Comandante: Hugo Chavez's Venezuela

by Rory Carroll

  It was not under control. His generals refused his order to mobilize army troops around the palace, saying it would cause a massacre, and kept soldiers and tanks inside Fuerte Tiuna. The palace was guarded by only a few hundred national guard troops and civilian supporters. And despite the cadena the nation had seen the drama on the streets while he talked because four private stations broke the chain by splitting the screen. On one side the president, on the other live images of smoke, bodies, blood. The juxtaposition made the president look a liar.

  After the broadcast the president left Salón Ayacucho using palace tunnels for fear of snipers and in his office—the same office his fellow coup conspirators had tried to storm a decade earlier—swapped his suit for combat fatigues. He strapped a pistol to his leg and grabbed a rifle. But the most powerful weapon in this battle for power was not the gun but television. That evening while the president hunkered in the palace, private television channels showed more footage, recorded earlier, of pro-Chávez supporters shooting into Baralt Avenue. Then it showed wounded and dead. There were nineteen dead and hundreds wounded. Some of the dead were Chávez supporters, and it remained unclear who had done the killing. Unidentified snipers seemed to have fired down on the crowd from hidden positions. Private television stations simply pointed the finger at Chávez and led the valley in a howl of fury. Butcher! Murderer!

  By now it was dark, and Lameda was touring one studio after another denouncing the president and urging his friends and comrades in the military high command to intervene. “Take advantage of this message, think. And make the right decision.” The meaning was clear: Chávez had innocent blood on his hands and must be removed. Other opposition leaders echoed the call. Within hours the top brass, gathered in Fuerte Tiuna, issued an ultimatum saying it would bomb Miraflores unless the president resigned.

  Inside his office, Chávez felt trapped and desperate. Tear gas and bullets had dispersed the march, leaving streets eerily deserted amid debris and blood, but he was being blamed for the massacre. Many generals had abandoned him. Ministers and officials were in hiding, fearing retribution, others roamed Miraflores, frightened and uncertain. Chávez appeared so desolate aides eyed his pistol, which he had placed on his desk, and feared suicide. At this moment, a fateful phone call. Fidel Castro. “Chávez, do not sacrifice yourself, do not be a martyr like Allende, you must survive.” As midnight approached, he took the advice. Word spread that he agreed to resign on condition he and his family would be exiled in Cuba. He walked through corridors of weeping aides and was driven to Fuerte Tiuna, where he handed himself over to the generals. A prisoner.

  The next day, April 12, a helicopter took Chávez to Turiamo, a Caribbean naval base, then to an island, La Orchila. Chávez could be shot, put on trial, or allowed to go to exile in Cuba. In Washington the White House press secretary, Ari Fleischer, implied Chávez got what he deserved. “The details are still unclear. We know that the actions encouraged by the Chávez government provoked this crisis. According to the best information available, the Chávez government suppressed peaceful demonstrations. Government supporters, on orders from the Chávez government, fired on unarmed, peaceful demonstrators. . . . The government also tried to prevent independent news media from reporting on these events.” The New York Times said Venezuela had been saved from a would-be dictator.

  Back in Caracas mobs surrounded the Cuban embassy and elsewhere hunted fugitive officials, ripping their shirts, scratching their faces. Across the valley, relief and cheers. The generals celebrated. We did it! Bishops and businessmen celebrated. We did it! On television, commentators and journalists celebrated. We did it! Some grinned and said it was a conspiracy that had been planned for months. Somewhere during the march the anti-Chávez plotters and protesters had intersected.

  —

  Later that day, April 12, the generals invited Carmona, the business federation leader, to form a provisional government at Miraflores. Small, bald, mild, a former diplomat who spoke French, he was called a conciliator, levelheaded, a safe pair of hands. How, then, to explain what happened next? Was Carmona enchanted by Miraflores? Rafael Castellanos, a historian and palace archivist, warned of its sensual feel of power. “It seeps from the masonry. You feel it in the air, like an intuition, a spirit, almost supernatural.” The palace walls and ceilings danced with gods and demigods, centaurs and nymphs, products of the 1880s portrait fashion for fables, mythology, and cornucopia. Aurora’s throne of roses glided into the heavens. Cherubs and fruits tumbled from a huge golden goblet. Page boys heaved platters of food and flowers. A giant bottle of champagne exploded with angels and foam. A bronze Meleager hunted the golden fleece. A sculpted chariot raced toward victory. Independence heroes sat astride muscular stallions, holding swords, seizing destiny.

  His whole life Carmona had served power. Economist, adviser, ambassador, board member, token of others’ authority, others’ money. Now he felt he was man of the hour, savior of the republic. Bishops, generals, tycoons, politicians, and editors rushed to Miraflores, coiled around him, patted his back, whispered in his ear. Carmona flitted as if in a dream from the crystal chandeliers of the Peruvian Sun Room, past the bust of Napoleon in the Vargas Swamp Room, past the lunar rock donated by Richard Nixon and the immense mural of battle and floating heads in Salón Boyacá, past the Mirror Room, his image multiplied, and down into the vault of Salón Ayacucho, from where Chávez had spoken just the previous day, to take the throne.

  The assembled elites applauded as Carmona swore himself in as president in a televised ceremony. He took the silla presidencial, the presidential chair, and he nodded to the newly appointed solicitor general, who started reading out decrees. The National Assembly was to be dissolved. The audience cheered. All state governors were to be replaced. Louder cheers. The following were to be abolished: the Supreme Court; the Office of the People’s Defender; the National Electoral Council. As the list went on, the audience exploded in whoops. When the constitution was revoked, they hugged and wept with joy. There was to be a presidential election the following year. It was the liquidation of Chávez and everything he had created, with no pretense of inclusion or promise of immediate elections. The previous day’s protest march had become a coup d’état.

  Years later a university professor who had marched against Chávez confessed the moment’s sweet guilt. “In our souls we knew it was wrong. We were taking a shortcut, playing rough. But you must understand. We hated Chávez so much we couldn’t help it; we couldn’t stand it anymore. It was like a scab you’re not supposed to scratch. We scratched and scratched until it bled. We won, or thought we had won. But then we made a terrible mistake. We picked that fucking dwarf.”

  In fact Carmona was not really in charge. The generals picked him to give a civilian veneer to their overthrow of Chávez. He was the suit behind which uniforms jockeyed for position, a swirling, turbid contest between rival factions. But Carmona seemed drunk on the paintings of bacchanal that surrounded him and acted as if power truly were his. He offered posts to friends—Lameda was to resume running PDVSA—but nothing to the head of the army, nothing to the trade unions, nothing to anyone from the previous government, nothing to the millions who supported Chávez. His biggest mistake was freezing out Carlos Ortega, the union federation head, who withdrew his movement’s support. Blind to his blunders, Carmona settled into Chávez’s office and took the seat with the gold-plated sphynx under each arm, adjusting the lever so his legs didn’t dangle. The new president was so busy giving orders he was oblivious to the draft that rustled his papers, the cold gazes of guards, the icy tone of switchboard operators, the dropping temperature. The palace, like the country, was rejecting him like a transplanted organ.

  Within hours a revolt began in the military city of Maracay, where the commander of the Forty-second Paratrooper Brigade was Raúl Baduel, the clandestine 1992 conspirator Chávez had revealed to García Márquez. He rallied not just his brigade but the entire Fourth Division against Carmona. Word spread an
d events moved quickly. Other divisions denounced Carmona and demanded Chávez’s restitution. By the morning of April 13 the hill dwellers around Caracas had recovered from their shock and began to stream down into the valley, demanding the president’s return. Their numbers swelled, and they began to march on the palace. Television stations mentioned nothing of the army mutiny nor the Chávez supporters filling the streets. In fact they carried no news at all besides saying President Carmona was forming a new government and all was well. They filled the hours with cartoons and Hollywood movies. Relax, citizen, put your feet up, and watch Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman.

  —

  Lameda, dressed in pressed jeans and tucked-in shirt, the retired general’s civilian uniform, shifted behind his desk. He gazed out at his sun-dappled garden, casting his mind back to those mad days a decade earlier. The boxer’s stubby tail wagged, yearning to leave the study’s air-conditioned gloom for an afternoon walk. His master may have felt the same way. The coup was the opposition’s original sin. A transgression against democratic, legal, and moral norms that branded it for years to come. Its leaders were exposed as hypocrites who preached democracy only to usurp it, and to be so inept they made Chávez stronger, a victim and a hero. Lameda, the man whom Chávez had brought into government and trusted, had been in the thick of it. That such a stickler for old-fashioned rules and principles was implicated showed how polarization spun the country’s moral compass, subsuming right and wrong into the greater issue: for or against Chávez. It was, to use a loaded word, squalid.

  A decade later, Lameda cleared his throat and defended himself the best he could. No, he had not been part of any pre–April 11 conspiracy. Rerouting the march to Miraflores had been a spontaneous decision. No, the opposition had not planted snipers to provoke bloodshed and justify Chávez’s removal. No, he had made no deal with Carmona to be named head of PDVSA. And in fact had disapproved of the interim president’s inauguration ceremony. Nevertheless, Lameda accepted Carmona’s job offer and on the morning of April 13 went to Miraflores to be formally reinstated as head of the oil company. “I was putting together the list of names for the new board, talking to the new energy minister, getting ready for our swearing in and then”—Lameda paused, shook his head, still struck by the memory—“a waiter came in. Came in and told us a crowd of Chavistas was approaching Miraflores and that we should go.” The would-be oil lords strode through the corridors, alarmed to find them nearly deserted, and spotted Carmona with a navy admiral scurrying for a car. The crowd had surrounded the palace, but Lameda escaped through an emergency exit and made his way to the military base. He realized the armed forces had turned against the regime but found Carmona and generals squabbling over ministerial appointments, as if they were still in control. “It was a farce.” Then the penny dropped. “At a certain moment everyone realized the game was up, and all the uniforms left the room. Carmona was alone. It was a lonely, frightening moment for him.” Doubtless for Lameda too. The two men parted as pro-Chávez troops took control of the base. Carmona was arrested; Lameda was allowed to scuttle home. At the same time commandos dispatched by Baduel rescued Chávez from La Orchila and flew him back to Caracas. Later that night, on television, Lameda watched the denouement: spotlights in Miraflores picked out a helicopter that slowly descended amid a rapturous, jubilant throng. Chávez, resurrected, walked among them, hugging and smiling, bathed in the flash of a hundred cameras. The crowd chanted and sang. “He’s back, he’s back, he’s back . . .”

  —

  The truth about April 11 remained shrouded. Each side accused the other of massacring innocents and manipulating video footage. Witnesses contradicted each other, changed their stories, fled the country. A truth inquiry was suspended, and criminal investigations stalled. Carmona, baptized Pedro the Brief by Chávez, bribed his way to freedom and exile. Lameda was never charged but became a hate figure for the government and even a decade later could, in theory, have been put on trial. The only people jailed were three metropolitan police commanders and eight junior officers accused of siding with the opposition and orchestrating violence. The media oligarchs were disgraced, as were opposition leaders. The CIA, its own documents later showed, knew a coup plot had been bubbling. The U.S. ambassador said he warned Chávez a coup was imminent and that the president shrugged it off, saying he knew about the plot. Whatever the truth of that, the opposition felt emboldened by U.S. antipathy to the comandante, and the Bush administration smirked when he fell. But there was little evidence, as Chávez would later insist, that Washington pulled the strings. An Irish documentary, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, became an influential advocate overseas for Chávez’s version, casting him as a romantic hero. The coup entered folklore, guilt and innocence tangled in vines, details covered by moss.

  4

  THE YOUNG LIEUTENANT

  In the late 1960s a tall, stoutly built boy used to lead pupils from the Daniel Florencio O’Leary High School in Barinas into the street for boisterous demonstrations: the Vietnam War, the Paris student rebellion, liberation theology, the school’s blocked sewers, tasteless lunches. Rafael Simón Jiménez, head of the student union as well as the local communist youth group, possessed boundless energy, a booming voice, and a desire to change the world, starting with his school, named after Bolívar’s Irish aide-de-camp, and Barinas, a quiet, rural town amid the plains of southern Venezuela. His classmates did not always understand exactly why they were demonstrating or throwing stones, only that Rafael Simón instructed them to do so. Among them was a skinny boy with big feet and a toothy smile with the nickname Tribilin, the Spanish name for Goofy. He was a year younger than Rafael Simón, and his name was Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías.

  Huguito had been born on July 28, 1954, on the outskirts of Sabaneta, a dusty, somnolent village out on the plains. His father, Hugo, and mother, Elena, taught at the primary school. She had named her firstborn Adán and planned to name her next Eve. When it turned out to be a boy, he was named after his father. The family home had an earth floor and a palm leaf roof. As more children arrived (six boys in all, no girls), the overstretched parents sent Adán and Hugo to live with their grandmother, Rosa Inés, a widow who had a small adobe home nearby.

  They were poor, like their neighbors, and lacked running water and regular electricity. But Hugo adored this industrious, kind woman who made him rope sandals, cooked dinner over an open fire, and told him folktales—“The Headless Horseman” was a favorite—by candlelight. She also spoke of his great-grandfather Maisanta, an outlaw, who would gallop through the village on his way to join the great rebel leader Ezequiel Zamora. Huguito tidied the yard, picked mangoes, avocados, and papayas, and helped Mama Rosa, as he called her, caramelize papayas into spider-shaped sweets that he sold around the village and at school.

  “I want you to know that I have always felt proud to have been raised by you and to be able to call you Mama,” he would write to her years later. “And I ask you to bless me, your loving son.” Poems he wrote long after she died in 1982 stressed the importance of this childhood figure.

  Nurtured by this tender, loving bond, the future comandante was an active, happy child. When not at school or helping his grandmother at home, he watched the village men gather to play bolas criollas, a type of bocce, or bet on cockfights. He would also draw and paint anything—a tree, a cat, the sky, his grandmother. From the age of eight or nine, relatives recalled, Huguito became fascinated by the sound of his own voice. He was learning to sing folk ballads and corridos and stretched his vocal range, becoming successful enough to be invited to sing at other children’s birthday parties. He had a gift for memorizing ballads and lengthy corridos about the plains, outlaws, romance, and broken hearts.

  There was no high school in the village, so from the age of around eleven Hugo and Adán moved with their grandmother to the town of Barinas, an hour’s drive away. They shared a little house from which the brothers could walk to the O’Leary school. Rafael Simón disliked the aloof boo
kworm Adán, who was his own age, but befriended Huguito, also a bookworm but cheerful and chatty and a ready recruit for the older boy’s demonstrations. “When Rafael Simón said we had to throw stones, we threw stones,” Chávez said years later. But whereas Rafael Simón threw them in anger, Hugo did so just to fit in.

  What made Huguito’s blood race was not politics or even girls (he had “ugly” girlfriends, which was not surprising, since Hugo himself was no looker, Rafael Simón recalled decades later). What animated him was el juego de pelota. Baseball. A game introduced to Venezuela in the 1920s by American oil workers and a national obsession by the time Chávez was born. In Sabaneta he improvised with sticks and bottle tops and by the time he moved to Barinas dreamed of emulating his idol, Isaías “Látigo” Chávez, a famous Venezuelan pitcher who played in the U.S. major leagues and by coincidence shared his surname. One day in March 1969 grief visited the fourteen-year-old Huguito, a shock he recalled decades later in a state TV documentary. “My grandmother Rosa was preparing my breakfast and turned on the radio to listen to some music . . . We heard a news flash and for a moment I felt as if death had struck me, right then and there. A plane crashed soon after taking off from Maracaibo and there were no survivors. Látigo Chávez was on that plane . . . I fell apart. I even came up with a little prayer I recited every night, vowing to grow up to be like him.”