooping himself up in his headquarters while other conspirators fought and died. He placed a chicken on a desk and called it Hugo, and on a stage in Caracas he pointed toward the palace and bellowed to the crowd: “Let’s turn that chicken into soup!” It stung the comandante, now thoroughly diverted from the ruins of Vargas. He mobilized a hyperkinetic campaign that crisscrossed the country and dominated the airwaves, rousing supporters and depicting Arias Cárdenas as a traitor and tool of the oligarchy. “Burn the Judas!” he cried, and voters did, giving Chávez 59.7 percent and Arias Cárdenas 37.5 percent, an even bigger landslide than his 1998 victory. Crushed, the traitor limped into the wilderness.
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Through all these early dramas and triumphs, a glamorous figure with perfect teeth and an uncertain smile hovered by the comandante’s side. Marisabel Rodríguez, wife, mother, first lady, trophy. Her physical contrast with the comandante was striking. Pale skin, blue eyes, blond hair, delicate features. Una muñeca. A doll. She seemed incongruous, cast in the wrong movie, but she had chased this role, chased it and grasped it, and now blinked in the spotlight, co-star of elections, referenda, trips, and palace intrigues.
Rodríguez started her career as a radio journalist in Barquisimeto, a western city known as Venezuela’s music capital for the number of groups that rehearsed and performed in its plazas. In 1995 she was in her thirties, a small-
time broadcast success and single mother with a young child, when Chávez came to town. He had just been released from prison and was touring the country as a renegade politician. Crowds who turned up to hear him speak tended to be small, sometimes fewer than a dozen people, but on this day there were several hundred, among them Rodríguez, infant son in her arms. Chávez’s charisma captivated her, and she scribbled an improvised note. “Comandante, our homeland deserves everything, without reservations, and I am with you heart and soul. When you need me for your struggle, please call me.” In those days Chávez did not have an official wish taker, or Office of Hope archivists, and the message went astray.
A year later, when he passed back through Barquisimeto, a mutual friend introduced them. After notes and phone calls they became a couple on January 14, 1997. Their first date recalled with precision because it was the day of the Divine Shepherdess, the region’s patron saint, and they were part of a huge religious procession in the cattle town of Carora. It was also the day they conceived a daughter, Rosinés, in Chávez’s Volkswagen. A detail revealed with nudges and winks in a joint interview a year later, by which time they were married and Rodríguez was campaigning hard to get her husband elected.
The timing was fortuitous. Chávez had been married before, to Nancy Colmenares, a reserved, unassuming woman from his home state of Barinas. They had three children, Rosa Virginia, María Gabriela, and Hugo Rafael. They divorced soon after the 1992 coup attempt when Chávez became a celebrity and full-time politician. Around that time he also ended a decade-long affair with a Caracas-based historian, Herma Marksman, who had helped his clandestine plotting. Once released from jail, the dashing, articulate rebel enjoyed liaisons with swooning female admirers. Rodríguez, however, became pregnant and then his wife. Eloquent and pretty, she proved a huge asset in the 1998 election by soothing voters worried by Chávez’s rough, military edge. The following year Rodríguez was herself elected, to the Constituent Assembly, and became the country’s most popular politician after the president.
They appeared on the balcony of Miraflores—now dubbed the People’s Balcony—and elicited roars from the crowd below by kissing. They rode past a military procession in an open-top car, evoking comparisons with Eva and Juan Perón. During a Valentine’s Day broadcast in 2000, Chávez leered at the camera and said, “Marisabel, you’re going to get yours tonight.” Some thought it vulgar; plenty others chortled. It underlined not only his virility—in Venezuela to sleep with someone is to “conquer” the person—but also his leaping over race and class barriers. In this multi-toned society many parents encouraged daughters to find pale-skinned partners to produce white babies and thus “improve the race.” And yet here was this porcelain Desdemona sharing a bed with a zambo, the name for those of mixed race, with copper-toned skin.
Rodríguez hosted dignificados in La Casona, enjoyed brief sway in the Constituent Assembly, and had her aerobics instructor appointed deputy sports minister. Her political influence faded along with her marriage. Chávez was a moody workaholic; Rodríguez clashed with the president’s mother, his teenage children, and his entourage. They whispered that she was crazy, that the primera dama was a prima donna who ordered a military helicopter to bring her milk and cereal on the beach and took the presidential jet to Disney World. Their arguments, as well as his distaste for La Casona, prompted the comandante to spend more nights at Miraflores. By 2001 he had moved her out of the spotlight, and by 2002 she had moved out of La Casona and returned to Barquisimeto. They soon divorced.
This could have dented the comandante’s image, especially after the couple got into a tawdry, public dispute over their daughter and Rodríguez married her tennis instructor. Instead, a curious thing happened. Chávez vowed to remain a bachelor at least until 2021, the two hundredth anniversary of Bolívar’s final, definitive victory over the Spanish, and shunned public romances. There would be no more raunchy declarations to the camera or balcony smooches. The only women to hold his hand in public henceforth would be his daughters and mother. The comandante’s romantic life officially ceased to exist. In the public eye he became married to the revolution.
Rumors rippled through and beyond the palace of relationships with actresses, journalists, ministers, and ministers’ daughters. The bull, officials said with a twinkle, was not retired. But it was all handled with circumspection, even decorum. The media, even hostile, privately owned newspapers and television channels, drew a veil, breathed not a word, as if modern tabloid journalism and electronic gossip belonged to another era. Venezuela recalled Bolívar’s serial fornication—he merrily bedded peasant women, merchants’ wives, and duchesses during the independence wars—with an indulgent smile. Many Venezuelan husbands had girlfriends on the side. If Chávez was emulating the libidinous Liberator, went the smirking consensus, good for him.
Miraflores was filled with passed-on whispers, but few really knew firsthand. Those functionaries who did tended to be ciphers afforded knowledge not through seniority but through palace quirk, a cubbyhole in a strategic spot, a desk adjacent to sensitive conversations.
Carla had worked in the protocol office. She was retired and did not wish to endanger her pension, so her name is changed. She said: “Even before he divorced Marisabel, the president had very beautiful lovers. One of the early ones was one of my bosses, a department head. Green eyes, red hair, pale skin, a great body. I wondered how someone so beautiful could be with someone so ugly even if he was the president. I joked with her one day that he must be a bad lover because she wasn’t looking her best. She just laughed. When a Venezuelan woman has a bad lover she becomes dowdy, you see. The hair loses its shine.” Carla was in her sixties but had a flirty, husky manner and notably shiny hair. “Most days my boss looked well. She was passionate about the cause and enjoyed a good life. Whenever she had her car stolen, the next day she’d be given a new one. Colleagues counted thirty-nine lovers and said there were offspring here, there, and everywhere, children who looked like the president, but I don’t know about that. I knew only about La Loca [the Crazy One] who visited him in prison, La Hermosa [the Beautiful One], an Argentine, really stunning, and a minister’s daughter. They all seemed content, so maybe the president was skillful. But they also say a bad dancer is a bad lover. And that man doesn’t know how to dance.”
3
DEFECTORS
For Carlos García no single moment, no epiphany, signaled the revolution’s change. Denim jeans, boots, bushy mustache, powerful hands with chipped nails, sun-crinkled face, he did not care much for politics or Caracas, hundreds of miles and a world away. He cared for his family, workers, and cattle on his 1,400-acre farm, a patchwork of fields and dirt roads on the plains, the llanos, of Barinas state.
García had voted for Chávez to shake things up. These fertile prairies could be the breadbasket of South America, but migration had drained the life out of them. For decades peasants had sold their little plots and moved to coastal cities to the north, chasing the mirage of oil wealth, leaving land in the hands of a few wealthy farmers who only half worked their vast estates. You could drive for hours over bumpy tracks with no sign of man or livestock or crops. At harvesttime, farmers hired what laborers were left to haul sugar, corn, sorghum, and plantains, then the laborers returned to their shacks and poverty.
The rancher supported Chávez because he excoriated the waste, the old excuses, and he was a local son, born and bred in Sabaneta, a gritty, sun-bleached town not far from García’s farm. “At last,” he told his children in his hushed, raspy voice, “a guy with guts. Someone to get things moving.” Some of García’s neighbors, conservative old ranchers, did not vote for Chávez, but by his inauguration they too had been swept up in the excitement at having a young, charismatic rebel in Miraflores. In those heady weeks Chávez’s popularity nationwide touched 90 percent.
García’s laborers, of course, had all voted for the comandante. Their ancestors had fought in militias during the civil wars following independence from Spain
, and a flinty rebelliousness endured. García had known these thin, leathery men with tattered jeans and machetes since childhood. Some lived on his land in houses of brick, wood, and tin, others on a no-man’s scrubland where they inhabited small adobe houses with tiny windows, as in Bolívar’s day. When there was work, he gave them work; when there wasn’t, they made do. García had a good relationship with them, but other landowners could be ruthless. During disputes over pay or conditions, they would summon police, or private armed guards, and if necessary crack skulls.
García usually paid little heed to politics. His days started in the cool just before dawn when he started touring his land, the moon still glimmering overhead, continued through the sun’s blinding midday glare, and wound down after dusk when he dined with his family in a big, air-conditioned living room. García got his news in snatches from the radio when his mud-splattered Ford pickup passed through areas with reception. He caught fragments of Chávez’s speeches, which were often “chained,” meaning every radio and television station was obliged to carry them.
Every day there seemed to be a speech, sometimes several. The president, García said with a chuckle, liked to talk. And he was obviously thinking big. Just a few months after being sworn in, he declared: “We have to rescue the nation, rebuild it, make it beautiful. Venezuela is emerging from a terrible nightmare . . . Venezuela will again be dignified; it is marching toward dignity. Venezuela will again be great; it is marching toward greatness. Venezuela will again be glorious; it is raising the banner of its glory, the people’s glory, the people’s hope.”