Comandante: Hugo Chavez's Venezuela

by Rory Carroll

  To García the comandante’s first year justified such optimism. There was a new constitution, higher oil prices, talk of investment in agriculture, and inclusive vocabulary. Chávez spoke of the nation being reborn “para nosotros,” for us, and the revolution being “para todos,” for everybody. But as the autumn rains of 2000 gave way to the humid spring and baking summer of 2001, something nagged at García. There was a shift in the president’s tone, a creeping defensive bellicosity. He started referring to himself in the third person and harped on criticism, no matter how obscure the source or outlandish the content. When a visiting academic compared him to Mussolini, Chávez could have ignored it but instead, referring to himself in the third person, made it a central part of a speech in June 2001. “He is not disrespecting Chávez, don’t think I complain for myself, I do it for all of you because this people, our people, deserve respect. Here we have a democracy. And when someone comes to say that Chávez is a tyrant, a dictator, well, he’s abusing the people who elected me.”

  By now there was something about the way he said “nosotros” and “todos,” the way he railed at the “oligarquía,” that bothered García. As a candidate, Chávez had said the same things, but now he was on the throne, not the stump, and supposed to be ruling, not campaigning. The president’s resentment seemed to fill the airwaves. He announced “frontal attacks” and “offensives” against political obstacles as if still a tank commander. Denunciations of the “oligarquía” unspooled into tirades against “ellos,” them, and “esa gente,” those people.

  What García found troubling in the president’s discourse, his laborers found stirring. “Free land and free men! Free elections, and horror to the oligarchy!” The famous rallying cry, barely heard since the nineteenth-century civil wars, resounded again. Grubby and weary after a day in the fields, García, changing gears as he barreled down a dirt track, would sit back and shake his head at the radio. The laborers squeezed in beside him, just as grubby and weary, would lean forward to catch every word. For the rancher it was a cumulative realization. When the president spoke of “nosotros” and “el pueblo,” he, César García, was not included.

  Neighboring ranchers had the same feeling, and soon the cattlemen’s association in Caracas lodged a formal protest. But this made the president only more hostile. “We’re not going to keep accepting that there are big landowners who have abandoned their property while most live without a hectare, without a square meter to sow a stalk of sugarcane or bananas,” he railed. Then, in October 2001, the ax fell. “Let us say you have five hectares and the guy next to you has four hundred,” the president told a rally. He paused to let the unfairness sink in. “No, that cannot be . . . we have to finish off the latifundios!” He raised his voice to a shout. “The latifundio is the enemy of the country.” García looked with alarm at his laborers, his childhood playmates who never had his privileges and now craned their necks toward the radio to better hear the president. Did they see him that way? An exploiter? An agent of prejudice and iniquity? How dare Chávez do this! The hell with him! César García became what Chávez said he was: an enemy of the revolution.

  In November 2007, he was still on his ranch, still driving his pickup. Six years had passed since Chávez declared war on latifundios. The government had seized almost five million acres of farmland deemed idle or illegally purchased. Thanks to his relatively small holdings, García was still in business, just, but peasants had occupied neighboring farms with support from police, soldiers, and Agriculture Ministry officials. The government called this liberation; ranchers called it invasion. Crops had been burned and equipment and livestock seized. Criminal gangs were kidnapping farmers for ransom. García had hired two guards to patrol the perimeter on horseback but knew they would be powerless if truckloads of red shirts arrived. “It’s very, very bad,” he said in the soft, raspy voice. “We keep hearing rumors of an invasion. There’s not much we can do except keep watch and try to get an idea of how many. And when.” After a day touring what was left of his herds—he was selling off animals—García squinted at the setting sun. “It’s late. Time to head home.” He revved the engine, and we trundled down a deserted track. It had rained, and the earth was mushy. Birds circled overhead, a portent of more rain. There was nothing around except fields and shadows and emptiness, but García checked his mirror and peered side to side as if on a busy motorway. “With these abductions we vary our routes. And we don’t travel at night. We stay indoors and live like prisoners.” The radio stayed off. García no longer tolerated Chávez’s voice in his cab.

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  But this is skipping ahead of the story, overtaking the pace of events. In late 2001 the expropriations, seizures, and “liberations” were still in the future. No one knew for sure what was to come. But the rancher who had voted for the president with such hope three years earlier now loathed and feared him. García was not alone. Millions underwent a similar transformation, detaching from the collective exhilaration of Chávez’s inauguration by growing puzzled, then anxious, then enraged. Millions of others, however, stayed loyal. Their ardor for Chávez burned with greater intensity.

  Division was etched into the geography of Caracas. The capital was built along the contours of a narrow valley tucked inside coastal mountains. Its elevation from the sea gave a breezy, tropical savanna climate to the valley floor, and this was where money lived. The wealthiest inhabited spectacular mansions with mango orchards, swimming pools, and high walls. The less wealthy lived in sleek apartments with security guards and views of the Ávila. The almost wealthy rented smaller apartments facing the city. The hills that surrounded the valley were for the poor, descendants of peasant migrants who improvised ramshackle homes on vacant slopes. The higher you went, the narrower the tracks and flimsier the structures. Every morning the hill dwellers took little buses down winding paths to the valley floor’s realm of glass towers and electronic gates. Here they donned smocks to work as maids, sweeping, cooking, ironing, or clipped on name badges to work as private security guards, observing, registering, saluting. At dusk, when the valley was fed and had ice in its scotch, the buses took the visitors back up the slopes to home and a supper of beans and rice. The hills knew the valley intimately, how it liked its towels folded, its juice squeezed, its steak seasoned. The valley knew the hills not at all. The shacks were ugly, alien, a foreign land “up there.” In the darkness of night, from a distance, all you could see of the hills were thousands of lights twinkling like the Milky Way. Even this spectacle the valley disdained and so drew its curtains.

  Before Chávez this inequality stewed but did not boil. Left-wing radicals, supported by Cuba, attempted a guerrilla insurgency in the 1960s, but the campaign flopped for lack of popular support. Venezuela’s young, oil-fueled democracy bought the population’s acquiescence with elections and largesse in the form of subsidies, jobs, and housing. The poor did not get much, but it was enough to keep them passive. The one exception was the Caracazo in February 1989, when low oil prices and austerity measures triggered riots and a brutal state crackdown. A decade of stagnation later, the middle class and the wealthy were just as fed up as the poor, and so the two worlds, valley and hill, united behind Chávez, the insurgent candidate.

  The traditional elites were so sure of entitlement and power they expected to control the comandante. As a candidate he let them think that, and in these early years of power he left their wealth untouched. His economic policies were moderate—he courted foreign investment and even moved to privatize telecommunications—to the point frustrated radicals accused him of neoliberalism. But he methodically attacked the elite’s sources of political influence, dissolving the old Congress, firing judges, purging state institutions. For good measure he insulted them, branding them, among other things, “rancid oligarchs” and “squealing pigs.” No president had ever spoken this way, least of all to those who felt they owned the country. Their cry of dismay resounded through the valley. We should have known! He is so vulgar, so unc
outh. The elites were nervous. This was the language of class war. Their criollo ancestors had feared slave uprisings, and now it was their turn to scan the hills, fearful the drumming from Miraflores would awaken the barrios.

  The puzzle was not Chávez’s attacks on the plutocrats—when he accused them of looting the nation’s oil wealth, he was essentially correct—but his alienation of the middle class. The comandante proved to have a talent for aggravating not just middling ranchers like César García but other groups who, in his view, obstructed progress. When parents and teachers protested a proposed education regulation—it would rewrite history textbooks and expand military instruction—he called them selfish. “They live quite well, quite comfortably,” he told a boisterous rally in early 2001, a moment recalled in the Chávez biography by the Venezuelan journalists Cristina Marcano and Alberto Barrera Tyszka. “Fancy house, fancy apartment, they have no problems; their children attend good schools and travel abroad. Nobody criticizes them, but some of them don’t realize that in December 1998 a change took place . . . They look down their noses at everyone else, as if the rest of us were mere rabble. Yes, we are the same rabble that followed Bolívar . . . The decree will be enforced and I will be supervisor number one.” The crowd roared, and he threw down a challenge to the middle class. “Come out to the street and look at me! The more dirt you throw at me, the more I’ll throw at you. That is who I am.”

  A constituency that initially supported the comandante would challenge him over some issue, leading to tirades and insults. Business leaders were “vampires.” Catholic bishops were “ignorant, perverse, or perverts . . . What they need is an exorcism so that the devil that got into them will come out from under their robes.” Critics were worms, bandits, hypocrites, spoiled brats, bags of excrement. On and on, an assault of abuse and taunts rat-a-tat-tatting from the palace. It was not so much what Chávez did as what he said. He collectively branded his opponents “escuálidos,” which in Spanish suggested pale, puny creatures. Few realized then that there was a method to it all, that polarization was a strategy. A trap. Behind the big mouth there was a mind of cunning, foresight, and subtlety.

  What Chávez said mattered. He was a master of language and communication. He toyed with words, revived old ones, coined new ones, made them sing and sting. Words can provoke reactions and create their own reality. In Venezuela words spawned hatred and polarization. Chávez’s spurned allies found their voice and hurled back their own insults. They marched through Caracas with megaphones and banners calling him a tyrant, a dictator, a lunatic. They made racist jokes that “mi comandante” really meant “mico mandante,” monkey ruler. They banged kitchen pots and casserole dishes, a type of protest known as cacerolazo that filled the city with clang, clang, clang. Privately owned newspapers and television stations—at that time a Goliath compared with the state’s puny media presence—spewed a venomous mix of factual reports, exaggeration, and lies. This hatred generated an equal and opposite reaction in the poor, the vast army of laborers, maids, and security guards, who loved Chávez all the more and hated those who hated him. Each side glowered at the other, seething and uncomprehending. A fuse had been lit.

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  In the revolution’s folklore Guaicaipuro, an indigenous name, was shared by two very different men. One a hero, the other a traitor. The hero was a warrior who united the tribes of Caracas valley against the first Spanish interlopers. He was not just a cacique, a chief, but a guapotori, a chief of chiefs. Guaicaipuro killed and chased away the bearded gold seekers and successfully protected his ancestral lands for years, inspiring other tribes to resist. But in 1568, Spanish troops located his hut in Paracotos, surrounded it, and set it ablaze. Guaicaipuro stormed out amid the smoke and flames and with a captured sword threw himself at the invaders. They cut him to pieces. Chávez hailed the chief as a martyr and commissioned a bronze statue depicting him as a towering, muscular figure leaping into combat. He also renamed October 12, Columbus Day, the Day of Indigenous Resistance.

  The other Guaicaipuro lived in Bello Monte, a quiet neighborhood of pleasant houses and apartments behind high walls in the municipality of Baruta, named after the original Guaicaipuro’s son. A tiled hallway with stiff, ornamental chairs led to a compact, well-ordered study. A large, gloomy portrait of Bolívar gazed from one wall. The others were filled with maps and books. A boxer padded in, followed by a Chihuahua, then their master. Guaicaipuro Lameda was in his mid-fifties, of medium height, with a bushy mustache and brown eyes. An ironed short-sleeved shirt was tucked into belted dark blue jeans, which also appeared ironed. He made a slight click with his heels while offering a strong, squeezing handshake. What made his appearance striking was a bald, pointed head in the shape of an egg.

  It was March 2011. A decade earlier Lameda had been a key piece on Chávez’s palace chessboard, a knight who was supposed to leap over the battle lines and checkmate the opposition. He did as commanded, for a while, but then something happened, and at a climactic moment he changed sides. Lameda had had a privileged seat next to the throne for Chávez’s first three years. His defection signaled the moment hatred infected both sides with a recklessness bordering on madness.

  Half the country seemed to think he belonged in jail; the other half considered him a hero. His voice was inflected with the authority of the general he once was. At times he would jump up to consult a file—all duplicated, immaculately ordered—to keep his memories in sequential order. His father named him, he said, after the indigenous warrior who once roamed the valley. His father, an army officer and oil industry executive, also bequeathed a passion for the military and for numbers. The army recognized Lameda’s administrative bent after he entered the academy in 1971 and trained him in logistics and finance. Lameda briefly crossed paths with a cadet one year behind him, an affable, skinny llanero with the plainsman’s love of talking and joking. “We weren’t close. We had different interests. Chávez was into sports and theater. He was forever staging plays and performances. Once we were on a war game in the field, and he was put in charge. It felt more like a work of theater than a military exercise. I didn’t like that.” In the 1980s and early 1990s they fleetingly saw each other at Fuerte Tiuna, the military’s sprawling garrison headquarters in Caracas, but Chávez wisely did not try to enlist his stickler-for-the-rules colleague into the coup conspiracy.

  Chávez obviously respected his ability because shortly after the 1998 election he asked Lameda, now a brigadier general and the Defense Ministry’s budget director, to be the national budget controller. The president-elect said he wanted to replace the corrupt, bureaucratic practices of the “Fourth Republic”—the inherited, creaking democratic system—with a “Fifth Republic” of lean, efficient government. Meaning no more presidential slush funds, no more fiscal deficits, financial crises, or devaluations. “We had a long talk. He told me his time in prison had given him a chance to reflect and prepare a plan for government.” Lameda’s mission would be to march budget numbers into order and keep them in formation. He clicked his heels and accepted the job.

  “Oil was around $10 a barrel, and the treasury was empty. The previous government left us with no money, no budget. It was very hard, but we pulled it off. We made a fiscal adjustment and balanced the budget. Then, in 2000, oil prices started to rise, and we had a surplus.” Lameda helped manage a special fund to store the windfall. The idea was to save for the future and release portions, if necessary, to the executive, state governors, and mayors. “A responsible policy. That lasted until March 31, 2000. That’s when the president announced the government would spend more than it received.” The date barely figured in articles and textbooks about the revolution, but for Lameda it was a Rubicon. A crossover to “irresponsabilidad,” from which, he would discover in hindsight, there would be no return. “At a meeting about it with ministers, Chávez told me I was there to listen and execute, not opine. At the end I told him he had just decreed a devaluation because we were going to spend too much. He bristled a
nd said he didn’t want my opinion.” Lameda imitated Chávez’s voice and gesticulated: “My government will not be irresponsible like our predecessors. For me ‘devaluation’ is a dirty word.” The general sighed and shook his head. “Chávez doesn’t care about the economy. That was our big difference. What he cares about is politics. Money is an accessory.”

  After that clash in March 2000, Lameda felt as if the clouds that blanketed the Ávila had slid into the valley and formed a mist around El Silencio, the hub of ministries, agencies, banks, and offices that ringed the presidential palace. Objectives and strategy turned nebulous, targets drifted into haze. His authority as budget director seemed to dissipate. Ministers did not return calls, mislaid his reports, sent data late or not at all. One morning in September 2000 he discovered that the planning minister, Jorge Giordani, and the finance minister, José Rojas, were holding a crucial meeting over the upcoming national budget. Lameda had not been informed or invited. He raced to the Finance Ministry and notified the ministers, via a secretary, that he was at reception and available to participate. Their door stayed closed. One hour passed. Two hours. Three. Four. The budget director did not budge. What did he do during this time? “Flicked through magazines.” When the meeting ended, the ministers slipped out by a back door to avoid him. The meeting’s conclusions would be submitted to Chávez for his approval, then presented to the National Assembly. Lameda immediately wrote a memo to Chávez denouncing the proposed budget, but how could he be sure aides would deliver it? Power, he realized, hinged entirely on access to the throne.

  Lameda’s outspokenness had irked Chávez and infuriated ministers, who found their breezy fiscal assessments challenged, but instead of firing the general, Chávez promoted him. He valued the tactical advantage of surprising not only enemies but allies. As a tank commander, he had studied Clausewitz and Sun Tzu on the art of ambush. As a coup conspirator, he learned secrecy and intrigue. Now, in power, he used unpredictability to bolster his authority. Ambitious ministers would devise a policy, or plot against a rival, try to tilt the comandante a certain way, and when least expected, Chávez would yank the carpet so everyone—everyone but him—fell down in a tangle.